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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.
People have sent children by mail:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-chil...
...I don't think they let you do this anymore.
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.
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?
Hello from Japan as well. And we have American-style vacation allotments!
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!
$50k is real money -- it's more than I earn in a year -- but I'd pay it (or double, or triple) without question if it meant having our own child.
The problem with IVF is that it's not guaranteed. Would I part with a year's salary for a 10% chance of having a child? How about 90%? These are scary calculations to make in your mind... and those percentages go down with each passing month.
" Do you think it’s ethical to create a conscious entity that will have to suffer through 80+ years on this planet for the sole purpose of satisfying your primitive reproduction instincts ?"
In what way would my child be "suffering"? We plan to be the best parents we can possibly be. We will not be perfect, of course, but we certainly want the opportunity to try.
"I don't mean to offend but what is the difference to you that the child is genetically yours? why not adopt?"
This might be an unpopular answer, but it makes all the difference in the world. I want my family line to continue; I want my parents and grandparents to see physical features and behavior quirks in their (great-)grandchild that I haven't even noticed.
It's a primal urge and I can't explain it rationally except to say that I'm human and no exception to what we are hard-wired for.
I used to love Canadian quarters because they kept their steel/silver color all the way around, unlike the hideous copper-sandwich US coins. Was disappointed to learn as a kid that the Canadian coins were worth about 20% less than the American ones!
I had a rough upbringing too, and my parents (who would never admit to that) were a lot mellower with my sister, a decade younger than my brother and I am and born when my parents were almost 40, so when I was in my 20s I feared being like my own parents and wanted to have kids in my 30s. I didn't worry too much about it and had no idea that the panic and depression would sneak up on me like this.
In your case I certainly hope you don't suddenly change your mind!
Wasn't especting to see this kind of article referenced on HN, and it hit me hard. I'm 41, partner is too, and would give absolutely anything to have a child of my own. She was never ready until just recently.
I can't even go an hour without thinking about it...
”You say the working class can accumulate savings with low inflation, but savings interest rates are basically zero."
Yes; their savings maintains its value even if it does not earn interest. Inflation would destroy the value of what they have saved. Perhaps people are not saving as much as they would like because they know that inflation will ruin them, so they spend their money earlier than would be prudent.
We have had significant inflation in the past 10 years; the prices of just about everything at the supermarket have soared upward. That we can buy technology like computers and phones cheaper does not make up for this.
It sounds from your post like you have borrowed money to buy something (a home, perhaps) and are hoping that inflation will make it easier to pay back that debt. Your arguments work exactly in reverse for someone who is saving money for future large purchases and for whom inflation would be a disaster.
Without inflation, the working class is able to accumulate savings and better their lives. They don't need to put their money at risk in the markets or negotiate raises at work just to keep from falling behind.
Better still, all that money will get spent by all these people with more money and better jobs on buying better housing, newer cars, better food, more luxuries, and that money can make our corporations more profitable and faster-growing...
Maybe, maybe not, but all of these things can definitely be had by having a strong, stable currency that does not lose value.
The "go into debt and then have inflation devalue your debt" system creates a divide between people who are eligible to go into such debts, and people who are unable to and thus see their savings eroded by inflation. It would be much better to have stable consumer prices and to keep debt manageable by maintaining low interest rates.
"3. I hope I'm not alone in this, but for me, donning a nice, fresh, crisp uniform - whatever style it might be - makes me feel more assured, more vigorous, more ... "I got this" 'tude than if I just wear whatever. (See 'Interview' block below.)"
I have often thought that one of the hidden motives behind the recent trend of making casual dress near-mandatory is to prevent rank-and-file employees from feeling this sense of self-confidence and the unconscious additional respect they would get from people around them when they dress with some formality.
I know I felt it the first time I had a professional job interview when in college; the people around me looked at me and spoke to me in a slightly more respectful way than they would have if I had been wearing typical college-boy casual.
I've been enduring 28-degree Tokyo for a decade. You never get used to it.
"28c in the offices in a rich industrialized country? I wonder how much productivity they loose because of that."
A lot. The 28-degree "standard" has in fact been in place since 2005, when introduced by now-Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike who spent her younger years in Egypt, and has spread from government offices to almost the entire nation. In winter there is no corresponding artificially-low indoor temperature; if anything, they tend to keep it at 25-26 or more.
Total victory for the warm-blooded lizards and total misery for us hairy folk.
I envy your ability to be open about your (partial?) deafness. I have normal hearing in one ear but am almost entirely deaf in the other, and have looked into getting a hearing aid for it. (I'm also blind on that side, and there is no fix for that.)
Society can be pretty vicious when you ask people to stand on a specific side of you, or turn your head 180 degrees so that you can point your good ear toward them, but I think if you have a visible hearing aid, people will be less surprised if you spring a request like that on them. Paradoxical, because the device means that you can hear them no matter which side they're on!
I feel like in today's era of ubiquitous headphones you could have even a hearing aid that looked like something else, and it wouldn't look that out of place. If I get a hearing aid, I'll go for a gray (or white, or black) one like yours.
"I have a really boring story about that revolving around a company that paid out severance gradually instead of lump sum"
Here in Japan, where I live, this is one of the reasons that people can't take all their accrued vacation, even when quitting their jobs. When you leave a job, your accrued days are paid out as if you were still working. So if your last day in the office is June 30, but you have 30 days saved, your last day as an employee is ~August 15.
This sometimes means you can't start your new job until after that, and because employers typically want people to start ASAP, people end up forfeiting the vacation time they never got to take while working. The new employer wants them on July 7, so they take just the one week and then start at the new place.
And given how hard it is to take time off, the typical employee has lots and lots of unused PTO. My workplace has a cap of 40 and I am always at the cap.
You've got an extra zero in there; it's your age * 1,000 USD.
(Can confirm; age 40, 18 years with the company, base salary just over $40k.)
This is why you buy a fully-depreciated ~40-year-old apartment or house.
I spent my entire life's savings to do this and it was the best decision I ever made. When and if I leave Tokyo, I will rent it out for side income. I can't overstate the peace of mind this gives me.
But would they still be so thrilled on a Tokyo salary? People here (I live and work in Tokyo) have a much narrower pay band than you would see in NYC or any American city. You might make $25~30k to start, and $40~50k at age 40.
I'd love to move back to my native NYC, but I've been priced out forever, as the cliche goes. There are entry level people earning more than I earn as an 18-year veteran in Tokyo.
Electric bikes are making headway but many employers have rules specifically forbidding employees from riding them (or any other form of personal transportation) to work. There is a major national insurance company with which employers have a contract and that company won't pay out for accidents that happen on the way to or from work while the employee is on a bicycle or in their own car, so employers ban commuting by bicycle or car.
"many, many young people looking to move to cities would be perfectly happy with smaller living spaces at associated smaller costs, but those properties straight up don't exist, and also aren't being built"
This is it right here. Many municipalities won't even allow them to be built. I would love to live in a small town but such towns are designed around car ownership, total separation of residential and commercial districts, and massive housing lots. If you can't drive, you're stuck living in the big city. And that's only getting more difficult if you're middle income.
Upvoted; I love this book. Amazon recommended it to me out of the blue when I started studying Esperanto again and I went in totally blind; enjoyed it from start to finish.
Also, if you're interested in languages invented for TV and movies, read David Peterson's "The Art of Invented Languages", in which he describes how he created Dothraki and a whole bunch of other languages, including writing systems. As a linguist who would love to get into that kind of thing (and who has studied some very obscure languages which would make good influences), I totally enjoyed this. A little more technical than Arika Okrent's book, but still very accessible.