japan is fucked up!

A dicker move

well, yes

It's kind of a dick move. But on the other hand, why bother making the law if it's not going to be enforced?

the Japanese one, of course, not the train push.

but yeah, tl;dr zzzz

there is no one who isn't a dreadful, dreadful writer working for kotaku, but this piece takes the cake - i just scrolled through and through it, wondering, how long is this garbage going to ramble? i mean, who would read this much crap about whiney personal shit? i refuse to believe tom rogers even reread this through once, after its done.

kotaku = big black hole of gaming journalism.

as opposed to the high level of gaming journalism 2 be found elsewhere on the web

would much rather read gamesradar than kotaku badly rewriting something they found on some other website yeah

rockpapershotgun is pretty good

tl;rs,str (too long; read some, skimmed the rest)

My favorite moment of tone-deafness:

I think, in general, the Japanese seem to be comfortable stereotyping and being stereotyped.

His rant is right on most of the facts but lacks all perspective. A lot of his trouble seems to lie in the fact that he lives, works and plays in Tokyo despite admitting trouble dealing with noise, crowds and confusion. He really should move elsewhere, and not to Osaka either. Smaller (but still big) Japanese cities offer almost everything you can get in Tokyo (minus the bleeding edge cultural stuff) and are much more comfortable to deal with on a daily basis. He should look for a transfer to Sapporo or Kobe or Kyoto.

Most Westerners I met in Japan who had similar complaints were under the misapprehension that their home country was somehow welcoming to foreigners, or at least much easier for people coming from other cultures to get used to.

A major challenge to most Westerners living in Japan is dealing with the ongoing culture shock -- some of which can be overcome in a few months by learning a bit of the language and getting used to managing independently in new circumstances, but much of which persists as an irreconcilably different view of human nature and social interaction. Japanese culture is generally quite successful by Western standards (public transport, education, food and culture, commerce, etc) -- it's hard to see how American culture and habits taken as a whole would make life better on balance in a city the size of Tokyo. So it's hard to dismiss Japanese culture completely (despite the Kotaku writer's valiant attempt), which takes away the unhappy traveler's best defense -- believing that the locals are backward, benighted people who've yet to see the light of the American Way.

Every semi-naturalized gaijin has a long list of experiences that are psychologically jarring, whenever something Japanese strikes them as jarring or incongruous or intolerable on a personal level. Unless the matter can be written off completely as crazy or racist or stupid or "fucked up", the gaijin has to consider the unpleasant possibility that the problem is with his/her reaction to the situation, and not the cultural differences themselves.

Which leads to a lot of pointless ranting...

Long been recognized that cultural norms are widely divergent between cultures. Another thing to carry one set of norms inside oneself and live inside a completely different set. Gives some insight into sociopaths, I suppose.

maybe it's because i'm in a "punk" mood since this morning after watching "The Tomorrow Show: Punk & New Wave' trailer" on youtube but i found parts of article interesting . (not the parts that complain about meat and smoke, as it was noted, or not finishing soups or something.)

i lol'd at the assholish equation "the Japanese have distilled "social life" to a point where it is literally a part of work" = poor state of the economy/ low birth rate. keep on keeping society in check, punk rocker :-)

the screaming in circle thing was new to me. the way he puts it , it is sort of creepy.

also nu2me : screaming nonsense in a megaphone to give a certain overdrive ambiance in a store = lol'd.

"I once met a hardcore Japanese punk rock dude who brought up his own out-creeped-ness with the semantics of Japanese customary greetings completely independent of my input." would have liked to hear more from that guy.

... punk rawk!

would have liked to hear more from that guy.

Would have liked to hear more from any of the Japanese people the Kotaku author dealt with to see what they really think of him!

It's quite clear they thought he should smoke more and eat more bacon.

i can't believe tim rogers is still getting paid to write

Long been recognized that cultural norms are widely divergent between cultures. Another thing to carry one set of norms inside oneself and live inside a completely different set. Gives some insight into sociopaths, I suppose.

So fucking OTM

Kind of like people who stay on messageboards they vehemently complain about day in day out...

http://scarletjohanson.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/lost_in_translation.jpg
ilx is fucked up

lol:

Maybe you know the story about how Gran Turismo got started because Kazunori Yamauchi, on his first day in the Sony Computer Entertainment offices, wrote out a sample game design idea consisting only of the words "I want to drive my car on my television."

