Derek Grebe comments

Steptoe and Son.

Sadly, Doctor Who. Although they still crank out half a dozen tedious baffling episodes every couple of years, it's preachy convoluted garbage instead of "Doctor lands, something's weird, Doctor finds out what's afoot and sorts it out with his wits, then buggers off somewhere else" every week for six months of the year.

Any chance of this coming to Japan, or affecting Japan in any way?

If not, why is it being reported on JT?

I would love to watch this, but it's a long way to Broadway for 90 minutes of entertainment.

A ¥1000 yen coin on sale for a low price of ¥13,000 yen?

On the other hand, not many coins have a commemorative Goatse image on the obverse.

I think that although I feel much more secure raising a family in Japan than in my own country, with no need to worry about the overall prevalence of drugs and drug-related crime, there is still a remarkable lack of knowledge as to drugs here beyond the mantra "drug is bad".

Several years ago I was taken aback when a friend of mine, who works for one of the biggest law firms in Japan admitted that he didn't know that heroin and cocaine were different things.

I suppose this is the natural result of a media which reports seizures of anything other than marijuana as "an illegal drug" or a "stimulant".

And I'm not even going to get into the sheer nonsense of someone's life, reputation and career being destroyed for minute traces of "stimulant" (remember Noripi? 0.008g in the home she shared with her junkie husband) when getting pass-out drunk, urinating and vomiting in public on a weekly basis is viewed as part of the extra-curricular requirement of socialising in many major Japanese companies.

Drugs are evil. But ignorance doesn't help anything.

Premium Friday was a success for only one company - Dentsu, who got tens of millions of taxpayer yen to handle the publicity for this white elephant.

Face it - any endeavour to persuade the average office worker to leave a fluorescent-lit, window-blinds closed, hermetically-sealed, earnestly-silent assigned seat a moment before any of his colleagues (whether or not any of them are actually doing a scrap of work in their 14-hour day) was doomed to ignominious failure.

But the Dentsu boys got their slice so kanpai!

And in a couple of weeks we will be reading about a similarly indomitable octogenarian found dead of heatstroke in a rice field because they defiantly started working in the lethal heat of an August afternoon.

And we will all be expected to feel sad about it.

There is an admirable lust for life, and there is self-destructive folly. They are not the same thing.

Pick a lane.

You can trumpet on the world stage your unique omotenashi, or you can say that foreign tourists are some kind of burden.

Rome, london, Paris and Bangkok have no debate over whether or not the tourists are welcome to boost their respective economies.

Why is Japan bleating about people wanting to visit and enjoy this wonderful place?

Why do these buffoons keep putting themselves in jeopardy for the sake of a glimpse of gusset?

There is enough wankfodder of any description online for you to shake a stick at until you are naught but a withered husk , discovered only when the emergency services break down your door after the neighbors complain about the smell.

Tamanegi,

I have been seeing the same proposals to solve this problem since I got here in 1995.

Seen the the same total lack of action from the nabobs in the Diet for the same length of time, too.

"We must make sincere efforts" then off to the hostess club with the guys from Dentsu.

It puts me in mind of pandas. They have plenty of chances to do something about their declining numbers, but they just won't do what's required.

And the fact that only a quarter of voters support the three-decade history of failure and corruption of the LDP doesn't matter one single jot.

They will be voted in again next time because there isn't a democracy here.

There is a highly - visible kabuki of fealty and feudalism, cabals and brown envelopes.

Wave gloves hands out of loudspeaker blaring trucks every few months and continue to bilk the supine populace.

Then point at China/Korean abductees/ insert distraction and wait for the vassals to do that which is expected.

Diversity? Here? Hah.

The day that happens is the day I open a shop selling lit fireworks on the deck of a sunken ship.

I'm curious to learn why this man's name has been released when so much cover/privacy/presumption of innocence is offered to other alleged criminals,

Perhaps he doesn't have the right connections?

 three by-elections on a single day in more than half a century ago.

Paging JT Proofreader - you are absent from your station and your services are required.

Moderator: Thank you. It has been corrected.

While Christopher Nolan’s new film "Oppenheimer" is opening in much of the world this week, a Japanese release date has not yet been announced.

No doubt a few Crayon Shin-chan and Kamen Rider crapfests have to be pumped through the system first.

Can't have people actually choosing what they want to see.

Also, if we can't see this film until all the domestic pabulum has been and gone, what's the point in printing articles about it on JT?

Government begins ceremonial kabuki with intention of announcing all is fine and dandy with My Number system, before expanding its remit.

"the government would make further efforts to regain the public's trust."

Translation: "Trust me - I'm with the LDP. Now show me your papers ".

