paradoxbox comments

Facial recognition at the airport - Your image is inserted into the immigration database. Japanese immigration is controlled by the Ministry of Justice, same people as the police. Now you're part of the criminal database whether or not you've ever been in trouble with the law.

It won't be long before they set up facial recognition cameras at crosswalks and other public places. Jaywalked across an empty street in the middle of the night? Prepare for a police and immigration visit at your home!

Sure to be downvoted but you will see - give it 10 years, I promise that this is coming.

I think the more this kind of thing happens the better.

too many Japanese people believe foreigners/half people are some kind of circus attraction, not to be taken seriously. it's irritating on the surface of it, but downright infuriating when you're faced with it in serious situations with real consequences be they financial or whatever else.

if it takes a few famous athletes or actresses telling reporters and clueless Island mindset people to shut up, so be it.

ban knives! (already illegal)

ban walking with knives! (already illegal)

random police checks on the sidewalks! (already happens)

metal detectors that see through your clothing in public places! (already installed in certain train stations)

sometimes you can't legislate crazy away. you can however keep people who are mentally unstable on meds or in institutions if they are dangerous to the public. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that this guy was known to police or mental health institutions and had a history of dangerous interactions with the public and in particular women and children.

The Japanese government and especially immigration and judicial systems are famous for ignoring everything the UNHCR and OHCHR have ever said. Both agencies have put out official reports blasting Japan for its treatment of foreigners and its failure to abide by treaties and agreements regarding standards and rules of care of people being detained which the nation signed.

Japan just doesn't care and the UN has zero power.

This Canuck says it's a step in the right direction, but just one small step. I'll bet all you commenters don't know that it costs me more to fly to Haida G'waii from Victoria than it does to cross the Pacific to Tokyo, and more than twice that to fly to Yellowknife. Worst-case scenario - Vancouver to St. John's, Newfoundland. THAT'S the disgusting reality of flying in Canada; our country is huge, its population only about 35 million, and most of us, when flying for a holiday go out of country.

That is a problem of the economic viability of the route. It's simple math really. Calculate the cost of fuel for the route in the aircraft type you're using to get there. Consider the load factor (How many passengers on the flight vs the number of seats). Airlines are usually happy to get around 80% loading. If the load factor is below 80% consistently on a 737 or A320 they'll probably use a smaller aircraft such as a Dash 8 or regional jet. The costs go up when they need to do this. The airlines need to consider the load factor in both directions. Add in basic flight costs such as aircrew costs, ATC fees, landing fees, maintenance and logistic costs (Which will definitely be higher at out of the way destinations) etc. etc. Then the cost of leasing or purchasing the aircraft itself, which has to be considered. Then also factor in that flights in general need to be more than break even simply to ensure overall profitability of the company.

It becomes obvious why a 777-300ER full of passengers from Vancouver to Toronto is more economical than a Dash 8 half full to Haida from Victoria. They're probably losing money on most flights from a city pair like Victoria to Haida, where the airplane might be less than 1/3rd full on both trips but still costs the same amount of money to the airline regardless of how many people are riding on it.

It is no small wonder that airlines go bankrupt frequently. It requires a serious talent for business to keep one profitable. On top of all of the basic problems of accounting, the airlines also need to prevent their client base from shrinking due to bad PR or a general bad reputation due to service problems of any sort including late flights or lost baggage etc. Air Canada is either lucky or unlucky with this as they're the only option available to many Canadian destinations. A private airline has the option of simply not servicing routes that don't guarantee profitability, and private airlines can choose to cancel routes for a penalty if they're proving to be money losers.

I don't envy the task airlines have, but I also don't think they've been doing the best job they can do. But I also don't think that they have a problem as severe as a company like United, which has in the last several years beaten its passengers, killed a number of dogs, etc.

These issues are some big reasons why cargo airlines are, from a business and investment perspective, so very much better than a passenger airline is.

The city could make an effort to create designated spaces to hold celebrations instead of trying to resist them as it has been the past few years. Resistance is futile, you're not going to stop millions of people from gathering there. The city may as well make proper arrangements to handle the crowd. Does not seem like the city has invested anything into proper planning and management of halloween other than filling the streets with as many police as possible.

i love japan but given its current state of complete backwardness, i can't help but laugh and munch popcorn as the entire nation implodes

japan of the 60's - progressive, rapid modernization and adoption and improving of technology

japan of the 80's - the bubble. massive culture export everywhere

japan of now - no permanent foreigners, no children, no money, no allies

i do wonder how long it will take for the implosion to complete and the new generation to restart the country properly? i suppose i'll be a senior citizen before it starts to happen.

I have an idea! How about we use this article as a vehicle to discuss the harm underage prostitution does to young girls, and the best way to stop older men from sexualising young girls so that they won’t continue to be seen as legitimate sex partners?

