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Showing posts with the label travel

Defining "Developing" Requires an Exercise in Firsthand Comparisons

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It was only when the taxi sped out of Malta International Airport that I realized the meaning of the word "development." I had just spent a weekend in Tunis, only a short one-hour flight in North Africa. Fascinating as the capital of Tunisia was, with its combination of colonial French and medieval architecture interspaced with the hustle and bustle of everyday life, the city was clearly rough on the edge. Streets were overrun with trash, watery sewage, and feral cats and dogs. The pavements, buildings, and markets were crumbling from the lack of repair and random touts following tourists for a quick "gift."

Why is Tourist Traffic So Homogenous in a Racially Diverse Malta?

My wife made a great observation in our day walking around Malta's historical sites: while the country is a hotspot of globalization , with worker residents coming from around the world, the same level of globalization is not reflected in the country's international tourist traffic. Whereas the country's buses, shops, and indeed, the workforce of tourist hotspots like hotels and restaurants, are filled with people of different colors, the crowds of tourists that come from outside the Maltese islands are overwhelmingly white, sprinkled with some Asians.

Cultural Funding Shows that the EU Keeps Diversity Within the Continent Alive and Well-Preserved

In his heavy Maltese accent, the middle-aged man declared, "You know the Europeans give us money, so we get to renovate all this." Pointing at the big construction site in the middle of the historic town center, the man intended to be both comical and proud. As he casually struck up a conversation with me in my little self-guided tour of his hometown, he was clearly glad to see that there were so many foreigners who were willing to walk its winding stone-cobbled streets, gawking at the Instagram-ready white-washed houses fronted with potted plants.

日本の参考になるドバイの移民モデルとその成功要因

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  移民問題は日本においてますます重要なテーマとなっている。日本は過去数十年間、高齢化や人口減少といった人口構造の変化に直面してきた。これらの問題に対処するためには、移民政策を考慮する必要がある。なぜなれば、移民は労働力と消費者不足を解消するために不可欠である。高齢化が進む中、日本は移民の流入により、産業界は必要な労働力と消費者を確保することができる。これにより、経済成長が促進され、日本の国際競争力が向上する。

A Reflection at the Halfway Point of My 30s

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The "Happy Birthday" posts on Facebook seem to be sparser than usual. As the average user of the social media platform becomes older, it has become more and more difficult to keep them engaged and communicating with their equally older friends. After all, older people are busier. They have children to attend to, subordinates to manage, and more responsibilities at work to ponder over. What is more, with more of a stake in work and private life, they are much more cautious about their public image, and try to avoid leaving digital footprints. So many of them have Facebook profiles that stay the same for years.

The Oddities of Experiencing a Different Lifestyle for the Short Term

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A trip from my parental home in the northern suburbs of San Diego to the city center is quite a journey. Swapping through multiple trains, buses, and even a few Ubers, not to mention walks and wait times, each journey quickly becomes a two-hour-plus ordeal, physically draining due to the blazing sun of southern California and visually unappealing due to the constant sights of multilane freeways and shrub-filled canyons. Even in a car, the journey is not shortened by much, as rush-hour traffic has cars piled up in queues every time there is a red light.

Setting Low Expectation for Self as the First Step for Setting Low Expectation for Others

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The railway station was certainly a nondescript one. A little hallway straddling the railway leads to a flight of stairs opening up to a small traffic circle. Besides the station itself, there is a small park and a few late-night eateries and bank outlets. Nothing out of the ordinary for a very provincial town a good half an hour away by the slow train from the nearest big city. However, on the curbside is a small bus stand, equally nondescript, that advertises a once-every-half-an-hour service to an outlet mall on the outskirts of this nondescript town. That's where I met the Taiwanese couple.

Can Japanese-Style Public Baths Go Global?

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The rest area of the massive public bathhouse in a nondescript suburb of Chiba felt almost like a converted hotel lobby. Rows after rows of relaxing armchairs faced a massive ceiling-to-floor window, facing a cove and the open skies. The sea's waters felt tranquil at night, with occasional fishing boats bobbing on the surface. The cove is curiously flanked by shopping malls, parking lots, and a steel mill, all sprouting activities even as the evening winds down. Farther off in the distance are the skyscrapers of Tokyo, lit up in the night sky. A cloudless day brings bright moonlight that completes the whole picture.

A Massive Earthquake Makes the World Temporarily Forget the Blunders of the Turkish and Syrian Governments

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Looking back at the performance of this blog, peak interest was achieved back in 2011, when the Great Tohoku Earthquake disrupted the normalcy for the entire northern half of Japan and showed just how even in the most stable of societies, major natural disasters can spark a wave of reflections on just how fragile human civilization can be. That series of posts on the aftermath of the Earthquake, including broken supply chains that led to shortages in normally well-stocked Japanese shops and the fraught mental state of normally calm Japanese people, among others, will always be a highlight of this blog.

A Little Exoticism Amid Similarities Makes Taiwan Attractive to Japanese Travelers

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Any first-time visitor from Japan to Taiwan should be forgiven for thinking how the two are so different superficially. Whereas small standalone residences dot the landscape in rural Japan, in the more urban, densely populated west coast of Taiwan, personal homes, if not in high-rise apartments, tend to be bunched together should-by-shoulder, head-next-to-head. And whereas Japanese houses can be demolished in a few decades to make way for new replacements, Taiwanese ones sit continue to be fully utilized even as their exteriors are covered with black soot and grime.

