Japan is importing record numbers of workers. Most convenience stores and supermarkets in my town (far from Tokyo) are staffed by 'language school students' (an you can work 28 hours a week on a student visa). Agreements [1] between Japan and other countries to bring more workers are making headlines. At the same time, it's getting harder and harder to stay.
Permanent residency applications are being judged incredibly strictly. Citizenship applications need 10 years of continuous residence up from 5. Business manager visas have gone from needing 5m yen of capital to 30m yen.
It seems pretty clear that the goal is to get workers in for some productive years but make the path for staying difficult. I guess that's one way to solve an aging population problem.
To put things in perspective, Japan is an island and has entry and exit controls on the borders, so it is estimated that 0.05% of the population is illegal immigrants (people not leaving when their visa runs out). And the police can and do stop visible minorities to confirm their residence status on the spot. It is compulsory to carry identification documents if you are a foreigner. (There are questions about the legality of this but it is common and widely practiced).
Relatively small clerical errors causing people to get permanent residency applications denied is becoming a trope. The ones I have heard:
- Client company address changed 4 years ago and the paperwork wasn't filed within 2 weeks.
- A late pension payment 2 years ago.
- Pension and health insurance were paid on time, but the date stamp on the physical payment slips was smudged and so "did not prove" that it was paid on time.
- City hall workers didn't send out health insurance slips in time, applicant (through no fault of their own) couldn't pay by the deadline.
This level of strictness is affecting people's lives, ability to make plans, get mortgages etc.
To add to this, permanent residency application times are now very long. After you complete your application some people are waiting nearly 2 years to get a response. There is a lot of vagueness about what happens if the rules change during your application period.
Unfortunately, tbis may be the simplest and most cost effective way to clear the backlog.
It's unfortunately for people who in good faith made honest mistakes or were victims of honest mistakes. But it also may be a low cost way to filter out bad faith applicants who were never planning to pay pensions/taxes fully. An assymeytry of information means we never see the balance of honest mistake vs dodgy excuse makers....
Alos, Japan tends to play the grey zone of rule interpretation as a buffer zone for signalling hard feedback. it is generally periodic and ends after a while.
We had an interview scheduled at the start of February which you cancelled with 30 minutes notice stating you had filled the position. Since then, the position has been posted online and to HackerNews hiring threads.
Perhaps there has been a communication mix up here?
(also, when I tried to sign up to your service it was impossible to actually log in)
We had an interview scheduled at the start of February which you cancelled with 30 minutes notice stating you had filled the position. Since then, the position has been posted online and posted to HackerNews hiring threads.
Perhaps there has been a communication mix up here?
I saw a casual lecture given by Tony Hoare as a teenager. The atmosphere was warm and welcoming, even if I didn't fully understand all of the content. I remember he was very kind and answered my simple questions politely.
Imposter syndrome is a thinking trap. A couple of things you can do to help:
Try to separate out 'ruminating' from 'thinking'. What's the difference? For our purposes 'thinking' has a fixed outcome and an end point. Trying to solve a coding problem. Working out how to make dinner. Calculating your taxes. When you reach your goal, you're done and you stop. 'Ruminating' has no end point. There is not end or action associated with it. The tricky part is that it often masquerades as thinking, so you feel like you're solving a problem.
For example, you do a job interview and you go over and over what happened in your mind. "Maybe I should have answered this differently". "Maybe I should've prepared some more of these questions". Of course, you can't change what happened in the past. You're just rolling the ideas around in your head and probably making yourself feel worse and worse. Rumination can be focused on the past, the future or even some hypothetical, imaginary situation ("What if I lost my job", "What if my house burnt down"). Again, actual preparation (Saving an emergency fund. Getting insurance) has an action associated, but rumination never ends, it just keeps going around in your head.
