I’m not a woman, but almost every one of my foreign woman friends in Japan prefers life in Japan to living overseas.  Certainly Japanese women (in my experience) tend to view Japan as a much safer country than say the US.  FWIW.

Nobody is disputing that Japan WAS and in many places still IS quite ethnically homogeneous, so please keep your strawmans out of this discussion.

An increase of 30% in 6 years is a LOT. Any way you spin it. I realize other countries are higher but this is a big change for Japan. Tokyo in total is pushing 4% foreign residents and several wards are over 10% - Shinjuku is about 12% as of last year.

Nepal and Vietnam are the biggest contributors recently.

Have you BEEN to Japan lately?  It’s not the US but in the last 5 years especially there are SO many immigrants.  

Why’s that?  Lots of long term residents from all ethnic backgrounds, and even citizens.  Japan’s far more welcoming than some would have you believe.

Still not exactly controversial.  They’ve been exposed and aren’t vaccinated - excepting the unlikely edge case, they could have easily (and SHOULD have) been vaccinated, in which case there wouldn’t be any issue with their travel.

How is this controversial?  If you have an infectious disease and can very easily infect others, you shouldn’t be traveling and putting others at risk.

You and the other posted have the math wrong by several orders of magnitude. It’s a huge amount of water - run the numbers on V(mars+1.5m)-V(mars), where the radius of Mars is 3,400,000m.  That additional 1.5m in radius is a a stunning difference in a volume that size, more like a large sea than a small lake.  

Two other facts. First, a larger sensor affords you the ability to get better background blur on in a photo.

I do this, but I like taking pictures of nice food is why, and I don’t particularly like hot food.  Don’t care about likes etc either.

Uber has tried to make inroads in Japan the same way they have done in other countries, but they ran into two problems - taxis are expensive but are very safe and reliable, not to mention ubiquitous. Probably more importantly, ignoring the regulators and just “doing what you want” is the surest way to get shut down…

I live in Japan, taxis are great here and I can hail them by appli if none happen to be around. They’re always around though unless you are somewhere particularly remote.

Is paying your friends in cash just Not A Thing in the US anymore? That’s what I always did when I lived there.

Twice is very different indeed - wouldn’t say they are domestic oriented only as they are one of the few K-Pop girl groups to make a pretty big ripple in Japan, and they are ubiquitous all over SE Asia (as is Momoland). I think part of that is deliberately including members from other countries - was strange last…

Can’t speak for the P30 but my P20 Pro takes amazing pictures - as long as you keep it in Pro mode and control your settings yourself. The AI assistance in the normal Photo mode sometimes makes some strange decisions...

Curious if you avoid AT&T and Verizon for their ties to US warrantless surveillance? 

It’s pretty stock, actually.  I own a P20 Pro and I’ve owned several stock Android devices and EMUI feels quite close to stock to me.  

Bingo.  I can’t understand why people get worked up about it.  I mean, it’s a device that is already giving every bit of data about you to Google.

What, does a web browser not work on an iPhone?