Writer and poet Robert Lunday, author of Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness, shares his journey of growing up as a military dependent, the sudden disappearance of his stepfather in 1982, living on the Texas-Mexico borderlands and what it means to belong, and his impending move from Houston to the serene landscapes of Kyushu, Japan.
What if the tapestry of your life was woven through constant change and cultural encounters? Join us for an insightful conversation with writer and poet Robert Lunday, who shares his journey of growing up as a military dependent and his impending move from Houston to the serene landscapes of Kyushu, Japan. Robert opens up about how his early experiences of frequent relocations fostered a deep curiosity and understanding of diverse cultures—skills that will surely aid him as he embraces a new beginning in Japan.
Together, we navigate the sensitive subject of global disappearances, focusing on countries like Mexico, Japan, and the United States and the disappearance in 1982 of Robert’s stepfather. Our discussion highlights the courage of grassroots efforts, often led by families, to find missing loved ones when official avenues fall short. From poignant artistic memorials by a Mexican shoemaker to the haunting tales of Indigenous communities, these stories underline the power of collective action and the profound impact of “missingness” on identity and community.
As Robert prepares for his new, expat life in Japan, the conversation shifts to themes of cultural integration and adaptation. We explore the intriguing opportunities presented by Japan's abandoned homes and the unique challenges faced by expatriates in preserving these relics of rural history. Through the story of Robert’s wife, Yukiko, and her equestrian pursuits, Robert reflects on the blend of tradition and innovation that defines life in rural Japan. Whether discussing societal norms or language barriers, Robert's insights promise to enrich your understanding of what it means to truly belong in a new place.
Robert Lunday: https://robertlunday.com/
Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness by Robert Lunday
University of New Mexico Press, 2023
You can order Robert’s latest book directly from his website: https://robertlunday.com/books/
Chapters
(00:03) Moving Along With Robert Lunday
Robert Lunday's childhood as a military dependent shaped his worldview, finding solace in libraries and adapting to new environments.
(15:19) Studying Global Disappearances and Responses
Exploring disappearances in Mexico, Canada, Japan and the U.S., including law enforcement's role, grassroots efforts and the impact on Indigenous and Black communities.
(22:07) Global Disappearances and Collective Action
Indigenous experiences, personal journeys, and collective support in navigating the complexities of missing loved ones.
(27:46) Navigating Missing Persons Cases and Support
Social media's impact on missing persons, personal experiences, verification, global research, and ambiguous loss.
(42:19) Cultural Integration and New Beginnings
Adapting to new environments, diversity in Houston classrooms, challenges of immigration, and the role of writing in processing experiences.
(48:07) Exploring Japanese Culture and Language
Exploring Japanese culture and language, adapting as a foreigner, and considering societal norms and demographics with Robert's Japanese wife, Yukiko.
(55:43) Japanese Abandoned Homes and Expatriate Life
Abandoned homes in rural Japan are being purchased by non-Japanese for vacation purposes, while cultural practices like horse sashimi and waste disposal are also discussed.
[00:00:00] Christi: Welcome to Moving Along. I'm Christi Cassidy, your host, and today my guest is the writer and poet Robert Lunday. Robert is taking a huge leap and moving from Houston, Texas to the Japanese countryside.
[00:00:18] Christi: Not Tokyo, not Kyoto, or another foreigner friendly outpost of expats, but to the countryside with his wife of nearly 35 years, who is Japanese. Together, they are swimming into retirement in a beautiful, mountainous region of Japan called Kyushu.
[00:00:42] Christi: You were born in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, And then you grew up in Fayetteville and Waco. And At many other places and West Germany. what did travel and, moving mean to you as a kid?
[00:00:55] Robert: I remember it being very exciting, and I think it helped that a child doesn't bear the burdens of moving, of finances, of being uprooted and then, and then once again before the boxes are even unpacked in a year or two, you're moving again. My mother went through that through two soldier husbands. And where she is now, she's been there 40 years, but for five years, she didn't put anything on the walls because at a certain point in all the moving, it just seemed pointless to put something up that you'd be taking down again. She got in the habit of always having just a Girl Scout calendar on the wall where she would record. Things sort of like as, as in a diary, but for me as a child, I, I think at some point, and I think it can, go different ways. My sister, for example, who's older, when we moved, she would get out there right away and make friends and just was
[00:01:48] Robert: very, very much an extrovert. I would go find the library every time we moved, I go find the library and on military posts, you know, they're very socialistic. They have everything you need. Youth centers and libraries and everything's within walking or biking distance. As soon as the bike came off the moving van, I'd go find the library, get my library card, and I would go squirrel myself away in books. So I was sort of the opposite of my sister in terms of my strategy.
[00:02:16] Robert: I made friends, but you know, I went the opposite direction, the other thing I remember that was very Interesting, when I look back on it later as an adult, moving was very much an existential and a phenomenological experience. Now, as a five year old or an eight year old, I didn't have such terms, but I clearly remember certain perceptions.
[00:02:36] Robert: So, for example, you're in a new house, new neighborhood. I remember going out, and the way I describe it now is that I would have to sort of mentally Paint in from what I already knew about what places were like, houses and streets and neighborhoods and, and other people and things. But I would always have to paint in what was different from what my mental schema provided me with, how houses might be different.
[00:03:03] Robert: So in Germany, for example, so many things were so delightfully different about the street furniture. About door handles, curbs the sounds of sirens and things. And I remember just collecting that mentally, how things could be so different that we mostly take for granted. and I, there would always be a pattern.
[00:03:23] Robert: Now this would change as I was changing developmentally over time. Cause I, I remember thinking this when I was four, five, eight, 12 but of course it would then become. The unfamiliar would become familiar. And I remember around the time we'd be moving, the shortest move was nine months, the longest was two years, I'd be ready to move. Because, you know, I would say to myself, I kind of figured out everything that is familiar about this place, that is home like about this place. Let's see what the next place is going to be like. Or it would be things like people's faces. There would always be a typology of faces. I'm talking mostly about my peers, kids my age. They would look like somebody from a previous location, or they would look different. And I would just fit them in to an understanding of my fellow humans. Another curious thing that I still feel, and I would say it's a light form of paranoia, but because you're always new somewhere, when you're a military dependent, you're new, everybody else around you. Has been there X number of days, weeks, months, sometimes years, but on your day one for you, everybody else knows each other better than you know anybody. And I still to this day have that feeling when I'm in a room or when I'm in a situation that I'm the one who doesn't know what's going on, even when it's not at all true.
