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I want to be interested in Japanese politics. I really do. I like Japan, I have lots of friends there, but I just can't. It's so boring. Another year, another prime minister, a bunch of party infighting or some poo poo, and then nothing terribly important continues to happen. That said, at least raising the consumption tax is something, though it doesn't sound like a terribly good idea in a country already prone to saving rather than spending. I guess they'll see bumps in durable goods and other large purchases before the increases go into effect, but that's hardly a path to sustained growth or recovery, I'd think. A wealth tax of some sort to at least try to recapture savings and ticking up inflation a bit as a disincentive to make up the difference seems like it would be a better approach, but then like I said, Japan just can't hold my attention on these things, so I haven't been paying any mind to the debate there on these matters. Also, I know dick-all about economics.
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Jun 26, 2012 10:32
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Can anyone tell me about Abe's inflation scheme? I'm a bit out of touch with what's going on. But whatever he's up to, it's tanking the yen, and I'm loving it.  way later edit: I mean seriously. Over 88 yen/dollar for the first time in like 2 and a half years. I keep leveraging up to lock in my gains and it's just basically free money. ReidRansom fucked around with this message at 09:16 on Jan 4, 2013 |
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Jan 4, 2013 05:27
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Protocol 5 posted:I thankfully haven't had any direct experience with cops in Japan, aside from the occasional cursory eyefuck, but I do have a pretty funny anecdote from a former coworker. The guy had his apartment broken into while he was at work, so he called the cops and made sure not to touch anything. A couple of uniforms show up to take a statement and get a list of what's missing. They eventually wrap it up, and on their way out, one of them actually has the gall to criticize my former coworker for not cleaning up before they arrived. At that point he pretty much abandoned all hope of every getting any of his stuff back. My only experience with Japanese cops aside from stumbling into the odd Koban drunk and asking for directions was getting pulled over driving a friend's car after leaving some bar. She and her sister were arguing that the other should drive, so I said gently caress it, gimme the keys I'll do it. Now, I'd had a few drinks to be sure, and though I was probably below the US BAC limit, I was certainly above the Japanese one. Not defending my actions, yes it was a dumb thing. Anyhow, we come up on a police roadblock. I'm thinking I'm hosed, no DL, legally too drunk to be driving, but what else can I do but stop and roll down the window? Cop takes one look at me then immediately starts talking past me to my friend in the passenger seat. I sat silently as he explained that a vending machine was robbed and asked had we seen anything. No, we've been elsewhere, blah blah blah, OK, have a nice night. Basically (and fortunately for me, at least) Japanese police are completely incompetent.
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Feb 26, 2013 22:25
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My understanding of Japanese universities, and someone please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, is that they're basically a joke. At the undergraduate level, at least. Even the good ones. Hard to get in, but once you're there it's pretty much a cakewalk.
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Mar 10, 2013 08:08
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Ardennes posted:Also, I think there is a certain local governance issue of having ghost towns poping up. Farmers ultimately feed back into a rural economy that supports service and other ancillary jobs. You wouldn't just put the farmers on welfare but hope that there is enough left over from government checks to keep whatever local economy that there is left going. It isn't a real desirable situation either way and unfortunately, the most cautious and safest route (keep on doing the same thing) isn't going to actually fix the issue. Tying into that, I'd feel remiss to not mention one of my favorite blogs about Japanese poo poo, Spike Japan. He talks a lot about the decline of rural Japan, closed railways, highways that go nowhere since the real estate bubble popped, small villages fighting to survive, all that stuff. And he's quite a writer so it's quite a good read even when it's about some normally completely uninteresting poo poo, like annual trends in economic indicators or whatnot.
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Mar 19, 2013 08:14
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Ned posted:And apparently he's giving up the gig. Quite a loss! Yeah, I just saw that. Shame if he actually gives it up, because he does offer a lot of interesting insight into the side of Japan that most people don't ever see and all the various ongoing problems therein. Everyone go read his articles and maybe he'll change his mind!
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Mar 19, 2013 09:40
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Pompous Rhombus posted:My exchange rate I've made about $500 today so far and I didn't open a position until well after the drop, so gg Japan, keep it up. but also I saw this on my forex news feed quote:Soros says that the Yen fall in Japan may become like an avalanche which coming from a man who (notably silently) made a cool billion off the earlier slide of a few months ago has me slightly worried that he's not being completely forthright with that statement. e: or maybe he just doesn't have a position anymore and so is being honest. I dunno. Forex is weird. ReidRansom fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Apr 5, 2013 |
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Apr 5, 2013 03:21
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Mr. Fix It posted:Because the workforce is getting ready to shrink like crazy as the median age creeps up towards 50 (44.6 as of 1010). They need to be able to collect tax from retirees if they're going to make a dent, and a consumption tax is probably the only politically feasible way to do that. And it's only barely feasible since all those olds vote. Japan has always had a relatively high propensity to consume though. And also to save. They could easily recapture that from their olds on passing through an estate tax without endangering people reducing their spending.
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Oct 1, 2013 10:42
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Genpei Turtle posted:Maybe I should be more specific--I'm more talking about it becoming something "mainstream" for better or for worse. It's been around for a while, but to my understanding it's never been something that's been available to the extent you see now until the 80s. Sexuality and pornography in Japan is about as far from my area of expertise as you can get, but I definitely remember "the amount of child porn available suddenly exploded in the 80s" as something that stood out in class. The amount of every porn everywhere exploded in the 80s because of camcorders/VCRs, and again in the 90s with the internet and digital photography. Porn being easier to make and distribute = more porn.
