Samurai, WWII & What the West Gets Wrong About Japan | Joshua Walker

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saying and i should probably speak in japanese because some of your audience might be like we don't believe it his accent's too good in english but if i flipped into japanese so you can have your folks check it out because i think that you know uh so i'm joshua walker i grew up in japan my parents are missionaries they've been there for 45 years i lived in hokkaido japan sapporo specifically from 1 to 18 when i was growing up in japan uh going to church there was only two options english at home and japanese outside the home there weren't many other options um and so i've always thought it was kind of natural and normal that this is the way people were and it turns out it's not right and particularly since i became the president of japan society which is one of the largest and prestigious and most historic organizations that supports youth and youth rights and i've always thought it was kind of natural and normal that you know there are a lot of people like me out there but not as many people as you would think and particularly uh people that have a real passion for trying to explain because i feel like my entire life i've tried to explain america to japanese and i've tried to explain japan to americans and i do it from the perspective of someone who's grounded in both cultures in both communities and so um i find a lot of my work is you know talking about all sorts of really interesting things like back in the day when i was growing up most people had a very exotic view of the hostility to it of like oh japan's going to take over america one day they're going to buy rockefeller center they're buying columbia pictures like it's a bad thing nowadays like our kids to them japan is part of their culture right like if you look at the macy's day parade you're going to see pokemon you're going to see luffy like my kids honestly could not tell the difference between garfield and pokemon because they're both like characters and they probably think garfield and snoopy are old school and like pokemon's new right and dragon ball z um so i just think it's a that's who i am yeah it's really fascinating just a few things on japanese culture one just how how fast american japanese relations have normalized i mean going from direct adversaries during world war ii to now i mean at least from an american perspective so much japanese culture has been important just like you said that is integral to what it means to be you know american like i think about like american games like nintendo like that is an american game but it's not yeah and isn't it crazy right like super mario brothers that put nintendo on the map is an italian plumber invented by a japanese artist that americans have internalized as their own right right but you're you're 100 right i mean in my own family's lifetime and i write about this in the book my grandfathers fought in the war against japan and i have an episode i talk about in there where i was sitting there with my maternal grandfather dr graham who was a dentist and had been a you know b29 bomber pilot and i'm sitting there with tamaki oji-san someone that i grew up with for a long time and i'm sitting there with my maternal grandfather dr graham who was a my church that i referred to as like my grandfather my japanese grandfather and he was a small little guy and my grandfather was really big and they didn't speak the same language so as a nine or ten year old i'm translating for him with my dad there as well and it comes to the point of the conversation of like what did you do in the past and there's kind of this awkward oh we were fighting each other wow and it was just awkward and um the way the ice was broken was the the japanese grandfather actually thanked my grandfather for his service and for helping him be where he is today and my grandfather who had very few words giving him a hug which is very not culturally appropriate in the japanese context and as a nine or ten year old from that moment on i felt that weight of responsibility like wow never again and i don't think people in my generation and below know that side of japan because people below the age of 40 they know japan through anime through video games through food through architecture all that stuff that everywhere is surrounded here in new york and certainly across the country right yeah it's a interesting dichotomy because there's so many things in american culture that are so specifically japanese and even just you know from the region broadly speaking like i think the number one show on netflix right now is k-pop demon hunter yes 100 which you know obviously from korea but just another sort of thread that comes through from the region a country that we were adversaries with through the 50s that now is importing culture all the time and i love to see the cross-cultural pollination like i'm someone that loves cultures and loves people and humanity just at its core and learning about just different cultures is fascinating to me and seeing all the ways that it gets imported and kind of like reworked into the american paradigm i find fascinating but i mean also shohei hotani we can't we can't ignore him i mean you can't ignore the greatest baseball player ever not just in our lifetime now it's like ever yeah controversial okay i don't know if you can say ever ever i mean i don't know i think stats speak for themselves so bring me anybody else you want i'm sticking with shohei hotani i mean shohei's game i forget which what it was in the in the world series but where he pitched yep hit yes and it was like someone explained to me that knows baseball better than i did maybe you can sort of uh parlay into this but what he did was like the greatest feat in sports ever yeah it'd be like if tom brady threw and caught every touchdown in a super bowl it was like and and had a sack on the other quarterback right like it is literally that level right um and what's crazy is so the reason i'm such a fanatic shohei hotani fan is he actually started at the nippon fighters which is from my hometown of sapporo so he was a two-way player because he couldn't do it in many other places even in japan in the national baseball league there it was kind of like yeah you can't do that that's crazy but he did it and then he made it over to the angels and now he's on the greatest stage on earth and that game you're talking about was literally i was in japan for that game president trump was there as well meeting with the new prime minister at the time and they watched that game and so i think you know it took on a light a huge you know life-size thing of its own because again you know with like the super bowl there's only one game but with the world series there's at least four games and so that kind of crystallized in one small microcosm the greatness of shohei hotani so right even from this overview right here the do-it-all game game four yep and uh he pitched six scoreless innings 10 strikeouts three home runs played both pitcher and designated hitter in a 5-1 win over the brewers i mean phenomenal yeah well that can't be the brewers right it had to be the other team they played the blue jays or whatever it was right this was in the uh the uh oh this is the nls sorry i was thinking about the world series i don't remember it wasn't world series i misspoke it was the uh the conference yeah yeah but regardless there's so much cultural crossover but yet there's a dichotomy yeah because i do think for me at least there is this disconnect with japanese culture where i as an american look at the culture and it it is so homogenous and so ancient yeah that there are still many things that stand out as being particularly unique that i think a lot of americans don't understand yeah like oh are they there's a coldness there's uh maybe like a lack of romance like there's little things that kind of come through that i think make americans sort of uh maybe uneasy at times and so it's interesting there's so much cultural influence but yet so much that's unknown so much that's still mystical yeah and i'm hoping today we can get through all that yeah uh in addition to that also looking at american japanese relations through the lens of trump's presidency and what america first means for japan as well as other countries in the region yeah but before we get to that i did a recent episode on miyamoto musashi okay the the the greatest samurai ever yep the author of five rings um also the path of loneliness this is the american translation there's a better japanese word for it i'm sure yeah but uh in your book you mentioned that you sort of go through miyamoto musashi a bit and also touch on his philosophy and there's two things about him that are fascinating one like just his life story being this young kid basically orphaned to an extent that becomes one of the greatest samurais ever going through duels literally as like a teenager and defeating the most just the most prolific swordsman of the region yeah and it's like a remarkable story but then there's also a philosophical element of it that i think a lot of people miss so what can you tell me about miyamoto musashi i mean you did a pretty good job there i normally i'm used to people just being like oh yeah that five rings i'm like not the olympics like totally different you know i think that what's interesting about musashi is you know i grew up learning about him in japanese in japan and he's equivalent to a lot of people who are like oh yeah i'm like oh yeah i'm to many ways people like sun tzu uh or maybe even klausowitz uh that are used as kind of these great military strategists but i think you said it really well he's more than that you know it's not just the fact that he defeated some of the greatest swordsmen of his time he fought 60 duels and won every single one any one of those losses you're dead like that's the way that works there's it you know there's a winner and there's a loser and the loser is dead right so the fact that he did that and then he also wrote about the philosophy and the period of time that he grew up during the Sengoku period. which is the civil war period of japan right before uh tokugawa shogunate was established and the edo period flourished like he's this mythical figure right so 500 years ago and so the question is like the man and the legend and the myth right and i think he is this personification because he represents so much that japan can be proud of in terms of this warrior scholar concept right so he didn't kill people for the sake of just killing them it was that his honor was challenged and he's trying to help people understand when to use the sword and when to use the pen and that is very interesting because to an american it's like all right if you're a warrior like get buff get strong be spartacus like just kill people but then if you're gonna rule or govern then like do that and there's a separation of power right between military hard power and soft power over here and he represents both of those like he's not the most intimidating of japanese characters he's not this larger than life kami figure or god right he very much was a person he very much was this philosopher he's very much this warrior and i think that that sometimes gets lost because when i think about sun tzu i don't actually know what the living person was like all i know is he wrote some really great things that now are being used to be like defeat the enemy without having to fight them right you know these kind of phrases we use his work was actually his work is a little more deep than that you it's hard number one japanese language is difficult full full right like writing this book in japanese with a with my dear friend who helped me translate like i speak japanese pretty fluently i felt i needed a translator to get from my level of japanese to like the level of japanese i was appealing to and so to see what that represents 500 years after the fact and it's still relevant and moves people today there's an endearing philosophy and i think part of it is because that system of governance that he's talking about is what still resonates today in japan like the reason tokyo is one of the largest metropolises in the world and succeeds as edo is because of some of the work he did had he not been uh in those duels had he not been part of that group that was going to lead to the unification of japan we may not have the japan that we have today we may not have otani who may be the living incarnate of the musashino today right like there's a whole level and i would i would argue that whether or not shohei otani lives by that philosophy he would absolutely give credit where credit is due and say yes going back through this period there's this attention to detail and craftsmanship and to be at that level of a swordsman uh it's almost an artistry it's not just violence so i think that is what really appeals to me and when i think about my own understanding of japanese culture japanese history he stands out in that kind of canon of people just like the founding you know myths of japan and just like tokugawa himself the shogun and then the different emperors that have led to japanese history throughout time right i do think there is a a romance it's funny because in the west we talk about the renaissance man right like this is the man that can do everything he can play music and he can also do philosophy but he can also fight and you know battle hardened and like we create these sort of myths in america and through the west and like i think maybe marcus aurelius perhaps would come to mind and there's probably others but i it's it's interesting to me that miyamoto musashi is that perfectly embodied like this artist but also a warrior yes like the ultimate man yes and whether it is wholly true or it's partially mythologized it's just funny that it's kind of swept away from the western record it's not something that we talk about often yep so i'm curious what can we take away from miyamoto musashi like what could you say are some of the foundational philosophical elements that still translate that could be relatable to a young dude in america now yeah i mean i think the number one is is intentionality the idea of dope the way is something that very much i think he can take a credit for and it's part of japanese philosophy and japanese history anyways and he's following on a long path of it but the intentionality behind it when you take your sword out why and then as you're using and and kind of making sure that every stroke every uh kind of approach is is is is approach with intentionality i think in this day and age you know it's an attention culture like we have so much coming at us literally through screens and everything around us and it's it's it's it's it's it's around us is loud in that moment in time it was very similar like there was war everywhere it was very difficult to kind of make sense of who was winning who was losing which group to join and who was going to come out of this uh civil war period and in many ways he he asked you to look within yourself like don't look at the external world you can't necessarily control but look within yourself and so even the path of loneliness that sounds weird right because loneliness is this like empty space and you're trying to get rid of that feeling but if you walk that path then you in some ways understand from a zen point of view of like oh like that actually is a way to focus on what i have control focus on my breathing first focus like it you know in many ways before you can pick up a sword you have to understand everything else you have to master the universe everything else before you do that whereas in america like really because i feel like i need to just pick up the sword to start swinging at stuff and eventually i'll hit something eventually i'll get better and i think that craftsmanship that intentionality is something that we all could learn from and i think the world needs to learn from that needs a lot more of which i think going back to our earlier conversation is why japan and japanese philosophy and even people like shohei otani uh are so popular right now because it's so unusual to see that yeah it's a i think this is partially why i love studying religion because to me at the very least even if it's all human created and it's all purely a you know this desire for humans to you know ascribe like a some type of reason and order to this chaotic world at the very least it is an amalgamation of what works for humanity you know what i mean like if you do like this cross-religious analysis you're able to pull things together and i think that feeling of self-mastery is something that comes up in basically every religion and i mean i think seneca even wrote like intend to your garden like that is the single most important thing you can do mother teresa says if you want to change the world love your family and this focus on really kind of zooming in on what is within your control yeah in this world of chaos where everything seems like it's out of your control where your life you're just on a ride and you can't get off taking control over yourself and that includes you know the things you give your attention to your emotional state how you react to your emotions is all found within you know i think musashi's life and sort of his writings that you can feel a way but ultimately how are you going to channel that energy what are you going to do how are you going to react i mean there's even like an adage my dad would say like life is 90 how you react to it and musashi seems like he really embodied this i mean even