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This is purely anecdotal, but I occasionally work with people in the financial services sector in Japan, and by all accounts they're experiencing a huge boom right now. Hiring and salaries are up, and every major brokerage house in Tokyo has seen a massive jump in foreign investment. The conventional wisdom on this is that staying clear of mortgage backed securities left them with much healthier balance sheets than competitors on Wall Street or in the Eurozone, making it the default place to stash capital for safekeeping.
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Sep 23, 2012 17:23
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All of these disputes are just bullshit political theater to keep nationalists busy. For politicians it's a no-lose proposition, if you win, you can grandstand about how you outmaneuvered the duplicitous [country name here], if you lose, you can grandstand about how the duplicitous [country name here] have screwed you again, and if it drags on interminably, you can drag out the dead horse for another few licks to score points with racist shitbags. Doesn't matter which country is doing what to who, there's no incentive for politicians to resolve the issues amicably.
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Sep 26, 2012 01:44
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I translated a position paper for an energy policy think tank awhile back that rightly pointed out that the new solar energy subsidies are going to be mostly throwing money into a black hole, because there is no way in hell that domestic manufacturers of solar cells and whatnot will be able to compete on the international market thanks to the high yen. Stimulating that industry is pretty much pointless, since the other incentives mean that people who are trying to get the subsidies for home use are going to buy the cheapest equipment they can find, which is likely to be Chinese. Germany's solar subsidies had essentially the same problems and had to be massively restructured, yet the Diet went ahead with a plan based on the the failed policy in Germany, to no one's surprise whatsoever, I should imagine.
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Sep 28, 2012 18:24
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It's worth noting that people have jumped in with both feet trying to build up the domestic IT and web services industries over the last decade that manufacturing has been in decline, I just feel sorry for all the kids who are going to industrial high schools for vocational programs preparing them for non-existent factory jobs.
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Sep 28, 2012 18:43
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I was talking about jobs. Output is up, but much of the sourcing for parts, components and a large portion of the assembly is offshored. So while there are still a decent number of white collar jobs in the manufacturing sector, production line jobs have been drying up for quite some time now. It's been standard practice for years to have the bulk of the your line workers signed on as temps, so you can cut staff whenever you have a dip in incoming orders. With fewer and fewer companies sourcing stamped sheet metal parts etc. from companies in Japan, all of those suppliers are folding up or cutting way back on staff. The sustained profits have more to do with cutting back on production costs by offshoring sourcing and labor than they do with the health of the industry in a long term macro sense. The big thing for Japanese automakers in particular at the moment is offshoring the whole operation, from R&D all the way to sales and after service. Do everything locally to keep costs down and shorten the supply chain.
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Sep 28, 2012 20:39
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It is if you consider unemployment a good thing.
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Sep 28, 2012 21:18
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Would you care to advance and argument here or are you just going to keep phrasing pithy right wing talking points as questions? (See what I did there?)
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Sep 29, 2012 00:43
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That kind of hilariously ignorant and out-of-touch bullshit gets really tiresome after awhile. While less monstrously offensive than scaremongering about "death panels" and "FEMA concentration camps" by Republicans in the US, they're just founded on complete ignorance and contempt rather than paranoid conspiracy theories that somehow went big. For some reason, I'm more willing to make allowances for the mentally unbalanced than smug douchebags who just assume that every other country on Earth is a complete hellhole.
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Oct 25, 2012 11:04
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Strange trivia time: the Toyota Hilux is the preferred base for technicals throughout Africa, consequently giving Toyota a dominant share of the light truck markets in Africa. Protocol 5 fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Nov 16, 2012 |
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Nov 16, 2012 00:30
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Samurai Sanders posted:Is there rampant tax evasion or anything in Japan? I just realized I have no idea. It depends on what kind of taxes you're talking about really. For income tax, there are all the typical dodges you'd expect at the high end, and a lot of under the table employment and unreported (or under-reported) cash income at the low end. For corporate tax, the typical dodge for large corporations is to contract out various services to wholly owned subsidiaries so as to move profits around and avoid having to pay anything higher than the minimum marginal rate. A company I did consulting work for had a maintenance services subsidiary that did all of the custodial work for the parent company and had its own logo, executives and offices within the main campus of the HQ of the parent company. Many people will also try to avoid paying for entitlements like the national health insurance scheme, the national pension scheme, and school lunches at public schools. Wage stagnation and underemployment among under 30s is a big part of it.
