Japanese from the inaka here. My contribution to this dataset: nothing. No station in my town, never was one. The nearest line is an hour by car and it's openly next on the chopping block.
Japanese here. Took me years to stop looking up and wishing for what I'll never have, and just accept this is the body I've got and live with it fully.
I don't even follow baseball anymore, but every now and then Ohtani (the Dodgers guy) is in the news and the kid who dreamed of it is right back there for a minute. Not painful, just bittersweet.
Japanese here lol. "broke and hostage so they'd stay quiet" — honestly that one line taught me more about my own country than school ever did.
We get Edo as "250 years of peace" and sankin-kotai as some term to memorize for a test. Nobody ever just said the quiet part: the shogun kept his samurai poor and on a leash so they couldn't start anything. Kinda dark, kinda hilarious how well it holds up.
So nostalgic. AI, self-driving, ramjets — they packed it all in. And the thing that dates it isn't any of that, it's that nothing is a touchscreen. The future used to be chunky buttons.
First time I heard the word "ramjet" was as a kid watching the Goliath episode of Knight Rider. Definitely not a documentary, but the word stuck.
Then the Blackbird showed up in some plane book, and that was that.
Ramjets back in the news. Kid me is having a great morning.
CPAP user here, and "have you tried taking up the didgeridoo" is comfortably the best sentence I've ever read in a medical journal.
The mask works fine — it's just that I go to bed every night looking like a minor Star Wars character, so I'm very open to alternatives. And from the other comments, the didgeridoo sounds like the boring tongue exercises in a trenchcoat: same throat muscles, except you might actually keep doing it. Which is the entire problem with the tongue exercises.
Study was moderate apnea so I'm keeping the machine. But I am absolutely buying a didgeridoo and becoming insufferable about it. My household has been notified.
They do. My parents live in a mountain village in Japan and never step outside without bear spray and a bear bell. There have been some grim local stories — bears taking pet dogs out of yards. For people up there, it's a daily fear, not an abstraction.
Parted with my PSP years ago, but I still have a working Vita sitting in a drawer somewhere. Reading this made me get up, dust it off, and put it on the charger. Looks like the Vita's going to own my weekend.
Japanese, living here. I'd heard 人質司法 (hostage justice) used
in news commentary but never really pictured what it looked like
inside. 5-day showers, food slid through a slot, sleeping on the
floor with lights on. None of that is what most people here
imagine when they hear "detention."
A lot of us live with this background feeling that "if you get
arrested here, you're done" even if you didn't do anything. Part
of it is the system. But part of it is also a cultural thing
where being suspected at all is somehow seen as your fault. The
people around you start treating you differently before any verdict.
Whatever the underlying charge actually was, none of this should
follow from an arrest before any conviction. You were innocent
and they still put you through 35 days. As a Japanese person
reading this, I'm just sorry. That shouldn't have happened.
Honestly painful to read. I tried to distribute a free utility to
some friends last year and bailed somewhere mid-enrollment. Just
wanted maybe ten people to download a thing. The whole flow felt
designed for someone shipping to millions and I just couldn't
justify it for what I was actually doing.