JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
-
- 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
-
- FT English Teachers for Kids - Osaka
- Kohgakusha Co., Ltd. （株式会社興学社）, Osaka
- Salary: ¥255,000 ~ ¥275,000 / Month Travel Expenses, Encouragement of Japanese learning*
-
- Translator
- ZAIHON, Inc. (日本財務翻訳株式会社), Tokyo
- Salary: ¥6.0M / Year Negotiable
0
ThonTaddeo
Mindovermatter, the bus drivers are nothing compared to the taxi drives. For those guys, a light turning red means "you have three more seconds to get through"!
Article Unavailable
0
ThonTaddeo
With you here, Nemoflow. I ride my bicycle everywhere, and it never ceases to amaze me how oblivious people can be, particularly once they get a cell phone in their hands. Then they tune out the entire world, while unconsciously creating a huge buffer zone around them so that they don't bump into anything -- not realizing that they're preventing other, non-e-mail-focused pedestrians and cyclists from passing them.
Pedestrians will also take liberties around bicycles that they would never consider in the presence of an automobile. Sometimes I think that any time there's an accident, whichever person is using a mobile phone should be the guilty party. Just settle it right then and there; no muss, no fuss.
I'd like to see more of the thin residential roads closed to automobiles, and a better demarcation between automobile-oriented multi-lane roads and regular pedestrian/cyclist-oriented roads. Off the top of my head, the area between Iidabashi and Suidobashi does a great job here. There's a long stretch of road with a wide sidewalk with a pedestrian lane and a bike lane, on a road wide enough for cars to drive without hitting anyone.
Do you have insurance for your bicycle? How much does it cost, and what does it cover?
Article Unavailable
0
ThonTaddeo
She may need help, but custody of their child should go to this loyal husband rather than to a misanthrope who threatened her spouse with a knife. She may think she can raise their kid alone, but an impartial observer can see that that would hardly be a good environment for a child.
Posted in: Ex-soccer player Honda, wife divorce after 6 years of sexless marriage
0
ThonTaddeo
I realize that Tokyo Girls Fudosan is filling a niche market, and their innovation regarding shared residences is innovative, but the women-only policy isn't far removed from the disgraceful "Whites Only" and "No Coloreds" signs seen in the West within living memory. If many more real estate agents also refused to accept one gender as customers, it would become a serious social problem -- TKGF is profiting off the egalitarianism and lack of discrimination shown by other agents.
Posted in: Meet the brains of Tokyo's women-only housing boom
0
ThonTaddeo
Nonsense.
Posted in: ICHIHASHI ARRESTED BY POLICE IN OSAKA
0
ThonTaddeo
Not half as sexist as running a business that excludes half the population because they weren't born female. An estate agency that excluded foreigners in this way would be pilloried, andrightly so.
Posted in: Meet the brains of Tokyo's women-only housing boom
0
ThonTaddeo
There's no excuse for them not to do this. Even the old 40 GB PS3 had software-based backwards compatibility.
Hopefully they'll allow it again when the PS2 goes out of production. The're still making money selling those at $99 (Y14800 here!) and are banking on people owning both. Waste of labor and materials, if you ask me.
Posted in: Sony to launch PlayStation with bigger hard drive
0
ThonTaddeo
Aerocaster, what's with the sneaky wording? They're not "her" children; they're "their" children. What's more, the children are not necessarily on the same "side".
Maybe they should be in Japan (I think they probably should, too), but what "should" be is not for us to decide. The court decided otherwise, and Noriko defied the court.
Posted in: American man accused of grabbing own kids released
0
ThonTaddeo
Cleo, I see that you got your correction in as I was posting; ignore my first paragraph if you like!
Posted in: American man accused of grabbing own kids released
0
ThonTaddeo
Cleo, I had thought that as well, but there's a post on Debito.org suggesting that Isaac, the first child, may have been born in the US.
http://www.debito.org/?p=4751
Noriko is also "having her cake and eating it"; she went to the US for the divorce and received massive amounts of money while promising not to abduct the kids to Japan, and then did just that. You can't pick and choose which parts of court orders apply to you.
Debito's post also reports the 2005 date of the Chris-Noriko separation as being "confirmed", so I can't really blame him for finding a new lover three years later; you just can't ask a person to be celibate that long.
That being said, he (and his wife) need to put their kids' interests first, and with them being bicultural (and both parents being dual citizens), that means that either parent should be willing to live in the "other" country to raise them. Noriko should have stayed in the US, but she violated the court order and now can't ever go back to the US.
Perhaps the best solution now is for Chris to stay in Fukuoka for a few years (without Amy, if she's not willing to go) to raise the kids, with them then going to the US for high school and/or college.
