(upbeat music)
They are doing some kind
of construction next door.
So I set this up, I was gonna
go super early in the morning,
I was gonna ton done
today, and then they started
putting up scaffolding
right outside my window.
I’m not angry about it, these
guys got under their paychecks,
and the people next
door have to have the
right to fix their house
if something’s wrong.
Just, it was one of those things where you
have all your plans for the day laid out,
and then it’s just like,
good done, good done.
And I was like, okay, better day
than the minister of farming in Japan.
I guess the Japan farm
minister was giving a speech,
and he said that he has
never had to buy a rice
because people give him
so much rice, his supporters,
people who think, who
agree with him politically,
everyone loves him so
much they give him rice.
Now, rice prices in Japan
have hit an all-time high.
So you might think, hey, it
might be a little bit insensitive
for the guy who’s almost
in charge of rice prices
to talk about how he
gets all his rice for free
to a bunch of people who
have to pay for their own rice.
This is the case of an
out-of-touch rich guy
talking to another bunch
of out-of-touch rich people
who probably thought the
idea of him getting all his rice
for free was awesome, especially
in this time of very high rice prices.
So, you know, the poor people,
he said he gets so much rice
from gifts and from
supporters, he could sell it.
Now, that made people
angry, he came out again,
and he said, hmm, I’m
sorry, I may have misspoken.
I may have exaggerated to please the crowd.
So this is, again, rich poll
talking to other rich polls,
being told, and his
audience finds it really funny,
the problem is outside those
doors, other people actually
hear the things he says
and think, what an asshole.
Then he got in trouble with his wife.
I just got scolded by my
wife because, of course,
in real life, someone in
his household does buy rice.
So, when they run low, she goes out
and buys rice and comes back more.
He calls him up, he’s
like, what are you saying?
You absolute moron.
So he gets in trouble from his wife.
He does his apology.
The prime minister calls him in
and says, dude, what the fuck?
I mean, that is just the short,
I mean, of course, summarizing
paraphrasing, but he’s like,
what the fuck are you doing?
You’re the guy in charge of rice in
the country that eats mostly rice.
It’s like the staple of
everyone in this country
and the rice prices have
gone through the roof.
We have this store of rice that we are
releasing to try to keep the rice prices low.
The rice he’s prices to keep those lowly.
And he goes out again, the
prime minister apologizes,
and this is actually a point of
respect for the prime minister.
He says, I chose this guy,
I put him in charge of this.
He said something stupid that’s
just as much as my fault as it is his.
I’m not saying it’s the
prime minister’s fault,
but him taking responsibility
for the guy in his cabinet.
I think that’s a pretty smart move.
His approval rating is very low.
So it’s really hard for
him to make a mistake
anyways, but he’s earned
one point up from me.
I still don’t really know
how I feel about him.
From being really honest,
Japanese prime ministers,
I’ve never had a particularly
strong feeling about any of them.
So the prime minister apologizes, and then
this guy goes out and he has to apologize.
Again, he says, I retract my
comments and fully apologize.
And I would just like to say,
you are a rich piece of meat.
And I retract my statement and apologize.
(upbeat music)
This is actually quite scary.
A 25 year old has developed
dropping head syndrome.
You know, I see people
on their phones all the time.
I’m one of them.
I actually started
suffering slight neck pain.
I think because I was looking at my
phone too much, because I was on the train,
and I have a very long
train ride, very long commute.
I watch movies, TV shows on my phone.
So I’m looking down at my phone.
I noticed I was starting getting a
stiff neck of sore neck regularly.
And I was like, I have to fix this.
I have to sit up straight.
I have to hold my phone
up or something like that.
I have to change my behavior so
that I’m not looking down at my phone.
I’ve gotten on my kids about it.
It’s much harder with
kids ’cause they don’t,
you know, right now
they’re bouncing back.
But again, this kid, 25 years
old, he’s already developed this.
