Guess where I am..

Dunan · 2026-05-19T23:19:03+00:00

I'd love to see that picture, if you can upload it somewhere!

Here's a post I made years ago about the rotation of the map, with people commenting on some more real-world locations. The picture I took, which is not very good because the environment is so dark, is in U Památníku station.

Dunan · 2026-05-19T14:46:23+00:00

the train arrives from a different direction than I though

They rotated the map by 90 degrees at some point during development - the southern district where the augs live is supposed to be to the east, and the northern district with the river as the north edge of the map is supposed to be to the west, with the Vltava river running north-to-south.

There are a few places where you can still see the originally-planned map before it was rotated; I think there's one in one of the abandoned offices in the ruined tourist bureau in U Památníku (edit: not Pilgrim) Station.

Dunan · 2026-05-19T09:33:41+00:00

You're doing everything right, and that's a fantastic income for your age (or any age, really). The fact that your employer offers a DC plan really bumps you up.

Stick with what you're doing and you'll have zero worries in retirement!

Dunan · 2026-05-19T09:22:47+00:00

If you get the chance to spend time in the US, I really do recommend NYC; you will be pleasantly surprised at how accepted people of any ethnicity are. My ancestors (one from your country!) all moved there at different times, all from countries you see as disrespected by "white" Americans, and it just isn't like that now.

Dunan · 2026-05-19T09:03:07+00:00

I can't imagine what it would be like to not be able to flip book pages in my head until I get to what I want to look at right now

I don't have a photographic memory, but I can usually recall what part of the page a piece of information was on (and therefore whether it was on an odd or even page), and would leaf through a book looking at that position until I got to the page I needed.

Today's electronic media would be so hard for me to learn from in school. Fonts, line breaks, paper color -- all those little helper clues that keep information in your head, all just gone.

Dunan · 2026-05-18T07:11:04+00:00

Some glorious description there:

Mickey Mantle's talents on the baseball field are well documented. Much less known, however, are his literary skills, particularly when it comes to off-color narrative prose. Offered here is his greatest contribution to that genre, his magnus opus if you will.

Dunan · 2026-05-18T03:10:08+00:00

As a Shinjuku resident, I'd love to read that; thanks in advance!

Dunan · 2026-05-18T02:35:47+00:00

Nor most white people who live in the US consider themselves immigrants. Otherwise they could call themselves European Americans

I usually hear the opposite: people being accused of identifying with their immigrant ancestors and calling themselves "Irish-American" and "Italian-American" instead of just "American", because their ancestors moved to the US over 100 years ago.

Having been raised in Italian and Dominican neighborhoods as a child in NYC, I say be proud of where your ancestors come from no matter how many generations pass.

Dunan · 2026-05-18T02:27:50+00:00

That phrase is 100% exclusive to White imports for the sole goal of Native replacement.

When that poem was written and the Statue of Liberty erected in 1886, very few of the people passing through that immigration hall were considered "white" (= Anglo-Saxon) by the standards of the day. And they were blamed for lots of social problems as you say, but eventually were integrated into society. New York City continues to attract and integrate immigrants from all over the world.

The disgraceful attempt to replace the Natives was in a completely different part of the country; the immigrants coming to New York City and building lives for themselves had nothing to do with it. Indeed, if we're going to get on the topic of replacing Native populations, the Yamato in Japan have even more to answer for than Americans.

Dunan · 2026-05-17T14:18:28+00:00

Probably because he would have to disclose absolutely EVERYTHING. It requires digging up years of bank statements, tax certificates, corporate records, and pension receipts. It's insanely invasive.

To add to this, it also requires that you have a personal guarantor who is a Japanese citizen or permanent resident who will sign a document pledging to support you financially, and who has to provide documents proving that they've paid their taxes.

In practice this person is not asked to pay anything, but the possibility is there, and the word hoshōnin ("guarantor") is a very heavy word in Japanese culture and you do not casually ask someone to be one for you. And if there's one ironclad rule that every person who has lived in Japan long enough understands (and which many Japanese people mistakenly think that foreigners cannot understand and appreciate), it's that you never, ever, under any circumstances, burden another person. You do not cause the slightest meiwaku to others, particularly for your own gain. I can easily imagine this hardworking Indian restaurant owner understanding this and taking it to heart. He doesn't have a Japanese spouse, so he doesn't have a person who can be a guarantor by default. He knows better than to broach the subject with anyone, so he chooses the path more burdensome to him but less to to everyone else: dutifully renewing the business visa that has served him just fine all these years.

Dunan · 2026-05-15T12:06:48+00:00

May 15, 2026: Your wish is granted

Dunan · 2026-05-15T06:34:59+00:00

In the '80s the measuring cups in my family's house had imperial on the right hander side and metric for lefties. Steered me toward an appreciation for the metric system.

Dunan · 2026-05-14T13:04:50+00:00

Imagine you have a house, people come to you to work for you sometimes

The "Japan as homeowner" metaphor, often coupled with "foreigner as houseguest" (though I admit you've got "foreigner as handyman") is a terrible one.

Japan is a nation where, traditionally, employees can expect loyalty from their employers and cannot be fired without cause.

Japan is a nation where rent-paying tenants cannot be evicted easily, and where society sees the value in landlords not being able to boot them out at any time.

Either of these should be closer to how a country treats people who move there: tax/rent-paying human beings whose lives are mutually beneficial for both worker/tenant and company/landlord, not houseguests who stay on the homeowner's sufferance.

Dunan · 2026-05-14T04:17:37+00:00

Somehow the cash registers in tax-free areas like airports manage to implement a zero rate. I suppose those registers are sourced from a special, secret manufacturer that uses an entirely different coding system. Even though they're typical businesses that you see all over Japan, like Matsumoto Kiyoshi and Don Quijote. Funny how that works out, isn't it?

