Full Blog Archive

  • Shinto Essay Patreon

    Today, I launched a Patreon for essays about Shinto. If people are interested enough to support it, my plan is to write essays that are “accurate and objective”, insofar as that is possible, and use the associated website (Mimusubi) to publish my personal opinions and individual approaches. If you are interested in the topic, please…

  • The Empty Seat Thing

    If you read online accounts of foreigners’ experiences in Japan, you are likely to come across the “Empty Seat Thing”. This happens on crowded trains or buses. The foreigner is sitting down, crowded in by all the people standing around him or her, but there, right next to the foreigner, is an empty seat. No-one…

  • Against Meritocracy

    (Warning: Rant Ahead) We are so smug, so secure in our privilege. The clever ones. We understand the world, and we smirk at people who don’t. “How could they be so dumb as to vote for that?” “What on earth were they thinking?” “I could do a better job than that half asleep.” And you…

My Old Pages

These are links to my old webpages, from back before I moved to a wordpress-powered blog. Back when I wrote the HTML by hand in a text editor. Yes, really. The formatting on some of the pages has broken a bit, and there are newer versions of some of the content in the current part of the site. Nothing here is maintained, nor likely to have anything done with it in the future.