Michelle Klein-Hass comments

The Present Emperor should be allowed to be the Retired Emperor. If the "traditionalists" truly respected the Emperor his wish would be their command. Then again, his actions of late have been some of his best, beginning with his trips to Tohoku after the 3.11 tragedy. But after all, he's a mortal man, he's feeling his mortality, and he wants to pass his burden to stronger hands.

OK, here's an idea from a person who lives in the San Fernando Valley, CA. We now have a law on the books, although clogged up in the courts right now, that mandates condoms in porn. This industry is threatening to leave the Valley and the rest of LA County if the law is upheld. All Japan needs to do is mandate condoms in porn, and the JAV industry is DONE. Well, it will likely move to some other part of Asia, just like Western porn producers talk a lot about moving the industry to Eastern Europe if the condom laws are upheld. Honestly, I look forward to this move: our own industry is just as abusive as Japan's. We can do better here than being the Porn Fernando Valley.

Gorillas are not monkeys, they are Primates. Related, but different.

I suppose nobody remembers Hetalia. Short memories.

Pay attention to the dateline. This is the area that was affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. I suspect that there is a certain amount of PTSD involved that nobody's factoring into the story. His comment about wanting to escape from reality makes sense when you figure in that both of them dealt with the biggest human tragedy to hit Japan in centuries, and a disaster exceeded only by the Indonesian Earthquake and Tsunami.

Izumisawa Miki runs a Japanese fusion restaurant in Laguna Beach, CA. While our cranky "Sushi Nazi" Nozawa-sensei (Sugarfish) would look at her food and say "not real sushi," her food looks genuinely imaginative and beautiful and like it would taste good. I hope to visit her restaurant some time in the future. http://munchies.vice.com/videos/the-sushi-chef-miki-izumisawa

gokai_wo_maneku: neither is Moto, as in Mr. Moto. Hollywood is not so good about getting Japanese surnames right.

As of the Iraq War, the United States' hands are no longer clean with regard to Aggressive Warfare. American critics of Yasukuni Shrine no longer hold the moral standing to criticize Japan. (or Germany.) We did the very same thing in Iraq, a war of choice against an enemy (yes, Saddam was a brutal SOB and had poked us in the past) that had absolutely NOTHING to do with 9/11. The Iraq War was a war of aggression. Hopefully eventually people like Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and their puppet President George W. Bush end up in the dock for war crimes trials, because we committed lots in Iraq. Abu Ghraib, anyone?

Again, the Present Emperor outclasses the petty politicians of Japan. He has come out against the restarting of nuclear power plants, he went personally several times to Tohoku to meet with ordinary Japanese caught in the extraordinary circumstances of the Great East Japan Tsunami, he's a man of science. The fact that he can issue statements and the government can do the opposite tells you how much of a figurehead he is. It must frustrate the heck out of him but he maintains his quiet dignity. He carries his father's karma...it's like when he became Emperor, Japan's economy went sour almost right after. He's almost a Shakespearian character, buffeted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

No mention of Sessue Hayakawa, (Hayakawa Kintaro) who not only was one of the greatest actors of the silent era, but a producer/director who made movies that attempted to show a different side of Asia to Americans. He and his wife Tsuru Aoki fled to Europe in the wake of Executive Order 9066, but they found themselves in the middle of the occupation of France. Hayakawa and Aoki ended up becoming involved in the French Resistance. Hayakawa and Aoki came back to the US after the war, and an entirely new chapter of his career began, starting with Humphrey Bogart's film Tokyo Joe. His most famous role was Col. Saito in Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he received a Best Supporting Actor nomination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sessue_Hayakawa

I love both teams. Nadeshiko had a great run and THEY DID NOT GIVE UP. I agree with "Disillusioned" that they deserve much respect. They have almost identical records (AFP didn't do their homework) and they both played their hearts out. And between 2011 and 2015 the makings of an epic rivalry has set up. This is HUGE! France 2019 is going to be a great time for fans of each team and weird people like me that love both. Yeah, I'm an American, but I fell in love with the plucky Nadeshiko squad in 2011 and I would have been happy if they had won again in 2015. Footie fandom is built on great rivalries, although some in Europe get downright ugly. Maybe fans of Nadeshiko and the women of Team USA can show the world how a FRIENDLY rivalry can happen. Ganbatte Nihon 2019!

I want to see US v. Japan in the final. Rubber Match. I'm sure the women of Team USA want what they thought was rightfully theirs in 2011. However, Nadeshiko Japan winning in 2011 was a wonderful thing to have happen so soon after the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. The Nadeshiko showed how formidable they were last night against Netherlands. US v. China should be a great match, as will be Japan vs. Australia. Then it's a matter of finding out who prevails between Germany and France, and England and Canada. But I'm pretty sure that the rest of the board will be playing for third place.