[00:04:48] Christi: And yet a lot of your peers, they were in the same boat that you were, Cause they were moving all the time. And
[00:04:57] Robert: I think they tended to be like my sister. Just don't worry about that stuff, just get out there, make friends, talk, be popular and then do it again in a year or two. I haven't talked a lot to other military dependents or third culture kids as they're sometimes called because, you know, diplomat families, they go through similar experience or people working for international companies. But I think people tend to be very reflective and introspective or, or not. It's always a survival strategy and probably depending on just what your innate characteristics might, be in the first place. I have tended to be very fascinated with that boundary between familiar and unfamiliar. I was just visiting my mother in Fayetteville. Now she has lived there probably five different times going back to the 50s. and a lot of military families, they end up just staying a place like Fayetteville, Columbus, Georgia is another one. Cause that's another huge post.
[00:05:57] Christi: Didn't your sister settle somewhere where you had lived?
[00:06:01] Robert: she's in Omaha you know, you tend to get dropped off. She finished high school when my stepfather was going through what they call the bootstrap program. They would let an active duty soldier finish up college or start college. So she just got left there because she didn't have a good relationship with our stepfather So it was just both of them said to each other.
[00:06:22] Robert: Goodbye. Good riddance, you know, she stayed there the rest She's there now, you know, that was her life. She became a biker chick or she married eventually a Hell's Angel
[00:06:32] Christi: Wow. Oh, the they got the open road out there.
[00:06:36] Robert: yeah, and it's really interesting I mean she she has a whole interesting story, of course, herself, because that was partly a response to being raised by two combat veterans who were difficult macho men. they're very different, you know, subcultures. But with a lot of overlap in terms of hierarchy, in terms of burdens put on the women, the people now still alive of her generation are mostly the women because the husbands, they're mostly dead. They lived hard lives. you know, her husband died last year. And so it's something where it depends a lot on loyalty. and trust and interdependence, but now for that generation, it's mostly the women who are around and still supporting each other. They would have to during years of the husband being off in prison. And so it was, it's funny cause it's, it can seem patriarchal, but as is often the case, it's actually very matriarchal because the women are the ones not off prison holding things together.
[00:07:40] Christi: Another kind of missing,
[00:07:42] Robert: and that is something that you know, that whole project, I'm really interested in how things overlap by associations, Arthur Koestler, he wrote a great book on creativity. When he coined the phrase by association, that creativity in the arts or any field is really one vector crossing with another, at some point that you happen to notice, cause you're in the right place, the right time. And some concept is created from two things. Just. Vectoring into one another for me that's become Itself a very useful tool of creativity just to see where things overlap going to Japan part of what i've already studied is how in a certain culture like Japan disappearance or missingness as I've been calling it It has things that are that are grounded in what's particular about Japanese culture Curiously, they have a very strong Sense of privacy in Japan They're both very collective, very communal, but at the same time, even more than we are here in the United States, I think, they have built into their, their, their constitution and their laws, respect for privacy.
[00:08:52] Robert: So what that means, for example, Is that if somebody wants to leave a bad situation, it could be a wife leaving a an abusive marriage. It could be a man who has chained himself in the workplace in some way. And they have a higher rate of suicide. So that's one option, but they also have, they have what they call Johatsu, which means evaporation. And so a person can disappear without ever leaving Japan. In fact, Tokyo is so large. People will go to, one common area is a neighborhood called San'ya, and will just go, disappear into the San'ya district, do day laboring work, and they're almost impossible to find. A woman might just go a couple hours away to a mid sized city and they even have moving companies that will carry you away overnight. And so it's very structured, as many things are in Japan, and if you go try to find your missing wife, your missing husband, it's very hard because the authorities will not help you. they will not tell you where that person is. even my, my wife's father, he had been a yakuza, gang boss. He was basically a, a mobster when she was young.
[00:09:59] Robert: And he got out of it because he realized that the gray area was more lucrative. So again, as with, say, Hell's Angels, the gangs are very striated. They have rules. And it's hard if you're very smart, the way my, my late father in law was, it's hard to be bound by those rules.
[00:10:19] Robert: So he got out of the gangs because that gray area between legitimate and illegitimate was more lucrative. But at one point he went foul of the authorities because he wasn't paying his taxes. he was in Tokyo. He went to The Boso Peninsula. It's just across the bay. It's sort of like going to Staten Island.
[00:10:36] Robert: Let's say or New Jersey
[00:10:39] Robert: Or Long island and he just he
[00:10:41] Christi: That's a good analogy.
[00:10:42] Robert: he just hid away. It wasn't that far away. Really? It was maybe an hour on the ferry And he started a little restaurant. So he just went under the radar And even 20 years later when the statute of limitations was up He just stayed there evidently a lot of people do that and because the government You In a way, there's legal policies, but also just this attitude.
[00:11:02] Robert: Well, okay, let him go he's gonna live a sort of different, occluded life over there. We're not gonna worry about it. And so that's one aspect that's particularly,
[00:11:13] Christi: Did he have to pay the taxes?
[00:11:15] Robert: I, you know, I think he, he just got, he got away with it. In a way, of course, in a way he didn't because he had to live this very modest local life for the rest of his life. So he was in control of a very small world. When I first met him, he had two girlfriends who were sisters, and they both ran two little noodle shops that he had opened. His own sons my wife's stepbrothers, were basically slave labor in the restaurants. but he had to live in that little world. He had been a developer, and he couldn't do that, exaggerated work anymore because he couldn't draw attention to himself.
[00:11:49] Robert: So it was he himself is an interesting story because he fit into the culture in certain ways. and also it's about, you know, somebody who was, born during the war years and came of age in the post war years. When, no matter what kind of family you came from in those early years after the war, you were trying not to starve. he came from a good family, but, you know, immediately after the war, none of that mattered. Thank you. that was a way of remaking yourself.
[00:12:17] Robert: My son, when he finished high school, he went and visited family and my wife's friends all through Japan. And he talked to a woman who'd survived the Nagasaki bombing.
[00:12:27] Robert: Then he talked to his granddad who he'd seen many times. And his granddad just happened to mention, oh yeah, I remember the Tokyo fire bombing. Even the river was on fire. And these are the things that got into who he had been, I suppose. And again, you could be a quiet person, or you could be, a Yakuza gang boss, for me, it's just interesting to look at the choices people make, often because there are just these vectors, things that happen. part of what I want to do when I live in Japan is sink in. discover what's there that comes to my eye that might not come to somebody else's eye so easily from my, my sensibilities as a poet I think how I've evolved as a writer is I do obsessive research, just reading everything you can possibly read And then just seeing what crisscrosses. what appears to my eye almost as if serendipitously, which can itself sometimes be an entire massive project. But with disappearance, a lot of it is from Japan. I hope to then reach out to other countries, other people who are studying disappearance in their countries and their cultures, Mexico, where I'm living now in Houston.
