dicemoose

One of the reasons why it's harder to buy some used homes in Japan is because it's harder government backed housing loans for housing that do not meet earthquake standards. For older buildings it's also harder or not possible to get tax breaks.

Building standards were first implemented in Japan in 1952 and were revised in 1981 and 2000. Apologies for not having an English source, but of the people who were killed because of the house or building that they lived in, 98% were living in a building/house that did not meet the standards of the 1981 revision to the building codes.

https://www.kobe-np.co.jp/rentoku/sinsai/20/rensai/201409/00...

Is it important to learn the kana and kanji at the same time as learning how to converse in Japanese? I'm a native speaker, but it was a lot easier to learn kana and kanji because I already was able to speak some Japanese.

Also, I hope you try some immersion Japanese again. :D

`'One-punch'' assaults have cost 90 Australian lives since 2000, most in booze-fuelled bashings, a study has found.` ... `NSW had the highest number of king-hits (28), followed by Victoria and Queensland (24 cases each).`

So not night after night at all, but more than a couple (this article is from 2013.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/90-killed-in-singlepunch-assa...

Putting aside the content of the article, the photo of the "Cherry tree with temple in background. Chubu Region, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. " is actually a photo of Matsumoto Castle (in Nagano Prefecture).

One underlying reason for the split between the Imperial Japanese Army, and Navy was that the Army was generally made up of members of the Choshu clan who were rivals of the Satsuma clan that was mostly responsible for the Navy.

The two clans put their rivalries aside temporarily to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate, but from the Meiji Era the rivalry was responsible for the lack of coordination between the Army, and Navy through the Second World War. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunbatsu#Hambatsu

Google does not have majority share in Yahoo! JAPAN. There reason Yahoo! JAPAN uses Google instead of Bing (unlike the rest of Yahoo!) is because Yahoo! JAPAN felt that Google offered a better search product in Japan than Bing.

The 50k JPY figure comes from the budget for social welfare in Japan. Here is an article where it is broken down for 2009: http://diamond.jp/articles/-/16672

But, let me try it with figures from 2011.[1]

107,495 billion JPY for total social welfare 32,463 billion JPY for national health insurance

The author deducted the amount spent for national health insurance from total social welfare.

That leaves: 75, 032 billion JPY

It should only be for the adult population, but I can't find numbers for just adults, so I divided by 120million.

625,266 JPY annually or 52105.5 JPY a month.

IIRC social insurance is not included in the general budget.

As far as the 170k JPY calculation, that was just my imagining what would be a reasonable basic income. I have never crunched the numbers on it.

But, it comes out to 2.04 million yen a year. Since the GDP per capita in Japan is 3.76 million JPY, this would be quite the redistribution of wealth.

[1] http://www.ipss.go.jp/ss-cost/j/fsss-h23/h23.pdf

Zhou Enlai said,“two thousand years of friendship and five decades of misfortune,” about the relationship between China and Japan.

I certainly would vote for politicians that would support universal basic income in Japan. A calculation done in the past few years found that ¥50,000 a month (about $500 US) could be paid out to each citizen without raising any extra revenue. Something closer to ¥170,000 a month would probably be more reasonable, if we could figure it out.

Question: If this were to actually pass in the State of California, would the only thing necessary after that be for the US Congress to accept six new states into the Union?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Four_of_the_United_Sta...

That's a great point, the Tokaido Shinkansen (the first bullet train line in Japan) was created in the 60's but the Tokaido Main line is still going strong. The Tokaido Shinkansen is also very profitable. It'll be interesting to see how things change when the even faster Linear Motor car comes into service.

The competition for the High Speed Rail in Japan is really domestic air flights.

> This is an absolutely amazing 1st world country with 3rd world construction practices. The earthquake in 2011 probably showed that Japanese houses are built quite sturdily.

Older houses did not have insulation, but insulation has been the norm for a while. I've moved several times in the Tokyo area and the apartment I've had that had thin walls was an olden wooden building that's about 40 years old now. And I'm not living in expensive places either.

Yahoo! JAPAN uses Google for search instead of Bing, as a result Google has the largest slice of the search market in Japan.

SBBM is Softbank as well, so Softbank actually owns over 42% of Yahoo! Japan. In practice it's really Softbank's internet content and portal service in Japan that also leverages Yahoo! Inc. technology as needed as well as their brand.

I think it would be fair that the acceptance of mental illnesses by Japanese society still is lagging behind other developed nations.

