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A sexy submarine posted:It's a little bit problematic to refer to the issue of American military bases as purely one of politicians being slavishly devoted to maintaining the security agreement with the U.S. There was a time, back in the 70s and 80s, where Okinawa's local economy was based around the existance of the military bases, through land lease fees as well as "expenditure from SOFA status persons" i.e. soldiers buying stuff. According to Okinawa's 1999 data (I don't have any more recent figures, sorry) the military bases account for 5% of Okinawa's total prefectural expenditure. Land prices have dropped off as of late, but not dramatically. I have a hard time believing that the sheer bloodymindedness about the base situation in Okinawa is tied to revenues - especially when as you say, it's only about 5% of the prefecture's budget.
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Jun 29, 2012 10:41
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I'm in Japan on a business trip and I've only heard apathy. I don't think the Japanese I've spoken to are talking WW3 like some posters here. If anything, seems like everyone's bashing Ishihara for not keeping his trap shut. But that could just me being in Tokyo speaking to businessmen.
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Sep 17, 2012 14:19
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About the nuclear stuff, the government's capitulated and going 0 nuclear by 2030 which I don't see being feasible considering their power generation requirements...
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Sep 17, 2012 14:41
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Actually, it's pretty clear that Abe won not so much because he had more pull but because the LDP Diet members detest Ishiba. The first round of the voting was open to rank-and-file of the party; Ishiba's support comes mainly from the base and the he won the round handily. The second round with Ishiba & Abe was only open to Diet members -> the LDP Diet members voted to make sure Ishiba was out.
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Oct 6, 2012 00:31
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Konstantin posted:How come Japan has high unemployment with so many aging workers? Are they just not retiring, or are companies not replacing them when they do retire, or is it some other factor? Eh, Japan's unemployment rate is probably one of the lowest in the developed world. Under-employment is a totally different issue though.
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Nov 25, 2012 13:17
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ReidRansom posted:Can anyone tell me about Abe's inflation scheme? I'm a bit out of touch with what's going on. But whatever he's up to, it's tanking the yen, and I'm loving it. Part of Abe's election platform was a 2% inflation target. Considering that Japan has literally not had inflation rates anywhere close to that in decades, it's a pipe dream. What he has done is made a lot of noise about forcing the BoJ to accede to this with threats of pushing out the current governor and bringing in a more compliant one.
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Jan 12, 2013 15:20
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Kenishi posted:Theres no way Western businesses would look at Japan's redundancy and go, "I like the way they think. let's add 4 people to each position in the bottom 3 rungs of the organization. "But sir, we only need but maybe 1 extra person for maybe 4-5 positions..." "The Japanese do it so it must be good. 4 people in each of these 10 spots!" I can honestly say that given the option between a US cut-to-the-bone business operation and a Japanese one with layers of redundancy, I'd pick the latter any day as a societal model. Given the context of everything that's going on in the Western world right now, I find it hard to really criticize the Japanese model. Also, about the 2% inflation target. That'd would do a lot of good to the structure of Japanese finances (both at the individual level as well as the institutional level) because it'd disincentivize Japanese from parking their financial assets in 0% return deposits or JGBs. If you look at the average Japanese family, they park the vast majority of their financial capital in fixed deposits. Forcing them to either consume or invest would pump-prime the market.
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Mar 4, 2013 05:22
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It seems like a tendency for goons in Japan to pick up on the Japanese tendency to equivocate on the war but yeah, it's pretty lovely for Japan to try to paper over their "involvement" in stuff like the Nanking Massacre or the entire situation with comfort women.
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Apr 24, 2013 13:22
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Not to mention we can expect to see support for Abe/LDP crumble once "Abenomics" fails.
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May 30, 2013 02:04
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Speaking of Shin-Okubo, I was in Tokyo recently on a business trip and chatting to my Japanese colleagues about best/worst parts of town to live in. They mentioned that Shin-Okubo was the worst place to live in, and it took me a while to realize that they were probably pointing indirectly at the large korean population there. It's kind of amazing how Japanese can be incredibly racist but you don't realize it since it's never "in your face".
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Jun 17, 2013 02:22
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Yup. It was ridiculous that I found it easier to smoke in bars and restaurants than the outdoors. Not to mention the public smoking points in places like Shibuya are like gas chambers.
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Apr 8, 2014 03:22
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I've noticed that staff at conbini and coin operated eateries are largely mainlanders these days.
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May 2, 2014 12:04
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If you're a well(foreign)-educated Japanese, you'd probably want to work for a 外資系 anyway. I can't think of a single reason why you'd want to work for a local company over a foreign one.
