Hot Topics | |
---|---|
hanasims wrote:I assume you are Japanese, or non-white?
Alcazar wrote:hanasims is right, sex is becoming more pervasive in Western culture. The feminist gains of the past have evaporated with women's flesh constantly on show on TV, walking down the street, on music videos and of course the internet.
Whether this is good or not from a women's point of view is debatable, but for guys it is generally thought of as being a positive. Weird, considering that in spite of the few 'slutted up', very visible women on show in the West, the average Western woman is in some ways becoming less attractive relative to the Western woman of the past, eg weight wise. The Western women who can attain that contemporary sexy look can be very powerful!
contrarymary wrote:One very famous urban myth that I'm sure most on this site have come across it the vending machine which sells used school-girl knickers. Have tried for ages to find one of these things, but with no luck. One of my male friends in London wants a pair - I'm half tempted to send him some skid-marked bloomers with saggy elastic jobbies of mine, but I don't think his heart could take it.
Big Booger wrote:Alcazar wrote:hanasims is right, sex is becoming more pervasive in Western culture. The feminist gains of the past have evaporated with women's flesh constantly on show on TV, walking down the street, on music videos and of course the internet.
Whether this is good or not from a women's point of view is debatable, but for guys it is generally thought of as being a positive. Weird, considering that in spite of the few 'slutted up', very visible women on show in the West, the average Western woman is in some ways becoming less attractive relative to the Western woman of the past, eg weight wise. The Western women who can attain that contemporary sexy look can be very powerful!
As I have stated here, the bag of bones look is no longer hip. Many American men want a woman with some ass jiggle, big floppy hoots, and thick thighs.. Those damn runway models are disgusting..
Thick is in, thin is out. Gotta have some gravy with the mashed potatoes. If she doesn't wiggle when she walks, she's dieting.
Jack wrote:So I think many of the stories one hears is either one-off unusual stuff or plain untrue.
TGS Sidequest: Capsule Toy Mysteries
gameinformer.com / September 20, 2014
... in Japan, where many vending machines dispense unknown goods (though many are related to gaming). We took a break from covering the Tokyo Game Show to check out some of these unique treasures... though we definitely weren't delighted with all of our purchases.
Getting capsule toys is basically like using a gumball machine: You plunk in some money (usually the equivalent of a few dollars), and the machines spit out a random plastic bubble that contains your prize...Here are the results...
Undies
This just seemed too ridiculous to be true. It wasn't. You can get vending machine underpants in Tokyo...
More...
Papa-Lazarou wrote:I had a rich Japanese guy ask me to bang his 45 year old wife, as he was too busy sleeping with his "student" girls to bother doing it himself.
I did, and she was very nice. They both thanked me like i had helped them move a heavy wardrobe up a flight of stairs.
Reading the widely discussed farewell essay by the BBC’s outgoing Tokyo correspondent, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, I felt a deep sense of frustration. The veteran journalist summed up his impression of Japan — where he has lived and worked since 2012 — as one of stagnation and stasis, declaring that “after a decade here I have got used to the way Japan is and come to accept the fact that it is not about to change.”
And yet as someone who has lived in Japan, and who has gone back there for about a month out of every year since 2011, and who has written fairly extensively about the country’s economy, I can tell you that it absolutely has changed, in important and highly visible ways.
But before I go through Wingfield-Hayes’ article and explain all the things I think it gets wrong, I should say that although I’ve never met him, he seems like a good guy who honestly wants to see Japan do better than it’s doing. And some of the criticisms he makes are both accurate and very important.
For example, I think he’s absolutely right to identify gerontocracy as Japan’s fundamental problem. Wingfield-Hayes points to political gerontocracy — elderly voters maintaining the power of an elderly, ossified political class — but I think an equally or even more important problem is corporate gerontocracy. The near-universal practice of seniority-based promotion, combined with low startup rates and population aging, has led to an ossified class of corporate executives and managers who would rather preside comfortably over declining little empires than embrace new technologies and business models and take new risks. That in turn has caused Japanese companies to fall behind foreign rivals as they miss technological revolution after revolution — microprocessors, smartphones, semiconductor foundries, battery-powered cars, etc.
Wingfield-Hayes is also right to decry the low-productivity menial jobs that Japan has in abundance. Hiring 6 people to do the job of 2 is sadly common in Japan, and it’s a big reason why Japanese people earn such low and stagnant wages. The heart of the problem is the lack of new high-growth companies, which is due to deficiencies in R&D, lack of late-stage startup funding, and (especially) Japanese companies’ failure to tap export markets in lieu of their shrinking home market.
So Wingfield-Hayes is right to see Japan as a country that used to embrace the future and no longer does, and he’s right to point the finger at gerontocracy as the key problem. But his broader characterization of Japan as a stagnant, static society is very much off the mark. And I worry that this kind of article leads Western readers to think about Japan in terms of the cliches of the 1980s and 1990s — the postwar manufacturing successes, the bubble economy, the lost decade, etc., all of which Wingfield-Hayes repeatedly mentions. Those events were certainly important, but they don’t really define modern Japan or the challenges it faces in the 2020s.
Anyway, now let’s talk about some of the big recent changes in Japan that I think Wingfield-Hayes failed to appreciate.
Japan builds and builds and builds
The BBC correspondent’s most baffling argument is — if I read him right — that the built environment of Japanese cities has stagnated. This would be very strange indeed for a country that famously tears down its buildings after 30 years. Every time I go to Japan, I’m stunned at how many new buildings there are.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests