We’re in Thailand right now for a whopping two week vacation. This is our second full day in Bangkok. Until I got here, my only familiarity with Thailand has been through food and the musical “King and I”.

But I’ve been surprised at how modern and clean Bangkok is. I’ve been told how good the food is, and I’ve also not been disappointed. Yesterday, we went to visit the old palace and the temple next to it. We had dinner at a wonderful Indian restaurant at the top of the Rembrandt and ate while we watched the lightening hit some of the towers around us.

Today, we’re going shopping.

That’s the birth rate in Japan right now. Yep. A record low for the fourth straight year, and I believe one of the lowest in the world. This has all kinds of implications for social security as well as the economy.

This makes me recall an article I read in a Japanese monthly called Bungei Shunju in January. It was an essay by Masayoshi Son, the chief executive of Softbank Corp. What started out as an essay about how he came to acquire a baseball team, ended up with a diatribe on how the Japanese educational system is responsible for the lack of procreation in the country. According to Son, the problem is that people are brought up to express sympathy when a man impregnates a girl by mistake. Son says, men should be congratulated instead.

Note: Of course, I few days later I went out with the head of PR for a major Japanese firm and he had a fourth on the way.

It’s nearly 7pm in the West Coast. As I sit here munching potato chips, it kills me to know that PMK and his brother are probably still eating the meal of their lives at Alinea, Grant Achatz’ new restaurant.

My meals today?

Breakfast — coffee, banana, custard bun
Lunch – granola bars, wafer cookies, diet Pepsi
Snack – muffin, potato chips

It’s really disgusting. The food situation at E3 absolutely stinks. I’m determined to have a real dinner this evening, but given the amount of stories I have to write, it might not happen.

There’s nothing like a talk radio show to make you feel like you’re back at home.

I’m in LA right now on a business trip. The cabbie from the airport had on a local radio show where they were taking callers who wanted legal advice. One normal-sounding man comes on to find out if he had a case against a policeman who pulled him over and arrested him for driving without a license. When asked about his experience in jail, the guy replies, “Well, this was the first time I wasn’t strip-searched in jail.”

Something happened yesterday at work that I never dreamed could happen — they completely ran out of toilet paper. The ladies room on our floor has four stalls, and each one of them usually has two rolls on holders, plus an extra one hanging on a hook. All of them were empty. I ended up going to the fourth floor to use their bathroom.

Could it be that my company can no longer afford adequate toilet paper?

I just got done writing about how I sensed Christian roots in Nagasaki, but I was nonetheless pretty disappointed by the churches there. The most famous Catholic church, which is the oldest church in Japan and considered to be a national treasure, not only charged 300 yen for entrance, it didn’t seem to really be a church anymore. They had a real church nearby, but even that one had stores underneath, selling drinks and other touristy knicknacks.

The second most famous church — the one that was rebuilt after the old one was destroyed by the atomic bomb — didn’t charge admission but most of the church was roped off so you couldn’t even sit down in the pews.

We just got back from Nagasaki — you’ve probably heard of it because it was the city where the second atomic bomb was dropped at the end of WWII. I had mixed feelings about going to the A-bomb museum because I remember how ill I felt after I went to the one in Hiroshima about 15 years ago.

But I was actually pretty impressed with the exhibits. They showed some stuff that made you pale including pictures of charcoaled people, helmets with the person’s bone fragments stuck on it, clothes with blood, etc. But it was balanced. Impressively so.

They didn’t even forget about the non-Japanese that were also killed by the bomb. They had testimony by the Korean laborers that were forcefully brought to Japan to work, as well as testimony by prisoners of war that were being interned nearby at the time. They finished off the the exhibits with a deeply critical and thorough section on the nuclear bomb experiments that have been going on in the world since that time including testimony by those who have suffered from those after-effects.

Most importantly, I didn’t sense any anti-U.S. sentiment (although the exhibits came down hard on the U.S. regarding all the nuclear bomb tests they’ve conducted since then). I also didn’t feel like they were shoving my face into this stuff. The exhibits were intelligent and the message simple. I left the museum feeling sober but not sick.

This is my own interpretation, but I wonder if part of the reason for this is that the U.S. actually targeted one of the most enlightened communities in Japan. It’s got a very old Christian history, and you feel that undertone. (In fact the largest Catholic Church in East Asia was one of the main buildings to be destroyed as were the dozens of people who were attending midday mass).

One part of the exhibit was dedicated to the life of a Catholic Japanese researcher physician, Takashi Nagai (author of “The Bells of Nagasaki”), who helped the victims and spread a message of peace even as he was dying from leukemia. One of the things that Nagai says in one of his books is something to the effect of the following: “There’s no one to blame but ourselves for this tragedy.”

I can understand the temptation of wanting to blame the old enemy as was the impression I got in Hiroshima, but Nagasaki’s simple message somehow seems so much more powerful.

(The picture is one of Ground Zero although of course the bomb went off in the air)

Bathrooms in Fukuoka talk to you. I kid you not. I went to the bathroom at the train station yesterday morning. Not to get into the details, but when I sat down, something says to me: “Welcome to the bathroom. This toilet flushes itself as you get up or if you wave your hand in front of the sensor.” Ok, maybe it didn’t welcome me to the bathroom, but it did say the rest. Fukuoka takes noise pollution to a whole new level.