"If you ever meet a Japanese person…"

The "torch to burn" is for reality, as opposed to lazy, evidence-free pigeon-holing. I'll take the former and leave you the latter.

"… even if the Japanese wouldn't agree with it…"

I live in Japan, have for most of my life, and watch "the Japanese news" every day. Here I see diverse, individual humans acting and reacting with the involvement of diverse influences and emotions and motivations. I don't at all see "simply that Japan is a shame based culture". I don't see anything "simply" at all.

And I'm calling BS on this notion of some polar difference. It's fine for people to state their opinions or impressions, even with soundbite-friendly pigeonholing like "shame based culture". But the claim should be accepted as real only on the basis of evidence (not assertions / opinions / impressions).

I've been going through this entire massive comments thread just to see whether someone, anyway, would give that a mention.

Ooh, let me play, too! It's all about Asians "shaming their ancestors" when dishonorably "losing face" under Confucian values, for which honorable "atonement" can only come from committing Harry Caray with a sacred samurai katana sword in front of the Mikado under the cherry blossoms. For honor. And toss in "bushido",…

In cheesy Hollywood scripts and stereotypes, yes, "shame in Japan is… well, it's far more serious than shame here in the US".

A foreign company certainly could buy up Konami's IP. Or the company itself. Theoretically. If there were willing parties on both sides…

Japan's laws do not forbid foreign companies from buying Japanese companies. Where in the world did you come up with that?

"Stockfish"? Wasn't that the dot-com boom startup that promised to contextualize customer-facing infomediaries leveraging real-time turn-key B2C visualization of enterprise inventory?

Sometimes a chess game is just a chess game.

That makes a crapton of sense.

No Bush administration for seven years? Thanks, Obama.

So many viewpoints:

… or the other way around.

Ahem! That "fuck" is well established in Japanese, set in stone as ファック (with the glottal stop), or "fakku". And about that "vo": "v" has been glossed for many decades in the language as ヴ . "Vo" is ヴォ, appearing in words like ヴォーカル ("vocal"). Yeah, it's a linguistic newcomer, but it's handily beating back the pre-"v"…

If I stop using an iPhone, can I, too, be a bitter rage machine shouting at strangers?

80s tunes on Todd's phone. Next week it'll be revealed that the white supremo guys are totally into synthpop, hair metal, and day-glo leg warmers. They call themselves the Neon Nazis.

Metamucil.