Translation (1)

Language borders

By William Wetherall

31 December 2025

A few days ago I received an unusual request from the 1st older sister, in Japan, of my adoptive sister in America. She asked me to translate one of the poems from Genji monogatari for her Mainichi Culture Center lectures on Genji in modern Japanese, English, and Chinese translation.

The sisters are Nos. 3 and 4 of 6 daughters born and raised in the People's Republic of China during the early 1960s to a Chinese woman born in the Philippines, and a Chinese man born in the Republic of China before Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong (1893-1976) established PRC and drove ROC into exile on Taiwan in 1949. The daughters were born at time when PRC dictated that families have only 1 child. And boys were preferred to girls.

In 1980, the mother brought her daughters to Hong Kong, when it was still a British territory. People determined to leave the mainland found ways to cross the border. The oldest sister was 22, the youngest 11. Nos. 3 and 4 were 18 and 16.

After coming to Hong Kong, No. 3 worked as a dish washer and No. 4 worked in a factory. In the late 1980s, No. 4 came to Japan to study Japanese. Two years later, she was a fluent speaker of Japanese and addicted to Japanese novels. She then turned her attention to English, and I happened to be one of her teachers.

No. 4 wanted to study in the United States, so my parents sponsored her. She had to apply for a student visa in Hong Kong, from where she went to America on a Hong Kong passport, and became an unofficial member of the family. She took remedial courses at a community college, went on to get a BS magna cum laude and an MBA at a state university, then a law degree, and became a U.S. citizen. She now runs her own law office in a small town in California, where she consults in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese.

Wang, Chiang, and Mao

No. 3 came to Japan from Hong Kong in the early 1990s, just days before No. 4 left for America. She, too, came to study Japanese, bent on enrolling in a Japanese college. She passed the entrance exam to Hosei University, graduated in history, and enrolled in the graduate school of the University of Tokyo.

No. 3 advanced to candidacy in a doctoral program, doing research on the life and political philosophy of Wang Ching-wei (Wang Jinwei 1883-1944). Wang was the nationalist leader that Japan recognized as the president of the Republic of China from 1940-1944, after ROC's nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) was driven into exile in Chungking (Chongqing) by invading Japanese forces in 1937.

In 1945, Japan unconditionally surrendered to the Allied Powers, which included Chiang's ROC in exile. Chiang regained the reins of most parts of ROC he had lost, and an ROC representative accepted Japan's surrender of Taiwan, which the Ching (Qing) dynasty had ceded to Japan by treaty in 1895 -- 17 years before the founding of ROC in 1912, and 54 years before the establishment of PRC in 1949.

Postwar treaties generally make clear provisions for territorial transfers. The terms of Japan's surrender in 1945 required that Japan surrender Taiwan to ROC. However, no Pacific War settlement treaty formally retroceded Taiwan to China by any name.

From the moment ROC accepted Japan's surrender of Taiwan in 1945, it was assumed to have become a province of ROC. As such, it has never been under the control and jurisdiction of PRC.

Chiang's postwar reign on the mainland was short lived. He immediately faced the resumption of a civil war that he had been fighting with Mao before Japan's incursions in China in 1937. And he would again be forced to move ROC's capital, this time to Taiwan, and take refuge there from Mao's People's Liberation Army, in 1949.

Head unbowed

No. 3 was attracted to Wang as a Chinese leader who saw getting along with Japan as the better alternative to war. She had problems with her advisor, however, and left the doctoral program without a degree -- but with her head, like Wang's, unbowed.

No. 3 had naturalized in Japan, so she didn't need a visa to stay. She acted in a few amateur plays, even wrote a couple of plays herself, and penned -- in Japanese --an unpublished personal novel of her family's adventures during the Cultural Revolution in China. She then translated into Chinese -- and published in China -- a collection of early reports on Manchuria by three 19th-century Japanese writers.

No. 4 had come to Japan with only a middle-school education, completed in China at the time she migrated to Hong Kong. No. 3 had started but not completed high school. The sisters were native speakers of Fukien, but had lived in Inner Mongolia, and then Hong Kong, so were fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese as well. They had adopted English names in Hong Kong but had little contact with English. They studied English in Japan only after learning Japanese.

English is now No. 4's principle survival language, but she frequently visits Hong Kong and even Japan. She has lost her spontaneous fluency in Japanese but can manage. No. 3's principle tongue is Japanese. She had to read English writings on China-Japan relations while in graduate school, but didn't feel a need to speak English until visiting No. 4 in America.

I converse with No. 4 in English and No. 3 in Japanese. Since I have also naturalized in Japan, No. 3 and I are both Japanese, for whom Japanese is a common but not native language. I have long since forgotten my university Chinese, other than to say things like "Wǒ bù huì shuō Zhōngwén."

Genji monogatari

A few years ago, No. 3 -- impassioned about the characters and themes of Murasaki Shikibu's Genji monogatari -- began translating this best known massive work of 11th-century classical Japanese literature into Chinese. She has even created a series of talks on Genji monogatari in translation, which she gives in Japanese at the Mainichi Culture Center campuses in both Osaka and Tokyo.

The Genji enthusiasts who enroll in No. 3's Genji seminars include a few Japanese students of Chinese. She presents the original texts, then shows how they have been translated into modern Japanese, Chinese, and English by several hands in each language. Finally, she recites passages from her own translation.

No. 3's Genji seminars are a study in variation. All the translations are different. No. 3 sought my translation to fill a gap, for I am both a structuralist and a minimalist, who endeavors to translate as close to the metaphorical and stylistic bone of the original as possible. More about which in a later post.

Last revised 31 December 2025

Words matter (1)

Japanese

By William Wetherall

30 December 2025

I've been engaged in studies of minorities in America and Japan for over half a century. In both countries, social histories of minorities have changed. For history is not about the past, but how people presently living choose to consume, digest, and assimilate whatever vision of the past best suits current ideological fashions.

During the Pacific War (1941-1945), "all persons of Japanese ancestry" residing in military zones along the west coast of the United States, which the U.S. Army declared off-limits to "Japanese", were evacuated from their homes to temporary "assembly centers". Evacuees were soon moved to "relocation centers", which many were allowed to leave in order to work or resettle in localities east of the exclusion zones, while a few were recruited for military service.

Practically all of the terminology used by the U.S. government agencies that oversaw the mass removals of "all persons of Japanese ancestry" from their west coast homes are today considered "euphemisms" by scholars and others who write about the removals. Most organizations that memorialize the removal experiences of over 110,000 (or 120,000 or 125,000) persons of Japanese ancestry -- as examples of past injustices that should never be repeated -- offer alternative terms they claim are more "truthful" through the eyes of "critical" history.

I regarded the earliest adoptions of the critical alternatives as gestures of political correctness. Today, though, their "correctness" is so taken for granted that few writers bother to wonder whether in hindsight the "euphemisms" might not be more truthful.

"Japanese" or "Americans"

For example -- "all persons of Japanese ancestry" included both "Japanese" -- legally defined at the time as "enemy Aliens" -- and "U.S. citzens" who happened to be descendants of Japanese immigrants. Then (as still today), "Japanese" was widely used in English as a label for anyone regarded as being "racially" or "ethnically" Japanese by "blood".

