ThonTaddeo comments

Glad she was made whole. And those harassers will be having to explain their well-deserved dishonorable discharge any time they apply for a job in the civilian world, for as long as they live. Maybe they should have thought about that when they chose to sexually harass a subordinate.

They're not affecting my own writing, but the switch to text messaging for work-related communication results in a lot of context-less messages where the writer expects the recipients to know what's being talked about without any introduction. With e-mail there would be a subject line; instant messaging is just a non-stop barrage where you have to be continuously figuring out what the other person's perspective is.

But price increases have have outstripped increases in Japanese workers' earning power, keeping demand relatively weak and sapping growth in an economy largely driven by consumer demand.

All the way at the bottom of the article we get the truth: inflation is destroying the economy. Or rather, it's destroying working people. Up at the top, the connected politicians and rentier class profit from it. And those people increasingly aren't even giving lip service to the needs of working folks. We saw this coming as soon as the LDP retook power and tried to bamboozle the public into thinking yen devaluation and inflation would somehow save them.

While I like Kitasato and Tsuda, and that famous Hokusai wave in blue on the 1000, I'm not really a fan of the design. The current and previous series, which are mainly Japanese on the front and international on the back, have just the right balance. The new ones overemphasize the Western numerals (and a previous mock-up I saw even had "Bank of Japan" in English on the front below 日本銀行券). Also, why is the "1" slightly different "1000" and "10000"?

When the 2000-yen notes came out years ago they were beautiful and a model for what banknotes should look like. They weren't popular outside Okinawa, but I wish whoever had designed it had been give the reins to redesign the other ones, because the 1000, 5000, and 10000 are all downgrades.

As someone whose eyesight is not quite good enough to use a smartphone for everything, I know how he feels. At the very least, have the digitized menus on full-sized tablets with the fonts at the same sizes they've always been. No reason to make everything smartphone-dependent.

Remember that succession of do-nothing Prime Ministers from the mid-2000s until about 2012? I miss those guys. No inflation; if your salary went up you kept the full value; the cost of living was reasonable; real estate was reasonable. Consumption tax was lower. The PMs just stayed out of the way and let people do their jobs and live their lives and slowly get ahead.

@Laguna - As far as I know, his family emigrated from Japan to California when he was young. He's still Japanese despite having lived most of his life in the US. I'd be more impressed with the book if he were born in the US and was an American of Japanese descent, as the image I'm getting from it is that it wants to celebrate Japanese people through the medium of the English language.

A 5000 yen charge to see a world heritage sight like Himeji sounds about right.

It's half a day's take-home pay for a typical working-class person here. Ten times what you'd typically pay to enter a similar site.

How is the football team chef related to English? I can see why, in an English textbook, they'd celebrate a Japanese-English bilingual person who has found success in the English-speaking country he immigrated to. Why is this Japanese chef in an English textbook?

I find the automated payment machines that so many stores have brought in in the past few years to be the opposite of progress.

Not just because they put some young or old person looking to get work experience, spending money, or social interaction out of a job, but also because of how rage-inducing they are with the horrible high-pitched mechanical voice, the fussy steps where you have to specifically press buttons to tell it whether you need a bag, how you're going to pay, the order in which change and receipts are given; each step accompanied by that voice, which will repeat itself if you go five or so seconds without doing what it says.

And the poor employees who haven't been displaced and still have jobs in the store now have to listen to these things non-stop all day!

@Asiaman7

Perhaps a lower fee for “local residents” of Himeji City or Hyogo Prefecture would be more acceptable.

Himeji/Hyogo versus non-Himeji/Hyogo (with the visitor free to prove residency any way they like) would be fine; anything nationality/"looks"-based is absolutely not fine.

In my old castle town back in the day it was 500 yen normally and zero if you lived in the city. The default was to have to pay, and you had to specifically ask for the discount if you were local/disabled/etc. What you looked like didn't matter as there were plenty of foreign students who were city residents and got in for free, and plenty of Japanese-looking people from other prefectures who paid. This Himeji situation, with its insertion of "foreign" before "tourist", and the gigantic gap (3000 yen plus!) between tourist and local, is ridiculous. It's not like residents of other parts of Japan can afford the 4500 yen he's aiming for, either.

