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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- 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*
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- Translator
- ZAIHON, Inc. (日本財務翻訳株式会社), Tokyo
- Salary: ¥6.0M / Year Negotiable
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ThonTaddeo
Sakurala, I think what drove him to suicide was the sleep deprivation. Remember, he was on his way home in the evening when the incident happened. Then he gets brutally beaten by two men emboldened by drink and the desire to impress the false-accusing woman. Folowing this, he's interrogated in the police station all night long.
That kind of exhaustion can drive anyone to despondency.
Something tells me that he had no idea he'd be up all night answering aggressive questions from the police when he first entered the police station -- being bruised and bloody, he probably thought they'd be more interested in who attacked him!
Just about everyone except Shinsuke disgusts me: the woman who gets her two friends to beat someone just on an accusation; the two men who believe the woman's accusation unquestioningly; and of course, the bullying police who took the side of the false accusers and weren't even interested in the punishment they'd already given this poor man. What could they possibly have been asking him for six hours?
Posted in: Mother of falsely accused groper who killed himself seeks justice
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ThonTaddeo
I too love Nara -- I'd move back if I could!
What's the name of this Indian restaurant?
Posted in: Find your own forest in Nara
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ThonTaddeo
Cleo, no reason? Here's one: the knowledge that he'd have a good chance of getting legally-binding asurance that he could see his kids again, whereas had the case been tried in Japan, it would be entirely possible that a legal judgment would prevent him from seeing them.
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ThonTaddeo
One thing that would help Tottori would be for the national government in Tokyo to loosen its stranglehold on the management of prefectures and cities.
Tottori should be able to cut the consumption tax so that people can afford to buy more there. Cut corporate taxes so that businesses will relocate. The fact that the consumption tax is set nationally without regard for how much government is needed or desired in different areas is criminal.
It doesn't take much government to handle 600,000 people -- for a lot of places, that's city-hall level -- and I suspect that the kencho and other official buildings were meant to manage a much larget population. Trim them down!
Props to Mr. Adachi for getting food to people who would otherwise have a hard time getting to it themselves.
I notice that 80% of the students at Tottori University come from outside the prefecture. I'm curious; what is the university doing right so as to attract people? Can businesses emulate it?
Posted in: Tottori struggles to keep population from shrinking further
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ThonTaddeo
I thought she was a dual citizen as well.
Still, if the court order required her to stay in the US, that's what she should have done if she cared about her children. We can hardly condemn Chris for flouting the law if Noriko is doing the same thing.
Millions upon millions of immigrants have begun lives in America with a lot less English ability and general smarts than Noriko has. And they didn't have $700,000 in seed money to keep them set for life.
MistWizard, it looks to me like Noriko accepted the US as the forum for the divorce because she knew that then she could get the massive financial settlement that wives tend to get in the US, and then run back to Japan and keep the kids all to herself, something that wouldn't have been as possible in the US. She made sure Chris was on the losing end both financially and emotionally.
Chris may not be a saint, but as things stand now, we have a loving father stripped of his fortune and of any ties with his children, and a mother who is now rich, totally anonymous, and depriving her children of one of the most important people in any child's life.
Posted in: Dad who tried to take kids from Japan sues Tennessee judge
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ThonTaddeo
She's also a dual Japan/US dual citizen. It's standard to for judges to require custodial parents to remain in-state so that the other parent can be near their children.
Posted in: Dad who tried to take kids from Japan sues Tennessee judge
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ThonTaddeo
I do this very thing, Pukey; my better half is quick to voice her opinion on what looks good on me, just as I do the same for her.
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ThonTaddeo
Japanese people are indeed thin, though I have to admit that I prefer seeing lots of skinny people than seeing fatties everywhere!
I myself am considered big and strong by co-workers, who marvel at my ability to lift heavy things, etc. -- and I'm 179 cm, 67 kg! I'm thin by western standards, and look like the people you see out running and cycling.
On the baseball team I play for, my jersey is an O-6, which is one step above extra-large on the Japanese scale. I took it back to the US and laid it over a major league jersey, and it was the same as a perfectly-normal size 46! (That's halfway between large and XL in the US.)
My future wife is 168 cm, 53 kg. Just perfect in my opinion, and in fact her "three sizes" and height match that of a past Miss America, but of course she thinks she's on the verge of being fat.
As for the leggings boom, while I like seeing them much more than pants, they don't do as good a job of flattering a woman's leg shape as regular stockings or tights do.
I think the advantage is that you can't see through them, so they can be work with very tiny skirts without any fear!
I don't understand why they cut off at the ankle or have that stirrup under them -- it looks like something you'd see on athletes:
http://www.wcbias.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/morgan1.jpg
If Uniqlo wanted to sell them to men, they could make them in blue or red, with stripes, and market them as cold-weather baseball socks!
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ThonTaddeo
No more so than the man being expected to fall into the "salaryman" stereotype.
Women live longer, have more avenues for self-expression, and have an easier time entering the traditionally-male world than their husbands would have doing the opposite. For every rich male executive, there are a hundred miserable drones commuting to soul-crushing jobs on those packed trains, you know! Fortunately for Jiro Mifune, he's in a field where this doesn't apply, which is probably one reason why young Mika was attracted to him.
Posted in: Mika Mifune reflects on life with an older man
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ThonTaddeo
Sarge, he's 51 now, so he was 40 when they got married.
I agree with the posters praising this couple. If they're happy together, who are we to criticize them? I too know a fantastic old lady who married at 16; her husband was 30. They responsibly waited until she was 21 (and he 35) to start having children, and all six of their kids are smart and successful. I hope the same thing happens with these two.