― noted schloar (dyao), Thursday, 4 March 2010 05:06 (18 hours ago) Bookmark

this is one of the funniest things i've ever read. i don't know why.

http://singularityhub.com/2010/10/20/this-rocking-lead-singer-is-a-3d-hologram-video/

trippy vid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhHo6CUq4-o

At first I assumed it was male, but now I'm not so sure.

http://achewood.com/index.php?date=03242005

i always feel a little sad now when i read earlier, funnier achewood

Communicate with Shiri? Is this going to be in the next iPhone?

"Shiri, where is the nearest train station?"
*left cheek twitches*

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2013/jun/14/eyeball-licking-fetish-japanese-teenagers-sick

Tokyo FAP Wednesday who's in

me!
wait i'm not in japan yet

No panty Shabu Shabu FTW

calstars u in japan?

Sadly, no. I only go there to see the wife's family for a week at a time every year.

You?

in october, waiting for working visa approval. will live in atsugi city.

Sadly, no. I only go there to see the wife's family for a week at a time every year.

You?

― calstars, Wednesday, July 29, 2015 2:17 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this will be me soonish

dylannn, i guess you'll be hitting up yokohama to keep yourself from getting bored?

supposedly tokyo is easier to reach on odawara line
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odaky%C5%AB_Odawara_Line
but yokohama is reached on same line + transfer at machida

or roughly same time from hon-atsugi to shinjuku as hon-atsugi to yokohama

Good idea to study up on getting around ahead of time

i dunno, hope so. before i moved to guangzhzou i thought i had carefully like researched it and knew what i needed to know about the city and getting around and then i basically started from scratch when i got there as i never had any idea where i was without baidu maps. but i managed a daily commute from the most distant suburb without much pain so i hope i can manage the same from kanagawa->shinjuku.

forgot if railway has english options for purchasing tickets.

regular trains within the city do, for sure. worst case, it'll be like matching up cards from the map up top to the bottom screen where you buy your fare

under the impression that: chinese literacy but will never figure out native readings of kanji + being able to read hiragana katakana + still developing c conversational japanese ... it'll be awkward but fine to get around

unlike my china experience though i have no particular fascination w or romantic vision? of the country and know maybe a bit about japan but not that much. i dunno.

kanji is such a bitch. you'll see romaji at train stations, but i'd probably carry with me the kanji of the stops i need with their equivalent romaji just in case. some of the train staff can guide you a bit if all else fails. just show them the kanji of the stop you need to go to and they should be able to point you to the right direction.

wouldn't hurt to learn stuff like hidari and migi. my girl taught me this silly mnemonic. "just think of H&M". hidari means left, migi means right.

now that i remember, when i took the osaka to tokyo shinkansen i saw no romaji for the most part

Yeah. Very limited romaji. Add in the truly labyrinthine maps hung on the wall above the ticket machines (bring your glasses if you wear them) and the throng of thousands of salary men and office ladies trying to get to work, and you've got one bewildering, overwhelming experience.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34581340

as my country voted for a more "hip" prime minister, i read this in the news today and think what the need is to involve fashion to attract supporters.

this is by no means a japan thing, but i've noticed it more in japan. there is a tendency to take on a western "style" of any type of art form, whether it's music, fashion, dance, or "attitude" and "fashionise" it -- i know that's not a word. they copy a style purely for its aesthetic reasons and on the rare occasion that they do delve into studying its meaning, they come up with the most vacuous and oversimplified things. a lot of it is due to their interpreting of individual western cultures as a huge, single oversimplified culture, and another is basing their opinions on hollywood/movie, advertising, etc., stereotypes that feed into their distorted view.

this happens with north americans' interpretation of japanese culture, as well, of course. but it seems like north americans are trying a little harder to break that barrier because we seem to favour open, blunt, honest discussions in classrooms and in open spaces readily. the japanese are surely adopting this stance but at a very slow rate. what makes this a little difficult is the whole tatemae/honne and an image-conscious society.

there are many things i love about japan, but this is not one of them. and in ways, it is contentious, because it's like arguing who the real punks were, where you have some that went against it as a fashion movement, and those who in 1977 were in the business of making punk a fashion "statement." it's tricky.

