If you watched (or read about) the World Cup, you know that FIFA adopted “the American model” of ticket sales, which is essentially sanctioned ticket scalping, an activity that was mostly illegal in the United States before the lobbyists got hold of it and created a $5 billion industry.

In a comprehensive report on what it called FIFA’s “2026 World Cup ticket saga”, The New York Times wrote in June, “FIFA has almost always declined to say how many tickets would be available, for which matches, in which phases, at what prices.”

It also noted that, “FIFA’s initial prices, never announced but revealed by The Athletic in October, were by far the highest in World Cup history. Every ticket, for every match, in every category, was more expensive than any equivalent ticket in 2022, 2018, 2014 and so on.”

FIFA replied, “The pricing model reflects the existing market practice for major entertainment and sporting events within our hosts [although World Cup matches also were played in Canada and Mexico, this meant the United States] on a daily basis.”

And so, although I was in the United States for part of the World Cup, and attended matches during the 1994 (United States) and 2002 (Japan and South Korea) World Cups, I was not tempted to even try to obtain tickets to this year’s event, which I watched on television, which gave me a chance to explain the offsides rule to my 92-year-old mother.

In 2028, the Olympics are coming back to the United States, and with my son at university in Los Angeles, I thought I might try to get tickets. As regular readers know, I have some history with the Olympic Games, and I’m (mostly) a fan.

And yet, as the enshittification of society continues at a breakneck pace, I was not optimistic that 1) I would be able to obtain any tickets, or 2) that they would be affordable.

What is “affordable”? Well, as the saying goes, “If you have to ask …”

For years I have been taking my kids to Brooklyn Nets games because Knicks tickets are unaffordable. We’re not Nets fans, but if you consider the abilities of the visiting team, it’s (near) NBA quality, so …

But the cost of attending a sporting event in the United States is in general insanely expensive. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, the cost of the most expensive ticket to a New York Yankees game in 1978, when my father was taking me to games, was $6.50. In 1974 it was $4.00. In 2004 it was $80. In 2008 it was $250.

And today we are in the “dynamic pricing” era, in which tickets for in-demand games are only available to non-season ticket holders via the resale market. The cheapest “seat” in Yankee Stadium for Game 3 of the 2024 World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees cost $704, which didn’t even get you a seat. What your $704 got you was a “Pinstripe Pass”, a standing room only area behind right field. If you wanted to be closer to the action, you had to pay $17,820. If you wanted to bring a friend, so you didn’t have to drink $20 beers by yourself, you paid $35,640.

And if you wanted to bear witness earlier this year to the New York Knicks’ first championship since 1973, you might have paid over $200,000 for a pair (you’d have wanted to bring a date, someone to bear witness to you bearing witness) of seats.

Ticket prices have risen more than twice as fast as the price of goods generally in the U.S. from 2000 to 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and from 1991 to 2023, the price of attending an NFL or MLB game rose, on average, by around 300%. The average NFL ticket now costs more than $300. The cheapest ticket to an average NFL game is around $169.

“Dynamic pricing” came to U.S. professional sports in 2009, introduced by baseball’s San Francisco Giants, and allows teams (and resale platforms such as Ticketmaster and Stubhub, to adjust prices based on actual or expected demand.

The result is a $17,000 baseball ticket, and a $100,000 basketball ticket.

Back to the 2028 Olympics, last week I was notified by “the LA28 Ticketing Team” that I had been “assigned a time slot to purchase LA28 Olympics tickets during Drop 2.” I thought, sure, let me see what’s available, and see if I can land some tickets for my kids. I was told that during my time slot I would be able to purchase only 12 tickets, so I figured I would get tickets for six events for the two kids, and even if I was unable to get tickets during another drop [I was not given an opportunity to buy tickets during Drop 1.], they could have a nice little Olympic experience.

When my time slot arrived, I clicked in to the site clutching my scribbled list of preferred events and found that tickets were not on sale for all events. “The LA28 Ticketing Team” had written that all events would be included in “Drop 2”, but by the time my time slow opened, that wasn’t remotely true. Entire sports had nothing at all.

So, I was unable to buy tickets for at least half the events I was interested in, because they were gone. Possibly additional tickets will be offered for those sports, but who knows.

The number of tickets that have been offered, and the number of tickets that will be offered, none of that is public information.

I guess that to put together the Olympics trip I want, I will have to navigate multiple “drops” across months.

There were tickets to a few events I was interested in, though.

Tickets for a men’s volleyball preliminary match at 9:00 a.m. on 16 July, 2028 started at $285.27. Tickets for a men’s volleyball preliminary match at 1:00 p.m. on 15 July, 2028 started at $496.12. The competition draw is not yet set, so it’s impossible to know who will be playing in those time slots, but the original “official” prices for preliminary round volleyball tickets started at $28 and ran up to $210.

In other words, the cheapest volleyball tickets offered during my time slot were priced at 10x the original price. No thanks.

Track and field is my thing, and I thought I would check out the prices.

Olympic track and field, although obviously popular, will be held across 10 days in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which has a seating capacity of 77,500. Surely there would be some affordable seats in the nosebleed sections.

Nope.

In my drop, tickets for a morning session on 19 July, 2028 started at $750.38. This session comprises only six events, including men’s hammer throw qualification (yawn), women’s long jump qualification (yawn), three repechage events (the repechage round was introduced into the Olympic Games in Paris 2024 to give a few preliminary round non-qualifiers a chance to advance to the semifinals) and only one final, the women’s 3000 meter steeplechase.

Evening session tickets on 17 and 18 July started at $1,116.27.

These sessions include multiple event finals, and represent much better value, but still … prices started at $1,116.27.

Tickets for the evening session on 21 July started at $2,046.50. The session features a handful of finals, but … no thanks.

Like FIFA, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) doesn’t care what I think.

They have reportedly sold over six million tickets so far, and the Games will undoubtedly sell out, despite nakedly avaricious ticket pricing.

Will tickets for the Opening Ceremony or Closing Ceremony or gold medal basketball game sell for over $100,000? The organizers have not ruled out dynamic pricing, so it seems likely. “We’re gonna look at all of our data and figure out how we go forward,” said Allison Katz-Mayfield, LA28’s SVP of Games delivery revenue, in an interview with The Athletic this week.

As was true for the World Cup, tickets will be available on resale platforms, and the IOC will almost certainly be taking a cut (the IOC has its own resale platform, but has also partnered with Ticketmaster and Sports Illustrated Tickets, and inevitably tickets will also be available via other popular sites such as StubHub and SeatGeek). On those sites, resale prices are set by sellers and depend on supply and demand. According to Katz-Mayfield, there won’t be any restrictions on markups. “In the U.S. it’s a free market,” she said. It will not have gone unnoticed by the IOC that FIFA imposed fees on both sellers and buyers during the recent World Cup.

So, no, I won’t be buying tickets for my kids to see the Olympic Games in 2028.

There is an Olympic Games every four years (2032 will be in Brisbane), and I trust Europeans (and Aussies!) to refuse to allow the IOC to rip off fans.

But here’s another idea:

In 1991 I bought tickets to the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, and invited a then-friend who had competed in the same stadium in the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964. We attended almost every session across the nine days of competition, and although I can’t remember exactly, I can’t imagine I paid more than $800 for both seats.

The World Athletics Championships returned to Tokyo last year, and the majority of tickets were priced at ¥10,000 ($63) or less. Additionally, to maximize accessibility, 2025 special tickets were priced at just ¥2025 (under $13) per session.

My recommendation, then, to track and field fans, is that they spend their money not on Olympic tickets but instead, on a trip to Beijing for the World Athletics Championships that will be held from September 11–19, 2027.

While you’re there you can see the Great Wall.

Yesterday I overheard a snatch of conversation between a teenage boy and his girlfriend. I was running past, so I did not hear the context, but I heard the boy say, “That’s not what I’m saying, bro!”

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “bro” first appeared in A Treatise on Charitie, written by humanist scholar Thomas Lupset and published in 1533. Lupset, of course, was using the word in its traditional context, to denote “brother”.

The current (epidemic) usage is relatively recent; in print (where the best records can be found) it dates back around 200 years, and became more frequent at the beginning of the 20^th century, with the emergence of the word “brother” as a form of address in Black American churches.

Then, in the free-spirited 1970s, “bro” entered the mainstream, not only for Black Americans but also for people connected with Black American culture (though as someone who was very connected with Black American culture in the late 1970s and 1980s, I don’t think I ever heard it in New York City, where cabrón was much more common, even among non-native Spanish speakers).

As far as I can see, “bro” seems to have overtaken “dude” as a (sometimes gender-neutral) form of address, to the point that it seems ubiquitous among American men between the ages of six and 76. And it is not only a form of address but a pronoun, e.g. “Bro was low-key chillin’ ‘til shawty flipped out.” Bro has also crossed the Atlantic, and can be heard as “bruv” (but probably not from members of the royal family … except maybe Harry).

Dude is another term that gained prominence in the 1970s (a decidedly less formal time!), not through Black American churches but instead through surf culture. If you’re a film buff, you’ll remember the scene in the 1969 movie Easy Rider when Wyatt (Peter Fonda) explains to his cellmate lawyer (Jack Nicholson) the definition of “dude”: “Dude means nice guy; Dude means regular sort of person.”

Then there’s this dude, who really took the word mainstream.

Another form of address that came out of Black American churchgoing is “cuz”, originally short for “cousin”, but like “bro”, eventually going wider. In 1970s and 1980s New York City, “cuz” was popular among both Blacks and Hispanics (and white boys trying to pass).

Back in my parents’ time, I guess “buddy” was popular, but my sense of it was that the usage was often ironic, e.g. when a cop says to you, “Where do you think you’re goin’, buddy?”

“Bro” as a form of address has expanded to “bro” as a classifier, e.g. “finance bro”, “tech bro”, “gym bro”, and in the United States, a subculture (“bro culture”) characterized by (male) homosocial relationships and often, sexism and drinking. One thing is certain: when the finance bros – in particular the private equity bros – get hold of something you love, whether it’s a restaurant or a product or something else, it will be ruined.

Language can be code, signaling solidarity with a person or group. [Last year I wrote about President Obama’s ability to “code-switch”.] But while I stand with Duke Ellington “in the group of those who appreciate Bourgogne”, I don’t stand with those who use “bro” as a form of address, especially to their girlfriends.

Or to their grandmothers.

Last year, my son spent a couple of months in New York City, brushing up his English. I was in New York for the first week, but then flew back to Asia, leaving him and my 92-year-old mother to develop their relationship. Two months later, after he flew back to Tokyo for a last hurrah with his pals before starting at university in California, he expressed interest in returning to New York for the Christmas holidays.

He said, “I’m bro with Grandma now.”

What???

On 19 June, 1981, my friend Ian arrived in Hong Kong for the first time, to take up a job with the Royal Hong Kong Police Force.

I know this because he sent me a photograph the other day of the arrival stamp in his passport, with the note “45 years today”.

I first stepped foot in Hong Kong on 4 December 1988, according to the stamp in my passport from that era, which I just dug out. That was a reconnaissance trip for a young man in search of adventure, and I spent less than a month in the territory, including my first trip to Macau (only for a day).

The next time I landed at Kai Tak Airport was on 21 August 1989, and I remember vividly the smell of the (decidedly unfragrant) harbor penetrating the plane after the pilot turned off the air conditioning. [Note: the translation of Hong Kong (香港) is “fragrant harbor”.]

In those days, Hong Kong “visitor” visas had a validity of only one month, so I shuffled in and out of Hong Kong quite frequently to renew my stay before securing my first employment visa (valid for only six months!) in May 1990.

My passport from that era was issued in April 1985 and expired in April 1995, and I had pages added (at the U.S. Consulate-General) several times.

Not long after I arrived in Hong Kong I restarted my competitive running career, and very quickly I was eligible for selection to the Hong Kong national team. Not for global events, which required seven years residency, but for races in China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore and South Korea.

My first trip to mainland China was on 23 March 1990, to represent Hong Kong in the Canton Spring Meet, in Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton). That event was one of China’s best track and field meets, open only to Chinese athletes, but thanks to good relations between the Hong Kong and Chinese athletic federations, Hong Kong (which would be a British territory until 1 July, 1997) was invited.

On that trip I didn’t see much more of Guangzhou than the hotel and stadium, but I remember that China – less than 15 years removed from the Cultural Revolution – was very gray. In 1990, the population of Guangzhou was just over three million. Today it is just under 20 million. Lots of bicycles then, not so many now.

Since that first trip I have been to China over a hundred more times, mostly on business to Shanghai and Beijing, and although I moved from Hong Kong to Japan in 2002, I have returned a number of times to the post-handover Chinese versions of both Hong Kong and Macau (though as a permanent resident, I no longer get stamps in my passport when I enter Hong Kong).

In 1991 I was selected to compete in a track meet in Taiwan, a ‘soft power’ event to which the Taiwanese organizers invited athletes from around the Asia-Pacific region, plus a handful of Olympic medalists. For some reason I was in New York early that year, and I decided to get my Taiwan visa at the Taiwanese consulate. I looked up the address in the phone book (remember those?), headed downtown, and arrived in the lobby of the building just after 9 o’clock.

I scanned the building directory for long enough that the security guard took pity on me. “Say, brother, you lookin’ for Taiwan?” I said I was, and he directed me to the Coordination Council for North American Affairs Office in New York, where Wong Ying-Ming, Assistant, issued me a visa on 8 May. Further good news: in 2019, the Coordination Council for North American Affairs Office was renamed the Taiwan Council for U.S. Affairs, making it easier for young Americans to find their way to Taiwan.

My first passport stamp from Singapore – where I now live – is dated 15 July 1990, and it was a business trip. My first job in Hong Kong was for a Singapore-based media group, and I visited the head office for a few days. I have only a few memories of that trip, none work-related, but I recall a nice day at the beach (in East Coast Park) with a colleague whose name – but not legs – I have forgotten, and having been transfixed by a television broadcast (seen in my hotel room at the end of the work day) by a performance at the Singapore Arts Festival by the Japanese butoh group Sankai Juku, which I have made a point of seeing in person whenever possible since then.

My first passport stamp from Japan (where I lived from 2002-2017) is dated 23 August 1991. The IAAF World Championships in Athletics (now simply the World Athletics Championships) was in Tokyo and as a fan of the sport, I took the opportunity to get tickets for the entire week. I had an extra ticket, so I invited a friend who had run in the same stadium during the Olympic Games in 1964.

My first India visa is dated 8 April 1992, and was issued by Anil Kumar, Attaché (Consular) at the Commission for India in Hong Kong. Mr. Kumar’s visa notes, “Change of purpose not allowed”.

In November of the same year I traveled to Myanmar, and on 13 November the Consulate General of the Union of Myanmar in Hong Kong stamped a visa into my passport warning, “Land route not permissible”. I hadn’t planned an overland entry, so everything worked out just fine.

