ThonTaddeo comments

I notice that you only get 450 milliliters in a package that is normally 500. And it's at a premium price, too.

Maybe if they used a bright orange like, or pink, or black light, or white instead of red the idea might be more useful.

Agreed. Pick three completely different colors and use red, yellow, and green for "stop, caution go" and the other three for "the cars perpendicular to you are in the stop/caution/go state".

Achieving sustainable wage growth and stable inflation is a focus of this year's spring wage talks between employers and workers

This sentence is pure Kishida/LDP propaganda. Why would employers and workers want inflation? Everybody is supposed to work harder and more efficiently so that wages can grow, and then inflation takes the value of that growth away (and then some, as we're seeing)? That's the LDP and BOJ exploiting the serfs. Which has presumably been their goal all along. The people see right through it.

But it's ok for Lars Nootbar who is American to play for Japan in the WBC?

I would love to see international competitions in general become as open and inclusive as the North American baseball world is. You can be born in Country A but have citizenship in B, or both A and B, and represent either one. You can play for a country where your parents or grandparents were born. In the official records and team-issued media guides, players' birthplaces are recorded but nobody cares what nation your citizenship is.

Competitions that use passports as dividing lines are positively backwards compared to the openness of baseball. Rugby is even more open, using residence as the standard. The way I see it, Ms. Shiino was raised in Japan and can represent Japan, but was born to Ukrainian parents and can identify as Ukrainian too.

What will happen is that the people at the top, with lots of job options and lots of leverage, will get big raises, and those without a lot of negotiating power (the undereducated; older workers; minorities) will see inflation destroy their purchasing power even further. And the divide between rich and poor will worsen even further.

This is great to see. And the sounds of Shanghai Chinese are often closer to the Chinese that was brought to Japan 1300-1500 years ago than today's Mandarin is, so if you speak Japanese, a lot of Shanghai words will feel very familiar.

This silly association of visa-free travel with the word "powerful" is ridiculous.

A "powerful" passport is one that lets you live and work in many places; one where your embassy has your back in a dispute when abroad; one that doesn't make you give it up if you take on another nationality.

Just praise the Japanese passport as "ideal for tourists" and dump this misleading word "powerful". I see "powerful" over and over and it's a misnomer.

Personally, if I'm driving and someone attacks me and I feel my life is in danger, and they climb onto the car? Then they are going for a ride!

But that's not what happened here. The cyclist didn't just "attack" the driver; in this case, the driver rear-ended the cyclist with his car and then when the cyclist got up and approached him, attempted to drive away.

You don't get to claim self-defense and "feel" that your life is in danger after you've just put someone else's life in danger by hitting them with your vehicle. You have to stop the car and call the police and face the music for rear-ending someone, possibly causing a serious injury to them, who had no way of avoiding you.

@TaiwanIsNotChina

You could do much more than a tent - before WWII, there was a bonito plant there, run by a Japanese man who employed a few dozen Okinawans and mainlanders. They were the first, and so far only, humans ever to live on that chain of islands. China has never controlled them; neither has Taiwan. They're Okinawan first and foremost.

In other words, companies that are uncompetitive could disrupt the wages/inflation/growth cycle. Given the severe labor shortage, just allow them to go bust, for the sake of the economy and working people.

While I agree with uncompetitive companies going bust, there's no "wages/inflation/growth" cycle; that's LDP/BoJ propaganda. Inflation isn't part of it: inflation pulls the workers backward, reducing their purchasing power. The only beneficiaries from inflation are the elites who can borrow and then pay it back with cheaper money, and of course the central bank who issues the money. The ideal cycle for working people is productivity/wages/growth, in which workers produce more, earn more, and can then buy more and better goods, with the standard of living steadily increasing.

The headline says 'third time in 43 years', but really it's 'third time in 8 years', given that all the increases have come since 2016. I remember the first increase, that year, and people weren't all that angry given that they had enjoyed this popsicle for the same price for more than three decades. Now, with a 33% bump in just 8 years, we're seeing the real impact of what the LDP is doing to the working class: using inflation to make them poorer and poorer.

Or you can use one of the payment cards,

Cleo, I should have been clearer: I'm not talking about the easiest way to pay for things; I'm talking about how the machine should work if you're using a machine to buy something. The train companies have the ideal machines: you can select what you're buying first, put money in first; any order you like and no screeching voice stressing you out. No extra button presses to get started or make the money tray available or to say that you're done, either. Whoever designed these things should be in charge of designing the ones in the shops.

One thing I'm noticing in Japan recently is the hybrid 'manned self-checkout' which is the worst of both worlds: self checkout for only the payment part, which adds a tremendous hassle to the whole thing.

