Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

This blog started in 2010 to chart my life out of four tumultuous years as a student at Yale University. Those four years were at times traumatizing and left me with emotional scars that, at times, led me to conclude the very worth of going to Yale in the first place. The struggles of not only classes at a high level, but the social expectations of Yale students all being future leaders, lead to pressures to succeed in professional and academic ways that many, including myself, were not mentally prepared for. Some students excelled in such pressurized environments, while many others lost their ways.

A regular theme of this blog is self-reflection. Just a few months ago , I was looking back on my past year as a 33-year-old, wondering what is the next step now that I had my fourth anniversary working with Blackpeak, graduated from my Ph.D. program at the University of Tokyo, got married, as well as became certified in Teaching English as a Second Language, Fraud Examination, and Anti-Money Laundering, all in the matter of one year. A new life project beckons, but at the time, I was unsure what that would be or where it would happen.

It has been more than 16 years since I graduated high school. Many memories of my old days as a public school student in San Diego are fading, not the least because I have practically never lived in the city since graduation. But a recent request to summarize some tips on how I managed to get from a no-name high school to Yale has triggered a need for me to do a relatively rare self-reflection on my four years. It is not an easy one since so many other things that happened in my life since 2006 have been much more memorable and noteworthy than anything I've done back then.

Many Western, immigration-centered societies, from the US and the UK to Australia and Canada, claim to value diversity steeped in equality. Laws are in place to mandate the equal treatment of ethnic, gender, and religious minorities in the workplace and everyday life, often enforced with a strong social taboo against visible, public, and blatant displays of discriminatory behavior against people of different sociocultural backgrounds. Of course, plenty of discriminatory incidents, some of which are well-known and questionable, occur in these countries, but there is a broad consensus at the grassroots level that discrimination is undesirable. Part of how the anti-discriminatory consensus came about in these countries relates to the educational system. Elite universities in these countries are well-known for their student and staff bodies made up of intakes from around the world. The Harvard brand name, for instance, is valued just as much in other countries as in the US, leading to the

My wife often complains that my writing is not concrete enough. To her, my articles always seem to be circling around concepts and theories, with a dearth of concrete details that can make those abstract ideas grounded in the realities and experiences of day-to-day life. It is a point that I have to grudgingly concede on multiple occasions. Ideas are great to think about as mental exercises of "why" and "how come," but if they have any relevance as grounds for actionable plans, supplementing them with the "what" and "how" is imperative, and frankly, quite difficult.

Two days ago, I officially entered the 34th year of my existence. As it was a weekday, there was little in terms of celebrations, with the day marked by work as usual, and the night marked by preparations for the next day. Thankfully, as a married man living with my wife, I was not alone for my birthday. Despite her usual working-until-late schedule, she celebrated the occasion with me with some late-night food and watching YouTube videos. Given the circumstances of my life in Chiba, the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, and another workday the day after, I could not have asked for a better low-key celebration.

Jobs tend to be very hands-on. Employees are required to actively work on various projects, and the success of the projects is based on the output that is delivered to the clients. Creating the output requires employees to get their hands dirty, chipping away at a list of tasks for completing the project, and communicating with team members to coordinate the splitting up of tasks. No one gets to simply sit around and read without producing anything. Passiveness at work is, to put simply, not a job description of any productive employee.

During my long tenure as a Ph.D. student at the University of Tokyo, I took many odd jobs, both to supplement my income, learn about some new industries, and kill some time while waiting on professors' feedback for my research. One of the more interesting was acting as a test proctor at the university . With many other part-time workers, I had to show up to the testing centers, watch young students line up for their turns, and nervously go about their examination tasks. It was heartening to see the next generation of youths taking solid steps toward their eventual graduation, in a decidedly nerve-wracking atmosphere.

For many future English teachers, the first step is to get evidence that they have the right mind and skillset for instructing students. For many countries, their claim to be fluent in the English language, based on their nationality, cultural background, or visual looks, no longer suffice. With ever-tightening visa restrictions for English teachers, what used to be high-paying summer jobs for students from the world's best English language universities are now reserved for those with the right papers, in the form of diplomas, certificates, and training results, to show know-how in the art of teaching.

Accessing academic articles as an individual unaffiliated with any academic institution can be financially daunting. Academic journals put out by major publishers require expensive access fees to access their content. Many aggregation websites, not the least Google Scholar and JSTOR, either have their own subscription fees, lead back to sites with their own fees, or are not comprehensive enough to reveal all the most relevant and up-to-date research in a particular field. While universities have the financial resources to provide their researchers with access to many of these databases, individuals cannot hope to do so.

