Turning Japanese: Coping with stasis • Hacker News Board

Re: Turning Japanese: Coping with stasis

#81

Post by Dylan16807 » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 8:31 AM UTC

le_lenny_face wrote: post #23

carsongross wrote: post #2

Nearly everyone was on the same proverbial page: Japan's population is 98.5 per cent Japanese, as defined by citizenry. While ethnic diversity has its strengths (and some academics point out that, when you analyse the population's regional roots, Japan is quite diverse), a set of common cultural values, instilled from birth, may strengthen resilience in the face of crisis and adversity. Thought-crime in progress, cit…

Jesus Christ. Why do we even allow this sort of pseudo-scientific "race realist" (read: racist) rubbish on Hacker News? Japan is one of the most racist first-world countries in the world. Have you even seen their incessant xenophobia?

Culture isn't race... Are there actual comments from "race realists" somwhere I'm missing, or are you raging against something that doesn't exist?

Re: Turning Japanese: Coping with stasis

#82

Post by Dylan16807 » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 8:33 AM UTC

pikachu_is_cool wrote: post #49

serve_yay wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems OK for me with FF 33 and 36 on Mac.

He's talking about the click wheel scrolling that goes line by line. Not the two-finger magic scrolling in OS X.

And arrow key scrolling. So slow.

Re: Turning Japanese: Coping with stasis

#83

Post by Inetgate » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 9:01 AM UTC

There is one typo in brush style typeface translation. The word "萎縮" is pronounced as "Ishuku" not "Jishuku". If writer want to "Jishuku", chinese character should be "自粛".

Re: Turning Japanese: Coping with stasis

#84

Post by aluhut » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 9:04 AM UTC

hkmurakami wrote: post #3

> And then there’s the view. Whether it’s the outskirts of Queens on the way from New York’s JFK airport, or the fringes of the Los Angeles highway off-ramps by LAX, everything seems a bit run down and decrepit. Even on the train from Narita Airport to Tokyo, you'll pass plenty of comparatively run down "commerce areas" adjacent to small train stops. The buildings are old, and made of nondescript concrete that have b…

At least it's concrete. Not some rotten wood.

Re: Turning Japanese: Coping with stasis

#85

Post by VaedaStrike » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 9:08 AM UTC

Japan is a cut rose. Cut in a clean way. Kept at an optimal temperature and sitting in an optimized floral solution. It will last quite a while in a very attractive state, but its still cut from that which renews and replaces.they, like much of the world, are in for either a great mutation or an extinguishing.

Re: Turning Japanese: Coping with stasis

#86

Post by e12e » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 9:14 AM UTC

Bognar wrote: post #7

This site has this line in bookstrap.css: /* Use responsive pixels */ font-size: 1px; Since Firefox uses the font size to determine scroll distance, this page scrolls really slowly in FF.

Thanks for the heads up. I was mostly happy the thing worked well (except for arrow-key scrolling) with js off... I wasn't aware of this (mis)feature of Firefox (I can see the rationale of using line-height for scrolling a line at a time, so it might be safe to say that the css is at fault here).

Re: Turning Japanese: Coping with stasis

#87

Post by e12e » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 9:20 AM UTC

aikinai wrote: post #68

I just noticed that the calligraphy responsively changes from vertical right-to-left to horizontal left-to-right even though it's an image. If you're reading on an iPad, you can check just by changing the orientation. Very cool attention to detail.

Thank you for pointing this out (reading on a desktop, so I'm wouldn't have noticed otherwise). The source does this via:

And where ipad-landscape-img is backed by media-selectors in bookstrap.js.

I wonder if this "bookstrap" think is related to bookstrap.org? The site is blank, and the github-repo linked to from https://www.npmjs.com/package/bookstrap is gone/empty …

Either way it's refreshing to see some people still make sensible design without a ton of minimized CSS (even if this still pulls in two big stylesheets and a js-file … all to display some text … ).

Re: Turning Japanese: Coping with stasis

#88

Post by greggman » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 9:57 AM UTC

I've had that experience as well but it's arguably a pretty self selected thing. It's only people living abroad who are almost all people who wanted to live abroad. Ask the same questions to an actual slice of Japanese natives living in Japan and the number of people that want those things will likely be a tiny percentage of the total.

Re: Turning Japanese: Coping with stasis

#89

Post by chaostheory » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 10:20 AM UTC

> Japan’s 2014 fertility rate is low – 1.4 births per woman – but David Pilling, former Tokyo bureau chief of the Financial Times, notes that South Korea’s is lower; and that those of other developed countries, from Taiwan and Singapore to Germany and Italy, are similarly low.

The difference with at least Germany, Italy, and Singapore is that they are fighting low birthrates with increased immigration. Japan is not. They are betting on robotics, in order to keep their population homogenous.

Re: Turning Japanese: Coping with stasis

#90

Post by mikekchar » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 10:31 AM UTC

timeal wrote: post #52

Why so many negative comments? Japan certainly seems to outshine the US according to multiple metrics, so they are doing something right: Japan's unemployment rate is 3.6% vs 5.5% for the US: http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/roudou/results/month/inde... vs http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 Japan's homelessness rate is 20 per 100,000 population (25,000 homeless people in 2001) vs 220 per 100,000 in the US:…

I can understand why some people would like more a more quantitative exploration of the issue than the opinion piece that the article is. I hate to say it, but I think the the article is spot on. I lived most of my life in Canada, moved to Japan for 5 years, moved again to the UK for 2 years and have now moved back to Japan (hopefully for good).

Japanese culture is drilled into people at school. This is something heavily criticised by foreigners who pity the lack of freedom that Japanese school children have. It is a double edged sword, but this strong cultural upbringing (enforced by teachers, not parents) does have a lot of advantages.

I think one of the biggest thing I like about Japan is the lack of societal angst that I perceive here. Many, many people here are "poor" (I live in the countryside where jobs are not plentiful, or high paying), but I never hear anyone complaining about their salary. You just make do with what you have. Especially the "American Dream" is practically absent. Hardly anybody tries to strike it rich. They just try to make a nice life within their means.

When I lived in the UK, the sky rocketing housing market split people into 2 camps -- those speculating in order to make it rich, and those who were wondering if how they were going to be able to live on the pittance of a salary they received (and complaining about the injustice of it all).

I'm sure many people prefer the western approach, but I will happily live in "poverty" in Japan instead.