[00:13:39] Robert: I'm basically in the borderlands. It doesn't matter that Mexican border
[00:13:43] Robert: is a few hours from here. I live in Houston's East end. And so if I walk out to my nearby cafe, one of the things I'll pass, for example, will be this kind of. De facto bus station that every day there are people coming in from various states in Mexico or Central American countries, people going back that way. you can see signs for say the, money services for sending money back home.
[00:14:07] Robert: you know, and just when I talk to people, I realize, as a, as a non Latino person, I could be blissfully unaware of that. But if I'm opening my eyes, I look and I see from the reading I've done, you know, to find out what does it mean to live in the borderlands? Well, it means that you probably know somebody who has disappeared just trying to go back home and visit family or trying to come back from visiting family here. we have an organization here in Houston called Texas Center for the Missing I've been to some of their meetings And you'll have people just like that where my son went with a friend back to Mexico to visit family.
[00:14:43] Robert: He never came back Texas law enforcement can't do much i've talked to the mexican police They're useless. And so if I look at Mexico and I contrast it with Japan or here what i'm trying to Find then is what I call the tropes So one would be what can you do with law enforcement
[00:15:01] Christi: Oh, the tropes.
[00:15:02] Robert: tropes would be the thing
[00:15:04] Robert: that is the, that would be common everywhere, but also different everywhere.
[00:15:09] Robert: So everywhere you might say, okay, how do we deal with law enforcement in Japan, US, Australia, Mexico. You would consider that maybe everywhere, but in Mexico, your first thought would be they're probably in on what happened. If I go to them, I might be simply endangering myself. Here, you would think, okay, which law enforcement, local police, Sheriff's Department, State Investigation, FBI, How are they coordinated with one another? You know, again, if it's cross border, okay, Interpol or customs border protection in Japan, it's more centralized. But again, you're probably going to hit a wall simply because there's A limited amount of information they can give to you about the person you're looking for. So I'm finding that those tropes So law enforcement another could be the search In Mexico because they can't trust the military or law enforcement or government generally people Go out on their own and and then they
[00:16:13] Robert: discover other searchers and these are often women Men too, but often it's women looking for men who've been taken away and then they create Family and communal groups where they just work at the grassroots level A lot of my focus is on what I call acts of imagination in response to disappearance So that could be artists writers, but it can mean also one thing I read about Recently somebody who's studying disappearance in Mexico how somebody who's a shoemaker? He had the idea because they had family and friends looking for missing people and you just had the idea one day Well, give me your shoes Give me the shoes you have left from your missing son. I'm going to use them just to make art. And he would use these worn shoes that were very individualized from the walking, the wear of walking, and he made prints. And they would do prints and they'd work together in somebody's living room and just write on the prints and hang them up everywhere because the government in Mexico tends to be very very unhelpful for doing more public official memorials for the missing because they want to deny anything's happening at all. And that contrasts with other countries in, Central and South America, where you've had enforced disappearance. That was more clearly government or paramilitary, you know, as in Colombia, Argentina, Chile, and there you've reached
[00:17:37] Robert: points where there's reconciliation at the national level. But in Mexico, they're not even really acknowledging that this is happening in an official way.
[00:17:46] Robert: And yet they have, you know, a huge problem with disappearance. So I'm just fascinated at how, if you take those tropes, sightings law enforcement, the search, how you actually go about the search the missing persons report other protocols of search the family organization, this is something that I've seen worldwide, because it can be difficult to get official help. People just work together and again, it's, often mothers and wives and sisters looking, looking for men, looking for sons, husbands, fathers. And so that affects the ways they bring a certain dynamic to what they're doing and how that has evolved. See when my stepfather disappeared in 1982, now I realize there was almost nothing in terms of a lore You know, you could watch a movie, or read a mystery novel about a missing person. It was, It was, that. Jimmy Hoffa had recently gone missing. People were still looking for Amelia Earhart. But we didn't have America's Most Wanted yet, or things like that, even milk carton kids. Since then, there have been organizations, laws have changed.
[00:18:51] Christi: We have amber alerts
[00:18:52] Robert: yeah, many laws like that. And it's a very different world, and yet people still go missing. But it's got a cult, it's got a multifaceted cultural context to it now. And so really I'm studying that as a way of studying just what it means to be a, person. When we go missing, that's part of the way you then start questioning, well what is it I'm missing in the first place? what is it that's not here and how that has something to do with, well, who am I that I miss somebody? And what does it mean? I've become fascinated with that. And it's just as one way to then dig into the world because, you know, in the United States, we tend to be so focused on just, this is the world, but in other countries, I think they have more of a keen sense of. Globalism in all the things, in all the ways that has meaning. And so it's easier to sort of connect outward, I think and not expect that everybody's going to understand your sensibility. In Japan, they're keenly aware
[00:19:52] Robert: that only Japan is Japanese. And they have to sort of connect with other people. In a way, they have to find the tropes. Well, what is it that allows me to understand you through the things that we have in common that are also going to be different? And that dynamic is very interesting to me.
[00:20:11] Christi: Let me ask you, you wrote a piece on your blog about the indigenous women missing. Actually it was review
[00:20:17] Robert: Largely about the missing Indigenous women in Canada.
[00:20:21] Christi: In British Columbia, I sent that, the link to that piece to an author of mine.
[00:20:27] Christi: I she lives in Colorado. She herself is indigenous and her own father was taken and put into one of these Indian schools. And you mentioned that in that blog post, but I asked her, I said, well, what do you think of this?
[00:20:41] Christi: And she said, there's so much going on in right here. In the US, right, that, that the government she says they just deny they just like they don't even they won't even pay attention to it. you mentioned this in your book, Disequilibria. That what is, I think you said 40 percent of the missing in this country are black and brown people.
[00:21:08] Robert: Yeah, the numbers are very, very high. I think for Indigenous women, it's ten times the general population. For Black women and men, but especially women, it's four times. you know, of course you can, again, part of what's interesting is you can go into different groups however you define them in terms of gender or ethnicity or socioeconomic class.
[00:21:30] Robert: and this is just another way people going missing is another way to, be able to perceive broader experience. It's a kind of a a way of taking a temperature about what people really think and see and how they perceive. I met a fellow at an AWP conference a couple of years ago an older indigenous man who talked about his experience being just taken away to the school back in the sixties.
