One thing holding the iphone back in Japan is the lack of emojis, the ubiquitious emoticons used in all Japanese emails. Its not just a neat little gimmick here, they're necessary, and people can assume you're angry if you send a text message without them. The detail is buried here.
So much has been made of Japan as a society that takes care of its own with fantastic benefits. For a long time it enjoyed a reputation as a middle-class society, without extremes of very rich or very poor, where everyone was equal.
That all changed this decade. In wake of the recession big business lobbied government to cut them some slack, and "reforms" were enacted. The old laws required companies to pay generous benefits to full time employees, and made it difficult to fire anyone. In theory, that system still exists. But like so many other things, the government found ways to preserve the formalities and official rules, but allow changes through the back door.
Now, about 40% of employees in Japan are "temporary" workers, filling jobs via employment agencies. They work in the same offices as their full time counterparts, and do the same job. But they are paid via another agency and earn far less, with no benefits or security. So you see, Japan still has excellent employee rights...its just harder and harder to become one in the first place, that's all.
Good story about it here.
It's all here! The debate-
McCain gave his best debate performance yet, but its far too little, too late. voters handed the debate to Obama 58-31, and swing voters favored Obama even more, 58 to 23.
All this when the meta-pollsters doing 10,000 election simulations a day based on weighted aggregates of all national and state polls now find Obama winning 95% of the time, with a landslide 353 electoral votes. That would spell doom for McCain even if he killed it tonight. Instead, it saw undecideds breaking toward Obama 2-1 (about 18% going to McCain and 38% deciding to vote for Obama, with the remainder still making up their minds).
Obama has become a much more polished, and much more typical, politician over the past year. In the summer at the saddleback religious forum, where he appeared alongside McCain and answered the same questions, he spoke from the top of his head, uttering his often-mocked ers and ums. To some he sounded indecisive and wishy-washy. Some conservatives claimed he was forgetting pre-fed lines, and didn't realize they were witnessing the opposite- a politician that really and truly was trying to answer honestly and thoughtfully on the spot (to mixed results)
No more. Obama is a gaffeless, teflon campaigning machine now. Everything out of his mouth sounds like it was cleared and deliberated by a dozen aides. Nothing McCain ever does seems to shake him or put him on the defensive. Even his common reaction for when McCain issues an embarrassing charge (looking away and smiling), seems to be measured and pre-planned. He's unflappable. And the "body language" crowd, the types of people that think its more important the way a politician sits or looks at his opponent is more important than what he actually proposes to do, just laps it up. They wanted a typical politician, and they got it. To speak in crass pundit talk, he is the "alpha male" here.
Go to the 24:50 mark in the debate video, when the sparks start to fly and they start talking about each other's negative campaigning and things like the people at McCain/Palin rallies yelling "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" about Obama. He scolds McCain for getting emotional about how much it hurt him to hear Civil rights activist/congressman John Lewis accuse him of inciting violence. And McCain looks down in embarrassment when he talks. The image of the hardened experienced war hero vs. the dangerously green naif is shattered. McCain may be older, but fair or not, Obama looks like the grown up here.
Obama got McCain pretty good when he tried out the old "He still hasn't told us how much that mandate will cost" line in ref to Joe the Plumber. Watch his facial reaction here-
He's dumbfounded. Obama said it in the last debate, but he's awestruck in disbelief. Count the deer in headlight blinks.
Wonder who Joe the Plumber is? He's not a new spin on "Joe Sixpack"- he's a real guy that Obama discussed taxes with when he campaigned door-to-door in Ohio the other day. Here's the vid-
Like many conservatives, Joe may not be fully decided on McCain, but the subsequent interviews he's done demonstrates that he was already fully decided against a democrat, and nothing Obama can say will convince him otherwise.
Last night he told CBS News on their webcast that "He danced around my question better than Sammy Davis Jr." Ewwwww...ok, your 15 minutes of fame is up. Now.
Bonus- a picture of McCain after the debate. (Not photoshopped).
It's over.
The Nikkei lost 25% of its value over the past week. This is the worst crash here in 59 years, which is creepy, when you consider that 59 years takes you far past the crash that led to the bubble burst that ended Japan's golden age in the 80's, and all the way to the 1940's, not too long after two atomic bombs were dropped on this country, its capital city was burned to rubble, and the Japanese empire officially fell, leading to a decade of extreme poverty here that left many survivors of that period short from malnutrition.
