Archive for the 'Japan' Category

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Monday, December 26th, 2005

So what’s the best way to buy music in Japan? at 3,000 yen per CD (about 25 bucks), buying CD’s is surely not the way. So the natural alternative: rent CD’s. Yep. Go to the local media rental shop (which has CD’s DVD’s and the like) and a rent a few. Bring it back and […]

Saavy Businessmen? I don’t see any around here..

Sunday, December 25th, 2005

There’s that stereotype that the Japanese are business saavy, are great at spotting good long term investments and such. While that may be true for a small number of business leaders, it certainly seems not true for the rest of the population, particularly older folk.
Case and point: once a month, a representative from the local […]

Holy smokes

Saturday, December 24th, 2005

Well it turns out that Tokyo already has digital high definition signals going everywhere through the airwaves. It also turns out that the 30 inch LCD that my grandparents recently bought can recieve and display these signals just fine. Watching the news in HD is pretty ridiculous. Foreign shows allow you to switch audio streams […]

Cash money (and more attention to small detail)

Friday, December 23rd, 2005

Japan is a land of cash. Or well, at least Tokyo is a city of cash. People carrying around the equivalent of 1G all the time no problem. In such places, going to the ATM can be quite an affair. What if you need to do some hairy math to figure out how much to […]

It’s all the random small things

Friday, December 23rd, 2005

It’s all the attention to the small details that impresses me about Japan. Sometimes its just solving some kind of problem that only really exists in Japan. Other times its just pure ingenuity.
For example, the subway ticketing system. When the subway and train systems started really to acheive critical mass, they introduced automated ticket checkers […]

Tokto/Takeshima

Sunday, March 20th, 2005

What a mess.
Unfortunately, the blame for this diplomatic conflict falls on both sides.
It seems totally inappropriate to me, that a small prefecture in Japan usurp the voice of the nation and unilaterally declare a claim to the islands. In light of the increasing number of social exchanges between Japan and Korea, it seems like a […]

Japanese Media

Thursday, March 17th, 2005

Some disturbing information about the Japanese media. What’s really frustrating is that it seems as there are people in Japan who have the right attitude about things, but they often get quashed by the nationalists, and the rest of the people who follow them because they’re just uninformed and it feels good to be patriotic […]