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This weekend, I visited the Kyoto Aquarium with my wife Minori for the first time in six years. Despite the happy atmosphere of all the sea creatures and friendly staff, it was somewhat of a bittersweet experience for me.

The Kyoto Aquarium was one of our first date spots, but around the time we went in 2020 coincided with me receiving the news of my father’s health getting progressively worse. I’ve discussed these sad events at length before, but long story short, Dad would pass away six months later of colon cancer.

Coming back made me feel more emotional than I thought it would because it reminded me of what was a very different time in my life. Namely, those first couple months Minori and I were together were some of our happiest memories. It was right before I had to deal with so much heavy and important stuff, as well as when I was completely sure I’d be pursuing an academic career.

In 2026, Dad is no longer with us and I’ve dropped out of my PhD program because it wasn’t working out for me. I’ll get into that whole ordeal of quitting academia another time, but I’m now trying to start my own import-export business with a good friend. Instead of having what I thought was a set path in life, there are now a lot of unknowns to navigate though ahead. It’s both an exciting and terrifying time, to put it lightly.

Despite all these uncertainties, Minori and I are now happily married. Our second wedding anniversary is this week, but it also marks six years since we’ve been together in total. She has truly been my anchor through thick and thin. I can’t even begin to express how grateful I am for her support because I wouldn’t have been able to go through everything that’s happened alone.

My own personal connections aside, the Kyoto Aquarium is indeed a wonderful place to spend an afternoon. It’s home to multiple specimens of the Japanese giant salamander, one of the city’s beloved historic symbols. I had a good laugh watching a sea lion that looked like it was posing for visitors as it had a stretch on dry land. The hall of jellyfish was newly renovated from the last time we were here. The penguins were expectedly adorable, and they were actually the source of an internationally viral post of mine back in 2020. We arrived too late to see the dolphin show, but I remember it being thoroughly entertaining the last time and that’s just another justification to come back.

The Kyoto Aquarium isn’t particularly large compared to other aquariums I’ve been to in Japan, but you get a nice selection of sea life to learn about. The layout is straightforward and the building itself is within short walkable distance from Kyoto Station. There were naturally far more people now compared to the pandemic era, but it didn’t feel overcrowded despite us being there on a Saturday. Passing through the various exhibits again felt comforting as I contemplated both past and future.

It’s also located in Umekoji Park, a beautiful spot with lots of colorful flowers in bloom at this time of year. Kyoto always bears the brunt of Japan’s brutal summers, but the weather in April is still just right. Minori and I had a nice afternoon together strolling through the area. Students from local schools practiced sports and hung out with friends, while the overall atmosphere felt surprisingly relaxing.

Kyoto has a reputation of being made worse by hordes of tourists who turn the city into what’s essentially an amusement park. While that’s sadly true in a few places and the post-COVID overtourism phenomenon can’t be ignored, you can still find good spots as a local. My wife and I enjoy taking long walks on Kyoto’s backroads, while parks like Umekoji have some great scenery. We’re past peak sakura season, but the flora we saw still made for some stunning photos. Later in the evening we walked over to one of my favorite restaurants for some excellent Vietnamese food.

Despite this only being my second visit, the Kyoto Aquarium and surrounding area will always mean a lot to me. The last time I was here coincided with one important turning point of my life, and I’m once again at a similar crossroads. Amid a day of charming animals and gorgeous flowers, I remembered more innocent salad days while I contemplated on what the future may hold.

As best as I could though, I also treasured the present because my personality has always made it difficult to just sit back and enjoy the moment. Depending on where I end up setting up my business, we may no longer be living in Kyoto this time next year. It will be sad if we have to leave, but we hope to stay in or relatively close to Kansai. In any case, the Kyoto Aquarium will always be a memorable place for us. I’m glad we could spend another day there again.

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Foreign Perspectives is a mix of free and paid content. Certain articles such as these are exclusively for paid subscribers. If you enjoy the work I do, please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and ensures that this Substack can continue to deliver high quality pieces.

In The Travels of Marco Polo, the people of Japan are described as having “tremendous quantities of gold.” So rich is this country that “the King’s palace is roofed with pure gold, and his floors are paved in gold two fingers thick.” Such lavish stories were all Europeans had to go on about “Zipangu” back in the 13th century when Travels was written. This includes Marco Polo himself who never actually visited Japan.

The intrepid Venetian explorer most likely got his information secondhand during his time in China. Japan did export gold and other valuable commodities to the wealthy Song dynasty, but the country might as well have been a different planet to Marco. It would be well over 200 years before the first Westerners stepped foot in the Land of the Rising Sun with the arrival of Portuguese merchants in 1543. One can only imagine what must have been going through their heads considering the tall tales they had heard.

While Japan is no longer an isolated country, most Westerners still have no real conception around what’s actually happening here. Urban legends like there being vending machines which sell used panties on every street corner are usually based on outdated information in an attempt to make Japan seem more “weird” than it really is. In more serious cases, Westerners with certain political agendas will attempt to use Japan to prove their talking points around immigration, race, and other shibboleths despite having very little real understanding of Japanese society. Just this month, people on Anglosphere social media went wild with blatantly false claims that the country’s new prime minister was pursuing “mass deportations” of foreigners.

Despite the invention of the internet giving us 24/7 updates on everything going on in the world, misinformation around Japan continues to run rampant. Our shift into an online landscape has only made this problem worse, and it’s enough of an issue that I felt compelled to write about why fake news around Japan is so widespread.

Few qualified people know Japanese and English

The obvious language barrier is the biggest immediate obstacle to getting reliable information from Japan. One habit of mine that I’ve basically done since the day I first arrived is turning the television on when I get home so I can see what stories are being discussed in the zeitgeist. Even with the internet, TV is still how the majority of Japanese people get their news and popular variety shows which cover trending social topics are extremely popular.

Unsurprisingly, all of this is in Japanese. If you’re a monolingual English speaker, you’ll inevitably have to rely on translations which only give you a small sliver of daily events in Japan. Sure, you can go to the BBC, The New York Times, or any “respected” publication for some of the highlights, such as the results of major elections, but most of these places aren’t going to report on stories of local interest which give a better sense of how the average Japanese person might feel about things or what news items are gripping the country.

I’ve previously written about why Japanese people don’t speak English, but the same holds true in reverse. Japanese is a notoriously tough language to learn for foreigners, and the few who do learn it rarely get to a level where they can regularly interact with untranslated resources. The pool of people who are functionally fluent in Japanese, employed to produce professional commentary on Japan, and are good writers to boot is, as you can probably guess, infinitesimally small. That’s not the end of it either. Within this narrow criteria, there are plenty of grifters in the small world of Japan coverage who have outrage to push and narratives to sell. You will be shocked how deep this rabbit hole can get after reading how much of Tokyo Vice was made up.

Of course, there are exceptions. The Japan Times under its current editorial leadership has done a far better job producing articles on more esoteric, but still fascinating Japan-related subjects compared to its direction in the past. I highly recommend journalist Alex Martin’s work. Tobias Harris, who wrote a fantastic book on the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is the gold standard for English-language commentary on Japanese politics and his Substack publicaition Observing Japan comes highly recommend. Another reliable commentator is Gearoid Reidy, a voice of reason amid a sea of fear-mongering with his well-written columns.

Because most on both sides of the Pacific don’t really know each other’s languages, however, a significant gap in knowledge remains. Some people who got famous writing about Japan like Pico Iyer barely even speak Japanese! As Damien Flanagan argued a few years ago, this does not immediately disqualify you from cultural commentary, but I would still push back and say that it does cast doubt on your reliability as an expert if you can’t even speak to a country’s people in their own language. Considering how discourse around Japan can quickly devolve into a game of Chinese whispers due to a lack of linguistic knowledge, you really need to take the time to separate the wheat from the chaff in deciding whose opinions are reliable.

Japanese soft power creates self-proclaimed “experts”

For the handful of genuine experts who produce insights on Japan, there are also the weeaboos who fashion themselves as “experts.” Presently, global interest in Japan is probably at an all-time high. The weak yen is drawing in millions of tourists from across the world, and the popularity of “soft power” from anime and video games means that more people are paying attention to this country than ever. Yet many of these observations are often surface level and not very meaningful.

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In the opening of My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins asks why the English can’t teach their children how to speak. If he happened to visit Japan for some reason, I’m sure the phonetics professor would also wonder why the Japanese can’t teach their children how to speak English either. After all, it’s the de facto lingua franca of the world, the lingo of global commerce, and often the default tongue even for people who speak a different language natively. English is such an integral part to modern society, you’d have to make an active attempt to avoid it.

Or you could be born in Japan. If you’ve ever visited this country, you’ll quickly become aware of the startling reality that English fluency is almost nonexistent. Out of all the countries recorded, the English Proficiency Index places Japan in last place at number 92 with neighboring South Korea even beating them at number 50. Vietnam, Bangladesh, Brazil, Malaysia, and others were all ranked higher. To be fair, China is only one spot above Japan at 91, but we’ll give them a pass considering how they basically own the entire world now. Doing that *without* prioritizing English language skills is almost its own achievement, probably because our CCP overlords are plotting a Mandarin takeover.

But what’s happening here in Japan? How could a country with so much soft power and economic influence be more or less removed from the Anglosphere when most neighboring Asian countries appear to be doing better? It’s a complicated picture and largely the result of a combination of factors that are unlikely to change anytime soon. From bad teaching methods to cultural barriers that to this day have never really gone away, here are a few reasons why most Japanese people don’t speak English.

English education in Japan sucks

For my fellow Americans, think back to your time in high school when you were forced to take Spanish classes. Apart from asking where the library is and half-hearted attempts at trying to wrap your head around a different word order, do you really remember anything your underpaid teacher taught you? Of course not. You had zero interest in being there and spent most of the time staring at the clock until the dismissal bell rang.

Now imagine doing that for about ten years and you basically have English education in Japan. In fact, it’s arguably even worse. For as ineffective as your foreign language classes probably were, I’m assuming you had a qualified instructor who was a native speaker or at the very least someone with enough professional fluency to teach the material. That’s the bare minimum, right? Not so over here in the Land of the Rising Sun.

There’s a famous sketch by the late comedian Ken Shimura parodying the average English class at a Japanese public school. In a hilarious reversal of roles, the “students” are all real native speakers of English and good ol’ Shimura-sensei is the witless Japanese instructor who insists on “correcting” their pronunciation. Obviously there’s a ton of exaggeration involved here, but the general premise isn’t that far off from reality. Instead of actually teaching the proper sounds of English, most students will end up speaking some garbled Japanified version.

By the time English education starts in Japan, which is around the 3rd grade of primary school, children have already internalized most sounds of their native language. There’s still time for more development, but that would require a teacher with a native or near-native accent for proper instruction. Since most Japanese teachers are simply relying on rote memorization and other ineffective methods from stiff textbooks while they also have to juggle a bunch of other subjects, you probably begin to understand why there’s little room for improvement.

“But what about all those foreigners who come to Japan to teach English?” you may ask. This subject itself is worthy of its own piece, but to make a long story short, very few of these people are actually qualified to teach much of anything. Most of them are hired as ALTs, or assistant language teachers. As their title implies, their job is to assist the actual instructor in the room. This mostly comes down to providing “native” examples of English speech. Some ALTs play a more active role than others, but “human tape recorder” and “dancing monkey” are some of the nicer epithets that get thrown around online.

Being an ALT typically only requires a BA and a pulse, so the pay is low and the work is repetitive. When you pair them with a Japanese teacher that barely knows how to speak the language themselves, you have an extremely ineffective education system that does nothing to improve anyone’s level of English. Naturally, there are certified English teachers in Japan who know the language and have the right qualifications, but that is unfortunately not what most kids in this country will grow up having. By the time they reach university where such educators would be more plentiful, they’ve already gone through a decade of terrible instruction that’s very hard to unlearn.

Learning English is tougher than you think for Japanese people

Some might disagree with me on this one, but I truly believe that learning English for a Japanese person is about as difficult as learning Japanese is for a native English speaker. Anyone who has been on either side of this knows how radically different grammar, word order, and pronunciation are between the two languages. Japanese and Chinese at least have somewhat of a shared written script and Japanese and Korean have near-identical grammar. Romance languages have their quirks, but they aren’t that hard to wrap your head around if you’re only familiar with English.

Japanese and English though are like oil and water. While the former has adopted tons of loanwords from the latter, you quickly realize that there’s often a vast gap between their original sounds and meaning. That’s just on a vocabulary level. Japanese people have to unlearn everything they know about the way they were raised speaking which is why English grammar is so alien to them. Writing is no picnic either. You might think kanji are difficult for foreign learners of Japanese, but remember that English has odd spellings, silent letters, weird letter combinations, and rules around capitalization.

