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https://www.tofugu.com/japan/j...

He doesn't really study during college. But then he's really not the only one. The statistics are clear – Japanese students do not study. An earlier Japan Times article quoted some University of Tokyo research which stated that Japanese students study far less than American college students. Takashi skips a few classes a week, and for the lessons that he goes to, even if his classmates are physically present a large number are having a mental vacation in dreamland while the lecturer drones on.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and https://www.tofugu.com/japan/j...

Nintendo for years was like Apple - above reproach and doing it their own way, but now it's having to play everyone else's game for the sole reason that not enough people were playing their games.

Nintendo still very much is that way in the sense that they're control freaks when it comes to their own IP. In fact a lot of Japanese game developers are. If you peruse youtube a bit, you can find a lot of the people who upload their plays always complain about how Japanese companies are so hostile towards the gaming community, whereas game developers located basically anywhere outside of Japan aren't.

Example: (pardon the voice)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Compare that to every other game developer in the world, who actively encourages gamers to upload play videos, etc. It's no wonder Japanese games have really fallen out of favor in every place in the world that isn't Japan. Oh, and this doesn't help either:

http://www.tofugu.com/2014/03/...

CJK is supported, but the early Unicode committee unfortunately decided to "unify" the codepoints of characters with shared ancestry, even though they may be rendered differently in different language.

Technically speaking, Unicode represents characters, not glyphs, so it's a matter of whether you consider the different language-specific visual representations of those characters to be distinct characters themselves, not simply visual differences of the same character (which most native speakers would, of course). Obviously, since most text would not bother to interject a Chinese version of a character into an otherwise Japanese text, this works out reasonably well in most situations, so long as you're indicating which language you're reading (something Unicode was not supposed to need, right?). However, this multiple mapping creates significant difficulty for scholarly work in particular, which may need to reference individual glyphs of various countries within a single piece of work - something that was not easily done thanks to the way the characters were unified. Or for instance, say you have a small section of Japanese text inside a larger Chinese document, or vice versa, as you might see on the web... oops, sorry.

In version 3.2, Unicode introduced the ability to select among visual variants to help solve this issue, but I think many people feel this is a bandaid (and apparently poorly supported) solution over a poorly thought-out decision in the first place, made by representatives from North America corporations (with Chinese advisers) who didn't appreciate or care about the problems they were creating with this decision for other countries like Japan and Korea. It also may be the case that there was pressure to fit the codes into a 16-bit space, which was an initial goal until it was recognized to be completely infeasible to do so, but is pointless with the large encoding space we have today of a million character code points. Note that separate encodings would take 120,000 points instead of 21,000, which while significant, could easily be accommodated even today.

I have no idea what other flaws AmiMoJo is talking about, but the gripes with the way the committee handled Han unification was legitimate.

the most insidious vicious freedom destroying authoritarian government possible, would dose the populace with heroin, as the ultimate exertion of absolute control

there exists nothing that is capable of destroying free will better than hard drugs

bars in the mind, an interrupt switch in your very consciousness, is far greater control against your free will than any physical restraint possible

and look:

authoritarian control via hard drug:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

the fascist origins:

http://www.tofugu.com/2012/04/...

war and imperialism achieved through hard drug:

http://www.victorianweb.org/hi...

you want to destroy freedom? meth, heroin, coke... nothing destroys freedom better

that some cotton candy heads might actually *choose* to destroy their freedom is only a testament to ignorance, stubborn deluded cluelessness, desperate pain without proper social help, and loopy rationalizations

there is no greater fight at preserving and extending freedom than the basic maintenance effort of civilization to minimize the drug trade

drugs destroy lives and freedom at a root far deeper than any social hierarchy or political ideology: chemistry over mind

Otherwise history is going to look very different in the near future. Holocaust? Sorry, no records available. Khmer Rouge? Never happened.

You do realize that those events are documented by first hand accounts and historians right? How is being erased from Google's databases close to erasing the memories of witnesses or even the ability of historians to publish books? Not even close sorry.

As far as the internet is concerned, if you don't appear on Google, you don't exist. Practically speaking, a lot of people doing research today start with a quick google search. If they don't get any results, they are likely to assume the subject doesn't exist/never happened.

As for your point about historical records, accounts etc, the same are often accused of being fabricated/simply ignored. For example, even today there are many who deny that the Holocaust ever happened. Similarly, until today the government of Japan still denies that the Nanking Massacre occurred.

My point is, if this information is freely available on the web, it is much harder to deny the truth. Make this information disappear, and it is much easier to brainwash the public into believing it is a lie.

This brainwashing process has already begun.

Student show an iota of initiative and wants to program computers? Father lectures the child that is a way to be a failure.

Anything that deviates from the norm as it is, is considered to be bad. There is a saying there: "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.". I think the expression speaks for itself to be honest.