Will Miss #435 - fearless piracy

I can't exactly show a bunch of bits flying through a phone line, but I can show this bootleg Disney backpack.

One of the down sides to living in a foreign country, as I've mentioned before, is that you aren't in touch with the pop culture back home. It's not the least bit uncommon for me to be on a Skype call with friends or family and have people talk about how much they enjoy a T.V. show which I have never heard of, and I feel out of the loop and like I'm missing something. Fortunately, one of the things you can do in Japan with little fear of retribution from your ISP or legal entities is pirate television shows via Torrent sites. Back home, such behavior wouldn't be necessary because those shows could actually be watched there. In Japan, well, you have far fewer options aside from waiting until an entire season has ended and buy a DVD set (something which my husband and I tend to do with shows we've downloaded and enjoyed) and play it on your region-free player.

Japanese ISPs tend to look the other way about this particular behavior as long as one is not completely egregious with downloading, and while it's not an admirable thing, it is something that I will miss having the opportunity to do when there's a T.V. show I wanted to see and have missed the initial airing of.

Won't Miss #418 - "Whiplash Wangs"

I'm guessing that the people with filthier minds are going to be sorely disappointed by the content of this post because "Whiplash Wang" does not refer to a male appendage-related issue, but an episode of the old T.V. series M*A*S*H. On the show (and possibly in real life, I don't know),  that was a term for a Korean person during the war who would jump in front of an army vehicle, sustain an injury, and extort money from the Americans. In that case, it was a sad reflection of the poverty people were suffering in wartime. In modern Japan, this sort of thing happens because people are stupid and careless and they know others are so squeamish about the stigma of wrongdoing that they might just cough up some dough.

I have heard many stories in which a cyclist, pedestrian, pet owner, or driver of a vehicle has an accident in which the accident was not the other party's fault, but the "victim" demanded a huge sum of money for personal or property damage. More often than not, the other party throws money at the problem to make it go away before the police are involved. The bullies expect to be paid off in most cases because of the shame and generally passive nature of Japanese people. For foreigners, this is especially scary because of an incomplete understanding of the law, language issues, and the fact that the police are more likely to blame the foreigner by default. Because of the low number of civil cases, many foreigners don't know that this sort of thing is hardly uncommon in Japan. The actual number is masked by the fact that the victims cave in and the police or courts are not involved.

I won't miss having to worry about some idiot nearly killing me with his bike and then blaming me for the damage to person and property and then demanding money from me.