OTish: Life in Japan: Bubble Economy vs. Now

This probably isn't the best group for this but soc.culture.japan moderated doesn't have that many updates and people here like Japan and Japanese stuff anyway and probably know what I am looking for.

As I have mentioned before I spend Oct 2002-Oct 2003 teaching English in Japan. I have had a long interest in finding out what Japan was like during the Bubble Economy (say from 82-94) for several reasons. One many of my all time favorite anime came from this period (original BGC, UY, Touch, Maison Ikkoku, Patlabor, etc.) Also it seems that expats living in Japan during this time talk about it with the nostalgia of people who came to America in the late 1800s. Real streets paved with gold stuff. So if anyone knows the answers to these questions or can point me in the right direction to books or websites, I will be much obligied.

1. What was life like for expats in Japan during the bubble economy? I have heard stories about being able to step off the plane and land a job without any experience merely because you were a foreigner. I heard that Eikaiwa teachers were paid huge sums of money and given amazing bounses. When I was in Japan, I made decent but not great money and got no bounses. How much did English teachers make in the golden years?

2. Are there any good books about life during the bubble economy? I don't want harcore economics books. Im not interested in that. I want books on Japanese society and culture during the 1980s. Films and documentaries, websites would be good as well. I have seen some anime like KOR and a few movies (A Taxing Woman) which give me a flavor of life during the bubble economy but I need more.

3. Personal experiences are also welcome. For those who remember and experienced life in Japan during the Bubble Economy?

*snip*

You taught English in Japan and yet you can't spell 'bonuses'?

No WONDER the Japanese have an atrocious grasp of the language...

I am not the first person to mispell a word in a usenet post and send it without checking. Geez maybe this is why your idea of fine dining is fast food. You're so rude that no would in their right mind would ever hire you for a decent paying job.

I could accept it was a simple typo if not for the fact that you did it TWICE.

And also, the point is that someone who has the credentials to teach English shouldn't even MAKE mistakes like that in the first place...

Uh, no it isn't. I never said it was.

Was that supposed to hurt or something? Because, you know, it didn't.

Especially since people who are VERY rude

Not really. During rapid typing, sometimes people _consistently_ hit one key before another key that they thought they already had hit. So 'bonus' becomes 'bouns', because while the brain ordered the fingers to hit 'b-o-n-u-s', they his 'b-o-u-n-s' instead.

If the standard keyboard layout hadn't been designed to slow typists down (since really old typewriters would jam if you hit a sequence to quickly), this wouldn't happen as much.

*snips ELL's rant*

Wow ELL, you've hit a new low. Gotta rip on people's typing errors. That's really big of you. I wish I were as cool as you, but then, that means I'd actually have to somehow find a way to be an even bigger loser.

Thank you for turning what could have been an interesting thread into yet another one of your bitch-fests. God forbid we should have anything intelligent!

*Sigh* and here I thought you were going to become a USEFUL contributor to this board...

Okay I was there from 82-87.

I don't think this is true, but both me and my sister got paid good money for modeling and doing a tv commercial in Japan. Probably would have been more commercials, but we moved right after we did the first one.

I don't know if life was that different really, but maybe perceptions were different.

Well we didn't think of it as a bubble at the time similar to the US in the later 90's.

Troll killfiled. *plonk*

243.212.120.68.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer adsl-68-120-212-243.dsl.sktn01.pacbell.net.

This is why you're posting from a computer in California, right?

...It looked to me less like a troll than like a joke. Your call,