Keeping People Happy

(upbeat music)

  • Last couple weeks we have talked about

how the governor of ICHI is very upset

that people went to Ghibli Park and took pictures of themselves

grabbing the boobs of the statues of characters from Ghibli movies.

And then put themself in a position

where it looked like they were taking up skirt photos of the statues.

There was some speculation about what

those like what was actually under there,

which is maybe not where we should be going to this story.

And he was furious.

He was in a position where he’s like, I

consider this some kind of criminal act,

even though it’s probably not.

It’s not vandalism.

And he was like, I’m gonna get these guys.

Now, a mutual acquaintance of the dudes who did the acts,

did the deeds, contacted the ICHI government.

It was like, hypothetically.

If I knew some guys who went to the park

and they maybe touched some ceramic boobies

and took some ceramic up skirt photos, maybe they feel bad about it.

So anyway, we could hypothetically make this right.

What he was doing, those guys were too scared to call on their own

’cause they thought they were gonna get arrested.

So this guy calls on their behalf.

Basically then they wrote apology letters.

And the ICHI governor read those apology letters on TV.

Now then the governor said, they seem sincere in their apologies.

I, we consider the matter concluded.

So what he wanted was an apology that he could stand up and say,

like he kind of got justice and he did the thing he was gonna do

and he was gonna bring those guys to the forefront.

And he did,

I’m always a little suspicious of, oh, they really feel regret.

Because if they hadn’t been caught, would they feel regret?

So if they had come forward before the governor of ICHI,

he’d said like, I’m coming after you,

would they be feeling regret at that time?

That’s actually kind of where I am.

‘Cause it seems to me like people do crimes

or do bad things and they don’t feel any regret and then they get caught

and then they feel regret is that regret at the thing you did

or is it really just regret that you got caught and you’re in trouble

and now you don’t wanna be in trouble anymore.

I think we know the reality, which is

why I often feel like prompted apologies,

don’t mean anything.

This goes into the same section as politicians retracting statements.

But I said something, it was horrendous, it was racist, it was awful.

I’m gonna retract that statement, but in my head I’m like,

that doesn’t mean you changed the way you think.

The way you think and feel is exactly the same.

You’re just unhappy that you got in trouble.

So if you’re unhappy you got in trouble, you’re retracting your statement.

That doesn’t seem like a valid course of action to me.

So it’s almost like, what I’m saying is if you’re gonna go to Ghibli Park

and grab the boobies of a character,

you should commit to that and actually grab

the boobies of the character and be like,

I’m a ceramic booby-grabber.

I don’t know if the statues were made of ceramic, I just assumed.

I would actually not have respect for that, but I’d be like,

well at least you’ve chosen a position you live by it.

Whereas basically, oh, I got caught.

I’m gonna get in trouble.

So now I feel bad.

I don’t see that as a legitimate position.

(upbeat music)

There are a record number of foreign residents in Japan.

In 2022, there were 3 million 75,213 foreign residents

that is 11.4% more than previous years.

Just great.

It means people are coming to live in Japan

and contribute to society in a very positive way.

I think it’s there is some Japanese people might not see it that way.

They see it more as a cultural invasion maybe.

I don’t know.

Most of these foreign residents come from

China, then Vietnam and then South Korea.

Most of them are coming here from manufacturing jobs

or working with companies and whatnot,

exporting and importing stuff like that.

Great.

They have non-refugees.

So people who have come from a situation,

they’re not refugees, but they’ve been allowed to stay.

That number went up from 128 to 202.

I was interested in these statistics.

Actual refugees went from 1,180 to 1,760.

Now that is, I’ve always thought the number of refugees

that Japan takes on is really, really small.

Japan is maybe not a first, first world country like this.

I have to wait to see what Dave does.

He might want to sit on me.

He might want to get on the bed.

I think he’s going for bed.

Bed’s more comfortable.

He’s like Dave Settle.

Well, look at that butt.

Oh yeah.

Torken.

He’s gonna have to like wreck my bed.

Then he’s gonna get in his bed and go to sleep.

Or he’s just gonna like flat out take his much space on the bed as possible.

Let’s get out of the way.

Enjoy the show.

(humming)

Gotta get your face in there.

I don’t put a lot effort into making my bed, but I do make my bed.

Dave, when he gets on, cannot accept that.

He has to like pull every, oh, we stretched out like that.

That was long legs.

Sexy.

He’s not gonna be in camera when I turn my chair around.

I’m just too bad.

(humming)

Oh, that’s okay.

(laughing)

I’m gonna turn my chair around, I’m just too bad.

Oh, that’s okay.

(humming)

(humming)

It’s alright, ’cause when I turn my chair on,

you can’t see Dave, it just looks like I didn’t make my bed.

