JeffLee comments

@Mocheake

The general population resents the presence of people who do not look like them...

I don't know about that. I do that in a democracy, mainstream parties all pushing the same unpopular policy for quite a few years will open the door to extremism.

It's mass immigration, mainly. Especially after more than a million people arrived from the Middle East in 2015 alone. If you continually foist unpopular policies on a moderate population, you will eventually generate a lot of extremism.

Imagine if Japan decided to adopt the scale immigration that Germany and other western European have done? The reaction will be a lot harsher, I reckon.

That’s rich, coming from this guy. His business buddies are the ones mainly responsible for Japan’s many years of deflation: They cut their workers’ nominal and real wages for a couple of decades after the bubble popped -- and kept going even after their profits surged.

The government can’t do much. Maybe hike cut its spending. The BOJ is the one with the best tools.

The Philippines has a fairly good banking system. I’m not going to say these women asked for it, but they showed very little common sense carrying such a huge amount of cash.

When are the Japanese going to introduce individual or scooped out seating like other countries have? Bench seat has got to go.

gave their precious lives for the country

Well, the ones in WW2 gave their lives not for the country but for the Emperor, whom most Japanese at the time actually believed was not human but descended from heaven.

This idea was explicitly drilled into both soldiers and civilians and most believed it. There hardly any dissent at home, while Japanese soldiers had the reputation on the battlefield of being the most fanatical of all. To think there are folks today who want to bring at least some of that back is chilling.

The common enemy are the greedy corporations that are refusing to pay wages in line with their record-high profits.

It's just the big international companies doing these "big" salary increases,

In Japan, the large corporations set the standard within their respective industries. For example, what Toyota does filters down to its hundreds of suppliers.

Just deport them. That’s what Japan, S. Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and most other countries in the world do. Why doesn’t the UK?

The old stick-up-the-hole still seems to be the best method in terms of price (in Japan) and accuracy.

In some countries, it's due to propaganda by authoritarian regimes that the Japanese have coddled up to and effectively supported in the form of generous ODA. In Indonesia, for example, the Japanese invasion killed 4 million Indonesians, twice the number as all the Japanese who died in the Pacific War. Yet Japanese nationalists point to Indonesia as an example of how the people supposedly love Japan. If that’s the case, then the “people” have been deceived and lied to.

You may as well as ask why Poland and Germany are such great friends these days. To say it’s because the Germans actually treated the Poles well during WW2 would be outrageous, just as JT’s question above is.

It's about time! If all goes well, we'll be getting a stronger yen as well.

Same thing is happening in Canada. Tens of thousands of people die every year waiting for surgery. In this respect with many others unable to have a family doctor, I'm soooo lucky to be living in Japan, where social policies are so much more sensible and responsible than in the neo-liberal West.

The Japanese feel they need to monopolize any discussion on the A-bomb.

Oppenheimer created the atomic bomb, which means he made this world a very scary place.

The Americans accelerated their efforts after learning that the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese were trying to make atomic bombs. Many of the people, like Oppenheimer, who pushed development were Jews, in the strong belief that the world would be a much, much safer place if America and not the Germans and Japanese got there first. They were right.

Key background information like this is totally left out of the Japanese narrative, which is why we need more movies and books like "Oppenheimer."

seeing little benefit from rising share prices

In most case, that is because they are choosing not to benefit. Household financial assets are high in Japan -- and most of it is kept in cash!! The government has set up and promoted 2 outstanding programs, NISA and IDECO, that make investment cheap, easy, relatively safe and lucrative. They're there. If you decide not to use them, that's your problem.

The transport system was appalling the last time we went. We were crammed very tightly and uncomfortably into a very slow-moving every-stop bus, where every stop had long lineups of people waiting. Afterward, we vowed near to return.

 Like the resistance movements in countries occupied by the Germans?

Huh? Gaza wasn't "occupied" when the attacks on Israel took place. The Israelis left in 2005, so that the Gazans could rule themselves and choose their own leaders. And that's how Hamas took power.

The sound more than the jolt. Our buildings and the ones beside it rattling, humming, clacking, creaking and shuddering all at once and at a terrific volume.

Deciding whether our bicycle shelter would strong enough to protect us from falling debris. Running instead to a car parking lot and later watching the empty vehicles bouncing up and down during the many aftershocks.

Also, old people on the street of my Tokyo neighborhood remarking that the quake was the strongest they'd ever felt.

“go and find out…”

That’s the writer’s job, not the reader’s.

Homogenous, rule-bound and fussy Japan is not cut out for international tourism. Time for the country to bow out of its global tourism push and return to the quiet, forgotten and close-minded realm it once was.

The owner has been evacuated. It seems like the Mikan would have rotted if not taken.

If they’re so worried about “overtourism,” why don’t they just scrap the plans for those large casino resorts? They've been controversial from the get-go.

ABE234

What goes up WILL eventually come down.

OK, so you've never looked at any historical charts of the Sp500, the Dow, Canada's TSX, FTSE100, Germany's DAX, Singapore's STI. etc. Nearly all of the major stock exchanges in the industrialized world rise over the medium to long term, with many rising by huge margins.

We've seen Dot com bubble. Housing bubble. Pandemic crash. Black Wednesday.Asset bubbles. 1997 financial crash.

Which were all temporary setbacks. The US markets staged strong recoveries afterward.

Go, baby, go! Up, up, up!!!

The BOJ policies impoverish workers 

Private sector employers are impoverishing Japanese workers. The BOJ’s policy is based on the premise that Japan’s corporation will share some of their booty with the people who work for them. So far, they are quite reluctant to do so.

Margaret Thatcher, Marjorie Green, Georgia Milano, Marine LePen, etc., etc. Yeah, I wouldn't count on it. An embarrassingly simplistic world view.

The man's card did not have the information as he had apparently applied online.

So the real culprit seems to be another one of Japan's pathetic online administrative platforms. Maybe it was set up by the same people responsible for the My Number card?

Most rules are OK but a few are mind boggling. Why are my polypropylene and metal ski boots considered "burnable," for example? Burning those would create a toxic and hard lumpy mess. I assume that in the old days, shoes were made of leather or canvas, even wood in Japan's case. Maybe the authorities should first update and rationalize some of their crazy rules.

I also find the attitude of the garbage collectors "confusing." Every second Thursday , there is a pick up for "unburnable" trash. I put out a frying pan shortly before 8 a.m. when collection begins. They left it. One of the illustrations of examples of burnable trash is....a frying pan. How often do these kind of things happen and the Japanese blame foreigners for "not understanding"?

No surprise. German intelligence has always been riddled with lots of East Bloc spies and moles since the end of WW2.

Burns pushed back at Chinese accusations that the United States is seeking to decouple its economy from China's,

Why deny that? The US economy has boomed ever since the decoupling movement got started, while China's nosedived. Similar to how the US went on the ascent economically right after Japan's bubble popped. It's a zero-sum gain world, folks.

No criminal charges? Sure sounds like systemic fraud to me.