But this started in high school.
He was getting bullied.
He stayed home and he spent all
his time on his phone playing games.
So he was sitting
hunched over all the time.
He developed a large
lump in the back of his neck.
Now this is probably
torn tissue healing itself,
stretching out and then trying to heal and
getting into this big lump mass of flesh.
But then it became difficult
for him to lift his head up
because he’d actually kind
of like the ligaments had
stretched out too much and
he’d done damage to the vertebrae.
But because his head was forced downward,
he was finding it really
hard to swallow food.
So he started losing an
immense amount of weight.
He goes to doctors.
They at first try to
do exercises and stuff.
That doesn’t work.
They put a brace on his neck.
That doesn’t work ’cause it makes it.
He’s just saying like, my neck’s gone numb.
I just don’t feel anything anymore.
So then they had to do surgery.
They had to remove part of his vertebrae
and stick rods and screws in place.
He can now hold his neck up without pain.
I’m sure this is going to
cause problems in the future,
but for anyone out there
who’s spending a lot of time
on their phone or knows
someone who spends a lot of time
on their phone, in this
hunched up position.
This might actually be worth mentioning.
I think it might be one of those scare
stories because this is incredibly rare.
It’s an extreme case, but it
is a real thing that can happen
if you start experiencing
net pain, if you start
experiencing net pain,
please take care of yourself.
(upbeat music)
Very recently on the internet news.
I guess yeah, this is internet news.
This isn’t news.
Internet news is its own thing.
You’ve probably seen an article that says,
“We now know why orange cats are orange.
” And I, when I read that headline, my first
thought was like, well, it’s their DNA.
Like I just, I’m not even a scientist and
I know it’s their DNA, it’s a chromosome,
something, something
in there makes a orange.
I don’t need to do any
research to find that out.
Turns out I was right.
Without even reading the article,
a Japanese group has figured
out why calico cats are calico.
And let me tell you, before I even read
the article, I was like, it’s in their DNA.
Yeah, the DNA is making them that color,
those shades of color, it’s
things that are turned on
or turned off that make
them different from other cats.
120 years ago though, this was the
actual interesting part, 120 years ago.
People started noticing that
almost all calico cats are female.
So you’ll hear the statement,
all calico cats are female.
That is for the most part true.
There’s no point getting
an argument about it.
It’s like in the 90% it’s very high
percentage of calico cats are female cats.
It is not 100%, nature
doesn’t do 100% like the way
we would like it to to
win internet arguments.
Or I guess if someone makes
that statement, then you can pull
the technically correct so that
you can always like one up them.
So nature’s sort of on
the technically correct side.
60 years ago, they found that there were
two X chromosomes that were inactive.
To me that, again, it
was put on the path of,
oh, I know what you’re
talking about, it’s in their DNA.
We don’t really need, this isn’t news.
Then, of course, they
came out, it’s a specific gene.
A Japanese team found that the actual
thing is the ARHGAP36 on the X chromosome
and that is what makes
calico cats calamicious.
(upbeat music)
Californication.
Cala.
Because I was swearing
so much in the last one,
I think I might have gotten into a
little bit of swear mode in my head.
I have decided going
forward to censor my swears
just because I think it sounds
funnier when I put in censorship.
I mean, that’s literally
not because it’s gonna
be better for YouTube
or better for stuff.
It might be, I don’t know, but I think
it’s funnier when you censor swears.
I’ve been listening to different
podcasts and YouTube videos and stuff,
and I actually think I find it
funnier when they censor the swear.
‘Cause I know what the swear it is,
but I don’t know, it’s entertainment.
Two 16 year old girls have been arrested.
Whew, usually on Engineers Japan,
this would be like a lot, it’s not.
It is the food terrorism, which I actually,
it seems to have gone away,
it seems to have been done.
We had the guy doing stuff on the
Kaiten sushi, the conveyor belt sushi.