I’ve been to Africa around half a dozen times, and when I flew into Tanzania, on 16 March 1987, I had forgotten my International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP), which if you traveled to developing countries in the previous century you may remember as a yellow card on which your vaccinations against exotic diseases had been recorded. The border control officers at Dar es Salaam International Airport (now Julius Nyerere International Airport) were undoubtedly unconcerned about the possibility that I might spread disease throughout the country, but my mistake offered an opportunity to shake me down for a bribe and they ushered me into a small room for negotiations. By pretending I did not have any cash (this was the 1980s and of course I had cash, but I said I was meeting my friend outside and he had the cash) I escaped for only $20.

I first traveled to South Africa on March 20, 1996, and again on May 14, 2022. I landed in Kampala (Uganda) on August 1, 2009, having flown in from Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I’m not sure when I landed the Congo, in Kinshasa, because I can’t find that stamp in my passport. An exit stamp, yes. A visa, yes, issued by the Ministre plénipotentiaire of the Embassy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Tokyo, Raphael Mwenda, on July 7, 2009. But no entry stamp. Considering that the DRC has no postal service, no national airline, and the world’s second-highest rate of infant mortality, a missing entry stamp seems a small thing.

The years passed and I accumulated more stamps. Many, many entry and exit stamps at Shanghai’s Hongqiao Airport when I opened an office in China.

In 1995 I was tired of Hong Kong life, and after some thought, decided to move to Brazil. I studied Portuguese for a year, and I booked a reconnaissance trip to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. I was issued tourist visa no. 1650 by Gabriel Lino Lopes Maia, Oficial de Chancelaria in the Consulado Geral do Brasil in Hong Kong, and off I went. My move to Brazil didn’t work out, but I was happy to pick up another language (also useful in Portugal!), and I had a great trip (including a Rod Stewart concert on Copacabana Beach on New Year’s Eve; unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to meet Rod in person to remind him that he had chatted up my mother at a party in New York over 30 years before).

Even before Ian sent me photographic proof of his arrival in Hong Kong, I had been lamenting the demise of the passport stamp. In Macau earlier this month, the immigration officer handed me a slip of paper that served as proof that I was legally in the territory. I think Israel has done that for decades, because some nations would refuse entry to arrivals with Israeli stamps in their passports.

In Japan, believed by William Gibson to be the most futuristic of nations, biometric data is backstopped by border guards using cathode-ray tube terminals to confirm the issuance of adhesive-backed passport stamps, but the increased use of biometric data to control border access means that when you arrive in some countries you no longer even need to show your passport. I don’t show my passport when I fly back to the United States. And a machine scans my passport in Singapore, after which I get a confirmatory face scan. No stamps.

Of course passport-free travel throughout most of Europe has been possible since 1995, and in April, the European Union launched its Entry/Exit System (EES) at all Schengen Area border checkpoints. No more stamps.

Governments will tell you that using biometric data at border control points increases efficiency and reduces traveler transit times, but they really love it because it facilitates surveillance. Border control systems can be integrated with law enforcement networks incorporating facial recognition technology, and they are.

China is by far the global leader in mass surveillance, and Russia and North Korea are not far behind. India and Israel are in everyone’s top 10 of surveillance states, and the United States could be as well, though I suspect that law enforcement agency rivalries limit effective cooperation.

The point is, biometrics are here to stay, passport stamps are almost finished, and the passport itself is probably not long for this world.

That makes me sad, but having lived through the demise of rotary dial telephones, cassette tapes and manual transmission automobiles, I know nothing lasts forever.

Thanks for the memories!

In the 1981 movie Arthur, starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli, Arthur Bach (played by Moore) is a rich drunk being pressured into an arranged marriage by his family, who hope matrimony will prompt Arthur to “grow up”. Midway through the movie, Arthur stops by the home of his future father-in-law, Burt Johnson, with whom he has nothing in common.

Arthur has arrived drunk, and after a brief exchange, says to Johnson, “Want a drink?”

Johnson replies, “I never drink. No one in my family ever drinks.”

And Arthur delivers a line that has stayed with me since I saw the movie 45 years ago, “That’s great! You probably never run out of ice your whole life!”

I think about injuries in the same way.

I started running competitively when I was a freshman in high school, coerced into joining the track team by my football (soccer) coach.

I don’t remember getting any injuries in high school, but at university, the fun began.

I had a metatarsal stress fracture (I blame that on my coach, who prescribed the same hard hill workout, on a hard surface, over and over again, until I broke my foot), and a handful of less significant injuries (tendinitis, sprained ankles).

After university, I was able to continue competing, and the hard training that contributes to good results caused a number of additional injuries.

I suffered strained calf and hamstring muscles during track workouts, gave myself a case of chondromalacia patellae (if you find yourself suffering from “runners’ knee” at some point, I highly recommend the Cho-pat or a copycat), and had several bouts of plantar fasciitis, which I don’t recommend to anyone.

My big injury was a persistent case of retrocalcaneal exostosis, also known as Haglund’s deformity, named for Patrick Haglund, an osteopathic surgeon at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who observed and described it in 1927.

Haglund’s deformity is an enlargement of the bony section of the heel, where the Achilles tendon is inserted, that can irritate the soft tissue – which can include the Achilles and the retrocalcaneal bursa, a small fluid-filled sac near the heel – that helps cushion the area surrounding the heel. There are non-surgical treatments including physiotherapy, shockwave therapy and anti-inflammatory medication, but those did not work for me. [Probably “rest” would have worked for me, but I’ve never met an athlete who was prescribed “rest” and did not seek a second opinion.]

And so, in order to try to get back to running pain-free, I went under the knife.

My surgeon sliced into the side of my heel, then scraped away at the bony growth until it was roughly back to “normal”, stitched me up, threw on a bandage, and after a few hours of observation, sent me on my way.

I had flown to Hong Kong from Japan for the operation, so I thought I would make the most of the short trip by meeting a friend for a few beers that evening. After several hours, and probably four beers, my friend looked under the table at my bandaged foot (I had brought flipflops to wear post-op) and said, “I think we should call it a night.”

It wasn’t that late, so I asked why. He said, “Because you’re bleeding out.”

And so I was. Sitting at the bar for hours was probably not the recovery regimen my surgeon would have recommended, and blood had oozed through my sutured wound and soaked my bandage (and my flipflop).

I bade my friend adieu and took a taxi up to another friend’s house, where I would stay the night before flying home to Japan the next morning. My host had flown to London the previous day, so I was on my own when I arrived back at his house, and when I opened the door I realized I had a problem. The living room and stairs and virtually the entire house was carpeted, and the carpet was white. I hopped to the kitchen, located a plastic supermarket bag, tied it around my ankle and left it there until I left the following morning.

The good news is that my recovery from the surgery was amazingly fast, and I was running again in less than a month.

The bad news is that around 10 years later I developed the same issue – Haglund’s – on the other heel.

Again non-surgical treatment did not do the trick for me, and I scheduled another operation. By this time I was living in Singapore, and my surgeon was himself a runner.

Examining my “deformity” and listening to my medical history, the doc prescribed surgery, but explained that the surgical technique that was then recommended involved scraping down the bony growth via an incision made through the back of the heel rather than the side. A technique that is far more invasive, and likely to require a much longer recovery period, but has a lower chance of failure.

I spoke to the doc recently about that technique, and told him I think it should be less preferred for competitive athletes. Certainly my experience could not have been described as “painless”, and my recovery time was exponentially longer than for the first op. I was on crutches for several weeks, lost significant muscle mass in my right calf, and once I started jogging again, I incurred several other injuries because I was compensating for the newly created imbalance. Almost 10 years later, my right calf is still smaller than my left.

This month, Haglund’s was in the news when World Cup photographers captured images of Portuguese winger Pedro Neto’s football boot (see the above image), into which he had cut a large hole to relieve pressure on his heel. Other star football players, including Brazilians Philippe Coutinho and Roberto Firmino, German Mats Hummels and Italian Daniele De Rossi have similarly cut holes in their boots.

A number of professional runners also have had Haglund’s surgery, including two-time Olympic medalist Galen Rupp, and I imagine nearly everyone who has the operation has gone under the knife as a last resort, having tried – unsuccessfully – every other treatment.

And that’s the thing.

Haglund’s, tendinitis, stress fractures and other injuries are the result of overuse.

And while plenty of doctors will say, “Don’t do that thing,” we runners (and football players and tennis players and swimmers and cyclists et al) like to do that thing.

We want a solution that gets us back out there as fast as possible, ideally pain-free.

Across my competitive running career I have known a few people who have what I think of as “bulletproof bodies”, and are never injured, but that’s not true for the majority of us. The harder you’re pushing yourself, the closer you are to getting injured.

As a result, competitive sport can be a series of injuries, linked by periods of rehabilitation and “good” training and competition. With experience, you learn how to see the warning signs of incipient injury and can perhaps avoid it, but experience comes with age, and age is not the athlete’s friend.

At my age (old), new personal bests seem decreasingly likely, and yet, I remain hopeful.

An addition complication is my competitive nature.

Earlier this year I managed to strain a hamstring during a Pilates class, and if that doesn’t give you the picture, today I underwent an eye examination and was pissed off when I “missed” the final letter of the 20/20 line during one portion of the test.

The final letter, I thought, was a “C”.

“Actually,” said Dr. Wong, “it’s a ‘D’.”

To which I replied, “Dammit!”

When you need to “win” eye exams, you’re gonna pick up injuries.

The headline is a reference to something American baseball player Yogi Berra is famous for having said: “Baseball is 90 per cent mental. The other half is physical.”

Yesterday I tried to obtain a replacement part for an old appliance, and received an email saying:

Your email has been allocated to our team, ROW spare parts department. Please note 791013 has become obsolete, we are unable to supply.

Kind Regards,

Lin Z.

I will probably not be replacing the part that is in need of replacement; it may be available in a junkyard somewhere in New Zealand (where the appliance is from), but the time and effort and money required to secure a $1 part suggest to me that I should walk away, dealing with the minor inconvenience of an appliance that does not work exactly as intended, until I decide to replace it.

I am unimpressed, however, with Lin Z.’s response. It was efficient, certainly, but did little to persuade me that I am a valued customer.

As a professional communicator, words (tone and substance) matter to me, and I am a keen student of customer service. Many of my friends know this, and over the years have called on me to try to resolve a wide range of customer service problems for them.

On one occasion, a friend asked me to undertake on his behalf a correspondence with the general manager of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Hong Kong. My friend, who spent over 100 nights a year in the hotel, had been booted out of a promised room upgrade and was understandably unhappy. I exchanged several emails with the (Swiss, of course) general manager, and although he was sympathetic and apologetic, eventually he wrote to me, “I’m sorry, but I am not empowered to offer any compensation to your friend. It is not the way I like to do business, but the hotel is full every night, and frankly, the owners don’t need your friend’s business.”

I explained the situation to my friend and he said, “What do you think I should do?” I said, “If you love the Grand Hyatt, suck it up and continue giving them your money. If not, find another hotel.” He found another hotel, literally across the street, and sure, it was a 4-star rather than a 5-star, but he saved $150 a night. As the saying goes, $150 here, $150 there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

* * *

When I lived in Japan, on several occasions I used the AppleCare phone service, and without exception the experience was unpleasant and unsatisfying. On more occasions (eventually I vowed never to use the AppleCare phone service again) I took my various MacBooks to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store in Shibuya, where invariably I had a terrific customer service experience. My guess – which no one I spoke to at Apple Japan would confirm – is that the AppleCare phone service is outsourced, that the telephone operators are not Apple employees, and therefore much less invested in Apple’s brand and reputation.

A few years ago, I tried Apple’s service line in Singapore, and was connected to a call center that I suspect was in the Philippines. I spoke briefly with an agent whose suggestion for resolving my problem was so ludicrous that I immediately said thank you, hung up the phone and redialed in the hope of speaking with someone more knowledgeable.

This time, my call was connected to a call center in Australia that may have been staffed by actual Apple employees. The customer service was at the level Steve Jobs would have wanted.

I spoke with a customer service agent, then her supervisor, who spent 40 minutes with me trying to figure out a solution to my problem. And as I have written before, finally she proposed something we hadn’t yet tried, but as I was working my way through the process she outlined, our connection dropped and we were disconnected. Seconds later, her solution worked, and my problem was solved. I was thrilled, and I knew she’d be thrilled, but we were no longer connected. How was I going to get hold of a supervisor at a call center in Australia, when all I had was the main Singapore customer support telephone number?

Well, I dialed it, and luckily, was connected again to Australia rather than the Philippines. I said to the answering agent, “My name is Roberto and I was just speaking with your supervisor, but we got cut off.” The agent asked me to hold, and two seconds later, I heard an excited voice, “Roberto??? Did it work???” I replied, “Yes!!!” She said, “I’m so glad you called back! I’m so excited that this worked.”

I was excited as well. Not only that my problem had been solved, but also that I had had a customer service encounter with someone who really cared (which is why I made the effort to call her back) about figuring out a solution to my problem.

One last story: around 15 years ago I bought a pen I had coveted but been unable to find, a Rotring 600 rollerball. The one I bought was the last one for sale in Taiwan, I was told; the company had stopped making it. Sadly, after five or six years of old school pen-on-paper writing, the small metal band that held the cap on broke, rendering the pen impossible to close.

Thanks to Google, I quickly found a link to Rotring customer service in Japan, and learned that Rotring had been gobbled up by Newell Rubbermaid, a publicly listed consumer goods company with a history of growth by acquisition. I wrote to the company’s Japanese customer service unit, asking about a repair and offering to ship the pen anywhere in the world at my own expense. I got a reply within 24 hours:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for using rOtring.

It seems that a component part inside cap or joint needs to be replaced, but 600 Roller Ball is a discontinued item. We don’t manufacture the item and have no replacement component parts anymore, we cannot fulfill your request unfortunately.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for using our products.

Sincerely yours,

Newell Rubbermaid Japan Ltd.

In other words, thanks for using our product, which we no longer make, which breaks, and which we are unwilling to repair or replace.

I was unimpressed, but unwilling to accept that no one in the company understood the importance of keeping loyal customers happy.

I wrote again to Newell Rubbermaid, but in the U.S. Again, I got a reply within 24 hours:

Dear Mr. De Vido,

Thank you for your email and for the picture of your rOtring 600 black roller ball pen you attached.

Indeed this model has been discontinued for some years now. However as we still have some of these pens left in our inventory, and should you provide us with your address details, we will be happy to send you a new rOtring 600 black roller ball replacement pen at no charge to you.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Best regards,

Service After Sales
Christiane P.
Global SAS Consumer Service Representative

Now that’s more like it! I got to use one of my favorite pens for a few more years (until I lost it), and I got to renew my warm feelings about the Rotring brand (which is storied, in certain design/engineering circles).

There are so many lessons to be drawn from this incident it’s hard to know where to start, but chief among them, I think, is the importance of customer satisfaction.

A good customer satisfaction department does exactly that: satisfy the customer. A great customer satisfaction department goes further: it leaves the customer feeling even better about the brand than they did before they started talking to customer service.

Many large organizations have gatekeeper customer service mechanisms like Apple Japan’s AppleCare phone service, which appears to be designed to make problems go away (not to solve them).