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With 37 million international tourists visiting Japan in 2024, it’s safe to say that this country is at the peak of its global popularity. A trip to Japan to millennials and Gen Z might as well be what a trip to Europe was for their parents; the kind of aspiration you should put on their bucket list because everyone seems to be doing it. Japanese soft power being stronger than ever is undoubtedly one of the biggest contributing factors to this phenomenon, and when you pair that with the weak yen, why wouldn’t you want to come to Japan?

Of course, going to Japan as a tourist is worlds apart from actually living in Japan as a long-term resident. There’s a saying I often hear which I’ve always thought was a rather banal observation: “I’d love to visit X country, but I could never live there.” This is a trite thing to say because it’s only stating the obvious. Tourists are typically shown the best bits of a country and given experiences specifically catered to them as temporary guests. Living anywhere different from what you’re typically familiar with is of course going to be a challenge. After all, the point of travel is largely for pleasure and escapism.

With that said, I do think the gap between tourists and residents in Japan has only grown larger in the last few years. Inbound travelers largely congregate in the big three cities — Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto — and don’t really see much else of the country. Those places of course can provide unique experiences, but most tourists are going to end up seeing and doing the same things on nearly identical itineraries. Social media has especially contributed to overtourism, turning previously special locations into over-congested nightmares. The average Japanese person dealing with rising costs of living and stagnant wages has no reason to go to these places.

So what’s it like to actually live in Japan when you leave the tourist traps? In 2023, I wrote a piece explaining why I chose to move here. In 2024, I discussed what foreign commentators often get wrong about Japan. This time around, I aim to provide an updated assessment on what the current state of things are in the Land of the Rising Sun. Is Japan an attractive place to make your home in 2025? Is the anti-foreigner sentiment real or imagined? And how exactly does one make a living here? Well, I’m still trying to figure out that last question myself as a grad student reaching the end of his PhD, but I’ll draw on the experiences of many others I’ve known.

In any case, here are some thoughts that have been on my mind lately.

Moving to Japan is relatively easy (if you know what you want)

The good news is that if you’re interested in moving to Japan, it’s arguably the easiest it’s ever been. We’re long over the days of the pandemic when prospective foreign visitors were barred from entering the country due to the travel ban, so if you simply want to step foot onto Japanese soil as a tourist, go ahead. Japan has visa-free travel agreements with 73 countries, so chances are high that this probably applies to you. Most of these allow a maximum stay of 90 days.

However, don’t forget this crucial point: you *cannot* work in Japan while on a tourist visa. That should go without saying, but many with the time and cash to burn in this country for an extended period of time are sometimes under the mistaken impression that they can come here as a tourist and simply find work afterward. It doesn’t work that way and you’re most likely going to set yourself up for some legal trouble if you attempt it. You can certainly look for jobs and gauge what places are hiring while you visit on holiday, but the process of securing a work visa will almost assuredly require you to return to your home country.

I highly recommend at least visiting Japan before deciding to move here. A short holiday will obviously only give you a very skewed perspective, but it’s better than going in completely blind. You can gain some insights into how things are done and if the pace of life in the bigger cities is something you might be able to adapt to. Try to take the time to go off the beaten path as well and visit locations most tourists tend to be unaware of.1

The easiest time to attempt life in this country is when you’re young and still trying to figure things out. I first arrived in Japan when I was 19 thanks to an internship and study abroad program offered by my university which lasted a collective total of 15 months, so I strongly recommend seeking out those kinds of opportunities if you’re around that age. Trust me, there’s no better feeling than being in your early 20s while living abroad in a foreign country. After that though, it gets more complicated the older you get.

I returned to Japan via a scholarship for master’s in international relations provided by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology or MEXT. It was a very generous stipend, but unfortunately the Japanese government may be looking toward ending such programs over the next few years. That’s a topic for another day, but if you were planning on coming to Japan via the scholarship and higher education route, I suggest you start doing your research now. Most of these funding opportunities accept candidates up to the age of 35.

Beyond that, many choose the English teaching path like the JET program to get their foot in the door, but as I’ll explain in the next section, you shouldn’t bet on this being a sustainable, permanent gig. Instead, the best piece of advice I can give is to ask yourself what you would like to do in life regardless if you were living in Japan or not. One viable option is looking for employment at a company within your own country that could lead to work in Japan down the road. Start learning Japanese, build your portfolio, and have the marketable skills that make you an attractive candidate for being stationed in Japan.

The language bit in particular is non-negotiable if you want to have a successful life here.2 With Japan’s declining population, the government is currently looking for “specified skilled workers” to fill important jobs in fields like construction, aviation, and agriculture. This is not the route I personally chose, but there are no shortage of open occupations in Japan. This is why I believe it’s “relatively easy” to move to Japan now. If you already have the qualifications and a solid plan for the industry you want to get into, knowing Japanese on top of that should practically make you a shoe-in for a work visa.

It’s still certainly possible to move to Japan in your late 30s and 40s, but by that point you have to consider any existing responsibilities and commitments in your own country. Are you married? Do you have kids? Does it makes sense to change your career? The more of these things tying you down, the less likely moving to Japan long-term becomes. If you’re already doing pretty well and you have the disposable income, it might make more sense to instead look toward staying in Japan for only a couple of months on an annual basis. As long as you don’t overstay your tourist visa, there’s nothing preventing you from taking a yearly holiday here.

Staying in Japan is hard (and English teaching probably isn’t a career)

Getting a work visa to come to Japan is the initial hurdle, but it’s arguably the easiest part. What comes next is deciding how long you will stay in Japan and the steps required if you want to make it your permanent home. Foreigners have risen to around 3.8 million people or roughly 3% of Japan’s population — a considerable increase from the numbers seen over 20 years ago. With that said, this data needs to be viewed within the proper context.

Of those foreigners, less than 919,000 are classified as permanent residents. The rest fall into categories like temporary trainees and students who will stay in Japan for a few years, but will return to their home countries. Reasons for leaving are numerous, but they mostly come down to hitting a career ceiling and being unable to fully adjust to the culture. It should come as no surprise that the vast majority of immigrants to Japan come from neighboring countries. Most domestic discussions around “gaikokujin” are pretty much referring to the thousands of Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Asian workers, not the far smaller number of Westerners who happen to come here.

What does this mean? Well for starters, it’s generally easier for other Asians to adapt to another Asian culture. The number of people from Anglosphere countries has also increased, but they tend to be short-term expats who ultimately leave after being unable to fully integrate. The longer you stay in Japan, the more you have to become accustomed to how things are done here. As I’ve often emphasized, learning the language is just the first barrier. You also need to gain cultural fluency in understanding social cues, nuances, and general societal rules that can seem downright arbitrary and pointless. All of that can take years to understand just on a base level, so seriously reconsider coming to Japan if you aren’t ready to commit.

So what if you’re able to get over those cultural differences and you’re doing a decent job gradually picking up the language? You then have to consider what your future is going to be in Japan beyond whatever entry level position got you here. Expat life on convenience store food in a one bedroom apartment is fine in your early to mid 20s, but that can’t last forever. The majority of Anglosphere expats start in Japan on English teaching because most of those jobs only require a BA and a pulse. I cannot emphasize this point enough: get out of this field as soon as you can into something else.

This subject too is worthy of its own article, but I’ll give you the abridged version here. English teaching in Japan, apart from qualified instructors employed at places like universities, is a career dead end. For Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs), wages have stayed stagnant between ¥230,000 to ¥300,000 per month for years. With how weak the yen is, that’s roughly $1500 USD to $2000 USD a month. That’s barely enough to get by on in rural areas, while you would be in a state of near-poverty in major cities like Tokyo. Some places offer better wages than others and you might get subsidized housing if you’re lucky, but there’s a finite ceiling to how much you can make. Forget about having any kind of savings on what’s essentially a fast food worker’s salary.

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Foreign Perspectives is a mix of free and paid content. Certain articles such as these are exclusively for paid subscribers. If you enjoy the work I do, please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and ensures that this Substack can continue to deliver high quality pieces.

With everything going on in the world, you would be forgiven for not being aware that South Korea held a presidential election last week. If you did happen to catch the news, you were probably one of millions rushing to Google to learn who newly-inaugurated President Lee Jae-myung is. Like Japan, what goes on in the Republic of Korea on a domestic level is usually not something that most foreigners pay attention to. There are surprisingly few analysts out there worth a damn producing high quality analysis on Korean politics in English, most likely because it’s similarly a rather esoteric topic that doesn’t capture headlines as much as Ukraine or the Middle East.

I’ll use this opportunity to shout out the Substack published by my colleague Jeffery Robertson. He has over 25 years of experience researching topics related to the Korean Peninsula and regularly puts out high quality articles which provide important insights that more people should read. I also recommend NK News and its sister site Korea Pro, outlets I’ve previously contributed to that feature the work of some of the best Korea scholars in the world.

There was no new column on Foreign Perspectives last week due to some graduate school commitments on my end (I recently became a TA), but also because I rushed to put out some timely analysis for The Spectator within 24 hours of Lee Jae-myung’s election victory. You can check out the article here and a paywall-free link to it here. Due to the short timeframe of the commission and the audience of The Spectator, my piece only focused on the implications of Lee’s administration for the United States and North Korea. I wasn’t able to discuss Japan, so that’s what this follow-up is intended to cover.

In short, things at first glance do not look good. For all of his faults, the outgoing Yoon Suk-yeol was one of the most pro-Japan presidents South Korea ever had and his administration took active steps to rebuild ties with this country. The decisions of the Moon Jae-in administration resulted in what was largely considered to be the nadir of Japan-ROK relations. Seoul’s Democrats chose to reopen old wounds with Tokyo over historical issues that previous government declared resolved. I won’t get into war crimes discourse here as it’s really a topic worthy of its own piece, but the Japanese government has repeatedly apologized for its atrocities and given out multiple forms of reparations to surviving victims.

For those not in the know, the typical pattern is that conservative South Korean administrations will be more pro-Japan and less likely to use historical issues as a political cudgel, while liberal governments will do the opposite. There are numerous reasons for Korean leftists resorting to “Japan-bashing,” but more often than not it’s a cynical ploy for clout with a specific base at home and a cheap negotiating tactic abroad. This is why despite decades of conciliatory statements, apologies, reparations, and economic aid, there are always politicians in Seoul who think that slamming Tokyo will benefit them.

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The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is a branch of the U.S. State Department which is tasked with training American diplomats. Before taking on their responsibilities, many have to learn a foreign language in order to navigate the complex challenges of international affairs. On the FSI website, each language is ranked from Category I to Category IV. The former consists of languages closest to English like French and Italian which take 24-30 weeks of intense study to reach a basic level of fluency. The latter are languages about as far removed from English as one can get, taking a whopping 88 weeks of study. Japanese happens to be one of them.

That number of 88 weeks, or 2,200 class hours, should give you a rough idea of how difficult it is to absorb Japanese and other Asian languages like Mandarin or Korean, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. FSI candidates are not the average person. If you’ve made it that far, you’re being taught by the best teachers in the world because the U.S. government wants qualified diplomats who can represent American interests abroad. For these students, language is a required part of their skills toolbox. You aren’t going to be learning Russian just to chat about borscht and Dostoevsky. Well, maybe you will if it means keeping your cover as a secret agent when infiltrating the upper echelons of the Kremlin, but I digress.

In a nutshell, you’re looking at a serious time commitment. Given my position as someone with a decent readership who lives in Japan full time, I’m frequently asked how one should go about learning the language. For starters though, I think that’s the wrong question. The first thing you ought to ask is “Should I learn Japanese?” Once you figure that out, then ask “Why do I want to learn Japanese and are my goals realistic?” I’ll get to all of that and more, but this piece is aimed at who I presume will be the majority of readers — people who do not live in Japan.

If you live in Japan as a foreigner, I’ll state the obvious. Learn Japanese. You should have started learning Japanese yesterday if you haven’t already. While we inhabit an age where English is more ubiquitous worldwide than ever, some level of Japanese is still a requirement for basic survival in this country. The more you put off knowing how to at least speak the language, the worse off your life is going to be here. It places a significant burden on Japanese people who have to deal with you and only contributes to bad stereotypes around foreigners that refuse to integrate. That, however, is a topic better suited for a separate column on why short to medium-term expats leave Japan entirely.

Living outside of Japan places you at a far greater disadvantage with learning the language. While Japanese has over 124 million native speakers, 99% of them reside in its country of origin. The biggest Japanese diaspora populations are in the United States and Brazil, but it was very rare for me to ever encounter someone who spoke the language outside of a university setting when I lived in America. Most East Asians throughout the U.S. are of Chinese or Korean descent, which is great if you’re studying those languages, but you’re likely to encounter far more difficulty finding a Japanese person to befriend in your daily life. Language learning apps and websites can somewhat alleviate this problem, but you have to start somewhere before you touch those.

