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.