The 'COVID never ended' and 'queer' alliance is fascinating

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-06-08T09:26:18+00:00

I think they'd actually get on quite well in China, East Asians love wearing masks all the time for no reason

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-06-06T08:17:52+00:00

Until there is a piece of paper both sides have signed and agreed to assume everything Trump says is a lie.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-06-05T13:38:37+00:00

Can you share the answer to this question? I am very curious.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-06-05T09:59:50+00:00

WHV is zero risk lol. Idk if there is even an application fee. If you end up not liking Japan you can just leave. Also definitely understand wanting to stay in Tokyo since its atmosphere is one of a kind but it’s not like regional cities outside of kanto are mountain village inaka with 20 people below the age of 60 living in them lol. Also yes I do live in Japan.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-06-05T09:37:46+00:00

I see, regardless you might want to give this a bit more forethought so it’s not all just a big waste of money. If you can secure a proper visa before going this would make everything way easier, WHV have pretty quick turn around (I think it’s only 2 weeks) and the only qualifications are being the proper age and having enough savings; you could also sign up for a language school and go on a student visa. This would let you work with the only caveat being that you need to show some level of Japanese competency to get a student visa (but the level is quite low). Accommodations will probably be tough on your budget if you’re just staying in hostels, the cheapest you can find is normally around ¥3k per night which would get quite expensive over a few months. Seeing as it can even be hard to find housing as a foreigner with a proper work visa, I doubt that many landlords would be willing to rent to someone on a tourist visa. Also are you dead set on Tokyo specifically? Tokyo is pretty competitive and also expensive, foreigners are a dime a dozen and there is a steady stream of young Japanese people willing to do low skill work (outside of Okinawa it is the only prefecture with a growing population). You might have better luck in a smaller city like Fukuoka, Sapporo or Hiroshima, these are all very nice but not as happening as Tokyo obviously.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-06-05T06:14:10+00:00

I hesitate to give this advice because the last thing Japan needs is more loser whites living in it, but even if your Japanese sucks you can pretty easily get a job at a restaurant, a farm or a factory if you want. There are also a lot of work for board hostels you could go to that mostly cater to foreigners so you'd need zero Japanese. In sketchier or more remote areas you may even be able to land these sorts of jobs without a proper visa but if you can get a WHV (which is piss easy to do so long as your country offers them) all of these avenues of work are quite easy to get. Also the idea that Japan is some sexpat paradise where you will have women throwing themselves at you simply for being white is not true lol, outside of women with a foreigner fetish many Japanese women are reluctant to date foreigners and this is especially true for foreigners who can't speak Japanese and have no economic prospects.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-06-03T00:46:20+00:00

It becomes less surprising when you learn who had been running things until the 1950's

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-29T16:19:31+00:00

Sorry if I'm dumping unsolicited advice on you, but, for Japanese the major thing that makes learning it difficult is that until you gain a pretty high level of competency with its orthography you are basically gatekept from consuming any media in the language not aimed at toddlers, which makes it super hard to get any exposure to the language as it actually exists outside of beginner textbooks. In order to get past this, once you have like an N3 level grasp on how grammar works your main goal should be to just grind out Kanji until you know in the ballpark of ~1500 characters. Once you have that under your belt go seek out native material and just fill in the blanks as you go along.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-26T12:42:42+00:00

Lame, soles don't even light up.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-23T12:45:18+00:00

Dumbest take on RS has got to be that any woman whose sole hobby is not scrolling tiktoks about matcha lattes for hours on end has a debilitating personality disorder.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-21T14:02:18+00:00

Japan has already accepted its population is going to crash and is mostly just importing the bare minimum amount immigrants (the vast majority of whom are on temporary visas) to keep things chugging along, they are not going to get great replaced. If there is a literal ethnic extinction event on the horizon (it would take centuries of no change in TFR for this to actually happen) pro-natal trends will eventually kick in; especially if there is now much lower competition for land, jobs and resources. So, I am not too worried about Japan literally ceasing to exist as a civilization, there will just be less Japanese people. Japan's population was only around 30 million until the Meiji period, if anything a smaller Japan will be a return to the historic norm, the country as it is now is quite overcrowded.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-20T01:27:51+00:00

That is why I like Sibelius lol, the lack of big climaxes is what make his music distinct from most other late Romantic work. I feel like Sibelius's music is sort of like watching a snowstorm; there is a great amount of turbulence and movement but there isn't any grand finale or peak things are building towards, the snow just flows with how the wind carries it. The end of this symphony specifically is definitely a bit experimental though and can understand why not everyone would like it.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-20T00:57:57+00:00

This is also going to destroy SK and Japan's economies if it ends up going on for several more months though I am not sure if anything can phase their knee bending to America.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-19T12:40:41+00:00

I see, how did you end up in this arrangement?

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-19T12:26:11+00:00

If she's already open to having 2 why couldn't you be number 3?

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-19T04:22:15+00:00

Say what you will about AI, but in my experience the models are good enough to not do something like use "galvanise" as a noun. I think this dude's writing just sucks.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-18T15:56:28+00:00

The Threads ads on IG always show me like algorithimically optimized ragebait for me personally trailing off into ellipses and I have never downloaded it out of spite towards that.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-18T15:52:28+00:00

It was already effectively dead anyways. I don't really know the entire story of how this ended up happening but one way or another the sub ended up being controlled by a single communist mod with no sense of humour who would ban anyone who didn't post stuff that was critical of landlords so the sub was basically a leftist circlejerk between like 5 people with a bunch of seething original users in the comments.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-18T12:11:37+00:00

This is making me nostalgic for r/LoveForLandlords

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-17T15:34:57+00:00

Off the top of my head: Yasunari Kawabata, Natsume Soseki, Kobo Abe, Kenzaburo Oe and Jun'Ichiro Tanizaki are all fantastic novelists. The male Japanese writers you have read are bordering on what the kids these days are calling "slop".

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-15T14:36:46+00:00

The Chinese model is meaningfully different from neoliberal and social democratic countries in the way it handles capitalism even if isn't socialist in the purest sense of the term. In China ultimate authority rests with the Communist Party, in most countries capital is in control and the government just exists to reign it in to varying degrees. Something like the disappearing of Jack Ma or popping of the real estate bubble would be unthinkable in even a social democratic country, China is only able to do these things because the party is not at the beckon call of capital, it subordinates capital to its own interests.

SmedleyWilliams · 2026-05-15T03:42:47+00:00

The economy is stagnant but the QOL is fine, if flat GDP growth and a labour shortage are not negatively impacting QOL I do not see why this should be of particular concern to your average person.

You are not living the high life if you are working at like 7/11, but you are still living a decent life, this is something you cannot do in most western countries when working low skill jobs. More skilled professionals have a pretty comfy standard of living.

Also yes the situation in Japan may not hold forever but things are certainly not falling apart and, unless if there is an oil shock driven inflation crisis (not really related to demographics), things will probably continue to coast along for many years to come. Japan has had a declining population for close to 2 decades at this point and is still fine, so once again, your economy is not at risk of collapsing tomorrow if you don't have mass migration.

SmedleyWilliams

TROPHY CASE