Remember that 88 weeks figure I mentioned earlier? Well, it won’t apply for the average person. That’s because the typical language learner is realistically going to have to spend more time studying Japanese to get to a level where you can have basic conversations and read texts intended for children. Think about what those FSI candidates have to go through. They practically eat and breathe language study on a daily basis because that’s what they’re trained by the U.S. government to do before spending months or years living in a foreign country. Green Berets undergo a separate, more intense course for similarly difficult languages like Mandarin and Arabic, but it’s uncommon for even those guys to become truly fluent.

You probably aren’t a diplomat in training or a would-be John Rambo. You’re most likely either a college student or an average adult who works a 9-5 job. Along with sleep, you have families, friends, hobbies, and a ton of other real life responsibilities that significantly eat into those precious 24 hours. If you’ve ever exercised, played a sport, or practiced a musical instrument, learning Japanese or any language is the same kind of daily commitment. You cannot half-ass it and expect any progress. Before starting your Japanese language learning journey, consider if it’s something you can incorporate into your life. If you are serious, then you have to turn it into a daily ritual like brushing your teeth or eating a balanced meal.

Japanese will cause you to rethink everything you know about communication. To quote Yoda, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” While Japanese in its modern form incorporates a ton of borrowed words from European languages (known as gairaigo), which gives you about 10% of the vocabulary, that’s about where the similarities end. The word order and grammar are completely different. The written script might as well be moon runes if you have no background in Chinese characters. The levels of formality in addressing people across age and social status are completely alien to a monolingual English speaker. The sounds, thankfully, are actually on the easier side compared to other Asian languages, but you still need to constantly practice them in order to not sound like the American sailors in Shenmue.

Again, you need to ask yourself why you want to learn Japanese and if those goals are realistic. Is living in Japan in the cards for you at some point? Are you dating or married to a Japanese person and perhaps want to converse with your significant other’s extended family? Maybe you’re more focused on trying to read texts like novels or manga. The state of Japanese video games being released overseas is far better now than it was a decade ago, but there are still niche titles like Tokimeki Memorial and Segagaga which are unlikely to ever get an official translation. Or perhaps you’ve realized that translations themselves will always be someone else’s interpretation, so you want to experience the original Japanese and come to your own conclusions. Those are all valid aspirations for learning Japanese or any language, but whatever results you get are entirely dependent on how much effort you’re willing to put in.

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In May 2024, I embarked on a trip to lesser known parts of Japan. It was a journey back to nostalgic places I had not been to in years, each of which played an important role toward shaping my life here today. This solo excursion taught me more about myself than I had bargained for, which compelled me to write down everything I felt through a series of columns.

Across three articles, I ended up writing over 15,000 words and included more than a hundred of my own photographs. Other pieces that required my attention as well as real-life commitments meant that the series took more time to complete than anticipated, but I’m glad to say it’s finally done. From the esoteric hamburgers of Yokosuka to the middle-of-nowhere rural landscapes of Toyooka where I had my first serious relationship, the goal was to provide a travelogue of destinations in Japan off the beaten path with unique personal anecdotes.

Given the unexpected long gaps between each article’s upload date, I thought it would be prudent to assemble all the links here so I can direct new and old subscribers to one place. I also happen to be traveling to Tokyo this weekend and will already be there by the time this piece goes live. Since I won’t be able to write any new Foreign Perspectives columns while on holiday, it’s the perfect opportunity to repost the entirety of this column miniseries.

Going forward in 2025, about half the content on Foreign Perspectives will be free, while the rest will be exclusively aimed at those who opt for a paid subscription. These three articles were originally intended for paid subscribers of this Substack, but what I’m posting here is material free subscribers will not have read. I have taken excerpts from the paywalled sections of each part and reposted them here to give an idea of what a paid subscription entails. If you like what you read, I’m currently running a 20% off sale until the end of the month. Details here.

As for other updates, I plan on rounding off April with a couple more columns on Foreign Perspectives. The next entry of A Bit of Film and War is still happening, but it had to be delayed after my backlog of freelance articles ended up increasing. I recently wrote a piece on Japan-ROK relations for UnHerd and a book review of a new biography on Kim Il Sung for NK News, so do check those out. Work on PhD continues, there are a few other writing opportunities that I’ll be taking on soon, and I’m hoping to eventually collect and edit my best columns from Foreign Perspectives into a proper book, but those announcements will come at a later date.

As always, a big thank you to all my subscribers for being so supportive of this Substack. Your dedicated readership is why I continue to do this and I’m especially grateful to my patrons who help keep the lights on. Now, the journey continues.

Yokosuka

Cultural crossover extends to Yokosuka’s food, which is a mix of Japanese and American sensibilities. With so many Americans in the area, most are going to want a piece of home while they’re stationed away from the States. The result is that Yokosuka has no shortage of sports bars and restaurants that probably offer the closest thing to American cooking you’re ever going to get apart from ritzier places in Tokyo. Easily the most famous is the “Yokosuka Navy Burger,” which is somewhat of a famous local speciality offered by the restaurant Tsunami.

In 2017, I was amazed at the wide selection of burgers Tsunami offered, most of which were modeled after U.S. presidents. For example, the Obama burger contains macadamia nuts in reflection of his Hawaiian roots, while the Trump burger contains bacon and eggs which are his favorites. I went with the George Washington burger, which is a more standard bacon cheese burger. I suppose its classic design is meant to symbolize that he was our first president, but it also has a fried egg, which is something that Japanese burgers are famous for. So consider it symbolic of U.S.-Japan cooperation. I know I’m probably stretching the connection here, but there are only so many ways you can tie the U.S. commander in chief to burger ingredients. I don’t even want to know what a Martin Van Buren burger would taste like.

Of course, I’m not going to be able to accurately remember all the details of the George Washington burger I ate over seven years ago, but I will say that something about it has stuck with me since. Outside of your typical Japanese fast food chains like McDonald’s, Lotteria, and MosBurger, this was probably the first time I had a proper gourmet burger in a sit-down restaurant. Japan’s interpretations of American staples like burgers and pizza are often compared unfavorably to their originals, but from what I recall, Tsunami did a good job.

So how does Tsunami hold up in 2024? While the nostalgia was probably doing some of the work, I’m happy to say that I had a pleasant lunch. One thing that changed during my recent visit is that Tsunami now has a sister restaurant called Tsunami Box down the street from it. I actually made the mistake in thinking that the store had simply been renovated, but no, it’s an entirely new establishment. I only realized this as I was sitting down, but considering that both places are run by the same management and that the menus are virtually identical, there was no need to worry.

I began my order with a plate of spicy wings. Lo and behold, they were actually spicy too! Long-term foreign residents of Japan are probably aware that most food advertised as “spicy” is usually just slightly saltier or barely spicier than seasoning from a standard black pepper shaker. It seems that the standard palate here doesn’t really handle spicy well, which is evident by Japanese food being more famous for umami. Anecdotally, most Japanese people don’t seem to like spicy foods, so most restaurants apart from speciality places cater to that majority. Given that Tsunami attracts a lot of Americans though, their wings are properly seasoned with sauce that reasonably tastes like something you’d get at a typical U.S. sports bar.

The main objective of my pilgrimage to Tsunami was obviously one of their burgers. Looking back through my old photos and remembering that I had ordered the George Washington burger last time, I decided to go for the Trump burger. The menu describes the inclusion of peanut butter and jalapeños as an “accent,” which is probably the perfect culinary metaphor for his unorthodox presidency. Naturally, I had to try it.

The ingredients were high quality and the combination of flavors surprisingly worked. It’s hard to describe sometimes how Japanese hamburgers differ from American ones, but you can just tell if you’ve ever had both. It’s probably down to what ground beef is used, while much has been written on how much Japanese bread starkly contrasts from American or European breads. I make sourdough bread myself when I have the time and the results have been quite different when I use imported American flour versus what’s available in a typical Japanese supermarket. In any case, Tsunami still seems to be maintaining around the same level of overall quality I experienced seven years ago.

Read the full article here.

Yamaguchi

My former colleague Endo joined me the next day for more sightseeing around Yamaguchi. Our first stop was going to be Rurikoji Temple, which was a repeat of one of the key prefectural destinations I visited when I previously lived in the region. As Yamaguchi’s most famous symbol, the pagoda is considered a national treasure and is worth making the pilgrimage to see. Unfortunately, Rurikoji was going under major renovations when we visited the area and isn’t expected to be completed until March 2026. The impressive five-story tower was covered with a tarp, but the surrounding park is still open. Luckily I was able to take photos of it back in 2017.

Despite being unable to see the pagoda itself this time, I enjoyed once again taking in the serene green environments. In fact, whenever I think of Yamaguchi Prefecture, the color green immediately springs to mind. There are so many natural landscapes that remain carefully preserved and make this region stand out compared to what most are used to when they visit Japan. And speaking of green, that also extends to Yamaguchi’s signature local dish kawara soba — green tea noodles served on a roof shingle. It dates back to the Meiji era when soldiers scrounged together whatever ingredients they could find to make a quick and easy meal before battle. Endo took me to the same kawara soba place we went to seven years ago, which was just as delicious as I remembered.

While Rurikoji was a no-go this time, our next destination was thankfully still around. Located to the northwest of Yamaguchi City is Mine City. It features Akiyoshido, an expansive network of caves that’s one of the most popular tourist destinations in the region. I recommend having a camera or smartphone with good night photo capabilities as you’re going to need it to take clear shots of the interiors. The roughly one kilometer stretch open to tourists has been paved to be a very walkable path, with natural limestone formations and pools being some of the highlights. We were there when it was quite hot in May, so the cave’s cool temperatures were a welcome respite from the humidity outside.

Above the surface lies something even more unique — Akiyoshidai Plateau. Large blocks of limestone leftover from millions of years of erosion dot the rolling hills, making it seem like something out of a Studio Ghibli movie. While there are tour buses available that can transport visitors up and down the mountains, having your own car comes highly recommended. Simply driving around the winding roads is a breathtaking experience, and the main observation deck also provides a clear view of the sprawling landscapes which I can only describe as otherworldly. Hiking trails are also available for the more adventurous traveler, but there wasn’t time so late into the afternoon.

Read the full article here.

Toyooka

The nostalgia hit me like a warm wave as my train once again arrived at Toyooka Station six years later in May 2024. While the facilities had been updated to accept IC cards instead of only paper tickets, the station was exactly as I had remembered it. I walked the familiar skybridge leading east from the gate into the adjacent Aity shopping center. Having gone in there so many times, I practically had the area’s general layout memorized. The Sato supermarket was still there as were most of the other shops I once frequented. For the average tourist just passing through, none of this would mean anything. For me, it was like returning to another life that had continued to go on without me.

Here’s a travel tip. Kinosaki Onsen attracts a lot of tourists and most go there directly. If you want to save some money though, Toyooka has hotels that are far cheaper. None of them are Ritz-Carlton obviously, but you can expect to pay far less by staying outside of the main tourist attractions and you’ll probably only be here for a couple of days anyway. The onsen village is directly accessible by either bus or train, making it little hassle to get there. The city center offers plenty of tasty and reasonably priced restaurants, while there are also enough convenience stores and other shops to provide whatever you’ll need for your stay.

My hotel was only a couple of blocks away, so I checked in and unloaded my luggage. After settling in, my first goal was simple: a literal stroll down memory lane. I wanted to retrace my steps across the daily route I took from the apartment I lived in with A to the city center. Having returned to Japan in 2019, I technically could have gone back to Toyooka whenever I wanted to because it’s less than a three-hour train ride from Kyoto. Yet I didn’t have much desire to see A again and the chances of that happening were high given how small of a town this is. With six years having now passed since I left, however, I learned through Facebook that she had married and moved away from Toyooka. There was no risk of our paths crossing.

Returning to Toyooka Station, I instead left through the west exit and made my way through the surrounding residential area. With so many powerful memories returning to my mind all at once, I was particularly reminded of how I’d wake up each morning and use these streets for my jogging routine. I’d also ride a bicycle across town while running errands and doing shopping. One of the biggest differences between the Japanese countryside and city is that living in the former generally results in far more physical activity than the latter. That summer of 2018 was easily my healthiest period and I haven’t gotten anywhere near as slim since.

Just as I did with my visit back to Yamaguchi, I made it my goal to be as active as possible. I’ve discussed all the weight I’ve gained and lost in the last few years before, but this trip really hit home for me how much things can change depending on where you live. I was only in Toyooka for three days, but two of them were spent walking and running across my old stomping grounds. I ended up burning close to 2,000 calories each of those days, which is something I’ve never been able to do with all the conveniences of city life here in Kyoto. I’m in a much better state of health nearly a year on, but accomplishing those runs in Toyooka gave me the confidence to continue my fitness journey for the rest of 2024.

