tiredofsametab

Everyone I’ve known here who works in film, anime, manga, etc. work ridiculous hours with shit work-life balance. I’m sure that’s not true of everyone, but especially the smaller studios. It is something that needs to be addressed and, to its credit, the government has imposed more penalties on crazy work hours and upped enforcement, but it’s hard to catch the people who aren’t reporting their actual hours even if there are now penalties on the employees themselves as well for not doing so. There need to be some big, systemic changes in a lot of those areas here because it is also, in part, a culture issue.

identifying anime and video games as core industries in its revised Cool Japan strategy.

I’ll be impressed if the ‘Cool Japan’ program is proven to be more than primarily for domestic consumption to say “look! we’re doing something!”

You may have a different experience, as you married into the culture, and thus have a family there to help break the ice.

It certainly wasn’t breaking the ice; I first came to Japan after getting laid off living in a US state where I had no family, etc. I liked it enough to go back to live and didn’t meet my wife until about 6 years in. I made it a point to go to local bars and live shows and galleries where I’d meet people into what I was into, which is generally how it works in most of the world. The expat bubble is tempting, and yeah I do wanna speak English sometimes, but it’s just self-defeating to only live in that bubble.

How is this not conservative and insular?

Some people are conservative and insular, yes. A lot of them are not. I was giving one reason why some of them were.

. And by “weird spot” you mean decades of intense discrimination, including denying them access to basic healthcare.

By weird spot I specifically meant that many do not feel Japanese and don’t want to take Japanese citizenship but can’t necessarily go back. It is a weird spot insofaras it’s not a normal type of situation. This of course provokes discrimination from butthurt fuckheads who think “what, is Japan not good enough for you?” and the like. It’s weird because they are trapped in a situation where they are being asked to give up their identities (which is obviously wrong) but they also can’t go home to what they would consider or want to be their home. This, of course, is a gross oversimplification of the whole thing.

including denying them access to basic healthcare.

This I’m not aware of outside of the occasional “we don’t accept foreigners” which unfortunately does happen (sometimes due to worries about communication sometimes because racism), but it’s rarer in medical settings because denying treatment can come with actual punishment on that medical institution. Do you have more detail or a source (English or Japanese are fine).

Framing Japanese culture as conservative and insular was the polite way of saying they’re still a fascist country,

From the Wikipedia definition of fascism, it ticks some of the boxes but certainly not all of them. It certainly has more elements of it than I would like, but every time someone other than the LDP gets in charge (a couple of times since the '50s), they promptly faceplant and turn people off of themselves again. As a non-citizen, there’s basically nothing I can do on this realm. My wife also does not like this and votes for progressives and I think a lot of her generation would agree, but voter turnout here is a whole other problem.

run by the children of war criminals.

I think it’s more grandchildren these days, but yeah. The good news is that not everyone believes the same things as their parents or grandparents (I certainly don’t), but America’s involvement in the political system in the immediate post-war era and their working with those people and yakuza didn’t help things.

funding temples built to honor people who weaponized rape on a massive scale.

This I will take minor issue with. Yasukuni, which I’m guessing you’re referring to, was built to honor war dead more generally and all the way back in late 1860s for those who fought in the Boshin (Japanese civil war/revolution) War.

It does contain war criminals, which is fucking stupid, but also is no longer owned or run by the government (also something the Americans forced with separating religion and state). It’s now run by a bunch of far-right fucksticks. Some (generally very right-wing) government officials do interact with it “in a private capacity” which is often meant to signal something to their base. Some other do visit without the publicity as they would any other shrine.

I have family buried in Arlington National Cemetery in the US which also contains people who are guilty of warcrimes, convicted or otherwise. Should I never go there even though, to the best of my knowledge, none of my family ever engaged in such? That’s where I feel conflicted about Yasukuni. Fuck the org that runs it, fuck the politicians that use it to signal their far-right base, but I don’t begrudge people going to where their ancestors are enshrined. I would certainly love that all war criminals be purged from all such places globally, but I don’t know how one accomplishes that.

