I live in a neighborhood in central Tokyo where there are classes that teach this technique, out of one of the very few pre-war houses still standing.
We signed up for a class sort of at random and ended up making beautiful panels like the ones you see in the pictures. Attached them to handmade "washi" paper and made a lamp screen as a housewarming gift for my sibling.
It sounds funny, but they didn't really "mail" them as you think of the word. Rather they traveled in the company of a trusted adult who happened to work for the post office.
I read this article and was pleased not just with the community development, but with the spread of the word "stoop" all the way out to the West Coast.
It's a Dutch word brough over in the New Amsterdam era that was originally mostly confined to New York. It has the same etymology as English "step":
That's how I mentally processed them when first learning them years ago. Doing operations on x and y with log(x) = y in the background somehow felt far less intuitive than thinking about 10^y = x.
I really enjoyed this author's work, BTW. Just spent several hours reading the entire first five chapters or so. What an excellent refresher for high school math in general.
it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
Can you even imagine any piece of automobile infrastructure being designed in a way that is dangerous to drivers, and those drivers' concern being downplayed with the excuse that perhaps the person who designed the infrastructure isn't an automobile driver and didn't think about what it would be like to be a driver?
That would be inconceivable, but when non-drivers are the ones whose safety is ignored in favor of automobile drivers' convenience, nobody cares.
He also has his protagonists hail from the fictional town of Shiroiwa-cho 白岩町, which is a direct translation of King's frequently-seen "Castle Rock". I wonder how many Japanese readers of the original spotted that.
Seconding all of this; Human Revolution is an amazing game that will stick with you for a very long time -- even more so if you have a disability that human augmentation (one of the main themes of the game) could reverse.
I play this again every few years and am always discovering more. The sequel, Mankind Divided, is better technically but goes full-on into the dystopian scenario of the first Deus Ex, whereas HR was (at the time) something of a reboot and you could play it with the goal of preventing that future. (There are multiple endings, and one or two lead to DX1's future and at least one of the others is more optimistic and does not; the directors chose dystopia for the sequel.)
If you liked Michael McCann's soundtrack for HR, definitely check out his work for X-Com and Splinter Cell: Double Agent; more of the same excellence.
The mandatory overtime is a thing in Japan, too, though it's more like 30-40 hours built into the salary, not 10. You start getting paid 1.25x with your 41st hour of OT in a month.
Salaries are Europe-like, too. Having experienced all three, I'd move from Japan to Europe for the QOL increase before moving to the US to get more money, I think.
Thanks for this very informative post! Here in Japan, salaries are much more Europe-like, whereas hours are (I suspect) US-like -- the worst of both worlds!
My pay as a non-software-engineer doing a lot of Excel monkey work in the back office of a fintech company. I'll use yen for consistency; today the exchange rate is about 110 yen per US dollar.
1999-2001 3.6M base
2002-2006 3.6M base + 1.0M (night shift bonus)
2007-2008 4.2M base + 1.0M (night shift bonus continues)
2009-2015 4.5M base + 700k bonus + 1.0M night bonus
2016 4.5M base + 300k bonus + 500k night bonus (rotating shifts; fewer nights) + 200k vested stock options (issued 2012, vested after 4 years)
2017 4.4M base + 300k bonus + 500k night + 200k stock
2018 4.4M base + 300k bonus + 1.0M night (worked nights all the time again) + 80k stock (stock value plummeted)
2019 4.4M base + 300k bonus + 90k stock (no night shifts anymore)
I'm not a native speaker of Japanese, and have no desire to go into middle management, so I suspect things will continue as they are now indefinitely. There's a lot of pressure to reduce salaries and we have onerous KPI demands: five to seven every half year, all of which must be met to maintain salary. It gets harder and harder to keep coming up with ideas for them as the years pass, and I'm thinking of giving up my full-time hard-to-fire status and becoming a contract worker. Bonuses and stock options would disappear but stock options earned in past years would continue to vest. And my stress level would drop by quite a bit!
I'd say tech salaries highly depend on your company and even the type of position you're in.
At foreign FAANG (which means Google and Amazon here) and investment banks traditionally you can expect upwards of 10M JPY/y (total compensation) for moderately senior engineering positions and even over 15M for more senior positions.
But it's not just foreign companies. Some Japanese companies like Mercari and Fast Retailing are now in an engineer hiring craze and they're offering highly competitive salaries.
My personal history in Japan:
2015-2016 8M JPY
2017 12M JPY (renegotiated my salary)
2018 13M JPY
2019 14M JPY
That's a pretty impressive bump you negotiated! Same company, or a different one?
I'm in fintech too, but I'm not an engineer; more like a dime-a-dozen Excel monkey. Most people I know doing programming are terribly paid (<250k per month); they make even less than generic office workers, who make over 1600 yen per hour.
Having entered my 40s and not being in management, I suspect that my chances for a pay increase have long passed. I went to graduate school in my spare time (when I was working nights) and might try going into academics if I can't take company life any more.
Do you expect to see increases beyond that 14M or do you think that's the cap?
We signed up for a class sort of at random and ended up making beautiful panels like the ones you see in the pictures. Attached them to handmade "washi" paper and made a lamp screen as a housewarming gift for my sibling.