ThonTaddeo comments

平和堂。Peace Party.

Very small correction, but it should be 平和党 (Heiwa-tō), not 平和堂 (Heiwa-dō), which is a supermarket chain in Kansai. But seeing Heiwadō , I think society would be better off with her behind a cash register at a Heiwadō supermarket than trying to enter politics.

Everybody is bashing this guy, but the article doesn't say what kind of document the man was looking for and only implies that it's something about an American passport. What if the document is something for his dual-citizen child (proof of birth in Japan, perhaps, or proof of residence in Iwakuni) that he needs to submit to the US embassy to get his child's passport? Something that no single-nationality Japanese person would need, so the City Hall staff had no idea how to handle?

most of the right leaning people are just crying that they had to stay home and actually let some poor people have some money for once

I'm a little confused by this line. Worldwide government responses to the pandemic have been harder financially on the poor than anyone else: catastrophic inflation plus job losses hit them the hardest. The whole situation has been a giant funneling of wealth from the poor and middle class to the ultra-rich.

"Mr. Baseball" in the '90s was pretty good. Real ballparks, lots of references to things that really happened in Japanese baseball history.

Gold medalists Utana Yoshida, left, and Masaya Morita

Isn't Utana the woman on the right?

Moderator: Correct. Thanks for pointing that out.

I almost never see soon-to-expire food selling for less than half the sticker price, even if there are only hours left before that date. Let stores recover something from it; even 80% off is better than throwing it away!

Also I'd like to see the public understand that 賞味期限 (the date by which the taste is guaranteed) is not the same thing as 消費期限 (the date by which something should be consumed), and that you can still eat things the day after the best-by *shōmikigen.*

We close the lid before flushing. No sense in having bacteria flying all over the place and breathing it in when you flush.

I agree on the irreverent tone, and this line in particular stands out:

Fortunately, only the two pedestrians and the motorcyclist suffered injuries and none of them appeared to be severe.

Sure, only the people who weren't protected by the metal armor of an automobile were injured! How "fortunate"! Let's not think about the nightmares and flashbacks they might endure following being hit by a reckless automobile driver.

I would feel differently about the tone if she hadn't hit any human beings with her car and had just run into a pole or ditch. As it is, it's a little insensitive.

I bought Microsoft Office 2008 during my grad school days for a nice cheap price and don't ever want to lose it in favor of some subscription-based nonsense. I'm actually holding off on updating my Mac past OS 10.11 just because I like using the Word and Excel I paid for.

@Gokai - same, in 2005. Made some fantastic memories there and wouldn't trade my experience for anything.

Neighboring Shiga and Nara have no shortage of beautiful places to stay and would appreciate the business!

@Bret - two of the men (Sasaki and Iwade) seemed to have left the group when the realized what the rest were going to do, and those two definitely deserve kidnapping charges even if they didn't go through with the murder.

Haven't they already lowered the quality with fewer trains during the pandemic, which were not always brought back (though the fare hikes have stayed in place)?

One not-often-noticed bit of privacy invasion that comes with My Number cards is that they contain a backdoor way to identify non-Japanese holders. They have your name in Roman letters, zairyu card style, which gives it away, but even if you're Asian and have a kanji name, these cards use different formats for your birthdate depending on your nationality: the Japanese calendar if you're Japanese, and the Western calendar if you aren't.

I can't think of any reason to have two different calendar formats, and while surely there are few medical institutions that will treat you differently based on nationality, it will soon be trivial for them, or anyone who sees your My Number card, to do so if they wish.

My current health insurance card has my name only in katakana and my birthdate in Showa/Heisei like everyone else. I can't see an advantage of switching to this new card that will instantly reveal that I am an immigrant.

As bad as these scamming women are, let's not let this part go unnoticed:

a private detective who uncovered (at a cost of 4 million yen) the tawdry truth

That's a year's salary for a younger salarymen (or an older one, past 60 and on the post-career shokutaku track). Are these private detectives' expenses really that high, or are they, too, preying on these older men?

it wasn’t long that we were reading stories about the bank of japan and pundits talking about the demise of japan from the dreaded “deflation spiral.”

@Peter, I remember those days very well. Seemingly every relevant article on here contained a copy-paste line about how while deflation and cheaper goods may look good for consumers, it (somehow) causes them to put off purchases, slowing the economy down.

That nonsense was BOJ propaganda from the beginning. Anybody working for wages -- which is to say, the bottom 90% of society -- knows how much better things were when the yen was strong and prices didn't go up. An entire generation of young people were able to save and buy homes; older folks living off accumulated savings could maintain their lifestyle without putting their assets into risky investments.

Now the BOJ is getting what it always wanted, at the expense of the working class, who doesn't get a say in the matter.

strong demand for Japanese cuisine amid a boom in inbound tourism.

Seriously? It's the weak yen -- something caused by the LDP and BOJ -- more than anything. Tourists can take the blame for some other of society's problems, but this isn't one of them.

I'm usually the first to criticize the phrasings of article writers on JT, but this part here is just gold:

quite a bit more, at 2 million yen, making it even pricier than SNK’s infamously expensive Neo Geo home console

Casey has a way with words. JT, less LDP sycophancy and more like this, please!

At least it's cash, and not something linked to My Number cards or some hoop-jumping smartphone payment app that was developed with taxpayer money.

@NCIS, I remember those colorful black-and-gold Descente uniforms that the Pirates used to wear. Had no idea that Marty Kuehnert was the one who made that happen.

Zaphod, I'm in the same boat. I first got a smartphone in 2010 and loved having the internet in my pocket. That was before society started forcing people to use smartphones for everything, even things that have nothing to do with telecommunications. No, I do not want to use this device to ride trains, receive my salary, pay for goods at stores, or anything else (possibly installing some worthless app and uploading personal identification to some dodgy third party every time). And it's becoming increasingly difficult just to walk the streets with seemingly half the population looking down at their phones the entire time and not at the people around them.

Are automobile drivers still free to not just look at their phones, but watch television on their dashboards?

Peter has nailed it. It's always the consumer, the laborer, the producer who bears the burden while the middlemen insert themselves into the process and skim off fees. Not just trucking: credit cards, e-payments; real estate management; all kinds of things. There's never any discussion of these parasites lowering their fees.

So the Softbank company owns the e-money company through which they want people to receive their salaries? And the e-money company skims 2-3% (or whatever it is) each time the employee buys something with the e-money app?

@Abe234, @Wallace, @Jonathan; you see what they're trying to do. I'll stick to buying things in person with cash, thank you very much. I know the shop owner gets what I pay and doesn't have to pay a spiff to a parasitical corporation.

The logic I've heard behind making green card holders carry those cards in America is that "We allow dual citizenship; why are you choosing not to become a citizen and instead live here permanently without taking on that responsibility?" It's a naive attitude because the countries these immigrants are coming from might not allow them to acquire American citizenship without giving up the one they were born with, but it's a perspective I hadn't considered, being in Japan where you cannot become a dual citizen and have to "settle" for long-term or permanent residency.

Also the scope of who can ask to see a green card in the US -- immigration officials, basically -- is extremely limited compared to Japan where the police force is nationalized, every officer has the power to stop people on the street, there is no public/media pushback against police using race and appearance to target people, and there is a police box in every neighborhood. In the US a PR could go about their daily lives for years without ever having occasion to show a green card to anyone.

Humanity goes onwards and upwards ...

It's a small slice of humanity that bears the entire blame for these woes: specifically, the LDP and the Bank of Japan.

@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.