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Things I did not know, but upon thought, are actually pretty obvious:
Japan has a significant homelessness issue!
Again, I love learning about Japan, you just hae to sift through so much weebified shit that treats the entire country like a theme park to actually learn anything.
Tokyo cracks down on ‘kasuhara’ amid rise in customers abusing staff
Japan is celebrated for its exceptional levels of customer service. But the behaviour of a growing number of customers and clients leaves a lot to be desired.The rise of the abusive consumer has prompted authorities in Tokyo to introduce the country’s first ordinance – a locally approved regulation – to protect service industry staff from kasuhara – the Japanese abbreviated form of “customer harassment”.
While the Tokyo ordinance, which will go into effect in April, does not carry penalties, experts hope the move will highlight a growing social problem and, perhaps, encourage people to think twice before taking out their frustrations on staff.
A union survey this year found that almost one in two workers in the service sector – which accounts for 75% of employees in Japan – had been subjected to customer meltdowns, ranging from verbal abuse and excessive demands to violence and doxing on social media.
In one instance, an assistant manager at a supermarket in Tokyo received a call from a shopper claiming that the tofu he had bought at the store had gone off, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. When the employee visited the shopper’s home to check, he found that the tofu – a product with a short shelf life – had been bought a fortnight earlier.
Not wanting to alienate the shopper, the employee tried to remain diplomatic but was then ordered by the customer to prostrate himself and apologise.
Outbreaks of rage have crept into local government offices, with one female employee at a Tokyo ward office recounting how an elderly resident accused her of wishing she would die and invited her to drop dead instead.
“It seems that people feel they can say whatever they want when dealing with public servants because they are paying tax,” the official told the Asahi. “ I wish they could understand that employees are human beings too.”
The labour ministry is reportedly considering tightening the law further to address kasuhara across a wide range of sectors, including public transport, restaurants and call centres.
The Tokyo metropolitan assembly approved the ordinance last week under pressure from unions and industry representatives, which warned that the scourge of the disgruntled customer was spreading to other parts of the country.
Three other prefectures are considering similar measures, while some municipalities and firms now give employees the option of displaying only their given names on their ID badges. A Tokyo department store this year said it would ban troublesome customers and call the police in serious cases, while other firms, including Nintendo, have said they will not engage with abusive people.
Things I did not know, but upon thought, are actually pretty obvious:
Japan has a significant homelessness issue!
Again, I love learning about Japan, you just hae to sift through so much weebified shit that treats the entire country like a theme park to actually learn anything.
Not the place for me to comment on the country generally, but separate from that I'm always surprised by the quality of NHK English, with that video being no exception. It's more, say, BBCish than regular NHK. I wonder if there's a story there - staffed by ex-BBC folks, etc.
There probably are crazy customers in Japan but I'm just past a week on holidays moving through Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto and now Osaka - and I only saw one crazy customer - a tourist who complained she wasn't being served her icecream for her two young kids from the counter the treats would be collected from. Actually, the signs were there in the 4 main tourist languages (Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English) and it was a misunderstanding because her icecream was still being prepared - she just had to wait a minute and it would have been her turn to collect them.
From what I've experienced, they're of an incredibly stoic and repressed character. Getting up and offering elderly passengers your seat is as likely as not to be met with polite refusal. This was particularly so in Nagoya; the Tokyites will push to grab a seat because my lord peak hour metro commute is a horrible crush and a seat guarantees breathing space (one particular trip we were so crowded I could barely breathe with the bodies smashing into each other). Osakans are also nicer than their Tokyo counterparts, saw an office lady get up and offer her seat to a mother who was carrying a sleeping toddler.
With offering your seat, after offering, you literally need to turn your back and walk away. Then they'll take it.
When the employee visited the shopper’s home to check...
I cannot understand this. This is next level service.
On the other hand, we just bought an IKEA couch and their service was kinda shitty.
When the employee visited the shopper’s home to check...I cannot understand this. This is next level service.
It may be a cultural thing. Best practice in America (for small dollar retail returns like grocery, a field I once worked in for years) would be to issue an immediate refund / replacement before waiting to confirm the consumer wasn’t a scammer. “You need to prove the tofu went bad to one of my employees before we’ll entertain a refund” is a whole bunch of alarm bells.
Hmm that's not the practice in Australia and we have fairly strong consumer protection laws. Then again, there is a duopoly here in the grocery space.
I've never gone to the trouble of dumping say a pack of chicken breasts or thighs that went off a day or so before the use by date, because they typically request a receipt as proof of purchase.
As someone who enjoys reading notalwaysright and other customer service stories. The US system is way too friendly. Leads to abuse in many forms.
Best practice in America (for small dollar retail returns like grocery, a field I once worked in for years) would be to issue an immediate refund / replacement before waiting to confirm the consumer wasn’t a scammer. “You need to prove the tofu went bad to one of my employees before we’ll entertain a refund” is a whole bunch of alarm bells.
