Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

As part of the author's Japanese to English translation freelance work , he is currently working on transcribing some Japanese interviews into English.  Interestingly, the contents are not of business or mainstream entertainment, as market demand would usually expect, but stories of a niche community of Japanese interested in aspects of the Chicano culture.  For people who do not know, Chicano refers to inner-city Mexican-American culture, a distinct immigrant culture that straddles the supposedly "pure" Mexican and "pure" American cultures of the two countries' cultural mainstream.

It is hard to believe, but Tsuruoka, a coastal city of little more than 100,000 people in Yamagata Prefecture, has been designated a UNESCO City of Gastronomy since 2014.  And the designation really shows in the local food.  From locally harvested rice, fresh seafood from Sea of Japan, to locally branded beef, chicken, pork, and vegetables, the ingredients are of top-quality.  They are cooked in what are countlessly emphasized as truly local ways, steeped in local traditions, and supposedly unique and not found anywhere else in the country.  Local chefs and hotel staff are undoubtedly proud of the culinary tradition.

Undertaking a popular political movement against a government backed by military force is often not the easiest of tasks, and the task is particularly difficult if the government is a military junta with no hesitation to use force to keep itself in power.  Organizers of political movements, with no military force of its own, inevitably come up against the barrels of guns when confronting the state, often with devastating consequences that results in endless bloodshed.  The state, fearful of losing moral authority and political legitimacy as murderers of unarmed civilians, would of course like to suppress news of such confrontations.

Every unplanned trip has its unforeseen circumstances, and sometimes those unforeseen circumstances can get quite costly.  And there was certainly one of those on this particular trip through the Silk Road.  On the way back from Yerevan, the Armenian capital to Tokyo, the cheapest way would have been to fly through to Russia and then to Japan.  The next cheapest, involving non-Russian transitions, would have been costlier by a margin of close to 300 usd.

The movie Black Panther has been all the rage back in the US for quite some time now, particularly among the black community given its depiction of a wealthy, confident, powerful black country not suffering under the yoke of Western colonialism.  While the concept of Afro-centrism or Afro-futurism as many have termed it, is worthy of note, a bigger theme that goes beyond race comes to mind when watching the movie.  That is the question of whether and how a wealthy nation engages its poorer neighbors.

It is unsurprising that in many places of the former Soviet Union, people (and middle aged men in particular) love their alcohol.  The winters are cold and long, so shots of vodka are great for keeping warm and whirling away the long nights.  The wide availability and cheap cost of making and buying the stuff make them friendly on the wallet just as it is on the senses.  The public's indulgence has created a very strong distilling culture, in which high quality alcohol is even made at home with different fruits.

The immigration official at the Armenian land border with Georgia looked quite hostile.  "What were you doing in Azerbaijan?" He asked rather angrily as he flipped through the passport to find the unexpected Azerbaijani entry and exit stamps.  When he received the usual "tourism" answer, he was simply unconvinced, deciding to take a copy of the passport page with the Azerbaijani stamps before allowing the passport holder into the country.

The little town of Gori an hour outside the Georgian capital of Tbilisi is mostly known for one thing today.  It is the birthplace of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.  To most outsiders today, Stalin is known mostly for his unpredictable political purges and disastrous collectivization efforts, leaving hundreds of senior Soviet leaders and millions of its citizens dead.  But in his hometown, Stalin is still celebrated, not least for his contribution to defeating Nazism and turning the USSR into an industrial power within a generation.

Just a few days ago, the author found himself discussing how to increase number of tourists in Azerbaijan with a few locals in an underground bar in Baku.  The economy was in dire straits as the GDP dropped along with oil prices.  The government's supposed diversification to non-oil sectors involved little beyond investing in infrastructure to increase exports of natural gas.  Tourism, for a city as beautiful as Baku, deserves to be one of the main sources of income in a diversified economy.

The restaurant does not look like much from the street level.  With a little "restaurant" sign pointing at a dimly lit set of stairs leading down to a basement of a otherwise commercial building filled with fashion shops.  But as soon as the set of glass doors dividing the stairs from the streets were opened, the loud sounds from down below were inescapable.  Simultaneously, almost disco-like lights from the basement give off the impression that one is entering a nightclub rather than a restaurant.

At the airport in Baku, Azerbaijan's capital city, the author found himself briefly unable to enter the country due to misunderstanding of the country's visa-on-arrival rules.  The immigration staff not only helped him step by step through the process, he also did so with smiles, jokes, and even free chocolate to help him get over the three hour wait at 11pm.  In the subsequent taxi ride from the airport to city center, the taxi driver got lost but remained good natured, joking about how streets shouldn't have same names.

Astana, the capital city of Kazakhstan, is in many ways the city of its president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.  Having came up with the idea of creating a brand new city to replace Almaty, the economic hub of more than a million people, as capital of the country, he certainly did not hesitate to put his own imprints on the city itself.  The city's new airport, university, several other institutions are unabashedly named after him, while the main museums all have sections exclusively dedicated to his life and politics.