japan is fucked up!

http://kotaku.com/5484581/japan-its-not-funny-anymore

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."

OK so the guy rants about the fact everythng has meat in it and everyone smokes. What a pussy.

I feel like I only post when Japan comes up, but that article is depressing. Guy has spent 5 years in Japan but somehow only managed to learn only the most basic stereotypes about Japanese culture.

What a pussy.

He actually sounds like he's one of the many who come to Japan looking for exactly that, put 0 effort into learning the culture, and then start complaining about what a bewildering, impossible place it is once they realize they're not going to get any.

I feel like I only post when Japan comes up, but that article is depressing. Guy has spent 5 years in Japan but somehow only managed to learn only the most basic stereotypes about Japanese culture.

― adamj, Thursday, March 4, 2010 12:16 AM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark

now, now, don't be so hard on momus.

He's complaining that catering to pervs is a new thing in anime? That was the joke about it in the late '80s (when I first encountered it being sold in the comic book chain my mom ran) - the only people who came in to buy it were beyond skeevy.

yeah that's been a meme since 1970s.

http://i256.photobucket.com/albums/hh188/vicose88/Lost_in_Translation_.jpg

"Fact: I have never seen anyone playing Tekken 6 without also smoking a cigarette."

Guy has spent 5 years in Japan but somehow only managed to learn only the most basic stereotypes about Japanese culture.

I've only been overseas a couple years (and I'm about to move back) but, from what I've seen, this is pretty common for expats. Not even expats, I can think of Kenyan-born white people here that have said the most ridiculous shit. Or hell, everyone in Los Angeles re: cultures that are not theirs.

I guess we have higher expectations for expats, that they should approach other cultures with deep interest and humility. But maybe this guy just thought "hey, job/money, and Japan is cool - I'll give it a shot!"

Note that I'm saying this shit is common, not excusable. Dude definitely deserves some mocking.

Yeah I don't disagree with you; it's very common and that's why I find it so abhorrent. But then again most people who have been in Japan over a year have more insightful things to say than "They work long hours AND THEN THEY GO TO WORK PARTIES? OMFGWTF!!"

I thought the article was very funny.

I don't want cigarette smoke near my organic vegetables! Hel-lo? That makes them pretty much not organic anymore! You might as well just be buying them from a hobo, at that point.

first world problems, etc, etc

lotta save-a-totally-in-no-way-how-could-you-even-think-that-weird-culture-ing itt

actually, i should say that I found it curiously tl;dr for some reason and did not read it because it was too long.

Maybe if I moved out to Osaka, things would be better. What things, though? Well, maybe the people wouldn't bother me so much.

So when I told a friend, "Oh, I'm going to go home tonight and write a column for Kotaku.com," he said, "Oh, so you're going to write about Japan?" For a second, I thought he had read my mind. Well, let's see.

I'm sure if I said I'd feel sorry for the kids, someone would point out how Japanese people seem to pretty much never get lung cancer — maybe because of all the green tea, or walking — so it's not so bad if the kids grow up to be smokers. Well, what about the people who, like me, simply find the smoke terrible?

So lately, they're trying to cut down on people smoking. By "trying", I mean they're putting up signs everywhere that say you'll be fined 2,000 yen if you smoke. I wrote about this before. Well, five months later, I've never seen or heard of anyone getting fined.

Many bread-makers substitute oils, butter, or — god help us — margarine. Well, I can now curiously report that, on a recent trip to a super market, I couldn't find a single loaf of white bread that didn't have lard in it. Hmm.

I have a lot of fun, lately, making up the weirdest fake reasons for not eating meat: My favorite one is saying that I don't eat meat because I wouldn't want to ingest an animal weak or dumb enough to enter a life of slavery under another species, that the only meat I would eat would be that of an animal which a human cannot actually kill. This explanation, recently, actually drew the serious response, "Well, if you can't kill the animal, you can't eat it!"

Well, these days, people have iPhones, which are more or less like Japanese cellular phones, only browsing the Internet doesn't cost six dollars a page load.

Occasionally, I'll be out eating dinner with friends, and young people at a nearby table will be talking about opening a business. This is really common: it seems like they have no idea what the company is going to be. Okay, this happens in the West, too — BioWare got started from the idea of making medical software. Well, sometimes, Japanese companies don't even start with that much vision. They're just companies.

So, one day, we got an email: "THIS FRIDAY AT SIX PM, EVERY EMPLOYEE IS REQUIRED TO REPORT TO THE CONFERENCE ROOM TO EAT PIZZA". Well, there you go.

Their lives, bodies, and souls belong to the company; the energy that resides in those bodies is all to the company's benefit. If you say it like that, it comes out as sensationalist and weird. Well, it's that kind of thing.

Lots of people who I meet as tourists seem enamored with the idea when they first encounter it. It's a different kind of culture. Well, no one likes it after a while, least of all the people who are doing it.

