In some countries the archives can be browsed online so no need for such sites in this case.
But those services can still be useful to find an unknown branch of relatives when the ancestor who had emigrated in a different country didn't let any info regarding their previous life.
Interesting idea but I do not see the point: people are able to compute the same results mentally very easily.
By the way, I would suggest adding an option: how many consecutive days off does the company allow.
And which days are absolutely not allowed to be taken.
10 years ago, in my company (based in Japan), taking a day off on the first day of the week (generally Monday unless there's an holiday) was not allowed due to the general meeting kicking off the week. This changed recently in my company but as this meeting is common in many Japanese companies, some companies might still apply this restriction.
Likewise, taking a day off before or after a holiday was not allowed except for some specific days (typically Golden Week end of April/beginning of May, Obon in August, and the end of year/New Year). This changed a few years ago.
There's the matter of scope but there's the matter of motivation too.
When an opensource application like GIMP, Blender, or even Manuksript for a lesser known example, are started, it's mainly because proponents of opensource want to use such application but dislike closed source. They fill a need, so getting new people willing to participate even after the people who started the project moved to something else is possible.
For an opensource game, whether a clone or not, the project is generally started because some proponents of opensource like the original game and want to share it with the community. But they are not really needed per se. That means it's more difficult to get new people joining the project, and consequently if the original team cannot keep getting motivated for many months/years, the project end up abandoned.
> When an opensource application like GIMP, Blender, or even Manuksript for a lesser known example, are started, it's mainly because proponents of opensource want to use such application but dislike closed source.
Just for the record, Gimp was started as a student assignment project [1], and Blender started as proprietary software [2].
Yes, depending on where the stroke/aneurysm the effect can be totally different. I had one a few years ago, I was still able to chat with my colleagues and the hospital staff in Japanese and English, as well as in French (my native language) with my family back in France. However when looking at texts in French or English, I was recognizing the letters but putting them together I wasn't recognizing the meaning behind them. It took me a few days before being able to decipher them again, but it took me 3 weeks before recovering a decent reading speed.
But some blood that had escaped in my skull at that time was blocking some nerves linked to the vision, so I had a dead angle of around 45 degrees on my right side until the blood naturally disappeared.
The interesting thing is that like many people, they guessed that a lot of people would be contaminated during the 3-day weekend a week ago (great weather, cherry blossoms, and last carefree moments for people who will start their first job on April 1st). It's not innocent that Abe called for postponing the Olympics just before that weekend.
Koike could have asked the parks and popular venues (department stores) to be closed a week ago, but instead only asked people to refrain from going. What was poised to happen happened, and the number of infected people exploded half a week later.
We haven't even seen the numbers from last weekend.
It takes on average 5 days for infected people to show symptoms, and they only test once you have fever for 3-4 days (I can verify this first-hand), then 1-2 days for the test results to come back. That 9-11 days average.
We will see a spike later this week based on last weekends warm weather and hanami.
It seems to work worldwide: I watch it from Japan. Interestingly most of the commercials are not displayed from here, instead we get the rolling presentation of the channel.
Luckily the work culture is slowly changing, at least regarding the matter of OT: following the suicide of a new recruit of Dentsu that was ruled to be a death by overwork, several companies started to ask their employees to refrain from doing OT.
However, as an engineer, it is sometimes quite frustrating to work with colleagues who do not want to try anything by themselves, because they want to be taught everything.
This seems to come from the way they learn things at school: the teacher is always right, because he's the teacher; you need to listen to your seniors, because they know more than you. This leads to new recruits being taught everything by senior staffers, even when the methods are bad. And of course this limits innovation, because nobody wants to do something new.
On the other hand, for sure living here is great if you can live with the caveats of the Japanese society.
>However, as an engineer, it is sometimes quite frustrating to work with colleagues who do not want to try anything by themselves, because they want to be taught everything. This seems to come from the way they learn things at school: the teacher is always right, because he's the teacher; you need to listen to your seniors, because they know more than you. This leads to new recruits being taught everything by senior staffers, even when the methods are bad. And of course this limits innovation, because nobody wants to do something new.
In software engineering I've had the same experience with anyone from a rote-learning culture. Software engineering is problem solving. If you can't solve problems, what can you do?