Over the years I have found that most of the people who work within this gatekeeping mechanism (for whatever company) are not empowered to solve my problem. As soon as I determine this, I say, “Okay, I understand that you’re the person who can say ‘no’. Would you please connect me to the person who can say ‘yes’?” Most of the time, they know exactly what I mean, and connect me immediately to their supervisor, who may not be able to solve the problem (think about the Grand Hyatt’s general manager) but at least can express empathy.

On occasion, people have told me, “My supervisor will tell you exactly what I’ve told you, sir.”

Which has never, ever been the case.

If you know me at all, you know I’m what they call “outspoken”.

Which means I say what I think (for the most part), consequences be damned (for the most part). In business, and in life, this has advantages and disadvantages (“You can’t handle the truth!”). I’ve lost friends (turns out they weren’t) and business (ah, well) as a result of my penchant for truth-telling, but on one occasion my frankness landed me a bit of business that changed my life.

I was in a client’s office in Hong Kong, waiting for her to finish up a meeting, and on the table next to me I saw a localized version of the company’s global magazine. The company was one of the biggest and most prominent tech companies in the world at the time (and remains so today), but the Hong Kong edition of the magazine was dreadful. Thin, on cheap paper stock, with hardly any content worth reading inside. As a longtime communications consultant, I was sort of shocked that the company was sending the magazine out under its name.

When my client finished up her meeting and came to get me, I waved the magazine at her and said, “This is really crap!”

“I know,” she said. “Can you help us with it?”

At that point, tired of Hong Kong after six years, I had planned to close my tech-focused public relations business and move to Brazil. I had studied Portuguese for a year (muito obrigado, Silvia!), and I was just back from a reconnaissance trip to Sao Paulo and Rio. I hoped to be living in Brazil within a few months.

Also, I wasn’t a publisher. Sure, I could write (in English), and I felt confident I knew how a magazine was put together, but I wasn’t a designer, I couldn’t write in Chinese, and, well, I had never done it.

But I said to my client I’d think about it over the weekend.

On Monday she asked me if I would serve as editor for the current publisher (a Hong Kong playboy who fancied himself a photographer and also published the Hong Kong edition of Penthouse magazine) during the next publishing cycle, and I saw no reason not to do that while I continued my preparations to move to Brazil.

But at the same time, I also began to explore the possibility of creating a company that could publish magazines.

Why, I’m not sure, but it was a decision that changed my life enormously.

I teamed up with a guy who had a marketing services company (he turned out to be a crook, which is another story) that employed a few designers, and before I’d finished editing that single issue of my original client’s magazine on behalf of the existing publisher, we won a huge tender to create three publications for Hong Kong’s telecoms provider.

Business kept coming, I eventually opened a Shanghai office, I stayed in Hong Kong another seven years, and I never got to Brazil.

Where I might very well be right now if I hadn’t said to my client, “This is really crap!”

Or if she hadn’t been the sort of person who knew crap when she saw it, and wasn’t afraid to have it pointed out to her.

Four companies – Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google and Waymo) and Meta (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) – are projected to spend around $630 billion on data centers and AI chips this year alone, Morgan Stanley estimates. And last October, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said his company is committed to spending $1.4 trillion to develop 30 gigawatts of computing resources (i.e. data centers).

There are over 4,300 data centers in the United States, exponentially more than in any other country, though worldwide there are over 11,600, and in the U.S., 42 percent of Americans live within 5 miles of at least one operational or planned data center. That number is set to increase dramatically, because 67% of planned data centers are in rural areas, and 39% of planned data centers are in counties that currently don’t have any.

Although 25 percent of Americans have never heard of data centers, and know nothing about them, the rest are concerned. By large margins, they think data centers are bad for the environment, increase energy costs, and diminish quality of life for people who live nearby.

Because of these concerns, over 70 percent of Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their area, and nearly half, 48%, are strongly opposed.

During the first quarter of this year, at least 75 U.S. data center projects worth approximately $130 billion were blocked or delayed, and opposition has spread from the community level to state legislatures; bills proposing moratoria on data center construction have been introduced in 14 U.S. states, including New York, which has passed legislation pausing for one year the issuance of permits for large data centers.

And it’s not only Americans who are opposed to unchecked data center construction.

In South Korea, 17 of 33 data centers with construction permits experienced delays due to community pressures last year. Data center developers in Tokyo have faced opposition from local communities, and in February, Malaysians protested the construction of a Chinese-owned data center in Johor.

Last year, The New York Times reported that in Ireland, authorities have limited new data centers in the Dublin area because of “significant risk” to power supplies. In Chile, following protests, Google halted plans to build a center that could have depleted water reserves. In the Netherlands, construction has been halted on some data centers over environmental concerns.

* * *

Back in March, Microsoft President Brad Smith admitted that community opposition is a significant obstacle to data center construction.

“You have to ​win over the local community and ​sustain their trust if you are going to ‌build ⁠a (data center),” Smith said at the CERAWeek conference in Houston. “Obviously what you are seeing in the United States is now a ​concern about ​data ⁠centers.”

Smith’s remarks notwithstanding, Big Tech has been mostly unsympathetic to community concerns. The majority of data centers are constructed by developers, who then sell the finished facilities to companies such as Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta. During the planning and construction stages, these developers protect their high-profile clients from accountability, citing non-disclosure agreements that mandate secrecy about many (important to local communities) project details.

With hyperscale data centers costing billions to build and fit out, serious investment is required, but in my experience, which includes having worked for a company that builds data centers for Big Tech clients, financiers mostly don’t understand the ‘soft’ issue of community relations.

For many bankers, every problem can be solved with money.

To be fair, today that’s mostly true. And to be even more fair, it has been true for millennia.

Robert Walpole, who was prime minister of Great Britain from 1721-1742, is said to have gestured to a group of opposition members of Parliament and said, “All these men have their price.”

But not always.

* * *

The following is not a data center story, but the same principles apply.

A few years ago I was in charge of communications for a company that owned dozens of renewable energy facilities around the Asia-Pacific region. I had been hired to rebrand all the company’s (locally branded) assets in preparation for a sale, but throughout the sale process, the company continued with business as usual, developing and commissioning new projects in an effort to increase the value of the transaction (a significant portion of the sale price was expected to be based on projects in the pipeline).

And so, while my main job was to drive the rebranding process as fast as possible, I also had to manage day-to-day communications at both the group and operating company levels. In theory, anyway. In practice there was not time to do everything that needed to be done, and some triage was necessary.

Each country had its own managing director who was responsible for operations and development, and the differing maturity levels of each market (as well as the scale of our operations in each market) meant the company’s activities were different everywhere. In Japan we had nearly a dozen operating power plants that were generating revenue, plus another two dozen projects that were in various stages of development. In Thailand there were a handful of operating solar projects, but no development, because market conditions were not commercially attractive. In Indonesia there were a handful of solar and wind projects under construction, and the Philippines was home to several large operational wind projects and uncertain development prospects. Every market was different, due to commercial and political risk considerations.

My company was newly established in Taiwan, and while we had built several small solar projects, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was offshore wind. At the time, the Taiwanese government was preparing to auction 5.5GW of offshore wind generation capacity, and like every other major renewable energy player, we were hoping to win a portion of the business.

At the time, my priority was the group-wide rebranding, so the relationship between our Taiwan subsidiary and the residents of small towns in coastal Taiwan was not on my radar (and no one put it on my radar), but around 10 days before the auction bids were due to be filed with Taiwan’s central government, our country manager phoned me to say there was a problem.

It seemed some residents opposed our bid, and offshore wind in general, for the usual reasons: their sea views would be affected, fishing waters might be affected, etc. And unfortunately, our Taiwan country manager (who was not Taiwanese, and not plugged in to Taiwanese politics) had not made any efforts to help the locals understand the potential benefits (environmental, financial) to them of the project. As a result, in the region in which we had hoped to win offshore development rights, offshore wind had become a political hot potato (never a good thing) for government officials at every level.

How can companies building hundreds of millions of dollars worth of infrastructure fail to understand the importance of government and community relations? The engineer/project manager view often is: our numbers are solid so we should win the tender. Yet not every community wants to host a wind farm, bioenergy plant or hydroelectric project. And not every community understands or cares about the potential benefits to them.

What benefits? A greener environment, more reliable energy supply, local jobs, and (very probably) lower energy prices. But all benefits to not accrue to all stakeholders equally, not all stakeholders are in need of or interested in the purported benefits, and as a former colleague, a wind energy developer with decades of experience, said to me once, “No one wants a wind farm in their back yard.”

Anyway, in Taiwan time was very, very short, so I was not optimistic, but I told our country manager I would do my best and I called on a friend at a global public relations agency to ask if he could introduce me to his Taiwanese colleagues. He did and I rang them up immediately and they agreed it was very, very late in the day, but that they would try to help.

A few days later, I met them in Taipei and they were extremely well-prepared, and extremely knowledgeable about the issues. Why? They told me they had spent the last several years managing community relations for several of our competitors.

The agency head said to me, “You see the problem: your competitors have been working with local residents for years; you have a week.”

“I see the problem,” I replied.

Long story short, we did our best, but were not awarded any offshore wind contracts.

And I went back to my day job rebranding the asset portfolio, which six months later a large global infrastructure fund purchased for $5 billion.

My guess is that if we had won the Taiwan offshore wind auction, the purchase price of the asset portfolio would have been $1 billion higher (from not only the value of the first tranche of wind allocations, but also the value of having been able to establish ourselves as a trusted developer and operator of offshore wind projects, as well as a trusted supporter of the government’s energy strategy).

So, there is value in the ‘soft’ issues. There is value to listening to people and tailoring your business strategy to the interests of the communities in which you hope to operate.

* * *

Another story: I once worked with a guy who had been tasked with building a biomass plant that would be located in a small fishing town on the west coast of Japan. This guy knew nothing about biomass, but like many bankers, he thought every problem could be solved by throwing cash at it. He also, it turned out, did not have an ethical bone in his body.

He cornered me in the office one day and explained that there was a problem with the land acquisition; the local fishermen were opposed to the project. They worried that effluent cooling water from the plant might affect their fisheries.

This was a legitimate concern, though probably a minor one. My experience of living in a fishing village in Japan taught me that there are no more coastal fisheries in Japan; commercial fishermen travel hours offshore to find fish.

That said, the most powerful force in the universe is inertia, and for most people, (the prospect of) change is bad. It was certainly also true that we hadn’t undertaken any sort of persuasive environmental impact survey. We were pretty sure there the environmental impact of the plant would be minimal, but we didn’t have evidence.

Obviously, we should have commissioned an environmental impact survey, but time was short, there was money to be made, and no one was listening to my helpful suggestion on that subject.

I’m not an environmental scientist, I’m a communicator, so I suggested that we try to persuade the townspeople, including the fishermen’s family members, of the benefits of the project, not least of which was cheaper, cleaner energy (plus jobs). We would then let the fishermen’s families and friends try to make our case for us.

My colleague had a better idea. “Let’s give the fishermen’s union free electricity.”

I pointed out that the structure of Japan’s electricity grid meant that our project could not provide electricity directly to the fishermen’s union building.

My colleague: “Let’s just give them the cash, then.”

Me: “You mean … bribe them.”

My colleague: “No, it would be an amount that would cover their electricity cost. It would be as though we’re providing them with free electricity.”

Me: “But it would look quite a lot like bribery.”

My colleague walked away, shaking his head at my stupidity.

We ended up not paying bribes, as far as I know, and although I left the company before construction began on the project, I believe the fishermen’s objections were overcome by our (talented and more ethical) local managers and the project did go ahead.

But we could have done things differently, and if I had been brought in earlier, and had more influence, we might have.

* * *

In Tucson, Arizona last year, city council members voted unanimously to halt discussions with developers of a $3.6 billion data center that would ultimately have been operated by Amazon Web Services.

Tucsonans fought hard to get information from both the developers and the city government about a deal set in motion by the city’s Board of Supervisors that had the potential to impact their lives and the environment, especially the water resources that are scarce in Arizona, which is mostly desert.

The developers said the “net water use of [the project] is zero”, but their plan to achieve that goal included purchasing “water credits”, which – like carbon credits – involves investing in projects that conserve water resources, albeit not necessarily where the company is using water for its projects. This is the sort of dissembling that has fueled a backlash against data center developers, because if my water supply in Arizona is running dry, a data center’s investment in mangrove preservation in Louisiana doesn’t help me at all.

Following the city council vote, Councilwoman Nikki Lee said, “Project Blue represents a lot of things to a lot of people right now, more than just the data center and the project itself. It’s a distrust in government. It’s a distrust in corporations. It’s a very large distrust in tech companies, a distrust in technology and privacy in general, and a fear of artificial intelligence and how fast things are moving and how little control we have.”

* * *

Obviously Big Tech (mostly) doesn’t care about you, and it doesn’t care about the communities in which it does business. And this attitude is not unique to Big Tech. Mining companies have been destroying communities for centuries. And chemical companies. And oil companies. And electric utility companies.

What Big Tech does care about is profit, but despite the enormous sums at stake, companies mostly treat community and government relations as an afterthought. Local stakeholders are obstacles to be overcome (if they prove resistant) rather than partners in a venture that will yield mutual benefits for decades to come.

In authoritarian societies, market access does not require (much) community buy-in. Government officials (who may or may not have received financial consideration for their backing) can drum up media support (as Robert Walpole was famous for doing) and proscribe community opposition, with force if needed.

Democratic societies require a lighter touch and greater transparency. [Which is why authoritarian governments like to control the press.]

Citizens increasingly distrust business and government leaders, often with good reason (remember my colleague on the biomass project in Japan, who believed that “all these men have their price”).

For the ‘good’ businesspeople, the solution is obvious, but involves investing time and effort to persuade local stakeholders that their interests are in alignment. This can be accomplished by listening to local concerns, participating in local events and fostering collaborations that strengthen ties and generate mutual benefits, e.g. in the form of employment, education and economic development opportunities, as well as in support of cultural and environmental preservation.

I tell people that community/government relations is for the most part a “cups of tea” (or “glasses of beer”) undertaking that offers an often-unclear-to-senior-management return on investment that cannot be quantified in the Excel spreadsheets so beloved of investors.

* * *

Urban planner Robert Moses is famous for having designed and built the modern New York City, constructing bridges and highways and parkways that connected the five boroughs and laid the foundations for the growth of suburbs, especially on Long Island. In order to do so, he destroyed tens of thousands of homes of the city’s poorest residents, and his Cross-Bronx Expressway and Brooklyn-Queens Expressway slashed through neighborhoods without regard for the vibrant communities that lived there.

Moses was an affluent and powerful white man, and his refashioning of New York City benefited affluent white people the most. Other groups: Blacks and Latinos, and newly arrived immigrants of all races, were sacrificed on the altar of progress.

It’s hard to not see parallels to the way Big Tech and Big Government have aligned today to tell us AI and data centers are vital infrastructure. If we are to have unlimited memes depicting Donald Trump as Ronald McDonald waddling down the steps of Air Force One to participate in the G7, or ineffectively prosecuting a war against Iran in the style of The Lego Movie, we need more compute.

