JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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Why do Japanese change their attitude when they communicate with foreigners?
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Confrontation
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U.S. Navy investigating how parts fell off aircraft near Atsugi
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California court to decide if SeaWorld whales are illegal 'slaves'
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Kuroki reported pregnant 2 weeks after denying relationship with Akanishi
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- Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) in Kanto region
- RCS (RCSコーポレーション), Kanto
- Salary: ¥180,000 ~ ¥250,000 / Month includes performance bonus
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- Assistant Language Teacher - TOKYO - late-March start
- Interac, Tokyo
- Salary: ¥230,000 ~ ¥255,000 / Month
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- Assistant Language Teacher - Kanagawa Prefecture - late-March start
- Interac, Kanagawa
- Salary: ¥230,000 ~ ¥255,000 / Month
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chardk1
A perfectly fair point, but not really the issue for a lot of people interested in this kind of bike. There are lots of housewives, older people, salarymen etc. who want a smooth, easy ride at all times and a bike that is literally no sweat to ride even in the summer. I live in Yoyogi Uehara, a quite hilly area, and I can say that a $1000 regular bike would be small comfort to a someone schlepping around in August from Uehara to Hatagaya. Factor in a business suit, 60-year old knees, a child seat, a basket full of groceries, etc. etc. and hands down, anyone who isn't primarily interested in getting a workout is better off with an electric-assist bike.
I think Americans sometimes fail to understand that for the overwhelming majority Japanese people, bicycle riding is not a hobby, a sport or an environmental statement, it's just a form of transportation. They just want to get from point A to point B with some shopping bags with a minimum of fuss. And from that standpoint it's hard to argue with "less effort required, period."
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chardk1
The current eneloop has a 240-watt motor equivalent to 1/3HP. If one assumes that the current eneloop which offers 50% power is intended to slightly exceed the power production of an athletic person, the new eneloop presumably will have 1/2HP or more in order to provide 66% power.
The 2X power only operates at below 10 km/h, and the 1X power up to 24 km/h, speeds that can easily be exceeded by the most casual of riders. The Japanese government has no interest in having people flying around at 60kph on the sidewalk. In any case working the motor to reach and sustain such speeds would drain the battery after only a few miles.
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chardk1
Not to get all technical, but they did consciously change the name of the country at this time to Dai-Nihon TEIKOKU, the Great Japanese Empire. There is a reason why the Japanese insisted the King of Japan be called an Emperor. As Tamogami freely admits, Japan engaged in imperialism to keep up with the West. I don't care how good your intentions are, how do you build an empire in the span of a generation without any military aggression, through coincidence and luck?
People like Tamogami don't seem to understand, even if it is possible to ponder the question of "ultimately did Japan do more harm than good?" that is not really something for Japanese conservatives to take aggressively assert and take credit for. It's like the son of a slaveholder saying "hey, Blacks in America are better off on the average than Blacks in Africa, so they should be THANKING us for slavery. We can't have good race relations until blacks show the proper gratitude toward people like me." You can't take "credit" for something you never intended to happen just because things turned out a certain way.
Posted in: Sacked Japan air force head defends WWII actions
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chardk1
All of the manner posters are bilingual, why not kill two birds with one stone. This one concerns behavior more specific to Japanese people, but that doesn't mean they should change the basic format. It would clearly be more stereotypical if they made warning posters in separate languages that purported to define the bad behavior of each group.
I'm not sure I would consider middle-aged men drinking until they puke and pass out to be acceptable behavior even at home. Ah, viva Japan!
Posted in: Manner poster
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chardk1
Compared to where, Singapore?
Personally, I'd rather have people get baked than have them get so strung out they drive trucks into crowds, but I guess that isn't the Japanese way.
Posted in: Is Japan becoming a 'drug heaven?'
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chardk1
Are the women's national teams going to call themselves Chattel of the Male Head of Household Japan to draw on their own contemporary status with the Samurai? As long as we are going with tradition.