Jogging would come later in the evening. For now, I was having a pleasant walk down streets I had not trodden on for a long time. Yet I still knew where I was very well. Walking away from Toyooka Station leads to rows of houses and apartments that criss-cross between a small stream and another main road. Approach that road a bit further and you’ll see rice fields which are a standard fixture of the Japanese inaka near a Fresh Bazaar supermarket. Nearly all the restaurants I had gone to at least once during my time living in this area were still here. Chains like Shiogensui ramen, Coco Ichibanya curry, and Hotto Motto bento provided quick and easy lunches, while I also enjoyed exploring the independent bakeries, noodle shops, and Chinese restaurants.

Even the Ministop convenience stores I frequently visited for drinks and snacks remained. A few places had gone out of business or gone under renovations, but this neighborhood remained remarkably similar to what it had been all those years ago. I was the only foreigner for miles, which resulted in a few more stares than usual compared to tourist-jammed Kyoto. It recalled the mildly interested looks I got from schoolchildren in Toyooka every morning when I’d rise early to get my jogging out of the way after A left for work. I never really talked to many people, but business staff I interacted with were always friendly and interested in conversation.

Returning here felt like I had been transported back in time. To a different world, a different life, and a different me. When I had lived here, I was able to view such an uneventful rural place as akin to some distant oasis of peace and harmony because it was my last opportunity to enjoy Japan before I had to face the realities of my life and responsibilities in America. Perhaps it was also because I had come to prefer slower rural life to a faster-paced urban one. I’m no subscriber to the “civilization is evil” ideology philosophers like Rousseau espouse, but I can sort of get where the Frenchman was coming from when he said, “Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.” Or as Liam Neeson in Martin Scorsese’s Silence also put it, “We find our original nature in Japan.”

I navigated the back roads leading to the apartment me and A previously lived in. I obviously had no intention of going in, not that I even could have, but the exterior, parking lot, and general layout were all unchanged. Upon looking at what was in front of me, I once again faced the mix of emotions that had been building up in the days leading up to this moment. It was a place which brought me as much joy as it did sadness when I was still trying to figure out my plans for the future. I paused for a few minutes to remember the good with the bad.

Read the full article here.

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Foreign Perspectives is gradually shifting into more paid content. Certain columns will remain free for all subscribers, but articles like these will be exclusive for paid subscribers. If you enjoy the work I do, please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and ensures that this Substack can continue to deliver high quality pieces.

In the 2016 NHK documentary Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki, the famed Japanese animator reacts with visible disgust when presented with a demonstration showing off 3D animation created through artificial intelligence. Calling it “an insult to life itself,” Miyazaki vowed that he will never incorporate such technology into his own work and unfavorably compared the janky movements to that of a disabled friend unable to perform a high-five.

To be fair, Miyazaki was admittedly commenting on a very specific kind of AI animation that was about as far removed as possible from the kind of hand-drawn artwork that made him one of the most beloved creators in the world. Yet nearly a decade later, social media worldwide is now currently flooded with ChatGPT-generated images rendered in the round, cuddly style of Studio Ghibli’s beloved films like My Neighbor Totoro and Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Open up X (formerly known as Twitter) and you won’t have to look far to find everything from US President Donald Trump to classic reaction memes being “redrawn” into cute artwork that at first glance could be mistaken for frames taken from one of Miyazaki’s works.

While the most recent update to GPT-4o is more refined and also supports rendering in other art styles reminiscent of South Park or Ardman’s claymation, it isn’t perfect. The average person who cannot tell the difference between a Monet and a Degas might find the “Ghiblified” AI images indistinguishable from the real McCoy, but eagle-eyed users on X have already spotted the flaws. Genuine Ghibli animation is praised for being able to depict a wide gamut of emotions, finding a natural blend between stylized and realistic at the same time. The ChatGPT creations seem to understand the recipe in theory, but imperfections such as liquid tears not being quite right or the facial expressions approaching a strange uncanny valley make it apparent that we are looking at a computerized imitation.

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Foreign Perspectives is gradually shifting into more paid content. Certain columns will remain free for all subscribers, but articles like these will be exclusive for paid subscribers. If you enjoy the work I do, please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and ensures that this Substack can continue to deliver high quality pieces.

All things must come to an end and so does this column series chronicling a deeply personal journey I took throughout Japan in May 2024. The first part covered Yokosuka and the second was about Yamaguchi Prefecture. I certainly didn’t intend for these pieces to take as long as they did to come out, but other articles frequently got in the way and I had to deal with my old part-time job taking away so much time from writing.

One benefit to the delay is that it provided a greater amount of time for me to reflect upon everything I experienced on my trip. This final part covering Toyooka of Hyogo Prefecture arguably comes with the most emotional baggage and I wanted to give it the proper write-up it deserved. For three months in the summer of 2018, I lived here with my first serious girlfriend. It was a relationship that was doomed to fail, but my memories of staying in Toyooka are pleasant ones which have never left me. I had a lot to say and at over 7,000 words with more than 50 photographs included throughout, this ended up being the most ambitious entry of the column series.

Almost no foreigners have heard of Toyooka. Like my previous write-up about Ube in Yamaguchi Prefecture, it’s not really a place you go to unless you have a specific reason. The one exception is that it’s located adjacent to Kinosaki Onsen, which is one of the most famous hot springs in Japan. While I wanted to enjoy the onsen yet again, the main purpose of me returning to Toyooka in May 2024 was to remind myself of the unforgettable summer I had here.

This one is a bit different from the last two columns in that Toyooka itself really doesn’t have too much going with it apart from the nearby onsen. There are a few tourist attractions and I’ll provide some recommendations of where to go, but revisiting the town for the first time in six years was my own way of getting over the past. Those interested in a normal travelogue may be disappointed, but then again this is a personal journey through Japan after all. I also debated what details to include. I asked myself, “Does anyone really want to read about some guy’s failed first relationship?” and didn’t want to come across as if this was some horrible tragedy with all the teenage drama of a Tumblr post.

Still, I have touched upon the same subject in my piece about dating in Japan last year. Many foreign men moving to Japan make the mistake of getting too serious with the first Japanese woman who gives them attention. It’s worth knowing when the person you’re with isn’t right for you and when to cut your losses. Hopefully writing about some of what I went through will prove useful as many go into romantic relationships in Japan with naive expectations. I will refer to my ex-girlfriend only as “A” out of respect for her privacy, but I should also preface this by saying I hold no ill will toward her.

I’m a married man now with a life that is vastly different from the one I had in 2018 when I was just a 20-year-old college student. A is married too and we have both long moved on. Relationships that don’t work out are an inevitable part of the human experience and that holds true regardless of culture or country. A major theme throughout these columns has been me learning from the past, applying its lessons to the present, and moving on toward a better future. So join me as we reach the final stop of our voyage, a picturesque town in rural Japan called Toyooka.

The end and the beginning

“I could get used to this place,” I thought as I looked out the second-story window of A’s apartment in early April 2018. I arrived in Toyooka the previous evening with stormy weather having buffeted my voyage from Kobe. Because it was more or less pitch black when the JR train pulled into Toyooka Station, I wasn’t able to see much of my new surroundings until the next morning. The skies took on a gray hue and it was still quite cool outside, but the rain had at least stopped. Mountains seemed to dot the rural scenery wherever I looked and much of it reminded me of when I lived in Ube almost a year ago.

At this point, I was approaching the conclusion of my study abroad program in Kobe and trying to prepare for the next step — getting ready to leave. Anyone who has ever studied or worked in another country they’ve become attached to knows the feeling. You are so used to your exciting life abroad that returning to the hum-drum of whatever mundane place you left behind is like the melancholic end of an adventure. In my case, I was already aware of a realization that had long been etched into my heart: I did not want to leave Japan.

Going back to the United States to finish my fourth year of undergrad was non-negotiable. I had to graduate from university or else there would be no future for me. It was not a question of if, but a question of when I would leave Japan and I dreaded every day. After being unhappy in America for most of my teenage years, here I was, finally in a country where I felt completely at peace. I can now confidently say that my calling is in Japan because I’m married to a Japanese person and because I’ve built a budding career directly related to this part of the world, but back then I was a naive 20-year-old enjoying his salad days with far less things to worry about and far more spare time to do as I pleased.

I was also in love. Well, not really with another person, but with the idea of being in love. Living in a foreign country while having a “serious” romantic relationship? What person my age wouldn’t be attracted to that? It was the very idea of romance abroad itself out of an Ernest Hemingway or Graham Greene novel! During my initial stay in Japan I had met plenty of women through school events and exchanges. There were a few that I could have probably become more than friends with had I pursued them more, but by coincidence A became my girlfriend in late 2017 because we met on a language app, had a few dates, and later became official after spending Christmas Eve together — the most romantic day of the year in Japan.

We certainly had some good times together, but it’s pretty clear now with the luxury of hindsight and experience that it was not a good match. We had very little in common and even less to really talk about. I often wonder how we even stayed a couple for over a year when our lack of compatibility was so apparent. Part of it was of course my own inexperience and immaturity, but an even bigger issue was that we were at different stages of our respective lives. I was still a student while A was a couple of years older than me and about to take on a job as a primary schoolteacher in the countryside. That was how I ended up in Toyooka, looking outside her apartment window on that gray day in April 2018.

A was very busy at that time, but she put aside a Saturday to show me around. One of Toyooka’s more famous attractions is Izushi Castle Town, a recreation of the area during the days of the samurai with rustic buildings, bridges overlooking koi fish ponds, red torri gates, and what is believe to be the oldest Japanese-style clock tower in the world. The local speciality is sara soba, thin buckwheat noodles traditionally served as a course of five small plates. Even now I can still remember enjoying that lunch, taking in the lovely scenery, and later being driven to a park on the way back to see sakura starting to bloom.

While taking in all this beautiful scenery, it really dawned on me that within little over a month’s time I would have to say goodbye to A and pack my bags to go back to Pittsburgh. Even then I was already planning on returning to Japan for graduate school, but that would still mean our relationship would turn into a long-distance one for up to 18 months. Were we actually “serious” enough to last for such an extended period of time? This is a turning point many international couples in Japan inevitably reach and if you don’t have your long-term future sorted, you should pretty much consider your time together over.

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Foreign Perspectives is gradually shifting into more paid content. Certain columns such as Bonus Perspectives and A Bit of Film and War will remain free for all subscribers, but articles like these will be exclusive for paid subscribers. If you enjoy the work I do, please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and ensures that this Substack can continue to deliver high quality pieces.

Welcome back to the second of my three-part series chronicling an extended holiday throughout Japan I took this May. I returned to locations that played a pivotal role when I was first moved to Japan over seven years ago and set out to write about why they carried such significant personal importance. The goal of these lengthy columns is to convey my feelings toward these places, but to also highlight some towns and destinations that most foreigners who come to this country rarely visit.

It’s part travelogue and part self-reflection, but I hope you will find them informative either way. In part one, I did a deep dive into the port town of Yokosuka. I recommend checking that out first and will take this opportunity to remind readers that this series is exclusively for paid subscribers of Foreign Perspectives. I will transition completely into freelance writing next year as my main source of income while continuing my PhD, so your support is essential in making all of this a viable enterprise. It allows this Substack to continue and also gives you exclusive pieces like this one in the process. So thanks again to all those who have already made the jump.

This time I’m covering Yamaguchi Prefecture, a criminally overlooked region that has some of the most beautiful natural environments and sightseeing destinations out of the entire country. It’s located to the west of Hiroshima and to the north of the Kyushu region. Off the beaten path for sure, but that’s all the more reason why it will make your trip to Japan far more memorable than the standard itinerary most tourists choose. The New York Times even included it in their 52 Places to Go in 2024 feature.

For me, Yamaguchi is important because it was the first place in Japan I ever lived in and in many ways was where my coming of age process truly began.

Ube, where it all started

The palm trees outside of Yamaguchi Ube Airport were as tall and proud in the sunlight as I had remembered them. I would be meeting my former work colleagues for dinner later in the evening, but for the time being I had to catch a train to get to my hotel which was located quite a distance away. I could have taken a taxi, but I wanted to soak in all the rural scenery as I did the first time I had stepped foot into this town seven years ago.

Backpack secure and my one rollable suitcase in hand, I made the ten-minute trek out of the airport’s front entrance to the neighboring Kusae Station. Like many train stations in the Japanese countryside (which I will refer to from now as the inaka), it was unmanned and would not even accept IC cards like Icoca or Suica for fare. To get to my destination, I had to buy my individual paper ticket the traditional way and be more conscious of things like transfers and the correct line. Just like the old days, I wryly thought to myself.

But that was why I was here, wasn’t it? To revisit the days when I was a naive 19-year-old kid fresh off the plane in Japan for the first time. Ube, Yamaguchi is the kind of industrial town you generally don’t visit for fun. It would be like going to the United States and making Dayton, Ohio your first destination. You’re only going to come to Ube if you have a specific reason in mind. Vladimir Putin once stepped through the same airport I had just departed from to have a meeting with the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, though I can’t say my own initial invitation was anything as high level.