OMG. He still thinks he has a "Studly Body." It is to LAUGH! https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/67/00/30/670030e2904dbd3552a53802ba950b53.jpg

The Tea Party should be called the Confederate Party because their existence is informed by the values of the Deep South, which run counter to the rest of America. Zurcronium: you are partially right, racism is only one of the motivations involved here.

And Bruinfan: it got started by corporate interests, by the Koch Brothers. They own what used to be DuPont, Georgia Pacific, and a bunch of other holdings. Their father started the John Birch Society in the '50s. The Tea Party are "useful idiots" for the 1% because the more you can distract poor Whites from economic issues that would have them making common cause with poor People of Color, (Latinos, Blacks, Native Americans, etc.) the more you can split them off from the rest of the economically disadvantaged.

This strategy worked in the Antebellum South. "You may be White Trash, but at least you're White" was the message given to poor Whites by the Planter Class, the 1% of its day in the South. It worked to thwart Reconstruction and empowered racist "Redeemers" struggling against the attempts to integrate the South just after the Civil War. It worked to gain poor White support for Jim Crow, even though poor Whites and poor Blacks were often working as sharecroppers in the same fields for the same people who once owned plantations and armies of slaves. It worked to rile up poor Whites against the Civil Rights Movement.

The Democratic Party was once the party of the Planter Class. Up until FDR, it was pretty much in the same place regarding policy as the Republicans are now. FDR inspired the Southern Democrats shearing off and creating the Dixiecrat bloc. And the Civil Rights Act of 1965 created the final rupture that cleaved the Southern Democrats off of the Democratic Party. Nixon's triumph in 1968 had a lot to do with his skillful use of the "Southern Strategy" to capture the homeless ex-Dems that Wallace was also angling for. The Southern Republicans became more and more powerful, and some of them are found in the strange position of going against the Tea Party.

"Gun Grabbers," "Baby Killers," "Creeping Sharia," and "OBummer" are distractions from the economic issues that could unite everyone who is not wealthy and connected to fight for an equal shake. This is what has built the Tea Party wing of the GOP. It's part of the same handwaving used by the power players of the Deep South to keep the 99% there divided by color instead of united by economic issues.

There is a statue of Sugihara-san in Little Tokyo, Downtown Los Angeles, CA. The statue sits on a park bench and depicts Sugihara-san giving out Japanese passports. People sit next to the statue to take selfies. I don't know how many people "get" the story behind the nattily-dressed Japanese gentleman cast in bronze. I certainly do. His memory is a blessing, and no matter what you think about the conduct of the militarist Japanese government, his own personal actions were laudable.

Silly movie. It will likely be a hit on outlets like Redbox out here in the US, though. Doubtful I'll buy it.

Happy Coming-Of-Age, Kako-hime!

The current Emperor is right in choosing peace over militarism. He also holds a place in my heart for his travels north to Tohoku to meet with the suffering survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. The Japanese Government has forgotten them. Perhaps he should remind the politicians once again that IT'S NOT OVER for them. And maybe he should shame the politicians into action.

@Hotmail : Miyavi, the actor who portrayed the prison guard, is a musician first and foremost. He'll do OK. He's basically the Hendrix of Japan. And he's got fangirls all over the world into him because he's cute. If he ends up emigrating somewhere he's got his axe-shredding talent to fall back on. He is also likely to get some juicy offers from Hollywood to act, because the scuttlebutt about Unbroken is that there are some great performances in the film, Miyavi included. So let's not shed tears about Miyavi's prospects post-Unbroken.

This also said: Japan's willful amnesia about the horror of war and the atrocities it committed during WWII is scary because it allows the possibility of militarists ginning up the population for new aggressions. To its credit, Germany has been pretty fearless about the atrocities of the Nazi era. Far-Right parties have to operate underground and there are arrests of neo-Nazis all the time. German students get an unvarnished (more or less) reading of the Nazi era in their history classes. Germany has inoculated itself against a return to militarism and brute-force fascism by openness. It hasn't stopped them from embracing corporate oligarchism of a stripe quite similar to what has taken over the US beginning with Nixon, accelerating under Reagan, and which has become a runaway train since the Bush II (more accurately Cheney) administration. But will we see a Fourth Reich? Likely not.

Meanwhile, over 300,000 Tohoku people are still living in temporary housing that was not meant to last almost 4 years, which is how long the temporary housing has been occupied. Perhaps attractive incentives can be found to encourage migration of homeless Tsunami victims to these areas. Some places near the Tohoku coast should never be occupied again. There is a dead zone surrounding Fukushima Dai-Ichi that should remain a no-go zone for millenia, just like the area around Pripyat, Ukraine and the Chernobyl nuclear plant is. It's time to think about resettling these people from what has become a slow-mo manmade disaster, even though it started out as a natural disaster.

