Virtuoso comments

She hopped on the train after the pair, approached the smoker and calmly popped the cigarette into his breast pocket, before turning on her heel and stepping off the train.

I did the same thing to a really obnoxious Japanese guy once, only his discarded cigarette was still lit.

Puts a whole new twist on the expression "Living off the fat of the land."

Cars were called Jidousha, or kuruma then.

Excuse me, but what are they called now? Those are the only two words I know.

The rabid troll fea625 is off his meds again. time to call the men in white coats!

The Mexican Marines have really got their work cut out for them...

The reimagined Datsun — a five-seat hatchback — will go on sale in India next year

Ach, dot soon?

I think this "Kuchikomi" feature stories are particularly biased. Irresponsible, biased reporting with the aim of flaming tensions between the 2 countries.

When you don't like the news@Mitch Cohen, then kill the messenger, right? Didn't it occur to you that things are going on in the Japanese vernacular media that outsiders would be blissfully unaware of unless a small number of columns (including this one) brought them to readers' attention?

Koreans visitors to Japan made up 24% of foreign visitors to Japan in 2012, the largest source of international visitors to Japan, surpassing Taiwan at 17%.

Whoa! Did you know that of that figure, 930,000 or about 45% of those "foreign visitors" were ferry passengers from Pusan, most of who went no farther into "Japan" than Tsushima Island in Nagasaki, and never even set foot on the Japanese mainland? Smaller numbers took ships to Hakata and Shimonoseki. This Sankei article has the figures.

http://sankei.jp.msn.com/economy/news/130527/biz13052713440002-n1.htm

Deduct the ferry passengers -- who are really shopper-commuters, not tourists -- from the total and Korea drops to 3rd place after China and Taiwan.

For what it's worth, I've enjoyed my visits to Korea, especially Cheju Island where I would like to return someday. Even when the exchange rates are not so favorable to the Japanese yen, I felt the shopping and food in Korea gives good value for money (big portions and lots of free side dishes). I remember how astonished I was at the low taxi fare from the old airport (at Kimpo) to the center of the city. The country is foreign enough to pique Japanese curiosity. I can't think of any reason why the two countries can't enjoy friendly relations. Look at Germany and Poland today. And they are only separated by a river, not an ocean.

I saw a similar article on NAVER, a popular Korean web portal. The most liked comment, with thousands of 'likes' was "here I come Japan".

Sounds to me like a bunch of Korean travel agents were spamming NAVER to promote their flagging business. You don't really trust posts by anonymous bloggers do you? Or do you put out cookies and milk for Santa on Christmas eve as well?

Mitch Cohen@ FYI, it is a matter of established practice that the catalog prices of Japanese group tours by major wholesalers are only set twice a year: In April, at the start of the fiscal year, and in October, as an adjustment for the second half of the FY. So the prices for the group tours from Japan to Korea would have been set in advance prior to October and not changed until April 2013, irrespective of any fluctuations in the yen-dollar or yen-won exchange rates. This means 1) any drop in visitors from Japan between October-December could not have been affected by the yen's drop, because it hadn't dropped yet; and 2) the cost of joining a group tour to Korea departing up to March 31, 2013 would not have changed since the rates had been fixed in advance, through prearranged negotiations between tour organizers, airlines, hotels, bus companies, etc. The only things that would have gone up in price would have been optional tours, or outlays for souvenirs, meals not included in the tour package, etc. So your argument that the drop-off of travelers to Korea was due to the exchange rates might have some validity from April of this year onward, but doesn't really explain the decline in the months prior to then. What's more, you chose to disregard the Recruit survey about the drop in Korea's ranking as the country travelers want to visit from 6th place in 2012 to 18th place this year. This survey reflects consumers' latent desire and the cost of going there is typically not a factor. (Usually the top choices are countries like Switzerland, France and Australia.)

What a sorry excuse for a human being...

This article has several problems. First of all, who is Rachel Tackett, and if she professes to be an expert about China, why can't she spell Jiang Zemin's name correctly? Also, much as it makes me sound like an old fogey, anonymous posts by commentators on blogs do not, and should not, constitute a reliable source on which to base assertions on matters such as international relations and east asian history. Ms. Tackett, why couldn't you go interview a couple of university professors, intellectuals, political dissidents or members of the Chinese communist party? Or even the man on the street? You chose to cite from blogs, when you don't know who is posting (if it's anything like Japan's slimy 2channel, the same poster might even be posting under several different names). Sorry but in my book that's not an acceptable form of journalism. It's too bad, because the subject matter interests me. But what you've written is worse than worthless. Sorry, nothing personal.

The US is headed toward integration with Mexico, both demographically and economically. (And perhaps linguistically as well.) When that happens we can expect to see an even wider disparity between the rich and everybody else.

