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Japan Pins Tourism Hopes on PDA
Sammy at Palm Addict writes "According to Australia News.com, Japan will start lending PDA's to foreign visitors to help tourists get to grips with the country. The aim is to make Japan more attractive to foreign tourists, who are often put off by the country's language barrier. The PDA's will be loaded with travel information and translation services as part of a tourism promotion scheme. "Japan's tourism authority will lend the PDAs containing Chinese, Korean and English software, to selected tourists who land at Narita Airport near Tokyo from February through March to test the response" Japan's transport ministry said."
Sure, japanese women are often physically pretty and the japanese culture is sophisticated, complex, and ancient.
But the japanese are also quite possibly the most racist people on earth, in my experience. Yes, individual japanese people are often very nice (and painfully polite), but that doesn't mean the general atmosphere you get in japan isn't rather unfriendly, what with all the "no gaijin" signs. A "no japs" sign here would likely get you dragged into court.
I would love to go to Japan, but simple calculations put a 20 day trip there beyond my financial limits and there are still alot of cheaper places in the world I want and financially can see. Just to give you a quote of the Lonely Planet.
Japan is probably the most expensive country in the world for travel
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To do a little more of the same that you're complaining about, although somewhat qualifying your argument in the process... Here are things I heard from people living there... (just passing it along) In Japan (Osaka and Tokyo in particular), I came into contact with some people who had lived there over a year and admitted with some embarrassment that they knew practically none of the language. This made up most of the foreigners who I met. These were mostly guys, some of whom pointed out that they found that speaking purely English was a better way to pick up girls, since the girls preferred to practice their English anyway... and that with persistence, the young girls knew quite a bit of English, but were shy with it at first because they hadn't talked to foreigners before. This was also written in (free) club magazines for foreigners. Go figure. I also talked to someone who had been there for three years, studying Japanese and Japanese history intensively (in Japanese), but still couldn't read certain things and considered that 10 years of serious studying would perhaps be the right amount of effort to have acheived some mastery (qualifying that even this would be insufficient, and that for a non-native to come in and master it is pretty much unheard of at this point). Three years was however enough for this person to have acheived proficiency at singing some songs in a karaoke club. What does this all mean? I have no idea.
I've read about this on other websites, this project is so tiny it's practically nonexistent, there are only 50 PDAs to loan. There is considerable speculation that the project is intended primarily to gather GPS data on tourist travels rather than to provide any useful information to tourists.
After being self-isolated for over a thousand years
Less than 250 years, actually. And there was still contact being made, particularly trade with the Portuguese and Chinese.
then before forced to trade at gun point of the US navy
One right.
humiliated into signing the unequal trade treaties
While the treaties were unequal (yet better than the ones that other countries in the region would get), the Japanese government actually liked them at the time. Particularly those parts limiting their interaction with those nasty gaijin.internally usurped by the youth who felt humiliated
Humiliated by the Tokugawa Shogunate, not the Americans. The Satsuma and Choshu had been suffering long before Perry showed up.
forced into WW2 by this youth
Started hostilities, you mean, by invading Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937. (I'd throw in their invasion of Korea, but since it happened in 1910, that's even too early for a snide WW1 remark.)
declared the bad guys, nuked, occupied
More correct information.
and run by a puppet government
Come on. The LDP isn't that bad...