I seriously and portentously asked a question, then, which I thought was hilarious: "If we're the first one in the office in the morning, do we still have to scream 'Good Morning' and clap our hands to the sides of our legs?" Her answer was immediate, and humorless: "Yes." "Well, I mean, there's no one else around to hear it, right?"

"Well, [Name-removed]-san, you can try putting 'san' on the end of my fucking name from now on, then, you know, as practice."

I knew from the beginning that I would never "fit in" whether I wanted to or not; well, this was probably around when the rest of the world got the memo.

Western business gurus have been advising young up-and-comers for years to put "President and Founder" on their business card instead of "First and Only Employee." Well, Tokyo is a pedestrian culture, and on the ground, this advice translate into something terrifying.

Or maybe it's just me. Maybe these things really don't bother other people so much. Japanese people always tell me, "Oh, it's just a Japanese thing. If you grew up here, maybe you'd be okay with all of it."Well, sure.

They made a lot of little pastries, you know, just flinging shit at the wall. Nothing stuck. Well, eventually, they made a croissant with a little bit of chocolate in it.

The old people are the majority, and they don't like us because we lack the drive they had. Well, they've done fucked up a whole lot of shit, financially speaking.

And you say, "Well, Halo 3 was made by a team of like six hundred people. We've got, uhh, about sixteen people." And then he pumps his fist and says, "We're just gonna hafta work overtime!" No we're not, asshole.

The reason for the tattoo hatred is, so the urban legend goes, to keep the yakuza out of the gym / bathing area. Well, what about a white guy with a tattoo?

When is something like Nintendo's "Finance Diary" going to be implemented into ATMs? Well, cash will near-completely fade away, at some point in the future.

dude sounds like the type who would make a long list of complaints of wherever he lived tbh, but yeah, tl;dr zzzz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFy5B2NSHsg

c'mon, this is funny

I wonder what is the best/worst: complaining the whole time about the country you live in, or fully immersing yourself in its culture (and thus "alienating" yourself from your family who still resides in your home country)? Ideally (for all involved) it would be a middle ground, but rarely do I see/meet people who can do this (when living or having lived in Japan). Somehow everyone has a love and/or hate relationship with said country. Me, I fluctuate between these two emotions. lol

I mean, fuck, it's kinda sad for the guy. He's lived for so many years and at the end of it, he seems to bitter, y'know. But 1 it'll probably cool down once he moves away and 2 it's an article that is probably meant to be acidic.

this is a dick move:

So lately, they're trying to cut down on people smoking. By "trying", I mean they're putting up signs everywhere that say you'll be fined 2,000 yen if you smoke. I wrote about this before. Well, five months later, I've never seen or heard of anyone getting fined. I once pointed out, to a police officer, that someone was smoking in the no-smoking zone, and asked if he would fine him, and the cop simply asked me for my ID, passport, and visa papers. He looked them over, gave them back, and turned away.

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.

xpoost
kanazawa is a theme park
gifu is a suburb of nagoya

i'm exaggerating and i didn't mean dreary as absolutely negative. i love to stroll abandoned arcades and deserted red light districts. much of tokyo is dreary in a pleasant way.
most of the country that i've seen is beautiful and worth visiting, probably especially if you're not into big cities.

another intense gallery... that soapland shot is terrifying.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/queen-chateau-soapland

woulda loved to attend one of those back in the day

there are still a few in la

for science, research and reporting to the p01ic3 of course

Nice shots D

pretty massive earthquake in japan

and the west reporting erroneous and incomplete reports

smdh

6.4 is what I saw earlier on the USGS site

6.6, Hokkaido. houses buried in landslides, 2 reported deaths already

http://www.asahicom.jp/ajw/articles/images/AS20180906002535_comm.jpg
from the Asahi Shimbun

I missed the recent Kansai earthquake by a day and I’m in Sapporo in a couple of weeks. Sooner or later I’m going to be caught up in one of these, which is a pretty sobering thoughts.

Is the rain from typhoon jebi a factor in the landslides or just a coincidence?

Does dylannnn still post here?

Planning for 2+ week work trip. Last time I commuted from Chigasaki to Shibuya which was a little long but the family was stoked on the beach.

Was considering Karuizawa but that may also suck in the coming months, might be better to stay more local? I used to randomly hang in Tokorozawa back in the day and kind of have a fondness for scraping the edge of the outer suburbs. 2LDK mansions are surprisingly cheap on airbnb.

Haven’t seen him in a while but I thought he moved to china?

I found Ueno pretty easy to stay last time. It's the opposite side of the Yamanote line but there are straight-across trains from Akihabara. But Ueno Park and the museums etc around there make for nice variety, and the place has a good feel.

i'm in beijing a lot these days but still based in tokyo!

i hate leaving this particular ward in tokyo, so i base this mostly on transit. i don't see a commute from karuizawa working... i just looked up the transit situation and you'd have a tough time making it under 3 hours once you came into ueno or tokyo station on the hokuriku shinkansen then transferring to the yamanote. hakone or ohiradai, anywhere out there, not quite as pretty as karuizawa but you're on the odakyu line, one train to shibuya, get there in an hour and a half. you could even go somewhere way up in tochigi and get in easier than from karuizawa, still in some pretty mountains and not far from the water. how about along the ibaraki coast? i was going to recommend hiratsuka or somewhere else on the shonan coast (or down the miura peninsula) for good balance between city/ocean/mountain, but chigasaki is right there.

if it's the city, maybe kitasenju? it's a happening neighborhood suddenly and easy to get into the city but remote enough that it feels like you're in chiba. akabane out in kita ward, if you like that showa atmosphere.

In my much more limited experience, I second Ueno and Okachimachi.

Kitasenju look interesting.

I get to spend a couple of months in Tokyo next fall. My wife is going to be a visiting scholar at Keio, which apparently comes with an on campus flat.

i live just north of ueno station, and i'd recommend getting just a bit beyond the area, especially if you're staying in an airbnb. just the sheer number of tourists staying around here, the hundreds of hotels and airbnbs and other quasi-legal minpaku, all the tourists flocking to asakusa and ameyoko and the zoo, it can be offputting, i think.

if not kitasenju, then maybe minami senju or nihonzutsumi, a fascinating neighborhood that has a history as a center of labor struggle, outcastes, day laborers and homeless and plenty of charm still left, fairly welcoming because around 2008 world cup and before, hostels started to be built, business hotels, slowly being gentrified as the flophouses and business hotels are being converted to hotels catering to chinese tourists and suburbanites move in from chiba, still close enough to asakusa to walk down (five, ten minutes) and see the northern half of that area, yoshiwara, kappabashi etc. eat on the arcades around sensoji at dusk when the tourists have left... or around the triangle formed by nishi-nippori, nippori and mikawashima stations, right in the heart of gritty shitamachi, very quiet especially as you approach mikawashima, and yanaka ginza and the yanasen area are just to the west, but easy to get in and out. or further west, machiya or oji or otsuka, so you can stay in a chill neighborhood, ride the city's last streetcar around, but still hop on the yamanote to get to ikebukuro or shibuya or wherever. or even across the river in sumida ward, still in the early process of being gentrified (because it's going to be underwater when the big one hits and the alluvial soil liquefies), plenty of charm, museums and parks and good restaurants.

I have been a visiting scholar at Keio with an on-campus flat but it was in Hiyoshi fwiw. Though then you’re close to Yokohama which for livability I might prefer to Tokyo?

I find the areas around Ueno very sympa, Asakusa and even over the river toward the sumo stadium. These areas are older but seem somehow very solid, if that makes any sense.

Hopefully I will be going to Kyoto in April.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/15/japan-cyber-security-minister-admits-has-never-used-computer/

these photos of everyday life are great: https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/photography-2/tokyo-street-photographer-mikiko-hara/

as is: http://www.youtube.com/user/Rambalac/videos

Tell me more about this "Ueno"...

jk, please don't! I spent way too much time there in the 00s, plying my wares on the mean streets of Ameyoko. Fond memories of this dive: https://tabelog.com/en/tokyo/A1311/A131101/13008521/

Thanks dylannn for the recs, I'll spend this weekend doing some more research and hopefully booking by Sunday. No offense to the other recommendations but in case it's not obvious I'm looking for to stay not quite inaka but as far outside of town as I can manage (now that Karuizawa is off the table, Chichibu may be pushing it).

I’m still perplexed ueno is an actual tourist spot

chichibu would be doable. you could probably go a little further west to kofu, and have an easier time getting in to tokyo and be way out there but still in a town.

ueno, the keisei narita line dumps people right there, within walking distance to asakusa, the zoo, akihabara on 99% of foreign tourist itineraries and package tour stops, a billion hotels around the stations, ameyoko is now given over to mostly touristy-type shit, so it makes sense that people stroll through on their way to akihabara. it's a weird place to choose to live, i realize now, at ueno in peak tourism. i live in a danchi occupied by mostly 70 and 80 year olds who protested the construction of a hotel right next door, but what can you do? i should take my own advice and move to kofu.

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.

americans: somehow i missed that Strong Zero chuhai is now available in the USA as "-196" (was that the OG name in jp?) in lemon, grapefruit and peach flavors.

still waiting for umeshisho, sudachi or shiikwaasa flavors kana

i think strong zero is subtitled by -196 still

sugarfree kakuhai in a can, soda and whiskey only, has been replaced by more creative bourbon soda cans, evan williams, and so on. i wonder if americans get those

I drank so much strong zero in fukuoka last summer

Thank you 24 hour family mart