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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Patrick Smash
Japan still executes in cases of doubt, even when the authorities know confessions were forced. To not apply the death sentence for 40 years is a bit stronger than an element of doubt. That indicates they knew he was innocent and left him to rot.
AiserX, maybe it is a fitting punishment for heinous crimes, but the rest of the world got sick of finding out we killed the wrong people. Unless the legal system is perfect, innocent people will be killed. I don't think the family of Carlos DeLuna support the Death Sentence in Colorado. Sakae Menda doesn't support it here. Nor Toshikazu Sugaya.
Posted in: Court rejects retrial for man on death row over 1961 killings
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Patrick Smash
The fact that he hasn't been executed means that a succession of Justice Ministers has believed he is not guilty. Death Row is full of people who had confessions beaten out of them under so-called "mild torture" and JT has plenty of readers who believe anyone arrested and convicted under torture should be strung up by the state. Nothing ever changes...
Posted in: Court rejects retrial for man on death row over 1961 killings
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Patrick Smash
The whole yakuza thing is ridiculous to start with. These criminal organisations have offices in Osaka for crying out loud. Offices for criminal gangs are permitted. They drive around openly in yak cars dressed as gangsters with punch perms. So to attack this yakuza culture, instead of doing anything about yakuza, Hashimoto declares war on public workers.
tmarie, absolutely correct about labor laws. If someone working for me full time starts threatening to kill my clients, I can't do anything. So why would I ever hire anyone full time again. If this stupidity started because a public worker threatened a child in that way, that person should be behind bars, not picking up an enormous tax-funded bonus. Why doesn't Hashimoto have a go at these stupid labor laws instead of having a go at people with discrete tattos? After all he is a lawyer.
Posted in: Hashimoto clashes with Osaka officials over tattoo survey
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Patrick Smash
I personally wouldn't employ someone who had a visible tattoo as my clients would not like it, but going back to people that have already been employed in this way is nonsense. If you have to ask, it cannot be a visible tattoo. This must be illegal. Surely someone can take this nutjob TV lawyer to the cleaners on this one. It reminds me of an issue with moustaches from another nutter a few years back.
Posted in: Hashimoto clashes with Osaka officials over tattoo survey
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Patrick Smash
And this is the man that huge swathes of this country would like to see in power here. Unbelievable...
Posted in: Hashimoto clashes with Osaka officials over tattoo survey
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Patrick Smash
cleo, the mortgage periods will go to age 75 and sometimes beyond (depending on the lender) in part because people at those ages often inherit. The rates are higher for those longer periods though. One more thing about savings, most companies retire people at 60 and there is already no pension until 65 these days. By the time I retire that could have gone up to 70 or more. If a family doesn't have savings, it has to live on either no income or a tiny income for those five years. If it becomes a 10-year wait for the pension, who would want to have less than 16 million yen stashed away. I would hate not to have a spare 50-million yen the day I turn 60, and I mean spare. That could be nothing more than 5 million-yen a year at the prices we will face in 25 years time while I wait for my pension to kick in. Maybe companies will be fiorced to scrap or change the retirement age, but 'm not banking on it.
Dentshop, tax increases from 2014 are a fact. Declining savings are a fact. The low birthrate is a fact. The aging population is a fact. Huge government debt is a fact. Current retirement ages and pensionable ages are facts. Good luck with that 6% account. I can only get around 3% in the UK and those are for long-term bonds. Anything above that these days is gambling. I admit I do that too. You seem not to know the difference between an interest rate in the post office or bank here and the interest rate on a large loan. Your loan here will be cheaper than eg in UK?USA, but will still be around 3%, which is higher than the interest rates from our banks these days. I kept the loan until the scales shifted in favour of paying it off. Hope for the best by all means, but prepare for the worst. Don't hit 60 with no savings mate.
Posted in: Japanese family's average savings: Y16.64 mil
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Patrick Smash
What really matters is not the sport itself, but that both teams play it well on the day and create live drama. My sporting preference is rugby union because that's what I grew up with. Watching NZ batter someone by 100 points is not exciting. It is powerful and brilliant, but not exciting. The world cup final where France almost sneaked it and NZ somehow hung on was incredibly exciting to watch.
Football's often boring, but not always. When Americans knock it, I understand why. But the last 5 minutes of Man City vs QPR last week was incredible. All sports need a bit of squeaky-bum time for real excitement.
Posted in: Which sport, when played well, do you think is the most exciting to watch?
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Patrick Smash
Cleo, I don't have a mortgage. I paid that off ages ago. My advice to others is to do the same! The simple answer to "will they use savings?" for this is often "yes". A salaryman aged 45 takes a 35-year loan to buy a mansion with the intension of paying this off early using savings he will try and make. They do this as mortgages are readjusted, which often happens every 5 years or so depending on the plan. Maybe he will not use the 10m-16m earmarked for education bills and a bit for a rainy day etc, but the future savings (after that) will often be used for loan repayment. This goes a little against the argument that those with 10m will always save more and more, especially with tax increases and other changes on the way and the economy in overall decline. I really think anyone with a family and with less than 10m in savings by their mid-late 40s here is in a bit of trouble. For single English teachers etc it really doesn't matter.
Posted in: Japanese family's average savings: Y16.64 mil
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Patrick Smash
DentShop, you clearly have no idea how the average family spends its money. 10m yen is not a lot of savings for a family with education to pay for, a mortgage, and increasing tax and uncertainty on the way. If I only had 10m yen in total savings, I would be in panic mode right now.
