Posted in: Tourism boom sends prices soaring at Niseko ski resort See in context
Niseko and to a lesser extent Hakuba are resorts that have managed to position themselves to cater for the foreign market. That means at least a few higher-end western style hotels and also some kind of apres-ski nightlife options - bars and restaurants. The vast majority of Japanese ski resorts have none of that - just a few minshuku and there is absolutely nothing to do once the ski lifts close. Niseko is also famous for the powder snow, although there are plenty of other options in Hokkaido and even northern Japan that are just as good for that. Another thing is that Niseko have a gate system that allows skiers to access off-piste terrain when it's not too dangerous. Most other resorts, anything out of bounds is strictly forbidden. I think another thing for Niseko - it was, I think, partly owned by an Australian airline so they could offer great packages. Personally, I'll leave Niseko and Hakuba for the foreign tourists for the most part. There are plenty of other good places to get some nice powdery turns in Japan without the expense and the crowds!
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Posted in: Short ribs braised in wine and aromatics make for an elegant holiday dinner See in context
Pork spare ribs you can get, and not too expensive. Bone-in beef short ribs? Never seen them - but judging by the price of beef here, if you can find them I wouldn't be surprised if it cost a small fortune!
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Posted in: Short ribs braised in wine and aromatics make for an elegant holiday dinner See in context
A recipe whose main ingredient is bone-in beef short ribs is about as much use in Japan as a recipe whose main ingredient is hens teeth. Never in my 20 years in Japan have I ever seen bone-in beef short ribs sold anywhere in this country. Not even once. Even if you could get it, 2.7 kgs, plus a bottle of Barolo wine - it would end up costing 20,000 yen to make this one dish!
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Posted in: We would like international students to not just study medicine in Japan but also learn about the high quality of Japanese medical equipment and pharmaceuticals. If they introduce these things in their countries after returning home, it will help grow the Japanese economy. See in context
High quality pharmaceuticals? Funny, Japan continues to use all sorts of drugs that other countries stopped using ages ago because of various, sometimes serious safety concerns. Just take the over-the-counter Ibuprofen drugs you can buy here such as Eve - almost all of them contain an additional ingredient (apronal) that is banned in most other countries- you will face a large fine if you are caught taking that stuff to Australia for example.
I looked up an antibiotic that had been prescribed for one of my kids for a cold - turns out that too is only used in Japan, the reason being that it has a worse safety profile than most other commonly available antibiotics that do the same thing.
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Posted in: Foreign-born CEO says Japan needs immigration to thrive See in context
Based on my own personal experience as well as conversations with others about recruitment at various places, a lot of places in Japan are becoming more averse to hiring foreigners, not less.
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Posted in: While individual attitudes and social norms are gradually changing, and systems supporting child care have improved, many companies still hold the belief that men should earn recognition through long working hours. See in context
It's not necessarily paternity leave that is needed, but just more flexibility in working times, such as being able to get away from the office earlier so that the father can help with meals, bathing kids and getting them to bed etc. Also, the flexibility to be able to leave the office at short notice because, for example, the daycare or kindergarten just called to tell you that your kid has a fever and needs to be picked up ASAP, or because your kid has picked up one of about a dozen different bugs that pretty much all kids get in their early years that mean they can't go to the daycare/kindergarten for a day or three.
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Posted in: Don't text while walking See in context
Is this really such a major problem? I mean, what's the worst thing that's going to happen? You might bump into someone and have to say you are sorry? It's similar to how they go on about smoking while walking - I remember when people used to smoke in packed out bars and on the dancefloor in clubs and even in those situations it was hardly a major issue.
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Posted in: 1st shipment of this year's Beaujolais Nouveau arrives in Japan See in context
3000 yen seems a lot for a wine that only takes 6 weeks to make from the press. There is a reason why winemakers go through the expensive processes of longer maceration, fermentation and then aging in various types of oak barrels etc. - they do it because it makes a better wine that they should then be able to sell for more money. For 3000 yen you can buy a wine that has taken a lot more time and expense to produce. Usually, things that cost more to produce cost more to buy, but not always. People spend a lot more money on a t-shirt because it say Balenciaga on the front, yet it cost the same to produce as any other t-shirt. I guess the BN thing works a similar way. I think the stuff tastes very similar to a lot of Japanese wines costing 1000-1500 yen a bottle.
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Posted in: 1st shipment of this year's Beaujolais Nouveau arrives in Japan See in context
I think Costco have some of the best deals on wine - a couple of years back they had a Rioja Gran Reserva for just over 2000 yen - it was a fantastic wine for the money. That was replaced with a Ribera del Duero - the 2016 vintage was also fantastic - not quite as good as the Rioja. Unfortunately you can only get the 2015 vintage now and it isn't a patch on the 2016. Their Gigondas is good and they have quite a big selection of Californian wines, but most of the ones I tried seem to be just fruit bombs, similar to many Australian wines, if you like that kind of thing.
