/japan/ - 日本

>>2150

>I hate the new jisho.org

>new

>what is reading

http://www.afr.com/brand/chanticleer/japan-draws-in-big-infrastructure-funds-20150420-1mpawq

Probably behind a firewall so copied below

Australia's large and internationally active infrastructure investors are turning their attention to Japan as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe moves ahead with the third arrow of Abenomics.

IFM Investors, AMP Capital and Macquarie Capital are at the front of the queue to buy infrastructure assets being sold as part of Abe's structural reforms to position Japan to compete in the 21st century.

Japan has been very slow to get the private sector involved in the management of government infrastructure. Also, it has been reluctant to allow investment in government-owned monopoly assets.

While Japan was a leader in the sale of monopoly telecom assets with the sale of the first tranche of shares in NTT in 1994 it has been reluctant to sell other businesses.

Chanticleer was The Australian Financial Review's Tokyo correspondent in 1998 when Junichiro Koizumi first talked about privatising Japan Post. That ambition will be achieved later this year when Japan Post is sold to the public in an initial public offering.

Private sector involvement in Japanese infrastructure is a priority for Abe for two reasons. It will bring efficiency gains in the management of government assets and will make available funds to cut government debt. Japan has total debt to gross domestic product ratio of about 550 per cent.

The first significant asset on the block in Japan is the Kansai International Airport, which is an international airport located on an artificial island in Osaka Bay.

It is owned by the New Kansai International Airport Company which is in the process of transferring the management of the airport into private hands.

Brett Himbury, chief executive of global infrastructure fund manager IFM Investors is actively involved in trying to buy the airport. Other Australian companies to have passed the initial screening process include AMP Capital and Macquarie Capital.

Himbury spoke to Chanticleer after a trip to Tokyo last week to discuss the airport sale with government officials. The airport is said to be worth about $US4 billion ($5.1 billion). That price is well below the cost of construction and about $1 billion less than net assets.

The latest balance sheet for the New Kansai International Airport Company shows interest bearing debt of Yen 946 billion ($10 billion).

Himbury says there are a range of Japanese infrastructure assets which will be attractive to international investors including IFM Investors.

>The airport is said to be worth about $US4 billion. That price is well below the cost of construction and about $1 billion less than net assets.

Sounds like you're getting ripped off.

>>2165

>Isn't Australia a country of freedom of speech?

Not really. We have free political speech, but we don't have something like the US First Amendment.

This article explains that the tweets were against the Code of Conduct of the company. He didn't get in trouble with the law. He could also get fired due to these types of tweets in the US.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-28/wilson-freedom-of-speech-isnt-freedom-from-consequences/6427158

>students are allowed to discuss over their act in the past

Students are allowed to say pretty much anything so long as it is in the context of 'learning'. I never got told off for anything I said as a student and I said worse things than were in this guy's tweets.

What are your thoughts on UN pressure to implement hate speech laws in Japan?

So I found something interesting while browsing about for ways to learn japanese. Something that's been funded through a website of… questionable nature, but still looks very interesting. A game called Koe (声)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/297265509/koe-a-jrpg-with-japanese-at-the-core-of-gameplay/description

Apparently it's a japanese learning video game with focus on the game part of it, rather than the learning part. As someone who plays games with a passion, this is admittedly rather good news for me, as it provides an alternative into learning the language.

Of course, with it not being released yet, I can't speak much about it and how useful it is for learning, but that's something I am most likely gonna find out. If the game comes out.

Also apologies that I cannot talk about anything else other than video games.

>>2195

>4ちゃんに帰らない。悪徳なところになった。

うーん…、現時点では4chan以外に選択肢がないような気がする。

hmm, but I feel like there's no other choice than 4chan at the moment…

jp.8ch.netやLang-8はどう？

まぁ、8chの日本語版は完全に死んでるみたいだし既に多くの日本人が去っちゃってるけど…。

How about jp.8ch.net or lang-8?

well, the Japanese version of 8ch looks completely dead and it appears that many Japanese people already left there though….

誰か日本人が集まって話ができる場所を知りませんか？

Does anyone else know a place where Japanese people gather and we can speak with them?

>Also your English isn't that bad, it's probably a lot better than my Japanese.

thanks, but I think your Japanese is far better than my English. I often make grammatical mistakes and misspellings.

>>2220

>>2221

Norway's constitutional day celebration is… relatively tame, I would say. We dress up nicely, then we walk in a parade which spans the whole town, meeting at the local church, then we go to the local school to celebrate with some festivities. No fireworks, but flags everywhere for sure.

Then we go home to our families and eat yoghurt porridge with a few slices of fenalår.

File sharing; can any of you help this anon?

https://8ch.net/scurv/res/3230.html#q6314

私はきのうにがっこうでしゃしんをとりました。

うちもしゃしんをとりました。

I took pictures at school yesterday.

