Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Last week, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the country's main governmental agency for international development, announced that it was scrapping what it called the Africa Hometown Initiative. The initiative was originally intended as a city-to-city economic development partnership, with four Japanese regional governments being respectively paired with an African counterpart, so that Japanese resources and know-how can be shared at the grassroots level more efficiently and directly. The more bottom-up approach to international development promised an alternative to JICA's usual ways. It did not take long for the country's right-wingers to spread false information about how the initiative would be a beachhead for millions of Africans to swamp Japan. By focusing on the use of the word "hometown," these individuals easily played into the growing fear among the Japanese public about the country becoming less Japanese over time through a surge of non...

After years of popular films that portray Chinese patriotism in contemporary settings, China's film-makers finally turned back to the past, namely World War II, for more inspiration. Two recent films,  Dead to Rights (南京照相馆) and 731 , respectively depicting the plight of Chinese civilians during the Nanjing Massacre and the biological weapons experiments in Northeastern China, hit theaters. It is a rather opportune time for the pivot. The Chinese government had just concluded a massive military parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, reminding people to not forget a painful past.

The aftermath of the Japanese legislative elections this past week has only cemented an almost concerted narrative among international media outlets that the country is on the cusp of change, probably for the worse. The first time in post-WWII history that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party lost its majority in both houses of the legislature, and the very likely resignation of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba in the coming weeks, are seen in the context of greater instability, despite the much-needed conclusion of trade-deal negotiations with the US. 

I do not normally comment on Japanese politics. It is not because I am not interested in politics or the country. But it is much more because, for much of the past decades, it has not been a source of change or inspiration. As the country struggled with deflation, economic stagnancy, and depopulation, politicians had little to say about solutions, preferring to muddle on with a combination of quantitative easing and pensioning off the growing cohort of old people, buying political capital in a land where the youth are largely characterized by political apathy .

The young Chinese woman in the photo is certainly a beautiful one. In a recent social media post I came across, the poster spoke of how the woman, the girlfriend of a fellow American engaged in cutting-edge technological research in Japan, may be a front for Chinese state-sponsored spying. His evidence? That the attractive woman is just way out of his friend's league, and that her being enamored with him cannot realistically be possible without some sort of ulterior motives. Through the story, the poster cautioned others to stay far away from overly enthusiastic Chinese women in their midst.

The Pakistani man from Germany was ceaselessly inquisitive about the state of business in Malta. "I'm looking to start a new business here, maybe a shawarma shop, maybe an Indian restaurant. What do you think about the possibility of success?" He asked before proudly explaining the scale of his import-export business in Germany and the good pay his nephews are getting in Malta as signs that he has a pretty good shot at making it as a business owner in Malta too. 

A few days ago, global tech news was suddenly taken over by the emergence of DeepSeek AI, a previously unknown Chinese startup that released an AI chatbot that claimed to have the capabilities of the best that the likes of OpenAI can offer, but developed with a fraction of the cost. The firms providing the tools to the global AI race, most notably semiconductor designer Nvidia, saw their share values tank in response, driven by investors fearing that future improvements in AI can be done without the constant increasing number and sophistication of chips and equipment that their producers previously claimed.

"Hey, do you want to grab a seat?" The middle-aged black man tapped on my shoulder as I walked to the back of the bus, resigned to the reality of having to stand for the hour-long ride. He gestured toward an empty seat on the window side in a four-seat configuration facing one another. With the other three seats occupied by fairly large men with long legs, cramping another man into the midst was hardly ideal. Indeed, when the black man announced his intention to have me scootch in, his two seatmates only reluctantly shuttled their feet to make room.

As a lifelong traveler who, due to the meeting-heavy nature of my current job , is unfortunately not able to frequently head to new places, I watch travel vlogs as one way to quench that travel thirst to some degree. With the competitive vlogging landscape that is YouTube today, plenty of people, from all sorts of cultural backgrounds, dishing up their views on the same sites, both famous and mundane. While all are united in their love of travel, how they portray the places they visit, through their visual recording and verbal explanations, illustrates how travel, as a hobby and a job, is seen so differently. 

One of the common refrain for first-time visitors in Japan is that the country lives in the future. An example frequently cited for futuristic modernity is the prevalence of the ubiquity of the heated, bidet-enabled, remote-controlled toilet seat in Japanese restrooms. Even in personal anecdotes, I have heard too often why the piece of technology is not found outside Japan anywhere except in high-end hotels, even though the technology behind it is by no means cutting edge and the price of the product by no means prohibitively expensive even if subjected to export tariffs.