[00:21:55] Robert: And that was missingness because they didn't bother to tell his family what they were doing.
[00:22:00] Robert: When he was there for years, people started disappearing. He found out later they were being sent back home, but they never told him where his friends were going. And then he just appeared home. That's the way he told it, part of what I was studying while I was listening to the details of the story, I was thinking about his way of telling it and his way of telling it was very much kind of an indirect metaphor of a giant hand, just taking away efficacy altogether from who a person was. A giant hand taking you away and then bringing you back maybe. And, what is it like to live that way? You know, I don't know a lot and I, you know, I, I need myself given my own identity to be careful when I look at things, careful about what I see, careful how I characterize it. the brief experience I've had going through Indian country. When I try to reflect on it and I say, okay, what am I seeing? Why am I seeing it this way? I remember going through. South Dakota and just feeling when he stopped at the convenience store. What is this lethargy? Why am I feeling it? What, what does it mean? Because of course you can easily project history onto what, for the people there, and it might just be, hey, it's just a Saturday. You know,
[00:23:13] Robert: you know, so I was trying to be very self conscious, but still try to feel, okay, what is going on here? Because I'm a stranger. I don't know what they think, how they feel. I was too shy to ask or, you know, I didn't want to be rude, but I, but I remember being struck by it and then leaving and getting in my car and driving away and thinking, well, what is that about?
[00:23:33] Robert: What, what is that? And, you know, I think we still have to be curious, but we have to be aware of privilege. We have to be aware of what schema we're bringing to bear on what we see. And again, for me, that's one of the tropes. It's just, you go through and you check off things. And, my ultimate philosophy is you can never be sure about anything. So just try to consider, what do I call this? How do I define it? How do I connect that to other things that I, think I know about? And then you just cycle back through that. With missingness, that's definitely the case. I mean, for years, my youngest brother and I, who's spent a lot of his life trying to find his father. we've had to accept, okay, we might not have known this person we're looking for. We don't know what he was thinking. We don't know ultimately what really happened. Can you really know a person? Well, maybe not, but does it mean that you can't love somebody? Or can't try to have faith in them anyway.
[00:24:30] Christi: we should explain for those listening that disequilibria is about your stepfather's disappearance in 1982 and a big part of it is the different ways that you and your younger brother, Kevin approached that and that's what you were just saying. also I wonder about.
[00:24:52] Christi: Before, when you were talking about working together, is that part of the answer? That author of mine, her question for you is, what do you recommend people do?
[00:25:03] Robert: You mean when somebody goes
[00:25:04] Christi: Is it the Texas Center for the Missing? Is it working together in bands as searchers, like in Mexico?
[00:25:13] Robert: what I'm discovering from looking at this through a global perspective, forced disappearances, migrant disappearance experiences women's experiences because of the heightened source of risks that women have. all over the world, but for different reasons in the world that what I'm finding is that it really depends on not seeing yourself as alone. My mother in 1982, she didn't know of anybody else who had experienced what she was experiencing. And it was very embarrassing for her. It gave her a lot of shame when in fact there were plenty of people, plenty of women, again, whose husbands had gone missing. You know, we knew of things like MIA. And that was a big deal in those days and there's a whole lore to that things that are true things that are not True, but what i'm finding is that first you say, okay, i'm not alone So I need to find other people who know what i'm feeling who might be at an earlier stage in their experience and I can help them Or they're in a later stage and they can help me so that collective action Getting to know other people and and that can be social media just for starters that can be finding a family organization because they often start with some family mother or father or both. Their daughter went missing. They look for her and along the way they say, hey, we need to do this for other people. There's something called Texas EquiSearch here in Houston and they work all over the country and beyond Helping law enforcement helping other search and rescue organizations because they've been doing it. I think it's been more than 30 years now but there are several organizations that have started just that way their own provisional emergency that just they turned it into a, an organization. So you want to find other people. You want to learn through them, the systems that at present where you are might obtain again, from, for my family, it was go to the cops and file a report and deal with their snark, you know, early middle aged guy.
[00:27:20] Robert: Oh, he found a chippy, you know, They said that kind of thing and that meant we're not going to look for him.
[00:27:26] Christi: Your mother must have been devastated. I mean,
[00:27:29] Christi: was she? You don't talk a whole lot about her reactions
[00:27:33] Robert: you know, writing a memoir is tricky. I was trying to tell a story, but be careful I'm the sort of memoirist who does not want to alienate my loved ones. I know a lot of memoirists say, they just say, well, I got to do what I got to do. My mother, my brother, whoever, they're going to hate me. I didn't want to do that. I thought, okay, that's part of the creative challenge. Can I do this and not make them cringe, not make them never call me again. And so I just tried to be careful with telling my mother's story. That could be another book really, if I sat down with her and said, well, mom, what would your ver And of course she's talked to me a lot about it. But you know, I know that it would be a different book, but I just couldn't bring myself to violate c certain aspects of her life with my brother. I, I talked to him directly, or at least I tried to about what I was doing and to get his feel for things, and we were sort of on the same page. I think for the most part.
[00:28:32] Christi: And that comes back to that, the whole idea of working together. That's what made me think of it. And a couple things. One, you mentioned social media. And when I first started thinking about this, reading your book, it seems like We have social media will keep us connected no matter what and you've already kind of answered my question But I wondered about the idea of missing has really it's changed.
[00:28:56] Christi: I mean, it's it's no longer analog That's your point about you know, you file a missing persons report. There was no What was that show on TV? Oh, America's Most Wanted. There was none of that, right? And we didn't have that constant ability to communicate with each
[00:29:11] Robert: and to learn a language and see those shows and it's interesting because they came about partly because of the rise of cable TV. And in the eighties you had the creation of a subculture, a lore, but also systems attitudes, but what comes along with that, and this is especially true for social media, you get the good, the bad, and the ugly. And so one issue about missing persons through Facebook or other social media platforms is you have to be very careful about just sharing something that shows up in your timeline. Somebody might say, Oh, somebody is missing one issue. You have. And this is an important protocol. You have to kind of double check. Before you share because it could be that somebody likes say a an abusive husband is Using that as a way of tracking his missing wife who's missing only to him for good reasons For example, are people just just jerking us around because they can so you have to really try to verify Which is not easy to do. So there are some missing groups and pages. There are thousands of them, worldwide, through Facebook, I've found. And that itself is now being studied. That's another thing, just to kind of toss this in. There are, especially in the UK and Australia, there are geographers and sociologists studying missingness. As a phenomenon and even working in the U. K., working with law enforcement on, protocols, on, how to use data to better find missing people. And in the U. K., they focus a lot on preventing recurrent disappearances. Somebody runs away, well, they'll run away again, because they, the reason for running away didn't change. And it's interesting that in
[00:30:54] Robert: Australia and the U. K., there's more of that. Than I think here because America is so big we have thousands of law enforcement agencies and it's taken a long time to create what little degree of coordination we have and a lot of that is just geography as well as politics
[00:31:11] Christi: Right.
