Good Old Japan

File under Fucked Up Japan:

japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/japanese-company-offers-paid-leave-to-grieve-if-employee%E2%80%99s-favorite-idol-member-leaves-their-group

If a company man takes ONE fucking paid holiday a year he is a fucking pariah; "leaving us in the lurch", "not one of the team" etc and blacklisted for a dogshit future. They'll start looking for a reason to sack him. Or the "madogiwa" treatment. Stuck by the window (never understodd this; by the window sounds like a primo possie) and given NOTHING to do for 12 hours a day. Used to work in an office with one of these blokes. Demoted for fuck-knows-what, now totally disrespected and utterly emasculated. *Plink*, Plink*, *Plink*, we'd hear his fingernail clippings echo as they hit the bottom of the wee steel trashcan in the silent office.

Yet now some dipshit stalker office drone can get hols all cos some airhead ditz teen girl has left the guys favourite F-grade idol troupe?

They should have just loaded it into the containers on the Ever Given! It would have a been a great take on "The Ransom of Red Chief"!



 My friend's fb comment:

 
My take:
 900 million? That's like Friday-night Diet cab fare, isn't it?

Not that I've been lately but there is absolutely NO point in EVER going to a FUCKING Japanese hospital.

First, they will make you sit in a waiting room for 3-4 hours. Dead fucking set. You cannot "make an appointment". Even if you do, you will still have to sit there with all the other appointees for 3 motherfucking hours anyway.

Each hospital servicing half a million patients a day must have about 4 fucking doctors on staff. Just hire more doctors, you dipshite. And dont get me started on the doctors. I remember teaching a nerdy Jnr High and asking what jobs the kids wanted in the future and 90% of the blokes said "doctor". And not cos of any benevolent caring disposition to heal the ailing either.

Doctors get the hotties.

They get the salary and they get the arm-candy trophy bitch who gets to sit at home all day looking hot. The Doc could look like Quasimodo taped up in a burn clinic, with the disposition of Jeff Dahmer, and he is STILL going to get the 1% top tier choice of totty. Bitch magnet.

Anyway so these doctors dont give a fuck about health. They're just there cos of the poontang prize. I asked my doc student what % of j-doctors diagnosiii are correct and she prided herself on being 80% correct. Most doctors? "50%". 50 fucking %?>? You cuntz may as well toss a fucking COIN. 

And then when you finally get in to see the doc after 4 hours, the guy is an Aspergers wackjob who studied his arse off but has ZERO social skills and will just look at his computer monitor the whole time without even making eye contact with you.

"Uhh, heartbeat seem fine. Maybe you take it easy. Next!"

All fair and I appreciate being reminded of downsides of Japan because I tend to look back with rose to rainbow colored glasses but I will say as a foreign tourist uninsured in America (at the time, now I'm fully insured and super cool) digging through a B1 Disk Union I felt a sudden sharp and unprecedented pain in the just barely left of center of my chest.

Step 1, don't alarm the wife. If dying on the floor of a foreign record store, keep secret from life mate.

Step 2, google "heart attack," always good, especially with a pocket wi-fi that doesn't work from B1 level record stores.

If this pain were anywhere else on my (gorgeous) body I would definitely ignore it for minimum 48 hours to perhaps a decade or so but in my aged wisdom I am trying to be more responsible so I said, self, how dumb will you feel if you kick off here. You should probably deal with this.

Then I imagined the absurd impracticality of an ambulance "rushing" into the middle of Shinjuku and hurrying me to an unspecified hospital. Total shitshow, probably 2.5 hrs.

Anyway I walked in unannounced to a hospital in Asagaya, waited in line (not too long) and explained in broken Japanese that I never go to the doctor, don't live there and don't have insurance but now have a very sharp pain in the center of my chest.

She said we could do an EKG and I said ok can you ballpark if I'm looking at say 200 vs 2000 dollars worth of yen.

She wrote down an extremely specific figure that was like Y8715 which is exactly what I was charged.

They hooked me up and confirmed I was not dying (diagnosis still accurate as of this writing) and I would say this was done within an hour total of entrance.

I have to say, this is 100+ times better than America, as an American, and god knows if I wasn't. I mean the idea of an uninsured emergency room visit as a citizen is enough to give me an actual heart attack.