and i'm trying to think like his first three duels yes there's like a five-year gap in between them yes like i think there's on both sides there's maybe a a pendulum shift where it's like oh he was like a philosopher that would train with swords or he was this crazy warrior that would fight anyone yeah this is not the case yeah he was a very disciplined principled warrior yes and he fought once when he was like 16 and then again when he was 21 yep like that was the time man and in that whole time he was just training and mastering himself yeah and i think that that's a a lesson for people to take away like you know if you are a natural fighter if you are a natural person to stand up against injustice it doesn't have to be constantly raging at the entire world around you because you're going to get exhausted yep it's specifically locking into your emotions and choosing the specific battles that you need to fight when there's no other option yeah and whether that's a physical fight or an ideological fight whatever it may be no i really i really resonate with what you're saying because in many ways the reason i think that whether it's japanese gardens or whether it's a japanese tea ceremony which may not feel similar to musashi but in many ways are coming out of that same period because the way that the current japanese tea ceremony was created was in many ways uh that intentionality behind it if you think about it back in the day you had these different warring groups and they would meet how are they going to have a meeting to have diplomacy when like if all you do is fight all the time right but they needed a way to be able to show respect to one another and to be able to have a dialogue with one another and to be able to have a dialogue with one another and to be able to all the movements i think one of the things that americans don't fully appreciate about japanese tea ceremonies like hey just take a bunch of leaves and put it in hot water and you got tea if you've been to japanese tea ceremonies three hours later you're like wow like i don't know what i just experienced but it wasn't just about what was in my bowl it was the way in which i was received the hospitality the culture and so when you go into a tea ceremony you lay your sword down and it is considered the height of dishonor if anything were to happen to your guest in your care and so even if it's a trap even if there's something going on like it all happens and i think musashi has that in his work as well where there is that understanding that there is a time and there's a place for everything there's a season for everything as the bible says right and i think that that idea of tending your own garden first and focusing on what you can focus on you know i think a lot of people in this day and age feel like they're just they're not even an actor in their own life and there's so much they can't control but that's often because they don't focus on what they can control and so i think that's one of the things that i think is you know i think as a father you see that very intently and when you have that newborn for the first time you feel that deep connection that you can't even explain you can't even tell yourself before you had a child and then ever ever since after that it is both the ultimate form of selfishness of wanting to see yourself and wanting to do that but it's also the greatest form of selflessness because you want to protect that little life in so many ways when they can't walk and they can't do anything you want to hold and you want to be there as they get older you want to protect them for the things that they can't do and you want to protect them for the things that you know are not good for them, but ultimately, you've got to help grow within that life, that philosophy that you can never, you're never going to be there all the time for them. And you've got to, you've got to live that right and with an intentionality behind it, which I think Japanese culture gets very right. And sometimes in America, because we are so evolving all the time, we're a dynamic culture where we're constantly importing and bringing new philosophies. The fad of the day changes based on what you're watching, what the algorithms say. In Japan, there's something that stood the test of time, that ancient civilization that we're here talking about somebody from 600 years ago. There are no Americans from 600 years ago, right? Like that's just our country celebrating the 250th year this year. So there's a whole different level to it that I think is pretty cool. Interesting. Okay. I want to get back to Miyamoto Musashi, but what can you tell me about early childhood in Japan? How do Japanese parents raise their children in a way that is distinct from American parents? Yeah. I mean, you talked about Netflix and certainly my children watch K-pop Demon Hunters much to my chagrin because I can't get the earworms of the songs out. It's a good song. They're catchy, man. That song is amazing. It's amazing. But if you go on Netflix and you type in Japanese children, you'll get some amazing TV shows. They do TV shows where children who are younger than my kids, I have a seven and a nine-year-old, they go and get stuff. They just walk down the street across highways. They wear these little yellow hats to be distinctive everywhere. You would never see that. You would be arrested by child services if you let your kid walk down to the corner of 7-Eleven to buy something because it just is never done. In Japan, that's part of the way it's done. And I think it starts. It's early. Last year at the Oscars, there were a couple of documentary films that were made by some friends that we hosted at Japan Society about Japanese education. And those films really got to the core of the difference between a Japanese education system and an American one. I went to a Japanese yo-chin, a Japanese kindergarten. And what I was being taught, obviously, I was a little bit different. I was pretty big for my age. And in Japan, I was huge. My nickname was Godzilla, the American. I had all sorts of nicknames. And they had this. So what I was being taught was more about. More about social order. And even when it came to the food you bring. In Japan, you all bring your bento boxes and you all eat together. And then afterwards, you clean up together. Think about the U.S. You go to a cafeteria. The lunch ladies do everything for you. What are you being taught? Are you cleaning up after yourself? Are you helping serve your fellow students? That's just not the way America works most of the time. It's very individualistic. So I think that social consensus and that kind of collective will starts really early in Japan. And so, first of all, I think it's very important that you learn that from the age of kindergarten into elementary school. You learn that. Now, as you get older, things change. And I think Japan is very well known for a very disciplinary in society. Everybody has to wear a uniform at public schools. Everybody has to be kind of similar. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down, as an old Japanese saying. And so by the time you get to high school, where critical thinking is what we try to focus on here in the West and in America, especially by the time you get to college, in Japan, it really does tend to be more on the mathematical side. And so I think it's very important that you learn that. And so I think it's very important of remembering and kind of, you know, rote memorization, which I think in this day and age of AI and technology is becoming less valuable. But certainly at the elementary school, if I could have a choice, I think my kids would benefit from the elementary school. I think when we get to junior high and high school, we can have an active debate. But they learned that at an early age. That's interesting. Yeah. The American system, specifically in early childhood, is so individualistic and kind of like reinforces like a class idea of like, you are of this class and, you know, these people, they work for you and they do stuff for you. And it really does reinforce this idea of like, I'm kind of on my own. These people are on their own. They have their job. I have my job. We're distinct and separate, where it doesn't seem to be the case in Japan. It seems like there's much more collectivization from an early age that we're all working together. That show that you mentioned, I can't remember the name of it. Yeah. Would you mind searching this, the Japanese kids show where like they're walking around doing stuff? It's my favorite. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. It's just like the greatest thing ever, especially as a parent, right? You're watching this going, my parents would have, well, my parents wouldn't. They'd like, most American parents are like, you're like, you're my grandchild do that. And it's just hilarious because they go and buy alcohol. They go and buy tobacco and like cigarettes. And you're like, what? How is that allowed? Like in America, you got to show your ID for anything in Japan. It's like, oh yeah, you're so-and-so's son. Come on in and do this or that. It's amazing. Right. There's a, oh yeah, that's what it is. Old enough. Yeah. How do you say that in Japanese? What does that say? Hajimete no otsukiai. Otsukiai. Yeah. Yeah. Or my first errand. Yes. My first errand. Would you mind clicking a video of this? This is just so cute. But like, you'll see like a little kid, like holding fish in a bucket and a fish drops out and he's got to like put it back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's maybe like five years old. Exactly. Just walking around the streets of Osaka. He's like struggling with this huge fish and you're like, what is happening? And it's just like part of it. So yeah. Yeah. This one right here. Yeah. Could we, uh, this is probably going to be, oh no, we got ads. That's what always happens. This is America after all ads rule our life. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But seeing this little kid is walking to a supermarket, this little yellow flag, this indicates what exactly is it? Is this or is this broadly in Japanese culture? I think, I mean, I think there are elements of this, but a lot of it, as I was saying, is people wear hats or something distinctive to let people know that like they, they have their parents permission. They're not running off somewhere. And again, it's to make sure, I mean, you see this, look, this kid is walking across traffic. Can you imagine that in New York? Like you would have a lawsuit on your hand. And the fact that these kids who are like two to five years old are doing this stuff, like it's just not fathomable. And I have a seven and nine year old. I wouldn't even trust my nine and seven year old to do this stuff. This three-year-old is doing. And it's because they're teaching them at an early age responsibility. And it's like, look, I want you to do this. I mean, I just, can you imagine riding a bus in New York? Like I just, there's also massive levels of social trust. Yes. A hundred percent that I trust my child will go out and it won't be abducted. There won't be crime. There won't be some type of random scuffle. There won't be bullied, robbed. Of course, you know, crime happens anyway. Yes. But in Japan, it seems much more collective and cohesive. Well, I think that actually goes back to your point about the class. You know, I think that when you look at like the genie coefficient of American society versus Japanese, there are rich people in Japan and there's some really rich people, but on average, there's kind of a pride in the middle class. Like it is not a point of contention. You know, I think in the U S keeping up with the Joneses of like always trying to one up and like, and I think part of what we're describing, even not probably in our lifetime, in our childhoods, like the way we grew up where our parents would give us a certain parameter in our neighborhood, we could give them a certain parameter in our neighborhood where we could go to our next door neighbor's house, et cetera. That's not what we do with our kids anymore because of no telling you go and knock on the wrong door and somebody, you know, misinterprets whatever's happening. Like, you know, that has changed over time. And so even like our ideal childhood versus what our kids are growing up in, especially in a place, an urban environment like here is very different than kind of the suburban or, you know, the kind of idyllic, you know, America of the bygone days. Yes. Yeah. There's a great book by Jonathan Height where he writes, uh, it's called the anxious generation. Yeah. And he's just a great researcher. Yes. Oh yeah. Um, but he has a protocol for like how to deal with technology and your children. And one of the things that he talks about is like when your child is about like eight or 10 years old, send them on an errand. Yeah. You know, like don't, you can maybe follow them for a little bit, but like just trust that they'll be okay. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, Jonathan Height writes in this book, basically a protocol for how to deal with your children interfacing with technology. And he says like when they're eight or nine years old, send them out on an errand and just, you know, trust that they'll be okay. Teach them how to deal with the streets, do this and be like eight or nine. Yeah. Like that's, it's too late. It's way too late. Like you got to start this when they're five and they're six years old. And, uh, yeah. Teaching that, that ethic of responsibility and how to like operate as an adult in the society. When I also think there's kind of a generational piece here. Like I think, you know, the idea of your grandparents living with you as a pretty foreign concept to us in America, right? Whereas in Japan, that's the way it is. Like it is so expensive prohibitively. So to have a house that many people have generational houses. And so if you grow up and your children care, your grandparents, well, I mean now as a parent and you know, my parents, you know, being away from their grandkids, that would be idyllic because if there's anybody I trust to raise my own kids besides myself, it's not a nanny, it's not an au pair. It's not, you know, daycare. It's my parents because they instilled in me certain values that I want instilled in my kids. And I think that sense of collective responsibility is a pretty, uh, across the board, Asian cultural phenomenon. You see a lot of it in all parts of Asia, not just Japan, but I think that does get back to the collective piece of this. Have you heard this is, I don't know if this is valid or not. I just saw this on an Instagram reel, but it was an anthropologist positing this idea of grain societies versus rice societies when it comes to collectivization. And as I've heard it, and I'm curious what your thoughts are, the theory that he sort of floated was that wheat societies, grain societies generally, but wheat society specifically are much more individualistic that I have a field of crops that I'm, you know, tending to, and I'm growing my wheat and you have your own field of crops. They're distinct and they're completely individualistic. And my, my field is for my family and for my community and yours, maybe five miles down the road, that's for your people. And whether it gets destroyed or gets blight or gets any type of, you know, infestation that's on you. And maybe I'll help you out, but it's for a price, dah, dah, dah. And it creates a much more individualized sort of culture. Rice societies, because they're sharing the same waterways and you might have a rice patty that is connected to another rice patty, even four or five miles away, but because it's sharing the same water, what you, what you do to your rice affects me. And as a result creates more collectivized societies and over generations of reinforcing this idea that what I do affects my neighbors and what my neighbors do affects me creates more collectivization. What do you think of this theory? I mean, it seems to be true in my own lived experience, but I don't have the anthropological PhD that I'm sure they do. But certainly one of the things I can say about Japanese history as well is that even economically speaking, rice is in some ways the gold standard, where you have to, I think it's kind of undoubtedly a collective village to, you know, kind of harvest rice because it is such an intensive process. You've got to do so much more. It's not just like, okay, it rains or not. It's like you gotta keep water at a certain level. And then in Japan, there's certain levels of gradations of rice. And so this group needs to focus on the type of rice that is served to this group of people, to the monks and the priests, and it has to be the most sacred variety. And this bushel and this variety of rice is the commodity that allows economic trade to happen. And from this region is better. The same as tea, by the way, right? Like there are a lot of commodities in Japan that have these dual purposes and meaning in the same way that in the West, most of it is like minerals. And nowadays we talk a lot about critical minerals, but gold is still a huge, you know, commodity and all those things. In Japan, a lot of those things, whether it's incense, whether it's tea or whether it's rice, and you're kind of, as an American, you're like, those things don't seem that valuable, actually. Like how hard can it possibly be? It's pretty hard. Try to raise rice one day, try to go out there. Whereas wheat, you and I could throw that out there and probably get lucky. And, you know, that's just, that's the way it is. And I think