it does not help a conclusion either way
instead, it shows things are more complicated than what some people would like to believe.

Not the removal of all immigrants… just the one’s that didn’t wait in line like everyone else is doing.

I see. We can only hope that someday, Sergey Brin’s children may have a shot at the good life.

link:http://www.star-alliance.com/star_alliance/star/content/faq.html

Can’t say i seen a lot of white guys foaming at the mouth just because a Korean said so, If they’re inclined to hate someone over before they were born history then I think Pearl Harbor does the trick.

Perhaps a more interesting Japanese example than Softbank is Trend Micro. Founded by Taiwanese nationals Steve Chang, his wife and her sister – current CEO Eva Chen – the company is headquartered in Tokyo and was first listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The current CFO is Indian national Mahendra Negi. It is much smaller than Softbank but 2005 revenues of 73 billion yen probably keeps them all well supplied with bentos. Certainly, foreigners have founded other companies since the Meiji Restoration – like Kirin Brewery, SEGA, Morozoff and NEC - which have gone on to be listed but they had long gone by the time the shares were publicly traded.

Another relatively unseen area of foreign influence is in finance. You might recall last year when Tatsuro Kiyohara, an employee of hedge fund Tower Investment Management, was named as the highest income taxpayer in the land. There are a considerable number of foreign residents in Japan who run their own larger funds who earned more than Kiyohara but who arranged their tax affairs differently. Murakami, he of the recently beleaguered Fund, has just cottoned on to the fact that you can be located in Japan but regulated offshore. This predominance of foreign finance entrepeneurs has really only become significant over the last 10-12 years.

I always think it is better not to argue the toss over issues like how influential the foreign-born DPJ politicians are or what the motives were at Sony for appointing Stringer. Rather it is better to ask whether their appearance was predictable 10-15 years ago. I suspect you would have got long odds on both which tends to suggest that something has changed and perhaps looking into what that might be is more interesting.

If the Japanese economy does continue to recover, I wonder how many of these changes will stick. Japanese companies only started to solicit foreign ideas when they hit the skids. The doors could remain open if their fortunes improve but it could go the other way.

– to me the ’stepford wives’ comment is not part of the debate. it is post-debate.
– now this is sort of ‘insulting’. this is not unique for ‘chinese way’, right? you see “A reluctance to…..and insulting ….” way of ‘debate’ from japanese, american, british, chinese people, everywhere. not just everywhere, perhaps about the similar frequency, and before these cultures mingled. even though i personally believe chinese (and asian in general) traditional education is less rational than western edcuation.
FYI, there is a ‘chinese way’ of irrationality i dispise. it tends to focus on decoration of word, quoting obscure examples and ancient (usually confucian saints) quotes as supporting evidence (rather than applying rigorous logic or statistics) to argue. it started in chinese examination system over 1000 years, esp Zhu Xi in Song Dynasty. Again, this is not unique in China but it is more commonly found in (still today) in many chinese essayists.

re: reluctance to engage arguments on a rational level? i thought the arguments already ended when sonagi switched into the movie channel. we already heard the views from all the sides even though we may still diaagree. that is why we could switch channel. we would have been guilty to this charge if we layed into the stepford wives comment from the start, without having already engaged in rational arguments.
this would be my ‘rational’ answer if that is the question i am supposed to respond to.

—
@curzon,
while ‘inappropriateness or insult’ has never entered my mind, i do not think i could define what constitutes insult to other people. it is for that person to define, not me. now curzon feels offended, i think it is my responsibility to be sensitive and i would sincerely apologize if that caused any bad feeling. it sure was not the intention.

I’d welcome your thoughts on the lost comment noted above now or at a later date.

Anyways, if we are going to discuss common methods of arguement, I could go on about the Japanese proclivity towards laying on the evasionary passive aggression so thick that you can ladel it up with a fork.

Could you clarify what you meant by that?

from: Der Spiegel International, “Why I published the Muhammad Cartoons” (http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,418930,00.html )

Curzon’s OP featured a few real-life success stories in politics and business. I’m wondering if there are any statistics similar to those above comparing economic participation by non-ethnic Japanese with the Japanese. Googling good stats isn’t easy in English, nevermind another language, but I thought it was worth asking. There’s certainly no culture of welfare dependency in Japan, so I’d expect non-Japanese economic participation in Japan to be more like that of the US than of Europe.

That doesn’t mean that Japan is somehow opening up; it means that there are more gaijin so you aren’t treated like a total freak show any more.

And if you look at what these gaijin are doing, they’re either working minimum-wage jobs with no discernible future, or making ridiculous amounts of money and living in expat enclaves in south-central Tokyo.

Zainichi, on the other hand, are doing OK, but that’s because they’re not easily distinguishable from native Japanese, so they can find ways to do everything that Japanese people do.