When a "Niche Food" Tastes Good to One People and Not to Others

It is a genuinely odd thing to be tasting injera  in a nondescript suburb of Tokyo for the very first time in my life. But the fermented spongy flatbread made with Ethiopian staple grain teff was certainly the star of the show at the small Ethiopian restaurant. The place certainly was not easy to find. Located among rows after rows of mass-produced two-story residential buildings, interspersed with noisy highways overhead and little-used rivers, there is a small house that was only notable for the small menu board outside and a colorfully printed menu on its front wall. 

旅の始まり、振り返るのを忘れずに

みなさんは「旅」という言葉を聞く時、どのようなものがまず頭に浮きますか?見たことのない美しい街並み、食べたことがない料理の味、そして想像もしていなかった運命の出会い。それが私にとってまず思いつくことです。旅からは、日常生活では得られない未知と触れ合える刺激を期待し、出発から遥か前よりその期待でワクワクを感じています。実際に旅でその期待が満たされるかどうかはわからないものの、ただ単に何か違うものを経験できる可能性があるだけでも毎日のルーティンに久しぶりの新鮮さが現れることを感じます。

A Less Connected World May Boost the Business of "Being Here But Also Somewhere Else"

The French-style village on the southern shores of Chiba prefecture tried its best to look out of place. Even though traditional Japanese wooden houses are visible from its backyard, its colorful houses, uniformed staff, as well as pools and baths interspersed with European decor attract plenty of Instagrammers seeking to create a sense of a Frech holiday just a few hours drive outside Tokyo. The fact that the little French-style resort established in 1980 is booked full on the weekends despite lack of public transportation show that the average Japanese citizen's desire to go abroad remains strong.

Will EU Countries Banning Russian Citizens Entering Lead to the Creation of a New Iron Curtain?

As the war in Ukraine continues, Western states are now taking even more measures against ordinary Russian citizens. It has been several months since major Western firms pulled out of the Russian market, leaving ordinary Russians with fewer choices in their supermarkets and fewer ways to move their money across international borders. Now, news has emerged that multiple EU states have prohibited the granting of new visas to Russian citizens for the purpose of travel and studying abroad, making it ever more difficult for those wanting to leave Russia to do so legally.

Can Heatwaves Provide Places With Low Temperatures a New Economic Lifeline?

It is a bit surreal to watch the news about record-breaking temperatures in Europe from a hotel room in eastern Hokkaido. While parts of the UK and France are suffering their first-ever 40C weather in history, the northern island of Japan is still in the cool mid-20s, made chillier with frequent rains and winds, and untempered by the high humidity of the country's more southerly regions that draw up the wet-bulb temperature to uncomfortable levels. There is much to complain about the inconvenience of a rural backwater like eastern Hokkaido, but the summer temperature surely is not one of them.

Drinking on a Tokyo Street: Damn the Climate Change, Inflation, and the Pandemic

Not a day goes by in Japan in recent weeks that the topic of unusual weather hits the news. From record heat (40 degrees in June!) to clearly changing weather patterns (shortest rainy season on record) to difficulties of regular people handling the weather (the government urges people to cut back on electricity consumption), it seems as if this year will be a year to be remembered in future generation as the year when global warming and climate change went from mere slogans of a faraway land to real difficulties for everyday lives during the ever-longer, ever-dryer, ever-hotter summers.

Commodification of English Teaching as a Service

For many future English teachers, the first step is to get evidence that they have the right mind and skillset for instructing students. For many countries, their claim to be fluent in the English language, based on their nationality, cultural background, or visual looks, no longer suffice. With ever-tightening visa restrictions for English teachers, what used to be high-paying summer jobs for students from the world's best English language universities are now reserved for those with the right papers, in the form of diplomas, certificates, and training results, to show know-how in the art of teaching.

Empowering the Global South to Fight Global Warming: the Importance of Addressing the Geographical Inequality of Climate Change Impact

The term “global warming” is an effective moniker to convey the cross-border nature of an environmental problem. By emphasizing that the planet as a whole is becoming hotter due to human impact, it begs people from all nations and all corners of the globe to solve the problems that they all face as residents of the same planet. The power of the moniker is such that it has largely become a common belief among the believers of global warming that the issue is neither caused by nor can be solved by one particular group of people located in a specific place on Earth. Yet, a closer look at how the world has approached the issue of global warming reveals a gaping discrepancy in how it impacts different countries in different parts of the world.

The Disappearing Colonial Vestiges of Sapporo

Even at first sight, Sapporo, the capital city of Japan's northernmost Hokkaido prefecture, looks different from your average Japanese city. The center of the city forms a perfect grid, with the streets running north-south or east-west so straight that, if it were not for the streams of cars on them, one can easily see from one end of the city to the other. And these streets, at least two lanes in each direction (if not wider) are designed for easy navigation by cars and other vehicles, rather than facilitate easy crossing by pedestrians just wondering around to get a taste of street life. Shops and restaurants are neatly packed into rectangular buildings on rectangular land plots, rather than spilling onto the streets.

The Disappearance of the Manchu People in the Face of Historical Turbulence

It is interesting to witness a piece of history right in the neighborhood that you live in. In this residential suburb of Chiba city that I live in, there is a little wooden Japanese-style house sitting in the corner of a small backstreet, surrounded by similar houses populated by normal people. Yet, in this little wooden house, decades ago, lived Aisin Gioro Pujie (愛新覺羅溥傑), the younger brother of Aisin Gioro Puyi (愛新覺羅溥儀), the last emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty that ruled China until 1911. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, he came to Japan as a member of the royal family of Manchukuo.