warnerbro comments

Japan has many refugees to take care of before it should think about holding the Olympics. Construction firms are refusing to bid on reconstruction projects even now because they don't have enough building materials and labour and cannot estimate how much it will cost to obtain them. Abeflation will not help them in that regard. The Olympics may spur a bit of temporary economic growth, but in doing so will draw vital human and financial resources from Tohoku to Tokyo.

"China’s commerce minister appealed Friday to other major governments to avoid suppressing the value of their currencies to boost exports, warning that could hurt global growth."

This, from a Chinese official, set me to laughing so hard I have yet to finish reading the b%%dy article.

This could cause allergic reactions and panic. Those louts should be arrested and at least charged with creating a public nuisance.

Two term Republican presidency. Economic disaster. Two term Democratic presidency. Economic recovery.

Leave Rodman in Pyongyang until they give up.

"They own the corridors of power.” Professor Kingston is on the money, as it were, with this observation. The amount of funding nuclear plant owners pour into political coffers to support favourable politicians and into media companies, money that comes from our taxes and our electrical fees, is staggering.

"without its top players from Major League Baseball." The Americans have never fielded a team in the World Baseball Classic or the Olympics with its top MLB players, so Japan shouldn't be making such an excuse. To the Yanks it's not a championship, just a distraction from spring training. It was a good show for Japan last night, impressive tenacity. but it may not be easy from here on as Cuba beat Japan 6-3 and then lost to Holland 6-2.

One reason this report cannot be based on actual exposure is that as local authorities were monitoring radioactive iodine emissions during the peak of the crisis, the Ministry of Education telephoned and ordered them to stop.

"and the large relative increase in thyroid cancer amounts to only a small additional mortality risk."

Do you have any young children there, Steve Fabricant? It's easy to slight people's fears when you have no skin in the game, as it were.

"I also trust Japanese scientists, who have done the largest cohort studies of the effects of radiation. I do not believe that academic researchers at, say, Nagasaki School of Public Health, are likely to be influenced by anyone in government."

Do you live in Japan and speak and read Japanese, Steve Fabricant? Japanese scientists get nearly all their funding from the government. The small amounts of research money that come from outside are from industries with vested interests in the results and from think tanks stocked with former government bureaucrats and national uni scientists. Japanese scientists don't so much as break wind without the government's permission. To publish findings in opposition to government policy would ruin their careers.

The "Romanian's" father is Japanese and they live in Kichijoji. If he has dual nationality, the press is ignoring that. His mate that got away is Japanese. The Japanese press took a bit of time to get that up on the board.

"Changes to the guidelines were minor"

Things went so well the last time, why make major changes?! How about actually announcing a problem when it happens, even after the problem explodes live on TV, instead of denying it until it melts through the bl##dy containment? Might we put that in the guidelines.

The coal danger is a straw man. Japan has primarily turned to natural gas to replace the obviously unnecessary nuclear plants. If coal plants use the best available emissions technology, they would be less harmful than nuclear, but there is no need to use them at all because gas is plentiful, cheap, and much cleaner. Where are the power shortages that reputable sources warned us about, by the way? We were promised a horrid summer and a dreadful winter. Alas, reputable sources, where have these seasons of shortage gone?

"The studies showed that children had no higher incidence of thyroid nodules than their peers, and actually many times less than Chernobyl case"

I would not argue that the risk is less than Chernobyl, but that is hardly something about which a supposed democracy, a supposed world leader in technology should be proud or satisfied. Actually the only available data show that the incidence of thyroid nodules is much higher in Fukushima children, but apparently prior studies examined only larger nodules. The Japanese government even as we write is trying to create data which show that Fukushima children have normal thyroids but those data have yet to be revealed.

I laud the use of sports to open North Korea, but does Ryan Duffy realise that during the banquet he enjoyed many North Koreans dined that same evening on acorns?

Abe comments: "I want to appeal to international society that in modern times changes to the status quo by the use of force will justify nothing.” Allow me to focus on his use of the word "modern." That his comment includes the word modern is telling because it absolves nations, including Japan and Great Britain, from any responsibility for territories gained by use of force in times not defines as "modern."

By the way, in my observation, the women-only cars are not nearly as crowded as the rest. They are at the end of the train, however. I sometimes do wonder why women who are on the platform with time to choose a car ever elect the mixed-gender cars. However, it may be that they want to be near the stairs when they alight from the train.

It's a shame that these cars are considered necessary. But offenders are only charged with being a public nuisance, as if they've played a trumpet in the park at midnight. It's a form of sexual assault and should be treated as such. Yes, men are occasionally felt up, too, by gay men or by women. I've heard this also from other foreign men and never from Japanese, so I assume foreign men are more commonly targeted.

