JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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- English Instructor (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe)
- Berlitz Japan, Inc. (ベルリッツ・ジャパン株式会社), Kansai
- Salary: ¥125,000 ~ ¥250,000 / Month
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- ALT - Mie Prefecture - Yokkaichi City - June start
- NPO法人グローバル教育推進機構（GLAD), Mie
- Salary: ¥230,000 / Month For a full working month. Some months differ.
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- Business Teaching Positions - Part-time - Kanto Region
- Interac, Tokyo
- Salary: ¥3,000 ~ ¥5,000 / Hour
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Johannes Weber
Cos is somewhat right. You need an awful amount of luck to get a decently paid white collar job without university degrees. There are exceptions though. E.g. German nurses are extremely popular around the world, even though they do not study at a university. Instead, they have a long training and education at hospitals (don't remember how many years). And many of them, if they really want it, can easily study later on and get a medical degree. They are however, far more practical and savvy with patients than university grad nurses who wasted away multiple years in stupefying lectures.
However, the place where professors teach doesn't state very much about their qualifications. The only big difference is, how much money they and their subordinate researchers have to spend. That can be quite a big difference, even if the source of funding and the university is the same.
Posted in: Selecting the right university
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Johannes Weber
Choice of subject is far more important than a fancy name of a fancy university, where professors are too busy wiht admiring themselves. And even the best professors in the world have limited amounts of time for their students. The better they are, the less time they tend to have.
Posted in: Selecting the right university
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Johannes Weber
The problem is the range of locality. For a nuclear plant, the benefits and subsidies are restricted to a some ten or twenty kilometers of range, but the negative side effects in case of an accident extend much further. I guess he thinks of the ultralocal communities, who profit as well as taking the risks, which should not be able to decide on their own. In that case, this is not about less but more democracy.
Posted in: While we respect the wishes of Oi, given what happened at Fukushima, you can't just decide to restart the reactors based on the judgment of the local community.
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Johannes Weber
timtak brought up a very good point. The same approach is used in many other subjects as well. That is the reason, why the majority of people on this planet suck at math or science and are not more capable than a clever ten year old child. You can even see it, when you teach at universities, as I have been done for more than three years. Students mostly learn the primitive examples that we use to teach them by heart, but lack the ability to see their knowledge in a greater context. The "grammar translation method" doesn't teach application in context.
Now, from where do we get the application in context? From exercising the things we have learned in difficult and lengthy exercises. These exercises must be based on the new materials and they must be done inside of the system. This means in terms of science that you do not need to refer mostly to older references, but that based on a few hints in addition to what you studied recently, everything should be solvable. In languages that means writing in casual as well as formal style, writing about conversations of characters and getting the corrections for what you have written without open criticism in front of all and with suggestions about how to improve. And direct conversation, of course. Which means extra work for teachers, which is why they don't want to change the method.
Everything starts with some kind of "grammar translation method", but it doesn't stop there. That's the difference between good and bad teaching.
Posted in: The grammar-translation method: Is it really all that bad?
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Johannes Weber
It is good that he was arrested in Germany, since he'll at least get fair and decent treatment according to a fair constitution there. Imagine if he had been arrested in Japan...
Posted in: Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson arrested in Germany
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Johannes Weber
@gaijinfo:
These free markets would necessitate the descent of society into anarchy and violence as I have outlined. This can be directly inferred from the general properties of chaotic systems, since strife and civil war are allowed states of the configuration space of the society-market system. Nothing would become better without regulation. If you want to see the consequences of free market wait a while for the next killing sprees of frustrated US citizens. And that is what the tea party is about - free market at gunpoint. These are natural parts of the free market mechanism. The free market doesn't allow the protection of private property, since its main mechanism is the accumulation of property in the hands of a few until the violence breaks out.
Posted in: Congratulations to the voters in France and Greece
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Johannes Weber
There is a very interesting paradigm in the political arena, which many people on this forum seem to adhere. This paradigm suggests that the free market was a stable system. Even though volatile locally, in the general picture, some people assume that the free market is a self-stabilising system in general. Since the market is highly chaotic system, we can compare it with other chaotic systems and see how it works.
The free market includes necessarily anarchy, strife and civil war, since the entirety of these actions have economic aspects and therefore are part of free market movements (they are allowed points in the configuration space of the the society-market system). Since the free market is a chaotic system (and ergodic, if one neglects the finiteness of ressources), it will reach every possible state if one waits long enough.
Since these outcomes are undesirable, it is obvious that the market has to be regulated. Regulations can be considered as exterior forces applied to the society-market system. Regulations are usually applied in a way that they stabilise market trends, which point towards local concentration of economical and political power. We could call this time evolution a local time evolution in configuration space and it moves the system towards the next local minimum.
