kohakuebisu comments

I thought it was a dull game. Liverpool's best moments were just the ol' plan B of a long ball to or in behind to Salah. Their build up was almost non existent and midfield had no control. Harvey Eliot showed what a more rounded midfielder does when he came on. For Chelsea, Nico Jackson was quite bright, but they had few actual chances, due to little penetration.

Maddison played well for Spurs.

This is a cart before the horse technology.

Reducing emissions reduces CO2 in the atmosphere with 100% reliability. Its as simple as insulating houses, fitting solar panels, driving better cars, and taking trains not planes. None of this is a big hit to anyone's lifestyle.

None of the carbon capture technologies introduced so far works anything like as well as intended. It is therefore just a "we're doing something about it/tech will save us" empty promise. It should not be confused with an actual solution. It would make more sense to reduce emissions, work on capture, and then shift the emphasis away from emissions, or even increase them, once it is guarateed capture works.

The British guy is a legend and it was only embarrassing for the police and their hilariously inept efforts in trying to catch him. Once in custody, apparently they thought he was Spanish, because he answered questions in English in comedy Spanish, probably something like Manuel in Fawlty Towers.

Him and the guy on the mamachari who photobombed the trainspotters are my favourite "gaijin in Japan" tales.

Define "crowd"

This will be the same equipment/cameras and whatever used during Covid to see if the (soft) lockdown was working. There were regular reports saying whether efforts to get people to work from home etc were working. Foot traffic at major stations is something that is measured.

Get some data about something in Japan and flesh it out is classic reporting in Japan. Stories can be trivial in the extreme.

Still in recovery from Covid, so this is releasing of pent-up demand.

Every year in Japan, the official working age population of 15-64 shrinks by a lot, I think its close to a million. Many work beyond 60 and beyond 65, but they'll be on reduced salaries. If the working age population of people on decent money is falling, the expectation should be for consumption to fall. It's certainly not going to increase significantly in real terms, unless some Covid-like black swan creating temporary pent up demand happens again.

Stay safe everyone.

Weird weather this summer, with the Japan Sea side in almost drought but typhoon-prone areas along the Settounaikai and Pacific (that normally get hammered) getting extra hammered. Here's precipitation over the last 20 days. The entire country is either way above average or way below average with no inbetween. Average temperature has been above or way above average everywhere.

https://www.data.jma.go.jp/obd/stats/data/mdrr/tenkou/indexTenkouPre20dhi.html

I'm surprised Koo is saying this, because he has some interesting macro theories about Japan, principally that zero interest rates, later copied in the West, were a terrible mistake.

Anyway he is wrong here. The "10-15 years" is completely wrong. Any 25 year old house will have been built to post-Great Hanshin Earthquake standards. In many parts of the country, it will still have value, especially because new gomi rules mean demolishing costs more and woodshock/inflation/high oil/weak yen/tight labour market/10% consumption tax all mean building new costs much more than it ever used to. In some places, building new has gone up 30-40% in a few years. Tight labour market means any reputable builder will be run off their feet and unlikely to start any build for you for months. There are far more examples of and knowledge about renovating out there now and far less stigma about doing it. "Newlyweds must have a newbuild" has gone the same way as "a 25 year old woman is a Christmas cake".

Regardless of the above, real estate is still real estate and the most important thing is location. A twenty year old house will only be of zero value in a declining town. It would be worth a large % of the build cost plus the land value (which will have gone up) in Setagaya. Even second hand mansions with tiny allocated land have gone up in Tokyo.

This should probably be top story. My heart goes out to the people there.

Japan has more than enough natural disasters already without extensive fires. The background is human activity destabilising the climate, so these are not entirely natural disasters.

I can see the humour here, but the warnings on NHK screens will be mostly aimed at the elderly sitting at home. It's them at most risk. The "don't go outside" is encouraging them to not go out at 2pm and spend hours in full sun immaculately removing every weed more than 5mm high from their veggie patch. I can assure you that any unweeded veggie patch in Japan will soon default to full jungle, so all those neat ones that can be seen all over are people's dedication on show. They are the result of mostly old people working outside regardless of how hot it is.

I wonder how much insider consultants from Dentsu, Hakuhodo etc. got paid for all the promotion. I bet it was a large sum.

