My part of Japan has been sticking to the mid- to high-80s and occasionally a 90 or 91, though the heat index often kicks it a bit higher. As most of my family are living in Oklahoma or Texas, I am not allowed to make any complaints about the heat. I leave that to the locals. Toyama, even though it's farther north, seems to be stuck in the low 90s with a much higher heat index. But it only has about half the humidity that Kumamoto is getting.

Basically, expect August in Japan to be hot, prepare accordingly, and enjoy yourself. If it gets too hot, plan a trip into the mountains.

I remember that one. It was lost in the Great Server SNAFU of 2012.

Do you mean for foreign dubbed stuff or domestic dubbed stuff? Foreign stuff gets dubbed all the time, but the actors often use these traditional sorts of stage voices that sound ridiculously hammy and forced. For domestic animation, there's a trick to it. Apparently there's something in the way the Japanese language is metered that makes it easy to fake lip-synching in animated sequences.

I think I've mentioned this before.

Apparently a group called the Association of Copyright for Computer Software brought some major lawsuits to bear in the 80s that caused a halt to all video game rentals in Japan. I've certainly never seen a place that rented game software or hardware of any kind. The same group has tried to take out second-hand games sales at various points in the last twenty years, but with far less success.

Kotaku, of all places, has a detailed and accurate account of the rise and fall of rental gaming in Japan.

Cremation is the only means of dealing with the body in this country. There just isn't enough space for Western-style cemetaries. The only bury-in-the-ground cemetaries that I know of are now considered historical sites connected to the early foreign communities in Nagasaki. Also, since Shinto doesn't have much to do with life after death (cf. the myth of Izanami and Izanagi for some reasons why), Buddhism stepped in centuries ago to fill a theological niche in the cultural ecology. Typically, there is a big ceremony at the funeral parlor, where friends and relatives step up to console the bereaved in front of the casket. Post-cremation, relatives will sit around the box of ashes and pick out the remaining bones with a pair of long chopsticks. They pass these relics chopstick to chopstick around the table, finally placing them in the funeral urn. (This is, by the way, why one never passes food chopstick to chopstick in Japan.) The urn may be kept in a personal shrine at the family's house for years, especially if it holds the remains of grandparents. Eventually it may be placed in the family gravestone, which is a small monument kept in one of Japan's incredibly small and crowded Buddhist cemetaries. Ancient and powerful families of Japan may have their own private spaces on a mountainside with personal shrines for important family members. In Kumamoto, the Hosokawa family (formerly the daimyo of Higo and now the occasional governors of Kumamoto) has several ancestors so honored in a small park on Mt. Tatsuda in the middle of town.

During O-Bon (this week), many families will make a special visit to the family gravestone to clean it and honor their ancestors.

It's very focused on any event where Japan is strong, but recently the news has been good at showing all of the competitors, and not just the Japanese, at an event. Also, there are channels here that are specifically for showing the Olympic events as they happen. All in all, it's much better coverage than what NBC has been doing, from what I can see.

For a routine physical? I'd probably have to pay twenty bucks. For an official physical, of the sort that can be used in compliance with certain certifications, I'd have to pay a good deal more for various bureaucratic reasons. I've never had to get one of those, thankfully.

Many of the issues I've had or seen with the Japanese system have been with the people side of things. The Japanese tend to be very authority-conscious while at the same time very wary to ever admit to an error, and this makes for a bad combination at times. It's still uncommon to ask for a second opinion over here. Doctors will make mistakes from time to time, but have a hard time admitting it, and that sense of infallibility in authority makes it hard to gainsay them even when it's necessary to do so. Younger doctors seem to have a better time admitting when they're not sure about a diagnosis, but old doctors will often stick to their guns no matter what the results actually are.

The worst story I ever read about this was several years ago. Back around the turn of the century, this woman had come in with a pain in her chest. X-rays had shown something, and a biopsy was done. The senior doctor made the diagnosis of tuberculosis, and for the next seven years the woman continued with TB treatments, until she died of lung cancer. The senior doctor had retired years before, and his replacement had never checked the woman's file again, trusting in the authority of his senior. After the woman's death, her file was examined. As it turned out, the senior doctor had made a diagnosis before the biopsy had come back, and no one had checked to see that it confirmed his decision. If they had, they'd have seen that the lump in the woman's lung was actually stage 1 lung cancer. But no one looked because they all trusted in the doctor's knowledge and authority. He never looked because he'd made his assessment and never second-guessed himself. The patient never got a second opinion, even as her condition worsened, because she believed that the doctors knew best, so the option never crossed her mind. It was sort of a perfect storm of authority, ignorance, and pride. Also, this was not the sort of thing someone should read while waiting in the doctor's office and sick with mononucleosis, but...

I can find a lot of things from back home, just not frequently. If I want Dr. Pepper or goldfish crackers, I'm going to have to look hard. If I want to have some real cheddar cheese, I'm going to have to pay a pretty penny. Of all the foods from home that I could want, Skittles and pepperoni pizza tend to be the hardest to come by. Never could figure out why, though.