About six months after the Russian dictator’s visit, I was invited to Ube in May 2017 by a glass company that did a yearly internship program with my alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh. Three students were chosen to work at their branches located in remote parts of Japan and I passed the interview process for the one in Ube. I was already slated to do a nine-month homestay study abroad program in Kobe, so this extended my initial stay in Japan to a full year. It would end up becoming even longer than that, but that’s a story for another time.

In any case, I chose Ube specifically because I wanted to be in the middle of nowhere for my first outing in Japan. I was majoring in the language and had mastered enough of it to muddle through the internship interviews, but this would be out of the frying pan and into the fire. The English Wikipedia article for the city was barely a few paragraphs and even now there’s not much information about it. The only thing I knew about Ube was that it was the birthplace of Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno, while one of my favorite Japanese directors Yoji Yamada also spent his teenage years there.

Other than that, Ube really does fit the description of “Middle of Nowhere, Japan.” I’ve met Japanese people who have never heard of it, those who have heard of it are baffled as to why any foreign visitor would go there, and even Ube locals will often tell you in a self-deprecating way that their city offers very few interesting places of note. Its two most famous spots are Sorinji Temple and Tokiwa Park. The latter in particular symbolizes much of Ube’s history. It exists as a tribute to the town having once been an important coal mining location and is also home to great white pelicans. They’re the successors to a pelican named Katta-kun who was a beloved fixture of the city before his death in 2008.

My internship hosts introduced me to these sites within days of me moving into the city, while almost every weekend for the next three months was an excursion to other parts of Yamaguchi. To this day, these are still some of the most enjoyable and insightful experiences I’ve ever had while living in Japan. Ube itself is not necessarily what one should seek out when visiting this region, but it does serve as a convenient and cost-effective base of operations. You definitely are going to need to rent a car though, as public transportation is slow and only occasionally available compared to the conveniences of major Japanese cities.

Because so few foreign tourists visit rural towns like Ube, lodging is extremely cheap. Three nights at a decently spacious hotel near the main commercial street only cost me around ¥25,000 or about $160 USD. These days, that’s not too far off for just one night in Tokyo or Kyoto. I almost feel like I’m giving some kind of secret away by saying this, but it’s really just common sense. Most of the things people come to Japan for are going to be in tourist trap areas, while places away from the major population centers manage to still be affordable for locals and foreign visitors alike. I don’t know how long that will last for, but I certainly plan on taking advantage of inaka tourism.

During my most recent stay in Ube, I initially was going to attempt to visit (or more accurately revisit) some nearby Yamaguchi locations on my own. After I caught up with my former colleagues for dinner, however, one of them ended up joining me. Thanks to him driving us around, I was able to see far more than I would have if I had booked a tour bus as I have yet to acquire my Japanese driver’s license. I’m eternally grateful for your hospitality, Endo-san.

Shimonoseki by the sea

After a scrumptious dinner of yakiniku, I decided to make the next day a solo trip to Shimonoseki. My main goal was to visit Ganryu-jima, the site of the duel between famed samurai Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro. The island is located adjacent to Shimonoseki Harbor, which was a location I wanted to go to anyway to experience the seafood market.

A couple of transfers via the JR Line from Ube are needed to get to Shimonoseki, so I recommend departing early. Trains in the inaka are infrequent and smaller stations often have no staff, so a bit more careful planning is usually necessary compared to cities like Tokyo and Osaka. The station I departed from, Ube-Shinkawa, actually proved to be its own mini sightseeing destination.

As I mentioned previously, Ube is the birthplace of Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno. In the franchise’s most recent film, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, Ube-Shinkawa Station appears in the finale both in animated and live-action form. Thanks to this cameo, Ube actually became a minor tourist destination in 2021 for Eva fans. There’s not much to say about the station itself. It’s like any other one you’d see in the inaka, but sure enough the towering steps are right there just like in the film and it makes for a nice photo opportunity.

It was past noon when I arrived at JR Shimonoseki Station. The main destination that most are going to want to hit is Karato Market, which offers some of the freshest seafood one is likely to have in their visit to the region. It’s about a ten-minute bus ride away, but on this trip I was making a conscious effort to do as much physical activity as possible for reasons I’ll get into later. The weather was good though, which made me glad that I took the more picturesque route. The palm tree-laden boulevards of Shimonoseki deserve to be strolled at a leisurely pace and with the Kanmon Straits to the east, one is never far from gorgeous seaside scenery.

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Foreign Perspectives is gradually shifting into more paid content. Certain columns such as Bonus Perspectives and A Bit of Film and War will remain free for all subscribers, but articles like these will be exclusive for paid subscribers. If you enjoy the work I do, please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and ensures that this Substack can continue to deliver high quality pieces.

Paid subscriptions are currently 20% off from now until the end of October.

I’m at heart a very nostalgic and sentimental person. Much of what I write about deals with the past, whether it’s retro video games or old movies that remind us all of bygone eras that can never be recreated. Yet as time passes, I become increasingly aware of the fact that nostalgia is usually less to do with the physical thing it surrounds and more to do with how it made you feel at a very specific time in your life.

As I learned earlier this year, that also extends to places and what I’ve experienced throughout my time living in Japan. Back in May, my wife went to Taiwan for a 10-day business trip with her employer, so I decided to use that period to take my own small vacation. I initially considered going to Australia due to the relatively low price of the airfare and because I have some friends who live over there, but ultimately it was still too cost prohibitive.

So instead of leaving Japan, I opted to travel within Japan. Specifically, to three towns that were some of the most pivotal locations for me when I was just starting out in this country — Yokosuka, Ube, and Toyooka.

I first moved to Japan in 2017 at the age of 19 for an internship in Ube, Yamaguchi Prefecture. When that was finished, I traveled across the country to various places, with Yokosuka being one of the more notable destinations. After my holiday, I moved to Kobe for a homestay which lasted for nine months, though since it’s within close proximity to Kyoto, I’m still able to visit that city relatively often. Following the conclusion of my Kobe adventure, I briefly lived in a small town called Toyooka located north in the same prefecture. At the end of August 2018, I went back to the U.S. to finish university, and finally returned to Japan in September 2019 for graduate school. Subtracting that time I had to be in America for, I’ve been in Japan for over six years.

A lot happened. I lost my father to colon cancer and the COVID-19 pandemic forever changed the state of the world, but I also finished my master’s in international relations, got married, and started a PhD which I’m currently doing. I can confidently say that I’m no longer the same person I was when I got off the plane at Narita Airport in 2017, but I don’t think anyone can move to the other side of the world and not have it change you in some way. For thoughts on my current life in Kyoto, I’ll direct you to this piece.

The goal of my May trip was to revisit Yokosuka, Ube, and Toyooka. These were important places for my personal journey and growth living in Japan, and I had not been to any of them in over six years or more. Like the core memories seen in Pixar’s Inside Out, going back to these towns unlocked some powerful reminiscences, both positive and bittersweet. I initially wanted to cover all three in a single piece, but will instead be breaking up my thoughts into three separate articles.

Many readers subscribe to Foreign Perspectives to gain new insights into Japan, and I’m glad to provide information about places the average tourist would otherwise probably have no knowledge of. In that sense, you can consider this as more or less a travelogue series about three areas of Japan few travelers visit when they come here. I will provide some recommendations of what to see and do, so keep these locations in mind if you’re considering a trip to this country. Indeed, many are now because of the weak yen.

But this is also one of the most personal things I’ve ever written. While I’m not one to typically burden readers with details of my private life, I learned more about myself and what I’ve been through in the last few years than I thought I would. I mulled over how I would tackle this debriefing of my formative time in Japan, which is why I didn’t immediately start writing it when I returned home to Kyoto in May. I thought about it for nearly six months amid other articles I had to get to first, so here we are now.

Each location provided me with an important lesson on life, which is what I hope to convey here through this series. I apologize if these anecdotes and feelings are of little interest to some who typically reads my work, but as Stephen King once said, writing is about getting up, getting well, and getting over. I certainly gained some new insights from my travels and perhaps you will as well.

Looking for sailors

In 1999, Sega released Shenmue for their ill-fated Dreamcast console. While the system ended up being the company’s last, Shenmue was a groundbreaking title that pioneered open world environments in ways no video games previously had. Yet what made Shenmue even more special was how it depicted everyday life in the Japanese town of Yokosuka as protagonist Ryo Hazuki hunted down the man who killed his father. Players spent hours walking down streets and alleyways doing everything from looking for clues to practicing martial arts moves in an empty parking lot. Standard stuff in most video games today, sure. But in 1999? An immersive experience like no other.

Shenmue was intended to be the first part in an epic saga spanning multiple games, but the series currently remains on hiatus with its somewhat myopic third entry released via Kickstarter in 2019. While it could never recoup its massive development costs and the future of the franchise remains uncertain, it has attracted a loyal cult following which includes the present author. Long before Japan became a relatively affordable travel destination, Shenmue was the closest thing many foreign gamers had to visiting the Land of the Rising Sun thanks to its focus on realism and mundane life.

The later games brought Ryo Hazuki to exotic Chinese settings with a similar emphasis on slow-paced gameplay and letting the player soak in these Asiatic worlds. Many today find Shenmue boring, but fans of the franchise appreciate the intimate atmosphere director Yu Suzuki and his team were aiming for. On the other hand, Shenmue’s cheesy English dub is rather infamous for its delivery and tone. Ryo’s constant inquiries that he’s “looking for sailors” as part of his quest to find his father’s killer Lan Di has been an unintentionally hilarious meme for years.

Ironically, the series has maintained somewhat of a stronger following outside of its own country, likely because most of this would probably be standard fare for Japanese gamers. But for Shenmue’s foreign fans, taking a trip to Yokosuka is akin to a gamer pilgrimage. That’s precisely what I did in 2017 during my first year in Japan. While Shenmue obviously had to simplify things, it did a fantastic job in depicting real locations like Dobuita Street. It’s even more remarkable when one considers the technology available in 1999.

Practically everyone on earth knows about Tokyo, but far less know about Yokosuka which can take about two hours to get to by train. That makes it somewhat inconvenient for most incoming travelers, and indeed I wasn’t able to make it out there during my first stay in Japan’s famous capital. I arrived in May 2017 and spent about a week in Tokyo before moving on to do my internship in Ube, Yamaguchi. Once that was over, I went back to Tokyo in August with the intention of visiting Yokosuka and experiencing a similar path I had undergone virtually via Shenmue. A geeky goal? Undoubtedly, but Yokosuka is still worth visiting whether you’re a gamer or not.

Cultural crossings

Yokosuka’s strategic location near Tokyo Bay has always made it a city of vital importance for Japan. It’s been a major port town for centuries and also one of the country’s most notable connections to the outside world. In 1600, English sailor William Adams arrived on a Dutch expedition and ended up becoming a samurai in the service of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Sound familiar? Adams was the basis for the entire plot of James Clavell’s 1975 novel Shōgun, later adapted into a 1980s television mini-series and an even more successful show earlier this year.

William Adams’ Japanese name was Miura Anjin (三浦按針), “Miura” being the name of the peninsula which Yokosuka occupies and “Anjin” being an archaic word for pilot or naval navigator. There’s a memorial site dedicated to Adams and his Japanese wife in Tsukayama Park, but the site was quite off the beaten path from Yokosuka Station. I wasn’t able to visit on either my 2017 trip or my recent one this year, so it’s definitely on the list for when I visit next time.

Yokosuka’s other major connection to the West is the United States Navy base, which is an essential part of the military alliance between Japan and America. Commodore Matthew Perry arrived at the then-isolated country in 1853 with a fleet of gunboats, forcing the Japanese to end their sakoku policy. The spot of his landing was in an area called Kurihama. It would be easy to believe that Perry’s expedition would be a source of awkward history for Japan, but the modern reality is quite the opposite. The city of Yokosuka heavily uses Perry’s likeness for tourism, with there even being a park and memorial in Kurihama named after him.

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Foreign Perspectives is gradually shifting into more paid content. Certain columns such as Bonus Perspectives and A Bit of Film and War will remain free for all subscribers, but articles like these will be exclusive for paid subscribers. If you enjoy the work I do, please consider upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. Your support is greatly appreciated and ensures that this Substack can continue to deliver high quality pieces.

Paid subscriptions are currently 20% off from now until the end of October.

Out of all the places I wanted to live in Japan, Kyoto wasn’t my first choice. Even before the post-pandemic rush of crowds and congested streets, I always associated the city with being a tourist trap. In many ways, that image is very true and there are certain areas I try my best to avoid if I can help it. At the same time, I’ve learned to appreciate the finer things this city has to offer.

