Toys R Us Japan leaving the Japanese market isn’t going to be a minor shakeup. Since arriving in the country in 1991, it’s grown to approximately 150 stores across the country and currently employs a total of around 6,000 full and part-time workers.
Statistics on Toys 'R Us's presence in Japan before leaving the country in 2026.
Tamagotchi was released on November 23, 1996.
The first Tamagotchi was released on November 23, 1996. (Source: https://tamagotchi-official.com/us/history/).
We must leapfrog the current paradigm. History shows us how Japan's historical dominance in manufacturing was not achieved through abundant natural resources but by fundamentally redesigning the institution of the factory floor.
大多数人认为AI发展需要大量计算资源和数据积累，但作者认为日本可以通过创新设计而非资源投入来领导AI发展，就像日本制造业的成功不是依靠自然资源而是通过重新设计工厂系统一样。这种观点挑战了当前AI行业依赖大规模计算的主流认知。
金融業界へのAIの影響... 全78ページのレポート（本文は29ページ＋参考文献＋付録）
「日本金融业 AI 影响」主题输出 78 页报告（正文 29 页 + 参考文献 + 附录），涵盖国内金融机构数字投资 3 万亿日元规模等具体数据。令人注意的是样本报告的选题策略：两个示例都是「高价值 B2B 决策场景」（特朗普政策风险 + 金融 AI 转型），精准对准了 Sakana 的目标客户——战略规划部门、咨询公司、智库。这是一份经过深思熟虑的产品 demo 选题，每一页都在向潜在企业客户证明「这就是我们需要的」。
What do Saudi Arabia, Japan, and the Cayman Islands all have in common?
for - adjacency -Trump - Cayman Islands - Japan - financial crisis
日股长熊时期数次大牛市回顾
Japan promotesco-firing ammonia derived from green hydrogen in coal-fired power plants, bothdomestically and across Southeast Asia
Japan was the first country to formulate a national green hydrogen strategy in 2017(METI, 2017). Other large demand centres have more recently released hydrogenstrategies which often rely on building partnerships for import.
101st CONGRESS 1st Session H. CON. RES. 180 Commending the outstanding efforts of aviators and the Flying Tigers for valued and competent service to the United States. IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES July 31, 1989
resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Post Office and Civil Service.
Whereas aviators have had a distinguished record as volunteers in emergency and rescue missions;
Whereas the Flying Tigers originated in the jungles of Burma nearly 50 years ago with the United States volunteer group of General Clair Chennault;
Whereas the tradition of proud and distinguished service of the Flying Tigers to the United States began under the direction of Robert W. Prescott;
Whereas this proud and distinguished group of aviators has steadfastly served the specialized air transportation needs of the United States for more than 4 decades;
Whereas the Flying Tigers has provided assistance with rescue efforts in Korea, Hungary, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Ethiopia, as well as many other humanitarian missions; and
Whereas the Flying Tigers are representative of countless aviators that deserve recognition for service to the Nation and to thousands of individuals throughout the world:
Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That the Congress commends the outstanding efforts of aviators and the Flying Tigers for valued and competent service to the United States.
John Blackthorne, also known as Anjin-san, is the protagonist of James Clavell's 1975 novel Shōgun. The character is loosely based on the life of the 17th-century English navigator William Adams, who was the first Englishman to visit Japan. The character appears in the 1980 TV miniseries Shōgun, played by Richard Chamberlain,[1] and by Cosmo Jarvis in a 2024 series based on the book.
William Adams (Japanese: ウィリアム・アダムス, kyūjitai: ウヰリアム・アダムス, Hepburn: Uwiriamu Adamusu) (24 September 1564 – 16 May 1620), better known in Japan as Miura Anjin (Japanese: 三浦按針, "the pilot of Miura"), was an English navigator who, in 1600, was the first Englishman to reach Japan.
Adams was the first Englishman to reach Japan
itinerary ideas
You can order Correct’s indexcard, dock, and Kokuyo’s fieldnote via the Service page.
Hawk Sugano apparently offered the Pile of Index Cards as a physical product offering by combining Correct's index card dock and Kokuyo's fieldnotes in late December 2006.
