Category: Japanese Society/Culture

Check out this article in the Guardian: Japan’s asbestos time bomb
This is a HUGE problem on my island. Before they built the longest, tallest, and most expensive suspension bridge in the world between Awaji Island and Kobe, the only way to cross was by ferry. Hundreds of ferry boats operated by several companies made the trip between the island and the mainland (mainly Kobe and Osaka) every day. Of course, the bridge eventually killed this industry, and predictably, left thousands of locals without jobs.
My company employs several of those ex-ferry workers. In fact, the guy who sits right next to me is one of them, and he is talking about going in for tests not covered by our yearly physical because his wife is worried sick. You see, his job on the ferry often consisted of tying down stuff with lines, and the ropes they used were apparently partially made of thickly braided asbestos strands. They used the same type of ropes right up until the ferry company went out of business…. There’s not much you can say to someone after they tell you something like that, is there?
Well, I gave him an apple I picked up in the cafeteria today and told him that in the states, we say it “keeps the doctor away.”
The poor bastard grinned at me, then ate the whole thing, core and seeds and all. He is just living day-to-day and hoping for the best, I guess.
What the fuck else can he do?

I totally scored an out-of-print DVD box set of the entire Tantei Monogatari (Detective Story) series on Yahoo Auctions last night! This was a very famous TV series in Japan and is virtually unknown overseas; the same goes for the star of the show, Yusaku Matsuda (best known overseas as the character Sato in the movie Black Rain).
He was the shit back in those days, and his popularity hasn’t waned a bit over the years. I take pride in being his greatest gaijin fan – only a real fan would consider a 300 dollar DVD box set a real bargain, figuring, you know, that it’s an investment.

This new box size from DHL isn’t half as funny in English as it is in Japanese (junior = penis). I’ve always wondered if the reason Carl’s Jr. went out of business here was that people weren’t so keen on eating some gaijin’s dick with the whole family.

These long, dreary trips out to factories way out in the country – I will not miss them.
When you leave the concrete landscapes of urban sprawl and start seeing more trees than cars, you know you have left the embrace of modern Japan. Strange things start occuring to you in the sweltering heat of an uncontrolled climate, as the lush green of summer passes by.
Perhaps the majority of Japanese will die never having peed in the woods.
Most have never camped outside for free, or without being in close proximity of the car they came in.
Surely, none would know how to wage a guerilla war from the forest and fire an M-60 one-handed like John Rambo.
Like I said, the heat gets to you. But the reason I will not miss these trips out to factories in the sticks is not really the locales persay, it’s the people who work in them. You see, it’s my own private theory that for the vast majority of Japanese people, happiness can be directly calculated from the concentration of convenience stores, train stations, and pachinko parlors in their proximity. Remove just one of these factors from the equation, and you are tempting fate.
It’s like the triangle theory of efficient kitchen design – you want the sink, the stove, and the refrigerator positioned equidistantly.
Anyway, factories are usually located out in the boonies, and the ones I visit are no exception. The workers live close by in dorms or cheap apartments (that they jokingly refer to as “log mansions”), and you can tell there is a serious lack of the Golden Three, as mentioned above, because everyone looks seriously brain dead, and zombified, and honestly, just plain uninterested in living much longer.
In Japan, it is very hard working with brain dead zombies who have lost the will to live in the sweltering heat of pre-summer.
That is all.

This is a pretty amusing video someone sent me. You should look at the tiny on-screen details the second time around in order to appreciate it fully.
And now, in the immortal words of Hiro Protagonist, we present: REDNECK KATANA!

A while back, somebody explaining my family ancestry told me that I’m part Ainu. Which is funny, because when I first met my fiance’s dad, he said I looked part Ainu, and I thought he was crazy (I may have Russian sailor blood in me, as evidenced by the occasional rogue bright orange hair on my face, but Ainu?). It turns out that he was right (actually no real surprise since he taught anthropology at Mahasarakham University for a few decades – as usual, I turned out to be the dumbass).
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I like how the Wikipedia entry states that men eat with chopsticks, and women eat with wooden spoons. Do Ainu women usually choose the “soup” entree instead of the “salad” (as opposed to their counterparts in most other areas of the world)? And how the hell do any of them dig into, say, roasted wolf shanks, or a boiled badger steak?
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I’m not religious, but I find animism to be really cool sometimes, especially among the all the current day bullshit caused by religious intolerance. Give me a fire-worshipping, wine-sipping, animal-head-sacrificing pagan any goddamn day.
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Can the person who orginally told me I’m Ainu please stand up? I can’t remember who it was, but it was almost definitely my mom.