This week marks five years since I got off the plane and made Japan my home for the second time. The first was in 2017 when I came to this country for an internship and study abroad program sponsored by my university back in the United States. That period lasted 15 months, far longer than the average period an American student typically spends in Japan, but it instilled a resolve within me to want to return. And here I am now, having a little over six years of cumulative experience spent living in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Most of that time has been in Kyoto, a city which has gone through some significant changes in the last five years. I arrived in 2019 having been awarded the MEXT scholarship, a full ride to do a master’s degree in international relations at Ritsumeikan University from the Japanese government. I completed my MA in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and was later able to extend my scholarship to fund three years of a doctoral program, also in IR. My MEXT funding has come to an end and I’m still doing my PhD reaching Japan-North Korea relations with a long academic road ahead, but that’s a story for another day.

As I continue my studies, hopefully find another scholarship, work a part-time job, get whatever freelance journalism gigs I can land, and maintain this lovely Substack which you are currently reading, I’ll be in Kyoto for the foreseeable future. I’ve always been reminded of one of my inspirations, the great Japanologist Donald Keene, who also made this city his home. In an unpublished manuscript that has only recently been unearthed, he reminisced about his life here in the 1950s which contrasts greatly to how it is now.

Having been spared from most of the Allied bombings that burned down the rest of the country’s major cities, Kyoto represented traditional culture as other parts of Japan were being rebuilt with modern Western standards in mind. Keene writes of the distinct sound of geta sandals hitting the ground and taxis charging additional fees to take the more luxurious paved streets. He also mentions how foreigners were a rarity and how he regularly attracted attention as an American.

Needless to say, Kyoto in the 2020s is no longer the same city Keene lived in. No one bats an eye at foreigners anymore because tons of them regularly flood into the city’s hundreds of restaurants, shrines, temples, and other popular sites. While it would have been common for practically everyone to wear traditional dress like kimono and geta back in Keene’s day, doing so now is considered more of a novelty and something ironically done more by foreign and domestic tourists than most Kyotoites who actually live here. Apart from the Gion district and a few areas with backstreets intentionally designed to preserve traditional aesthetics, Kyoto is a modern city with modern infrastructure.

Tokyo is what most foreigners immediately think of whenever Japan is brought up, but I’ve come to enjoy the overall pace of life in Kyoto far more. Don’t get me wrong, Tokyo is obviously comparable to New York and London by being an economic and cultural powerhouse. You will never run out of things to do in Japan’s capital and it’s the most populated metropolitan area in the world for a reason. But see, that’s the thing. In an unimaginably huge space comprising of over 13 million people, there’s inevitably an impersonal, cold feel to being in a fast-paced urban hub. I’ve been on enough depressing midnight trains surrounded by drunk salarymen and lonely women to decide that the unending corporate rat race of a city like Tokyo isn’t for me. Kyoto, on the other hand? Kyoto has personality. And to quote Jules from Pulp Fiction, personality goes a long way.

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On April 20, 2024, I finally became a married man at age 26. After four years of dating my girlfriend Minori, we decided to tie the knot and make the ultimate decision to hopefully spend the rest of our lives together. It was something we both had planned for a long time and is currently more of a formality than a major change that will affect us in the immediate future, but it was an important milestone nonetheless.

I never thought I would get married this young nor did I think it would happen to me on the other side of the world, yet here we are. Getting married in Japan is the start of a new adventure and further assurance that I’m likely going to be here for the rest of my life. But how did it happen?

Topics related to love and romance in Japan unsurprisingly attract a lot of interest. Tons of late-night television shows offer dating advice, there are services here dedicated specifically to matchmaking leftover from centuries of the omai tradition, and you can’t escape the plethora of J-pop songs, television dramas, films, and anime which revolve around the theme of love. This is the same country which created the dating sim genre of video games after all.

If you’re a foreigner who has decided to live in Japan, it can seem intimidating trying to enter this world of romance as an outsider. You’ll probably ask questions like if Japanese people are interested in dating foreigners or how much factors like linguistic and cultural differences will affect a relationship. Now that I’ve reached the point of marriage, I’m here to offer my own thoughts on how I got here.

It goes without saying that I’m writing this article from my own personal experiences and generalizations based on observable trends. I can really only speak from the perspective of a heterosexual male from the United States, but whatever advice I give should still mostly be applicable to any foreigner curious about how international relationships in Japan work. Everyone is going to have their own experiences, not all Japanese will interact with all foreigners in the same ways, and what kind of people you’ll meet is really down to the luck of the draw like in any other country.

Still, I hope that you’ll find what I have to say interesting and possibly useful. There are a lot of misconceptions or misguided expectations among foreigners toward romance in Japan, so I aim to provide a realistic point of view.

Finding that special someone

So you want to meet people to date in Japan — where to start? Beginning with what’s obvious, the dating pool is mostly going to consist of Japanese people given that 98% of Japan’s population is, well, Japanese people. But to get a question you’re probably asking out of the way, is it wise to date other foreigners as a foreigner? Well, it depends.

Most foreigners who are in Japan are only going to be here for a couple of years, and that may include you too. As someone who knew that he was going to be here long-term to permanently, that basically eliminated my own interest in dating people from other countries. If you do choose to go down this route, be sure you both know what your eventual long-term plans will be. As I’ll get into later, not being on the same page when it comes to where you want to plant your feet will lead to inevitable heartbreak.

The majority reading this are going to want to know about what dating Japanese people is like, so that’s what I’ll be focusing on. As for meeting new people, it’s not actually that different than other countries. If you live in a big city like Tokyo or Kyoto, there is no shortage of events which are specifically dedicated to getting foreigners and Japanese to interact each other for the purposes of language exchange or simply making friends.

I would be cautious in using these kinds of meetups specifically for dating because that is not usually their intended purpose. Instead, use them like you would any other social gathering as an opportunity to mingle and socialize. Making friends in Japan can be difficult as a foreigner especially when both sides are often not confident in each other’s languages, but shared hobbies and interests break down many barriers. If you want to date people in Japan, you should start by learning how to make friends with people in Japan first.

I went a different route. Shortly after I moved back to Japan, the pandemic hit and most meetups were cancelled. This lead to a surge in dating apps growing more popular. I did try Tinder and Bumble before the pandemic, but they didn’t lead to anything meaningful. I’m not sure if anything has changed since I haven’t used them in years, but at least back in 2019 most Japanese people viewed apps like Tinder as an opportunity to make friends and not go on dates, while women in particular would rarely show their faces in their profiles for fear of embarrassment. Not to mention there are loads of fake spam accounts.

Instead, I opted for Pairs, one of the many apps that is domestically made and explicitly marketed as an avenue for people interested in dating. The benefit of apps like these is that everyone who uses them knows exactly what they’re for and there’s less room for misunderstandings. A lot of people in this country lead busy lives with long work hours, so platforms like Pairs are the easiest way to meet potential partners. They’re free for women, but men usually have to pay a monthly fee if they want to reply to messages. If you take this option as a guy, I would recommend setting up an account and then paying for one month of the service if the matches come in.

Many Japanese dating apps encourage you to write a detailed profile and sort the profiles that come into your feed by shared hobbies and interests. This immediately increases the chances that you’ll be paired with someone more suited to what you’re looking for. The field is narrowed down even further when you can list if you drink alcohol or prefer non-smoking partners. You can even list your job and yearly income, though it isn’t necessary. I’m not sponsored by them, but through Pairs I got far more matches than any other site I ever used. I met my wife thanks to this app, so it has my recommendation.

There is no set period of time for when a couple is considered “official” or exclusive, but most would usually expect it to happen about a month or two of dating. It can be even sooner though if mutual attraction is clearly there. Japan has a “love-confessing” or kokuhaku culture where one party, usually the guy, will directly ask the girl he’s dating if they want to be a couple. Japanese culture site Tofugu has a guide to it here that I recommend reading if you want to learn more.

I always found it a bit ironic that while social interactions in Japan often rely on unspoken rules, this is an exception where an explicit affirmation is normal. Many Japanese women will expect a kokuhaku at some point, but by the end of our first date, me and Minori already knew we wanted to be a couple after a few weeks of messaging beforehand. No kokuhaku was necessary. On the other hand, another woman I previously dated strung me along for over two months and continued to give me wishy-washy answers around commitment even after I did a kokuhaku. So your mileage may vary.

Assuming that things have gone well, you’re off to the races. Go on fun dates and enjoy the time you have together. As Obi-Wan Kenobi once told Luke Skywalker, you’ve now taken your first step into a larger world.

Speak my language

Another important question — is it necessary to know Japanese to have successful dating experiences in Japan? Not necessarily, but it does make things a lot easier. I would wager that the biggest reason why a Japanese person wouldn’t be interested in dating or marrying a foreigner is indeed fears of the potential language barrier.

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Another week, another period of social media discourse where Japan is at the center of arguments between people who know very little of what they’re talking about.

Earlier this month, the subject on Twitter (which I refuse to call X) was the film Oppenheimer and Japanese war crimes. A feature that was little more than thinly-veiled anti-U.S. propaganda appeared on Al Jazeera, making the bizarre claim that America never considered its role in dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 80 years since. The response from the other side of things was equally false claims that Japan never apologized for its crimes during World War II.

I plan to address this latter point in a future article, but in the meantime I appeared on my friend Austin Petersen’s show to discuss some of these issues. You can watch the full interview here:

As how things typically go on social media, this topic soon died down, only to be replaced with yet another Japan-related subject to light the torches and ready the pitchforks. American comedian and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel recently visited Japan with his family, coming back with nothing but high praise for the Land of the Rising Sun. Addressing his audience of millions of viewers, Kimmel stated:

"Not only did I not encounter a single dirty bathroom, the bathrooms in Tokyo and Kyoto are cleaner than our operating rooms here.”

He went on to compare Japan to Disneyland, while likening the United States to Six Flags, which for my non-North American readers is an amusement park notorious for poor upkeep and customer service. While it’s understandable that Kimmel is prone to overstate things for the sake of comedy, if you can call most of his trite material that, what I found more interesting was the response from conservative pundit Ben Shapiro.

Being more of a politically right-leaning individual myself, I technically have more sympathy to Shapiro’s side of the argument. Yet a large portion of his “takedown” of Kimmel relies on similarly incomplete information, which compelled me to write this piece. Normally I would care little for what an American comedian has to say about Japan, but both Kimmel and Shapiro have a combined audience of millions of people. This speaks to a larger problem I’ve noticed of Western pundits waxing on about Japan despite having very little real knowledge about the country, and I think some corrections are necessary.

Starting with Jimmy Kimmel, one needs to address the elephant in the room: he’s one of the richest entertainers in America with a net worth of $50 million. He can afford to stay at ritzy places that the vast majority of his viewers never will, which means that when he travels, he does so in luxury. When one visits Japan as a short-term traveler, they tend to only see and remember the good parts because there’s not enough time to really see much else. For a celebrity like Kimmel, it’s not surprising that what he personally experienced was the best of the best.

To be fair to Kimmel, I agree that Japanese restrooms are on average much cleaner than American ones. Most mid-range hotels and restaurants will aim to have a basic level of cleanliness that will probably come as a surprise to most people from Western countries. But go to a dive restaurant or small izakaya (Japanese pub) and you’ll find plenty of restrooms that definitely look like they haven’t been cleaned in ages. These places also tend to be very cramped owing to how much of a luxury space is for dining establishments throughout Japan.

And despite Kimmel’s praise of Japanese toilets, he either ignored or never had to deal with the inconvenience of squat toilets. While the government is pushing to phase them out, you’d be surprised how they’re still sometimes the only ones available, especially in the countryside.

Kimmel’s other bit of praise comes from Japan’s seeming lack of litter on the streets. Again, likely owing to intentional exaggeration, he claims that there are “no garbage cans in Tokyo,” but this isn’t entirely true. Trash cans can be found in every major train station and convenience store, while large public parks will also tend to have them. His general observation that most Japanese people take their trash home, however, is largely correct and something unique to this country. Neighboring Asian countries like China and South Korea are much dirtier, which often shocks Japanese tourists when they visit.

There are many theories as to why Japan appears to value cleanliness more than other cultures, but one of the more plausible ones is the belief that the it’s historically tied to Shintoist and Buddhist practices. It’s been largely exaggerated how unhygienic medieval Europeans were, but the level of cleanliness in those societies largely varied depending on the social class and availability of public bathhouses due to changing perceptions of sexual mores and the risk of plague spreading.

It would of course be inaccurate to say that all Westerners are unwashed heathens and all Japanese are squeaky clean, but their respective histories and cultural attitudes are clearly different. Centuries of tradition have resulted in Japan being a country which values personal hygiene and America being a country where people have debates if they should wash their legs. Even if you argue that the latter is just Twitter nonsense, one would be hard pressed to find similar discussions in Japanese online circles.

