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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]