The argument of Big Tech in favor of data centers is that investment in technology is “good for the economy.” But when “good for the economy” so often means “good for a handful of senior executives at a Fortune 100 company”, more effort must be made to explain the benefits of infrastructure projects to affected communities.

Obviously the modern world does need “more compute”.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of powering the development of AI-generated memes, the growth of the middle class globally means that from 2020 to 2030 the upper middle class will grow by 400 million people and the lower middle class will grow by 900 million people. Nearly all of whom will need more and better phones and computers and smart devices.

But for the most part, people do not trust businesses to act in the public interest.

In Japan, only 47 percent of people trust businesses to do what’s right. In Germany, it’s 48 percent. In the United States, it’s 54 percent.

And they trust their governments even less.

In Japan, only 37 percent of people trust the government to do what’s right. In Germany, it’s 42 percent. In the United States, it’s 39 percent.

It’s understandable, therefore, that when Big Business, in partnership with Big Government, comes to your community and tells you they’re planning to do something that will be good for you, you might be skeptical.

And it’s even more understandable when you do some research, uncover some negatives, and then are stonewalled by Big Business and Big Government when you try to get answers to a few basic questions (e.g. will this data center use up all the community’s water and double our electricity prices?).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Luddite. I like an anti-Trump meme as much as the next guy.

But I do believe that businesses and governments should do the right thing.

* * *

A few years ago McKinsey & Co published a report quantifying the value of government relations (with which I will bundle community relations).

McKinsey wrote: “Since there’s so much money on the table, you might assume that companies would organize government relations as carefully as they do other business functions. Surely, for example, companies have people in place to understand the relevant economics, structures, and processes to drive this understanding into important business activities, and regulatory-affairs professionals who work in a collaborative and integrated fashion with business-unit leaders to capture value.

“Yet the reality is quite different. In our most recent annual survey, fewer than 30 percent of the executives responding said that their external-affairs groups had the organizational setup and talent necessary to succeed. Only about 20 percent of executives reported frequent success at influencing government policy and regulatory decisions—a proportion that has not increased in the four years we’ve conducted the survey.”

Bankers gonna bank.

And they ain’t got time to sit down for a cup of tea or a glass of beer with the village elders.

They ain’t got time to explain how much water will be used and if there will be an impact on the potable water supply for the residents. They ain’t got time to explain if the project will it put pressure on the power grid and drive-up electricity prices? They ain’t got time to explain if construction will affect traffic, noise, air quality and the surrounding environment.

Just trust us, bro.

As a native New Yorker who remembers the Knicks’ last NBA championship, I really, really enjoyed watching Jalen Brunson and his teammates dance through the playoffs, sometimes floating, sometimes grinding, everyone contributing something when ‘something’ was really needed. There is no “I” in “team”, Victor Wembanyama.

What I did not enjoy throughout the playoffs was the relentless celebrity-philia, especially at Madison Square Garden. As an actual basketball fan, I’m not at all interested in Timothée Chalamet, his girlfriend-du-jour Kylie Jenner, Ben Stiller, John Turturro (though I love him as an actor), Mariska Hargitay, Taylor Swift and Spike Lee, sitting courtside in $100,000 seats that it turns out they didn’t actually have to pay for.

And I was borderline outraged that some of the celebrity fans appeared to believe they were team members, celebrating wins on the court with the players, and in Spike Lee’s case, nearly walking onto the court while screaming at the referee during game 3 to protest the non-call of what Lee thought was a foul.

I understand that the NBA is an entertainment business, but as a former athlete who knows something about what it takes to achieve something hard, I am insulted that the Knicks players and coaches are having to share their accomplishment with a bunch of celebrity freeloaders.

You’re a fan? Great. So are millions of other people. During the final minutes of game 5, my son sent me a photo of his Apple Watch heartrate app; he was at 144.

This week, almost inevitably, social media is full of demands that the Knicks award a championship ring to “superfan” Spike Lee, which made me want to vomit. A rich guy who is so insufferable (have you watched an interview with him?) he has spent most evenings over the past 50 years sitting alone at courtside in Madison Square Garden deserves acknowledgment of his ‘contribution’ to the Knicks’ championship win? The same guy who in 2020 said he would no longer attend Knicks home games because the team repeatedly asked him to use the VIP rather than the employee entrance to Madison Square Garden? Fuhgeddaboudit!

Of course, I don’t have a vote. Reviled team owner James Dolan and his front office executives will decide. And Dolan is the guy who invited Trump to game 3.

But I’m with Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns, who said this week, “In my mind, the real celebrities are the ones in the 200’s and the nosebleeds.”

In 1934, the United States government issued a $100,000 bill in an effort to curtail gold hoarding during the Great Depression (1929-1939). The $100,000 bill was a gold certificate rather than a Federal Reserve Note, and was used for gold transactions between Federal Reserve Banks, issued against an equal amount of gold bullion held by the Treasury.

Around 42,000 of the $100,000 bills were printed, from December 18, 1934 through January 9, 1935, but they never circulated publicly, and were eventually withdrawn from use. It is illegal for individuals to use them today.

Additional gold certificate denominations issued in 1934 were for $100, $500, $1,000 and $10,000, and Federal Reserve Notes for $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 had been in circulation since 1918. The $100 note, and smaller denominations, were first issued in 1914.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has not issued banknotes larger than $100 since 1969 (and not printed any since 1945), but Federal Reserve Notes up to $10,000 in value remain legal tender (although you are unlikely to encounter any; their scarcity means they are mostly in the collections of numismatists, and in 2023 a single $10,000 bill sold for $480,000 at auction).

The United Kingdom uses £1 million ($1.345 million) and £100 million ($134.5 million) notes to back the value of the everyday notes issued by commercial banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland. But – perhaps obviously – these notes are not available at your local ATM or bank branch.

In times of hyper-inflation, governments have printed high-denomination banknotes: Yugoslavia, as it was gasping its last in 1992, printed a 500-billion dinar note; Zimbabwe, under ‘Mad Bob’ Mugabe, printed a 100-trillion dollar note. At the time, the official exchange rate was 669 billion Zimbabwean dollars to one U.S. dollar, but on the street, one U.S. dollar bought 300 trillion Zimbabwean dollars.

But these notes were nearly worthless symbols – and now souvenirs – of failed economic policies.

The highest-value major currency (i.e. easily negotiable) banknotes that circulate today are the U.S. $100 bill, the €500 bill ($580) and the ¥10,000 note ($62.50). Canada used to print a CAD1,000 bill, but stopped in 2000 due to concerns that the notes were primarily being used by criminal organizations. And although the €500 bill remains legal tender, the European Central Bank no longer prints new notes, again because it believes the notes are primarily being used by criminal organizations.

In 2010, former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said it is estimated that as many as two-thirds of all $100 notes circulate outside the United States.

Why?

The U.S. dollar is the world’s most easily negotiable currency, and the $100 bill is the highest denomination currently produced.

As a result, the weight of the $10 million that might be received in exchange for a large shipment of cocaine or other drugs is around 100 kilograms (220 pounds). While not practicably transportable in a suitcase by one person, $10 million in $100 bills is five times easier to transport than $10 million in $20 bills, and 10 times easier to transport than $10 million in $10 bills, which is why the $100 is favored by drug cartels and other criminal organizations.

Good news, then, that U.S. President Donald Trump, the capo of the world’s most prominent criminal organization, the Trump Administration, is pushing Congress to amend the Federal Reserve Act to require the Secretary of the Treasury to print $250 Federal Reserve notes.

The proposed note, inevitably featuring a portrait of Trump himself, would reduce the weight of the $10 million that might be received in exchange for a large shipment of cocaine or other drugs – or in exchange for a presidential pardon – to a very manageable 40 kilograms (88 pounds).

When Ferdinand Marcos fled the Malacañang Palace on February 25, 1986, he carried with him 22 crates of cash valued at $717 million (plus 300 crates of assorted jewelry, $200,000 in gold bullion, and much more). Fortunately for Marcos, the Reagan Administration was waiting at Clark Air Base with a fleet of U.S. Air Force C-130s to transport him (and his 90-person entourage) to first Guam, then Hawaii, where he lived out his days in luxurious exile.

Trump may be thinking that if a U.S. Air Force escort is not available to him on short notice, the $250 bill would greatly facilitate the hurried transport of cash to a nation that does not have an extradition treaty with the United States (e.g. Russia, Saudi Arabia).

Last year Nobel Prize-winning economist defined ‘billionaire brain’ as “that special blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs all too frequently in men who believe that their success in accumulating personal wealth means that they understand everything, no need to do any homework.”

I wrote about ‘billionaire brain’ a couple of years ago when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about online child safety, and seemed extraordinarily ill-prepared.

Senator Josh Hawley grilled Zuckerberg about links between mental health and social media use, links that Zuckerberg’s company had documented in its own research, and the Meta CEO countered multiple times with his usual dodge:

“Our job and what we take seriously is making sure that we build industry-leading tools to find harmful content, to take it off the services, and to build tools that empower parents ...”

“Our job is to make sure that we build tools to help keep people safe.”

“I view my job and the job of our company is building the best tools that we can to keep our community safe ...”

Finally, Hawley says, “You didn’t take any action. You didn’t fire anybody. You haven’t compensated a single victim. Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. There’s families of victims here today. Have you apologized to the victims? Would you like to do so now? They’re here. You’re on national television. Would you like now to apologize to the victims who have been harmed by your product?”

And Zuckerberg turns to the gallery and says, “I’m sorry. Everything that you all have gone through, it’s terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered and this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry-leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer.”

That’s a #fail for Zuckerberg and a #fail for the communications team that failed to prepare him.

And it’s an obvious example of Krugman’s ‘billionaire brain’; a billionaire who has no need to do any homework (Senator Hawley had – as usual – done a lot of homework).

* * *

If you follow U.S. politics, you will remember that billionaire Michael Bloomberg fancied himself a contender for the Democratic nomination for President in 2020. Bloomberg had served as mayor of New York City for 12 years, and spent over $1 billion on his campaign, but dropped out after he failed to capture the public imagination in two nationally televised debates.

The format of American political debates is not a mystery, and Bloomberg’s perceived weaknesses (“stop and frisk” policing, #MeToolawsuits against his company, his own past misogynistic statements ...) were well-known.

Bloomberg was a latecomer to the presidential campaign, but quickly spent hundreds of millions of dollars on television and digital ads, and of course came into the race with strong name recognition. The debates were to have been his coming-out party, his opportunity to share a stage – and trade verbal blows – with the rest of the Democratic Party candidates.

The next day, The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Bloomberg’s debate performance on Wednesday proved so lackluster that both supporters and rivals counted themselves taken aback …”

Is it possible Bloomberg didn’t spend dozens of hours practicing the live debate format, with aides hurling uncomfortable questions at him, trying to provoke a stumble? That seems inconceivable, but I’m not a billionaire, with a billionaire’s certainty that my business success translates to success in every other area (or negates the need for me to be successful in other areas).

After the first disastrous debate, Howard Wolfson, one of Mr. Bloomberg’s closest advisers, took the blame. “I led the debate prep and I accept the responsibility for inadequately preparing him,” Mr. Wolfson said.

But as Neal Kwatra, a Democratic political strategist who dealt extensively with Bloomberg’s New York City administration, noted, “It’s very hard when you have someone who isn’t necessarily amenable to instruction and direction.”

‘Billionaire brain’, Krugman would call it.

* * *

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos showed off his own ‘billionaire brain’ these week in a televised interview on CNBC with financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, well-known for being smarter than most of the people he interviews (see him earlier this month interviewing GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen).

Sorkin started with a question that Bezos and his communications team could not have failed to anticipate:

“These days, it feels almost impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading a headline about wealth in America, about the billionaire class, about wealth inequality and policy and everything else. And it’s taken a uniquely critical turn, I think. And I’m so curious, before we even get into everything else, what you think about that right now.”

What Jeff Bezos thinks is that “it’s kind of a tale of two economies. So you have a bunch of people in this country who are doing really well, but you also have a bunch of people in this country who are struggling – struggling to pay rent, groceries. And so what’s, you know, what’s happening here is politicians are using the kind of age-old techniques. So there’s this tale of two economies, and they’re using this age-old technique of, you know, picking a villain and pointing fingers.”

Sorkin went on to ask Bezos how he would “fix the problem”, and Bezos declined the opportunity to show empathy to working class Americans, and declined to admit the obvious: no one needs $260 billion.

Instead, in a country that is running a $1.8 trillion deficit, the world’s fourth-richest man, who paid no federal income tax at all in 2007 and 2011, said, “if you really are being honest about it, we don’t have a revenue problem in this country.”

He went on to misrepresent the U.S. tax system, suggesting that “the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay 40 percent of all the tax revenue” and “the bottom half pay only 3 percent.”

Well, no, Jeff. When we account for all federal, state, and local taxes that people pay, the richest one percent pay a share of total taxes (24 percent) that is only a little higher than their share of the nation’s income (20 percent).

Bezos pretends personal income taxes provide all federal revenue, but they comprise only around 50 percent. The remainder of federal revenue comes from payroll taxes (around 80 percent of Americans pay more in payroll taxes – which fund social welfare programs such as Social Security and Medicare – than income taxes), corporate income taxes, and other sources such as customs and excise levies. Bezos also neglects to mention state income taxes, general sales taxes and specific taxes on items such as gasoline and alcohol.

Bezos doesn’t need to worry about state taxes, of course, because in 2023 he moved from Washington state to Florida “for family reasons.”

For those who don’t know, Americans pay not only federal income taxes but also state income taxes, except in the states that levy no income taxes. Florida has neither an income tax nor a capital gains tax, and when Bezos sold $13.6 billion in Amazon stock in 2024, he avoided around $952 million in capital gains taxes … “for family reasons.”

We live in a post-factual world, so I suppose Bezos went on Sorkin’s show figuring he would be able to burnish his image (and that of all his fellow oligarchs) by offering an untruthful or misleading narrative that no one would bother checking.

Unfortunately, Sorkin, usually a good journalist, mostly cooperated. He did not push back on any of Bezos’s misleading assertions, and he seemed ignorant of the basics of the U.S. tax system (e.g. as mentioned above, that around 80 percent of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than income taxes).

Bezos went on to say, “… people sometimes say that, that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. That’s not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes.”

Sorkin replied, “Right.”

He didn’t say, “Jeff, you paid no federal income tax at all in 2007 and 2011, and between 2006 to 2018, your wealth increased by $127 billion, but you reported $6.5 billion in income. The $1.4 billion you paid during that 12-year period in federal income taxes is a lot of money, but it amounts to a 1.1% true tax rate on the increase in your net worth.” [Bonus note: Bezos’s wealth engine, Amazon, paid an effective tax rate of 1.4 percent in 2025.]

Wealth concentration in the United States has reached historic levels: in the third quarter of 2025, the richest one percent of Americans controlled 31.7 percent of the nation’s wealth, the highest share since records began in 1989.