it would happen sometime and not. So I don't doubt it. I don't have the research on it, but I think in my own lived experience, I can definitely feel that. Okay. Now I just want to touch back on Miyamoto Musashi. Is there anything else from his life or philosophy that you think is relevant to Japanese culture today that Americans would learn from? Yeah. I mean, look, I go back to the Otani example because I think that this idea of being a master swordsman, right? The way in which he used the sword was really seen as being an artisan or craft. And I think we just don't think about things like that in the West often. If you took everything you do, your job, everything you're doing today, if you're listening to this and you're on a FedEx truck or doing a UPS run or whatever, like if you took the same level of pride as Shohei Otani does of playing in the championship game of the world series, or, you know, Musashi did as a, you know, kind of defender of Japanese culture and the faith and being a philosopher, would that make a world a different place? Again, instead of worrying about all the customers and the people that are bad and making your life miserable and the person that's driving in front of you, that's driving you crazy, but you focused in on your craft. Would that make us a better place? And would we all see our lives as craftsmen? Would we take more pride? I mean, there's a great Japanese movie that came out about a toilet cleaner and that toilet cleaner, you know, the pride he takes in cleaning every single, and these are public toilets. These are not like some fancy, you know, Trump tower type of toilets. These are like, you know, nasty, gross, like, and even that, and you can feel it when you go to Japan and you walk around the society, you see how clean it is without there being any trouble. We're often in the U S it's like, well, that's not my problem. Like I'm gonna walk outside and throw it on the ground because it's not my problem. That's your responsibility as the keeper. You got to go and get the snow off your area. It's your responsibility. Whereas in Japan, it's our responsibility. And I think that sense of collective responsibility would benefit all of us because we are interconnected. And the question becomes, where's that line? Because there's benefit on both sides. There's something beautiful in the American sense of individuality and that free spirit and kind of manifest destiny and all that stuff. There's also beauty in a collective way. And I think at their extremes, they both can be taken too far. But one of the things I like to do at Japan society and my work is to show a mirror to both sides to help Americans say, wow, there's a lot we could learn. And if I want to be as good at a craft as Shohei Ohtani, I got to go back to Musashi's work. And if I want to be as creative and do the types of things that Americans are known for entrepreneurship innovation, maybe I've got to color outside the line sometime. And when is the right time? Because even Musashi would agree that there are times that the rules need to be broken. There are times in war. And when you're defending your loved ones, that goes out the window. But most of the time, you stick with the katas, the way that martial arts is taught. And so they've codified so many aspects of fighting and kendo and karate and Aikido and all these other forms that have grown out of that period of time. Yeah. I think that is a good thing for Americans to keep in mind. I think that there's a give and take. America is very individualistic, which is awesome. And it creates so many amazing things. But by being a little bit more conscious of the people we live around and trying to be a better steward of this nation that we all share, we inevitably would benefit. But I can't help but feel like that economic pressure, and I don't want to be too material first when it comes to. I've been reading some left-wing philosophy when it comes to economics. But I just. I can't help but think that that the pride in the middle class that the Japanese have really contributes to this feeling, that there's no shame in being a toilet cleaner. That's right. This is my job right now, and I'm going to do the best that I can at it, because that is what this job calls of me. Whereas the American ethic is constantly moving up. It's like, I have this job now and this job sucks, and I hate this job, but eventually one day I'll have a better job and I'll be rich. And the American philosophy is constantly pushing forward, climbing the ranks, trying to move up the ladder. Is Japanese culture in that way where someone might have a regular middle-class job and they constantly are trying to get out of it? Yeah, it's changing. And I think that the American dream is probably more alive and well in Asia and Japan than maybe even in this country. Because I think there's something beautiful about the American concept of pulling yourself up at your bootstraps. And you don't need support from the government. You can come from wherever you come from. That's the whole reason America was founded, right? My family came to America 400 years ago from Britain to escape a certain viewpoint of what religion was, a certain class, system. And they were successful here in Virginia and other places that they went. But I think over time, societies have to struggle with the evolution. And I think that Japan, which has been around much longer than the United States, certainly from a civilizational point of view, has kind of codified certain things. And I think increasingly, we are in danger of that in Japan as well, where there are a lot of rich people in Tokyo, especially. When you go to Tokyo now, I mean, it's a different. I didn't grow up in Tokyo. I grew up in Sapporo in the northern part, so very different. Nowadays, when I go to the parts of Tokyo I go to, there's really auspicious wealth on display. And there's the Maseratis and the Ferraris and non-Japanese cars that are meant to stick out, which you never would have seen when I was growing up, because that wouldn't have been kosher. It's not cool to rub it in someone's face. So even if you have money, you try to lower. And again, I think the Japanese idea of humility and the sense of fitting in with others versus the American, like, "Let me show off." And it's okay to show off because you know that I could be next. I'm going to get mine, and I'm going to be successful, and I'm going to keep on hustling and pushing, et cetera, which makes cities like New York so gritty and resilient and so desirable. But Japan is beginning that pattern as well. And again, I don't think you can make a generalization that all Japanese people are this way or all American people are this way. They're good and they're people in all cultures. But I do think collectively, the cultures value different things. And I do think that Japan has become more capitalistic over time, and it is valuing that capitalistic society of growing. But certainly in the political realm, politics continues to try to get Japanese to think of themselves collectively and not kind of only focus on rich or poor people, where I think sometimes in the US we focus on extremes and the people that are the loudest get the most airtime, versus in Japan, that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Yeah. I'm curious, if you have a middle-class job in Japan, could you live comfortably? Yeah. Maybe you own a small sandwich shop, or maybe you're just working as a waiter. Are you constantly living paycheck to paycheck, getting sick and not able to pay for it? The things that many Americans in that kind of wealth bracket would struggle with. Yeah. I think it's different in the sense that there are a lot more social nets there. I think that the healthcare system, very different, one of the best in the world, does not have all the. Here, you're one paycheck, or one kind of injury away from disaster in many ways, if you don't have a type of job that provides your healthcare for you. And I think that families take care of each other better, because if you're living together and you hit some hard time, people are going to collectively come together. Whereas here, one of the reasons it feels like there's an epidemic of homelessness sometimes is mental health crisis, people just. They're not there for each other in the community. I think that is more alive and well. I think that affordability, that term has probably been controversialized, it's become polarized. But that's a topic everywhere. I mean, Japan right now feels really cheap to Americans, because of the rate of the yen. And for us, the cost of living in New York versus Tokyo, you can't even compare the two. I can get a nice meal in Tokyo for five bucks. There's nothing I can get. Even McDonald's, I can't get five bucks anymore. Everything has taxes, everything is. And the stuff they're giving you is kind of like filler, it's not the real good stuff. So it's a lot easier and it's a lot more affordable. But as I said, it's still hard to buy land. It's still. It's still hard to buy something. Because again, it used to be back in the 1980s, the entire value of the land around Tokyo was worth the entire state of California or something crazy back during the bubble days. That has changed, but it's still prohibitively expensive. And the American system of mortgages and et cetera is not as prevalent in Japan. You've got to have cash. If you don't have the money to guarantee that plot of land, you're not getting that plot of land. And most plots of land are deeded to a family, and you pass it from generation to generation to generation. And that used to be the American way. But now it's the American way too. We're not seeing that as much. And you see a lot of the wealth coming in, certainly in Manhattan, to buy these huge things and to show off in different ways. So it is a different lifestyle, but I do think the middle class, just like in the US, struggle with things. But I think it's a little easier because of the social networks that are there. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I could see someone taking pride in having a middle class job when they feel like they're not an injury away from being just completely in poverty forever. And it also feels like the debt systems are probably a little bit different. Yeah. and that you can live comfortably maybe in one of these outside cities, town yeah and have a good job but nothing you know insanely you know ostentatious yeah i don't know it's uh it's just so different from the american ethic and like what the ideal of americanness is yeah yeah i'm curious uh just other random little lifestyle things i don't know if we talked about this before remind me if we did okay we can skip over it i'm obsessed with the floor bed maybe we talked about it briefly but yeah i've been trying to convince my wife she's not going for it she's not going for it how common is that so it's interesting um it used to be very common these days as i said a lot of things are trending uh i think most people may have a room because the way this works i mean it's a pretty efficient way of thinking about it right like if you only have a certain number of rooms so you don't get to have your own bedroom right so imagine that you have a house with three bedrooms and you got a family of like four or five then you gotta everybody's got to sleep together and rather than having the bed that take up the entire space why not just fold your bed up in the morning put it away and you can use that room as a playroom use it as a study room whatever else and so it's very efficient from that point of view um it is old school and again the reason they didn't have that is in many ways why would you use trees for that that doesn't seem like an efficient use of resources why not have like the the tommy mats that do the the work and they allow you to stay both warm and then people are closer together and then you can sleep together and then you can sleep together and then you can you know be more efficient with small spaces people in new york would feel very comfortable with this the number of people who sleep on beds and are on uh you know mattresses and everything else i mean it's a it's equivalent of the new air mattress right that are really comfortable i love photons and i think that the ryokans kind of mini japanese uh you know ins uh have these for tourists who find it fascinating and are really interested in it and it's good for your back sleeping on the floor right versus like on these really springy and you know all these things i'm sure your advertisers will be happy with me look at sleep mattress and the nfl players will tell me otherwise but you know i i do think there is something to that it is not common anymore but what's interesting is there is a subculture in japan of returning to the roots of japanese-ness and what makes us japanese what's unique and i think what's interesting is the futon which most americans call futon like they they they they bastardize it just like how do you say is it karaoke karaoke so karaoke is how you say it right so karaoke and futon which you're like you're like those are the same words it's not how you pronounce it it's like ikea is whatever it is in sweden and they sell futons like okay um i think what we now have learned from that is okay how do we get a bed that we can fold up but that's not actually what a futon is right a futon is actually you put it up in the closet when you're done with it there's no there's no furniture around it's just the mattress on top of the tatami mat it doesn't work when you're talking about a wood floor so i think a lot of americans misinterpret that and they're like oh i'll just put a futon on top of this you know it doesn't work if it's on a wood floor it only works when you've got the soft tatami and again most japanese houses in a modern japanese house they'll have one room that's traditional often that's the room where they would have a futon and if a guest comes that's where you would offer it um that's also where you might have your traditional um kind of shrines or your different pictures to loved ones who've gone and everything else it's the traditional room of the house and the rest of the house it looks just like a house that you and i are used to and maybe even more modern because japanese architecture tends to be more minimalist and much more kind of clean than certain um you know american style interesting now this is a controversial question okay because we touched on this collective feeling of what it means to be japanese and how japanese culture is like very trust-based and it's so ancient yeah and given the current state of american politics a lot of people would say well you know look at you know japan's immigration yep like there's no people coming in really like it's a very small amount of people coming from other countries that are immigrating and so as a result they've kept this one cultural thing yeah so alive whereas in america it is persisted on immigration like the whole essence of the country has been generations so i'm curious there's probably people listening like oh well japan's able to operate this way because there's no immigration in america because you have people coming from so many different countries and cultures it creates a new thing that's beautiful in its own way but you know social trust all of a sudden gets broken down and a lot of our institutions that are held up by cohesion about what it means to be american is now diluted because the idea of american-ness is so forged in the mind whereas the idea of japanese-ness is something that goes back so many generations yeah so i'm curious what is the japanese broadly speaking the idea of japanese-ness is so forged in the mind whereas the idea of japanese-ness is something that goes back so many generations yeah so i'm curious what is the japanese broadly speaking the idea of japanese-ness is something that goes back so many generations yeah so i'm curious what is the japanese broadly speaking the idea of japanese broadly speaking the idea of japanese-ness is something that goes back so many generations immigration and does that interface with the american ideal in any way well first of all i think to be an american what does that mean right so even if you're born in the country there's a certain understanding of like i'm making a choice to follow a certain creed and to be part of something bigger than myself and to be an american and that's what the statue of liberty and these different uh elements or symbolism of the red white and blue and the stars and all that stuff in japan there's not as much of that because it's like you're born japanese and it's just you either are or you're not right like in japan there is racism is alive and well but it's not black and white like it is here right where in america it's like there's a spectrum and so especially when you're from the south it goes from one end to the other and one is good and one is bad in japan it's like well you're either japanese or you're not japanese and if you're not japanese it doesn't make that big of a difference to me what do you do oh you're a basketball player that's awesome you're a jazz player awesome like you're just you know a random tourist you know they they don't see it in that way they just like okay you're not japanese if you're japanese as you said there's a class system there and so i think what it means to be japanese um is something that is not as uniformly spouted like there's not the same overt trappings of japanese-ness like people don't use the japanese flag as much as americans do and when you see the world cup and when you see the olympics