• 1 Post
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle









  • As someone who reads Japanese, reading all kana can be slow because you are reading one syllable at a time. It makes going back to old video games and reading children’s media tedious.

    Once you know enough kanji though, you can read incredibly fast. Depending on the material, I can speedread faster in Japanese than I can in English.

    This is because kanji is meant to be recognized at a glance rather than read in your head. The kana in Japanese sentence is supposed to provide grammatical context. So instead of reading “Inu ga ie ni nemashita” in my head, I’m seeing “Dog, in house, slept” from a glance.

    So the downside to this system is that you’re spending most of your education learning every character you’ll need, but the upside is it can make reading very efficient once you have got it down. I think it’s part of the reason Japan still has a pretty robust book culture.



  • Long distance walking. I usually pick a direction, put on a podcast or some music, and just vibe as I walk and listen.

    I do it because it’s not overly complicated, allows me to relax and enjoy something to listen to as I walk, gets me out of the house and maybe towards another activity I’d like to do, and it helps me sleep better at night.

    On a light day, I might do it for 30 minutes. I might go for 2 hours if I’m in good condition. I think my record was over 5 hours.










  • For Japan, you could encourage growth in the economy again, and encourage population growth by simply requiring companies to give ample vacation time, and require people to use said vacation time.

    It’s fucking ridiculous how much time Japanese people are forced to work. They basically spend the entire day at the office, sometimes the entire night with staff because companies force staff into not mandatory but totally mandatory afterwork drinking parties, and by the time people get back to their tiny homes and apartments, they might get a Sunday off to sleep off the exhaustion, then it’s back into the office.

    Many Japanese youth never even see their father, meanwhile they themselves are relentlessly robbed of their time by schools, after school clubs, cram schools, English Schools, test prep, and stupid amounts of homework they’re expected to finish on top of that. Many of my students are on summer holiday, but are just as busy as school time thanks to all the homework they’re saddled with and the clubs and jukus certainly don’t let up for summer.

    Nobody respects other people’s free time here, thus people don’t have the energy to do anything outside of their daily cycle, let alone fuck. Why buy a game console, TV, or a nice car when you never have time to enjoy it. Why go to Okinawa, or Fukuoka or Hokkaido when you’re only going to have 3 days tops to enjoy it, and if you do somehow get a week to blow, why not take the dream trip to Hawaii, and spend your money out of the country.

    Japanese population and economic troubles ultimately cycle back to the end of free time that the miracle period encouraged, and the bubble economy drove into overdrive. They have tried everything but taken this issue seriously, and the only thing they’ve come close to resembling addressing this is creating more national holidays, which are always way off from any vacation period, and many companies try to get out of giving time off, ands those that can’t expect workers to make all the time up the day after.

    They are literally working themselves to death here.