JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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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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- Full-time English Teacher - Osaka
- Epion English Language Schools, Osaka
- Salary: ¥200,000 ~ ¥250,000 / Month Depending on your ability and experience
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- Part-time English Teacher - Osaka
- Epion English Language Schools, Osaka
- Salary: ¥10,000 ~ ¥15,000 / Day Depending on how many days a week are worked
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as_the_crow_flies
Coincidental that Jaczko is apparently vocal about protecting public safety and suddenly he doesn't fit corporate values. Sounds like Woodford and Olympus all over again. Sometimes you need someone to stand up and shout out self-evident truths (eg about the evacuation zone around Fukushima( when governments and nuclear industry figures were doing everything to deceive and not protect the public. Sounds like he's the one who'd being bullied here.
Posted in: Jaczko's response to Japan crisis criticized by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
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as_the_crow_flies
Ｙｏｕ ｈａｖｅ a very ｓｔｒａｎｇｅ ｎｏｔｉｏｎ ｏｆ society, Naruhodo． Too many years of Japan Inc brainswashing, methinks. From what you say, as you don't know where other posters are all from, you seem have the idea that every other country in the world's economy is struggling. You think to have got the idea that Japan is still stomping majestically forward on a buoyant market, pounding its carbon footprint into the ground with all the consumption you proudly trumpet. Last time I looked, Japan was the poster child for deflation and an ever collapsing internal market. This is not because the naughty consumers are failing to do their patriotic duty, but because millions and millions of them are ageing into a future of increasing poverty, or dying, or if younger, stopping having children because although they want to, the society and economy is so rigged against them it's not viable to do so, and now, a huge percentage of people are not even finding a partner in prime child-raising ages because the prospects are so grim. Exhort them all you like to think more of Japan Inc and spend more, if the realities of that bubble age are gone for good, you're on a loser there!
Some people are indeed brainwashed into thinking that completely environmentally unsustainable consumption patterns are somehow virtuous, but I think that model is now crumbling before our eyes. It spells mid and long term disaster. Meanwhile, "people like us" are trying to protect the planet and keep to more sustainable, environmentally friendly consumption.
Posted in: Japan extends tax breaks on low-polluting vehicles
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as_the_crow_flies
Sorry, my mistake. 5.000 a week. I was doing the comparison to the UK system. It's 256,000 a year at 60, rising to 350,000 a year at 65. It's not based on any concept of what you need to live on, it's a number crunching exercise. If like me you were not paying in from 20 because you happen not to be Japanese, this is what the numbers pan out at. I think I'd have to collect this amount for about 20 years just to get back the money I paid in. The good news is if I manage to stay in work and keep up my contributions until I'm 60 that the amount just might rise to the dizzy height of 50,000 a month.
I know cleo, it's thanks to *karakikan *that makes me eligible to actually get something. Oh, and this is for two of us to live off as hubby is disabled and can't get work. He wants to, but they don't really go for disabled foreigners at many Japanese companies. We're training ourselves to be like the cars of the future, to live off water.
Posted in: Try finding a job at 60
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as_the_crow_flies
If you're looking to stay in Japan and don't have private income, this could be YOUR future. Where I work, there is mandatory retirement at 60 (with no final payment). I now qualify for pension from 60, the pension office worked out my entitlement and it now stands at 5,000 yen a month, rising to 8,000 at 65, based on my current contributions (been in Japan 16 years). So the prospect for me in a very few years is having a monthly income of 5.000 yen. check your real prospects, and above all, I suggest you don't sneer at all those older people you see doing menial jobs for 800 yen an hour. Even two hours work a week might be bringing in more than they get in pension, perhaps.
If they want to get seikatsu hogo to supplement their pensions, they have to destitute themselves first.
Posted in: Try finding a job at 60
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as_the_crow_flies
Getting sick of what, exactly? Does that mean you'd rather go on with business as usual* Yakuza milking companies dry, with the nod from those companies' legally appointed executives, who stand by or actively collude in this happening? I think a lot of people are
of the culture of immunity for leeches and parasites who are allowed do carry on with these shenanigans, and get away with it for years, despite commiting crimes.
From the comments they make, it would seem that many on this board are pro-corruption, pro-yakuza, pro-impunity for the few who get away with stealing millions from the hard-working employees and shareholders who've built up firms. Unbelievable!
Posted in: Ex-Olympus CEO Woodford heads to U.S. for FBI talks
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as_the_crow_flies
He is viewed here as a snitch and a pariah
Ah, the convenient passive tense! No wonder the Japanese are in love with it! Viewed by who? According to who? Probably by Kikukawa, Mori and Yamada, yes. Quite probably by those members of the Yamaguchi-gumi who are now suspected to have received 50% of the missing millions in the Olympus accounts.
