125 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
  2. Dec 2023
    1. Rapidly adopting western modes of education, military organization, and technology, yet retaining their own distinct Japanese national culture and unity

      Foreign emulation of contemporaries as opposed to classicism

    2. Having determined that the Shogun’s regime was outmoded and incapable of defending Japan, modernizing leaders from two southern provinces undertook a revolutionary war to overthrow it. Proclaiming their loyalty to the Japanese emperor—who had been a ceremonial figurehead under the Shoguns—the leaders of this so-called Meiji Restoration claimed only to be restoring the primacy of the emperor.

      Monarchism as opposed to republicanism

    3. Shoguns had been financially weakened by growing debts to the rice merchants of Osaka

      Internal pressure

    4. In 1852, the U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry sailed a fleet of modern steam-powered warships into Tokyo Bay in an impressive display of force. Sweeping aside all resistance, he imposed a humiliating treaty on the Shogun.

      External pressure

  3. Jul 2023
  4. May 2023
  5. Apr 2023
    1. **Recommend Resource: ** Under the "More Information About Other Open Movements" I recommended adding Higashinihon Daishinsai Shashin Hozon Purojekuto, (trans. Great Earthquake of Eastern Japan Photo Archiving Project) which is one of Japan's open government and open data efforts to document all photographs about Japan's 2011 earthquake.

      The site currently contains close to 40,000 photographs of the aftermath of the natural disaster.

      The photos are hosted by Yahoo! Japan and are published under non-commercial clause for open access to the public.

  6. Jan 2023
    1. "It wasn't all that easy to apply the concept of living life in the countryside to a game design document," said Yasuhiro Wada, creator of the Harvest Moon franchise. Wada had moved to Tokyo after being brought up in the countryside. Though he had no interest in returning to that environment, he finally understood its advantages compared to the big city, and thus wanted to turn that experience into a game. The problem was that he didn't know how. "I needed to nail the player experience," said Wada, but he had a problem: "How do you express the game system of living while working?"

      Yasuhiro Wada, the creator of Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons, explained that he first had the idea of creating a game where the player cared for cows from growing up in the Japanese countryside.

  7. Dec 2022
    1. In addition to pigeon, crow, and eagle, there is also a “sexy pigeon” option which coos much more sexually than your average pigeon.

      While I will not download this app -- points for creativity.

  8. Oct 2022
    1. Many now find Japanese society’s prevalence for mask wearing and the numerous vestiges of preventative measures (social distancing in some restaurants, compulsory temperature checks and hand sanitizer upon entering facilities with cramped quarters, just to name a few) all an overcautious holdover from another time.

      lol at westerners thinking wearing masks is overly cautious

    1. Chinese Dragon was originally founded by descendants of Japanese nationals left in China after the end of World War II who eventually came to Japan. Originally forming in the late 1980s, the gang has managed to avoid being caught in many of the anti-organized crime ordinances that have reduced the size and influence of Japan’s yakuza syndicates since Chinese Dragon has not been officially classified as a boryokudan, or organized crime group, because of its looser hierarchal structure.

      Very interesting origin story for the Chinese Dragon gang. Would be curious to learn more about the Japanese soldiers and other nationals who were left behind in China after World War II.

  9. May 2022
  10. Apr 2022
  11. Mar 2022
  12. Feb 2022
  13. Jan 2022
    1. In Japan, the country where the first emoji sets originated, red is traditionally used to represent increases in the value of a stock. Meanwhile, green is used to represent decreases in stock value.