Instead of just handing the total to the friendly cashier who just rang everything up, you now have to operate a machine that makes demands of you in a rapid high-pitched mechanical voice, requiring you to press a button to tell it how you want to pay (oshiharai hōhō), then another button press as it asks you if you're finished (yoroshikereba...). It might ask you if you want a bag and maybe make you press a button to tell it whether you do or don't. All in a specific order that the machine knows but you might not.

It's far more stressful than dealing with a human being, who will wait patiently and not shout at you if you take more than three seconds to answer something, and can see whether you've got a bag and how you'll be paying.

Learn from the train companies, who figured this out long ago: eliminate all these extraneous button presses and questions, and eliminate the voice entirely unless a visually-impaired user asks for it. When buying a train ticket, you can press the button for the ticket and then insert the money after, or vice versa; there are no extra 'confirm' buttons. You don't have to specifically tell it how you're paying; you just put money in the slot. Everything is quick and snappy and all the extra interactions are optional.

That's how self checkout should be. The supermarket machines are a weird hybrid that seem both over-designed for first-time users but also seem to expect the user to already know a lot. Hire whoever designed the JR and urban subway machines to handle it; they've already figured it out.

In what would be the first postage price rise in 30 years, excluding increases in line with consumption tax hikes

This phrasing is weaselly enough as it is, but they don't mention that it only applies to standard-sized domestic letters. Seemingly everything elas has gone up significantly, including domestic postcards, which saw a massive 20% increase in addition to the consumption tax-based rises.

I was under the impression we were still a considerable number.

It's about 20-30%; similar to the proportion of the population aged over 65, which no media would ever frame as "only a small number of people".

Note also words like "still" and "remain", as if making this card mandatory at some point in the future is a foregone conclusion, not two decades after the people decisively rejected "Juki-Net", the My Number precursor. The central government just keeps on pushing and using this kind of manipulation to get people to give up.

Kishida has warned of the risk that Japan will revert to deflation without a virtuous cycle of price and wage hikes.

He'll never stop with this BoJ propaganda. There's no "virtuous cycle": price hikes hurt the workers, and wage hikes help them. It's some number of steps backward, then possibly some number of steps forward; that's not a "cycle". Ideally the steady increase in human productivity would lead to wage hikes with no price hikes, enabling working people to buy more and better products and increase their quality of life from year to year. Price hikes prevent workers from enjoying the fruits of their labor and benefit only the money-printing government at everyone else's expense.

While there is of course no excuse for murder, this point is something we should be thinking about more:

He also seemed obsessive over anonymous student reviews at the end of each semester, Whittington said.

The ability of customers to anonymously complain about things without the person being complained about being able to know who the complainer is, and thus unable to work out any kind of compromise or mutual understanding with the complainer, has long been a societal problem in Japan and now with the rise of anonymous Google and Amazon reviews, it's becoming a problem in the West too.

These days if you're not happy, you don't have to talk to the manager of the restaurant, or the hotel, or the professor; you can say anything you want about them, safe in a cocoon of anonymity, particularly online. Being evaluated is stressful for even people with great mental fortitude, and now every small business, every teacher, everyone selling their old knickknacks on eBay, is being rated, with complainers (because in both business and in schools, they're the paying customers) generally being favored if a dispute arises.

Ever see that episode of Black Mirror, "Nosedive"? We're not there yet, but we're on the way. We're going to see more people snap and go on violent rampages the way things are going.

The most prominent Black character, a girl named Noodle, played by the talented Calah Lane, takes a back seat to Wonka in the major events of the film.

Everyone takes a back seat to Willy Wonka, no matter their race, and no matter how talented they are. If one of the prize-winning kids upstaged Wonka, the story wouldn't be the same.

When I came to Japan 50 years ago, this country was booming. It certainly isn't now. What's the difference? The huge one that I can see is taxes!

Indeed. I recently read a Japanese-language article talking about the massive increase in payroll taxes and insurance contributions over the last 30-40 years: national pension (huge increases), nursing insurance for workers over 40 (didn't exist then), and several others. About the only thing that has gone down is the marginal tax rate on super-high earners!

Someone earning 330,000 yen today takes home less than a 300,000-yen earner did back then, and that's before we even look at how inflation has destroyed the purchasing power of today's workers. Those at the top just keep squeezing and squeezing.

The agency looked into about 637,800 cases, higher than those probed in the year through June 2019 prior to the global spread of coronavirus infections.

The total amount of back taxes and penalties were also the highest ever at 136.8 billion yen, the agency said.

That's only about 200,000 yen per case. Not a lot of money compared to what politicians and other bigwigs routinely pass around in brown envelopes. Looks like the National Tax Agency is even going after small fish.

In 2011 and 2015, helped by weak international eligibility rules, it was 10.

Disappointed to see editorializing like this. I'd rather say "liberal" international eligibility rules, or "more open" or "more inclusive".