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Nov 24, 2012 22:38
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Well, Japan simply doesn't have enough arable land to provide enough food to sustain its current population with the majority of that land being used for wet rice cultivation. Actual food self-sufficiency would require major changes in the use of arable land and diet. You have 140M people give or take in the roughly the same land area as California with significantly less arable land, so using the majority of it for a nutrient-poor staple like polished white rice is a non-starter if self-sufficiency is your goal.
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Nov 26, 2012 03:14
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Frankly, they sound like a bunch of wing nuts to me. Putting Ishihara in the forefront sends a very clear message. Sure they'd change stuff, but they'd almost all be changes for the worse, especially for non-Japanese residents.
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Nov 28, 2012 10:16
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It's more like, "If we do join the TPP, let's protect our excellent national health insurance that allows us to freely receive treatment both for conditions that are diagnosed as covered by insurance and those that aren't." I don't have any contacts in the healthcare industry, but from what I know about the TPP, it doesn't sound like it would have much of an impact on the health insurance system, since it mainly focuses on intellectual property rights.
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Dec 4, 2012 11:33
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Nope, I was talking specifically about how it would affect healthcare in Japan. It wouldn't have any effect on healthcare or health insurance providers except within the realm of patented drugs, etc, and Japan doesn't have public health problems anywhere near the scale of, say, HIV infection rates in Thailand. The IP protection provisions are one of the major sources of resistance within less affluent countries considering membership, mainly because they are worried about pharmaceutical companies throwing their weight around and the way they have in Africa. There's also some potential for increased restrictions on free speech, but that's not really germane to healthcare.
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Dec 4, 2012 15:56
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The irony of all this is that you can trace the cripplingly strong yen back to the fact that major Japanese brokerage houses didn't get suckered into the mortgage-backed securities scam on Wall Street. A guy I knew who worked as an analyst for Nomura back when the meltdown happened was gloating that anyone dumb enough to buy into the idea that property prices will never go down deserves everything they get. I'm sure it doesn't seem quite so funny to him now.
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Jan 13, 2013 11:16
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That was pretty funny. Abe got clowned by the US press corps something fierce. I also thought it was hilarious that they made a point of noting that he didn't respond to a request to explain his position on the Senkaku Islands dispute. Never mind that any response at all would draw criticism from someone for no appreciable gain, but why on Earth would he give a gently caress at all? The territorial disposition of some loving barren rocks a hemisphere away are bound to be pretty low on his list of priorities of things to formulate positions on.
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Feb 24, 2013 03:15
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I've ready about the issue plenty, thanks. I fail to see what the US president would gain from publicly taking sides on it. There is not going to a be war over the Senkaku Islands, regardless of all the ridiculous posturing and saber rattling. The rewards are utterly dwarfed by the immense political, economic, and social costs of armed conflict. The State Department's stance has been "we aren't touching that one with a ten foot pole", and though the mutual defense treaty would compel the US to step in should armed conflict occur, it's never going to happen. As with everyone other hot-button China-Japan issue, it's just political theater to stir up yahoos while business goes on as usual behind closed doors.
