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Mad cow protests in Taiwan get crazy
About two weeks ago I talked about how the protests in Taiwan over the importation of American beef are more about anxiety over a loss of sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China than about any...
View ArticleA Tragic Comedy in Ass Surgery
Some narative was inaccurate and corrected on the instruction of the author — Curzon My post from last summer criticizing Japan’s medical system is still generating comments, so I thought it an...
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Are the Japanese crazy like us? (And by “us”, I mean “Americans”)
Ethan Watters is the author of “Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche,” and recently appeared for a six minute interview on the US comedy show The Daily Show. Curiously, much of what...
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Filipino Freethinkers hit Internet meme culture
Readers may remember that during my most recent trip to the Philippines I quite randomly made friends with many of the core members of the Filipino Freethinkers, a new advocacy group working for...
View ArticleThe mass graves of Toyama Park (well, almost)
Suburban Tokyo park may hide a terrible wartime secret, The Australian, January 15, 2011: IF you knew nothing of its sinister history, you could pass by a thousand times without casting a second glance...
View ArticleWho can and can not donate blood in Japan
[Correction: Accidentally typed Australia at first below, should have been Austria all along.] There has been a lot of confusion over who exactly is allowed to donate blood according to Japanese...
View ArticleWant to help out a medical team from America?
I was forwarded an email from an American medical group that says they have experience working in the 2005 SE Asian tsunami zone, Haiti after their recent big quake, etc. and are now looking for some...
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Radiation safety update
Click here for the latest updates to this post. There is an awful lot of panic and speculation regarding the situation at the Fukushima #1 (Daiichi) Nuclear Power Plant and in particular its possible...
View ArticleBenefits of Bilinguilism
From last weekend’s New York Times: Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok...
View ArticleSome impressions after getting a herniated disc in Tokyo
So the last week and a half has been pretty harrowing. The morning after an official company function I woke up with excruciating pain running down my left leg, like something was stabbing me from my...
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