There is no such racial beast in Japanese law. In Japanese law, a "Japanese" -- or "subject" (historically) or "national" (historically and today) of Japan -- is someone who possesses the purely civil, raceless, non-ethnic nationality of Japan. This is also the essential sense of "Japanese" in U.S. laws that differentiate between "aliens" and U.S. citizens or nationals.

Likewise, a citizen or national of the United States is legally anyone who possesses the nationality of the United States -- regardless of the person's racioethnic status in America's "race box" culture. Note that U.S. passports declare that the bearer possesses the "nationality" of the United States of America. Whether the bearer is a citizen or national of the United States is a matter of U.S. domestic law, not international law.

Keep in mind here that in conventional Americanese -- the language of the street, novels and movies, and even some journalism and scholarship -- "What is your nationality?" generally alludes to a person's putative biological "race" or "ethnicity" or "heritage" or "culture" or "peoplehood" -- rather than to the person's passport status.

Also in conventional Americanese, "persons of Japanese ancestry" was then (and is still) typically reduced to "Japanese" -- a highly racialzed term that alludes to anyone with putatively "Japanese blood". The term has nothing to do with civil nationality, and everything to do with race.

The same confusion between legal status and social perceptions of "race" and "ethnicity" is every bit as prevalent in Japan. Just as in Americanese "Japanese" is almost always racialized, "Nihonjin" (日本人) in vernacular Japanese is typically racialized. So it comes as no surprise that immigrants to the United States from Japan have usually racialized themselves as much as they have been racialized by others.

Japan, however, didn't (and still doesn't) have race boxes. Japan's civil laws did not prohibit interracial marriages. Japan's Nationality Law did not prohibit naturalization on account of "race" (jinshu 人種) or "racioethnic nation" (minzoku 民族). In fact, equivalents of such words are absent from Japan's laws, though its 1947 Constitution prohibits discrimination on account of race, or other personal attributes tantamount to descent or ancestry.

Densho on "Japanese American vs. Japanese"

Densho -- an organization that advocates "Preserving stories of the past for the generations of tomorrow" -- adopts the following stance on terminology (viewed 30 December 2025).

In the 1940s, government officials and military leaders used euphemisms to describe their punitive and unjust actions against people of Japanese ancestry in the United States. The deceptiveness of that language can now be judged according to evidence from many sources, most notably the government's own congressionally-ordered investigation, documented in Personal Justice Denied (1982-83), the report of the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC).

Today, these decades-old euphemisms persist in textbooks, news sources, and other platforms -- meaning that most Americans learn about this history through a distorted lens that diminishes the harsh realities of Japanese American WWII incarceration.

Densho makes the following argument for replacing "Japanese" by "Japanese Americans".

Media outlets and other sources often refer to the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent imprisoned by the U.S. government during WWII as simply "Japanese" -- but this both erases their American identity and conflates Japanese Americans with Japanese citizens in Japan. The wartime government employed this strategy itself, inventing the orwellian term "non-alien" to describe Japanese American citizens in public documents.

The Nisei ("second generation") were U.S. citizens born to Japanese immigrant parents in the United States. Many had never set foot in Japan. Their Issei parents were forbidden by discriminatory law from becoming naturalized American citizens, but by the 1940s most had lived in the United States for decades and raised their families here. Most had no plans of returning to Japan, and would have become naturalized citizens if allowed. By birth or by choice, Japanese Americans were just that -- American.

The cold reality of America's unjust treatment of "all persons of Japanese ancestry" during the Pacific War is precisely that it racialized as "Japanese" both aliens and Americans perceived as having "Japanese blood". That America's naturalization laws viewed aliens of Oriental "national origin" as racially ineligible is important. That immigrants from from Japan therefore couldn't become Americans is important. How many might have naturalized had they been allowed to is irrelevant to a truthful history of the period. All that matters is that they were legally race-boxed as a caste of aliens ineligible for citizenship.

Not about "Americans" by any definition

The use of "non-alien" in the context in which it was introduced is legally precise and not at all deceptive. That American citizens of Japanese ancestry were regarded as "non-aliens" who thus had rights and duties different from those of "aliens" in general and "enemy aliens" in particular is of utmost importance.

The day after Japan's attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor, subjects and nationals (not "citizens") of Japan were declared enemy aliens. The phrase "all persons of Japanese ancestry" conflates Japanese enemy aliens with their U.S. born descendants, who were American citizens. The phrase also includes persons, of neither Japanese nor U.S. nationality, who were regarded as being of "Japanese blood".

The phrasing is intended to be racialist -- because the removal of people of "Japanese ancestry" was predicated on race, not nationality. Their civil status, as aliens or citizens, didn't matter to exclusionists. Whether out of hatred or fear, exclusion was not about being "Japanese American" by any definition of the term -- but only about being "Japanese" as a matter of putative race.

The use of "Japanese" as a racialist reference to anyone perceived as being of "Japanese blood" is as prevalent today as it was then. Little has changed in that regard. Race boxes are alive and well in the United States today. Eavesdrop on a conversation between self-styled "Japanese Americans", talking about their "identity", and witness how quickly "Japanese American" is reduced to just "Japanese" as a biological imperative of Japanese American identity. It was then, and is still, all about pride in biological ancestry.

Euphemisms

As for "euphemisms" -- "evacuated" and "relocated" may smack of banal bureaucratese. But historically, they are far more truthful than "imprisoned". The "relocation centers" were not prisons. The removals of "all persons of Japanese ancestry" from their homes were horribly unjust, but they were not punitive. They were, in fact, for the purposes of evacuation and relocation -- more about which in future posts.

Last revised 30 December 2025

Nationality (1)

Dual nationality

By William Wetherall

29 December 2025

On 1 December 2025, Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republication representing Ohio, introduced the Exclusive Citizenship Act of 2025, to establish that citizens of the United States must have "sole and exclusive allegiance to the United States." The bill provides that naturalizing aliens who would continue to possess the nationality of another country, after taking a sole-and-exclusive oath of allegiance to become a U.S. citizen, would have one year within which to renounce their foreign nationality (or nationalities) or lose their U.S. citizenship.

The main points in the proposed law are these.

1. An individual may not be a citizen or national of the United States while simultaneously possessing any "foreign citizenship" -- defined for the purpose of this act as "any status recognized by the government of a foreign country that confers on an individual the nationality or citizenship of such country or requires the allegiance of an individual to such country."

2. U.S. citizens who, after the date of the enactment of the law, voluntarily acquire a foreign citizenship shall be deemed to have relinquished U.S. citizenship.

3. Within one year of the date of the enactment of the law, U.S. citizens who, at the time of the enactment, also possess a foreign citizenship, shall submit written renunciation of the foreign citizenship to the Secretary of Homeland, or be deemed to have voluntarily relinquished U.S. citizenship.

These provisions resemble those in Japan's Nationality Law, and in the nationality laws of many other countries, in that voluntary acquisition of a foreign nationality is commonly a cause for loss of the country's nationality. In fact, this was the case in the United States, until 1990, when as a result of a series of earlier rulings in U.S. courts, the State Department changed its policy regarding its presumption of intent regarding retention of U.S. citizenship when naturalizing in another country.

Nationality, not citizenship 

Moreno's definition of "citizenship" for the purposes of his bill is essential. While "citizenship" is the term commonly used in U.S. nationality laws, "nationality" is the term recognized in international private law, and on passports.

