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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pawatan
Patrick
Oh, so I am supposed to be a mind reader now? Here's what you said (emphasis added):
"If you think this is what most Japanese baseball fans would want, then you should go back and look at certain "Japanese" NPB players who were kept off previous Japan rosters for the WBC because they weren't Japanese enough, for example they are ethnic Koreans."
For example, you say. "Weren't Japanese enough", you say - the very reason Darvish was able to be drafted by Nippon Ham - the more "Japanese" clubs didn't think much of a "haafu" player. The reason Nagashima was so much more popular than Oh, despite Oh being the record-setting power guy. So which is it? Ethnicity matters, but only if they are Korean, not Iranian, not Taiwanese?
Of course MLB is a stronger league than NPB. But the NPB guys wouldn't be going there if the payday wasn't so good. Their marketability increases once they play overseas - look at Matsuzaka, still all over ads despite being somewhat of a failure in Boston. Notice NPB talent didn't flow to the West until the West started paying so much more. Or did I miss where Ochiai, Kiyohara, Hara played in the MLB, even though it was the superior league in the 80s and 90s, too?
Lucky enough to get to the final. Lucky enough to win your domestic league. Sure gotta play a lot of games to get "lucky", don't you?
Pretty much any other NPB team wouldn't have choked to the Samsung Lions this year.
Posted in: Samsung Lions beat Softbank Hawks to win Asia Series
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Patrick
Matsuzaka is getting paid $10M next year regardless of incentives. As I showed you in my link, that's 2x the highest amount paid to any player in Japan. Likewise with Gojira - maybe Yomiuri "could" pay $10M (still less than $13M/per he made with the Yankees) but they wouldn't, and won't. Nobody gets paid that much in NPB, and nobody will ever get paid that much in NPB. There's just no incentive, NPB is poorly marketed and just doesn't generate that sort of revenue.
Still half of what he's making in the US, and he doesn't have to work in Saitama and play at the crappy Seibu Dome to do it.
So players will always talk about 'proving themselves against the best', but it's mostly just a great way to get paid, and very well. After you play in MLB, you can always come back and get paid well again as an "ex-MLB player" even if you are currently crap. Witness Iwamura and Kaz Matsui for that...
Nice job insulting me there, Patrick. I go to minimum 50 games every year in person and watch many more on TV, as well as participate in the blogosphere and on NPB fan sites. I'd say I'm more familiar with NPB than 99% of Japanese people.
It doesn't matter who is BEST. It matters who WINS. Chiba Lotte was most definitely not the best team in Japan last year but they WON. That's all that counts! The Hawks have frequently been among the best in recent years but haven't gotten it done until this year. Best has little to do with it.
Posted in: Samsung Lions beat Softbank Hawks to win Asia Series
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pawatan
Fanboy fanboy fanboy fanboy fanboy, that's all I am hearing here. Why are you making a pointless Mac vs Windows argument? Windows is crap. MacOS is also crap (maybe less so since it's Unix based, though it's like *nix for Dummies). iOS is truly crap. Android is nicely open source, can be adapted by anyone for any device, and is already far outstripping iOS development due to it's adoption on a wide variety of platforms. Heck, you can get apps from more than one source - how AMAZING! I don't have to shop at the same crappy, restrictive store all the time!
The iPod WAS just an MP3 player. It had a nifty little click wheel for sure. iTunes was, and still is, crap. Apple had to be shamed into releasing higher bitrates than 128, shamed into selling DRM-free music, way behind when other stores (ahem, Amazon) did.
I think you never used one. They worked just fine, but were large and quite expensive.
Macs used FIREWIRE; everybody else uses USB. Macs throw out floppies - oh yeah, everybody was already using ZIP, CD burners or similar.
Geez, Macs had many innovations but color was most definitely not one. The first Macs were B&W! My Commodore 64 in 1982 had a color output, thank you very much, and it was hardly the first (nor did it cost the thousands that a Mac did).
Look at the iOS icons and compare them with any icon on any other device. Coincidence? I think not.
I installed software from the internet in 1994 on a Unix box.
Licensed by Apple from another company.
That cost 2x as much as my nice, thin, cheap Acer.
Nor are there for *nix. NONE. And it's FREE (well, as Linux, it's free)
Posted in: Samsung wins appeal in Apple tablet battle
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pawatan
First to make an MP3 player? Nope, that was Rio. First to make a tablet PC? Nah, several were released 10 years ago. First GUI operating system? Er, that was Xerox.
But I guess Apple is the world's leading innovator for preventing you from using the device you bought the way you want unless you hack the crap out of it, so there is that.
Posted in: Samsung wins appeal in Apple tablet battle
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pawatan
Except music, food, TV, movies... But other than most things, you are very correct, kibousha!
Posted in: KARA appear in fried chicken ad campaign for FamilyMart
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pawatan
Well, of course the posting fee takes a chunk out of the overall compensation. But you think Matsuzaka would get US$10M/yr from Seibu? Or Gojira would get US$13M/yr from Yomiuri? Or Ichiro would get US$18M/yr from Orix (his current salary)? That's more than 50% of an entire NPB roster (not named Yomiuri or Hanshin).
