Yesterday I had a business lunch at a nice restaurant in Kyoto. The menu was prix fixed. JPY 2500 for the pasta lunch (choose one from various types of pasta), JPY 3500 for the meat lunch (same, choose one), and 4500 JPY for the pasta and meat lunch (choose one of each). As is

Lots of people like to talk about corporate governance in Japan, but I don't know that any of them have talked about the goodies that companies give to their shareholders. This article is old, but just saw a TV segment about this guy who basically builds his whole life around

For those who might be interested: zjapanr.de/index.php/zjap… sfgate.com/opinion/articl…

A question for Bing or possibly Microsoft Edge Why do the URLs I find and view using your tools convert to non-links when I try to post them to X? It is very tedious having to open Firefox and then copy them from Firefox so they stay as links. I am not a technical

Grok v. Copilot. "Create a triangle comprised of three circles, the one on the top should have 法 in it, the one to the bottom left 律 and the one to the right 令." (actual prompt edited for brevity) Grok doesn't seem to be able to identify Japanese characters so I had to

It will be pretty funny when Pokemon stores have to start doing KYC on customers and confirming source of funds to buy that gold Pikachu card because.. money laundering. Oh and you need a Japanese cell phone and residence certificate because... money laundering.

I suspect a flaw in this brilliant plan might be if it is a criminal offense to melt down nickels. It is an offense to melt or even deface coins in Japan.

So my theory is that this illustrates one of the reasons why America has such a consumer culture; people do stuff like this but then when they need something out of this exquisitely organized storage, it is so much work that they end up just going out and buying a new whatever it

Most of this seems to be about the burden of medical care and other social insurance. So mostly about money. For me, what I found most interesting is that the LDP and Ishin coalition involves an agreement to: 1. Keep the current rules of male only imperial succession but

Older folks: remember when the Internet was a never ending stream of commercial pop up ads? And then they were mostly gone? It's nice that GDPR is replicating that experience for the younger people.

Legally there are multiple categories of "minister" in Japan. To understand them it helps to understand that the Japanese term for "minister" (大臣) has nothing to do with the term for ministry 省. First there are the ministers of actual ministries which are provided for under

To me it the interesting thing about furusato nozei is how the Ministry of Internal Affairs tried to punish Izumi Sano City for being too innovative in how it operated the program, which resulted in a rare dispute before the "local-national government dispute committee" the

"Dear [members of institution] Yesterday, we just did a phishing test using an e-mail that looked like this. [details of e-mail I vaguely receiving and ignoring because it was obviously phishing] To find out more about how the IT department manages security please see [URL]."

Discuss. (from a certain American high school World Religion text)

Today I had a surprise video debate at an AI company apparently in a conference hall. Asked why I for decades said The Keepers Of The Status Quo at Wikipedia is really bad training to reach AGI. I played this James Burke video. It silenced the room!

I think the real thing of interest here is not that the Emperor does not have a name (he does!). It's that neither he nor any other member of the imperial family have a surname... This is probably why the right wing often links the seemingly unrelated issue of spousal surnames