w00kie

I don't think you're factoring in the weather: Tokyo is incredibly hot and humid in Summer (even more than Singapore, but there it's like that all year round), has a long rainy season in late-spring/early-summer and regular typhoons in late-summer/early-fall. Basically, for more than half of the year you're severely pondering the convenience of taking a cab over walking in the heat/rain.

Even then, the vast majority of people taking taxis regularly are business people going to and from business meetings and expensing it away, as evidenced by the heavily targeted ads for BtoB SaaS playing on the screens in the back of Tokyo taxis.

Don't make the mistake to think these jobs are just there to keep bored retirees active. The basic old age pension (kokumin nenkin - for sole-proprietors and people who have worked in non-permanent positions or small companies) is significantly below the poverty line at 70,600¥ per month -- that's $450 and that's if you've worked for 40 years without any gaps.

The vast majority of old people working these jobs, e.g. construction site security, do so because they would likely starve without it.

Taxes

I might also add that all of the big data center companies have sustainability goals that will push demand for cleaner energy, and therefore investment, in the country where they build.

I work for one of the top datacenter companies in the world and we run 8TWh on 96% renewable energy.

Because "data centers are evil" is trending with the masses.

All this talk of "universal chargers" gets on my nerves: you're not mandating anything about chargers, just the cable connections.

Phone chargers have already been made universal for years, they're all USB-A or C. Stop saying we're revolutionizing the charger industry, we're just standardizing the fucking cable.

Yes, but only after 3 months without a new job as opposed to immediately if laid off.

They can reduce or plain not pay your bonus, yeah. But making the employee pay for "damages", even by subtracting them from remaining pay or bonuses, is very very illegal.

It still takes one standard car's worth of space on the road and one standard car's worth of parking space. This is not a solution to anything.

They can naturalize anytime they want but choose not to...

You're taking the two places that have the most tourists and lowest residential concentration in Tokyo. Obviously it's going to be mostly tourists in the shop.

Go see a Donki in a residential neighborhood and it'll be full of locals. I live in Shirokane, an upscale highly residential neighborhood off of Meguro station, and even if it's reputed as one of the richest place in Tokyo there is a Donki and it's packed with local families shopping.

I love that I can see a word I don't know and get good grasp of its meaning (you can somewhat do that in Latin languages if you have a good grasp of latin and greek roots, but not as reliably). However I still cannot read it since I don't know with any certainty how to pronounce it if I've never heard it before.

And in the old analog days, even if you're an expert with keys and stroke counts, it was still much faster to search a roman character word in a dictionary than a Japanese word you don't know the pronunciation of.

平成 (Heisei) commonly translated to "Achieving Peace" as stated in the article, can also be read as "Flat Growth" which is more indicative of the past two decades here :)

They were actively recruiting clients in France to offer them tax evasion services. There's nothing innocent here.