Archive for the category Society

Useless doors

Por kirai el 27 de November de 2008 en Society

This is my collection of “useless doors”, there are tons of them in Japanese cities. Japanese is a relatively secure country but people usually install advanced security systems (Alarms, cameras and stuff like that), but it seems that they don’t really care too much about the security level of their garden door.
For example, look at [...]

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Earthquake risk areas in Tokyo

Por kirai el 20 de October de 2008 en Society, Tokyo

I friend send me a report made by the Tokyo Government that analyzes potential earthquake risk in Tokyo. At the end of the report the conclusion is this map where the orange-red areas are the riskiest ones and the green-blue ones the safest. I live in a blue zone

It looks like Tokyo east [...]

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Crisis, danger, opportunity

Por kirai el 09 de October de 2008 en Society

The word crisis in Japanese (危機=kiki) has the kanjis 危=”danger” and 機=”opportunity” (This kanji has also other meanings). The Japanese are pretty good finding ways to find opportunities when things turn bad, the best example is how they resurrected after the war.
A more recent example has been Nomura that just bought the Lehman Brothers Asian [...]

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Security for the G8 summit

Por kirai el 07 de July de 2008 en Society

These last days I’m noticing LOTS of extra security measures in Tokyo, even though the G8 summit is in Hokkaido (1.000 km away from Tokyo). I’ve seen many police, some streets with extra security controls, and even some areas in Shibuya and Shinjuku where traffic was cut for some reason.
Here there are two posters [...]

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Transparent umbrellas

Por kirai el 30 de June de 2008 en Society

I think I’m starting to be too used to Japan and I’m loosing my capacity to be surprised by “things that make Japan different”. I uploaded his picture to Flickr and many users told me that all umbrellas in the picture except mine are transparent!

View picture on Flickr

Yes, the transparent umbrella is the most [...]

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Land prices falling during 16 years in Japan

Por kirai el 11 de June de 2008 en Society

Real state and land prices have been falling in Japan during the last 15-16 years. In this chart, there is data until 2005.

I think this chart is made with average data from urban land prices.

After 2005 it continued falling but at the end of 2006 and during 2007 prices started rise (A little bit, around [...]

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Pension system in Japan

Por kirai el 28 de May de 2008 en Society

There are 127 inhabitants in Japan, and 35 million of them are retired. In 30 years it is expected that 50% of the Japanese will be retired. Immigration and natality rate are really low in Japan. Everyone between 20 and 59 years old has to pay to the pension system by law. But the big [...]

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100 million super-mega-region

Por kirai el 16 de May de 2008 en Society

My brother recommended me Richard Florida’s blog a while ago. It happened that while I was in Hamburg last week, Richard Florida was also there and he was talking in the same conference as Danny. My brother bought one of his books after the conference, Who’s your city. I’ll talk more about this interesting book [...]

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Take the poo with you

Por kirai el 24 de April de 2008 en Society

I was walking with Danny the other day and we found this interesting sign:

It says that you shouldn’t leave your dog’s shit on the street. Generally Japanese people follow the rules (That’s good for some things, but not so good for other things), in this case is good because it’s very difficult to bump [...]

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The least religious countries

Por kirai el 10 de April de 2008 en Society

A study made by Pitzer concludes that Sweden, Vietnam, Denmark, Norway and Japan are the least religious countries in the world. The United States is one of the countries at the end of the list.

It’s interesting that the US is the country with less percentage of atheists and Vietnam is the one with more percentage [...]

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