As U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted recently, “You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.”

Is she right?

Let’s say you earn $100 an hour. Pretty decent wage.

You work 10 hours a day, five days a week. You work 50 weeks a year, taking two weeks off to recharge your batteries. That’s $250,000 a year, a pretty decent income.

How long would you have to work to earn a billion dollars?

Four thousand years.

And long would you have to work to earn to earn $260 billion?

Just over a million years. And by “just over”, I mean 40,000 years longer than a million years.

So yeah, you can’t earn a billion dollars.

Five years ago, I wrote about taxing the rich.

I quoted U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren saying, in 2011, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.”

And President Barack Obama saying, in 2012, “I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there ...”

President Obama’s point was that American society laid the foundations for the (at this point, insane) wealth accumulation Bezos is trying to gloss over.

Jeff Bezos wants you to believe he’s “on the side of America.”

He wants you to know he thinks “we have way too much corporate welfare, way too much corporate subsidies,” that “there’s way too much influence in politics from business,” and that “there’s a bunch of people interfering in the political process.”

Sorkin didn’t point out that Amazon spends $20 million a year lobbying Washington legislators.

At the same time, while Bezos was on television trying to rehabilitate his reputation by suggesting that nurses from Queens who make $75,000 a year shouldn’t have to pay taxes, he could not resist asserting that Amazon’s decision to produce a documentary about Melania Trump, directed by #MeToo-canceled director Brett Ratner, was “a good business decision.”

Amazon reportedly paid $40 million for the rights to produce the film (the second-highest bidder was Disney, at $14 million), and spent another $35 million on marketing, an astonishing sum for a “documentary”.

A reviewer from The Guardian wrote, “It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.”

Two-thirds of the New York production crew staff asked to be omitted from the credits.

Bezos also wants you to believe he’s not trying to curry favor with Trump when he spiked the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, and when he decreed that the Post’s opinion and editorial pages would focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” and that “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

He said to Sorkin, “… this idea that, you know, that somehow that is a way of buying influence, it’s just not. It’s just not correct. I can see why people say this.”

And he continued … “free markets”, “regulation is bad”, “businesses are America’s goose that laid the golden eggs”, finishing with, “Does that make sense?”

Sorkin: “Completely.”

Coming back to Paul Krugman’s ‘billionaire brain’, “that special blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs all too frequently in men who believe that their success in accumulating personal wealth means that they understand everything”, Bezos went on to – from my perspective – completely undermine his efforts to position himself as someone who is not a complete villain, saying he thinks Trump “is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term,” and that “Trump has lots of good ideas and he has done a lot of, he’s been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due.”

No, Jeff, I don’t.

One of my pet peeves about Japan is that outside of major cities, you can’t find real ice cream. The choices are soft serve (either vanilla or some sort of possibly disgusting-in-ice-cream local flavor, e.g. seaweed, which a visiting friend once tried in my village) or convenience store bars, cones and cups.

Around 10 years ago I discovered a strawberry ice cream popsicle covered in strawberry-flavored chocolate made by Meiji that was delicious. It actually tasted like strawberry. Then, the next week, I saw a blueberry version in the konbini. Also delicious! They really tasted like fruit, and it was gonna be a great summer.

Except that I saw them only another three or four times. What happened? These bars were obviously superior to everything else in the freezer case, and they were being distributed in convenience stores, fer chrissakes, not exclusive ice cream bar boutiques. But they were impossible to find.

A friend said, “Maybe Meiji is boosting demand by making them difficult to find.” Well, maybe, but because they were impossible to find, I imagine the revenue from those in-demand products was right around zero.

On 31 March, 2015, Japanese beverage giant Suntory launched Lemongina, a spin-off of Orangina, which it acquired from Schweppes in 2009. Aside from some early reports from consumers that Lemongina tasted like dirt (no, really!), sales were brisk, as might have been expected.

So brisk, in fact, that Suntory pulled the drink from the market because it was unable to meet demand.

CUT TO A LOCAL PRIMARY SCHOOL CLASSROOM: “Kenji? Are you chewing gum? If you are, I hope you brought enough for everyone!”

It’s a Japanese thing. If you don’t have enough for everyone, you can’t offer any to anyone.

Amazingly, I first heard about this from a friend who ran Japan’s de facto national food bank.

After the terrible earthquake and tsunami of 11 March, 2011, he and his team raced up to northern Japan with truckloads of donated food for the tens of thousands of people who had been driven from their homes and were living in shelters.

He told me stories of arriving at evacuation centers, meeting the people in charge and explaining that among other supplies he had, for example, two boxes of bananas to offer. After which they would pause, suck their teeth, and politely explain that they were fine, thanks, and didn’t need any bananas.

Which my friend knew was untrue. Hundreds of people were in the shelter, with little to eat.

But if he wasn’t able to provide at least one banana for every shelter resident, the shelter managers preferred to refuse the offer entirely. United we starve.

After Suntory pulled Lemongina from the shelves, they never brought it back. Possibly because a certain portion of the population tasted “dirt” when they drank it, but perhaps for other reasons. Within two months, Suntory introduced Honey Lemongina (adding honey to counteract the “dirt” taste?), but Honey Lemongina is now also a distant memory.

There is no market more cutthroat than that for Japanese soft drinks, and manufacturers are always trying new things in an effort to capture the zeitgeist in a 500ml PET bottle.

Lemongina was a Suntory gambit, but the unquestioned king of weird soft drink rollouts is Pepsi.

Here are actual products that Pepsi has introduced within the past 20 years:

• Pepsi Shiso (a shiso leaf is often served with sashimi)

• Pepsi Ice Cucumber (green, “cucumber” flavor)

• Pepsi White (yogurt-flavored!)

• Pepsi Gold (ginger-tinged!)

• Pepsi Azuki (azuki bean in a PET bottle)

• Pepsi Mont Blanc (hazelnut and chestnut)

• Pepsi Pink (pink, strawberry milk-flavored)

• Pepsi Salty Watermelon (as advertised)

• Pepsi Sakura (inevitably, cherry blossoms)

• Pepsi Blue Hawaii (pineapple and lemon-flavored)

Japanese are famously risk-averse, but clearly not all Japanese.

Imagine how fun it would be to work in the R&D department at Pepsi-Cola Japan.

Under the sign that says, “There are no dumb ideas.”

If you follow the news, you will have noticed that the Chinese government regularly lays claim to having invented most of the useful and good things on earth.

Paper. Printing. The compass. Gunpowder.

Football. Golf. Pasta. Nail polish. The toothbrush.

Some of these claims are simply claims. China’s state-controlled media isn’t known for its nuance.

But having traveled the world, I am prepared to support any Chinese claim to having invented the restaurant toothpick.

In many (most?) restaurants in China (oddly, this is relatively rare in Chinese-dominated Singapore), and many in Japan, you can find toothpicks on your table, or near the cash register.

As far as I’m concerned (not least because I don’t carry a handbag in which I keep a supply of toothpicks for post-prandial use), toothpicks on restaurant tables should be universal.

Pro tip: the correct etiquette is to cover your mouth with your hand while you dig that shred of pork out from between your teeth.

If you’ve been to Japan, or to a mid- to high-priced Japanese restaurant, or flown in the front of a commercial airliner, you’re familiar with oshibori, the hand towel that is handed out at the start of the meal/flight.

Oshibori derives from the Japanese verb shiboru, meaning “to wring”, and can be hot or cold. In winter, usually hot; in summer, often cold.

The quality varies with context. Sit in economy class on JAL and you will get an oshibori that is made from synthetic material and sealed in a plastic wrapper. In a Michelin-starred restaurant, your oshibori will be similar to the face towel you use at home, and handed to you by the chef or server.

As with all things Japanese, there are plenty of people (mostly gaijin fanboys, but also Japanese wives and girlfriends) who will tell you that you can only use oshibori for wiping your hands. Never your face (or for those of us who haven’t spent money on shampoo in decades, your head!). But the reality is, especially in the depths of a hot and humid Japanese summer, oshibori are incredibly refreshing. Plenty of Japanese ojisan (and almost no women) wipe their faces (and bald heads) with oshibori.

Many years ago, I had a girlfriend in Hong Kong whose wealthy parents maintained (more accurately, their housekeeper maintained) a supply of cold oshibori in their refrigerator at home, so they could wash off the grime of the city when they returned home.

Very civilized, I thought.

For years I suspected that TOTO, the Japanese toilet manufacturer that produces the Washlet and Warmlet, had the worst marketing team on earth. Japanese companies are not renowned for their marketing savvy, but although “build it and they will come” rarely works in business, the Washlet is one of those products that – once experienced – makes marketers think, “How can this not succeed?”

And in particular, how can this not succeed in the American market?

Because the Washlet is ubiquitous in Japan. It has succeeded.

Introduced in 1980, the Washlet is a toilet seat with an integrated bidet, allowing users to wash themselves with water rather than just wiping with toilet paper.

I see that you’re skeptical. Well, you’re just gonna have to trust me. If you travel to Japan and use a Washlet (hopefully you can find one with English-language instructions!), you’re going to want to buy one for your home.

And that’s what has happened recently. North America counts for around 10 percent of TOTO’s global revenue, but until around five years ago, it accounted for almost zero percent.

Then came COVID, U.S. toilet paper shortages, and the rise of YouTube, Instagram and TikTok influencers who introduced bored WFH salarymen and salarywomen to wonders from around the world. Eventually, even South Park was lauding the Japanese toilet.

And why not? If you want a toilet that opens when you enter the bathroom, pre-mists the bowl before use, creates soundscapes to mask the noise of bodily functions, washes and dries your backside (and frontside!), and cleans the bowl regularly with electrolyzed water, the TOTO Washlet is for you.

Seventy million toilet users can’t be wrong.

Last month a friend took my son to a San Francisco Giants game at Oracle Park, where the Giants have played since 2000. The Giants started out in New York, as the New York Gothams, in 1883, and were renamed the Giants three years later. They moved to San Francisco in 1958.

My father grew up a Giants fan, even though he lived in Brooklyn, but in 1958, when the Giants moved across the country to San Francisco, he switched his allegiance to the Yankees.

The Brooklyn Dodgers also moved across the country in 1958, but to Los Angeles, and the New York Mets were not founded until 1962, so for my father, it was the Yankees or nothing, and when I was growing up, he took me to watch the Yankees, not the Mets. We went once or twice a year, back when the top price for a box seat was $5 (and a seat in the bleachers was $1.50), and he taught me the now-lost art of scoring a game.

My son grew up in Japan, where they have plenty of good baseball, but he has always had a keen interest in his American side, and from a young age became a Yankees fan.

A real Yankees fan, not one of the tens of millions of people worldwide (so many of them in Asia) who wears a Yankees cap (possibly not even knowing what the logo means) for the street cred.

He’s a Yankees fan who starts every season optimistically, but secretly knows that come October, manager Aaron Boone will have mollycoddled his players into an early playoff exit, and that general manager Brian Cashman and owner Hal Steinbrenner will have pronounced themselves completely satisfied with the job that Boone has been doing (not delivering a championship for 17 years).

I followed the Yankees – and baseball – when I was growing up (in the pre-Internet era, when we had nothing else to do!), but having lived in Asia for the past 35 years, I lost touch with the sport.

My interest in baseball was rekindled in the late 1990s, when I opened a branch office of my Hong Kong company in Shanghai, and was traveling there once a week. My office was on the Puxi side of the Huangpu River, only around 20 minutes from Hongqiao Airport, which at the time was being replaced by Shanghai Pudong International Airport but was (and is) still receiving flights from Hong Kong. I was able to take the 8:00 a.m. flight from Hong Kong, and be in a meeting in downtown Shanghai at 10:30.

If I had a multi-day trip planned, I stayed at the ANA Hotel, which no longer exists, and which at the time was very clearly going out of business due to the shift of international flights (and Japanese travelers) from Hongqiao to Pudong.

I loved the ANA Hotel, though, and some nights I suspect I was the only guest. Because the air pollution in China was horrific in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I did my running on a treadmill in the gym, and to relieve the boredom of treadmill running, I watched TV. Because it was a Japanese hotel, they had all the Japanese channels, and because this was before I moved to Japan and learned the language, the only thing I could understand was baseball, which was broadcast nightly on NHK.

Japanese baseball has come a long way since the late 1990s (Ichiro Suzuki made his MLB debut on April 2, 2001), but at that time, it was very … Japanese. Which made it even more interesting to me, because I was able to compare it to the baseball I knew, the baseball I had grown up with (but hadn’t seen much of in over 10 years because I was living in Hong Kong).

As an example, time and time again I watched the best pitchers in Japan pitch carefully to the worst hitters, rather than simply overwhelming them.

Is that a cultural thing, I wondered? It was hard for me to imagine steroid-fueled strikeout specialist Roger Clemens pitching carefully to any of the of the worst hitters in Major League Baseball. “For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out, at the old ball game!”

I never became a fan of a particular Japanese team, though. My kids supported, I think, the Yakult Swallows, when they were little, because their Japanese grandfather did. The New York Yankees of Japan are the Yomiuri Giants, and Ojiichan was anti-Giants, so therefore he was pro-Swallows (the other Tokyo team).

Today the kids are fans of the Yokohama BayStars (which got their start as the Taiyo Whales). But also of the New York Yankees.

And my son (correctly) is therefore not a fan of the New York Mets, and not a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, although the Dodgers are essentially a Japanese all-star team (Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki).

I’ve always been interested in sports, but I’ve never really been a fanatic. I can’t imagine spending 50 years attending Harvard-Yale or Army-Navy football games, and I can’t imagine painting my face blue and screaming “Let’s go, Duke!” at a college basketball game.

I attend sporting events for the athleticism, the determination, and the occasional miraculous feat, but for the most part, I don’t care who wins (although as a New Yorker of a certain age, I do love to see the Red Sox and Celtics lose).

But my son’s interest in the Yankees has rekindled my own interest, and during baseball season we exchange messages about the team’s results, as well as, toward the end of every season, about our shared dread that the Boone-managed Bronx Bombers will again bomb out of the playoffs, despite a payroll that is among the largest in the game.

My son is also a New York Knicks fan, and as with the Yankees, his interest has rekindled mine.

I grew up when the Knicks were good, in the 1970s. My Knicks were the Knicks of Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, Earl Monroe and Bill Bradley. But as with baseball, my interest in the sport waned after I moved overseas. The NBA was not the global business it is today, and although probably I could have watched Knicks games via satellite in the 1990s, I had better things to do. Many Americans spend their weekends (and weekday evenings) sitting on the couch watching professional and college sports, but that’s never been me.

And yet, I’m enjoying being a Knicks fan again (though I’m pleased I’m neither a billionaire nor a celebrity and don’t have to sit between Timothée Chalamet and Spike Lee at home games).

One place I haven’t followed my son is to the Premier League.

I can tell you who’s at the top of the league table right now, I seek out Champion’s League highlights on YouTube, but I have not felt the need to get invested, although my son is a Chelsea fan who will wake up at 3:00 a.m. to watch games.

