The 2-Belo wrote:
> Declan Murphy and fj.life.in-japan is a baaaaaaaaaaad combination:

>>I dropped in to the city hall in Okazaki on Friday to update my gaigin
>>card thingee. Two things caught my eye - one is a chart displayed near
>>the entrance with the number of deaths/births and arrivals/departures.
>>The population had jumped another 500 last month - births in Okazaki
>>outnumbered deaths by 2:1 accounting for 220 of the increase. The rest
>>was a net increase in internal migration. It seems to average 500 a
>>month more or less. The other thing was that a fair bit of the increase
>>was due to the spreading outbreak of gaijinitus, which has spread to
>>include 2.8% of the 350,000 residents, with the number of Koreans as a
>>percentage for alien registrations below 1 in 5 for the first time. How
>>many of them are "westerners" isn't exactly clear.
> 
> I would venture a guess that Central and South American peoples would make up
> the bulk of that. I certainly would hope they're not *all* Novabots.

Around 51% of the gaigin are apparently (Brazil:Peru:Columbia:Other). 
Apparently out at Toyohashi there are something like 18000 south merkins 
registered. The largest groups of "western" gaigin here are the Yamasa 
mob (200 or so - http://www.yamasa.org), the boffins (100 or so - 
http://www.orion.ac.jp) and the large contingent of Mitsubishi Aussie 
engineers. Everybody else is a bloody individual, with a surprisingly 
large number of them long term. There seem to be hardly any novabots 
relatively speaking.

The Brazilians in particular are making a splash. On Thursday I was 
asked to make a radio show (for http://www.763.fm) in English, 
Portuguese, Chinese and Korean to be paid for by the city hall. The 
JET/CIR here (met him for the first time on Saturday) is a native 
speaker of Portuguese, so maybe I'll shanghai him into doing that segment.


-- 
In heaven the cooks are French, the police are British, the mechanics 
are German, the lovers are Italian, and everything is organized by the 
Swiss. In hell the cooks are British, the police are German, the 
mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized 
by the Italians.