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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- 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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jeancolmar
I love this:
This is to say that the health of millions of people is going to depend on how the wind blows if all else fails. So much for the vaunted safety of nuclear power generation and to the safety standards of Tepco.
I also love the non-answer to "Why was the official announcement made late Sunday about something that occurred Friday?" The real answer is that the company and officials were trying to cover the facts until it was impossible to do so.
This is not unusual.
The BBC's Richard Black ("Huge blast at Japan nuclear power plant," 12 March 2011) notes:
Nuclear power generation is dirty and dangerous and should be phased out. End of discussion.
Posted in: Questions and answers about Japan's nuclear plant crisis
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jeancolmar
Right now John Pistole is the most dangerous enemy of democracy in the United States. TSA (aka Totally Stupid A**h***s) has become a virtual Gestapo under his rule. Note that the current fill body scanner / grope n' poke tactics of TSA were kept secret until they were suddenly sprung on the public. There is a question of whether the scanners are safe. There is no question that groping passengers is perverse. Also be advised that that if you refuse the scanners and the groping you will be taken into custody and held for an indeterminate time as a terrorist suspect--and you'll also be barred from flying.
John Pistole is creating an empire of terror for himself through TSA, an organization that has been useless since its founding and ought to be disbanded. Arrogant and contemptuous of the public, John Pistole is a latter day Joe McCarthy who ought to be fired immediately.
Posted in: TSA chief calls for understanding; pat-down leaves Michigan man covered in urine
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jeancolmar
This is a very sad case. Another young person I wish I could have saved.
Bullying is not simply endemic to Japan. It is a worldwide problem. There is a very familiar pattern to this case. Child is bullied and is silent about it. Authority looks the other way. Child commits suicide. Authority expresses surprise and tries to cover its institutional hind quarters.
Bullying does not end in school. It continues at work, on the street, in law enforcement and public service.
In this case, I hope that rotten principal resigns or is fired and the families of the children who bullied that girl to death are publicly shamed.
Posted in: Hokkaido schoolgirl commits suicide, blaming bullying
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jeancolmar
Thank Kein2 for the good word and the clarification. Good to be back. Been very bizzzzzy.
Posted in: TSA chief calls for understanding; pat-down leaves Michigan man covered in urine
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jeancolmar
Here is the latest from Yahoo about what Tom Sawyer about his interaction with TSA agents:
"Every time I tried to tell them about my medical condition, they said they didn't need to know about that," Sawyer told MSNBC. "One agent watched as the other used his flat hand to go slowly down my chest. I tried to warn him that he would hit the bag and break the seal on my bag, but he ignored me. Sure enough, the seal was broken and urine started dribbling down my shirt and my leg and into my pants."
I must add that TSA is only a part of the problem. Immigrations agents can be creepy as well--the sort who think you are going to be an illegal alien when it is obvious you are doing perfectly well in Japan. Then there the rude US airline personnel, who are the worst of the lot in that you are paying for their services.
But, that aside, TSA knew that Mr. Sawyer knew about his artificial bladder and refused to listen to him. TSA is blame in this matter.
On top of their thuggish inhumanity of TSA agents, TSA has nothing but the most arrogant contempt for the public. It has officially said that flying is a "privilege" and that if you, in effect, don't want to chance being humiliated by TSA don't fly. Unfortunately, flying is a necessity for the majority of people who fly. If there was a viable alternative, millions of people, including myself, would take it.
Posted in: TSA chief calls for understanding; pat-down leaves Michigan man covered in urine
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jeancolmar
TSA ought to be called Totally Stupid A** ****s. It is incredible that TSA personnel did not "listen" to this person with bladder cancer. It is not, however, surprising, considering the sort of low-level thugs working for TSA. TSA is a useless agency and ought to be dissolved. Unfortunately, this would put a lot of potential criminal elements out of the streets.
Posted in: TSA chief calls for understanding; pat-down leaves Michigan man covered in urine
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jeancolmar
Half the casualties of World War II were civilians, Frungy. Hiroshima is not exceptional in that way. Hiroshima and Nagasaki owe their fame to being bombed with exotic and new weapons of mass destruction. Interestingly, the firebombing of Tokyo yielded more civilian casualties than in Hiroshima.
Hiroshima has long been used as a smoke screen for Japan's Asian Holocaust. It has also been useful as a focal point in the battle against nuclear proliferation. These days, I prefer "Mayors for Peace" than presidents (and ex-presidents) and prime ministers for war.
Posted in: Hiroshima not shy about its atomic bomb legacy
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jeancolmar
Goodbye almost universal health care in the US. The combined capitalist interests cannot even stand the watered down Obama version health care for everyone.