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Nov 7, 2013 03:45
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Samurai Sanders posted:Not even with Latin names, but a popular fish to eat in Japan translates to English as "bonito", but who the hell knows what that is? Hearing my Japanese friend say "I just love bonito" and having no clue what she was talking about (not knowing that she was talking about a fish, or even a food) is one of the first things that told me how useless bilingual dictionaries can be sometimes. I think bonito was originally the Spanish or Italian for it, but it has kinda become known as that in English also, probably because of the Japanese. In proper English, I think we call it skipjack tuna. e: nope, it's its own fish, not a skipjack, just similar.
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Nov 10, 2013 18:10
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I assume the Valkyrie-like paint scheme is intentional.
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Aug 21, 2014 03:33
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Bakanogami posted:I really have no idea why Japan freaks out about marijuana to the extent that they do. The punishments are incredibly severe, and they seem to think that places legalizing it are crazy. The gist I got when I was over there (and looking for weed) is that it's illegal and therefore it's bad; they wouldn't have made it illegal otherwise. No further explanation given.
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Aug 26, 2014 15:48
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pentyne posted:
Ryoichi Sasakawa comes immediately to mind. An admitted fascist who in addition to funneling a bunch of money back into right wing nationalist stuff, also bribed a shitload of people to get motorboat race gambling legalized, and was BFF with another class A war criminal, Yoshio Kodama, who also sidled up to the US to hate on communists. Sasakawa was at least a semi-legitimate businessman, Kodama was a notorious Yakuza and was heavily involved in drug trafficking. There are a lot of real assholes on the Japanese right. e: Also Sasakawa built this ugly thing overlooking the South Kurils because whatever reason it is they consider so important  ReidRansom fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Aug 28, 2014 |
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Aug 28, 2014 00:06
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I'm almost positive I've read something from one of the Donalds that covered it briefly, at least. But I cannot recall which Donald or what book/paper/whatever. The kawaii culture thing, not the decline of political activism. Though there's probably something about that also from one or the other.
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Sep 2, 2014 02:03
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I remembered the book. It was The Image Factory by Donald Ritchie. A good read, as indicated by this 1-star Amazon review:quote:This book makes a fun subject boring, tedius and scholarly. I would only buy this book if you have to write a paper on the subject. I bought it for fun reading because I love cosplay, manga, anime, Japanese pop culture and Japanese fashion. However, this book is filled with complicated, esoteric language meant to alienate the average reader. I don't know who the author thought he was writing for, but it was definitely not for young people who would be intersted in this stuff. It sounds like he was writing it for college literature professors. He really makes it boring!...
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Sep 2, 2014 02:47
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Did any of you ever read Gormenghast? Everything I've ever read or heard about the imperial family gives me that sort of vibe. It's really pretty sad.
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Oct 3, 2014 15:06
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whatever7 posted:I have ported my phone numbers to google, I can't afford to think otherwise. Evil or not, better to be friends with the self-aware network entity than on its poo poo list.
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Oct 10, 2014 21:44
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Navaash posted:Funny you mentioned them: My Japanese is a bit rusty so I didn't catch everything they're saying, but that's rather stronger language than I'd have expected.
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Oct 23, 2014 14:43
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That's what, maybe 10 or 15 drinks? Sounds like a pretty tame night out for Japan, frankly.
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Oct 24, 2014 04:03
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Though I'm not entirely convinced of it myself, I can kind of buy the argument that the increase isn't quite as regressive as analysis might suggest since a good chunk of those with low income are either young people who still may be receiving assistance from their families in some way and in any case still have a decent lifetime earning potential, or are old and retired, in which case though they may have little or no income might have significant savings. Also I would guess that for the former their marginal propensity to save is quite high and for the latter their average propensity to consume quite low so maybe it's not so bad. Not that it isn't a bad and ineffective idea, just that it isn't necessarily bad because it's regressive. 7c Nickel posted:In my opinion, the fact that something as regressive as this was the only solution the political system could poo poo out is an extension of those structural problems. Well there's also the changes to the inheritance tax, but I'm not clear on what it was before and how much it changed, so I can't really comment.
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Nov 18, 2014 04:19
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Madd0g11 posted:I'm sure it's fired up the legions of internet retards who support him. quote:安倍さんはアラーに宣戦布告した偉大なる日本人のリーダーである。 Ya, seems so.
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Feb 2, 2015 23:02
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Protocol 5 posted:loling really hard at "the emperor is the only true god" I don't know about you, but I'll readily admit my Japanese is only so so, and so it is entirely possible that post is dripping with sarcasm I'm just not picking up on. But the Japanese don't really do sarcasm, the internet is the internet, and it came from 2ch, so, you know.
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Feb 3, 2015 02:11
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I sometimes get the feeling that Japan could basically do away with nearly all its laws and nothing would change much.
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Feb 18, 2015 06:15
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A big flaming stink posted:uh I'm pretty sure that the japanese electorate overwhelmingly supports the pacifism clauses of their constitution. It's one of the biggest disconnects between voters and politicians in japan Japanese people support the law because it is the law. If the constitution said something else, people would support than instead.
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Jul 20, 2015 20:35
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icantfindaname posted:It's interesting how the Japanese people seem to have agency when they're neonazis and are thus responsible for their beliefs but when they're pacifists they're just dumb borg drones repeating what their superiors told them Inertia means a lot. Even moreso than most places, they are very resistant to societal change and support the status quo even when it is demonstrably bad. If things are a certain way then they're that way for a reason and that's the right way it should be. Marijuana is bad because it's illegal, because it wouldn't be illegal if it weren't bad. That sort of thing. e: they expand now, within 30-50 years they'd face the same resistance if they tried to re-pacify.
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Jul 20, 2015 21:03
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