When the transition to the anarchy (or revolutionary) phase happens, it causes a restart of the free market cycle. This is a large step in configuration space. Like in any other physical system, such large steps in configuration space require large conjugated momenta, which must be generated by large generalised forces, which will accumulate over time by the imbalance of the system, when it is moved out of the central region into outlying local stationary points.
The anarchy phase is a necessary part of the free market mechanism. If the conjugated momenta due to the inner forces of the system grow too large, they cannot be compensated anymore by external forces (which are limited due to their nature as being imposed by a society in consensus). This will cause lgross changes in the society-market system, which will imply severe damage to many people.
Therefore, there is an obvious need to prevent this anarchy phase by preventing the accumulation of power, which is the trigger for the anarchy phase. The only way to do this is by introducing exterior forces to the society-market system, which drive the configuration instead of the local stationary points towards the central region, where the global minimum and relative stability against perturbations can be found.
Thinking about the market as a physical system, the conclusion that a certain extent of socialism is the only reasonable policy is obvious. The question how much socialism and how to apply it properly remains open to debate. By the way, true communism would be fixed-point of the system. While that might be possible in a system with infite ressources, it can be basically excluded by the dissipative nature of the finiteness of ressources.
Posted in: Congratulations to the voters in France and Greece
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Johannes Weber
@mikemcfly87:
The initial investment for "green" power plants is definitely not significantly higher than for new nuclear plants. Thus, the critical aspect is not the "type" or "species" of power plant, but the fact that it must be build from scratch. If the state has invested as much subsidies in "green" energy as it has already invested in nuclear power (over the last five decades), I am finally willing to admit that subsidies to the renewable sector should be cut instead of increased. Let's talk about this again in a decade or two when equality might be reached.
Second, if there are only a handful of legal storage facilities, they can charge their clients almost as much as they want. That is the nice thing about capitalism. Pass a law that nuclear waste has to be safely stored and those who meet these criteria will and can provide such storage become extremely wealthy BECAUSE THE NUCLEAR WASTE STAYS FOR A FEW MILLENIA. Any community hosting temporary nuclear waste storage has secured high income for centuries SINCE THERE WILL NEVER BE A PERMANENT SOLUTION TO THE STORAGE PROBLEM. Let the nuclear companies bleed for the storage of their waste.
Posted in: What do those towns that host nuclear power plants, and whose economies depend on those plants, need to do to survive, if Japan is to move away from nuclear power?
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Johannes Weber
Pure horror. I can't imagine reading anything more terrifying than "humans" mail-ordering baby powder for consumption. Another hint that a world without "humans" might be better off. This story makes me sick.
Posted in: S Korea cracks down on human flesh capsules from China
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Johannes Weber
The right answers are already posted here. Nuclear plants provide "safe" employment for typically about a decade after their final shutdown. That is truly enough time for planning. They can build "safe" temporary waste storage facilities, since permanent facilities will never, ever be available in Japan and they already have the local expertise at hand. And they should invest in new energy sources - like wind, PV, tidal, geothermal or whatever comes in handy. I can't imagine that anyone could possibly want to buy land which once hosted a nuclear plant and transform it into an agricultural or residential are after all...
Posted in: What do those towns that host nuclear power plants, and whose economies depend on those plants, need to do to survive, if Japan is to move away from nuclear power?
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Johannes Weber
Hollande will soften up to the realities of economy. Every politician's promises do not hold past the first clash with reality. After all, the president is just the packaging of the country and normally completely unrelated to the country's contents. Even though this will probably be a violent clash of fact and fiction, when you remember the French protest and strike culture. However, Hollande will have a hard time to underperform in direct comparison to Sarkozy.
Posted in: Japan monitoring European reaction to Hollande win
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Johannes Weber
It goes beyond that. To the same extent that the Japanese society is indoctrinated to be infatuated by Keidanren and Denjiren and the nuclear industry, Germans are raised from an early age (since about 30 to 40 years) to be sceptical of everything which bears the word "atom" or "nuclear". The mindset of the mostly uneducated parts of the populace are completely different.
Furthermore, Japan is not as dynamic as Germany is, since it isn't part of something greater like Germany, which is more or less one of the two or three core countries of Europe. This interconnectedness allows Germany an economic flexibility and adaptivity (even though sometimes at a very high price), which Japan can never dream of. Lastly, Germany is basically undisputed world leader in almost all fields of large scale renewable power generation since they started the shift of paradigm one or two decades earlier than the rest of the world. As long as Germany is not punished with neoconservative governments for a full decade or more, it is practically impossible for the rest of the world to catch up.