All that is true here too afaik - I assume the manager visited to apologize/refund, but while there he was shown the tofu and then realized how absurd the customer was being.
slazev wrote:When the employee visited the shopper’s home to check...I cannot understand this. This is next level service.
It may be a cultural thing. Best practice in America (for small dollar retail returns like grocery, a field I once worked in for years) would be to issue an immediate refund / replacement before waiting to confirm the consumer wasn’t a scammer. “You need to prove the tofu went bad to one of my employees before we’ll entertain a refund” is a whole bunch of alarm bells.
It's a mix around here. If it's small value stuff it might be an immediate refund but this is usually tracked, so "repeat offenders" are flagged. For high value stuff it usually requires physical returns (customer uses a carrier or returns in a store) and quality check.
Frontline doc, so it's gonna be long, and probably crushingly sad, but COMPLETELY worth your time.
Disabled orphans bear brunt of China's overseas adoption ban
Eight-year-old Grace Welch has been waiting since 2019 for her older sister to occupy the bed next to hers.
Her parents had told her that, Penelope, a 10-year-old born in China, would be joining the family, who live in Kentucky in the US.
Grace, also adopted from China, was born without her left forearm. Her mother, Aimee Welch, said Penelope too has a “serious but manageable” special need, although she did not wish to disclose it.
The Welch family, who have four biological sons, sought to adopt children with disabilities after the birth of a nephew without arms.
“He taught us all what a person with limb differences can achieve with the right love and support. His birth started us on the path towards adopting Grace,” Ms Welch said. “We believe in the dignity and worth of each person, just as they are, in all their diversity.”
But the pandemic delayed their plans.
Then in September, China announced that it was putting a stop to international adoptions, including cases where families were already matched with adoptee children.
The painful wait will particularly determine the fates of China’s most vulnerable children - those with special needs.
Up-to-date statistics are not readily available, but Beijing’s civil affairs ministry said that 95% of international adoptions between 2014 and 2018 involved children with disabilities.
These children “will have no future” without international adoption as they are unlikely to be adopted domestically, says Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow at the US-based Council on Foreign Relations.
Ms Welch said Grace was especially saddened by the news that Penelope may never come home: “She told me, ‘We were meant to be a family of eight so that everyone could have a buddy.’”
Ms Welch called on China to “keep the promises made to the children already matched with adoptive parents”.
Beijing has not commented since the September announcement, when it thanked families for their “love in adopting children from China". It said the ban was in line with international agreements and showed China’s “overall development and progress”.
Disabled life in China
China began allowing international adoptions in 1992 as the country was opening up, and they peaked in the mid 2000s. More than 160,000 children have been adopted by families across the world in the last three decades.A contentious one-child policy had forced families to give up children, especially girls and kids with special needs. Social stigma around disability had also led to more children with special needs ending up in orphanages.
Dani Nelson, who was adopted to the US in 2017, said she was given basic care at an orphanage in the southwestern city of Guiyang, but it was “not enough for me to live a normal life”.
The 21-year-old was born with spina bifida - a spinal defect - and hydrocephalus, which is a neurological disorder that causes water to gather around her brain.
In her first three years in the US, she had seven surgeries which she said helped her “lead a normal life”.
“I joined a swim team. I got a job… Adoption saved my life,” said Ms Nelson, who now works as a cashier at a coffee shop.
Like in many Asian societies, disabled people in China face discrimination and are sometimes even seen as a source of “bad luck”.
China has made some strides in improving accessibility to the disabled, but public infrastructure, especially in rural areas, are still weaker than countries in the West. It has only recently started developing education institutions and curricula for students with special needs.
Only the most seriously disabled receive financial support from the government.
The BBC had previously interviewed Chinese adults with special needs whose parents have had to stop working to care for them.
Aware of these challenges, waiting families are concerned about what will happen to the children they were meant to adopt, some of whom need urgent medical treatment.
Meghan and David Briggs were matched with a boy in Zhengzhou, Henan, in 2020. The 10-year-old has a “moderate special need that requires medical intervention”, Mrs Briggs said.
The couple live with their biological son, also 10, in Pennsylvania. Mr Briggs said the family made a “wilful choice” to adopt a child who is more vulnerable and less likely to get the specialised care and therapy in an institution in China than with a family in the US.
“Such care is a financial and emotional responsibility. We were prepared to offer this care because we view this child as our family,” said Mr Briggs, who himself was adopted from South Korea.
“He was promised a family by his own government,” Ms Briggs said. “The children are the ones who will suffer with this decision,” she said.
A sense of relief for some
Not everyone agrees.Some, including adult adoptees, are relieved about that Beijing has ended foreign adoption.
