Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Often, communication among people of different countries, unfortunately, boils down to "it is like this in Country A, but it is like that in Country B." People quickly just to country-to-country comparisons, utilizing overgeneralized stereotypes that assume everyone in a particular country follows a certain set of norms universal yet unique to the country. Such assumptions quickly bring down in countries where different cultures coexist, especially in migrants-dominated societies like the US and African countries, where borders are arbitrarily drawn by colonists ignorant of local cultures.

Recently, "Pocketalk," a translation device with the ability to accurately interpret dozens of languages in real-time, has been all the rage.  The Japan-developed device is certainly revolutionary in its accuracy.  Just by talking into it, the user can get a sentence interpreted in seconds into the target language.  With its customized SIM card, it can be used anywhere in the world without the need to adjust the setting every time one enters a new country.  Such a device really helps people to imagine a future where the language barrier is no longer a barrier, and technology will allow people speaking different languages to communicate naturally in real time.

One of the greatest merits of East Asian languages is that much information can be packed into short standalone phrases that are easily remembered by even the laymen without the need for detailed explanations.  The ability for information to be communicated so concisely and densely means that it is possible for the phrases to be used as new concepts themselves, without the need to create alternative shorter codes that have equivalent meanings.  The idea of densely packed phrases acting as linguistic codes is so common that people in this part of the world do not even think about it.

The microbrewery in the center of Takayama city felt a bit out of the place.  Despite being surrounded by wooden buildings from more than century ago, the clientele of the little bar and restaurant is distinctly un-Japanese.  When I visited the location for dinner at 8pm on a Saturday, none of the people inside were Japanese.  Perhaps attracted by the reputation of their brews, white couples in the fifties and sixties occupied most of the tables and the counter, trying more than half a dozen unique beers the microbrewery had on tap.

It is a brilliant message on the part of business English-teaching schools in Japan everywhere.  In a bid to target regular people who are nervous about the prospect of using English in their jobs, despite having zero experiences with the language in their daily lives, the schools strive to lower the hurdle for English learning.  They do so with the uniform message about how English is simply a tool for business communication, and learning to speak better English does not necessarily mean one has to give up some part of Japanese identity and acquire foreign values .

A professor at the prestigious Duke University in the US found herself in hot water last week after social media broke the story of her telling Chinese students in her department to not speak Chinese while in the department building.  While the professor merely emailed the students of the department after receiving complaints from other professors, the subsequent outrage to the email focused solely on her wording in the emails, eventually with the professor issuing an apology and the school getting involved in the investigations.

Once in a while, one gets to meet one of those people who take upon themselves to learn as many languages as possible.  After conquering one language, they practice the language through conversations with native speakers and equally minded language learners, all the while moving to study another new language.  They call such behavior "a hobby" based on a fascination with cultures.  Others, already having a hard time learning one foreign language , not to mention one after another, simply describe those with the language learning hobby as "naturally talented at learning languages."

An e-commerce firm can become successful in a few different ways.   Having a great selection of high-quality products at bargain prices certainly help.   So is having convenient payment methods and great customer service when things go awry.   But no part of e-commerce operations leaves a greater impression on potential customers than being able to deliver purchased products quickly, safely, and at exact times designated by the customers.   A previous article on Tech in Asia already made clear the importance of product delivery in overall customer satisfaction.   Similarly, several academic studies have shown the importance of logistics management and capacity to customer satisfaction and firm performance. Furthermore, a survey in the American and European markets showed that 38% of online shoppers will never shop with the e-commerce provider again after suffering a negative delivery experience.

Reading through some of the Master's theses produced by University of Tokyo students, I am struck by just how abstract some of them sound to the layman.  Referring to one obscure study after another, their authors simply assume that whoever that is reading their outputs would simply know by heart all the supposedly groundbreaking studies by famous scholars.  Such careless assumption goes back my previous argument that academics and non-academics simply do not communicate on the same page, leading to academic works not being taken seriously outside the tiny professional academic research community. 

The Japanese female high school uniform is almost a cultural institution in itself.  Immortalized in anime such as “Sailor Moon” and countless bittersweet love stories of campus romance on the big and small screens, its distinctive blue-and-white sailor-like design is recognizable to even the most casual purveyors of Japanese culture.  For millions in Japan, it is the visual manifestation of what it means to be youthful, innocent, and full of hope and drama.  It is the physical reminder of the coming of age.