Germany already has achieved a change in the mindset of the population, which is far more important that the bare numbers of renewable kilowatt hours or certain aspects of thin, organic or multicrystalline solar cells - whether it is the way how Germany tries to deal with waste reduction and recycling, whether it is insulation and energy efficiency or whether it is a diversification and decentralization of energy production..
Modern wind power plants are almost completely accident free. They might have some shutdowns due to strong winds, but clever German makers (like Procon) have developed technologies to deal with that and keep the plants operating safely. They have ridiculously low insurance premiums (of about 100 Euro per year), since it can be almost excluded that they take severe damage or inflict severe damage to anything if operated properly. And last but not least - an honest full cost calculation of all kinds of electric power reveals that the only energy source, which is cheaper than wind is conventional hydro, which is restricted, since there are not enough potential sites.
Posted in: Crisis-hit Japan debates shift to renewable energy
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Johannes Weber
No one should interpret up the words of "Ahmadinedschad" as general official Iranian policy. He is just a madman, who can't be reelected for a third term. Since he doesn't have proper economic results, he needs a foreign enemy to put the blame for his failed economic policies. An evil US or Israel comes in handy for occluding a record of failures. In that sense, if nothing extremely bad happens in the next few years, the situation should become better. The majority of Iranians probably don't give a penny on whether Israel exists or not.
Since even a lot of senior Israeli security experts say that there is no real proof yet that Iran actually tries to obtain nuclear weapons, the crisis (which mostly exists in the heads) is something of a virtual crisis, which could become real, if the hawks on either side have their way. There is no way any nation can deny another nation the right to develop nuclear power plants, if they cooperate with the IAEA as the international watchdog. Nuclear arms are a different affair though. But there is not proof (yet), that Iran's ambitions for nuclear arms are more real than the WMD in Iraq used as a justification for the last war in Iraq.
The article is quite good since it avoids inflammatory calls to arms which are all too common nowadays and which serve no purpose but make things worse. Having nukes pointed at your country is not the end of it all.
Posted in: Defusing the Iran crisis
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Johannes Weber
There is a very simple background for that. The European period of enlightenment and industrialisation is the foundation for the prominence of western languages. Greek and Latin have been the languages for education during the last two millenia in the civilizations that shaped the recent five centuries.
The question, whether anyone wants to do business in a language or with certain people is irrelevant. There is a simple answer why no other language will ever surpass English as lingua franca for common people around the globe and that answer lies in the Internet and the operating systems, system languages and so on, which are based on English. This is due to a historic background - the majority of these technologies were initially introduced in western countries - and for practical reasons - since English has an exceptionally small character set, which is completey covered in basic ASCII code. For everyone who is using computers beyond the pure user or application level, English is unavoidable.
Learning Kanji is neither more nor less of an issue than learning basics of Latin and ancient Greek for western people. These skills are required to understand the working principles of languages on a higher, abstract level. For daily life, you can get quite far without deeper and structured knowledge of the underlying principles. In that sense, 500 to 1000 Kanji are already a very good start for Japanese fluency.
I further must support the notion that Katakana is the disease that keeps the Japanese majority from fluency in other languages. Katakana should be banned from all kinds of foreign language training in Japan, because it interferes with the ability of children to learn new phonetic systems. The most severe deficiency in educated Japanese people is their ability to handle different phonetic systems and pronunciations. Furthermore, it is nearly impossible to understand foreign names onces these names have been brutalized to fit into the Japanese Katakana scheme. It is absolutely beyond me why the Japanese mainstream cannot leave foreign names in the appropriate characters.
Posted in: Why you must learn kanji
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Johannes Weber
The author is completely wrong about English and its difficulty. The majority of "difficult"English words is based on either Latin or ancient Greek. People with some level of classical education at school can use this to derive the meanings of plenty of words in almost all western languages from their basic education. Furthermore, since these words pervade all western languages, they contribute a lot to understanding most western languages.
Meanings of words like telephopne, television, telecommunication and telescope are plainy trivial for educated people. Oops, all that "tele"(Greek for distant) wihtout Kanji. How is that possible? Complicated words in western languages are easiest for language learners. I'd say Latin and ancient Greek play the role of Kanji in western languages. This acutally compares well to the Kanji usage in Kango in the Japanese language that are often formal ways of expressing simple things. Japanese people suck at this very often because they don't have any classical or multilingual education at school.
