not till sept/oct I think, but not totally sure yet. 

Or is it just for us with a small currency that speculators don't like to seek comfort in when they've made a mess out of the economy? 

not just you. Been looking at the latest published travel guide which has prices listed as $AU 1 = 100 yen, which is almost half price compared to the actual exchange rate atm. 

Yeah it's become more expensive, probably only temporary hopefully.

Nitin, I could spend hours recommending places to go, but I'll just suggest a few quickies:

If you go to Kyoto, don't miss the Fushimi Inari shrine, it's a bit to the south, but definitely worth taking a quick train/bus ride to visit it. (Second best temple in Kyoto being Kiyomizu).

Try spending a night on Miyajima island if you can, during the day you can climb up the island by cable car, see wild monkeys at the top of the mountain, and then get lost walking back down (good hike). It's one of my best memories from my last trip. Staying the night is nice, you can walk around the small village when it gets dark, great atmosphere.

In Tokyo, if you're going with a lady-friend, spending an afternoon+evening in Odaiba is nice, sunset on tokyo can be really great, romantic.

In Osaka, spending an evening in Dotonburi is great (popular street with lots of lights and restaurants).

Don't forget to eat lots of good food!
I could keep going for a while... =) 

Do you need to speak fluent Japanese in Japan, or can you get around with just knowing the English language? 

"Sumimasen."
"Wakarimasen."
"Watashi wa baka desu." 

 

 

Did you ask "Where is the toilet coming to life?" 

... or has my memory gotten a bit fuzzy since high school japanese class? 

Kyoto is awesome, for all of the two days I spent there, and four days in Japan. We went to Kiyomizu-dera and it was awesome, if Bal says Fushimi Inari is better it's probably worth checking out :)

You can get around without speaking any Japanese in Japan, just expect a certain level of confusion (and not knowing quite what you are eating!).

I even blogged about our trip: http://mikeandemmastravels.blogspot.com/2008/11/japan-day-1.html 

thanks, had noth the kyoto things marked.

I have gone through 2/3 of the travel guide and already there's way too much stuff that I ahve marked (including a highly unlikely but would be cool if I could trip to ogasawara-shoto.

have you been to himeji-jo? pics definitely look inspiring. 

thanks for the link, nice pics! 

Yeah Himeji is very nice, best to go there from Kyoto as a one day trip, no need to stay there the night. There's a garden outside the castle that is very nice too, forgot the name, they sell tasty anago there (conger eel sushi, yummy).
It's alot better than the Osaka castle, if you're planning on going to Himeji, Osaka Castle isn't worth the trouble I think.

Ogasawara-shoto looks cool. I'd still like to illegaly get into Gunkanjima sometime, know some people who've done it and they took some friggin awesome photos. 

Since I remade my site recently, my photo gallery is gone, but I still have some Himeji photos on Picasa:
http://picasaweb.google.com/benoit.stordeur/JapanHimeji#
(Also some photos of Dotonburi, which I talked about in my previous post: http://picasaweb.google.com/benoit.stordeur/JapanOsaka# ). 

what's the feeling there? 

Obviously the Egoshooter (yes, that's what FPS are called in Germany) Counter-Strike - where you get extra points if you use a shotgun to kill the stroller pushing grannies - has killed some people. Even though that dude was said to not being "interested in computers or the internet". 

Bayern Muchen suckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk 

or has my memory gotten a bit fuzzy since high school japanese class?

I had two years of French in High School, two years in college. Can I speak French? Absolutely not. 

Obviously the Egoshooter (yes, that's what FPS are called in Germany) Counter-Strike - where you get extra points if you use a shotgun to kill the stroller pushing grannies - has killed some people. Even though that dude was said to not being "interested in computers or the internet".

I recall reading a blog between the creator of the Irrlicht engine and a developer working one of the Cryteck games, both Germans, talking about how the developers of shooters are treated like child rapist in Germany. We get the same irrationality here, of course.

