My plans are:
Normal but different service will be resumed this weekend.
Pursued by a bear, perhaps? You make up your own mind.
Hiko, thanks for your honesty. I’ve been thinking about what you’ve said a lot the last two days.
Laxman, when you stop your tiresome Master Race and heightist microaggression, you are an interesting poster. Thanks!
空, your heart is in the right place, but you don’t half go on!
Anonymous, you don’t half go on!
Jimmy Di Grease, congratulations to you and Anonymous for doing far, far more to ruin Mr Arudou’s site than I could ever hope to do.
Tepido Twelve, thanks for wonderful debates, discussions, information and keeping me on the right track.
CJ, you’re an arse.
Mr Arudou, your year in Hawaii is soon to end, I think, so I recommend you spend some time reflecting on the state of Debito.org, and listen to the people you have recently banned and blocked, and others like Olaf who can give you tough but friendly advice.
In the meantime, catch me on either Google+ or email seron at whatjapanthinks.com. I need some time to revive another site that has run fallow for far too long, I’ve an Android app to write, etc. There is a "market" for an anti-anti-Japan site (Japan Probe is excellent for the stories, but comments can be quite superficial), so I will of course be back in some form or other. In the meantime:
Today this was posted on Debito.org:
and compares it to his connection afterwards with a full-of-praise Tepido “Hikosaemon”
I know Hiko through Google+ and a few other online places, but the only place our Tepidean paths have crossed is when he checked out Mr Arudou’s and my schlongs. So, I decided to drop Hiko a line on Google+, and he said:
On Debito vs Tepido, and other similar forums, I look at it mostly as the same kind of lonely testosterone alpha male vs alpha male trolling that characterizes the expat community in Japan
He also says he has never posted to Tepido.org, which should be obvious from the above comment, but even more revealing, he didn’t even know it is my site!
Furthermore, thanks to Mr Arudou’s post, Hiko tells me he has been getting phone texts asking if he runs Tepido.org, and flames on his blog and Twitter, even as far as death threats, apparently! He also had this exchange with Mr Arudou over Twitter:
At least that solves the mystery of "The Tepido Twelve". 
Mr Arudou, I think you had better apologise to him too.
In a very odd post, quite frankly, one of Mr Arudou’s readers (I’ll spare his Google blushes by not naming him…) gets an essay posted that he says took him over a year to write. Putting on my Machiavellian hat, I would say that after Mr Spiri criticised Eric C’s post, Mr Arudou wanted to post something from a reader that was obviously "Look, I don’t agree with him!" Mr Arudou does also not award this post the "considered and considerate" label he gave Eric C.
Instead of raising sales tax from 5 to 10% and upsetting everyone, why not raise it to 20% with the promise that health care and education becomes completely free.
One problem now with hospitals being almost free for old folk is that they visit more often than they need. Coming from the UK I do of course support free medicine, but it isn’t a magical panacea, and waiting lists there are horrendous! Anyway, in the UK it is National Insurance that pays for hospitals, not VAT. Free public schools, however, is a good idea.
First, the ward and city taxes should be calculated and taken out from people’s salaries along with the income tax.
I thought this was the standard way. Perhaps for self-employed or with companies under a given size (and English schools playing fast and loose with the law?) people do not get automatic deductions.
Cities like Tokyo and Osaka should have extremely high living taxes in order to encourage more migration to the countryside, and companies should also have to pay hefty taxes for having offices and factories in these major cities.
Err, they already have high rents and rates to pay for being in the cities!
Pachinko and Hostess club taxes
Fast Food Tax
Tobacco Tax
I notice no alcohol tax – perhaps this is a list of taxes on Things I Don’t Like? For the fast food section, I will presume when you say "family restaurant" you actually mean "family-run", not ファミレス. I’d be interested to hear if your definition of "fast food" also covered ramen and stand-up noodle shops, which I think is also in the same order of badness as hamburgers due to high salt levels.
Working hours
A better way would be to, for instance, make overtime start at time-and-a-half, not time-and-a-quarter, and also ensure existing laws have teeth.
Minimum Wage and the working class
You know, … aww, bugger it Let’s fast-forward a bit.
Why not make all day care centers in Japan English speaking? This would ensure all Japanese children would grow up with very good English speaking skills and give young women encouragement to have more children.
What better reason to have babies than knowing that there is an English teacher in your daycare? 
Government run Japanese language programs.
Much as a broken clock is right twice a day, I find something I can sort-of agree with.
The Japanese today are a far cry from the Japanese of long ago who would die for their country. Those before thought nothing of committing suicide for their country.
Oooh, channelling Mayor Ishihara I see, who incidentally did chop down a lot of birch cedar.
Furthermore, James "anecdotes-r-us" Grey chips in right off with:
for example, it’s just too late for a 20% tax hike; the IMF is recommending 40%
Nope, they have recommended 15%.
I found an interesting view on that microaggressions article by Gord Sellar in Korea. He bases his article around Highly Sensitive Persons (perhaps as flaky a concept as microaggressions itself, but…) to explain why Mr Arudou and others can have a completely different experience to that of NHSNJ (as it were). His interesting proposition is:
I think what wears down the more sensitive people is their incessant desire to understand why people keep behaving this way.
