JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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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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ssslithe
200 yen is probably the cut the five members get paid between them - how nice of them to forfeit their wages for charity.
Johnny's = yuck.
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ssslithe
Um, the headline doesn't match the story - shouldn't that be "Optometrists: Nintendo 3DS could help detect vision issues"? The exact opposite meaning.
Anyway, my 3DS hurt my eyes a bit for the first few days but then I got used to it - no problems at all. I get headaches with regular 3D from the glasses.
Posted in: Optometrists: Nintendo 3DS could identify vision disorders
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ssslithe
I totally agree with this article. I've had some really bizarre arguments with shop staff and (even worse) taxi drivers. To whit:
Almost any restaurant that offers a lunch set includes tea or coffee with the meal. I'm allergic to caffeine, so I tell them I don't need a drink - I'm fine with just water. The response I get at 99.9% of these places is that I HAVE to take either tea or coffee, even if I'm not going to drink it. This is obviously an insane waste on their part, but I've totally given up on it. If they want to waste a cup of coffee, that's their problem.
A chain cafe near where I was working had a really tasty-looking soup, but it was only available as part of a particular set that (yep) included tea or coffee. It's a small bowl of soup, so not really worth paying 800 yen considering I wasn't interested in the tea/coffee. Could they sell it a la carte? Absolutely impossible.
Most taxis you clamber into ask you where you're going and then ask you how to get there. How the hell should I know? I figured I was going to get there in a taxi. I don't expect them to know every street (though the taxi drivers do in London, where I'm from), but they could at least use the sat-nav. In the end you get a fare that can be anything up to double what you'd expected, and sometimes the driver even blames you for not knowing the route. Infuriating.
Arranging a wedding - that was a nightmare. We saw about 30 venues, and I didn't expect the staff to speak English, but whenever I asked them to stop using keigo and keep their Japanese a bit simpler: refused. They were worried about getting in trouble for not being polite enough to the customer. As if ignoring a reasonable request like that is polite!
And so on. I agree that service with a smile is more than we're capable of in the UK, and I'm happy to encounter friendly staff at all times of day and night. I don;t expect special treatment for being a foreigner, and I speak pretty good Japanese and mind my manners. But if you have some reason to deviate from the set pattern, you're screwed.
Posted in: In Japan, the customer is not king
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ssslithe
While of course it's not on to punch people over something so trivial (if the guy was raping someone on a train, fair enough), I must say I despise people speaking loudly on the phone on public transport.
A couple of months ago in London I had to endure a verrrry long, slow, hot bus journey where a girl nearby was yapping away on the phone to all her friends and relatives, one after another, broadcasting her whole life story to the entire bus. After 30 or 40 minutes of this we arrived at my stop, and as I got off the bus I said, "Good luck with the new job and your mum's new boyfriend, and have a nice dinner with Nancy tonight, yeah? Say hello from me." Not aggressively, but in an overly familiar tone. Hopefully it made her feel uncomfortable enough to keep her voice down in future.
So yeah, while I sometimes dislike Japan's surplus rules and find people's manners on trains here leave a lot to be desired, I'm behind the the no-phones rule all the way.
Posted in: Man punched in face by fellow train commuter over phone manners
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ssslithe
"The SDF pledged to drive safely and complete the process with no accidents."
Why did they need to pledge that, exactly? Some terrible snow-based terrorist ambush last year?
Posted in: Preparations begin for Sapporo Snow Festival
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ssslithe
Cicada:
Erm, I was asking what would happen if all the publications closed shop tomorrow. Obviously the writers would work for 'someone else', but it would be in a different industry.
I'm telling you that journalism is rarely lucrative. Taking on more lucrative work means exiting the industry. Not exactly healthy.
No evidence necessary, mate. What evidence do you need to prove that mashing your own testicles with a hammer is stupid? I'm afraid there's only right or wrong on that score.
Exactly. So just post any old bollocks, and let the reader decide whether it's true or false.
Blogs are totally biased! Any piece of information written and edited by one person is going to contain bias, and without objective fact-checking, any errors are there to stay. Of course, newspapers are biased as well, but they are also monitored by industry watchdogs. Blogs are useful as an additional source of information, but please don't labour under the misconception that they can replace the solid news sources they leech off.
Posted in: Many newspapers around the world are considering charging fees for readers to view online content. What do you think about it?
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ssslithe
Rajakumar, Infernus - do you really believe that?
It's pretty simple. If every proper news organisation in the world closed down tomorrow, the free sources - blogs and news sites that run wire stories, syndicated copy and, at worst, unadulterated press releases - will have no one to copy from. Quality articles written and researched by professional, unbiased journalists - human beings who need to eat - would cease to be available, and it would become impossible to find the truth among conjecture, hearsay and propaganda.
Newspapers and magazines are hurting because their ad revenue is spiraling along with their circulation (the cover price actually only accounts for a small proportion of a publication's income and certainly doesn't offset costs). And since web advertising revenue is not really that much, it seems fair that they might charge for their product online. After all, they are businesses, with a responsibility not only to shareholders but to employees. As a writer myself, I can tell you that freelance pay rates and starting salaries for staff writers get lower every year. Do you really think people who write for free bother to properly research their articles? Nah, just chuck it all on the blog. It's a dangerous approach, and I guarantee that you will miss us professional writers if we all jump ship for more lucrative work.
The question is, do consumers care enough about quality to pay for it? We've all seen how happy people are to download poor-quality MP3s for free rather than pay for music, but options such as iTunes and Spotify eventually provided a legitimate path for consumers to find reasonable quality at a fair price - and millions of people have chosen to pay. Online news subscriptions seem to me like a similar deal. If there was further incentive - download the contents of the website to your iPhone or e-reader every morning, for example - then it could work.
Either way, anyone who thinks all newspapers are greedy and redundant is a cast-iron, gold-plated idiot. Fact.
Posted in: Many newspapers around the world are considering charging fees for readers to view online content. What do you think about it?