That is the other "reason" people dim their car lights at red lights here. Both are illegal, btw. You aren't supposed to douse your lights on the road at night. Everyone does it though. I don't, and my Japanese wife kinda harrumphs about it.

You mean, Why would those who *only* read a roman alphabet be directed to a site in Japanese? This is /. I'm sure many of us can read non-roman alphabets. I, myself, live in Japan, you insensitive clod.

That's funny. I travel to the US with my Japanese wife and my two small children annually. I've had nothing but a pleasant time flying into SFO. Then again, I'm an American, as are my children. Maybe they like having us back home and would rather you take your Anglo self through another country on your way to, I'm guessing, Canada. Or maybe it's because I know how to deal with American law enforcement types. Looks like it worked. One less family transiting the US.

One of the only commercially successful consumer robots so far is made by an American company, iRobot Corp. The Roomba vacuum cleaner robot is self-propelled and can clean rooms without supervision. "We can pretty much make anything, but we have to ask, what are people actually going to buy?" said iRobot CEO Helen Greiner. The company has sold 2.5 million Roombas -- which retail for as little as $120 -- since the line was launched in 2002.

The way this was written leads you to the impression that good ol' merican Roombas are successful in Japan, when nothing could be further from the truth. http://search.kakaku.com/ksearch/search.aspx?query=roomba&search.x=0&search.y=0 lists the Roomba 530 at around ¥70,000 (~USD680), while a check at Amazon says I can buy the exact same model in the States for USD260. I'm guessing that extra $440 isn't import robot tax. Of course, a Roomba is rather useless in your average Japanese house, where there are often raised sills between rooms.

The Aizu Chuo Hospital spent about some $557,000 installing three of the robots in its waiting rooms to test patients' reactions. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, said spokesman Naoya Narita. "We feel this is a good division of labor. Robots won't ever become doctors, but they can be guides and receptionists," Narita said.

I've lived in Japan for most of my adult life, and this is not an indication of cool Japan. This truly is the beginning of the end for this country as a first-tier power, economic or otherwise. Where is there any mention of nurses in the above quote? My wife, an experienced nurse in her 30s, is the person whose job those $185,000 robots are trying to take. But there aren't any robot nurses here, nor will there be any here soon. Yet her salary is shockingly low (at least compared to what she could earn in the States), and hospitals are putting pressure on the government to let in nurses from the Philippines so they can pay them minimum wage to care for an aging population. Japan doesn't allow dual nationality, thereby forcing my children to choose between US and Japanese citizenship when they reach majority, much less any meaningful immigration. Robots are a Goverment of Japan red herring to keep the populace from worrying about 2050 when the population has dropped from the current 128m to 95m http://www.prb.org/Countries/Japan.aspx