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
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
Shoguns had been financially weakened by growing debts to the rice merchants of Osaka
Internal pressure
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
In Indien, Japan und den USA folgen Starkregenfälle auf die Hitzenwellen der vergangenen Wochen. Mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit wurden sie durch die globale Erhitzung verstärkt.
Überflutungen und Erdrutsche haben in Japan mindestens sechs Todesopfer gefordert. Auf der Insel wurden die stärksten Regenfälle der aufgezeichneten Geschichte beobachtet https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/11/heaviest-rain-ever-causes-deadly-floods-and-landslides-in-japan
https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/194730263
Hawk Sugano used a Correct Indexcard Dock (C-153DF) box for some of his index card practice.
Climate experts criticised the G7 group of advanced economies for failing to commit to tougher action on fossil fuels after Germany and Japan prevailed on the continued use of gas and coal respectively.
Die G7-Staaten haben sich nicht auf konsequentere Schritte zur Dekarbonisierung verständigt. Vor allem Japan und Deutschland haben in Hiroshima klare Aussagen zuum Verzicht auf Gas und Kohle verhindert. https://www-ft-com.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/18ae7257-dd02-4965-9de9-faec5e339be2
G7-Communique: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/05/20/g7-hiroshima-leaders-communique/
**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.
"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.
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.
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
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.
Nori (Neopyropia tenera)
Isahaya Bay Floodgates for nori production, fishery and farming
Japan Dish made of agar, red seaweed
Japanese Agar Agar production, also called Kanten
Akaliyski, P., Taniguchi, N., Park, J., & Gehrig, S. (2022, February 4). The COVID-19 Pandemic Inflicts Lasting Changes in Societal Values in Japan. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gx5mn
‘Capitalizing on skepticism’: How the coronavirus has exposed us once again. (2022, February 16). The Seattle Times. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/capitalizing-on-skepticism-how-the-coronavirus-has-exposed-us-once-again/
Torjesen, I. (2022). Covid-19: Peak of viral shedding is later with omicron variant, Japanese data suggest. BMJ, 376, o89. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o89
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
Dr Ed. (2022, January 8). You get the public health outcomes that your system is willing to support https://t.co/amcWBlraK2 [Tweet]. @notdred. https://twitter.com/notdred/status/1479791237108539393
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
Tsukuba, U. of. (n.d.). Vaccine hesitancy changes over time: Attitudes toward vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Retrieved January 18, 2022, from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-vaccine-hesitancy-attitudes-vaccines-covid-.html
Active epidemiological investigation on SARS-CoV-2 infection caused by Omicron variant (Pango lineage B.1.1.529) in Japan: Preliminary report on infectious period. (n.d.). Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.niid.go.jp/niid/en/2019-ncov-e/10884-covid19-66-en.html
Gearoid Reidy. (2021, November 22). Tokyo coronavirus case count for today is just 6 Previous two Mondays: 7, 18 7-day average: 17.1 Serious cases -1 to 8 Newly reported deaths: 1 https://t.co/RMcui7EaZf [Tweet]. @GearoidReidy. https://twitter.com/GearoidReidy/status/1462694865964175361
Portfolio, B. and S. S. at N. (2021, November 3). No evidence school closures reduce the spread of COVID-19. Behavioural and Social Sciences at Nature Portfolio. http://socialsciences.nature.com/posts/no-evidence-school-closures-reduce-the-spread-of-covid-19
Back from the brink: How Japan became a surprise Covid success story | Japan | The Guardian. (n.d.). Retrieved October 15, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/13/back-from-the-brink-how-japan-became-a-surprise-covid-success-story
Simms, K. T., Hanley, S. J. B., Smith, M. A., Keane, A., & Canfell, K. (2020). Impact of HPV vaccine hesitancy on cervical cancer in Japan: A modelling study. The Lancet Public Health, 5(4), e223–e234. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(20)30010-4
