Caroline S. Hau (Cultural Studies)
In my childhood during the 1970s, two-wheeled, horse-drawn carriages called kalesas were ubiquitous in Manila’s Chinatown. They brought denizens to and from school, the movie house, restaurant, clinic, store, church, and temple. Their cousin, the spacious karitela, transported goods in bulk from the markets of …

Tomohiro Machikita (Labor Economics and Industrial Development)
Increasing numbers of stores are installing self-checkouts recently. The customer places the basket with the goods on one side of the self-checkout and hangs a shopping bag on the hooks on the other side. The barcode …

Nathan Badenoch (Linguistics)
Living in Japan, your surroundings talk to you—along the Kamo River, in the local Lawson, walking up to Yoshida Shrine, or on the 205 bus—through onomatope, or onomatopoeia. …

Minami Tosa (Librarian at CSEAS)
In our daily lives, it is now commonplace to use translation tools and generative AI to understand foreign languages, and it goes without saying that we enjoy the convenience of such tools in various situations. However, …

Wataru Yamazaki (Food hygiene, zoonotic disease, animal infectious disease)
My first encounter with pathogens was in January 1993, when I was just 20 years old and aboard a night bus from Nepal to India. I still vividly remember …

Genta Kuno (Area Studies, Urban Studies)
It was dry season in Jakarta. I found myself heading to one of the city’s most infamous prisons with two friends. When our turn came, a warden handed us lanyards and stamped our hands with a UV mark. …

Chika Obiya (Modern History of Central Asia, Central Asian Area Studies)
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with a woman from Belarus who is involved in volunteering to support Ukraine. We met at a gathering of Japanese people who understand Russian, and the first thing she said was, …

Ryota Sakamoto (Field Medicine)
When I was a child, my mother always read picture books to my sister and me before we went to sleep. Even when I was in elementary school, I was often taken to the library, where I chose books eagerly. …

Toshihiko Kishi (Asian History)
During my primary school years, I was very much a “TV kid,” deeply enamored with the program Kanetaka Kaoru Sekai no Tabi (Kaoru Kanetaka’s Journey Around the World), which I watched religiously with my family each week. …