Samuel_kb_Ampong comments

Why does it feel like this article -- which has no author byline, mind you -- was specifically placed to get readers to support the My Number system?

The dollar slipped to 107.85 yen from 108.14 yen in New York. A stronger yen makes Japanese exporters less profitable.

And makes life easier for every single person in Japan, because we all consume fossil fuels, electricity, and other products that are sold on the international market. Please stop running these articles past Abe's political censors. It is getting tiring to see nearly eveyr business-related article contain bits of propaganda that could have been written by biased LDP hacks.

I have heard of cases in which the early morning raijio taiso was well attended by both kids and elderly pensioners (for many of whom it's a popular way of socializing and getting a little exercise), but complaints were received from young adults.

Exercise and socializing are wonderful, but the timing of rajio taiso is just plain horrible for working adults: it starts at 6:30 AM.

Imagine you're a young sleep-deprived salaryman stuck at the office until 10 or 11 every night. You want to sleep until the latest possible moment in the morning, and you can't because of this. The oldsters have all day to socialize in the park -- how about in the afternoon when the grandkids get home from school?

My apartment building is situated above a park, and every morning (unless we get rain), a cadre of 20 to 30 people, all elderly, go out to do rajio taiso. Their chatter is loud. Their radio is loud. The clapping that you do while exercizsing can wake the dead. And because every participant is old, their hearing is starting to go, so the volume gets turned to the max.

I'll be the first to admit that in most cases it's the curmudgeonly seniors making things miserable for everyone else, but with rajio taiso it's the elderly who are torturing the rest of us. Loud music at 6:30 AM in the middle of a densely-populated residential district? Only in the gerontocracy that Japan is becoming would this go unopposed.

"Application that will translate the language in the world did you developed? I look forward to. But I wonder would really usable?"

(Yes, that's what Google thinks 世界中の言語を翻訳してくれるアプリケーションは開発されたんですか？楽しみです。でも本当に使えるのでしょうかね？means in English. Don't start banking on Sykpe just yet, folks.)

Hampton, you can say that again. When the DPJ was in power, it felt like there was a mhcb broader mix of opinions being published about their policies, with seemingly more criticism than praise. With Abe, whose administration's policies seem to be overtly harmful to the middle class and the working poor, it's knee-jerk one-sided support all the time even as he explicitly vows to restroy the value of people's hard-earned savings.

Abe wants to be able to draft young Japanese people into his military and doesn't want any nitpickers pointing out that they'd be dying for their country without ever having had a say in the matter.

Ethan, I wish it weren't so, but it's already come to light that 20 pages of her doctoral thesis were copied-and-pasted directly from a US government site. Her PhD might be rescinded, though I hope that the original research she performs isn't discredited any further.

All she had to do was say something like, "The informative explanation given in Smith (2010: 1-10) cannot be surpassed, and here I will quote from it directly," and it would have been fine. And of course the thesis committee deserves some blame for not spotting the plagiarism. Maybe she thought that since it was in English, it might receive less scrutiny.