The other thing is to keep an accurate record of your performance. This will be different for everyone, and varies a lot depending on the job. The key thing is to make the record as close in time to the action as possible. For example, you feel like your pull requests aren't as good as other people's. Don't wait until the end of the week and then reflect on the quality of your work. Instead, every time your make a pull request, write down an accurate, objective assessment of the quality.
People who suffer from imposter syndrome tend to forget their wins and remember their losses again and again (there's that rumination!). By having an accurate record that you made yourself you can cut through this and show to yourself your true performance.
I enjoyed reading your thoughts on thinking and rumination. I fall prey to circular thinking myself. This can unsettle my wife at times as she is not this way inclined. I can incite worry, while I move on and probably forget about the very concerns I have been raising.
I have been learning to quieten my ruminations by keeping a journal. This stops all the meanderings escaping. A kind of triage so to speak, where important thoughts get revisited and the rest stay in a journal no one will read.
People who do lots of work and ship lots of projects tend to have a certain level of mess in their workshops. Creation is repeated cycles of trial, play, reflection and tidying.
For anyone thinking about trying out Obsidian, here are some problems I have solved with it:
- Remembering where I met someone, what we talked about and then connecting up with them at a later date. My ability to remember names is easily 10x because of obsidian.
- Seeing who in my family's birthday is coming up soon and their address so I can send them a card.
- Graphing how far I've run for each day/week and any quick training notes.
- Showing me friend's restaurant suggestions on a map when I've got a free evening and I want to try something new.
And all of this stored locally and synced onto many devices.
If you're curious I highly recommend starting simple. Don't worry about plugins, just write a quick daily note every day about the information that is important to you. When you feel like you're outgrowing that, adopt a structure that fits you and solves your problems.
The problem is there's "mess" and then there's mess, and it's nontrivial to distinguish the two.
Ultimately, it comes down to: can you find something you're looking for? For most people, this will require some amount of organization as they will not be able to remember the location of every individual thing, but what this organization looks like may seem inscrutable to someone else.
I have stub notes for people I've met, and link to them in the journal section of my daily note when I've met them; I can then check the backlinks on that person's note when I want to check where I've seen them before.
Not the OP, but I've got a "Names to remember" evergreen note in my Reference folder. Within it, I have a few headings (e.g. neighbours, or locations), and a bullet point for each person, with context that will trigger the memory. That might sound like there's a lot of structure, but it's really the act of writing it down in the first place that helps me remember.
I use Obsidian for the same purpose as the sister comment. I have a long old note where I add the name and a minor info for new acquaintances. Mine is charavterised by the environment of acquaintance, i.e Work/Town/Rave/Hobby/Online. Rarely need to refer back once ive written down.
I make a new card in a folder called People whenever I meet someone. Then I add information like email address, phone number, connections to other people when relevant.
I find engaging like this helps my memory already on its own, but if I'm ever really stuck with a name I just take a quick look at my phone. The person is usually linked to the event where I first met them or similar.
I use the Tracker plugin [1] to make charts of things like running distances etc.
For maps, I have a folder called Places and each markdown file in there is a place. I add latitude and longitude to the frontmatter and then display them on a map.
if you mean "graphs" as in "plots", you can just use matplotlib with some Markdown parser. the Templates plugin (built-in) helps maintaining cohesive structure that helps both parsing and human comprehension.
for maps, there is an Obsidian Maps plugin. recent addition, built-in as well. I personally don't use it much, but I know the kind of person who would be very happy about it!
and then there is an up-and-coming Obsidian CLI, which is in paid beta. the license is cheap, around $25 for forever access to current and future betas, but it's optional.
I like the message but I think it's worth tempering people's expectations. I spent years working with a few different voice teachers and the amount of practice and dedication you need is substantial. Even after the best part of a decade I am unable to belt.
I started using obsidian about a year ago and I have found it to be an invaluable tool.
The key is using it to solve problems you actually have, rather than problems you want to have.
I was losing track of people's contact details --> I made an addressbook in obsidian.