If Ichiro could get $18M/yr here, he'd be here. He'd be very, very lucky to get 40% of that. Darvish is the highest paid player in Japan - approx. US$6M.yr at current exchange rates.
http://baseball-data.com/ranking-salary/all/
Posted in: Samsung Lions beat Softbank Hawks to win Asia Series
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pawatan
Absolutely. And absolutely. Why wouldn't they use their entire roster? It's a club championship, not a national competition.
Yes, like half-Iranian Darvish Yu. It was a shame they left him off the 2009 roster. Wait, he pitched in more games than anyone? He started game 1, and got the win in the final? I forgot how much Japanese fans HATED that!
Posted in: Samsung Lions beat Softbank Hawks to win Asia Series
2
pawatan
The main reason is $$$$$$. MLB pays a heck of a lot more than NPB. I'm sure most Japanese players would rather be superstars in their own country than semi-anonymous cogs in an MLB team, but the MLB team will pay them 2x, 3x, 5x more...
I don't see how the limits on foreign players hurts NPB. There aren't that many superstar foreign players despite the much higher average salaries than the Japanese players. There's no indication at all that if more foreign players were allowed the quality of baseball would be much improved.
Posted in: Samsung Lions beat Softbank Hawks to win Asia Series
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pawatan
Smith, even a cursory Google search shows how incorrect that is.
http://www.asianplasticsurgeryguide.com/news10-2/081003_south-korea-highest.html#data
SK has almost the same number of surgeries as Japan with less than 40% of the population!
Anyway the girls from Kara are great looking and good dancers - I couldn't care less if they've had surgery or not.
Posted in: KARA appear in fried chicken ad campaign for FamilyMart
1
pawatan
Hawks are chokers, that's all. Chunichi was just a bigger bunch of chokers this Nippon Series. I can guarantee 2010 Chiba Lotte would never have lost to Samsung Lions had they held the series last year.
Posted in: Samsung Lions beat Softbank Hawks to win Asia Series
5
pawatan
You have hit the nail EXACTLY on the head as to why this is happening. Fuel charges are a smokescreen; they already charge us extra for fuel, and that amount goes up and down as fuel prices rise and fall.
Just another power play by management to crush the unions, that's all. Watch them turn around and ask for "loans" from the US government to "help them through these difficult times".
Posted in: American Airlines files for bankruptcy protection
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pawatan
You always say this or something like it. It's always irrational paranoia.
Posted in: Egyptians vote for first time since uprising
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Miyagidad
Indeed. Please take care as best you can.
Posted in: Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant director sick, says TEPCO
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Miyagidad
My sympathies for your position. It's horrible and nobody should have to be put through such a situation.
However, this doesn't change my opinion. I'm in Kanto, BTW.
I will likely get thumbed down hard for this, but I honestly don't understand the huge stress related to fear of cancer. My brother died of cancer, my mother had several cancer related surgeries and my father had cancer when he died (of unrelated issues). It's something i've thought about in the back of my mind since I was a child, not only for my health but for my mother (still in good shape through it all) and sister as well. Maybe if my family were generally healthy I would be more worried, but as it is it's just another likely fact of life for me....
Posted in: Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant director sick, says TEPCO
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pawatan
Geez, smith! Do you have to be a raging Apple fanboy in every tech post?
I greatly prefer reading on my eInk Kindle to any tablet (and yeah, I own one). It's just so much easier on the eyes than a backlit screen. It's so cheap that I don't worry about damaging it. Dunno about the Fire, but the eInk Kindles are fantastic.
Posted in: Kindle sales quadrupled on Black Friday: Amazon
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pawatan
I disagree very strongly with you on that one, Miyagidad. We don't know what Yoshida-san did or did not do before 3/11. We don't know what alarms he raised. We don't know if his concerns were ignored. We can see from his actions to stem the crisis that he did not hesitate to go against the will of his superiors when it was absolutely necessary. Hindsight is always 20/20 when discussing what he should have done before.
We DO know what he did after 3/11, and that makes him a hero. He (and others) probably gave his life to save ours - I will not be critical of a man who sacrifices so much.
Posted in: Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant director sick, says TEPCO
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pawatan
Like anything else these days - hardly something unique. I never needed a manual for either my iPhone or my (current, happy to have upgraded to) Samsung smartphone.
I'm not sure where people live that they get better reception with Softbank than Docomo. In my own apartment Softbank was horrible,especially for data. I was in Shibuya a few weekends ago and couldn't connect a call. The iPhone NEVER worked in inaka, only if I were actually at a train station. No such problems with Docomo, get coverage pretty much anywhere. Very happy to have switched.
Posted in: DoCoMo earns highest marks in customer-satisfaction study
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pawatan
Because they haven't been convicted yet, and this Indonesian chap has.
Posted in: Ex-Indonesian official guilty of improperly procuring 60 used trains from Japanese firm
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NetNinja
WHY? Please explain why his health needs to be public. It's well known he has spent a lot of time working on site, and it's well known there are levels of radiation on site that pose a significant risk to health. WHY do you need to know the cause of his illness? It's very well established that he has quite likely been exposed to significant levels of radiation, much much higher than the general public. How does this affect you? Don't insult, explain.
Posted in: Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant director sick, says TEPCO
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pawatan
Don't be silly and make strawman arguments. Nobody said the Seychelles would be under water by 2010. You are probably thinking of one of the lower Pacific island groups, which it's sometimes said they will be largely under water by 2050, not 2010.
Posted in: Salvaging Kyoto Protocol a tall order