Here is a case of a foreign citizen winning a lawsuit against a discriminatory car dealership in Japan
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2017/10/11/issues/att...
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https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2017/10/11/issues/att...
Social time is another aspect, although linked more closely with clock time. After moving countries I found it very strange to see popular TV shows advertised with with a start time of half-past midnight. "Who would be up to watch it?" I thought. Of course, it turns out, there are plenty of people up watching TV at that time in this culture.
The other side of this is many people are not full time employees. Dispatch (派遣) employees are employed by one company and then sent to work alongside regular employees at other companies, with the dispatch company taking a good slice. The employer is now able to shrink their workforce more easily and the employee gets a smaller piece of the pie.
Simply writing a temporary contract might not even be enough. Recent changes to the law say that if you have been on temporary contract that is renewed for 5 years then you have the right to full time employment with the same conditions. Now you see plenty of people getting let go at 4 years, just to be on the safe side.
It reminds me of shuhari (守破離), an idea from martial arts and other traditional practices. It basically means "Follow the rules, break the rules, transcend the rules", and the characters mean "follow, break, transcend". The article hints at this too: follow the rules until you find a good reason not to. As it is aimed at beginners we should mostly be learning and following the rules until we have enough experience to start breaking them.
Verbs are functions. In English, arguments are positional.
SUBJECT verb OBJECT.
I eat pizza.
But in Japanese they are named arguments with small helper words called particles. The subject uses 'wa' and the object used 'wo'. The convention is postfix in contrast to English's prefix notation.
Watashi-wa pizza-wo taberu.
With other verbs English uses named arguments too:
I go to the bank by car.
Japanese uses "e" and "de" for the arguments to this verb. Car is kuruma so "by car" becomes "kuruma-de".
Watashi-wa kuruma-de ginko-e iku
Obviously this is a massive simplification but I always found thinking about verbs as functions and the other words as named arguments to be very easy to understand.
(Edited for clarity)
As for companies in Japan, there is a wide range. From very old fashioned businesses where programming is seen as simple grunt work to modern development shop that keep up with industry best practices. If you don't speak Japanese you will limit your options, but filtering for English speaking workplaces will probably leave you with a smaller number of better companies.
Start off by taking a look at the English speaking expat focused job sites [1][2].
If you have a university degree and can get hired by a company in Japan the visa situation is very straightforward. No lotteries or waiting lists, just a few forms.
You would be right in saying that salaries tend to be lower. This article[3] from JapanDev is a good starting point. Cost of living is also lower, depending on your lifestyle. Inflation is starting to catch up with Japan so it's not clear what things will be like in the future.
[3] https://japan-dev.com/blog/software-developer-salaries-in-ja...
This is not true. It is possible to become a permanent resident or to become a Japanese citizen (for citizenship you must give up any other citizenships)
Most concepts in programming took me years to pick up. Many things are not easy, even with good teachers and lots of effort. Maybe now you can see why it's a lucrative job.
To see images try an image search for 3点ユニットバス
There's plenty of good advice in this thread. Take in but be wary of falling into the trap of "If I just 2x my salary, then I'll really be happy." (Or buy a house, or get married, or get a job at google or whatever) It's best to focus on the now as much as you can, because in 5 years time you'll find that you're living in "now", not in some magical 5 year future time.
Find your happiness in what you are doing now, whatever that is. By all means make improvements, but aim for small and immediate over long term and big overarching goals.
Bluffing games, guessing games, dexterity games are much more fun for me.
A lot of founders think "When I launch, all my potential customers will see it that moment". This leads to delaying until it is "perfect" or waiting for the "perfect" moment.
In reality, when you release a few people see your product. And then a week later a few more. And then maybe someone who likes it shares it. You lose nothing by releasing now. The person who sees your product today and thinks "Unfinished and buggy" is not the person that buys your product in a month.
By delaying you lose valuable feedback. Maybe a key feature that takes 30 minutes to implement is missing. Maybe there's a bug that affects real users much more than you thought. You don't know until you have real users.
I read the article and was interested but after clicking around the site I was thoroughly confused about billing/pricing/metering.
As far as I know there aren't any clever tricks that don't involve drugs.
There one positive is that practice compounds. 20 talks isn't double the experience of 10 talks it's 10 times more. The change for me was quite sudden. Going from very nervous to reasonably comfortable quickly. I spoke to other performers and they said their experience was similar.
In illustrator you can make a dashed line that nicely lines up with the corners of a square (putting one dash in each corner). Nothing else seems to handle this case. [1]
I use Illustrator to make stitching patterns and lining up the corners in this way is absolutely essential, otherwise the stitches come out looking lopsided.
[1] https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/145760-how...
It will be interesting to see how this affects the 50cc and below vehicle class, which require helmets, have a speed limit of 30kph (somewhat enforced, often broken) and are required to make a two-step right turn on larger junctions.
