Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

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.

Chiba city is a decidedly underrated city in an underrated prefecture. Tokyoites find little reason to make the trip to the prefecture beyond the use of Narita airport, even though Chiba prefecture is right next door and the trip to the center of Chiba city can be done in less than an hour. That lack of firsthand experience with Chiba causes Tokyoites to have acquired a distinct misconception of the city with nearly a million residents just to their east. Tokyoites perceive Chiba city as lacking in basic amenities that make life comfortable, and that Chiba residents need to head to Tokyo for any sort of proper entertainment.

Almost as soon as I asked for quotes, my phone was buzzing with inquiries from half a dozen moving companies, big and small, national and local. Many immediately wanted to visit my apartment to see how much stuff needs to be moved to the new apartment, and to give a quote in person. The fastest visit happened within 30 minutes of my initial inquiries for a quote. The salesmen (and yes, they were all men) proved to be relentless even in the days after, sending follow-up emails and newsletters, just in case they did not manage to leave a good impression on the initial phone call.

Variety shows are a genre to itself in Japanese TV. Comedians, actors, and other TV personalities get together on-stage, crack jokes, watch videos, and talk about their life experiences. Sometimes, these personalities are sent to various restaurants, shops, and other locations, where they interact with locals, shop, eat, and talk so that the audience get to know the personalities, learn some new knowledge, and find out about new destinations to hang out on the weekends in their hometowns and faraway cities. Sometimes, the shows are cringeworthy and xenophobic , but they continue to thrive and evolve.

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.

Thanksgiving is a time for family get-togethers in the US. Distant relatives come for a dinner party, with turkey or otherwise, under one roof, perhaps for just this once in a whole year. But eating and talking are not the only activities when family members get together. When people get together so rarely, some gift-giving is bound to be necessary, so retailers see the Thanksgiving weekend to be a great time for pushing more products out the door. The result is a Black Friday tradition of jaw-dropping discounts and binge-buying for the whole family.

For those of you who do not know yet, I have been running a small non-profit organization called the Study Abroad Research Institute for quite some months now. The organization's mission is quite simple. First, it collects information about academic programs open to foreigners from universities in Japan and hopefully soon, other countries where students may be interested in studying abroad. Then, it takes the information and shares it with students in Africa (and hopefully soon, other parts of the world) so that they can apply to the programs directly if and when they are interested. As part of sharing the information the study abroad information with students that may be considering studying abroad, I have had dozens of opportunities to speak directly to students currently located in various African countries via video calls. The ostensible purpose of these calls is to introduce the very idea of studying abroad in Japan and what may be benefits for them to consider the option. Bu...

It is no longer news that the Japanese population is shrinking and aging. With the country's birth rate hitting record lows and having no signs of a consistent rebound, for all sorts of businesses in Japan, the prospects of an ever-tinier domestic market are a cause for great worry. And that worry will hit no industry faster than kindergarten operators. Providing a once-in-a-lifetime service, these businesses rely purely on the number of children in the country. They are stuck with the decline, having no option to target repeat customers or expand the consumer base in any way.

It seems to be a social norm everywhere in the productive world that imbibing alcohol is an after-hours activity. Because people are generally consigned to work during the day, drinking before dinner during weekdays is frowned upon as the behavior of the unemployed alcoholic. And in a world where many proscribe to the idea that a good day off is a productive day off (in a sense of getting hobbies and other things done outside of paid work), drinking while there is still sunlight out on the weekends is not exactly the most socially acceptable behavior either.

There is no point in sugarcoating it: I did not handle my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine well. Even though people say the first dose should lead to anything more than some arm pain afterward, my reaction was much more severe. Aside from the thumping arm pain that lasted a better part of a month, I found myself sleeping the whole day the day after and even a part of the day after that. Considering that those who reacted badly to the first dose tend to also react heavily to the second, the anticipation for fevers, pains, and worse have been with me ever since I had the injection a few hours ago.

A small L-shaped counter with six seats, a long cabinet crowded with bottles of alcohol, and two TVs playing old movies and music videos...the little hidden bar is simple enough that one could mistake it for a nightspot in rural Africa . But this little bar was in the back of a nondescript office building in a nondescript neighborhood in a nondescript part of Japan. For 18 years, the owner of the bar ran the place by himself, relying on the old regular customers who have grown to know him personally as they came in week after week, month after month, for chilling and quiet chats.

