Japanese Society/Culture
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Tendai Visit – August 2025
Nam and I met at Tenri University in Japan 30+ years ago. Over the years, we kept in touch with Tendai from Thailand both formally and otherwise, which led to formal MOU signings between Tenri university and Nam’s employer, Mahasarakham University, as well as mine, Rajabhat Maha Sarakham University. This eventually led to yearly trips from Tendai to MSU with groups of up to 20 students, as well as Nam taking students from Mina’s high school (with her uni students acting as chaperones) for intensive Japanese language training and cultural study in Tenri. The Tendai group always has a couple destinations when they come over, and they left for Phayao…
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21 Years of Steam
If that’s not a cringey Steam profile, I don’t know what is. I’d like to say I registered for Steam on dial-up, but looking back on posts from 2003 just before I signed up*, it was either my first FTTH line (NTT 100Mbps service on a Japanese island 20 years ago!), or Dual ISDN (128 kbit/s and more expensive than the FTTH, if I remember correctly). I was one of the only Dual ISDN subscribers on Awaji Island according to the techs who installed it. After I upgraded to FTTH and they came by for maintenance, they said I had the fastest hikari (fiber) connection they had seen, as well.…
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Sushiro End Stack
I remember using QR codes for product tracking (with Keyence printers and scanners) as a salaryman around Y2K at an electronics factory on monster island. The only other place I’d ever seen them used was at kaiten (conveyor) sushi, on the bottom rim of the plastic plates. The codes would be scanned as they went by on the conveyor so old plates of sushi could be pulled – this was more than 20 years ago! Things certainly come full circle (although the new system seems to be RFID-based): There was a boom in QR code usage here in Thailand from around ten years ago specifically for adding friends in the…
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Makizushi Class
For the past year, Nam and I have been arranging sushi roll-making events for university students and schoolchildren. This video is a typical first attempt of trying to stuff too much into a roll. I would say 75% of people end up making this mistake the first time. But hey, if you don’t make mistakes, you never learn, right? It’s been a lot of fun just trying to do our jobs well.
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Bowser Jr. Boss Fight
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Shorts
I’ve been having fun experimenting with YouTube Shorts, basically trying to understand the algorithm. I haven’t had much luck deciphering it yet, but I’m still just a week or so in. This is a time lapse video I shot in the pit of Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Japan.
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DTAC International Roaming
If you are planning to visit Japan from Thailand and haven’t been suckered into buying an eSIM yet, I highly recommend buying a roaming package from DTAC/TRUE (AIS also has similar plans, but I haven’t tried them). The main reason is that it’s much cheaper, but also because I saw many travelers struggling with SIM cards/eSIMs purchased from both vending machines in Japan and online. In the space of one week, I saw at least five people complaining about weak coverage or spotty connectivity. The DTAC package we chose also came with free travel insurance for a week, which is great, but very difficult to actually find on the DTAC…
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Babytapi Amemura – Osaka
Babytapi America-mura (ベビタピ アメリカ村店)
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Raw Liver at ลาบ ลับ ลับ ปรีดี 43
Either Taro or my cousin knew about an awesome Japanese street restaurant in Bangkok that serves raw beef liver – a dish once very popular in Japan that is now very hard to get (where it is available, single portions are apparently given out to customers in a sealed plastic container with origin/tracking information). Everything was excellent, but the liver, served traditionally with rock salt and sesame oil, was outstanding. Taro and I ate too much. The sashimi was also pretty good: It was very hot that night, but we had a blast:
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Tokyo Sasumata Incident
One of my YouTube vids from six years ago shows police in Maha Sarakham using a sasumata (a nonlethal man-catching staff of samurai-era design) to subdue a knife-wielding suspect at our local bus station. I posted about it at the time and there are a couple links (amazingly still live) about other incidents down at the bottom. Weapons similar to the sasumata have a long history in many cultures. They were known as “man-catchers” in Europe and used until the 18th century, although their non-lethality may be up for some debate: The flanges on the top of that are spring-loaded and were designed to open up after it was thrust…
