Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Night has fallen as the slow train pulled into its final destination in Nagano . Even though it is a prefectural capital and host of the 1998 Winter Olympics, amid the unending heavy rain, its bleak darkness could not have been less welcoming. Watching people rush past to avoid the downpours, I chewed on a burger in the MacDonald's in front of the main train station. "But I ask, what really is good about the democratic system?" I suddenly heard a young but confident voice amid the noisy banters in the fast food joint. The determined (and highly uncharacteristic and out-of-place) conversation continued, "before Pearl Harbor, America was anti-war in its entirety, so the presidential candidates, knowing that war was about to happen, still played the pro-peace card!" No doubt, I was thoroughly surprised. Nowhere in Japan have I ever heard such confident and bold talks of politics, and nowhere in the world have I heard such talks in a fast food joint. In a population

I have always believed (and probably always will) believe that language is a tool of expressing culture . Language detached from culture can never be truly considered a true language as it is then effectively detached from all cultural nuances essential for generating deep conversations. Thus, a person without cultural knowledge associated with a particular language can never be considered fluent in that particular language no matter how effortlessly the person can speak it. The above logic is the fundamental reason I am against all efforts to introduce English ( or any other language, for that matter ) as the working language for a non-English-speaking environment. Because English, as known by her native speakers, ignores all socio-cultural customs of the non-English-speaking locality…this is especially true in Japan, where the various unwritten social rules of embarrassment and isolation so commonly used is practically unknown in the Western world where English originates. However

The rain gets stronger, the wooded mountains more isolating, and the journey on the slow local train continues into the rural areas as night falls on the flatlands of central Japan. Every time the train stops and temporarily shuts down her engine, the only noise that can be heard is the sound of the rain showering the ground. There are no longer any malls, or even any stores and houses, outside the passing landscape, and seeing pedestrians of any sort is quickly becoming more and more of a rarity.

Outside the windows, the mountains seemed to rise out of nowhere. Heading out of each tunnel, the traveler is suddenly blinded by the bright colors on the slopes. With not a single piece of dirt, the golden yellow and the bight green leaves of well-preserved old growth is dotted by the occasional pink blossoms and uncharacteristically fiery red. The concentrated eyes of the traveler are forced to refocus to find these dissidents of nature amid the equally beautiful majority. And as the traveler continues to glance through the rising landscape, the insignificantly little yet respectably resilient human habitation comes into his eyes. The old wooden houses with black tiles are seemingly decorated by the movements of the hardy (aging) farmers picking through the nearby fields. If it were not for the well-worn little trucks taking the produce to the faraway markets, no one would be able to tell that this is no longer feudal Japan… Inside the warm and nearly empty trains, children spok

Recently, I watched a lecture on increasing realization of civil rights in China and the media's role in the realization. The lecturer made a strong point that the increasingly unstoppable dissent by journalists in officially sanctioned press, combined with spread of the info through SNS , is forcefully breaking down the propaganda apparatus maintained by the Communist Party (cited by the lecturer as "the most sophisticated in human history"). He notes with optimism that the media, backed by intellectuals, is institutionalizing dissent and slowly eroding the established cultural attitudes of the Chinese people. Foreign ideas, passed on through the media and SNS, is infusing foreign ideas rapidly into the Chinese mind...All very clichéd arguments that have been made by "Chinese experts" for years now. But a little side-note I picked up in his argument (and I want to discuss a bit) is that he notes the same thing did not happen with Japan's "free pres