Category Archives: Japan (日本)

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) September 29, 2020 Japanese movies and TV shows seem to have always taken great pains not to show manufacturer’s brand names and a look at the labels used in props in Japanese dramas often is funny with dummy labels obviously done in haste pasted on beer cans and packages. The exceptions are when a manufacturer is a sponsor of the work, in which case the product gets brand overkill. Perhaps the most ugly examples are the odd decals covering the brand insignia of cars. The Toyota, Nissan and other marks are quite large in size, so hiding them makes the car look rather fake and places the film or show itself further away from reality. Movie and film makers are always fishing for sponsors for their works, but I wish they’d do it in ways […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) August 22, 2020 Showa Generation and Heatstroke Many people born in the Showa Era grew up in homes that had no air conditioning with electric fans at best. Even in Hawaii, most of the homes back then had no air conditioning. When I first came to Japan in the 1980s, the situation was pretty much the same. Some of the retail and service industries had air conditioning, but it was still a rarity in most homes. At the time, though, Japan’s population was still mainly made up of comparatively young people whose bodies were capable of a rather wider range of metabolic adaptations. In addition, the old-fashioned A/Cs were pretty much straightforward and mechanical, while lacking the current microcomputer abilities of the units we have today. Terms like “cooler-byo” (A/C illness) and comments like “I […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) July 14, 2020 The 5% refund program to promote cashless transactions ended on June 30th. Since then, I’ve reverted back to paying cash for what I buy and my credit cards remain in my wallet. When I went to a rather popular liquor store yesterday, I noticed that almost everyone was paying cash at the register. A few weeks ago about 70-80% of the shoppers were using credit cards (I never saw anyone use PayPay or any of the other cash transfer systems). The same held true at the supermarket, with a slightly higher percentage paying with cash. I think it’s proof that the fools in Tokyo who think cashless transactions are great have once again misread the Japanese population. 現金支払いに戻った 5%還付金制度が6月30日に終了した。それ以来私は現銀で買い物をしている。還付金を貰うために使っていたクレジット カードが財布の中のままで出す気もしない。 昨日、人気のある酒屋さんに行ったとき、殆どの人は現銀で支払っているに気付いた。数週間前、約7～8割の買物客はクレジット カードを出していた（PayPayなどのような支払いはそこで見たことがない）。酒屋さんに行く前に寄ったスーパーも同様だった。しかし、スーパーの現金払いの割合が高かったような気がした。 この現象は政治家のバカさの証拠である。彼らは国民の意思が読めない。誰も欲しくないマイナンバーカードから安倍のマスクまでの失敗の連続だ。 *************** Books published by AELS (AELS出版書籍) 魔女学院＆光塾：魔女ガールズの冒険 原作＆翻訳：ビレー　ハモンド 日本語編集：伊庭野れい子 […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) June 10, 2020 Censored Bids The Abe Administration has turned out to be a master of cover-ups. Documents get censored, lost, shredded, or altered before ultimately disappearing from the public’s view. The latest fiasco is a public bid for a company to handle the distribution of emergency funds. The bid summary has had the figures for the losing bid blackened so that nobody can see if it was higher or lower than the winning bid tendered by a rather suspicious company that immediately proved to be incapable of doing the job and which subsequently shoved it through other companies to get the work done while pocketing a hefty commission. This deal has nothing to do with Japan’s national security and people who pay taxes have the right to know everything about it. Anything less makes […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) May 22, 2020 Abe’s Mask Fiasco On April 1, 2020 PM Abe announced an insane plan to send packets of two cloth masks to every mailbox in Japan. As time passed, the people learned that the masks and subsequent distribution would cost 46.6 billion yen. Initial recipients of the masks revealed that they were too small for adults and that many were poorly sewn, moldy or dirty. This necessitated a recall and checking of the masks. My cloth masks arrived on May 18th. As I had expected, the masks are too small, so I’m planning to donate them to the after-school classroom teacher at the elementary school once my aikido classes resume. Had Abe been a bit more in touch with Japan’s citizens, he could have put patterns for making masks on the Internet and […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) May 16, 2020 Japan’s politicians are bickering about the start of the school year, which currently begins in April. Some of them want to switch it to September under the pretext of globalization, but the reality is that the school shut-down due to the Wuhan coronavirus has created a lag in the progress of children’s education that they want to cover up with a shift to a September start. Both systems of starting school attendance in accordance with a preset school year are outdated in this day and age of online education! The child’s birth date should be used as the determinant of when he or she begins school. This would eliminate the current time lag of almost a year between students, which is quite large in developmental psychology. It would give each student a […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) May 10, 2020 I’d been under the impression that the Abe cloth mask fiasco wherein the administration ordered cloth masks for the entire Japanese population and received dirty, substandard masks in children’s sizes was finished when it was revealed that they’d been duped by the manufacturers. Yesterday’s TV news announced that the masks would be delivered this month. Delivery of the masks will cost a huge amount of money in postage charges in a situation where many Japanese hospitals are on the verge of closing due to a lack of money stemming from coronavirus fears keeping patients away. PM Abe should obviously let the issue die, but instead he’s chosen to take a whip to the proverbial horse in an effort to revive it. The Abe mask should be given to the school boards in […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) May 4, 2020 I saw a patient on a ventilator in an ICU ward on TV who was positioned face down. If I hadn’t taken the course in mechanical ventilation from Harvard Medical School, I would have wondered what the reason was for putting a patient in what would seem to be such an unusual position. The weights of the heart, chest wall, abdominal contents, and the lungs themselves exert pressure on the lungs and compress them. This leads to atelectasis and derecruitment. Proning the patient helps maximize the V/Q (ventilation and perfusion ratio) and prevents atelectasis, which is a big problem in Covid-19 and ARDS patients. Thus, the team in the Japanese hospital was taking advantage of the latest research in pulmonary care for Covid-19. The scene impressed me and made me aware of […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) April 30, 2020 Education Reform Chance Japan’s lawmakers are debating changing the start of the school year from April to September. They really should be talking about how to move their educational system into the 21st Century rather than trying to go backwards and repeat the 20th Century. Learning can be carried out for all grades entirely online. For example, the Internet Academy in Washington State offers kindergarten through high school online and is fully accredited. For those who feel they need to use the schools as babysitters, there is the more expensive and cumbersome “blended learning” wherein children can attend the physical schools and do some of their learning online. For more on the subject, you might want to take a look at my blog article, “Online Learning: K-12“. The real question that needs […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) April 26, 2020 The unbelievably low death rate in Japan for Covid-19 infections has led some to speculate that the Japanese might have some kind of unique immunity to the disease. Some people have pointed to the TB vaccination program carried out in Japan using the BCG vaccine, but I have my doubts about that theory since TB is caused by one of the bacteria in the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex and not by a virus. I thought back to the diseases I’ve gone through since coming to Japan and two candidates arose: influenza and rubella. Influenza is a single-stranded negative sense RNA virus and while it enters the cell by endocytosis like Covid-19, there are features of the virus that make me want to look elsewhere. On the other hand, Rubella is a member of […]