      Reason why chart increasing emoji 📈 is red

    1. Dr Satoshi Akima. (2022, January 8). I’ve had people mention rising case numbers in Japan and South Korea. But let’s really put that rise into perspective. Nations that have early accepted that #COVIDisAirborne simply fair better https://t.co/KaoE26gQ0N [Tweet]. @ToshiAkima. https://twitter.com/ToshiAkima/status/1479724180840988673

  14. Nov 2021
  15. Oct 2021
    1. Coronavirus Pandemic Data Explorer. (n.d.). Our World in Data. Retrieved March 3, 2021, from https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer

      is:webpage lang:en COVID-19 graph case death Germany Sweden UK Afghanistan Africa Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Anguilla Antigua Barbuda Argentina Armenia Asia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bermuda Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Cape Verde Cayman Islands Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Congo Costa Rica Cote d'ivoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czechia Democratic Republic of Congo Denmark Djobouti Dominica Dominician Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia Europe Europian Union Faeroe Islands Falkland Islands Fiji Finland France Gabon Gambia Georgia Ghana Gibraltar Greece Greenland Grenada Guatemala Guernsey Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Isle of Man Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jersey Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macao Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Mashall Islands Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North America North Macedonia Northern Cyprus Norway Oceania Oman Pakistan Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philipines Poland Portugal Qatar Romania Russia Rwanda Saint Helena Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South America South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Switzerland Syria Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor Togo Trinidad Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turks and Caicos Islands Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates USA Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Vatican Venezuela Vietnam World Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe test vaccine chart map table data case fatality rate mortality

    Tags

    Annotators

    URL

  16. Aug 2021
  17. Jun 2021
  18. May 2021
    1. Phil Magness. (2021, April 18). Fixed version: Here’s how the Imperial College model of Neil Ferguson performed over 1 year. I used their most conservative R0 assumption, so this is actually generous to them. Https://t.co/vVJJ629jO0 [Tweet]. @PhilWMagness. https://twitter.com/PhilWMagness/status/1383870801309360135

  19. Apr 2021
  20. Mar 2021
    1. Li, S., Sim, S.-C., Lee, L., Pollack, H. J., Wyatt, L. C., Trinh-Shevrin, C., Pong, P., & Kwon, S. C. (2017). Hepatitis B Screening and Vaccination Behaviors among a Community-based Sample of Chinese and Korean Americans in New York City. American Journal of Health Behavior, 41(2), 204–214. https://doi.org/10.5993/AJHB.41.2.12

  21. Feb 2021
  22. Jan 2021
  23. Nov 2020
  24. Oct 2020
  25. Sep 2020
  26. Aug 2020
  27. Jul 2020
  28. Jun 2020
  29. May 2020
  30. Mar 2020
    1. In an article on Pinyin around this time, the Chicago Tribune said that while it would be adopting the system for most Chinese words, some names had "become so ingrained in our usage that we can't get used to new ones."
  31. Jul 2019
    1. Children are going hungry too. Almost 14% of kids, or some 3.5 million in all, are estimated to live in poverty -- and that’s already down from a peak of more than 16% in 2012. To combat the problem, local governments around the country are opening thousands of cafeterias where children can eat for free.
    2. Given all of this good behavior, conservatives might expect that Japan’s poverty rate would be very low. But the opposite is true; Japan has a relatively high number of poor people for an advanced country.
  32. Apr 2019
  33. Mar 2019
    1. This article is a new law that was appended to Penal Code in 2011, and in Japan, it is generally known as the "Offense of Creating Virus".  Although the law calls it virus, the wider definition of this law was set with an  intension to crack down on developing and distributing malware.

      Wow. Three Japanese individuals are facing strong sentencing due to draconian and weird "cyber laws".

      The individuals simply provided people with links to an infinitely looping web page.

    1. “Most Japanese people see cannabis as a subculture of Japan but they’re wrong. For thousands of years, cannabis has been at the very heart of Japanese culture,” Japan’s leading expert on cannabis, Takayasu Junichi, told the Asia Pacific Journal in an interview.

      This is quite something.

    2. Japan today has some of the harshest drug laws of any advanced democracy. If you are found in possession of cannabis in Japan for personal use you could receive a maximum prison sentence of five years, and if you are caught growing it, you can be sent to prison for up to seven years. Each year, the laws are enforced against 2000 people, who are brutally publicly shamed before, during and after their prison sentence.[2] For example, when the actress Saya Takagi was caught with cannabis, all reruns of the dramas she appeared on – like the popular detective series Aibo - were scrubbed from the TV schedules.[3] She had written the theme song for another TV show: it was immediately ditched. Or to give another example, when a rugby player for Japan’s national team was caught with the drug, he was banned from ever playing again, and the electronics giant Toshiba suspended all sponsorship of his regional team.[4] To be associated with cannabis in Japan is to be destroyed.

