Gaijin-dough

Now someone tell me how to turn this thing off…

An open letter to my loan company. (There was a whole other tirade about them not letting me enter a foreign address (or even so much as a postal code that was more than five digits) or delete any characters in certain fields due to their elite Javascript foo that preceded this.):

Also, who was the network security wizard who thought up these gems for a secure password?

•Your password may be any combination of 6 to 10 letters and numbers.
•It can’t contain special characters (?&%$#@+=!’~, etc.)
•It can’t contain two separated numbers (i.e., Abc12ef34 would be invalid)

I am racking my brain to try and figure out how these limitations are possibly accomplishing other than encouraging people to use retarded dictionary word-based passwords, but I’m sure you must know what you’re doing. Glad to know you take protecting our accounts so seriously.

(P.S. - My password is ’superman69′. Am I doing this right?)

With geniuses like this looking after my social security number, I’m probably better off waiting for them to fuck up big time and tank a la Bear Stearns than bothering to pay them off.

I recently downloaded NetNewsWire on David’s recommendation and have been giving it a test run the last week or so. I’ve traditionally avoided RSS readers, but I’ve been feeling like I need slightly more context in my life than my two main sources of world news, Reddit and the Daily Show/Colbert Report block can provide. It certainly makes keeping track of blogs easier, if nothing else.

I figured I’d add a bunch of feeds out of the gate and trim them down as I go along. Besides the blogs I tend to frequent and a few major news sources and a bunch of feeds that come standard with NNW, I made a folder for Japanese News, since I am completely out of touch with what is going on in this country outside of my immediate sphere. I added Mainichi Daily News and The Japan Times, for no particular reason other than that they just so happen to be names I’ve heard in passing at various times.

Turns out I got more than I bargained for.

From Wikipedia:

Two former Mainichi Newspapers Chief Executive Officers have gone on to become prime ministers of Japan. The Mainichi is the only Japanese newspaper company to have won a Pulitzer Prize. The Japan Newspapers Association, made up of 180 news organizations, has granted the Mainichi is Grand Prix award on 21 occasions, making the Mainichi the most frequent winner of the distinguished prize since its inception in 1957.

Sounds pretty respectable, eh? Well, not so fast…

Read the rest of this entry »

Full story

The fertility rate in Japan is 1.29. That is 1.29 children per woman, whereas demographers consider replacement fertility to be about 2.1. All developed countries have lowering fertility rates, and its a problem of varying degrees. The liberation of women, higher ages of marriage, the cost of raising and educating children, all contribute towards low fertility. Japan suffers more than most (only Italy’s fertility rate is lower) but it’s a country-killer especially in Japan because

Japan refuses to take immigrants.

Immigration is the lifeblood of America, Canada, Australia and Europe. It keeps the economy, culture and pension systems alive in those countries. It provides young people (who have babies) and workers that both produce goods and consume them. Immigration causes some problems and the process is rarely completely smooth. But the target cultures are immeasurably enriched. New ideas, languages, cultures, food, all serve to enliven and stimulate the host country.

Some interesting responses in the comments.

Here’s a pretty interesting post on courting and sex written by a foreigner who spent some time here and dated several Japanese men.

1. Nanpa (the “pickup”)
Nanpa only refers to the case when you don’t know the other person at all, and you want to pick them up. Nanpa is direct. “You’re cute. What’s your name? Do you have time? Let’s go somewhere.” That is the classic script of nanpa.

…

2. Negotiating through a third party
Again, it’s not really flirting, but since flirting is showing your feelings openly–that is, pushing your feelings onto another person, which is direct and rude–it’s better to show no sign to the other person and meanwhile exploit the back channels. Sort of like in high school. So that convoluted human chain whereby: you like Hiro and you tell Junko that you think Hiro has a nice smile knowing that Junko will intuit that you want to know if Hiro likes you back, since Junko is friends with Goro who is friends with Hiro and Junko will talk to Goro and Goro will bring it up with Hiro etc etc etc etc etc etc. Once everything is confirmed, Hiro will ask you out. (The girl ask the guy out? Ahahahaha. Be serious.)

…

The biggest difference is that sex in Japan is not a mutual sharing experience with both partners spontaneously doing whatever they feel like or enjoy whenever they feel like doing it. Sex has rules and sex has roles just as every social interaction in Japan has rules and roles. There is an active partner and a passive partner. Active means moving; passive means unmoving. In heterosexual sex, the active partner is always male, and the passive partner is always female. In gay sex you work out your roles beforehand: the seme is active, the uke is passive (for gay guys); the tachi is active, the neko is passive (for gay women).

…

So there is an active partner and a passive partner, which causes various flow on effects. You can’t have “Whoo-hoo! Go for it!” sex because both partners are constrained by their roles. The passive partner (obviously) because she can’t move, and the active partner because he has to take care of the passive partner, instructing her on what to do and exerting himself so that she has a good time.

Japanese guys are generally more stressed out by sex than western guys and that is because they are responsible for the sex; as the active male, the sex is their burden, they have to do everything, it’s all up to them. Sex equates not only (sometimes not even primarily) with ‘fun’ or ‘pleasure’, it also equates with ‘work’ and ‘obligation’.

I also can’t emphasise enough just how passive the passive partner is. The way a woman kisses is by submissively opening her mouth, not moving her tongue unless she is cued to do so; if she’s really feminine she won’t open her mouth at all, until she’s told to. Sometimes women will move around a (very) little during sex, but mostly not at all. The slang term for a woman who lies completely still in bed is maguro (tuna). For me, with my western sensibilities and preconceptions, calling someone a ‘tuna’ in bed sounds like an insult, conjuring up images of cold dead fish, but in Japan that word has a very positive connotation. Tuna’s an expensive delicacy.

Full post here