“Have you guys heard about the two major Japanese religions yet?” our tour guide Daniel asked the group.
I cannot resist a trivia question or an opportunity to look learned in front of strangers, so Shinto and Buddhism! jumped to my mind and then through my mouth. We’d been in Japan for 10 days, seen its many shrines and temples – shrines for Shinto, temples for Buddhism. We had bowed at the torii gates and performed our doubled claps and bows; we’d bathed in incense and thrown coins to statues of monks. I felt reasonably confident that the two major Japanese religions were Shinto and Buddhism.
So I was as confused as the look Daniel gave me when he cocked his head and said, “What? No… The two major Japanese religions are working and drinking. ‘Shinto’, you said? Never heard of it.” Big laughs, all around. The Hungry Osaka Tour was a hit, and I highly recommend them.
We’d done a lot of walking tours in Japan. In Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. No better way to see a city than by foot. Though, in Japan, ‘by foot’ is an expansive concept. Through an application and a digital ‘Suica’ card on my phone’s wallet, we could seamlessly move into and through a world-class railway system. We were terrified of the thought of this before our trip. In America – if subways exist – the cultural connotations of subways are the scary places where you come into contact with the dreaded public; a public which is unhoused and unwell. Japan was… not that. Fast, frequent public transit delivered in clean stations with plenty of art that were a joy to be in. I am become train-pilled. The Shinkansen helped. We rocketed along from Tokyo to Osaka and back. We toured with guides and took the pictures and made the memories. Nothing too crazy. Standard gaijin’s first Japan trip. It was as magical as you think it was. Or, if you have been, as magical as you remember it being.
I have been to Japan now. And as you might expect, I can’t shut the fuck up about it. I am prepared to make ‘white guy been to Japan once’ my whole personality. This is who I am now. Japan guy. Moshi-moshi. And while I have so much to talk about, there’s one thing that has been on my mind: it felt like slipping into another world where better things were possible.
“You’re not depressed, you’re just in America.”
Japan is a completely different culture. Did you guys know they use chopsticks there? I am not trying to do orientalism or romanticize the Japanese. Their culture, like all cultures, has its problems. “Why is there a women’s only train car?” was an awkward question for Daniel to explain to some others on the tour. But what I am saying is this: I got to see a different culture, with a different history, that values different things, and that made different decisions about how to create their world.
And spending time in that world – a world organized around communal spaces, shared and effective public transit, and dignity in work and living wages for all – that was a revelation.
Japan is a world organized around communal spaces. There was art and nature woven into the experience of Japan. Even in the most bustling cityscapes of Tokyo and Osaka, we would stumble across parks, shrines, temples, museums – little oases of sacred spaces in the profane bustle of the metropolis. The Japanese love parks, Daniel explained, on account of how they spend all winter in tiny apartments. When the weather allows, they cascade out into the parks, flooding it with picnics and small gatherings.
Did I mention the trains? Look, I am an American. I get in my air-conditioned car and drive to my air-conditioned work or my air-conditioned gym and then back to my air-conditioned house. It is a very different experience of the world than moving with your feet, in and amongst people. Being in the mass of Tokyo was a deeply sonder-inducing experience. I was struck by the sense that all of these people had unique lives and trajectories. I saw so many faces and emotions, people with their pets and books and cute outfits. You feel that as you move in and through public transit that works. Driving feels so impersonal, is so draining on the nervous system, and induces so much rage and anxiety. Being in public transit felt like being part of humanity and made moving through the world a much more pleasant experience. You know what rules? Not parking anywhere. And when you don’t have to account for parking, things become denser and more walkable. It felt like freedom. Freedom is an environment designed for human flourishing.
Freedom is also being in a crowd and not wondering if you’re part of a ‘target-rich environment’. Guns and mass shootings are part of the American psyche and experience. Crowds aren’t safe, or rather, there’s always the potential they won’t be safe. Where won’t shootings happen in America? It’s like there’s this uniquely American natural disaster that just… doesn’t affect other places. “No Way To Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. The same way Japanese people seem to think a lot about tsunamis. We saw tons of evacuation signage and communication for emergency community gathering points. It felt like people were looking out for you. Like you were part of a society, rather than an individual. You could be with people without worrying that there would be some crazy person with a gun. Some unhoused person we’ve pushed into social death that we must hurry past as we move from private space to private space. It’s not safe out there. Maybe you should have a gun. Do you have your situational awareness, are you sufficiently anxious and alert to everything and everyone? I was surprised by how many of my default American systems calmed and how pleasant the experience of being in the city was.