Sounds like the perfect opportunity for a consultant! You're presumably an expert and have technical authority that is not anchored to the company hierarchy.
Hate to go off on a tangent, but there was that article about how NIH lead I think nextdoor to abandon cron and make their own alternative. I wish we could do both, be willing to learn and understand history and context but be willing to break the mold. We seem to be off in the reinvent everything mode because we all want to innovate, even when that innovation is unwarranted.
> this limits innovation, because nobody wants to do something new.
Curious. The stuff that I've read about Toyota says they have "continuous improvement" as a core principle[1]. Does that just not carry over into the way they do software, or is Toyota an anomaly among Japanese companies, or what?
In short, Toyota does not see themselves as a software firm (and they aren't in a broad sense); Sony also failed to transition beyond their best years of the 90s largely because they did not understand the importance of software and the Internet on consumer electronics as Apple did. I say this having worked at Toyota building some of the very first websites and web services for Toyota globally as well as working at Sony as well (I built the Internet services for the Network Handycam as well as other things.)
The OP is making stereotypes, and they aren’t universally true (as is usually true for stereotypes).
Japan is a big place. There are all kinds of people, and plenty of innovative organizations. It’s frankly embarrassing, the amount of nonsense that people are spouting in this thread.
That sounds like top-down improvement such as 'agile' development, not bottom-up improvement like hacker culture. That said, I'm sure there are plenty of Japanese who are curious and self-motivated, and there are plenty of non-Japanese who don't want to put in any individual effort. It's just that the cultural narrative told by each society highlights different things.
>> who do not want to try anything by themselves, because they want to be taught everything
Anecdotally, from a recent podcast on military history, I heard this same explanation for why the Japanese Army did very poorly in some WWII battles where they lost commanding officers early in the fight: The footsoldiers were unable to think for themselves, unable to adapt/improvise, and unable to organize anything other than suicide charges.
Source? Because that's distilling a lot of complicated history down to a simple motivation.
Given that glorification of suicide was specifically taught to military recruits, and that various commanders promoted or dissuaded it to their subordinates, it would fair to say that many times Japanese suicide charges were ordered in-spite-of better ideas.
Better support for overly rigid, hierarchical structures would come from the performance of upper echelon commanders during the war, and an inability to adapt doctrine to rapidly improving technology (e.g. mixed air-ground-sea task forces, carrier tactics, and radar).
You misunderstand. My point was that your attribution of motivation...
> The footsoldiers were unable to think for themselves, unable to adapt/improvise, and unable to organize anything other than suicide charges.
... is overly simplistic.
The soldiers were not necessarily unable to think of alternatives: they were doctrinally taught to reject those alternatives in favor of frontal assaults. They, their superiors, their superiors' superiors.
So "Japanese soldiers were unable to innovate" does not follow from "Japanese soldiers were prone to conducting frontal assaults."
"Japanese military doctrine in the 1930s strongly discouraged lower-level innovation" would be a more accurate statement, without attempting to tie it to capability.
A friend who is freelance translator sponsored herself when renewing her work visa (previously she was a colleague of mine and our company sponsored her at that time, but since becoming freelance she's not employed by anybody but herself). She just had to produce proofs for each the recurrent contracts she's got so she can show that she's earning enough money. So yes, sponsoring yourself is possible, but it requires a lot of paperwork to prove you have the mean to live in the country.
I don't know how much difficult it is start your own business in Japan, for this Patrick is clearly the most knowledgeable person here, but once it's done, you just need to give yourself a salary to be able to renew your visa.
Salaries in Japan are much lower than in the Bay Area: many Japanese companies use a salary grid and reaching the 10 million yen mark requires decades in the same company.
It might be possible to get such a salary much earlier in some startups, and it is certainly possible for people detached from a foreign company. For everybody else following the same route as Japanese people the highly skilled professional visa is very difficult to get.
The image you have is probably close to how in some societies 2 families decide their children are betrothed to each other.
The reality is closer to match making: some colleagues might introduce you to somebody who could be a match. Or maybe they will invite you to what is called a goukon, a group date where one of the male participants invite a few colleagues or friends of his who are single while his girlfriend invite the same number of female colleagues or friends of hers who are single.