[00:31:11] Robert: I want to just emphasize that you know working together not not believing that you're alone You There's a woman Lissa Yellow Bird-Chase, I briefly mentioned in the book. She is in Indian country in the Dakotas. She uses social media relentlessly. She uses her cell phone relentlessly, but she also just uses her car relentlessly, just drives in and looks for people, even when family members don't want her to. She doesn't stop. So she's relentless. She's connecting with people every which way she can. I think those are things you find. You find that people, they have bravery, but they're not going to go it alone. and to learn, learn what the, the techniques and the protocols are that if you look globally, you see that people have already figured things out probably in a way that will fit your circumstances, your case, you know, there's even a whole field of study of what's called ambiguous loss. There are several people in Australia that are working a lot on this. Pauline Boss. It's probably the first person to really push the idea, particularly 9/11, which was, among other things, a massive missing persons event. And so her idea is great, Pauline Boss, B O S S, and it's just a way of studying through the psychologists and therapist paradigms how you deal with what is like grief and is a kind of grief, which my mother, I mean, I watched her experiences.
[00:32:35] Robert: How do you grieve for somebody who isn't dead and buried? who isn't officially dead. And you don't know, and we don't know to this day, 42 years later, is he really dead? Where's the body? Many people, you know, 98 percent of people who are reported missing, generally speaking, not counting enforced disappearance events are found within days or weeks. Typically in most countries, when it gets out to a month gone, There's a steep drop off in terms of the likelihood of their being found alive. And it gets more complicated when you're, accepting that you might be searching for a dead body. Rather than a live person. This whole continuum, say, between voluntary disappearance, involuntary disappearance, and things that are sort of in between, and this is what these geographers and sociologists are studying in really interesting ways.
[00:33:25] Robert: I find that empowering. I think the other thing I'd say to somebody is go ahead, go ahead and, and find books and articles and websites to read, because to some extent, yes, the danger is that it might traumatize you a bit, because you'll see what the worst case scenarios are. But I think in the long run,
[00:33:43] Robert: it helps you realize what might lie ahead and you can prepare yourself. And again, if you go back to the first thing I said, that you're not alone. Other people, again, can say, here's what I did. One of these Texas Center for the Missing events I went to, there was a a husband and wife. Their daughter had just gone missing here in Houston just a couple of weeks earlier. And so they were new. There was a woman there whose daughter she believes was sex trafficked, but at the time it was maybe 12 years earlier. So they were a great, you know, kind of match because you had somebody who'd been dealing with it for years and still was emotionally dealing with it in a very hard way, partly because she refuses to give up, you know, some people
[00:34:28] Robert: decide, okay, I'm not looking anymore.
[00:34:30] Robert: I'm going to get on with my life. It doesn't mean you love somebody less. Again, like me and my sister, you're going to make sometimes completely different choices, but because you're completely, you're different people and you have to go your way, they have to go their way. But they helped this husband and wife. Ultimately their daughter's body was found. She had had a mental health crisis. And part of the story, unfortunately, a very, recurrent story, police law enforcement can be very helpful. They can become themselves obsessed even after they retire. But sometimes it can be the other way around.
[00:35:04] Robert: This woman had a brief encounter when she was going through this crisis. So technically she was actually being sought because her car sort of narrowly missed a policeman who was trying to stop her. And she was found months later just dead in the woods. But then there was body cam footage and audio that was released to the public later, where they were looking for her but talking about her in such alienating terms, just insulting her. you know, a lot joking about it. And this was so re traumatizing for the parents. She'd been missing. They dealt with that. Then they dealt with her not being missing anymore, but being found dead. And then they had to deal with this kind of thing. The people looking for her were not our allies.
[00:35:50] Robert: And even if you could try to understand this as some sort of just a way that police deal with the difficulties of their job, that doesn't comfort parents who are dealing with re traumatizing again and again. And, but they got great communal response when she was supposed to graduate from Lamar University. They, honored her. You know, we have several thousand people. And social media, I think, has been Good for them in terms of people being really sensitive and really responsive. so for me, I've just been sort of following lurking online to kind of observe how their experiences played out, because this is the case where, okay. She went missing and then went unmissing.
[00:36:32] Robert: to get back to the Indigenous women experience in, Canada and the U S it's people who are activists, like with Lissa Yellow Bird-Chase, who's just
[00:36:39] Robert: dealing with it. Cause she just got obsessed. I think her first main case was actually a white man who went missing from one of the working camps and she just wouldn't let it
[00:36:49] Robert: go. But there's also, there are academics. Who are trying to use Annita Lucchesi, I forget which tribe she's a member of, but she is a cartographer. And so she's using her skill sets to quantify and visualize the huge number of cases of women who go missing in ways that are, it's just an argument itself through the social science that she is an authority in.
[00:37:15] Robert: And I think you're just finding many cases where, whether you're an artist are a scientist or an activist. are just a mom. the Argentine mothers and grandmothers going back to the, the early eighties, they were just mothers and grandmothers, but they had an immense power and bravery, which they needed because some of them were disappeared in the early days until they got enough of a platform that was global that would intimidate the military men enough, but there've been so many interesting things as they continued and really kind of had a victory. In terms of ending that period of terror, some degree over many years of accountability. And of course, some lack of accountability as well. But they had interesting responses over the years. Again, culturally there, one issue that, You know, it goes on to this day is many of these, women who were kidnapped, tortured and murdered were pregnant,
[00:38:10] Robert: or they had small children, these children were taken and adopted by people connected to the juntas. Most of them still don't know who they are. Some of them have been found and some of those have Gone back to their biological families. Others have refused to because they that's not what they know But that means that these organizations they still go on because one interesting attitude I've seen, which is very interesting to me, is some of them, they kind of split, they split into factions because one group wanted to say, we want closure. We want to know what happened to our, children. We assume they're dead, but we want to know, and then we want people brought to justice. But another group said, no, we want our children back the way they were before you took them. We want them back alive. Now other people would say, okay, that's not rational. What are you doing? But they insisted on it. And it was interesting that was two choices and they both make a kind of sense. They both, I think, work.