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Feb 24, 2013 19:52
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ozza posted:Interesting discussion. For those of you in the United States, how would you compare the arguments of pro-death penalty Americans you've encountered versus pro-death penalty Japanese? Haha, I saw this in the theaters when it first came out, on a date no less. That was awkward as gently caress. The ensuing argument about how tossing the presumption of innocence out the window to placate an angry populace rather than actually trying to change the attitudes and conditions that cause or enable molestation (sexism, overcrowding etc.) doesn't actually help anyone torpedoed that relationship pretty much instantly. In my defense: she picked it. The overall crowd reaction was impossible to read, but I do recall a lot of whispered conversations among people on the way out to the lobby, so it at least gave them something to think about.
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Feb 25, 2013 02:49
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I remember when they were leading up to the introduction of the lay judge system, I read a Yomiuri article in which a lawyer explained that judges often convict because to not do so will piss off the prosecutors, cops, and the victim's family. So unless there's some kind of political pressure to acquit, they'll convict and then sentence based on the relative strength of the prosecution's case. If it's airtight, they'll go the full nine, if it's paper thin the poor gently caress will get off with paying a fine or making a written apology (yes, that actually happens with some petty crimes). Of course, a criminal record will turn you into a pariah, so even a slap on the wrist is pretty cold comfort.
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Feb 25, 2013 08:50
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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.
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Feb 25, 2013 21:19
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In Japan, education for women has historically been focused on the arts and accounting. Court women during the Heian period were expected to be poets, and lack of artistic sensibility could hamper your social standing. Samurai wives were expected not only to be a good hostess capable of entertaining guests, but also to be able to competently run family holdings while the husband was off tending to official business. They also frequently received a fair amount of military training, and were often expected to be able to organize and participate in a defense if necessary. In merchant families, women were either trained in the courtly fashion if they displayed aptitude for it, or trained in business skills otherwise. A woman who lacked both artistic accomplishment and managerial acumen was harder to marry off. Obviously, this leaves out the vast peasant class, but they rarely had any formal education, and thus had little influence on it. Mentoring of young men was done exclusively by older men, regardless of class.
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Feb 28, 2013 02:43
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That article mentions the extremely low rate of men taking childcare leave, but neglects to mention that it's often extremely difficult to use childcare leave, even for women. It's rarely denied, but there is a huge amount of pressure from coworkers and superiors not to take it, and those who do take it are often criticized for their lack of dedication to their work. Many companies will allow employees to switch to part time or flex time after their child is born, but will do absolutely nothing to accommodate them in terms of reduced workload etc.
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Mar 3, 2013 01:49
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There's nothing better than the look of stupefied wonder you get when you whip out your hanko to sign for a package. Mine is my first name in Roman letters, people wig the gently caress out. "Can you do that? I'm not sure that's legal."
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Mar 4, 2013 09:33
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Required reading for any US citizens working abroad as a resident alien. The short version is that you're on the hook for any taxes on income in your country of residence, but if you meet the requirements, you can exclude up $95,000 of your 2012 foreign income for purposes of filing your US tax returns.
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Mar 4, 2013 10:30
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About a decade ago I did some undergraduate research into understaffing and related problems at hospitals (ended up catching bronchitis in my study abroad year and got interested in the healthcare system), and the condensed version is that the financial rewards of opening a private practice as a specialist in an urban area are so large that there is a shortage of generalists nationwide, and an even more massive shortage in rural and semi-rural areas. This is compounded by a lack of actual space in rural hospitals to house patients who need extended care. This means that many of those hospitals are only capable of maintaining a minimal staff outside of normal operating hours, and would be caring for more patients with the same number of nurses if they expanded capacity. More recently I've heard rumblings about pushing for reforms to how the KKH handles payouts to favor practices that keep costs down, but that wouldn't do much to ameliorate the structural and societal issues that are putting pressure on the system in the first place.
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Mar 5, 2013 23:42
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A town I lived in actually sent me an informational booklet (in Japanese only, of course) with tons of useful information about nearby hospitals, government offices, waste disposal regulations and contact info for large items, etc. The local city/town hall should also have tons of pamphlets available. Granted, the smallest place I ever lived had a population of 120,000, so I don't know what it's like way out in the williwags.
