Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Why is it that when you put a coat hanger on your head, you are able to turn your head around further than normal?

And, how do people discover such things?

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Surfing Al Gore’s interwebs and came across the following interesting Japan related news stories.

From the British Times website: Ochone! Japanese whisky is voted the best in world. I find that a bit hard to believe, but then I have never really been a big fan of whiskey. I remember on the ferry to China that a couple of Japanese backpackers, long-haired and already a little smelly had a large bottle of Nikka whiskey which they were sharing. Very kind of them. Anyway the Californian photographer who had the bed next to mine had a few too many and ended up passing out on the ferry’s helipad. It was a little disturbing when the ships stewards carried him in around 3 am. He wasn’t in good shape, but luckily he kept it all down.

The BBC news website has a story Japan PM’s party in poll defeat.

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party has been defeated in a key by-election, dealing a fresh blow to the leadership of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda.

LDP candidate Shigetaro Yamamoto was easily defeated in the vote in Yamaguchi prefecture.

Senior opposition MP Kenji Yamaoka told Japanese media the result was “the beginning of the end of LDP rule”.

Hopefully this will mean a return to a Japan lead by people with interesting haircuts.

Japan detects bird flu in four wild swans from Reuters. I think I can discern the beginning of a newly revised Tchaikovsky ballet in this story. The swans were discovered near Lake Towadako which is in Akita, closish to where I used to live. Quite sad really.

Lastly the most disturbing of the stories: Japan: Where has all the butter gone?

No butter = no toast = no breakfast….

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Having a scan around the job boards for computer related jobs and found this position advertised:

Oracle EBS: We are looking for Japanese nationalist / Bilingual, Project manager/ Team Leader/Team Members of Oracle EBS for Hitachi Kenki KK Permanent Position in Tokyo. Responsible for some PGs and Test Engineers.

I see lots of Japanese nationalists driving around in their trucks on the weekends near here. Maybe one of them would be interested.

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Just playing around with some RSS feeds, using the Feedlist plugin for wordpress from Bill Rawlinson. Wordpress is pretty amazingly versatile in what it can do; one never ceases to be surprised.

The previous post - Jobs in Japan - takes the first 10 job postings at Gaijinpot.com and displays them. I will be looking into putting up some more pages to help job seekers in Japan on this site over the next coupld of weeks. Gaijinpot is a good site if you are looking for English teaching or other language based jobs here in Japan.

Having used the Gaijinpot site for a number of years it looks like they are trying to push things more towards the IT and business job finding market - as that of course is more lucrative. Personally I feel that they have the English teaching job listing market pretty much tied up - so they will have to be careful they don’t alienate that user base too much. As it is they run a forum section of the site, and sometimes posters on there can be a bit harsh on Gaijinpots’ advertisers. So they do have to walk a fine line between deleting over the top posts and annoying their user base (which is what they offer to the advertisers) or pandering to the slathering trolls on the Gaijinpots forums and conversely taking fire from their advertisers.

From my point of view, while it isn’t always an easy call to make, I would say side with the employees - of course there will always be complete nut cases (especially on such forums), but the majority of users are just normal people looking to have an enjoyable and productive time in Japan. The companies the posters bitch about, if they really are that bad wont be able to stay in business in the long term.

The ongoing saga of Nova is a case in point. They aren’t out of business yet, although a lot of their staff still haven’t been paid and a fair few of their schools have been closed. And yet while Nova was in business and paying for (? did they) advertising on the Gaijinpot site, threads relating to Nova were monitored and objectionable content was deleted. Now of course that has stopped (duplicate content is still deleted) but to be honest deleting such threads only works in the short to mid term with a long term negative effect.

An American company was in the news yesterday for its’ lack of a sense of humour. Abercrombie which apparently is an apparel retailer in New York couldn’t see the amusing / interesting side of a piece of performance art by Improv Anywhere which involved 110-odd males simultaneously taking off their shirts in the company’s New York store. You can read more about the story here: No Shirts. The thing is, that while I had heard the name I knew very little about the brand, and now I know a bit more about them and it isn’t a positive impression.

Keeping that balance between what your audience / consumers want and what your clients want is a fine line.

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Well we have been back in Tokyo for just over a week now - all the chaos of moving and reorganizing is over, and we are settling back into life where left off when we left Tokyo a bit over two years ago.

For those of you who couldn’t read the Tokyoだ post as it was in Japanese - we have moved back to Minato Ward in Tokyo. We found an apartment in Azabu, just down the road from where we were living when we were last in Tokyo. Not a house this time and we did go and see our old landlord but that area is being redeveloped. If I understood correctly because of the rick of earthquakes in Tokyo they want to get rid of all the old houses in this part of town. It is kind of sad to think that Tokyo will go the way of places like Shanghai with little of its’ traditional architekture preserved, but such is the nature of ‘progress’ in Asia.

We are on the top floor and for the first time in quite a few years in Japan we have a view again. Those of you who visited our place in Mita will remember it was a little on the dark side, so having a well lit place is a welcome change. And the view from the roof is superb - it is going to be a great place for barbecues once summer roles around again.

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