GaroJ comments

Personally, I think Amnesty International should not be going after the judges but should be calling for an overhall of the J police system. I have even heard that there are no laws against entrapment in Japan!!!! Is this true?

Agreed. Your post really rang true with me. The problem in Japan isn't with the death penalty itself, but with the justice system's lack of 'due process'.

Seriously, if 'it's what everyone is doing' is the best argument European countries can come up with, Japan should just continue to ignore it. Europeans are becoming notorious for protecting the 'rights' of criminals over appropriately punishing crimes.

Many people here need to understand the word 'contribute'. The question isn't 'Does violence in movies cause violence in society', it's 'Does it contribute to it'.

In my opinion, people can be violent by nature regardless of the presence of or exposure to violent media, but can violent films and media (even news reports) fuel the imaginations and desires of already crazy people? Yes, I think it can.

Great! Too bad this did not happen a year ago before the worst possible event occurred. This is like turning off all the dangerous old power outlets after the house has already burned down.

Are you positing from some kind of apocalyptic alternate reality where 'the worst possible event' actually occurred? In this reality, that description's a bit of an overstatement. To be expected from the anti-nuclear brigade of course.

Johannes Weber

It would be better to teach children other languages like Chinese or Spanish, since they have more native speakers around the world than English (if you don't count India) and since they have much higher intrinsic difficulty. Concentrating on English is a typical example of overdoing without seeing the forest between the trees.

That's disingenuous. By virtue of having the most native speakers (though the difference isn't large for Spanish vs. English), they have more native speakers 'around the world'. According to Wikipedia, approx 80-84% of all Chinese/Spanish speakers are native speakers and probably the vast majority of those people actually live in China/Spain/Argentina/etc. Outside of those those countries, the presence of the languages and their speakers are limited. Compare that to English, where (approx) only 22% of its speakers are natives and you'll have a more reasonable picture of which language would be most useful to learn.

And why would you consider the 'higher intrinsic difficulty' of the Chinese language a good thing? Are you really calling for a generation of a Japanese children to learn a difficult language which has limited application unless you're dealing with one of the very small number of countries that have it as an official language?

English is the most widely spoken language in the world (as I'm sure we all know). That alone is enough reason to keep the language on the curriculum.

Yes, there are many people and many professions within that don't need English in their daily lives, but, as has been mentioned, leaving things there is the kind of insular thinking and behaviour that will never help Japan grow as a country.

This article seems to be about cultural differences, but she's talking about which is as true of Japan as it is for anywhere else. In fact, you probably switch all the 'US' references to 'Japan' and the article wouldn't be any less accurate.

I think Makoto's views of America are not necessarily inaccurate, but she seems to have an unusually positive view of Japan and it makes many of her comparisons irrelevant to/dissonant with non-Japanese people.

Also, if the Japanese woman in the opening story just turned up at someone's house out of the blue, then of course the American woman would've seemed surprised/put out by it. When people say things like 'you should come over sometime', it's usually meaningful but doesn't mean that you can drop by at random. Ojama ni narimasu yo!

I'm way too foreign to go looking for that kind of thing in public and I don't need anymore confirmation of what's available on the internet but I find it hard to believe producers and retailers would get away with selling such stuff openly.

How about another perspective:

Yeah I don't think that a pedestrian walking into me would be that big a deal. Even getting barged by someone running probably wouldn't ruin my day (or theirs) that much. However, if a fast-moving, carelessly ridden bike collided with me, the results would be a lot worse.

Is there no more context for this quotation? I read somewhere previously that Japan's response to crisis situations is often slowed down by the need to 'build a consensus' amongst a relatively large group of interested parties.

If a smaller group has the requisite expertise and are free from corruption/agendas (this is the hard part), I think it makes perfect sense to have a small group running things in a considered, but quick and decisive manner.

In a crisis situation, taking time to build a consensus over what to do and then who to do is what can (and probably did) cost lives.

And the make-up on those flight attendants is clown-level.

Yoshinoya is well known for being cheap, JAL is well known for being rip-off expensive. With the amount they charge, you'd think JAL would try to avoid the cheap and quick image of a place like Yoshinoya. I actually like the chain but this tie-up makes me less likely to use JAL.