We had people like eating from the ginger
stuff that is shared at the Gudon places.
This is the reason I
don’t go to Gudon places,
is ’cause they have all
this stuff out in its shared,
and then you get idiots and gross
people who think it’s funny to do this.
These two girls took
a shared picture of tea,
so they’ll basically
have a big thing of tea
on the table and you pour
a glass and you drink it.
That’s how civilized human beings do it.
It gets shared around
maybe about a couple people.
I go to a round in place on occasion.
It has water and a big
jug, and then you’re at a
bar, and there’s about
two or three on the bar.
You grab it, you pour yourself
some water, you drink the water.
It’s shared amongst multiple people.
These girls thought,
“Haha, wouldn’t it be funny?
” If we filmed ourselves
drinking directly from the jug,
they did that, posted on social
media, and were immediately arrested.
(upbeat music)
Last week, I talked about the
guy who climbed up Mount Fuji,
had to be rescued, left
his cell phone up there,
went back up Mount Fuji and had
to be rescued again on his way down.
I did say, do these people have to pay
for the cost of the
rescue, because it’s a
helicopter, and I know
helicopters are expensive.
Something I learned,
and this was 20 years ago,
so the volume of money
we’re talking about has changed,
it was 300 an hour, it was $300 an
hour to rent a helicopter for a movie.
So that includes wait time,
spin up time, flying around,
waiting, get your shot and
then landed and all that stuff.
So 300 bucks an hour, I
don’t think that includes
fuel, that’s just
renting the helicopter.
So helicopters are crazy expensive.
When people are rescued from
Mount Fuji, they use a helicopter.
So this became interesting for two reasons.
One, I learned what you
do and don’t have to pay for,
and then I learned that
the mayor of the area,
the mayor of a town that is responsible for
these rescues has similar feelings to me.
A UK couple, one wearing a
long sleeve shirt and shorts,
and the other wearing a
short sleeve shirt and pants,
decided they were gonna hike up
Mount Fuji, and they, of course, I guess,
I think it’s because Mount
Fuji itself is accessible,
and this gives people the wrong impression
of how easy it is to climb up Mount Fuji.
And there are trails, and
you just walk up the trails,
and I think for the first part,
probably maybe the first 1,000 meters,
you’re not terrible if
you plan to go back down.
If you’re gonna go all
the way up to the top,
the 3,000 meter mark
or however high you can
go, the highest way
station you can stop at,
you need multiple, like you
need hot and cold weather gear,
you need boots, you need
like stuff to keep you warm,
you need food, you might
even need oxygen people,
they have like way stations
where you can get oxygen.
That kind of stuff is necessary,
because it’s not that easy.
This UK couple clearly didn’t look into
it, they’re wearing their spring clothing,
and they go up the mountain
immediately getting trouble,
because it’s too cold
for them to make it all
the way to the top or
come back down again.
So they call helicopter is dispatched, the
helicopter rescues them, takes them off.
I hope they’re not hurt, they
got stuck at 1,750 meters,
and they couldn’t find any shelter, so
they called emergency services in Japan,
that’s 110, and they sent a
helicopter to go rescue them.
The mayor wants people who get rescued on
the mountain to have to pay for the rescue.
So right now, he was actually very generous,
he actually said off season hikers.
So when it’s the main time, I guess there’s
people up there monitoring or helping,
or maybe there’s more in
place when it’s on season,
but off season, I guess you
can still just go up to trails,
he says those people
should have to pay full price.
He said they are not
listening to the warnings
and selfishly choosing to
climb during the off season.
The cost of rescue
operations is tremendous,
so shouldn’t the burden
of paying those costs be
carried up by the people
requiring off season rescues?
They have a responsibility
for the result of their actions.
I agree, this is really, really important,
the people who actually get in trouble
should actually have to pay
for the trouble they cause.
I think would actually stop people
from doing so, actually probably wouldn’t.
