Reinaert Albrecht comments

Much could be achieved if they stopped voicing over English on TV and in the cinemas. It would expose the Japanese to a lot of practice material and at finally they would hear somebody speak English with a proper accent.

@gaijinfo

Nobody anywhere ever said otherwise. But there are ramifications to everything. Shutting down all nuclear power, might make people feel better, but it will drastically increase Japan's dependency on imports (something that anti TPP crowd is strongly against) and pretty much throws any promises of a "Green Japan" out the window.

I don't see how that will actually increase Japan's dependency on imports. Where do you think the uranium comes from to fuel the nuclear reactors in Japan? From the mountains? Forget it. It's uranium comes from imports as does the MOX fuel they use.

As usual, the one element that is lacking in this discussion that still proposes nuclear as "cheap" is what Fukushima is going to cost over the coming 100 years and it won't go away soon. Nuclear is not dead cheap!

People having difficulty remembering kanji can have a look at http://rtega.be/chmn/ It offers sentences for each character in order to remember them more easily, tying the meanings of other characters together.

The last sentence says it all...

Don't understand the comments here. I've been flying with them over the last few years but last year I switched to Korean Air. I must say that Korean Airs inflight service is a lot better whereas their ticket prices are much cheaper that ANA. The planes are much better as well. I never liked ANA that much.

The writing is on the wall for Apple too. They are simply out of ideas and possibilities. They have indeed ruled by and large for the past few years but that probably is not going to last. If Telcos start to go bust because Apple charges too much, it won't take long for the prices of the iphones & co. to sky rocket. They simply have no idea what to market next. Most of their recent ideas and marketing came from Steve Jobs and since the guy is no longer here it is not clear who's going to replace him in that department.

Switch off all air conditioning and replace it with ventilators. Problem solved.

@SushiSake3

That's largely because rising populations demand more energy - that's a brutal economic reality.

Note that Japan's population is declining faster every year...

@ Rick Kisa: correction you meant a meagre 12%. Electricity does not run your transport truck, it doesn't fly your transport plane, it does not power your pack boat. Nuclear is not going to solve our energy problems. Whoever invented that myth should be shot.

As soon as I can find their excellent lamps here in Europe I'll buy them.

Two things to bear in mind:

The price also goes up as a result of all the crap that has to be cleaned up in Fukushima. Some one is going to pay for it.

Japanese still throw out buckets of energy out of their window everyday so there's a lot of room for improved efficiency.

It's not irradiated debris, it's radioactive debris. Please correct the translation.

And Japantoday still doesn't know how to properly link a website. Digital illiteracy? Please, when are you going to learn the wonders of the a-tag in HTML?

Look at the graphs on this page: http://alturl.com/iru38 and what tiny fraction nuclear takes up there. Next explain me how you are going to replace that with nuclear.

The words "mac-and-cheese" and "new heights" don't belong in the same sentence.

@ThreeDogsFM

Obviously, you have not been paying attention recently. It looks ever more likely that indeed, TEPCO was at some point very close to abandoning the site all together. If it were not for a very angry Kan, 1 third of japan would have been totally uninhabitable by now and with no options whatsoever to get even close to the site to clean it up again. What we have now is better but still a ticking time bomb for which the official cleanup schedule is 30 years. And that schedule relies on technology that does not exist yet. One can hardly call that safe or sound.

Any tourist visiting Japan should shun Tokyo anyway. Mostly concrete and rusted steel. You can easily spend most of your holiday in Kyoto-Nara or Okinawa. Never would I think about taking any relative of mine to Tokyo.

The only thing that should be dissolved here is Ozawa himself...

Climate Gates 1 and 2 exposed the fraud and sank the Climate change bandwagon for good.

Climate gates 1 and 2 just showed to the general public that sciences is about checking facts with approving and disapproving opinions until everything is fleshed out. The press dumbed that down to: "wow, some guy says he's not entirely sure: it must be all wrong." Maybe you should read something about science before you say something about it. Let me quote the wikipedia article on climate change: "In the scientific literature, there is a strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused mainly by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view,[140][141] though a few organisations hold non-committal positions."

You can be quite sure that those non-committal positions are held by institutions with industry links who don't want people to believe that men is causing all this.

Who's idea is it anyway to ship snow to Okinawa? With daytime highs of 23 degrees this time of the year, nobody needs no stinking snow anyway.

Wow 18M is too much aggressive number. It won't be possible until unless yen@200 and too much initiations from the Govt and easing the VISA norms.

Why should visa norms be eased? The VISA for foreign tourists are exactly the same as everywhere in the world. No normal tourist wants to stay longer than 3 months in the same country.

What have these guys smoked? 8.6 million was the best they ever got. They think they are going to double it after Fukushima? Come on...

You can be sure they are on their way to the North Korean death camps by now.

Chances are very high that even without the tsunami there would have been the same amount of problem (only problem is TEPCO doesn't want to release all information). This quake came as a godsend and I don't mean to insult the many people that lost their lives or are still struggling to catch on. The nuclear industry was going up like it had never done before. Everybody seemed to have forgotten about Chernobyl and still today all research concerning the ill effects on health of the Chernobyl disaster are massively being denied. Let's hope people learn their lesson thoroughly this time: Japan is not a safe place to build nuclear reactors and basically very few places in the world are.

How is it possible for a young person to save up a million dollars for a car these days is beyond me. Most people won't even make that in a lifetime.

Not necessary: 200.000$ will suffice.

If all of them are positively confirmed to be speeding by the police, I guess there won't be any insurance cover this time...

If it was at night the hospital where he could have arrived by taxi would probably have refused him until an ambulance had arrived. Japanese hospitals don't take patients at night who are not carried by an ambulance.

The good news is that the amount of this vinegar being imported is going down. Only seven million bottles this years as opposed to 12.5 million 7 years ago. This means that even the japanese can't be fooled forever.

Is this even an article?