Imagine this mayor's proposal spreading nationwide and cultural properties demanding to see things like residence cards and My Number, as if they were Ministry of Justice officials, from anyone who doesn't look like they live here. (And of course Japanese-looking people who don't live here would walk right in at the regular price.) That's not the kind of society I want to live in.

@Asiaman7 - discounts for residents of the city/state are common everywhere, including Japan. Making national residence into a barrier is unheard of.

I used to live in a city with a historical castle and entry was free if you lived in the city. The default was that you had to pay the fee, but if you lived there and said so, you got the discount. If it's based on national residence, any one who didn't look like a Japanese national would have to be continually insisting that they live here; it is easy to envision officious clerks demanding some kind of proof only from people who don't look Japanese. It would be a very unpleasant experience in a situation that is supposed to be relaxing.

Are you equally critical of international reports that show Japan in a more favourable light, or do you only scrutinise and discredit organisations when Japan does not rank highly in their reports?

Of course I am. Flawed research methods remain flawed no matter whom they favor or disfavor.

Are you equally critical of the Nobel organisation, often seen as Western-centric and elitist, when a Japanese person wins a Nobel award?

Is there some recipient you have in mind? My criticism of this survey does not mention Japan and would be the same no matter where any particular country ranked. If the Nobel Prize organizers use flawed and biased methods to choose recipients, then they deserve criticism.

@Ilyas and Wolfshine -- your understanding of how flawed this survey is, and has always been, is correct. You can read it here:

https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2024.pdf

...and the shamefully-flawed methodology is explained on page 64. I quote:

The third distinguishing feature of the Global Gender Gap Index is that it ranks countries according to their proximity to gender equality rather than to women’s empowerment. Our aim is to focus on whether the gap between women and men in the chosen indicators has declined, rather than whether women are winning the so-called “battle of the sexes”.

Sounds great. But the very next paragraph contradicts that:

*Hence, the index rewards countries that reach the point where outcomes for women equal those for men, but it neither rewards nor penalizes cases in which women are outperforming men in particular indicators in some countries. Thus, a country that has higher enrolment for girls rather than boys in secondary school will score equal to a country where boys’ and girls’ enrolment is the same. *

The last line tells the whole story: if a gap is in favor of women, there is no penalty, whereas if a gap is in favor of men, the country is penalized. A hypothetical country where boys were banned from going to school, could not vote or hold political office, and died a decade before women did would be a country with disgusting gender gaps... but it would get a perfect score on this survey. The quickest route to a higher score, if you're a dictator looking to move up on this list, is to start oppressing your boys and men, making sure they're never ahead of women in any field, but not paying any attention to areas where women are ahead.

The survey does the exact opposite of what it claims to do: it is a Women's Empowerment Index and not a gender gap index, because it looks only at gaps in one direction. Just call it the Women's Empowerment Index and be done with it. (Or, better yet, measure gaps in both directions so that the numbers will actually be meaningful and the name of the survey won't be so deceptive.)

Kishida has been emphasizing “wealth redistribution” for the past three years. What has he achieved? 25 straight months of real wage decline during which inflation exceeded wage growth.

His inflation-loving policies have been "redistributing" money from the working class to the rich. By design.

They look great for their age!

My job requires 100% Japanese, with full understanding of every word and phrase, and full cultural fluency as well. Can't get tired listening to those long pointless meetings, either. Today's chat/messaging-heavy workplace is tougher than ever because you can't see people's facial expressions or get context.

@Gill -- totally agreed on how complex and inefficient the whole thing is.

Particularly the order in which you have to answer the "side quest" questions: they make you tell them how you want to pay before you even know what your total will be, so unless you've been keeping a precise running total of the bill as you put stuff in your basket, you can't really asnwer. If you've got 3000 yen in your pocket and are figuring you can use a credit card if the bill is more than that, how can you say how you'll be paying at the very beginning?