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Posted in: 1st shipment of this year's Beaujolais Nouveau arrives in Japan See in context
My French friend told me that Beaujolais Nouveau day was just an excuse for students in France to get drunk on cheap wine! I’m sure the taste appeals to some - it tends to be light and very sweet - similar to a few Japanese wines I’ve tried. I prefer something dryer and more robust that has seen some oak. For the price you can pick up a good Rioja Reserva that for me personally would be much, much better.
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Posted in: Women at Japan's top university call out gender imbalance See in context
Missing the point.
With all due respect to anyone who does an honest day’s work, we are taking about losing out on possible high-flyers in STEM who are quite rare.
An environment which doesn’t encourage these possible high-high flyers is a very stupid one.
Maybe it wouldn’t be a perfect balance but other countries do better than Japan on this score.
Must do better. Benefits the country.
Have you tried applying for an academic position in a STEM subject in this country? Every position advertised gets 100 applicants or more
The vast majority of people with STEM degrees (or other degrees for that matter) do not work in academia.....
Beat me to it.
OK, so you want to talk about high-flyers in STEM, outside of academia - creative types forming the next big STEM start-ups and so on, the Zuckerbergs and the Musks. Well, there isn't much of that in Japan, unfortunately - there is no Silicon Valley here. But I don't think that is an issue of a lack of women in STEM - the culture in Japan is risk-averse - there are not many who want to become entrepreneurs and build the next big thing from scratch. The brightest here either go into top academic positions or go to work for the biggest tech companies like Sony and so on. By all means, encourage more women into STEM, but it isn't going to fix this particular problem.
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Posted in: Women at Japan's top university call out gender imbalance See in context
So in other words you are defending a decision that was clearly wrong
Not defending it - explaining what the motivation behind it was. I don't think it was the right decision. I think that it would have been better for them to try to make their workplace more accommodating to people who want to raise families. But as I mentioned - that would probably be hard to do, changing the entire work culture at the place and then there is still no guarantee that it would work given the ingrained attitudes in Japanese society.
The vast majority of people with STEM degrees (or other degrees for that matter) do not work in academia.....
True, but the brightest ones often do. Very few graduates from private universities go on to become academics, but from the top public universities (higher level), quite a lot of them do. Also, please let me know where all these vacant STEM positions are outside of academia so I can apply for one - most of them take in students immediately after graduation and if you miss that it is pretty much game over.
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Posted in: Women at Japan's top university call out gender imbalance See in context
Again, this misses the point.
Having your best and brightest in STEM benefits the country.
Gender studies, literature, economics and all that are all well and good but an environment which puts your best brains off from entering the sciences and engineering is not a good environment.
Other countries do better.
Do better.
Have you tried applying for an academic position in a STEM subject in this country? Every position advertised gets 100 applicants or more - most of them very, very strong applicants too. There are plenty of fantastic brains in science and engineering, but the fact is there are not enough jobs! Many just end up teaching or pursuing different career pathways in the end.
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Posted in: Women at Japan's top university call out gender imbalance See in context
In the UK now it's close to 60% females in universities overall, but you'd never know it. All you hear about is that there are slightly fewer women in one or two STEM subjects and how biased it all is against women.
There isn't any discrimination against women in UK universities - the reason that there are more male physicists than female ones is the same reason there are more female Taylor Swift fans than there are male ones - it's just fashions and trends. Physics is just not a cool subject among women in the same way that Taylor Swift is not a cool artist among men.
The comments made toward those women at Tokyo University are clearly wrong; it shouldn't happen and they are right to call it out, but I doubt that that is the reason why there are so few women at Tokyo Uni.
This story reminds me of the Tokyo Medical University scandal from a few years back, in which the test results of female applicants were reduced by as much as 20%.
Why did they make the decision to do that? Just because they were sexist and biased against women? There was a reason for it - the graduates from the university then become doctors there, the hospital would spend several years, time and money, training them up after graduation only for the females to go and get married and retire to raise children. It still isn't right of course, but what can they do? Maybe look into ways to change to make it easier for women to balance working and raising children etc., but doing that is hard and it still probably wouldn't have a huge effect. They'd have to change attitudes in the whole of Japanese society. I think that was a pragmatic decision, not an idealistic one.