      Whoa! To be associated with cannabis in Japan does seem equal to public shaming. This is probably the least helpful way to try and make people not use drugs. Also, addiction is a disease.

    1. Asked which of his films are his personal favorites, Kore-eda — in characteristic fashion — expounded upon a familiar adage until it felt new: “It’s like asking someone which of their 10 kids you like the most. You may have one child who’s just ridiculously successful and making tons of money, and then you have this other child who’s living in poverty, but they’re just so lovable.” He grew silent for a moment, and then went on: “I would say there are two children who are most similar to myself. ‘Nobody Knows’ is the film that I became a director to make. ‘Still Walking’ is special to me because I made it shortly after losing my mother. Having said that, I also have to mention ‘Like Father, Like Son,’ because that film took me to the next level, to the point where I couldn’t believe this was really my career.”
    2. The truth, as always, is more complicated. Kore-eda cited the formative experience he had with “After Life” in 1998, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival after a programmer sent the director a handwritten fax proclaiming his love for the movie. But a gala debut wasn’t enough to get the movie sold. The director sighed: “I received very blunt information from the agent saying that this isn’t the kind of film that people want — they didn’t want to see people in heaven, they wanted the kind of typical Japanese film that would be representative of a national cinema.” Emotionally inhibited parents drinking sake on tatami mats, rogue samurai wandering the countryside, geishas scuffling around the Gion, that sort of thing. It could have been a devastating moment, but Kore-eda chose to see it as a call to action. “That process made me realize that I don’t have to make what other people want,” he said. “‘After Life’ led me to have confidence that if I make something that I love, there will be fans and critics out there who will love it also, and won’t start putting labels on it.” To his point, “After Life” now regularly appears on (American) lists of the best films of the ’90s. “I feel really fortunate that I’ve been able to find those people,” Kore-eda continued, “even when I’ve wanted to make films just because I liked them.”
    3. “The traditional concept of family was already being dismantled or destroyed in Japan, and 3/11 just made it obvious that was happening. I believe you can no longer interpret the true value or purpose of family based on the antiquated traditional tropes of Japanese society. In ‘Shoplifters,’ I was looking at three generations living together, because that’s typically what you’d find in a Japanese household. But I wanted to play with that, and show that even within those terms the nuclear family is undergoing a permanent change.”
    4. To watch Kore-eda’s films — and certainly to hear him talk about them — it’s clear that he’s not interested in judging this perceived degradation of traditional norms. These movies don’t lament what’s been lost so much as they wonder about what’s been found, a dynamic that allows even the most devastating pieces of Kore-eda’s work to feel intrinsically hopeful (his thoughts on the ending of “Shoplifters” were too spoiler-heavy to share here, but they made it clear the director savors that bittersweet aftertaste). His films are less concerned with passing a verdict on the state of things than they are in studying the various mechanisms that bind people together, and the performative elements required to keep us that way.
    1. That’s exactly right. What’s the technique to avoiding that stance?I don’t think it’s a technique. I don’t think that’s something you can make up, or trick people into believing through your filmmaking. It comes from the fundamental worldview, the sense of humanity. It comes from the depth of the work’s creator. If you have that empathy, you won’t go down the road of voyeurism. You can’t just sympathize; you have to make visible what is invisible. Make visible the factors that have brought the impoverished to this point, so that the audience can see them in a fuller and more complex way. That skirts the trap of poverty porn. Regarding your initial question: I don’t want to present the film in such a way so that when the audience leaves the theater, they say, “Well, it’s the government’s fault! It’s the system’s fault!” That’s not what I’m trying to portray. They’re part of it, but the people watching the film are part of it, too, and they need to feel that by the end.
    2. I’ve read that you visited an actual orphanage while researching this subject. What sort of emotional response did you have at that time?I did not go to an “orphanage,” per se. I went to a facility run by the government that houses children with parents who are dysfunctional in some way, through alcoholism or domestic abuse or something like that. Just wanted to clarify that first. While I was there, a young girl in grade three had just come back from school, and she read for me the book Swimmy by Leo Lionni. I happened to be there in time to witness this. The people who worked at the facility went, “Oh, no, don’t bother him; he doesn’t want to listen to this.” But she completely ignored them and kept reading this book right to the end. And at the very end, I applauded because she had done so wonderfully. The girl was absolutely thrilled by this, and she smiled a big smile, and it occurred to me that it was her parents that she wanted to have witness this reading of Swimmy. This moved me. That was the feeling I took with me when I made Shoplifters. The young boy in the film reads Swimmy, to show to his parents that he’s reading. That sense of pride and joy that the little girl had was something I held with me.
  34. app.getpocket.com app.getpocket.com
