oyatoi comments

The song remains the same. Rake offs, insider trading, and all manner of financial shenanigans are par for the course here. Whatever punishments are meted out will be purely cosmetic and largely ineffectual. Despite all the pious blather and promises of remedial action to prevent a recurrence, we know better. Soon enough, the same JT bat channel will be regaling us with news of yet another case, complete with stock photos of corporate clowns inclining to the requisite degree and mouthing the same tired cliches about how regrettable it all is and making promises they’re not capable of delivering, not by a long shot. Gotta preserve that Wa.

The big loser was Renho……..

Her nationality drama a few years ago surely didn’t help. Even though she’s supposed to have renounced her Taiwanese passport, in the public mind she’s forever tainted by the perception that she has divided allegiances. It matters not one jot that both Koike and Ishimaru are ‘out of towners’; they’re qualified and she’s not in the way that really counts.

How are (kids) supposed to practice swimming when they (on average) only have access to a pool for 6 weeks out of 52? It’s crazy.

Sheet home the blame to a lopsided sense of top down priorities which relies heavily on the long suffering, stoically enduring public’s capacity to defer gratification of elementary needs to the Afterlife. The promotion of improved water safety awareness and skills, one example among many, trails a distant last to other far more pressing claims on the public purse; another road to nowhere in deepest, darkest Akita, or ensuring an endless supply of ‘free’ money to underpin yet another predatory takeover abroad. Japan’s ‘ketchyness’ is completely explicable as soon as you realize the ‘country is everything, individuals are nothing’ predatory, mercantilist mindset that permeates and underpins so much of what goes on here.

The resident foreign community surely views such incidents with a growing sense of unease and trepidation. As China continues to ratchet up tensions in its efforts to supplant the US as the dominant power in East Asia, they may well come to a decision that they’re not prepared to chance the increasingly Sinophilic vassal state Japan’s likely to resemble and decide to hightail it out of here instead.

Yet another poor ‘adult film star’, innocence lost after entering the lion’s den.

Japan can modernize the industry, make it competitive and boost the number of employees

If the situation was reversed and it was US Steel seeking to take over a Japanese steel maker, the song and dance from all sides here would be deafening. Black Ships would be invoked, rightist sound trucks would be doing the rounds, and all manner of dire predictions about Japan’s imminent demise would be fodder for the wide shows. In addition to blocking the acquisition on national security grounds, it should also be blocked out of solidarity with workers here until such time as they’re treated with more compassion and humanity and not as expendable fodder to be thrown into the maw of J Inc.

Top government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi said Friday that … it is extremely regrettable,"

They’re like a stuck record with these crocodile tear insincere regrets they trot out each and every time the country suffers a loss of face and reputation for probity as a result of somebody, somewhere, somehow, stuffing up.

One benefit of teleworking is that sexual harassment of a physical nature becomes impossible.

Virtual harassment, the next big thing. Choose your avatar wisely!

And very little actual discussion is seen in the media of pressing political issues.

Ahh, gubernatorial silly season rolls around and the farce that is democracy here is center stage once more. Those who make the rules evince no desire to rock the boat and the masses are complicit in allowing them to get away with that. Soon enough, the party hats and props will all be put away, the music will die down, and things will go on just as they did before.

18 years in a hell hole of a Japanese prison won’t exactly be a holiday. Compared with incarceration in a Western jail, convicted felons here are subject to far more intrusive and restrictive micromanagement of their every waking hour. And every moment of that will, hopefully, be one of self reproach and regret. Some people only learn the hard way.

Where I live in Australia, we get 40C +. Highest recorded is 47.3C.

An Oz summer is way preferable to the unrelenting heat and humidity of high summer in Japan. Apart from the occasional and very welcome typhoon, weeks go by here where the procession of days hardly varies an iota in their constant oppressiveness. Life without an aircon, an endurance trial if ever there was one. North of Kanto isn’t as bad, or as bad for as long, but the bulk of the population live in the torrid zone south of there. In Australia, even on the hottest day, in the shade of a tree one feels instant relief. Not so here, where the oppressive, clammy heat envelopes one from all directions and there’s little respite offered by shade.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/22/cgtv-china-tv-mocks-trump-791428

Don’t be fooled. She’s the same person who in a previous incarnation was doing the bidding of the Beijing kleptocrats.