It might be good timing to re-assess the rules for 50cc vehicles. Driving at 30kph while traffic is going past you at double the speed is more dangerous than moving with traffic. Differential speed limits have been shown to be unsafe and modern 50cc scooters can keep up with all but the fastest city traffic.
Think of a Japanese native speaker listening to English. The L/R sounds don't really exist in Japanese, so they sound the same. You can say "copy this sound" as much as you like, but if someone can't discriminate between the sounds in the first place then it's very difficult to copy. Practicing with minimal pairs (words that differ by only a single sound) can help build the ability to hear the difference between the sounds. Fortunately, this is not such a big issue for learning accents in your native language: If you can hear the accent you can hear the sounds.
Reproducing the sounds comes next. Learn about vowel placement. Learn IPA. Listen to snippets of the target accent and try to pinpoint what particular sounds make that accent that accent. Practice producing those sounds, recording yourself and using those hearing skills to notice if you are creating the right sounds.
Finally, you've got to put them all together into an integrated performance that becomes an accident. People doing "bad accents" are usually doing one or two key words and then slipping back into something much closer to their regular accent.
Speaking to young people regularly too is great. They have new ideas, new perspectives and are brimming with enthusiasm. Sure, they have new words, new ways to hang out with their friends, new music and fashion but we're all more the same than different.
HTML is really very accessible to someone with basic computer skills. It's a shame that a standard business website is now a facebook page.
There is a local gym near me with a static HTML webpage, hosted on local ISP web hosting. It's quick to load, responsive and always up to date. Checking the opening times, address and special events is much easier than on some aggregator site or google maps (which is often out of date). It's also very easy to read on many devices.
Imagine someone terrified of having a car accident every time they drove. "Have you ever been in an accident?" "No, never."
Or someone constantly worried about having left the oven on at home, so much so that they have to check it multiple before they leave. But they've never actually left it on.
This isn't an attack or a criticism, but sometimes it can be difficult to notice our own unhelpful patterns of thoughts, even though we'd notice them straightaway in others.
When choosing a teacher, think of them like a coach. They'll give you guidance, encouragement, correction and explanations, but they won't do be able to do the work of learning tons of vocabulary for you. You have to find a way to get all that stuff in your head, just like an athlete who has to find a way to wake up early and jog for miles everyday.
Start with spoken language. Spoken language is the ground truth of a language. Writing has additional layers of culture, class, snobbery and education. Speech is pure grammar flowing out of people's mouths. Try to find TV shows, podcasts, youtube channels and so on where you can listen to the language and get a good feeling for the sounds and rhythm. Try to make sure you listen to a reasonable amount of unscripted conversation. Hollywood movie scripts are too perfect. You need to get used to all the "umms" "errs", sentences that change direction half-way through and so on.
If I had to lay down a more specific plan I would say do something like this:
* Go through an audio only language course like Pimsleur.
* Start watching TV shows, movies and videos in the language. As you watch, pick out words and phrases that seem to pop up a lot. Look them up and put them in flashcards/a notebook/an app so you don't forget them. You'll notice that you pick up the meaning from context surprisingly well on occasion. (It's very easy to work out a phrase like "Run away!!" in an action movie, for example)
* As you build your vocabulary you'll start to notice chunks of language together and patterns. Study a basic grammar book to help understand how the phrases that you already know are put together.
* Keep doing this process regularly for months and years. You'll get to a point where you more or less know all the words, and you'll have learnt them in common, natural phrases and sentences.
Some pitfalls to avoid:
* Hyper-optimising the language learning process and endlessly trying new apps, software. Sure, it's fun to write a script that grabs words from X and puts them into beautiful flashcards in Y, but really you only need to learn 10 words a day steadily for a couple of years, may as well just write them by hand.
* Trying to race through lists of the 10,000 most common words. No context, no grammar. Very boring too so most people give up.
* Translating everything to your native language all the time. At the start, translation is necessary, but even simple concepts and words don't map neatly between languages. It's best to avoid your native language as much as possible.
* Focusing on the written language over the spoken language. If you goal is to read and write, no problem, but in reality spoken and written languages can be quite different.
* Asking "why" too much. Sometimes an explanation can be helpful but often the answer is "That's just how people use the language". Getting hung up on the thousands of strange rules and inconsistencies in a language isn't helpful. Just listen, copy and use!
My suggestions: * Move somewhere quieter if you can and if there is no foreseeable end to the noise.
* Practice techniques for calming yourself and accepting the noise.
* Put earplugs in and then play loud music/audio through over the ear headphones.
* Many places do "all you can drink deals" sure, students and ying people use this to go crazy but I feel like older people are sensible and just treat it as a way to not worry about prices/splitting the bill.
* Alcohol is very available and very cheap. A bottle of coca cola and a 9% lemon drink are more or less the same price in a convenience store. Spirits and sake are cheap.
* Drunkenness is fairly common but violences is rare. I often see people falling over in the street making merry, or vomiting in the street in less merry moments. I've almost never seen a fist fight, which would be sadly common in the UK.