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Mar 6, 2013 03:40
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That Time article is loving infuriating, primarily because it's the same ignorant bullshit that gets trotted out when ethnic minorities complain about horrible stereotypes in America. "You're just reading too much into it." "You're just being oversensitive." "You're just looking for an excuse to be offended." Nope, it's an offensive, racist caricature. Might as well call him Ankuru Tomu. EDIT: The author of that piece is, of course, ethnically Japanese, born in Hawaii. Protocol 5 fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Mar 8, 2013 |
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Mar 8, 2013 10:46
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ReindeerF posted:I'm curious, when you guys get mad about this stuff are you angry more from a personally offended standpoint or from a public morality & ethics standpoint? Like, does it hurt your feelings personally or are you angry at Japanese society in the broader sense for perpetuating its famous ethnic nationalism? Obviously it could be both or something more, but I'm just trying to figure out what, in particular, actually causes an emotional reaction of hurt feelings or disgust. I despise all racism equally. Racism in Japan irritates me because it is based on simple lazy stereotyping and ignorance. Pretty much any racist stereotype held by the typical Japanese person would be immediately debunked by spending any time at all learning about or interacting with those cultures, but they just can't be bothered, or are terrified of having their preconceptions shattered. It's lazy and cowardly, and frankly a bizarre aberration considering Japan's eagerness to adapt new ideas and styles from other cultures. I really think they're better than that. Actual personal experiences of racism are unpleasant, but what actually angers me is the fact that the vast majority of people in Japan don't understand, or simply refuse to understand, why racism is a problem.
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Mar 9, 2013 00:58
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Rising Sun by Michael Crichton is pretty much the gold-standard for contemporary hysterical anti-Japanese racism in America. The ironic thing is that it paints Japan as the most racist country on Earth, while simultaneously characterizing protectionist government policies and commercial practices as essential elements of the Japanese devious racial character and a valid justification for hating and fearing them. Not only that, but it was published right on the heels of the recession in 1991 that was caused by the savings and loan crisis.
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Mar 9, 2013 08:46
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That kind of stuff is really funny because genetic analysis has shown that people in Japan today share a shitload of characteristics with the Chinese, Koreans, Ainu, Ryukyuans, and everyone else in the region. It's a surprisingly diverse profile for a country that was considered an isolated backwater for much of its recorded history. They're about as unique and special in a genetic sense as say the English.
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Mar 12, 2013 05:33
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It's way outside the scope of this thread, so I'll just suffice to say that yeah, there's a shitload of Chinese traditional medicine practiced in Japan. Acupuncture, massage, herbal remedies, kinesthesiology, you name it. Since it's largely unlicensed and not covered by KKH, the government pretty much looks the other way unless someone starts importing controlled substances, parts of endangered species, or is dispensing stuff that is egregiously toxic. As far as homegrown psuedomystical health mumbo-jumbo goes, look no further than the many "medicinal" hot spring baths. While they do have some therapeutic value in that they are relaxing, as well as some mineral springs containing substances that are efficacious for certain skin conditions, many springs will claim to be able to alleviate circulatory disease, liver disease, gastrointestinal conditions, neuralgia, rheumatoid arthritis, and so forth. Since the government only regulates labeling based on water quality (eg; must have a certain amount of sulfurous compounds to call it a sulfuric spring etc.) and do not regulate therapeutic claims, owners can give the illusion that their claims are backed up by the government. It's similar in many ways to the "organic" labeling in countries that do not regulate use of the term with stringent guidelines.