Coronavirus Pandemic Data Explorer. (n.d.). Our World in Data. Retrieved March 3, 2021, from https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer
Price, A. (2021). Commentary: My pandemic grief and the Japanese art of kintsugi. BMJ, n1906. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n1906
Ingram, J., Hand, C., Hijikata, Y., & Maciejewski, G. (2021). Exploring the effects of COVID-19 restrictions on wellbeing across different styles of lockdown [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/9vwtf
Saire, Josimar. E. Chire., & Masuyama, A. (2021). How Japanese citizens faced the COVID-19 pandemic?: Exploration from twitter [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/64x7s
Shimizu, K., Sridhar, D., Taniguchi, K., & Shibuya, K. (2021). Reconsider this summer’s Olympic and Paralympic games. BMJ, n962. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n962
Imperial College London. (2021, February). Covid-19: Global attitudes towards a COVID-19 vaccine. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/institute-of-global-health-innovation/EMBARGOED-0502.-Feb-21-GlobalVaccineInsights_ICL-YouGov-Covid-19-Behaviour-Tracker_20210301.pdf
Japan’s Response to COVID-19. (n.d.). Daiwa Foundation. Retrieved 18 June 2021, from https://dajf.org.uk/event/japans-response-to-covid-19
Ian Brown wrong to claim Japan refuses blood from anyone who’s been vaccinated—Full Fact. (n.d.). Retrieved June 5, 2021, from https://fullfact.org/online/ian-brown-wrong-to-claim-japan-refuses-blood-from-anyone-whos-been-vaccinated/
Mahase, E. (2021). Covid-19: UK has highest vaccine confidence and Japan and South Korea the lowest, survey finds. BMJ, n1439. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n1439
Japan denies planning to prioritise Olympic athletes for Covid vaccine. (2021, April 8). The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/apr/08/japan-considering-vaccinating-tokyo-olympic-athletes-before-rest-of-population
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
Masuyama, A., Shinkawa, H., & kubo, takahiro. (2020). Development and validation of the Japanese version Fear of COVID-19 Scale among adolescents. [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jkmut
Diseases, T. L. I. (2021). An exceptional vaccination policy in exceptional circumstances. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 21(2), 149. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00008-6
Genomic characterisation of an emergent SARS-CoV-2 lineage in Manaus: Preliminary findings - SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus / nCoV-2019 Genomic Epidemiology. (2021, January 25). Virological. https://virological.org/t/genomic-characterisation-of-an-emergent-sars-cov-2-lineage-in-manaus-preliminary-findings/586/2
Mullard, A. (2020). How COVID vaccines are being divvied up around the world. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03370-6
Kubo, T., Sugawara, D., & Masuyama, A. (2021). The effect of passion for activities on fear of COVID-19 and mental health among the Japanese population. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rvgs7
Ashraf, B. N. (2020). Economic impact of government interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic: International evidence from financial markets. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, 27, 100371. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbef.2020.100371
Moehring, A. V., Collis, A., Garimella, K., Rahimian, M., Aral, S., & Eckles, D. (2021, February 8). Surfacing norms to increase vaccine acceptance. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/srv6t
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
Time. ‘The Great Reset: How to Build a Better World Post-COVID-19’. Accessed 19 February 2021. https://time.com/collection/great-reset/.
Lewis, D. (2020). Why many countries failed at COVID contact-tracing—But some got it right. Nature, 588(7838), 384–387. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03518-4
Masuyama, A., Kubo, T., Sugawara, D., & Chishima, Y. (2020). Interest consistency can buffer the effect of COVID-19 fear on psychological distress. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ygz37
Japanischen Politik zur CO2-Neutralität bis 2050, Experteninterview. U.a. zu Wasserstofftechnologie und zu schwimmenden Windfarmen. Eine große Rolle spielt auch die Reduktion des Energie-Verbrauchs.
