Maff comments

Poodles actually get very chilly in winter because they don't have an undercoat. Have you ever seen a poodle's tummy? Not a hair in sight.

I despise Facebook because I'm addicted to it. I work freelance from home but spend hours on FB insead of working, resulting in a huge amount of lost income. I'm thinking about suing them. They don't tell you you can get hooked when you sign up.

I didn't use to believe it, but the longer I live here the more I realize that blood type really does relate to personality. I can usually guess someone's type correctly now once I've got to know them a bit. And other people can guess mine more often than not.

Why does the Japanese media report suicides? I don't know of any other country in the world where you get straightforward suicides reported on national websites, TV stations, etc. It's just not news.

Some of the newer ones aren't bad. I'd been drinking Suntory RICH MALT (kind of an ironic name) for a while and thought it was OK. And if you drink two cans every evening like I do, you save a lot of money. But I stopped buying it when I realized I was basically drinking whisky and soda. It just didn't feel right mentally.

Kuristofu,

You're talking rubbish. For starters, I'm guessing that in your country kids sleep in their own rooms from birth (I know that's normal in my country). And what happens when the parent goes to the toilet in your country? Does he/she take the kid in with them? What happens when the parent is washing the dishes or loading the washing machine? Do they put the kid up on the sink/washing machine? Seriously, I think it's time for a reality check, mate.

There isn't much point in taking semen samples in rape cases because the perp will always claim that they had consensual sex. Doing so would only work if the perp said, "I didn't even touch her," which isn't very likely. It might make the victim feel like her report is being taken seriously, but there isn't really much point in doing it.

They can't all be cheerleaders. Surely some of them have to be led.

It's a bit of a gamble if you ask me. The best young players might just decide to go to the U.S. and never play in Japan - ever.

If that happens, NPB will become even less popular than it is now.

One point that should be mentioned is that Nambu completed the work for which he was awarded the prize in the 1960s, but only became in American citizen in 1970. H therefore earned the prize as a Japanese, though will receive it as an American. So perhaps the U.S. media outlets claiming that the prize was won by an American are the ones at fault.

A prefecture with seven-million people crammed together in a contigious suburban sprawl.

And this is all that's happened there in the way of serious crime in the last week or so.

Woooh. Scary place.

In Japan, kids are generally allowed out to play with friends as soon as they enter primary school. It's great, because the kids get to play with their peers every single day, not like the poor kids in the West whose parents are so busy that the kids are lucky if they get one supervised "play date" with one carefully chosen peer once a month. The kids also develop independence, making them a lot more mature than Western kids, who often have to wait until they're in their teens before they're let out of their parents' sight because of all this crazy paranoia about child molesters.

Sure, tragedies will sometimes happen, but we can't protect our children from everything forever.

American banks and securities houses are a joke. Even more poorly managed than the Japanese banks were in the 1980s and 1990s.

When I look down the list of murders on the JT Crime page, I see cases from Tokyo, Niigata, and Okayama, too, so it's not like Saitama is the murder capital of Japan. Also, with just under 7 million people, Saitama is the fifth biggest prefecture in Japan in terms of population, coming after Tokyo, Osaka, Kanagawa (Yokohama), and Aichi (Nagoya), so it's bound to see a fair amount of murder and mayhem.

Yamashinaku,

Japan has over a hundred million more people than your hometown. This isn't a local newspaper. It's a site with news from all over the archipeligo. This explains why, as far as I know, no one is shot, stabbed, or kicked to death in my small hometown here in Japan, either.

In low-crime Japan, of course, relative-on-relative murders get a lot more coverage than they do in the West, giving the false impression that such crimes are more common here.

Moderator: Comparisons to crime rates in other countries are not relevant to this discussion.