ThonTaddeo comments

@Moonraker; oops; you're correct. It was @Kohakuebisu that I wanted to quote. Not that your comments aren't also insightful, because they are as well.

@Moonraker

The presence of international students with different perspectives and backgrounds is likely to conversely strengthen the institution and improve the education of the Japanese students there more than the presence of more Japanese people would.

I felt the same way while there, and feel the same way when adjuncting classes at a Japanese university. The presence of differing perspectives is a priceless part of education. Quite a few times while I was in school a professor would remark that the thought process behind an answer given by me or one of the other international students was something no previous student had given before, and while the effect is surely greater when coming from different countries and cultures, it applies to gender too.

This is the exact opposite of the corporate world, where every employee is expected to have the same baseline level of "cultural fluency" and to approach problems in the same way, anticipating superiors' responses, and the like. As a non-Japanese person, any alternative perspective I might offer has no value, and if you're not Japanese there is a glass ceiling that might be thicker than the one hanging over women's heads, so while I may dislike the "a Todai education doesn't do anything for your kind, so you shouldn't have gone there" viewpoint that is also being applied to women whether foreign or Japanese. Needless to say, having a job that will never progress beyond a certain low level (as so many local women also do), as the years pass it becomes more and more embarrassing for people around me to know that I went there, because for a Japanese man, it's a ticket to a much higher station in life.

I enjoyed every minute I spent at that school, and wish it weren't over. It was 180-degrees different from the corporate world. It's a whole different side of Japan; a much more pleasant and open-minded side. Everyone with the academic ability to become part of such an environment should do it, and I salute the women who thrive there even while their parents can't see what they're getting from it.

I attended, and graduated from, the university being discussed, and am a man. My department had a roughly equal gender balance, but there were plenty of other departments, such as law and engineering, where men outnumbered women 90-10.

The entrance examinations do not allow for gender discrimination as the graders only see the examinees' numbers, not names, but at the postgrad level there are in-person interviews to get through, so Id be interested to see if more women than men are being denied at that stage.

One thing I often felt as a foreigner, which I think also resonates with women, was that outside the university you would occasionally meet people who begrudge you your place there, insinuating if not outright saying that a Todai degree doesn't give you any advantages or let you into any of society's inner circles, so why are you taking a place from a Japanese person? I was there for the education and research, not as a springboard to a corporate boardroom or political position, but there were a few students -- and these are pretty much always male -- who attend these top-class unviersities not for the education, but for the connections and the status. Female friends of mine have heard the same thing, only with "Japanese man" being what their position would supposedly be better spent on.

(What these pragmatic bigots are not generally aware of is that nobody is stealing a seat from anybody else these days: the number of seats per department was set decades ago in an era with a lot more young people, and since the 1990s plenty of postgrad seats have gone unfilled for lack of qualified applicants. So no foreigner or woman is taking anything from anyone.)

One proposal that was being floated back in the day was that the affiliated nursing school, which is as overwhelmingly female as engineering and law are male, be fully integrated with Todai and give them the same degrees. The campuses on Hongo are right next to each other and really there's no reason not to do this.

I'd also be interested in the ratios at the postgrad level, where the "stepping stone to power and influence" crowd is gone and everybody is there for the research only.

Second-highest temperatures... so far.

And yet governments and corporations aren't talking about reducing pollutants, or planting trees, or even a willingness to spend money to cool building interiors... they just want workers to grit their teeth and endure an ever-longer "Cool Biz" 28C-indoors period so that they can save money on air conditioning costs.

Huge decline in standard of living for most people.

Highest inflation rate and biggest decline in the average person's standard of living in decades. None of those do-nothing PMs in the 2000s oversaw a decline like what we've had since 2020. I'm hoping that Ishiba, who is at least more of a populist than his predecessors, can do better.

“I will keep reminding him of his acquittal every day” until he can finally believe it.

Right in the feels. Hideko, you are a saint.

This is fantastic news. I want to see those prosecutors making long, low, humiliating bows on national television and making donations to Mr. Hakamada so that he can live out his remaining years in luxury. I can only imagine the flashbacks and nightmares that he is guaranteed to face even sleeping in his own bed.

Credit where credit is due: OT has dropped dramatically where I work, with most people leaving 10-20 minutes after quitting time. I'm not a fan of all the control and "spying" that we also now have -- your computer login time and building entry time are tracked and matched and an alert is sent if there's a mismatch -- but I certainly like going home at a reasonable hour.

Completely agreed. Inflation has always been bad for working people who just want to own homes and live their lives. Thanks to the very mild deflation of the 2000s, I was able to buy an old apartment in central Tokyo for my wife and me to live in. That would be unaffordable now, with salaries stagnant and daily expenses going up. Inflation has really sent our QoL downwards. Maybe if you're among the rich, connected elite, with your income guaranteed to rise with the CPI, and the ability to borrow while things are affordable and then pay it back with money that isn't worth as much, you're shielded from inflation or are having it work for you, but for the bottom 90%, we're working harder, paying more, and earning less.

Aly, that's disappointing; I had been fearing that it was something like that. I've been to other kebab shops in Akihabara but Moses really was the best.

Aly, I too used to love Moses' kebabs. I know bits and pieces of some Turkic languages and they gave me extra meat when I thanked them in that language! What kinds of harassment stories did you hear? Harassment from whom?

His party and the BOJ seem to be working hand in hand to destroy the working class and siphon their assets to the rich. Easy to "respect their independence" when you have the same goals.

Depends on what they're voting for. Things related to national policy or the military, probably not. Local issues like where to put bus stops and traffic lights or how to fund schools, probably yes.

"Kinryu’s dragon has made it a local landmark and won it word of mouth even from foreign travelers who can’t read the restaurant’s name or know what it means."

