Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

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.