Why Chelsea?

Apparently, when he was 11, he went to a soccer shop in Tokyo with his mom and spotted a black-and-gray striped Chelsea shirt with the Yokohama Tire logo on the front. After securing it as a birthday present, he “wore that shirt a million times.”

Five years later, as a high school student, he made two friends who loved watching soccer.

He says, “One was a Liverpool fan and the other was a Real Madrid fan. They asked me about my favorite team, and until then, I wasn’t a fan of any team. But to make our weekends more fun, I felt as though I had to pick a club. While I was thinking of an answer, one said to me, ‘You’re wearing a Chelsea shirt in your LINE profile picture, you must be a Chelsea fan!’ And I replied, ‘Yeah, I’m a Chelsea fan!’”

Since buying that first shirt, he has experienced the ups and downs of fandom (as he has with the Yankees and Knicks). Chelsea won the league in 2015 and 2017, and the FA Cup in 2018, but are having a(nother) bad-for-them year, and will have to have a few things go right over the next two weeks in order to play in Europe next season.

None of that matters, of course.

What matters (to me, anyway) is the opportunity to share something, to share an interest and to share experiences.

Last year I had lunch with a friend who is (and always has been) decidedly non-sporty. But during the course of our conversation he showed himself to be extremely knowledgeable about American football. When I expressed surprise that the NFL would be among his topics of expertise, he told me that when his sons had become fans, he had “studied up.” And because he’s smart, and was motivated, he became an expert. He’s not passionate, in the way his sons probably are, but he’s an expert, and while his sons were growing up, and today, they share an interest in NFL football.

In June, the World Cup begins.

I am a fan of the World Cup (less so during the current Infantino era), and my son is much more of a fan than I am. I was sorry to see Italy not qualify, but I am hoping Japan goes deep into the tournament.

I also hope Iran does well, just for the “Fuck Trump!” of it.

I am American, but today, now that the United States has become an unquestioned member of the Axis of Evil, I can’t support American teams in international competition. American athletes, sure. But teams, such as the U.S. Olympic ice hockey team, with boorish MAGA-leaning fans traveling the world to chant “U-S-A! U-S-A!” at games? No thanks.

The other day, Donald Trump was asked, “What if Iran wins the World Cup?”

Trump replied, “It would be hard to believe [that they’ve got a decent team].”

To which my son said, “Let me tell you, dumb ass, you’ve also got a shitty team.”

Not wrong, according to U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino.

So in June, hopefully just after the Knicks have won their first NBA championship since 1973, my son and I will be able to bond in support of Paraguay, Australia and Türkiye, the U.S. team’s opponents in the group stage of the World Cup.

Just for the “Fuck Trump!” of it.

A few years ago I spent a week in the Lofoten archipelago in Norway, in early July, when northern Norway is The Land of the Midnight Sun (and in fact, the sun did not set during my time there).

And as a runner, I have an opportunity to see much more of the places I visit than the average tourist. In Lofoten, I ran alongside fjords and up mountains that were carved by glaciers two million years ago. I experienced half a dozen kinds of weather, sometimes during the same run, and one cold, rainy day I came face-to-face with a young reindeer who was as surprised as I was to encounter another trail user.

My most interesting run in Lofoten, though, was on my first morning, a 40-minute tour of the suburbs of Harstad, the town you’ll probably fly into from Oslo if you visit Lofoten. Like pretty much every town in Lofoten, Harstad is on the sea, so I didn’t bother to check a map before I went out; my idea was to get out of town (though it’s very small) and enjoy nature.

But before I managed to get out of town (eventually coming up against the gate of a military installation that cut short my run anyway), I came upon a church that was lovely enough that I decided to stop and check it out.

According to Wikipedia, Trondenes Church is Norway’s northernmost medieval stone church, and the world’s northernmost medieval building. The church as it stands today was built in around 1435, but construction on the oldest part – the nave and choir – began in around 1180 AD. Probably due to a shortage of funds, the building was not completed until 1250, and even then did not have a roof, but while Harstad is a small town today, and was a small town 900 years ago, in around 1400, as is true of many other fishing villages around the world, it started to become a wealthy small town. The parishioners of Trondenes Church contributed funds that allowed the construction of a roof, as well as the purchase of three altarpieces made in the northern German Hanseatic cities, probably in Lübeck.

I checked all of this out during a short interruption in my run, but thought to myself that I would like to come back and take a more leisurely look at both the church and adjoining cemetery, so I ran on, circled back to my hotel, showered, and came out again in dry clothes, after a few cups of coffee.

By the time I returned to the church, the parish priest had arrived, probably having just finished his own run, shower and breakfast. He and I were the only ones in the church, so I asked him to tell me the history of the building, which I have recounted above.

I asked him about the cemetery, as well as what were marked as the ruins of a small World War Two prison camp, farther along the coast.

He told me that Harstad had been an important node in the “Atlantic Wall” that Adolf Hitler built – stretching from Norway to Spain – to defend continental Europe against an Allied invasion.

And of course Hitler didn’t build ‘the wall’ himself; he imported slave labor – prisoners of war – to do the job for him.

During World War Two, Nazi Germany captured around six million Soviet soldiers and civilians; over three million died. And an estimated 100,000 prisoners were sent to Norway as slave laborers; around 13,700 of them died, mostly within months in harsh winter conditions.

The camp near Trondenes Church housed around 3,200 prisoners of war, of whom 800 died. The camp was burned down in 1946, but it’s possible to walk through the ruins and get a sense of the place. The plywood huts had concrete floors measuring 15 meters by six meters, and each hut housed around 100 prisoners. There was no heating.

One of the victims, Konstantin Seredintsev, kept a diary during his short time in Trondenes. According to the Trondenes Historic Centre, Seredintsev had been captured in southern Russia in August of the previous year, and arrived in Norway on 23 February 1943.

He and the others were put to work digging fortifications around the clock; Seredintsev worked the night shift, from seven in the evening to five in the morning, and reported that prisoners were fed once a day: a 300 grams of bread, 25-30 grams of fat and 75 grams of canned fish, as well as a small bowl of coffee.

In the spring of 1943, German doctors prepared a report asking for increased rations to combat high prisoner mortality, but the improved rations were instituted too late for Seredintsev. He wrote in his diary that his physical strength began to fade after ten days at Trondenes, and on 22 May, 1943, he died. He was 31 years old.

Germany had invaded Norway on 9 April, 1940, the last Norwegian forces surrendered on 10 June, and Germany established a puppet government, as it had in France, eventually headed by Vidkun Quisling, head of the Norwegian fascist party. [Fun fact: Americans of a certain age will know the name Benedict Arnold as a synonym for traitor; “quisling” has gained even wider usage and has the same meaning.

Again as in France, the memory of Norwegian resistance to Nazi occupation has been glorified over the decades since the end of the war, almost certainly to excess.

Norwegians want to remember sneaking food past concentration camp guards to supplement the prisoners’ meager rations, and certainly some locals did, but that was not the norm.

Mostly Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war slaved to build not only Hitler’s Atlantic Wall but also roads, railways, airports, factories and power stations.

After the war, the prisoners were repatriated (and many were sent to Soviet gulags), but the priest at Trondenes Church told me that during the war, dead prisoners had been buried outside the camp, and that throughout Norway, dead prisoners of war had been similarly interred near the sites of their camps.

And once the fog of war had cleared somewhat, the relatives of the Russian and Ukrainian victims of the Nazis came to Norway to locate the final resting places of their family members, scattered across hundreds of cemeteries.

This was awkward for many Norwegians, said the priest, because, “We like to think our war history was different to what it really was. To see these Russians and Ukrainians walking our streets, asking us questions about their loved ones, was … uncomfortable.”

In 1951, the Norwegian government decided to help Norwegians avoid this awkwardness by organizing ‘Operation Asphalt’, an exhumation and relocation of the remains of all the dead Soviet prisoners of war to a centralized war cemetery on Tjøtta island, around 1,000 kilometers from Oslo.

Consecrated in 1953, the Tjøtta Russian War Cemetery comprises 826 individual graves and a common grave including the remains of 6,725 dead. Operation Asphalt’ owes its name to the containers – heavy-duty asphalt bags – used to transport the remains.

Today, the priest told me, Russians and Ukrainians travel to Tjøtta, so that Norwegians don’t have to think about the war.

History is (re)written by the victors.

My first foray into ultrarunning was the famous Oxfam Trailwalker fundraiser, a 100-kilometer jaunt across the spine of Hong Kong’s Kowloon peninsula that has raised over $75 million since its founding in 1986.

In 2001 I was five years past failing to qualify for the Olympic Games marathon, and I was bored with the Hong Kong track and road running scene. So when a couple of friends asked me if I would join their Trailwalker team, I said, “Why not?”

The Trailwalker format is simple: four-person teams hike (or run) the 100 kilometers of Hong Kong’s rugged MacLehose Trail in under 48 hours. And although many people will tell you that “it’s not a competition”, everything is a competition. Unless, of course, you are in a team that wears black tie and stops for trailside meals featuring tablecloths, candelabras and catered haute cuisine.

My team didn’t do that.

I had been approached by Nick, a Frenchman, and Rolf, a Swiss, to join a team that also included Raymond, an American who lived in Japan. Those three had – with another friend – entered the event the previous year, but Raymond had dropped out with heatstroke during the third of 10 stages, and while the other guys had soldiered on, finishing in just over 24 hours, the team did not record an official finish.

Our goal, Nick and Rolf told me, would be to finish in under 24 hours.

I couldn’t imagine doing anything for 24 hours, and I told the guys I expected that we would finish much faster than that.

Nick and Rolf were not runners, but they were fit guys in their 30s, good at other sports, and familiar with the need to train hard to achieve difficult things.

The three of us did train (reasonably) hard over the three months preceding the event, meeting a couple of times a week at my house in Hong Kong’s New Territories, which was conveniently located at the end of the MacLehose Trail’s stage three and beginning of stage four, for trail runs of 4-6 hours.

Nick was in regular communication with Raymond, and reassured me and Rolf that Raymond was also training.

A brief aside: Raymond fancied himself a good runner, but he talked a much better game than he played.

The previous year he and I had traveled to the Czech Republic to run the Prague Marathon, where Raymond was going to make his debut at the distance. I was past my best and not particularly fit, but I was there for the holiday and figured I could easily break three hours. Raymond said he thought he could run close to 2:30.

I had no idea how fit Raymond was – or wasn’t – but at that that point I had run under 2:30 half a dozen times, and I was very familiar with the required pace.

After the starting gun went off, I set out at 2:45 pace, but within 800 meters Raymond had dropped behind. I struggled that day because I hadn’t trained enough, and muscle memory will only carry you so far in a marathon, but I did finish in under three hours as expected, and I was surprised that Raymond hadn’t overtaken me during the final 10 kilometers, during which I felt I was barely moving.

Another couple of friends were in the race, and I hung out with them at the finish line for almost an hour, before finally deciding that Raymond must have dropped out, and that I should go in search of my bag. Just at that moment, Raymond appeared, girlfriend on his arm, having finished in around 3:45.

Well done for finishing, dude, but 3:45 is not 2:30. Just sayin’.

Back in Hong Kong, on race day we drove to the start and although I didn’t share it with the guys, I figured we had a shot to finish second overall.

A team of professional ultrarunners, sponsored by Montrail, was expected to easily win, and at the end of the first 10-kilometer stage, they were already out of sight, probably 10 minutes ahead of us.

The course is relatively easy for the first two stages, then climbs and climbs and climbs, confronting hikers (and runners) with over 5,500 meters of elevation across the 100-kilometer distance.

In an ultramarathon, almost everyone will hit a bad patch at some point, and our strategy was to stick together to provide one another with as much support as possible. Historically, teams of firefighters (well known for working well together) have done well; teams of bankers have not.

But just after the start of stage two, Rolf and I had moved ahead of Nick and Raymond to the point that when I looked back, I couldn’t see them. We had just come off Long Ke Wan beach, and were just over 10 kilometers into the race, but we would not see our support crew for another 12 kilometers.

Rolf and I backtracked, and in a few minutes we encountered Nick and Raymond, walking off the beach toward us. “What’s going on,” I asked Nick. In his superb French accent, he replied, “Raymond … eez pulling a Raymond.”

I knew immediately what he meant from having listened to the stories about Raymond’s heatstroke the previous year.

Raymond was still on his feet, so I told the guys I would get Raymond to the next checkpoint and that they should go on ahead so they had more time to refuel and refill their hydration packs.

For the next hour I chivvied Raymond along up the trail. He was basically out of his mind, to the point that after I had given him all my water, and asked him to give me the hydration pack on his back, which he had mostly not used, he angrily refused.

Eventually we got to the check point, where out crew was waiting, and I said to Nick and Rolf, “Raymond is done. We can quit, or we can do what we have trained to do, without him, for an unofficial finish.”

Before I finished my sentence, the guys were up and ready to go, and after I refilled my water bottles, we headed out. [Annoyingly, by the time we reached the next check point, Raymond was completely recovered, and making out with his girlfriend.]

The rest of the race was great, though. Nick and Rolf were fit, and we were able to keep to the pace I had thought we were capable of.

By the time we reached 65 kilometers, night was falling, and we were at the foot of the appropriately named Needle Hill, a 500-meter ascent on stage seven. As we started up, I felt a sharp pain in my left knee, something I had never felt in two decades of competitive running. The pain was bad enough that I couldn’t imagine getting to the top of Needle Hill, let alone running the 30 kilometers after that.

Nick was wearing elastic knee braces, and I said, “Nick, give me one of your knee braces.”

He replied (again, use your best French accent), “But I am using zem!”

Me: “If you don’t give me a knee brace, we’re done.”

Him: “Well, eef you put eet zat way …”

He pulled off one of his elastic sleeves, I put it on, and I was a new man. No pain at all.

We climbed Needle Hill, then 957-meter high Tai Mo Shan (thankfully easier than the much shorter Needle Hill), and we descended to almost sea level for the final 12 kilometers along the northern edge of Tai Lam Chung reservoir.

That final 12 kilometers is flat and fast (if you’re still capable of “fast” after 90 kilometers of running!), and as the trail curled around the edge of the reservoir I could see the headlamps of the second-placed team, around a kilometer in front of us.

“Come on, guys, let’s fucking go!” I said more than a few times during that final hour, but although we pushed ourselves to the limit, and gained slightly, we didn’t come close to catching them.

We finished an unofficial third (we were a disqualified team that finished between the second- and third-placed teams) at around 2:00 in the morning, and completed the course in – I think – somewhere around 16 hours 30 minutes, almost eight hours faster than Nick and Rolf had hoped.

As we sat on folding chairs in a recovery tent at the finish line, covered in sweat and salt and trail grime, there was a certain sense of satisfaction, and Nick caught my eye.

“Roberto … for me, ze best part is seeing you sitting zere … absolutely fucked.”

And yes, I was.

If you liked this one, you may also enjoy reading about my 100-kilometer road race debut, in which – like Icarus – I flew too close to the sun, and crashed painfully to earth.