When the Republicans finally slaughter almost universal health care, the American will not take the streets and demonstrate like the French. They'll eat it, they'll rejoice they don't have "socialized medicine." Then they will pray to Jesus to help them, blame their troubles on illegal immigrants and kill each other. When they get sick they'll just curl up and die.
In your face conservative American plague lice. We in Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Scandinavia and even the UK have it better than you.
Posted in: Republicans in charge take aim at health overhaul
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jeancolmar
News flash. According to Wikipedia, "On January 10, 2008 Citizen bought the Bulova Watch Company for $250 million. Together they are the world's largest watchmaker."
But Bulova is still headquartered in the US.
Amazing bit of information that.
Posted in: U.S. watchmaker Bulova establishes Japanese subsidiary
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jeancolmar
Given Japanese tastes, Bulova is going to have a tough fight competing with Rollex, Tag Heur, Breitling and, of course, the high end Seikos and Citizens. Good luck Bulova. Yes, it is amazing that the US still makes watches.
Posted in: U.S. watchmaker Bulova establishes Japanese subsidiary
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jeancolmar
If I were singe, I take all of the above.
But even if I were single I would not eat at Hooters. The food is far from healthy and it is overpriced. You are paying the high price for the view. You can get the same view for free on a sunny day on the Ginza.
Also, the name Hooters leaves much to be desired of as regard 21 century sensibilities. "Hooters" is a slang for women's breasts. You can date this slang expression when you consider it refers to the rubber bulb of a horn that used to be used on automobiles a century ago. You pressed the bulb and the horn went "hoot, hoot." I imagine this slang term was made up by inexperienced farm boys. Anyone with experience knows that women's breasts, no matter how big, do not go "hoot, hoot," and neither does the woman to whom the breasts happen to belong.
The only reason I might remotely consider eating at Hooters is if they ban smoking and nothing better is available. I mean if my usual non-smoking restaurants are packed.
Posted in: Girls, girls, girls
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jeancolmar
Well, surprise, surprise. It turns out that Frau Merkel and her conservative friends are Nazis at heart. But they are polite Nazis. They don't go in for the cruder forms of Nazism, like denying the Holocaust, which is illegal; nor do they go around saying things like "Foreigners Out!" They probably don't even make Turk jokes. But Merkel let the cat out of the bag by saying, "Multiculturalism" hasn't worked in Germany. It's like Bill O'Reilly saying that building the Islamic center near Ground Zero is "inappropriate."
Merkel is not only a Nazi in her heart of conservative hearts, she is also wrong.
Immigration has been an integral part of Germany's Economic Wonder. It is also providing population to a country whose citizens have a low birth rate (like Italy and Japan).
Okay, while immigrants should learn German (many know English, as do most educated Germans) and German norms (a number of which we can do without, like the those notorious German screaming matches) the Germans have got to get rid of its residual racism, which you will find primarily in the provinces.)
Merkel's remark sound neutral, seemingly scientific. But what she has said is dangerous. It is as dangerous as any of the Nazis pronouncements, like Ein folk, ein Reich. The Nazi exterminators spoke in neutral terms as they sent millions of innocent people to gas chambers and firing squads.
Posted in: Merkel: German multiculturalism has 'utterly failed'
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jeancolmar
That's one way to get out. Go mental. No Catch-22 here.
Posted in: U.S. soldier dismissed for threats in Iraq protest
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jeancolmar
As I said at the onset, Obama is a custodian president, cleaning up after the mess made by Bush and his gang. Pursuing the Afghan war is a big mistake. On the other hand, trying to establish universal health care in the US was a truly noble deed--pity it was watered down to almost nothing. With Bush there was no hope. With Obama there may be a chance he can be persuaded. I am grasping at straws. Obama is as good as it is going to get in America, the land that makes trouble all over the world and cannot take care of its own people.
Posted in: Obama, receiving Nobel Peace Prize, says war sometimes justified
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jeancolmar
First of all, Obama is not a man of surprises. He has said all along that what he was going to do, as President was to get out of Iraq so that the US could concentrate on Afghanistan. There was a brief breathless moment when it looked like he might see reason and announce a pullout. But no. He was going to do what he said he was going to do all along. Don't blame Obama for lying. But blame him for being a fool in this case. Gorbachev had the sense to pull the Soviet Union out--one of the first thing he Obama is no Gorbachev, unfortunately.
Of course, Obama' Nobel Prize speech was nonsense. It was a dreadful moment in the Nobel Prize Award's history: a US president justifying war while accepting a peace prize. And not just any war but an utterly immoral and worthless war--Bush's war--that should never have been started. That war, which was claimed thousands of innocent Afghan lives, had as its primary aim to get Bin Laden. In 2001 we all knew where he was. In 2009 we do not. The US has recently admitted that its intelligence agencies have lost track of him. It is a lost war and has been for years.