‘Cause again, these people aren’t thinking,
they’re gonna climb up the
mountain and get in trouble.
They’re thinking this is
gonna be a really nice hike,
we’ll get up to the top of
the mountain in like an hour,
and you know, just look
out, it’ll be a beautiful view.
Right now, rescue ease, pay
for the fuel for the helicopter.
They don’t pay for the
helicopter, or the people’s time, or
the before and after, or the
maintenance of the helicopter,
and every other other cost
that would go into a helicopter
rescue, I guess air traffic
controls also in there.
Like, there’s a lot of stuff
that I’m not even gonna be able
to think of on the fly that needs to be
paid for, for these things to be successful.
Right now, they pay for the fuel for
the helicopter to go up and go down.
I’m sure that’s still a lot of money.
It’s only a fraction of
the cost of what it must
actually cause to send a
helicopter up a mountain,
pick some people up,
and bring them back down.
Like, just the pilot’s fee has to be a lot.
So the mayor of the city
thinks that the people who get in
trouble off season, should
have to pay the full cost, I agree.
I think the people who
get in trouble on season
should have to bear a
certain amount of the burden,
because right now,
this is coming out of
taxpayer’s money, cause
this is rescue services.
It’s gonna be maybe in a
special burden on that town,
but he’s now making appeals to like,
for federal funds, this kind of stuff.
And then putting the federal
side on it, actually make the
government be like, hey, yeah,
we don’t wanna pay for this.
Maybe you, the idiot
who went out Mount Fuji
in the T-shirt, maybe
you should pay for it.
(upbeat music)
You’re planning your burglary, God damn it.
So you’re planning your burglary.
So you’re a serial burglar.
You’re the ham burglar, cause
you’re stealing ham wherever you go.
I found out that they don’t fingerprint
into DNA, like they do in the movies,
like when someone like Burgles a
house, the cops show up, they kind of go,
what was stolen and they’re
like, all right, thanks to you.
Now that’s North America.
If it seems like a serial case
in Japan, so there are like
multiple burglaries, I’m gonna
mess up this word multiple times.
There are multiple, there are
multiple burglaries in an area.
They will start taking fingerprints.
And they were very frustrated
because there was a serial
burglar burgling because I’m
having trouble with the word.
I’m gonna say it as much as I can.
Because there is a serial
burglar burglaring in an area,
they’re like, we’re gonna
actually start taking
fingerprints, but they
weren’t finding any fingerprints.
So this guy was leaving no clues.
He wasn’t leaving fingerprints,
probably wearing gloves, pretty
simple solution to that problem.
He wasn’t probably going full clean suit,
like they do when you assassinate someone,
you don’t wanna leave any hair
follicles behind or anything like that.
But he was being careful.
He was burgling with expertise.
And this is, it puts
them in a spot because
without clues, how are
they supposed to get them?
Well, then one day, the case broke.
And it broke in the best way possible.
He, being a 68 year old man,
actually took medicine regularly,
he had his medicine bag with him, he
dropped it or left it in one of the house,
he had burgled, and the
medicine bag had his name on it.
So this is always one
of the things that I think
about burglers and like
robbers and stuff like that.
There’s two problems.
One, you’re never as
careful as you think you are.
He was careful enough to wear gloves,
but you’re always gonna make a mistake.
And that’s one of the things I
always think like criminals do,
is they make more mistakes
than they think they make,
or they get overconfident and
overconfidence where it comes from.
Then the second one is
always they’re too greedy,
because you get a certain amount
of money and you should stop.
Now this guy, he was burgling residences.
So a burglar burgling residences
is only gonna make so much money,
because you might get
lucky and get one of those old
people’s houses who don’t
seem to believe in banks,
and they keep like millions and
millions of millions of yen in the house.
Like we’ve had stories
in the past 70 million yen,
150 million yen were kept in like
under the bed in a box in the house.