And if it were to be true that this sentiment was widespread, it would speak volumes for Japanese morals, and connexion with reality. Morals because this is crime, corruption and fraud, on a huge scale. Reality because if you do business in a multinational world, you can't expect to run and hide under the skirts of your own country's white-collar crime-tolerant laws and regulations. You're subject to the laws and regulations of whatever countries you do business in. You accept international investment, auditing, because they're a necessity in this globalisated world, you're accountable according to international standards.
Posted in: Ousted Olympus CEO Woodford to return to Japan next Wed
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as_the_crow_flies
If you don't like the massive food waste that happens here, there's another thing you can do - vote with your feet, and stop buying ready-made meals from convenience stores. If demand drops, they'll soon reduce the amount they put on sale. I've been taking my own lunch to work for a couple of years now, and saving myself over 150,000 yen a year into the bargain.
Posted in: What can be done to reduce the amount of food items that get discarded each day by convenience stores and supermarkets?
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as_the_crow_flies
Is that Japanspeak for it should not join? Will being slow change anything? Can Japan always expect that all arrangements will be suited for Japan? Or does it need to recognise its fast-declining clout and realise that sometimes it will have to compromise on what suits 'Japan'? The speed of the rise of competitor companies to Japanese exporters like Sony or Toyota give the lie to that. A lot of Japanese firms that taking its time is the last thing Japan Inc can afford to do.
Posted in: U.S. seeking to boost its clout in Asia through trade
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as_the_crow_flies
I think it's telling that local ordinances have been brought in against the yakuza, rather than laws passed nationally. That tells you everything about Japanese politicians, doesn't it?
I personally think that making it illegal to support organised crime is an intelligent way to try and address the problem, but I also have this niggling doubt. Isn't this victimising the victims? Say you set up a business and the local gang sends someone round to politely suggest you start making your contributions. You are afraid, for your business, yourself and those around you. Who is going to protect you from the yakuza if you say no? There has to be a huge push on the part of the police to convince the public that they are capable of and are going to protect ordinary people who start to say no. Even tougher if you're already being extorted. Otherwise the victims are going to be ordinary people.
Posted in: Yakuza pundit: New laws unlikely to eradicate gangs
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as_the_crow_flies
@warnerbro. Amen! There you have it! I actually agree, from an environmental point of view, that countries should try to increase their food self-sufficiency. But, the opening of markets to force the agricultural sector to rationalise are also necessary. What they call co-ops here actually seem like cartels. A case in point. The word came down from JA that consumers were getting far too picky about their cesium and strontium intake and that a lot of farmers were finding it hard to offload their produce that consumers were not convinced was safe to eat. Rather than tackling this issue by calling in experts to help them run stringent testing, publishing the results, clear labelling and promotion of these scientific safety standards in supermarkets, they strongarmed the supermarkets into respecting farmers feelings by taking down prefecture of origin labelling of fresh vegetables. Now you need to take a microscope to the packaging and read the small print to find where your spinach is coming from. And just in case you get too canny, half the time it's not even labelled, or they mix Fukushima and Kanagawa cucumbers. Hah! And they lecture us about food security! How about food SAFETY!
I have a lot of sympathy for the many farmers who do want to continue farming, know things need to change, and are ready to try another way. Why doesn't JA get the government to help with advisory services to set up true co-ops, change land-use laws if there's a need for re-zoning in some places e.g. areas in Tohoku damaged by the tsunami that they could change land-use in order to build in safer places, or make it easier to resolve land title issues that mean that a piece of land can't be used because of some age-old dispute. They could encourage immigration for young workers to set up businesses, set up training courses so they can reduce reliance on pesticides, organise machinery-sharing associations ...
There must be a million and one practical ways to encourage revitalisation of agriculture.
Another completely unadressed issue in this whole "food security" debate is the fact that the Japanese consumer has been trained over the last half century to expect fruit and veg that looks like plastic and tastes like cardboard. If there wasn't such massive food waste, then perhaps more people could get well fed from the food that's already being grown, but is being destroyed before it ever gets near a dinner table. Get the monopoly retailers out of the way and food security would probably go up by 20% overnight.
Posted in: Big anti-TPP rally held in Tokyo as deadline for decision looms
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as_the_crow_flies
This is impressive! My respect to the boys. I hope they find a way to donate it to an organisation or organisations that are transparent and that the money actually goes to helping the people most in need of help. There's so much to be done up there - and so much potential for siphoning of money that's given with the best of intentions. I hope they target small voluntary groups that are moving mountains up there, not big bureacratic dinosaurs that are out of touch, or worse still, corrupted organisations that are lining their own pockets out of human misery.
