Dennis Sawyers comments

Good. It’s a crime that no one is being held criminally accountable for the deaths caused by these planes. Let’s not forget the people who died needlessly due to corporate malfeasance, including former Tokushima ALT Sarah Auffret.

I lived in Japan from 2005 until 2012, and as an ALT from 2005 - 2009. I would say that level of sexual harassment was common during that time period. I'm curious about the nationality of the male ALT.

In Japan, for those of you who don't know, inviting someone over to your residence is equivalent to asking them for consent, and the man is expected to be aggressive and the woman is expected to protest in play. It's part of the culture. In my prefecture, about one female ALT would go home a year after making the mistake of inviting a Japanese guy to her house and undergoing a harrowing, traumatic situation for someone raised in a culture where no means no.

As a person married to a Japanese woman with a kid on the way, this is my biggest fear.

For all Westerners here, there's a few things to know. First, Japanese people do not have a concept of unconditional love. It's 100 percent obligational and if one side breaks that obligation, the love is immediately cut and you will be treated like an enemy.

Next, Japanese are not compassionate people at all. Like unconditional love, compassion is a Western concept grounded in Christianity. There is thus no mercy for the parent who doesn't get to see the child, at all. Compassion is a foreign concept. There is in group and out group, uchi and soto, and when you are placed in the soto group you get the same treatment as a stranger.

The only reason I married a Japanese woman is because I am prepared mentally to wake up and lose my kid one day, and if you aren't the type of person who can endure that, don't marry a Japanese. It's too risky.

The tax hike is trying to solve a problem that it will actually make worse. Japanese people simply aren't having enough babies because family formation is unaffordable for most people with a "good job." "Good jobs" are nearly all located in urban centers, keeping the cost of living high even as the countryside dries up, and most Japanese companies pay their new hires very little for years. This means that, in Tokyo, an average salaryman isn't even ready to think about starting a family until they are at least 30.

So people don't have enough kids, so the tax base shrinks. Raising the consumption tax means less kids which means a smaller tax base.