    1. Sakura Ando gives a phenomenal performance as Nobuyo. Can you talk about your collaboration with her? I agree that she is phenomenal. To answer quite honestly, I first heard about Sakura Ando through actors or cameramen who are friends of mine or who I worked with. They all said she was amazing. I was still unsure she’d be right for my film because the part of Nobuyo was written for someone who’s in their 40s. However I ran into her in the neighborhood and we just talked for a little while. And then I ran into her a second time. After that I thought she might be the best person for this role [despite her age] and I offered her the job. You are a director who has successfully directed children in many of your films. How do you work with them? Thank you saying they are successful. For 15 years the way that I have worked with children is I never give them a script. They have no idea about the full story. Everyday when they come on set, I tell them each individual line when they need to know it. So I whisper in their ears this is your line, this is what you are going to talk about, sometimes they choose their own words. But also during auditions I choose children who specifically seem to respond to that method well. Once I’ve chosen them I organize activities to create trust and a relationship with them. My goal is to have them come to set every day smiling, excited and looking forward to the work. That’s my approach.
    2. There is a density and depth to your stories and characters that’s reminiscent of novels. I’m interested in your writing process and how you come about it? That is a difficult question. First there's the person, a human. Then the situation and what if that situation causes the human to do something? I don’t know if it’s right or wrong but I don’t actually sit down and write all the details about each character, their whole history. If you were to attend a screenwriting course, often they’d tell you to sit down and define each character before writing the script. I don’t believe in that, I don't think character development is the way to go. For me it’s the relationships. The relationship between one person and the person standing in front of them. It’s the way they move, the way they react, and how they relate to each other. That’s what defines them. Take for example the character of the father Osamu, he’s defined by the context of the relationships around him. The story comes out of the numerous interactions between these different people.
    1. Thinking of happy accidents, it looked like Miyu Sasaki, who plays the young Juri, really did lose a tooth. Is that something you had to incorporate into the script? On the first day of shooting, we were shooting the scene where she’s discovered on the veranda and it just happened that the tooth came out. [And she yelled] “Oh no, my tooth came out!” We talked about fixing it so there was a fake tooth there, but then I thought I might as well write a scene about losing her tooth. [SPOILERS AHEAD] Then I thought what would be really interesting would be to write a scene where the grandmother who has no teeth dies and the granddaughter loses her teeth and then you throw the teeth up on the roof, so I thought the combination of those two things would make it very interesting and I wrote it into the script.
    2. Was the family’s home on screen a set or a real location? We did use a real house [for exteriors]. There was a small house that existed within all those high-rises, but most of the interior scenes were shot on set. There’s a scene where [you see] the entrance to the home [where] they’re on a little corridor or a little porch outside and when I went to see the house, I was just looking around it with my crew. it’s very near Sumida River, which is very famous for the fireworks coming up, so I just thought, “Oh, it’s very near the river, but [the family] would never be able to see the fireworks,” [which] stayed with me, so I decided to write a scene about it.
    3. Is it true you got to shoot the first scenes of the film in the summer and then go back later to shoot the rest of the film, after you had an idea of how they might interact with one another? Yes. When we started shooting in the summer, the truth is the script wasn’t really finished. I hadn’t really had a complete script by that point and we shot it anyways because we thought we might need it. I told all the actors we may not even keep this scene and Kiki Kirin [who plays the grandmother] said, “Well, in that case, it probably won’t stay. It won’t survive.” [laughs] But then there’s the scene where it rains suddenly and where [the family] finds the cicada, so it was fortuitous when those things all happened. And then when I went back and wrote the script properly in the autumn, I incorporated some of those things in it.
    4. There is a bit of a fantastical quality to the film, which comes through subtly through the score, and I loved how visually, there are often boxes created throughout the frame, particularly inside the family’s house. How did you go about getting the tone right aesthetically? In terms of the visual, in terms of Kondo [Ryuto, the cinematographer], when he talked to me about how he viewed it, he really wanted a poetic state, so visually we were looking at poetic images around their lifestyle and after about a certain amount of filming, I just let Kondo-san go — he was the one that decided the framing, so it was his sensibility that created those lines that you’re talking about. With Honoso [Haruomi, the composer], it was more the image of swimming, so the family were like a bunch of little fishes at the bottom of an ocean swimming around and they would look up at the surface and see the sparkling night, but the sound of that sparkling night would come down to the bottom and twinkle around it.
    5. You’ve acknowledged that “After the Storm” marked a bit of a turning point where you’d start making films about broader Japanese society. What inspired that shift? I look at it a little bit differently because for me, from “Still Walking” to “After the Storm,” that thread was really very much about me looking at what went on inside of a family, inside of the home, [with] a narrow and deep perspective. But that was more the exception. With “The Third Murder,” I felt I went back to where I started, which was with “Nobody Knows” and looking at the family within society. That’s the thread I was following and then I got disrupted by my own personal inquiry.
    1. Internet has affected international politics in many ways; however, it is seemingly overlooked by most scholars, and in particular, realists who view the Internet as low-politics. This article argues that the impact of the Internet on international politics should not be underestimated. By focusing on the capabilities of the Internet in general and P2P net-works in particular, this paper shows how the Internet is able to disseminate soft power re-sources. This is demonstrated by an exami

