Category: Japan
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For our final session of 2015 my group and I tried a short run through the Fantasy Flight Games zombie apocalypse role-playing game The End of the World, a rules-lite system intended to simulate zombie survival in a collapsing world. I’m going to give a very brief summary of the game we played, and then…
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I am not a big fan of baseball, and I didn’t enjoy my high school days overmuch. Combining these two seems like a recipe for a bullying and unpleasant experience, and definitely not something I would have any interest in. The Koshien, however, changed my mind about high school baseball. The Koshien (甲子園) is an…
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Today is the 70th anniversary of victory in the Pacific (VP Day), when Japan surrendered to allied forces. For the USA, UK and Australia this marked the end of four years of merciless war; for China it marked the end of about 20 years of colonial aggression on the mainland; and for Korea it represented…
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I have been in Oita on a ferocious business trip, one day of which was meant to be spent watching fireworks in Beppu, only to have them rescheduled due to a typhoon that failed to deliver either any rain or any wind. Nothing interesting happened in Beppu, although I am proud of having survived a…
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This week Vox posted an article on “Japan’s blackface problem,” which aimed to give an American perspective on the practice of Japanese actors putting on black faces, and to discuss what the author calls Japan’s “bizarre, troubled relationship with race.” I wonder what Japanese people can learn about how to treat race from that sophisticated…
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Tonight I was having dinner at kushi no kura in Shinjuku with a friend, and we noticed the mysterious oddity of shinshu salmon on the menu. For those of you unfamiliar with the vagaries of Japanese food culture [1], shinshu is an area of inland Japan roughly encompassing the Prefecture of Nagano, and its snowy…
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Standard economic orthodoxy seems to be that deflation is a terrible thing that all economies should avoid. Most central banks now seem to have an inflation target that is greater than 0%, and move their interest rates to try and keep inflation inside this target; inflation numbers are eagerly anticipated economic indicators, with anything below…
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The most well-respected methods for reducing carbon emissions seem to be carbon taxes and carbon price mechanisms. I have written before about how I think they will not work to achieve a zero carbon state, based on lessons from the field of public health. Here I want to explore in a little more detail just…
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Cheerleaders from two US football teams – the Jets and the Bills – are suing their former bosses for unpaid wages, and as part of the case we get to see some fascinating insights into how the football teams tried to control the lives of their cheerleaders. These women paid incredibly poorly – something like …
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China and Japan are in a dispute over the Senkaku islands. China has pulled out of UN negotiations over a territorial dispute with the Philippines. Both of these disputes (and a few others) are about possession of the oil and gas resources under the South China Sea. If the world is to avoid warming beyond…
Compromise and Conceit 