At first sight, Squid Game  has a lot against it on the road to global popularity. It is unabashedly violent, refers to some idiosyncrasies of modern-day South Korea that many people around the world may not be familiar with, and does not stack its cast with the young, beautiful, and famous. Yet, what has been termed as the South Korean version of The   Hunger Games , speaking directly out against the evils of social stratification by taking class schisms to its extremely violent logic end, has somehow become the biggest original series in the entire history of Netflix.

The setup at one of the University of Tokyo's bigger conference halls is also designed for a major event. Hundreds of staff members checking paperwork, rows of chairs for people waiting their turn, and elaborate signs and partitions to direct the flow of traffic have turned the normally empty conference hall into one that serves a single purpose: an assembly line of getting as many COVID shots into people's arms as possible in a short time. The massive amount of human and physical resources, not to mention the planning, that went into the affair certainly displays the dedication of the university to its staff and students.

The 24-hour gym that I go to near my apartment is moving up the technology chain. Replacing a contactless card key system that allows users to go in and out, the gym recently introduced a facial recognition system that allows those registered to open the door just by scanning their faces. It is more convenient for users who are unwilling to carry their card keys around. And from the gym's perspective, it effectively prevents users from lending their card keys to their non-paying friends. The goal is to eventually entice all users to switch over to the facial recognition system and get rid of all card key users. Some users seem to be quite resistant. Even though the gym sent multiple emails to users about registering their faces for the new system, and posted the same notice on the gym's premises, the majority of the users continue to show up with their card keys. Even though gym staff is around when these users visit, the users do not seem to have any intention of speaking to t...

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.

Turn on Japanese TV and one often sees programs about foreigners living in the country. The shows have foreigners introducing their cultures to a Japanese audience, stories about foreigners who lived in the country for decades and how they interact with the community, and unfortunately, many foreigners who choose to caricature their own cultures to make a living as foreign TV stars. But as COVID rages on and Japan remains firmly shut to the very idea of accepting new long-term foreign residents, TV shows about foreigners have also evolved somewhat in line with the changing attitudes during COVID.

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. 

As the 2020 Tokyo Olympics draws to a close, major media outlets in Japan and around the world are already coming up with compilations of these Games' greatest moments. Particular to the Japanese case is a sheet abundance of crying on the part of both the athletes and commentators (many of whom are former athletes who participated in past Olympics). In media interviews, athletes shed tears of joy when they won medals, and plenty more tears of regret and disappointment when they lost close matches or just missed a medal. As commentators cried on-screen with the athletes, the media outlets hope that the audience cried with them.

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.

For some people, the legendary American gymnast Simone Biles is currently in the news for all the wrong reasons. Before the Tokyo Olympics started, the news was all about her dominance in her sport, revolutionizing the field of women's gymnastics like no one before she has ever done. Given those news articles, people rightly expected her to win gold medal after gold medal in Tokyo. Yet, instead of winning gold medals, she has recently been in the news for suddenly dropping out of the team and individual all-around competitions, citing issues with her mental health.

It was a traditional sight in front of the local community center. Several pairs of mothers and their young daughters were walking from the nearby parking lot, dressed in the summer kimono of different colors highlighted with graceful floral patterns. They were perhaps heading into a classroom that would show the young daughters how to properly dress and undress in these traditional Japanese dresses, no longer used in daily life but still a common sight in summer festivals like firework watching, night prayers at Shinto shrines, and just any traditional summer outings for traditional holidays.

Even at first sight, Sapporo, the capital city of Japan's northernmost Hokkaido prefecture, looks different from your average Japanese city. The center of the city forms a perfect grid, with the streets running north-south or east-west so straight that, if it were not for the streams of cars on them, one can easily see from one end of the city to the other. And these streets, at least two lanes in each direction (if not wider) are designed for easy navigation by cars and other vehicles, rather than facilitate easy crossing by pedestrians just wondering around to get a taste of street life. Shops and restaurants are neatly packed into rectangular buildings on rectangular land plots, rather than spilling onto the streets.

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.

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.

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.