I took pictures at home, too.

Does this make sense?

Or should the second sentence be:

きのうにうちもしゃしんをとりました ?

Good artbook.

>>2258

>Cafe du Lapin

確かに、画集はごちうさファンの間で人気でしばしば売切れてるみたいだから、なかなか買えないんだよね。

Yeah, the artbook is very popular among gochuumon fans and seems to be often sold out,

so we can't buy it easily.

>>2264

Have you read the other artbook titled Memorial Blend?

>>2268

>Have you read the other artbook titled memorial blend?

実は画集やグッズを買えるほど余裕がないので、まだ一度も読んだことがない。全部ほしいんだけれどもね。

現時点だと持ってるのはごちうさの第一巻、第二巻、第三巻とアンソロジーコミックのみなんだ。

to be honest, I've never read it yet because I can't afford to buy all of gochiusa artbooks and goods even though I want to get them all.

I only have gochiusa volume 1, 2, 3 and comic anthology at the moment.

>>2273

Preview them online.

Is it not possible to have a look at the bookstore?

>>2276

探してみたけど、プレビューできるオンラインブックストアを見つけられなかった。

I tried looking for the online bookstore where I can preview them, but I was not able to find it.

>>2283

アップロードしてくれてありがとう。

thanks a lot for uploading. I'm glad to read them!

Please post an infographic of the best Japanese movies.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-30/baby-sumos-face-off-in-traditional-crying-battle/6509412

Amazing that Japan is so low.

This article may be paywalled

http://www.afr.com/news/world/asia/japans-woes-are-a-warning-to-the-world-says-yoichi-funubashi-20150623-ghthoo

Japan's woes are a warning to the world, says Yoichi Funabashi

If there is one thing that keeps Japan afloat in the eyes of its stoic citizens and often mystified foreigners, it is a sense of an exceptional history.

This is the country that went from outright isolation to Asia's most potent military, most modern economy and a beguiling artistic culture in a few decades in the late 1800s. And then it did it all over again – without perhaps acknowledging the military part – in the 1950s recovery from the Pacific War.

So after two lost decades of economic stagnation what will it take for it to happen all over again? Well, it never will and that's not such a bad thing, according to Yoichi Funabashi, who arrives in Australia this week with a distinctive message for anyone worried about the future of our broadest relationship in Asia.

"Japan's exceptionalism, Japan's Japaness, Japan's unique culture simply does not help Japan revitalise its economy and society. We are confronted with similar challenges (to other countries) whether it be deflation or the demographic challenges or globalisation of income disparity and the rise of China," Funabashi says in an interview ahead of his lecture tour.

Yoichi Funabashi is Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation chairman and a former Asahi Shimbun editor in chief.

Yoichi Funabashi is Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation chairman and a former Asahi Shimbun editor in chief. Supplied

The former newspaper editor turned public intellectual turned self appointed change agent will be reporting on the outcome of the work of his Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation (RJIF) and its new publication Examining Japan's Lost Decades.

BUBBLE ECONOMY

Those decades are the 20-year period from the early 1990s which saw the collapse of a bubble economy with an asset price decline more than two times annual GDP, a long banking crisis, deflation, a peak in the workforce and then the population itself, serial prime ministers and the world's second-worse nuclear disaster wrapped in a massive earthquake and tsunami.

Funabashi was a prominent observer of much of this as the editor in chief of The Asahi newspaper but is now a player in trying to fix what he sees as one of the underlying causes – a lack of an independent regulatory and review culture.

The RJIF was established after the tsunami to conduct an independent investigation into the failure of the country's politicians and bureaucrats to properly oversee the powerful nuclear industry and then effectively deal with the disaster. It can take some of the credit for the establishment of a more rigorous nuclear regulator.

But the foundation then extended its remit when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came to power in 2012 promising to fix Japan when as Funabashi puts it: "we had no critical assessment of what caused the lost decades."

Some, including the prime minister, might dispute that. But what they can't dispute is that Funabashi, true to his old newspaper career, can describe the complex existential dilemmas facing Japan with cut-through descriptions not often found amongst his peers.

'CRISIS-LESS PESSIMISM'

So he is fired up about the pervasive existence of "crisis-less pessimism" in which Japanese people have become used to deflation and population decline to the point where until the Fukushima nuclear shock there was an emerging culture of graceful decline.

He rails against a "Galapagos syndrome" in which some of his counterparts believe that developments in Japan are unique and should be judged in isolation from the rest of the world.

Instead of jokes about the world turning Japanese – in the words of a famous cover of The Economist – Funabashi says this is a wrong way of thinking because the events in Japan have "universal relevance" to the world.

