That needs to be the theme of your line of commercially available pies. Think of the advertising campaign!

Could it be that people are getting more realistic about English learning but continue to have pie in the sky fantasies about other languages? I mean, learning JE translation would seem to require both good English and a specific plan as to what you want to do with it.

Too late. You announce it here, you have to get some pie or cookies to all of us, y’know, so we can give you advice and help you refine the recipes.

It’s interesting to search blogs for signs that China is now the place to go have your eikaiwa adventure. Might be a trend that picks up if the language teaching industry continues to dwindle/diversify here. (Utterly anecdotal, but I run into many more people these days who are studying French or Korean or Italian, whereas they all would have been in the English course back in the day. And I’ve been working at a language school for around seven years now and my classes have seen nothing but rising numbers of applications, but this is for translation courses, not conversation.)

My mind exactly.Like I said,I found double standard in the argument on fear factor here since the U.S fingerprint scheme “hasn’t specifically been called racist”,while the same scheme in Japan are called nothing but.As if no terrorist is considering using Japan as neither supply base nor target eventhough Bin Laden himself had repeatedly accuse Japan as the running dog of Ameican infidel.Anyone ever noticed that Japan is a concentration of US forces in the pacific?

There has been a claim in the 80’s that certain Phillipinos in Japan are fund raising for New People’s Army and same argument on the Sri Lankan for the Liberation Tigers for the Tamil Elam.They are report from vague security sources and there’s no way for me to confirm these allegations.

I think I’ve wrote this here or some where,but when I was working on assignement on the muslim community in Japan,I’ve run into a plain cloth cop in Asabu’s Islamic estate owned by the embassy of Saudi Arabia.Few years later,I was told from superior of mine that the head of the center was refused to permit diplomatic visas for being persona non grata,because one of his student in Saudi University was Osama Bin Laden.

There was also a early warning from US embassy in Japan in early September of 2001,that U.S related facility could have been chosen as target by Al Queda,which later turned out be a disinformation.But authority became extremely nervous about the whole idea.

In 2005,One French muslim got busted in Germany as the suspect to Al Queda ring.This guy was who working in Isezaki,a city in Gunma where I’ve conducted research,as a used car dealer and making money and recruiting personal to build clandestine network within Japan.He kept using fake passport and entered to Japan multiple times.

I’ve run into a pair of Singaporean muslim who came to Japan to help building new mosque in Gunma around 1998 when I was flying back from Cambodia via Kualalumpur.Nothing wrong about that especially and I didn’t care at that time.But one of the place they were heading was Isezaki and it doesn’t take any imagination that cops would want to know more about their activities.Who’s making these orders,who’s funding,how they recruite these volunteers.

Considering there’s a network of money,people and information among the muslim community in Japan,I wouldn’t surprise authority is increasingly interested in learning more and restriciting more.In their mind,fingerprinting may not work to prevent everything.but it can be used as deterrence.Especially considering Anti-demolition act law is a paper tiger,for government refused to act based on it during Aum SHinrikyo gus attack in 1995.

But the US fingerprinting policy has been widely criticized by human rights groups, privacy groups, and even by security experts who decrie it as “security theatre” that has little real preventive effect. Maybe the US policy hasn’t specifically been called “racist” but it’s certainly been attacked as xenophobic, of which racism is just one variety anyway.

Interesting note about the mid 80s bomb, but it’s still only a single incident of foreign terrorists. But could the fingerprinting system have helped find it?

What deVries was saying on fingerprinting in Japan was probably because of this article from Canada’s Maclean’s magazine.I can’t say anything about what deVries think on the issue.But I agree on one point.
http://www.debito.org/?p=2062

If the U.S does it,it is conisidered as a procedure to fight terrorism and any debate on the issue revolve around whether it is acceptable nor overkill.but when Japan does this,this is racism,nothing but.I run into couple argument regarding this issue that since all the terrorism in Japan are homegrown,this finger printing scheme is an example of Japanese xenophobism.I don’t where this argument comes from originally,but Debito’s blog is one source.

I was expecting any Canadian journalists working on this assignment to know about Air India Flight 301 incident that killed a land crew in Narita back in mid 80’s.The bomb was planted by a Sikh extremist with Canadian nationality instead of reference of Jesus’s grave in Aomori…..

– Talk about a BS headline – there was just one really big incident (7 dead) and a few others (4).

The REALITY of random violence is higher in the US, but I’m not so sure that the FEAR is.

– Very well put.

While we should always express our annoyance toward “foreigners behaving badly” in Japan, the guys in question in the onsen case were members of a lot of groups – sailors, Russians, foreigners, drunks, a$$holes, people who can’t read Japanese, etc. Why pick “foreigners” out of that list? That’s just lazy.

Stuff for gaijin to do – I know a guy in Japan who imports and personally leads a Japanese team to assemble “import houses” from North America. Makes 5 times what he would as a builder back home and loves his job. Foreigners who start companies in Japan and do well deserve props.