According to comments you made on another article yesterday, you advocate holding underaged youth criminally responsible for their actions. But with this post, it appears you only believe so if the perpetrators are male.

So which is it?

Is your official position that you support discrimination against males by the criminal justice system?

There are not enough facts in the article to make a judgment either way.

However, breach of contract by either party is an issue that will need to be settled by the court.

I strongly doubt the contract was worded specifically enough to allow the company to fire him, have his visa status revoked and ultimately result in his deportation, simply due to a "lack of Japanese skill". More to the point, I find it very difficult to believe that people who are not experts on language learning would have the foresight to include specific Japanese Language Proficiency Test scores within the contract itself. The JLPT test is important in this case because it is one of only two tests accepted by the Japanese government as verification of a person's Japanese ability, the other test being meant for overseas students and not applicable outside of educational institutions.

The JLPT tests occur only twice a year and moving to higher level requires a minimum of 6 months. If his visa was revoked before this period had elapsed I find it hard to believe an impartial court will not side with him.

To complicate matters, fishermen certainly do not speak Japanese in the way that someone who holds a JLPT 5 certificate is going to understand. Aside from colloquialisms, there is also the dialect issue - being the company was in Hiroshima, there is a fair chance even someone holding a JLPT 3 certificate would not understand a good portion of what was being said by the average fisherman from Hiroshima or anywhere else near Kansai. JLPT study material and the test itself only cover hyoujungo, standard Tokyo Japanese as is used in NHK broadcasts.

Perhaps the government should think harder about exploiting cheap, unskilled labor before approving visas en masse. Once a precedent is set with this case, I think we're going to see a lot more cases like it in the near future by angry exploited workers unless both companies and the government learn to be more responsible for ensuring that the workers they're hiring are actually suitable for the job before signing contracts.

Some of the shrill feminist comments in this article make me laugh - no wonder left wing governments around the world are being elected out of power.

There is a time and place to get very upset about things. This is not one of them.

The boys should face some punishment, a school suspension or perhaps some minor community service, but treating them as criminals for this very, very common behavior is not appropriate. There are bigger fish to fry.

Those calling for criminal justice here need to get a life and I take great comfort in knowing that you can't vote here for politicians that would validate your opinions in any meaningful way.

I'm no fan of trump but are they ever actually going to produce hard evidence of what it is they're trying to prove?

what use is a subpoena, witness testimony is widely known to be the least reliable form of evidence in legal cases.

if they have hard proof i'd like it to be put out there, enough of this circus from both sides.

holy moly that girl is a mass of muscle. look at her back!

jail for abe. bozo doesn't have a clue. nearly a decade of failure. fall on your sword abe

In Japan butchers were considered burakumin so you don't find them very often these days. Which is too bad really. I would love to have a local butcher to buy quality meats from, even if they're not Japanese cuts of meat.

People have got this obsession with marbling in the meat, and that might be great for yakiniku, but an expensive cut of high fat wagyu as a steak is disgusting, it is extremely oily due to all the fat. It's fantastic in moderation and great for yakiniku but for a "traditional steak" which IMO has its birthplace in the US, a decent sized cut of red meat with moderate marbling is desirable.

I do wish that butchers had some kind of standardization. There are certain parts of the meat which have very intense flavor but are not well known in the US. You can mention the name of the cut to them but they won't know it. Same in Canada. In the UK they do.

It's rather sad to see a lot of the old traditional trades such as fishmonger and butcher etc. disappearing from western society. Sure for the average shopper they're unnecessary but restaurants certainly still need these folks to help keep the quality high. I suppose the days of markets have come and gone in the west. In Japan at least we still have fish markets but I've never seen a meat market.

The question here is one of cause and effect. Ghosn was initially arrested on 19 November of last year. For the fiscal year ending in March 2019, Nissan's profits were down 57.9% from the previous fiscal year (from 746.9 billion yen to 319.1 billion yen).

just look at the shikihou for nissan and you will be able to get a clearer picture as to whether this circus is what drove the performance down.

looking at the past year and a little bit, we can see that it was already on a downward trend, but since the news of ghosn's arrest, the profits dropped, as mentioned, around 60%. however, profits also dropped by about 50% in late 2017 before remaining relatively stable throughout the rest of the year.

i think it's safe to say that nissan was experiencing some difficulties but this obvious coup has trashed the reputation of the company.