[00:39:11] Christi: I want to go back to the move. Okay. Going to Japan. All right. And let's see, you wrote, I'm preparing for the last big move.
[00:39:22] Christi: Moving has been my life. Moving is also the illusion that death, the sum total of one's choices and fortunes, can be delayed forever. The last big move is one more try at cheating death. So, you believe this. Do you think it's true for
[00:39:42] Christi: everybody?
[00:39:43] Robert: know, that particular idea and that feeling are very pandemic related because it was in the depths of the pandemic when I was very alone, like a lot of people, that I started having that feeling. And in a way it goes back to the idea of the file or the archive because I was obsessed at the time with scanning books and papers and photographs and things, and just fascinated by the idea that you can, you can fit so much. onto a little flash drive That you could probably even like put in your skin or something and so I had this little fantasy of sneaking into heaven with you know everything That that wouldn't be noticed and just as a kind of thought experiment And I, but I do believe it. I think I believe it in my body.
[00:40:28] Robert: It's sort of like, if I go back to the idea, I want them back alive. I don't care how many decades. I don't care if, if everybody else has been found dead. I still see them in my mind's eye as somebody who's going to walk through the door and say, hi. I had many dreams about my stepfather coming through the door and acting like nothing was wrong. and I, in the dream would be. Just kind of weird and somewhat disappointed that he was back because it meant that his disappeared self was now missing. I've had now a longer relationship with his disappearance self than I ever did with the man who disappeared. And so he's a kind of a, kind of a golem in a way. So if he did come back, as he's done many times over the years in my dreams, It would be, Oh, well, now your other self is gone. I miss him because he never hit me. See, the thing is my stepfather, I loved him and he loved me, but he was a, he was a violent man toward his sons. And so I've always had mixed feelings about his going away.
[00:41:29] Robert: It was almost like a, you know, that, you're cursed by having your prayer answered, you know, which I mentioned in the book, which is a trope that you find in The Great Santini by Pat Conroy. The son feels guilty because. I thought one of my prayers was up there, you know, and it caused his plane to crash.
[00:41:44] Robert: And, that idea though, of, moving, I feel at this age that you lose so much when you move. It's not like when I was a kid anymore, where I felt the excitement. And not much else. Now I really feel how so much is disquieting. Like I'm in this empty apartment now that was a little while ago.
[00:42:04] Robert: It was a really nice little cozy home and now it's just a room. So I'm not here anymore and yet I'm still here. And the month I spent in Japan with my wife, just to kind of, you know, so we could see each other again before the big move, was so wonderful because it felt like home. I'd never been there. But she had made it feel the way I know a home feels from our 35 years now together And so it was not so uncanny to me. It felt right. She was there A dynamic was there that that we already shared even though my body wasn't there yet you know a lot of it has to do I think with how we have to create things that are not physical. They're very mental. They come out of the imagination and out of the way we intellectualize things You you know, I wonder how some people are good at nomadic existence and other people are not.
[00:42:57] Robert: And I think a lot of it is the imagination. You've got to be able to imagine who you are in a certain location. to go back to Borderlands, in my teaching, Many of my students, most of my students really here in Houston, Houston is the most diverse, large city in the world, I believe, certainly in America.
[00:43:18] Christi: More so than New
[00:43:19] Robert: It is just barely. I think some years ago we beat out Queens, which I think at the point had been the most, you know, now this is of large cities. If you go to midsize cities, from what I've read, it's actually the communities around DC.
[00:43:33] Christi: Oh,
[00:43:33] Robert: in terms of large cities, I think it's Houston. And so my teaching at the community college was mostly migrants, immigrants, refugees, expatriates. international students. And so in one classroom, I'd have all this clash of sensibilities. And the idea then for my teaching for most of my career was how do I make use of this so that people actually get their minds blown in good ways from the fact that the person next to them is from Albania. They never even heard of Albania, or they're here to Yemeni brothers who can tell them about the Yemeni war that they've never even heard of Yemen. And so that
[00:44:09] Robert: was so wonderful. And I realized that a lot of what I had to do was think about how, okay, these people have had to go through acts of imagination to see themselves here before they ever got here. In the borderlands, somebody has to be able, what I often would encounter with students was, they were not trying hard enough to see themselves in the picture. As students, as college students, or as citizens fully with their rights. And knowing what those rights were there was a tendency to be kind of in hiding or try to be in hiding If you had snuck across the border, for example, it's probably hard to get that out of your system Until you're in a situation where your imagination is fed by you know, the evidence that yeah you belong here You're supposed to be here.
[00:44:59] Robert: Welcome in Japan. I
[00:45:02] Robert: felt very welcome in that We'll see what happens when i'm living there for a long time People almost never did a double take with me I know that for many of them, I was the first non Japanese person they'd seen. But the general habit in Japan though, is you don't really reveal only one time did I, did I see somebody catch somebody in a double take. Well, what are you doing here? Mostly it was just, okay, you're here. Well, what we're doing now is we're doing the communal cleaning. the men were organizing it. The women say, yeah, yeah, you're organizing it, whatever. The women go off and sweep.
[00:45:37] Robert: The men go off with the gas powered grass cutters. They had me go with the women to sweep. And I don't think they were trying to insult me. It was just they, we don't know what to do with your, you, whatever you are. So that's safer. And I was fine with it, but they were being kind. they were not trying to kind of proscribe me or, put me at arm's length, at least not as I understood it.
[00:45:58] Robert: And so now I'm about to go into a kind of life where there are going to be things that are going to be, they're going to seem to be blocking me.
[00:46:06] Robert: Language, you know, I'm still struggling to get fluent in Japanese, and you know, I'm just going to wait and see, but go in with the right attitude.
[00:46:14] Christi: With the right attitude. Now, this brings me to something else that you said. What? You need to get past the essential newbie or re newbie mistakes such as believing that my observations are anthropological insights, a common error for new arrivals in Japan. How do you keep from looking at your new neighbors as the other?