Posted in: Japan to be known as 'Samurai Japan' at WBC
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chardk1
Yeah, that's terrible that people should pig out occasionally for fun, in civilized societies people understand they should grossly overeat every meal.
Posted in: Woman downs 383 bowls of soba in 10 minutes
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chardk1
I am a Democrat who supports Obama, but geez people, at some level you have to hold individuals accountable for their own actions.
It doesn't seem to make any sense to blame society or capitalism for this particular person's predicament. Lots of people work their way through college. It doesn't have to be Todai, he couldn't go to a vocational school, nothing? He got "bored" working at his parents's shop so with a high school education, no training, no plan, no money he just showed up in Tokyo and it's society's fault that nobody handed this guy a well-paying job?
Not to say things in Japan aren't a bit dire but if the subject of the article is any indication at least part of the problem is a surplus of listless young people with neither plans or skills. 9 man a month is not a lot of money, but at even a piddling 800 yen an hour that means he's only working about 25 hours a week. My wife's cousin is a high school dropout, he busted his ass for years as a truck driver, dishwasher and construction worker. He finally bought an old ramenya with his savings when he was in his early forties, and now ten years later he is quite well off, with a couple of yakiniku restaurants. If he lived his life like the subject of this article, he probably would be homeless by now.
The race can go to the swift OR the steady depending on the distance one is willing to traverse, but with some of these people it's like they aren't even showing up at the starting line. I'm not saying everyone can be successful but I don't see a shred of evidence this guy is trying hard and failing, just failing.
Posted in: Japan's burgeoning class: Working poor
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chardk1
Yeah, man these anti-GOP journalists are so biased that McCain-Palin never had a chance. Like that raging liberal Karl Rove who said on Fox News today that McCain has "a steep hill to climb," projected that as of today Obama would win in a landslide and criticized the McCain campaign staff for infighting and disloyalty that undercut the ticket. What can McCain do to fight this tide of biased liberals who won't even cut him any slack when he puts them on his payroll.
Noted political columnist David Frum, who is about as liberal as Rove, in the Washington Post: "John McCain is losing in a way that threatens to take the entire Republican Party down with him ... [he] has alienated and offended the great national middle, which was the only place where the 2008 election could have been won."
Plus the BBC polled people in 22 countries and found in every single country, Obama had more support than McCain. Stupid biased world! We will bomb them until they understand freedom and democracy means agreeing with American neocons!
I don't have a problem with pragmatic conservatism. I think George H.W. Bush was a highly underrated President. But McCain ran a lousy campaign in what was not a favorable year for the GOP. You want to ban abortion, cut taxes and build up the military then run on that, don't support the same trillion dollar bailout as the Democrat and then call the other guy a socialist and then cry when the media calls you a hypocrite.
Posted in: McCain dismisses poll numbers; insists he will win
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chardk1
What has this person done to be respected as a politician regardless of her age and gender?
Posted in: 'Too beautiful' Aomori politician losing supporters
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chardk1
Uh, you're not an actuary are you? The probability that someone 72 will die in the next five years of is his life is approximately ten times that of someone 47.
Posted in: Palin gets chance to overcome doubts in VP debate
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chardk1
What has been fascinating to me is hearing House minority leader John Boehrner and John McCain complain that the Democrats are responsible for the bill failing because Pelosi and Obama weren't persuasive enough in getting more Republicans to buy into the bailout. Uh guys, so at this critical time, on this critical issue, after you claimed this was the only thing you would be working on, your excuse is that the Democratic leaders in Congress didn't do your jobs for you?
It's getting pretty obvious how McCain's "bipartisan leadership" operates - say "I'm da bipartisan leader" loudest and oftenest and challenge the Democrat counterpart to actually do all the heavy lifting for both parties so you can take credit for everything if it works and blame the other guy if it doesn't, and all throughout do a lot of press conferences bragging about how you get results when in fact you can't even get a single congressman from your own state in your own party to support you on the solution you endorsed for the self-proclaimed biggest financial crisis of the past 80 years. That's some fine leadership.