The tablet you order your food from could do with an additional option; enabling one to summon the robot to take your empty plates to the kitchen. For no good reason I can think of, this is one task that, as yet, has not been delegated to robots

The figure was 5.6 percentage points higher than seen in a similar survey conducted by the Cabinet Secretariat domestically.

Statistically then, they’re only slightly more lonely there than their almost as lonely brethren here.

China pulls these stunts in the hope that Japan blinks. It reeks of bluff, however, designed to deflect domestic criticism of the Government’s failing economic management credentials as well as pander to the insecurities and acute feeling of inadequacy of a people long conditioned to viewing the country’s interactions with the world through a distorting prism that emphasizes a need to avenge historical wrongs.

….unlike the west there are very few opportunities to inherit wealth in Communist China. All land is owned either by the state or by farming communes so kids can't inherit their parents home or homes. There is no private land ownership and the condo or apartment you "own" is really only leased.

Hence the massive outflows into places that are supposedly safe from that. But safe for how long? It’s becoming increasingly impossible in the West to disguise the dispossession and marginalization of those unable to take advantage of the opportunities for aggrandizement afforded by unfettered capitalism of which hot money inflows are emblematic.

Always remember that whenever they open the ‘free money’ spigot, compassion is hardly the watchword. Instead, the essential motivation is a fear of the retribution they know from historical example that the plebs are capable of summoning up.

Those liquidated $US assets were bought at a fraction of the cost that they sold for. In addition to the profit made on repatriating back to yen, there was sizable interest made on those assets. Whenever foreign reserves have needed to be liquidated, such as following the Hanshin and Tohoku quakes, the yen has always appreciated as a consequence. As Japanese long bonds move towards and then past 2%, and the interest rate differential between here and abroad shrinks, significant yen appreciation is not out of the question.

As they watch their savings and life chances disappear steadily down the gurgler, those with escape options are beginning to contemplate and prepare for contingencies that don’t necessarily preclude emulating those flyjin of yore.

Terrorists raus!!

https://www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/Jacobs%20Transcript.pdf

Here’s the story of one of those 11,000; Brooklyn born and bred before being shipped off together with his German born immigrant parents, to Texas. After the War, to add insult to injury, the family was dumped back in ruined Germany.

The Japanese were quite happy to make it all about themselves, when what they should’ve done is refuse any compensation until their fellow camp members received an apology and compensation and justice was truly done.

Argentinian stocks up nearly 6% yesterday. Some people there have more money than they know what to do with.

Both Germans and Japanese were incarcerated because of their ethnicity. Only the Japanese, however, received compensation. An historical wrong still awaiting rectification.

How about drawing a huge picture of Mt Fuji on the screen?

Just make sure it’s not Hokusai quality; or they’ll be lining up in their thousands. In the next stage of this long running farce, we’re likely to see other Fuji adjacent municipalities eyeing this as an opportunity to expand their tourism footprint.

I’m glad we cleared that up and that you’re not in favor of junking the justice system on account of ‘on the balance of probabilities’, being an insufficient safeguard when determining guilt, not only in the first instance but also the inevitable appeals process for capital crimes.

Stuart Gale

You readily concede there are “cut and dried”, presumably deserving of the death penalty cases, yet want to deny use of the penalty in ALL cases. Presumably, just to be consistent, you’d be fully in accord with the proposition that “beyond reasonable doubt”, the principle upon which our criminal justice system is based, is not fit for purpose and should therefore be junked. After all, who would want a justice system that instils doubt?

Details forthcoming?

Don’t bet on it, unless it was an accident.

An overwhelming majority of Japanese people support capital punishment. Proponents of its abolition would do well to ponder the reason why this is the case, and why for the most heinous of crimes, there is negligible public support for removing it from the statute books.

In an interview with the Tokyo Shimbun in 2021, Nishimoto said he ran in the race to “increase my popularity.” It was also reported that Nishimoto’s father was a member of an organized crime group, and that his mother left the family when he was 1 year old. He then became a member of a gang when he was in junior high, and was sent to a juvenile detention center three times.

Looking forward to hearing all the reasons why this piece of trash deserves to be housed at public expense and one day allowed to go free, instead of being consigned to a swift demise at the end of a rope.