Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

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.

For decades, Japan has been living a convenient fiction. The country accepted hundreds of thousands of low- and semi-skilled workers, giving them fixed contracts renewable only for a set number of times and prohibiting them from bringing with them family members from their home countries, in a bid to convince a mostly ethnically homogenous general public that they are only temporary guest workers who will leave when their work is finished. The policy marks them as "separate and unequal" from more skilled white-collar workers, who can bring dependents and eventually become permanent residents or citizens.

Like other countries in the world, summer in Japan is often defined by summer festivals, ranging from more traditional family outings in local shrines and fireworks events, to more modern ones that involve trending musicians from all over the world. In the pre-COVID days, crowds would have gathered by the thousands, crowding around stages and drinking from dawn to dusk. Even when outdoor festivals are not happening, balmy summer nights would have driven many youngsters to the plentiful bars and nightclubs of the country's biggest cities, as hopping among them would have taken such a physical toll.

The after-school hours of underaged children in China are going through a revolution in recent days. Almost in a targeted sequence, the Chinese government killed off for-profit after-school tutoring, limited the number of hours for gaming to one per day, and if that is not enough, reemphasized that children are not supposed to go through private tutors giving lessons in private homes. For tens of millions of kids who have heretofore been occupying their hours after school with homework, cram schools, and video games, their nights have just become much freer, to a degree that probably worries their parents. 

OnlyFans was supposed to be a game-changer for the porn industry. A field long plagued by the ease with which a casual audience can find content for free, its workers have searched far and wide for ways that they can consistently monetize their (quite literally) sweat and tears on and off the screen. OnlyFans, with its ability to have content creators price different levels of access to content and a variety of other physical and virtual goods, inadvertently promised workers in the porn industry to be paid their fair share, cutting out the porn studios, distributors, and websites that all undercut what performers can truly earn.

If there is one thing that biased Western media coverage got right about the current state of Afghanistan, it is the precarity of governance in the era of post-Taliban takeover. As the Taliban streamed into the major cities of the country practically unopposed, a large number of locals have spurned the new government, fleeing to the Kabul airport in the hopes of catching an evacuation flight to a new homeland. Many of these people genuinely fear for their lives, having collaborated with the Western "occupiers" and the previous "puppet" government that the Western allies propped up at great expense. 

As Kabul falls and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is nearly complete, there is a rather bipolar coverage of the events on the ground among Western media outlets. On one hand, there are extensive analyses of what led to the fact that an Afghan military, 300,000 men strong, that was trained and equipped with modern, US-made guns, tanks, and fighter planes, at the cost of more than USD 80 billion over two decades, simply disintegrated in the face of a two-week assault by a group of guerrilla fighters carrying nothing more than rifles and grenades. 

If there is one keyword that describes the athletes that competed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, it could be "diversity." Perhaps an unprecedented number of minorities among minorities found themselves on the biggest stage of their athletic career, making news not just because of their performance, but also for their very identities. The examples are numerous. From a Haitian-Japanese lighting the cauldron at the opening ceremony, to a transgender competing in women's weightlifting, to the very first ethnic Hmong competing for US Gymnastics, there are many competing, who, many just a couple of Olympics ago, that would not be present.

A mutually agreed ceasefire has finally taken hold after a short eleven-day rocket-and-air-raid war between Israel and Gaza. But the ceasefire only took place after hundreds of protests across the world (both in solidarity with Israel and the Palestinians) and pressure from major powers around the world. This ceasefire, unfortunately, was too late for the more than 200 people who perished in the conflict, thousands who were injured, and more than 50,000 people who were displaced in Gaza as Israeli airstrikes destroyed their homes for being suspected centers of operation for the ruling political party-cum-militia Hamas.

Two months after the military overthrew the civilian government in Myanmar, the country is on the verge of civil war. Ethnic militias are gearing up for a fight against the increasingly violent military, which has resorted to shooting protestors to keep an increasingly tenuous peace. Protestors, not content at being shot at, have graduated from throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails to fleeing from the cities to join guerrilla groups in the mountains of the country's remote borderlands, hoping to take back their country by force. Conflicts have embroiled Burmese communities outside the country, with individual Burmese, not to mention diplomats and governments-in-exile, openly speaking out against the junta.

Scholars of geopolitics have been talking about geographical chokepoints for decades. The Strait of Hormuz for oil, Malacca for Asia, and Gibraltar for the Mediterranean are all raised as fine examples of narrow waters that, if blocked, can bring national economies tumbling down. Their strategic values remain paramount, and their controls a matter of national security. The recent blockage of the Suze Canal, a manmade geographical chokepoint, showed just how vulnerable the world economy is when such a narrow body of water is suddenly rendered inaccessible. Billions of dollars of trade are lost and the attention of global media remains fixated on the blockage.