As a passport status signifying political affiliation with a recognized state or state-like entity, the term is "nationality", not "citizenship". In point of fact, U.S. passports declare only that the bearer possesses the "nationality" of the United States. Whether the bearer of a U.S. passport is a "citizen" or just a "national" of the United States is a purely domestic concern.

Nationality is something you either have or don't have. If you possess Japan's nationality, you are Japanese. If you don't, you're not. You cannot be half or any other fraction of Japanese.

You may have two or more nationalities, in which case you are a dual national or multinational. Or you may have none, in which case you are stateless -- an alien in the eyes of every country.

Unlike nationality, citizenship is not a 0 or 1 binary. Citizenship comes in different sizes and colors, depending on personal attributes like nationality, residential status, age, legal capacity, and possibly sex.

Tolerance of dual nationality

Tolerance of dual nationality was inconceivable in most states of the world until the middle of the 20th century. By then, degenderization -- the elimination of sexual distinctions -- in nationality standards had generally undermined the older principle of single nationality for internationally married couples and their offspring. Today, nationality -- while defined and regulated differently among sovereign states -- is almost universally regarded as a personal rather than collective family status.

During the last half of the 20th century, more states began to realize that they were unable to prevent dual nationality without trampling on personal rights. Between a rock and a hard place, states began to see that their fears of dual nationality stemmed more from nationalist paranoia than legal realities.

More commentators have concluded that dual nationality is not only harmless to a state's political integrity, but is generally beneficial for mixed-national families, which in turn are generally beneficial to the state. True, dual nationals are likely to encounter some conflicts between the laws of their countries of nationality in the course of their lives. But most such conflicts -- involving international private law -- are generally addressable by laws of laws and treaties that determine matters like applicable law, jurisdiction, and venue in cases of conflict.

Expatriating acts

Naturalization in another country is a potentially expatriating act in practically all countries. Until 1990, the State Department presumed that a U.S. citizen who naturalized in another country intended to forfeit his or her U.S. status. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that a Poland-born naturalized U.S. citizen, had a constitutional right to remain a U.S. citizen even though he voted in an Israeli election after becoming a U.S. citizen (Afroyim v. Rusk).

The 1967 ruling had a domino effect on a number of U.S. laws, treaties, and policies that had restricted dual nationality. The final dominoes fell after 1980, when the Supreme Court ruled that the United States could not expatriate a dual U.S.-Mexico national, born in the United States to  Mexican parents, simply because he applied for a certificate of Mexican nationality while studying in Mexico. The United States was obliged to prove intent to relinquish citizenship by a preponderance of evidence (Vance v. Terrazas).

Since April 1990, the State Department has presumed that a U.S. citizen who naturalizes in another country intends to retain U.S. citizenship. Relinquishment, as distinct from renunciation, is a fairly simple procedure. But to meet the "preponderance of evidence of intent" provision, the State Department now imposes time-consuming and expensive barriers that discourage renunciation.

Nationality choice

In the meantime, since 1985, Japan has implemented a "National Choice" provision that requires Japanese who possess other nationals to declare, within 2 years after coming of age, their intention of remaining Japanese. The age of majority in 1985 was 20. It has been 18 since 2022, Those who become dual nationals after coming of age similarly must declare their choice of Japanese nationality within two years of their naturalization.

Contrary to its tag translation in English, the "nationality choice" (kokuseki sentaku 国籍選択) form is not a form for choosing a nationality. Rather it is a form for a Japanese national who possess other nationalities to notify (declare) ones intent to remain Japanese and relinquish the other nationalities.

The notifier is required to list the other nationalities, relinquish them to the Japanese government, and vow to endeavor to renounce them. The form is used by all dual nationals, regardless of how they became dual nationals, whether through birth, or through legal measures later in life.

Nationality through birth through birth is passive. Nationality acquisition later in life may also be passive, such as when acquired through marriage, or when naturalized by a parent or guardian. But most adult nationality acquisition -- usually in the form of naturalization -- is volitional.

When applying for permission to naturalize in Japan, a non-stateless alien generally vows to renounce ones nationalities -- not just to relinquish and endeavor to renounce, but to renounce, period. The "endeavor to renounce" phrasing n the national choice procedure appears to reflect a judicial understanding of the legal difficulties of enforcing hard-and-fast rules in a world in which all nationality laws are different, and Japan has no standing in how other states deal with dual nationality.

Nationality management 

Given its national household register system -- administered not by the state or by prefectures, but by municipalities -- Japan could, but chooses not to, keep track of every Japanese person who is known to possess, or is thought to potentially possess, other nationalities.

Japan could, if it embraced the "exclusive citizenship" mindset of Senator Bernie Moreno, force compliance with a single-nationality scheme. But even in the computer age, enforcement would require considerable bureaucratic resources. Enforcement would also risk appearances of trampling on the rights of other states regarding how they treat nationals who happen to also be nationals of Japan -- not to mention the plausible rights of individuals to identify with and belong to more than one country. 

One problem is that not all other states recognize choice of Japanese nationality as a cause for losing their nationality. Some countries even forbid renunciation, or make renunciation extremely difficult.

Japan fully understands that all nationality laws are different. It has a sovereign right to determine the standards for acquiring and losing Japan's nationality. But it also recognizes that other states have the same right regarding their nationality.

More importantly, though, despite popular claims to the contrary, Japan's Nationality Law has never prohibited dual nationality in principle. It has prevented it in some cases, discouraged it in others, and tolerated it when it is unable or unwilling to strictly eliminate it -- as in cases of multinational Japanese who for a variety of reasons have obtained and retained other nationalities.

The result is a gray zone that accepts dual nationality so long as it doesn't involve fraudulent behavior -- such as when, say, a dual Japan-U.S. national who enters Japan on a Japanese passport, and is thus Japanese, then uses his or her U.S. passport to get discounts or tax breaks intended for foreigners.

Moreno's bill 

Bernie Moreno was not born a U.S. citizen. He immigrated to the United States from Columbia with his family when he was 5 years old. He grew up in Florida, and naturalized to the United States when he was 18 -- the youngest age possible.

Moreno's "Exclusive Citizenship Act" bill --  119th Congress, Senate Bill 3283 -- is currently assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee for review. Whether the committee approves it and passes it on to the Senate for deliberation and voting, remains to be seen. If passed by the Senate, it would go to the House of Representatives, and if passed there, it would go to the President, who could sign it into law or veto it.

Even if Moreno's bill manages to attract other sponsors, it faces numerous hurdles, especially in light of Supreme Court rulings that dual nationality -- if not exactly a right -- is not a cause for expatriation.

Last revised 30 December 2025

Viva analog (4)

San Francisco Examiner

By William Wetherall

28 December 2025

Fifty years have passed since the San Francisco Examiner published my Other Voices op-ed, Bilingual education -- a way to Identity, in its Wednesday, 11 June 1975 edition (pages 1 and 35).

While a student at Berkeley at three different periods from 1962 to 1975, I contributed a number of "Letters to the Icebox" column in The Daily Californian, the campus tabloid. I also submitted occasional letters-to-the-editor columns of San Francisco papers.

