Joel Tucci comments

Week over week comparisons are a lot more useful than day over day as week over week more accurately accounts for variances one testing that occur over the week(with weekend testing being less frequent)

Another reason is that Japan has one of, if not the lowest, rate of obesity in the world. There are mounds of data that suggest obese people are muh more likely to have severe symptoms and die than people who are of healthy weight.

Oh man remember that time we went parting and all caught Coronavirus? Those were good times!

It never ceases to amaze me how many people I see walking with toddlers who are not holding their hands at all times here. Toddlers run out into traffic, it’s what they do, it’s your job as a parent to hold their hands at all times wherever there are cars around.

Dominos came up with an ingenious way of dealing with this, if you ask them to the delivery driver will not come within 2m of you. It’s a great way to let people who are under self quarantine still get food without risking infecting the driver. Other delivery services would be smart to adopt this model

The increase in the Tokyo population and the decrease in the overall population are related, Japan has a serious “Tokyo problem “ that it’s not really addressing. Look at the situation a lot of young Japanese are facing, you can either

a: Stay near your hometown and familial support structures where cost of living is cheap and commutes are reasonable but there are few job opportunities or

b: Come to Tokyo where job opportunities are plentiful but you are hundreds of kms from your family and face brutal commutes and sky-high living costs

Do either of those sound amenable to having children? The sky high property costs in Tokyo also impact the availability of day care, day cares require a lot of space making it fiscally impossible often times to run one. The birth rate in Tokyo reflects these issues, it’s the lowest of all prefectures and yet Tokyo is taking in all the young people. The Japanese government finally realized this a few years back but their half hearted attempts to reduce the population (convincing elderly people to go back home and offering tax breaks to companies that relocate outside Tokyo) have been abject failures

Maybe it's because Microsoft was so sure of itself it thought the only competition anyone could mount would be internally. There was a time when Microsoft was releasing and advertising THREE different, completely incompatible, versions of Windows Mobile. THREE! How on earth did they expect to be "dominant" over other competitors when they couldn't even get their act together and release one unified platform.

Since I can’t edit my comment let me try again, for all the people that are making comments about less crowded trains etc. you have no idea about how Japanese demographics are playing out. The population decline isn’t happening in the big cities, in fact Tokyo and Osaka populations continue to rise. It’s the countryside that is emptying out.

Japan’s “Tokyo problem” needs to be addressed and soon. A big contributor to the low birth rate is the dilemma a lot of young people are faced with. They can either stay home close to familial support structures where housing and commutes are reasonable but jobs are scarce or go to Tokyo hundreds of kilometers from family and face brutal commutes, sky high housing costs but where job opportunities are plentiful. Neither of these situations is particularly conducive to child rearing and that bears out in all the statistics in the article

not using Van Halen's "Right now" to promote it seems like a mistake #reallydeepcuts

All it will lead to is Companies that use these so called "rare earths" seeking alternatives, there was a comment just last week by South American producers of lithium that with all the new mines coming online that prices will drop as supply increases. Short term China may hold the cards BUT in the long run alternatives will be found.

Keep in mind that China has been increasing its monopoly on the whole vertical market, its not just a problem of mining the materials, but also processing them. That kind of expertise and those facilities can take years to come up full speed. The West let China monopolize this market and now is paying the price for their myopia.

While Donald Trump is certainly exacerbating this situation, this is the result of a long-standing failure in US leadership to maintain expertise in several critical industries. China has been planning this monopoly for over 15 years, neither Bush or Obama did anything to stop them and this is the natural result.

In 2018 Japan imported 74,966.7 million dollars from the US and exported 142,596.2 million dollars to the US. But also keep in mind that Japan has less than half the population than the US, in fact per capita the Japanese consumer consumed about $591 USD of American products, but per capita Americans only consumed $435 of Japanese products. How exactly is the trade policy "unfair" when it in aggregate benefits the United States? More economic idiocy from this administration, not exactly surprising.

