Cameron comments

Maybe after the morning drinking binge he started to see the world differently, which led him to the conclusion that cleanliness is next to drunkenness.

We are seeing infections in The Village. Assuredly over the Olympics and Paralympics month and a half we will see more.

In my office building when a positive is reported elevators, common rooms, etc. get disinfected.

Once the Olympics are done, apparently the Village will become luxury condos. I wonder if they will disinfect every single space?

People seem to be focusing on the “with himself” aspect and calling it redundant. Assuming that the act can only be performed on oneself is sad and absolutely incorrect.

it sounds like Australia is facing what the rest of the world faced a year ago. I haven’t read anything about “the curve” for … I can’t even remember how long. If I didn’t know better I would think that the news feed mistakenly posted a year-old news article.

The way this article is written, one would think Australians are not in the habit of wearing masks and have not developed the habit of social distancing. Could it be their “success at beating this thing” that caught everyone sleeping?

"When you're in apartment buildings, we're not wanting you to congregate in any shared spaces," said New South Wales chief health official Kerry Chant. "We are really requiring under a public health order that you wear masks when you're transiting through common areas."

Is this actually how people speak in Australia? The grammar is definitely unique.

The article does not say trespassed in a nearby apartment it says trespassed AT a nearby apartment. All that could be is the poor drunk guy stepping around the hedge to find a private spot to take a whiz. Some suspicious person looks out the window at the sound of the bushes rustling, sees some terrifying barbarian doing unspeakable things to the foliage and calls the police. After all it is well known that drunk Japanese men can whiz anywhere. (And get away with it).

New Disney superhero film "Black Widow" took…

Scarlett Johansson as the cat-suited superspy…

how does a black widow spider resemble a cat?

As my father who grew up on a farm in the Canadian prairies used to say, “a good rain keeps the dust down.” We don’t get enough rain in Tokyo as is, so this rain was very much appreciated.

Woo hoo! This is the most exciting roller coaster ride I have been on in my entire life! Up, down, up, down, uuuuuuup!

I called my local ward district today to help me find a location where I can register for a vaccination. When I tried on my own there were no clinics or hospitals offering appointments for months. Finally the soonest I could book was August 3rd.

I wonder if giving away all of these ampules is affecting the availability, or are the clinics and hospitals really that slow to ramp up? (Both I presume)

“Expats”, and by this I mean the executives who get sent by a company to live and work in a foreign country at a branch office etc., as opposed to us “normals” who live a “local” lifestyle, have huge incomes, incredible benefit packages, and are housed in places that normal people could never afford or even see the insides of.

I have seen a couple of these places when invited for a dinner by a newly installed VP from a foreign partner company. They are obscenely large and outrageously expensive. One VP I met “had to justify” (and did so successfully) that the JPY 2MM/ month condo he wanted to be put up in was standard pricing for Tokyo. And the companies pay.

So these are not normal places to live. The food they eat is not normal. The drivers they have to take their kids to International school is not normal. The expense account they receive is not normal. There is nothing normal about an “expat life” abroad. Which in the end makes this annual report pretty much worthless for normal people.

Because if you live a normal life in Tokyo it really is very affordable. And I agree with the other posters, food here is so much cheaper than in, say, NA, where every time I go back I am shocked at the cost of a restaurant meal. Even groceries here are cheaper than in Canadian supermarkets.

I wonder how the 99% in Ashgabat actually live? Probably like the 99% in any other city around the world.

Still not big enough for a true tower burger. Unfortunately I am not a fan of teriyaki sauce.

It is the delta variant, I think that is currently causing problems in the fully vaccinated population in the UK.

I actually snorted when I read this headline. And then when I read the entire article I laughed out loud at the stupidity of it all.

I see that many people are concerned about the excruciatingly slooooow vax rate to date. But we all know that Japan has an incredibly shallow and long lag phase to get everything started. They try to imagine and “solve” all imagined risks before they get going. This happens in business here, too. It’s not just the government, it is a cultural phenomenon.

And then, just when everyone is about to give up on Japan for failing, suddenly they hit an extremely steep log phase and zoom ahead of everyone, baffling the world.

I would not be surprised if before long, Japan gets her stuff together and “suddenly” we are approaching the head the pack. What? How?? When???

The private sector steps up to the plate. This could be a grand slam home run.

I checked in with my Taiwanese coworker who went into the Nagano/Gifu mountains for five days during GW, when I first read that two police officers died whilst hiking in the mountains. I was so happy she made it back. And now when I read this article I am even more happy.

Great article! Nobody can bash Japan here.

Just when the pundits claim that we are about to run out of fossil fuel, technology develops and new pockets, larger than those to date, are found.

Some of us (not me) remember when it was IMPOSSIBLE to fly to the moon. We are way beyond that now.

