EbiKatsu comments

Heaven forbid that Japan should end like an anglophone nation! Where would I go then?!

The results read to me like it was a phone robot survey where you just listen and press buttons and no one could be bothered listening to more than a few options and McD was always in the top 3. I live in a town of 40,000 and there is one each of McDonalds/Mos/lotteria and none of the others on this list. Folk have plenty of other options and those shops are always busy.

I think many folk on this forum might be from the US where PAYE, insurance, healthcare and consumption taxes are much lower than in other parts of the world. The EU has some really high consumption tax rates, albeit there is often a lower rate for food. As it stands Japan's 5% is one of the lowest, and 8% will still be amongst the lowest.

It's hard for anyone with depression in Japan, where mental health is seen as a shameful lack of personal accountability rather than a health problem. Help is thin on the ground for many newly delivered mothers and the hospitals/maternity centers etc, while generally very good often ply the mother with "oh she's so cute", "babies are such fun aren't they?", when the mother is so tired and needing support. PND is often a cursory part of the 'lecture by the midwife' on the 3rd or 4th post-partum day. Yes, you get stuff to read and a hot-line number, but it must still be very hard to think of using these services in a culture where folk do not reach out and your child-rearing difficulties are to be met with gaman. She must have snapped. She herself phoned for an ambulance. Please don't judge this woman.

Oh speed bumps for sure. I feel like making my own sometimes. Roundabouts would be better in those situtations where there is a very small intersection which really only needs traffic to slow down, not come to complete stop and wait. Out here there are some places that have stop signs in both directions which is kind of like a roundabout without the circle in the middle. Rules for roundabout use are no more difficult than rules for other road use.

What is the relationship between Tohoku restoration and the Olympics exactly? Tokyo won the games, not Japan. Tokyo will finance them, and it is a rich city. Anyway, 1/4 of the funding will come from the US via broadcast rights. If the national debt is 1 quadrillion yen, what does it matter if you host an olympiad, or a million olympiads? Would not hosting the Olympics really change the debt scenario? I think as a shot in the arm for the Japanese its potential value is enormous. Banzai!

Abbott as PM? Things keep getting weirder...

“The opinion among the groundwater specialists is that TEPCO has no idea what it’s doing,”

Among the groundwater specialists and everybody else. Is it too late to panic?

"Only the baby-boomers were a model generation : married at 22, kids at 25 and 28, buying their house, having 2 cars... well, it's also because they had a stable job at 22, a steady career with increasing income. That was the exception in human history to have the economy allowing that. Before and after that, people had more complicated lives. My grand-parents marrying at 30 and nearly 40 due to poverty then a little war displacing everybody...is not so different from the youth now, not getting jobs with income enough to pay a roof before 30 and thus starting steady relationships only then."

This historic point is so often ignored. But societies everywhere still run by BBs fear the non-model citizen and judgement is easier and cheaper than help.

ii kaori!!! Will the cabins be misted with vanilla air? Think of all the omiyage tie-ins here. These LCCs are often marketed at young women who go on budget group holidays and like buying cute things. Not your sophis flyer.

No deal!!

Even the Japanese police say that folk here have 'poor risk assessment'. I don't know why that is. The amazing chances I see parents taking with their kids astounds me: kids running into car parks, standing inside moving cars, mothers walking through a car park with kids wandering behind them, even toddlers not being carried across car parks.Both the death of a child and being the cause of it is a tragic event.

@unholyimage I would hope that a large resort casino would be subject to better planning etc. than the awful eyesore pachinko parlours. In the town I used to live, they pulled down a newish pachinko palour, bulldozed the site, built a new one and have to this day, never used it. It is now covered in kudzu with a carpark full of weeds. Nth Saitama is festooned with ghost parlours rotting into the ground.

I know Packer's casinos in Australia, and while they are huge operations with restaurants, brand shops, cinemas etc., and done well, once inside the gaming area it is old folk and disability pensioners emptying their pockets into slot machines - a depressing sight.