ThonTaddeo comments

All this will inevitably result in the best jobs, ie international companies, being more accessible to English speakers from abroad.

I'd love to see that, but let's be honest: when English is needed in the Japanese business world, Taro the Japanese middle manager will always value other Japanese people with mediocre English over an English speaker from abroad. This is one of the reasons Japan lags so far behind in English: they absolutely refuse to cede authority to a non-Japanese on what is correct, even when the subject is the non-Japanese person's native language.

@darknuts

It's ridiculous that Japan still has not worked out this issue.

A cynic would say that Japan has worked out this issue exactly as it wanted to.

@Mike - absolutely, and the patronizing "explaining adult concepts to children" tone that these articles always take, seen in the second sentence here, just makes it worse:

Weakness in the Japanese yen also helped Nissan’s bottom line. A weak yen raises the value of Japanese companies' overseas earnings when they are converted into yen.

These writers shill for the government and BoJ over and over, parroting propaganda that is directly against the interests of working people.

It's pretty ridiculous that any single company could be able to trademark a single letter of the alphabet to begin with. Perhaps trademarks should be limited to phrases or sentences.

Do what Japan does and set fixed prices for medical procedures, ensuring that there are no unpleasant surprises when you suddenly need medical care. This is the real strength of the Japanese system, more than how everyone has to pay into it.

@David - I'm not talking about barbecues or doing any other specific thing on building property; I'm talking about legal ownership. Apartment ownership is not just a box-shaped piece of air as is occasionally mistakenly believed; you own your share of the land under the building.

@David - you do own land; if there are N units and they are all the same size, you own 1/N of the building's land area. If they're different sizes and your unit is X square meters and the total land area is Y, you own X/Y of the building's land area. If the building owners vote to demolish the building and sell the land, you would get that proportion of the proceeds.

Let me get this straight: a man is bullied by police into confessing to a crime. He is put on death row and spends every day wondering which day will be his last. After 48 years behind bars, evidence exonerating him is finally presented and he is released.

The prosecutors don't appeal. (Why is the prosecution allowed to appeal, anyway? That means even people declared innocent can never rest easy.)

And now, at 87, they just can't let this innocent man finally enjoy the freedom that they deprived him of for half a lifetime. These people are monsters.

At the end of a day all you will get is suspended sentence.

He didn't have to go to prison, but he had to pay a penalty of roughly 8 times the profit he made. Just for buying stock in the company he worked for, which seems bizarre to me. He wasn't short-selling in advance of an expected decline that only insiders would know about; he was buying. Many companies encourage employees to regularly buy the stock.

If the government's position is truly:

The first is creating a neighborhood that is fun to walk around

Then why is there a multi-decade plan to widen all the thin pedestrian streets and force setback land-confiscation on new construction so that every road can accommodate automobiles? All these charming pedestrian-first streets and alleys are being taken away because they don't want any roads thinner than four meters.

prove your innocence if you can.

This is not how the justice system works in civilized countries, of which France is one, and of which Japan claims to be one, at least when the Minister of Justice is not misspeaking. (She said this very sentence, in direct opposition to Japanese law, during Ghosn's escape.)

What school of economics is that statement from?

The school that puts the big business and LDP-insider rentier class ahead of people who work for their wages.

It's sickening to watch the media shill for them nonstop and bias everything in their favor. Watch, next week they'll be using words like "gains" and "boosts" for price hikes due to inflation. For these elites, working people are serfs from which to extract wealth.

Oh gosh whenever you hear people calling "chan" in the workplace (especially men calling other men) run away and never look back.

@finally rich - I'm glad my post gave you the toxic-Showa-patronizing-bully image that I wanted it to have. These are places that ruin their employees' mental health and I don't blame the employees for wanting to quit, or for needing assistance when they quit.

If these companies are ensuring that the employee isn't cheated out of any remaining unpaid PTO or other benefits -- and it sounds like they are, given that Guardian includes membership in a union -- then it sounds like they're earning their fees. Imagine trying to quit with your last day of PTO being the second of next month, and your boss saying something like, "And you expect Tanaka-chan in accounting to process an entire paycheck just for two days? And your pension and insurance? Why are you doing that to your co-workers? Why are you so selfish?" ...when you are only exercising your legal rights. I'd love to have a hard-negotiating agent in my corner in this situation.

@Stephen - Nux is Latin for "nut". Nuculeus (with that u in the middle) means "little nut" and it's what the center of the atom (containing protons and neutrons) was named. "Atom" comes from Greek a-tomos, meaning "not-cut"; it was accurate at the time but not so much now that we can split atoms, whereas nucleus is still a good metaphor. They're just words; neither one is more threatening than the other.

@Kazuko - I read the PDF. While the proposal isn't as horrible as people might think, they're engaging in the usual deception when they use numbers. I can't speak for the tennis club, but much of the supposed "increase" in open space comes from not counting the amateur baseball field as open space today (though it clearly is; a nice patch of green in the middle of the park which I have been to many times), and having more dead space between facilities rather than packing them in efficiently as they are now. The amateur baseball field will be gone, as will the Swallows' secondary field.

Will the team have to bus players around the city to get to their practice field? That's not very green. But it is another example of externalizing costs, something both corporations and government are really good at.

@Yubaru

How about "only" ID card for those without a drivers license! Dont say the insurance card, because there is no picture on them!