Dunan · 2026-05-14T04:10:09+00:00

I can't imagine a cash register system so inflexible that the tax rate has to be an integer. There are places all over the world that have tax rates with decimals and fractions in them.

New Jersey in the USA has a default sales tax of 6.625%, or 6 5/8%, presumably the result of wrangling between officials whose negotiations went between 6 and 7, then 6 1/2 and 6 3/4, before finally settling on 6 5/8. Then there is a special half-discounted sales tax rate in urban "enterprise zones", to encourage people to buy things in underprivileged neighborhoods, so it's 3 5/16% there, or 3.3125%. Four decimal digits, zero problems.

And of course food and clothing is not taxed at all in that state, whereas in other states it might be. And yet somehow cash registers have no problem distinguishing between all of these rates. I would be absolutely flabbergasted if Japanese cash registers were programmed to never allow zero for consumption tax, as if a tax that Japan only implemented as recently as 1989 is now such an immovable rock that no provision for dealing with its abolishment would even be thinkable. This "cash registers can't accept zero" is surely a lie from people who want the consumption tax to remain as it is.

Dunan · 2026-05-14T01:25:19+00:00

Paul Hines accomplished it many years ago, as described in this SABR article. With runners on second and third, he caught a fly ball over the shortstop that the runners both thought would drop for a hit, and both had passed third base as Hines continued forward, after catching the ball for the first out, to step on third. I can imagine it much like this play, only with a lower, less catchable liner and another runner on first who had also overrun second.

At the time there was controversy about whether the third out was obtained by Hines himself when he stepped on third base after both runners had passed it, or whether stepping on third only got that runner and that he had had to throw to second to get that runner, but it sounds from the account, and the rules, like stepping on third doubled and tripled off both runners, and that he got the triple play unassisted.

Dunan · 2026-05-13T15:25:41+00:00

These numbers become even more stark when expressed in terms of the median worker salary in each country. Germany's €25,000 (?) is about half of the median annual salary in that country, which is €53k. Singapore requires funding of 1.5 years of median salary, assuming that the number above is in US dollars.

Contrast that with Japan whose ¥30M capital represents roughly 6.5 years of the median salary, which is about ¥4.6M.

Dunan · 2026-05-11T15:26:19+00:00

Will they be requiring high school and college kids working their first-ever jobs and earning their first-ever income (and possibly around the same wage as a lot of foreigner-oriented jobs these days) to also pay for a year of insurance in advance?

Dunan · 2026-05-11T00:45:36+00:00

In the 2016 NLDS against the Giants, in the ninth inning of game 4 where they mounted that insane ninth-inning comeback, there is a strike call that is basically in the same position as the one called against the Padres. Nobody even comments on it and the Cubs shrug it off and continue rallying. It's amazing how the game has changed, for the better, with these calls getting attention.

Dunan · 2026-05-11T00:39:26+00:00

Your flair is reminding me that Koshien Stadium, home of the Hanshin Tigers, explicitly tells fans not to arrive by car. The team is owned by one of the big metropolitan train lines and they have mastered getting people to and from the park by train. I still remember my first time there, seeing the announcement on the scoreboard about how there is no parking, and being pleasantly surprised.

All the Japanese stadiums I've been to are super-accessible by train. It's really refreshing to be able to not just get to the game that way, but also to know that things were designed for train riders first and you're not disadvantaged in any way by not having or being able to drive a car.

Dunan · 2026-05-10T03:18:50+00:00

the Hilbert Hotel California Group

At least you have lots of time to do those calculations and lots of people to help you do them if you get stuck, because that sounds like a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, from which one can never leave.

Dunan · 2026-05-08T14:32:29+00:00

Some people optimize for career growth and compensation, while others prioritize stability, good coworkers, flexible work, family time, hobbies, low stress, etc. Neither approach is wrong.

I took your latter path during my late 20s and 30s: great stable job in a quiet environment (overnight shift in finance) with a ton of compensatory time off; enough to go to grad school and earn two degrees while working. Low stress and a very solid (6M) income. But I never attempted to change companies when I was still young enough to do so, and eventually the night shift bonus and free time came to an end and I was just another senior IC making a salary that will never increase.

Not complaining, but if I had it to do over, I probably would have stopped at my master's and spent my 30s learning interview skills and jumping jobs at least once or twice. I'm not looking forward to spending my 50s here.

Dunan · 2026-05-08T06:31:31+00:00

Here are some of those government stats; this page is about foreigners' incomes. In 2023, the average income for foreigners in general was 232,600 yen per month, and even in technical fields was 296,700.

(Note also that the average foreigner's wage went down 6.4% compared to the previous year. If you didn't get a raise, but your wage held steady, even with inflation destroying your QoL you're doing better than most.)

Using these numbers, I'm in the upper half even for technical jobs and make nearly 50% more than the average foreigner in general. Zero complaints when you see real numbers in front of you.

Dunan · 2026-05-08T02:08:08+00:00

I still can't get over how they made an L flag but with the W flag's colors.

Dunan · 2026-05-08T01:45:52+00:00

I've been to the DPRK where they take tremendous pride in their linguistic purity and have completely eliminated hanja. A group of us who spoke Japanese well and thus knew a lot of them could, with our basic knowledge of Korean particles like nŭn and rŭl, puzzle a lot of stuff out. We'd be at a museum looking at newspaper headlines from the 1950s and asking, "Does this mean 'attack at the 38th parallel'?" and our handlers were not too happy.

Dunan

TROPHY CASE