LBW2010 comments

What. A. Surprise.

The American support for Abe's policies is more cynical than this spokesman would have it. The U.S. corporate establishment is enjoying the weak yen, plain and simple.

Monetary easing (to giant corporations) and tax hikes (for the masses) is also a colossally stupid way to stimulate an economy.

I don't understand how cigarettes relieve stress. They just make me nauseated and kind of anxious...

If they actually relieved stress like, uh, ALCOHOL does...I would smoke all the time.

Classy.

This spring, thankfully.

BUST.

I am always depressed and baffled when Japanese friends of mine talked about how karaoke helped them "relax and let go of stress." Goodness. Go for a run or just hang out talking. Read a book. Walk in the park. Sitting in a creepy neon box singing bad songs...just awful.

Karaoke is only a part of my life when I'm de-stressing in a different way: by getting thoroughly drunk.

More articles like this, please, JT.

The economics of air travel have turned economy class cabins into sardine cans. There are just not enough customers to make more frequent flights with more spacious planes.

I hate flying (except in business or first) and always prefer trains. Just compare the heavenly spaciousness of a Shinkansen interior with that of an airplane. Oh, and you can buy all sorts of snacks and get up and wander around all you want. Bigger windows, better scenery, etc.

Flying has become a miserable, fascistic experience for most everybody.

This is just another bizarre, misguided, out-of-touch government initiative that is bound to be mishandled and go nowhere.

Nobody is going to pay any attention to this.

That plump farmer must be doing something right compared to those skinny folks from Japan!

I like porn (probably too much), but there's something kind of lonely about it. Especially in a society like Japan that seems to almost RELY on it sometimes for the general health of the culture.

Strongly support.

Secular humanism is the defining philosophy of all modern, civilized societies. Toward that end, obtrusive public expressions of religion should be banned.

They were idiots for driving with 8 people in a 5 seat car.

It's also a shame that the U.S. is such a public transportation nightmare that foreign students are forced to drive everywhere they go. I know lots of foreign students who maybe know one person with a car and are always driving that car unsafely / overloaded and getting tons of tickets and getting into dangerous situations.

When I studied abroad in England and and when I worked in Japan, I was also a moronic and largely incompetent youth. But I never had to risk my neck driving in a foreign country because the cities I lived in (and they weren't big cities) were walkable and had lots of public transportation.

I've said it before and I'll say it again...I pity ANY Japanese who come to the U.S.A with no experience and expect it to be as convenient as Japan.

Very dark.

深谷？That is DEEP Saitama. Living there, plus working at a pachinko parlor? Tough luck.

On one trip to a grocery store at a neighboring train station, I walked my bike down the ramp to the underground bicycle parking lot and was positively horrified as no less than FIVE elderly, uniformed workers descended upon me, directed me to a COMPLETELY INCONVENIENT bike spot, half-heartedly helped me get my bike in the rack, and then walked me to the ticket office where I had to fill out forms in triplicate to complete my parking transaction.

Just set up the bike racks and put a coin-operated gate at the entrance.

That's all true.

But the Black voter turnout in Ferguson is, in part, low due to the fact that those people have, in all likelihood, been gerrymandered into virtual non-citizenship and have been abused and neglected by both the state and the federal government for decades.

Yeah, you need to pull up your pants and you need to vote. No argument from me there. But the problems in communities like Ferguson run deeper than just the private responsibility to stay politically involved.

Pretty ashamed to be an American when I look at the images coming out of Ferguson. Militarized police looking like Navy SEAL teams. Miserably neglected neighborhoods full of decaying buildings, graffiti, cracked roads and sidewalks, and people who look like they're from a third-world nation. The inherent racism and humiliation and misery that comes from living in a society that, as a policy, just doesn't care about its poorest citizens.

I don't blame them for rioting. They live in a hell hole and most have no hope of ever getting out.

The urban heat-island effect cannot be overstated. Even disregarding the temperature fluctuations brought on by climate change, the fact is that Japanese cities and suburbs are unbelievably crowded and chock-full of concrete, burnished steel, plate glass, asphalt, and engines. It's simple physics.

A 90 F day in a shady grove near a stream is just not the same as a 90 F day when you're trapped in what is essentially an urban convection oven.

Zichi, I gave you a point.

@StormR:

So she got in a box by the highway and then killed herself?

Well, Japan is totally alright with drinking. But for all their neon lights and izakaya and hanami, their is a decided "anti-fun" streak running deep through Japanese society and culture.

This picture is dark. Subjecting a polar bear to Tokyo summer weather is tantamount to animal cruelty. He should be indoors in the air conditioning.

The atomic bombs were beside the point. Had LeMay's aerial incendiary campaign continued for any number of months, Japan would have surrendered. The country was in absolute ruins. The firebombing killed more civilians that both atomic bombs combined.

In any event, both the atomic bombs and the aerial incendiary campaign averted the need for Operation Olympic, which would have resulted in an ungodly amount of U.S. and Japanese casualties, a prolongation of the war, and very likely a division of occupied Japan between the U.S. and the USSR.

It was a Delta Air Lines flight, and the man was tried in a U.S. court under a U.S. criminal statute. So it's really not unreasonable to take into account how the threat of terrorism has influenced American aviation security laws.

Punching "someone" at a bar while drunk is, I'm afraid, vastly different from punching an on-duty crew member at 40,000 feet over the Pacific.

Obviously there are extra-legal repercussions for this man's actions--he'll be placed on some sort of airline no-fly list, he's probably lost his job and maybe his wife, and he's going to carry the stigma of this with him for the rest of his life.

But three months seems light to me, for physically assaulting a crew member in the post-9/11 world.

Six months or a year.

Great work!

Any thoughts on what her visa situation might be? Save up and apply for an investor visa? Get married? She's been there long enough that maybe she successfully applied for permanent residence.

I don't mean to be nosy but I'm interested in the logistics of things like this.

While this occurrence is certainly a big deal, and quite disgusting, I have to say that it could have been a lot worse. The factory simply shipped meat that was past its expiration date. I think we've all had expired food from time to time and been none the worse for the wear. The fact that there has been such a large public outcry and that the factory has been shut down is a sign of how (relatively) capable the food-safety chain of command currently is--even in countries like China.

It's still freaking gross, though.

Call me a philistine but...Asahi Super Dry 500 mL cans. Three or four over the course of an evening works just fine.