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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2143 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for August 9, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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What year did you move to Japan? Pre-1993?

1998, August. Why?

Just curious if you saw it before the crash.

Ah. No, I was here well past bubble years, or the babburu jidai バブル時代　as it is remembered here, though one read much about those days even when I was first here. I can't imagine, from reading and hearing about it, how much the world must have seemed like a playground in those days. The wild excesses strain credulity. Nothing gold can stay, I suppose.

I have a friend who was working there at the time. If you were walking through the financial district (and were a reasonably well turned-out foreigner) strangers would literally grab you and pull you over so they could buy you dinner.

Fortunately a lot of the money got put into building programs. Museums, bridges and so on. Not all of which were necessary, or great value for money, but at least there was a legacy that outlasted the bubble.

I have been to places even now where it is very likely that I am the first real-life white dude anyone has ever seen. The foreign population here is still only about 2 something %, and caucasians are not the majority (that would be Chinese.) No one's ever randomly bought me dinner, though. Ou sont les neiges d'antan?

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