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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Apple dethrones Google as company with most respected image in eyes of consumers
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JFA plans to hold Under-20 Women's World Cup match in Fukushima
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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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tkoind2
Very simple, people like to complain. It is a release for stress and a way to bond. Go to Seattle tonight and you'll find people grumping away over traffic, the increasing number of highly pierced teens on Broadway or the fact that Belltown has been overrun by an army of beige clad yuppies who are trying to destroy the world with their SUVs and dockers.
Expats in Japan complain and are grumpy about things like any other urban citizens. There are things that are terribly annoying in Japan. Just like there are in New York, London, Istanbul or wherever you are. And more so when are far from what you know as truly familiar.
I've been here a while now and I honestly have a love/hate thing with Japan. I love the people I've met here and would not trade their friendship for another 50 years of youth, am annoyed by armys of cell phone checking girls who could do with a few lessons in walking in high heels. I love that the city is organic and that it changes and grows constantly. I'm annoyed that my favorite restaurants disappear over night.
Both Japanese and Expats have our attributes that hold up to the stereotypes. And we are also all unique. Tokyo is quirky, irritating, fun, suffocating, dynamic and too much to bear. And that is why a lot of us stay here. Like any major city, it is a wonder and pain to live here. So we rave about what we love and we complain about what rubs us the wrong way. This is natural and healthy as long as we remember that we only see the world from our own point of view.
Posted in: Stereotypes ’R’ Us
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tkoind2
I love people here and this country has a lot of up sides, but logic here is not a strong point. Nor is community outrage when leaders do thick skulled things like this. I wish people would push back when leaders do clueless things.
Posted in: 'Pedestrian paradise' to be suspended in Akihabara
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tkoind2
Another idiotic knee jerk reaction. Brilliant leadership guys! Solve the problem by masking it with a pointless solution. Let the bad guys win.
Why don't you just put up barriers on the streets instead? Or do something about treating the problem with all the alienated people out there. But that would mean doing some real work and we can't have that now can we.
I've seen better governed shanty towns than Tokyo's uninspired leaders.
Posted in: 'Pedestrian paradise' to be suspended in Akihabara
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tkoind2
Wonder if we'll see the return of passenger ships and Zeppelins when the airlines price their way to extinction.
Posted in: United joins American in charging $15 for first checked bag
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tkoind2
With fuel cost add ons, baggage add ons, XYZ add ons maybe they should just build all their seats to be first class bubble compartments. After all, seems that only the wealthy will be flying anyway. Business is going to video and web conferencing. Flying is becoming too expensive for business and pleasure.
What happens in emergencies? Seems like these would be obstructive.
Posted in: JAL
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tkoind2
Corporations are finding every new way to bleed a little more money out of people. What they don't realize is that we also have our rising costs of fuel and food and that means that trip to X destination may just get put on the back burner because all the extra fees, fuel charges etc... just make it cheaper to take a train to the countryside for a holiday rather than dealing with flying somewhere.
This is likely to leave only people who Must travel and who travel for business doing much. Already Japan has seen a decline in travel. And yesterday articles were talking about trying to encourage people to do so. Well... adding more fees is hardly encouraging.
With every possible company adding every possible extra charge and both size and quality of everything diminishing, consumers will start to look at alternatives and these companies and airlines will find they have even more reason to worry about revenue and less effective means of generating it. We consumers should teach them a lesson by spending our travel money at home for a while.
Posted in: United joins American in charging $15 for first checked bag
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tkoind2
Does this achieve anything at all? Yaks will still import illegal red light workers, factories illegal wage slaves and kitchens someone to clean up the dishes. When will Japan start to let more workers become legal and contribute to society, pay taxes and become good citizens. Now that would be a worth while campaign. And retirees could rest assured in the revenue stream to fund their health and social benefits. Win-Win.
Posted in: Campaign against illegal foreign workers
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tkoind2
Sex volunteers? Just who are they planning to do this work? Japan is becoming an experiment in disfunction. Why not put sex workers on the national payroll? And even offer big bonus money for having them decide to give birth. Turn the kids over to corporate worker farms and build a master race of tax paying salarymen. Or...
We could try to assure real jobs and incomes to allow people to develop more balanced fulfilled lives. But that would be sensible and we rarely see sensible solutions here.
Posted in: Sex becoming a luxury for working poor
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tkoind2
Where are the team from CSI when you need them?
Posted in: Human leg found in river in Kumamoto
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tkoind2
Fair dinkum! You are dead on with your position for this. This is a mental health crisis that is causing these outbreaks. Look at the rising number of violent incidences on trains. People are stressed, frustated, hopeless and self destructive. Prosecution is not going to do anything for this problem. People who have lost a sense of self are not going to be thinking rationally about consequences. So raising the consequences does nothing to help this problem.
The problem requires a national reconsideration of mental health and how to improve it. Plain and straight, address the causes or suffer a lot more of the symptoms of this crisis.
Posted in: 16-year-old boy arrested for barging into ex-girlfriend's high school with knife in Kitakyushu
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tkoind2
Himajin "What do you suggest they do?'
Address these by putting real councellors in schools to provide mental care for students and campaign to destigmatize mental health care in the country so more people will reach out for help. Get a couple trendy actors to talk about their sessions positively and the doors will open.