The issue of extremely high health insurance rates occurs with people who enter their second year in Japan or after a change in employment. I have experienced this, my insurance went from being reasonable to being over a quarter of my paycheck. It took a lot of wrangling to get the city ward to back off. I forget the details of how and why it happened as it was nearly a decade ago, but I can say that it does happen to some people and the ones who don't fight back on the issue end up paying exorbitant health insurance rates.

silly comments, that's why we have to change the constitution so we can go overseas and whoop some ass.

and get some nukes! don't forget nukes! then we can beat 'em all! if they fight back, we'll nuke 'em all! yeah!

What we're witnessing is the setting of a dangerous precedent by the legal system of Japan, again.

There is NO law that forbids you from carrying objects through a crossing when the signal says you're clear to walk.

What the justice system is aiming to do is further increase its ability to arrest people for doing nothing. If this group of people is convicted it will set precedent allowing police to arrest anyone walking on sidewalks or crossing the street under whatever pretenses.

Police should not be allowed to arrest people for walking on the street, whether they're carrying a bed with them or not. I really hate to see how the place has become a police state. Things weren't like this 10 years ago.

Third incident in the last week involving injury or fatality to parties not driving the vehicle being chased.

Japanese police need to reevaluate just how necessary it is to endanger the lives of uninvolved citizens in order to catch suspects. Apparently our lives are worth nothing if it means they can catch the perp.

does anyone who has been in Japan for the last decade really believe it has gotten better?

it seems awfully clear to me that the moment abe came around the nation became more hateful, the government started actively suppressing the media, destroyed relations with Korea within about a year and with China about the same.

New laws designed to track and trace foreigners were enacted. new laws to enable slave labor by foreign workers were enacted and then utilized to conduct the nuclear waste cleanup.

term limits for a sitting party member were removed. people who don't use. computers were appointed as cyber security ministers. Olympic ministers bashed victims of the earthquake.

taxes will double. the proceeds were. promised to Fukushima but they have not and never will see any of it. the peaceful constitution will be abolished - despite the current one not limiting the size of the defence force, nor the capability. solely for the purpose of being able to conduct military operations outside of Japan.

the number of children is at an all time low. the politicians told women that they should do their job of producing babies more diligently.

the government pushes desperately to increase inflation at any cost yet wages have not increased in a decade.

excuse me, are things really getting better? if so I do not see it. things were better when I first arrived than they are now. abe is at the root of it. he is the worst thing to happen to japan since ww2. the damage he has done and is doing will affect us for decades. things have not gotten better and as long as he is around I don't think they will.

second incident like this in as many days.

many police forces will abandon a chase if it appears there is a danger to the general public.

helicopters can be called, dogs can be used, camera footage etc.

the police need to learn when to pull back to avoid putting innocent people at risk. a suspect who thinks he's gotten away usually slows down. you can catch him later, you cannot restore the life of the man in the other car.

what an absolute circus.

the issue is not about ghosn it is about the police and Nissan operating outside of the law and detaining people in perpetuity without a chance to defend themselves, all the while conducting unrecorded interrogations without a lawyer present.

the fact that he was released on bail then rearrested was disgraceful, this latest release just solidifies the issue, Japan's justice system is severely broken.

This guy putting Japan back on a path to war..Really don't like him.

this is probably the only hope for our species, to be honest

humans are built in with some incredibly destructive tendencies that threaten the global safety.

editing out or toning down genes that cause extreme aggression, mania, depression, etc. could significantly improve how humans cooperate on a whole.

I find it amusing that some people are professing the virtues of Japanese prison/detention food.

Let's get a few things straight: Food for prisons is not the same as the food for detention centers. The sources may be the same, but they may also be COMPLETELY different. It's possible food in one prison may be cooked by inmates, but it's also entirely possible that it's completely contracted out to a third party.

In the case of detention centers, detainees are almost never allowed out of their cells. In Carlos Ghosn's case, you are looking at someone who is in solitary confinement for close to 23 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can forget about people doing kitchen duty in a place like that. His only time out of a cell is to see the lawyer or brush his teeth, and once a week, have a 5-10 minute bath or shower.

Let's talk about the nutrition of these meals. If you have ever met someone who's been in detention a long time, you'll notice right away that they're approaching Auschwitz levels of malnourishment. I interviewed a guy who had been in custody at a detention facility for 8 months (Without trial, just like Ghosn). He was nothing but skin and bones.

The types of food, and the quantity of food, served at detention centers seems to assume everyone being fed has the absolute lowest basal metabolic rate of the average Japanese citizen. Between the morning meal and evening meal, you're looking at perhaps 1,000 calories of energy, most of it coming from white rice. The remainder of the calories are provided at lunch in the form of pure carbohydrates, mostly sugary jam packets and juice boxes. Daily average is somewhere between 1,500 and 2,100 calories, it varies depending on the food served on a particular day. For diabetics or people with medical conditions, there are alternative foods provided, but the alternative foods do not take into consideration the calorie and nutritional deficit created by not having sugary or high starch items. So you end up with some people gradually withering away into walking skeletons, and developing internal organ problems because they're just barely sustaining themselves on small portions of protein and grease.