Posted in: Pop group Arashi raises Y300 mil for disaster relief
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as_the_crow_flies
I hate to burst James A Foley's bubble, specially when he had to travel such a long way to report on his findings in Iwaki, but today's Mainichi tends to disagree with him, in an article entitled 'Gov't releases map of radioactive tellurium-129m contamination around nuke plant', (http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20111101p2a00m0na011000c.html) James A., wafting on a cloud of hyperbole, gushes that
Well it may seem they do, specially if your flight's been kindly paid to make it seem to, but unfortunately the government seems to say the opposite, which is highly regrettable. Yes, hmm. Indeed, the map actually seems to show Iwaki generously peppered with radioactivity, in impudent defiance of Foley's divine winds theory. The article goes on to say
The article does say the amounts of tellurium found are no longer a concern because of its short half-life. However, the presence of "...a relatively small dose" of tellurium indicates deposits of other radioactive isotopes, in particular cesium, in the same places.
I remember an old resort poster advertising Blackpool with the slogan 'I'm enjoying the ozone!' Maybe he can tell us Iwaki should do the same with its cesium134-137 -strontium complex.
And as for this part:
it's beyond crass. I think most of us had figured out that even irradiated landscapes can be beautiful, and that radioactivity doesn't make the irradiated either evil, dishonest, or even unreal. Still, maybe there are people out there who need to be reassured on that point.
James A. Foley intrepidly jetted in, was driven around in a car for an afternoon, jetted out, then sat down to write this utter tosh about the 'evocative outskirts of nuclear no-man's land' and make a glib joke about people not glowing. For people stuck there because the government is in denial and doesn't want to pay out by widening the evacuation zone, many are left with the nagging uncertainty and fear, wondering if, as they try to piece their families' daily lives back together, they are or their children are slowly and steadily being exposed to chronic, low level radiation doses that will play out over the next years and decades in their bodies. Spectacularly bad hack journalism by a paid shill.
Posted in: Traveling to the edge: Why tourism in Fukushima makes more sense then ever
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as_the_crow_flies
Should we additionally consider them flyjin and disloyal for leaving Thailand in its hour of need? Or is that just reserved for the Japanese factory workers who fled the Thailand floods?
I wish these Thai workers all the best and hope it helps them to support their families back in Thailand who are hit by the flooding. I also hope they get treated and paid fairly while they are here.
Posted in: Thousands of flood-hit Thais to be allowed to work in Japan
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as_the_crow_flies
Google "Ex-Olympus CEO Woodford says seeking police protection" to watch an informative interview of Woodford by Reuters. Also "OLYMPUS: Bringing It Into Focus–A Special Breach Of Trust?" which puts a clear case to suggest Olympus was basically taken over by the yakuza in 2008, in a similar way to Lehman Brothers Japan.
All very very interesting, and I wish Woodford the best of luck in trying to deal with this. I won't hold my breath that any Japanese organisation or legal body is going to do anything here, but certainly the international repercussions for Japan, and Japanese companies are going to come, if it doesn't do something about this.
In a funny way, Kikukawa is right about the cultural argument he tossed out to explain ousting Woodford. It's certainly not the Japanese way of doing business! There appears to be no obligation to shareholders or employees, either explicit or implicit, in the way these dinosaurs behave themselves.
Posted in: Fired Olympus CEO dismisses internal probe
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as_the_crow_flies
@Alita
First of all Alita, how about avoiding the emotive terms like "paranoid" and "flying away", and the bad translations from Japanese like "running." I thought that whole tacky flyjin rubbish had disappeared back down the whole it crawled out of months back. Second, a lot of people, some of them Japanese and some of them non-Japanese ARE deciding to move away, or to leave Japan altogether. Of those that are not, many are making really hard decisions about whether to send children out of Kanto, or out of Japan, if they have jobs to hold down and feel that they have to split up their families for their childrens' sake. Many more would like to move, but don't feel they can, economically, or because they don't know how to go about emigrating. They feel trapped. Many more are resigned, and just hoping for the best. And yes, yet more are in denial. I think you will find that very few Japanese feel they are doing "just fine", as you are. As far as eating and drinking goes, I see a lot of people studying labels very carefully in the supermarket, and from the reactions of the staff when I ask questions, I know that a lot of people are doing the same. If you're okay with whatever comes at you, then fine, good luck to you, but try and respect those who are concerned for themselves or their children.
As a lot of posters have explained to you, chronic radiation exposure like we're getting is first, hard to measure because the information is not being given us in a timely, scientific, consistent and reliable manner, second it will be varying wildly because of the way it's being dispersed through the air, the food chain, and eventually the water supply, and third there is the government's wildcard of spreading the pain by incinerating radioactive waste. This makes it almost impossible to know who's being exposed to and how much.