Her overtime far exceeds what I have ever worked in one month. I found early on that overwork immediately depresses me and causes health problems and I adjusted accordingly and prrhaps lost opportunities that I was not suited for.

@Redemption - Certainly, and I think it's the sleep deprivation that increases the depression to a suicidal, no-point-in-living level. That's how it was for me when I was a young salaryman working those hours more than 20 years ago. (In fact, it's what got me to join Japan Today and start commenting: there was a story about Ichiro Oshima's family hiring Mr. Kawahito and suing Dentsu for about 100 million yen and I spoke up in defense of the thousands of other young men just like Oshima who were being exploited every day. At the time, it was unheard of for young women to be forced to work those hours, but as we now see, in the exploitative entertainment industry, no one is spared.)

There's something deeply depressing about finishing a day of work and knowing that even if you bathe and climb into the futon the moment you get home, you still won't be fully refreshed when you have to get up and do it all again the next day. I remember my alarm waking me up on Monday morning and realizing that as tired as I was right then, it's more energy than I'll have at any point for the next five days. Why push through the next five days? Why push through one more day? I'm very happy to see the recent reforms that are attempting to limit overtime hours per month, but I'd like to see more specific requirements that guarantee employees the right to get enough sleep every single day.

I'm pleasantly surprised to see that the lawyer defending the bullied member is Hiroshi Kawahito, who has been battling this kind of abuse for decades now. He wrote the book Karoshi ("dying from overwork"), which popularized that word worldwide (along with karo-jisatsu "suicide from overwork") after successfully suing Dentsu when that company drove 24-year-old employee Ichiro Oshima to suicide from overwork and sleep deprivation.

Mr. Kawahito is one of Japan's most tireless defenders of the oppressed worker and we need a hundred more just like him.

 But how did they ever think that it would drop down to Y108 with the amount of inflation going on in the US and around the world due to pandemic spending.

I think the horriffic US inflation was what made them think that the dollar would fall (from ~130 yen to ~108) and that the yen would rise. As bad as inflation has been in Japan, it's worse still in the US, which should cause the US dollar to drop, but because the US is raising interest rates to fight inflation, the dollar is going up against the yen, in which there is little incentive to invest as the BoJ insists on ultra-low interest rates.

If you can earn 5% on your savings in US dollars, you're still ahead even in inflation is 4%. In Japan, if inflation is also 4%, you can't protect yourself by buying interest-bearing bonds because the bonds pay less than 1%, a fraction of the value that inflation is taking from you. In past years the yen was a safe haven as inflation hadn't been destroying its value all through the early 2000s. Now, during inflationary times, the conclusion for investors is to sell your yen for a currency that lets you protect yourself better.

I wonder what PM Kishida is thinking in the photo above as he stares at that lettuce inside the Kiba Ito-Yokodo?

"It's just a head of lettuce, Taro; how much could it cost? A thousand yen?"

They require customers to speak Japanese? In Naha, Okinawa? So if you walk up and say saki ga du numi busan ga, yamatu-guchi ya wakaran (I want to drink some alcohol, but don't understand Japanese) you'll be refused service?

(My Okinawan grammar is a little shaky but the point would get across.)

Editors, now is the time to start insisting on writing Smile-Up in articles, ignoring this firm's ridiculous mockery of the English language and its standards. No, Johnny's, you don't get to insert a random period after your name and force beleaguered journalists to come up with kludges like:

Johnny's will be renamed "Smile-Up." from Oct 17

...with quotes around it, just to make it readable.

No Japanese media would allow a foreign entity to do this with the Japanese language; why do they expect English writers to endure it?

I see that the Japanese media are using the "Smile-Up" name with that silly extraneous period included, just like they did with Morning Musume and its 「。」. I hope they aren't expecting the English-language media to do that and make. sentences. barely. readable.

analysis showed that if no one walked, you could actually get more people up the escalator quicker than if there is one lane standing and one walking (this is due to people queuing up for the standing side).

Even if total throughput were higher, having to stand means that the escalator has no value if you need to be at the top in less time than the escalator gets everyone there in.

The time lost by people queueing on the standing side isn't really "lost" time; these people don't care about saving time. If they did, they'd go on the walking side. It's no more efficient than telling walkers that they'll save physical exertion by standing; their answer will be that if avoiding physical exertion were important to them, they'd stand.

Most societies have settled on the "one side walks, one side stands" convention with this logic in mind: it lets people with varying needs get what they desire.

The 15 measuring stations selected to determine the average surface temperature in Japan are specifically selected to avoid that bias, they are outside of areas affected by heavy urbanization.

This has always angered me; it's as if they're designed to understate the heat endured by the people, who are surrounded by asphalt and concrete and are sweating through temperatures several degrees higher than what is reported. "First snow of the year in Tokyo"? Sure, on some mountaintop where no one lives!