Posted in: American man accused of grabbing own kids released
0
ThonTaddeo
Chris and Noriko had been separated for a few years before he left for the US and got together with Amy. We have no idea why the marriage initially broke up several years ago, only that it broke down well before Chris' marriage to Amy, and I commend both spouses for not dragging that kind of thing into public view.
Posted in: American man accused of grabbing own kids released
0
ThonTaddeo
How do we "know" this? That works out to over five million children dying of malnutrition every year. Nearly a Holocaust, annually?
I'd like to see how this "very six seconds" fugure was arrived at. It makes a good sound bite, but is it true?
Posted in: U.N. says record 1 billion go hungry
0
ThonTaddeo
You can substiture "her" and "she" for "him" and "he", and the statement is no less valid. And her extralegal actions occurred first.
Posted in: American man accused of grabbing own kids released
0
ThonTaddeo
I had the exact same thing happen to me.
I was on my bicycle on the Gaien-Nishi street in Yotsuya (south of the 3-chome crossing; Sanai-cho, I think) and, while riding on the sidewalk, spotted what looked like a long stretch of road with no people or cars on it. Wanting to get into that area so that I could speed up a bit, I shifted lanes only to be suddenly thrown to the ground by an invisible rope, with a heavy metal pole falling on top of me! I was pinned to the ground, but thankfully an older man passed by and lifted the pole up. I had blood all over my chin, hand, and one knee, and my bike was basically destroyed.
I went to the koban near Shinanomachi, where the police -- god bless them, this time -- gave me some bandages and, uncharacteristically, didn't accuse me of being a bike thief. I went back to visit the site the next day, and saw that the rope really is impossible to see in low light. It really was filthy, and had a child run into it at full speed, the rope probably would have cut a line into his neck.
I was pretty sure that the cops would fob me off with something about staying on the sidewalks, or on the other side of the road, or that I would have seen it if my eyesight were better, or whatever, so I didn't make an official complaint, but the rope is still there. If you're going to block off a section of road, the rope has to be clearly visible!
Posted in: Woman on minibike injured after run-in with rope tied across road
0
ThonTaddeo
Cleo, good catch!
W505a, you're being a bit disingenuous when you compare Japan's national consumption tax to US state sales taxes. In my home state when I lived in the US, there was a 6% sales tax, but it didn't apply to essentials like food and utilities. Poorer people -- particularly single poor people -- spend a proportionally larger percentage of their disposable income on things like this than the rich do -- and in Japan they have to pay tax on it! I find it abhorrent that the Japanese government taxes people for things that they literally cannot live without. If people's welfare really is what comes first, there should be no tax on unprepared food, electricity, and heat.
And in the US you can always move to a state with lower taxes if you don't like how your own state is being run. (Indeed, this competition for residents' and corporations' business keeps taxes from getting too high, and benefits everyone.)
Posted in: Health insurance gets more complicated with new visa law
0
ThonTaddeo
W505a, don't forget consumption tax. If you save 20% of your take-home pay, spend 20% on rent (untaxed), and spend the other 60% on goods and services, that's roughly another 75,000 yen (2,500,000 x 60% x 5%) being taken from you by governments. And just about every politician is determined to raise that figure in the next few years.
Posted in: Health insurance gets more complicated with new visa law
0
ThonTaddeo
What happened to lemon Pepsi and vanilla Coke? I loved them, and haven't seen them in years.
Posted in: Azuki-flavored Pepsi
0
ThonTaddeo
LFRAgain, well said.
Posted in: American arrested in Fukuoka for kidnapping own kids from ex-wife
0
ThonTaddeo
Yeah, that's what I thought. I would have thought money would do the same sort of thing, but it's kind of cool that machines can block it completely.
Cool? I don't think that's cool at all. Put a watermark in the bills, fine, but the government has no business tweaking the software in ordinary people's machinery.
Posted in: Student arrested for using counterfeit money at flea market
0
ThonTaddeo
Greencardfan, read my sentence again:
"I'm guessing that they're (surname last) "Kyung-gil Hong" and "Suk-ja Pak". Any Korean speakers who can help?"
'They're' means 'they are', with 'they' referring to the two names. "I'm guessing that the names of these two people are (surname last) Kyung-gil Hong and Suk-ja Pak."
Using 'their' in that spot wouldn't make any sense at all.
Anyway, here's a link to the story in Japanese, in the Mainichi:
http://mainichi.jp/area/tokyo/archive/news/2009/09/23/20090923ddlk13040133000c.html
The names of the two people involved are 洪京吉 and 朴淑子 in hanja (kanji). Any Korean readers out there?
Posted in: Man arrested after strangling wife to death in Tokyo apartment