Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

There is nothing remarkable about the Korean restaurant around a corner of the residential suburb that I live in. Toted as a family restaurant, the small space, with a row of counter seats facing an open kitchen is usually run by an elderly couple with little Japanese skills and their middle-aged children. In a neighborhood with few options for Korean food, the restaurant gets a steady stream of customers, at least on the weekday nights that I have visited. Given that many Korean dishes require lengthy preparations of putting together and boiling the ingredients, the proprietors of the restaurant were constantly occupied.

It is interesting to witness a piece of history right in the neighborhood that you live in. In this residential suburb of Chiba city that I live in, there is a little wooden Japanese-style house sitting in the corner of a small backstreet, surrounded by similar houses populated by normal people. Yet, in this little wooden house, decades ago, lived Aisin Gioro Pujie (愛新覺羅溥傑), the younger brother of Aisin Gioro Puyi (愛新覺羅溥儀), the last emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty that ruled China until 1911. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, he came to Japan as a member of the royal family of Manchukuo.

The bulletin board on the first floor of the small local community center was full. On a Saturday morning, the few classrooms available to rent by the center are all filled in with activities like "International Exchange," "Basic English," "Singing," "Calligraphy," among others. Various activity groups have their little posters pasted on the nearby walls, advertising in pictures and words their membership, meeting times, and the reason others should join. From the first look of the place, it seemed as if the community center is really a meeting place for all members of the community.

On the 4th floor of a nondescript office building, a five-minute walk from bustling Chiba train station is a series of small booths fronted by a reception. Those who are casually passing by may see that these booths resemble small meeting rooms, where those keen on privacy would be interviewed for jobs or thrash out the details of business ideas. That these booths are a "party space," as their operator calls them, would not be the first thing that would pop into the casual observers' minds. Their hidden secretive structure does not indicate their users wanting to talk to many people, as one would at a party. Yet, it is in these small series of rooms that many romantic couples are formed, after paying good money. After those interested sign up for a "party for people looking to get married" (婚活パーティー), paying JPY 5,000 (for a man) or JPY 1,500 (for a woman) each, they are directed to these little booths, where they are told that they will, in quick succession each

Room 706...707...708. I was told by the lady, in her thickly accented Japanese, to head to the 7th floor of a nondescript high-rise apartment building a five-minute walk from the train station. The door to Unit 708 is not marked by anything in particular, with no sign whatsoever that is a business of any sort. It is unsurprising though. The building is, after all, a purely residential one, and a solidly middle-classed one at that. Surely the neighbors of Unit 708 would not appreciate it if they knew that some Chinese lady is operating a massage parlor within this exclusive symbol of well-lived white-collar life.

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.

In front of my apartment in Chiba, there is an elderly man in a uniform every morning from 7am. Tasked by the neighborhood committee, the man is at the same spot every weekday to greet the young children passing through on their way to school. "Good morning!" The elderly man never fails to say in his loudest voice as each child passes through. His voice is loud enough that I, living in the apartment unit right next to the road where he stands, can be woken up in the morning just by his voice. Most of the children he greets are equally vocal, responding in equally loud voices almost as a routine day after day.