Another thing I noticed: the dignity of work and the professionalism we saw in everything. It seemed almost as though everything and everyone was built for purpose and took their one job seriously. From restaurants to cabs to stores, we saw people doing specific jobs well, and people had livable wages. We saw millions of people and could count the homeless on one hand. I am sure that it’s more complicated than all that, and it seemed like there were a lot of things going on. Everything is high density housing. Food was cheap, plentiful, and nourishing. Like I said earlier, there was a sense of the community. In America, we have to make it on our own, and nobody is going to help you. You can’t have a shitty job, because then you won’t have healthcare, housing is most of people’s paychecks, being unhoused is like a loaded gun pointed to your head, and our cheap food is poison that kills you. Again, not trying to be all “weeaboo” about this, I know Japan has problems. I recall the First Major Japanese Religion, Working. The Salaryman culture seems problematic to me. But I am just trying to tell you what this other world felt like to me. It felt like people’s more basic needs were taken care of, allowing everyone a place to start from where they had the potential to thrive. That they could thrive because of their society rather than in spite of it.
You know how it made me feel? It made me feel like we are getting fucking robbed.
Maybe I should explain. We all find ourselves thrown into a particular time and place. History and context matters a lot. And we found ourselves in Japan in April 2026: One year into the Second Trump Regime, two months into an evil and illegal war we launched against Iran, and weeks away from Tax Day.
Now look – I don’t mind paying taxes. I have been lucky, my success is not my own, it is built on the infrastructure and work that society has provided for me. I feel good, generally speaking, about the fact that I contribute to the public coffers. But this year is different. Donald Trump and the DOGE boys have spent the last year dismantling anything and everything that I would have been proud to contribute to. No money for science, or the arts, or for hungry kids. Maximum money for bombs and bailouts for their Argentinian libertarian friends. We ‘fed US AID into the wood chipper’ – destroyed the $34 billion of good work and soft power, only to send $40 billion to the weird Argentinian chainsaw guy. So while I am usually pro-taxes, this year felt very different. While it used to be kind of possible to feel sort of good about funding American society, that was no longer the case. What do we get with all that we pay for? The way the Republicans tried to police citizenship, you’d think it came with benefits or something. We get nothing, and we’re told to like it. What are you, unpatriotic? Or worse, a socialist?
We have infinite money for murder, but no money for life. Every year of my life, for as long as I have been alive, we have invested billions and billions of dollars in weapons. And what does it get us, what can it do for us? How valuable has all of that strength been against Iran as we take a historic L? We huffed and puffed and incinerated children. We made fire stream through the streets of Tehran and unleashed a black cloud of toxic rain. To what end?
We were in Hakone when Donald Trump threatened to wipe an entire civilization off the map, never to return. By that time, we had been to the museums, had seen Japanese art and treasure spanning back thousands of years. I wondered about the cradle of civilization and how many priceless Persian artifacts existed, and whether they might disappear into the nuclear vapor of a mushroom cloud. As we walked in the shadow of Mount Fuji, along the banks of Lake Ashi, I thought about the world’s rising temperature and the burning petrochemicals of ruined facilities in the Middle East. The world’s longest running continual record of climate change comes from Japan. For 1,200 years, monks have catalogued the Sakura season, the magnificent and majestic blooming of the cherry blossoms. The monks, like everyone else who is paying attention, have noticed the climate change.
So against this backdrop I experienced Japan. It made for a psychedelic experience. And like any trip, I have come back with reflections on myself and my culture. They are scattered and disjointed, and like all psychedelic knowledge, it is difficult to impart to someone who didn’t experience it. I have to try, nonetheless, to explain what I feel after.
America is a profoundly sick and misguided culture, and it was easier to spot this from Japan, where they have made different and frankly better choices. I got to look at the Empire from its Imperial Periphery. I wondered how many of the Japanese I saw would be impacted by the whims of Donald Trump and his cabal of billionaire pedophiles. And it made me mad that these people have so much money and power. We could tax them and remove their economic power. We could have a real democracy and break up their political power. And we could have nice things in this country. It is possible for all of us to have food and healthcare and education. It just means that we have to tax the wealthy and corporations so that all of us can meet our basic needs. And when we do that, we can unleash a flourishing of human potential. I saw so many craftsmen and artisans in Japan, and it is because they can have a living wage on a small salary, because their society provides for them.
That is Not America. But it could be. Other worlds are possible – ours is not the only way to be. They say that travel is like therapy – it forces you to confront that the way you are living is not the only possible way to live. In therapy, they try to accomplish this with words and concepts to break your normal mental framework. Travel works more directly with experiences, felt and visceral. I will remember the way I felt in Japan for the rest of my life, and how that compares with how I feel in the United States.