In the spring of 1975, as busy as I was -- taking my oral exams, applying for research grants, preparing to move to Japan and begin my field work on suicide, and managing the apartment building where I lived north of campus -- I somehow found time to read the San Francisco Examiner, and carry on a rather heated exchange in its Editor's Mail Box column with Guy Wright (1923-2006), one of the paper's most popular columnists, who opposed bilingual education, such as for the Indochinese refugees then streaming to America, many as "boat people" rescued on the open seas by passing cargo ships.

While I didn't consider myself a radical, my sympathies with disadvantaged people were definitely liberal. And when reading today my 1975 Examiner op-ed, advocating bilingual education as a human right, I'm keenly aware that I talked the talk, if I didn't exactly walk the walk, of 1970s radicalism.

I spoke of "3rd world peoples" and "heritage" much like the "woke" generation of recent years. My editorial perch was a high "royal we" -- though of course I had absolutely no authority to speak on behalf of anyone other than myself.

My op-ed was purely polemic. My advocacy of bilingual education was fashionable and even ideological, not reasoned or realistic -- a priori rather than empirical.

Not once did I examine actual conditions in the real world. I failed to examine even my personal experiences, such as they were at the time -- limited but, in hindsight, more in tune with Wright's arguments than mine.

Bilingual circles

Today my support of bilingual education in any country is predicated on the need to first and foremost share the languages in which a country conducts its domestic affairs. In most countries of the world this means a single language -- hence English in the United States and Japanese in Japan.

There being hundreds, even thousands of languages in the world, there have to be people who are able to speak more than one language, whether because they were born into a family or community in which two or more languages were spoken, or later in life acquired the ability to speak other languages through study, travel, or migration.

Throughout history, in all parts of the world, bilingual people have played roles in commerce and peace making between villages and countries that don't share a common language. In almost all communities of any size, there are people who for whatever reason are able to speak a language or two other than the language which has the most currency in the community.

International diplomatic, academic, athletic, and other fetes need highly skilled conference and simultaneous interpreters. AI-assisted interpretation is beginning to relieve shortages of trained human interpreters, but the fact remains that human migration and mixture naturally produce bilingual people without the need for bilingual education.

Professional interpreters may need specialized training and supervised internships to hone and discipline their skills as say court interpreters, or interpreters for heads of state in which mastery of protocol is also required. But this would be true for all fields of human endeavor. Specialization at advanced levels come after general education and experience.

Tourists of course may need a certain amount of support in the form of multilingual brochures and maps. Most large cities and not a few smaller municipalities in Japan provide information in English, Chinese, and Korean, in addition to Japanese. But anyone who comes to Japan other than as a tourist, who is permitted to stay, with an obligation to register as a denizen of the municipality in which they wish to reside, has no right to expect to be accommodated in a language other than Japanese.

That some municipalities today go out of their way to provide information in at least English, for the benefit of non-Japanese reading residents, is partly because they want to appear to be friendly rather than hostile toward foreigners. Local governments have also learned that explaining garbage collection rules in foreign languages is the quicker and more painless way to realize compliance among those who can't read Japanese. 

Yet anyone who comes to Japan to live, without having learned basic Japanese, about a hundred hiragana and katakana, and a few hundred Sino-Japanese graphs, will quickly find that foreign-language support, such as it is, is extremely limited. And unless they embrace a willingness to linguistically assimilate, their lives in Japan will be bound by the limitations of their alien tongue.

An American friend who has been in Japan as long as I have, once asked me why I don't select English at ATMs or ticket machines. I tell her if had chosen to live my daily life in English, I'd never have learned to do everything in Japanese. She knew I wasn't saying this as a personal dig, but was simply being honest about the consequences of not striving for a minimum functional level of reading if not also writing ability. She speaks Japanese but struggles to read anything written only in Japanese. Thus she heavily depends on friends who can read Japanese, whether natively or as a second language, who are willing to treat her as what I would call a "professional alien".  

Rights versus choices 

But back to the United States, where written English does not impose the sort of barrier that written Japanese or Chinese, or even Korean, poses for people familiar only with alphabetic scripts. People traveling in the United States as tourists generally come with some understanding of English, even if limited to what they learned in an English language class in an otherwise monolingual school. Very few countries are motivated to provide public school educations in multiple languages.

I'm not saying that there is no room for opportunities to learn history or arithmetic in two languages at lower levels of schooling. An English-speaking American who plans to work in Germany as a chemist needs to know Chemistry in German, even if German colleagues can speak English. But that would be a personal choice. It would not be cause to offer a bilingual English-German course in chemistry at any level.

Did children of Cambodian refugees in San Francisco in the 1970s need to be educated in both English and Cambodian? Did they have a right to a bilingual education?

My answer today would be that public schools in the United States have no obligation to provide educations in languages other than English. If a child of Cambodian-speaking parents speaks Cambodian at home, that is a family matter. If Cambodian-speakers settle in the same neighborhood, and choose to speak Cambodian with each other, in the shops and restaurants they may operate in the neighborhood, and at meetings they convene for the purpose of conducting communal affairs -- that, too, would be a private matter.

But step outside ones linguistic comfort zone in say Vietnam, into the United States or Japan, and one is obliged to learn English or Japanese. It's that simple and sensible.

What about adult refugees, who may arrive in the United States or Japan with no English or Japanese ability whatever? If admitted as refugees, and permitted to settle, they need to quickly learn at least enough English or Japanese to survive and minimally participate in American or Japanese life.

They need to be able understand the local language of daily transactions when shopping or using public transportation. They need to be able to convey basic medical needs at clinics and hospitals. They need to be able to read and understand traffic and road signs to qualify for a driver's license.

Minimum fluency won't come over night, but survival in the new language needs to be the primary goal. Initial support in a native tongue is analogous to training wheels on bicycles. One can chose whether to use the wheels and for how long. Some people, though, have found it more effective to dispense with training wheels, and focus on building balancing skills while facing and overcoming the fear of losing balance.

Naturalization

In the 1980s, the semanticist, columnist, and politician S.I. Hayakawa (1906-1992), a Canadian who turned American, started a movement to make English the official language of the United States. Guy Wright became a staunch supporter, and also endorsed Hayakawa's opposition to bilingual ballots, which had become popular in California and several other states.

The question came down to whether an alien who can't understand basic English, sufficient to participate in American politics, should be admitted to U.S. citizenship. And whether ballots should be available in languages other than English.

My answer today would be no. My own personal experience -- not an ideology of linguistic inclusiveness -- convinces me that a certain amount of linguistic assimilation is the price all people who cross language borders have to pay for a place in their adopted home. They may regard their mother tongue as their most spiritual language, as I do, but that is private matter. What matters in the public square is whether they are ready, able, and willing to meet the public language at least half way. 

As for citizenship -- aliens who naturalize in Japan are not required to show that they know anything about Japan's history, its constitution, and its system of government. Nor are they required to take a language test.

Aliens seeking to become Japanese have to submit all documents in Japanese. Documents originating in other languages have to be translated into Japanese. While forms may now be completed on a computer, applicants must submit their statement of why they want to become a national of Japan, in Japanese, in their own hand. And they to conduct interviews with Legal Affairs Bureau officials in Japanese.