Posted in: Mika Mifune reflects on life with an older man
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ThonTaddeo
Are you for real? Language can be learned abroad, form textbooks and classwork; cultural literacy is only obtained from living in that culture for a long time, preferably in one's formative years.
Posted in: Train shame
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ThonTaddeo
The volume of any music leaking out of someone's headphones is as nothing compared with the endless barrage of useless recorded announcements reminding you not to talk on a cell phone, not to smoke, and to hold the handrails when riding the extremely dangerous escalator.
Maybe if we got rid of all that garbage, people with headphones wouldn't rile others up so much.
Posted in: Train shame
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ThonTaddeo
Will this thing be unplayable for the visually impaired, or will there be some way to show both sets of pixels to the same eye?
I'd hate for 3D-only to become the new standard. The perfect-eyesight people don't seem to be clamoring for it, and those without would be frozen out of one of their favorite hobbies.
Posted in: Nintendo to release DS game console in 3-D
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ThonTaddeo
Don't be fooled by the government: they want inflation so that the value of the massive debts they've created can go down, with the average working stiff paying the bill in the form of a decrease in the purchasing power of our savings. They want people spending as much as possible (and paying consumption taxes on that, with the recipients also paying taxes). I'd rather have the peace of mind of knowing that my money will reatin its value no matter what I do with it.
Inflation is worse than taxation -- high taxes only affect the money you earned in the current year. Inflation destroys the value of all the money you've saved in all previous years.
Goddog, you should be wishing for the exact opposite. If inflation and interest rates rise, the price of real estate goes down; buyers can no longer afford as much, because more of their monthly payments will be eaten up by interest.
Brotokyo, any increases in your salary and increases in interest paid on your salary would be negated by the increases in what you'd be paying for things (and in what your savings could buy) if the government gets the inflation it wants.
Posted in: Bank of Japan expands lending to fight deflation
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ThonTaddeo
Indeed. I wish I could have lived in one of those.
Posted in: The rise and fall of the Roppongi Hills 'tribe'
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ThonTaddeo
Bicultural, I'll go one step further on this:
Not necessarily correcting, but just defending your own Japanese usage when it differs from what someone else expects. I had a linguistics professor at a very high-up Japanese university who taught in some of the clearest, easiest-to-understand language you could imagine, and when he instructed his students (Japanese natives, mostly) on the finer points of usage, we listened. One such point he impressed on uswas to make sure to write 「にも拘らず」and not「関らず」(ni mo kakawarazu) when it's used to mean "regardless of...", and he gave examples from literature and such.
Fast forward to my career in a Japanese corporation -- I'd get many compliments on the quality of my e-mail correspondence, but once a co-worker walked past my desk, saw something I was writing, and pointed at a 拘らず and said it was wrong and that 関わらず was the only correct one.
I mentioned that that word was one of my professor's favorites, and that I trusted this professor, and the co-worker, instead of even discussing it or defending his position, just started to get angry. A deep, emotional anger, as if my calm rebuttal was a slap in his face.
It was as if that professor's knowledge and stature were totally negated just because the same knowledge had passed through the brain of an untermensch like myself.
One thing I'll say in defense of English speakers is that they have a healthy respect for the English ability of non-natives, and will cheerfully admit that sometimes a native might make a common mistake where a non-native will have learned it correctly. In Japan, I find, there are still too many people who don't give any thought to language use, but then they they suddenly do think about it, it's only to insist that their opinions are always the correct ones.
Japanese and English are both rich languages full of variation (in both time period and location), and I wish speakers of the former would learn from those of the latter and be a little less stuck up about it.
Posted in: Traditional approaches to Japanese language learning are changing
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ThonTaddeo
Max, it's not as easy as it once was, in this era of sexual harassment paranoia. Chat up the wrong woman and you might find real police officers taking you to a real holding cell. A regular guy might be able to adjust and sense when he's dealing with a woman like this, but the "herbivore" guys? Forgeddaboutit. They're terrified enough as it is.
Posted in: Miniskirted 'policewomen' ready to help stressed-out workers
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ThonTaddeo
Indeed, it was the ApocalyPS3.
This kind of thing is why I don't buy games online. Nont only can you not sell them on when you're done with them, but you're at the mercy of the network wen things like this happen. Imagine this glitch occurring in 2018 or 2030 when only fans of older games are still playing them, and imagine it locking you out of your purchased content forever. Sony wouldn't have cared.
Posted in: Sony's PlayStation 3 consoles hit by clock glitch
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ThonTaddeo
The machine is 99.9% accurate? That means a thousand false positives every day if the station sees 1,000,000 passengers pass through, and big stations like Shinjuku see even more.
It means that you, Mr. and Mrs. Daily Commuter, will be falsely flagged roughly once every five working years -- more often if you use the station on the weekends.
As Ranger Miffy says, terrorists will just take taxis.
And we, the public, will be left paying for, and being hassled by, this garbage.
Posted in: New ticket gate that checks for explosives tested at Akihabara station
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ThonTaddeo
Hokkaidoguy and Steen, my sympathies are with you. Narita will never reach the top in user friendliness as long as the National Police Agency uses it as a free training ground for their recruits while using skin color (and not actual dangerousness) as their sole determinant when choosing who to harass.
I've never understood why the manager of the airport, the mayor of Narita, and the governor of Chiba let the NPA get away with that garbage.
Posted in: Narita ranked third in airport quality survey