Back to the subject at hand though, is there anything really that notable about a rich American celebrity going on vacation in Japan and coming back with a positive experience? Not particularly, but because everything has to be a battleground for American culture wars, it’s the ensuing discourse that followed which is what I take issue with. Like Jimmy Kimmel’s observations on Japan, Ben Shapiro’s thoughts have some grains of truth, but he ignores some important things that are pretty major oversights.

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Foreign Perspectives took a hiatus this month because I spent all of February in the United States and had much to catch up on after returning to Japan. The following piece is about that trip overseas. I will be returning to a regular posting schedule from now.

It’s a bit of a running gag among my Twitter followers that no one can really place what my ethnicity is or where I’m from. Despite my bio clearly stating that I’m a Kyoto-based American researcher on Japan-North Korea relations, people often mistake me as everything from Japanese to Korean. As well as a CIA operative, but that’s a story for a different day.

In truth, I really am an American, having been born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for almost the first 20 years of my life. I’m also a Canadian citizen through my mother’s side, which is ethnically Lebanese, and also half-Chinese through my father’s side. My background takes about a paragraph to explain, and many different cultures influenced my upbringing. After moving to Japan for the first time in 2017, I’ve since gone back and forth between here and the U.S. on multiple occasions, but it was my most recent trip to Pittsburgh in February that really made me become aware of the concept of reverse culture shock.

The last time I had been to the U.S. was in late 2020 during unfortunate circumstances. My father was losing his battle with colon cancer, so it was my final opportunity to see him before he would pass away. Overseas travel at the height of the pandemic was already its own exhausting ordeal, but the added psychological and emotional stress of why I was going back only added to it. Since most of the U.S. was in lockdown or social distancing mode at the time, there was very little for me to do other than stay home with my family.

In contrast, my trip to the U.S. last month was a “real” holiday, and I brought my fiancee Minori with me. It was the first time I had been back in over three years, but also an opportunity to show someone who had never been overseas at all what American culture was “really” like. The few weeks I spent in the U.S. were largely pleasant ones, but they ultimately reaffirmed my choice to stay in Japan. As I’ve written in a previous piece, where you choose to live comes down to what trade-offs you’re willing to put up with. Those trade-offs will vary from person to person, but my most recent trip to America once again reminded me of what I liked and disliked of the country while growing up.

One thing I was looking forward to the most upon revisiting the United States was enjoying all the food I normally can’t get in Japan. Being a Pittsburgh native, Primanti Bros. with its French fries and coleslaw stuffed sandwiches were of course a must, while I was dying to have real corned beef or pastrami as the Land of the Rising Sun doesn’t really have them. Being away from America for so long made me forget just how commonplace pizza and sandwich shops were in every town. Pizza in Japan is a very different, and often more expensive affair. Japanese convenience stores are of course known for their eclectic sandwiches, but good luck finding a genuine Italian hero apart from making them at home as I often do.

The food in America, while largely delicious, was also somewhat of a drawback. We were staying at my mother’s house, but her kitchen was being completely remodeled throughout the entire duration of the trip. That meant that apart from a home-cooked dinner one evening at my brother’s place, nearly every meal had to be takeout or at a sit-down restaurant. America’s food portions are notoriously huge to the amusement (and mostly horror) of foreigners, and my fiancee certainly took notice. It comes as no surprise that the U.S. continues to have one of the worst rates of obesity in the world.

We ate way more than either of us were normally used to and were rather sick of food in general by the time we returned home to Japan. The only reason I didn’t put on that much weight while visiting is because I made an active effort to walk and exercise as much as I could. With that said, I don’t think Americans fully comprehend the splendor of their massive supermarkets in comparison to other countries. Having become used to the far smaller grocery stores of Japan, I felt like a Cold War refugee from a communist country entering an American supermarket and being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choices.

The theme of “big” is something that I think has uniquely defined the United States for most of its history. While Japan has to manage with only a tiny amount of land, us Americans revel in the large scale of our country and enjoy soaking it in as much as possible. It struck me how large the house I grew up in was after living in what’s essentially a shoebox of a Japanese apartment for so long. A nice shoebox in one of the most culturally rich cities on earth mind you, but a cramped dwelling nonetheless. Where I live close to the center of Kyoto is much cheaper than the equivalent studio apartment in an American city like New York or Chicago, but it’s going to be much smaller than even those. Remember what I said about trade-offs.

As much as I enjoyed being able to stretch my legs relatively further in America, that also came with needing to be more on guard about my surroundings than I normally would be in Japan. Besides staying in Pittsburgh, Minori and I had a weekend trip planned in Washington D.C. that required us to take a night bus to get there. I already made the rookie mistake of booking a Greyhound Bus (you can read some of the horror stories others have experienced here), but even worse than the shabby transport accommodations was the fact that we had to wait in the downtown Pittsburgh area until midnight. As I expected, Minori was terrified of the prospect.

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Few subjects around Japan attract more attention and fascination than the stories of the country’s ancient samurai class. Whether it’s because of their elegant swords, intricate armor, or ideology, there’s undoubtedly something about samurai which has captured the imaginations of countless people both domestically and abroad.

The samurai are of course a distinctly Japanese symbol, but foreigners who resided in the country were occasionally awarded this status as well. Arguably the most well-known was William Adams, the first Briton to arrive in Japan. He became a close advisor of shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu in the early 1600s, having been rechristened as Miura Anjin (三浦按針) and allowed to wear the swords of the samurai with the same privileges such as land ownership and servants.

Less famous today are the Chinese, Korean, Dutch, Italian, and Prussian men who also became samurai. Enough documentation to varying degrees about their lives survives to know that they existed and were considered a part of Japan’s warrior class. But then there’s a man known only by his Japanese name Yasuke who continues to be the subject of great interest and controversy.

Chances are that you’ve probably heard some variation of a story about an African slave who arrived in Japan in the late 1500s at the height of the country’s Sengoku period. With black people being a rarity in the country, daimyo Oda Nobunaga is fascinated by the man and ends up employing him in his service as a samurai due to his size and strength. They fight many battles together until Nobunaga is betrayed by his retainer Akechi Mitsuhide during the Honno-ji Incident, and Yasuke subsequently disappears from history.

While the above anecdote is partially true, it is a considerable oversimplification of what we do know about Yasuke, which is to say very little. The lack of concrete information has caused many to invent wildly speculative tales around this mysterious “African samurai,” who may have not actually even been a samurai.

Existence Confirmed

The vast majority of details around Yasuke remain a mystery, including his actual name, date of birth, and country of origin. His existence, however, has been a known historical fact for centuries.

What we know for sure is that Yasuke came to Japan in 1579 as the valet of Alessandro Valignano, an Italian Jesuit priest renowned for his missionary work throughout East Asia. Christianity first appeared in Japan thirty years previously with the arrival of Portuguese Catholics led by Francis Xavier. The writings of these Jesuits have proven crucial in our understanding of this time period, both for providing an early Western perspective of the country and for their extensive documentation that not even concurrent Japanese sources had.

It is important to remember that only the most educated in both Japan and Europe were capable of reading and writing back then, which means that we are largely limited to this world of elites when it comes to what was considered “important” enough to be put down on paper. It isn’t clear if Yasuke was a slave, an indentured servant, or a free man who willingly chose to be in Valignano’s service, but his appearance in Sengoku-era Japan was certainly enough of a notable event for both sides to record his existence.

The closest contemporary source which confirms the existence of Yasuke is the second volume of a compilation letters entitled Cartas que os padres e irmãos da Companhia de Jesus escreverão dos reynos de Japão e China II published in 1598. Written by the Jesuits for a Catholic European audience, the Cartas reproduces a letter from Portuguese missionary Luís Fróis to fellow colleague Lourenço Mexia based in Macau which chronicles Alessandro Valignano’s 1581 visit to Oda Nobunaga’s court. Fróis, who wrote extensively on his experiences in Japan, was an eyewitness to the meeting and recorded how the daimyo was fascinated with Valignano’s African valet.

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If you try to look up information about Japan on YouTube, chances are that you’ll inevitably come across videos which attempt to cover the steamier and more scandalous aspects of this country.

Drama around love and romance can be found in practically all cultures, but pair that with the fascination Westerners have toward Japan, and content creators practically have a goldmine on their hands. Given how gravure and pornography are unfathomably huge industries here, the Japanese are well-aware of how much sex sells both at home and abroad.

But like with many things about Japan, it’s easy for certain aspects to be taken out of context or highly oversimplified to the point where people who don’t live here come away with the wrong impression. I previously wrote about why I chose to live in Japan, arguing that foreign media tends to hype up elements of Japanese society which results in a lot of misinformation.

I was reminded of this yet again recently when the topic of cheating in Japan went viral across Anglosphere social media due to various clips and later a full video being uploaded by the channel TAKASHii from Japan. Multiple Japanese women in Tokyo are asked about their thoughts on what counts as cheating, if they have ever cheated, and if they would allow their boyfriends to visit prostitution services. Because of their answers, foreign outlets like The New York Post claimed that the “consensus seems very clear” that prostitution is widely accepted among Japanese couples, while tabloids like The Daily Mail giddily reported that viewers were left “speechless” around the video’s findings.

Social media accounts with large followings sharing the clips resulted in the usual dumpster fire of replies from people who clearly know nothing about Japan making sweeping assumptions that have little basis in reality. But what’s the full story behind Japan’s cheating culture?

Firstly, I think it’s important to analyze the content of the viral video in question itself because I take several issues with it and how it’s being framed by foreign media.

I’ve always had mixed feelings toward the channel TAKASHii from Japan. While from the outset it’s admirable that more Japanese content creators are attempting to create more videos in English to explain aspects of their country that get less coverage overseas, Takashii, whether he does it intentionally or not, often ends up producing material that can be easily clipped for viral soundbytes on social media.

One of the biggest problems that I immediately noticed is that Takashii’s video on cheating translates the word 風俗 (fuzoku) as “prostitution” in the English subtitles, but this is not entirely accurate. Prostitution, which most would consider as paying for sexual intercourse, is actually illegal in Japan. While the word fuzoku refers to the sex industry, it is NOT synonymous with prostitution and covers a wide spectrum of alternative services that may or may not include sex.

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As Gearoid Reidy of Bloomberg pointed out, one can only imagine what must be going through the head of whoever is in charge of the McDonald’s Japan Twitter account now.

On Sept. 20, the Japanese branch of the famous American burger chain posted a tweet showing a family enjoying a meal as part of its promotion for a chicken nugget French fry combo which is popular over here in the evenings. Translated, the text reads “It’s nothing special, just a happy time.”

The wholesome imagery and charming anime artwork by Urachan proved to be an instant hit, probably far more than McDonald’s Japan ever could have imagined. It’s currently going viral among international audiences, but for reasons far beyond the original intentions of either the brand or the artist.

Within a day of the tweet, Western accounts (many who are mutual followers with me) praised the ad for supposedly promoting the nuclear family model, compared it to former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s push for Japanese people to have more children, and contrasted it with social justicey ads previously posted by the American version of McDonald’s.

Not even realizing this discourse was happening at the time, I myself tweeted about how the culture around Japanese McDonald’s is notably different from that of McDonald’s in the United States, leading to a viral post which unintentionally added even more fuel to the fire. As to be expected from the wonderful dumpster fire of a site that is Twitter, certain people sent rather colorful comments my way and went as far to call me an “Asian fetishizer,” which is a rather odd thing to say to someone who is Asian.

But is there really some deeper meaning here to what’s happening? Is McDonald’s Japan subliminally trying to get its customers to reproduce more via the power of burgers and fries? The answer to me appears to be no, and this controversy just seems to be another attempt at trying to pull Japan into American-style culture wars it has nothing to do with.

It’s first necessary to point out how McDonald’s is generally viewed in Japan to provide some context for that viral advertisement.

Entrepreneur Den Fujita established the first Japanese McDonald’s in 1971 to give his fellow countrymen a slice of Americana as the country was becoming an economic powerhouse in the decades since WWII. Having also been responsible for introducing Toys “R” Us and Blockbuster to Japan, Fujita was an eccentric businessman who wanted to provide fun and amusement to families.

McDonald’s investors initially expressed concerns over how successful burgers and fries would be in an Asian country that typically prefers rice over bread, but Fujita’s smart marketing and adaption to local Japanese tastes with exclusive menu items made the Golden Arches a massive hit in the Land of the Rising Sun. The rest, as they say, is history, and McDonald’s continues to be the top fast food franchise in Japan with nearly 3,000 stores in operation. This makes Japan the most successful country for McDonald’s outside of the United States.