Last revised 29 December 2025

DEI fantasies (2)

Preferentialism

By William Wetherall

27 December 2025

Discrimination is a biologically enabled capacity essential to survival. Failure to differentiate poisonous from non-poisonous mushrooms, or between friends and foes, can be fatal. Parents have reasons for teaching children to be cautious of strangers. The problem is, when is it safe to say hello to someone you don't know? And dangerous not to say hello?

Preferences are forms of discrimination. I prefer ice cream to gelato. Maybe I'd feel differently if I had been raised in a family that preferred gelato. But I grew up in California liking ice cream. In fact, I can't recall encountering gelato until coming to Japan.

In Japan, as I did in America, I accept ice milk as the cheaper and often more available alternative to real ice cream. But I prefer real ice cream, even if it costs a little bit more. And I have always liked vanilla more than chocolate, which is not to say that I haven't liked chocolate. In fact, I have a weakness for chocolate cakes and candies.

But when it comes to ice cream, chocolate has always been a second choice. And generally I've eaten strawberry only when there has been no other choice. Mixing the three doesn't appeal to me. If someone today were to offer me only Neapolitan, I'd be inclined to simply forego dessert. Ditto with gelato -- which I don't hate, but simply don't prefer, and would eat only to be polite.

Do I discriminate? Yes. Am I biased? Yes. All preferences are about discrimination and bias. Do I advocate racioethnic preferences of any kind? I question the very notion of classifying people according to their putative race or ethnicity -- especially for the purpose of establishing enrollment, employment, and other such quotas.

A shoe store owner is biased if he or she seeks a clerk who is able to climb a ladder to fetch shoes from stock, and stoop to measure a customer's feet or feel the fit of a shoe. When, if ever, would it be appropriate to prefer a minimum height, or a maximum weight or a sex or an age range, or a race, religion, or political affiliation?

What if an employer was willing to hire any male, of whatever putative race, so long as he were clean shaven and had short hair? Or any female who agreed to wear skirts, heels, and makeup? When do preferences -- all of which are by definition discriminatory -- become unacceptably discriminatory?

Equality and equity

Equality of opportunity, and equity in outcome, are not the same. As preferences, they generally contradict each other. To prefer and achieve equity in outcome, one usually has to disregard inequalities in qualifications.

Take for example jobs that require formal educations in computer science. To guarantee that the sexual breakdown of employees at a large tech company in Silicon Valley reflected the sexual composition of the general population, you'd have to hire every female graduate -- regardless of her performance in college -- and the staff would still be predominately male.

Hire every so-called Hispanic or Latino, Black or African American, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and Multiracial computer science graduate, and Silicon Valley staffs would still be dominated by so-called White and Asian employees. And Asians would still be hugely "over-represented" compared to Whites in terms of their relative populations based on Race boxes in US censuses.

Does being "created equal" mean that everyone has a right, not only to pursue happiness, but also to be happy -- regardless of where their pursuit leads them? Even were governments able to guarantee every pursuer of happiness an equal start, how are they to guarantee that everyone will catch up with happiness?

Do students admitted to elite universities deserve to expect As rather than Bs or Cs, or heaven forbid Ds or Fs -- simply because they were accustomed to straight As in high school, and scored in the top percentiles of achievement and aptitude tests? Should all sprinters who make the final heat in the 100-meter dash be given a gold medal, never mind the order in which they finish?

Is it contradictory for the government or a company to bill itself as an "Equal Opportunity Employer", then allow extra points for military veterans? Is this not discrimination against conscientious objectors?

And what about the increasing preference, by all manner of companies, for AI agents and robots over human beings?

Last revised 31 December 2025

Viva analog (3)

California Engineer

By William Wetherall

26 December 2025

The fall of 1962 was a big year for me. I had graduated from Sierra College in June 1961, and was accepted by the Department of Electrical Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. I was supposed to start my studies as a junior that fall, but was granted a 1-year leave of absence to work for the Department of Navy at San Francisco Naval Shipyards at Hunter's Point, where I had worked the summers of 1959 and 1960.

At the shipyards I was an engineering aid in the Fire Control section of the Electronics Division. I job was to assist the civilian "yard bird" engineers who installed and tested fire-control radar and sonar systems for state-of-the-art ship-launched guided missiles and torpedoes, and antiaircraft batteries, on new, refitted, and vintage warships, from submarines to aircraft carriers, and occasionally a minesweeper or transport. Most of our work was on ships tied up along a quay or sitting on blocks in a dry dock, but now and then we'd go out on a ship on sea trials along the coast outside the Golden Gate.

Engineering students at Berkeley were "red hots". We were proud of the 12-1/2-inch Keuffel & Esser Log Log Duplex Decitrig slide rules we carried everywhere, often slung from our belts, though not (contrary to folklore) strapped to our legs. We were loaded for any bear of a problem our profs and TAs could throw at us, so long as we could reduce it to an equation, into which we could assign values to all variables, and crank out an answer on our slip sticks. We knew next to nothing, and were taught even less, about the social and political complications of life, like girls and Cold War politics.

Then came the Cuban Crisis. We should not have been shocked. The campus was dotted with bomb shelters and other "Civil Defense" facilities. Like many other engineering students, I had studied radio activity, and had even taken part in field exercises in which we walked a grid in a park with a Geiger counter, measured the level of radiation at each point, plotted the data on a map of the park, and located the hot spots. It was an Easter egg hunt, in which the eggs were vials of radioactive material the instructor or a TA had buried in the ground.

Not a few engineering students, myself included, became totally disillusioned by the prospects of working for the "military industrial complex" as Eisenhower had called the symbiotic parasitism of the armed forces and the weapons industry. We knew that roughly 70 percent of all electrical engineers did work related to the defense industry. Glamorous aerospace jobs were satellites of the defense industry. The technology that would out-orbit Sputnik was the same technology that would put the United States ahead of the Soviet Union in the ICBM race.

I stopped going to lectures in the College of Engineering and began auditing courses on subjects ranging from archaeology to zoology. I read a lot of fiction, from Ayn Rand to Zane Grey. I read several volumes on information theory and the history of science and technology. I read Walden Pond.

My report card for the Spring 1963 semester was full of withdrawal Fs, as I had not sat for my final exams and skipped the make-up exams. Early in the summer, while working as a surveyor for the Tahoe National Forest, I received a letter from the assistant dean of the College of Engineering informing me that I had been put on academic probation for a year, during which I would not be allowed to enroll.

Late that summer I was ordered to take my Selective Service physical, the first stage in the process of being drafted into the military. In order to be able to choose an occupational specialty, I enlisted in the US Army and indicated my desire to be a surgical technician. I was in infantry boot camp when Kennedy was assassinated. After finishing training as a medic and truck driver, I drove an ambulance in a Strategic Army Corps medical battalion. I spent one-month participating in a field exercise called Desert Strike.

In the heat of the Mojave in California and Arizona, a couple of active Army divisions and Air Force groups fought over the Colorado River. I was on the side that wore Roman crests on their battle helmets. The object of the umpired maneuvers was to test the ability of US forces to fight a desert war. But the ambulance support was not simulated. In addition to the real blisters, crotch rot, and other military malignancies, soldiers were bitten by scorpions, killed in vehicle accidents, crushed by tanks in night operations, and blistered to death in the unforgiving sun. But Operation Desert Storm would not come until twenty years after another war had been fought, and lost, in the hot steamy jungles of Vietnam, on the other side of the same Eurasian continent.

