Posted in: Destroyer came close to sinking after collision; bodies found: Fleet commander See in context
@ akoppa June 1811:15 pm JST
You wrote: " There is a simple navigation rule when two ships are face-to-face ".
Do we actually know they were closing "face-to-face" ?
Could the ACX Crystal have been overtaking the USS Fitzgerald ?
Does the photography clearly show direction of impact?
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Posted in: Destroyer came close to sinking after collision; bodies found: Fleet commander See in context
To see tracking map, go to MarineTraffic.com, create free registration, search vessel ACX Crystal, select past track.
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Posted in: Destroyer came close to sinking after collision; bodies found: Fleet commander See in context
Re: "tracking map"
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-40317341
"The ACX Crystal appeared to make a U-turn before the collision, before rapidly adjusting course and setting off to Tokyo "
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Posted in: Abe says it is his duty to revise constitution; calls for debate See in context
@John-San IMI owns the patient on the 9mm bullet? please explain.
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Posted in: China threatens sanctions against U.S. companies: Is this the future? See in context
@AsianGaijinYesWeExist
Tibet is not a country, no matter what Robert Redford says.
But the Republic of Ryukyu would be?
have consumers pay $30 for a T-shirt at Wal Mart? All those American workers need their $25 an hour wage, health insurance and 401(k) too, you know. Unless you're proposing that manufacturers hire illegals at $6 per hour?
You may have a point worth considering - a thought exercise which would include examining the "$30 for a T-shirt at Wal Mart" case which you pose as a thing to fear. Manufacturers already hire workers at (much less than) $6 per hour, probably even within a few hours drive from the US.
My question is, how many $3 T-shirts does one need?
Assuming you live in Japan, you can around you see the equivalent of $30 for a T-shirt at Wal Mart, while trying to provide health insurance, pensions, etc. Certainly things are not perfect, but to much of the world it looked like an enviable system - at least until Chinese goods were allowed to flood the local market..
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Posted in: Why doesn’t the U.S. adopt the metric system? See in context
"1kg is the weight of 10cm/3 of distilled water at sea level"
Isn't it 10cmx10cmx10cm (=10 to the third power =)1000 cubic cm of water= 1 liter=~~1Kg in mass/weight?
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Posted in: Crown prince warns of need to remember World War II 'correctly' See in context
Prince Naruhito's courageous and much needed statement strengthened my faith in the possibility of a bright future for Japan.
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Posted in: 2,100 people sue Asahi Shimbun over 'comfort women' stories See in context
Hello Yubaru
I think you made a good and important point. Ultimately, we are discussing the sad realities of countless abuses by people of any given ethnicity against other people of any given ethnicity. These are not crimes against, for example, Chinese rights, Korean rights, or Indonesian rights, but crimes against human rights, and not crimes performed by Japanese only, but by heartless greedy and brutal people of any given ethnicity.
You may be interested in Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute, a documentary (it left me speechless), which is described in the following quote from Wikipedia:
Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute is a 1975 Japanese film by director Shohei Imamura. It is a documentary on one of the Japanese "karayuki-san," who were women who were forced into prostitution in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II. Imamura focuses on one particular woman who was sent to Malaysia and never returned to Japan.
**
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Posted in: Ex-adviser to Abe praises apartheid as means of immigration control See in context
I've lived here 30 years. We bought a house. I have a kid in university here, another one employed fulltime, grandkids.
I can't just leave, and really don't want to, but lately I've been having nightmares about experiencing something like what happened to my grandparents during the Nazi occupation in Europe. I feel insecure, sometimes even scared. Weimar-like times indeed...
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Posted in: Noodles spice up China-Japan tensions See in context
@Salvor Hardin
We've got to overcome this stupid Neanderthalic reaction before the intolerance kills us all!
As a part-Neanderthal, I protest your insensitive remarks.
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Posted in: Japanese activist challenges secrets law with whistleblower website See in context
@ sf2kDec. 22, 2014 - 01:47PM JST
It's Japan though; wouldn't a fax number be better?
Haha, beat me to it. It's painfully true. Another article in today's JAPANTODAY, "Why the Sony hack isn't big news in Japan", says the same thing really:
Japan's newspapers, which have the highest daily circulations in the world, are inclined to avoid news that is technologically complex. Like hacking. Nobuyuki Hayashi, a veteran freelance tech journalist and consultant based in Tokyo, said the tendency stems from reporters and editors who often don’t have a deep understanding of technology. And neither do their aging readers.