      zzzzz

    2. Japanese

      Japanese inventions

    3. general and P2P net-works in particular, this paper shows how the Internet is able to disseminate soft power re-sources. This is demonstrated by an examination of the dissemination of Japanese

      The best farah in the world

    4. long peace because it became a deterrent among states as well as an in

      !!!

    1. As for why the West has done even worse than Japan, I suspect that it’s about the deep divisions within our societies. In America, conservatives have blocked efforts to fight unemployment out of a general hostility to government, especially a government that does anything to help Those People. In Europe, Germany has insisted on hard money and austerity largely because the German public is intensely hostile to anything that could be called a bailout of southern Europe.
    2. So there are really two questions here. First, why has everyone seemed to get this so wrong? Second, why has the West, with all its famous economists — not to mention the ability to learn from Japan’s woe — made an even worse mess than Japan did?The answer to the first question, I think, is that responding effectively to depression conditions requires abandoning conventional respectability. Policies that would ordinarily be prudent and virtuous, like balancing the budget or taking a firm stand against inflation, become recipes for a deeper slump. And it’s very hard to persuade influential people to make that adjustment — just look at the Washington establishment’s inability to give up on its deficit obsession.
    1. Did Japan actually lose any decades?
    2. Household consumption, rather than total GDP, is an even better comparison, since that’s a closer proxy for living standards of actual people
  35. Feb 2019
    1. Indeed, Japan’s parenting attitudes, as reflected in the World Values Survey, are closer to those in culturally remote Germany and the Netherlands than to China’s.

      This has got to be a huge difference from thirty years ago. Japan's demographic problems have meant that every kid has a future now.

    1. Because mountains and streams divide Japan's farm land into small, isolated areas, it proved difficult to unify Japan politically. For most of its history, Japan has bean divided into many autonomous domains, each governed by a regional strong-man. No one of these local rulers was able to claim national leadership until 1600, and not until the end of the nineteenth century did Japan have a central government strong enough to assert control over all of Japan.
  36. Jan 2019
  37. Jun 2018
    1. In the last two centuries, there has been remarkable progress in the field of gastroenterological surgery, including the curative resection of cancers, replacement of failed organs through transplantation, increased safety of undergoing major surgeries and decreased operative morbidity through developments in minimal access surgery.

