First I worked and payed taxes in Germany. From 2016 on, in Japan. Time to think about the differences in paying taxes, and how they are used. I dislike doing taxes, would prefer if everything would be deducted automatically.. but taxes are there to stay. The differences between both contries are interesting! Income tax in Germany In Germany, income taxes are automatically deducted from the monthly wages. One a year,

Background: I’m a German, living in Japan. Details are here. The visitor visa In March 2008, I went to Japan for the first time. For 3 month I would live and work in Tokyo. As German citizen, or being from other 1st world countries, that is easy: for business as well as holiday you can get a visa for staying up to 3 months in Japan. No application in advance

So, having seen Norbert and @codewiz mentioning Plasma frequently, I decided to give it a try. My desktop box is Fedora33, which comes with a quite current version of Plasma. Some years ago, I tried gnome - but Gnomes “let’s make it as simple as possible, leave buttons out”-strategy does not stick well with me. I don’t want a dumbed down window manager. I use WindowMaker since dozends of years. It’s nice and lean, but does not seem to have a future with Wayland.

Onsen? Ryokan? Japan being on the intersection of seismic plates is leading to earthquakes, but also to hot water which is used in bathes, so called Onsen. A Ryokan is a traditional style of hotel in Japan, with tatami mat covered rooms, often a bath attached, including good meals and services like preparing futon beds in the evening for visitors. Japanese sometimes go to Onsenmeguri, which means ’travel with stay

There is great food in Japan, let me share a week of autumn food in Japan. I do not eat much for breakfast, but for lunch I visit various places. Keema-Nattou Curry Fridays Keema-Nattou curry with rice. Keema is minced meet, Nattou is a speciality from Japan often eaten for breakfast, these are fermented soybeans. Fermented means ‘has been changed’, like sauerkraut in Germany, or Kimuchi in Korea. Also in

Intro I get weekly Japanese lessons via Skype. At the moment we are reading Japanese news articles: discussing grammar and rare words, and the topic itself. After 5 years, my teacher knows me well enough to select topics which are interesting to me. Recently we read the article Is it hard to live in Japan?. Seems like my teacher shortened the article to 5 points - after reading the original I find the shorter version more to the point.

The previous article introduces into HDMI grabbers on Linux. When is latency relevant? My first use case was to play a game on a device like the Nintendo Switch, with the HDMI output only visible via grabber. While playing with various options and software, I needed a way to nicely measure the latency between the HDMI signal output, and the picture displayed on my screen. How to do that? Best is to show the current time, sufficiently accurate, on both

HDMI grabbing? These are devices you connect you a computer (might be a tiny one like a Raspberry Pi), and which convert HDMI input from a cable into something useful for further processing. I’m sharing here details from my experiments with 2 grab devices, and using Linux for processing. So practically, what can I do with this? My usecase is that I have just a single monitor, with just a

Climbing Mount Fuji at Night: Ascend covers the ascend. For 2 hours I was waiting in the cold at the summit, drinking green tea from the vending machines. Due to the cold, I could not sleep or stay at one place without moving - and that was even with proper jacket, I had seen people climbing up in short trousers, probably not waiting for the daylight but directly descending. Eventually a hut opened, people streamed in and ate udon.

In many countries, climbing the highest mountain is just for professionals, or for expeditions. Mount Fuji in Japan has with it’s 3776m just the right height to be a bit of a challenge, but being doable for an average trained person. One starts with looking up reports from others and wonders: what should I take with me? Is my condition good enough to do it? Do I need maps and

First things first: there will not be a clear winner, but let’s try to look at this from various angles. As a German living in Japan, I am tied into people and media in both countries, let’s try a comparison. Infection numbers Numbers of daily new infected people is considered one of the most interesting criteria. Being near to China, Japan had first infections quite early, but Germany was catching

Background Everybody knows about the Japanese “san”, which you attach when communicating with Japanese colleagues. So, when you also refer to non-Japanese colleagues in the same email, do you then also use ~san? If not, do you think they read the email as ‘he does not respect us equally’? Just asking to point out one of the small oddities about this piece of etiquette. For those who do not know