If you broke into my house, there
wouldn’t be much money available.
I do almost all my purchases
on my phone, so using pay pay.
My wife doesn’t keep a lot
of money around the house,
the kids don’t have any real money,
so you’re not gonna get millions of yen
from this household,
should you burgle this house.
You could get my picture of
Dave there in the background
and believe me, this would
be a John Wick situation
where I come after you and your
family and everyone you’ve ever known.
I would kill so many people, so as to
erase the memory of you from this world.
Anyone who had met you and known
you and could say your name would die,
and to the point where
you just cease to exist.
But on a more happy note, between December
2024 and February 2025, you stole 1.
3 million yen from homes, and he’s suspected
in participating in 48 other cases.
So this is again, 48 in these houses.
So we’re talking like 50, 60 houses,
he burgled over a couple of months,
’cause it’s really just
December, January, February.
But 1.3 million yen isn’t
even enough to live on.
Like you’re gonna need
four, five million yen.
Over the course of, I
guess that’s three months
a million yen, you might
be doing a mediocre salary,
but you might as well just get a job
because then you don’t risk going to jail.
And at 68 years old, I gotta say, I do
have some appreciation for the physicality
and was required for
him to be 68 years old,
get the motivation up,
go break into houses.
We had the guy last
week who got out of prison
and immediately went back
to, he’s like, I got bad legs,
I can’t work, so I’m gonna
immediately go back to crime.
Start breaking into people’s
houses and stealing stuff.
An interesting fact of
Japan having a grain society
is that Japan has a
grain society of criminals.
So you get these guys in their 60s
and 70s who are still committing crimes,
’cause at this point, the only
thing they know how to do.
(upbeat music)
So this is something that
has come to really bother me
about news and it’s one
of those things that news,
especially in Japan because it’s
so sensationalized on the internet.
One of the things of having
Western people come in,
so they’re coming from their
Western environment and the
Western internet into Japan,
where a lot of the stuff they know
or the information they have
just comes from the internet.
And so they’ll believe things
that are straight up not true.
So about two months
ago, maybe a little more,
but around that time, there
was a story going around
that they were going to make
breeding passports for Japan.
And the thing about breeding passports
is if you know anything
about the Japanese mentality,
the last thing they want
is a bunch of foreign people
coming in an interracial mixing, intermixing
intermixing with the Japanese people
because what they’re
really afraid of is diluting
their culture, Japanese people take great
pride in the uniqueness of their culture.
So the idea of just like, yeah, we’re
gonna give extra special easy passports
for people to come here and knock up
our women is just inconceivable to anyone
who’s actually lived in
Japan for any length of time.
So this information is very skewed.
And it’s like, if you
know anything about it,
you would know like that’s
completely unreasonable.
It wasn’t a real thing.
Last week, it showed up in my Discord,
it showed up on a bunch
of my feeds was this thing.
It was primarily on Reddit.
I’m sure this is on TikTok.
This video gained a
certain amount of notoriety
because she’s talking
about a single’s tax.
Now, what she’s saying isn’t factually
incorrect, but her presentation is so skewed
as to what it’s actually
doing that I found a defensive
and I think this is basically, they found
a pretty girl, stuck her on the screen.
She says some stuff,
everyone like freaks out.
And I realized a long time ago, if I
could get a pretty girl to do the host role
of Ninja News Japan, like I’ll write
it, send it to them and they say it,
and they’ll, we would
again be making millions of
dollars by now, but
because it’s a 50 year old,
kind of gross looking man, well,
you get what you get I guess.
So let’s take a listen to this and I
wanna do a quick analysis at the end
about how much I hate this
and her and everything about life.
- In Japan, bachelorette
tax will be introduced
from April, 2000, 26, due to the glazing
of birth rates and low population in Japan.
- A bachelorette tax is
not going to be introduced.
They certainly wouldn’t
introduce it like that.
That’s not how that works.
