roobs's comments

I can't show you a specific legislation that says "you cannot hold workers liable for your losses", but the proposition seems a bit absurd to me because that just seems like unlimited liability on the worker; could you sue a worker who has to take extended sick leave because they become disabled or otherwise unable to work?

Again to be clear I'm talking about contract employees 契約社員 who fall under the scope of the Labor Standards act - freelancers who agree to pay a penalty if they breach contract I'm not sure on how enforceable that would be.

I live in Japan and while also not a lawyer I've had experiences with the labor bureau - this is totally false, and even explicitly stated in the Labor Standards Act:

"Article 5: An employer must not force a worker to work against their will through the use of physical violence, intimidation, confinement, or any other means that unjustly restricts that worker's mental or physical freedom.

...

Article 16: An employer must not form a contract that prescribes a monetary penalty for breach of a labor contract or establishes the amount of compensation for loss or damage in advance."

(Source: https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/3567)

This explicitly applies to contract workers (契約社員) too, and protections for employees (正社員) are so strong that it can often take months of documentation to dismiss someone. Whether people know they have these protections, knew they had them before they sign something their company gives them or feel comfortable actually reporting when a company has violated them is a different story. But basic salary is protected strongly enough that most Japanese companies heavily weight compensation on annual/semi-annual bonuses, housing allowances etc... (which are not protected).

The "paper version" is still required - the RFID is authenticated with information from the passport. The idea is at a border the passport itself will be scanned, OCR'd (from the data in the machine-readable zone) and then that information will be used to read the information + signature from the RFID chip to authenticate the document.

I'm not sure when this post was originally written, but at a quick glance I can see some mentioned stores/restaurants that have since unfortunately shut down (like Deus Ex Machina which I used to frequent when it was in Harajuku but has since moved about 45 minutes away to Asakusa). This might not be the most up-to-date resource if you're visiting Japan in the future.

Also, this list specifically recommends the APA hotel chain, whose president leaves copies of his revisionist history book denying the Nanking Massacre in their hotel rooms, often in foreign languages[1]. There are quite a few nationwide hotel chains in Japan like Dormy Inn and JR METS as well as thousands of independents, most of which are listed on price comparison websites and will come in around the same cost as a room at APA. Please consider supporting another hotel, ideally a local one, before APA :)

[1] = many sources, see: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/01/25/national/despit... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/book-foun...

Until they start doing this to you :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rj0a19/made_...

Try Japanese business banking - where you have to pick an OS and stick with it when registering (with a paper form), and must use either the ESR release of Firefox or Internet Explorer. If you don't have a user agent of either of those it won't even let you sign in.

This is one thing the Japanese banking system actually handles pretty well. When you send money, you enter the bank name, branch and account number and it will give you the reading of the name on the account (Japanese names/words can be read in many ways). If you keep trying this on different accounts your bank will disable this functionality and require you to enter the reading on the account to send money to it, until you go into a branch to reset it.

There is definitely similar Japanese-specific issues with specifying readings (especially for foreign names), but this works far better than requiring someone to specify the name exactly on the account to see if it is a match or not. I'm not sure if that would work well in the UK given how much more larger the Faster Payments infrastructure is.

Credit scores are not a thing in Japan. Unless you already have a significant amount of debt, a shaky payment history or other risky factory they will give you the card.

It’s insecure too :)

https://blog.innerht.ml/google-yolo/

I moved from primarily using a MacBook Pro to an iMac Pro a few months ago, and have struggled to find a non-awkward FIDO U2F key due to the ports being on the back. I'm really looking forward to a decent range of BLE U2F keys that are supported on Desktop and Mobile.

I've been living in Japan for about 6 months and recently I've felt a very aggressive local push to get people to use these barcode payment apps. For example I recall in January PayPay were offering a discount at FamilyMart (a konbini/convenience store) for signing up and using their app, then a few weeks ago LINE Pay had a similar promotion. Both apps offer loyalty points for paying with them.

But what's strange is this feels like a backwards step; you can also pay with your train IC card in konbini and now that you can get Suica (one of the train IC cards) on Apple Pay and Google Pay it's significantly faster to use that than unlock your phone, open LINE/PayPay and get the barcode. LINE Pay also have their own prepaid card and Mercari just launched their own prepaid card built into Apple Pay too.

Still, I wonder which (if any) will come out the winner and how many more will pop up in the meantime.