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Posted in: We want to clearly convey that public drinking is not part of this ward’s culture. See in context
With all the money that has been spent around there, I think they are just trying to turn it into something not too dissimilar to other nearby areas like Omotesando, Aoyama, Ebisu, Daikanyama, Hiro-o etc. - another place mainly for rich people. The kids can go elsewhere.
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Posted in: Material that cools down by glowing developed by researchers in Chiba and Osaka See in context
Its quite interesting - the complete opposite to normal fluorescence or phosphorescence where light of higher energy is absorbed and light of lower energy emitted, the difference resulting in a slight warming of the material. I'm interested in the photophysics behind this - unfortunately no reference to the paper!
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Posted in: Typhoon buffets Japan's Pacific coast, causing transport disruption, power cuts See in context
Was able to drive back from our summer trip on pretty much empty expressways today - not one single traffic jam - usually we'd get delays of at least 1.5 hours - possibly thanks to the typhoon! I'm not sure what all the fuss was about - for the last 48 hours it has been clearly predicted not to make landfall and skirt well to the south.
Tokyo dodge a bullet,this storm would of set Tokyo back years,if had a direct hit
There was a similar strength typhoon, maybe slightly stronger that made pretty much a direct hit with Tokyo about five years back - there were some wind damaged buildings in Chiba city I think, quite serious but it was hardly a huge disaster to set the city back years.
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Posted in: Anti-racism protests sweep Britain after far-right riots See in context
The far-right is rebelling with violence, because they couldn't win at the election.
Most of the people protesting have one major issue on their minds - they want to put an end to mass immigration to the UK. Beyond that, most of them are not especially political. Being against mass immigration, is of course a far-right position, but just because someone holds that view, it doesn't necessarily make them far-right. Indeed, anybody on the political spectrum from centre-left to far-right could be against mass immigration.
I'm sure there are some far-right protesters among them, but for the vast majority, it's a protest against mass immigration. On that front, the anti-immigration vote has won two recent elections - first the Brexit vote, which although not exclusively about immigration, that issue was a large part of it. Then the vote for Boris Johnson, which re-affirmed the Brexit vote. And what happened after winning those elections? They were completely ignored - net immigration to the UK has soared to all-time highs both legal and illegal. Thats why the people are now rebelling with violence.
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Posted in: Do you think roundabouts in Japan would reduce the number of traffic accidents? See in context
there are mainly two set of rules for round abouts: 1) Cars inside the round about have the priority, or 2) Cars entering the round about have the priority...
there are not two sets of rules. The rule when entering a roundabout is very simple - you give way to traffic coming from the right (in Japan at least). Cars entering the roundabout never have automatic priority.
not people just doing whatever in traffic circles. Maybe one lane circles are fine but more than one lane are a recipe for disaster.
it isn’t just people doing whatever in traffic circles, you are just showing your lack of understanding of how they work. There are clear rules for using roundabouts. In the UK there are roundabouts with multiple lanes everywhere and nobody has any problems with them.
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Posted in: Do you think roundabouts in Japan would reduce the number of traffic accidents? See in context
In most locations, there is no room for roundabouts. 20-ton trucks trying to go around them. Chaos. Stick with the lights.
Roundabouts all over UK roads and plenty of 20-ton trucks. I wouldn't say there is no chaos on UK roads, but it isn't the fault of trucks having difficulty going around roundabouts. There are plenty of locations in Japan where roundabouts could be installed with no issue.
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Posted in: Do you think roundabouts in Japan would reduce the number of traffic accidents? See in context
What will be a deciding factor is driver etiquette and capability.
Roundabouts don't operate on a principle of driver etiquette. There operate on a principle of clear, easy to follow rules. I think the Japanese aversion to roundabouts is just the fact that they never learned the rules, never learned how to use a roundabout. It's not just some crazy free for all.
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Posted in: Do you think roundabouts in Japan would reduce the number of traffic accidents? See in context
Surely there must be some hard data out there that answers this particular question?
As far as I know, there are no major concerns as to the safety of roundabouts in most situations.
In the UK, we have them all over the place and for places where space is limited, there are mini roundabouts - little more than a white circle painted in the middle of the junction. For the most part, they seem to be a lot better than the traffic lights everywhere solution that we see in Japan, allowing the traffic to flow freely. In some situations, they can get clogged but often that is remedied by putting in part-time traffic lights that come on at peak times.
I would like to see roundabouts adopted in Japan, but for some reason, Japanese people just can't seem to accept them - they just think they are scary for some reason. The rotary (a roundabout controlled by traffic lights), something I have seen in Japan, is pointless - totally defeats the objective of having a roundabout in the first place.
