The curious case of the eroding eikaiwa salary. Now fraught with job insecurity and low pay, there was a time when the work was steady and salaries were high for those who taught English in Japan. Around the turn of the millennium, salaries and work conditions for English teachers in Japan began a downward trend — one that has now spilled into the '10s and shows no signs of slowing, let alone reversing.
posted by KokuRyu
on Jul 4, 2012 -
49 comments
Covering Tohoku The Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan (
FCCJ) has posted a special edition of its
No. 1 Shimbun covering the Tohoku Earthquake:
FCCJ members, many of them freelancers, were the first on the scene after the quake and have led coverage since. Weeks after the global media pack left, they're still here. There's articles by veteran Japan reporters such as
Charles Pomeroy who recently retired to Otsuchi after covering Japan for 50 years, to newer stringers such as
Gavin Blair who worked as a "fixer" for foreign prima-donna journos dashing in and out of the disaster zone. There is a photo by photographer
Rob Gilhooly who recently made
a heartbreaking trip into the exclusion zone near the plants. Although not included in No 1 Shimbun, freelancer
Yas Idei provides a Japanese perspective (in English) about the multiple disasters.
Idei's piece about Rokkashomura is pretty enlightening, frightening, and depressing.
posted by KokuRyu
on Apr 12, 2011 -
23 comments
I asked Igari to help me deal with the fallout from the book. After much discussion, he and his two colleagues came up with a plan. His parting words were: “It’ll be a long battle. It’ll take money and courage, and you’ll have to come up with those on your own. But we’ll fight.”
On August 28th, his body was found in his vacation home in Manila, wrists slashed. Time of death unknown. It’s been ruled a suicide. Personally, I believe he was killed. I probably will never be able to prove it. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu
on Nov 25, 2010 -
23 comments
The Royal House I knew I had seen one of the pictures before somewhere before, and understood instantly what the surrounding pictures all had in common. A familiar symbol caught my eye, glinting gold. It was the mark of the Imperial House of Japan.
posted by KokuRyu
on Nov 23, 2010 -
13 comments
The Yamanote Halloween Train vs. Japanese Netizen Rage The Yamanote Halloween Train party was planned to be held on Saturday night in Tokyo. However, sometime on Saturday morning, the Japanese megaforum 2ch.net discovered an English-language post about the event on
JapanProbe, and translated the information about it into Japanese, igniting a raging storm of anti-foreign hatred and sending over 10,000 visitors to the popular English-language blog about Japan. Scroll down for an interview with a JR employee about the event.
[more inside]
posted by KokuRyu
on Oct 28, 2007 -
39 comments
The Mahikari Hoax The Harvard Asia Quarterly tells
the story of Fujimura Shinichi, a once-renowned amateur Japanese archaeologist nicknamed 'God's Hands' (神の手） for his seemingly preternatural talent for finding artifacts, who was caught planting planting stone tools, some of which he had fabricated himself, others he had taken from other sites, at an archaeological dig in
Miyagi, northern Japan.
[more inside]
posted by KokuRyu
on Oct 6, 2007 -
25 comments
Discovery [youtube] Anyone who's ever been to Tokyo or any other big city on Earth knows how hard it is to navigate crowded, narrow sidewalks, especially when you have to "take a dump."
posted by KokuRyu
on Mar 15, 2007 -
61 comments