it's kind of the only time i'm used to seeing people flying the japanese flag or painting themselves in different colors whereas americans like we do that on every one of them and i think it's kind of the only time i'm used to seeing fourth of july you know we celebrate constantly and i think that immigration does play into that where from the american point of view it's like okay you can be a hyphenated american you can be whatever you want to be um japanese american you can be irish american whatever in japan it's more difficult because there are not large pockets there are korean japanese there are groups including people from south asia indians and others that have become pretty prevalent in japan but it's pretty clear i mean i think we talked about this last time on the driver's license in japan in the u.s it says your hair color your eye color your hair color your eye color your eye color your eye color your height everything else in japan it doesn't say that because how ridiculous would that be everybody's hair color is like black everybody's eye color brown and the only people have blonde hair or blue eyes is people who are weirdos who like change that to stick out of that culture right they don't want to be associated with it and so i think that immigration is both necessary in japan because the shrinking population demographics are trending the same way they need people to run their convenience stores they need people to go out into the rural countryside and it's really only tokyo that's growing in japan the rest of japan is shrinking and it's really only tokyo that's growing in japan the rest of japan is shrinking and it's really only beautiful ancient farmhouses that are for sale that many americans are like oh that's awesome i want to retire there i want to live there and there's an attractiveness to it and i think as america goes through what we're currently going through with immigration where many americans are like whoa like i i agree with what you said about what it means to be american but we've gone too far here and we need to put a line in the sand on our 250th birthday about you're either here legally or you're not and you got their rules and like people have not been following those rules in japan the rules are more important than the rules of japan so i think it's really important to much easier to enforce because it's an island nation like if you're there illegally you're not going to stay for very long like there is no like oh they're living here and they're just going to hide before ice finds them like that's just not a thing in japan and also japan because of that collective sense of responsibility um has had waves of different levels and what's interesting is what people may not know about japan also is there are waves of immigrants that left japan at periods of time the reason there's a japanese american population here which is very significant particularly culturally in the role they played during world war ii and they were interned and the history of the civil rights movement and all that but there are many japanese uh in brazil as well the largest population of japanese outside of japan is actually in brazil right uh and i think those it's different when somebody from that population moves back to japan that's not seen as immigration you may be brazilian but you're ethnically japanese in the same way that israel has that same uh kind of philosophy where it's like well if you're jewish and you come back and you do aliyah that changes things as well so i think that is not something that americans understand because we don't have that right now we don't have that right now we don't have that right like there is no ethnically american right people who look like you and i may be the people that have been presidents for most of the time but we don't have a particular claim if you're not native american and original tribes that are here like we're all kind of equal in that sense of my family's canadian exactly people look at me and they're like yeah you're obviously american i'm like maybe especially with what's going on in canada these days that's a whole nother level of things elbows up right so all my cousins might actually be american yeah yeah it's an interesting thing just the american philosophy of what it means to be american yeah is that it's it's so unique to america because i think most other countries japan included has such an ancient history of what it means to be japanese or what it means to be you know chinese yeah you know even what it means to be french yep like there's like yes this has been going on for hundreds of years you either are you aren't yes and there's very much like you know japan specifically it's like ethnic based where it's like you know you look japanese you're born to japanese parents you've lived in japan your whole life you were japanese yeah people probably saw you and they were like you're not japanese yeah even though you've lived here for a long time you're yeah the majority of your life up until you were 18 yeah there you go you're not japanese but you're like but what am i yeah so and that's fascinating that's one of the reasons that i wrote this book right and you you joked about reading it but if you look at this book there is no way that mark has read this entire book but he's got great chat gpt and it's amazing what you can do i felt compelled to write this book partly for that exact reason because my entire life i grew up as the american like i told you my nickname was the american um because i grew up in a part of japan that didn't have that many foreigners now everybody's going to hokkaido because they got the best education and they got the best education and they got the best education and they got the best powder if you're a snowboard you've heard of niseko 1972 winter olympics my hometown sapporo they got a great beer lots of great things about my hometown but when i was growing up it was very clear that i was not japanese and i kind of took pride in being the American but I spoke Japanese and so you assume that I didn't speak Japanese because like what dumb white guy could speak Japanese and I would blow their minds whereas my Japanese American friends when they spoke Japanese they're like your Japanese is not very good and I'm like what are you talking about like his Japanese is better than mine and they're like yeah but you're a white guy and you you you're dumb you can't possibly get this he knows better he's ethnically Japanese it's in his blood and so that distinction about blood and what's what's interesting is what I do now so a lot of my job is dealing with political leaders and business leaders etc I have been embraced you know the term I use it's on the front cover here you know it's funny it looks a little bit like Times Square there's too much going on here the reason they put that picture there which is kind of obnoxious to an American point of view is they want to show that it's a white guy who wrote the book and what it says next to it is Dosanko American Dosanko is a term that is used only for people in Hokkaido you would never learn that word in a Japanese school because it's only used by people of my island right and it means a child of the northern island or of the way and it's so no one's ever used that term before Dosanko American Japanese American I'm not right like I'm not ethnically Japanese I'll tell you a funny story when I went to college and they asked me where I was from and they asked me to sign some of the stuff I didn't understand the concept of American ethnicity so I said I'm Asian American because I'm American I grew up in Asia so I must be Asian American I went to orientation I looked around and I was like oh it's like being in Japan this is great it didn't phase me until halfway through the thing a counselor came over and was like um we need to talk to you and I was like what did I do wrong and they're like you don't belong here and I was like what do you mean I'm from Japan they're like yeah and I'm Mickey Mouse and I'm like no no I'm really from Japan my parents are you know serving there and they're like this isn't for you this is for Asian Americans and I was like yeah I grew up in Asia and I'm American they're like but you are not Asian American and I was like what do you do with people from Japan they're like well they're welcome and I'm like and it was it was a very awkward thing but I didn't understand the concept so now I can laugh about it and there's a lot into that especially with Asian American hate and all the other stuff that's going on in the world and I have to be very careful I've learned a lot about what white privilege looks like and how I can be associated with that just by being being present but I think in Japan now I'm embraced people are so proud of myself calling myself a Dos Anko American people in my island have you know the governor himself who has the same birthday as me has nominated me to be the kind of a smile ambassador ambassador for the island to promote what Hokkaido is and to promote Hokkaido's all about which I'm proud to do and I do willingly and lovingly on my own I don't need any title to do that but they're so proud of someone like me that is now the president of Japan society that they want to associate that that's a different Japan than 40 years ago because when I was growing up I knew I was not Japanese and I would never be Japanese my brother incidentally was born in Sapporo he'll never be Japanese I mean unless he becomes good at sports and you know gets a citizenship but like that's just not the way it works in Japan but now people embrace me approaches and mannerisms and intentionality mimic Japanese themselves. And I sometimes find myself saying we, and it confuses a lot of people, including myself being like, what were you talking about? We as Americans or we as Japanese? Like, again, I know I'm not Japanese ethnically, and I know I'm not Japanese national, but I do feel that Hokkaido is my heartland. And I understand from where I come. And I also deeply appreciate how Japan shows up in the world. And that's why I'm doing what I'm doing, because I think there's an abundance that we can learn from that. And I also think there's a lot we can learn from America. There's a lot of bad stuff going on in the world, and nobody's perfect. And I find that anytime you get up on your soapbox, and as a preacher's son, I'm very good at doing that, you often are pointing things out. But when you point one finger at somebody, you've got four pointing back at yourself. And so I try to imbibe that and learn through that Japanese philosophy of kind of taking a humble beat and also learning that sometimes it's better to listen. But again, you're 100% right. Like a white guy walking into my Japanese classroom, like all I have to do is open my mouth and then things change. But up until that point, I can't change how I present. I think it's a really interesting and unique perspective to have on the world. And I think for me, growing up in America, but having had such amazing opportunities to travel the world, it has given me a different perspective on just how humans are. And the American idea of what it means to be American is purely an idea, because we're such a new country. You have these people that are like, okay, well, America is a white nation, because we're founded by white people. It's like, okay, well, whiteness, first off, what does that even mean? You know what I mean? Like over here, just became white, like, you know, 100 years ago. So it's like, what does it even mean to be whiteness? So it's like, okay, well, you have Native Americans here, but they're not American, but they are technically because they got reservations. Okay, fine. So it's white and indigenous. And then it's like, okay, well, slave trade. So you're like, all right, well, black people are also Americans. So you're like, all right. And then you're like, all right, Mexican-American war. You're like, okay, we got a bunch of territory. There's a bunch of Mexicans there. They're American now. So you're like, okay, black, Native American, da-da-da. Irish immigrants, you're like, all right, they're white now. So they're a part of it. So it's like, you can tell me like a Hawaiian person, they are one of the 50 states. They are ethnically Hawaiian. Many of them are Japanese. And overnight they just became American. So it's difficult for someone to tell me like America's white when it's like, well, there's a bunch of Japanese people in Hawaii that all of a sudden are American. So it's like this idea of trying to racialize what America is doesn't work in the way that it might in other places. Because the way America was founded on is so fundamentally different. I had such an interesting conversation when I was in Saudi Arabia with a guy who I asked him, I was like, where are you from? He's like, I'm from Jeddah. I'm like, okay, so you're born in Saudi Arabia. He's like, yes. I was like, have you ever lived anywhere else? He's like, no, I traveled to England once, but I've lived in Saudi Arabia my whole life. And I was like, oh, awesome. So as a Saudi person, he goes, I'm not Saudi. I was like, what? You've lived here your whole life. Like in America, if you're born in America, you're American. Like that's what it is. And he goes, that's not how we do it. I was like, so what are you? He's like, oh, I'm Jordanian. I was like, but- Did you ever live in Jordan? No. Are your parents from Jordan? He's like, well, my great grandparents are, but my parents were born in Saudi Arabia. I was born in Saudi Arabia, but I am Jordanian. I was like, what? Like the American brain can't comprehend how most other countries have a blood and soil relationship to what it means to be them. So oftentimes we try to, I think, you know, overlay these older ancient cultures onto the American ideal and it just doesn't work. And then it creates all these like racialized ideas of what Americanness is, which I think, hey, it's not that. Yeah. And I also think that the idea of America is incredibly powerful. And in some ways we do ourselves a disservice when we start focusing on the divisive things that kind of divide us from each other versus like actually what unifies us is this. Because I sometimes find it's a little bit like my parents are missionaries, right? A new convert to Christianity is like on fire for Christ. And as someone who's been a Christian for a long time, you're like, man, I wish I had that level of enthusiasm. Same with Americans, right? Like some of the most recent Americans, right? Some of the folks that I'm like, wow, like they're on fire for America. I wish I could feel that way about my country because I'm depressed right now. Like I just, America's place in the world feels like we're under assault and we're under attack. Like everybody wants to take, you know, it's like King of the Hill. It's like, okay, you're number one. Now we're going to bring you down and tell you everything that's wrong. And we're not going to celebrate what's great about America. And I think that's what's going on internally of this, you know, we're talking about the same thing, totally different eco chambers. And I think that looking at the world from an outside point of view, whether it's from Japan or from Canada, you see things about America that are so amazing and beautiful that Americans themselves may not actually see. I mean, I find that Americans who don't have passports and have not traveled the world, they just assume that things are always done this way. And I'm like, if you went to Japan and saw how our trains work and you saw how our toilets are and how our cell phones are, you would never call me a savage, right? Like you'd be like, yeah, you eat raw fish or whatever. And I'm like, now everybody loves raw fish. And like, sushi is what our kids are craving. And like, I can't afford to keep up with the trains anymore. So I just think that that openness and that curiosity, whether it's in Jeddah and Saudi Arabia or in Sapporo, Japan, like there's just so much out there that unites us that it's frustrating that we're focusing so much on the negatives these days. Right, exactly. I think that is what's beautiful about America is the idea. And it doesn't always live up to the goals of the ideal, but the idea itself is so noble that you can come here and be the best version of you. Like, that's a beautiful thing. And I always tell my friends that, you know, leery of like immigration, and of course, people should immigrate legally. But the people that are immigrating here legally are the most on fire. Talk to like the legal Cuban migrant to America. Because we're getting all the people that hated where they were at. We're getting people that are legally migrating from a socialist country. They're like, I don't like that. And so we're afraid of people importing their socialism. I'm like, no, no, the people we're getting are the ones that left that on purpose. Like I have friends that are leery of, I mean, I actually don't have friends. I see people on the internet that are leery of like, you know, Iranian migrants that came, you know, right around the time of the revolution. I'm like, no, no, no, you don't understand. They're like, oh, they're going to import radical Islam. I'm like, the people that left in 79 are the people that are the most against that. These are people that are identified as Zoroastrian most of the time. They're coming here to chase the American ideal. So to me, I'm like, if you're coming here and you're willing to leave your entire family and years and years, generations of culture to pursue the American ideal, and you do it the legal way, I'm like, hell