As every one knows, Columbine was blamed on Doom under the theory that the virtual blows suffered by the teenagers during the game by those fucking imps caused the boys more psychological trauma than the actual blows suffered at the hands of jocks in the fucked up culture of our High Schools. Slashdot did an excellent report on this at the time.

At the risk of adding to unscientific findings in the ways common to media and politicians because I know little on the subject, I have seen convincing reports showing that a common element of past shooting sprees has been the prescription of psychotropic antidepressants. 

1. He was under psychotherapy for depressions, but quit (and nothing happened)
2. One of his collegues said he was regularly mobbed in school
3. He shot almost exclusively women (headshots)
4. He was pretty bad at his already second-rate school
5. His dad left his Beretta and several hundred ammo lying around his parents' bedroom (uhm... why? Also, why did his dad have such a weapon?)
6. A chat room post appeared where he says "no one realizes my potential" (but this may be a fake)
7. He had no friends
8. Apparently, no one ever noticed
9. Some say he was a very good shot with his dad's gun, but apparently he fired about 60 shots. He immediately shot at police, too.

10. All of the above came together

:-(

Oh yeah, he also played computer games and watched videos. A neighbor told the press he watched "horror movies" regularly. No one knows what he actually watched, but it's easy to guess what he played. The same stuff that millions of other people are playing.

I get the impression that the family had moved there from some other place a while ago. If that's true, he was the new kid at school. I may be wrong here though.

The press and politicians claim that it is impossible to explain why he did it. Now this makes *me* want to shoot *them*. It's pretty obvious IMO.

Several people made mistakes, basically.

Nothing will change, of course, and the countdown to the next one has already started.

Also, Germany has a three-tier school system, tier 1 meaning good success and posh kids, tier 3 meaning failure and no job. He was in tier 2, but barely made it. He had gotten a job afterwards, but IDK about the details. Yup, he was out of school for a short while already.

You can only go to college when you finish tier 1; tier 2 ppl normally get medium to bad jobs, if at all. Tier 3's outlook is coal black. It's also due to the current job situation etc. But of course, the guy had personal problems, too.

It has to be noted that the amok run of Erfurt (2002) happened at a tier 1 school though; in that case, the guy shot mainly teachers. Erfurt is in Eastern Germany (again a different situation). He had been fired from his school and thus officially failed (a regional problem). Thus he, too, had a pretty bad outlook (especially considering where he lived).

Plus, what Spirit said. It happened in a smallish town, not actually in Stuttgart. In very southern Germany (ie, a conservative environment). Southern Germany has relatively good economy, while the East and North aren't so prosperous (Berlin, for example, is piss-poor like the rest of the East). It's directly inverse, though, when it comes to progress and personal liberties vs. conservativism. I wouldn't want to live in the South. Incidentally, there is also a confessional split; the South is practically Catholic, while the East is protestant and most people in the North aren't very religious at all. The East has a huge Nazi problem though (this tells me that poverty makes people Nazis, apparently). But I digress.

I don't claim 100% correctness here, but it should come reasonably close. 

6 is a fake and that was proven yesterday via the Google Cache: http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=b747f229

It's amazing how the print media is full of it today. Frontpage stories even. Quoting the ~police that "it's definitely not a fake" Can't wait to have this incompetent morons try to censor the internet... 

He had problems in school, was mobbed by classmates, had problems with girls, had no friends, was clinically depressed, saw no future, and was maybe smarter than you would guess. And then he found a gun.

A frighteningly common story, huh. Up until that last point (and now imagine we had no gun control).

Guilty parties:

Himself (pulling the trigger)
Classmates (mobbing, failing to help, social failure)
Parents (wtf happened with the gun?)
Perhaps teachers (failure to notice and take action)
School system
Social system
Health system
Economy

... bah, it's impossible to explain, really. Let's go to church (at least once), cry, and then forget about it...

Oh, wait, I forgot "computer games".

:-( 

I find the lack of originality in all these shootings rather depressing, if you're going out with a bang can't you at least be a little bit creative? 

the similarity in these actions seems to suggest that the news media is a better suspect than games/movies.