farmgineer

… but it’s already the eleventh?!

(days without timezone issues: -1)

it’ll become acceptable to us

Speak for yourself. This is fully unacceptable.

My senior highschool English teacher (a somewhat precocious PHD student), assigned us basically the opposite of code golf; make the longest grammatically correct sentence you can (with some rules that basically amounted to ‘do not be boring/repetitive’). The use of semicolons was encouraged.

Not in Japan yet, at least on my account. I only use amazon a couple of times a year for things I can’t get anywhere else, but it should have plenty of history to work with.

My union says we will go to the legal system if no agreement is reached. It’s just been very slow going and, at first, felt like nothing was happening.

People do hidden recordings. I’ve heard a mix of things about them actually being admissible if it goes to court (mostly that they are not).

Japanese reputational damage laws. You can get sued even when what you are saying is 100% true

My family gets sued. AboardInJapan would also get sued which is why no news orgs ever pick this stuff up.

Farming is a hobby. A lot of it is done on tractor or seated in the dirt.

I was also tired of the constant noise and business of Tokyo. Don’t really have expensive maintenance.

Call the media, do the drama

Even saying 100% true things, this gets you sued in Japan. This is specifically why I don’t name the company.

I considered killing myself last night. I self-harmed for the first time in many years. My company advertised remote work. I asked if I could move far away from Tokyo and sure, no problem. I got told if RTO, then it would be close and new people only. I got permission to run a side job doing a small farm. Sure no problem.

I’ve been in this industry for 20+ years now.

Mandatory return to office (I live 4 hours each way). They pay transportation expenses per month at a level that wouldn’t cover one day. If you’re nice and apply, we MAY approve (for three months only) 2 days a week required in the office. No guarantee it will be approved. I joined a union to fight this but it’s slow. They will likely still try to fire me.

I have a mortgage. I got a subsidy to move to this small town, that many in Japan provide, but it must be paid back if leaving within 5 years. I also am a registered farmer with farm land which means I legally have to maintain it properly.

Yesterday, they said no more side job is allowed. So I’m not allowed to sell anything I grow anymore, have to close my self-proprietorship, and have to close my company (which has tax impacts on me because now nothing counts as expenses and I lose my ability to do special tax forms). They apparently want food to rot. They want me to rot. The farm was not even yet at a point to make me money. They falsely claimed I got subsidies for farming (I did not and do not) and that it’s no longer just selling extra produce (it still is) and is a full-scale farming operation (it is not). My sales were like 10k yen last year and maybe will get to that this year.

My wife does not work. There are few jobs out here. No remote jobs in the US or Canada are responding and few would even allow Japan time zone even with overlap. Remote jobs for a backend engineer (primarily golang lately with very rusty Java somewhere in my brain unused for many years) are basically non-existent. I’ve applied for jobs in the EEA but, as a non-EEA-citizen, I can basically go fuck myself. My body is way too messed up (multiple broken bones, back issues, etc.) for any really hard manual labor.

So I lose my job, I lose my income, I lose the house, I will never get another mortgage in Japan again, there’s no point to being alive. My wife’s birthday is coming up, which is basically what stopped me. She’ll have a better life without me and at least the house will get paid off so she can do whatever with it.

Living in an apartment in Tokyo would also violate the terms of my mortgage making me lose it (on top of losing a huge chunk of my paycheck) and would also make it impossible to keep up with farm maintenance, let alone the rest of the house and property.

I am fine for now. Just not sure I’ll survive any future attacks from my company. Thanks for the kind words.

Absolutely not. I didn’t want to be alive in the first place, don’t particularly enjoy being alive, and would certainly not want to do it again.

Yep. At the height of summer, I can walk around outside at 3ish in my super-countryside area and see well enough to start doing farm work.

I’m digging it. I don’t start getting woken up by by sunlight at 4am unlike the height of summer. Being in coastal northeastern Japan, I really think we need to move the time zone by an hour or two so the sun comes up closer to 5 or 6 in summer.

I do lament our lack of summer this year. We had the rainiest weather on record in many parts of Japan. Days and weeks without a rainless day.

You can do demiglace instead of the ketchup as well; the ketchup version is usually the cheaper/easier one. I’d definitely eat what you made there.

I also think being closer to twilight (even maybe dark in some areas) has something to do with it.

I used to fish with my dad in a creak/river than ran behind a different Navistar location. Freaky perch were not rare. No idea what they were dumping in that water (or I guess someone upstream; I can’t prove it was them, but I don’t recall it from other parts upstream).

Statute Tit

teehee. (Why no period after what I assume is the abbreviated word ‘title’?)

town-gown

TIL about this phrase.

If you’re gonna eat animals, eat all the edible bits.

If there’s nothing else in the pantry, boil the noodles and serve with tuna. Separately make the jello for dessert. If you have other things, do that but make a sauce for the noodles as well.

I’m not buying shit, thanks.