"It does not seem like you have native pronunciation" seemed straightforward enough. This is an excerpt from an email from a leading online English language school in Japan, rejecting my application to become part of its roster of part-time tutors. The application itself was simple: I had to submit two separate 30-second video recordings of myself, respectively explaining an idiom and giving a self-introduction. For the evaluator, that one minute of talking, plus my visual looks on camera, was enough to determine that I was not suited for their clientele of many beginners who could not even tell apart accents.

There is something incredibly different about going to the gym in Malta compared to Japan . It is not just that the Maltese gym has a nearly even breakdown between female and male members. But it is how the female gym enthusiasts in Malta dress and behave. many show up only in a sports bra and tight figure-hugging leggings, revealing ample cleavage and their round bottoms for all to see. Many of them, clearly active on Instagram, would pose in front of the many mirrors of the gym, accentuating their flat abs and muscular legs for photos to be shared later online.

I could not take my eyes off the third-floor booth. A family of six, what looks to be a grandmother, a set of parents, and kids, all in matching black T-shirts and dancing together with big smiles to the live performance on the stage they see below. Now, multiply that by some 40 booths, plus 900 seats at the first level, in one of the oldest and continuously operating opera houses on the island of Gozo . It was a sight to behold. From kids to the silver-haired, all gyrating and singing along to the tunes while standing on their feet, one of the most intergenerational concerts I have ever attended.

I used to be miffed whenever I heard those who do not come from an English-speaking background get English names. When I worked in an internship years ago in China, I was disgusted that my Chinese colleagues would not call me by my name simply because I did not have an English one. They would address each other by their English names before returning to their Chinese conversations. I found the act highly superficial: having English names did not automatically make them proficient in English, just as their choice of not addressing my Chinese name did not make me less international than they are.

The terrorist attacks launched by Hamas against Israel should be a time for soul-searching. The pre-attack Middle East was defined by a cautious embrace of the Jewish state among its Arab neighbors. Despite opposition from their respective populations, the likes of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and others were increasingly willing to see Israel as a permanent political presence in the region, and a useful economic partner to help them diversify away from natural resource extraction. Hamas needed a dramatic measure to remind them, and the world, that the embrace should not come at the expense of the Palestinians.

Watching the Super Bowl and its (some would call, underrated) Half-Time Show this year made me realize once again just how invisible Asians are in the American entertainment industry. As the Chiefs and the 49ers battled it out on the field and Usher reminded us of his hits from the 1990s, not an Asian face was projected, even for a split second, onto the TV screens of more than 100 million people around America tuning into the biggest sporting event of the year. The biggest representation of Asia in this Super Bowl, sad as it is, is whether prominent visitor Taylor Swift would get there in time from Tokyo.

The local takeout burger place was manned by three youngish workers when I last visited. One yellow, one brown, and one black. Clearly from three different countries (none of which is Malta) and they communicate in perfect English amongst themselves and to their equally multicultural clientele and delivery personnel taking orders for various meal-order apps. This little spot is a perfect microcosm of modern-day Maltese society: a society that is, quite literally, full of people from around the world, working and living together to make the island economy tick along.

"Political correctness" seems all the rage in modern social discourse. Whether or not one supports its aim to punish any and all public figures found to have engaged in any wrongdoing in the past, plenty of individuals, both famous and not-so, have had their careers derailed due to their dark secrets revealed to the masses. The power of what some come to term the "cancel culture" have ensured that everyone thinks twice before saying or doing anything in public, lest their actions and words be interpreted as hurtful to any social group in the future.

People have stereotypes about other countries. These stereotypes help people make sense of countries they have no first experience interacting with. It can be exhausting to navigate the almost endless nuances of sociocultural, political, and economic differences. Shorthand labels, however crude and oversimplifying they may be, provide, at times, practical starting points for people to build knowledge of a topic that they have little background in. For those who are emigrating to another country or coming into contact with people of another nationality for the first time, having a starting point is certainly better than not having one.

This blog has had a persistent issue with how Asian men are portrayed in American mainstream media. To this day, the post about the perceived lack of "manliness" among Asian men is the most viewed of the blog's history spanning more than a decade. In subsequent years, this blog followed the rise of K-pop as a phenomenon that gradually changed how Asian masculinity is defined in both Asian and non-Asian culture, sparking a boom of clean, often non-muscular Asian men being perceived as a more down-to-Earth alternative of the domineering, violence-prone attitude of the Western "alpha male" trope.