Majid, I am sorry that I knew nothing about you before they hanged you. Forgive us. Majid, you have a family. You are someone’s son. Someone’s brother. Someone loved you, waited for you, worried about you. And yet we know almost nothing about you. This is Majid Adineh, a protester from the January uprising whom the Islamic Republic hanged on Sunday morning. There was not even a single photograph of him publicly available before his execution. This image is taken from a forced-confession video released by Mizan, the judiciary’s own media outlet. That is how brutally the regime silenced your family. They made you disappear while you were still alive, and then they took you to the gallows. I don’t know what happened to you when they came to your cell and said, “Get ready. You are going to be hanged.” I don’t know what went through your mind in those final moments, when they put the rope around your neck and kicked the chair from beneath your feet. Did you think you had been forgotten by the rest of the world? The unbearable truth is that almost nobody knew your name until the regime announced that you were gone. They silenced your family. They hid your face. They kept your name from us. And then they ended your life.

In Japan, almost every impression of an American starts the same way. The arms go wide. I wanted to know what comes after the arms. So this month, I asked people I know to show me their American. Coworkers. Neighbors. My barber. A ramen chef. A six-year-old. No explaining. Just show me. This is you, as performed by Japan. A guy on my team, 41, slapped both hands on the table, stood up, and said, "Alright. Let's do this." Then he sat back down. I asked what they were going to do. "Doesn't matter," he said. "They say it first and figure it out after. It shouldn't work. It works." Our whole team says it now. We still don't know what "this" is. We're ahead of schedule. My barber, 52, put his feet up on his own counter, leaned all the way back, and said, "Take your time, buddy. I'm not going anywhere." Then he sat up fast. "They mean it," he said. "That's the scary part. You will be there two hours. You will leave knowing everything about his cousin's boat." A hair stylist, 33, looked at my phone for one second and screamed, "OH MY GOSH. STOP. She's GORGEOUS." It was a photo of my lunch. "That's normal," she said. "Americans have the energy of a wedding at all times." A ramen chef, 62, took one sip of nothing, closed his eyes, put a hand on his chest, and said, "Man. Best thing I've had in my whole life." He has heard this about the same bowl roughly four thousand times. One man said it about the water. "I believe them every time," he said. "That's their trick." A college student, 20, walked up to a stranger at the bus stop, said, "Love the jacket, man," and kept walking. Didn't look back. "That's it," he said. "They hand you a compliment and leave. Like a delivery. No signature required." A convenience store clerk, 24, said, "Hey, how are ya, good, thanks, you?" in one breath, with nobody answering. "They do both parts," she said. "It's very efficient. Japan should study it." A retired truck driver, 71, used no words at all. One lift of the chin. That was the whole performance. "American men say everything with the chin," he explained. "Hello. Nice truck. Good game. Sorry about your dog. All chin." The little girl next door, 6, put both thumbs up, showed me every one of her teeth, and said, "AWESOME." To me. To her shoe. To the wall. "Americans say awesome to walls," she told me. She is not wrong. Then I asked Mrs. Nonaka. She's 45. She's the head nurse on the ward where my mother had her knee done. She is the calmest person I have ever met. In three weeks, I never heard her voice go up. Not once. She didn't open her arms. She stood up, made a megaphone out of her hands, and shouted across the waiting room: "OKAY. WHO NEEDS WHAT?" Every head in the room turned. She sat back down like nothing had happened. Kobe. January 1995. She was fourteen. The earthquake took her family's house in about twenty seconds, before the sun was up. That night, she was in a temple hall with two hundred people. No heat. Candles. The floor shook again every few minutes. Her grandmother sat in the corner wrapped in a curtain someone had pulled off a window. Her heart pills were somewhere under what used to be their house. Nobody asked for anything. In Japan, you don't. It would be rude to trouble anyone. So two hundred people sat very still and very politely and waited to be cold together. Then the door slid open, and an American walked in. Six-foot-four. Red Nebraska cap. Glasses taped at the corner. An English teacher from the high school down the hill. Everyone called him Mr. Dan. He looked around at two hundred silent people, made the same megaphone with his hands, and said it. "Okay! Who needs what?" Nobody moved. He said it again. Louder. Nothing. The third time, he pulled a marker out of his pocket and started a list right there on the temple wall. His own needs first, to show them how. "DAN: Socks. Coffee. A better haircut." Somebody laughed. In that room, that night, somebody laughed. Then an old man raised his hand. Blankets. Then a young mother. Milk. Then a boy. Batteries. Then everyone. The list ran down the wall and onto the door. Mrs. Nonaka raised her hand last. She was so ashamed she could barely get the words out. "My grandmother's heart medicine." He wrote it down. No questions. The roads were gone. The trains were gone. Mr. Dan got on a bicycle and rode off into a city that was still on fire. Every hour, the fourteen-year-old went to the door and looked out. He came back after eleven, pushing the bike. Flat tire. In one hand, a paper bag from a pharmacy across the river. In the other, a net bag of mikan oranges. Forty. Exactly the number of kids in the hall. He had counted before he left. He tossed the first one to the smallest boy and said, "Room service." That's when somebody noticed his feet. Canvas sneakers. Soaked through. No socks. His apartment had come down that morning too. He'd walked out with his glasses, his wallet, and the marker. The socks on the wall were not a joke. Nobody in that hall had socks to give him. So her grandmother took the curtain off her own shoulders, got down on her knees, and wrapped his feet in it. He tried to stop her. She didn't let him. Her English was zero. His Japanese was close to it. It didn't come up. He dozed off upright against the wall, under his own list. In the morning, he was gone. Someone said he'd walked to the next temple. With his marker. Her grandmother lived to see Mrs. Nonaka graduate from nursing school. The earthquake was thirty-one years ago. She never learned his last name. But every morning, when she walks onto her ward, she says it. In English. To the whole floor. "Okay. Who needs what?" The young nurses say it now too. Her patients think it's an old Japanese phrase. She has never corrected them. Last spring, an American tourist came in with a broken ankle. He heard her say it and burst out laughing. "Ma'am, where on earth did you learn that?" "Nebraska," she said. He took a second with that. "Yeah," he said. "That tracks." So, America. You keep wondering what the world thinks of you lately. Here's what happens in Japan when someone says, "Show me an American." A man who says "Let's do this" before he knows what "this" is. A stranger who loves your jacket and won't stay to be thanked. A chin that says "sorry about your dog." And a teacher in a red cap with no socks, asleep against a temple wall, under a list that two hundred strangers were finally brave enough to write. That's our impression of you. It's also the one you left.

Mikan works as a stationmaster at the Ciaotou Sugar Factory Station on the Kaohsiung Metro in Taiwan. He was originally a local cat who lived near the station, but the staff and passengers cared for him and he became the "face of the station".

1001 Threads of Mizan is an action-adventure game with drop-in, drop-out co-op, letting you play solo or with up to 3 people. Developer MBC Game Studio told us how they developed the traversal and combat. Presented by 1001 Threads of Mizan