Very well worth a read.
And on a completely unrelated note, FRANCA Japan really is dead, as it would appear that FRANCA cannot afford or doesn’t want to pay the $10 per month year to park the URL. I’ve gone through the site and marked my one link to the site as rel="nofollow", just in case.
On another completely unrelated note, Mr Arudou is usually very careful to credit his co-author of the Handbook, but his new blog entry header says "Books etc. by ARUDOU Debito", and features not just the Handbook, but also Sour Strawberries and Fodor’s Japan.
You may remember my mention of the awful Bread and Becquerels article in the Japan Times a while ago. Well, the reader responses are up – I don’t like the "Readers vent" title, though – and no doubt these nine againsts will be another bunch of names to be added to the Tepido Twelve.
In other news, @cjinasia continues to be fascinating, with another new name added to the Tepido Twelve:
@1rick Martin is a fraud, thief, cyber criminal, spineless sock puppeteer on tepido, other hate sites. But I’m the bad guy for exposing it?
I’m not aware of a Rick Martin posting here, and at this rate we’ll have a Tepido Twelve Dozen by Christmas.
Which will be rather appropriate, as we’re all so gross here. 
You are probably all familiar with this definition:
Cult: A sect one doesn’t like.
Let me create a similar definition:
Stalking: A Google search one doesn’t like.
Connected with this, Mr Arudou recently commented on Mr Spiri’s hatchet job in Japan Times, an article which the more I thought about it, the less I felt it belonged on the pages of that or any newspaper:
Spiri was apparently too angry to do more accurate research on his subject’s history, even though that is the first thing incumbent upon a critic
But if I or my commenters try to do more accurate research on Mr Arudou to make sure our criticism is accurate, it becomes stalking…
There is also another issue of trivialising real stalking and cyber-stalking; if I were, for instance, using fake accounts or third parties to report on private discussions on Facebook or Google+ (I’m blocked on both!) then we might have something to talk about, but for now I’m happy that (bar a couple of incidents…) I don’t go any further than research via publically-available Google information.
An editorial entitled ‘Flyjin’ rather few took a look at a recent survey by Tokyo into proving that flyjin exist re-examining how information is delivered to foreigners. JT says:
That survey seems to imply that many foreign residents did indeed become "flyjin," […]. The survey, however, also confirms that the vast majority of foreigners in Tokyo stayed right where they were — in Tokyo.
How does a survey imply anything? And the vast majority did not stay where they were; as the Mainichi’s report says:
Meanwhile, 56 percent of the respondents said they did not leave Tokyo following the disasters, while 5 percent had moved to the Kansai area in southern Japan or other places within the country.
The headline figure was 25% returning home temporarily, but as the survey notes, it was 56% who "stayed right where they were", hardly a "vast majority". I’m not sure where the other 14% went – did they move from northern Japan to Tokyo or did they leave and not come back? Can anyone get a hold of the full results? UPDATE: The full results are found here. 5% moved southward, 2% evacuated to evacuation centres, 3% did other (I hope some headed north to volunteer!), and 9% did not answer. Note that the poll also says that the 169 people respondents were contacted by email and fax, and the sample was obtained through International Exchange Groups and Foreigner Support Organisations, and given that just 25% were company employees, this sample would barely touch the "true" flyjin, the worker who downed tools and left on the first flight out.
[T]he governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, inflamed the controversy by exaggerating the extent of foreigners leaving the country and impugning their motives for leaving.
Did he? I’ve never seen a quote to either effect, although I suppose it is easy (and intellectually lazy) to reflexively attach any nasty comments to him.
Similarly, those Japanese who remained in Tokyo were not necessarily acting out of national pride or bravery; they may have been too terrified to go anywhere.
That sounds kind of microaggressive to me, as well as wishful thinking of the same kind you are ascribing to the anti-flyjin.
The survey did little to better understand all Tokyoites’ complicated reactions to the crisis.
Err … oh sod it, 
The survey, interestingly, did not determine exactly how many of those 25 percent eventually returned to Tokyo.
All 25%, at a wild guess. I’d have thought as the press, you’d have got a full copy of the survey and have no need to presume.
The metropolitan government should prepare a means to give all residents of Tokyo, whatever nationality they are, trustworthy information during emergencies so safe, sensible decisions can be made.
But, you said earlier that many people were "instructed [to leave] by embassies or employers", where from what I heard the employers were on the whole foreign ones, and you also chose to ignore that another main reason for leaving was being "strongly urged by families abroad", according to the Mainichi.
Next, Japan Times is running a microaggression poll, with, as has been pointed out earlier, three "yes" answers and one "yes, I don’t mind it", but also features the dreaded gaijin word, not once but twice.
PS: Can anyone find data for a survey of Japanese who left Tokyo? There’s plenty of data regarding Tohoko evacuees, but not Tokyo.
Japan Times also prints It’s just because . . . foreigners know best, a very pointed message to Mr Arudou.
I’m heading out shortly, so I’ve got no time to comment on it further right now…