LaWren: "Dr." Mercola is a quack. I live in California, where currently there is an epidemic of Whooping Cough in those least able to fight it off -- BABIES -- because of the anti-vaccine movement. People forget that the consequence of NOT having vaccines for childhood diseases means little coffins.

I lost a colleague to cervical cancer...it is not a pretty way to go. She fought valiantly but her case was too far advanced. Vaccines are a boon to our society. Anti-vaxxers are a MENACE.

I love Japanese Kare Raisu. Here in Los Angeles we have huge populations from India and Pakistan and now Afghanistan, so authentic curries are very available, both vegetarian and also with meat. Kare Raisu is something I consider a completely different dish from curries from the Indian Subcontinent. The same goes for the curries from Thailand...very different. They may all have the same name but they are very different. I love them all, though.

As a native Angeleno my taste is for spicy food. When I make Kare Raisu at home I start with S&B Golden Curry Extra Hot, and add a bit of garlic. It's the first Japanese curry roux that is spicy enough for my tastes without having to doctor it up. I either use chicken as my base or go completely veggie, and I tend to put lots more veggies in mine than is the Japanese taste. In fact, I figured out something awesome with my last batch: add Kabocha puree to the sauce, and you add sweetness and substance to it. For someone who's a veggie conscientious objector, the Kabocha puree sort of melts into the sauce and is not perceptible as a separate ingredient.

As far as Japanese Kare Raisu in restaurants here, we have had Curry House for at least two decades, and there's Hurry Curry in the Sawtelle District. However, I can't think of any Japanese restaurant, unless it's a sushi restaurant primarily, that doesn't do Kare Raisu. It's part of the landscape here in LA.

Major Kusanagi Motoko, to the white courtesy phone, please...

Tim_Fox: no, you can't do this in the US. Haven't you read about the difficulties the mother and father of the Isla Vista Mass Murderer had getting help for their adult son? You have to be an IMMEDIATE DANGER TO SELF OR OTHERS in order to get committed for a 72 hour 5150 observation. And that has become a very high bar to jump.

I have an uncle who for about 20 years lived under pack rat conditions in a house without water, power or telephone service. It's a long story. We are attempting to relocate him to an assisted living facility. The first one was not to his liking so he basically ran away. Hopefully the next one will be more to his liking and he'll be able to settle down. We cannot FORCE HIM to live there. We have to prove that he is entirely unable to handle his own affairs, in front of a judge, in order to force him to stay someplace. It is exceedingly hard to prove a person is incompetent here in the US. I don't know about Canada, I only know about my own experiences here.

Japan, don't let Sheldon Adelson anywhere near your country! He's horrible. To use a Yiddish turn of phrase: he's a Gonif. A thief.

Do this right. Restrict casino ownership to Japanese citizens, and keep the authentically Japanese flavor of the gaming. Pachinko? Yes. Mah-Jongg? Yes. Poker and Roulette, Craps and Blackjack? No way.

And maybe reconsider the locale you are going to open to casino development. Kansai is doing just fine without gaming. What about Tohoku? Tohoku needs investment and a new economic model because fishing and farming are next to impossible right now. Think Sendai, not Osaka.

Why does Axis Powers Hetalia come to mind when I see this? Could it be the overwhelming buffoonery?

Good to see "Daddy" Choo is following his son's lead and doing good things for Japan. The whole Tohoku region is full of great artisans who just need a little help in rebuilding their workshops and getting their goods out to market. Good to see Choo the Elder doing this.

Either way, this is fat shaming and wrong. People forget that High Fructose Corn Syrup was invented in Japan, and Japan, along with the US, puts it in a huge swath of processed foods and sauces. The Japanese traditional diet, which is very healthy, is being pushed aside in favor of an embrace of the Standard American Diet that would make even Americans embarrassed. Check out some of the super-sized entrees at Japanese fast food places! It's insane! The Japanese are also far more disinclined to exercise than even Americans...my friend Stu Levy is trying to change that with his "Super 40" videos on YouTube, and there are others trying to get Japanese people to get up and go. But it's slow going. It is only a matter of time before a higher percentage of Japanese become "Chubbies." For those curious about Super 40, here: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCydBVd_LNyLMtAWndY8aSNQ (Note: in Japanese, no English subs)

I think perhaps there should be a shrine to the memory of these Unknowns, and they should be lain to rest on hallowed ground...perhaps on as high of ground as can be found so that a future tsunami cannot disturb their rest. It's almost 3 years since 3/11. It's pretty clear their families will never be found. It's time to deal with them in a dignified and respectful manner.

Wreck-it Ralph was called Sugar Rush in Japan.