el comments

Removal of lymph nodes can cause weight gain.

Removing lymph nodes can cause lymphedema, which is different from normal weight gain and needs to be treated differently - with compression garments and specialized massage, as well as exercise. Dieting helps with LE but can't cure it completely.

While it’s true that younger Japanese aren’t as interested in travel, it’s the ridiculous airfare and strong dollar that are inhibiting folks heading for Hawaii. Southeast Asia is closer and cheaper.

No, usually you don’t have a bra on for an ECG.

Why was her face covered with a towel? Obviously to allow this perv to do his thing but I’m surprised the woman didn’t think it was weird.

Having a sales tax on food has always struck me as outrageous. Get rid of that and things might improve a bit for the average person

I once spoke with somebody who grew up in an SDF family. He said the pay was terrible because the SDF members are essentially civil servants, so it’s very hard to get salaries raised.

Why did it take police until sunset to abandon the search if the distress call came at 1230 pm?

the Japan Meteorological Agency said, adding that they no longer forecast it to directly hit China.

This typhoon was NEVER forecast to "directly hit China" No meteorological agency anywhere made such a forecast!

Actually I believe both China and the JMA said it earlier this week, and before the turn eastward became clear it did look possible.

Many people knew as soon as Tokyo was awarded the Olympics it would be conducted with under the table deals and mate’s rates. It is how Japan works.

Not just Japan, I think this is virtually guaranteed with any Olympics, sadly.

I actually enjoyed the Olympics up until Tokyo, but watching how the IOC pretty much forced Tokyo into holding it during the pandemic has soured me on the whole thing. The sports can be nice to watch, but I think the organization itself is rotten to the core.

This article doesn’t even mention “Your Name” by Shinkai, so I can’t really trust the story.

Why are LANDLOCKED Nagano and Saitama on this list? That’s just weird.

Imagine that you can't inherit your partner's assets, you don't have parental rights to children you may have between you (unless you gave birth to them) and you can't even make medical decisions for them or visit them in the hospital. This is what same-sex couples want, the basic right to live with whom they love and have a secure life.

I imagine this was an effort by a very upset person to cremate the baby, so in a twisted way they were trying to do right by it and give it proper rites. It's hardly unique to Japan; what's unique is that this kind of thing makes the news here. If pregnant women were aware of more options, this sort of thing might happen less frequently - for a lot of reasons.

Or would you prefer to live in the traditional Japan where international/interracial marriage was a social taboo?

The mean spirits on view in many of these comments shouldn’t surprise me, but do. How does it hurt anybody to let people marry whom they love? Especially since I’d venture to guess many of these commenters may be in what were known as “mixed” marriages - that were frowned on - in the past?

The misogyny on display here is stunning. Look at the numbers - Japan ranked 116 out of 146 countries on gender parity in the World Economic Forum's global report last year, the lowest of any country on the International Monetary Fund's list of advanced economies. Or Women make up just 15% of Japan's senior public and private-sector officials and managers, according to data collected by the International Labour Organisation. Are there really NO qualified women here? This sort of figure, in 2022, points to something systemic.

Tokiko Shimizu and Yuri Okina were high on the list for potential candidates. Both have long careers in finance. They'd have been good. On the other hand, given that the job this round is a bit of a poisoned chalice - the two top men in contention absented themselves from consideration one way or another - perhaps it's best a woman not be part of what's likely to be a rocky couple of years.

Meanwhile, the Japanese citizen arrivals breezed through their own vast and empty counter zone with no waits at all.

The Japanese authorities should end their discriminatory attitudes and systems if they want the number of foreign visitors to rise so sharply. Treat everyone the same. I'm not optimistic, though. Discriminatory attitudes are ingrained here.

Stupidity? yes. Discrimination? probably not. Every country has separate lines for citizens and non-citizens, and in mid-January there simply were more foreign travellers than Japanese, I imagine. (I came back in early January and breezed through the shortest lines of all: foreign re-entrants with PR) It's more a staffing issue than anything else.

"He has youth..."