maybe i'm missing some key element or i'm misreading the protests don't seem vastly different in attempt at "attention to style, slick visual productions and media savvy" and attempt at a tidy overall aesthetic than umbrella movement protests in hong kong but compared to hong kong, japan has limited historical political turmoil and limited political engagement among young people... you end up with slick visual production and people milling around in shibuya while listening to records? again, maybe my lack of knowledge of contemporary japan is the issue but it just looks like a more low stakes version of the hk protests.

flying to tokyo tomorrow btw

nice! good luck and have fun, man! keep us posted.

i will, i will.
i'd still like to know what you think of character or more the aesthetic of umbrella movement vs. recent japan student protests. maybe i should go to shibuya and have a look.

food is good.

http://imgur.com/O1UddgK.jpg

that's where i live

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Why-large-scale-immigration-would-be-bad-for-Japan

Replace japan for the US in that article and ilxors would ban the hell out of you

Thing is, nikkei’s arguments are exactly the same arguments US republicans and Canadian tories make

i don't really agree with tasker. i don't think japan will tolerate large-scale immigration, anyways, but i don't think that's what abe is trying to push, either.

i'm not really a keen observer of japanese politics but it seems like it's not immigration but deeper problems that are the issue. i think you could look at it from tasker's point of view, like, there are inefficiencies and we could just solve them.

but also, there are "labor shortages" but most new jobs are low income zero hour contract jobs: low-paid irregular workers account for nearly 40% of the entire labor force in 2017 (compared with 15.3% in 1984 before deregulation),29 while Japan’s minimum wage is the lowest among 19 advanced economies: ¥798 per hour (on average for FY 2016). ... Moreover, the number of the working poor (those who earn less than ¥2 million a year) increased from 10.9 million in 2012 to 11.32 million in 2016. https://apjjf.org/2018/6/INOUE.html bringing in temporary and quasi-temporary workers from the china or vietnam or nepal helps put off real reform, caters to the corporations that have benefited from abenomics, maybe forestalls left agitation for better quality of life, worker rights etc. don't worry about immigration fucking up the social welfare system when it's already been gutted. don't worry about a labor shortage when everywhere else in the developed world is reducing poverty except japan, 1 in 7 japanese children are poor, the worst gender pay gap among developed nations, corporations are making record profits but wages haven't stagnated for nearly three decades...

turn the place over to the chinese, i don't care

fuck, have stagnated for decades, among other typos.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/07/13/business/poverty-japan-underclass-struggles-achieve-upward-mobility/#.W--Zonozarc

ilx japanophiles, are any of you knowledgeable about japanese art history especially okakura tenshin, fenollosa, meiji aesthetic nationalism, new conceptions of oriental art history and unitary asia?

or any good books on the development of asian art history, even.

if not, that's okay, too.

The Musée Guimet here just had an exhibition on Meiji art and the catalogue could be relevant: here. Nb it may be in French, I haven’t seen it. My autumn was too busy to go to the exhibition.

“On Tuesday, after a flood of eager consumers crashed the website of the electronics manufacturer Sharp, the company said that it would sell its latest line of masks via lottery.”

if you had told me in advance that Japan and Sweden would be outliers in the quality of their response to covid-19 I would have said "sure, makes sense" but I would have assumed the opposite of what actually went down.

Among other headlines you wouldn’t expect about japan

Low-tech Japan challenged in working from home amid pandemic

maybe this will finally cure them of fax machines

And hanko! Nice though they are.

https://newrepublic.com/article/160595/new-yorker-japan-rent-family-fabricated

Thanks, good article

decided to do a (long) thread on nazis in anime/manga lol

major tw for nazi imagery, pedophilia, and antisemitism. pic.twitter.com/rhjaSTiBBT

— ube bebe race reveal party (@VlVlISM) April 20, 2021

Some of this is pretty shocking. I've seen a lot of back and forth about what Attack On Titan is really doing but I don't know.

Thanks for linking

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/08/18/drink-alcohol-japan-urges-young-people/

they should hire Viz as consultants for their national "drink more booze, kids" ad campaign

This is a bad idea

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/business/tiny-apartments-tokyo.html

The times really seems to have a handle on this theme

i lived in a tiny apartment. the bed was in a loft accessed by a ladder. the loft ceiling was too low to make love in many positions, nothing more elevated than a modified froggy style. to avoid climbing down, it was best to begin and finish in the living room / dining room / everything room.

tokyo is affordable. you don't need to live like this. it is fun for a while.