(humming).

Oh, we can just continue the story from where we left off.

Dave, man, just… He’s gotta mess up my bed and his bed.

And then people have come on the stream and actually said,

like, you don’t make your bed.

I make my bed.

Dave unmakes my bed.

There’s a difference.

You just staring at me?

You just, you don’t know what to do?

(laughing)

If I bring him over here, he’s gonna be in, he doesn’t sit down or anything.

He always stands on me.

Getting your bed.

I’m not continuing the show until he settles down.

This happens like every time.

The number of refugees in Japan.

(laughing)

It’s weird to transition from watching the dog get settled too.

How many refugees are in Japan?

The number of refugees in Japan went from

1,188 to 1,760, which is not many refugees.

Japan is a first world country.

It is a fairly rich nation.

I know it’s been in a recession for like 30 years.

And it’s not the richest country in the world.

It’s like, I think I actually dropped to fourth.

But it could take on a lot more refugees.

And I think Japan is a country what they

wanna do is actually send stuff overseas.

So you stay in your country and will help you.

Because they are nice people.

I mean, one of the benefits of Japan is a country.

They are very kind and generous.

But they don’t really want the foreigners to come here

where it actually might be safer.

There is still a lot of tension about how many foreigners live in Japan.

And the fact that it’s gone up 11.4% from last year, or 2021 to 2022,

is a point and issue for some Japanese people.

It is the highest number of refugees since the program was begun in 1982.

So I guess that’s an improvement.

I would like to see, depending on step forward and take on more refugees.

But I think it would just be, it would be

beneficial to the country just to have more,

a more mixed culture.

(clock ticking)

Since we’re talking about numbers, sort

of talking about crime on a regular basis,

the number of Yakusa have fallen below 10,000 in 2022.

This is just sort of like general crime

stats for the year, for last year, for 2022.

There were nine shootings and four deaths in Japan in the entire year.

So I’m betting in the time it took me to say that

there were more than nine shootings in

America and more than four deaths from guns.

In the entire year.

So when they talk about, when they have

one, have the argument about gun control

and gun control doesn’t work,

and the good guys would go on some bad guys would go on some.

There is the issue in America that they already have so many guns in play.

But, Japan is an example of tight gun control.

Nine shootings in total for the entire year and four deaths from shootings.

One of those deaths being the former prime minister,

who the guy who had a homemade shotgun ran up behind him and shot him.

It’s actually surprising that that

shotgun worked if I’m being really honest.

321 handguns were confiscated, that’s 26 more than 2021.

People who are linked to the Yakusa, not necessarily Yakusa themselves,

22,400, that’s 1700 down.

So the number of Yakusa are down,

therefore the number of people linked to the Yakusa are down,

which means organized crime is down overall.

There were 2,141 drug investigations,

that doesn’t actually mean all those people were guilty

or they found drugs every time.

There were 1,424 cases of fraud investigated,

and 1,142 cases of bodily injury,

which I would assume just people beating each other up, investigated.

There were 9,548 foreigners investigated, which is down 1,129.

When they have a crime in Japan, it involves a foreign person.

The country they come from, or the fact that it’s a foreigner,

is put front and center.

It’s given Japanese people a false impression

that foreigners commit more crime proportionally than anyone else,

whereas they are 2% of the population overall,

and they commit proportionately less crime overall in Japan.

But it’s sort of the same bias that maybe I have about America.

So the number of American shootings and how dangerous America is,

I have a strong bias from that, because when I watch the news,

it’s school shooting, school shootings,

downtown shooting, shooting shooting shooting.

In my head, America, the country is no longer a safe place,

where I’m sure the reality is very different,

but that’s actually shown in one of the sort of media biases

you have to be aware of when you’re watching

the news and all this kind of stuff.

There is an elite boys high school, and so the high schools have regulations

about how you can have your hair done, all schools do in Japan.

There are only tales and above the shoulders and stuff like that.

This boys high school only has a single hairstyle you can have,

but it has to have the sort of the nape of your neck is trimmed,

it has to be above the ears, and then if you pull your bangs down naturally,

it can’t touch your eyebrows.

Now there have been claims of human rights violations

based off this hairstyle, not the hairstyle itself,

but the inspections that the teachers do.

Because once you put a rule in place,

the inspections to make sure those rules were being followed.

The rule, the government has decided, it’s not unconstitutional.

So schools can have rules about haircuts because you apply to schools,

so you know those rules before you go in,

so it’s not unconstitutional to have a rule about dress code.

But the students are claiming it’s a black school rule.

So a black rule in Japan is a rule that’s

violating some sort of right that you have.

Now they’ve looked at Article 13 of the Constitution,

the guarantee of individual rights,

so they’re saying that the rule doesn’t violate Article 13.