At age 66??? Has youth been redefined?

This is referring to Sato, though I'd argue the same point can be made about 53.

May 8 is of course totally arbitrary and because they want to say they were doing prevention during Golden Week. I imagine most folks will still continue with the masks - or take them off earlier. In restaurants I've been in recently nobody has been pretending to wear a mask while they're enjoying themselves, and they are - talking is at normal levels. So it's kind of silly to put the mask back on once you leave but....whatever.

I know that in most cases Covid is not serious, but I have a friend who got it a year ago and is still struggling, so that makes me a bit warier about it all. Though I also think at some point they may find that some people are simply immune no matter what.

I'm asking this sincerely, but why does this kind of thing happen virtually every.single.year? I grew up in a place with heavy snow and have the experience of being whited out on highways, but we went to the nearest exit and found a hotel and were fine. Do people just think it won't happen to them? We were the only ones on the highway and figured we were foolish, learned our lesson....

This was such a SMALL part of the whole ruling:

Japan court upholds ban on same-sex marriage but voices rights concern | Reuters

Counting on tourism is way easier than doing things that might improve life for the JAPANESE people who live here, like raising wages perhaps.

Of course I’m not completely unsympathetic, but there are some regimes you just don’t mess with, and Myanmar’s one of them - has been like that for years, and worse since the coup.

That said, I imagine they’ll release him in a few months, once they’ve made their point.

ALL Japanese politicians have sons/relatives as their political secretaries, so that alone isn't that big a deal. It's also not necessarily inappropriate - the son is 30, graduated from a good school, presumably "studied" politics for a year to get real experience. Probably a better appointment than many. BUT, it is tone deaf right now to do this.

What would be nice would be if this opened peoples' eyes to the fact that EVERYBODY does this and this is why politics has become a hereditary business here, not to the country's benefit. Abe didn't have a child himself but he was reportedly training the son of one of his other brothers to do the job. If this provoked the kind of general outrage the reports of the Unification Church have, maybe there will be some real change. But I bet a lot of the LDP lawmakers will handle this carefully on the "if you live in glass houses" principle.

Talk about intrusive; when Akihito was having prostate tests, I was working for a media company - and we did a small article on it. One of the editors came rushing over - "Do we have his PSA numbers? We have to have his PSA numbers!" and got quite exercised over it. We figured, given his age, it was hitting a bit close to home.

The MRI wait could be anything. Probably it's not anything serious but he might be putting it off due to scheduling concerns, "just in case" something more major needs doing - the way ordinary folks might do as well. As for the announcement, yes it does seem intrusive - but again, publicizing these tests often has the effect of prompting more ordinary people to get them. Most prostate cancer is nothing much, but the bad version can be quite nasty and life-threatening.

I don’t know 100pct how these things work, but I’d guess protocol mandates someone the level of a Vice President for an EX leader - nothing more or less. Arranging a Presidential trip is too much and he was just here in late May.

The UC connection is the least of the reasons to replace Kishi. Another is getting rid of an Abe faction member. But the biggest is just his health, it’s really going downhill and this is not a time for a defense minister who isn’t physically up to things.

In my area, we had crows attacking people as they came to shop and taking things right out of their bike baskets. For a couple of weeks they played a recording of hawks screaming and the attacks seem to have stopped. The hawks sounded like a kitten in pain, so it was disconcerting.

Imagine it was some kind of post-partum depression. So very sad. Japan has worked hard to lower its suicide rate and done quite well in general by addressing a lot of factors in the culture, but I'm not aware of much discussion of post-partum depression, which according to some reports I've read can be really horrible.

Racial profiling of any kind is abhorrent. But, those of us who are Caucasian from Caucasian majority countries need to remember its as bad if not worse for POC in our native countries, especially in my own US, where “living while POC” can get you killed. I’ve tried to use this as a lesson in empathy.

Japan in 2020 accepted 47 refugees and another 44 for "humanitarian reasons." This from the UNHCR.

Anon, hate to disappoint you but Chiba IS part of the QSOE