If you contact the MOJ about what the nutrition of meals provided to detainees or prisoners is, they'll block you at every turn. They will tell you that the meals have been designed to sustain a person and keep them healthy. However if you analyze the content of the average meal it is clear to see that the meals are not even close to healthy, with the majority of items being expired bento boxes full of deep fried, breaded foods, and it is impossible to get even a general figure on what nutritional guidelines are actually being met with these meals. If you follow up with the contractors who supply and make these meals, you may get some nutritional information out of them, and it becomes very clear that you cannot keep a person healthy by feeding them such food for extended periods of time. You have got to remember we're talking about people being detained for months or years at a time, and this is the only thing they can eat to survive. They need to be given decent enough food to prevent muscle atrophy and organ damage.

The reality of the situation is that the MOJ doesn't know nor care what detained people are being fed, so long as they don't die of starvation before they're moved to a prison where the meals actually are regulated and managed by a nutritionist, or in the rarest of cases, just released back to society.

The MOJ provides itself with an escape route: It's possible for detainees at some (Most?) detention facilities to purchase bento boxes made to a higher quality and nutritional standard. They're generally high in price so only those who were carrying a lot of cash at the time of arrest can continue purchasing these for long, or they'll need to have a lawyer bring cash to them.

TLDR: Japanese detention standards are a throwback to the 1800's. Only superficially does it look like modern standards are being met. In reality the conditions are similar to those of third world nations, and slow starvation does occur in certain people detained for long periods.

I have no way of determining whether his condition is real, doctors will be able to determine that and provide documentation if it is.

That being said, this angle is a very well used one in cases of detention in Japanese facilities. It is generally the last trick up the sleeve of any person being detained without chance of release. Which is why we didn't hear about it until now. It's fairly rare for people to be let out of Japanese detention facilities on medical grounds.

You can read several stories per year where people being detained in both immigration centers and police detention centers are extremely ill. They're then released and die within several days. Removing them from the custody of the facility absolves the MOJ of any responsibility for denial of basic health care.

IIRC in 2013 or 2014 a man with a cancerous tumor was held in an immigration facility until 1 week before his death. He was routinely denied medical treatment. When the tumor was finally discovered he had only days to live and was unable to walk.

This is the reality for people being detained in Japan.

Even if he manages to secure release from police custody, unless he has PR in Japan, it is likely his original travel visa has now expired, thus when he's released from police detention, the immigration authorities will be there to arrest him for overstay of his visa and he'll be placed in custody at an immigration detention center. This is how the MOJ operates, it's standard procedure. There's no way to extend your visa while in custody, it is purposefully designed so that any foreigner put in custody can not be freed. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

I'm never going to buy a Nissan again, and I was a long time fan of Nissan cars and have owned several high end Skyline models in the past.

Whether Ghosn is guilty or not, it is clear that the management have strung up their CEO to take the fall for something it seems clear they're all involved in.

In the process of doing so it also appears that they have set precedents that all foreigners living in Japan are going to have to live with for the rest of our lives, things like having our passports confiscated without being charged with any crime, and unlimited detention periods while people directly related to "investigations" are allowed to consolidate their story and destroy evidence.

Nissan can bite me as far as I'm concerned, they'll never get another purchase out of me. Sometimes it's not only the quality of the car that matters, but the corporation's ethical responsibility to the community and humanity in general.

shouldn't have come back, she's going to be jailed by the clown court and denied any chance of a fair trial or chance to. defend herself.

they'd sound swell if it wasn't the case that japan still institutes forced manual labor, basically unpaid (it's paid at the rate of something like 1,000yen per month). prisoners are required to buy their own basic toiletries such as soap, toothpaste, etc. which are all sold at normal consumer prices.

then there is the problem everyone is starting to realize is true - that the japanese justice system incarcerates anyone, regardless of whether they've had a fair trial or not. with the conviction rate as high as it is, it's pretty much a certainty that many foreign prisoners in japan are actually there without having committed a crime. perhaps they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or perhaps they committed a minor infraction and had the book thrown at them, perhaps false confessions, who knows, but since the prosecution has a carte blanche and police interrogations are not recorded, we'll never know.

you won't find a lot of iranians begging to be transferred back to iran. the iranian embassy actively protects its citizens from being deported from japan to iran in many criminal cases. turkey as well. from what i understand, some of these people face life in prison or death if they ever return to iran for whatever crimes they've committed or are accused of. most of them are in for drug trafficking.

I predicted his arrest just hours before it happened..

anyway, he should have fled. he is never going to receive justice in Japan, the system is a farce.