Four years of covid have kept me from my beloved Tokyo. I have been coming to Japan for nearly 50 years, usually for two months; once longer and now mostly for one month.
What is the difference between Tokyo and San Francisco? The food is spectacular here, every meal. In the past I’ve had horse and whale and today I had ox tongue. I love horse, some variations of whale are interesting, the tongue was grilled in tiny pieces; it was not as interesting as boiled cow tongue. I also had clam chowder on a hot dog. Not as bad as it sounds. Plenty of good espresso.
Everyone on the street is immaculately dressed, immaculately. Much of it is exquisite.
Everything works; buses are to the minute, trains are to within 30 seconds and clean, clean spotless. This is a dense city of 40 million compared to dirty S.F. 850,000.
The biggest surprise is to walk through stores, giant department stores and all the merchandise is out. Everyone pays for what they take. In San Francisco, much of the merchandise is behind plastic doors with locks and the merchandise that isn’t is loaded by the criminal underclass into bags to be stolen.
In San Francisco, we now get electric outages on days of good weather, floods from the underground water pipes that aren’t maintained and hypodermic needles nearly everywhere we walk in commercial areas and East of Van Ness. Along with the vast numbers of street people. Street people use public transportation making it smell awful. Use of public transport has dropped so low it can no longer survive.
Downtown San Francisco is empty, I’m not exaggerating. Tourists are few and largely European. Over ten thousand retail businesses have failed in the City.
I don’t miss the foul life of San Francisco and contemporary America. And we live in a prosperous neighborhood.
It is hard to ignore the idea that America is a failed state. The goal of the military is to ‘fight global warming.’ Enlistment has fallen catastrophically. Nearly every college and university teaches that America has endemic racism and that meritocracy is malignant white supremacy. No society can survive that self image.
The worst of America is the rapid rise of Jew hate. No society has ever survived Jew hate, certainly not modern Russia, Poland; Spain or East Europe.
I’m reading the autobiography of Bibi. Really great. History will record that I lived in the time of Bibi and Elon and that I appreciated them both.
Sushi for lunch today. I only eat sushi in Japan. Four years without sushi. Only sushi chefs in Japan love raw fish enough to understand how to recognize high quality fish, cut it, prepare it and serve it.
My goodness, the dollar is strong and the yen is weak for the moment. I am enjoying my new found wealth. It's temporary.
Japanese small businesses were not hurt too badly by covid. Small businesses are financed by their landlords, their suppliers and their neighbors. American small businesses are only financed by friends and family. Seldom deep pockets.
Department stores were hurt during covid because tourism, especially Chinese tourism, evaporated. The Japanese equivalent of Amazon, Rakuten, has hurt too. Home delivery never got as big for the Japanese as it did in the U.S. Different ways of shopping and cooking.
Uber is insignificant in Tokyo. There are so many taxis and they are everywhere. They are clean, they are immaculate. Very different from the U.S. yellow cabs.
The Japanese had a tiny fraction of the covid of the U.S. because they are so clean to start with. But still 9 out of 10 people wear masks in public. I think it is because they are naturally shy.