Again the Saudis buying of Jared Kushner has paid off in spades.

I have no major objection to the gengo system per se, as long as emperors stay healthy and live long. That was not the case in medieval times, which added extra work to the study of Japan's history.

The one emperor one era name system is actually relatively new, it only started with Meiji. Before that the name would change periodically, often in response to natural disasters, famines, etc. I guess to ward off the bad luck from the old era.

Oh man, where am I supposed to get underwear at 3 am now?

They should have gone with ramen, much more addictive

Tokyo’s infrastructure is becoming old thus breakdowns will become more of the norm in the future

Not only old, but overtaxed. Many of these lines were not designed to run as often as they do, but as Japan’s Tokyoinization problem continues to worsen expect more of the same

per capita the Japanese already consume more American products than visa versa, in order to “balance” the trade deficit the average Japanese consumer would have to consume triple the amount of US goods than they currently do, that’s just not feasible. But expecting Trump to understand basic nuance or logic is a lost cause. Abe if you want Trump off your back all you gotta do is sink some money into Kushners money pit real estate and he will do whatever you tell him to, worked for the Saudis

I just wish Japanese food and beverage manufacturers would stop putting sucralose in everything, gives me terrible headaches

Having been in Tokyo in 2003 I can attest that at the very least homeless were a lot more visible back then. They would often form makeshift cardboard shelters inside large train stations, especially in the winter. Nowadays there is not a homeless to be seen near Shibuya station(though there still are plenty under the bridges). Probably due in part to economic progress and in part to being much more harshly treated by police. I remember being near a park in Tokyo and seeing the cops drag off a homeless man, who obviously didn’t want to go to wherever they dragged him off to... I kind of felt guilty about not getting involved (I didn’t have any device capable of recording video), but I knew as a foreigner there was nothing I could do

Or you could, oh I don't know, encourage companies to hire outside of Tokyo, make it so that young people from other parts of the country don't feel that staying in their home town is career suicide. That would certainly go a long way to reducing the congestion in Tokyo, probably help raise the birth rate to boot.

I wonder how many were by infants "using" their parents smartphone, mine has almost called several times now

Here's a suggestion, how about we fix the problem by not cramming every single person on the archipelago into the Tokyo area, that will certainly fix overcrowding(and a lot of other problems as well)

Oh good, we had a guy who worked hard and paid taxes and because he did something that hurt no one my tax money gets to go to paying for his imprisonment, great use of funds Japan

Why would he even go there while the couple was there if theft was his motive?

Because if they kept most of their valuables in a safe then being able to force them to open said safe is going to be much more profitable. Guy probably wasn't the sharpest bulb in the box, so I don't think he is able to crack them open himself.

How about fixing prefectural economies instead so that not everybody has to move to Tokyo to find good employment...that would certainly reduce crowding... Nah some posters and random prizes is obviously much more effective.

Anyone who didn't see this coming years ago was blind, China copied the Japanese formula right down to the bad loans. Anyway, if you have any investments in China, get them out now. When things go bad the CCP will get grabby, and the first thing they grab are going to be foreign assets.

Yes, should be a wake up call for them to abandon the security mess known as Windows. World would be so much better without Microsoft, abandon them en masse for Linux, problem solved.

Here's a tip, do something about the fact that most of the good jobs in the country are being created in or around Tokyo.

Look at the choices presented to a lot of young Japanese:

Move to Tokyo hundreds or thousands km away from familial support structures with its brutal commute times and sky-high housing costs, but where jobs are (relatively) plentiful

or:

Stay at home close to family with reasonable commuting and housing costs but face being unemployed or underemployed

do either of those situations sound amenable to raising children?

30+ years after Chernobyl boars in Central Europe are still not safe for human consumption: http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-czech-boars-still-radioactive-31-years-after-chernobyl-2017-1

You do NOT want to eat boar who have been in radioactive areas.