Though to be fair, arranged marriages are pretty common in Japan. Several of my friends have arranged marriages and are as happy as any other couple I know. I suppose you can think of it like online dating, where there is also an expectation that both parties are looking to get married. It would not surprise me at all that a company would pay the fees for a match maker if being single was causing a valued employee emotional distress. Especially foreign workers don't have family to take care of this kind of thing (sometimes parents will intervene and contact a match maker if they feel that their child is taking too long to get married).
I've never been a full time worker in Japan, except in my own consulting company (obviously -- otherwise I would still be there ;-) ). But with a 1 year renewable contract (the normal way to work if you are not a full time employee), I was surprised at the extent to which the company takes care of you. It's nice if you are like me where you want to concentrate on work, but I've known people who get frustrated by what they see as an intrusion on their personal affairs.
When I was working at the high school where I taught English, several times I had conversations with the vice principal who felt that me being single past the age of 40 was a problem. He even sent me to talk to the nurse so that she could explain how Japanese relationships work and impress upon me the importance of taking things seriously.
And... well... I listened. And they were right. I got married to a Japanese woman who I was dating (not the nurse ;-) ). Not only has it made my life dramatically happier, but it's helped my job incredibly (even though I'm consulting IT related stuff instead of teaching English ;-) ). But it's kind of beyond weird have that kind of intervention at work...
Wikipedia: "According to the 2010 census, 58.9% of Japan's adult population is married", "As of 2006, 55.7% of Americans age 18 and over were married."
If you can find the rate of people living with an unmarried partner in the US or in Japan, I'll be surprised because I certainly can't. Part of the reason is that until recently it wasn't even on the census -- only "cohabitating families", which includes living with your parents.
I know this kind of stuff get repeated in the news over and over again, but I'm going to be honest with you. A lot of it is bad journalism. It is popular to trash foreign cultures and hold up your own as superior -- it sells. Reporters get these fluff pieces from news wires (or actually the vast majority of "trash japan" stories start from a single place - The Japan Times) and don't check the facts.
Having said that, if you actually can find the facts, I would be interested in seeing them. I suspect that you are right that people living with unmarried partners (the term currently used by the US census) has a higher incidence in the US than in Japan. But you will have to do a fair amount of work to make the comparison meaningful.
The average age of marriage in Japan is 30.1. The average age of marriage in the US is 28.2. If you couple that fact that 66% of people who got married in the US in 2012 cohabitated for more than 2 years, then you can see that there are a fair number of young people in the US who are essentially married, where in Japan people wait until they are older.
In Japan, that kind of cohabitation is rare (people live with their parents before they get married). One of the reasons (and IMHO, the overriding reason) that Japanese people get married late is because young Japanese women hold a lot of power in the proceedings. Young women live with their parents and work. And even though they often help with costs in the household, they are relatively financially well off. Also, young women tend to want to have children when they are older because it will interfere with their job. Single income families with stay at home mothers is still very popular here. This pushes the age of marriage back. It also pushes the fertility rate down (because if you have your first child in your early thirties, then there often isn't enough time to have many more. Also, it increases the generational gap).
Now, another complicating factor is that in Japan "marriage" is not really a thing the way it is in the west. In the west, marriage is still, by and large, a religious institution. In some countries, only the church can marry you. In Japan, the only thing that counts is having your name on the family register. You don't even need a ceremony. You can just wander up to city hall, fill out the forms and, voila, you are married.
If you are not on the same family register in Japan, you are not in the same family. It does not matter where you live. When the census comes around, it is sent to the head of the family on the register. If there are 2 families living at the same address, then there are 2 census forms. There is no way to indicate that you are cohabitating! Similarly, if you are on somebody's family register (because you got married), but you aren't living together -- there is no way to get another census form! So separation statistics in Japan are also impossible. I even know people who have had a wedding ceremony, but for various reasons did not want to change the family registry. So they are not married! (Which makes things very complicated because all family law is based on the family registry -- if you are not on the registry, then you are not a family, by definition).
Basically, what I'm saying is that you're going to have your hands full if you want to make a meaningful comparison. And like I said, I realise that people are inundated with a lot of stuff from the media (and especially youtube), so it is hard to know what is right and what is wrong. Just keep in mind that quite a lot of the stuff you here is motivated by something other than trying to educate you.
But those services can still be useful to find an unknown branch of relatives when the ancestor who had emigrated in a different country didn't let any info regarding their previous life.