Starting the year in April
I have kind of grown to like the rhythm of the years in Japan. Starting everything in April seems right now.
Accordingly, this is the last week of the 2023 academic and work year. People are finishing up jobs and graduating from schools.
Next week they will be starting new jobs and looking forward to (?) their new school life.
My eldest granddaughter is starting junior high school in April. I’m also going back to work (for my wife). A big change for both of us!
What is changing for you next month?
RetireJapan TV
My conversation with Philip Brasor last week is here. Check it out if you missed it!
I really enjoyed chatting with him and getting to know him a little better.
YouTube
Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel. We are growing quite strongly this year, and it is largely down to your help and support. We are currently at 4,427 subscribers, which is pretty incredible.
This week we published a video about retiring in Japan.
What are your thoughts on retiring in Japan?
The Forum
The Forum is doing well (34,283 posts so far). Excitingly, we now have over 2,000 registered members (2,123 currently). The forum rules are here. In essense, they are:
- Be nice
- Ask any question you like
- Only answer questions when you have relevant knowledge or experience
Here are the latest active threads:
This week’s books
I finished Swan Song, by Robert R. McCammon. It was kind of like The Stand, but darker and not as well written. Very striking, and it kept me reading, but I’m not sure if I would recommend it. Maybe if you like this kind of thing and are not intimidated by very long novels!
I’m now rereading Stephen King’s On Writing (which is excellent, of course) and trying to finish Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. Very interesting, but not really the kind of thing you read all at once.
This week’s product
I started seeing ads for Henson Shaving everywhere this month, and they have a very compelling story and good reviews, so I (foolishly) ordered one from Canada.
I like the razor just fine, but they have a store on Amazon Japan so that would have been quicker and cheaper…
Been using mine for about ten days. So far I like it. Seems to work better than the cartridge razors I have used in the past, and I love that the blades are only about 25 yen each. Recommend.
This week’s links
- Great news for non-Japanese kids: More foreign students set to be eligible for Japan government scholarships
- This is why I stick to global stock funds: The contrasting fortunes of Britain’s European stock market rivals
- For now. ChatGPT Can’t Plan. This Matters.
- Nooooooooooooo: Can scientists save your morning cup of coffee?
- Interesting: Why Did The BOJ Move Despite Conflicting Evidence on Wages and Prices?
- Nice follow up on buying a jikko bukken: Ghosts in Japan—Love Them or Hate Them, No One Wants to Live with Them and Living in a Haunted House in Japan
- This is one of the things I am worried about growing old in Japan: loneliness. Mammal.ai
- Not a fan of this: ‘It’s a weird dynamic’: the US parents financially supporting their adult children
- Wasn’t aware of this trend: In Japan Maybe You Can “Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm”
- Quick roundup of news: Interest rates up, the LDP down | This Week in Japanese Politics
What do you think? Anything interesting in there?
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The post on loneliness was excellent and informative. We aren’t meant to be alone, and for 99.99% of our history we were almost never alone. We lived in small tribes of 50-100 people who knew us from birth to death. But not today. It’s the most isolating time, and the author is right about extremism, exploitation of this desire, and I fear that it will get worse. Not sure what the solution is, except to do my best to close the laptop, turn off the phone, and join as many group events as I can, with an open heart and a hopeful spirit.
I just retired to Nagoya last year at 78. I moved here from Torrance California in the USA because my wife Masako wanted to spend more time with her mother. I also like her mother because she is so cheerful and used to be a real artist as a seamstress. I really like the cost of living here, as we can afford to explore all over and generally enjoy luxuries that would have been out of reach in California.
I hear a lot of people mentioning loneliness as a problem, but it is never a problem for me. I once lived for some years at a place called Weitchpec on the Yurok Indian Reservation. The Klamath River there was gorgeous and fun for fishing, but the population was only 185 and there was no phone, no TV, no radio, and I had to drive a half mile to my mailbox. If anybody ever came to visit, I could hear them driving up the road long before I saw them.
In those days (1977-1980) we had no computers or email. I used to read a lot and have always liked gardening. Now I spend mornings studying Japanese, and that’s about the only rigorous mental exercise I get but for playing chess on the computer.
You may want to try Feathers, it’s a Japanese brand for shavers and other kind of blades. A friend from UK asked me to get him one last time because they are really popular but expensive there.
The article about older parents supporting their older children was disturbing. Why is it so hard for young people to make a living? Six of my adult children have settled in the US after being raised in Kagoshima, and they are doing fine. Are they just the lucky ones?