studebaker comments

From wikipedia so it must be true:

Later the same month, she participated in a United Nations program in Tokyo on AIDS awareness in the week leading up to World AIDS Day on December 1, 2004.

She wrote extensively about a World Aids Day event in Tochigi Prefecture on December 6. On March 3 2007, Sports Nippon reported that Ai Iijima was suffering from hay fever, pyelitis (ascending urinary tract infection that has reached the pyelum (pelvis) of the kidney), cystitis and acute backache. She had written in her blog that she had kidney problems and inflammation of the urinary tract and bladder.

Ongoing health problems, pneumonia being a common cause of death for people with AIDS, and significant participation in the Aids awareness community leads me to one conclusion.

It is a severe disappointment that the media doesn't use this to raise awareness about the dangers of HIV. Did all of you know that Japan is the only developed country in the world in which the number of HIV people infected every year is still growing? (ie: more people got infected this year compared to last year etc.)

Superstitious, if it has anything to do with luck. I wonder if the winner will promptly find a pachinko parlour in which to make billions.

I find it disappointing to see such garbage passed off as news. Japan Today should have more self respect than to pander to the celebrities' PR agents like a tabloid newspaper.

Moderator: The purpose of the Entertainment section is to provide the latest info on what's happening with celebrities in Japan.

I thought initially that shiuu was trolling, but now I see that he's serious. The bailouts of 2008 are worth more (even when factoring inflation) than all other bailouts of the 20th century. It might be like the great depression of the 1930s all over again, except worse. When all your friends are living in a tent city, who will you turn to? "Get a job" and "don't be lazy" don't really apply when there are no jobs to go around. When the people in the states get re-hired to new positions, what kind of pay cuts are they taking to get any kind of work? The fact that people with means are buying gold and platinum shows that there are some serious problems coming in 2009.

James Bond will be released in Japan THREE months after its release in England and Europe. It has been released in every other country in the world already except for Uruguay (it opens there tomorrow). The DVD rip has already become available on the internet and it STILL hasn't come out in Japan. Is this because there were Japanese movies being released which would have had their box office revenues reduced if Bond was released at the same time? It obviously couldn't have been subtitling issues because the movie was released expediently in Mandarin and Korean shortly after the English release. A great big WTF to the movie theater industry here.

Oh, and I must say that this film doesn't live up to the expectations set in Casino Royale.

Where will the protesters be tried? In Japan? Japanese law doesn't extend to Antarctica, and dragging protesters all the way to Tokyo would be just as illegal as the American DEA coming to Canada to bust seed sellers. This will be an interesting battle this year.

I get tested once a year just to be safe: the Shinjuku free clinic has stats up in the office. Of the people going to get tested something like 1% have it. The actual numbers of people who are infected but do not know (and have been infected for more than a year) are probably pretty scary.

Make traveling here less expensive. Less expensive travel means more tourists; more tourists means Japanese become accustomed to foreign faces, which leads to tolerance, which decreases discrimination. You can't put the cart before the horse.

But maybe Japanese people don't view tourists as a necessity. In Thailand and the 'welcoming countries' the people are smiling because you equal money to them. Without tourism, their country would lose a significant portion of its economic wealth. In Japan, the amount that tourism contributes to the economy is so small, perhaps Japanese view foreign tourists as something which isn't needed.

Obviously, with so much recent news about the push to grow Japan's tourism industry, the people in charge are trying to find new sources of economic development. Perhaps Japan is rich enough to: 1. Be too expensive for tourists and 2. Not need tourism as an industry.

In Japan, people meet people by being introduced. Japanese people rarely go out and make new friends without being introduced to them by someone they both know. There are exceptions to this however. The same could be said about the business world. All of the business I have done over the past few years in Japan has been the result of meeting people, meeting their people and their people's people. Cold calling might work in some industries and it might work in other countries, but in Japan, you're better off to go meet people you already know and build your network.

There IS a book about it, called Hokkaido Highway Blues, and retitled Hitching Rides With Buddha, by William Ferguson. It is quite possibly the most accurate and most entertaining book about people in Japan that I have ever read.

I've hitch-hiked around Kyushu and Shikoku, and it's true; getting into someone's car is like being welcomed into their home. People would pick me up and because I was camping (in December) they insisted that I stay at their house, feed me dinner etc. Some of the best experiences I've had in Japan were hitch-hiking.

However, a great way to ruin the experience for everyone is to write an article recommending it in the news...

You are all wrong! Japan Today is wrong. People aren't rude on the internet. We're honest. ;-)

I wonder if she tried to got too close to the baby bear nearby. Bears almost exclusively attack to defend their young or if they are surprised.