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Posted in: Regular people far outnumber foreigners being spied on by NSA: Washington Post See in context
@Serrano
You wouldn't believe how many "troublemakers" are regular people who were designated as "troublemakers" by the government when they were trying to expose government fraud waste and abuse!
Now please explain how they are to protect their rights?
So many people are too afraid of the government to admit even to themselves there is something wrong, and would rather twist the meaning of evidence so they can feel safe and excused from doing anything.
You sound like you would have been very at home in pre-war Japan (or in the DDR, under another government that worked out so well)
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Posted in: Regular people far outnumber foreigners being spied on by NSA: Washington Post See in context
@Wolfpack
the Left? There is still a Left left in the US?
But your point is well taken.
Power you give to the government when your preferred party is in charge will still be available to the government when your pals are replaced with someone elses.
"Intelligence" can be collected and disseminated with a minimum of oversight if so desired by those in charge and used to extra-judicially destroy someone's life.
No warrants needed if it won't be used in court. No rules of evidence.
Privacy protection rules? Consider what Snowden could take without permission, imagine what can be done with collusion from within government.
What can the victim do? Claim they were wiretapped by NSA?
There'll be no proof and their credibility will be damaged. They might as well ask to be committed for paranoia.
Nobody has nothing to hide!
Relationships,Health information,Business information,Financial information
Information is power. Power corrupts. Total power corrupts totally. Anyone for Total Information?
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Posted in: Korean campaigns for removal of Japanese flag from French stores See in context
A few years ago I went to visit my relatives in Europe with my Japanese wife and children.
As my pre-teen children were playing, I was discussing our life in Japan with my uncle. His wife stood up and suddenly left the room, saying she could not endure hearing the Japanese language.
She later explained to me that she, as a child in World war 2 ,had been an inmate in an internment camp in Java, and had witnessed her best friend 's mother beaten to death with wooden clubs by camp guards for accepting a gift of bread through the camp fence.
The camp guards spoke Japanese. Many of them were Koreans. Their commander was Japanese.
Her parents had worked for a colonial regime with had it's own record of inhumanities.
Her distress was real. She did not want to hurt my children's feelings, nor mine or my wife's, and she overcame her feelings and shared dinner with us. I later explained to my children as much as I understood of her feelings and experience .
I hope the experience helped them to become better people, not ashamed to be Japanese but also not too proud, aware that non-Japanese are people too, do good and bad things at times and have feelings too. Just like Japanese.
The crimes and suffering of the past perhaps can serve as lessons to prepare a better future if we neither deny the past nor use it to create hate in the present but rather to show the real consequences of actions that lead to violence..
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Posted in: Singapore warns foreigners to obey its laws See in context
@JeffLeeMay.
"I've been to Singapore a number of times and have never seen a cop."
Perhaps, but you can be sure more than one cop has seen you....
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Posted in: Gov't plans to increase number of foreign English teachers to 10,000 See in context
angeia
I remember fighting with my elementary school to allow me to teach the kids how to write the alphabet, but they absolutely forbade me to do so because it was against the ministry of education’s guidelines. They said ABCs would interfere with their hiragana-katakana learning. Puh-lease.""
I have the same experience, and apparently frungy does too.. As many non-Japanese sounds cannot be properly represented by kana, for example non-vowel word endings, I think the monbushou would improve things much by stopping the use of katakana for teaching pronunciation of foreign language in general and by replacing kunrei transliteration of kana (taught in elementary schools) with Hepburn transliteration for English in particular.
Transliterate "sit" to kana and then to romaji according to kunrei and it should be clear the practice does not distinguish between bull-sit and .. well it should be clear.
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Posted in: U.S. serviceman says he doesn't remember punching boy See in context
The Airman's behavior is of course unsat. But I can't help wondering if he was one of the many aircraft maintainers at KAB that have been on 16 hr shifts with almost no days off for a year or so....
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Posted in: Your face on a Y10,000 bill See in context
10,000 yen is about $85?
How much in dollars will you let me exchange for yen at that rate?
according to http://www.xe.com, 10,000JPY = 125.40USD
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Posted in: Beat Takeshi compares same-sex marriage with bestiality See in context
Re Male-Male erotic relationships in traditional Japanese society, less informed readers of this forum might benefit from searching Ihara(井原 西鶴?, 1642 – September 9, 1693) and Comrade Loves Of the Samurai, a collection of Ihara's stories dealing with the topic, or The Great Mirror of Male Love (The Encyclopedia of Male Love) (男色大鑑 1687)
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Posted in: Do you support torture as an interrogation method if the objective is to prevent a terrorist attack or capture criminals? See in context
Torture does work- it may not work reliably as a means of obtaining tactical or strategic information, but it is effective to terrorize large numbers of people who see even a few others' loved ones' lives destroyed.