And in dissecting the lost decades he points to the problem of the "lost issue" where problems have been identified in public debate and government have gone through the process of responding only to see reform action lost due to risk averse bureaucrats and lack of political leadership.

Examining Japan's Lost Decades tries to chart a path between two forms of fatalism that have allowed this "lost issue" syndrome to persist – on one hand the idea that all problems need a uniquely Japanese solution and on the other a sense that Japan has suffered misfortunes beyond its control.

"Japan is responsible for its own losses. The country's delayed adaptation to the international environment and its weaknesses in international competition in terms of industrial bases, workforce, businesses entrepreneurship, and globalisation – none of these things were forced on Japan by any external actor. The results have all stemmed from Japan's own domestic situation and are of Japan's own making,' Funabashi writes in the conclusion. "It is only when we can view the lost decades as the result of the choices that Japan took, rather than simply in terms of things that malfunctioned or were taken away, that the lost decades will be seen for what they are, and freed from myth."

COLLABORATIVE EFFORT

The book is the result of a two-year collaborative effort between a group of Japanese and foreign scholars which has been occurring as Abe has embarked on his own more practical program of national renaissance, now widely known as the three arrows.

While Funabashi was initially sceptical of the basis of Abe's program, he argues that while the prime minister may be a nationalist he has at least dropped his own belief in Japanese exceptionalism in favour of a very realist set of reform policies. "This is huge progress in my view," says Funabashi, "There is some hope."

He argues that in the creation of a new nuclear regulatory authority – following an unprecedented (for Japan) three independent inquiries, including one he headed – the country has made an important step towards a new approach to managing government and governance.

But with all its nuclear reactors still closed three years after the disaster he says a big task remains to strike the right balance between the risks of using nuclear power and and the rewards of such an industry in a country with few energy resources.

While his disaster report was scathing about the captured regulators who turned a blind eye to the risks of the Fukushima accident, he is now more concerned about how the Japanese population is rejecting nuclear energy until they are guaranteed it is risk free. "There are risks involved in running nuclear plants but the politicians are not prepared to tell the public this. We have still not really learned about risk management," he says.

Having watched Japan make a mess of its lost decades Funabashi is well aware that some foreigners might be inclined to ask why they shoud worry about what happens next. But he has an ominous message for those who want to write off the country: "The resolution of Japan's lost decades, and of Japan writ large, carries profound historical implications for the country's role as a force for enduring stability on the global stage, especially in the Asia-Pacific geopolitical context.

"One worst-case scenario would be if Japan were to default on its sovereign debt, which would then inflict a catastrophic shock on world financial markets.

"If, however, Japan breaks away from its lost decades and stops the cycle repeating itself, it will provide an indispensable point of reference for countries such as those in Western Europe, and even China, that now confront similar challenges. In other words, the lessons of Japan's lost decades are lessons for the whole world to learn."

Yoichi Funabashi will speak at the Crawford Australia Leadership Forum at the Australian National University on Monday June 29 and at a lunch sponsored by PwC and Asialink in Melbourne on Friday.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-29/japanese-stationmaster-cat-tama-mourned-at-lavish-funeral/6579446

>>2481

Pretty much. Seems like a new type of person to come forward with this notion. Just seems like an attempt at mainstream acceptance rather than groundbreaking research.

Well this is awfully depressing.

Satoru Iwata, CEO of Nintendo, has recently passed away.

https://twitter.com/BulbaNewsNOW/status/620380249407094784

https://twitter.com/Nintendo/status/620379176919367680

>it seems like Google has blocked 8ch.net.

What do you think about it?

㍍

Why?

台風18号が日本に直撃しようとしてるので、こっちでは大雨が降っているよ

the typhoon is about to hit Japan, so it's raining heavily over here.

>>2587

JAPS OF /JAPAN/ I HOPE YOU FAGGOTS ARE ALL ALIVE, I LOVE YOU FAGS VERY MUCH, YOU'RE ALWAYS SO POLITE WHEN YOU VISIT OUR IMAGEBOARDS.

>>2589

>>2590

無事に生きてるよ!

だけど、台風と洪水の影響で断水してる。

I am alive safely!

but the supply of water is stopping right now because of the typhoon and heavy floods.

Making my first japanese food ever

>tfw it's Chaliapin steak

>tfw I'm using a random beef, some hopefully not to old onions I found in the fridge, no-salt butter, salt and pepper if I find any

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-22/bonsai-round-the-world-and-into-space/6875466

Some really interesting photos.

みなさん、今晩は！お元気ですか。

遅いけど、メリークリスマス！

そして、あけましておめでとうございます！

そして、１月５日にこのスレの誕生日もあったよな

ここにいる皆さんも、この一年の間に誕生日があったはず

お誕生日おめでとう！

今年こそ頑張ります！！