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.
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britling
Strictly speaking, the British monarchy is not completely hereditary since the Privy Council must meet, approve the succession and take the new Sovereign's oath. In theory, they could block Charles or reject a younger male heir in favour of an older female one. Such action would be unlikely, however, in a system that runs based on convention and precedence.
A return to the Anglo-Saxon model of nominating monarchs might be a step in the right direction.
Posted in: UK mulling royal succession rule change
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britling
Let's hear firm, detailed proposals from the LDP for dealing with this mess. They've already refused to work with the government during this crisis more than once, and yet now they're complaining that the government is incompetent. So why not step up? Tanigaki must be secretly breathing a sigh of relief that this didn't happen on his watch.
Posted in: Gov't under fire for disaster response; TEPCO chief heckled in Diet
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britling
I got sucked into it because I found it was the only way to communicate with some people. But I only use it for sending messages and occasionally re-tweeting stuff. I think tweeting your own opinions is just like talking to a wall. Then again, I'm on JT. :)
Posted in: Do you use Twitter?
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britling
I think like most people here criticising the 'flyjin', I was talking about the ones who cleared out even though they were many miles from the Fukushima plants. If you were living in the post-tsunami disaster zone that the foreign media have mostly now forgotten about, you had several good reasons to get out. Likewise if you're close to the reactors.
Posted in: Why did those foreigners who decided to leave Japan in the aftermath of the March 11 disaster come in for so much derision from some people who labeled them with words like 'flyjin?'
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britling
"We gotta respect everyone's decisions" is the kind of opinion that annoys me most, as it seeks to excuse inexcusable behaviour based on panic, fear and ignorance. It's more like, "Hey, I don't like your decision but I don't want to take it up with you." Wuss.
As for people leaving because of their families begging them to: stand up to them. What are you, still in nappies? Why not start by asking them why they believe tabloid newspapers more than their own relative, and one who is on the ground at that.
@Proudgaijin: actually, the majority of legal foreigners here are long-termers.
Posted in: Why did those foreigners who decided to leave Japan in the aftermath of the March 11 disaster come in for so much derision from some people who labeled them with words like 'flyjin?'
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britling
Of course, the US is morally obligated to help out in such a disaster, but it is debatable how much credit they should be given for that. It is, of course, partly because of the US occupation and subsequent military arrangements that Japan has less-developed armed forces that can respond to crises. For example, they only recently gave back control of Okinawan airspace.
As for the UK: USAF bases are officially RAF bases, and the US has at no time occupied the UK. Also, many of the bases are in out-of-the-way locations and the local economies are not reliant on them. So, there is less opposition to their presence than in Japan.
Posted in: Disaster aid puts new face on U.S. military in Japan
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britling
Regarding the experts vs. non-experts in the Slovic study: yes, the experts rated nuclear power as 20th in a list of most dangerous activities. But for the anti-nuclear people out there, you can take comfort that nuclear power is indeed more dangerous than: food colouring; home appliances; hunting; prescription antibiotics; vaccinations; spray cans; high school/college football; power mowers; mountain climbing; and skiing.
Posted in: What's behind our conflicted feelings on nuclear power?
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britling
I hope she hasn't got one of those luminescent clocks. Wave the geiger counter near it and she'll think the whole place is covered in fallout.
The professionals are using specialist equipment at monitoring stations across the region to measure the radiation. It ain't even close to dangerous in places like Tokyo, nor will it ever be. Too far away and not enough explosions.
Posted in: Geiger counters sell out in Akihabara over radiation fears
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britling
Some great, classic denialist claims above, which take a long time to unpick because the premises are so fundamentally wrong. No, the fact that the climate changes naturally does not mean that change now must all be natural as well. No, a British judge did not identify 9 actual errors in Gore's film (Most of these alleged errors, picked out by a non-expert judge - who did not dispute the central thesis that warming is man-made - were later refuted, and his instruction was that the film should be accompanied by alternative arguments, not that it should be labelled 'opinion' only). No, the IPCC are not part of a vast climate conspiracy. They make errors, same as everyone else, but fixating on a handful in years of reports running to thousands of pages does no-one any favours.
Here's another way of looking at the issue. Say the 'skeptics' are right. How and why, then, is the climate changing? If man-made emissions have no significant effect, why is the planet seeing rapid warming? What mechanism ensures that those emissions have no effect? We know that the presence of carbon dioxide will lead to warming of an atmosphere, so why wouldn't all that CO2 do anything? How can 'natural cycles' that play out over millennia be responsible for rapid warming now? If you think the planet is not warming, even cooling, how is it that human activity has no effect at all? What is responsible for cancelling everything out, consistently and completely, over time?