2018年、台湾政府は2030年までに台湾を英中バイリンガル国家にする 計画を発表 し、英語教師の雇用や訓練、英語教材の作成や利用を目的とする、台湾各地の学校、政府機関に対する 3400万米ドル の初期投資をすることにした。首都台北では、大学とのコラボによる英語教師の研修プログラムが推進され、2021年までには小学校から高校まで含む 51校 がバイリンガル教育対象校と指定された。台北はシンガポールを模範とし、海外人材も在住しやすいグローバル社会を目指している。

近年、日本やアジアの大都会で歩き回ると、所々で外国人の存在を見かける。見た目で明らかに地元の人ではないことはすぐわかるが、彼らは頑張って現地の言葉でコミュニケーションをとっている。世界はグローバル化によってこのような国際移民の数が増加している。2020年世界経済フォーラムの 統計データ によると、同年において出身国以外に住む人口は2.72億人に達し、1995年の1.74億人を遥かに上回っている。新型コロナヴィルスによって海外移住は一旦困難となったものの、今後の世界状況をみると、母国を離れ、他国で常住し、仕事や学習に励む人々が増える傾向は止まらないと思われる。

For the UN to become an independent force capable of devising and implementing its own agendas, the organization needs to step above national interests. To do so, it must aggressively push for compromises that align with the interests of all sides in any particular conflict. Only with such initiative-taking can the UN not succumb to one-sidedness when conveying international legitimacy. The task of the UN is not to offer moral high ground to any particular side, but to establish objective forums to discuss how conflicts can be halted in a positive-sum fashion.

Recent increases in the number of new COVID infections make for some grim reading. The city of Tokyo saw an unprecedented 20,000 cases per day for two consecutive days, with no sign that the number of infections will decline. Japan as a whole recorded 3 million cumulative cases of infections, only two weeks after hitting 2 million. With much of the population not yet receiving the third shot of the vaccine, little is there to slow down Omicron and whatever other variants that COVID will evolve to next in its quest to continue dominating the daily lives of people around the world.

The year 2000 started well. I was an ecstatic little boy graduating from elementary school in provincial Japan. Finally, I was joining the “big boys” at the middle school across the street, donning the cool uniforms that I observed in pure envy for the past six years. Change was afoot, and I was so ready to embrace it. Instead, the change was much more radical than I had ever imagined. Instead of moving across the street, father came home one day and notified us that our whole family is moving to the USA, thousands of miles away.

Chiba city is a decidedly underrated city in an underrated prefecture. Tokyoites find little reason to make the trip to the prefecture beyond the use of Narita airport, even though Chiba prefecture is right next door and the trip to the center of Chiba city can be done in less than an hour. That lack of firsthand experience with Chiba causes Tokyoites to have acquired a distinct misconception of the city with nearly a million residents just to their east. Tokyoites perceive Chiba city as lacking in basic amenities that make life comfortable, and that Chiba residents need to head to Tokyo for any sort of proper entertainment.

It is no longer news that the Japanese population is shrinking and aging. With the country's birth rate hitting record lows and having no signs of a consistent rebound, for all sorts of businesses in Japan, the prospects of an ever-tinier domestic market are a cause for great worry. And that worry will hit no industry faster than kindergarten operators. Providing a once-in-a-lifetime service, these businesses rely purely on the number of children in the country. They are stuck with the decline, having no option to target repeat customers or expand the consumer base in any way.

There is no point in sugarcoating it: I did not handle my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine well. Even though people say the first dose should lead to anything more than some arm pain afterward, my reaction was much more severe. Aside from the thumping arm pain that lasted a better part of a month, I found myself sleeping the whole day the day after and even a part of the day after that. Considering that those who reacted badly to the first dose tend to also react heavily to the second, the anticipation for fevers, pains, and worse have been with me ever since I had the injection a few hours ago.

The setup at one of the University of Tokyo's bigger conference halls is also designed for a major event. Hundreds of staff members checking paperwork, rows of chairs for people waiting their turn, and elaborate signs and partitions to direct the flow of traffic have turned the normally empty conference hall into one that serves a single purpose: an assembly line of getting as many COVID shots into people's arms as possible in a short time. The massive amount of human and physical resources, not to mention the planning, that went into the affair certainly displays the dedication of the university to its staff and students.

The National Museum of Japanese History is a sprawling complex in Sakura, in the hinterlands of Chiba prefecture west of Tokyo. Its semi-rural location perhaps allowed the government and academic facilities that together set up a building complex that, albeit briefly, goes through the entirety of Japanese history from the pre-historic to the post-World War II era. It is an ambitious project challenging for both the curators and visitors alike. I started my tour of the facility at 11:45 am and had to rush through the last two sections of the museum just to make our exit before it closed at 5 pm.