yeah. Yeah. You're like, you are, you're buying into what the idea is just by the fact that you showed up. Yeah. So to me, I'm like, I'm, I'm always excited. Anytime I meet someone that's like, dude, I just got my green card, just got citizenship. Yeah. Cause those are the people that are the most hungry to get after. So I think that's ultimately the beautiful thing about America. But another thing that I was reading about with Japan, I recently did an episode on religion camp about Shintoism. And it's an interesting philosophy. I'm almost hesitant to call it a religion because it doesn't exactly the exact tenets of what I would perceive a religion to be. But what can you tell me about Shintoism and how it shapes Japanese culture. Yeah, I mean, look, what's so interesting about, let's just start with religion in general in Japan is, you know, I think that often religion, as you've just articulated, you got to pick one or the other. It's not a pick your own adventure. Whereas in Japan, that's absolutely what it is. And Shintoism is very much like an animanistic, almost like a Native American view and appreciation of the world around us. And that in everything, there is a God, right? So in this wood, there is a God, right? And there's some of the most sacred things in Japan are both the trees and also the torii and the shrines that are built from that. And at the same time, right living next to it is Buddhism. And so you're kind of, well, what are you, Buddhist or Shinto? And most Japanese would kind of not understand the question. They're like, yes. You know, which are you? Yes. Because you are either, you know, born in a Buddhist way and you go out in a Shinto way or vice versa. I always get it wrong. And I think what's interesting about that is there is such a beautiful harmony that exists between. But I think Shintoism is an indigenous. It's an indigenous, uniquely Japanese thing, right? Buddhism, you find in India, you find in China. Shinto, you can only find in Japan because it's rooted in the island of Japan itself. Because in that nature is where the gods come from. And from the ocean came the volcanoes, which came the trees, the mountains, fill in the blank. And I think that appreciation and when you see the ceremonies that are kicking off the new year or some of the major things that have happened, they're all built into traditions and the nature that it's around them. And, you know, kind of the cycles of life that are natural to any culture that are then codified into that philosophy. And I think you're right to call it a philosophy in that way, because if there's God everywhere, then there's not just one God. In some ways, you could incorporate Judaism and Christianity and Islam into Shinto in some ways, whereas those religions would kind of say, yeah, you can't do that. Like there's only one way, the truth and the light. And like Shintoism is not that. But I think that when you go to a Japanese Shinto shrine, most of the time they're around natural wonders as well. Right. So Ise Shrine, which is one of the most holy spots and where the different summits have taken place, it's built on these beautiful areas, whether it's the coastline or whether it's the rock formations, whatever else it is. And so it really makes you wonder. And again, oftentimes we look at Native Americans in this country and you're like, well, what do you mean the big sky and the big mountains and whatever? Like, you know, and we're like, well, you know, that's my land. Like, no, that's not your land. That's that is a God in and of itself. And I think. That philosophy is very much there. But I think that in Japan, religion is just a part of everyone's life. And it's kind of embedded as a philosophical understanding of being part of something collective. But you don't get to then impose it on someone else because of my philosophy of Shinto. You're not allowed to do that. Yes. Cutting down a tree or being disrespectful to pollute water may be against the tenants that are there. But it's different than kind of like, well, I'm going to take a sword and convert you as a crusader, because if you don't do this, you're going to end up here. And it's like, well, isn't that. Ultimately, God is going to be the judge of your life. And I'm simply a vessel of that. So I do think sometimes the philosophy that I've learned in Japan might be closer to my own understanding of my faith tradition than sometimes what I hear from people in the United States using a certain terminology to define themselves as this or that. Right. Yes. This idea of the kami. Yeah. This is this idea that there are many kamis, perhaps infinite kamis. Yes. Someone has to fact check that. Like, you know, God exists within the mountain, not Fuji is like that. Yes. And like the storm is a kami. And I actually I looked this up because I wasn't sure and I'm slightly forgetting it. But the term kamikaze. Yes. I was like, oh, did they think that these guys were kamis? Yeah. It's not exactly that. Can you tell me? Yeah. So kamikaze means divine wind, God's wind, kamikaze, wind, God. And it basically when there were Mongol invaders that were coming across the ships from the mainland of Asia to take over Japan. These winds blew the boats off course or these major storms. And the Japanese said that is a divine wind that prevented it. And so it was then used in the war to kind of say, well, this is going to be the thing that strikes our American adversaries down. He's like, you know, we don't have the missiles to take them out. So we're going to take these airplanes and just crash them into our aircraft carriers and everything else. Right. Yeah. It was kind of politicized. Yeah. Like there's an interesting just even from the brief research that I did that you have. Oh, there isn't a fixed number of kami. Oh. But tradition states there's eight million kami, meaning countless or innumerable. So infinite. Infinite. You got it. Yeah. OK. I'm on something. Yeah. But it's just this interesting idea that it like Shintoism was an ancient sort of tradition, a philosophy of sort of like being one with nature that then got politicized around Imperial Japan. And it kind of got utilized in order to, I guess, maybe fuel the spiritual essence of this war effort during World War II. Yeah. And then you have this idea that kamikaze, this sort of divine wind, God's wind, kamikaze, divine wind being used as a, you know, an actual like military operation. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm curious. We talked a little bit about Imperial Japan before we rolled. But this idea of Imperial Japan versus Japan today, I when I did the episode on Shintoism, someone had maybe maybe it was a different episode, but someone had commented the idea of Imperial Japan is very different and distinct from Japanese culture today. And then in America, I don't personally I didn't really know how it interfaced because in American society, like we don't really know how it interfaced. We kind of view like all of American history as our history. Yep. Mostly the good stuff. But like you look at like the Revolutionary War and you're like, those are Americans. Yeah. Even though it happened, you know, 1700s. Yeah. Whereas in Japan, you have the 40s, which is kind of a different period. Someone likened it to the Third Reich in Germany versus the German people today. Yeah. That it's distinct. Yeah. What can you say to Imperial Japan and the philosophy of Japanese people now when they look at that period in Japanese history? Yeah. You know, it's interesting because I think that that's kind of a way that Western history defines Japanese culture. Right. Because Japanese themselves do define their terms based on the emperor. So if it's about having an emperor, we're still living in an Imperial Japan. But that's not the way we're using it. Imperial in our minds usually means that you have an empire. And we today recognize the islands of Japan and actually some parts of Japan are under occupation by foreign forces. The Russians still have four islands that they have not given back since World War Two. And they're still negotiating over that in the same way that the Korean War is still ongoing. Right. I think that that definition of Imperial Japan is usually defined kind of from the 1890s to about the end of World War Two, because that's when Japan, the island nation, began to conquer other parts where the imperialist Europeans that had before that conquered parts of China and other parts were falling apart and Japan was beating them. Right. And whether it was World War One that led to the League of Nations, which led to Japanese being, you know, asked to take over or they volunteered to take over. And then, of course, leading to fascist and imperialist Imperial Japan that we talk about. But in Japanese, you would not refer to it as that because, again, Japan is a nation, but it's also a concept of something much bigger. And the emperor is the living embodiment. He's the head Shinto shrine. Right. He's a head Shinto priest and he's a living embodiment of the Japanese people and nation, which I think is different than like an elected president or like a king. Right. Because a king, how did he get appointed? Like he just was. And I think with the emperor, there's a sense that, well, you can trace the lineage, but it's the longest lineage of any human history that goes back to the sun god that led to the islands of Japan. Right. Like 200, whatever number there is. We should fact check that. I don't know how many numbers there are of descendants, but it's crazy the numbers. And we define Japanese history in these terms. But the terms are not the name of the emperor, because like, you know, in Roman times, you'd be like, OK, Caesar, this and Augustus, this in Japan, they pick terms. So the current generation we're living in is called Reiwa, which is basically beautiful harmony to represent the current empire. And so, you know, it's a very, very, very, very, before that, you had Heisei, which is peaceful generation. And before that, you had Showa. Right. And so those different periods are not defined by kind of when did Japan conquer this island or do this? It's more about, well, that's when the emperor was reigning. But in the modern context, it's not the emperor that's making the laws or determining. He's a symbol, just like the king of England is a king. The emperor of Japan serves in that way. But I do think that, you know, it haunts Japan. I think that even 80 years later, we're still trying to understand. And dissect what happened in that period of time, which may be unfair because there were a lot of horrible things that happened 200 years ago, 300 years ago that we don't talk about because essentially we're looking at the last world war and the losers, Germany and Japan, don't get to be part of the UN Security Council. There's a lot of ramifications, whereas the United States and China and the Europeans ended up on that other side of things. So I think it's a different world. What is the average Japanese student taught about World War II? Hmm. So it's a it's a really good point. So I did. My dissertation and totally could geek out on this for days, the way I look at 126 and that's pretty impressive. You know, 126 emperors in terms of you think about how many generations, like it goes all the way back to like 660 B.C. So starting with Emperor Jimmu. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, you know, a whole whole thing, like the period of time when Japan is talked about. So what what here's what here's how Japanese history usually goes. You have a textbook and you start with that period of time and you go from the Jomon's, the first recorded Japanese in there, and then you work your way through. They talk about World War II, but it's a very small area. What they really don't talk about is what happened before World War II. Right. It's kind of like Japan after the Meiji period was modernizing as a nation. It was growing. It became this, you know, power and then it got into a war with America. Bad things happen. And then we start talking about postwar. So the level they talk about it. So in my dissertation, I talked about empires and when they collapse, how do they remember their history? So in Russia, for example, people glorify the imperial period of Russian history. And in Turkey, for example, they glorify the art Ottoman period of time, because that was the zenith of Turkish power was when they were the caliphate. They ruled the Muslim world. So they glorified it in Japan and particularly Germany. They reject their history. They basically say the Third Reich does not represent us. And the Fuhrer and that was complete an abomination. If we had stuck to what it meant to be a German nation and we didn't try to conquer all of Europe, we might have been OK. Similar things are happening in Japan, but I wouldn't call it rejection more. It's just ignoring like it's not that they are disputing the history. They're not saying these bad things didn't happen, but they're like that doesn't need to be the focus. Let's focus on something else. And I think that's true. Victors write the history. And so the defeated people have to learn how things came out of it. And I think in many ways, Germans of today, when they look back to that period, they don't see themselves and what what Hitler was representing in terms of that racist Holocaust thing. And I think similar in Japan. But there is because the emperor and the line is uninterrupted. It wasn't like they were like, OK, we're going to go to war. We're going to go to war. And so one of the debates in U.S.-Japan relations was after the war, America occupied Japan for seven years. And Douglas MacArthur was the supreme leader. He controlled every aspect. He chose to leave the emperor because he said, if we take away the emperor, it could be chaos. Right. Something I wish we'd learned in Iraq when we got rid of Saddam Hussein as easily as we did. Something that, you know, we're learning throughout history. Constantly we go into places and we kind of colonize, we occupy. And then we learn, oh, wow, the system that was in place, even if it was in the same place. And so in the Japanese context, it was a choice that was made. And it was something that seemed to be right for the time. And certainly today, there's not an imperial system as we talked about. But I don't think that Japanese in many ways really relate to that period in the same way. Interesting. Now, the emperor's current role politically, is it how we would look at the king of England? Yes, very much so. It's very much ceremonial and on behalf of the people. So in the New Year's, the greeting, the only time that a public member can go into the imperial court, which is in the center of Tokyo, is then. And they all cheer for the New Year. Usually the emperor reads a poem of some sort. He goes on diplomatic missions, a 300 year history between this and that. I think this year is a 400 year history between the Netherlands and Japan, constantly being part of that imperial family in the conversation. You know, at the UN, oftentimes the head of state, prime minister versus president, or head of nation. So the emperor never comes to the United Nations, because that's a policy shot. But if the emperor were to come on an official visit to the United States, that would trump whoever the prime minister is, because ultimately that is the most important thing. And we haven't had an imperial visit by the current emperor. We've seen the emperor go to England because he went to school in Oxford. And he's actually a very learned scholar of water, believe it or not. And so I think he has a PhD. I need to fact check that as well. But he went to a really great school. And so when he did his first visit as emperor, he went to England and had an amazing state visit that we rarely see. I mean, in our parlance, we talk about state visits, but technically speaking, a state visit is only between the head of a nation, which is emperor. So he's very much used in the same way that the royal family is in England. Oh, that's so interesting. I wonder what his experience at Oxford was like. I know. I know. Was he in class with just like other kids? And he's like, I'm technically the emperor. The thing is, like, this happens a lot, right? There are quite a few, you know, royal family members that are probably in the United States right now from all sorts of places, whether European or in the Middle East. And so it is fascinating because remember, the emperor is considered God. So there are these great stories. So Japan society was founded in 1907, but it was refounded in 1952 because we had that bad period between Pearl Harbor in 1952. And the Rockefeller families were very involved. And the Rockefellers were very close friends with the imperial family and the emperor's father. And the Rockefeller's were very close friends with the imperial family. And the Rockefeller came to the United States and actually stayed with the Rockefellers and would play tennis with them, which is a huge controversy because if he's God, he must be the best ever, right? But obviously, he's a human being. And so they played tennis. And so the stories I've heard from that family of the conversations, and that would be scandalous in Japan to acknowledge that, even though you're like, OK, well, clearly, he's a human being, right? He made a mistake. Yes. It's like, what do you mean he didn't serve every single time, right? He's not like the champion of this. So, you know, they were like, well, he's a human being. They would tell stories where they couldn't let anyone watch those matches. And it was only between, you know, the current, the Senator Rockefeller and the emperor who played those matches with each other. And only they could see, like, no one could ever see him fault. No one could ever see him do anything that wasn't that. So imagine the pressure that must feel. So I can't imagine what growing up as that. I mean, the good news is I think people in England or America probably couldn't tell a difference and wouldn't even know. And unless you said, oh, that's the heir apparent, that's like the prince, then like no one would know any difference. That guy, like, really? Like, he seems just like a geek. Over there, you know, whatever. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I've mentioned to you before, like the massacre of Nanjing. Yeah. And it seems like it's just sort of ignored. And, you know, in some places in official capacity, like acknowledge, but never apologize for. And Americans, I think we have a similar relationship probably with slavery. Yes. I mean, that's right. There's probably a bunch more if you want to consider like regime chains and coup d'etats that America has been involved with. But I think slavery is probably the most poignant example because a lot of Americans are like, yeah, we acknowledge it. Yeah, it happened. It happened. But we don't need to focus on that. That doesn't need to be the only thing. And Americans, I think, generally are like, yeah, George Washington was a great guy. And he had some slaves. And like, it's kind of hush hush. Yes. It's like, why does this need to be the focus? Exactly right. And it's become like a big political point of contention where it's like, do we need to teach this in school as the primary sort of, you know, character trait of this person? Or is it a sort of tertiary thing that we can kind of ignore a little bit? Yeah. And when it comes to like, you know, statecraft and nation building, these are just. These are decisions that people have to make. Is this something that we can kind of conveniently ignore? Is this something that we need to confront? I think in America, we probably have to confront it because the nature of how our nation was literally crafted and the fact that there's so many descendants of enslaved people still living here, where other countries probably have a little easier time being like, ah, we don't need to get into all that. Well, and also, it's kind of like, when does history stop? So if World War II is when history stopped, then yeah, Japan's on the wrong side of that history. And certainly if I'm Chinese or Korean, I have a lot of grievances. But there are many other people, people in Taiwan, people in Southeast Asia and other parts that have a very different memory of that because they had recently been colonized by European powers. They had other problems. And so, of course, I'm not at all trying to whitewash history. I think it's important that Japanese know their own history so that when they travel the world and when they go to Nanking and they go to that museum, they understand like the trauma, the tragedy of that absolute massacre that took place. At the same time, understand the context, just like with slavery. And so understanding what that looks like and why today as a white man, there are levels and history that's there, even though these are things that happened 150 years ago during the Civil War or even 50 years ago for civil rights, it still has a shadow. Like I talked about in my dissertation, I called it shadows of memories because I think those memories linger. And every people tells a story, a national founding and a myth. And in some ways, I think some of the things that happened in World War II, particularly to China and Korea, have led to the founding narrative of the Chinese. The Chinese Communist Party, that was the brave fighters that did this versus Chiang Kai-shek, who is actually the one who fought in many ways against the Japanese. They've gone on to a different history in Taiwan and they have totally different memories of that period of time. So Japanese, in my mind, should just it's not about embracing it. It's simply acknowledge it, because if you ignore it, it's going to fester and someone else is going to put it in your face. But I think there is a feeling where at some point in time you say, look, we've acknowledged we've apologized. How much more do we have to do? Like the Korea Japan relations have never been better looking at them. Today, but there have been moments in time where political leaders have kind of reached into the nationalist toolbox and pulled out these things that made everyone angry at Japan during the World Cup or people were rioting, etc. Right now, we're going through another moment where China is absolutely upset at the current prime minister and is really going after her. It's really working in her favor. You can see by the election results what that means. And so I think that that history is never fully dead. It's always alive. But is it about the facts of the history and what actually happened, or is it about your interpretation of it? And as a political. Leader manipulation of that history. Yeah, I guess someone that, you know, myself personally, I'm very fascinated by history and I love reading history. One thing that I always come away with is that, you know, people say history is written by the victors. Of course, that is true, but it just exists in different perspectives, depending on what side you're on or even if you're involved at all. Yeah. So, like, you know, we look at Pearl Harbor in America and we as Americans might have a very specific image of that, but then you could look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan and they probably have their own specific imprint. Yeah. And it's like, all right, what actually happened here? Well, your perspective and your worldview and the culture that you belong to is going to massively shape that. And, you know, it doesn't necessarily make it, like, from good to bad, but it maybe changes the spectrum and the shade in which you look at something. Yeah. And I don't know if there's a way to fix that. I don't think there is such a thing as, like, objective history. It's like it all is kind of blurred by the perspective that you're looking at. Yeah. So, in that regard, I'm like, I have. It's somewhat of an aversion to certainty. Yes. Maybe when people are like, this is what happened and this is bad. Yeah. I'm like, I can agree it's bad, but, like, the level, the amount of intensity, it's going to depend on what side you were on and how it immediately affected your family. Yeah. I mean, one thing you probably can appreciate this as well, when you study history, studying it in a different language, because language has a huge, I mean, there's so many things embedded when you learn a language. So, one of the things Japan Society does best is teach Japanese language. We teach more Japanese language students here. So, we teach more Japanese language students here than anywhere outside of Japan and when you're learning Japanese and you learn Japanese history through the Japanese language, there are things that you've never thought of before that you're like, whoa, like, that hit me a different way, because even the way you phrase it, right, and all the stuff that you've learned about Japanese history, there are things that you've never thought of before that you're like, whoa, like, that hit me a different way. stuff you just said can be embedded inside of a language and you learn culture through that. And I think what you do in terms of comedy is the ultimate form of it, right? Like it's really hard to get a laugh in Japan. Like I would, I'd be fascinated. Like, so I used to have to translate and the hardest thing for me to translate was a joke because the joke is so tied to everyone having a similar understanding of something and understanding what that punchline is. Right. And so Japanese humor tends to be more linguistically based, like making word plays and things that just are not all that funny in English. And you're like, why is that funny? It sounds the same, but that's what's so funny about it. Right. And so I think that there's those different levels. And again, like history is about like facts and about, well, this is what happened here and this is what happened then. But then you layer on that, the cultural understanding. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have comedy, which is like, okay, let me tell a story that will amuse and entertain you. How would I do that if I was doing this in a different language? And how would I do that? It's just a different world. So I have just like a huge level of respect. I don't know how you do it when you go to Saudi Arabia and you try to tell those jokes. Like it totally works. Fortunately that there's a selection bias that happens with people that come to the shows are like, we like American comedy. I've never entertained an audience in a different country in that language. So, but I have friends that do multilingual linguistic comedy. And it's interesting because they always say the same thing that I'm like, oh, well you just translate your jokes. And they go, no. I have my Brazilian set. Like I was talking about my buddy Rafi Bastos and he was like, I do my Brazilian jokes and then I do my American jokes. And they're fundamentally different. Like, even outside of wordplay, just like the things that they would find funny culturally are so different. Like I've always remember like being a kid reading joke books and you get an old joke book and it'd be a whole section on Polish jokes. Yeah. And I remember as a kid being like, what, like, why is this funny? Yeah. Cause they're doing dumb blonde jokes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it was created in a time where Polish people were migrants and then the stereotype was that they were dumb. And so it was Polish. But I was like, I literally asked my parents, I was like, why is it Polish? Yeah. I had, it made no sense to me because I had no, relationship with Polish people in that way. The stereotype didn't exist anymore. So it all made no sense, which is why comedy is an interesting art form because it is so temporal. Yes. It is so culturally confined and then temporally confined. Yes. Like even the greatest comedians with all due respect to the legends, most don't really hold up. Specifically in cultural commentary, sometimes like wordplay stuff. Like you can listen to like an old Borscht Bell guy. Oh, I get the misdirection. Yeah. But like Lenny Bruce, like I listen to Lenny Bruce now and obviously I have respect for an OG, I'm like, oh, I don't really. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't hit me in the same way because I just like, he's talking about like, oh yeah, you can't say shit. And I'm like, yeah, you can. Yeah. I do it all the time. Yeah. It doesn't have the same resonance because from such a different time and comedy just ages so quickly. Yeah. I mean, it's funny you mentioned that because literally when I wrote my book, I did not think I'd be writing two separate books. Right. And it's interesting when you were talking about how Americans experienced Japan, the title of the book in for Japanese is Alliance at a Crossroads, right? Has this kind of like dark we're at a crossroads, which direction we're going to go. My English version of the book is beyond the Gen Con and Gen Con is an entranceway. It's, it's where, when you walk into a Japanese house, you're, you're, you're, you're directed to see what they want you to see. You know, Americans don't have Gen Cons. The best translation for a Gen Con is probably threshold or lobby. So when you walk into an American house, you almost, you walk right in, like you don't take your shoes off. You go straight in Japan, you stop, you take your shoes off, you put on the slippers, they transition, they open the door. You then are welcomed into a certain, and they have a room, they have a tea room. Like you never get to see the whole place. Whereas most American houses are designed where you walk in and you're there. Exactly. And whatever, whatever your kids have been doing that day, whatever, like if you don't clean up your house, you're in trouble. Whereas in Japan, it's like, no, we can contain you. We can keep you in the box. Right. And so that concept of the Gen Con is when I find very useful because as an American who grew up in Japan, in many ways, I've gone beyond the Gen Con. I couldn't help, but do that. I spent 17 years of my life growing up there. And as an outsider, I've ultimately become the ultimate insider where now I'm the guy that you know, political leaders, the ambassador and help try to translate culture, society and everything else. And so I think in many ways, you know, I wrote the English book because I wanted, you know, people kept on asking me like, what book should I read about Japan? And I gave all sorts of advice, Embracing Defeat, a long, great history book, Bending Adversity. But those are books from like at least 30 years ago. And to your point about comedy, like you've got to update it. So I wrote this book through my own prism and it's hard to crystallize U.S.-Japan relations. Usually they're defined as a president and a prime minister. That relationship, defines U.S.-Japan relations. I tried to use my own life to make that experience. And I used the lessons learned, what we were talking about with Musashi going back to say, okay, what are some of the lessons I've learned and some of the things that as an American who grew up in Japan that resonates today? Because I think there's a reason we're going through this cultural moment. There's a reason that Japanese culture resonates so much. And as I was doing that, and then I tried to translate, I was like, Japanese people don't need to learn about their own history. They don't need to learn about green tea ceremonies. But what they do need to know is how they are seen in the world. How do Americans think about their culture? And how do Americans think about Japan? And so this book is very much that. And it really does address the questions of like, could Japan do a better job and could soft power have a different role? It's never going to be a military power again. It's just not in that space. And you know, I thought the thing I'd get criticized the most for in this book, Alliance at a Crossroad, was my critique of political leaders and the way I've seen certain things play out. No one has criticized me on that. You know what the biggest criticism I received is? You have too high view of Japanese. You think that we can actually do some of the things you're suggesting. And you know, as a father, I'm like, I guess that's a pretty fair thing to say. Like, my son one day may come to me and be like, Dad, you had such high standards. I never quite reached that. I'll be like, I love you no matter what, son. But if I had low expectations, you're going to meet him. So why, of course, would I have high expectations? Again, I think Japanese have too high expectations of Americans right now. Americans are not interested in leading the world. We're not interested in leading the world. We don't want to be responsible for being the policemen around the world. I don't want to take care of what's happening over there, right? Like, I'm okay with focusing on this. And what happens in Ukraine and what happens in Taiwan? Your problem. And guess what? Japan's close to Taiwan. That's your big problem. And China, you've dealt with them for a long time. You're up. Take care of them. You pay for your own thing. Take care of it. And I think Japanese are really confused by that. They don't understand the transactionalism they're seeing out of Washington and Americans. And I'm trying to explain that. But on the other hand, they have agency. They're the largest investors in this country. People love Japanese culture. People are practicing martial arts or doing all these things. Why aren't they being more engaged? If they're in America, do things the American way, right? You can do things the Japanese way. But if you're going to be politically engaged, many Asian Americans are absolutely using their voice and their power in a way I don't see the Japanese doing. And certainly Japanese companies want nothing to do with and they take a huge step back when things are happening. Every American company is taking a stand on this or that. Japanese companies are like, we can't do anything. It's political. You cannot do it. Well, guess what? As a corporate citizen, you can't do anything. You have to take a stand sometimes. So my advice in there is not to be political. It's to understand the moment we live in and to address that. And so the criticism that's come at me is like, yeah, you have too high expectations. You hold us. You think we actually have agency and we just don't. We are an island nation that can't handle when there are divine winds or there's earthquakes. We don't have agency and we just live in the world we live in. And I just fundamentally think they could do better. Yeah, it depends on how you call it. But yeah, I mean, there's kind of modernization reconstruction from 1952 until the Tokyo Olympics. I mean, I think it actually goes deeper than that. You know, I don't think that there have been moments in history. One of the things I focus on is there are these moments where these outside forces, one of them is the kamikaze, the divine winds that protected Japan from Mongol invasion. Right. Another time was during World War Two when America defeated Japan. Another time was when the black ships of Commodore Perry showed up to open the Tokugawa Pier and in the Edo period. To Meiji period, because on its own, Japan was not ready to open up to the