Now, cue the comedy.

I'm like okay let's pay. But there's some retarded ass system where you go to a different window that is open different hours so first of all they put me in a weird corner of the giant basically shared exam room and I waited there for like 45 mins, then another like 45 to get the bill (yes they just saved my life and yes I'm complaining about it) then like another 30 to wait in line to be told I couldn't pay there, then like 30 to figure out that I just had to come back the next day (honor system?) then show up the next day, figure shit out, take a number, wait like an hour, then some more confusing shit happened I don't remember.

Anyway in summary Japan rules, America sucks, but there are still some funny inefficiencies going on over there.

Well I mean $80 with no insurance to treat a strange foreigner spur the moment. Would that happen in America? No.

Don't know that one!

I'm trying to think if there's anything I'd really fall over for. I guess it depends on the price right? Like I really want Spiny Norman's Mind Games. I think there was one on ebay not too long ago for $1200 which is WAY OUT OF THE QUESTION, so like $300 would induce flutters.

That's the kind of record that once in a long long while, if you're obsessive and refresh every 10 seconds, actually does come up mispriced. I saw a Strychnine "Jack the Ripper" with sleeve go for TEN BUCKS as a buy it now and was like okay, why don't I spend all of my time online refreshing saved searches.

Part of my serious adult plan with the COVID work from home thing and having set up a home office was to leave a screen of ebay/discogs up and refresh often. Pathetic, I know. Also I legitimately work to the extent that I rarely get around to those tabs.

RE: Japanese medical care
What year did that happen Nik?
I am not completely knowledgeable but I think post-Koizumi there have been changes, and you started hearing about incidents with people being turned away from hospitals. I would hope that, in general, it would still be as easy for tourists/foreigners to do that. I think New Zealand extends their national health insurance coverage to tourists, so you would even pay less. The pressure of the soaring elderly population is going to weigh heavy on the social insurance system as a whole...Massive issue, so let's just see if Japan survives the (cancelling of the) Olympics...

wft

LOL anyone who's taught an Engrish class in Japan could tell you the females - RIGHT FROM FUCKING KINDERGARTEN-  are largely cheerful and talkative and the males are the absolute polar opposite; petrified shy incels terrified of making a mistake and having their emaciated dweeb "masulinity" publicly emasculated and committed to the public register.

By the time the two sexes get to Jnr High, Engrish has largely become a chick thing (due to, you know, having to have social skills to communicate via a language) and the guys have given up turning up for that public humiliation which they perceive as a curious torture of their own socially-hamstrung contrivance.

I'd subscribe to that newsletter fella...

So j-blokes reticence comes down to not having the masculine and feminine forms in Engrish to choose from as they do with nihongo? Damnit I've been here for 800 years wg\hyFT did I never once think of this? #mailing_it_in

Weirdly, I never really noticed this til a couple of years ago. Even with the 20-year old college dolly birds it's just motherfucking relentless. They ALL want to go to Disneyland every minute of every day, work at Disneyland, live near Disneyland, on and on and on. It's fucking mental. You're 20. The stuffed toy phase is over you starling-brained ditzes.

Pretending to. I have pretend students too.

IT'S ALL AS REAL AS YOU WANT IT TO BE

japantoday.com/category/national/visually-impaired-paralympian-hit-by-self-driving-bus

wft this sounds like a bullshit headline I would write for the Daily Mainichi News Wire...

Where's the blog thread? Can't be assed, also like 3 humans read this whole board?

Well humblebrag, I have worked for this cunt online since like 2005. Correct English online via email, total pain, can be done whenever, I just keep doing it out of habit. When I moved home in 2011 I was like hey, this still works for me, unless you see a reason to change it, let's just keep it going.

I normally disembark, put my Hello Kitty debit card in the machine at Narita, pull out say Y130,000 ish, and have a nice vacation.

Well thank you COVID, I am banned from entering the country, even as a regular cunt so oops, we're like Y700,000.

My white guy guilt is kicking in, like I'm an idiot. A decade or two ago I did whatever I wanted, 10 grand in cash on the plane, fuck you, I'm American.

Now? Well, I don't know.

So what's my problem, I have too much money in a foreign bank account?

Yes, that is actually something I worry about.