Similarly, if you've brought your own bag but the goods you buy aren't going to fit, you won't know until you've rung everything up. Ask the bag question after that!

Why even force people to answer that stuff at any specific time? The train companies had all this figured out 20 years ago: you can select your train ticket and then pay, or you can put the money in first and then buy the ticket. You can press a button for audio help but also keep things quiet if you don't need it. Super efficient, flexible, and fast. I have no idea why they haven't been hired to create the supermarket machines, because the ones in the supermarkets are a loud, stress-inducing mess.

a positive cycle of pay and price increases

They keep spouting this propaganda, as if price increases were somehow good for wage-earners. The true positve cycle is between pay and productivity increases, with no price increases, so your spending power goes up all the time and improving technology enables you to produce more. The only thing price increases do is take away the value of any wage gains you might have gotten.

Human checkout 100%.

If the self-checkout machines were more like the ticket machines at train stations, they'd be fine. But the ones at the stores have a rigid order in which you have to do everything, forcing you to press lots of buttons and answer questions (no, I don't have your silly point card) just to finish a simple transaction. And they're loud. Sometimes I think that if I have to hear some high-pitched machine voice screech オシハライホーホー... one more time, I'm going to have a panic attack.

He's right but not for the reason he thinks: the Japanese leadership in Tokyo accepts US defense aid to deter big, bad China, but forces most of the bases to be in Okinawa, one of the poorest, most discriminated-against prefectures, which wasn't historically part of Japan and which was discriminated against by their mainland overlords for centuries. If the Tokyo elites had "guts", they'd force their own Yamato people to endure the bases rather than the Okinawans.

Snakes on a train? Where's Samuel L. Jackson when you need him?

Where I work, it's 28 in the summer but also 25-26 in the winter. No such thing as "Warm Biz"; it's overheated all year 'round. Ridiculously one-sided.

The massive amounts of personal space that they grant themselves while walking with their heads pointed down toward their phones. They know that they're not paying attention to anything around them, but they somehow have the sense to leave just enough space between their bobbing-and-weaving selves and the walls or fences so that no one can overtake them and they become even more of a public burden than someone wandering around in public paying no attention to their surroundings would be to begin with. It's uncanny.

Happy to see the tabloid magazines saying what the LDP-loving mainstream media won't: the BoJ is destroying the working class with inflation and devaluation, and while they tried to delude the people into thinking it's for their own good, the workers see right through it. Now if only the people could vote these thieves out!

This entire culture of people being able to publicly rate the people they come in contact with needs an overhaul. Sometimes I think it's yet another attack on small businesses: a giant corporation can bathe in hateful reviews and nothing bad will happen to them, but a neighborhood shop or even an individual selling old stuff online will be destroyed by a few spiteful "Karens" who will blow small problems out of proportion and now have a platform to tell the entire world. Who benefits? The Amazons and Wal-Marts of the world who don't have to worry about such slander.

"I'd like to see a change in the police approach toward Japanese who have foreign roots," the litigant told Machi Kunizaki

A little disappointing to see this naturalizer "pulling the ladder up after himself", so to speak. The police shouldn't be hassling anyone who isn't suspicious, whether they hold Japanese nationality or not.

A weak yen cuts both ways for Japan. It boosts the overseas earnings of Japanese exporters in yen terms but it also inflates import costs, in a blow to resource-scarce Japan.

I'll give these copy-paste journalists (note the lack of an individual byline) credit: they've modified this hackneyed sentence to at least mention the weak yen's effect on import costs. Until now it was "weak yen good; who cares about the working class" all the time.

@Stormcrow - wasn't there a scandal with the Angels a few years ago where a staffer was involved in getting drugs for multiple players? While I'm very happy to see that Ohtani is innocent, I wonder if other players weren't funneling money through Ippei.

I thought this ws going to be the sad story of a homeless guy who just wanted to get his butt clean any way he could. Turns out it was much weirder and more disgusting.