I cannot remember precisely what went through my mind in late October and early November 1962 as I watched, in the common lounge with the students who lodged and boarded, or like me just boarded, at Arch Place, the news reports on the showdown between Kennedy and Khrushchev over the buildup of Soviet offensive missiles on Cuba. All I recall is that I wondered what kind of career awaited me, and what sense it made, if any, to devote my life to the design, manufacture, sales, and service of devices that could destroy the entire planet.

I had already launched my writing career, as it were, with letters to the editor of the Daily Californian, the Berkeley campus paper. I had also published a critique of Nevada County Education and Culture in The Union, a hometown paper, which had also run a column I wrote while at Fort Ord called Life in the Army.

But the Cuban Crisis, and readings of books like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, compelled me to write longer and deeper about the contradictions of technological development and civilization. I read, and wrote, from sanctuaries in various US Army posts, but did not finish my first essay until around the time of the Tonkin Gulf incident in August 1964. Though I was soon to be caught up in what would became a full-scale and very nasty war, at the time I had little understanding or interest in what seemed at first to be just another minor skirmish in a far off corner of the world I was challenged to locate on a map.

What shall we do with Andromeda?

I finished What shall we do with Andromeda? while studying to be a medical laboratory technician at the Sixth US Army Medical Laboratory at Fort Baker just north of the Golden Gate Bridge between the bridge and Sausalito. The laboratory was directly across San Francisco Bay from Letterman Army Hospital in the Presidio, where we also did some training.

I was, of course, delighted that the California Engineer accepted my manuscript. For it was, to say the least, a very unconventional piece of writing. Nothing quite like it had ever appeared in the magazine. I wonder if the editors were as overwhelmed then, as I am now in hindsight, by its cocky rhetoric. Whatever they thought of it, they touched not a word -- not even its odd neologisms, which fortunately never made it into a dictionary. Did the editors think of looking them up? Or did they just feel that Wetherall seems to know what he's talking about, and besides they had a nice ring to them?

Fifty years later, while reflecting on the pompous rage that drove me to write the piece, I am aware of how much of that youthful anger, though now much quieter and more moderate, still simmers in the furnace of my brain, and still fires my gravest misgivings about the human condition, but as well my deepest hopes.

Global conditions haven't improved but arguably have worsened. Whatever glimmer of hope I once had that technology might come to the rescue, has vanished in the rush of governments and corporations, bent on global domination, to consign the killing fields to drones, and replace humans with AI agents and robots.

Cybernetics and semantics

In the fall of 1965, except for the fact that I was in still the Army, I was a very happy trooper. What shall we do with Andromeda?, my first magazine article and the cover story of the March 1965 issue of the California Engineer, had been published. It caused a bit of a stir for a magazine not known for its interest in the social consequences of technology, and the editorial of the October 1965 edition credited my article with inspiring "three more views on the relation of contemporary technology to man and environment" in that issue.

While still serving in the U.S. Army, deployed as a laboratory technician at the Ft. Ord U.S. Army Hospital, I proposed an article on Cybernetics and Semantics and was encouraged to write it. The editors had decided to make "Communications in the Modern World" the focus of its January 1966 issue, and my article, which was all about communications, would fit right in.

I had already started compiling notes and writing paragraphs on the Smith-Corona portable typewriter I packed around everywhere. I worked in the bay of the barracks I shared with a couple of dozen other hospital personnel. I bummed a number of books from the Ft. Ord Library, where I had once worked part-time reshelving books and attending the checkout desk. And I bought a few older and newer titles at book shops in Monterey.

Then orders came down for me to report to the 106th General Hospital at Fort Bliss in El Paso. The war in Vietnam was heating up. The 106th, I was told when reporting for duty, was gearing up to be sent somewhere in Asia to support the war.

The ambulance company I had been with at Fort Ord before being sent to Fort Baker for lab tech training was by then in Vietnam, and I was corresponding with a couple of other medics I had worked with. The medical battalion to which the ambulance company had been attached, and the evacuation hospital to which the battalion had been attached, were also in Vietnam, where I would have been had I not been sent to Fort Baker.

The 106th General Hospital was a field hospital and was prepared to set up and operate in tents anywhere in the world on short notice. At the time we had no idea where we were going -- probably not to Vietnam, but definitely to a neighboring country to which the wounded who survived their treatment in evacuation and MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) hospitals in Vietnam could be airlifted. While at Fort Bliss, the 106th was a component of the William Beaumont General Hospital, where the 106th's resident staff worked to maintain their technical skills.

Newly assigned personnel like yours truly, however, would bide their time in the barracks, to do chores around the company area or elsewhere on the base, for the few weeks before the 106th received its orders to move out. I used my time to continue writing, but not for long. Lab techs were in short supply, and I got seconded to the medical laboratory at the new McAfee Army Hospital at White Sands Missile Range. Though I had less time to write during the day, I had no other duties, and so feverishly wrote in the evenings and on weekends.

I was at Ft. Bliss for about 2 months from mid October to mid December, and all but the first and last weeks of this period I spent at White Sands. As I recall, the deadline was the end of November, and I mailed my manuscript out, with a few hand corrections, just in time.

There was no email in those days. All my communication with the California Engineer was by postal snail mail. I never personally met or talked on the phone with any of the staff. By the time I returned to Berkeley in 1967, as a student of Oriental Languages in the College of Letters and Science, the then incarnation of the magazine had stopped publishing. I would like to think it was not because of my articles.

In the fall of 1965, I was also more than a little full of myself. Reading my California Engineer articles today, but especially Cybernetics and Semantics, I shake my head in utter awe at the magnitude of my "attitude" -- for that's what it must have been. It's still there, I assure you. But in the subsequent decades, I've worked very hard at suppressing it, or hiding it behind a veil of writing that even I can understand.

"Our Far-East Correspondent" 

What amazes me, though, is how Richard Sullivan, the editor of the California Engineer, justified including, much less leading with, my article. Was it to get the worst over with? Or to scare readers away from the rest of the issue?

Sullivan even listed me as "Staff" on the masthead and called me "our Far-East Correspondent" on the "About the Authors" page. This was the first and last time that I would ever have such a title. 

One thing I will say about my writing then -- after quitting my engineering studies, and before embarking on my language and literature studies -- is that I really knew how to pile it higher and deeper. When I read today what I wrote then, I have to reread some phrases to parse their seamless, practically comma-free streams of pretentious thought.

I can generally still figure out what it was I was trying to say. And I can generally sort the wheat from the chaff. From my vantage point half a century later, there was mostly chaff. And bloopers like "somantic" not being a corruption of "semantic".

Someday, when I have time, I may try to rewrite the essay in clearer and simpler terms that an editor today might agree is good prose. The sentences will be half as long and say twice as much. And I wouldn't have to look up my own words in a dictionary and discover that don't, and have never, existed.

Alternatively, I could compile a glossary of neologisms, and outright Wetherallisms and BS, to aide reading, and markup each word in the glossary to display a pop-up annotation on mouseover.

The extinction of civilization

While doing bacteriology and parisotology at the 106th General Hospital, I fired off a third manuscript to Sullilvan, certain he would like it. He never acknowledged receiving it, but I don't think it was lost in the mails. He and his staff surely read it and rightly concluded that Wetherall had gone mad.