Male-only cars would not protect men from being groped by gay men, but it would protect them from mistakenly being charged. There is no presumption of innocence in Japanese culture and police may hold a suspect for weeks without charge. A mistaken charge or even arrest would likely result the in loss of a job (Check your contracts, mates. In most cases you may be absent only a handful of days without approval before being terminated. Would they approve of your taking leave for being arrested?). This may also mean the loss of a career, as future employment in Japan would be unlikely for someone fired as a groping suspect, and the end of a marriage (and therefore permanent enforced separation from one's children) so I think we blokes, too, should have the choice of a gender segregated car.

Nothing will change as long as teachers themselves are free to beat and humiliate children, and as long as the airwaves are filled every night with so-called "talents" enduring and providing humiliation and physical abuse in the name of "humour."

Good thing they made a prompt announcement, only A DAY LATER, when it would have been too late, according to the several cyanide experts posted above. They've obviously learnt a lesson from the chaps at TEPCO.

So 1/3 of this studio's films involve the war with Japan? They must be interesting. The forces of the both KMT and GCD spent most of the war retreating from Japan and utterly failed to defend their homeland. The KMT was particularly unkind to civilian Chinese. And Japan's forces committed horrors that are well-known. I would urge that this studio guide viewers into the already decade-old 21st century instead of contriving heroic fictions from a horrific past.

The allegations have already been fully investigated. There is no question about what happened, just about why the Japanese judo authorities allowed the coach to remain in charge. Sorry, no questions about that, either. The only questions are regarding what will be done. If any coach were immediately terminated, and his or her dan rank and coaching and competitive records nullified, that might work.

To the economy, it doesn't matter whether the jobs are in the private or public sector. Their salaries all spend the same and all contribute to economic growth. No administration, Republican or Democrat, counts people who are not searching for work as unemployed. Whether they should or not is a different question and I believe they should.

The Japanese government was fully aware of the practice, so it is entirely appropriate to recognise its culpability. To be sure, Japanese women were also victims and have never received apologies of any kind from anyone. Prostitution was completely legal in Japan until 1956 and even before the Occupation families falling on hard times might sell a daughter into the sex business. We might also ask whether prostitution was legal in Korea before Japan occupied the peninsula in 1910 and whether women were forced into it. If it existed we should assume that women were forced into it.

Dices la verdad, Elbunda Mexicano! "holding regular meetings with teachers and reporting pertinent information to police stations." Regular meetings during which the teachers will TRUTHFULLY and FULLY disclose all incidents of bullying AND corporal punishment [which is illegal] that they see or hear tell of. And the police will... I'm laughing so hard my fingers are slipping right off the keyboard...INVESTIGATE said incidents! This must be the latest comedy gag...where's the Wild darou!?

First of all, Japan would need an actual intelligence gathering capability, while at the moment it has few government personnel who can communicate in English and almost none in Arabic. Japan's lack of anything approaching an immigration policy means that there are no Japanese who can blend into the background of any North African or Middle Eastern society, quite unlike Great Britain, the U.S., or France. If Great Britain and America were incapable of inserting a response team, well, keep your PlayStation on, mates, because that's as close as you're going to get. "For troops who must make life or death decisions in a tenth of a second to be forced to act within the limits of the law or risk violating..." S'il vous plaît! The Coast Guard briefly faced one hostile North Korean vessel and two police officers were tragically murdered in Cambodia, but when since 1945 have Japanese military personnel experienced such a situation? In Iraq they hunkered down in the safest quadrant of the country and provided drinking water to civilians. I've met the colonel, now a Member of Parliament, who led them and he said the scariest situation was being kissed on the lips when meeting local Iraqi potentates. A mortar round landed within a few klicks of their perimeter and it was national news.

Or maybe they grabbed some innocent bloke and bullied him into confessing, like they did with the last computer crime that came to their attention?

“megascale engineering puzzle.” Right, mates. Completely unexpected. The Fukushima of the airline world. How could Japan's superior technology not be superior?

The Americans are not about to go to war with China to save a few isolated rocks for Japan. Japan hasn't the manpower to face China and never will have it. Take a look at the number of Chinese who reach conscription age each year and compare that to the number who reach service age in Japan.

"63.3% backing the government’s handling of the Algeria hostage crisis, in which 10 Japanese nationals were killed."

The government's WHAT of the Algeria hostage crisis? I would hardly call send a plane to pick up the dead "handling." It failed to do what the Japanese government usually does, pay huge ransoms, because the Algerian government had other ideas.

See the article on “relaxation services.” That's what Abe is providing and his services will prove just as productive.

As Aldous Huxley wrote: "Machines are going to do the work now. Man has got to learn to live." Unless we can extricate ourselves from the fantastically flawed logic of unrestrained free market capitalism while avoiding the equally fallacious nature of extreme communism, we are in for severe social upheaval.

I wish him well, saw him play when I lived in the States, but he must have fallen on hard times to be coaching basketball here.

"Thank you America. Please continue your good work against yakuza." Indeed, because the Japanese police certainly will not be doing it!