An English translation of the laws protecting children is available online. Production and distribution is punished with prison sentences, while possession seems to be perfectly legal. Recently, it was ruled that illustrations of people who look underage engaging in sexual activity is not illegal because it is not harming children. But we all know that what is illegal and what is not illegal is not necessarily what is right and wrong. ahem.

Gluing pictures of children's faces onto pornographic images is not illegal. It is disturbing, wrong and shows a definite problem in the mind of the man. In the apocryphal situation that BPA found himself, smashing the man's camera could have turned into an assault case and the foreigner 'violent offender' would have faced deportation.

This article sounds very much like the instincts of a protective father emerging in written form.

Here is a link to the .pdf file of the law. http://www.cas.go.jp/jp/seisaku/hourei/data/APARCP.pdf

No matter which way you slice it, being in prison is worse than not being in prison.

I thought Osaka was the place to go in Japan for food: 1 restaurant per 81 people was it?

to electric2004: I'm sorry to hear about all those excuses. It makes me think about the prenuptial agreement that some guy wrote which stated that if his future wife was to have sex with him less than 5 times a month, it would be grounds for divorce...

Cleo: it doesn't matter if she's the dead-end bit and she doesn't have a hope it marry him. She enjoys feeling special in the moment and doesn't plan her life all the way to the end while in the prime of her youth.

I learned this stuff a few years back at the Dale Carnegie course. It did wonders for my communication skills and public speaking skills. I remember applying 'don't use 'but'' to discussions, and having a better success rate.

The benefits of having an affiar? Let me list them:

Many Japanese wives cease to have sex after they have had kids. Many couples even get separate beds after they've had their lot of children. I met a guy once who has been living with his girlfriend for 15 years, but won't marry her because he knows how Japanese women change after they've tied the knot.

Younger, hotter women. Men can try to deny that they crave a wide range of healthy, fertile mates, but we are genetically hard-wired to spread our genes in order to ensure their success. Read the book "Sperm Wars".

And to answer why women go out with men who are married? They enjoy feeling special: so special that a married man would risk it all to be with her.

Martin's office in Denenchofu is quite possibly the coolest office I've seen in Tokyo (and possibly anywhere), and the offices he has done for his clients also look quite stunning. And to electric2004: an office's design depends on a lot more than the quality of the furniture, but it does play a role.

I said that it wouldn't sell well because the youths that would make it popular can't use it. ie) girls with long fingernails can't use the touch screen. I also said that many people without technical abilities would find it intimidating (even though we find it easy to use). I also asked what features (other than gimmicks) does it have that other japanese keitai don't have? Perhaps faster internet, but that is about it.

Sorry to disrupt your discussion but 2 things:

The Uigher separatists were conveniently branded terrorists after sept 11th 2001, and it became easier to for the Chinese to control them in their 'Autonomous region'.

Driving a dumptruck into a group of jogging police officers and then throwing grenades into the base sounds a whole lot like some Grand Theft Auto missions.

By way of analogy: 4 years ago I bought a charm that wards off wild elephant attacks. I have not been attacked since, so it must work.

Wow, I have one of those charms too, but it also protects me from lions and tigers!

In Japan, if a woman is unmarried after 30, it becomes much more difficult for her to find a man, because Japanese men are not interested in women over 30. The solution for many Japanese women, it seems is to marry a foreign man. Take a look in any international classifieds section and most of the women-looking-for-men will be over 30.

Ummmmm, isn't this why they built the G-cans project (world's largest storm drain) up in saitama? http://www.flickr.com/photos/41894169961@N01/sets/72157594197258304/

Greyhound transport has been the worst form of transportation in Canada for many years now. It is full of drifters, dopers and people from the bottom of the barrel. This is a perfect example of animal behaviour.

Second Life, for people with no real lives. Oh, and doesn't X-box Live already have places where friends can create avatars and meet online? Yes, that's right, they are called 'online games' and they can kill each other there too. (Possibly ideal for the Japanese market)

When I first arrived in 2001, fishnet stockings were all the rage. Where I come from, only a certain type of woman, in a certain type of job would even consider leaving the house in those. A significant number of Japanese girls dress like actual prostitutes.

You might have considered that many of them are actually prostitutes. By a look around the internet and around the vast numbers of adult entertainment districts, I'd wager that as high as 10-20% of the girls walking the streets of Shibuya make money through lines of work your mother warned you about. Hostesses, health, soap, compensated dating, girlfriend experience...

When I first arrived in Japan, I had no idea about who was doing what to whom either.

This information is from a poll collected from registered members at a newspaper group. I think this poll's information does more to show the stance of the kind of people who have the time to join a newspaper group than it does to show the general opinion of the people.

Judging by the amount of OL pornographic video being released in this country, I would expect that a poll of real salarymen would result in the preference for their younger female staff to be topless if at all possible.