It's Not Just the USA

Japan has been in election season, so it’s not uncommon to see people with banners in matching t-shirts handing out fliers and pamphlets. What’s a bit different this election is all the buzz around a particular far-right party: Sanseito. And wouldn’t you know it? They were promoting their candidates not only at the train station by my work but right in front of the grocery store where I buy my milk. Well damn.

Main Story: Japanese Elections

Sanseito is the Japanese equivalent of the American fascists in the Republican Party: They are anti-vax, anti-welfare, and definitely anti-foreigner.

The elections were Sunday, and results are still being finalized, but the mass hysteria and hype rustled up by Japanese social media about a far-right takeover by Sanseito didn’t manifest. For being such a small party, it did win 14 seats, up from the 1 it held prior to the election. Who is voting for them? Young urban youth. It seems that more moderate parties and candidates won out in rural and older districts.

The ruling party, the LDP, has basically had a chokehold on the country for most of modern history, post WWII. This is the party Shinzo Abe was a part of. People were very upset and everyone in the world of politics could feel it: The LDP was about to lose a lot of seats. This is mostly because they couldn’t keep the price of rice down or combat inflation well, which is disastrous where a meal isn’t considered a meal without some rice.

The LDP still has the most seats, but failed to make a coalition government (hooray parliamentary democracy!), so they’ll rule as a Minority Leader. I’m not even going to pretend I know what the means for the governance of Japan.

Here’s the weird thing I don’t get about Sanseito: For as much as they want foreigners out of here, they sure do use a lot of English to get their messaging across. That would be like Trump posting everything in English and Spanish to communicate his disdain for immigrants. Hell, they offered me a flier for their candidate when I was slowly walking by their boosters, desperately trying not to draw their attention. When I did the typical “polite wave of refusal,” the woman said, quite sincerely, “Have a nice day!”

Have I just been brain damaged by American politics? To be fair, her compatriots did side-eye me and avoid talking to me, so this may have just been the one woman.

Their presence is small, yes, and they are wimpy compared to many other parties, but the concerning thing is how much they are growing. With that growth comes visibility and feeling emboldened to engage with others more publicly. Most Japanese people have a bone to pick with Sanseito, though, with their archaic language trying to demonize Japanese people who don’t support them being a big sticking point.

They are also pretty consistently protested against when they hold rallies, so it’s not everyone. But the growth and the fact that it is urban youth… you know, the urban youth I teach and live next to, that I find a bit unsettling. It also makes you wonder: Is my cashier a fascist?

Good Thing: Shampoo Bars

Not going to lie; it was a bit tricky thinking of a good thing, mainly because most of my good came from my miscellaneous media. I’m trying not to pick too many media-related things for this section to keep my media in check.

So, I’ll keep it simple: Shampoo bars. It’s like a bar of soap, but it’s shampoo. Not exactly the most groundbreaking of things, but this particular bar from Lush gets nice and frothy when I go to wash my hair. Perhaps even better than my liquid shampoo? It feels very satisfying to scrub the old dirt out of my locks. If you have the money and the access, give it a go!

Listen, it’s hard to follow up a deep dive into popes; I’m running on fumes and this is all I got!

Miscellaneous Media

In an attempt to further chisel down my sanity, I finished reading EM Bender and Alex Hanna’s The AI Con. Since I’ve read so much about AI from other books and articles, a lot of it felt like a refresher course. I did appreciate how they break down anthropomorphism, or our proclivity to assign human-like qualities to non-human objects. It’s like how guys name cars or boats and if they’re needing a tuning, they say “She isn’t doing so great.” That kind of thing. Bender is a linguist, so I appreciate the focus on how we refer to this technology matters.

Just a reminder: These tools don’t “think” (that’s anthropomorphism!), they process information and make sophisticated predictions (the quality of that output is very debatable, though) based on a metric ass-ton of data. I’m pretty sure ass-ton is the measurement Sam Altman mentioned. Let’s go with that.

I’ve also had the building itch. I found a javascript, open-source version of SimCity (micropolisjs) online that I’ve been playing during lunch at work, and I’m already up to 100,000 citizens. I’ve never gotten to 500,000 before, I think, so this might be a first if I keep it up!

I also bought TheoTown on Steam, as I heard that has some pretty good SimCity 2000 vibes to it. I absolutely threw down on SC2K back in the day, even delving into the Urban Renewal Kit and dabbling a bit in ResEdit to edit files directly to make my own scenarios and tinker with the game a bit. TheoTown is nice, but I feel like the map is pretty small. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to grow past city level 10 or 11 without completely wiping the map and re-zoning everything. It’s probably because I kept playing on the tutorial city. That’ll teach me to get complacent!

Other than that, once the semester is done, I’m getting the fuck outside more. Morning bike rides and yoga sound good. I need to see some goddamn trees. The heat has been really punishing, but I’m going to try my darndest to get in some forest baths over the holiday.