Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

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。

I told myself that I can do this. Yet, the Word document remains blank. “I need a sentence, just a simple idea to get this thing off the ground.” The mind was reaching a state of frenzied desperation, even as the fingers remained motionless on the keyboard. They say they do not accept “garbage” for output. But have they never heard of the saying that one man’s trash is another’s treasure? Maybe what I think is the mundane would be interpreted as extraordinary when read elsewhere.

COVID-19 is a time of great instability. As one variant after another hits the global economy, many companies suffer from volatile costs associated with changing travel policies, supply chain disruptions, and clients being unable to continue business relationships. Many employees end up paying dearly for the suffering of their employers. For those unfortunate enough to be in the most volatile industries like restaurants , whole departments, workplaces, and business ecosystems have disappeared alongside jobs of individual employees.

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.

One of the most evident beneficiaries of the rush to work from home in the COVID era is video call services. With the advent of fast internet connections, people now matter-of-factly speak to each other over Zoom, Teams, or Skype video calls, for both the purpose of work meetings with colleagues and clients or casual meetups with friends and family members. Some people relish the ability to talk from the comfort of their living rooms, clad in pajama bottoms, to whoever they need to speak to with the push of a button. Some have come to consider video calls to be at the forefront of the vaulted goal of digital transformation of the workplace.

The business of meeting new people is, in the pre-COVID days, was a lucrative one here in Japan. Even in the most residential of suburban neighborhoods, Japanese-style izakayas and Western-style bars are physical locations where friends and colleagues get together to complain about the travails of their daily lives over glasses of beer or cups of sake. For those without anyone to speak to, a bit more money in host or hostess bars will furnish the customers with male or female companionship, not for erotic purposes, but simply to lend an ear to the conversations.

The modern white-collar work, in many ways, is designed for the benefit of extroverts. Those who are happy to talk to many people fit themselves suited for essentially communicative roles, both external-facing, winning new businesses from potential clients, and internal, handling tricky relationships among colleagues. A service-oriented economy is fundamentally one where the engine of growth is greased by collaboration among people to get things done and fulfill customers' needs. In this world, introverts, many of them not fond of speaking to strangers, are more or less forced to be more communicative just to get ahead professionally.

As the global vaccination efforts against COIVD continue steadily, governments are preparing for how to systematically handle international travel in the post-COVID world. Aside from putting in place measures that detect new cases from incoming travelers, facilities to quarantine, and creating institutions responsible for continued monitoring, governments around the world are seeing a new "vaccination passport" as a way to ensure safe travel on a large scale while minimizing risks of a new contagion. The argument goes that if there is some sort of global standard for assurances of a traveler's inoculation from epidemic diseases, costly prevention measures would become obsolete.

When people talk about automation in the world of work, they assume that it is the unskilled blue-collar laborers that will be the victims of it. As factories and warehouses depend more and more on machines to operate, thousands upon thousands of people who depend on their hands and feet for a living will be out of work, with nowhere to go since other menial jobs they are qualified to do are also disappearing. In this scenario, the wealth gap between the uneducated, vulnerable to automation, and the educated, evermore in demand due to their ability to thinking critically and innovate, will only become wider and wider.

"No Masks, No Service." As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, the wearing of surgical masks in public has increasingly a global norm, spreading beyond the confines of East Asia where it has been used for decades to mark colds and other potentially contagious illnesses. As scientists around the world shift from recommending not just essential health workers, but everyone to wear masks, their ubiquity, and level of general acceptance have increased, despite some continued resistance.

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.

"Digital transformation" has become a hot trend in the non-IT business world in the past few years. As a slew of software firms come to maturity peddling productivity-enhancing programs for more legacy firms, the legacy firms have come to grips with a renewed sense of crisis that they need to adopt more IT in their day-to-day operations just to keep up with tech firms that can achieve so much value with relatively few employees. The idea of using the tech firms' own products to help retool the likes of manufacturers and traditional brick-and-mortar service operators is becoming not just mainstream but urgent as they adapt to the work-from-home world of COVID-19.

I recently had an opportunity to speak to a group of new university graduates just joining a particular Japanese firm, as part of the company's initial training for new hires. As an icebreaker to get to know the group a bit better, I asked each member of the group about why s/he decided to join this company. The answers, to my sheer disappointment, was extremely underwhelming. One mentioned that the company is big and stable, another said that the firm's older employees all seemed to be very friendly, and scariest of all, one person bluntly mentioned that there is no particular reason that she chose the firm over others.

There is probably no worse time for people looking for a career change. As COVID-19 continues to rage around the world and output data show double-digit declines across major economies and rising unemployment, employees are lucky that they still have a job. In a world in which employers are concerned whether they will have enough business to cover them for the months to come, none are particularly keen on expanding the number of employees at this very moment. For those who are currently stuck in jobs that are less than interested in and looking for a way out, it seems they are unlikely to be successful at it until COVID goes away.

The Japanese language has a term サービス精神 ("the spirit of service") to denote anyone who has the mentality to be helpful to others, whether the others in question are clients, coworkers, or family members. The idea of being helpful to others is an essential part of the concept of "omotenashi," the idea of predicting and then following through with what others would find most pleasant and comfortable. In the world of business of retail, hospitality, and other service industries, the spirit of service is needed for customers to happily part with their money .

A common refrain that is often heard about the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic is that the growth of dense urban areas has in some ways contributed to the rapid spread of the virus. The close proximity in which people live and work, along with the highly developed and extensive transport networks that carry people through and beyond major urban areas have allowed the virus to be transported and exposed at unprecedented speed and range. In other words, in areas that lack major cities, the coronavirus would be less damaging.

"I see you have done many different things in your 20s, but there is nothing further after Ph.D., so this particular job search will really be key for you," the recruiter was absolutely spot on when hearing about my desire to look for a long-term job at age 30. Just as much as going back to school for further studies hurt the prospects of landing a high-paying job afterward , years of jumping around different parts of the world doing what many think are odd jobs also make getting the next job only that much tougher. When the initial curiosity over an international resume ends, recruiters only have a bunch of questions left about motivation.

There is plenty of oddities about getting a job in Japan. For new graduates, the most notable is the mass hiring of new graduates that are not tied to specific positions. A month or two of group training that gets the newbies excited about the company is followed by assignments to different departments that are made without consideration for what the new employees want to do themselves. In the olden days, the first assignment will be followed by new assignments that also align more with the interests of the company's needs at the moment, rather than the employee's desire for a certain career.

One of what many social scientists consider to be a growing problem of modern economies is the spread of precarious work through the "gig economy." An increasing number of people are working as full-time freelancers, such as drivers for Uber and project-based consultants, through contracts that do not guarantee them fixed monthly salaries and employee benefits like insurance available to full-time staff. With incomes seasonally volatile and subject to changes at any time, such freelancers are rightly protesting their fates as expendable laborers with little leverage over their employers.