Initiatives to get Japanese to work less should be encouraged, but the best way is through flexibility and workplace cooperation, not this or national holidays where everyone is directed to move in the same direction at the same time. A big reason stopping people taking the statutory holidays they have already is resentment from coworkers. So long as "worker=corporate slave" and not "worker=person who contributes" persists, opportunities will be limited for non-corporate slaves, e.g, more independent-minded people, people with childcare responsibilities, or people caring for elderly, etc.

Hey FireyRei! German hip-hop? Bist du down?

I didn't know about it, but here's Herc recreating what he started off playing, the famous break from JB's "Give It Up and Turn it Loose" with "Bongo Rock" by the Incredible Bongo Band on the same album as hip-hop/electro super classic "Apache" (released in 1973) and a tune I don't know called "The Mexican".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qwml-F7zKQ

My folks lived in Toronto for a couple of years in the 60s and used to go and see the Hawks before their work with Dylan. The venue is still there, but is now the Hard Rock Cafe. I don't remember him playing the Band in the car, it was Dylan all the time, but my dad always spoke highly of them.

I miss my dad, so thanks Robbie and RIP. It sounds like Big Pink and the Byrds Sweetheart of the Rodeo came out within weeks of each other, so that's the birth of country rock right there.

In my town, the deputy mayor is appointed by the mayor, who is elected. The deputy is therefore an appointee, not an elected official. A mayor who wants to shake things up will appoint their own person, but more often than not (in my town), it'll be a senior city hall worker to get city hall workers on the mayor's side.

If it's the same in Shibuya, that would mean this is an appointee/insider name-calling someone who was actually chosen by the local public.

Politics that involves name calling, whether it is "idiots", "facists", "woke", or whatever, is bad politics. You should play the "ball" (the idea, the policy, or whatever), not the "man" (here, a woman).

It mightn't be for other folks, but the shinkansen is quite luxurious to me and removing this makes it less luxurious.

The green car is only a few percent extra, and it sounds like you can still get food on that, albeit from an app, which again is not as luxurious.

Taken in isolation, this is a weird thing to say, especially for someone helping addicts.

Many addicts are high-functioning, holding down jobs and positions of responsibility. Their addictions go unnoticed by those around them. It wouldn't surprise me if thirty plus members of the Japanese or UK parliaments are alcoholics or other substance abusers. Most alcoholics and even hard drug users are not "in the gutter".

kokumin nenkin is far too low, in both contributions and payouts, to support a retirement. Since some people say the contributions are already too high, do not expect it to improve. Provided that everyone knows you cannot live off a kokumin nenkin pension and will need to work or have other savings/assets, perhaps its not such a problem.

Given life expectancy in Japan, its pretty good that it still pays out at 65. It means the average woman will get the money for 23 years. No retirement scheme was ever set up with the intention of paying people that long. Japan also has the longest healthy/active life expectancy. The average 65 year old Japanese is way healthier and active than most people in every other country. Healthy and active is great of course, but it also means healthy and active enough to work. My dad was completely crooked from the physical side of his job at 61/62.

The free pension for a dependent spouse should end. Everyone should have to contribute.

They'll have settled out of court for some nominal sum, probably much less than most people would imagine. A corporation fining a kid a big sum is not good publicity and doesn't solve the issue of customers worrying about hygiene at the restaurants

This was a good opportunity for me to teach my kids about how you can be fooling around doing something stupid as a kid, that can ruin your life, especially if its on video.

That's a good way to take something positive from this.

I also think the overreaction to this, it's disgusting, but it is still just a kid mucking about, is partially driven by the attention grabbing "sushi terrorism" moniker it was given. While this may be superficially clever and ha ha ha funny, its brought far more attention to this incident than it actually deserved. Larking about is not terrorism.

Good move.

There can be all kinds of ways to slip through the net on this. Rules that might apply if the parents were married but they weren't, rules that might apply if the mother's application to naturalize had been accepted before the baby was born, but it wasn't, etc. Such things can leave children stateless.

My impression of Japanese police is that they do not do very much policing. In my inaka town, the police chief spends 10 days a year attending entrance and "graduation" ceremonies at the local nursery, kindergarden, elementary schools, junior high and senior high. They also go to the school sports days, any big events in my town, and do promotional things, like cycling proficiency at school. There is zero enforcement of cars and trucks going through red lights.

Cycling in inaka is mostly fine, but is dreadful in the city, with cyclists holding an umbrella or looking at their phone. The police should crack down on both.

