missbatten comments

I have a friend who is nearly 70, looking after a senile parent aged over 90. The minute my friend turned 65, her "nursing care" taxes were bumped up. Her mother's "nursing care" taxes are even higher, and her medical costs are steadily increasing. My friend is still working full time - she can't afford to retire on her tiny kokumin nenkin pension and pay all these social security taxes on her salary. Like many women, she is not a "sei-shain" so her pay is low and benefits few.

She applied for help watching her parent, but because she lives with the parent, she is not eligible for more than a once-a-day drop-in helper. So she battles on, already elderly herself, balancing, her own advancing age, work, and the economic and housework burdens of supporting herself and her parent. Is her back turned for 5 minutes now and then? You bet it is!

Yubaru you can just sweep the Taisho period under the carpet? Such a funny wee fellow. Yes, the 60s and 70s had their student demos, but I think the Taisho period protests and the hardships of the working poor and their families reached much further into Japanese society. But of course, since that's all BS, as you say, we can relax and stop worrying about the similarities between the changing political mood in the '20s and in our own time. Such a relief, thank you!

There's a reason why people here don't complain, don't take to the streets, and don't publish critical ideas, although they used to. That reason is called the Taisho period. There are still people alive who remember the Kempeitai.

I'm afraid I know of cases where a teacher has bullied children about eating school lunch. In one case, the teacher refused to admit that the allergies existed when notified by parents at the beginning of the school year, and continued to make disparaging comments in front of other children, despite several allergy-related hospitalizations over the school year.

The school refused to permit the child to bring a packed lunch "in case we were blamed for anything that happened to the lunch during the morning", and also refused to allow the child's medication to be kept by the school nurse, stating that they were not willing to permit any medication in school unless the mother brought it directly to the classroom and administered it herself, passing over the child's lunchbox at the same time.

I thought this was excessively punitive, and found it difficult to believe that the school had never before had a child who needed to take medicine during the day, and hard to believe that this was their first case of food allergy either. No trouble believing that schools do not implement allergy guidelines. Part of that problem comes from the ambiguous nature of a "guideline" in Japanese legislation.

So...you have to pay for cold teas, the saving grace of Japanese fast food chains, but for soda it's just "open wiiiiiide". If they offered tea at the same price, I'd have no complaints, but the faster this campaign disappears, the better.

Tokyo Tech High School already teaches English at a higher level than many respected liberal arts schools. Go for it, and don't stop with English - a few more languages would be useful too.

I'm surprised they haven't yet held a competition to choose a cute mascot character...

the “Old Fashion”, will see changes made to the sugar and flour mix of its batter in order to improve the product’s texture. The sweetness of the honey used to glaze the Honey Dip will also be increased.<<

Sigh. "Improve texture" almost certainly means more sugar in the batter too, as sugar makes things crisper. Byebye to Japan's not-too-sweet sweet treats...

Japanese attitudes to smoking....there's a shop in my neighborhood that seems to be a pharmacy, but half the shop is devoted to cigarette sales, while the opposite wall is medications!

Smoking is banned in the streets where my husband works, but not where I work or where we live. This is a bigger issue than it used to be now that more people try to keep their living-spaces smoke-free. There is only one road to my local station, and as Probie says, smokers who light up while walking make life miserable for those behind them. The smokers are breathing the nice, fresh morning air, while their cigarettes mostly dangle ignored from their hands. Meanwhile, everybody behind them gets 100% stink, no let-up, and no way to opt out.

Visual entertainment is taking the place imagination and original thought.<<

You seem to be implying that it's the visual element, and not the entertainment element, that is damaging to imagination and original thought?

Inundation by a lot of visual media is not the same thing as intelligent and discriminating understanding of visual media...which is what Scorsese is asking for.

Since it's how you watch more than how much you watch that is the issue, simply reducing exposure to visual media isn't going to produce a flowering of imagination and original thought. That would be too easy!

About time. Huge numbers of women teach in low-paid hijokin part-time jobs, and I have yet to see a Japanese university that can boast even 10% female faculty in full-time, tenured positions. Too much OB networking by those on the hiring end, not enough reading of CVs.

It's not just about groping...I often see women's faces crushed between the torsos of taller passengers in the regular carriages. That must be panic-inducing as well as plain uncomfortable. Although there are some tall(ish) women in the women-only carriages, generally those short people look a lot more comfortable riding with people of similar build!

Long historical tradition? Let me see, ocean whaling in Japan started about the beginning of the twentieth century, wasn't it? Of course, politician's memories are notoriously feeble!

What the hell does this mean?<<

Possibly means that one of the back-up systems intended to provide redundancy had instead been connected to the primary system?

"international monetary independence" wot dat???????

I had a "dai-ku" the year my husband died. Beautiful poem but rather depressing postlude to the whole horrible thing.

Mostly because they've booked their travel and accommodation and hate to waste their money, and/or look like wimps to other members of their group. The cancellation fees and embarrassment are here and now, the possibility of dying is still days away...

Switzerland does actually have one of the highest rates of civilian gun ownership in the world...gun homicides may be much lower than the U.S., but they are by no means low.

