/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Japan

>>7630613
I'll be on my way back to Cleveland.

>>7630594
My old roommate is a Bleachfag and he's dating an Asian (read: Chinese diaspora) girl, btw.

I'm flying through that shit on Tuesday.

>>7630542
That dude looks like my old roommate...also, when I was in Kyoto this afternoon I noticed a bunch of pasty white weeaboos dressed up in yukatas for Gion (which I skipped to go sit in air conditioned comfort).

>>7630455
Dominos is fucktardedly expensive in Japan. It's like ~$50 for a large pizza.

I had pizza-flavored potato chips, mint Pocky, and a Meiji chocolate bar that I bought at internet cafes in Kansai earlier today, then I just got a bowl of rice with a quail egg and veggies and fried duck from the convenience store in my hotel's lobby.

ON FEBRUARY 19th 2006 Kimiko and her married lover Tetsuo checked into an Osaka love-hotel, swallowed sedatives and slit their wrists. When they awoke at midnight and realised their suicides had failed, Tetsuo strangled Kimiko at her request, then tried to hang himself and cut his wrists again. Unsuccessful, he called the police. At the trial, where an American court would consider questions of intent, the Japanese court based its ruling on whether Kimiko was in love. If she was, the court reasoned, she may have consented to her murder and Tetsuo would receive a lighter sentence.

Many facets of Japan seem mysterious to outsiders. Courts are sometimes obliged to seek answers to questions about love that may well be unanswerable. Yet in cases where love might indeed have a bearing, such as divorce, judges usually ignore the emotion entirely. Teasing out the mysteries of Japanese society by way of its statutes is the speciality of Mark West, a professor at Michigan Law School.

In “Lovesick Japan” he trolls through 2,700 court opinions to paint a picture of a country that treats marriage more as an economic contract than an emotional bond. As seen by the judiciary, a little adultery should not trump marriage as an institution. “Japanese courts have no problem waltzing into bedrooms and brothels in ways that are not essential to deciding the case at hand,” he writes. “What they find there rarely seems to please them.”

>>7330355
tjat soundsAWEOMSE zun you better do this or else i will make you go to china

>>7330293

i agree op rocks good job! represent our country well~

>>7307597
Thanks. I will.

>>7306638

I am disappoint

>any tips for an australian dutch guy to survive in Japan?
If you are into /jp/ related things, you'll probably enjoy living here. If you're a normalfag, you'll probably enjoy it for the first few months, and then start to hate it.

no seriously, what the fuck.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fLHUyI9Toc&feature=player_embedded

IN THE Hokkaido town of Yubari, the general hospital was one of the earliest casualties of the municipality’s bankruptcy. The building was so big that the heating bill alone ate up a lot of the budget, and the growing number of elderly patients put it under increasing strain. So in 2006 Tomohiko Murakami, a pioneering Hokkaido doctor, decided to turn it into a blueprint for health-care reform. His blunt message was that the money had run out, so attitudes had to change.

He closed down two-thirds of the hospital, cut the number of ambulances in half and told his elderly patients they should walk to hospital because it was good for them. They grumbled, but it caused no obvious deterioration in their health, he says. They had to use their own initiative rather than relying on the government to look after them. It was the same when half-empty schools merged. What he calls the “Yubari model” may hold a lesson for the country. “It may take bankruptcy to change attitudes in Japan, but that would be a good thing,” he says.

Similar change is creeping into other pockets of Japan too. Doctors praise the preventive health care in mountainous Nagano prefecture, which has the highest life expectancy and the lowest health-care costs in Japan. In one Nagano village, Shimojo, where almost a third of the citizens are pensioners, some of the elderly have started providing child care so that young women can work. The birth rate is rising.

WALK into the inn in the Hokkaido village of Akanko, and everything from the welcoming cry of “irasshaimase” to the taciturn old man grilling chicken on the fire seems quintessentially Japanese. Until, that is, you hear all the customers speaking Mandarin. The Chinese have flocked to this area since it provided some of the settings for a 2008 Chinese blockbuster comedy, “If You Are The One”.

The local Japanese were shocked when the early arrivals used the onsen, or spas, to do the unthinkable: they washed their dirty clothes in the hot tubs. There is still some tut-tutting about Chinese customs—the elbows on the table, the lack of familiarity with flushing loos—but if it were not for these visitors, the tourist trade in the area would be half-dead. Before the Chinese fly out of Sapporo, Hokkaido’s capital, they splurge on items like medicines and rice cookers. Tourism officials call it the “Hokkaido boom”.