Going to McDonald’s in Japan is an experience I always look forward to. The meals are usually fresh and while still fast food at the end of the day, the chain offers a consistent level of quality which is in sharp contrast to how it typically is in the United States. Chances are much higher here that your burger is going to actually look like how it’s advertised. As expected of Japanese service, the staff are trained to be alert and friendly with customers, which means interacting with them is almost always pleasant. The restaurants themselves are very spacious and clean, which makes them surprisingly ideal places for long study sessions. It’s very common to see large groups of Japanese teenagers studiously working on homework or preparing for exams as they munch away on fries or have a coffee with their friends.

Pointing this out on Twitter mostly resulted in people agreeing with me, but inevitably other replies and quote retweets were the same “Place, Japan” meme being spammed over and over again. On one hand, I sort of get it. There are weeaboos who overly idealize Japan, but at the same time I think the opposing crowd who are constantly cynical are just as inaccurate with their assessments. In this specific case, McDonald’s Japan is a culturally distinct experience from its American counterpart and it isn’t a stretch to say that it’s objectively a better one.

Unlike in the States, McDonald’s Japan is also still keeping its menu items relatively cheap and affordable for the average consumer. This month I ordered a Big Mac medium set, a five-piece chicken nuggets box, a piece of Shaka chicken (a Japan-exclusive exclusive item), and a medium milkshake for ¥1450. That’s about $9.80 USD altogether, which in the current American economy would be considered the average price for just the Big Mac set.

This brings us to the original topic of discussion, that wholesome Twitter advertisement. Just as Den Fujita envisioned over 50 years ago, McDonald’s Japan is aimed at a wide audience of consumers, particularly families. Much of the brand’s marketing has strongly featured this theme, resulting in plenty of emotionally moving advertisements such as this one from 2022 featuring a father and daughter who bond over the food. The slogan “Together with family” also regularly appears in McDonald’s commercials.

With that background, the Twitter advertisement is hardly anything original or particularly noteworthy for the brand. Sure, it features eye-catching anime artwork, but McDonald’s Japan has done entire animated short films as marketing tools for attracting new staff. While some are making dubious connections to the fast food chain trying to promote reproduction amid Japan’s worrying demographic problems, this ignores the fact that McDonald’s Japan has always promoted family since its inception. Go back to the 1970s and the commercials covered the same ground long before Japanese politicians were expressing concerns over the country’s shrinking population.

A consistent uninformed hot take I’ve been seeing is that while Japanese McDonald’s is promoting family with its marketing, its Western counterparts are excluding this messaging because such values are supposedly no longer relevant in our decadent last-days-of-Rome era. But is this really the case?

A look at the McDonald’s USA YouTube channel shows a recent commercial depicting a happy African-American family going to the restaurant. McDonald’s UK has a cute advertisement showing multiple families in traffic all excited to visit the burger chain. McDonald’s Canada? A touching video promoting how the brand helped a family whose child was diagnosed with leukemia. While I do think that the Japanese McDonald’s ads are ultimately superior (come on, this country has always been the king of amazing commercials), I just don’t buy the idea that the other versions of McDonald’s across the globe are somehow more adverse to happy families.

Many are citing the “stop killing black trans women” tweet as a sign that McDonald’s in the U.S. has gone irreversibly woke, but that isn’t the whole story either. While I do think it was out of place compared to the rest of the company’s typical messaging, bear in mind that this was at the height of the 2020 virtue signaling hysteria over George Floyd’s death that virtually every brand participated in, including several international companies. Apart from that one time, the U.S. McDonald’s Twitter account hasn’t posted any notable statements on political or social issues that I could find via a keyword search. The American brand’s social media now largely just sticks to rather droll and harmless content.

But again, what about the supposed “controversy” with the Japanese McDonald’s tweet? People on the right say that leftists are “seething” over the ad because it allegedly “promotes the traditional nuclear family,” but I’ve searched high and low for any kind of real progressive backlash and couldn’t find any. I’ve seen plenty of conservatives claiming that leftists are angry, but actual left-wing accounts are just finding the whole premise absurd.

I can only come to the conclusion that like with so many things on Twitter, this entire controversy is simply a manufactured narrative where people are fighting windmills in yet another terminally online culture war. The fact that some seriously think the Japanese tweet features a white family just tells me that many of these takes are coming from a place of pure ignorance. We’ve already established that McDonald’s Japan has branded itself as a family restaurant for decades long before the country’s demographic woes and that its Western counterparts have done the same.

And herein lies the main problem I see with this discourse. Westerners, but mostly Americans, are trying to project their own beliefs and insecurities onto a country that is completely divorced from these culture wars. Whatever Japanese executive commissioned that advertisement for artist Urachan to draw clearly did not have any kind of political or social agenda in mind. It was simply a piece of marketing consistent with what McDonald’s Japan has done for decades, but foreign Twitter users unaware of that context ended up making a mountain out of a molehill.

I find it a shame that an innocent piece of cute artwork is igniting such volatile discussion that’s well beyond its intended purpose. The bizarrely hostile replies to my tweet about Japanese McDonald’s being better than the American version when I was just talking about food illustrate how Twitter in the Anglosphere is run on so much negativity and constant cynicism. I’m used to it as someone who has been on the platform for over ten years and maintains a moderately decent following, but certain grifters know exactly what they’re doing because intentionally antagonistic posts are how they create clout.

The stuff that Westerners on Twitter constantly argue about such as J.K. Rowling’s name being attached to Hogwarts Legacy or selectable pronouns being a feature in Bethesda’s space role-playing game Starfield are typically not things that Japanese people are aware of. But I think that the McDonald’s advertisement is an even dumber vessel for controversy and hardly something that should be igniting days or weeks of heated discussion as being symbolic of Western civilization ending.

Sometimes a commercial with good aesthetics trying to sell you fast food really is just a commercial with good aesthetics trying to sell you fast food. I’ll take the Big Mac set to go, please.

“I think Japanese people are even more apathetic about politics now than in the past …and I do think the actions of myself and others have contributed to that.”

These were the words of former Japanese Red Army founder Fusako Shigenobu decades after she and her organization once established themselves as one of the most notorious terrorist groups in the world.

As radical communists influenced by the New Left movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the Red Army occupies a fascinating space in the political history of Japan. But while once regarded as among the most dangerous extremists of their era, there is now next to nothing left of them today.

In modern-day Japan, left-wing ideologies like socialism and communism have little resonance with the Japanese public. The Japanese Communist Party maintains some degree of influence on local politics, but it is a far cry from the ideals of a sweeping international revolution in solidarity with other states as envisioned by Marx and Engels.

Yet more than five decades ago, this was the dream of the Red Army and one they were willing to achieve by any means necessary. Their advocacy of revolution through terrorism and constant in-fighting, however, proved to be their downfall. 

Events such as the Yodogo Hijacking Incident, the Asama-Sanso Incident, and the Lod Airport Massacre brought the group’s violent activities to international attention, which played a major role in left-wing movements failing to achieve success in Japan. Unattainable goals and internal divisions additionally made a single unified vision all but nonexistent.

While the Red Army was not the sole cause of leftism’s decline in Japan, it was certainly a catalyst that did no favors to the existing factionalism of Japan’s major left-wing political parties. The organization’s terrorism ultimately imparted a negative impression on the consciousness of the Japanese public which in the end chose to reject their murderous ideology.

The Birth of the Red Army 

It is first necessary to define the name “Red Army” (Sekigun) itself, which is often used interchangeably for three separate, but related groups. In its earliest form, the organization was referred to as the Red Army Faction (Sekigunha), led by Takaya Shiomi in 1969. Members of the RAF joined forces with another group to become the United Red Army (Rengō Sekigun) in 1971.

A separate organization referred to as the Japanese Red Army (Nihon Sekigun) formed in Lebanon the same year by Takeshi Okudaira and URA member Fusako Shigenobu, who formally broke with them to lead the JRA full time in 1972. This article will refer to each group by their specific name when it comes to analyzing their respective activities, but it will employ the general term “Red Army” to refer to the overall movement as a whole. 

The group’s original form, the aforementioned Red Army Faction, was essentially stripped of its relevance in the first year of its existence. It advocated “‘simultaneous, worldwide revolution’ through violent tactics, in the name of Third World and other oppressed minorities” and was linked to other New Left factions overseas.

The Japanese New Left movement was essentially analogous to its Western counterparts, but some members took things to even more bizarre extremes. Political activist and later terrorist Katsuhisa Oomori created the self-hating ideology of “Anti-Japanism,” which advocated for the eventual extinction of the Japanese race as a whole. While only the most radical of extremists subscribed to views like Oomori’s, such beliefs are said to have influenced the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo and their sarin gas attack in 1995.

Breaking off from the Japanese Communist Party in order to mobilize a younger student-led movement, the Red Army Faction’s initial key issue was the anpo security treaty between Japan and the United States which was set for renewal in 1970. Even further to the left than the JCP, the RAF engaged in assaults on government buildings and violent clashes with police. Poorly executed, it rapidly lost members due to arrests, which itself culminated in the imprisonment of its leader, Takaya Shiomi, after a failed insurrection against Prime Minister Eisaku Sato in November 1969.

Consisting mostly of university students, the RAF’s goals were lofty at best and a serious security threat at worst which made acceptance by the Japanese public unlikely from the outset. By 1970, Japan had the third largest GDP in the world and was experiencing unprecedented economic success. Moreover, the Japanese Socialist Party and Japanese Communist Party were weakened due to a lack of clear vision, which only solidified the power of the Liberal Democratic Party.

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Japan has the reputation of being a relatively safe and peaceful country, but you wouldn’t have believed that one year ago when a lone gunman shot Shinzo Abe before a crowd of around 300 spectators. After being rushed to hospital, medics declared the former prime minister dead hours later, and the next few days of highly controversial revelations shocked the country to its core.

Abe’s last moments were spent giving a campaign speech in Nara Prefecture for a fellow Liberal Democratic Party candidate ahead of election season on July 8, 2022. It was your standard political rally in an urban area, but one that had been decided upon hastily only the previous day. In the aftermath, police remarked that less security was provided than should have been made available for such a high-profile politician like Abe.

Questions were immediately raised around how such an assassination could have happened, both due to the public setting and the fact that the perpetrator used a homemade firearm in a country where guns are notoriously difficult to acquire. When the assassin’s identity was revealed, a disgruntled unemployed 41-year-old man named Tetsuya Yamagami with service in the Japanese navy, public speculation only grew more intense.

The intrigue around Abe’s assassination has not waned a year on, and the legacy of the prime minister himself remains a debated one.

Born Into Politics

Shinzo Abe was born into what can essentially be called the rough Japanese equivalent of the Kennedy family with its political prominence. His maternal grandfather was Nobusuke Kishi, a controversial post-war prime minister suspected of “Class A” war crimes and later made infamous for sparking the 1960 Anpo protests over the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Shinzo’s paternal grandfather, Kan Abe, was on the opposite side of the political spectrum and had strongly disagreed with the war effort waged by Hideki Tojo while serving in the House of Representatives as a pacifist. Shinzo’s father, Shintaro, became a prominent member of the ruling LDP and successfully took Kan’s seat representing his district of Yamaguchi Prefecture. Abe also had two brothers; one who stayed apolitical and one who later became a defense minister.

Yet despite this background, Shinzo Abe himself was not described as very political by those who knew him in his youth. He instead chose to study abroad at the University of Southern California in 1978, gaining proficiency in English and working in the American branch of Kobe Steel at the behest of his father. From the testimony of his colleagues published in later books, Abe did not ask for special privileges as the son of a politician and demonstrated deep loyalty and commitment to those he worked with. Upon his assassination last year, even Abe’s political rivals spoke highly of his character.

But Shinzo could not avoid politics forever, and Shintaro hired him as a personal secretary after recalling him back to Japan. Abe grew more conservative around this time as he shaped his ideology, but working with his father allowed him to visit dozens of countries throughout the 1980s at the height of Japan’s economic influence. This instilled within Abe the importance of maintaining ties with world leaders and understanding what role his country played in international affairs, traits that would be seen throughout his entire political career. Continuing the family tradition, Shinzo won his father’s Yamaguchi district seat in 1996 five years after Shintaro had passed away.

Becoming Prime Minister (Twice)

After working as chief cabinet secretary in the administration of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Abe became Japan’s youngest postwar prime minister in 2006 at the age of 52. His mentor Koizumi had pushed for neoliberal policies while in office, but Abe was more concerned with bolstering a secure social safety net that could aid Japan’s most disaffected people. His platform additionally included revising Article 9 of the constitution, creating a more equal relationship with the U.S., and emphasizing more top-down political leadership.

Yet his first term was a short-lived one, with his cabinet appointees becoming embroiled in scandals and the prime minister himself being criticized for focusing more on foreign policy issues instead of domestic economic ones. The Liberal Democratic Party lost to the Democratic Party of Japan in a landslide at the 2007 elections, leading to opposition control of the House of Councillors for the first time since 1999.

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