In other words, what are the 'skeptical' models of climate change or stability? Denialists are very good at cherry-picking inconsistencies in a vast amount of research supporting man-made climate change, but not very good at providing their own models or explanations. Unfortunately, they will also repeat the same arguments, ad infinitum, rather than modify their views in accordance with evidence. In that sense, their views are not part of science but of a political game.
Posted in: Prince Charles blasts climate-change skeptics
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britling
The elephant in the room is religion. Since Iran is a theocracy, any move against the government will be viewed by a significant portion of the population as an anti-Islamic plot. Unlike Egypt, a lot more people in Iran have a lot to lose if democracy takes root.
Posted in: Egypt echoes across region: Iran, Bahrain, Yemen
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britling
The Japanese have the moral high ground but not the actual island high ground... seriously, in the 1940s they would have had the entitlement but the problem is that generations of the now-exclusively Russian population have lived and died there.
The other problem is that under the 1951 San Francisco treaty, Japan relinquished all the islands and officially stated at the time that those included the southern Kurils. The deal to hand back some of them in the 1950s, which was blocked by the US, would have officially assigned the larger islands to the USSR in any case as well.
Yeah, I know the USSR never signed the treaty and the international community has never officially said that all the islands are Russia's. But the USSR got them by default. There's no international law that says Hokkaido belongs to Japan either, but everyone accepts that it does.
I found an indication that all this goes back to the 1855 Russia-Japan treaty, which apparently differ slightly in the Japanese and Russian versions... the Russian one says that Russia will take the "other" Kuril islands, with that word missing from the Japanese version, i.e. the Japanese version alone implies that only the northern islands are actually the Kurils. A stroke of a pen and 200 years of conflict follows.
Posted in: At this point in time, who has the best claim to the disputed four Russian-administered islands off Hokkaido?
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britling
I think the problem with global-warming denialists is that they adopt the premise that 'warming' must mean that the weather would get warmer across the whole planet. Therefore, if it's cold somewhere or glaciers are increasing in one part of the world - even if they're melting elsewhere - then global warming can't be happening.
This, of course, is not what global warming is. An increase in the overall average temperature of the planet by even a few tenths of a degree has major effects because the climate works on tipping points (in the same way that water boils suddenly around 100 degrees celsius at sea level). That can mean that in some parts of the world it would actually get colder. Colder or warmer, either way you get more extreme weather, which is bad for us.
Posted in: Prince Charles blasts climate-change skeptics
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britling
No doubt we will hear much about how this victory owed much to Japanese willpower, Japanese spirit, Japanese genes... and little about how their foreign coach (who the players didn't originally want to avoid the language barrier) had completely reorganised the squad.
Posted in: Japan lifts Asian Cup with 1-0 win over Australia
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britling
It will be a strange new internet if people start using Facebook as their primary search tool, staying logged-in forever to one site and one network for everything.
Posted in: Google tries to hold off Facebook threat
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britling
It is unlikely that the Muslim Brotherhood would take power in Egypt; they lack support both from secular opposition groups and the governments of the wider region. They've stood as independent candidates in the past and not received a large share of the vote. Mostly, Mubarak has used the spectre of the Brotherhood seizing power to stay in office.
Posted in: As unrest sweeps Egypt, president refuses to quit
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britling
Unfit and overweight??
Posted in: NHK newscaster Yuko Aoyama to move to daytime TV
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britling
No tears shed over Taguchi's departure. I always felt the programme was sharper when it was just Aoyama in the studio. But no doubt the next two will continue with the practice of an older man pontificating to a nodding younger woman.
Posted in: NHK newscaster Yuko Aoyama to move to daytime TV
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britling
"The big news today was the football" they said at the end of NHK News Watch 9 tonight, after conspicuously failing to mention the new #1 bestseller. Comedy show on the other side of the planet, though...
Gratifyingly, though, Ichihashi's book is running at only 2.5 stars on Amazon at the moment.
Posted in: Ichihashi's book goes on sale; says he hopes to give royalties to Hawker family
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britling
"[Obama] defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity. The United States' belief in that truth is what brings me here today... We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world's information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it. This challenge may be new, but our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic."
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"This disclosure is not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests -- it is an attack on the international community."
Posted in: WikiLeaks founder turns to Switzerland for help
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britling
I also have a Japanese female friend...
She has fluent English, an advanced degree from a US university and a US teaching certification, none of which, she learned on her return, count for anything here. She has to do the full teachers' license course with no exemptions, including sitting through English classes taught by people whose fluency is well below hers. She is currently unemployable despite her background. To cap it all, she was marked down by Japanese teachers for her English speaking ability: "You speak English too fast. We have trouble understanding what you're saying." No too fast, too fluent.
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