Posted in: Japanese family's average savings: Y16.64 mil
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Patrick Smash
Dentshop, yeah, the average annual salary in Japan is around 4.7m yen including bonus. A Japanese family with only 10m savings is poor. That money is not going to cover education costs for one kid and leave any decent amount of change.
In the next few years we will see consumption tax double and carry on rising, income tax increase by 4%, dependencies and allowances slashed, the population continue to age, social security and health bills increase, Japanese mega-firms contnue to decline and other countries become more competitive. This rate of savings would be okay in eg UK and other similar countries with free healthcare and free education until university entrance, but here in Japan it is really not a lot and is mainly not earmarked for a rainy day.
Posted in: Japanese family's average savings: Y16.64 mil
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Patrick Smash
gaijinTechie, yes, a very good point. Japanese parents do not pay this absolute fortune on education so that their only son can work part-time in a conbini. That hardly repays the years of kumon, juku and university costs. But in all honesty, not only in Japan but the world over, many graduates have no real skills that can be applied to the workplace. If the companies are tending towards part-time and hourly-contracted employment, there are not enough graduate jobs for the incredible number of graduates. Too many people go to universities and then expect quality graduate employment. This is not the real world anymore as you quite rightly say.
Posted in: Housewives seeking part-time work squeezed out by surge in jobless
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Patrick Smash
I employ a lot of people and I have interviewed thousands of staff over the years. I don't want to hire any more full-time workers either, so people like me are part of the reason for the expansion of temporary contracts. The main reason is not financial, the main reason is that the Labor laws of Japan make it almost impossible to do anything about idiots who cost companies a fortune. Japanese Law thinks that private businesses should employ useless timewasters forever, pay their salaries, unnecessary overtime claims, health and pension contributions etc, but in return the employee does not have to do anything useful. That is why there are fewer and fewer full-time positions available in this country.
In Tokyo and the major cities, this means there are plenty of part-time jobs of course, but in the countryside there probably are not. University grads have often been spoon fed through an incredibly expensive education system to be sarariman with no work skills,so they are not going to take part-time jobs are supermarkets. Some of them could have been employed fulltime by people like me, but we are sick to death of the way Labor Law protects uselss people forever and we will not hire full time for this reason. I don't care how thumbs down I get, but this is the truth. In rural areas part-time positions are becoming scarce, in the cities this is not the case. Either way, full-time positions are becoming even rarer for the reasons given.
Posted in: Housewives seeking part-time work squeezed out by surge in jobless
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Patrick Smash
Speed, yes they do play alone, but that doesn't make it okay. Kids around my place as young as 3-4 play in the streets with no parental supervision all the time. One of them is likely to feature in a news story like this one sometime soon.
Posted in: 6-year-old boy drowns in irrigation canal in Miyazaki
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Patrick Smash
zichi, I think people believe this is 24/7 because last year in Kanto stations has the air-cons off 24/7, late subway trains were baking and restaurants and izakaya were generally a sweaty mess. The government's idiotic brown-out plans included power-outs between midnight and 6am, which was obviously unnecessary. This was all about the perception of dealing with the issue, rather than actually dealing with it. But this has led people to believe that any shortages will be 24/7. Profiteering and Perception (the 2 Ps) accounted for a lot of the suffering last year.
Posted in: Gov't seeks 20% cut in electricity use in central, western Japan
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Patrick Smash
Any efforts need to be directed at saving power from around 10:00-17:00, from Monday to Friday. If you are being cooked at other times this summer, the reason is either companies profiteering from our discomfort, or the great Japanese concept of perception over substance.
Posted in: Gov't seeks 20% cut in electricity use in central, western Japan
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Patrick Smash
The end of Paul Watson is also the best hope for the end of Japanese whaling.
Posted in: Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson arrested in Germany
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Patrick Smash
GW, I took a look at out bills. We are using less power this year month by month compared to last and the bills are around 30% higher than last year. Yes, they have already been hiked and without a sodding word said to the consumers.
So Edano will have meetings with experts before using his hanko and upping our bills even further. Japan and meetings eh. Waste time and fling bureaucrats more money before the foregone conclusion can be concluded. Terrific.
Posted in: TEPCO officially applies to gov't to hike household electricity rates
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Patrick Smash
I don't see why my taxes have to be used to help other families have 2 incomes when mine only has 1. A lot of these working mothers have a wealthy spouse. I know these people personally. The cost of these facilities is only around 15,000-yen a month in parts of Tokyo because of the subsidisation. More childcare facilities are clearly needed, but at very least this should be means-tested. Responsible people who choose to look after their own kids will end up paying more taxes so that people who choose not to bother looking after their own youngsters can make more money. The idea itself is good, but the subsidies should go to poorer families, not to the wives of wealthy salarymen, which is what often already happens.
Posted in: Diet deliberates bill to support working mothers
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Patrick Smash
Well, there were 86 deaths that were recorded and logged within 24 hours of the accident taking place in the GW period. They keep other figures for deaths in traffic accidents, but only ever hand out those certified dead within 24 hours. Lower numbers is a good thing of course, but with speed cameras in use, cameras for catching those who jump lights in place, speed bumps and police who actually stop people for mobile phone use and manga-reading etc, the figures could be a lot lower.
Posted in: Golden Week road traffic deaths lowest since 1970
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Patrick Smash
gyouza, you're right, that is the latest news. But it was not the news item we were posting on. The article here infers driver fault and that is what the responses were based on.
Posted in: 8-year-old girl killed by bus; driver arrested