@Tamanegi - I agree, and not just for Asian tourists; kin (gold) and ryu (dragon) are words that people who love Japanese culture but aren't fluent in the language have a good chance of knowing. No need to talk about those customers so condescendingly.

@餓死鬼

So this guy wrote it in simplified Mainland Chinese characters?

Clearly it isn't to sway the opinions of visitors to the site. It's to impress people back home with his "patriotism".

If he was travelling to Taiwan by canoe, what island did he set out from? These islands are north of Ishigaki and northeast of Yonaguni. Taiwan is 120 km from Kubura, Yonaguni's westernmost point. If you start on Ishigaki, you'd have to go very far out of your way and if the wind and sea had blown this man that far off course, it must have been terrifying. The government should be focusing on how they rescued a man at sea whose life was in danger and not jumping to charge him with immigration violations.

The flouncing of rules by foreigners is often accompanied by another term, yaritai hodai, which literally translates as “doing what you like as much as you like“, another selfish trait that flies in the face of Japanese morals. 

Yaritai hodai only flies in the face of Japanese morals if you're not yet 70 years old, if you have to work for a boss, and if you're not a politician. If you're old, rich, or part of an elite family, it might as well be your motto.

@GBR48 and Dagon - completely agreed, The BoJ and LDP have used inflation to make the average worker a lot poorer than they were even five years ago. Non-stop propaganda about how the tiny deflation rates of the 2000s and early 2010s were somehow bad, while the public did just fine. Then massive devaluation, massive inflation, and everybody who isn't in the top 5-10% is getting poorer. But then again, the silver-spoon politicians never did care about the bottom 90%.

Japan ranks well below the OECD average for annual wages, at around $43,000.

The annual wage in Japan is 6,300,000 yen!? That's news to me; every report I've ever read puts it at around 4,600,000 yen, which is about $31,200 as I type this.

For a society so hell-bent on following rules, driving rules (laws) seem a little less important.

If there's one thing society loves more than following rules, it's following the social hierarchy. My guess would be that automobile drivers see themselves as "above" pedestrians, and think that the pedestrians should be the ones adjusting to them, regardless of what the law might say.

If they had told the truth and said, "Please lower our maintenance costs for us at the expense of your valuable commute time," it might not go over so well, to they're drumming up some bogus "danger" to get people to act against their own interests.

If the escalator makers don't want the uneven usage pattern of the weight of the standers always being on the same side, they can rotate the standing and walking sides at regular intervals. The current system of walking on one side and standing on the other is perfect and meets everyone's needs equally. If you have energy and no time, walk; if you have time and no energy, stand.

Finally someone hoping for wages and productivity to rise together and not the bogus, working-class-destroying circle of wages and prices rising like the nonstop LDP and BoJ propaganda tells us. Wages and productivity rising together means better goods at lower prices and a higher quality of life for all. In recent decades the world has seen massive increases in productivity, but all the wage growth has been negated by inflation.

The smaller UK-style roundabouts with pedestrian crossings would be fine, though they take up a lot of space.

The gigantic space-hogging American roundabouts (or rotaries, or traffic circles as they are sometimes called) often don't have pedestrian crossings and are really dangerous and inconvenient for everyone who isn't in an automobile.

I'd love to see the UK type become common in the Japanese countryside.

Glad she was made whole. And those harassers will be having to explain their well-deserved dishonorable discharge any time they apply for a job in the civilian world, for as long as they live. Maybe they should have thought about that when they chose to sexually harass a subordinate.

They're not affecting my own writing, but the switch to text messaging for work-related communication results in a lot of context-less messages where the writer expects the recipients to know what's being talked about without any introduction. With e-mail there would be a subject line; instant messaging is just a non-stop barrage where you have to be continuously figuring out what the other person's perspective is.

But price increases have have outstripped increases in Japanese workers' earning power, keeping demand relatively weak and sapping growth in an economy largely driven by consumer demand.

All the way at the bottom of the article we get the truth: inflation is destroying the economy. Or rather, it's destroying working people. Up at the top, the connected politicians and rentier class profit from it. And those people increasingly aren't even giving lip service to the needs of working folks. We saw this coming as soon as the LDP retook power and tried to bamboozle the public into thinking yen devaluation and inflation would somehow save them.

While I like Kitasato and Tsuda, and that famous Hokusai wave in blue on the 1000, I'm not really a fan of the design. The current and previous series, which are mainly Japanese on the front and international on the back, have just the right balance. The new ones overemphasize the Western numerals (and a previous mock-up I saw even had "Bank of Japan" in English on the front below 日本銀行券). Also, why is the "1" slightly different "1000" and "10000"?

When the 2000-yen notes came out years ago they were beautiful and a model for what banknotes should look like. They weren't popular outside Okinawa, but I wish whoever had designed it had been give the reins to redesign the other ones, because the 1000, 5000, and 10000 are all downgrades.

As someone whose eyesight is not quite good enough to use a smartphone for everything, I know how he feels. At the very least, have the digitized menus on full-sized tablets with the fonts at the same sizes they've always been. No reason to make everything smartphone-dependent.

Remember that succession of do-nothing Prime Ministers from the mid-2000s until about 2012? I miss those guys. No inflation; if your salary went up you kept the full value; the cost of living was reasonable; real estate was reasonable. Consumption tax was lower. The PMs just stayed out of the way and let people do their jobs and live their lives and slowly get ahead.

@Laguna - As far as I know, his family emigrated from Japan to California when he was young. He's still Japanese despite having lived most of his life in the US. I'd be more impressed with the book if he were born in the US and was an American of Japanese descent, as the image I'm getting from it is that it wants to celebrate Japanese people through the medium of the English language.