Newgirlintown comments

Wasn’t there a movie about that with that guy out of Pulp Fiction?

Hopefully this guy won’t be 90% of the news in Japan in a few weeks. I’m sure he’s a lovely guy, but he’s never off the TV.

Sinking ship.

The media are absolutely obsessed with this guy.

Let’s hope he gets pelted with some rotten vegetables now.

Again.

Climate change in action.

This is what happens when you keep raising prices but don’t raise wages.

This has been a kind of urban myth for years. Now it seems it’s actually true.

God I’m sick of seeing this overpaid guy in the news every day.

Absolutely shameful that the BBC is not mentioning the torture video.

This from the BBC website:

“Videos of brutal interrogation sessions were apparently leaked by Russian security forces, and reports suggest at least one had suffered electric shocks.”

I wonder how much those Trump cards are worth now, the ones everyone seems to have forgotten about.

The Japanese Rocky.

This is the kind of thing that they run features on on NHK that give all foreigners a bad name.

I believe the correct term is "identified" as girls not posed.

Not really. You’re thinking of transgender people. These guys were pretending to be girls so surely it would be more apt to say pose as.

Shameful.

The only ‘Curse of the Colonel’ is diabetes and obesity.

Japan is the new Thailand.

You mean this wasn’t already a thing?!!

…the presence of the "go-go dancers" were intended to ensure "diversity".

Ha! So ironic. They’re trying to be woke by talking about diversity, but then create a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in the 1970s. Jesus, this is embarrassing.

The government plans to set fares on the express buses at 500 yen for adults and 250 yen for children, about double the price of respective tickets on city buses.

Then surely word of mouth will spread that it’s cheaper just to use the public buses and the new tourist buses won’t solve the problem.

The problem (one of) is that the meaning of gender has changed over time. For second wave feminists reading Judith Butler, it meant a kind of performance in line with social expectations. What was progressive was that men and women could reject those societal stereotypes: a woman could be a truck driver and still be a woman, a man could be an nurse and still be a man. With fourth wave feminism, gender became something innate, like a kind of spirit. It became seen as a spectrum. The problem with this view however, is that each end of the spectrum collapses gender into the very stereotypes that second wave feminism was trying to free men and women from. Not very progressive. And, if gender is a spectrum and you have Barbie for women at one end and GI Joe for men on the other, we’re all non-binary and no one gets to be ‘special’ and cool anymore. Because nobody is literally Barbie or GI Joe. So then, what is a man and what is a woman?

And why is there no equal outcry about men changing their bodies?

I think it’s because the trend largely skews towards young women as the book points out.

They’ll probably decide your status based on your visa or passport. If you have anything other than a tourist visa, you’ll probably have to pay a thousand yen or something. Given the price of flights these days compared to just a few years ago, it’s a drop in the ocean.

Maybe now he can start paying his workers a decent wage.

Excellent.

The idea of the bumbling foreigner who doesn’t speak a word of Japanese and doesn’t follow the rules is a persistent one in Japan. During my time here however, I’ve witnessed Japanese people throwing litter from car windows and into rivers, getting into onsens without first having a shower, making excessive noise at the gym and fly tipping. Yes, this is anecdotal evidence, but the media doesn’t do much to dispel the idea that it’s always a foreigner.

Now that…

….is creepy.

Dejavu anyone?