Pretty much the same as it is for English-speaking anything.

You might get lucky once in a while.

More often than not, whether at major transport hubs (Shinjuku, Shibuya, Haneda) or places looking for the tourist shekel (Ginza, Harajuku), if you get lucky, you might meet someone who doesn't get the upper-lip sweats at the prospect of speaking to one not of pure blood.

If not, and you're in dire straits and needing mental health assistance, just get ready to take whatever pills they fob you off with. Better to be zombified than causing the revered sensei to lose face.

Zoroto: regardless of whether or not it meets your somewhat idiosyncratic definition of what constitutes a blockbuster, I still fail to see why film fans in Tokyo have to wait for weeks after it's been enjoyed by South Korea, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Indonesia.

My local cinema currently has two screens given over to "Tokyo Revengers - Bloody Halloween" (which hardly seems topical), plus Sailor Moon and Detective Conan.

Fans of western cinema can choose between The Pope's Exorcist or Super Mario Bros, both of which were released in April everywhere else in the world.

I want to watch the new MI film, as I have found it to be a consistently entertaining franchise for about twenty years. It annoys me that I have to be one of the last fans in the world to enjoy it because I live in Tokyo, which likes to present itself as a world leading destination of some kind.

And it's not released in Japan yet, because Japan is again the last place in the world to release a guaranteed blockbuster.

You can watch this film in Ukraine, for crying out loud.

But they don't need to exempt Crayon Shin-chan's latest release from competition in Ukraine.

Been here the best part of 30 years and this is the most brutal heat I've felt yet.

Walking my dog at 6am (he needs a good hour's exercise in the morning) and we were both knackered when we got back.

Still arafos with blankets on their laps in the 28⁰C office, though.

Japan "assured" the world that the meltdown we all saw on TV was "an escape of steam" and that "Fukushima is completely under control".

I'm going to maintain a healthy scepticism on these assurances.

Are these the same dairy farmers who couldn't provide butter for three years not so long ago?

Or, more accurately, produced just enough butter to engineer a shortage, leaving consumers only allowed to buy one packet at a time at an artificially - increased price?

Naturally, the fact that New Zealand butter is both excellent and plentiful didn't apply here. Can't expect J-Ag to become competitive on the world market now, can we? There'd be no point in locking in all those LDP votes from farmers if that happened.

Yrral - That was Samuel Johnson. Once again, the US trying to lay claim to other people's territory,

We've had it, folks. We had plenty of time to do something about it, but the people we voted for couldn't be arsed.

If you don't already have grandchildren, you're lucky in a way. If you don't already have children, don't have them.

If you have kids, tell them that you love them every day.

We could have changed this. we didn't. We're screwed.

I would view the difference as follows:

Patriotism: "My country has achieved A,B and C, and carried out good things such as X,Y and Z. I consider myself lucky to have been born in my country, and celebrate these historical achievements, even though I had little to do with them."

Nationalism: "My country is better than yours. I don't know why, but anyone born further away from where I was born than I was is to be looked down upon and discriminated against, and probably a terrorist. Yee-haw."

Ok, let's begin by tracking in detail anyone with known associations with the Unification Church cult, or the Yakuza.

Wait, that would be pretty much anyone in the LDP cabal.

Better make it "anyone we don't like the look of", then.

I'm old enough to remember when the TEPCO/LDP cartel told us there was no problem, that the explosion we had all seen on TV was simply steam escaping, and that there was no possibility of a meltdown.

Twelve years on, twelve years of bilking the tax payer for any number of boondoggles - remember the "impenetrable ice wall" they started building in the hottest June on record? - TEPCO have got fat on our subsidisation of their incompetence, they're going to increase their electricity rates for domestic consumption by 40% (that's taxpayers, not their chums in industry who magically don't have to pay tax), and despite strong resistance from their usually tame fisheries industry, the best they can do is dump this poison into the sea.

There was never a plan B. It's always been about how much grift they can squeeze out of us before they do what they were always going to do.

Shame on everyone involved.

Why is the poo yellow? That doesn't look healthy at all. It reminds me of the time I caught hepatitis some years ago.

I need an updated definition of the word "brandishing".

The one I've been working on is:

"wave or flourish (something, especially a weapon) as a threat or in anger or excitement."

However this story says:

"The man was seated with two knives of around 25 to 27 centimeters, wrapped in what appeared to be cloth...No eyewitnesses saw a knife being swung."

So "brandishing" now means "owning in the presence of people who soil themselves with fear at the slightest stimulus"?

Liverpool still milking The Beatles after 50 years. Stop the press.

It's not "The" Titanic. It's Titanic.