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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donkusai
What a horrible match to watch with the sound turned up. I tried to watch it for as long as I could, but after a while I just had to turn it off. All that grunting and wheezing... the international tennis community needs to speak up about it or they'll lose a lot of viewers.
Posted in: Azarenka thrashes Sharapova to win Australian Open
1
donkusai
Swallowed by a wild crocodile? I didn't know there was any other sort. I'm pretty sure crocodiles can't be tamed.
Posted in: Crocodile swallows Indonesian girl
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donkusai
The movie and music industries have been playing this game since VHS and cassette recorders first came out, always claiming that these technologies will destroy the industry and trying to lobby for laws that essentially punish people before they get their day in court (guilty until proven innocent). What history actually shows us is that when these industries embrace the new technologies, their profits go up. Instead, they try to use draconian measures to maintain existing profits without wanting to put any effort into addressing the changing world we live in. It's called lazy business practices, and companies that are lazy tend to collapse under their own antiquated weight. We've seen a good example of this just this week with Kodak. You can't legislate for profits, you need to earn them.
Posted in: U.S. Congress puts online piracy bills on hold
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donkusai
Does this mean that you think Japan seizing Chinese boats in their territorial waters is illegal? At least Australia has the decency to talk to the Japanese government and ask them to leave rather than just arrest them. With the Yushin Maru No.3 now well within 12-nautical-miles of Australian land and refusing to leave, it will be interesting to see what happens. At the very least, this is a disrespectful and hypocritical action by the Japanese government (regardless of what you think about whaling in general).
Posted in: Aussie PM criticizes antiwhaling activists after Japan decides to free them
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donkusai
The comments above raise an interesting question. Just how much whale research does Japan do around its own territorial waters? Cost-wise, it would be far more efficient to research whales locally, or is Japan's whaling research really only focused on restarting commercial whaling, hence all that expense to travel to the other end of the world. It would be an interesting stat to know as it really would reveal how genuine Japan is in regard to this research.
Posted in: Whale's body found in Tokyo Bay
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donkusai
Minello7, if they split the country in two, then what of the people who live in the north who aren't Muslim? They'd be faced with the exact problem that you said you don't want to see, and on top of that the power of secular government would be halved (at best). As the story says, the "followers of both faiths have for years co-existed in the different regions". If we can identify what has changed recently, it would go a long way to telling us what needs to be done to address this issue. It only takes one group of idiots who think have access to weapons and think their views (whatever they are) should be imposed on everyone else for this sort of mess to happen. Whether ideological, religious or political, no one group has the right to hold a whole country hostage to violence.
Posted in: Nigeria killings called 'ethnic, religious cleansing'
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donkusai
Well, it's 2012 here and for those still living in the past (2011), I must admit it doesn't look that much different to 2011 so far.
Posted in: New Year cheer starts early in time-jumping Samoa
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donkusai
While I'm no fan of guns and think there's no good reason to have them other than in the sporting arena, I think the issue here goes much deeper. I just don't understand why people who feel that they want to end it all want to take other people with them. If you've had enough of life, go see a professional councilor. Don't take your gun and blow your family away. Nobody deserves that. This type of news, though it seems to be repeated over and over again, never stops making me feel sad for those innocent men, women and children who pay the ultimate price for someone else's self-absorption. My condolences to the surviving family and friends of these people.
Posted in: Gunman in Texas murder-suicide dressed as Santa
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donkusai
You know, most religious people are actually nice, just as most people who don't believe in a religion are also nice. Most people, irrespective of religious belief, get annoyed with the minority who try to push their own beliefs down other people throats whether it's their religious beliefs or distortions of religious beliefs used to try to make them sound deliberately ridiculous. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive (one answers how, the other why). Some of the greatest thinkers in history (Greece) wrote 2,500 years or so ago. We should all accept that not every one will agree with us and not think that we have to "win" every argument as most end up breaking down to a he-said/she-said scenario anyway.
Anyway, hope you all be a happy (and tolerant) Christmas and New Year.
Posted in: Spiritual reminders
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donkusai
A good motto to live by. We enter this world with nothing and we leave the same way. We've just got the make the most of the time in between. Sometimes we need to be shaken out of our comfort zones to realise this. Merry Christmas to all.
Posted in: Room at the inn for Fukushima Christians
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donkusai
The Sydney to Hobart is one of the greatest (and difficult) yacht races in the world. I'd love nothing more than to see a bunch of Asian teams attack the course with one of them walking away with the prize.
The only thing that worries me about this years entrants is that one of the Hong Kong yachts is called "Strewth". Is this a common word in Hong Kong?