Did I say something about doing away with mandatory fingerprinting of gaijin yesterday? Sorry about that, what I actually meant to say is that they are doubling it: Japan plans to expand fingerprinting requirement for foreigners

Another reason I’m definitely leaving Japan next year: Japan to have all foreigners carry IC cards for crime control

The LDP and the government claim the new policy is aimed at keeping track of foreigners as part of measures to prevent terrorism and crimes.

Well, it might be especially effective if they decide to embed RFID chips to enable remote scanning. I can just imagine all Japanese police cruisers equipped with gaijin detectors on the dashboard. Perhaps they can include a dye packet and/or taser function to help out, as well.
I imagine this also has to do with the recent spate of counterfeiting and identity thefts – I’m told that stolen gaijin cards can be sold for 20,000 yen in minami, no questions asked, and that a fake one can be purchased from around 70,000.
The most intrusive part of the new plan that they are admitting to lies here:

Holders will be required to report any change of address and obtain permission to change jobs.

As if it’s not tough enough to get a job as it is now, in a couple of years you’ll have to obtain permission from the government first.
Hey look, in the opening paragraph of the article, they used the words “Japanese government” and “intelligence center” in the same sentence! Why does the government have to be such a pain in the ass and go so far out of their way to be oppressive? Is this payback for doing away with the mandatory fingerprinting of gaijin or something? All I have to say is, sayonara suckers.

Pronounced as the answer to, “What do you call a Japanese woman with no arms and no legs, propped against a wall?”
The following quotes are from the unbelievably retarded Yomiuri article located here: LINK

Cheap hotels in Osaka day laborer district lure foreign tourists
Kahori Sakane / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
Five budget hotels in the Airin district of Nishinari Ward, Osaka, which have typically catered to day laborers, are seeing an unexpected increase in foreign and Japanese tourists looking for inexpensive lodging.

Okay so far; it’s no surprise that tourists are attracted to rooms cheaper than $80 a night (a fairly average hotel room price). But this article is just getting started, as you will see…

The trend has encouraged some of about 100 other hotels in and around the district to target foreign tourists rather than laborers. A local association of the hotel operators and a nonprofit organization supporting day laborers have also launched a project to make the area a backpackers’ town, such as Khaosan Street in Bangkok.

Well, it sounds like some new Osaka politician is going to start lobbying for prostitution visas (oh wait, they already did that with the “massage” visa earlier this year) or attempt to make Kinryu ramen available for 50 yen a bowl on the street, that’s great. One question, though: What do the urban planning visonaries propose as the prefectural backpacking destinations of choice? The container stacks at Nanko (slogan: “Visit the drug-sniffing dog petting zoo!”)? The romantic banks of the Yodogawa “Industrial” River (“Home of the Lucky Osaka Two-headed Carp”)? Or maybe there are plans to establish the 1990 Nishinari Riot Memorial… Let’s move on:

“Is there any place around here to go dancing?” a blond Finnish woman asked a clerk at Hotel Raizan South, a budget hotel in the Airin district, last Monday night. The clerk smiled and said there were some clubs in Nanba, two stops away on the Midosuji subway line.

Notice the key words, “blonde,” and “Finnish.” Aside from the inference that Hotel Raizan South clerk hiring guidelines stipulate at least one Scandinavian and one Romantic language (Aramaic is a plus), perhaps we can also assume that a brunette duchess from Luxembourg would have been referred to Kitashinchi on the JR Tozai line. More:

The question would not seem odd at most hotels. But according to Hidenori Yamada, 28, executive director of Chuo Group, “A foreign tourist leaving a Nishinari Ward hotel at 9 p.m. was unimaginable five years ago.”

Let me fill in the missing sentences here: “They used to just smoke the methamphetamine this area is most famous for and stay up all night watching the traffic cams on NHK; it would be very difficult to persuade them to leave even well after check-out time the next morning. I guess the new wave of tourists is more into Ecstasy and clubbing.”

Another attraction of Raizan Hotel is its convenient location, which is 15 minutes by train to Universal Studios Japan (USJ), one hour by train to Kyoto and 50 minutes to Kobe.

…As is the rest of Osaka, you hacks. Or Namba, at least, since that’s the comparison. Next:

Known as one of the largest day laborer districts in the nation, the Airin district has a population of about 30,000 in a 0.62-square-kilometer triangle south of JR Shin-Imamiya Station…
…In Sankaku Park, about 500 meters southwest of the hotels, many homeless people live in blue tents or spend the night in a city-run shelter, which offers hardtack in the evening. On weekends, they line up for meals at a soup kitchen.