They do want to increase the birth rate.
So they want people to be
more comfortable having babies.
They want more people to have babies.
This is a real problem in Japan.
They want this to happen
and they are introducing taxes
in the future, but let’s get a
little more of this presentation.
- Basically being single will be taxed.
- Mummy, I would break it down.
- I hate that, Nummy.
Her accent almost sounds fake to me.
It’s almost like she’s
probably got a bit of an accent
and she’s pushing it up so that to make
it more, to make it like more Japanese,
but she’s actually gone to a
point where it actually sounds
like ’cause it’s stronger
than most of the students
I’ve had in my time as an
English teacher in Japan,
like to the point where I’m
actually a little suspicious
of it, but anyways, the
Nummy really puts me off.
I guess that’s just, you can
make a big face at the screen.
- Great and low population in Japan.
Basically being single will be taxed.
- Mummy, I would break it down.
So the government’s Japan will
increase the tax to help raising a child.
- Okay, so increasing tax to help raising
children is not a tax on a bachelor.
That is, everyone pays those taxes.
So that’s the first thing.
Yes, you have to pay more
tax, I guess, technically,
but that’s not just
’cause you’re a bachelor,
that’s everybody that’s
called supporting society.
And that’s one of those
things that really bugs me.
If you’re a single or married, no
having children, doesn’t matter.
Everyone has to pay this tax.
- So there you go.
It’s not a bachelor tax,
it’s not a no-kids tax,
it’s a tax for everyone,
it’s a societal tax.
So she’s already inadvertently backed,
like walked her statement
back from when she said,
it’s a bachelor tax because it’s like, look,
we need to support people who have kids
so they have more kids
or it’s easier to have kids.
And if we do this, then
people might have more kids.
This is a societal problem.
- Like this, if you give a course,
you receive money from the
government more than before.
- So even that, more than before.
So I have had two kids in Japan.
I received money benefits from the
government for having kids in Japan.
There’s actually lots of countries support
families with kids in different countries.
It’s not just a Japanese thing.
In my town, like you’ll
actually find different cities
are different, in my town, medicine was
free until my kids were 15 or 16 years old.
So that’s not a tax on healthy people.
That’s not a tax on adults or old people.
That’s just a tax that is given to all of
society to support raising young people.
- Stuff like that because
government’s gonna use that tax
to give money to the
people who have the kids.
- Government wanna
Japanese people to wanting kids.
So they’re introducing this battle of tax.
- And then she’s gone right back to,
okay, I’ve made my initial statement.
I walked it back, I actually clarified
that it’s not just a tax on
bachelors or single people.
It’s actually just a tax on everybody,
but then I can go back to my original
statement and call it a bachelor tax again,
sort of reinforcing the disingenuous
nature of my initial statement.
- Do you think this will help
Japanese people to make babies? - So the very last statement is that,
do you have any ideas on how to do it?
If you listen to an engineer’s
Japan for any amount of time,
you’ve heard me talk
about this multiple times.
‘Cause it comes up constantly.
It is a real problem
for Japan as a country,
declining population,
we’re talking pension issues,
we’re talking medical
issues, all this kind of stuff.
This is something that Japan
as a country has to deal with.
I think governments really struggled to
find ways to make people have babies.
It’s almost like they don’t
understand how babies come about,
like ’cause it comes from
financial security and having
time to make babies, which
people do not have in Japan.
So it has nothing to do
with money in my opinion,
or at least not as much
as they think it does.
It has a lot more to do with free
time, time to have relationships,
sort of the optimistic nature of people
when they feel positive about the future,
because if you hate your life and
stuff, you probably don’t wanna have kids.
When you see internet news,
and like this is it in that little video,
she actually gave you
all factual information,
but then disingenuously
reframed it two times.
Once at the beginning and once at the end,
please be careful about your internet
information, try to get the actual information.
The only source you should
trust isn’t engineers Japan.
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