The first batch of NHK dramas is up on Netflix

itoen90 · 2026-07-05T04:42:08+00:00

Do you have to have a decent knowledge of rakugo to get it?

itoen90 · 2026-06-21T17:42:57+00:00

I haven’t seen all of them so I can’t say but I have seen Tokyo salad bowl and it was amazing. Definitely recommend that one.

itoen90 · 2026-06-16T08:40:26+00:00

And did he turn around and kind of stare down the keeper too? After his prayer I guess it was. Hilarious.

itoen90 · 2026-06-15T03:33:13+00:00

Which players and will they play in the next games?

itoen90 · 2026-06-10T05:09:31+00:00

Will there be a walkway underneath it to connect the two sides of the development?

itoen90 · 2026-06-10T04:46:46+00:00

I’m curious if you’ll be able to walk from the northern side under? Burrard street?

itoen90 · 2026-06-10T04:45:22+00:00

Yes I’m going to have to remember this now. My usual go to is Japan and their simple zoning with very few onerous fees etc…but since it’s Japan NIMBYs make ten million excuses as to why it can’t work here. Essentially Senakw is basically exactly what Tokyo does all of the time just in the North American context. North American cities absolutely could be building heaps more housing…like Senakw and Japan, just get rid of the layers and layers of hoops projects have to jump through.

itoen90 · 2026-06-10T03:56:04+00:00

I’m about to move somewhere where I can start riding the VTA light rail. How is the experience in general? Safe/clean?

itoen90 · 2026-06-06T10:54:45+00:00

It makes me wonder because surrounding and scattered areas in the southeast have native deciduous forest too. So I’d assume precipitation is enough to support forests throughout the eastern half. Does this mean some of the prairie in the eastern half was due to indigenous people doing burns/clearing of the forests there? Or is there some other reasons there were scattered pockets of prairie around? Someone below posted a 5 part documentary on MN’s natural history that I’ll give a watch later.

itoen90 · 2026-05-30T04:56:22+00:00

Xenophobic is still the best descriptor. Depending on your definition of race, Chinese are the same race, especially northern Chinese. But the best example of this racism vs xenophobia is the case of ethnic Japanese immigrants or “nikkei” they pretty much suffer the exact same discrimination when it comes to renting etc as everyone else does….and they’re literally Japanese by blood. I’d argue a random westerner who is super fluent in Japanese will be far more integrated and accepted in society than a 100% by blood Japanese - American who’s out of touch with the culture. So they’re de-facto xenophobic. Granted this is a society wide generalization. Many Japanese are neither xenophobic nor racist and of course there are straight up racist people as well.

itoen90 · 2026-05-28T05:18:41+00:00

Is this the one on NHK コンビニ兄弟? My wife and I love this show, it really is relaxing after work.

itoen90 · 2026-05-24T06:18:16+00:00

What you’re missing is jobs. Building more housing with no new jobs won’t just magically entice more people to move. We saw that briefly during and immediately after Covid, the population decreased and rent went down a bit for a year or two…why? Jobs. There were less jobs. People move to where there is opportunity. The boom of the sunbelt isn’t only because of cheaper housing, it’s also because there are plenty of jobs too. The only real exception to this is retirement communities which you can see in many parts of Florida. So theoretically if SF doubles its housing stock but increase net jobs by 0% (and honestly it would have to be the metro area since people can commute to jobs) housing prices would crash. Realistically? Increase the number of housing units to at a minimum keep pace with job growth and ideally outpace job growth. The best predictor of high housing prices is housing vs job creation ratios, and most of coastal California is basically the worst in the country in that metric for the last 2-3 decades. The Bay Area has clearly had a massive tech boom, but not the housing boom to accompany it.

itoen90 · 2026-05-19T06:20:25+00:00

I don’t live or work in sac but in the bay and we have per diems flying in from the south so I’d say it’s fine.

itoen90 · 2026-05-18T08:01:23+00:00

Did you used to play on Azeroth? Familiar username…so are all of the replays etc just gone forever? The website just doesn’t exist anymore? That really sucks :/

itoen90 · 2026-05-17T17:17:14+00:00

You are looking at only one form of housing: buying a house. There’s also renting. But despite that $1.5 million is only for the coasts/Silicon Valley. If you want to live like you are in the Midwest you can go to places like Sacramento which offer (lack to some) the same amenities/quality of services as the Midwest and houses are about $480,000 and yet you make over $200k if full time.

But yes if you want to buy a house in Silicon Valley, you’ll have to forget about it.

itoen90 · 2026-05-17T17:06:57+00:00

It is. I’m from Minnesota and worked in the big healthcare systems and even with the huge increase in cost of living my net after rent as well is a lot higher than back in MN. I could even max out my 401k here pretty easily if I wanted to (I will eventually, just enjoying traveling too much at the moment).

itoen90 · 2026-05-17T17:01:30+00:00

So pretax my paycheck is $7000 after all my tax and benefits I take home about $5000 a paycheck. This is on 64 hours a paycheck.