Japan is a country with immaculate service, good food, beautiful countryside and excellent beaches. As the domestic population shrinks and regional economies suffer, it makes sense to encourage increasingly affluent visitors from other parts of Asia. The Japan Tourism Agency (JTA) has at last understood this. It has set a goal of attracting 10m tourists this year, a big leap from last year’s figure of 6.8m. To make this possible it has relaxed its stringent visa requirements, which used to allow in only the wealthiest Chinese. Figures up to September showed a 56% rise in tourist arrivals from China, a degree of success that has caught the Japanese off-guard.

TWO decades of post-bubble economic stagnation, together with an ageing population, have led to what the Japanese call the waniguchi (crocodile’s mouth) effect: total public expenditure has soared whereas tax revenues have dropped. The fastest-rising expenditure item in the budget is social security (covering pensions, medical insurance, welfare and employment programmes), which has risen from ¥11.5 trillion in 1990 to a forecast ¥27.2 trillion this year. Some 70% of all social-security payments now go to those over 65.

Japan’s social-security benefits are still less generous than those of many European countries, but the scope to increase them is limited by the size of the national debt. Already pension payments are absorbing a growing share of the total social-security bill. In 2006 they accounted for 13% of national income, almost double the level of 1990, and their share is due to rise further (see chart 5).

A reform of the public-pension system in 2004 provided for a small rise in contributions each year until 2017, when they will be fixed at 18.3% of income. It also committed the government to increasing its subsidy to the basic pension and drew up a framework for indexing pensions based on the number of contributors and on life expectancy. The idea was to reduce overall benefits and stabilise the system for 100 years. But the OECD says that for people on low pay the projected pension, at 47% of previous earnings, is much lower than the rich-country average of 72%.

SATOSHI OGISO was 32 in 1993 when he took on the task of building what Toyota, his employer, vaguely thought of as the car of the future. The deadline was the start of the 21st century. In America at that time car designers were sketching gas-guzzlers or sport-utility vehicles. But Mr Ogiso’s team, mostly in their early 30s, wanted to create something that would “do the Earth good”, as he puts it. Within two years they had come up with Toyota’s hybrid technology, in which a battery powers the car for short distances and a petrol engine kicks in at higher speeds, recharging the battery. Within four years they had their first Prius on the road.

Now there are 2m of them and Toyota has a prototype plug-in version that can be charged at home, like other electric vehicles, but has a petrol engine for long distances. In Toyota’s more distant vision, the home (built, of course, by Toyota’s housing division) will be solar-powered, which will cut emissions even further. And at night, when demand is low, the home may even be plugged into the hybrid car, which will have recharged its battery from the engine.

This is the kind of thing you would expect from Japanese manufacturing, with its focus on craftsmanship, or monozukuri. Mr Ogiso’s project exemplifies some of the strongest traits: teamwork, in-house development and a desire to earn glory for the company. What was different was the engineers’ ages. All young, they were given the freedom to follow their instincts, with no middle managers to second-guess them. “The senior engineers could not understand the hybrid engineering,” chuckles Mr Ogiso.

THE oldest company in the world is Kongo Gumi, a construction firm based in Osaka. It started building Buddhist shrines in 578AD, and was still run by a man surnamed Kongo 40 generations later. The next four firms by age are also Japanese. According to Yasuchika Hasegawa, chief executive of Takeda Pharmaceuticals (founded in 1781), more than 20,000 Japanese firms are at least 100 years old.

This has many merits in a world where most firms come and go. No one wants to see Japan’s industrial heirlooms vanish. But too many businesses are surviving because credit costs nothing, and bankers care little whether their borrowers are profitable or not. That has two damaging consequences: it ossifies corporate culture, and it drags down productivity.

According to Mr Feldman at Morgan Stanley MUFG, since the 1990s productivity has been rising by an average of around 1% a year. That is not too bad by rich-world standards, but the trend is downwards, and if it drops much further GDP will turn negative because of the country’s demographic drag.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djZIpmp_nVo&feature=player_embedded


is this racist? I'm black and am a huge fan of the Japanese culture, I collect manga and learn all I can about Japanese culture. but this is pretty shocking for me and kinda turning me off of it. I never knew this kind of thing went down over there. I don't know what to think now

>>6207525
Kazari is in the hospital, I'm filling in for him.

Hi /jp/, how was your day? Did you play any VNs today?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItVdHh4MTeQ#t=2m37s

What the fuck is up with Japan? Are people taught to be racist over there or something? Watch this video, its about a Japanese girl on vacation in America. The only blacks in the video are portrayed as thieves and gangsters.

I believe there is even an implication that the girl will be raped by the black men towards the end of the video

Why doesn't that society teach it is wrong to stereotype an entire race? They may not have the same virtues as the west but why is racism so accepted and ignored? Why doesn't Jesse Jackson make a case about Japan?

Not the master race indeed.

I live in Japan right now for the past two years. ive been with my body pillow since i went to tokyo. i love it! its good when the girlfriend isnt home. i also got my touhou plush reimu and Hina with me too that my girlfriend bought the other day