The world of Japanese snack bars

If only food service paid decent money.

I know the majority owner of a pretty massive fast food chain (600 stores, most franchises) and he was telling me he was offered 10M to sell the company. His entire life he worked day and night, and he would be getting $3M. (Mind you, he owns dozens of franchises, so he still keeps those)

He brought his kid into the business, and I can tell he has a bit of envy that I own a small software company that within a few years is approaching 1M in revenue. There is less glamor and margins in food.

I have some ideas of using my math/engineering skills to make low cost recipes that taste good, using my masters in Industrial Engineering to lower cooking/labor costs, but... economics pushes me towards high value. Any time I do the math on food service, I see myself making 100k/yr, and never 1M/yr.

JP Resident, and LGBT.

The vast majority of the "rules" apply only in extreme business situations, generally in the oldest Japanese companies.

Outside of that, the Japanese are extremely forgiving of those that are visiting not following _every single custom_. There's an understanding that so long as you're not disrupting the peace (being super loud, making a mess, etc) then a level of tolerance is applied.

LGBT is much of the same way where, your personal feelings and decisions don't impact everyone else, and thus it's not their business to decide what you can/can't do.

Once you're living here, there's some expectation that you start learning and participating in customs and traditions, but even that's extremely flexible.

My British friend that lived in Kyoto had his favorite snac bar. He was accepted as a local and even had a whiskey bottle saved for him (privilege for the regulars!)

Another snac bar that he brought me to had an interesting story. The snac bar was in an apartment complex (due to Japan's funny zoning laws) at the nightlife district, could maybe fit 5-6 max. The place was filled with blues and jazz LPs! When we went there, there was only one man sitting, eating omelets and a talking to the owner.

Turns out the owner used to be a salary man in Tokyo, but got sick of the corporate banking life, took his savings, moved back to Kyoto to open his small bar. He loved music, particularly blues and jazz, so just bought an apartment and rebuilt it on his own as this jazz n blues bar. He barely made any money, lower than minimum wage. but he said to him it was a life style, and he enjoyed it and wouldn't have it any other way.

The guy eating the omelet, turned out to be a pretty famous professor at Kyoto University. He had this deal with the owner that he would make him lunch boxes and dinner for the professor (omelet wasn't on the bars menu), and he hanged around there every night. They've had that setting going for 8 years and the owner laughed that he was essentially the professors wife, and a bad influence for his workaholics habit!

There's a charm to those places, but they're best observed from the distance. The group of exchange student I was part of made a local bar close to the uni our hang out, because they had cheap beer and amazing food. But one day the owner politely told us they didn't want us to come back. That 10+ tall loud white people was ruining the third place this bar represented to the locals.

Funny thing many of the students protested "I don't understand. We're customers. We're paying and bringing many customers!" they tried to convince the students "to you it's consumption but to us it's a community place". Few of the students would accept that answer, but obliged. Oddly only the French did understand the sentiment. (and the Swiss were the most entitled)

> Notably, the lack of legalised marriage is not because the population is too conservative. Rather, it is because the US forced a constitution on Japan which enshrines heterosexual marriage as constitutional law, and changing the constitution is significantly more difficult than changing a normal law.

Beyond the fact that they could easily get around this with civil unions, this feels like a massive misrepresentation of the status quo inside the LDP politicians that ultimately get to decide whether progress is made on this.

The current prime minister, in her previous attempt to campaign to be the head of the party (back in ... 2022 I think?), declared her opposition to married couples opting out of sharing a last name[0]. In the 21st century, strong opposition to the idea that somebody might want to keep their own family name after marriage. Something so small and unimportant. Still very far away from civil unions for non-hetero couples.

The Japanese ruling class is so far away from acceptance of anything beyond a very specific notion of married couples, even if the general population thinks differently. These things can change quickly but just in terms of policy delta between Japan and most other members of the OECD the gap is quit huge. Legal rights for one's spouse starts is important, and right now there's really nothing.

(There are some logistical things around the family register that mean that such a change would require some changes to that format. This is not a good enough reason to prevent this!)

[0]: In Japan if two Japanese people get married then they have to unify on their last name. In practice this usually means the woman throwing away their last name. In a funny twist of fate you actually have more flexibiltiy in an international marriage. If a Japanese person marries a foreigner they _don't_ have to do this (and can even go with a hyphenated last name!).

You could play with that though since "both sexes" could be perceived as "both individuals that have a sex" and "husband and wife" don't have any technical meaning.

I'm not a lawyer, but they're working on it.