The monthly hair inspections though,

they, if you fail that inspection, can result in expulsion.

They’re saying that’s going too far,

and then some of the teachers use this

rule to intimidate or bully the students.

So basically saying, “I can make it seem like your hair is out of order,

and therefore I can have you expelled.”

So they’re using that holding that over, because it’s so easy to say like,

“This day the hair touched his eyebrow,

or this day that the hair was too long on the side of his head.”

So he can be expelled for that.

So they’re using that rule to bully the students.

Teachers have actually gone and cut hair of students during inspections,

so they’ll grab the hair and then cut it.

And then some have pulled the hair forward on their heads

so that it forcibly touches the eyebrow,

so that they would fail the inspection.

So basically that is the violation of human rights.

But they shouldn’t be grabbing kids, they shouldn’t be cutting their hair,

they shouldn’t be forcing them into a situation where they might be expelled

from the school that they’ve applied to.

And this is now being reviewed by lawyers.

And the school has not responded, which is I think very suspicious,

because that would imply to me the school knew this was going on.

They knew what was happening, and they weren’t doing anything about it.

They were allowing the teachers to bully the schools,

which probably is a violation of, I

don’t know if I would call it human rights,

but you do have the right to bottle the autonomy.

You have the right to not be touched and have your hair cut forcibly.

And certainly you should not have a school rule used to bully children.

[Bell ringing]

I really enjoy this, I don’t know why,

it’s not a particularly exciting story.

An Osaka employee got a 10% salary cut for six months,

and has been told to return 1.44 million yen for smoking on the clock.

And I think it’s as a non-smoker,

I was always kind of like my friends or my co-workers who were smokers.

They could go out during their shift in smoke.

So in my company, we have an open office.

And the smokers used to, I don’t know if anyone in the office really smokes,

certainly not on the clock if they do, they probably smoke on their breaks.

We had this guy who was in another section,

and he would go out every hour and take a

smoke break, it would be about 10 minutes.

So in a six hour period, he would take almost an hour off,

standing outside in the balcony, smoking.

Now I, as a non-smoker, wasn’t able to do that.

And I sometimes wanted to take a break.

And so one time I went out and I just stood on the balcony,

and he said to me, he literally looked at me and goes, “What are you doing?”

I’m like, “Well, I’m just taking a 10 minute break.”

So you don’t get breaks.

Because at that time, I had a compressed shift.

So it was like a six hour shift.

So in that shift time, there were no breaks.

But he was on the same contract type.

So he actually shouldn’t have been taking breaks either.

So somehow, standing on the balcony, smoking was acceptable.

But standing on the balcony doing nothing

for the same amount of time wasn’t .

And he was like the HR guy.

So he actually was like the guy who tried to enforce the rules.

So the next day, he went out and he took one of his smoke breaks.

And I grabbed his sandwich and I stood on the balcony.

He goes, “What are you doing?”

Like really aggressively.

And I looked at him and I said, “I’m smoking.”

And I just started eating my sandwich.

And we stared at each other for a really long time.

And he knew that there wasn’t really anything to do about it.

Because either he had to bring me in an officially complaint

that I was taking 10 minutes I shouldn’t take.

But then I was doing it on the exact same 10 minutes he was taking.

Or you would have to stop smoking.

That was a point of annoyance for me.

He was a nice guy otherwise.

I think he wanted his smoke time to be private time.

And I think he wanted to get his hour of paid smoking time every day.

But this guy in the Osaka company, I don’t know how they figured this.

They must have extrapolated.

There’s no way they kept track of this.

They say he smoked 4,512 times over 14.5 years.

And then I was like, “Oh, I’m going to do the math on that.”

Using the 10 minute time period to figure out how much time he spent smoking

on the clock.

They already did it.

They said he smoked for 355 hours and 19 minutes while on duty.

So I’m wondering if they went and got like CCTV or something.

They figured out when he left his desk

and then just calculated all that time.

I wonder how many days that is.

I’m going to figure that out right now.

235 divided by 24 is 13 days.

So basically one day a year he was smoking and getting paid for it.

Like one 24 hour period, one full day smoking on the clock.

So what was happening?

How this actually came to be an issue?

Is that he and a coworker were taking 10 minute smoke bait breaks regularly.

They got an anonymous tip.

And so you know what they were doing was like I was annoyed that my coworker

was smoking and getting an hour off every day where I wasn’t.

And my coworker was smart enough to when I started you know, challenging him

on it be like,

“I don’t want to ruin my smoke time so

I’m actually not going to make an issue.

I’m just going to let Peter stand on the balcony and eat a sandwich.”

So I didn’t give an anonymous tip to his boss.

Whereas these guys probably were dicks about it.