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Mar 12, 2013 08:23
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The self sufficiency argument doesn't hold water, mainly because there simply isn't enough arable land to meet the caloric needs of the country at its current level of population. The food self sufficiency rating has hovered around 40% for the last 20 years or so, according to MAFF statistics. For comparison, the UK is around 70%. Remember that we're talking about a country of 120 million+ packed into an area roughly the size of California, with a large portion of it mountainous or occupied by conurbation. Reclaiming land is an expensive boondoggle that can cause immense environmental damage and disrupt a wide variety of marine-based industries such as fishing and seaweed harvesting (see the Isahaya Bay Reclamation Project and its effects on the Ariake Sea). That's not to say that domestic agriculture should be abandoned, since that would just make the country even more vulnerable to international price shocks and shortages. However, the simple reality of the circumstances is that no matter how you massage the numbers, Japan is still going to be dependent on imports for a significant amount of their food supply.
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Mar 15, 2013 10:37
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I don't have any numbers, but having been born in Newport, RI, home of the Naval War College, I know that the tendency is for government contractors to soak the military for all they can. The point remains that commissary prices are heavily subsidized in much the same way that housing prices are for servicemen and women, for the same reason. It's hard enough keeping people in for multiple tours of duty as it is, so you don't want to have people getting pissed off about not being able to afford a decent steak or a reasonably sized apartment.
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Mar 18, 2013 12:50
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Stringent posted:So grocery prices for soldiers are subsidised therefore Japan's protectionist tariffs are a-ok. Gj japan thread, stay crazy! I'm not sure who you're replying to with this. Me and Kenishi were both commenting on why PX prices are so low. Neither of us were tying it to a supporting argument for protectionist tariffs.
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Mar 18, 2013 20:07
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Food security is an important issue, and it's not likely to go away. With the depletion of fish stocks getting worse every year, price for marine products are going up too. I'm not claiming to have any answers, since I don't know the first thing about maximizing crop yields etc. etc., but saying gently caress agriculture altogether because it's fiscally inefficient seems pretty short-sighted. Reforming agriculture sounds like a good idea, but replacing the current status quo with US-style agribusinesses strikes me as unlikely to be much better. So far I have yet to hear any proposal that looks to be sustainable long-term. The rice issue is an important one though, mainly because so much arable land is devoted to rice cultivation, and polished white rice has a pretty lousy nutritional profile. More diversity would help a lot.
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Mar 19, 2013 03:34
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Grand Fromage posted:Try convincing someone over here that rice isn't the healthiest food on Earth. I agree with you in concept but I don't see any way it's going to happen. I know that, that's why I brought it up. The whole ridiculous obsession with rice and how only Japanese rice is good enough is totally loving people over. My stance on most issues facing Japan is morbid curiosity. You know, what is it going to take?
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Mar 19, 2013 03:45
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Let's not rehash the godawful interminable nationalist shouting match that is the Takeshima/Senkaku issue. It's the Israel/Palestine of East Asia threads.
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Mar 27, 2013 05:18
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Well, there's also the fact that many ethnically Japanese people born in another country are treated with a certain amount of condescension by the establishment. There are a ridiculous number of films and novels where the main conceit is an elderly relative teaching a foreign-born Japanese character "how to be Japanese". There's a nasty subtext that they have somehow been tainted by exposure to a different culture and they can only find happiness by assimilating their "true culture". Anecdotally, Japanese-American coworkers and friends got cut no slack whatsoever for social missteps, and one guy I know related an experience he had in which his Japanese supervisor openly insulted his parents for not teaching him "proper" manners on a regular basis. I'd imagine a lot of people just get tired of that poo poo and decide not to bother.
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Mar 28, 2013 04:13
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I dunno, seems to me like its just a higher proportion of kids in Japan have figured out that the current socioeconomic system is a grinding, soul-crushing engine built to enrich the well-connected elite and they want no part in it beyond making a livelihood. You can hardly fault them for knowing whats up and opting out.
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Mar 29, 2013 21:14
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The strong yen has been depressing the manufacturing sector something fierce. Predictably, there are already Austrian school dingbats getting down with the doomsaying, while ignoring the various factors that were screwing the Japanese economy. Yeah, they totally should have gone for austerity measures, because they've been so successful in Europe.
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Apr 5, 2013 02:09
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