Even a casual purveyor of Japanese pop culture would be familiar with the concept of "kawaii." Loosely translated as "cute," it introduces a certain immature, baby-like naughtiness to everything from interior design to the pages of comic books, reflecting a nation often obsessed with seeking out both physical and mental youth even in the twilight years. Nowhere is kawaii more apparent than in the designs of female girl bands, or "idol groups" in the local parlance, that often consist of teens in matching uniforms dancing in sync to bubblegum pop songs about first love and growing up to leave adolescence behind. 

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.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic became big news, a topic that frequently popped up in mainstream media is the damage that fast fashion does to the environment. The enormous cost of producing, transporting, and handling the disposals of clothing and shoes that go out of fashion supposedly in a year or two has been rightly pointed out as a culprit for increase in trash in the rich world and excess exploitation of both natural and human resources in poor ones. While the garment industry brought development to a few countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Cambodia, for most of the developing world, the negatives outweighed the positives.

East Asia is known to worship flight attendants. Chosen to be young, beautiful, and cosmopolitan, it is a group of people that many young women aspire to be a part of, and many men look forward to meeting when they are on planes, and date when they are off. The blatant objectification of flight attendants, as I argued in an opinion piece back in 2017, holds back efforts to advance gender equality and to allow people to have a realistic view of what flight attendants essentially are: overworked servants in cramped spaces that have been over-glamorized by society in a way that attract applicants to an otherwise unglamorous job.

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.

The National Museum of Japanese History is a sprawling complex in Sakura, in the hinterlands of Chiba prefecture west of Tokyo. Its semi-rural location perhaps allowed the government and academic facilities that together set up a building complex that, albeit briefly, goes through the entirety of Japanese history from the pre-historic to the post-World War II era. It is an ambitious project challenging for both the curators and visitors alike. I started my tour of the facility at 11:45 am and had to rush through the last two sections of the museum just to make our exit before it closed at 5 pm. 

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 has already become a cliche to say that the COVID-19 pandemic will be revolutionary for human civilization. Countries keen on securing vaccines and personal protective equipment have worked quietly to roll back globalized supply chains built up over past decades. Differing policies and level of success handling the virus' spread in different countries mean that, at least soon, the physical mingling of a globalized elite will be minimized, as airlines fail and borders shut. What people took for granted as everyday life, such as going to school and commuting to work, will remain somewhat of luxuries that are subject to cancellations and restrictions at any time based on public health concerns.

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.

It seems like the MeToo movement has finally hit the pop music industry. The grassroots criticism of how male managers and guardians of young pop stars like Britney Spears that have been brewing for years and decades have now re-emerged as society reexamines the power dynamic of the entertainment industry, with older men in power abusing their power to overwhelmingly benefit, both financially and sexually, from the hard work of female workers. As the world comes to acknowledge and be appalled by the behavior of Harvey Weinstein and his associates over the course of decades, there is a growing call for other men to come forward with their misdeeds.

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.

「お二人は3月にゴールインしました！」goes the TV program that discusses the relationship trajectory of a newlywed couple. Literally stating that "the two people reached the 'goal in' in March," this phrase uses "goal in," a Japanese-made English term that is commonly used to refer to two people that have been dating for a long time getting to the stage of marriage. The term is so commonly used that Japanese speakers rarely think about the underlying implication of the term itself, and how marriage, as an institution, is perceived within modern Japanese culture.

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.

Ten years ago, in the aftermath of the Great Tohoku Earthquake, the Japanese economy faced a brief slump that was attributed as much to the behavior of the Japanese general public as damages by the Quake itself. Due to the devastating nature of the Quake, many Japanese people took upon themselves for "self-restraint" (自粛) on entertainment-related spending, canceling parties, outings, and other leisure activities as a display of respect toward the thousands who perished in the Quake.

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.

"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 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.

The biggest news of the year that just passed is no doubt the global spread of COVID-19. Media outlets and people around the world have over time became front and center in a historical moment, as a global pandemic, unprecedented in the lifetimes of most of today's residents on Earth, ravaged nations and economies around the world, disrupting everyday life. As different states came face-to-face with the speed with which the virus claimed the lives of their citizens, the media coverage increasingly centered on how the disease seemed to take on different trajectories in different places, hurting some countries much more than others.