Remember how the US boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan? When they did it was bad, when the US did the same thing it was good.
The Nobel committee should have withdrawn the prize after Obama announced he would escalate the Afghan war.
Posted in: Obama, receiving Nobel Peace Prize, says war sometimes justified
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jeancolmar
The Nobel Prize people work in strange ways. They always have and always will. They have not always made the best choices. Tolstoy, Proust and James Joyce were passed up for the prize. The prize should never have been given to a mass murderer like Henry Kissinger, or to Pinochet's poster child Milton Friedman, whose economics has caused misery to the poor of the world.
The Nobel prize should not be political but it is. It always has been and always will be.
Obama's Nobel Prize is interesting. Forget whether he deserved or not for a moment. The question is why Obama got it. He has done a few remarkable things. First he got elected President, the first Aftrican-American to do so. That alone might have gotten him on the short list. In his short tenure as President he has evened out relations with Russia, which Bush messed up, declared as his goal the abolition of nuclear weapons, which no US President has done, worked for ending the war in Iraq and has fought for universal health care in the US and saved the world economy (for now) among other things. Sadly, he is still committed to Bush's Afghanistan war, which would, in my view, disqualify him for the prize, though Obama's pluses out shine his minuses.
The common wisdom is that Obama got it on the promise on what he could deliver. In that case, I should have the prize for my Nurse Oppai tales in JT. But there is more to the story than promise.
My view is that the Nobel Prize represents a collective sigh of relief after 8 terrible years of Bush. After so much evil we suddenly have an American President who wants peace in the world. It is a sigh of a relief and a statement that someone like George Bush (meaning an Republican) should take Obama's place in the White House 4 years from now. Above all, it is a prize for the US for electing not an African-American as President, a mile stone in American history and an a guy who stood up against Bush's Iraq war.
Anyway, Obama has it and let him enjoy it. Let the people who put him into office rejoice as it is their prize as well.
I also think it would be bad form for Obama to reject the prize. It would be insulting. And under Bush the US insulted way too many people and nations.
Posted in: Obama's Nobel honors promise, not action
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jeancolmar
Well, I'm happy Mr. Obama got it. I suppose the reason is the same reason he got the Nobel Prize: A lot of people are putting a lot of hopes on that man. If he accomplish half of his perestroika of the US is will be a major feat.
It is expected that the right-wing ding bats wish vent sours grapes out their behinds. But this is our night. I opened a rare wine in Obama's honor.
Yeah, I still like the guy in spite of a few things like Afghanistan. He sort of grows on you in ways no president I can remember has.
Posted in: U.S. President Barack Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize
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jeancolmar
What's the point of all of this? A tiresome old con blowing wind. What Obama did was not unusual, a president talking to American kids. The cons manufactured an issue out of something that was not an issue. The sad thing is that a number of school districts were intimidated by the cons and wouldn't let the kids hear their own President. Reminds one how yakuza rightist intimidate people here in Japan.
Posted in: Presidents walk fine line when talking to schools
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jeancolmar
The Holocaust happened and it is stupid to deny it. It is particularly stupid for Palestinians to deny it, for if any people have a right to identify with Jews under Hitler it is the Palestinians under Israeli apartheid. The Palestinians also ought to realize that Israel exists largely because of the Holocaust. To a great extent the Palestinians can blame Hitler for their troubles (and ours).
What Palestinians (and the rest of us) ought to demand is that the whole truth of the Holocaust be told whenever the Holocaust is brought up. The Holocaust did not kill 6 million people but 11 million people. Hitler killed at least 6 million Jews, which is hideous enough, but he also killed 5 million other people. The other 5 million are invariably unmentioned or underplayed whenever the Holocaust is brought up. Many of those were Leftists, homosexuals, Gypsies, Slavs and the like, which suggests that they same people who sympathize with the Jew see the other deaths as somehow either unimportant or desirable. Whatever the case may be, this has played into the hands of the rightist-racist branch of Zionism that brings up the Holocaust whenever the world objects to Israel's Nazi-like outrages against the Palestinians.
Perhaps the Palestinians, once they get the entire story of the Holocaust (available from the Holocaust Museum online) they will most identify with the Gypsies. They lost a greater percentage of their people than the Jews and they have been the most discriminated against and neglected people in the Western world, mainly in Europe.
Arab Holocaust denial is something new and dangerous. It won't lead to Palestinian liberation. It will only nurture tyrants.
Posted in: U.N. caught in Gaza dispute over study of Holocaust
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jeancolmar
It is past time.
Posted in: Gates says it's not time for U.S. to leave Afghanistan