This is one step that will result in some people chosing help over violence.
Posted in: Police search
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tkoind2
rtrhead1; I'm not saying don't enforce. I'm saying react in a manner that helps.
Look at it this way. If the reaction is to start searching everyone the police think is "suspicious" then we compromise human rights. If we start monitoring everything on the web then we violate everyone's privacy.
What makes more sense is for the government to work to address the causes of the problems. And that means taking a long hard look at modern Japanese society and acknowledging a lot of things that are broken. It means funding mental healthcare and councelling for children, young people and adults. It means working to weave a stronger social fabric to help invest individuals in life and society rather than allowing them to become alienated. It means making better provision for people to be involved with their families with more rational work hours.
Yes we can monitor the web, but not to invade privacy. We can do so to study what is happening to people and to look for solutions. This guy is not a lone character. We've seen a lot of this behavior and we will see more. So if we don't understand and address what is causing it, no amount of web monitoring or spot searches on the streets will help. Because the number and random nature of these attacks will be too much for an ill prepared police force to deal with. Our only security rests in getting to the cause and doing something about it. Then maybe we can avoid this kind of tragedy in the future.
Posted in: Suspect says he decided to stage Akihabara attack a few days before
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tkoind2
A year or so ago a friend, Japanese, got picked up in Asakusa for having a tiny Swiss Army knife in his bag when he was spot searched. He is an engineer and the knife is more a set of mobile tools with a tiny useless blade than any kind of imaginable weapon. Yet it ended him up in jail for ten hours or so while they sorted what to do.
The knee jerk reaction to Akihabara's tragedy will be a lot more of these spot searches. Idiot governments rarely address real problems. It makes more sense for them to just crack down or to resort to searches and fear. Sadly the problems can be addressed. If only there was a will to do so.
Posted in: Police search
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tkoind2
Personal security will soon be the next big business here if this kind of thing continues. Knife proof clothing, pepper spray and more. Sad to see the nation head this way. At least the violent ones at home usually have a financial agenda. These random attack guys are far more creepy.
Posted in: Man slashes schoolgirl with knife in Nagoya
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tkoind2
This cannot be simplified into some crazed comic book fan. This is a symptom of very deep societal disfunctions that must be urgently addressed. If not this will happen again and again.
Japan has a growing number of alienated, hopeless people who are detached from society around them and no longer capable of empathy or compassion. We see it in the increasing incidents of conflicts on trains, raging suicide rate, frequency of strange murders and attacks and more. In many cases the culprits talk as if what they did had no moral or ethnical context or consequence. And in the end they dehumanize their victims into objects for whatever self gratification they were after.
We need a rational approach to reverse this problem. An execution will do nothing to achieve that and may even contribute to more dehumanization in this society.
Posted in: Akihabara
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tkoind2
The worst thing to do is to overreact and start calling for some kind of knee jerk police state with cops ready to taser anyone who looks a bit risky.
The problems are societal and will not go away until addressed. Enforcement will more likely just make life worst for the general population and may compromise the fragile freedoms in this nation.
Posted in: Suspect says he decided to stage Akihabara attack a few days before
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tkoind2
This cop did a good job stopping this guy and taking him alive. But the reality remains that cops here are very ill prepared to deal with real threats. That simple.
Posted in: Suspect says he decided to stage Akihabara attack a few days before
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tkoind2
Hughgarse, exactly the point. Why?
If they have direct flights, aren't they afraid the locals will all escape and leave the place with no one to turn out the lights?
Posted in: Denver lobbies for direct flights to Tokyo
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tkoind2
There needs to be consumer protection for airline surcharge structures. It should be included in the advertised price of tickets and not an add on. This is just their way of hiding it until it is too late. A bait and switch plan to say "Hey Hong Kong is only 19,000yen this weekend." Then they add in the other 19,000 yen. This should be illegal.
We get that fuel costs more. But your profits on are on the rise. I smell a rip off. Again normal working class people suffer so fat corporates get even fatter.
Posted in: As fuel prices continue to rise, the fuel surcharge on airfares is also increasing. What's your view on the issue?
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tkoind2
The nomination does indeed look sealed. It is now time to turn our attention to the utter destruction of the Republican reign of terror.
I am not a democrat. My politics are complicated and not terribly mainstream. I can say this. I believe strongly in rational foreign policy, working class centered domestic policy, universal health care and safety nets for the less fortunate in our society. I believe these things to be humanitarian and a moral responsiblity of any developed society.
That said, Obama is the most likely option to make some of this into reality. And I hope Clinton joins him as a running mate to fully unify the party.
Now the real work begins. Working class people need to get out and vote this time. The Republicans have demonstrated very little concern for us for a very long time. They are willing to send us to die in pointless wars but unwilling to assure that we can work, get healthcare and send our kids to college. This is unacceptable.
It is time for working class people to take control of how our nation runs. It starts with someone like Obama and an willingness for change. But it equally requires removal of congress members who stand in the way of change. And we must also keep who we do elect honest and accountable. Change is possible. Let's assure it happens.
Posted in: Obama seals Democratic nomination; Clinton seeks VP slot