Calling for an online link to an alleged online activity seems logical to me. Why is that astonishing for you?

"The letter to the IOC included clippings of coverage on this topic by the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN."

MC@I see nothing in the above excerpt that indicates the letter to IOC was "online." Please stop trying to change what is unambiguously stated in the original article. Furthermore if you want to take your own internet-driven arguments to their logical conclusion, then how do you explain the fact that VANK has posted nothing "online" to assert that the coverage in the Japanese vernacular media claiming that it sent a letter to the IOC is incorrect?

This article is seriously flawed in the sense that it assumes "ham" is the same thing in the US and China. Chinese huotui is very different from American ham in terms of texture and flavor, and the way it is combined with other foods, in soups, etc. It's a case of never the twain, and I can't imagine Chinese wanting to eat the US variety as-is. If the company in Virginia intends to export, it will have to smoke and salt the meat using processes that are unfamiliar to Americans.

A tabloid magazine (Shukan Jitsuwa) came out on Thursday claiming that Abe suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Wonder if that's linked to his diet...

It astonishes me to no end that there are people in this world whose criteria for "proof" of anything is a link to something they can view online. It's like the Obama birth certificate argument. Give them something and then they demand something else. Give them that and they insist it's phony and still won't believe it. There's no satisfying them. Given Koreans' penchant for engaging in noisy public activities aimed at irritating Japan, what makes VANK's action seem so far-fetched to begin with?

CraigHicks@Just because you don't seem to know how to use a search engine doesn't mean a story didn't happen or wasn't reported elsewhere. Check this out, reported by a completely separate media organization on the same day that VANK announced it had written to the IOC to appeal for Japan's exclusion from consideration.

http://news.searchina.ne.jp/disp.cgi?y=2013&d=0405&f=national_0405_012.shtml

I saw plenty of other references to the same story online, but this is as far as I go to hold your willy for you while you tinkle. The Sankei-Fuji group might be right wing, but they are generally a reliable media source. So I hope you'll deign to stop being a troll and accept the piece as truth.

It would be responsible of AFP to investigate sources for such hate-inspiring articles, and place those references for all to see.

CraigHicks@Why do you think the French news agency (AFP) was involved in translation of this article? AFP's name was not mentioned anywhere. Your insinuations that a story attributed to a nationally circulated publication like Yukan Fuji is fabricated -- "hate-inciting fiction" as you put it -- are pretty serious. This time it was easy enough to verify by going to Zakzak, the web version of Yukan Fuji, and typing in the search terms "kankoku," "dantai" and "olympics." And up popped the story on which this article was based!

Give me a .22 caliber rifle and pay me a bounty of 100 yen per corpse, and I will gladly embark on a hunt to rid metropolitan Tokyo of this pestilential pterodactyl.

Back in the late Meiji period a man was imprisoned for 不敬罪, lese majeste, i.e., failure to accord due respect to the emperor. After the war, when the new constitution recognized his human rights, he sued the government for compensation. The Supreme Court ruled (and by this time the plaintiff was a very old man) that it could not overturn a previous ruling in the case of a law that no longer existed. Conclusion: when you try to get something from the Japanese government, it will unfailingly find a pretext for not paying. The Koreans should not hold their breaths.

Sorry@CraigHicks but your skepticism is sorely misplaced

http://www.zakzak.co.jp/society/foreign/news/20130701/frn1307011811004-n1.htm

The US should allow him to be extradited to China for the murder of that Boston College student. The Chinese will not waste their time debating the pros and cons of punishment vs. rehabilitation.

A poem: Whatever you do/ Don't anger the oyabun/ I miss my pinky.

Once something is typed into a computer, it stands the chance of being read by everyone in the world, until the end of time. People with common sense should act accordingly.

The troops might leave, but the drones will remain.

I must confess that I came by my ignorance the hard way, with no help from erudite manga illustrators.

“I will have a greater fighting spirit during Ramadan,”

The loud rumbles from his empty stomach may terrify his opponents.

Once I paid a considerable amount for a state-of-the-art FM tuner, only to find that you get 15 minutes of music per hour --- if you're lucky --- interspersed with 45 minutes of mindless yakkity-yak. Then I got a digital TV, only to see exactly the same "entertainers" being aired every night of the week who I saw back in the 1970s, only with more cosmetics to cover their wrinkles. If Japan were Egypt, hundreds of thousands of people would be demonstrating daily in Hibiya Park demanding decent entertainment. Instead they have just tuned out the world by crawling into the tiny screens of their keitai denwa and pulling the covers over their heads. Anybody who willingly puts up with the mind-numbing crap that attempts to pass for entertainment on TV here is* inscrutable.