Shares for companies like Toyota and Sony are selling under the net value of their assets, which means that the market is treating them as if they'd be better off just selling everything right now and going out of business than if they pressed on. A little extreme, don't you think?
Recall the Great Depression of the 30's. Men that picked up stock in General Electric and other survivors during those times made millions. I know how counter-intuitive it sounds when everyone is panicking and fleeing the market, but this strikes me as a great time to buy. Even if the next great depression does happen world wide this coming year, eventually, eventually, life will go on. Its important to remember that before the panic, people knew Toyota was positioned to become the biggest car maker in the world over the next few years, what with General Motors tanking. And Toyota's commitment to good mileage and electric cars puts them in a great position in this changing world. The shares may well plummet further as the world goes to hell. But what about 10 years from now? What about 20, or 30? What about 40 or 50? As you approach retirement in the far future and look back at the past on the investments you could have, would have and should have made, I suspect a lot of people will be kicking themselves for not snapping up stock during the great crash of '08.
(Big PS- No-one here knows a thing about it. The panic seems to be fueled by foreign investors, the same crowd freaking out back Wall Street and elsewhere. Bizarrely, most people I talk to here don't know a thing about this yet.
As far as the big picture goes- the government, the economy, the stock market- I learn a lot more outside of this country and through foreign news sources than I do actually living in it. Its like living on HAL in the movie 2001. On BBC World you can see that in Parliament, people are -sometimes literally, screaming with limbs flailing- freaking out. Then you turn on national TV, and they're barbecuing fish and marveling at the chef's roasting technique, or taking a tour of a park in Hokkaido. And a calm, pleasantly monotone voice seems to emit from the television, saying "Remain calm! All is well!")
This from the cabinet of the new Japanese Prime Minister, Aso. Aside from the racism and backward thinking in an age when Japan has a plummeting birth-rate and desperately needs immigrants to replete it's work force, it's also astonishing in its sheer incompetence: This idiot was the Minister of Tourism.
He has been forced to resign. But my suspicion is that the only significant difference between him and the rest of the cabinet is that he was stupid enough to say something like this out loud. In 2005, the same guy (Nariaki Nakayama) said he was glad that descriptions of how occupying war-time Japanese soldiers kept concubines of "sex slaves" out of textbooks. The conservative new Prime Minister Abe knew exactly who he was appointing, and its likely that he and the rest of his cabinet reflect the same views.
In the past, Nakayama has already served as the transport minister and the Education minister in previous cabinets. The point? The "new" Taro Aso Cabinet is just the same old guys from the past shuffled around, doing and saying the same things. Aso is just another insider, and nothing has changed.
I'm really fed up with the Japanese government since Koizumi. Koizumi pushed some much-needed reforms in the extremely corrupt government system, putting an end to racketeering by Yakuza and heavily curtailing pork, but was eventually pushed out. Since then, 2 Prime Ministers have come and gone, each resigning after less than a year. The first, Abe, responded to Japan's serious issues by legally requiring school children to become patriotic through public education, as if singing the national anthem each day will solve anything. The second, Fukuda, faced opposition from the entrenched party interests for trying to push reforms, and became a scapegoat for all the country's problems in the public's eyes at the same time.
The new PM Taro Aso probably won't have trouble from the backrooms for trying to push reforms, because he is likely aligned with them himself. He is by far the richest man ever to become Prime Minister of Japan. His hometown is in Iizuka, near Fukuoka, and his family owns several businesses in this area. I suspect the construction businesses his family runs will be seeing a lot of pork soon enough.
With the exception of Koizumi, who more and more is beginning to look like an anomaly blip on the radar that won't be repeated, It's just more of the same, every time. The same political party, the LDP, has run Japan almost continuously for over 30 years, making elections almost a formality. The party chooses its leader, not the public, so everything goes on from the inside. And it's the same types of people, again and again and again.
When things go sour, they bring in new blood by getting a wealthy socially conservative, 70 year old man who thinks the answers to Japan's problems in the 21st century is to look to the past. When that fails...they bring in new blood, with a wealthy, socially conservative 68 year old man who thinks the answers lie in the past.
