Countries like Japan thrive on barriers to information flow. It is hard to overstate how deep and wide the rift caused by linguistic differences between Japanese and Indo-European languages is. The number of people who speak both very good English/German/French etc and very good Japanese is small and unlikely to grow dramatically. Yet there is […]
Six days have passed since the fateful earthquake and tsunami of 11 March. I’m still staying in Tokyo, and unlike a lot of the foreigners here, I don’t feel that there is any immediate danger to my person. Life goes on: Yesterday I had a few drinks with my friend. A lot of places were […]
I thought I would write a quick summary of the situation following the huge earthquake in Touhoku, as I understand it, possibly with more updates to follow. 1. I am fine, and there is no immediate danger to me personally. When the quake occurred, I was in Sapporo, and I came back to Tokyo on […]
Some scattered thoughts on idea flows. The global idea space is partitioned in various ways. One example would be peoples speaking different languages. English speakers all understand each other, Japanese speakers all understand each other, but there are relatively few people who speak Japanese and English very well. We can understand this situation in an […]
Nomura’s jellyfish, a species frequently encountered in Japan and China, is one of the largest in the world. The body can reach a diameter of 2 m. Since they create big problems for the fishing industry, Japan has now sought China’s help on the issue. It is thought that a recent proliferation of the species, huge […]