I have close friends in Japan that have received superb support from psychiatrists once they were able to get help for their illness. They are all doing better as a result.

Yes, they share some common infrastructure.

What you're stating is a gross generalization and untrue in a literal sense (probably easy to realize if you remember how things were a decade ago).

While Y!J and Y!Inc are separate entities, the former does borrow/use technology from the former and some of the Y!J services use Y!Inc servers and/or services maintained by Y!Inc.

Y!J user ids are completely separate from Y!Inc though (Y!Inc ids are shared through out the Y! locales).

It's been almost a decade since I was at Y!J, but from what I understand Y!J does continue to leverage the Y!Inc relationship for services and servers.

Additionally, simply stating that old technology is the reason for a security breach could be a red herring, it isn't always the age of the technology but how it is implemented.

Inter carrier SMS messages in Japan were not possible until recently (July 2011, or about ten years behind other countries). This had to do with some of the Japanese carriers adopting PDC as a 2G standard instead of something that was used more internationally (eg. CDMA).

To allow customers to communicate via text with friends with other carriers, Japanese carriers adopted email on their phones and the Japanese customers became more familiar with email instead of SMS for text.

Salesforce Japan was also a joint venture between Salesforce.com and a Sunbridge (that Salesforce.com eventually bought out). Sunbridge was founded by Allen Miner who already had experience building out Oracle in Japan and the team that helped him there also helped build out Salesforce.com in Japan.

I recently was talking with some folks from that team and they did share with me that the experience was anything but easy but that it was all par for the course for SAAS sales in Japan.

Edit/Addition: I would disagree with points 1 and 5 that patio11 are making though. Past experiences (working at both SAAS and other internet companies) and also current experiences (starting up an Cloud Telephony platform https://www.fullcourt.co ) has me believing that the following from the article is always a great issue.

People were saying, “It’s a really good product. It is reasonably priced. But, who else is using it?” In consensus driven Japan, where nobody budges unless the next guy is doing the same, Winder faced a chicken and egg problem.

I've/we've often been asked about our other customers. Another thing that also often comes up is that we're asked for a comparison study with competitors, this usually happens because our point of contact doesn't have final authority and needs to build a biz case for his/her superiors.

Regarding "1) Japanese companies don't buy SaaS.", this definitely isn't true at all. I dare say that all of my former employers, a number of their partners and customers did use SAAS products from both domestic and foreign companies. It takes a long time to sell but once you get a few key companies that you can reference (for whom the sales process can often take months and sometimes years), then customers will start lining up.

Higgs actually wanted to call it "the goddamn particle."

But, that time designing the form is better spent making sure that you actually have something that customers would pay for. My experience has been that if you have something of value, customers will want to pay for it and you can worry about getting paid at that point.

Worrying about how to get money for a product without value is a waste of time/resources.

Ah geez, that's unfortunate. The hack to make CJK input work is the only part of Textmate 1 that I found sucky.

Knowing the guy that's working on it, I'd say it isn't anything malicious. Though, I'd agree that the placement of that ad seems really well planned (evil) but more likely poor design.

"In the end you would've ended up with a peace treaty with the same war-mongering people in charge as before."

The Allies conditions for surrender by the Axis powers were for an unconditional surrender. All the Axis powers surrendered unconditionally regardless of whether they took an A-bomb or not.

Actually, the demonstrations are usually held by right wing Japanese organizations on August 9th, the day of the bombing of Nagasaki.

This was also the day that the Soviet Union broke the neutrality pact with Imperialist Japan and invaded Manchuria and other parts of the Japanese Empire. The protests are usually against this invasion and consist of calls to get the Northern Territories of Japan returned.

Also, there are angry tantrums and shouting, but there are no throwing of empty bottles at the walls of the embassy because the riot police do quite an impressive job not letting any of the protestors through. It's a bit of a charade and an annoyance when you're trying to conduct business in the area, but the reality is different from the story you're sharing.

Japan's actually got 100V/50Hz and 100V/60Hz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_mains_po...

They're still there and working on the plant. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/latest-updates-o...

Actually, two plants in Fukushima. Onagawa is in Miyagi and is not affected, though they did detect heightened radiation readings probably from Fukushima.

Really appreciated the following especially as I try to balance local (JP) coverage and international news. "With all the death, devastation and disease now threatening tens of thousands in Japan, it is trivializing and almost obscene to spend so much time worrying about damage to a nuclear reactor."