For goodness’ sake
Oshio Manabu’s likeness as drawn by Fuji TV’s court reporter is the absolute spit of Da Pump’s Issa, FWIW. Also: wonder if Oshio was going grey before recent events and he’s been denied access to (or seen it as prudent to stop using) hair dye? Or are his balls not as big and brassy as his front had led us to suspect?
I won’t be the first or last to note this, but it’s incredible to me that Japanese firms can balls up the spelling of words fundamental to their business in English documentation. I have seen official docs from a payroll outsourcing firm that without fail spell “salary” incorrectly; a French restaurant near my house misspells “bistro” on its sign; a cleaners in the reasonably near vicinity gets “cleaning” wrong, and so forth. Like arsed-up kanji tattoos, you’d assume with something so permanent and potentially embarrassing that a little more due diligence would be in order before putting pen (etc.) to paper (etc.); is the assumption just that it looks sorta right and sorta cool and that no-one’s likely to notice if it’s slightly wrong, being equally ignorant?
Mazda’s “iStop” is exactly what I wish would happen to the trend of prefacing product names with a lower-case “i”.
Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice is worth your time and money. Only jarring note was the claim that “dasai” has its origins in the place name “Saitama,” which it doesn’t. While the play on words “dasaitama” has been used to ridicule the prefecture, it was coined long after “dasai” came into common usage.
One of Goldman Sachs’ legacies that may not be very well recognized is its influence as simultaneously a role model and an example of what to avoid. I spoke today to one senior ex-Goldman person who espouses the firm’s emphasis on culture, reputation and client service but prefers not to emulate its ultimately destructive focus on (often short-term) profit to the exclusion of all else. He isn’t alone, either. Further evidence that the tide is turning against GS’s heavily prop-focused model and back toward, well, financial *services*—i.e., putting external clients first? That may be the naive hippy view, but it wouldn’t be a bad thing.
