RonJB comments

Man, that's some strong lipstick!

Meanwhile, the foreign national population rose 243,000 to about 3.16 million.

OK, but how many Japanese people left the country in search of job/life opportunities?

They really have no idea about being a regular member of society.

And yet when they do try, people monitor their every move and pick on every tiny hint of privilege or error.

Good luck to her, I say. Better than sitting round in a palace surrounded by servants.

Would you ever get a modern artist coming out with something sublime like this?

We skipped the light fandango

Turned cartwheels 'cross the floor

I was feeling kind of seasick

The crowd called out for more

The room was humming harder

As the ceiling flew away

When we called out for another drink

The waiter brought a tray

Mind you, as I type this, I'm watching an AKB48 2012 concert boxset that I picked up from a charity shop. It all sounds quite profound when you can't understand the language.

"When I started out in the entertainment business, there was one thing people wouldn't stop telling me," she said in the film. "You are a product. You need to exist as the finest, top-quality product to the public."

I'm guessing the people who are saying this are the ones making the serious money off the image of their "product", while the singers are given tight contracts and small percentages.

Can't wait for the first news report of someone getting chocolate mushrooms stuck in their ears.

:-)

I'm not an expert, but putting switches on flight deck seats doesn't sound very safe to me. Especially ones that have a "motorized feature to thrust the pilot into the controls".

I just checked and Joni Mitchell wrote/sang Big Yellow Taxi in 1970:

Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you've got

Till it's gone

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot

Here's an article giving details on some of the other countries that charge some form of tourist tax.

https://www.euronews.com/travel/2024/01/05/tourist-taxes-all-of-the-countries-you-will-have-to-pay-to-enter-in-2022

But can I buy one to use on the streets of London?

So does this mean the end of one of the classic anime tropes? What will happen to those high school comedies/dramas when February comes around and they can't show the horror of a clumsy girl forcing herself to learn how to make chocolate for the boy she loves?

It looks like the perfect product to be sold by CMOT Dibbler.

Sausage inna bun.

"I didn't think so many people would die, and now I think I went too far," Aoba told the Kyoto District Court when the trial opened in September.

Sorry, what!? "I think I went too far"? There speaks a man who still hasn't accepted the responsibility for his actions.

While solar and wind energy can be used for power generation, maritime shipping, aviation and road haulage will still require fuel, she said.

Yes, because no-one could possibly imagine a world in which maritime shipping uses wind power!

/sarc

As Billie Holiday sang, nearly a century ago:

Them that's got shall have

Them that's not shall lose

So the Bible said and it still is news

Help, I’ve just discovered my teen has watched porn. What should I do?

Congratulate them for reaching puberty?

ChatGPT maker OpenAI has said it will introduce tools to combat disinformation ahead of the dozens of elections this year in countries that are home to half the world's population.

Well, I for one feel reassured that our IT overlords are looking out for our welfare!

/sarcasm

The simplest fixed-price lunch menu runs to 150 euros ($167)

So just two and a half times the price of my return ticket from London on the Eurostar. Somehow I don't think I'm the clientele they are looking to attract.

:-)

Usually one waits for the snow to stop falling, don't they? Not that we here in the UK have that problem (London is apparently set for its warmest Christmas since 1920!).

Enjoy the festive season, wherever you are.

Someone needs to point out that being naked is not always about sex/pornography.

It appears a number of comments think this is a problem peculiar to Tokyo/Japan. Sadly, it is happening everywhere. Oxford Street in London is a hotbed of people addicted to screen staring.

When I was young, I trained myself to read and walk by honing my peripheral vision and not blocking out the sound of traffic. Perhaps what people need is a course on how to stare at a screen while walking without crashing into people or walking into traffic. Maybe a good idea for a start-up?

Expect to see AI given as the answer to all life's problems for the next year or two, until the whole shaky edifice comes crumbling down. Surely people can spot a inflating tech bubble by now?

It seems that like workers in the U.S, Japanese people love working and are very loyal to their company,

Sadly, the companies very rarely show a similar level of loyalty to their staff.

The Food Sanitation Law was amended in 2018 in response to an E. coli outbreak in 2012 in which eight people died after consuming pickled cabbage in Hokkaido due to a problem in the manufacturing process.

But was it in one of the large-scale factories or a small traditional local producer? It would be ironic if a tragedy caused by a big company ends up shutting down all its small scale competitors.

Most problems are customer generated except for the occasional unreadable barcode.

Not the case in my experience. There are also the frequent problems when the weight doesn't quite match what has been coded or the discount on the shelf hasn't been updated for the registers, and recently I had to wait two minutes for a coin, while the machine rattled and whirred (with the attendant watching on) looking for the coin. A local store has four "cash or card" machines, three of which are regularly adorned with a sign saying "card only".

It's strange to realise I saw Aerosmith play live back in 1991/2, as part of their comeback tour. How are they still going? It must be all that taiyaki. :-)

Was Hachiko a better dog than Greyfriars Bobby? They'd certainly never put Bobby in a room, mostly because his statue is squeezed onto the corner of some major intersections.

Unfortunately for fans wanting to go back and re-listen to Hayashibara’s performances in Kitty-chan’s YouTuber-style videos on the official Hello Kitty YouTube channel, it appears that all videos in which she voiced the character have now been removed.

If she's been voicing the character for 33 years, that doesn't leave much left on the channel, does it?

And as the media conglomerates take over and shut down DVD/BR suppliers (yes, I'm looking at you, Crunchyroll), their stranglehold over home entertainment is almost complete.

I tried a deep fried Mars bar in Edinburgh once about ten years ago. Afterwards, all I could think of was getting back to my hotel and cleaning my teeth (which were tingling and possibly vibrating).

I have felt no desire to revisit the experience.