I do not have a copy, and cannot remember the title, but it must have been gloomy. The story likened the spread of science and technology, and the industrial revolution, from Europe to the Americas and elsewhere around the world, to a pathogen that colonizes every part of the world and depletes the continents and seas of all their resources. Without nutrition, and exhausted, the colonies implode on themselves, and the pathogen becomes extinct.

Looking back, I have to thank California Engineer for showing good judgement and restraint. It was not in the business of publishing dystopian science fiction. But was the analogy wrong?

Last revised 28 December 2025

Viva analog (2)

Early writings

By William Wetherall

16 December 2025

While calling myself a journalist, I have been a reporter in pursuit of news on only one occasion. From the start of my life as a writer, I have been mainly an opinionist when not a publicist, and a feature writer. Most of my articles have focused on current, especially social issues, but I also take on history, language, and literature.

My first two ventures into the world of print media -- for which I received nothing but the thrill of seeing my by-line in the paper -- were published by The Union, a Civil War era broadsheet, hence the title, published in Grass Valley, California, where I graduated from high school in 1959.

Grass Valley is a small town, but is the largest municipality in Nevada County, in the Sierras northeast of Sacramento. The Union had been a town rag in the early gold-mining years, but then became a county paper. I was acquainted with the editor, who owned the building leased by the shoe store where I had worked part time, across from the paper's office and printing plant on Mill street.

Nevada-County Education and Culture

My first published article -- A Treatise on Nevada-County Education and Culture -- appeared in the 16 April 1963 edition of The Union. I was 21, an electrical engineering major in my junior year at the University of California at Berkeley, with a B+ GPA, and enjoyed my studies. But in the fall of 1962, with the publication of Rachael Carson's Silent Spring in September and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October and November, I lost my political innocence and decided to drop out of engineering.

I became disillusioned by the prospects of working in the aerospace industry, a synonym for weapons development. I stopped going to classes and audited a few courses on the humanities side of campus. I have never turn my back on science and math, but their applications by global corporations and technocratic nationalistic governments continue to sadden me.

No longer saddled by engineering homework -- problem sets that kept hard-science students out of trouble -- I decided to write something for The Union about my recent education in Nevada County schools. Though awakened to the realities of nationalism and industrial pollution, I was still unaware of how much my education had culturally and socially pickled my brain in the brine of Saturday Evening Post America.

My diatribe filled over one full broadsheet page of the older kind with small print and crowded columns. Reading it now is painful, illuminating, and entertaining. How did such rubbish get as far as the linotype operator? It would have broken all of today's spelling, grammar, and style checkers, and driven an entire bay of human fact checkers and PC-minded editors to the brink. Yet my father, on his death bed half a century later, could still remember a line he treasured about how doctors save the broken backs of ditch diggers, who save the backs of doctors from being broken.

Life in the Army

After sitting out all my final exams in the Spring 1963 semester at Cal, the College of Engineering put me on academic probation for a year. That summer, while working on a surveying crew for the Tahoe National Forest, the local draft board -- aware that I was no longer attending college -- ordered me to take a physical, which I easily passed.

While in college I had worked summers on ship-to-air guided missile systems at San Francisco Naval Shipyard. So thinking that I'd be assigned to a missile unit if drafted for 2 years, I enlisted for 3 years in order to choose my military specialty. 

After basic combat training at Ft. Ord near Monterey in California, I was sent to Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio in Texas for my Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) training as a medical corpsman. I was then assigned to a Ft. Ord ambulance company, which was part of a medical battalion that supported a 24-hour-readiness Strategic Army Corps (STRAC) evacuation hospital, but also supported basic training maneuvers. 

With time on my hands, and fresh memories of basic training, I banged out Life in the Army -- my first newspaper column -- which The Union ran in 16 long installments from 29 October to 26 November 1964. 

Robert Ingram, the editor and owner of The Union, read the galleys but touched very little. One time, though, something I had written required surgery, and pinched for time, he had the galleys hand delivered to my father to rewrite and tone down. My father had no trouble cutting and recasting the problematic graphs. I learned many red-lining skills from my father, a lawyer who knew how to write.

I saved nothing from the column, not even the clippings. Yet I now have copies of everything -- the galleys and correspondence with Ingram, and a full set of clippings -- in Japan. Ingram's widow found my file in her husbands office and mailed it to my father, thinking I might like to have it. And Bob Lobecker -- one of my closest friends from high school and college, a local boy who unlike me finished his electrical engineering studies at Cal and then earned his living as an EE -- had clipped the entire column in real time, and decades later he sent it to me.

Rejection letter

In the summer of 1964, while in the ambulance company at Ft. Ord, writing the first installments of the "Life in the Army" column, there was a meningitis outbreak at the training facility, which resulted in the entire base being quarantined. I followed the reportage in the press, and certain that I could contribute to the outside world's understanding of the causes of the outbreak, I submitted an unsolicited article to the San Francisco Examiner -- or perhaps the Chronicle, I frankly forget -- and received a personal and encouraging rejection letter from an editor.

It was not a pre-printed rejection slip, mind you, but a hand-written, thanks-but-no-thanks note -- encouraging me and giving me some advice. The editor said my writing reflected the zeal of a journalist and story teller. The problem was, I was too alarmist about things that were well understood in the real world, where most readers would not be shocked by my reports of the conditions of life in Ft. Ord's barracks.

In other words, if I wanted to be a writer, I would have to be less naive. This was probably the best advice I have ever received. It did not dampen my idealism and romanticism, but it did help me become a better doubter, skeptic, and even cynic.

While at Berkeley, I submitted a number of poems and vignettes to various magazines, and had gotten several rejection slips of the form-letter kind, sent in the self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) I always enclosed with a submission. I kept them in a file, tokens of my clamoring for admission to writing circles.

I added the rejection letter to the file, proud of it as evidence that I might have discovered an alternative to a career in engineering. A few years later, when visiting my parents -- in a funky erase-the-past, clean-the-slate mood -- I threw out a box of youthful memorabilia, including the file of rejection slips -- and even photos of my high school classmates, though I hesitated tossing the yearbooks, all but one of which have survived and are now in Japan.

It would be several years, after settling in Japan, before most articles I submitted to newspapers on spec were accepted -- usually as I wrote them, and with my titles.

Last revised 16 December 2025

Hibernation

"If summer comes, can spring be far behind?"

By William Wetherall

14 December 2025

Having just finished my 2-week turn to police the neighborhood garbage collection station, I passed the duty roster to the next in line -- one of my 7 fence neighbors.

Either I have a huge lot, or my neighbor's lots are tiny, you might think. In fact, my property includes a very long approach from the street to my home, which sits on a fairly long and narrow back lot. And my neighbor built his new home far from the street alongside mine.

My neighbor keeps a couple of turtles in an enclosure with a pond between his home and mine. The enclosure is covered with a net to keep cats and crows at bay. The turtles can swim in the pond, rest on the bottom, or crawl out to bask in the sun or cool off in the shade on rocks or grass.

I asked my neighbor how they were faring in the cold.

They're hibernating, he said.

Already.

Yeah.

No movement.

No.

No need to feed them.

No.

I wish I could hibernate, I said.