We’re taking time off.

You can’t take time off because you don’t smoke.

His supervisor gave them a warning.

Like you got to stop smoking on the clock.

But then they ignored that and still smoked.

And I bet that’s why they got in trouble.

I bet their supervisor was like, “I tried

to tell you you’re going to get in trouble.”

This is a great piece of Ninja News Japan advice for anyone who’s got a job

anywhere in the world.

Has nothing to do with Japan.

But if you’re messing around on the clock

and someone else challenges you on it,

you got to make that person happy somehow

so that they don’t get you in trouble.

If your supervisor comes and warns you that you got to stop,

you should actually stop because the supervisor isn’t warning you because

they care about you.

They’re warning you because they’re going to end up getting in trouble or

being responsible if you keep doing it.

So they’re not doing you a favor.

They’re just covering their own ass.

If they’re covering their own ass, you actually want to help them do that.

So your supervisor likes you so you don’t get in trouble.

It has nothing to do with right and wrong.

It has everything to do with do people like you and what you do.

I didn’t care that my coworker smoked.

I just was like, he’s taking six, ten minute breaks a day.

I want one or two and he was like after

realizing what was happening was like,

I’m actually okay with either taking 20 minutes if I’m getting an hour.

I’m not going to complain about that and he immediately stopped complaining.

So there was no issue going forward.

If you’re in a similar situation, you got to take a minute and think,

am I screwing around on the clock but do I keep the people around me happy?

That’s maybe the most important element that people sort of forget.

Talk about not making people happy.

A guy in the city I work in, Nagoya, 50 year old dude, so same ages me.

So this is like really resonated with like, would I do this?

Because this guy’s got a very similar sort of life situation.

Although he lives in a dormitory, so I don’t know what that’s like.

He was arrested because he was caught dumping 30 plastic bottles of urine

so the garbage can at work.

So he wasn’t even pouring them in the toilet.

He was just taking a full bottle, like a Coke bottle.

A pet bottle is like those plastic bottles that Coke comes in.

And just hucking them in the garbage.

Now, why did he have that?

Because he was filling them up at home.

He was filling them up at home because he said it was too troublesome.

His home again is a dormitory.

And so it has a shared bathroom.

It was a hassle to go to the shared bathroom,

so I’m betting it was down the hallway.

But that meant he was collecting these 30 plastic bottles of pee.

And then decided it was easier to carry

them to work and dispose of them there

than to carry them, I assume, again down the hallway to the toilet

and throw them in the toilet or just dispose of them around his house.

Maybe he didn’t want them around his house

like he would get in trouble for that.

So I bet the trash can that he was throwing them in was a public trash can.

The 30 bottles, the website I got this information from,

Woodwave, if you use the smaller 350-millimeter bottles,

was 13.6 kilograms of urine, so 30 pounds of pee that he put those bottles

I assume into a backpack or a bag or something,

and then lugged that to the office to

dispose of them, and it was ridiculous.

When he was arrested, he said, “There is no mistake that I threw away

plastic bottles filled with my own urine.”

And that’s when he revealed his motivation was it was too much of a hassle,

it was too troublesome, to go to the shared bathroom in my dormitory.

These are, it’s a violation of Japan’s waste disposal law.

You can’t just take tons of pee and poo and just throw them wherever you

want in this country.

Which is a good thing. That’s a law I support.

And that actually weirdly relates to our previous story,

because taking a ton of pee and throwing it away in public isn’t going to

keep the people around you happy.

And that’s how you end up causing trouble for yourself and getting arrested.

So I guess the solution is don’t do that.

[Music]

Chat asked why didn’t he throw them

away at a con beanie or a public trash can?

No, I, okay.

N-T-B-T show. That’s excellent name.

It’s nittipit show. I don’t know how to, I’m going to have to come up with a

pronunciation.

I would end up just saying N-T-B or N-T.

It sounds like he was using a public, but I mean,

if he went to the con beanie or train station waste baskets,

I bet you’re getting just as much if not more?

I’m not sure. I assume that if you threw it out at the convenience store,

you would get in just as much trouble.

This guy didn’t seem like a deep thinker. How about that? He, sorry.

He was, I bet going to a secondary location,

so he’s going from home to work to home.

I bet in his mind going, because it’s too troublesome to go to the toilet.

It’s too troublesome to do anything.

I bet in his mind anything beyond the basic minimum,

I have to go from A to B is too much.

This is all extrapolation just from reading that one little article.

But I bet his idea of doing anything extra is too much work, is the problem.

So having a minor deviation from his way to work to a different place

where he could anonymously throw away the urine bottles,

I bet in his mind that was too much.

I don’t know, because I don’t have any more information

information and the stuff I’ve already given.

But I’m betting that’s the case.