The other day, I was talking with a friend in Copenhagen about our globalist university age daughters, eager to study abroad (from Denmark, in his case; from Japan in mine), and he said, “There are so many great opportunities, in Rome, in Sydney, in Tel Aviv.”

I said, “Well, maybe not Tel Aviv at the moment.” He thought for a second, remembered the shitshow that is contemporary geopolitics, and agreed.

A few weeks earlier, another friend told me that his son had been invited to participate in a U.S. State Department workshop in Istanbul in late March or early April. I suggested that on the remote chance the workshop wasn’t cancelled, his son carefully consider whether or not it was worth participating.

I’ve written before about risk assessment, and about fear, and while I’m definitely not a fraidy cat, and my risk tolerance threshold is probably higher than yours, I don’t need to take unnecessary risks.

In these overly online times, however, there is no shortage of people who want to tell you how you should live your life.

If on 28 February, 2026, you were living in Dubai or Kuwait or Qatar or Beirut, you might have wondered if you should leave, at least temporarily. And thousands of people did, or tried to.

As far as I have been able to see, few of these refugees from Donald Trump’s “Iran war” have faced criticism for their decisions to leave, but 15 years ago, I saw something different.

On 11 March 2011, I was living in Japan when an earthquake and tsunami struck the northern part of the country and killed almost 20,000 people.

Where I lived, just south of Tokyo, the earthquake felt big, but the electricity went out almost immediately (for several days), so I was not immediately aware of the scale of the damage up north.

Once the lights (and TV) came back on, I saw the devastation, and when I traveled to the tsunami zone a few days later, as a driver and fixer for a Finnish television journalist, Petri Saraste, I got an even better view. Surprisingly, to me, that disaster resulted in very few injuries; if you escaped the tsunami, you escaped. If you didn’t, you probably died.

Thousands of people (around 160,000) were displaced, of course, and either moved in with friends and relatives elsewhere in Japan, or into temporary housing provided by the government. Five years later, tens of thousands of people remained stranded in those temporary facilities.

But in the first few days after the tsunami, for tens of millions of people living in the northern half of Japan, the main concern was the nuclear reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Number One Power Plant in Fukushima prefecture, north of Tokyo.

Although the nuclear reactors in Fukushima shut down automatically during the earthquake, the systems that cool the reactor cores were damaged by the tsunami, and five days later the reactor operator had not only been unable to get the situation under control, but also had seen three reactor buildings explode (though leaving the internal containment domes intact), and radioactive steam escape into the atmosphere to be carried by prevailing winds toward Tokyo.

Last month, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported, “Fifteen years later, 4,000 workers struggle to control the ongoing disaster. The three melted reactors remain so radioactive that they destroy the robots sent to explore the damage. No one knows exactly where the melted fuel is located or how deep it has burrowed below the reactors’ concrete pedestals, possibly into the ground. The water used to cool the reactors is stored in more than 1,000 tanks that reached capacity in 2023. This cooling water, which [the Tokyo Electric Power Co.] initially claimed was clean and has been releasing into the Pacific Ocean since 2023, was found to be contaminated with 62 radionuclides, including cesium, strontium, and plutonium. Two fuel pools packed with spent nuclear fuel have yet to be emptied. They sit precariously on top of units 1 and 2, which are exploded tangles of metal ready to fall over and spill into the ocean.”

During those first days and weeks, what was clear to nearly everyone in Japan, and to many outside the country who had a stake in the problem, was that the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), which already did not have a stellar reputation for ethical behavior and honesty, had – despite the unquestionable bravery of individual employees on the ground – continued to let its customers, and the country, down.

The company threw up its hands three days after the quake, unable to get its nuclear material under control, and decided to pull all of its employees out of the crippled facility, which was at that point leaking radiation. Prime Minister Naoto Kan reportedly called TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu into his office at 4:00 a.m. on 15 March to say in no uncertain terms that pulling out was not an option. On 16 March, according to the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, Kan told Kiyoshi Sasamori, special advisor to the Cabinet, “In the worst case scenario, we have to assume that all of eastern Japan would be wrecked. The Tokyo Electric Power Co. has almost no sense of urgency whatsoever.”

Those of us outside the tiny bubble of TEPCO executives and senior Japanese government officials had to parse official statements and news footage and the musings of media-sourced ‘experts’ in order to try to figure out what was really going on. A New York Times reporter wrote on Twitter that the paper had reason to believe the Japanese government was holding back information about Fukushima. And who holds back good news?

What was clear was that nothing was clear. In the worst case – a case TEPCO and the government studiously avoided discussing – the nuclear fuel in the reactor cores and storage facilities could have melted down [this happened], and melted through the radiation-proof containment domes [it remains unclear to what extent this happened], significantly contaminating the environment.

There were differences to Chernobyl, thankfully, most of which were positive for Japan. But the situation, Prime Minister Kan said on national television, was “very grave”. From what I read at the time, even in that worst-case scenario, the health risks in Tokyo would not have been high, but more important for Japan, a good-sized exclusion zone would almost certainly have to be permanently established around the plant, and that exclusion zone would very possibly have required the rerouting of major transportation links serving the east coast of Japan north of Tokyo.

As it turned out, an exclusion zone (with a 20-kilometer radius) was established, but over time, the government redefined its boundaries and reopened some ‘safe’ areas for resettlement. The ‘exclusion zone’ has been rebranded a ‘Difficult-to-Return’ zone, and unsurprisingly, many former residents have not returned.

Everyone’s case is different, and everyone’s perception of and strategy for dealing with risk is different. When the President of TEPCO is ordering (unsuccessfully) the evacuation of his entire workforce, abandoning a handful of nuclear reactors to certain catastrophic meltdown, you can very legitimately ask questions about your own safety, even if you’re 225 kilometers (140 miles) away (and of course many Tokyo area residents in the neighboring prefectures of Chiba, Saitama and Ibaraki prefectures were much closer).

In that light, many people in the Tokyo area, though almost certainly safe from the radiation that was leaking from the reactors during those first weeks and months, made plans to leave the city. Many of those people had young children, who are far more vulnerable to radiation sickness than adults. And while many were foreigners, who were described acerbically by foreign media as “fleeing”, many more were Japanese. A friend, taking the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto less than a week after the reactor meltdowns, described seeing a young Japanese couple on the train in full hazmat suits.

With my family, I traveled to Kyoto to stay with a friend for a few weeks. My children were young (five and three), the electricity supply in our area was irregular, and I was fortunate enough to be able to work from virtually anywhere, so my wife and I decided it would be better to keep our kids as safe and comfortable as possible until the situation was clearer.

Did I have any concerns at all about my own safety? Not at all.

I was in the earthquake/tsunami zone on March 14, one of the first reporters there. I’ve traveled to and worked in places where guns almost outnumber light bulbs.

Six months after the reactor meltdowns, the Finnish television journalist wrote to me to ask if I was interested in helping him with a follow-up story. We would again drive up to Tōhoku where the tsunami had devastated the coast, but we would report the area’s recovery. He was also interested in reporting from the edge of the Fukushima ‘exclusion zone’.

We drove up in August, wearing shorts and t-shirts to combat the heat and humidity of the Japanese midsummer, and I navigated my car to the southern edge of the semicircular exclusion zone, where we came up against our first police roadblock.

The road was barricaded, and a handful of police officers were sitting in a van with the windows rolled up and the air conditioning running.

While Petri set up his tripod and camera to frame the barricades and the empty road beyond, I walked over to the van to reassure the cops that we weren’t troublemakers. One of the officers got out, masked, wearing a long-sleeved shirt, unfriendly, and uninterested in us (after determining that we posed no threat, hahaha). Our conversation was extremely brief.

Petri got his shot in 10 minutes and we got back in the car, continuing around the arc of the exclusion zone to the next intersection, and the next roadblock, where we encountered more barricades and another police van.

Petri again got out to set up his gear, and I again walked over to explain our mission to the cops.

This van was different, though. The windows were open, and the officer who got out to speak with me was unmasked and in short sleeves. He was curious and friendly, and after 10 minutes of conversation, as Petri was packing up his equipment, I said, “We just came from a roadblock 10 minutes south of here, and the officers there had a very different attitude. They were sealed inside their air-conditioned van, and the officer who came out was masked and wearing long sleeves. You guys seem to be a lot more relaxed. Aren’t you worried about radiation exposure?”

The cop explained that police and fire services personnel were being rotated into the area from all around Japan to minimize individual exposure to radiation. “We’re only here for two weeks, so I figure how much risk can there be? Also, it’s too hot for all that nonsense!”

Everyone’s perception and strategy for dealing with risk is different.

Would I have stayed in Dubai or Doha or Kuwait City last month, with the air raid sirens going off and missiles and drones occasionally delivering explosive payloads onto civilian infrastructure? Probably.

Would I have stayed in Beirut, where Israeli strikes have been exponentially more devastating to the civilian population? Probably not.

What would you have done? Maybe the same thing, maybe something different.

You make the smartest decisions you can with the information you have.

And you don’t judge others.

Hong Kong, where I lived for 13 years before and after the 1997 handover of administration from the United Kingdom to China, has a system of tropical cyclone warning signals, known more colloquially as typhoon signals. A “signal 1” means stand by, a typhoon (also known as a hurricane) is centered within 800 kilometers of Hong Kong and may affect the city. A “signal 3” means strong winds (41-62 kph) are expected or blowing, and a “signal 8” means gale force winds (63-117 kph) are expected or blowing. A “signal 9” means even stronger winds are expected, and a “signal 10” means “Heeeeere’s Johnny!”, the typhoon has arrived, and winds are in excess of 118 kph (73 mph).

Nearly everyone who has endured a typhoon in a major city (Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy excepted, in recent memory) knows the concrete urban jungle is generally well-built enough to make residents say, “Has it arrived yet?” or “Has it gone yet?”, but Hong Kong is comprised of a number of islands connected by ferries that are unable to operate during typhoons. Signals allow citizens and businesses to gauge risk, and allow people to get home or stay home when conditions are dangerous or transport links are severed.

Signals also allow citizens to “batten down the hatches” in anticipation of storms. Of course, most people don’t literally have to batten down hatches (instead, they are advised to batten down the furniture and house plants they keep on their high-rise balconies), but Hong Kong’s elder generation retains a bit of a refugee mentality, a legacy of the post-war years when an estimated two million people fled mainland China in search of a better life (and away from the deprivations of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution).

When the typhoon signals go up, this refugee mentality means the city’s streets are jammed with osteoporosis-afflicted old ladies rushing home from the supermarkets carrying 10-roll (I always found it embarrassing!) packages of toilet paper. The panicked accumulation of toilet paper appears to be the only manifestation of worry that Hongkongers allow themselves in the face of imminent meteorological apocalypse.

Why so much toilet paper is needed I have no idea. Perhaps there’s a Cantonese pre-typhoon ritual that involves eating Vindaloo curry.

I have always enjoyed (the extremeness of) typhoons, and I’m sad that in Singapore, where I now live, there are none, but for the most part (again, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy are recent exceptions), if you live in a city in the developed world, you’ve got nothing to worry about when a typhoon hits.

Although I once spent an hour on the balcony of my 27th floor office in Hong Kong, in the middle of the night, wearing only a pair of shorts in 100+ kph winds and drenched by horizontal sheets of rain, bailing water over the side with a bucket (actually, just throwing it into the air and letting the wind do the rest) because the drain had clogged and water was leaking into the office.

And although another time I had to venture out on the roof of my house in Hong Kong’s New Territories with a knife clenched in my teeth because typhoon winds had wrenched the iron frame of my awning from its anchors. I was alerted to the problem by the noise of the frame being slammed into the roof repeatedly, and I had to cut away the canvas to prevent further damage.

When I lived in Japan, in a fishing village on the Shonan coast, typhoons were commonplace, and during the strongest of them, my (wood-framed) house would shake as though in an earthquake.

Once, a two-story-tall tree in my front yard was blown over, crushing the front gate and fence (allowing me to play with a chainsaw for the first time in years, later in the day). And another time, a typhoon blew the roof off the shed where I kept my Ducati, knocking over a concrete wall and cracking the (expensive to replace!) cowling and windscreen.

In Japan the Pavlovian responses to typhoon warnings were less obvious than in Hong Kong, but I was embarrassed to discover one day that I had 72 (!) rolls of toilet paper in the house.

Nothing to do with typhoons, but it appears that when I go to Costco, I get a mental block that prevents me from remembering when I last bought toilet paper. And as Costco sells toilet paper in 24-roll packages (even more embarrassing than Hong Kong’s product packaging, but at least I got to stash it in the car rather than having to lug it home through Hong Kong streets), my hoard of toilet paper could quickly balloon if I didn’t keep an eye on it.

I know what you’re going to say: eat more Vindaloo.

In 2001, the science fiction writer William Gibson wrote in WIRED magazine, “I wish I had a thousand-yen note for every journalist who, over the past decade, has asked me whether Japan is still as futurologically sexy as it seemed to be in the ‘80s ... If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technology-driven, you pay attention to Japan.”

Well, no, not really.

Gibson certainly did his bit to make the rest of the world think Japan was/is “the future”, but like many places, Japan is not always what it seems, and in the case of digital technology, Japan is far from a leader.

In 2018, Yoshitaka Sakurada, a right-wing politician who was then deputy chief of the government’s cyber-security strategy office, and Minister of State for the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, told a parliamentary committee, “I have never used a computer!”

But in 2021, recognizing that the country was falling far behind in “digital transformation”, Japan established a new Digital Agency, with a mandate to streamline bureaucratic processes, enhance public services, and ensure digital equity across society. The agency immediately encountered quite a lot of pushback from its putative clients, especially in local government.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of visiting a Japanese government office, imagine a completely monochromatic environment: gray carpets, desks, chairs and filing cabinets. Under the light of cool-white fluorescent tubes, young and old bureaucrats in black suits and white shirts shuffle reams of paperwork, mostly ignore their Windows-based desktop computers, and occasionally tend to fax machines.

A few years ago I wrote about Japan’s love of fax machines, noting that in 2022 Japan had over 9,000 government regulations that requiredthe use of outdated technology, including fax machines, and discouraged remote work by government employees.

And yet, on 3 July, 2024, Japan’s Minister for Digital Transformation, Taro Kono, triumphantly proclaimed, “We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!” [Note to young readers: the floppy disk was a digital data storage medium enclosed in a square or nearly square plastic shell lined with fabric to help remove dust from the spinning magnetic disk. Floppy disks were read or written when inserted into a floppy disk drive connected to or built into a computer or other device.]

Oh, come on, you say! Japan is the future! William Gibson said so!

Try paying at a Japanese department store with your phone, then. I dare you. Not possible. You need your ACTUAL CARD. The somewhat good news is that in 2026, the clerk can process your transaction in front of you, with a 21^st (or did we have these before Y2K?) century mobile terminal. A few years ago, you had to wait at the counter, drumming your fingers impatiently while the clerk disappeared into a back room with your card.

Why don’t Japanese department stores upgrade their tech?

Why should they? After all, Japanese people understand how things work, and in Japan, that’s all that really matters.

