Dylan Bodington comments

There already is a fast lane, and has been for at least 5 years now, but you had to register first. Registration takes all of 15 mins, and can be done at the airport.

I'm guessing that this new system just allows selected people to skip the registration step.

@Sensato: Well, you can't fault them for using "cardiopulmonary arrest" correctly. If a reader is confused due to their incorrect interpretation of the term, then it is the duty of the reader to correct their misinterpretation, not the duty of the writer to modify their correct use.

I concede that this is a very common misinterpretation, one that I myself had in my childhood (most likely due to movies and TV), but it is a mistake nonetheless.

From the brief description in the article, it appears this points to a somewhat different bad driving habit to those mentioned (disregard for zebra crossings, 3-second-rule interpretation of a red light.) When turning with green for both traffic and pedestrians, instead of waiting for the crosswalk to clear, drivers will pull right up to the line and push into a gap, or even anticipate a gap in pedestrians without stopping. Even worse, this is done when turning right, leaving the car with less scope for error in avoiding oncoming traffic. Any small change in circumstance eg a kid rushing to catch up with her mother then becomes a sudden and dangerous situation rather than what it is, a perfectly normal and imminently predictable occurence.

I wouldn't isolate truck drivers as monsters, as these bad habits are commonplace, and I've seen the police stop plenty of people for doing dumb things. Without knowledge of any actual statistics, I'd say that pedestrian/cyclist deaths in Japan are no more or less frequent than in other developed nations, but Japan does have its own set of particular bad driving/cycling habits, many of which really annoy me.

Why is sexuality an issue in the Board Room?

Why are people so intent these days to announce their sexuality to the world?

Because there is active discrimination against homosexuals at all levels, and a very important part of reducing that discrimination is exposure. Sexuality is about more than "what one does in the bedroom". I'm heterosexual and married to a woman, and like to think that my relationship with my wife is about a little more than just sex. Tim Cook said "I'm gay", not "I had sex with a dude last night", and that's appropriate in a business magazine because it's part of a public discussion on discrimination.

And for anyone who claims that it's nobody's business whether someone is gay, do you not see the irony of complaining on a public forum about the fact that you now know someone is gay? You have every right to believe homosexuality is wrong, but you don't have the right to not know something. If you're not interested in a story, leave it and read another. Reading a story, and commenting on it, suggests that you are in fact very interested and wish to discuss it further.

Respect for the elderly and disadvantaged is a fairly universal standard of good manners, and it has nothing to do with personal judgement of an individual's worth to society.

When talking about train/bus seats specifically, elderly (and pregnant and injured and otherwise disadvantaged) people don't deserve to sit more than anyone else, but the difference between sitting and standing can have a much larger impact on them than on others. For an able-bodied salaryman, standing is slightly more uncomfortable than sitting, for some people the extreme discomfort of standing could prevent them from even using the train. They don't deserve it more, but they definitely need it more.

In general, people in Tokyo, a large metropolis, have less respect for other people than in other parts of the country. Again, a fairly universal state of affairs. Personally, I prefer to keep my own standards rather than regress to the standards of wherever I'm living, and I'd rather sit in the priority seats and offer them up, because I see people sitting in them ignoring others in need far more often than I see people offering them.

@cleo I'm surprised at how many people read your post sincerely. ;)

Bolting the stable door.

This is not quite how the idiom is phrased, and surely closing the stable door to prevent all the other horses from bolting is quite sensible.

"We'll get him when he comes back in"

"He's not coming back."

@bass4funk After reading all your posts, I realized I judged a little too quickly, and I'd retract a previous post, but it was already removed. It seems your stated separation of personal opinion and public interaction is genuine.

So can you not grant others' arguments the same leeway without labelling everyone opposed to you as 'liberal' and attaching views and opinions that haven't been stated? For one, many people who use this site are not even American, and the liberal and conservative stereotypes mentioned in these comments are very US-centric. I'm all for debating American politics, but in this case the article is actually focussed on somewhere else. Personally, I feel reducing any debate to abstract stereotypes completely destroys the debate.

There are some countries where women's faces are hidden, but I wonder if Japan is the only country in the world where it is permissible for grown men to walk around incognito?

I really hope you realize the irony of this statement.

It seems some people have a fundamental misunderstanding of civil rights. You cannot compare LGBT rights and civil rights because they are the same thing. The civil rights movement is aimed at equal rights for all under law, not any specific group. Seemingly well-informed people complaining that LGBT rights are not the same as civil rights just reinforces the importance of LGBT rights campaigning.