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Lammasu posted:Has an Evil Religion in a JRPG ever been based on the Moonies? Earthbound's Happy Happyism always seemed like it parodied the Moonies specifically.
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Aug 24, 2022 11:02
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Vegetable posted:This is more economics than politics, but I don’t totally get why Japan is so loving psyched to have inflation finally hit a positive number. They’re just finding out that wages aren’t keeping up so everyone is just earning less and spending more. I get the problems of deflation but the central bank cheering on inflation is still just the weirdest thing to me. Modern economics 101 says that you need some inflation to drive investment to make the economy grow. No inflation means less pressure for money to flow into investments since it's not gonna lose any of its value just sitting in a bank account. ECB, for example, has attempted to keep Eurozone inflation at around 2%, high enough to incentivize investment but low enough to maintain price stability and therefore keeping the labour markets relatively calm. Whether you think this is sound macroeconomic theory is up to you, but it's why Japan's central bank would celebrate inflation after years of deflation - to them it's a signal that the economy is on a genuine growth track.
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Oct 30, 2022 18:13
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The Japanese system is purpose-built to massively emphasise the vote of rural areas to almost ensure conservative domination. Why? Because of post-WW2 fear of any brand of leftism, which of course had their greatest supporters in urban areas. Surprise surprise this has the effect of demoralizing right-of-right voters when the Soviet Union is decades away and it seems nothing will ever change, no matter how you cast your vote. No need to invent any vague cultural explanations about Japanese society not being a good fit for democracy because tradition~ when it's clearly just a case of a fundamentally broken system.
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Dec 24, 2022 08:35
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The Japanese activist Left did get suppressed in the 1960s after the immense street battles against the police finally petered out, but that only accounts for a bit. (The JCP is still very visible and one of the most organized and popular Communist parties in the industrialised world, for example.) Mostly the current system is just built in a way that LDP cannot be properly electorally challenged by a seasoned opponent. A lot of this has to do with the way that Japan is super centralized and there are no middle tier regional political arenas that could host an alternative power base. Depopulating rural districts full of olds carry a disproportionate influence and the LDP knows how to stuff them full of pork to ensure they remain with the LDP. The social democrats / opposition democrats whatever they call themselves now just can't get their poo poo together long enough to mount a real challenge. People are aware of this and have just turned apathetic, ensuring the situation continues. Democracy is fun!
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Feb 14, 2023 18:45
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I saw these poll numbers and laughed, it's pretty amazing how much the situation favours the LDP. https://twitter.com/UnseenJapanSite/status/1635407131682938881 That's LDP (自民) and their government partner Kōmeito (公明) with a combined 40% of the vote against 8 larger opposition parties, good luck mounting any kind of opposition in the foreseeable future. I would love to know what the hell is happening inside the unaffiliated category.
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Mar 14, 2023 11:35
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I always felt that what set "JRPGs" (I guess using the scare quotes feels apt if we want to move away from the term for something more inclusive) apart from "Western-style" RPGs like the gold box AD&D games and Ultima etc. in their heyday in the 1990s was the focus on the unfolding plot and story-driven adventuring as a group of characters, with less emphasis on just wandering around as an individual and the very involved map, stat and inventory management which often were the main thing the player spent their time on. In that I felt they resemble point-and-click adventure games in that the main hook was the very involved storylines (at least in Square/Enix games), so, uh, Adventure RPGs? Story RPGs? I also feel that the somewhat culturally insular nature of Japanese pop culture at the time had a large role to play in the formation of the genre, just as back in the day it was also very easy to tell British games apart from French ones, for example. Internet, globalization and the resulting citational styles of heavy borrowing from different cultural milieus have changed all of that irreversibly, so I guess we could stop also holding on to the idea that Japanese RPGs work like this while US RPGs work like this.
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Mar 28, 2023 18:37
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CottonWolf posted:To be fair, all my favourite video games are about old men loving each other. I also love the Yakuza series. And doesn't seem like the thread was getting much use outside twitter embeds so at least the video games discussion is old men loving -adjacent, I guess.
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Mar 28, 2023 19:33
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I guess Japan is having a #metoo moment. It's rather sad that none of this actually surprised me one bit, and that Johnny managed to die before anyone dared to really push the matter instead of just looking the other way for decades. CW: sexual abuse https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/12/ohnny-kitagawa-former-j-pop-idol-kauan-okamoto-alleges-sexual-abuse-japan-music-mogul
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Apr 17, 2023 11:22
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There's also a popular majority now for legalizing same-sex marriage but the LDP has a sizable contingent of ultraconservatives who are digging their heels in on the issue. Unsurprisingly the same conservatives are also a good chunk of PM Kishida's power base within the party.
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May 31, 2023 10:52
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Bloody Pom posted:Found a pretty funny Youtube video that goes over the whole Big Motor shitshow: Thanks for the recommend, this is wonderful. I kept going "surely it can't get worse? oh no" through the entire video, 
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Sep 28, 2023 14:39
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https://twitter.com/mrjeffu/status/1722620732268859805
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Nov 10, 2023 16:13
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Apparently there's a full-blown funding scandal on and the Abe faction of the party has been implicated: https://twitter.com/mrjeffu/status/1733846535115575491
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Dec 11, 2023 13:05
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The Mainichi: Disapproval rate for Japanese Cabinet highest since 1947 https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20231218/p2a/00m/0na/003000c The disapproval rate is a historic 79%, the approval rate an almost-historic 16%. The one government in history that managed to limbo even lower was... Naoto Kan's DPJ government in 2011, clocking in at 15% Is there a good recent-ish guide to all the LDP factions? I would also like to read something on how Japan's party system ended up being such a splintered clusterfuck. I've been getting into Japanese language and culture lately and for a politics nerd this poo poo is utterly fascinating, a whole new universe of terrible.
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Dec 19, 2023 21:41
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