May 29, 2025
Guests:
J, M
Discussion Content:
M arrived first. Since this was the final salon, she asked if I could continue the salon privately at a separate location, and I said I would have to check with the company, just in case. Understandably, they would like to continue having a chance to practice their English, as it’s very easy to lose your ability with a foreign language if you don’t use it regularly.
J arrived soon after, and he brought some farewell gifts for me. First was a small ring binder, which I thought was the gift by itself, but M said, “Aren’t you going to open it?”, and when I did, inside were handwritten messages – some very well designed with nice illustrations - from most of the members, thanking me for the salon. J then took some photos of me, and was able to print them on the spot on to sticker paper, which he then added to the binder, turning it into a lovely memorial photo album.
In addition, J brought a bag of fancy sweet cakes for me from a store in Inzai called “Itabashi Kashiten”. (Two weeks ago, he had suddenly asked me via LINE if I or my wife had any kind of wheat allergy, so I now realized that this was why.)
Further, there was also a wonderful key chain, designed and handmade by J’s 8-year-old daughter who came to the salon recently during Golden Week.
M also brought some more castella cake this week, following her trip to Nagasaki. This time it was chocolate flavored castella, which I had never had before. It tasted like a brownie, but not overly sweet like the brownies you buy at a convenience store, so I liked it very much – even more than the regular type of castella. M also prepared tea once again, but she suddenly realized she had forgotten to bring paper cups, so she asked me if the nursery school might have some, but I was pretty sure they didn’t, so we had the castella without tea this week, which was fine.
After this, we began a regular salon conversation, and somehow got on to the topic of AI. I said that although many occupations will soon be replaced by AI and machines, there was one occupation which I thought would likely never be replaced – that of a nursery school teacher for small children. I couldn’t imagine any parent being willing to hand their child over to a robot to look after all day!
However, J had a different perspective. He thought that the current generation of children – who he called “digital natives”, a new term meaning a person born or brought up during the age of digital technology and so familiar with computers and the internet from an early age – might not have much resistance to allowing a robot to look after their children in the future.
(This reminded me of a famous movie starring Robin Williams called “Bicentennial Man”. It’s about a family that buys a robot which does all the housework and child minding, but over time, as the robot company updates its functions, it begins to experience emotions, and eventually desires to become more and more human).
I then changed the subject, and said there are three people my wife says are constantly on TV so much that she’s tired of seeing them, and asked if J and M could guess who I meant. As a hint I said they are three men - two politicians and one sportsperson, two Japanese and one American. They soon guessed correctly that it was Donald Trump, Shohei Ohtani, and Shinjiro Koizumi, the new Japanese Agricultural Minister.
We then talked about the news about the government releasing the emergency reserves of rice and them being sold from stores at a much cheaper price than regular rice. Normal rice has become so much more expensive this past year, so the government decided it’s a bit of an emergency. Unfortunately, even though the emergency rice is much cheaper, it apparently is also of a much poorer quality, and probably a few years old.
I said that I can’t really tell the difference between good and bad rice as well as Japanese people can, so I will be happy to eat the emergency rice and my wife can have the good type. This led to a discussion about how foreigners love to see the Japanese food in supermarkets. Even though to Japanese people it’s just normal food presentation, for foreigners, even the average bento looks great. But J said that behind the scenes there’s an “unignorable amount of waste” created.
I felt as if I had never heard the word “unignorable” before, but it is a correct word. J said he just did a direct translation from the Japanese phrase, “mushi-dekinai”, but it turned out really well.
Useful phrases:
handmade
handwritten
perspective
digital native
resistance
Bicentennial
Agricultural Minister
emergency reserves
unignorable