“Aging population is a concern for the workforce and the local economy.” That statement was drilled into my head over and over again during my high school years in Singapore. Having the third highest life expectancy in the world (CIA, 2016) and a constantly declining birth rate, Singapore has always been extremely concerned with its […]

Before I came to Japan I had the perception that the country had an intimate relationship with nature due to films and anime I had seen during my childhood. Our assignments and site visits, however, changed this view soon after I arrived. What really caught me off guard was when one of our speakers, Seiichi […]

There’s something electric about Japan. Amid our ceaseless moving, the endless influx of sensation and the hyper speed of modernity, almost nothing seems constant or steady about the culture. But having left Tokyo and settled in at the base of Mt. Fuji, the focus of our study, I can’t help looking each day in awe […]

Food is one of the most highly glocalized items in the world. In fact, my first experience with glocalization in Japan was at a vegan ramen shop run by and for Muslim women in Shinjuku on my second night in Tokyo. Since then, I could not avoid seeing the traces of glocalization at every meal […]

In Japan, the term satoyama describes both a feeling and place. It is a situated feeling of nostalgia associated with life lived in the countryside before the influence of contemporary technology. Centered around agriculture, satoyama encompasses rice paddies, orchards, woodland forests, grasslands, and thatch-roofed farmhouses that became the culmination of culture and biodiversity in the […]