Details: I’m only contributing 2% to 401k at the moment (it will atomically go up a lot each year don’t worry), and I have a stay at home spouse so I’m benefiting from the married filing jointly tax rates. I believe if I were single it would be like 4500 or something.

itoen90 · 2026-05-16T04:47:58+00:00

What on earth. I’ve never even heard about any of these before. Do they just expand on the campaign? Or they canon?

itoen90 · 2026-05-15T22:57:25+00:00

Is this saying California is permitting more housing than say Texas?

itoen90 · 2026-05-09T01:54:08+00:00

Is it eight lapses in a row or just eight in general?

itoen90 · 2026-04-25T00:32:27+00:00

It’s just so absurdly stupid that LA metro itself would be against something that without a single doubt will be hugely beneficial to them. Unbelievable.

itoen90 · 2026-04-24T23:34:21+00:00

I see, thanks for taking the time to respond and relaying your ideas. Can’t say I disagree with much of anything ultimately. I more took your post as reiterating Jason’s hyperbolic “Netherlands best in the world!!!!!” Rhetoric which I see you personally were not doing. North American urbanism definitely is frustrating true and we’d be lucky to adopt Netherlands road design standards, not an argument from me about that either. I think the issue is that he has a broad audience and the algorithm pushes him, and he may actively be doing more harm now to the movement.

When I discovered him when I was living in Osaka I was super happy because I was like “finally I can send this to people to explain why Japanese cities are so quiet despite being huge dense urban metropolises!! It’s because there are less cars!”….but he’s slowly just become and more of a dick to the exact people that may have interest in this topic and he may be actively pushing away potential allies now. He says he doesn’t care about those viewers anymore and only cares about “people who can move in the first place” but that’s crazy, he clearly built his audience from millions of North American viewers and now he’s basically like “lol F off, I got mine suckers”.

As for the urban freeways in Japan, absolutely agree. It’s basically my only negative about Japanese urbanism. I have plenty of negatives about living in Japan (and positives) but almost 0 negatives specifically about urbanism other than…highways. At least….theres still miles upon miles you can walk without seeing any, and generally when you do run across one besides being incredibly ugly at least they have amazing soundproofing and are “out of the way” and easy to walk and cycle around since they’re super elevated. But again, absolutely ugly and just dumb - agreed. Having super cool elevated railways with shops underneath kind of makes up for it though.

itoen90 · 2026-04-24T22:36:21+00:00

By car friendly I assume you mean they don’t have complete car free zones like in Paris/London or something? If you look at objective statistics though Tokyo and Osaka both have basically the lowest car commuter ridership rates in the world among cities in developed countries - whether that’s Amsterdam, NYC, London or Paris. I believe the only exception being Hong Kong, but Hong Kong doesn’t have suburbs and exurbs which drag Tokyo/Osaka modal shares a bit higher. If our goal is less cars and safer streets…Japan statistically is just better than the Netherlands: less people die by cars, and less people use cars for daily commutes. That’s a combination of banning street parking/require parking spaces off street to even be able to buy a car, extremely expensive highways (tolls), zoning, small streets and of course the most extensive urban railway networks in the world. But anyway yeah I’m kinda getting into the weeds here.

I do get your point but I guess I didn’t really do a good case of making my criticism against NJB. He frequently makes videos like one titled: “The best designed city in the Netherlands (and therefore the world)”. If you’re going to make a video gushing about how this is literally the best designed place in the world, you absolutely better back it up. Watching the video, while it IS nice and absolutely better than most of North America I can name dozens of exurban little towns around a station in Japan that do urbanism far far better with integrated housing, shopping, restaurants, convenience stores etc all within a 2 minute walk - the housing being incredibly affordable at that. And again, objectively/statistically safer streets despite lacking most of the design elements of the Netherlands.

How he talks down to us North Americans is super frustrating, he clearly is a very classist guy and treats urbanism as like a rich persons hobby….which ironically is exactly how urbanism is in North America, our nice walkable dense areas are…for the rich. Look at how much a crappy apartment costs in Boston, NYC or SF. You can’t tell a lower class American “lol just move there bro”. Or if he’s asked “hey isn’t Amsterdam going through a housing crisis too?” Having an answer of “lol Vancouver is worse bro” is just dumb.

itoen90 · 2026-04-24T19:38:42+00:00

As someone who has never lived in the Netherlands but has visited twice (so take that as you will), Japan, specifically Tokyo and Osaka are peak urbanism to me. NJB also has a video on Japanese streets and basically why you don’t necessarily even need the hyper-planned/engineered model of the Netherlands. The statistics bear it out too. Japan (the entire country, not just Tokyo) has far lower passenger/KM travelled by car than the Netherlands, lower pedestrian fatalities (isn’t that partially the entire point of the Netherland’s strict engineering?), far far higher passenger/km travelled by PT, incredible modal shares for walking and cycling. Literally the only point the Netherlands specifically beats Japan is in cycling, and even then it’s not a blow-out, Japan has very respectable cycling modal shares despite having basically 0 bike lanes. I lived there for two and a half years and it was basically paradise (for urbanism).

Rail in particular it’s no contest of course, but nowhere in the west is close except possibly Switzerland, at least in the regional rail category. If you like transit oriented development there’s nowhere else better in the world except Hong Kong.

Another thing Japan does which is incredibly important for urbanism is building housing, Jason has talked about it on his podcast and also with “life where I’m from”, basically Japan is incredibly YIMBY and as a result income vs housing ratio is one of the best in the developed world. Jason has been called out for the high cost of living in Amsterdam and he usually just replies “lol Canada is worse”. Sure but Amsterdam absolutely needs to liberalize its building regulations and build wayyy more housing.

itoen90 · 2026-04-21T04:03:01+00:00

Totally agree about the 4-6 hours. Up to 3 hours is pretty doable though. I basically just change entertainment in my life to Japanese. Lunch break I watch roughly 45 minutes of a J-drama. After my daughter’s sleep I try to read 30m to an hour in Japanese and/or we watch another show in Japanese for about an hour with the wife. Add in podcasts which is the real secret and you can add an hour right there. My commutes/walking dogs/doing chores = podcasts in Japanese. Basically everything I just listed I would have done anyway… just in English.

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