There's actually one photo ID you can get if the reason you can't drive is that you're disabled: the Disabled Person's Book or 障害者手帳.

This was one of the first things the government targeted when they started talking about converting all kinds of other IDs into the My Number card, and I remember being disgusted, because they were of course starting with some of the most vulnerable and underprivileged people in society. Thankfully, that merger has not happened (yet). Still, some corporations with online-only smartphone-only account openings don't accept it, taking only My Number or a driver's license, and no one seems to be addressing it.

From what I have heard, the imposition of English at these companies often causes Japanese managers to overcompensate with excessively traditional "Japanese" work culture in lots of other ways, making them much more difficult workplaces for the international employees than you would think, The international employees end up leaving, defeating the purpose of having people use English.

This country's love for sleep deprivation is something I'll never understand. It doesn't make you stronger; it doesn't make you smarter; all it does is destroy your health.

Very happy to see an article that criticizes inflation and points out how things are for the wage-earners; usually these articles are stuffed with BoJ propaganda and sneaky BoJ/LDP-favoring language.

@Kazuko

Article: … a government survey of companies with five or more employees found real wages fell 3% from a year earlier in April, marking the 13th straight month of declines.

I think the math works out like this: wages rose 0.2%, but inflation reduced the value of those wages by 3.2%, meaning that "real" (inflation-adjusted) wages fell by 3%. That is, inflation took away all the gains the workers made with increased productivity. But the number on the pay stub went up just a tiny bit, so technically it is not a lie to say that wages rose.

@beerDeliveryGuy, if that's a standard military schedule, and recruits can only get at most 7 1/2 hours of sleep per day even with all that activity packed in, I can easily imagine people snapping and going crazy. Not the kind of environment in which you want to put people who are being trained to kill.

Prices for food and non-alcoholic drinks have actually fallen in Europe, from 17.5% in the 20-country euro area in March to a still-painful 15% in April.

This is either deceptive or a mistake. Prices haven't fallen; the rate of increase in prices has fallen (disinflation, not deflation). People are still having to pay more than they did in the past; they're just not getting poorer as fast as they had been.

"We expect the Bank of Japan to achieve its price stability target of 2 percent in a sustainable and stable manner in view of economic, price and financial conditions, accompanied by wage increases," the document said

Do they have George Orwell writing for them? Is this the Ministry of "Truth"? A 2% increase every year is the exact opposite of "price stability"; it is a commitment to having prices rise every year, ensuring that the wage-earning working class gets poorer every year while the rich, who have many vehicles to insulate themselves from inflation and even profit from it, get richer still.

"Slumping"? Oil prices are still high enough that airlines are taking massive oil surcharges!

@Rex - I was thinking the same thing. People like the Switch, but Sony seems obsessed with streaming rather than letting people own the games they buy. Having enjoyed the Vita, this seems like a giant waste of data to me.

So your PS5 has to be on, and you have to have an internet connection on both ends, to use this?

Even if they're not going to make dedicated handheld games for it like they did with the Vita, why not let people pre-load games on their PS4/5 and take this device to continue playing on the go?

"We can't get women, who are typically the ones who manage household finances, to work for us, where we push out nonstop propaganda about how inflation and currency devaluation are somehow good for working people and households! Why can't women see that we elites are correct and the people are wrong!?"

@USN

Driving is not a right. It's a privilege 

Yes, it's a privilege -- one where people who have it take it, and its subsidization by the public, for granted. Those people have constructed an entire society where it is presupposed that everyone has this privilege; in many comunities you can't find a good job or home, or enjoy a decent social life, if you don't have it.

Nagano's subsidy is a welcome initiative for people who don't have this privilege.

By that logic we should be eligible for a refund if we never have to call an ambulance, the fire department, the police, etc.?

That's not the same logic. It would be if some people were banned, because of a condition they have no control over, from calling those services if they need them, like they are banned from operating a car. (Illegal immigrants, perhaps? I can't think of any other equivalent.)

It's a public service/infrastructure that's there for everyone's benefit to varying degrees and paid for by everyone. There's no social inequality.

If you think there is no social inequality involved in today's car-centered society, I ask you this: imagine the government (or some eccentric rich environmentalist, or whatever) came to you and offered to pay you in exchange for permanently losing the privilege of driving, how much would you have to be paid? You would never be allowed to operate a car again, ever. Other people can drive you around, and other people can deliver things to you by car, but you can't ever drive. Would you take this deal for one single yen? Certainly not. How about for a million yen? For a hundred million?

There's a number in the middle that would be your price, and I suspect it's pretty high. That's how valuable being able to drive a car is; drivers don't see all the advantages they have until the advantages are taken away. Nagano's very limited discount taxi service is a great first step, but it doesn't come close to the disadvantages of not being able to drive.

All of use or benefit from this "infrastructure."

But we don't all benefit in the same way, or receive a net benefit compared to what we have to pay, as anyone who cannot obtain a driver's license, or is trying to keep theirs at an advanced age, can attest. Older people cling to their licenses because they know how many opportunities are denied to you if you can't drive a car. The visually impaired and epileptics and others who can't drive learn this at a much younger age. And the general public either doesn't care, or insults them by claiming that because goods can be delivered to them by automobile, they shouldn't complain about never being able to operate an automobile themselves like the majority takes for granted.

A program like this one in Nagano is a tiny step toward alleviating this gigantic social inequality.