Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

In an era of the general public being inundated with different kinds of museums displaying a wide variety of exhibits , for any to really stand out from the competitive crowd, new methods are needed to draw in the interest of potential museum-goers.  Factory tours, at the first glance, fit the bill extremely well.  But presenting how everyday products are made from scratch via seeing the process actually at work in a normal setting, factor tours tend to provide a much more interactive experience for the general public, in ways that static displays of words and pictures cannot.

A recent news that is causing controversy is the plan for the Danish government to get rid of the country's ethnic ghettos by more forcefully assimilating its non-white migrant communities.  It is just a long line of growing trend of migrant host countries to compel migrants to assimilate faster through political and sometimes legal means.  The French bans Muslim headscarves , in plenty of countries (including the US), knowing the national language as a prerequisite for naturalization, and here in Japan, foreigners have to change to a Japanese surname upon becoming a citizen.

Japanese streets on the weekdays can be extremely colorless.  Salarymen in their millions walk about in almost identical black suits, quickly rushing toward their office buildings and clients.  But the black suits, for all their ubiquity, is not exactly designed for the hot summers that engulf the island country.  As humidity soars and temperatures rise above 40 degrees Celsius in some parts, keeping to the business norm, fashion-wise, can become tortuous.  Salarymen constantly wiping off their sweats can attest to the difficulty.

When one thinks of Tokyo, dense, crowded streets full of neon lights and skyscrapers probably come to mind.  And for the central parts of the metropolis, that image is more or less true.  But people, even those who are born and bred in the city, tend to forget that Tokyo actually extends hundreds of kilometers to the south, to the Izu and Ogasawara island chains where sparsely populated and little-visited islands can be found.  Life on these islands cannot be any more different from downtown Tokyo and perhaps anywhere on "mainland" Japan.

Right next to the apartment where my girlfriend lives is a construction site where a new partment building is built from scratch.  Aside from the half-a-dozen construction workers who are putting together the building itself, there are another half-a-dozen workers who are doing nothing but manning the different roads leading into the construction site.  Holding LED-lighted guiding sticks, they direct the trucks transporting materials to the site, and apologize to each pedestrian who happen to walk by the construction.

It is tough to talk about a social problem faced by a social minority, especially in a country like Japan where social minorities are often assumed to be absent or nonexistent.  Many people simply do not want to face the uncomfortable fact that there are minorities among them who missed out of the country's general sense of prosperity and order.  Instead, they struggle for both society's acceptance and just make ends meet in the direst of material conditions.  A recent Japanese film Shoplifters , in such sense, is truly an uncomfortable one to watch for many Japanese people.

One of the little-known idiosyncrasies of the Russian Far East is the presence of a relatively large North Korean population.  The region's low population translates to a chronic shortage of laborers needed for low-paid construction and menial work Russians are reluctant to take up.  In European Russia, Central Asian migrants fill the role, out here the North Koreans play the same role.  Despite ongoing sanctions that dramatically reduced their numbers, North Korean laborers are still preferred by Russian firms for their manageability, diligence, and lack of negative cultural (read: Muslim) influence.