Repeat after me: TOURIST’S! PARADISE!

The hotels began attracting a few South Korean tourists shortly after launching a Web site in the same year, although they originally hoped to attract more Japanese tourists and businesspeople.

Fishing for sea bream, the damn fugu kept stealing my bait. – Japanese proverb

In order to meet the demands of foreign tourists, mainly from China, South Korea and Taiwan, the hotels began listing their information in English, Chinese and Korean a few years ago.

…Because we all know that English is secretly the official language of all three of these countries, right? Jesus Christ. In all fairness, the discriminatory overtones I’m sensing here might be imagined – perhaps the author is just that bad.

Minerva Jormola, 22, and her friend, Ho Yueching, both from Finland, told The Daily Yomiuri they found Hotel Raizan on the Internet and decided to stay there because of the low price of 4,200 yen per night for a twin room.

Of course, what we really want to know is: Which one is the blond? For Amaterasu’s sake, could you bastards please maybe use more than a single source in your hotel guest interviews (and a random Ho doesn’t count).
Much later:

A local nonprofit organization, Kamagasaki Community Regeneration Forum, which supports the district’s homeless and day laborers, is also interested in involving laborers with the project…
…The forum hopes out-of-work laborers and local welfare recipients will engage in tourism-related jobs or volunteer work created by the project.

Wow. Somewhere in Kamagasaki, a dutchie is being passed, presumably on the left-hand side. We all know how being on the dole tends to spur the volunteerin’ spirit, right?

The forum believes a bicycle rental business could be an option since some of the workers learned to repair bicycles in an Osaka municipal government vocational seminar.

Is that what they call “jail” these days?

Under the plan, when a tourist rents a bicycle, a laborer will deliver it to their hotels. If they want to leave the rented bicycle at a sightseeing spot in Osaka, the bicycle will be retrieved and brought back to the district base.

And doesn’t that just scream VIABLE BUSINESS PLAN. The sad thing is that while one might assume that this entails paying honest, hard-working people to ride bicycles back to homebase – providing both employment and a healthy lifestyle with the added benefit of preserving the environment – I somehow suspect a flatbed truck driven by a gang of bicyle thieves is closer to reality.

Arimura said it was important to make use of people and resources in the local community.

As opposed to outsourcing it to professional tour guides and bike shops in Hokkaido, I presume. Pearls of wisdom, people. Pearls.
Lastly:

“If group tours increase through our efforts and the Airin district brings in more individual tourists, it may not be so difficult to attract 2 million foreign tourists to the prefecture,” Yano said.

Well, he did say “if.”
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Alas, I don’t know why this article, among all those churned out over the weekend, caught my eye. I also don’t know why I felt I had to fisk it. I just did.

By now, everyone is probably familiar with the theory of the rookie driver derailing the train by attempting to speed through the curve, as well as the story of several JR employees going bowling on the night of the accident, but get a load of this:

An obsession with being on time was also seen in the behavior of two JR West drivers who were aboard the derailed train. The drivers, neither of whom was hurt in the accident, left the scene without helping to rescue passengers and headed straight to work.
According to JR West officials, one of the two called his supervisor by cell phone to say he had been on the derailed train. But the supervisor did not instruct him to rescue any of the injured and instead said, “Make sure you’re not late.”
The 27-year-old driver later confessed in writing that he was sorry for doing nothing to help.
“When I think back calmly now, I was irresponsible not only as a JR employee but as a human being,” he said.

But the whole point is that he wasn’t irresponsible as a JR employee, right?
It’s a fairly interesting article, even if it does lay it on a bit thick with the “overpunctual society” line. Yes, “Japanese people should adopt a more relaxed way of living,” but even if they manage to pull this off with some mystical wand of compassion and understanding, it probably won’t magically prevent train derailments for the foreseeable future. Just to be contrary, I offer this: As long as it’s safe, there’s nothing wrong with the trains being on time, guys. Not a goddamn thing. Ah, but the poor drivers get stressed out! They have to pick weeds and greet incoming trains like common peasants! I hear you. Life’s a bitch, ain’t it? It seems that the problem is with the drivers training programs, and to allow JR to ultimately place the blame on society instead of improving their training programs is just plain wrong.
Here’s the link to the full article: Train crash reveals fatal flaw of obsession with punctuality