Posted in: Sydney to Hobart yacht race calls out to Asia
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donkusai
This has more to do with poor parenting than with racism. Unfortunately, international students aren't always aware of local conditions and often find themselves in parts of a city that locals wouldn't go anywhere near at night. This makes them prime candidates for robbery. It's the same in every country. My job is to work with international students, and while most of them are very intelligent, they are completely unprepared for the cultural differences between their home country and Australia.
This is not "racism", this is spoilt kids who think the the world owes them everything they want and are only looking for the easiest mark to take. There is little doubt that if a white Australian had walked alone through the same park that night that the same thing would have happened. The true tragedy is that a young man with his whole future before him had it all taken away by a greedy kid with no morals who was willing to stab someone with a knife just so he could get the latest hi-tech fashion accessory. Very sad.
Posted in: Australian teen jailed for 13 years over Indian's murder that fueled diplomatic dispute
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donkusai
So we should respect everyone except those who don't believe the same thing as us? Funny, but we tend to get the same line from religious fundamentalists. Intolerance is a door that swings both ways.
Posted in: Study: Christian population shifts from Europe
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donkusai
Yeah, tell that to the people of Russia under Stalin or Cambodia under Pol Pot. If you get rid of religion, the wars will be political or ideological as pretty much all the major wars of the 20th century were. Get rid of politics and ideology and the wars will be over greed as we see today in some of the failed developing states. In the end, when you break it down, wars are usually fought on the want of power, on intolerance or on plain old greed. If you can work out a way to get rid of those, we'll all be much better off.
Posted in: Study: Christian population shifts from Europe
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donkusai
A man whose world clearly revolved around himself. I have always believed that the level of egotism, arrogance and self importance shown by the likes of Hitchens and others of the same ilk, whether in the field of politics, religion, pop-psychology or whatever, makes the world a darker place.
Posted in: Author Christopher Hitchens dies at 62
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donkusai
I can't help but thinking that we're in for another long Cold War style stand-off in the future, though centered around East Asia. We can only hope that, like the European based original, no actual conflict results from it. Neither China nor the West will win from actual conflict. I just hope the leaders of all these countries keep this in mind before they get too high up on their patriotic horse.
Posted in: China sends patrol ship to disputed waters
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donkusai
Serrano, I remember reading the stats and nature is responsible for around 97% of CO2. The logical response to this is that cutting greenhouse emissions seems like a complete waste of time, but the natural system is in balance and pretty much all of that CO2 is reabsorbed into nature. The problem with adding our 3% to the already existing natural CO2 emissions is that it puts the total CO2 in the atmosphere beyond the rate nature reabsorbs it, meaning that if, say, 2% of what we add is not reabsorbed, that 2% extra will still be around when we add another 2% the following year, taking the total above the ability of nature to reabsorb to 4%. As it increases, it's soon 10%, then 20% and so on. As of 2009, we're sitting at 39% over normal natural levels, but it is still rising.
Posted in: Climate talks see some progress as clock ticks
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donkusai
Yet more people were killed in the 20th century than any other, and pretty much all of these killers were atheist/secular in nature, including Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot. What do we learn from this? Should we put secularism and atheism in the murderous doctrine bucket? Of course not. What the great killers of history have in common can be better related to megalomania and narcissism. When one group, whether religious or anti-religious, stands up and says "everyone who disagrees with us is stupid/wrong", then we start getting trouble. When we lack compassion and tolerance for those who disagree with us, then we have problems.
And that seems to be exactly the problem here. Seems this guy has ended up on the wrong end of the Saudi religious police because his brand of Islam didn't match theirs. I hope the Aussie government can sort something out and get him out of there.
Posted in: Australian sentenced to 500 lashes in Saudi Arabia for blasphemy
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donkusai
Regardless of the domestic American situation, Obama remains one of the most popular US presidents on the international stage. Whether you love him or loathe him, he's done an amazing job of restoring some of America's international image after the debacle that was the W. Bush era.
Posted in: Obama talks Bieber and beasts with Aussie students
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donkusai
From other, more in-depth interviews that I've heard, this "moderate Islamic group" want to call upon their own beliefs to create a stable and workable Tunisia that will benefit the whole country. They have no intention of embedding Islamist beliefs in the constitution, but rather they intend to create a secular constitution that protects the people of Tunisia and enables the country to grow. The "moderate" part of the label used to describe them apparently implies that they want to protect the country from the more extreme forms of their own religion. If this is true, I wish them all the best in achieving their goals.
Posted in: Tunisia's moderate Islamists win landmark vote