Posted in: U.S. lawmakers try to revise bailout plan
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chardk1
A sign of the McCain's so-called leadership skills: the number of Arizona House members who voted for the bailout? ZERO. Even Bush, with little political capital, managed to help wrangle 9 "yes" votes from the regulation-unfriendly Texas contingent. McCain did achieve a kind of bipartisan cooperation I guess, if you mean both Republican and Democrat representatives from his home state (4 GOP, 4 Democrat) blew him off.
McCain has been all over the news blaming Obama (in now-classic McCain fashion, his usual line is "Obama and the Democrats kept the bill from passage, but now is not the time to fix blame" hypocritically 1) fixing blame and 2) lying, since it's the Republicans who killed the bill by a 2/3rds majority), but 50% of the Illinois members of the House, including 2 of 8 Republicans (1 abstaining), voted yes on the bailout bill. Assuming McCain is being sincere in claiming he wanted the bill passed and would spare no efforts in getting it done (not clear since he is ideologically opposed to these kinds of bailouts) . . . he is the one didn't get it done. And this is when he was supposedly focused on one thing and one thing only, imagine when he has to deal with multiple problems.
Posted in: U.S. lawmakers try to revise bailout plan
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chardk1
I was being sarcastic, sorry if that wasn't clear.
Posted in: Edo era firearms
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chardk1
I'm surprised the Koreans and Chinese didn't protest this blatant glorification of period Japanese aggression.
Posted in: Edo era firearms
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chardk1
I guess that's why all those men's magazines with the full-color spreads on manners sell so well.
Posted in: Manners more attractive than boobs, says Mika Kano
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chardk1
You know, Palin needs to just say "You're right, I don't have a lot of foreign policy experience right now. But neither did Truman, Clinton, Carter etc. and they did just fine in that regard. Also, John McCain is particularly gifted and experienced in that area, I'm a fast learner and in six months on the job I'll be as good as anybody. To me this is largely a manufactured issue by the Democrats." I wouldn't agree with most of that, but at least it is a logically and intellectually sound argument, unlike this expertise by osmosis theory she refuses to give up on. For God's sake, "people in Alaska trade with foreign countries and I'm their governor so I must be a foreign policy expert"? That isn't poor reasoning, that isn't reasoning at all. She is taking a hypothetical that could be true (i.e., the governor of Alaska *could *have relevant foreign policy experience) and presenting it baldly as a fact. Inexperienced is not good, but blind to one's weaknesses is a lot worse.
Posted in: Palin defends Alaska-Russia remark
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chardk1
And there you are, just like clockwork. Sometimes a caricature is simple because the subject is not complex.
Posted in: McCain warns Washington big shake-up is coming
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chardk1
Eh, whatever. I'm tired of stumping for (against?) people who insist on shooting themselves in the foot with the guns they love so dearly.
The sad truth is that the "liberal elites" "Hollywood pinkos" and "left-wing media" that supposedly all of the red-blooded "real" Americans are sticking it to by continually voting for people like Bush and McCain are among the Americans least affected by partisan policy decisions because they are relatively well situated economically, and have education and skills that make them competitive in a global market.
So let the "real Americans" who always "put America first" (an act apparently defined as "acting out of self-interest like everyone else, but being Republican") vote for whomever they want, but it is laughable such people think they are sticking it to Obama, Ellen DeGeneres, Keith Olbermann, etc. worse than they are sticking it to themselves. At the end of the day, liberal elites have houses and money. Their kids aren't going to Iraq. They don't have to worry about unplanned pregnancies or kids learning medieval science. Not surprisingly, liberal elites benefit from pro-rich, pro-corporate policies just the same as conservative elites. They just don't feel quite so good about it.
Like your Bible says, "as you sow, so shall you reap." Real Americans, you want it, you got it. Just don't kid yourself about who is really getting it and where.
Posted in: McCain warns Washington big shake-up is coming
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chardk1
Well, they just came out with a farce called "Hamlet 2" why not do the same with the "The Vagina Monologues 2."
Posted in: 22 female freelance TV presenters to hold poetry reading on stage