el comments

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

I saw a different prediction with March 23 fir Tokyo. Anyway it often changes.

Actually now it’s pretty standard for them to let close contacts of any nationality go home rather than stay in the hotel, I’ve heard of lots of cases.

I arrived back in Japan on Dec 30, with about 3 military personnel among the 30 or so of us deplaning in Japan. It annoyed me to see them not only get separate and preferential treatment - although two of them DID do the PCR test along with us - but to be picked up by somebody from the base at Narita and go back home, to presumably live their life without any constraints while the rest of us went off to do our 6 days of hotel quarantine. Not only that, their greeter stood there shouting with a mask slipped half off of her face - and of course nobody objected. Meanwhile we were shipped off on a bus to Mito for our quarantine.....

Without this kind of hole being patched, these border measures become even higher on the BS scale than they already are. Equal treatment for all!

It's not ALL RESIDENT FOREIGNERS, it's those from 10 specific countries. So let's not panic yet.

That said, this isn't a good sign.

I desperately want to get back and see my 86-year-old mother. Now it looks as though the US may ask all travelers to do a seven-day self quarantine - so I'd get it coming and going. At least part of it is political theater to look more competent than the leader before them. In both nations.

Yotomaya, I don't know how they coordinate. I assume it may be something like landing slots, with each company/flight allotted a certain number of tickets/people a day. But just a look at the prices show that it's definitely an effort to make up for lost money, and the person who buys the tickets first, gets them.

Yotomaya, there's a reason plane fares are so high: limited seats. Basically it's first come, first served; if the tickets are gone, they don't care about nationality. Simple as that.

That “foreign source” for Delta could well have been Japanese returning from abroad. GoTo isn’t necessarily bad but it should go in tandem with opening to foreign tourism. Why not do what Bali is doing and start on a small scale with quarantine required for three days? I’m down in Kyoto right now and it’s the lack of foreign tourists hitting folks here more.

I heard somewhere that she's been getting 16 million yen a year since turning 20, so she probably has decent savings for somebody her age. And we have no idea if they aren't getting some other support somehow. Plus there are rumors she might work for the Metropolitan Museum as a curator of their Japan collection....though that can't pay much either.

All well and good, but what are you supposed to do when your company boots you out at 60 just because you've turned that age, regardless of experience, the work you're producing and so on? Not to mention that some companies in fact mandate retirement at 60, not 65.....

No wonder this country can be such a joyless place at times.

”Brain paralysis”??? I’m guessing this is a really bad translation of cerebral palsy, but you’d think they could at least get their terms right.

Very nice, but some of the interpreters on the ground at the venues are not very good. I’ve felt fortunate I speak Japanese

Now it just remains to persuade those young people to vote, which will likely be much harder than persuading them to drink.

Unfortunately there's been a growing trend of young people voting for the LDP, so this wouldn't necessarily lead to the desired changes. The biggest problem here is lack of a creditable opposition, which was partly just bad luck - the Dems were running the government when 3/11 happened. I personally don't think the LDP would have handled things any better, but the Dems have been tainted in the minds of the people and discredited as a government force. Sad but true. A friend once described Japanese elections as "re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" and that's going to be more true than ever this fall.

If it's so safe and secure, why is Herr Bach wearing an N-95 mask?

The vaccines they donated were AstraZeneca, which while approved won’t be used here because of the very slight chance of danger. Unfortunately for Japan a huge part of the doses they secured were AstraZeneca.

She’s done way better as governor than her predecessors, and it’s hard not to conclude so much of the bashing here is misogyny. I mean, her two predecessors both quit due to SCANDALS - haven’t seen any here. She’s had to deal with the pandemic and Olympics and been more decisive than a lot of oyajis would have been - better than Abe, certainly.

The thing that everybody's forgetting is that the athletes desperately want to be here - it's their profession, they've trained for it, and they only have a small window of time in many cases. Does that mean all of them will obey the rules? I'll believe it when I see it. But though from outside it seems as though the IOC is pulling all the strings, the athletes are more than happy in most cases to go along. One reason the Olympics were postponed last year was big athlete groups, whole nations, refusing to go. Not this year.

Actually, Tokyo 2020 people have said before, as has Suga, that journalists who break the quarantine rules would have their coverage accreditation taken, and could be deported. Again, this may all just be talk, but.