If you feel I missed something (in your first post, I wasn’t entirely sure to which specific group of Koreans you were referring, which may have led to some confusion and I certainly don’t claim to know everything in detail on the topic), you’re welcome to link to something so I can get more context or background.

People didn’t find what they wanted and/or went back to what was stable and familiar. I still am avoiding using reddit for anything except the subs related to people living in Japan (the community didn’t move over; a couple did but there were basically no posts very quickly) and when it shows up in some search result and nothing else has worked.

I’ve always liked boot styles of the 20s and 30s. Upper-left has some nifty boots.

I can try to answer. I’ve lived in Japan for almost a decade (this is my 10th year).

Yeah, some is specific to Japan, though there will be similar hurdles anywhere the US has an agreement (and that the target country’s institutions actually follow it, I suppose).

I have a couple of retirement accounts in the US that I contributed to before (I moved overseas in my early 30s) that I basically can’t touch for a number of reasons right now. Just wanted to throw it out there.

iirc, they did use a damaged wheel to try to figure out a situation where a rover was stuck, though I don’t remember any details about it.

Further, not doing so could impact things like voter registration depending upon the state. The whole system of US voting is a mess since it’s all at the state level.

However, since you don’t pay taxes on that money, it can impact which kinds of retirement accounts you can use based in the US, if any. Also, trying to invest as a US citizen outside the US can suck because of all the agreements with US banks. Many Japanese platforms, for instance, won’t touch me because of US reporting requirements. I also can’t functionally use the tax-advantaged retirement accounts here because many amount to what are called PFICs by the IRS which requires paperwork and are taxed punitively more than wiping out any advantage the retirement accounts would have.

You’re also going to have a rough time getting a US investment account if you don’t have one already. Then you have to figure out how to have a US phone number because two-factor auth basically requires it for any bank or anything that will touch you.

There are other “fun” things about being a US citizen living abroad.

Eh… Unless you are actually Japanese, you’re probably going to be hanging out with other ex-pats, or just very lonely.

I disagree here. Learn the language and hang out where Japanese hang out.

Japan is an extremely conservative and insular country. They don’t really mind people visiting for the most part, but they don’t really think highly of people actually immigrating there.

The “they” here is doing a lot of work. Certainly, a number of people are anti-immigration as they see an erosion of their tradition and some, the I suspect it an ever-shrinking minority, Others are mostly fine with immigration if it’s “the right kind/race of immigrants”. I have a loving family here in my in-laws with whom I am often involved (grandpa loves writing letters). As for immigration itself, in the ~10 years I’ve been here, they’ve added new visas with quicker paths to permanent resident status. One can apply for citizenship after 5 years (though it requires renouncing all others which is why I don’t do it – I do wish they’d change that).

There are ethnic Koreans who have lived in communities in Japan for hundreds of years who are still considered outsiders and are treated like second class citizens.

I don’t know exactly what you’re referencing here. There are zainichi Koreans who are in a weird spot. There is more racism to people from the neighboring countries than perhaps others, but that’s also not universal. A lot of Koreans that are here because their homes/families were in the north don’t take Japanese citizenship and, often, don’t really feel Japanese either; they feel their identity is north korean, but don’t move their either for obvious reasons. As such, they don’t take Japanese citizenship and are basically waiting to “go home”. I used to hang out with one and my wife knew a couple and they are in an interesting spot. They often also go schools run by nork-friendly institutions and some (many? all?) do at least visit pyongyang once, but they’re well aware of how much they are taught and shown is carefully curated and not typical. Anyway, the not taking citizenship and not going home does rub some (especially the far right) the wrong way and they’d rather they GTFO. Edit: a lot of the families were brought over, often involuntarily, during Japan’s colonization of Korea and WWII.

Racism is definitely something that I think is shrinking over time, but definitely still too high and a problem to be addressed.

Japan’s economic policy always has been weird, but lately things just keep appearing to get worse with like 30 years worth of shrinkflation happening all at once and wages not raising with inflation at all. The yen has slid against the dollar to pretty terrible rates. While it sucks for me personally wanting to do things like visit family overseas, it also plays a role in imports. Especially post 3-11 when they started turning off nuclear, a lot of fuel for everything, including keeping the lights on, must be imported. The low JPY basically just benefits the export markets.

