HokoOnchi comments

The Crook in Chief.

All that for something worth less than Y300?

Pedestrian commuter rage

Anachronistic Chinese hegemonism is pretty obvious to everyone.

Why else break international laws and create artificial islands in the South China Sea to disavow claims by the other riparian nations?

Beijing has the idea that China needs to make up for all the lost opportunities since the days of the Qing dynasty and to show everyone, especially Europe, America and Japan who's the boss.

It's hard to respect the bluster of the current Trump Organization executives. Pompeo has made a number of gaffes that reveals his lack of breadth of knowledge of the players on the global stage on which he operates.

But maybe he knows a little bit more than his boss. Maybe.

Clinton was not impeached. He was not found guilty.

Trump, by the facts, is guilty of many things. Whether this shakedown of Ukraine is sufficient to qualify as a high crime or misdemeanor to be found guilty will depend upon how many Republican Senators vote with their consciences rather than their partisan membership cards.

As it is, the House should use deliberate care and caution to establish an evidentiary record that is itself unimpeachable.

As South Korea kept moving ahead of North Korea in the past 20+ years, North Korea's aggression through criminal behavior kept increasing. Negotiations with Pyongyang were episodes in which extortion was used by North Korea to get more lucre for the filthy few in the Kim dynasty's loyal followers, the denizens of Pyongyang.

This pattern continues with each new threat becoming closer to reality because they are armming up with nukes while the South and Japan conscientiously observe the Non-Proliferation Treaty while the North withdrew from it in 2003.

The hand writing has been graffitied on the international wall for 14 years now. China and Russia both don't want either the South or Japan to move to have nuclear deterrent capability independent of the US but, basically, they are letting the North create the wedge issue that may make non-proliferation a dead option.

Then what will they do?

All Kim Jong-Un wants is to negotiate with us while dangling missiles above our heads to get everything he wants, dribbling some of it to his acolytes in the capital city, and those unworthies who live outside Pyongyang get nothing. Well maybe they get to slack off a bit and not work slave hours quite so much.

The phenomenon is real and being measured. There are multiple layers of cause and effect in play. Some of the effects themselves are aggravating causes for other effects that contribute to the phenomenon. Other causes are independent of others.

Earth's overall climate is a hugely complex system. It has multiple factors some that aggravate each other, others that combat each other.

But we cannot dispute the slow but steady increase in global mean temperatures, year on year, season on season, month on month, etc.

There's a vast difference between educational information available at a temple where the manji is prominently displayed and a tourist who has no intention of visiting a temle but seeing what the person mistakes as a hakencreuz all over the map.

The intention is to avoid confusion and negative impression not to demand that the tourist immediately educate himself or herself and understand what the manji is.

Its for PR, not for PC.

There is a growing effort to distinguish "business as usual" Republicanism from Tea Party Republicanism and Ted Cruz has jumped on this as a chance to mark himself out to be the only Tea Party answer.

I don't know who gains in this though. Sarah Palin had been receding into her corner before this so the question is whether Trump really gets Iowa out of this. I assume his ad-marketing whizzbangs have scoped out the demographics in that State.

Tone deaf. Completely tone deaf to international, especially Western, sensibilities. Which may justify it to some as being too Occi-centric an objection. This is just wrong.

I think it is a good idea. In this world of tiny micro-bytes of attention paid by the general public (at least outside of Japan if not inside), written explanation is not something that should be expected clarify the situation.

Anyone online has had first hand experience of idiotic spleen venters who take any image they can to express indignation and report scandal without any thought given to the actual facts and try to make it go viral (as too many times it does).

The Olympics are about public relations and countries putting the best foot forward. No point in creating tourist literature that appears not only tone deaf but pigheaded to boot.

The Park Geun Hye government has not been very transparent about the fact that the Park Chung Hee Government actually did receive reparations from Japan that addressed the comfort women and any all other claims for compensation.

What the Park Chung Hee Government did with that reparations money isn't being connected to the current state of affairs.

But as it is, the South Korea Supreme Court has again ruled that the Treaty between Korea and Japan has settled all issues regarding compensation so that surviving victims of the Japanese comfort stations cannot maintain lawsuits seeking damages now.

The Supreme Court in South Korea has, again, denied the right of some surviving comfort women from seeking damages against the Govt. of Japan citing the fact that the Treaty between Korea and Japan that normalized relations included the payment of reparations for all compensation claims. So that should say something about the "legal" basis of these claims today.

Human (white slavery) trafficking is the most probable vehicle and viable explanation of what enabled the prostitution that is involved with those comfort stations. We still have that kind of trafficking today. It persists everywhere. And those modern day women enslaved.

It doesn't take a stretch of the imagination that there had to have been cooperation between those traffickers in Korea and those who provided the logistical support to the Imperial military to engage in this type of "trade" in women. Control them and coerce them.

At the time of his birth, in Canada, Ted Cruz' dad was NOT a naturalized citizen of the USA. His mom is a "natural born" US Citizen, however. His Dad fought with Fidel Castro but then became disenchanted with what Castro was doing so he left for the US.

Cruz' Dad did not naturalize until 2005 after Cruz had already launched into his political career in Texas.

Being born in Canada and as Canada has the same birthright citizenship provision that the US has, Cruz for a time had dual citizenship status. But after his dual citizenship status was brought up by the Texas media in 2013, Cruz decided to formally renounce his status as a Canadian Citizen and did so.