      Transplantation and organ failure

  38. Apr 2018
    1. Japanese people tend to require more information before reaching a purchasing decision. So for printed brochures, it is standard practice for Japanese companies to create one text-heavy version for the Japanese domestic market, and another “rest of the world” version that gets localized into multiple languages for markets worldwide. Often the Japanese domestic version goes into more detail and mentions this or that technology as part of a product’s appeal. The non-Japan version focuses more on user benefits, oftentimes not even mentioning the technology that makes those benefits possible. Western thinking is, consumers want to acquire an experience, not a technology. Japanese thinking is, those promises feel more real when somehow linked to technology.
  39. Oct 2017
    1. “the power and majesty of nature in all its aspects is lost on him who contemplates it merely in the detail of its parts, and not as a whole”

      "A Frog in a small well will never know of the ocean".- Japanese Proverb

    1. Japan succeeded in lofting hundreds of incendiary balloons, swept eastward by the jet stream to the U.S. West Coast. These killed seven people, ignited forest fires and crashed in Medford, Oregon, and Billings, Montana. But the logistics of sending infected rats or fleas across the Pacific apparently proved overwhelming. Late in the war, the Japanese devised Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, a plan to send kamikaze pilots to bomb San Diego with plague-infected fleas. But with the U.S.’ atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the plan was never carried out
    2. A three-day-old baby was said to have been jabbed with needles and submerged in icy water and live victims dissected without anesthesia. Circles of doctors would cut open screaming women to examine their reproductive organs.
  40. Sep 2017
    1. These lonely deaths are called kodokushi.

      Almost 25% of Japanese men and 10% Japanese women over age 60 say there is not a single person they could rely on in difficult times. The American crisis may not be so dissimilar from the Japanese one.

      The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare reported there were 3,700 “unaccompanied deaths” in Japan in 2013, but some researchers estimate that because of significant under-counting, the true figure is closer to 30,000. In any case, the frequency of kodokushi has been on the rise since they emerged in the 1980s.

  41. Jul 2017
    1. “Japanese food was created here, and only Japanese know it,” Mr. Kadowaki said in an interview. “How can a bunch of foreigners show up and tell us what is good or bad?”
  42. Jun 2017
    1. Japan, introducing L.14 on the elimination of discrimination against persons affected by leprosy and their family members on behalf of the Core Group, said the resolution aimed at closing the history of discrimination against and stigmatization of leprosy patients, ex-patients and their families, and focused on their social inclusion.  It requested the establishment of a Special Rapporteur on the elimination of discrimination against persons belonging to that group, and reaffirmed that they were entitled to the full enjoyment of their rights.  The aim was for the Special Rapporteur to fulfil the mandate within one three-year term ending in 2020, or two terms at the most.   
  43. May 2017
  44. Feb 2017
    1. Give Trump some credit, however, - a good while into Abe’s speech Trump noticed the earpiece and realised he should probably put it in.

      Yeah, I've been there!

  45. Dec 2016
  46. Oct 2016
    1. “But it is futile. In Japan, one thing blends into another seamlessly. And importantly, nobody (no Japanese, anyway) worries about where the line is drawn. I would agree with the shell-less egg analogy. I cannot successfully engage in a conversation with a westerner without defining things and showing borders. And yet, I am certainly Japanese, in the sense that I stand back and ‘marvel’ at westerners who keep trying to define this undefinable thing called Japan. Why bother? You cannot do it. I will not attempt it.’”One of the best descriptions I have read of someone trying to “understand” Japan compared the process to peeling an onion. The cultural explorer pulls back layer after layer looking for Japan’s inner meaning, without realising that the meaning is to be found in the discarded layers. At the centre of the onion is nothing.
    1. and among the top three most popular sites for suicide in the world.[

      There were around 30 suicides documented every year for Aokigahara. However, there are 70 suicides in Japan a day on average. As a single site it might be "popular" but it is a tiny percentage of total suicides in Japan.