Slate's Daniel Gross is in Japan for the week and has been posting stories that are Japan related. For example this one on the popularity of American fast food in Japan:
The image of Japan as being inhospitable to imports is old, enduring, and not entirely unjustified. The government is offering immigrants from South America—many themselves descendants of Japanese emigrants—$3,000 to return home (the better to free up jobs for native-born Japanese). The vista that meets visitors at Narita Airport is hardly more welcoming: masked staffers, health disclosure forms, and a sign warning that people who are coming in from countries such as Bolivia and Brazil must go in a special line. (They're looking for either soccer players or swine flu.) On the 80-minute ride from Narita Airport to Tokyo, I tried in vain to spot an imported car on the road.
Here's another on the financial crisis in Japan:
Combine Japanese cultural tendencies toward formality, politesse, and indirection with the usual central banker's love of opacity and econo-jargon, and you'd expect that a meeting with the deputy governor of the Bank of Japan would be a one-way trip into a cloud of vagueness. But in a meeting Monday, Kiyohiko Nishimura, Yale-trained economist, former Tokyo University professor, and deputy governor of the Bank of Japan, gave one of the most lucid and useful explications of the credit crisis and its aftermath that I've heard—and I've heard a lot of them. And even more surprisingly, it was pretty optimistic.
And this one on the cool biz craze:
But I soon solved the mystery of the failing air conditioner. Japan has eagerly embraced technology and practices that will reduce emissions and combat global warming. It invented hybrid vehicles, has extensive mass-transit systems, and uses wind power. In 2005, Environment Minister Yuriko Koike, a pioneering female politician, was seeking ways to slash energy use. And she came up with the Cool Biz campaign. The idea: Government would cut energy bills by keeping thermostats in its buildings at 28 degrees Celsius—82.4 degrees Fahrenheit—during the summer. It quickly produced results and was adopted by the business establishment as well. Since Japan's energy mavens realized that simply unbuttoning a shirt collar can make people feel about 4 degrees cooler, dressing down became part of the Cool Biz mentality. (Here's an ABC News story on the phenomenon.) The only people we met with this week wearing suits, ties, and cufflinks were Americans—diplomats at the embassy and the boosters from the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan.
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