• Daily Life

    Watching from the Window

    I’ll never forget how I delighted I was a few decades ago now when I discovered the Japanese term madogiwazoku, literally meaning “the tribe beside the window.” It’s a derogatory term dating back to the country’s postwar economic miracle heyday and used to refer to the usually older workers who’ve been deemed to be beyond their serviceable peak for the company. But, either as a reward for services performed, or more likely strict labor laws that make it detrimental for employers to simply dump workers when they’ve outlived their usefulness, the window-side tribe seemed to have fallen by the wayside…

  • Daily Life

    Take a Good Look at Yourself

    Navel-gazing is a dubious “talent” of which I have been adorned with for life, bar those couple of decades when I was too grossly obese to be able to even see my navel. That never stopped me from over-thinking: worse, actually, as taking any action has always been pretty close to a last resort even now when I am more nimbler physically than the mental agility I was blessed (or cursed) with in youth. My over-thinking now is about work. I caused a scandal a couple of decades ago, but Google makes sure it remains fresh in the mind of…