Kanji on the other hand cannot be learnt without available imagery, since they are abstracted too far. Unlike "tele" which is extremely simple, as it is everywhere. Either you have to memorize the Kanji by rote learning or by one or two particularly memorable examples of use or by some mental image - kind of a mapping between the Kanji's form and the space of meanings and images. This can be created artificially (which is the Heysig method), this can be clobbered into the brain (which is the Japanese method) or this can be picked up in passing once you have learned the basics of the language, lived in Japan for a while and once you have stopped bothering about perfect and full knowledge of the language.
Posted in: Why you must learn kanji
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Johannes Weber
There was a good reason for "Mein Kampf" being banned from sale in Germany over a long time and it was a completely legal process, since the Bavarian state simply held the rights. And I seriously doubt that anyone (with a sane mind) would want to read it in German, since everyone knows that the language is horrible. It might actually be an "lighter read" if a translation is used. But that isn't its purpose. By the way, I often hear that it is quite popular in Britain and the US. I'd say most Germans simply don't care about the book, which is probably the best possible mindset.
Posted in: Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' to return to Bavarian schools
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Johannes Weber
Putting two different things into one pot. There is a Difference with capital "D" between "emotional age" and "intellectual age". And while girls on average surpass their male fellows in "emotional age" for a few years, this cannot be claimed for general "mental age", since it also includes "rational" and "analytical" features, which do not depend on gender, but on socialisation (and a bit on genes as well).
Physical deveopment shouldn't be a problem in class either. After all, class is not about physical contests (and even there boys fare better most of the time) or about showing off how far your body has developed towards adulthood.
The main reason why girl school students might be more successful is because there is less distraction at a girls-only school. But this reasoning would lead in the final consequence to private teachers for all students, whose parents can afford it. And the girls-only school students miss important aspects of social learning (like getting along with the other sex). There is no overall advantage of one system over the other.
Posted in: From late primary school to middle school, girls develop faster than boys both physically and mentally. So it's inefficient for boys and girls to take the same classes together because their mental ages are different.
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Johannes Weber
As far as I know, poverty is also very common among unmarried young males in Japan. Young single males are the social layer with the 2nd highest rate of poverty (after single mothers). It is fully true that the Japanese company system is to blame in both cases.
However, I truly wonder which qualifications even the average Japanese employee (or unemployed worker) has that would make her (or him) fit for seeking a well-payed job abroad. It's not just English (or any other foreign language skill) that is missing, they also lack basic qualifications in many cases (Japanese university education is rather poor in many cases). Why hire someone from another country, who expects a high salary, if you can get a worker fluent in the local language and similarly compentent for a cheaper price, as it is the case in most places around the world?
Posted in: Suggesting single poverty-stricken women should seek job opportunities abroad or try to establish their own businesses sounds fine ... but this is extremely difficult in practice.
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Johannes Weber
I can personally confirm that 6 months was more or less the time (in Japan) it took me to start to blather in Japanese. And to have Japanese interfere with my previous third language, French. I guess, once one foreign language pops up in the mind involuntary when searching for another, that can be conisdered as fluent.
However, I had some different experiences from what the author describes. The most important ones are the following:
First, fluency (as I experience it) is obtained by the absence of conscious thought about the fact that you're speaking a foreign language. Once You stop bothering about mistakes, your fluency improves faster than you can realise it yourself. The task is not to think at all.
Second, vocabulary doesn't matter. You can always resort to using nouns from one language in another language, since You will have a description at hand if You need it. It makes no sense at all to translate "conbini" or "nikuman" to another language. Instead, I treat it as a name and explain its meaning. Otherwise, saying "sushi" (instead of sliced raw fish on rice, which had been put on rice-based vinegar before) in English or my native German would mean that I'm not fluent. And that's rubbish.
Third, the popularity. I never experienced popularity due to being a foreigner who speaks fluent English. Instead, I grew more popular with people once my Japanese improved significantly. Maybe that's due to the fact that most of my dealings were with either young Japanese (below 30 years) or those with a scientific background who actually knew that their Englisch was rather acceptable.
Posted in: The skill of speaking fluent Japanese
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Johannes Weber
@nandakandamanda:
They have to have routine shutdown at least once in every 13 months. Thus, since March last year, each and every one had to go through it at least once. And the safety situation does not allow a restart. Some were already in shutdown in March. Some went into emergency shutdown. The rest regularly.
Every country tries to have sufficient energy supply to cope with failure of parts of it. And Japan reduced its dependence on fossil fuels by building nuclear plants. However, since the companies in principle know about the lack of reliablity of nuclear power, they could not afford to remove their old fossil fuel plants, which would be required in times, where nuclear energy is not available. I think this is applicable to electricity companies globally.
Posted in: DPJ's Sengoku compares closing nuclear plants to 'mass suicide'