[00:46:39] Robert: I think that's in the writing process, to write things down, and and then just show them to people, look at them as a writer, you know that you can write something and you can feel like, Oh my God, I'm a genius. That's brilliant. Then the next morning you look at it and say, Oh God, what trash, what, what was I thinking? You know, and, and so I, I think you just have to kind of make the writing process itself a testing ground. I think something is going to sound right. If it's true, the rhythms, the cadences, the language, the diction, it's going to feel right. I believe that. But again, that comes mainly from, you know, in Japan there are already other writers who've been there. a long time. The other issue though is they can often sort of forget what it was like to be new. So it's not bad meeting a new person because they can sort of remind you about what's, fun about, your own, your own life experience. And just, you know, reading, I, I, there are many wonderful books in English. And it's worth remembering, okay, what I read in English I'm learning to read Japanese, but I'm a long way from actually being able to read Japanese well. And so, the first thing I think is, okay, what's written in English is a small part of what's there that could explain things to me. My wife can help in some ways. Yukiko can read both languages well, so she can help a lot. But just to remember that, okay, what's there is wonderful, but it's a small part. So, for example, one of my favorite books is a guy named Alan Booth. He was a British traveler and he wrote a couple of books, but the best one is The Roads to Sata. Sata is this sort of far
[00:48:13] Robert: south peninsular point in Kyushu. And it's a beautiful book because he was a great writer. He died many years ago now, but, but his insights are great to study because he's aware that he's not the first person to travel. What he did is he walked from the northernmost Cape in Hokkaido all the way down to the southernmost Cape. in Kyushu and just walked and stayed at inns and drank beer with people and, and had this I suppose you could call it a sort of British sensibility toward things. And but when you read the book, I've read it twice now. He just has a really wonderful writer's sensibility. He's aware of his own metaphors. And the limits of his own metaphors. He creates characters of which he himself is one. And he has a deep sense of irony and joy and humor about it. So, I mean, part of it is just for me to read these things and say, wow, I wish I could do that even half as well. but also just, you know, I'm going to be living life and just, and my wife, I got to really emphasize that she was here in America for more than 30 years. you know, we've been married a long time, 35 years almost. And she would every now and then remind me. We'd have an argument about child raising or finances or doing the dishes or whatever it would be. Every now and then she'd remind me with her hands on her hips, you know, we're arguing in your language. Just remember that.
[00:49:38] Christi: Touche.
[00:49:39] Robert: exactly. And she would usually win anyway. So, you know, with the handicap. Didn't matter. So, you know, now it's going to be flipped around. But I wanted to be. See, before, when I lived in Japan before, I didn't even try hard to learn Japanese. Now I've been trying really
[00:49:55] Robert: hard. I was in Tokyo and I taught it in English language college.
[00:49:58] Robert: So I didn't really have such a powerful need to, plus I was depressed the whole time, didn't know it. And so I was not a good expatriate because I didn't really appreciate at the time what experiences I, had in front of me. Now I'm really going into it. I think with exactly the opposite mindset, kind of excited about the opportunities and The adventures that I hope to have and that we'll have together at this point in our life where We're not raising a kid anymore where We both keenly appreciate what it means to be together because we've been apart for so long and I think that that's going to just compound the insights but also It'll keep reminding me of how some things that i'm seeing and not understanding.
[00:50:43] Robert: It's just Maybe because I'm being a dodo. Because my wife can remind me and also I can see her perceptions on things. Because again, her experience, as I, as I said earlier, was also, you know, why do I feel like I'm the odd person out here? I'm Japanese. Why are they treating me this way? And she had to be, and it was good for her.
[00:51:04] Robert: She had to go back and, sort of realize, I've got to just sort of breathe and, and observe and listen. Because you know, I don't know what's going on here. And so that's been interesting that she's already been there now going on five years. and she's made a lot of progress and so I can, you know, and I'm lucky I'll be able to depend on her, her strength, her wisdom, her humor, and I think it's going to be a great experience. And I want to keep writing about it.
[00:51:29] Robert: You know, I really want to keep writing about it and getting people's feedback and people come visit. You know, come and visit,
[00:51:36] Christi: I bet you'll have a lot of visitors and they'll be like, where are you? I'm coming
[00:51:41] Robert: At this point, it's not really, it's not really a place that, that non Japanese, even Japanese people don't go there a lot. Non Japanese don't travel that way a lot. And I'm not even sure I understand why. I think it's because it's not easy. to get there and feel comfortable with being there because you're not going to find a lot of English speakers in that part of Japan. And so you have to learn some Japanese, and I think that's what keeps people from really going beyond, Kyoto, Tokyo, and some of the other really kind of, interesting tourist spots. But Japan's changing, you know, they're, they're aging, and they're, I was just reading in the Times today, they, they realize they need to allow in more immigrants, and not only as short term guest workers, because that's not going to be good enough in the years to come,
[00:52:29] Robert: so it'll be interesting to see how Japan, urban and rural Japan, deal with what I think is the likely influx.
[00:52:36] Robert: the great majority of those people 98 percent or thereabouts, they're other East Asians. And I mention that only because, what does it mean then to be non Japanese? Well, it depends on whether you're Vietnamese,
[00:52:48] Robert: Taiwanese Australian, or whatever else it might be. So you can't assume that. Your experience as a foreign, I mean, me as a white American, there are certain things that would just not ha again, it's privilege. There's certain things that I would likely not encounter that a Black American might, or that a, non Japanese East Asian might encounter. Because there are just different forms of bigotry. And not that I wouldn't experience it sometimes, but for the most part, they just sort of make exceptions. For white guys.
[00:53:16] Christi: Hmm.
[00:53:17] Robert: White women, or women generally, again, they can have problems. because it's a fairly sexist society. so again, to be aware of that is I think
[00:53:27] Christi: How did you decide that you were gonna go to this particular area? to kyushu
[00:53:34] Robert: know, I'm not sure my wife for years, I think she'd been researching Japan and places to go. It probably began with the idea of, her living in both countries, kind of going back and forth. She has a kind of an enterprise, which In Texas, where we had a small horse farm, she would bring Japanese mothers and their small children all the way to Texas. And she had for years been doing a newsletter, a blog, websites, online classes, basically just helping Japanese mothers. figure out how to be better mothers and how to deal with being an educated Japanese woman with the frustrations that come from not necessarily having a husband who was understanding or helpful.
[00:54:20] Robert: I mean, they often do, but they often don't. And so these women would come with their children and they would work with horses. And my wife just got really, really good as a horse woman, just from working really hard and being really smart. And the idea was, okay, if you can learn to control this thousand pound beast, why can't you control that 50 pound, kid or that, 150 pound husband, it's all in how you breathe and in your body language and your stance and in your attitude for everything.
[00:54:51] Robert: And she was just really good at teaching people that. And so then the idea was, well, if, Hey, if I do that in Japan, there's a whole group of mothers and children. Who couldn't go all the way to Texas, but they can go to Kyushu. So she looked for a place where there was good nature but relatively cheap real estate now throughout Japan one one kind of interesting phenomenon Is that there are all these akiya? abandoned houses Millions of them
[00:55:18] Christi: Ah, I've heard about these.
