Hello again from Japan, where the Yellow Pages are called the Hello Pages.
Japan is reeling from a terrible tragedy this weekend. On Friday, a man entered an elementary school in Osaka and ran amock with a knife, killing 8 and injuring 13. The slain students were all first- and second-graders, aged 6 and 7, in what is one of the bleakest days in memory in Japan. Japan has had a string of tragic incidents of this kind over the past five years, including school stabbings with deadly “butterfly knives” of teachers by students, younger children by older bullies, as well as murders by young people. While nothing compared to the sad events that occur in the U.S., the terrible trend underscore instabilities with Japan’s society. As a parent of young children, this unfortunate event has left my blood chilled.
The latest issue of Newsweek (the International edition, not the U.S. one) had an interesting story on the trend towards young people in Japan not caring to find full-time jobs. I’ve noticed this too — more and more, a class of “freeters” (young people who prefer to work part-time jobs, changing every few months) is emerging. In Japan, there are three kinds of jobs: seishain (full-time jobs, with all benefits and annual bonuses), “part” (part-time jobs with some benefits), and arubaito (from the German word albeit, this word means week-to-week part time jobs). In the old days, life was very simple — you studied hard to get into a good collge, entered a good company, and stayed there all your life. Now that lifetime employment is basically out the window, fewer young Japanese want to follow the same path their parents did. I wonder what repercussions this trend will have on Japan over the next decade or so?
One of the major complaints by foreigners living in Japan is the dentists here. Basically, Japanese dentists are famous for taking a certain job and making it take weeks. I’ve had three root canals done while living in Japan, and each time the dentist managed to break the work up into at least eight visits. I suspect that they do this because the Japanese medical insurance system limits the amount they can charge for each visit — probably around $50 — so they have to break up the job into many visits. Still, it’s far from fun to have to go back again and again and again just to have a tooth filled.
If you look at the J-List site, you’ll see that we’ve “forgotten” to end the 10% off on all magazine, manga, photobook and art book orders sale. We’ll leave it up through the weekend, so if you want to save some money on that Golden Stage manga set or that Ohura Anna photobook you’ve had your eye on, we won’t mind…