Zu den niedrigen Infektionszahlen in Japan, Juni 20
Sueki, H., & Ueda, M. (2020). Short-term effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on suicidal ideation: A prospective cohort study. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/3jevh
Kubo, T., Sugawara, D., & Masuyama, A. (2020). The effect of ego-resiliency and COVID-19-related stress on mental health among the Japanese population. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/up6c3
Infectious Disease Response—To see the forest, not just the trees: What differentiated Japan from the Western countries? | Discuss Japan－Japan Foreign Policy Forum. (n.d.). Retrieved July 18, 2020, from https://www.japanpolicyforum.jp/diplomacy/pt20200605162619.html
Six-Country Survey on COVID-19 (n.d.). IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved August 4, 2020, from https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13230/
Sakakibara, R., & Ozono, H. (2020). Psychological Research on the COVID-19 Crisis in Japan: Focusing on Infection Preventive Behaviors, Future Prospects, and Information Dissemination Behaviors. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/97zye
Uchikoshi, F. (2020). COVerAGE-JP: COVID-19 Deaths by Age and Sex in Japan [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/cpqrt
Sugawara, D., Masuyama, A., & kubo, takahiro. (2020). “My satisfied life was locked down!” Change of life, fear of COVID-19, negative symptoms and present, future, and past life satisfaction [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/sndpm
Prof Shamika Ravi on Twitter: “1) ACTIVE cases...shows which countries have 1) Peaked: Germany, S Korea, Japan, Italy, Spain... 2) Plateaued: France 3) Yet to peak: US, UK, Brazil, India...active cases still rising. 4) Second wave: Iran and.... Spain (?) https://t.co/C5c3gAhINc” / Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved June 2, 2020, from https://twitter.com/ShamikaRavi/status/1267664491040440322
Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare - PDF
Yamagata, M., Teraguchi, T., & Miura, A. (2020, April 10). The Relationship between Infection-Avoidance Tendency and Exclusionary Attitudes towards Foreigners: A Case Study of the COVID-19 Outbreak in Japan. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/vhrqn
Yonemitsu, F., Ikeda, A., Yoshimura, N., Sasaki, K., Takashima, K., Qian, K., … Yamada, Y. (2020, May 4). Warning “Don’t spread” vs. “Don’t be a spreader” to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/u4z3e
Hironori Funabiki on Twitter
Yamagata, M., Teraguchi, T., & Miura, A. (2020, May 5). The Relationship between Infection-Avoidance Tendencies and Exclusionary Attitudes toward Foreigners: A Panel Study of the COVID-19 Outbreak in Japan. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/x5emj
Galandra, C., Cerami, C., Santi, G., Dodich, A., Cappa, S., Vecchi, T., & Crespi, C. (2020). Covid-19 in mind: How job loss and health threatening events modulate risk-taking behaviours in real-life contexts [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5n942
北海道知事が「緊急事態宣言」、週末の外出自粛を要請. (2020 February 28). 日本経済新聞 電子版. https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO56188700Y0A220C2L41000/
Nishiura, H., Oshitani, H., Kobayashi, T., Saito, T., Sunagawa, T., Matsui, T., Wakita, T., MHLW COVID-19 Response Team, & Suzuki, M. (2020). Closed environments facilitate secondary transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) [Preprint]. Epidemiology. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.28.20029272
The Government of Japan. (2020 March 09). Expert meeting on the novel coronavirus disease control (Summary version). https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/10900000/000608425.pdf
Yoshioka‐Maeda, K., Motegi, R. I., & Honda, C. (2020). Preventing the dysfunction of public health centers responding to COVID‐19 by focusing on public health nurses in Japan. Journal of Advanced Nursing, jan.14409. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.14409
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."
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.
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.
Feudalism in Japan and Europe
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.
“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.
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.
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.”
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.”
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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Japanese
Japanese inventions
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
long peace because it became a deterrent among states as well as an in
!!!
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.
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.
Did Japan actually lose any decades?
Household consumption, rather than total GDP, is an even better comparison, since that’s a closer proxy for living standards of actual people
Japan’s recovery is the greatest economic success story never told
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.
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.
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
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.
“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
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
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.
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.
“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?”
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.
The enigma of Japanese intellectuals.
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!
Japanese handshakes tend to be “very, very limp.”
Yes. Handshakes in Japan always seem awkward to me.
European Union, Japan and the United States
Find out specifically which of these are "open" and if they are all focused on neuroscience?
“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.
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.