For anyone who wants to see more videos about Japan, Thuong started a walking tour channel as a new hobby. If you have any requests around the Nagoya area, let us know. #nagoya# #japan# #walkingtour#

What was life really like under communism? Bulgaria is now turning that question into a tourist attraction. In Sofia, an €18 “Communist Tour” takes visitors through Bulgaria’s 45 years under communist rule - from the former Communist Party headquarters and a secret-police investigation facility to Soviet monuments and a memorial to the regime’s victims. Capitalism is now selling tickets to communism. But real life under communism was not a three-hour walking tour. It was the entire horizon of a person’s life. For many Bulgarians, the system provided employment, basic housing, public education and healthcare. That helps explain why memories of the period are not entirely uniform - and why some older people still feel nostalgia for its relative stability. But that security came with an enormous price: one-party rule, censorship, political persecution, secret-police surveillance, confiscation and collectivization of property, forced-labor camps, shortages, queues and severe limits on what people could say, read, believe or do with their own lives. Communism began with an immensely powerful ideal: eliminate exploitation, reduce inequality, give dignity to workers and organize society for the common good. Perhaps many of its early believers genuinely meant well. But when one party claimed the exclusive right to define the “common good,” idealism became coercion. Without a free press, political competition, private initiative or meaningful accountability, there was no effective way to correct mistakes - or restrain those exercising power. The promised equality too often became equality in scarcity, while a new political elite enjoyed privileges unavailable to ordinary people. The architecture tells the same story. Travel through former communist countries and you repeatedly encounter the same landscape: enormous government buildings, vast squares and row after row of grey, standardized apartment blocks. Parts of Bulgaria reminded me vividly of the China during the 1980s and 1990s. The resemblance was not accidental. Soviet architectural models, centralized planning and standardized construction methods spread throughout much of the socialist world. Rapid industrialization required millions of people to be moved into cities and housed quickly. Prefabricated concrete blocks were inexpensive, functional and easy to reproduce. Individuality, ornament and local character became secondary. In systems already suspicious of private luxury and individual expression, uniformity could even be presented as a virtue. Yet while ordinary homes were made repetitive and impersonal, communist governments loved enormous, muscular sculptures: heroic workers, soldiers, farmers and mothers standing upright, gazing confidently toward a radiant future. These figures represented communism’s idealized “new human”—strong, selfless, productive and devoted to the collective - almost like a robot! The contrast was striking: Private life was standardized. State ideology was monumentalized. These buildings and sculptures show both the ambition and the tragedy of communism: its desire to build an entirely new and more equal society—and the authoritarian, colorless and frequently brutal reality that emerged when human complexity was forced into a single political design. That is why these tours matter. Communism should not be reduced to either nostalgia or a tourist spectacle. People should be able to examine the distance between the promised utopia and the lives that were actually lived. As someone who grew up in China, this history did not feel remote, but disturbingly familiar. As socialism regains appeal in parts of the U.S., Bulgaria’s history should ring a warning bell: without checks on power, the promise of equality can become a machinery of control.