To close this piece, I want to reflect on some of the reasons why I think America is like this. Individualism over community comes to mind. In America, we pride ourselves on rugged individualism and lifting ourselves up by our bootstraps. We’re a nation of Self-Made Men (it is usually Men). We think of ourselves as being, rather than interbeing. Atoms rather than molecules. I was raised this way, but the older I get the more bizarre this seems to me. No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. I am not me without you, because it is through dialogue with you that I discover myself. Self and Other are one.
Another reason is unrestrained capitalism. If we are part of a community and we have responsibilities and obligations toward each other, well, then we have to do something about the health of the community. We’d need shared resources. And that would make it harder for Donald Trump to give himself and his rich friends tax cuts. When I saw ‘we are being robbed’ – this is by whom. We are robbed several times over – once when we lose the public goods they privatize, again when we pay private providers for what should have been public goods, and thrice when we consider the loss of human potential, all the money we have left on the table by not adequately using the full measure of people’s talents – talents that they could have discovered and made use of with more robust social safety nets[1].
Another reason? Cars! I mentioned how Japan’s train system radicalized me. I took the trains like autistic people take to, well, trains. Cars have created a dystopian environment that alienates us from our world and our neighbors. I have experienced a walkable city with robust, efficient public transit. It is so much better as a lived environment. Tokyo is dense, walkable, infinitely explorable. America is not. We saw children navigate Tokyo – my wife and I would spot one and cry ‘Old Enough!’ Kids in America cannot walk anywhere. They will get hit by trucks the size of tanks that never saw them under their bumpers. It made me really reflect on our car-centric environment and how toxic it is. As mentioned earlier, there is a fundamentally different shape to experiencing the world on foot and with others, opposed to and against being in my single-user automobile. In my car I scream and I swear at the morons and idiots on the road. On foot, I smiled at a lot of strangers, strangers with whom I shared an environment and an experience.
And finally – the racism. Why can’t America have nice things like Japan does? Because then Black people might use them. Again, don’t get me wrong – I do not harbor any illusions about Japan as a land of racial peace and harmony. I watched Japanese MMA; I remember how they treated Bob Sapp. I know Japan is xenophobic. I know how they treat gaijin vs Nihonjin. But you cannot look at America in the Year of our Lord 2026 - where Republicans move to resegregate society and bring back Jim Crow – and tell me that racism isn’t the problem here. Why don’t we have good public education? Why can’t we have nice public transit? Well, because some of them might use it, and then what would happen? They could end up *gasp* in the wrong part of town, where they don’t belong. This whole goddamn country can be explained by Drained Pool Politics. In a 1971 case, Palmer v. Thompson, Black residents of Jackson, Mississippi sued their government. Jackson was ordered to desegregate their public pools. Instead, they drained them. If black people were going to be considered part of the public, then the public wasn’t going to get anything at all. So it goes in America.
It is cheaper to house people than to let them be homeless; cheaper to care for them than to let them fall sick; a better investment to educate them than to leave them in ignorance. We do not do so, because of racism and capitalism. We are so fearful that the ‘undeserving poor’ will get some benefits that we run programs which spend more on administration than services. And you know who they mean when they think of the undeserving poor, right? Besides, if we helped the poor meet their basic needs, how would we be able to threaten the American worker? How would we force them into precarious and exploitable work conditions? Time and time again, we cut off our noses to spite our own faces. And it has never been clearer to me than when I went to a place that wasn’t like that.
I mentioned the historical context of my Japan trip earlier, but I left out one key other happening: the Artemis II moon mission. I saw a diverse group of experts in their field accomplish something incredible for humanity. Pictures of the Earth rising over the moon moved me to tears. We share this one planet, and it has so much. We exist in a vast stretch of nothingness beyond what is comprehensible. I saw Soviet space propaganda once. It has always stuck with me. It had a cosmonaut in the night sky, searching for God in the inky blackness, with the words “БОГА НЕТ!" – “There is no god”.
“БОГА НЕТ!" – “There is no god”.
I agree with them. There is no higher power in the sky waiting for us. What we find when we go up there is our shared humanity – how small and fragile and contingent our existence is. Out there in the void, it is only us. Us and the choices we make. The only justice is here and now, the only paradise the one we build here together. It can and should include all of us. Better worlds are possible. We just have to make different choices.
[1] I always think of Conor McGregor. While now a controversial figure, there was a time when Conor McGregor was naught but a young MMA fighter on the Irish dole. That welfare program let him chase his dream, and the Irish government has more than made up for its investment in the welfare of its people.