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Posted in: Spain beats England 2-1 to win Euro 2024 final See in context
I guess England fans would take anything at this point, but let's be honest, scraping through to the final barely managing to beat a bunch of nobody's with uninspiring football (maybe the first half against Netherlands aside) and then hoping that by far the best team in the tournament have an off day is no way to end 58 years of hurt.
When Southgate took on the England job, he seemed to work wonders with a very limited and young team, he has built a mental toughness into his teams that England always seemed to lack, we can win on penalties and we can pull last minute winners out of the bag that pre-Southgate teams would never have managed. However, with all the amazing players now at his disposal, he just hasn't managed to get them playing well together. The same players have been fantastic at some of the best clubs in the world. Spain seem to be a team that is greater than the sum of its parts, but England much less. We need to be better to win a major tournament. Could someone else do a better job than Southgate? Probably, but I don't know who it would be.
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Posted in: UK's Labour sweeps to power as leader Starmer vows to bring change See in context
Farage’s party/company ended up with the same number of seats as the Greens.
And attracted double the number of votes. Also got more votes than the lib dems who got 71 seats. the DUP got 5 seats with a little over 170000 votes compared to the 4 seats for Reform who attracted over 4 million votes - it's close to half of what Labour got.
Labour hardly increased their vote share from 2019 - they didn't win the election the Tories lost it - many voters ditched them for Reform and the Lib dems and to a lesser extend others. For many, it was just anyone but the Tories, many others just stayed at home and didn't bother. Hardly surprising as the Tories have overseen the worst 14 years of government in living memory.
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Posted in: UK Labour on course for massive election majority, exit poll shows See in context
A lot of news outlets refer to Reform UK as far right or France’s RN as far right, but I never see any of them referring to Japans LDP as far right, yet most of the controversial policies of RN and Reform are already implemented here in Japan, often to a more extreme extent than those parties propose. Seems quite hypocritical to me.
Good to see the tories kicked out, they have been disastrous, but I’m not sure that Labour will make much difference. They need to get a control on immigration, which is something that doesn’t seem to be in their DNA, and the massive transfers of wealth from the public purse to the wealthiest during the banking crisis and then again during Covid, that needs to be transferred right back again. The focus should be on expanding the middle class and improving access to it to anyone prepared to work for it.
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Posted in: The government has finally taken a step forward and I hope that everyone will drive at lower speeds as a matter of course. See in context
The design of the roads has a huge influence on the speed at which people feel comfortable driving on them. If you have a wide, straight, open road people feel more comfortable driving at high speed than they do on a road with narrower sections, trees at the side and so on. Changing the road design - introducing traffic calming measures is going to be more effective than just reducing speed limits that many people don't follow anyway if they feel they can get away with it.
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Posted in: Near-complete Tokyo condo to be demolished for spoiling Mount Fuji view See in context
I'm not sure what surprises me most - the fact that they are going to take it down, or the fact that it costs 70-80 million yen for a condo way out in Kunitachi!
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Posted in: DisneySea opens Fantasy Springs themed after 'Frozen,' 'Peter Pan' See in context
It is getting to be very expensive these days - especially now that you have to pay extra for the fast passes, premier access, etc. - it really feels like they are penny pinching with stuff like that.
Having said that, they really do know how to make a great experience for families. Sure, it is going to be a bit lame for older teenagers or younger adults, but then that's not really who its aimed at. Last year I took my family to both Fuji-ku and Disneyland. There was simply no comparison - Disneyland doesn't have the big rides that fuji-ku does, but overall, it was vastly the superior experience. Fuji-ku many attractions were closed, and the place seemed very understaffed so there were huge queues everywhere despite the place seeming to be half empty.
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Posted in: What happens if you get a traffic ticket in Japan? See in context
If they were serious about stopping speeding on the highway then they would monitor what time you enter and exit the highway but then most people wouldn't use the highways which are technically privately owned.
Every time I use the highway (typically weekends and holidays) I always end up in a massive traffic jam at some point, so even if I went 150 for most of the way, I'd still end up having averaged 60 because I spent an hour in stop-start traffic!
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Posted in: Premier League in the U.S.? FIFA weighs allowing overseas games See in context
Can’t see English football fans allowing it - there will be huge opposition to it much like there was to the planned European super league - another stupid money making plan that was scuppered because fans hated the idea.
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So how many more decades should the US be expected to fund Japan with the trade imbalance?
Posted in: Japan records trade deficit of ¥2.76 trillion in January as tariff worries loom
Kim looks like the panda on loan from China!
Posted in: N Korea slams U.S. and Asian rivals for pursuing 'absurd' plans to denuclearize North
Posted in: Mother, son fall to their deaths from 14-story apartment in apparent murder-suicide