“In most forms society, be it a company, a school, a country, the rule of 20-40-20 applies: the top 20% of the population do much of the work, the middle 40% get by doing what they need to, and the bottom 20% find ways to feed off the group without any work input.”
Apparently, this is […]
A guest teacher flew in from Japan, gave a lesson at the San Francisco Enshin Karate dojo. He was stereotypically and most amicably Japanese; short, stout and with buck teeth, he’d a habit of chewing and twitching his neck, like he was eating a carrot and warding off a mosquito at the same time. In […]
Before anesthetics and dentistry, how did people keep good teeth? My guess is they didn’t. Thinking such thoughts on the way back from the dentist, I had an epiphany. Ohaguro was punk rock!
The ancient Japanese thought it fashionable to paint their teeth black (ohaguro). Why not, if their teeth were already bad? Instead of trying to […]
(Warning: not a happy story)
A friend three times removed grew up with a bear. She is from Hokkaido, the northern most island in Japan, where bears roam rampant. A cute little cub had found itself at her family’s back yard, lost, and so the family decided to raise it, making the cage bigger as the […]
Nowhere else would the topic of horses and whales naturally tie into a conversation revolving around food, other than with the Japanese, who, until I pointed it out, found it quite normal to think of them as something to eat.
I remember in elementary school we were often served whale meat, which were minced and fried. […]
It’s even got a name. “Colony Collapse Disorder“. My brother had heard about it last year in the UK. My mum waited in line to buy a book, “The Collapse of the Honeybee and the coming Agricultural Crisis“, in Japan. How come I haven’t heard much about it in the US?
This phenomenon of disappearing adult […]
For the past few days I’ve been working as a translator at a Clean Tech conference. There were 5 of us translators, and each of us had one Japanese businessman or city employee to tend to.
The person who I translated for was from a southern city called Kita-Kyushu, which had recently been designated by the Japanese […]
As I use the corner of my bosses’ business card
to clean out the dust in the seam of my desk
suddenly I remember
an incindent in Japan that stirred the whole nation
of a politician who received a business card
and, before putting it in his pocket,
folded it in half
Some years ago in Japan, a few children got lost in a mountain located in their neighbourhood. Their parents thought they got kidnapped and called for help. A few days later they were found, hungry and dirty from a few days of mountain living.
This incident became a hot national topic, peopled talked about it on […]
Back from Japan already, but there’s so much more magic to share, so let’s pretend we’re still there.
Mother found paradise an hour away from home.
We swam in water we could drink from.
We gave peace signs under the sun.
And found solace in the sound of a clear water fall.