Kinryu hits the spot when you're on the grog, which is all a stand-up ramen should do. As eaten by Harrison Ford, in an advert for Kansai Cellular (the precursor to "AU"), for anyone wanting the full "its just like Blade Runner" experience.

It was twenty years ahead of its time, but Haagen Daaz used to have an Alice in Wonderland like shop right on Doutomburi bridge. It was really trippy inside, with mini roundabouts, carriages, weird mirrors etc. If they had it now, it would be massive on Insta.

What is WAP?

I would bet money that somewhere in Japan, there will be elementary school kids earnestly doing a "hiphop" dance routine to that song, sometimes in front of other kids, completely oblivious to what the lyrics are.

fwiw, I don't support throwing microphones or other objects at people. She has security to deal with them.

The most prominent administrative gaffe in recent times, that guy who was given an entire town's Covid relief payments, all four thousand and whatever times, was not due to My Number. About ten years ago, the government admitted thousands of paper records of pension contributions had been lost. Compared to these, the issues so far with My Number have been very minor.

The system won't be perfect and is probably handing tasty fees to amakudari at companies like Paypay, but as other posters indicate, the simple existence of a National Insurance number equivalent or Social Security number equivalent should not send people into a tizzy. It is probably long overdue. I would hope local government folks moaning about it have spotless records in dealing with poverty, old people's mobility, non-attendence of school, and other important issues in their jurisdictions.

It was on Japan Today the other day, but there is increasing evidence to suggest that the human body is less tolerant of high wet bulb temperatures, i.e., combinations of temperature and humidity, than previously thought. According to this evidence, a temp of 33C with 55% relative humidity already hits the "danger" level. This will be very common in Japan, especially in a heatwave like this.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/heat-humidity-bodies-wet-bulb-1.6525711

A quick google suggests the idea of calling an on-the-bone tonkatsu a "tomahawk" may have (unsurprisingly) come from the USA.

This is an LA blog for a Japanese restaurant in LA from 2018, back when tomahawk steak would have been largely unknown in Japan. It certainly makes more sense to call a big tonkatsu with a bone served unsliced a tomahawk than something already sliced up small for eating with chopsticks. The Fujiki restaurant in this story does not use the expression "トマホークとんかつ" themselves, only a less attention grabbing 骨付きとんかつ

https://ameblo.jp/la-k-town/entry-12429151932.html

The only one I've been to was Nagano City. There were no foreign tourists in the places we went, no traffic jams, no nothing.

This is just about Tokyo and Kyoto, right?

Horrific.

I do not know Australia. Does "childcare" in Australia mean preschoolers (i.e., children well under 10) ?

We've had "Respect" (the referee) campaigns in English football before that were completely ineffective. Hopefully this one will actually work.

John-san

If you look at customer numbers from the ski bubble (1990), far more people went to Hakuba to ski than before the Olympics, and way more (probably five times) than now. Hakuba has four? five? old ski resorts that existed during the 1980s and 1990s but have since closed. Happo One went from something like one million winter visitors to now under 400,000. The peak was before the Nagano to Hakuba road was widened to become the Olympic road and before the Nagano Shinkansen was built. Access has nothing to do with customer numbers, the crucial factor is people's willingness to go. There will have been massive traffic jams every day during the ski bubble, on top of long lift lines to ride the lift every time. It will have been nighmarish on weekends. People wanted to ski, so neither put them off.

Hakuba became popular with foreign skiers before Shiga Kogen because it had cheap old pensions that foreigners could buy cheaply and start promoting independently to other foreigners via the Internet. Such places also exist in Nozawa and Myoko, which is why they were next to see foreign interest. Shiga Kogen is mostly large hotels that are harder for ordinary folks to buy. With few foreign businesses doing promotion, the area has been slower to attract foreign skiers.

Mostly rich people shop at Hankyu and Hanshin department stores. Their customers could easily save money if it mattered to them by shopping elsewhere.

I only say "mostly" because I used to really like an "ikayaki" pancake sold in the basement of the Hanshin store, which was only 200 yen.

https://catalog.hankyu-hanshin-dept.co.jp/hankyu/brand/?bd=hsb_ikayaki&btm=0&cp=snack15

The Winter Olympics made the Nagano Perfecture an international snow destination to this day

No it didn't. International skiers only started coming to Nagano in numbers after Niseko in Hokkaido became popular. Hosting the Olympics was irrelevant.

All early promotion of Hakuba etc. was about "powder snow", not "Olympic host".