Month: February 2011

China becomes World's second largest economy surpassing Japan

Post author By ageekinjapan
Post date February 14, 2011
3 Comments on China becomes World's second largest economy surpassing Japan

The government of Japan has just published its latest GDP data confirming officially what everybody else already knew, China is the second largest economy in the World by GDP. The GDP of Japan contracted by 0.3% in the last semester of 2010; however 2010 was not a really bad year because as a whole the GDP grew by 3.9% in 2010. The prospects for this year are quite good but it’s almost sure that Japan will never be able to keep up with China, whose economy is booming.

In this article on The Wall Street Journal they say something very interesting:

“If Japan’s economy had grown 1% more per year over the past two decades, then we could have stayed ahead of China for another 20 years.”

It’s pretty impressive how a mere 1% every year can change things over a long period of time! But Japan couldn’t do it; in the last lost decades Japan hasn’t been able to adapt to a fast-changing world and hasn’t been able to keep up the pace of growth they had after the war.

Sources: WSJ 1 and WSJ 2.

Related posts:

Drinks

Coffee foam art

Coffee foam art is a really good example of how much importance Japanese people give to details in the presentation of food and other services. Sometimes more time is spent taking care of the presentation than the preparation. Some of these coffees look so beautiful that it’s a pity to drink them:

Coffee foam art

That’s not coffee! It’s tea foam art.

Various

Murder announcement in 2 Channel

Post author By ageekinjapan
Post date February 12, 2011
1 Comment on Murder announcement in 2 Channel

At the beginning of last week somebody with the nickname “Mato” ( 殺す ) wrote a message in 2 Channel (the most visited forum / BBS in Japan) saying that he was going to kill people indiscriminately on the streets near Shinjuku station south exit on Friday (yesterday) at 9:00pm. The announcement quickly spread around Twitter and in just some hours everybody in Japan knew about it.

42　：Mato：2011／02／06（日）　15：51：35
On February 11st at 9:00pm, in the south exit of Shinjuku station, near the bus stop I am going to kill three people. If you don’t want to die, don’t participate in the game. I am going to execute my plan no matter what happens. I really feel like I want to kill.

Yesterday afternoon, in Shinjuku station, there were more policemen and members of the Self-Defense Forces (Japan armed forces) than pedestrians.

Fortunately they caught the suspect that wrote the message on the Internet before he killed anybody. It turned out to be a 15 year old high school student!! No further information about the arrest has been released, only the suspect’s age.