JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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- 秘書及び業務サポート
- 加治金属工業株式会社, Tokyo
- Salary: ¥4.0M / Year
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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.
3
Stephen Knight
I don't think I've ever seen a woman in an ostrich...
Posted in: Small step in high heels; a giant leap for prosthetics?
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Stephen Knight
An "iconic" clubhouse sandwich is made with turkey, not chicken, and has tomato but no egg. I prefer the BLT myself; less bread!!
Posted in: Paris takes the cake for priciest club sandwich
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Stephen Knight
Actually I suspect the Colonel would probably enjoy his chicken with a glass of bourbon, not scotch... But the writer apparently doesn't know the difference...
Posted in: KFC Japan serves chicken and whiskey at new ROUTE 25 bar
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Stephen Knight
While tornados seem fairly infrequent here, one report said that Japan is in the top ten in terms of insurance losses reported due to tornados--probably because structures (mostly homes) are not built to withstand them. It's surprising there were so few casualties from Sunday's tornado, which was quite powerful if relatively small in scale.
http://m.eb.com/topic/599941#218356.toc
Posted in: Aftermath
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Stephen Knight
It's even worse close up, a monolith of concrete without a scrap of green or a hint of warmth. I guess they're relying on he surrounding parks for that...
Posted in: Palace Hotel Tokyo to open May 17
0
Stephen Knight
Hmmm...
This superb piece of investigative journalism seems to have left out details about the presence of the young man's alleged personal psychic at the scene of the alleged proposal...
Anyway, the guy's a dolt and both women are better off without him, I'm sure!
Posted in: Two-timing Shun Shioya reportedly proposed to one of his celebrity girlfriends
4
Stephen Knight
In Seattle, the police would be marching proudly in the parade along with everyone else... :-)
Posted in: Rainbow Pride
2
Stephen Knight
I put half a cup of frozen blueberries in my smoothie every morning, they take the place of ice and make me feel I might be doing at least a little something positive for my long-term health prospects... :-)
Posted in: Eating berries may slow brain's decline
2
Stephen Knight
The difference being, of course, that the translations produced by the human translators are, as a whole, comprehensible, grammatically correct, clear renderings of the original text, while in many language pairs, Google Translate "converts" perfectly legible sentences into mangled, sometimes unrecognizable texts...
It's press releases like these that fool people into thinking this is an acceptable state of things.
Posted in: Google online translation tops 200 mil users
5
Stephen Knight
Given Japan's financial condition and its own problems at home, this is like me borrowing $2,000 on an over-extended credit card to help out an unemployed friend when I'm three months behind on my own rent...
Posted in: Azumi: $60 bil to IMF was to help global economy, acknowledge quake aid
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Stephen Knight
MUFJ has them, but only as an adjunct to the traditional ATM card + PIN combination. This new machine eliminates the need for a physical card. Still, a misleading headline...
Posted in: Bank to install palm-reading ATMs
0
Stephen Knight
Ironic, though, that theyd've chosen to hold there confab here, a nation notorious for its inflexible attitude toward refugee issues (Japan has accepted what, something around 400 refugees in the past decade?), with a reputation for cluelessness when it comes to public diplomacy...
Posted in: China calls on Japan not to host Uighur assembly in May
5
Stephen Knight
Many of the environmental protections in place today were put in place because of the extreme damage done to the environment by big business and government in the no-holds-barred rush to economic growth of the sixties and seventies. Rolling back those protections now risks a repeat of the same kind of wanton destruction of the country's natural assets. I agree that geothermal power has great potential here (though a straight-line cost/benefit analysis probably doesn't present a very enticing picture), but any deregulation of land use laws and protections needs to come with strict controls on scale, location, and long-term mitigation--controls that didn't exist in the past, with disastrous and lingering results.
Posted in: Environment Ministry eyes geothermal power stations under national parks
-5
Stephen Knight
I just knew they were part of a vast alien conspiracy to conquer earth!!
Posted in: Karasia
0
Stephen Knight
Precisely. It's like with automobiles. Blame the other guy for the fact your products don't sell. On the other hand, The Japanese government does have a habit of talking out of the side of it's neck when it comes to international agreements...
Posted in: Japan urged to provide level playing field for all insurers
6
Stephen Knight
Yeah, deploy your Patriot missile batteries smack in the middle of the nation's most populous city--that'll have a real calming effect, I'm sure... （−＿−；）
Posted in: Japan deploys missile defenses at 3 locations in Tokyo
4
Stephen Knight
>
It just looks wrong. I know that's not fair but it looks wrong.
Why? Because he's wearing a suit instead of a kimono?
Posted in: Japan Next
5
Stephen Knight
I once spotted an old woman--she must have been at least 80--on the bus here in Tokyo, wearing a tee-shirt that said, on the front, "a Good Man Is Hard to Find", and on the back "And Vice-Versa". The English itself was perfectly correct, of course, but something tells me she had no idea what it meant (and if she did...whew!).
Posted in: What are some of the weirdest examples of English used in ads or on T-shirts, bags, etc, that you have seen in Japan?
39
Stephen Knight
Oh for crying out loud... Is the average foreigner, interested enough to actually visit Japan, really going to be this ignorant? Why don't we add taking off our shoes in the house, bathing naked in public, and filing neatly onto escalators while we're at it??
And FYI, Japanese girls don't walk pigeon-toed because they're not used to high heels, but because they're taught it's more "feminine" (a holdover from the kimono days, when women pretty much had to walk that way), or pick it up from copying they're friends, and eventually can't go back to a normal stance. Or so a Japanese podiatrist once told me.
The idea that slurping is a sign of "appreciation" is also somewhat of a myth. People slurp their noodles because that's how you eat noodles (and it helps cool off the hot kind), not because they'd be considered unappreciative for not doing so.
Posted in: Some Japanese customs that may confuse foreigners
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Stephen Knight
Woo-Hoo, they've got AbFab...! ＼(^o^)／
Posted in: BBC and Hulu tie up