So will be the case with faster-than-light travel. What is science fiction today becomes science fact tomorrow.

@ gokai - these are the results of three days ago, Thursday, not today, Sunday. I often wondered why they would report the findings early in the afternoon, until I finally caught on.

People love those out of bounds areas on the ski slopes because the Japao is so enticing. But it is also extremely dangerous. Very unfortunate for her and family that she lost the roll of the dice.

5,183 square meters of floor space?!?!!?? That’s almost 56,000 square feet!!!!! Of floor space! Did the journalist maybe mistake imperial for metric when reporting this size?? Holy moly!

He resembles Ewan McGregor. Doing an advertisement for Nike.

Beatles music plays in the background....

”Back in the USSR!”

Fade in Nike catchphrase...

”Just Do It!”

Just because you are positive doesn’t mean you have to take up a bed in a hospital. There are a plethora of people around the world who can go through it at home. My friend in Denmark, her brother, her boss all did. And they survived. Healing at home is not necessarily wrong. Please don’t jump to conclusions that the Japanese government is handling this the wrong way. I have seen too many people bashing J-Gov no matter what they do. Look to your own countries, please.

I really feel for all these people; when it snows this much it doesn’t matter how prepared you are, it’s simply overwhelming.

I lived in Fukui for 20 years, near the mountains. I think it was the winter of 2004/2005 but we had 4m of snow in four days. I shoveled on average 5-7 hours every day from 12/15 to 03/15. There was so much snow that there was nowhere to shovel the snow.

I had to go onto my roof and shovel it off several times. It was always a little frightening going up on the roof because you can’t tell where the roof ends as the snow is so thick and overhangs the roof edge. every year elderly people would fall off the roof, become buried in the snow and die.

I miss snow but I must admit I don’t miss that much snow.

January 3rd was a Sunday and most medical institutions are not working at full capacity on Sundays. Had it been a regular work day we might have seen double the tests resulting in a different spread of positives (possibly higher). Let’s see what tomorrow and Friday’s numbers, based on Monday and Tuesday’s full day of hospital testing bring. Then we should see a more accurate representation of what happened during Oshogatsu.

Bob’s comment made me look at the photo again; and by George I think he’s right! It’s almost like Prince Hisahito is chomping at the Imperial bit to get to the front of the line.

The other day when we had the huge number of positives (945?) with only about 2,000 tests (45% positive) not a single person questioned this. Rather than bashing the Japanese government for doing everything wrong, couldn’t this have been an editorial miss with the actual number of tests at 12,000 instead of the reported 2K? It just did not make sense that the number of positives would suddenly jump from 10-15% to 45% in one day without a red flag being raised.

Oh, and ¥9800 is economical compared to what I had to pay a private lab in Canada to get my test done in less than the 72 hours required by the Japanese government in order for permanent residents to return to Japan. Canada could not do it in less than 80 hours and I had to have four tests before the last one from the private lab was able to get the negative results back to me in time to change my flight and get on a plane to come HOME to Japan.

Saliva testing is what the government does for every PCR test conducted at the airport upon arrival here. Japan developed this and is able to get results in about one hour. This is their standard now. Isn’t it possible to think that maybe they figured something out? Or is Japan just a failure at everything they do? Wouldn’t be the first time that Japan improved on things.

I work in Harajuku. In the first several months the area was dead and businesses on Takeshita St went down. It was a true ghost town. These days foreigners (from the Asian countries that the J-gov wants to do business with) are visibly increasing.

The other day I saw four White guys walking the streets. Sure enough, they were sporting Australian accents; another country that has been “eased”.

It took me a month to come home to Japan after I had to go to Canada for my mom’s sudden death. The 72-hour COVID year restriction on non-Japanese permanent residents of Japan traveling from the banned country of Canada resulted in me having to take four COVID tests before I could finally get one back in enough time to change my flight and rush to the airport.

And here we have Japan opening up Australia for entry into Japan with no restrictions, as part of their plan to increase business with APAC.

I was talking to my friend on the train this morning about this. She was wearing walking platform sandals to the office. She said that in her company, corporate has banned the wearing of heels over 7cm in height “because they are dangerous if required to escape the building during earthquake, fire, etc.” However, her boss (she calls her “Sexy Boss”) is 175cm and always wears 10cm “pinheels” in the office in spite of the ban. Nobody complains. She doesn’t complain. And so because the boss does it, a lot of other women in her department also wear high heels (because they want to). And they don’t get reprimanded for breaking the code.

Again, it’s not all about bashing corporate Japan for being behind or oppressive. If we look for the negative, that’s what we are going to see.

As an aside, maybe the woman with bloody toes needs to find a different pair of heels that fit her feet better, so that they aren’t causing her damage? Foot for thought...