“My experience as a transracial adoptee being raised in a predominantly white, Christian city is that you often get looked down upon. I was constantly reminded that I don’t belong,” said Lucy Sheen, who was adopted by a white family in the UK.
Ms Sheen, now in her 60s, added that her adoptive family had little knowledge of her Chinese culture and heritage. She was once told off for asking to learn Mandarin.
“Some adopters have a ‘white-saviour’ mentality or have the ideology that they are bringing us where they come from because ‘West is best’, I think that needs to change,” she added.
Nanchang Project, a non-profit group that helps connect adoptees to their roots in China, said it felt “a sense of relief that no more children will be separated from their birthplace, culture, and identity”.
“We hope this moment can shift focus toward the need for post-adoptive services to support Chinese adoptees and their families for the rest of their lives,” the group said in a statement last month.
Under the new policy, China will only send children overseas for adoption if the adoptive parents are blood relatives. The BBC understands that US authorities are in talks with Beijing on whether a further exception can be made for waiting families.
John and Anne Contant who were matched with five-year-old Corrine in 2019, said they “honour China’s decision to change course on their adoption policy”.
“If there have been more families wanting to adopt domestically, that’s wonderful… Our ask is for these 300 children who have been matched [to families in the US] to be allowed to come home,” he said.
The couple live in Chicago with six children. Three of them were adopted from China and live with albinism, as does Corinne.
The Contants spoke to Corinne via WeChat when their plans to travel to China were shelved because of the pandemic.
“Corinne met our children, saw her home and the room that had been prepared for her, and experienced the excitement our children felt in preparation for her arrival,” Mr Contant said.
“In one of our conversations, she pointedly asked, ‘When are you coming to get me?’”
Haitian gangs recruiting starving children to fight security forces, rights group finds
Haitian armed gangs are recruiting starving children to swell their ranks ahead of an anticipated long and bloody battle with international security forces, a report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) has found.
Armed groups – which control most of Haiti – are enticing hundreds, if not thousands, of impoverished children to take up arms with offers of food and shelter, the rights groups said.
HRW says that up to 30% of Haitian gang members are now children forced into illegal activities as armed soldiers or spies or exploited for sex.
“All the sources we consulted, including children associated with criminal groups, told us that more children are joining the gangs and that it is in preparation to have more personnel available to fight against the international security forces and the Haitian police,” the report’s author, Nathalye Cotrino, told the Guardian. “Eventually, they plan to use children as ‘human shields’ if operations against criminal groups begin in their controlled areas.”
Haiti has fallen into ever-growing chaos and desperation since its president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in July 2021. Across the country, 5.4 million people are regularly going hungry and 2.7 million – including half a million children – are under the dominion of violent armed groups.
Kenya deployed the first contingent of a UN-backed security force intended to restore order to the Caribbean nation in June but momentum has stalled due to a lack of funding, allowing armed groups to bolster their forces in the expectation of drawn-out gun battles over territory.
Last week, the Gran Grif gang massacred 70 people, including some children, in the western town of Pont-Sondé, as it went from house to house unchecked, executing civilians and torching buildings in what the gang’s leader, Luckson Elan, said was retribution for civilians not stopping police and vigilante groups from killing his combatants. Six thousand people were forced to flee the agricultural town, where rival factions are warring for control of the country’s breadbasket.
Gang leaders were publishing videos on TikTok that portrayed them living glamorous lives full of cash, women and flashy jewellery to lure in impressionable teenagers, Cotrino said.
“This attracts the attention of children living in poverty who are often homeless and going days without food. They see it as their only way out of misery,” she said.
Children are often exploited as informants, as they are less conspicuous, but are also forced to carry out extortion and violent crimes such as kidnapping and murder.
Girls are often forced to cook, clean and offer their bodies to gang leaders.
Children interviewed by HRW said they joined the gangs when they were desperate and hungry, but once they had picked up a machine gun there was no way out.
A 14-year-old member of the Tibwa gang – one of the more than 200 criminal groups competing for control of Haiti – told HRW: “Once, they told me to blindfold someone we were going to kidnap. When I refused to do it, they hit me in the head with a baseball bat and said if I didn’t, they would kill me.”
HRW has called for the government to launch programmes to safeguard children and help them demobilise and reintegrate into society.
Aid organisations on the ground say it is challenging to stop minors from being lured into gangs, given Haiti’s state services have all but collapsed, hunger continues to grow and schools are frequently closed.
One humanitarian worker at an educational centre on the edge of Port-au-Prince said it was easy to identify the children once they were in the orbit of criminal groups but it was far more difficult to get them back out.
“Generally, the children start coming in with new clothes, like shoes or jackets, or with small amounts of cash,” the aid worker said. “They also start to withdraw from activities and begin to miss days – at first, one or two days, and then a week – if they return at all. When we notice this, we immediately start a conversation with the child to find out what’s going on. The response is almost always the same. They say, ‘I have to support myself, and they, the gangs, are the only option.’”
