Long time no write, hope you’re all well.
Funny aside, I’ve not noticed any lisps in Nihon. Hmm.
Well I didn’t get a white Xmas this year, just the cold so far. There’s snow about to be sure, and on a recent trip into the mountains, to stay at a lil’ pension next to a safari park, we drove through a light fall of snow.
But as yet, no carpet of snow over and around my little shack on the hill.
I guess the holes in my wall should be considered a blessing in disguise. They stop me getting gassed to death by the fumes from my kerosene heater. Then again they stop my kerosene heater from being truly effective during the Japanese Winter. It could be colder. I could be living in Hokkaido which is just across the strait from Russia. And it IS snowing there now.
I’ve been wandering through the electronica stores recently, drooling mostly but also wondering who owns all this great stuff. I see people with digicameras here and there but some of the devices seem almost fit for 007 only.
It is truly amazing what can be found in the shops here. The phones, cameras, portable music devices are getting smaller and smaller. The combined units like laptops with cameras attached that plug into your mobile phone so that you can sit in some café and email/video conference with your associates.
Although even the cafés are starting to put on internet connections so that people with laptops can just hook into the café network and access the Net from there. I guess the coffee costs more in these places. I haven’t been yet. No laptop to plug in. I wouldn’t feel right just drinking coffee and not surfin’ da Net. ;)
They must be constantly installing new lines. We, the members of the public, are now being offered ADSL which is the fastest option one can get for internet access using the standard twisted pair of copper wires that provides most of us in the first world with phone access. But now the latest offering includes fiber optic services.
Fiber cable is finally being stretched around the country and seeing that the Japanese all live in such a confined area I would expect them to all be easily connected to fibber with a few years. If they so choose/need.
Reports are always showing growth in the numbers connecting to the various Net options.
Of course growth is a dubious concept. WE don’t have the room, any of us, to keep growing ad infinitum, although many still do and most of the economic models I perceive are based on such premises. Growth, growth and more growth.
We aren’t fighting off saber tooth tigers any more or trading daughters for live stock, is that the right way around, so the need to breed is really only an individualistic thing.
A I-want-to-have-one kind of thing. Sure I know it’s genetically encoded in us to breed but so is urinating against trees, for the boys at least, and we curb that desire in the name of civility. So if society is to survive can we keep breeding at the current rate? Not in my mind.
I saw something recently that pointed at some sort of program or incentive that would hopefully get the birthrate up in Japan. Sheesh I think they’re lucky if the birthrate declines. The smart thing, in my book, would be to develop an economic system that allowed the country to thrive with a static birthrate/population growth.
So I see the old people of Japan, kinda mesmerised lookin as they watch their younger generations break dancing and rapping and skateboarding down the sidewalk. And I see the younger ones all working part time because the lifetime company job is falling to the wayside here as companies take their factories to China and Korea and so on for obvious gains in the profit margin.
I see lots of shops that sell products made in other countries and wonder how different it is now to maybe 10 years ago. Was it all “Made in Japan” back then? It surely isn’t now.
Love from Nihon