world. And these Europeans were coming in and trading and forcing them to do it with these ships. It was the Americans that came in with big guns and said, you got to do it for everyone. It's got to be fair for everyone. Give us the same deal you're giving the Dutch. Give the same deal you're giving the Portuguese. And that led to it. That's what the Shogun movie series is all about as well. That period of time. And then another one was 311, the big disaster and kind of earthquake and tsunami and nuclear disaster. Like it takes those major moments to live. Japan first, but Japanese first. There's a party in Japan. that is currently vying, that is on the extreme nationalist end, that wants to make Japan only for Japanese. And so someone like me would not be considered part of that. People that have spent generations living there from the Korean or Indian other origin would not be considered part of it. Now, in some ways, that might be national, you know, nationalism in a normal sense. But I think what Trump has done in his second term is very different because Japanese like predictability. They like stability. And so actually, in some ways, as a political scientist, what Trump is doing is imminently predictable. We know exactly what he's going to do. He tells you what he's going to do. I want Greenland. I'm not backing off. I want it. Give it to me. One way or the other, I'm going to come back to this over and over again. I know that economic tariffs may not be the flavor of the day among economists, but guess what? It's what I got and I'm going to use it. Liberation Day, we go after you. Economists, you know, in some ways were wrong, right? It didn't destroy the entire economy. It's working in some ways. And I would predict that whoever the next president is, Republican or Democrat, is going to live with that. And I think that's going to be the legacy because it's hard to wean yourself off of free money when you're putting tariffs. But the world that grew out of after World War II, the post-war America that really became the leader and created the United Nations and led the free and open system is now changing. And it's becoming more inward focus. We're fighting among ourselves more than we're fighting enemies abroad. We're our own worst enemies in some ways. And so I think for Japanese, they look at this and they're worried because their ultimate security rests on our health as a nation. And so if America is going through a crisis internally and we're fighting ourselves in Minneapolis and all the other places we see around this country, Japanese are worried because they're not able yet to protect themselves. If America is distracted and China decides it's going to take Taiwan, Japan's next. I mean, if the world we live in is a sphere of influence where America is saying America first means we are going to take care of the Western hemisphere, China can have Asia and Russia can have Europe, that's a big problem for Japan. Japan's always lived in a bad neighborhood and it's always dealt with a Chinese aggressor. And it's always dealt with China as not an equal. Japanese culture in many ways has a lot of connections to China, but it also is in many ways in opposition to China. And so I think that Japanese are worried about the state of the world and they would like to see America first. They would like to see America being the global leader because the alternative is unthinkable from a Japanese point of view because the alternative is not Japan leading the world. And the question is, what's the alternative that's not China or America? And is there a middle power strategy the way that the Canadian prime minister posited at Davos? It feels like that's premature. I'm interested in seeing what Canadians do about this. I think no one likes being picked on. They don't like being bullied. So they're going to rally. But economic reality catches up at some point in time. And at some point, you're like, OK, we got to appease the bigger power here and we got to work around great power politics. That's been human history from the very beginning of time. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Japan sees America as this great ally, that they are specifically where they're positioned geographically. You know, if it's, you know, China versus America, they're taking America because of obviously, you know, the history between Japan and China and the more unstable America is. And if America is like, yeah, you're on your own now. That's a massive threat to the Japanese way of life. That's right. So I could see them in that moment being like, what what do we do? Where do we go? Is there a contingent of people in Japan that are pro Trump? Like, is that yeah. Do you see like MAGA hats? Like, is that a thing that's come up? So it's not as extreme as we've seen in certain European places where right wing populist, particularly in Hungary and others have really adopted it. You know, I would say that by and large, the media in Japan tends to be pretty critical of Trump a little bit like the American liberal media has been particularly in the city in New York, right? But I don't think there's been a movement as that spawned the group I was referring or other before Japanese first the Sun seto. They they mimic Trump, the guy that runs that party was a YouTuber and he knows how to use social media very effectively. He has a lot of those Trumpian qualities of a populist and nationalist. But because the LDP, the ruling party is so successful at kind of staking out a middle position and being a big tent party, it's been able to avoid that. And the question has been Takaichi Son, the current prime minister, the first female prime minister we've ever seen in Japan, is a protege of Prime Minister Abe. And Prime Minister Abe knew how to get along with Trump better than anyone. And so there's a in polite company in Japanese, they will say some pretty direct things about President Trump. But in English, you're never going to hear nasty stuff. I mean, Japan is the most proper, polite society in the world. And even as a ugly barbarian, you and I can go in and stomp around in the the stone rooms and do everything wrong and destroy the tea ceremony. They're probably not going to scold us. They're going to give us looks and they're going to do very subtle things that let you know that you're not there. But if you're not in tune with it, doesn't matter. And so when Trump visited Takaichi for the first time within a week of her prime ministership, you know, it was a love fest like I've never seen. I mean, everywhere in Tokyo when I was there was the red, white and blue. The Tokyo Tower, the TV tower, the buildings were all lit up in red, white and blue. The emperor and Trump met. Takaichi gave Trump a bunch of things from the late Prime Minister Abe. And so that personal relationship seems to be there. We're going to see shortly in March a visit between the prime minister and the president in Washington. And we're gonna see how that goes. Right. And that's going to happen going back to Otani, the World Baseball Classic at the same time. So in some ways, the win-win for all of us is that we're going to see how that goes. Right. So in some ways, the win-win for all of us is a great match between the U.S. and Japan. But ultimately, both sides are going to rally for their team. But I think we're living in a really moment of change and partly because everyone doesn't know where to look anymore for leaders. Is it Trump still the leader of the free world or does he not want that mantle anymore? He only cares about America. And America first means he doesn't care about the rest of the world. And so I think Japanese are beginning to cope with that reality and say, OK, we got to be strong on our own. We got to start increasing our defense budget, which is a big thing. And I think that's already done. And they got to start finding ways of allying themselves with Korea or Australia or India, like-minded countries to deal with China that is so much bigger and more powerful in many ways than Japan will ever be. What an interesting position to be in. Yeah. There's a great book. I talk about it all the time on the show. Prisoners of Geography. Yes. By Tim Marshall. Yes, yes, yes. I think it's fantastic. Yes. I try to hedge and not call myself like a geographical determinist, but it just is such a. Yeah. It is such a. It's such the case that Japan's geographical sort of positioning in the East puts them in a very precarious political position. And that their size, the size of their military, they're forced to make compromises and kind of choose. America doesn't have to choose in the same way. China doesn't have to choose. But Japan does, and most other countries do. Basically, any country without nuclear capabilities has to. And it creates such an interesting paradigm where I don't know if Americans are always sympathetic to that. Yeah. Because even in America, obviously, there's so much discourse of like, yeah, we need to be America first and take care of our people. But then at the same time, it feels like those same people sometimes say, but we also should be the global leaders. Yes. And it's like, well, you can't really do both. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're going to do these massive funding campaigns to go help a nation, that's going to take it out of the American coffers. Yeah. So we kind of got to choose a little. Yeah. And it seems like the American people have chosen with their vote, at least in the last election, about how they feel about America. And I think that's the thing that's been taking priority over. American citizens taking priority over citizens and being a global leader. But at least for me, I never put myself in the position of someone in Japan. Yeah. Or someone in Cuba, right? I wonder if Cuba's almost in a similar but different position, specifically during the Cuban Missile Crisis. You have this small island directly next to this massive empire. There's already been so many regime changes. And now the Cuban politicians, Fidel specifically, after Batista is like, all right, well, I got to choose. It seems like America is pretty hostile towards us. So we're going to go with the Soviets. Yep. And they just kind of picked. Yep. And obviously, communism is built into that, et cetera. But it's an interesting moment where they were on Earth's geography. They had to kind of choose a side. Yeah. And Americans, at least for me, I don't ever consider what the citizen over in some random island nation has to deal with. Yeah. No, I think you're exactly right. Continental powers generally have an abundance of natural resources. And they don't have to think in those terms. Whereas an island nation, particularly an island like Japan that is completely volcanic and does not have many natural resources, the greatest resource they have are their people and their seas, where they have abundance of seaweed and fish. Whereas America, it's like we've got oil and gas popping up wherever we don't know and with fracking and everything else. So I think there's a totally different viewpoint. And you're right. I mean, when you're as big as America, you don't have to think about somebody else. But I think that when you are Japanese, you grow up with an appreciation from a young age, as we talked about, of looking at someone else and to think about putting yourself in their shoes. I mean, the concept of omotenashi, Japanese hospitality, I write in the book about geopolitical omotenashi, which is very similar to what we're talking about, like geographic determinism, realism, as we would say, an international relations theory. You always have to anticipate the need, not just because you're being nice, but because it's the best thing to do. Because if I understand the American mentality, the Chinese mentality, then I can anticipate what your moves are going to be. Whereas if I'm American, and I'm not really thinking about it, I'm not really thinking about it, I'm thinking about anybody but myself, we do stuff. And then their reaction is like, well, how did that happen? Like, what do you mean, like, they didn't like that? What? I wasn't trying to be offensive. I just walked into the place and threw the table up in there and had a, you know, good old weather Western, you know, American, you know, Cowboy Fest. And so I think it is very different. And you can see that action. And sometimes in the case of world wars that America has won, it works really well in our favor when we become single minded and determined in our focus, but it takes a really hard, nasty approach, like what happened with Pearl Harbor hadn't Pearl Harbor not happened, would America have joined the war in the way we had, it would have been hard to mobilize everyone, right? Just like it was really hard to get Americans behind Vietnam or behind any of the wars we've had, since then that was such an easy and egregious attack that came out of nowhere from an american perspective whereas from a japanese perspective you guys had been trying to keep us from getting natural resources in southeast asia you were preventing our empire from spreading so we had no choice but to strike first and i think americans are like that's a crazy way of thinking about things like we didn't attack you and you attacked us like well game on right and i think that's something that japan has definitely learned from in its history and then even on the economic front i mean we i think we spoke last time just about what a powerhouse japan has become from you know considering just the population the size of the island and just how much gdp the amount of corporations exist multinational yes like it's sort of shocking when you think of like car companies tech companies chip companies i mean clothing it's like just so massive but something i never considered that you touched on a little earlier was how does a japanese company interface with american politics yes and obviously there's the economic side but then there's like a lot of the economic side of it and then there's like a lot of the economic side of it and then there's like a lot of the economic side of it and then there's like a lot of the economic side of it and then there's like a lot of the economic side of it and then there's a lot of the economic side of it and then there's like a lot of the economic side of it and like the social side like i couldn't even imagine if i had a company that was in japan yeah and there's some type of outbreak where protesters and the police are battling against each other yeah and every other company in japan is taking a stand and some are on one side some of the some around the other if i i have no idea yeah how do i yeah i don't even reconcile that no because the police are good yeah but wait the protesters had a point yeah like what like how do you even wrap your mind around yeah and have you had to consult for japanese companies to be like hey this one you sit out yep hey this one you should make a public statement as a company yeah and how do they respond to that so look japan society is non-partisan non-political so i i never uh am coaching them uh to deal with the political stuff that lobbyists and others have to do but certainly they are asking me to be a cultural translator for them and that's kind of been my role throughout my life take the best example that the last time we met we probably didn't talk about but now is a big deal nippon steel right it bought u.s steel like literally like the steelers like superman like man of steel like that is like iconic company and they they basically were told by the president united states president biden you can't do it like it's national security you're not going to do it and nippon steel didn't take that one on the chin and just leave it actually doubled down it got lobbyists it got lawyers it got involved it got engaged in the american system and it got everyone in pennsylvania excited about the investment it was going to make it made every politician want to come on their side and by the time a new president came in president trump came in they found a way to negotiate now we're still we don't know exactly what the golden share means and president trump says they can't do anything without my approval like but what i'm saying is that nippon steel in the past the most traditional of all japanese companies found a way to do something i've never seen it sued the president of the united states and it forced the u.s to change because it was the right thing for the u.s in terms of the amount of investment now in full disclosure japan society is honoring nippon steel at our annual dinner this year japan society is honoring nippon steel at our annual dinner this year so i'm a little biased here but i was really impressed because when i saw the original way in which this played out i was like wow this is going to be a disaster a pr disaster for u.s japan relations i'm going to be spending all my time trying to explain just like in the 1980s how toyota is you know not bad and people are bashing their cars in and you know rockefeller center and all this other stuff so we've come a long way but we're still not there yet and i think japanese companies as i write about in the book need to take a stand on certain things like i can't necessarily recommend japanese companies to do something like that because they're not companies getting involved in domestic politics but the american political system is pretty clear it's a pay-to-play system and if you're going to create a pack like toyota has done and all of their local dealers are involved in kind of the types of regulatory environment that help them like why would you not get engaged that's