Trudeau: India made ‘horrific mistake’ in violating Canadian sovereignty
Justin Trudeau has accused India of making a “horrific mistake” in violating Canadian sovereignty, amid an escalating diplomatic row over the murder of a Sikh separatist in British Columbia and allegations of a broader campaign of threats and violence against Indian exiles.
Testifying at a public inquiry into foreign interference on Wednesday, the Canadian prime minister accused Delhi of rebuffing efforts to cooperate and causing the increasingly bitter public feud that resulted in the mutual expulsion of senior diplomats on Monday.
“We are not looking to provoke or create a fight with India,” Trudeau said. “The Indian government made a horrific mistake in thinking that they could interfere as aggressively as they did in the safety and sovereignty of Canada. We need to respond in order to ensure Canadians’ safety.”
In his most detailed remarks on the saga so far, Trudeau said Canada had not wanted to “blow up” its valuable relationship with India.
But he said that after Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen, was shot dead outside a Sikh temple in British Columbia last June, “we had clear and certainly now ever clearer indications that India had violated Canada’s sovereignty.”
Trudeau made a number of explosive statements, including claims that highly classified intelligence suggested members of the opposition Conservative party were “engaged, or at high risk of” being a part of foreign interference efforts.His comments came in a tumultuous week in which Canadian police accused the Indian diplomats of working with a criminal network led by a notorious imprisoned gangster to target Sikh dissidents in the country. India has rejected the allegations as “ludicrous”.
Responding to Trudeau’s comments, a spokesperson for India’s ministry of external affairs said: “What we have heard today only confirms what we have been saying consistently all along – Canada has presented us no evidence whatsoever in support of the serious allegations that it has chosen to level against India and Indian diplomats. The responsibility for the damage that this cavalier behaviour has caused to India-Canada relations lies with Prime Minister Trudeau alone.”
Trudeau said Canadian officials privately shared evidence with their Indian counterparts who, he said, have been uncooperative.
“The decision by the RCMP to go forward with that announcement was entirely anchored in public safety and a goal of disrupting the chain of activities that was resulting in drive-by shootings, home invasions, violent extortion and even murder in and across Canada,” Trudeau said.
The prime minister said Canadian authorities first raised the Nijjar murder during the 2023 G20 summit in New Delhi. Officials working “behind the scenes” told the Indians “there are real concerns that your security agencies were involved in the killing”, he said.
But when Trudeau confronted Narendra Modi on the final day of the summit, he was told by the Indian prime minister that Canada should do more to crack down on Sikh separatists, he said.
And despite Canadian efforts to engage with Indian officials, Trudeau said, they appeared uninterested in “taking the off-ramp” offered.
Since Trudeau first told parliament of a “potential link” between the Indian government and Nijjar’s murder, Ottawa and Delhi have been locked in an worsening feud over the issue.
India temporarily stopped issuing in visas in Canada, and on Monday Canada expelled six senior diplomats, including the high commissioner, Sanjay Verma. India retaliated by ordering the expulsion of six high-ranking Canadian diplomats, including the acting high commissioner.
Trudeau’s latest statement comes as Canada seeks to convince allied nations to also condemn India’s alleged actions – an effort that has so far produced mixed results.
Earlier on Wednesday, the UK called on India to co-operate with Canadian legal authorities to investigate the allegations, following a phone call between Trudeau and the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer.
The British Foreign Office said: “We are in contact with our Canadian partners about the serious developments outlined in the independent investigations in Canada. The UK has full confidence in Canada’s judicial system … The government of India’s cooperation with Canada’s legal process is the right next step.”
As Canada’s allegations have broadened, it has become more difficult for its allies in the Five Eyes intelligence partnership to remain silent.
Man, I had a by-election to vote at today coz old mate decided he was pro renewable energy (that he jumped ship to being a Federal bureaucrat a few months ago and now again to leading a private sector renewables mob)...and there were no democracy sausages :/ What's going on on this country??
I'm sorry, it's hilarious to find out that Cubans went to China for advice, and China's advice was "maybe stop being communists?"
I'm sorry, it's hilarious to find out that Cubans went to China for advice, and China's advice was "maybe stop being communists?"
I have deleted the long draft I wrote on debates within Communist circles about the role of markets in achieving Communism. It turns out one of my pet peeves is people claiming that only Stalinist Central Planning counts as Communism. The PRC is very definitely Communist. As was the former Yugoslavia, one of China’s models for how to mix socialism and markets. Anyway if you want to read a good book on the political and economic currents for why China is the way it is I can’t recommend enough: How China Escaped Shock Therapy by Isabella Weber.
Yeah. Korea is living through Children of Men.
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