You loosely can identify the type of engine used in a jet plane based upon the contrail that it leaves behind as long as you also have temperature reading and altitude of the surrounding atmosphere at the time. I imagine that Russian jet engines operate at different parameters, heat and efficiencies than US or European ones so that in some conditions a Russian engine would leave a contrail while a US or European one would not and it is possible that by difference in thrust power, one Russian engine would leave a contrail of kind that perhaps another Russian engine wouldn't.

The Renminbi Yuan is still pegged in a modified way to the dollar. It is not unpegged. The Central Bank sets a daily trade exchange rate for the RMBYuan : USDollar with an upper and lower limit against which the Bank will act to control the rate of exchange.

This partly is why when China devalued the RMB Yuan it caused negative reactions. Because China already manipulated its exchange rate with the USDollar anyway.

Obviously you don't commemorate every tragic event but some have an order of magnitude that leaves behind cultural, socio-psychological scars and a record of the political competencies that responded to the event.

The 3/11 definitely is one that should be remembered because of the lesson that had to be re-learned. Tragically, those ancient stone markers on the hillsides in some of the towns that marked out the line below which building was unsafe were long forgotten.

The difference in how German education and media treat the history of the nations actors and their deeds in WW2 and what Japan does is far greater than the spans of Pacific and Atlantic Oceans combined.

Germany does not engage in an official campaign to erase any mention of facts involving what happened in the War or why they nation entered into it like Japan is doing in successive waves of educational "updates." The intellectual dishonesty in official Japanese education policy is deplorable.

The Government is 100% complicit in whitewashing the past. It is not a question of shame which I assume is why this whitewashing is happening. It is a question of preserving the frank and stark truth about the barbarity of war itself and the responsibility that Japan (as a past belligerent) has to see to it, now as a first world nation, that something as globally terrible as what happened then is not perpetrated by other actors on the world stage today or in the future.

I'm sure Abe will end up saying too little of what matters and too much that is disingenuous at best.

How refreshing it would be if a Japanese political leader stepped up and said he'd had enough with this posturing in denial and to just say. The nation is a first world nation and needs to acknowledge its responsibilities as such both economically, militarily and politically. And as far as the political acknowledgment goes, that terrible things were done by various Japanese actors and agencies and that Post War Modern Japan core foreign policy is to not letting that be repeated by this Nation or by any other nation.

This constant back and forth with Korea and China the erosion of Japan's public diplomatic relations that results, will continue as long as Japan's political leadership follows Abe's and his LDP rightwing nationalist path of denying the obvious and paying homage at Yasukuni.

As Haruki Murakami has said, apologies should be made whenever called upon. It is just an acknowledgment that what happened was wrong. As long as this isn't done, Japan cannot move on.

If Abe really wants to move this country toward a more "complete" foreign policy actor with the ability to extend its military force for the cause of good, he of all people should have realized long ago that gong to Yasukuni and diverting statements about what happened in the War would only continue to foster distrust and ill will toward anything but a totally pacifist and powerless Japan.

As I recall, you're supposed to make eye contact with the waiter and say please, preferably in French.

I have no idea what she may have tried to do to get a waiters attention (other than raising her hand and being observed doing so) but that's not going to get a Parisian waiter, especially, all that interested in attending to you .... especially during tourist season.

There goes a collectictible!

Herman's Head was tv show that had a similar premise. It came out in 1994 so that pre-dates either Poison Berry or Inside Out.

Really, imitation is the best flattery.

If apologies were made, even if the same words each year during the Hiroshima memorial, it would diminish the significance of the so called respect that politicians feel they need to pay at Yasukuni for the "war dead."

And if we are to remember the atomic bomb drops each year, we also should remember the perpetration of war in Asia each year as well.

That would be very fair and balanced and it would encapsulate the human anguish, ordeal and loss suffered because hot-heads prevailed around the world.

Finger prints on the product and on the toothpick.

The guys finger nails are really long. Is that a fashion these days?

It isn't even a "prank" since there isn't anything funny to it and it isn't really harmless. It is just an act of malicious vandalism.

He told Sakurai that his pejorative rants against Koreans was trashy or "kudaranai." Was this a play on words by Hashimoto? An ancient Japanese name for a part of Korea is "kudara," after all.

It doesn't seem like Sakurai got that .....

Not all in Japan think one way. As much as there is a lot of effort to foster a "group" mentality, it isn't a process in perfect working order.

What appears to be hate based anti-Semitic vandalism likely was the result of more than one person. A handful, is my guess.

Whoever they were, they had to be assimilated into this country enough to be able to navigate the public libraries and in such a way that they would not be remarkable (i.e., not walk up to the librarian's counter to ask for a copy of Anne Frank's Diary, etc., etc.).

So the odds are that the perpetrators were either Japanese or long-time residents with skills in speaking, reading and writing Japanese and also who would not be remarkable when present in a library.

The intention also is muddied and unclear. Why just deface books? If their hatred of Jews is so strong, why not a more public spectacle that doesn't take time to emerge and become reported as news?

There is a lot to question about who and why about these vile acts.

And I vote that Holocaust Denial be made a crime in Japan.

He needs to resign. He is entitled to his opinion but the office he holds does is not.