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May 11, 2014 02:28
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Another way to get a glimpse into this aspect of Japan is asking a local about burakumin. I was once astonished to hear an Oxford educated Japanese friend of mine tell me with a straight face that such and such a politician was a shitbird and that it wasn't surprising because he had burakumin blood or something along those lines.
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May 11, 2014 05:20
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It's also interesting to see a gradual shift in the demographics of foreign expats. At least anecdotally, I've seen an outflow of well-heeled expats from places like the US and UK, especially after the Tsunami, and an inflow of foreigners from places like Eastern Europe and Africa. Of course, outnumbering all those, are the mainland Chinese. Again, another litmus test of Japanese xenophobia, is asking a native about mainlanders.
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May 11, 2014 06:01
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Eh, online shopping is definitely a thing in Japan these days.
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May 11, 2014 08:01
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Yup, and citing Adelstein doesn't particularly inspire confidence either.
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May 11, 2014 08:42
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caberham posted:Yeah they still have those "old master" system and apprenticeship in Japan. It's weird How is this different from the Mittelstand model in Germany? It's another good example of how people and media will reflexively slant something coming out from Japan as peculiar. This is a very good example because people have been lauding Germany's skilled apprenticeship system in SMEs as a moat to foreign competition but view the same model in Japan as archaic. I've basically given up on most media and expat portrayals of Japan. It's so lazy.
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May 11, 2014 23:30
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I was thinking along the lines of high end industrial equipment all coming from Japan. Like AIDA, Okamoto, Sodick, and making higher end glass and solid caps.
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ookiimarukochan posted:The reason that Japan was so late in automatic factories was just how damned cheap human labour was - the same is not true of Germany. That's not really relevant to my point about apprenticeships in SMEs.
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May 11, 2014 23:44
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I don't get it. So Japan doesn't serve downloadable content (e.g., Steam) just like the States does... and what?
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May 12, 2014 05:24
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To be fair, it's an expat thing everywhere in the world to bitch about locals and local customs. Chat to a European living in the States and he'll likely have a laundry list of Americanisms to vent about. Japan's slightly more extreme in that a lot of foreigners there never pick up any real facility with the language. For ugly expat syndrome, you can't beat China right now though.
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May 12, 2014 05:56
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I was actually thinking more of expats going colonial and treating locals like dirt. I went on a business trip to Shanghai last year and was brought out on a night out with some Japanese businessmen. Some of the stuff I saw was pretty disgusting.
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May 12, 2014 06:17
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you always hear about the racism between the Chinese/Koreans/Japanese, what're the racists' views on other Asian countries such as Taiwan and SE Asia?
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Dec 29, 2015 15:04
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that CNN feature on enjo kosai is something special
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Dec 29, 2015 17:22
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Random q but is there any country founded by colonists which hasn't mistreated its indigenous population?
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Dec 29, 2015 20:00
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Not sure why the American servicemen in Okinawa can't seem to stop raping locals
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Mar 14, 2016 09:13
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Given the authority's reluctance in actually indicting military personnel, these statistics don't really mean much.
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Mar 14, 2016 17:41
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lol 一般社員の７割「仕事以外で上司と付き合いたくない」 http://www.asahi.com/articles/ASJ3H52S9J3HUTFK00B.html
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Mar 15, 2016 12:23
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Continuing the trend of US military sexually assaulting Japanese - http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/03/19/navy-arrest-groping-japan/82008926/ quote:A U.S. Navy officer who was arrested Friday on charges of groping and punching a Japanese woman on a commercial air flight from the United States has been released to U.S. custody.
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Mar 21, 2016 13:37
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I'm reading the Japanese equivalent of 'Lying with Stats' which focuses on debunking home-grown stereotypes of Japanese twenty-somethings (e.g., proportion of 20-somethings virgins has risen dramatically, they drink less beer, they vote less). It's fascinating because a lot of this misinformation percolates out to Western media, and then the broader Western public. Two examples - 1) 20-somethings are terrible because they never vote. Fact: They vote less than their predecessors but the decrease is largely explained by a macro drop in political participation.  (The graph shows t-scores for Japanese voter participation by age from 1967 to 2014) 2) 20-somethings are more progressive (in Japanese political terms). Fact: There's no discernible skew in political leaning across age groups  (Graph shows 2016 votes for the various Japanese political parties broken down by age; left-to-right: LDP, DPJ, Komeito, Communist Party, Japan Innovation Party, Others) If you can read Japanese, I'd recommend the book だから数字にダマされる http://www.ebookjapan.jp/ebj/385089/volume1/
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Apr 2, 2017 13:28
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And speaking of Rakuten, I interviewed to join them post-MBA. Their management team is pretty focused on building an executive pool that's drawn from global talent. If anything, they tend to focus on HBS for their management program because Mikitani went there and he's a big fan. That being said, the company is doing the same old song-and-dance of Asian companies attempting to build a global conglomerate by M&A rather than growing organically. They've pullbacked from this due to poor performance with their overseas acquired BUs.