not a republican democrat thing that's just like being an american and not being an american or being engaged or not being engaged all of us as citizens have certain rights and certain responsibilities and corporations have similar areas and many of these japanese companies that are based out of japan have become global companies they hire more americans than they do japanese to make a toyota car these days look at every single sporting event right you're going to see the toyota center like look at the super bowl look at the you know olympics you're going to see that everywhere nowadays toyota doesn't necessarily conjure up the old stuffy japanese mentality the 1980s of the show it actually represents something new with hybrid cars and lexus and everything else that's there have you ever heard of a guy named claude rapai i don't think so it's a french guy okay he was a brand consultant a ton of multinational companies that basically he he wrote a book called the culture codes and he kind of would basically consult for these companies to tell them how to enter different markets and he would basically do a a comprehensive brief on the culture and what it means to be japanese or american or mexican or saudi and they he would really understand it so that different companies could enter into the markets and it just made me think it just you know like uh he would come up with like branding campaigns and pitches and one of them maybe i mentioned this to you before about japan this is a separate one but uh about like the jeep in america yeah yeah and that he said like the jeep is not a car it's a horse like make it feel like a horse yeah like call it a wrangler like this is something you need to control like it's american power it's based on the military like this is what it means to sell to americans like how do you market the jeep yeah and then he would do this in japan with like coffee yep and introduces coffee into the japanese market to say like the japanese people don't drink coffee they yes so how do we sort of assimilate them to this idea of coffee yeah he had this whole campaign where he created like a character almost like an anime then then started selling candy that was coffee flavored to create like this taste for coffee yep and it's just an interesting thing when it comes to companies trying to enter into global markets you know how does toyota feel about you know this protest yeah you know this political agenda to make this type of uh you know like push yeah just any any of them whether it's gay rights you know any type of justice campaign how does a company yeah deal with that and it's it just creates so many interesting questions that americans again we don't really think about yeah because for us it's like yeah i feel like we just push our stuff out we're like yeah just buy it yeah yeah but other countries specifically japan japan is so interesting because it is such an outsized power yeah that militarily is confined yes like i almost wonder if japan's relationship with germany in world war ii is kind of a predecessor to that where they saw this moment in you know european chaos that they could utilize this force to create an ally so that they could continue their imperial mission and it's not the exact same but in this modern paradigm they're teaming up with the americans in order to you know sort of achieve their economic mission and they're constantly because they produce so much are sort of forced to choose up do you think the i mean that's a crazy example yeah you don't have to you don't have to entertain me yeah yeah if you're in our water but i mean there's so much there it's hard to even unpack it we should do a whole nother episode on this right there's just so much there but i think you're right i mean starting with the first point japanese are really bad at marketing themselves and telling their own story i think the french are the opposite they're really good at telling their story and they're really good at kind of being imperialist with their culture right they've not been very successful militarily right like since napoleon uh and the japanese in some ways could appreciate that i do think there is something to what you're saying which is that i think that japan reads the room there's a word in japanese kuki or yomu um read the air very well uh and certainly you know there was a kind of a alliance of convenience with the axis powers and it was the wrong choice for them because they thought they could keep the americans out and the americans were content and being out but they were not okay with japanese imperialism in in its form coming down too close to the philippines getting too far into the oil and resources they need to to fund their engine that's the problem with imperialism always fails at some point because trying to subjugate people and you know again going back to the analogy of the companies um i think americans sometimes underestimate how the brand of america is going to change and how the brand of america is going to change i think there are a lot of people who think that the brand of america has been so strong since in the world war ii where what coca-cola represents to people what levi's represent what hollywood movies represent is modernization and achieving success is what many people associate with that from you know saudi arabia to japan uh and nowadays that may not be the case anymore and maybe the brand of the u.s is is is not what it used to be and actually i would argue that brand of japan all the surveys i see show that japan is one of the most popular countries in the world because how can you be mad at japanese like i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know they're not an imperialist power like the americans or the chinese are and they have so many great things they've contributed and korea's in the same boat as that so i do think there's something there but there's a whole nother area of like oh is japanese strategy strategically trying to bandwagon with the u.s and hide behind this or that because at some point in time uh if there's a war uh there's only one ally that japan has america has a lot of allies japan only has one and so if america goes to war japan is going to be dragged in and if america goes to war on something that doesn't necessarily affect japan as much japanese history is filled with okay during the iraq war we have to support this and during the war on terror we have to do this and you know what about when we have a problem is america going to be there for us and i think that has been called to question the trust that has been there for 80 years between the u.s and japan is beginning to get questioned partly because i don't think it's trump's fault i think trump is representing something that is coming out of americans of like hey that post-war consensus is broken and we don't actually want free trade anymore like i want to be able to protect my society and i want to be able to protect my society and i want it to be america first i want americans to get those jobs and i don't want anybody else and you know as long as you play by the rules and as long as your ally and as long as you invest in us we'll be fine but otherwise you're up to your own yeah the transactionalism yes it's very shocking yeah okay last thing before we go yeah i wanted to ask you about the unitarian church yes which is this is kind of a diversion but also i think relevant politically and then also to our you know religion conversation about shintoism what is the unitarian church and how does it show up in japanese culture yeah i mean so look the is in some ways probably most analogous to the Church of Scientology or kind of the Moonies, the word church has resonance to me because my dad is a pastor and church is a safe space of worship. It's not a cult, right? I would describe the Unitarian Church as a cult because there's a very clear system. And the reason we're even talking about the Unitarian Church is because their actions led to the person that ended up killing Prime Minister Abe feeling like they were being subjugated. Their mother had gone into serious debt because they were contributing so much to the Unitarian Church. And now that church has lost its status as a non-profit. It's lost its status as being a recognized religion in Japan because of the scandals. Part of what it did was attach itself to the political system. It'd be the equivalent of any group, like I mentioned, whether it's the Church of Scientology or the Mormons or any denomination, basically saying, we're going to pay off these politicians to, not do these things. Let us have our own way of things. Just keep, just stay out of this part of our life. And I think that is a very uniquely Japanese phenomenon in some ways, but it's something that's universal. We see these around. And it's not just the Unitarian Church. There are other groups in Japan that have those similar statuses, but that Unitarian Church has become wildly famous, not popular, because of the fact that the grievances that the killer had were directly related to that church. And there were direct connections between that church and the ruling party in Japan. Would you say, on the aggregate, that most Japanese people contribute the death of Prime Minister Abe to the Unitarian Church? Or is that a little bit of a conspiratorial thread? No, I mean, you can draw a direct thread. I think most people would say that the killer is responsible. And whatever he said his motivations were, we understand the grievances. But at the end of the day, he killed someone. And especially in Japan, how hard it is. He had to make his own gun. He had to show up at the rally. He had to do all these things. He is singularly responsible. And I'll never utter his name, because he doesn't deserve that. He's not a victim. He did this to himself. But the investigation subsequently, and what has come out through the trial, was that the Unification Church led to his sense of disgruntlement. And the reason he connected it, the reason he targeted Prime Minister Abe, was directly related to Unification Church. So in that case, how do you define that? Is there a cultural pressure to ban the Unification Church? Yes. I mean, there's been a lot of political pressure as well. And even now, politicians that have taken things in the past, when it was perfectly acceptable, just like it's perfectly acceptable to take donations from any of the churches or houses of worship here, now it's kind of, it's like taking money from the mafia. It's not a positive thing, and it continues to have ramifications. But the fact that they're banning the church from being able to operate the way it has in the past, the political status is in question. The problem is, it's having implications, because other legitimate churches are now under threat, because it's like, well, let's just get rid of all churches. Like, forget Unitarian, just get rid of all churches. It would be unfair when, like, you have so many other styles of worship. Like, just because they use the word church doesn't mean that every Christian congregation needs to be kicked out of Japan. That seems extreme. And also getting rid of, revoking their non-profit status is way too far. Because again, like, the only reason we're talking about this is because of a mentally unhealthy, demented human being that did some really, really bad things. Is there a stain on the politicians that accepted money? Absolutely. So even after everything happened, they looked through all the donations. They said, oh, you took money, you took money, you took money. Yes. Did those people fail? Did they face challenges politically? I mean, many of those people were kicked out of the ruling party. Now, increasingly, they're coming back, because it was so widespread. It's like, well, were those people really, like, supporting the Unitarian Church? I think there are distinctions. What level of support they had? Did they actually know the belief structure? Did they know what was going on? Or were they just taking money because it was expedient and easy, because they could mobilize? And that you can see across Japanese politics. Interesting. Yeah. Now, were they connected to the sarin gas attacks? No, that was a different guy. That's Om Shiniko. That is an offshoot. I think they were connected I think of Buddhists. You have to check me on that. But it's called Om Shiniko that did that. But there are many groups like that that have done that. You know, that group was kind of like the Waco, Texas type of, like, the day is going to end and the world's going to end, and so we must do this. Whereas I think the Unitarian Church has, I don't want to call it more standard, but a little bit more, you know, normal philosophies that are there. Whereas Om Shiniko was just very much out there. From the beginning, that was classified as a cult. It never had anything beyond being a cult. Whereas I think, you know, Unitarian Church had a very legitimate, you know, role, and it was clearly accepted by Prime Minister Abe and politicians that were there. And now we're beginning to dig deeper in that way. Oh, I see. Okay. So if Unitarian Church is Scientology, the sarin gas attacks, that group would be a way farther fringe. Yes, yes. Interesting. Whoever did the Waco thing. Right. The Branch Davidians. Yes, yes, exactly. I see. I haven't heard that in a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Well, I can't end on that note. And you know, the last time I came, I told you that in Japanese culture, you always have to bring a gift. So I did bring you a gift. Again? And it's not just my book, by the way. You can't read my book. So when my English book comes out, I'll give you that. But I had to bring you something from my heartland. So this is. Please. Thank you. This is. You see how I accepted it? Yeah, I know. You did it. You know, I just. We're learning. We're good. So this is actually. The translation of this is hilarious. I promise it's not racist. In Japanese, it says white lover on the outside. It's white chocolate with this amazing cookie on the outside. They are made in my island of Hokkaido. They're the most delicious thing in the world. I'm very biased. But they are one of the most popular souvenirs from Japan, whether you're from Hokkaido or not. And so last time I brought you whiskey because I thought whiskey is like, you know. Which is. I finished it. Oh, good. I polished it off, but I kept the bottle. Good, good. That you can, you know, taste it with it. And maybe even your son might enjoy that as well because he can enjoy that. And so it's basically like French-style kind of white cookie with white chocolate inside. And it's just in Japanese because my area has so much snow. They mean white in the sense of snow. So, you know, white lovers is more of a. that. It has nothing to do with ethnic thing because in Japan, we don't think in those terms. So. I thought you were a Florida ethnic. Oh, sorry. Sorry to disappoint you. You know, you're an attractive man, but I think your wife is in good hands. Yeah, that's true. So these are just lovers of the pow. Exactly. They love the snow. Yeah. And, you know, they. Can I open it now? Please, please, please. Is it rude to open it? No, not at all. Okay. It's funny. There's like a whole ceremony that's attached to it. But like, you know, you wrap the outside, you have the whole thing, and every single cookie is individually wrapped. Oh, wow. So, it's a whole nother thing. So, anyways. And this is only in Hokkaido? Only in Hokkaido. Okay. There are many things from Hokkaido that are delicious, Royce chocolate, but this also, this brand is very popular. And Japanese, it's immediately associated with my island. And so, people are. like, everybody knows they're obnoxious now. They're like, you know, so. You have to open that little. I should show it off. Yeah. Here's the front. Okay. Okay. And then you crack it open. Oh, since 17. 1976. Yes. Okay. And it's interesting that it is French. So, that's the point. So, in Japan, French things are considered high quality. And so, they made the confectionery like it's a French cookie. But it's, you know, when you taste it, a lot of Westerners prefer this to the kind of Japanese style sweets. Like, this feels more, you know, Western. So. I love the packaging. Yes. Isn't it great? It's great. I mean. You got to have it. No, no. No, you have. I can't. No, no. You have to eat it. Because I have to watch you enjoy it. And then that. That's the rule? Yeah. Okay. Now, I am flirting with you, but that's okay. Okay. All right. Well, I cracked it open. We're going to see how long it takes Mark to open this. This is actually part of the gag we're going on here. Yeah, I know. Somebody. One of your listeners told me. I think the. Your sound guy told me that. So. Yeah. My fat, dumb American fingers. I can't figure it out. Oh, here we go. Blame the Canadian side. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My fat, dumb, Mountie fingers. Oh, oh. Here we go. Okay, I broke it. And you cracked it on the way. I know. I know. I know. This side is perfect. Yeah. Am I getting the show? It's like an ASMR. Yeah. It's like an ASMR. It's like an ASMR. Yeah. It's like an ASMR. It's like an ASMR video. I need to have like a bowl of tea there with you. A little like English breakfast that has Japanese-style. Dr. Walker? Yeah. It is fantastic. Good. Thank you for having me as always. Thank you so much for joining me. Truly, it is a pleasure and you are welcome anytime in the tent. Awesome. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than one, go to ChatGPT.com. More than just answers. Give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans.