Shawn's blog

The National Museum for Emerging Science and Innovation, known as Miraikan, reopened last Saturday after a three-month closure. Part of the Miraikan's ceiling collapsed during the earthquake.

Some video taken on the seventh floor during the quake.

This clip captures the ceiling collapse.

Over the past 10 years, LJ has gone from being a website that tried to warn others about the pitfalls of working for GEOS, to documenting the criminal activities that are a part of eikaiwa, large and small schools alike.

The March 19th edition of the Toyo Keizai magazine reports an embarrassing situation for G.communication.

According to the article (see attached PDF), G.com was looking to raise to some money last October, so it sought financing from Yohohama-based BOW Networks and put up a sizable chunk of its shares in G.Taste, G.Networks, and Yakiniku Saki as collateral. The shares amounted from around 4 to 10 per cent of G.com's issued stock and had a value at the time of about 500 million yen.

One aspect of the disastrous earthquake and tsunami is that it has caused certain food items to disappear from stores all over the Kanto region. Although I live in Chiba, hundreds of kilometers away from the disaster area, you'd be hard pressed to find milk, rice, bottled water, bread, instant noodles, or any other packaged ready-to-eat item. That said, the shelves are still full of fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, and fish.

The shelves at my local supermarket look like this:

With the JET Programme potentially slated for the chopping block, it seems that nobody is showing enough concern for the program's future. Cue JET alumni:

Time to pop some champagne as this past weekend marked the tenth year for the domain letsjapan.org. It's hard to believe this site has been up for a decade now.

This is revolting. Tatsuya Ichihashi has written about his 31 months as a fugitive while in prision. According to the book's publisher, Gentosha, the book is "'part of an act of contrition for the crime," and said he plans to hand over any royalties to Hawker's family.'"

This was mentioned in comments in a previous thread on GEOS, but the Honolulu school is no longer accepting students. The Honolulu page on GEOS.net looks like this:

The last I checked, April 1st is still a few months away, but that's the question the Yomiuri shimbun asks in a brief article about G.communication's attempt at running a university.

The kanji for 2010 was "sho"（暑）meaning hot. Looking back on the year, as far as this blog is concerned, the word of the year is probably "GEOS" owing to the closure of its schools in Australia and then its bankruptcy in Japan. On the other hand, if you worked for Nova when it collapsed in 2007, the fact that the trustees have started paying unpaid wages probably came as a pleasant surprise. For what it's worth, here's a recap of the issues covered on Let's Japan.