He laughed, then we started talking about the maple tree immediately beside us midway along the approach to his home. It had been in the garden in front of his parents home, which had been on the same lot but near the street. After his mother died a couple of years  ago, his father having died several years before that, he built the new home and tore down the old old to sell its half of the lot -- but not before transplanting the maple to the font of his new home.

It is the deepest, richest purple I have every seen. And it was still dropping had just started to drop its leaves, a week before the winter solstice.

Winter skys are my favorite as they are the clearest and darkest. In the foothills of the Sierras, where I grew up in my teens, the bottom of the night of my neighborhood -- on a terrace in a clearing on the top of a ridge, fenced by ponderosa pines and incense cedars -- the bottom of the nights were whitest under the Milky Way in winter. There wasn't a star or nebula on the naked-eye magnitude chart that I couldn't see.

I have rarely seen even a dim suggestion of the Milky Way where I live in Japan, on the fringes of the suburban sprawl around Tokyo. But I can see more in mid winter than at any other time of year -- enough to enable me to imagine the rest.

My only complaint about winter is not the cold outside but in my home. It's old, uninsulated, and drafty. I warm the kitchen by opening the refrigerator door. Wouldn't life be nicer to fall asleep at the end of autumn, and wake up at the start of spring?

Come to think of it, though, that would be boring and lifeless.

I'd miss the barrenness of winter trees that makes their blooming in spring worth surviving to witness. And I'd miss the stirring of the rain frogs coming out of their winterless slumber in another fence neighbor's garden.

And without its winter metaphor, Shelley's poem would lose its elegant pathos.

Last revised 5 January 2026

Viva analog (1)

Analog digits

By William Wetherall

13 December 2025

I was born and raised in the analog-age, and remain attached to books and other printed matter. I also insist on honoring the standards of creativity and originality instilled in me by all my mentors, who insisted I think for myself, and kill Buddha if I meet him on the road.

Yet if ever I wrote an analog story in the pre-digital age, I can't recall it. Every story I've written in my life, I've written digitally. Baby pictures confirm I was born with ten fingers, and this story is proof that I still have them. For I wrote it using my fingers. I didn't dictate it. It is not the product of a thought reader, much less inspired or in any way faked by AI.

My digits first learned to manipulate crayons, pencils and pens, then manual and electric typewriters. Now they pound away on a wireless keyboard that transmits my brain and spleen dumps to a word processor, as a train of bits and bytes transmitted by electromagnetic currents to other devices, via the Internet.

Eventually my digitized stories generate pixilated graphs on a monitor, or text on paper if directed to a printer -- conveying my thoughts and feelings to anyone who can read the language in which I choose to write -- aided only by an occasional consultation of a dictionary or thesaurus, now online, as my frayed paper copies collect dust.

I've fingered a friend's tablet, and thumbed my daughter's (and more recently my own) smartphone. And I have no doubt that -- if stuck with such devices in a dark elevator, just me and my type of woman -- I could hack out the same sort of stories I've written since the early 1960s in California. And they'd be no better or worse because of technology -- or because of the how technology has changed some of the ways I write, or how human editors shepherd my stories into public media. But let me return to the question of quality later.

One, Two, Three . . . Infinity

This is the title of one my favorite books -- subtitled "Facts and Speculations of Science" -- a best seller published in 1947 by the Soviet-turned-American cosmologist George Gamow (1904-1968). I read the original edition in the late 1950s, and the 1961 revised edition in the early 1960s, at the peak of the race for space and the cold war between Gamow's fatherland and his new homeland.

At the time, I read mainly books about space and western gunslinger fiction. I wasn't supposed to be a writer. My hobbies, grades, and aptitude tests said I was strong in math and science, and weak in English and everything else that required literacy.

Long before the Soviet Union launched the first artificial earth satellite in October 1957, shattering America's confidence in the superiority of its rocket technology, I saw my future in electronics. But the Sputnik Shock greatly improved the education and employment opportunities for space-age dreamers like me.

My aspirations, when graduating from high school in 1959, were to study electronics and become an astronautical engineer. I had built an oscilloscope, read a thick handbook on orbital mechanics, and gazed at Saturn's rings through my own telescope near my home in the Sierras, where the skies were owned by the Milky Way, and beyond it Andromeda and the bottomless night -- to paraphrase Kawabata's beautiful metaphor that Seidensticker, when translating Yukiguni as Snow Country, declined to put into English.

So in the fall of 1962, when enrolling in the Department of Electrical Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, to begin my junior year, I was ready to explore the cosmos. My mind could not have been further from history, literature, or social issues, or anything Japanese except transistors and optics. I was fresh off a public school assembly line -- ignorant, romantic, and full of myself.

But I could type, and I had grievances. A dangerous combination.

First drafted January 2022
First posted 13 December 2025
Last revised 13 December 2025

Cultural advice

Heads I win, tails you lose

By William Wetherall

3 December 2025

I needed information on Marie Duret, a 19th century English actress, who settled in America but also "played the empire" in South Africa and Australia. Among the websites that featured what little is known or conjectured about her life was Australian Dictionary of Biography -- An initiative of the National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University.

When I clicked the link, my screen filled with a pop-up window -- not a cookie consent notice or product promotion, but a piece of "Cultural Advice" -- with a huge "Hide Message" button at the bottom.

"Cultural Advice"? Did one of the bots that monitor my online activities conclude that I might be planning to visit Australia, and needed some cultural advice? 

Japan is my home -- has been for half a century -- and I have no intentions of visiting Australia again. I spent 2 nights in Sydney on my Tokyo-Hong Kong-Sydney-Fiji-Honolulu-Tokyo honeymoon in 1971, and ate enough lamb for a lifetime. And over the years, an occasional Australian acquaintance in Japan, a journalist or disoriented Japanologist, has updated by impressions of life in the down under Commonwealth of Nations realm.

How a country can recognize the monarch of another country as its head of state, and still call itself a sovereign state, mystifies me. But then I live in a country, and in fact am a national of a country, that hosts and relies on many American military bases -- yet considers itself a sovereign state, and a parliamentary monarchy with an "Emperor" who is not, if that makes sense.

Anyways, I was about to click the "Hide Message" button -- half expecting to then see a "Show Message" button, as though I might want to go back and see what I missed -- when my eye caught the first word, and I was hooked.

"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this website contains names, images, and voices of deceased persons."

That's not me. What did the bots that monitor my online activities take me for? I'm a native of San Francisco, who migrated to Japan via Grass Valley and Berkeley.

Even if I were an aboriginal Australian or whatever, why would I visit a biographical dictionary to find information on a 19th century actress who had no name, no image, no voice, and was still alive?

Half trigger warning, half land acknowledgement

As I kept reading, I realized the "Cultural Advice" was half trigger warning, half land acknowledgement, half travel alert, and half declaration that no matter how you flip my coin, heads-I-win, tails-you-lose. I know this adds up to two, but if you raise two to the zero power, which represents nonsense, you get one. In fact, anything (x) to the zero power (^0) is one. Remembering that may save your life someday.

What I'm being told is that, if I'm not an aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, I don't need to be aware that the website contains names, images, and voices of the dead. Or to be alerted that I might encounter language considered inappropriate today but not when the dead were living.

I'm also being told that, even if I might be upset or offended by some of the material on the website, it was going to be there -- whether I liked it or not -- so live with it.

It's only history.

Last revised 3 December 2025