Khabarovsk is a city of more than half a million people, located more than twelve hours by train away from similar-sized Russian cities (Vladivostok to the south, Chita and Ulan-Ude to the east).  This very geographic fact should create a fairly big local market for consumer products that are not easily fulfilled by traveling elsewhere in the country.  People would buy locally simply because there are few choices to go buy somewhere else.  Yet, speaking to the city's Chinese merchants and a different picture emerges. 

It is hard to imagine a more wilderness-filled stretch of land between two major cities.  The city of Khabarovsk, population half a million, and Komsomolsk, population 300,000, are separated by a two-lane highway running through a beautiful piece of untouched nature.  On a clear autumn drive, the eight-hour drive is an almost unbroken forest of yellow-leaved trees, with white, strong, and thick trunks as far as the eyes can see.  They are only punctuated by the occasional tributaries of the mighty Amur River.

Every time the author travels to the immigration office here in Tokyo, he cannot avoid the feeling that the place is almost designed to spite foreigners living in this fair city. Situated in the midst of the city's commercial warehouse area right next to the Port and stacks of shipping containers, the brutalist concrete monstrosity seems to swallow thousands of foreigners living across the city and the surrounding region, away from the preying sight of locals who no doubt would feel unease from seeing such huge congregations of foreigners in one place.

For most people, the image of being a student is probably one of habit.  With a set schedule of classes, seminars, and exams, students know where to go when, and when there are no classes, they spend a significant amount of time in libraries and study rooms completing their assignments and prepare for exams.  The student life is imagined to be a very regimented one, where the student would know exactly where to go and what to do during the course of their semesters.  Their only free time would be during summer and winter vacations when they are free to take up jobs or internships in preparation for full-time jobs.

In an era of the general public being inundated with different kinds of museums displaying a wide variety of exhibits , for any to really stand out from the competitive crowd, new methods are needed to draw in the interest of potential museum-goers.  Factory tours, at the first glance, fit the bill extremely well.  But presenting how everyday products are made from scratch via seeing the process actually at work in a normal setting, factor tours tend to provide a much more interactive experience for the general public, in ways that static displays of words and pictures cannot.

It is tough to talk about a social problem faced by a social minority, especially in a country like Japan where social minorities are often assumed to be absent or nonexistent.  Many people simply do not want to face the uncomfortable fact that there are minorities among them who missed out of the country's general sense of prosperity and order.  Instead, they struggle for both society's acceptance and just make ends meet in the direst of material conditions.  A recent Japanese film Shoplifters , in such sense, is truly an uncomfortable one to watch for many Japanese people.

Living among the cultural Other is difficult, and it is especially difficult to do so in a foreign country.  Strange language, strange food, and even stranger people.  All this can be depressing to face for people who are residing abroad for the very first time.  They just do not have experience in handling people who do not come from same cultural background, raised under same educational and social atmospheres.  In short, such is the situation faced by the migrants from rural China who now reside in Vladivostok. But they are not the only ones faced with such difficulties. 

In Vladivostok, it is difficult to miss the city's two most obvious landmarks.  A pair of suspension bridges, towering above the low-rise cityscape, connects its centuries-old downtown area with southern suburbs across the Golden Horn Bay, and mostly wilderness Russky Island further south with the southern suburbs.  Already nicknamed "Russian San Francisco" for the zigzaging bays intersecting the city, Vladivostok only reminds more of the north American city with the bridges that look conspicuously like the Golden Gate. 

The Asian Exhibition Gallery at the Tokyo National Museum features some of the most exquisite artefacts from Pacific islands to the depth of ancient Mesopotamia.  The display is often a potpourri of different things from different eras, discovered by different people and sourced in different ways.  But in all the confusing variety of the artefacts, the central message of the Gallery was never lost in each of the exhibit: that the various cultures of Asia, as represented by the artefacts present, serve as the cultural foundations of Japan as a country and people today.

The clock strikes 2pm at a local art museum in the well-off Tokyo neighbrohood of Shirokanedai, and the floors seem to fill with more and more people.  The museum's eclectic collection of a permanent exhibition on the history of art deco in Japan and a special exhibition on French children's books is drawing what seem to be a highly varied but equally enthusiastic audience.  College students carefully reading the descriptions bump shoulders with housewives snapping photos and middle-aged men in suits.  From the looks of the crowds, it just does not look like a weekday afternoon in any way.