After spending months denying that COVID-19 is a big issue in Tanzania and promising that God will save the country from the epidemic, Tanzanian president John Magufuli was suddenly pronounced dead. His death only comes weeks after his public disappearance, leading to speculation that he was airlifted to Kenya for urgent medical treatment. More than his denial of the seriousness of COVID, Western media made sure to include references to his attacks on Tanzanian democratic institutions and opposition politicians since coming to power in 2015 in their obituaries of Magufuli, implying that his death provided a chance for Tanzania to reverse its democratic decline.

It is sad to see how low the reputation of Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of Myanmar until a few days ago, sank on international social media. While Burmese citizens appealed for international solidarity in criticism toward the military coup that toppled the Suu Kyi government on the likes of Facebook and Twitter, the response of foreigners has been lackluster, to say the least. The few outspoken foreigners have instead used the sphere to criticize Suu Kyi's apathy toward the suffering of the Rohingya under her watch.

The success of the world in tackling COVID often depends on access to personal data. When authorities find a person who tests positive for the virus, it often becomes essential to be able to know who the person has come into contact in the past weeks and where s/he has been, so that contact tracing enables more testing that can prevent the emergence of clustered infections. Such successful contact tracing requires the tested individuals to reveal some very personal details about their lifestyles.

As Tokyo declares the second state of emergency for the ever-increasing number of cases of COVID-19 in the greater metropolitan area, one of the focal points of the lasting long-term damage from the policy may be education. In a nation that is already facing a steadily declining and aging population, with an ever-lower number of births before COVID, any government signaling that the pandemic is not completely under control is only going to dampen the enthusiasm of its young citizens reproducing. The possibilities of offsprings facing interrupted education and a not-so-vibrant economy in which jobs are difficult to find will only further the deterrence.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc on the world, more and more consumers are shunning the potential dangers of brick-and-mortar stores in favor of their online alternatives. Major e-commerce platforms, along with their counterparts peddling everything from inter-personal communication to insurance products, have become the primary beneficiaries of the pandemic era. Yet, as their market values hit one record high after another, the global world of "big tech" is also facing unprecedented scrutiny as governments around the world finally begin to grasp and rein in their influence.

It is no longer news that Japan's provincial areas are facing a steep long-term decline , as the country's overall population decreases and ever-more opportunities for work and high living standards become concentrated in Tokyo. As provincial areas face a steady decline in population, the local tax base, proportional to the declining number of people and businesses that make the locality their permanent home, is also declining in tandem. With the same areas facing ballooning costs from pensions and healthcare as the population ages, the fiscal shortfall threatens to break the fragile balance of payments for the local governments.

More than a year ago, I argued that a history of ethnic conflicts and a political structure that gives too much regional autonomy threatens the peace the country achieved under Abiy Ahmad, a 2019 Nobel Peace laureate. Indeed, as 2020 draws to a close, the Ethiopian federal government is on a military offensive against Tigray, a northern region whose ruling political party was once behind the political force behind the authoritarian regime that Abiy and his allies worked hard to overthrow. With the federal government cutting off electricity, water, and internet to Tigray and a large number of locals fleeing across the border to Sudan as refugees, the war threatens to destroy Abiy's hard-earned international reputation as a peacemaker.

For most casual readers of world history, the term "sphere of influence" has a distinct feel of yesteryears. The word conjures the image of colonial heydays when European powers drew artificial lines on a world map to mark the geographical limits of their competing interests. Within the drawn boundaries, puppet states were without any ability to make any independent decisions. Instead, small states are forced to follow the grand designs of their superpower "allies" and "partners" and not communicate with other superpowers. Students of history are taught that with the advent of formally signed agreements, of political, economic, and military nature, such "spheres of influences," grounded in unequal relationships between small and large states, are no longer present.

Trump has made himself clear even as Biden secured the 270 electoral votes needed to secure his election as the next president of the United States. Through speeches, official statements, and tweets, the current president assured the general public that he is not yet backing down, taking the election to the next stage of recounts and legal conflicts. During this whole process, his supporters stood by him, calling for vote count stoppages, recounts, and throwing out "illegal" votes wherever it suits the incumbent, and for every online article that celebrated the Democratic victory, hundreds of social media posts called that the election is not yet over, echoing Trump himself.