I think I have this time-stamped appropriately on YouTube, but you might get a commercial to watch first.
I have been watching Sora the Troll videos since the later part of the pandemic. He is really cool as Japan-side YouTuber, who posts in English and does a lot of clownish but interesting stuff. He is really keen on the attraction Americans have for Japan, and the interest that other people around the world also have for this country.
To get away from life in August, I decided to join the membership group, and there is a tight circle of aficionados who hang out via YouTube. They are in all different places, but get together during the day.
Any number of “content creators” that I watch have these groups.
So, it turns out that Sora was heading to the area near Narita Airport that had been the site of some of the riots in the airport construction days (1970s), and I reached out and said, “hey, you’re in my neighborhood today!”
So after the planned trip, Sora returned through Tomisato, the neighbor town of Narita, and I walked over there and we hung out for half an hour of so.
I am really grateful for having the opportunity to appear on camera, and practice being on camera. I know I bored the people and talked a bit too much, but it was fun to do, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity without Nishimatsu-san’s efforts.
His streaming channel tends to go into the “mizushobai” talk in the late evening hours (“water trade” in Japan, which usually involves a rated R or X cultural background), but daytime stuff is really informative, and you get to see a lot of the countryside of Chiba, the less-traveled streets in Tokyo, and more background about living in Japan that you may or may not get from a tour guide. It’s an interesting mix.
I hope Nishimatsu builds the channel as an online tour-guide channel that encourages people to come and appreciate (and respect!) Japan. I also appreciate the comedy (and mizushobai element, as long as there’s a heads-up!)
He has a lot of talent as a performer. I wish I had that kind of talent.
[Update 9/29/25 am: In it, I’m tired and a little nervous. I did it on three hours of sleep the night before. Since Extension Season is rolling in, and I’m already backlogged on tax-return work due clients, I had that going on in the back of my mind. I talk with my hands a lot (“gesticulate”). My lips get dry.
One of the live commenters said I looked like Pope Leo the fourteenth.
It’s always nice to be complimented. When I got thin in my late 40’s, one kid in Tokyo said I looked like “House” (Hugh Laurie). I am chubbier now.
Sora seemed not to take me seriously when I said the Japanese government already “doxxed” me, but it is true. I found that info in fifteen seconds. I assume anybody can.
We live in a weird world where, within our lifetimes, (the 20th century), the phone company used to put everyone’s names in a book—with phone numbers. Then, send a copy to everyone’s house and the library. Free.
Now, we are encouraged or forced to be made strangers. Yet people lament the fact that communities can’t organize as well as years ago, and everyone is looking at each other like a political enemy. Well, it’s because nobody knows who the other people are, and everyone is made afraid to say anything. This is how “totalitarianism” wins. ]
[Update 9/30/2025: I was researching the issue of public information in Japan even more, and it turns out that there is a law called, in English, “Act on the Protection of Personal Information”. It dates from the early century. I think Sora was nervous because I wasn’t saying “please publish this”, I was saying, “this is already published elsewhere.”
It turns out that it doesn’t matter if it’s already published elsewhere.
But it seems to me that the whole exchange taken together says that contacting me in Japan for US taxes is OK-even if I don’t say that in an automated, Japanese way.
Contacting me for any negative purpose is NOT OK.
Last night on the Sora chat, I felt I had to mention about how dangerous America can be when someone “shows up”. There was the October 1992 killing of Yoshihiro Hattori, who mistook the wrong house looking for a Halloween party, and was shot dead by a homeowner. When I am stateside, my family’s borough is, frankly, an armed camp compared to Japan. I know at least six neighbors who keep loaded guns at the ready. And when I say neighbors, I don’t mean “in the town” neighbors. I mean, like, on the same road neighbors. And that’s just one part of one development. As someone who’s been messed with by nuts both online and before there was an internet, I felt maybe I should have stressed that.
Experts think there are a half a billion guns in America.]
[Update 10/3/25: I am one of the many “Eleanor Rigby” of bloggers, but if you happened to catch the skit, and it was totally impromptu, I assure you, Sora makes much of my orange T-shirt. It’s actually getting faded-it’s brighter in my BlueSky picture from 2023 in Beppu.
After I wrote about American gun-culture, and its Pennsylvania variant the other day, I started thinking about my late father, Frederick Arthur “Fred” Gundlach. We were not the closest father and son, let me put it that way—BUT as I told both my siblings, I know that my father loved us. In his own way, as he could. My brother showed me the pictures he carried of all of us in his wallet. Like many men of his era, fathers could not maybe express it well and you have to, usually later, figure it all out. It’s a recurring theme in movies in Japan.
My father is the man to the right, in this picture taken by his Cocalico Sportsmen gun club, just over ten years ago.
Notice any sartorial similarities?
He was a popular man in whatever circles he travelled.
This is us in the late 1960s.
These were pictures offered for the memorial service, that the funeral home put out on the internet. ]