Isa comments

I feel bad for the staff. Their wages are already low enough as it is, now they're going a full month without work...

also I went to both parks the weekend before they announced the closure. It was packed to the brim, even with Corona fears.

my local inaka Hamazushi did away with the revolving part last year, they've been order only for a good while now

I was talking to a colleague just yesterday about this. She's a part time worker - works for 3 hours a day, and then she goes and picks up her kids from school, does all the chores, and cooks food for her family. She hates it. She hates it so much. Her husband criticises any little mistake she makes because he says 'you don't have to work, why are you messing up this simple thing?' I said to her 'but housewife is a job too - and a difficult one at that' and she said agreed with me. She said she wished she could go back to her old job, long hours and all, because at least she got rewarded with money for all of her work. Being a housewife (in general, but especially here) is an exhausting, thankless job.

I'm a hayfever sufferer, so I've taken to sticking old ones in the washing machine and reusing them. They hold up against a spin cycle pretty well. Dunno how it affects their ability to reduce viruses but it still does the job against pollen.

My neighbour back in the UK fostered a little girl until her parents were deemed unsuitable to have their children returned to them (serious drug addiction and the health complications that followed), and the little girl was adopted into my neighbour's family. She's a sweet girl in a much better place than with her birth parents, and it made me want to be a foster parent myself.

Also, as someone who works in Japanese schools, I hate to say that I see too many children who in any other country would be put into foster care because their home situations are frankly atrocious. Abuse happens everywhere, of course, but the neglect that some of these children are suffering is infuriating. There will always be people who want to help but feel they can't because of this country's culture of not interfering with other's business. I wish that fostering was more common here.

Mr Kipling, I know, I live 15 minutes from where this incident took place. There are a number of recently immigrated families here who still don't speak much Japanese.

Her husband bleeding to death outside so she calls her boss?

she probably doesn't speak Japanese and called the first person she knew who spoke both Portuguese and Japanese

I watch everything I can with subtitles because I struggle with processing speech, especially if it's not a conversation I'm actively involved in...you get used to it really quickly.

my triple barrel surname makes my Japanese colleagues sooooo confused it's almost amusing, if not a bit sad how they can't even consider not having the same surname as their spouse, parents, or children.

but damn the line about Koizumi expected to be a prime minister was...sinister? might as well save some money, stop holding general elections if y'all in the Diet have decided that already

Yeah...no, playing on their phones at night and being sleepy the next day probably isn't even in the top 10 most common reasons as to why chronic truants aren't going to school

funny, my area has embraced solar panels and wind turbines without much complaint - though I guess our local nuclear power station looming over us is probably an influence on the lack of complaints

I have a friend who only speaks Japanese - but has lots of foreign friends. She knows that I can hold a conversation about most things, but will immediately switch to 'simple' Japanese for me when the topic exceeds my level. It's really not that hard to do, and I do agree that it would be extremely useful for disaster situations. Probably more useful than the butchered English that NHK puts out.

If you need to use violence to parent/discipline your child, you're not doing a good job. My parents never raised a hand against me, and I still received punishment appropriate to my bad behaviour. A child can be taught consequences without the threat of violence.

does he think that excuses his terrible actions? also cmon dude, no one is buying the zimmer frame shtick

what a tragic accident, I can't imagine how the mother must be feeling

Really it all boils down to what your personal strengths are. I know myself that I can pick up a language just by listening and speaking, but I have a very hard time learning a new writing system. Which is why my Japanese colleagues get very confused that I write like an elementary second grader when I am much more fluent while speaking.

I'm actually all for being able to openly talk about being on your period, and removing the stigma surrounding menstruation, but start that in schools and education, not with some silly badge.

Ricky: yeaaahhhh I don't believe that 'urging' China will make them change anything. Condemnation doesn't do anything, either. Tibetans and the Uyghur people can testify to that.

Oh yes well done Abe for doing the absolute bare minimum, such a great and wonderful leader, whatever would Japan do without your completely empty and meaningless words

Amaterasu forbid that a woman becomes the head of a constitutional monarchy where the monarch is supposed to be nothing more than a figurehead...unless these ossans are still living with the idea of restoring an empire or something

When people are told to 'gaman' harassment and bullying from a young age, why would they trust any authority figure enough to report it sexual harassment/assault?

ALT here. y'all should see the English textbooks for elementary and junior high school. It's boring. It's difficult. I don't blame my junior high schoolers for completely giving up because this language is already hard enough to learn, without the fuddy duddies at MEXT deciding what obscure vocabulary and grammar they think should be taught and not giving a second thought to actual teaching techniques or anything that might interest children. The system is failing them from the primary stage.

I binged the Japan mini series in one night and my face was so swollen the next day because of how much I cried. Especially for episode 2 and 3, with the young man and woman who were so full of self loathing because of the pressure from people around them.

lord, the lack of empathy in this comment section is depressing. is it nice to live in such a black and white world, where all laws are fair and just, and all people are either good or evil? I guess it must make things more simple, especially something as complicated as immigration.

the mental gymnastics that the White House had to perform to make this statement would be almost impressive if it weren't so farcical

I saw an investigative video on YouTube where identical twins sent their dna into a variety of these different genetic services to see how the results would differ between services and the twins themselves. The conclusion was that they're highly inaccurate because they don't have a wide enough pool of 'control DNA'. I'd never pay for one myself, even though I'm mixed race and very curious on my ancestral history. (plus I'd really like to know if the diabetes from dad's side or the heart disease from mum's side is gonna get me first)

A government has failed when voluntarily giving up your freedom is the easiest road out of poverty

They target young girls and women because they won't fight back. Manly hey

on top of that, in cases like these the perpetrator often has a mentality of being angry at women for the things that aren't going well in their lives - eg; no girlfriend? it's all women's fault, not theirs.

Okay so I can speak Japanese well enough, but reading the disaster alert messages that came to my phone during Hagibis? First, they're multimedia messages so you can't copy and paste them into Translate, noooo, gotta screenshot and then put them in. Then there's the issue with Translate not being perfect, misreading some place names, and just occasionally leaving out entire grammar points that change sentences. I also have the Japan Shelter app which gives me disaster alerts for wherever I want and automatically translates them but that makes the text lose all its formatting which makes it near impossible to read.

Foreigners living here could get by if they're tech savvy and know a decent amount of Japanese (that's not to say many are). But if you're a visitor who only knows how to stiltingly say 'arigato', none of this is useful. AND the NHK news channel had a translator with poor pronunciation and grammar skills when translating into English. There was only one translator who had a decent grasp of the English language.

I think my eyes just rolled so far back into my head that I saw an alternate universe where these old men were voted out of power