To everyone in America, and to all of you in the English-speaking world who always take the time to read my posts. Maybe some of you are just being polite, but I hear this all the time: “I really want to visit Japan someday.” “Japan is on my list.” “I’m planning to go one day.” At the same time, I often hear another concern: “I’m worried about the language.” “What if I can’t communicate?” “What if I need help and don’t know what to say?” That got me thinking. I’m currently working on an app or website that could make those moments a little easier. Not a generic Japanese phrasebook, but something built around real situations you might actually encounter in Japan. Ordering at a restaurant. Going to a yakitori restaurant. Taking a taxi. Checking into a hotel. Asking for directions at a train station. Dealing with those small situations where you suddenly think, “How do I say this in Japanese?” The idea is simple: find the situation you’re in, pull up the Japanese phrase you need, and show it to someone if you can’t say it yourself. I want to build it from a Japanese perspective, with the kinds of phrases that actually make sense in real-life situations here. And I’m planning to make the first version completely free, so people can actually use it and tell me what works, what doesn’t, and what should be added. If you’re planning to visit Japan someday, would something like this make you feel more comfortable? I’d genuinely love to hear what situations you would want it to cover.

I can’t stop crying. Another temple burned down today. It was a historic temple in Yamaguchi Prefecture, founded in 931. Who is doing this? Are we really going to be told “the cause is unknown” again?

Two men are dead. Four others were drugged and survived. And what is everyone talking about? Her face. A case in South Korea has been getting a lot of attention. Kim So-young, 20, is accused of spiking men's drinks with benzodiazepines, drugs she had been prescribed for herself. Two men died in Seoul motels. Four others survived. On August 18, prosecutors asked for the death penalty. But online, people keep saying she is pretty. That they would have accepted a drink from her too. That is the least important part of this case. The timeline is what bothers me. December 14. Her own boyfriend drinks something she hands him in a parking lot, collapses twenty minutes later, and spends two days unconscious. He reports her to police. January 29. A man is found dead in a motel in northern Seoul. Security cameras catch a woman leaving. February 6. Police identify her, run her name through the system, and find the December complaint. Same woman. February 9. The forensic lab confirms the dead man had the same family of drugs in his body. That same night, another man walks into a motel with her. He is found dead the next day. She is arrested that evening. Police say they did not have enough evidence to arrest her sooner, and legally that may be true. You cannot arrest someone for looking suspicious. But the family of that last victim keeps asking the obvious question. He died three days after police already knew her name. Prosecutors also say she had asked ChatGPT about overdosing on sleeping pills, and that after the first man survived, the doses got bigger. She says she only wanted to make the men sleep. That she never meant to kill anyone. This whole thing gave me a strange sense of deja vu. When I was younger, the Kijima Kanae case was on Japanese TV constantly. She met men on marriage sites, sedated them with sleeping pills, and staged their deaths to look like suicide. Three died. She is on death row now. And I remember the talk shows barely discussed the victims. It was all about her looks. In her case the question was the opposite, "she is not even pretty, so why did men trust her," but the camera was pointed at the same wrong place. Korea is doing the same thing right now, just in reverse. Here is why the timing matters: the verdict comes down this afternoon. Whatever it is, I keep thinking about one question. When police have a survivor, a complaint, a body and one name connecting them all, what is supposed to happen in those three days? I honestly do not have a good answer. If you do, tell me. Two men are dead. They are the ones this story should be about.

In Japan, if you mess up the way you cook something, people will politely say, “It’s okay, it’s still edible,” just to keep you from feeling embarrassed. In Texas, I overcooked the meat at a barbecue. Actually, I didn’t just overcook it. I turned it into charcoal. Appearance: steak. Texture: construction material. Smoke level: small wildfire. An old man standing nearby looked at it for a second and quietly said, “That’s not meat anymore. That’s history.” A guy holding a beer walked over, poked the black lump with tongs, and said, “Give it another five minutes and it might connect to Wi-Fi.” The kids laughed. The dog sniffed it once and walked away. Someone started recording on their phone. Then one guy patted me on the shoulder and said, “Brother, don’t worry. If you managed to cremate something at your first barbecue, you’re doing fine.” Nobody ate it. But nobody had to. That day, I wasn’t cooking meat. I was grilling my initiation into America.

My company actually used to hire a large number of Muslim workers because we were short on labor. But now, the company says it will never do it the same way again. The reason is very real on the ground. They asked for a prayer space inside the company. They wanted the cafeteria menu changed. They said they didn’t want to work with certain people, so they wanted assignments changed. They said some jobs were too difficult, so they didn’t want to do them. Requests like that kept piling up, and the people on the ground got exhausted. Of course, we can be considerate. But trying to reshape an entire workplace around your own needs is different. A company is a place to work. Prayer, food, coworkers, job duties — if everything becomes “adjust it for us,” the workplace cannot function. If you work in Japan, you have to adjust to the Japanese workplace too. If even that is too much, then the problem is not on the side of the people accepting you.

In 1549, some regional lord legalized free trade in his territory. Nobody remembers his name now. In 1567, a 34 year old warlord named Oda Nobunaga copied the idea and ran it across his whole territory. Everyone remembers his name. Before any of this, getting goods to market in Japan was brutal. Near Ise Shrine there was an 18 km stretch of road with 60 toll checkpoints on it. Sixty. Merchants paid a tax at every single one just to keep walking. And even if you survived the road, you still couldn't just sell stuff. You had to join a guild called a "za." The guild paid temples and nobles for the right to control who got to trade. If you weren't a member, you were locked out. Didn't matter what you were selling. Nobunaga ripped both systems out by the root. Checkpoints, gone. Guild monopolies, gone. Anyone could show up and sell. This wasn't kindness. He needed cash and soldiers, and an open market makes both faster than a controlled one. Killing the guilds also starved the temples and nobles who lived off that money, which happened to be his political rivals. A 16th century samurai ran one of the first large scale deregulation campaigns in recorded history, then used the tax revenue to build an army.