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Apr 2, 2017 13:32
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Fewer working age Japanese isn't a problem in of itself. It's the ratio of workers to retirees which is frightening. I've done a fair bit of research work on the Japanese pension structure (top-down as well as looking at individual institutions such as the GPIF, mutual aid associations), they're hosed way more than the West which has its own set of retirement entitlement problems. It's funny because you've had hedge funds bet against JGBs over the past two decades due to macro issues tied to this, and blown themselves up. But at the same time, you know something's got to give at some point when Japanese pension funds can't buy sufficient poo poo to keep yields so low.
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Apr 3, 2017 02:38
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You have to wonder how much the government can "lead" the public in accepting foreign immigration even if they wanted to open up the spigot. I haven't looked at public opinion polls but given the endemic racism towards Chinese (who'd likely be the primary source of immigrants), I'm not sure if there's a solution that's palatable to the Japanese public.
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Apr 3, 2017 09:02
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I think this is a good example of how far Japanese civil society has to progress in terms of child rearing
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Apr 3, 2017 13:29
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Or people w/ NIMBY syndrome regarding the building of daycares due to the noise the kids make. It's hard to blame the government when it's a wider societal issue 
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Apr 3, 2017 13:37
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Kenishi posted:Again, the racism issue is something really only something present in the older generations, but those also end up being the generations that happen to vote the most, so.... I think the government could easily make a few changes that would make it easier for anyone to come into Japan without inciting too much backlash. They could do it under the guise of simplifying the immigration process and reducing the amount of "wasted time" on the part of immigration officers. They could basically do away with the work visa types. Right now when you apply for a work visa you also have to specify a type such as Engineer, Humanist, or Instructor. These types all have their own mini-requirements that have to be met in order to get a visa to work in an industry usually. Simply do away with them and make a single "Work Visa." Next, grant work visa's to any company/person that can show they are hiring and paying someone a livable wage. The "credentials" of the person receiving the visa shouldn't matter if the company is already willing to hire and pay them; there is no reason immigration should play the role as a secondary "interviewer" in this process. These simple changes would make it easier to get visa's for pretty much anyone and would simplify the application process enough that Visa lawyers should no longer be needed to apply for visas. The greatest source of friction with respect to immigration will likely be low wage immigrant laborers (e.g., farmhands, conbini/coin operated eatery staff, retail, factory workers, nurses), both in terms of sheer numbers as well as the gap between cultural norms between the China, Philippines, and Japan (or ingrained racism related to the Asian races pecking order). I doubt enough educated professionals will want to move to Japan given the low pay and lovely working conditions to push the immigration needle.
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Apr 4, 2017 02:03
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I agree with you in the abstract but practically speaking - a) The recent populist backlash against immigration in the West underscores the problem of 'foreigners for cheap labor, Japanese get better paying jobs'. b) My experience is largely with finance but I feel comfortable extending that to IT - there's limited capacity in those sectors in Japan for non-Japanese speakers. And I suspect the language barrier becomes more severe once you move out of those two sectors to other major industries. I would love to see Japan embrace English but it hasn't happened and I don't see any macro trend pointing to a cultural shift there. Rakuten is on the bleeding edge, entering its seventh year of 'Englishnization' and you still get the sense it's an executive decision by Mikitani and not something that has become engrained in the corporate culture. c) Again, it could be due to our disparate personal experiences but I don't see the legal burden of getting a work visa being the main barrier for professionals. It's getting companies to the point where they're willing and actively recruiting for foreign professionals. Put another way, is there a problem we're seeing with companies trying to hire foreigners and not being able to get work permits? I would say no.
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Apr 4, 2017 05:27
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I can't stop recommending the Lying with Stats book (http://www.ebookjapan.jp/ebj/385089/volume1/) - Just read a section where the author talks about a Japanese study that seemed to find that older women that live on higher floors of apartments are more prone to miscarriages than those living on lower floors  (x-axis: floors, y-axis: % have experienced miscarriages) There's a bunch of arguments he makes against it but mostly sample size; the 67% for 10+ floors came from 4 women out of 6 in the bucket.
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Apr 5, 2017 05:03
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Polling by Japanese media tends to be pretty lovely. If you look at the polling setup this time round, they lead the question about the constitution with a bunch of questions equivalent to 'man, it's scary what NK is doing amirite?' so not surprised if that's skewed people's responses.
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Apr 18, 2017 23:53
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I don't know if it's another one of those fake news stats, but something like 40% of Japanese aged 18-34 are virgins.
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Aug 10, 2017 12:56
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