Torture is therefore tempting to those seeking power. Some will seek to use it to impose their political will, even against their own populations. They have to start somewhere, with a plausible excuse. Then mission creep sets in.
Study the reality of torture in political struggle and then where it leads, its ultimate forms, whether in Soviet Gulags, Nazi concentration camps, Cambodian killing fields, Chinese or DPRK's re-education camps, in Chile under Pinochet, or in Argentina during its dirty war. Torture takes on a demonic dynamic of its own.
What person or institution can you really trust with this insidious weapon of mass persuasion?
What you do to your enemies' troops will sooner or later be done to yours. What you do to your enemies' populations you will sooner or later do against your own. What you do to your enemies will be done to you. Imitating your enemy you will become your own enemy yourself.
If you still think torture can get you something you want, study the lives of torturers. Many did not end well.
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Posted in: Disaster survival kit See in context
No drinking water? Looks like it needs a water filter or bleach for purifying water, containers for/with water, trash bags to keep blankets and other items dry or use as rain coats, flashlights or light sticks. Etc.
19 000 for blankets, toilet paper and gloves? Oh, and a blowup pillow. Sweet dreams and good luck....
I think they make the storage box it's in and found another way to sell it?
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Posted in: What do foreigners find strange about Japan? NTV finds out See in context
"Free " toll roads paid for by ----- everyone's taxes...........
Some toll-road company must have made out in a gross way, but hardly anybody questioned this?
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Posted in: At least 10 groups dealing with disaster kept no detailed records of meetings See in context
not even a tape recording?
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Posted in: Tokyo starts radiation checks on city's food See in context
replying to DisillusionedNov. 08, 2011 - 09:50PM JST
I have to disagree with the, "too little, too late!" comments. (..)Gees, your smoke detectors in your home give off radiation.
I invite you to eat the Americium-241 pellet in your smoke detector. Grind and dissolve it first to better simulate the form that radioactive contamination in food may take.
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Posted in: Contaminated soil found outside Fukushima no-go zone See in context
@Johannes
I'm worried that possibly the risks of internal radiation are not addressed enough.
The radiation dose rate you mentioned -0.3 muSv/h- may be safe, but reflects only the external gamma radiation reaching the body from its environment.
Cesium is a strong beta emitter. It is present as microscopic dust in the environment,and perhaps dissolved in rainwater.
Beta particle radiation travels only a few inches in air, and as most contamination is on the ground, it is underrepresented by the dose rates obtained from typical measurements taken 1 meter above the ground. That's if the detector is even sensitive to beta radiation.
Is there not a strong possibility that people will inhale cesium dust or ingest cesium in some form, whether in rice or mushrooms or from eating a sandwich with contaminated hands? Does Cesium leave the body quickly or does some of it become part of body tissues? And once in the body, does Cesium not bombard the tissues around it with beta radiation? Is that radiation not a risk? In addition to the external gamma radiation?
I agree the ambient gamma radiation level in Tsukuba is relatively low, except perhaps in some hot spots. Going North from Koriyama the ambient level increases rapidly, in areas where people still live their daily lives.
I watched kids walking to school as I drove by, my car raising a cloud of dust as I listened to my GM counter making more noise than I had ever heard from it (other than testing using a known source). And I worried about that. Perhaps I was overreacting?
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Posted in: Ishihara says Japan should conduct simulated nuclear weapons tests See in context
smithinjapan: Why not just send a TEPCO manager? Good point! They could probably lie, cheat and mismanage any country back to the stone age using just the available local technology if given a chance by politicians they bought and paid for. Sigh.
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Posted in: Ishihara says Japan should conduct simulated nuclear weapons tests See in context
Does Japan really need nuclear bombs? Can't they just send a Tepco-managed nuclear powerplant to their enemies? That weapon was already tested and appears capable of serious damage.
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Posted in: 3 Kanagawa teachers disciplined for various infractions See in context
IMHO If you have the money to drink out -after driving there-, you have the money to take an unten daiko. If you don't have the money for an unten daiko, you don't have the money to drink out .
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So obviously this woman has mental issues, and that is why she did not know what to do when her…
Posted in: 54-year-old woman arrested after body of 91-year-old father found at home
@Agent_Neo To make the master happy?
Posted in: Japan says it will watch U.S. moves over ICC, but stops short of criticism