I wanted to track my exercise to find out how much I was running each week --> make graphs
And so on. Your obsidian should get a bit messy before you try to impose order on it. Use it to solve a problem badly (Just writing down how far I run in a daily diary note) then improve (Writing a query to turn all of those notes into a graph).
Personally I don't use any AI with my knowledge base. Good searching tools and a little bit of organization are the most useful thing for me.
Personally, I think keeping lots of notes/links is a kind of digital hoarding. Just like real hoarding, it's an emotional problem not an organizational problem. If you can work out what emotional need hoarding links is fulfilling for you then you're on the way to working out how to get that emotional need fulfilled by something else.
I think this is an underrated point. A lot of “knowledge management” is really anxiety management — saving feels like progress, and deleting feels like losing options.
One thing I’m trying to learn is whether the “fix” is actually less intake / better filters (so you don’t hoard), versus better retrieval/action tooling after the fact.
For you personally: what has helped more — changing the capture habit (rules/quotas/digests), or having a ruthless review/delete loop? And what triggers you to save in the first place (fear of forgetting, future usefulness, perfectionism, etc.)?
For someone who hasn't grown up speaking an language with tones or pitches, the process of learning them can be maddening. I applaud anyone who makes tools like this to try to make the process easier.
My experience in learning Japanese pitch accent was eye-opening. At the start, I couldn't hear any difference. On quizzes I essentially scored the same as random guessing.
The first thing that helped me a lot was noticing how there were things in my native language (English) that used pitch information. For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.
The next part was just doing lots of practice with minimal pairs. Each time I would listen and try my best to work out where the pitch changed. This took quite a lot of time. I feel like massed practice (many hours in a day) helped me more than trying to do 10 minutes regularly. Try to hear them correctly, but don't try too hard. I didn't have any luck with trying harder to 'understand' what was going on. I liken it to trying to learn to see a new color. There isn't much conscious thought.
The final piece of the puzzle was learning phrases, not individual words, that had pitch changes. For example: "yudetamago" could be boiled egg or boiled grandchildren. Somehow my brain just had a much easier time latching on to multi-word phrases instead of single words. Listening to kaki (persimmon) vs kaki (oyster) again and again seemed much harder.
Of course, your mileage may vary with these techniques. I already spoke decent Japanese when I started doing this.
> For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.
Wow… Thanks for making it clear that English also has tones! I hadn’t thought of it this way before. “Uh-huh” sounds similar to Mandarin tones 3 & 2. “Uh-oh” is similar to Cantonese tones 1 & 3.
I’m wondering if we can find good examples to teach the Mandarin tones. I think two or three syllable words are best because it illustrates the contour of the tones.
Pitch levels are important enough in English that native speakers spontaneously develop ways to write them down, even though the standard written language has no way to indicate them.
However, they operate at the level of the sentence rather than the individual word, which sets up a conflict if an English speaker wants to learn Chinese.
The most common uses of pitch in English are to annotate the grammatical structure of a sentence, making it clear which words belong together in larger phrases, and to mark yes/no questions.
English does have one clear example of lexical tone, the "I don't know" word, which is pronounced very similarly to the Mandarin pinyin éēě. (If pronounced with the mouth open. With the mouth closed, it would be more like 嗯嗯嗯 in the same 2-1-3 tone sequence.)
Permanent residency applications are being judged incredibly strictly. Citizenship applications need 10 years of continuous residence up from 5. Business manager visas have gone from needing 5m yen of capital to 30m yen.
It seems pretty clear that the goal is to get workers in for some productive years but make the path for staying difficult. I guess that's one way to solve an aging population problem.
To put things in perspective, Japan is an island and has entry and exit controls on the borders, so it is estimated that 0.05% of the population is illegal immigrants (people not leaving when their visa runs out). And the police can and do stop visible minorities to confirm their residence status on the spot. It is compulsory to carry identification documents if you are a foreigner. (There are questions about the legality of this but it is common and widely practiced).
[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/10/27/india-valua...
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