Idle Musings

  • The Steakhouse in Delhi

    When people think of Delhi, one image that comes to mind—at least for those who visited 25 years ago—is that of cows. Sacred cows. White cows. They wandered calmly through the streets while rickshaws, motorcycles, three-wheelers, cars, and trucks squeezed past one another in every direction. It was Indian chaos at its finest. . Yet when I returned about five…

  • Comedic Variants for European Serious Operas

    The other day I went to see Wagner’s Lohengrin—performed by the Nikikai Opera Company with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. The performance itself was magnificent. But the opera? The libretto struck me as Wagnerian in the worst sense: childish, contrived, and absurdly solemn. And musically this is still early Wagner—endless repetitions of the same booming triads: do-mi-sol, so-shi-re, over and…

  • Can ChatGPT Grasp What Infinity Really Is?

    Every now and then, I like to spar with ChatGPT—not for answers, but for thought. It’s not just a machine that gathers bits of information from somewhere and stitches them together. As I’ve mentioned before, it seems to have some kind of judgment of its own (or perhaps it aligns itself with the user’s values), combining what it finds to…

  • “From ‘Markets = Wealth’ Back to ‘Territory = Wealth’”

    Watching the way Trump and Putin speak and act, one cannot help but feel how fundamentally different their mindset is from ours. Seizing land through connections, force, and money, then developing it for enormous profit—Trump seems to view the world with the mentality of a ruthless land developer, which he really is. It is like a schoolyard bully who never…

  • The Foundations of “Modernity” Are Gone—So We Need New Institutions

    　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　.Akio KAWATO In Japan, Europe, and the United States, we still debate politics using the modern values of “freedom” and “democracy.” But the real foundation supporting those values was the economic development of Western Europe since the 17th century—above all, the dramatic rise in productivity brought by manufacturing. As manufacturing expanded, more people were able to earn solid middle-class incomes…

  • Russia, cursing the dollar, cannot forego it

    Russia never misses a chance to square off against the United States. The dollar has long been one of its favorite targets. The message has been simple enough: why keep using the dollar, that tool of American imperialism? Why not settle trade in rubles or Chinese yuan instead, and show the Yankees that the world can move on without them?…

  • The AI Rush; But Does It Have To Be So Expensive?

    These days, whenever AI comes up—NVIDIA, xAI, all that world—people casually throw around figures in the tens of billions of dollars. It sounds almost surreal. Then again, maybe this is exactly how early 19th-century Britain must have felt when iron, railways, and chemicals suddenly replaced cotton as the engines of growth. Compared with spinning mills, the money required must have…

  • Living in the Age of the Bully

    I finally managed to revive my blog, yet somehow I cannot quite summon the energy. In times like these, no matter what one writes about the world, Trump the realtor arrives like a bulldozer, flattening every counterargument and dissenting voice in his path. Even when he himself seems to hesitate, pressure from America’s evangelicals and MAGA forces (though those circles…

  • Can ChatGPT Grasp “Infinity”?

    When I’m working, I sometimes feel like taking a break and playing with ChatGPT. It’s not just a machine that picks up bits of information and stitches them together. It seems to have some kind of internal standard of judgment—or perhaps it borrows the user’s values—then recombines what it finds to produce something new. In that sense, it does something…