Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

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.