More progressive, basically. The person who came second for PM wants to continued forced unified surnames (at least when both people getting married are Japanese) and has a bunch of positions on things like LGBTQI that drag progress backward. It also reads like she would revoke broadcasting licenses for news channels whose politics she doesn’t like. We already legally have to pay a yearly fee (kinda like a UK license fee, I think) for owning anything capable of receiving a TV signal. This was initially done (at least in part) to fund NHK (Japan’s BBC or PBS or whatever) outside of the government. They still have self-censored and at times aired wildly bullshit, racist things (particularly around corona). The position is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanae_Takaichi and, if another PM election which is not unlikely soon, I suspect she might win.

Can confirm, it beats the fuck out of Tokyo 99% of the time. Edit: no dog yet, though, as we want to do some rather long traveling before we get a pet. We do have neighborhood cats and one will come chill near us (though not let us touch him).

If I had it to do over again (born/raised in the US, living in Japan), I might pick Norway or Finland over Japan, but overall I’m fairly happy where I am.

I types out and deleted twice multi-paragraphee answers. I don’t think a tldr is better. For reference, I’m barely gen-x and voted.for harris. my immediate family, whom I will reference, are boomers from the late 40s to 1960. I don’t know that they all voted for trump, but at least two said they planned to (I have step-parents as well, so it’s not just a pair above me).

Although there are groups and people they hate, particularly in the context of evangelical christianty in the case of at least two, that was not the motivating factor. The motivating factor to all of them (at least so far as I can interpret it) was a combination of fear and loss of power and purpose when I try to boil it down.

Some of my direct family live in a place that got famous for its.immigramt population this cycle. When I visited I summer of 2023, their complaints were about systems not being able to keep up and unlicensed and uninsured drivers in those groups. Even one of my super evangelical baptist family members didn’t comment on the different variety of Christianity. Had many not been Christians, that might be different

Ok, this is several paragraphs again already. What I think, reading this rambly mess, is it is less hatred at a group (though that does exist), it is fear-based but also based on placed whose systems can’t keep up with the issues they face.

Though, having grown up not far from said place, there are hateful and racist people so that factor’s weight is also non-zero. Even then, I think the erosion of the middle class and their loss of status was the cause rather than direct hatred.

I guess, at my 4th or 5th attempt at this post, my point is that those folks mostly did not directly or intentionally vote because of hatred, but more out of fear and loss.

But don’t worry; well make you buy those legacy games in the shop again because fuck you pay me for the 4th time for a game from the 80s/90s. ~ abe Nintendo, probably

I’ve mostly heard ‘yanks’ in English. I don’t know if Japanese slang specifically has a word for USian foreigners as most situations don’t really care about which country and, if more specificity than ‘foreigner’ is required, it’s usually going to be some adjective/descriptor (loud, rude, skin_color_here, etc. in the case of people being those things).

Unfortunately for my sanity over here in UTC+9, I can’t just sleep through the whole thing. I’m hopeful that work will be busy enough tomorrow that I won’t have time to think about it. What I also know is that it’s most likely going to get drawn out longer, so I won’t likely be specifically watching anywhere, but just picking up occasional US news somewhat accidentally along the way (either here or via fark). I voted as soon as I could print my overseas ballot and get it in the mail so I’ve done all I can do.

I didn’t have a car for a few years and the one I had was 2003 (with a slight stint from a similarly-aged car during a couple-month time I had to drive). I now have a car again and I HATE that my heat/air and such are all flat against the panel (not a touch screen, though). I literally can’t adjust anything without looking in my current car. Thankfully, I avoid driving it whenever possible.

I’ve always liked the name Ruben for some reason and only ever known one that I can recall (whose brother was called Robin).

I also am partial to Ezekiel and they can have Zeke as a nickname which I think sounds pretty rad.

generally one at a time, sometimes 2 if I decide to grab a cup of coffee.