[00:55:20] Robert: and so a lot of non Japanese people. You can't even get a visa very easily There's no retirement visa. It's hard to get a permanent visa You have to be married to somebody. That's how I'm getting it. And so what they do is they, buy the house anyway. They fix it up on their, whatever they've got a month or three month tourist visa, the plan being, they're just going to go back, stay as long as they can, you know, like a vacation home because you can get a house virtually for free. Generally, you're going to spend twenty, thirty thousand dollars or as much as you want fixing it cleaning it up somebody can give you land, but if it's covered in debris, you know used furniture appliances tires or whatever It'll cost you more to properly dispose of the debris than than it would to buy the land so there are a lot of interesting situations, but there are literally millions of these abandoned homes because The typical young Japanese person doesn't want to live in the countryside.
[00:56:15] Robert: They want to go to this city You And so they will abandon these homes that they inherit from their parents when they die. so Yukiko had the idea, okay, we'll get one. There's even programs where some local governments support you. If you're going to bring enterprise into their community. There's a lot of complications, a lot of footnotes to it, but that was the idea. And I think she just chose Kyushu because she's really good at sort of scoping out. Okay, where would be the best place? In the whole country, where would be best? When we moved from Houston to Bastrop, Bastrop was just a kind of little cowboy town, kind of near Austin, but not yet really in the Austin orbit. By the time we left, it was another bedroom community for greater Austin, which meant real estate zoomed up because people who could no longer afford to live in Austin proper were finally, just as we were leaving, looking for houses out in that direction from Austin. So she's good at scoping things
[00:57:10] Christi: Perfect.
[00:57:10] Christi: She's got a nose, I bet. Did she ship her horses
[00:57:13] Robert: no, we, we, we, we had, we had five horses, four horses and a mule in Bastrop. And when she decided that, we lived there long enough, she worked really hard to find good homes for all the animals. That's something you really have to, I mean, some people aren't that way, but she was good at finding the right people to take care of them. So the horses she has now, she bought, it's expensive to get horses in Japan. But she got two good horses and, and now we have four it just seems to work out that way. But what she's doing is she connected with basically the horse world in Japan. They kind of already know who she is because she's been writing Facebook posts in Japanese for probably 15 years now and has garnered quite a following both in terms of mothers, but also people in the horse world in Japan. And so she, she heard about this person in Hokkaido. Who transports horses down south because in Kyushu, one curious thing there is that they in some parts of Kyushu, they love horse meat sashimi.
[00:58:13] Christi: Ooh.
[00:58:14] Robert: part where she used to live, they love chicken sashimi, which I have not
[00:58:20] Robert: tried. I have to confess that long, long ago
[00:58:23] Robert: I had whale sashimi. I didn't want it.
[00:58:27] Robert: My father in law kind of forced me to have it and I felt bad after.
[00:58:32] Christi: At least the whale swims in
[00:58:33] Robert: Yeah. the chicken sashimi, I thought, I can't believe you eat raw chicken. And then, and where she lives, they eat, you can find little shops, horse sashimi. So she rescued these two fillies. She got a guy to kind of fund this effort. She had never really trained a horse from that age on. we always got rescue horses. There were maybe at most a year, usually a little older. So this was a good opportunity for her to try out her own not so much breaking the horse, but starting the horse. People call it when they want to, you know, emphasize that they use nonviolent And so the idea was that she would train these horses. She and the other fellow who technically owns them will, share what they get for training the horses. But she's got them for about a year just to, learn how to, train two horses. But save them meanwhile from the butcher block.
[00:59:21] Robert: But the house we have, we don't have an adjacent field of our own.
[00:59:24] Robert: Mm hmm. It's it's what we call a kominka, which just means old country home literally And it's a beautiful traditional style house might be around 70 years old or so And so the previous owners probably had their own rice fields, and other fields that we no longer have it was abandoned but the son Kept it up for a number of years.
[00:59:44] Robert: He tried to turn it into an airbnb. he maintained it It didn't fall apart. It's in pretty good shape it's cost us probably 18, 000 overall, plus a little money in fixing things. And again, the problem was the barn was filled with junk. So she'd spend a lot of money just getting somebody to cart stuff away. It's a good thing though, that the idea is you can't just toss stuff in a landfill. Everything in Japan, and I think this is true for a lot of countries that are more enlightened than our own, you've got to take a certain responsibility for how something is recycled or. disposed of in a way that is not too harmful for the environment and that can be costly So we've got a great barn with she's turned into four stables and some storage space But then she borrows fields pays a little bit of money per year to use fields from people who are not actively farming anymore And then we'll just see where it goes from there if we end up with our own adjacent fields someday Because you know the the people in the village are mostly in their 70s and older So, you know, the next 10 years, there's going to be some great changes in terms of who's living there and what they're doing.
[01:00:49] Christi: Wow.
[01:00:49] Robert: the expat life. Particularly with regard to banking and finances and other things that are political, hasn't really kept up. We're near a town called Fukuoka. It's the sixth largest city in Japan. It's about an hour north of us. They are trying really hard to be an international city, to have people working there remotely, but also living elsewhere, like Australia, but doing business. with people on the ground in Fukuoka. They're really seen from what I've been reading just in English. They're really trying hard to become an international city as their way of kind of continuing to have, like that old Avis rental car thing, you know, trying harder when you're second, they're not Tokyo, they're never going to be Tokyo or Osaka. But they're now, a big, big city. And so they're just trying to make things new for people and let it be known. Hey, we want you to come, even if it's only virtually.
[01:01:40] Christi: Yeah, and, but maybe in real life too, because then that helps with that population issue
[01:01:47] Robert: Yeah. They know they need
[01:01:48] Robert: that. Yeah. It's interesting. I'm interested in seeing how that plays out because Japan has always been very much a mono ethnic culture. And it's also something that the whole world is dealing with and we'll have to deal with in the next century as population declines. And what that's going to mean. I mean, the so called border problems that we're experiencing here. There are for so many reasons, but they're not, you know, they're not thinking of them as problems. That's the first problem. Because it's, it's just a reality that has many layers to it and many causes to it. So we just got to change, you know, what we call it in the first place. And Japan has to, has to reach that point of understanding as well. They centuries ago, foreigners came in, they decided they didn't like it. The, the daimyos, the people in power, and they said, okay, leave. And for a while at work for a few centuries at work, but I don't think that's going to happen again. So we'll see.
[01:02:47] Robert: Well, this was great, Christi thank you so much for having me. Christi, I really, really, really appreciate it.