But Japan has made a lot of cool stuff, you say. Japan is where Nintendo, Nissin, Uniqlo, Sony, Toyota, Rakuten, Softbank and Studio Ghibli come from.

True, but those are Japanese companies that “Think Different.” Overall, Japan is a culture in which thinking different is not encouraged, and frankly, is discouraged.

To its credit, the Japanese government recognizes the problem, and the problem is that Japan is being left behind economically. A poor digital infrastructure makes it difficult for Japanese companies and workers to compete globally.

The International Institute for Management Development (IMD), a Swiss business school, publishes an annual global digital competitiveness survey that ranks 67 economies in terms of their ability to adopt and explore new digital technologies. IMD’s most recent ranking, from 2024 data, ranked Singapore first, up from third the previous year. Switzerland was second, and Denmark, the United States and Sweden rounded out the top five.

Japan finished 31^st, a record low. Its rankings in some categories were far worse, however. It ranked 53rd (out of 67) in ‘talent’, 39^th for its ‘regulatory framework’ (a dramatic improvement over the previous year, when it ranked 50^th), and a shocking (not shocking) 58^th in ‘business agility’.

Breaking down Japan’s ‘talent’ problems further, IMD reported that Japan ranked 56^th out of 67 in ‘foreign highly skilled personnel’ (‘foreign talent’ is not something Japan wants), and 67^th out of 67 in ‘Digital/Technological skills’.

And while Japan ranked high (6^th) for its ‘technological framework that could underpin digital transformation, it ranked 67^th (of 67) in terms of ‘agility of companies’, 67^th in terms of preparedness for ‘opportunities and threats’, and 64^th in terms of ‘use of big data and analytics’.

So what’s wrong with Japan?

It’s not hardware, it’s software.

It’s not technology, it’s people.

It’s attitude.

In an earlier post, I wrote about why Japanese – despite spending $2 billion a year on the effort – can’t speak English. Mostly because they don’t believe they can.

Again, attitude.

Since the bursting of Japan’s asset price bubble in the early 1990s, the government has been unable to pull policy levers that would stimulate economic growth, and voters have mostly not made politicians pay the price.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is president of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has been in power for all but six of the past 71 years. She is a protégé of Shinzo Abe, who as prime minister from 2012-2020 propounded a mostly unsuccessful program of economic stimuli known as “Abenomics”.

Japanese companies (notice I didn’t say “Japan”) have developed many of the world’s most sophisticated technologies. My guess is that very few of the #robotfail videos you have seen on social media have involved Japanese robotics.

But while many Japanese believe robots will save Japan (from its demographic inevitabilities), robots need programmers, and Japan is critically short of skilled information technology professionals. An additional complication is that Japan’s well-known monolingualism (see above) limits the access of its IT community to global best practices and resources.

To improve Japan’s competitiveness, Prime Minister Takaichi and her government are putting their money on a labor importation scheme called Ikusei Shūrō (“Employment with Skill Development Program or Training and Employment System”), set to take effect in April 2027. Ikusei Shūrō replaces Japan’s previous Technical Intern Training Program (TITP), under which employers exploited foreign ‘trainees’ and angered not only the trainees but the governments of the (mostly developing Asian) countries they came from.

But don’t call it an immigration policy; the government has been careful to say that “the introduction of this system is not intended to be an ‘immigration policy.’”

An ‘immigration policy’ would have to address the rights of families settling in Japan for the long term. A ‘labor importation scheme’ establishes parameters within which ‘laborers’ (be they construction workers, bus drivers or software developers) may work in Japan.

Singapore and the Persian Gulf states have ‘migrant worker’ programs that I have long thought are models for the labor market the Japanese right wing wants to set up, and in fact Japan has already implemented the most important of the ‘second-class citizen’ measures that are features of the Singapore and Gulf state migrant labor schemes: visa holders (in some categories) cannot be accompanied by their families.

If you meet a foreign worker in Japan (one of approximately 2.6 million) who works in the hospitality, food and beverage, construction, shipbuilding or agriculture industries, his or her family will not have been able to obtain visas to accompany the visa holder.

Information technology workers are (at the moment) in a different visa category, but with Japanese salaries the lowest among ‘high-income’ countries, it’s easy to imagine that most software developers and system managers who pursue employment in Japan will be from developing nations in Asia. It’s easy to imagine that the continued rollout of artificial intelligence ‘tools’ will commoditize IT skills, and that the ‘skilled workers’ Japan is hoping will drive increased digital competitiveness will be less and less skilled.

Japanese policymakers are caught between the desire to improve economic conditions and the need to preserve ‘social harmony’ (this can also be read as ‘racial harmony’). They have been working this problem for the past 35 years, however, and they’re failing on both fronts.

A record number of foreigners work in Japan, mostly unwelcomed by the central government (to their credit, many local governments are doing a much better job) and the general population.

And in terms of digital competitiveness, Japan ranks seventh of 14 nations in Asia. Ahead of Mongolia, the Philippines and Indonesia, but far behind South Korea, China and Australia.

Globally, Japan ranks ahead of Kazakhstan, Chile and Romania, but far behind Qatar, Lithuania and Iceland.

Digital transformation is not about technology; Japan has the technology.

It’s about redesigning society. Governing for the future. Investing in education. Empowering (digitally fluent) young people. Enabling the immigration that facilitates a skilled, knowledgeable and ambitious workforce.

These are the building blocks of societies that continue to grow and provide quality of life for citizens.

Unfortunately, the “Activity Report and Future Plan of Digital Agency of Japan”, published in September 2025, does not offer much reassurance that the Japanese government is up to the task of “moving fast and breaking things.”

As I suppose is normal for government strategy documents, the “Activity Report and Future Plan” offers plenty of generic aspiration, and very little “how we’re going to get there.”

I think we can all agree that “human-friendly digitalization” that “leaves no one behind” is a good idea, but how is that going to happen? Providing digital access to government services is a good idea (and would have been an excellent idea 30 years ago), but who’s going to teach Japan’s millions of old folks, many of whom carry flip phones, how to navigate online services? Promoting use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in government is a good idea, but Japanese bureaucrats have a very poor record of maintaining data security. And so on.

Will Japan be able to pull up its digital socks anytime soon? Maybe and maybe not.

But for the time being, I’d like to suggest a new mission statement for the Digital Agency.

I think you’ll like it, and it’s from Japan fanboy William Gibson:

“The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

In 1542, the Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos named the Pacific islands of Leyte and Samar “Felipinas”, after his patron, King Philip II of Spain, who has endured as the eponym for the Philippines for nearly 500 years.

Bolivia was named (in 1825) for the Venezuelan soldier and statesman Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios Ponte y Blanco, better known as Simón Bolívar, and also known as El Libertador (the Liberator of the Americas).

And the memory and name of British East India Company sea captain Thomas Gilbert has endured since 1820, when the Gilbert Islands were named for their European discoverer by Russian admiral Adam von Krusenstern and French captain Louis Duperrey. When the Gilberts gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1979, the country was renamed Kiribati, the Kiribati language pronunciation of Gilbert.

In a similar vein, it’s no secret that Donald Trump has always loved himself.

Long before most non-New Yorkers had heard of him, Trump was a private citizen bankrupting businesses such as the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino (watch a very satisfying short video of the building’s demolition here), Golden Nugget Atlantic City, Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City, Trump Entertainment Resorts and Trump University.

Trump Tower is the jewel in Trump’s tarnished real estate crown, and there are also a Trump Building, Trump Palace Condominiums, Trump World Tower and several other Trump-owned and Trump-branded properties in Manhattan.

However, most of the things that have Trump’s name on them are not owned by Trump, who has for decades fleeced unsavvy investors into licensing the Trump name.

There are Trump Tower buildings in Tampa, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia, Moscow, Bangalore, Rio de Janeiro and – if you can believe it – Damascus.

Another dozen Trump-branded building projects were cancelled or never completed, including the Trump Plaza Tower in Tel Aviv, the Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico and Trump Tower Europe in Stuttgart.

There are Trump International Hotel & Tower properties in New York and Chicago, and a Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas (the Tower was cancelled), but additional Trump International Hotel & Tower properties in Baku (Azerbaijan), Belgrade, Bangkok, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dubai, Doha and Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) have all been cancelled or were never completed.

As President, Trump has wielded power to rename buildings after himself. Such as the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts (formerly the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts).

And the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace (formerly the United States Institute of Peace).

This summer, thanks to the Florida Legislature, Palm Beach International Airport will become the President Donald J. Trump International Airport.

And Trump is most excited about the President Donald J. Trump Ballroom, his ostentatious yet banal replacement for the historic East Wing of the White House, scheduled for completion (yet unlikely to be completed) in 2028.

Perhaps Rafael Trujillo was unaware that Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, which he renamed Ciudad Trujillo in 1936, would revert to Santo Domingo in 1961, after his assassination.

Perhaps Saddam Hussein was unaware that Saddamiat al-Tharthar, an eponymous resort city he built 130 kilometers west of Baghdad in 1999, where a 30-foot bronze statue of the Butcher of Baghdad greeted visitors at the gateway, and nearly every brick was engraved with his initials, would today resemble a Mesopotamian archaeological ruin, with every building razed and desert sand drifting through the empty streets.

And perhaps the Bavarian nobleman Focko was unaware that the town he founded in Austria in the sixth century AD would be renamed in 2020, when residents finally decided – after 1,500 years and the theft of hundreds of road signs – that the “(place of) Focko’s people” would be better rendered Fugging than Fucking.

And perhaps Trump is unaware that his name will not endure on the “White House ballroom” – or the Kennedy Center, or the Institute of Peace – for more than a New York minute after he leaves office and again can be referred to as “TFG”, an acronym used by former president Joe Biden to avoid speaking Trump’s name out loud.

The definition of “TFG”, though, is likely to change from “The Former Guy” to “That Fucking Guy”, and it’s difficult to imagine that even 1,500 years will be enough time to rehabilitate Trump’s reputation so that he can be referred to as That Fugging Guy”.

If you follow the news, and these days who can afford not to, you know that shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has slowed to almost nothing following Iranian strikes on shipping in the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and even the Black Sea.

The shipping shutdown has affected the 20 percent of global oil that transits the strait, as well as shipments of fertilizer, petrochemicals and sulphur, all of which are produced in significant amounts in the Gulf region.

The economic consequences of Donald Trump’s “war of choice” will be felt for months all over the world, and came as a surprise to the American president, who has never been described as geopolitically savvy.

Previous oil shocks followed the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the outbreak of the Iraq–Iran War in 1980 and the Persian Gulf War in 1990, but none of those conflicts had anywhere near the effect on the global oil supply that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is having.

Just over a week ago, Trump said Iran’s strikes against neighboring countries including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait were a surprise. “They [Iran] weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East. Nobody expected that. We were shocked.”

Of course plenty of people expected that; regional spillover had been the outcome in virtually every simulation of a potential Iran conflict staged over the past 45 years.

Two weeks ago, Trump said, “I think the war is very complete, pretty much. [Iran has] no navy, no communications, they’ve got no air force. Their missiles are down to a scatter. Their drones are being blown up all over the place, including their manufacturing of drones.”

Unfortunately for the global economy, “a scatter” of missiles still represents unacceptable risk for shipping companies. On Monday, one of those missiles hit Tel Aviv.

And although “their drones are being blown up all over the place”, many drones are getting through, and represent additional unacceptable risk.

The greater risk to commercial shipping, though, is naval mines, invented in the 14^th century by Chinese artillery officers to deter Japanese pirate ships. Early Chinese naval mines contained explosives that were triggered either by timers or firing cables from shore. During the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 20th century, Chinese forces used naval mines to prevent Eight-Nation Alliance forces from sailing up the Hai River to Beijing.

To get a sense of how worried mariners are by mines, during World War One, around 235,000 mines were laid to protect the British coast and control the exits from the North Sea. Following the armistice that ended the fighting between the Allies and the Germans in November 1918, 82 ships required five months to clear all the mines.

World War Two saw the return of mines to seaways and harbor entrances, and inevitably saw the development of more and more sophisticated types of mine, as well as methods of deployment that included aerial mining (i.e. dropping mines into the sea and into harbors from airplanes). During World War Two between 600,000 and one million naval mines were deployed around the world, and not all of these were meticulously charted, especially those dropped from high altitude by bombers. After the war, the British Royal Navy worked for two and a half years to clear European seaways of mines, in large part through the German Mine Sweeping Administration (GMSA), which consisted of 27,000 members of the former Kriegsmarine and 300 German vessels.

Unlike former U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Senator John Kerry, who commanded a U.S. Navy Swift boat during the Vietnam War (winning Silver Star and Bronze Star medals, and receiving three Purple Heart medals for having been wounded in combat), Donald Trump doesn’t know much about naval operations, and is almost certainly unaware that since World War Two, mines have damaged 14 United States Navy ships, while air and missile attacks have damaged four.

Three weeks ago, President Trump said, “[Iran] has no navy, it’s been knocked out. They have no air force, that’s been knocked out. They have no air detection, that’s been knocked out. Their radar has been knocked out. Just about everything’s been knocked out.”

On 24 July, 1987, during the Iran–Iraq War from 1980 to 1988, the supertanker SS Bridgeton struck an Iranian naval mine in the northern half of the Persian Gulf, near Kuwait. The double-hulled Bridgeton was damaged, but made it to port.

One day before the incident, Rear Admiral Harold J. Bernsen, commander of the Middle East Force, said, “The Iranian Air Force and Navy are not strong. It would not be in their best interest to utilize their forces in a direct confrontation.”

Nine months later, the guided missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine in the central Persian Gulf shipping lane and was nearly sunk. Ten sailors were wounded.

During the Gulf War (the first one), two U.S. Navy ships struck mines and were badly damaged. The USS Princeton was a guided missile cruiser and the USSS Tripoli was an amphibious assault vessel (the Navy’s term for a helicopter carrier).

Iran is believed to possess around 6,000 naval mines, and is one of around two dozen nations that manufactures mines.

Iran has submarines, including around 20 Ghadir-class midget submarines that are well-suited to guerilla operations. And of course it has many speedboats that can easily ply the waters of the Strait of Hormuz, which at its narrowest is less than 40 kilometers wide.

According to a CBS News report published on Monday, U.S. officials say Iran has deployed “at least” or “less than” a dozen mines in the strait. U.S. officials can’t get their story Strait, it seems.

Trump, predictably, denied that mines had been laid, and at the same time demanded their removal: “If Iran has put out any mines in the Hormuz Strait, and we have no reports of them doing so, we want them removed, IMMEDIATELY!”

During the Korean War, North Korean mines sank five U.S. Navy ships, including two minesweepers, the USS Pirate and the USS Pledge, on the same day, 12 October, 1950. Following the completion of operations to rescue survivors, Rear Admiral Allen ‘Hoke’ Smith sent a message to Washington, reporting, “We have lost control of the seas to a nation without a Navy, using pre-World War I weapons, laid by vessels that were utilized at the time of the birth of Christ.”

There may have been a lesson there.