The impact on everyone's health will be similarly hard to quantify. Radiation impacts the body in a multitude of ways, and some may take 30 or 40 years to manifest themselves. It's not surprising you haven't sprouted a new hand out of your shoulder or developed lung or stomach cancer, or heart disease, or leukaemia over the last six months. Just like most smokers will feel "just fine" within six months of starting to smoke. However, something between a quarter and a third of cancer deaths in Japan are currently attributable to smoking. I don't believe I can live in a bubble either, but I do everything I can to avoid second hand smoke, because I want to reduce my chances of cancer and heart disease or stroke. Seems like common sense to me, not paranoia. In fact, not doing whatI can to avoid exposure seems, well ... stupid.
Likewise with the nuclear disaster, you can expect a similar process of growing numbers of deaths attributable to radiation exposure to kick into gear over the next decades. This is something that the experience of Chernobyl has demonstrated. And just taking the case of cancer, which is just one of the illnesses caused by exposure to radiation, you can be sure that it's not a "just fine" way to go.
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as_the_crow_flies
Yes, it was rebuilt. They'd just opened a couple of weeks before when I went up in August, and it was the only new building in that area, Koganehana, apart from the also newly built Seven-Eleven. I bought a few things there, and yes, they were great, so friendly and it was great to see at least one local business in an area that's just dead after nightfall, even though people live in the area.
Posted in: Bakery stands out in tsunami wasteland
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as_the_crow_flies
There is denial on a massive scale going on here, both on the health hazards of the waste, and the fact that local governments are too scared to say that huge tracts of land are not going to suitable either for living on or for cultivating. Some coastal areas, for example in Ishinomaki, are now a metre lower than they were, and should be considered unviable for settlement. That people in those areas want the debris out of sight is understandable, but the considerations should be based on the potential public health risk, flooding or earthquake risk, and on the economic practicality of making the land usable for whatever they want to use it for. Considering depopulation in general of those areas, and the loss of tax revenues that this implies, along with the ageing population, they need to be realistic about the kind of public works projects, such as draining land and then building up the level, never mind decontaminating it, that they can take on. And that's without even starting to consider the radiation issue. Looked at in this way, the unholy haste to get all the debris out of Tohoku seems even more meaningless and impractical.
Posted in: Miyagi begins testing debris for radioactivity before sending it to other prefectures
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as_the_crow_flies
Zichi is spot on. To me the big certainty is that this contains a soup of toxins. Public service workers up there are pretty much unanimous about that too. The basic soup will include asbestos, sewage, and any kind of toxins that you will find in any kind of car engines. Anyone who's done drain cleaning or cleaning out under people's houses in tsunami areas knows what this is like. There is black gloopy gunk that spread over everything. That much, combined with pictures showing the force of the tsunami, will tell you that any and every toxin that was already in the environment was generously spread over the whole tsunami area, and over everything. You burn timbers from a house, they're soaked in this soup. The radiation is the icing on the cake. We know enough to know we don't know enough about concentrations of different isotopes, but speculation about levels on the outside or in the middle of the mountain are no more than that. In the week or two immediately after the Daichi explosions, it was snowing up there. The debris would have been coated in whatever the snow brought down, and when the snow melted it would have soaked down through everything. My speculation is that some debris is going to have very high concentrations, and some very low, so random sampling of a small amount is unscientific and meaningless. That's why it all needs to be treated as toxic waste, moved as little as possible, and NOT BURNT!!! This is obvious, and that anyone is even considering doing business out of this massive public health threat, spreading it around and incinerating it tells you just how morally bankrupt the government is.
Posted in: Miyagi begins testing debris for radioactivity before sending it to other prefectures
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as_the_crow_flies
It was due to nuclear rumours arising from the harmful accident It was due to harmful nuclear arising from the rumour accident It was due to harmful accident arising from the nuclear rumour
> There is no safety problem at all in our city, as far as radiation is concerned
There is no city problem at all in our concern, as far as radiation is safety There is no radiation problem at all in our city, as far as safety is concerned There is no concern at all in our city, as far as radiation is problem There is no concern problem in our city, as far as radiation is safety There is no safety concern in our city, as far as radiation is problem radiation is safety radiation is safety radiation is safety (fadeout)
In honour of Gil Scott Heron
Posted in: Hermitage cuts short Japan exhibition tour due to radiation fears
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as_the_crow_flies
Somewhere else on this site it was reported that there are nearly 50,000 centenarians in Japan, and rising, and yet over 50 is in the twilight years? So what percentage of the population does that tip over the edge? 60%? More? Arggggh!
Posted in: Over-50 first-time marriages increasing