If that doesn't work? Well, there's a party insider who relatively young at 69. He's spunky, socially conservative in a tough way and knows how to get things done. You just wait, he's really going to shake things up!
EDIT: On the other hand, the new PM Aso did once say that he wanted to "make Japan the type of country that rich Jews would like to live in". Now, it's possible he just meant that figuratively, as in, just make it the kind of country they would like to live in, though he still wouldn't have any intention of actually letting them in.
But as perverse and sad as it sounds, if he meant it literally, it would actually be a pretty encouraging and progressive policy on immigration....by LDP standards, anyway.
For sensible people, it won't matter either way. But beyond a few southern states where racial tensions run deep (and where they would have gone red anyway), there's a chance it may actually help him at least as much as it hurts him. Let me explain.
There are two types of racism among white people, hard racism and soft racism, or "cultural" racism. Hard racism involves people that really and truly believe that people from a different lineage than themselves are inherently inferior. Thankfully, these people make up only a small percentage of the population.
Soft racism, however, is far more prevalent. Soft racism involves antipathy toward cultural markers that differentiate minorities as out-groups, for example, clothing, slang, heavy accents, music, customs, etc. These things make minorities seem different from white people, and therefore questionable or scary. These people have issues with people that walk, talk, dress and behave differently than themselves. They may attribute these differences as having to do with the out-groups' race. But, as unjustified as it remains, ultimately it is the different behavior that makes them wary and fearful.
The point of this is that unlike hard racism, soft racism is malleable and subjective to the individual. If a minority person dresses, acts and speaks the same ways as a white person in the same walk of life, even many white people who can otherwise be soft racist will feel relief and warm up to them relatively quickly. They will put that minority in a different category from the "other ones", and soon they will forget about that person's descent altogether.
By acting like a white person, minorities can often alleviate a lot of soft racism among people that know them. Not all, I hasten to add. But a good deal of it. Indeed, some black professionals have said that when they reach the top, they feel that they have been "anointed" by their new friends and associates. Racism still exists, it just isn't directed at them so much, at least by the people they know well and deal with every day.
Obama himself is keenly aware of this fact. In his 1994 memoir Dreams from my Father, he wryly noted how easily he could get out of trouble as a teenager just by smiling and acting non-threatening "People were so relieved to see a young black man that wasn't angry that they would let anything go" (He noted that the one white person that this didn't work on was his own mother).
There are minorities that have thrived after thwarting soft racism. One of the most visible examples is Obama's fellow Chicagoan Oprah Winfrey, who may be one of the wealthiest entertainers in history. She is beloved by tens of millions of housewives across the nation.
Here's a question- If being black is always a hindrance in America, does that mean that Oprah Winfrey could possibly be more successful than she already is, by being the same person she is now, only white? Somehow I doubt it. Winfrey is at the top of her field. Its hard to imagine her -or anyone, really- being more successful than she already is. It's even possible that for some strange reason, it oddly became a benefit. Maybe people were more comfortable hearing about the taboo topics Winfrey started her career discussing when it came from someone who was likeable, relateable and empathetic, but also in other ways a bit of an outsider.
In Obama's case, once he convinces whites that he's just like them and part of the club, being black could just be another way of setting him apart from the typical politician. The stereotypical corrupt politician is an old, over-polished white guy with silver hair and an easy, slightly superficial familiarity with others. It may not be a conscious reaction, but some people that have come to trust Obama as normal culturally might look at him and go, "I think this guy is different from the other politicians. I can't put my finger on why, but I don't think he's the same as all the others".
I got this as part of a free promotion in Tenjin. Guys- don't you hate getting these damn things on? Half the time its hard to tell which way to put it on, and then there's the agony of unrolling it from itself. With this condom, the edges have pull-tabs that yank it on to your member in one smooth, continuous roll. So in theory you can get it on in a single motion without even touching it.
On the wrapper the guy says to the girl "hey, have you heard about the lastest super cool thing?" and goes into the pitch, while, apparently, dropping his pants and demonstrating how its used right then and there. And she's all like, "Wow, really and truly no touch!!