Mochi now have "break lines", but it takes some strength to break them, and even more to cut them into small pieces. Elderly people and young children have long been given shiratama dumplings, but that means making a serving of them separately, and replacing the mochi under protest from the elderly person. I　went looking this year for some kind of "mochi for the elderly", but absolutely no luck. It should be easy enough to make mochi-shaped objects that are softer and less chewy, even if they do not have the shelf life of regular mochi. Why don't manufacturers take the opportunity to make a little money?

Have committees continue to submit reports until they reach the "right" conclusion?

True. Try comparing White Papers on Energy from 2007-9 with those from a decade earlier.

Let's hope they will be distributing apps that work a bit better than the Android Kindle reader app!

My Political Diary Aug. 15 Wail about sorrow and unwisdom of war. Aug. 18 Crank up territorial dispute with well-armed neighbors one more notch...

A lot of schools in Tokyo (be they international or Japanese) have good music programs

A well-researched observation, dazzlingly specific as well, yet strangely unconvincing. Somehow, iIt seems more likely that LiVEJAM started up because Tokyo schools do NOT provide many opportunities to learn music.

I have no idea whether " a lot" of international school in Tokyo have good music programs, but Japanese schools certainly do not. They did not set out to provide an education in the liberal arts, and they have not changed their policy. Music is not taught as an exam subject, and in some public high schools, students are only offered a choice between music and art. Public or private, some schools offer only 1 year of music or art at high school, and I rarely hear of any that allows students to continue with any non-exam subject other than PE into their 3rd year. 3rd year students are not normally allowed to participate in band or choir etc. either.

The exceptions are the handful of schools that have a music department, or a music course. There are roughly 1 or 2 of these per province, and the music "course" schools are usually aimed at students who do not have the academic skills to cope with a general education course. The music "department" schools are extremely rare...not every province has even one. Tokyo is better off than the rest of the country, because the national University of the Arts and the larger private music colleges (around half a dozen of them) have attached high schools, but even so, the total number of Japanese schools in Tokyo and the three surrounding provinces offering music beyond the basic non-exam limit is not more a dozen.

The extra-curricular music opportunities are limited to peer-taught groups. Those that have supervision and funding as a school "bu" still do not offer tuition, although they may provide instruments, and will at least partly sponsor trips to participate in competitions. They usually include choirs (so cheap...!), band, and occasionally orchestra. Non-orchestral instruments, whether Japanese, classical western, or pop, are usually relegated to the unofficial clubs and circles, which are simply given a place to practice, and allowed to perform at the school festival (but not usually at other school events). The situation is pretty much the same at all Japanese schools, public or private.

Great that LiveJAM got some free publicity, but that first paragraph is a waste of space...and that's charitable.

Japan WAS working hard on renewable energy sources through most of the '90s. And then somehow talk of such programs disappeared, and we started seeing heavy promotion of policies that depend on nuclear power (e.g. the "yakan denryoku" night rates aimed at using some of the power that nuclear power stations generate round the clock, since nuclear power is very hard to adjust to temporaryl fluctuations in demand). When we started seeing glossy pamphlets from TEPCO being handed out to 3rd graders in school science lessons, I think it was fair to assume that government policy had done an about-face. But if they can flip-flop once, I suppose they can do it again.

The nursing candidates are working under systems similar to other "trainee" systems, where "trainees" are thrown at companies who are allowed to organize their own "training"...or not. If the companies are only looking for cheap labor, they have little incentive to actually train the "trainees", who will no doubt merit a raise if they do actually pass their exams. What's different here is that there are some people who actually want the nurses to pass...the question is, do any of these people want to organize and pay for the training, and can companies who are used to "use 'em and lose 'em" attitudes to foreign trainees actually cope with having their work "interrupted" by training, instead of leaving them to educate themselves in their own time and out of their own pockets.

mastertigurius: Mitaka is nothing like Misato.

Laissez-faire might work in leafy Setagaya, but in this area, Lourdes' approach is the way to go. Local cram schools and other places where children gather called parents and asked them to pick children up the evening after this attack...they didn't seem to think that fostering independence by sending kids out to walk home alone in the dark was a good plan either.

The school the girl attends is very close to where I live. The roads are busy, with poor visibility, and there are mostly no footpaths...after a few serious accidents, the busiest places are patrolled before and after school. We have also had our share of knife-wielding nutters in parks and on the streets since disability benefits have been cut (the mentally ill are the group least able to argue that they really do need assistance, and the more they need it, the less able they are to fight for it). Two or three kids have been dragged into cars within the closest three school districts and abducted in the past decade...and let's not start on the damage kids are able to do to each other on the way home from school!

I am not sure which river the girl was walking along, but some have limited car access and few houses nearby...but easy enough for somebody who lives not far from Misato or Matsudo to walk down the main local river from the nearest Musashino Line station.

I first taught Japanese university students in 1980...I haven't been in Japan or taught continuously since then, but I can confidently claim that students these days generally have better listening and speaking skills than their counterparts a generation ago.

That counts as a JET-program success, even if direct teaching by ALTs is only one factor in that success. Whether or not today's students have better English skills overall is debatable, and that is related not only to English curricula, staffing, and total hours of tuition, but also to the typical 2010 student profile.

Smoking on the streets...I'm not a fan. I often need to leave home around 6 am, and it's disappointing when instead of the fresh morning air that is about the only consolation in an early morning start, all I can smell is the cigarette the guy 10 meters in front of me is smoking. I bet he (it's never been "she" so far!) gets a lot less of his cigarette than the hapless downwind walker.