In 1942, a California farm inspector quit his job to spend three years working eighteen-hour days on ninety acres of grapes that weren't his. He got shot at for it. He lost his marriage over it. And on the morning the owners finally came home, he was waiting in their kitchen with dinner on the table. His name was Bob Fletcher. Most Americans have never heard of him. I'm Japanese, and I hadn't either, until this year. I haven't stopped thinking about him since. In Japanese, we have an old phrase: rusu o azukaru. It means "to be entrusted with someone's absence." When a family has to go away, someone they trust keeps the house. Sweeps the step. Keeps the fire going. So that when they come back, home is still home. It is one of the deepest kinds of trust one person can give another. This is the story of an American who carried that trust for three families, when almost nobody else would. Florin, California, was a farm town near Sacramento. A man named Kuzo Tsukamoto had left Hiroshima at seventeen, worked his way across the Pacific and up the coast, and finally settled there and planted grapevines. His son Al was born in America. So was Al's little girl, Marielle. They were Americans. After Pearl Harbor, that stopped mattering. In the spring of 1942, families of Japanese descent on the West Coast were ordered to leave their homes for camps. They could take what they could carry. And if nobody paid the mortgage and taxes on their land while they were gone, they could lose it. Al Tsukamoto went to a man he knew through work. A state agricultural inspector. Tall, lean, quiet, unfailingly polite. People said he looked like Gary Cooper. Al asked him: Would you run our farm while we're gone? And our neighbors' farms too, the Nittas and the Okamotos? Pay the bills, keep the profits. Ninety acres of Tokay grapes. Bob Fletcher had never grown a grape in his life. He asked for a week to think about it. Then he said yes. He would have to quit his job, so he would need to keep some of the money. But not all of it. Half. The other half, he would save for them. On the morning of May 29, 1942, five-year-old Marielle was sent outside to find her grandmother. She found her in the rose garden, crying. Her grandfather was standing at the edge of the vineyard, looking at the vines he had planted twenty years before, wondering out loud if they would ever see this place again. That morning, Bob Fletcher loaded up the family's belongings and drove them away for safekeeping. The family got on a train. Nobody on that train knew where they were going, or for how long. Then Bob went to work. Eighteen hours a day. Three farms. Every bill paid. Every vine tended. At harvest, on good days, he and a small crew packed two or three hundred boxes of grapes. Not everyone in town approved. People called him names I won't repeat here. Someone fired a rifle into the Tsukamotos' barn. Years later, when he was asked about that, he said he'd been too busy to even think about it. Somewhere in those years, his first marriage ended. Al's wife, Mary, always believed the farms had cost him that. But he found one good thing out in those vineyards. A young woman named Teresa was hired, with her mother, to tie the vines. When Bob came by in his truck to pick up the crew, Teresa always made sure she climbed in first. So she could sit next to him. They married in June 1945. He wrote to the family in the camps. Once with bad news: their dog had run off. Once with good news: grape prices were climbing. There would be money waiting for them. On July 10, 1945, before dawn, the Tsukamotos drove back into Florin. Three years and forty-two days. The town looked like a ghost town. Boarded windows. Stripped tractors. Some houses burned to the ground. As they turned onto their own road, Al switched off the headlights. Nobody in the car said a word. Then they saw it. The house. The barn, leaning against the walnut trees. The vineyard. All of it, exactly where they had left it. They got out of the car and ran around the farm in the dark, touching everything. The walls. The posts. The vines. To make sure it was real. Then they opened the door of their own house. Bob and Teresa Fletcher were waiting inside. With hugs. And a meal on the table. Up and down the West Coast, families came home to dead vines, stolen trucks, strangers in their houses, or nothing at all. The Tsukamotos came home to dinner. For the rest of his life, whenever anyone tried to call him a hero, Bob Fletcher said some version of the same thing. "I don't think I did anything." He went on to serve as the local fire chief. He helped protect the water rights of the farmers around him. He lived to be 101. Before he died in 2013, he gave five acres of his own land to the town, for a park. Mary Tsukamoto called him one in a million. Half a century later, she said he was still their best friend. He said there was nobody he liked better than Mary. In Japanese, we needed a whole phrase for what he did. In Florin, California, it only took one man. And he was too busy to think about it.

Good to know that Konami is not letting Silent Hill go. Series producer Motoi Okamoto told Famitsu that now the "first wave" is out (the Silent Hill 2 remake, Silent Hill f and Townfall), the team has to "consider the second and third waves." He says they're "looking at a number of projects." Three games in three years after a long stretch of nothing. What a turnaround. I'm hyped, but a little worried too. Horror needs time to stay scary, and a game every year can start feeling like an assembly line. I think a Silent Hill 1 remake is in that second wave. What do you want to see next?

Annual releases and multiple unannounced games for SILENT HILL! 🗣️ "Our goal,with luck,is to have an annual release of new games," Okamoto said What do you think of this strategy? Do you think it's a good idea to release them annually or prefer them to be released more slowly?

A new report claims the Silent Hill 1 remake is targeting a 2027 PS5 release from Bloober Team and Konami. It also names Gabrielle Fritz and Jade Matthew as part of the voice cast. Fritz has prior game credits in Battlefield 2042 and Wolfenstein II. Matthew’s credits are mainly in Torchwood. No details on Harry Mason have surfaced yet. For three years Konami has put out a new Silent Hill title annually. Franchise producer Motoi Okamoto has said the goal is to keep that pace, with multiple unannounced projects already in development. The report suggests the remake would fill the 2027 slot and continue that cadence. So far Bloober has only confirmed the project exists via a social post. More could surface before the end of the year.