I’ve been in Asia for nearly two years now, and it isn’t some indulgent “escape” or a fashionable reinvention. There are reasons. One is straightforward: my wife’s family. Another is less sentimental and more practical—Asia is one of the few places left where you can still watch systems operate from the ground up, where you can see real logistics, real markets, real constraints, real improvisation, and real competence without everything being smothered under layers of institutional theatre.
If you spend your life in Europe or America, you learn a great deal about rules, committees, narratives, and people who specialise in calling meetings about outcomes. You do not, as a rule, learn much about how things work at the grassroots when no one is paid to pretend they do. Out here, you can learn the parts that are never on the syllabus: how people actually build, trade, plant, fix, make do, and adapt. If you’re trying to understand the real world rather than the brochure version of it, you pay attention to environments where the brochure isn’t the primary industry.
That’s part of why I’m here. The other part is that I have projects that require exactly this kind of context. I’m working on a number of research projects, and one of them—oddly enough—looks like the least academic one from a distance: my farm. It’s not a hobby. It’s not cosplay. It’s an agricultural experiment, a live system, something I intend to refine and document and, if I get it right, something I’d like to see replicated in years to come. The entire point is to test ideas in physical reality rather than in a PowerPoint that ends with “further research is needed.”
There’s something refreshing about a domain where the earth keeps score. You don’t get to bluff soil. You don’t get to “narrative” your way through irrigation. You don’t get to announce a “framework” and then quietly re-label failure as progress. Either it works, or it doesn’t. That’s a kind of honesty the modern professional class has almost forgotten.
But this isn’t permanent. The irony is that this period of living in what people like to call “the developing world” has been one of the most direct engagements with reality I’ve had in a long time. And after it, I’ll be going back to what I’ll call—without romance—the real world: the West, with its money, its institutions, its politics, its moral panics, its endless arguments about abstractions, and its talent for turning simple questions into permanent bureaucracy.
The choice remains either Europe or the United States. I’ve lived long enough and watched enough to be under no illusion about either. Europe has immense cultural weight and a history that still matters, but it also has a growing habit of confusing regulation with virtue, and administration with achievement. The United States has all the failings everyone knows it has—loudness, vulgarity, internal contradictions, and a talent for exporting its domestic neuroses as global policy. But everything, the way things are going, points more towards America. There is still a pulse there—still room for building, still room for ambition that isn’t apologetic, still room for people who can do something rather than merely comment on it.
When that move happens, the long-term plan is simple, even if the road to it has been anything but. I will go back to teaching.
...
S. Tominaga, AKA CSW
Jan. 10, 2026
https://x.com/i/status/2009866331726975396
https://t.me/S_Tominaga/5197
If you spend your life in Europe or America, you learn a great deal about rules, committees, narratives, and people who specialise in calling meetings about outcomes. You do not, as a rule, learn much about how things work at the grassroots when no one is paid to pretend they do. Out here, you can learn the parts that are never on the syllabus: how people actually build, trade, plant, fix, make do, and adapt. If you’re trying to understand the real world rather than the brochure version of it, you pay attention to environments where the brochure isn’t the primary industry.
That’s part of why I’m here. The other part is that I have projects that require exactly this kind of context. I’m working on a number of research projects, and one of them—oddly enough—looks like the least academic one from a distance: my farm. It’s not a hobby. It’s not cosplay. It’s an agricultural experiment, a live system, something I intend to refine and document and, if I get it right, something I’d like to see replicated in years to come. The entire point is to test ideas in physical reality rather than in a PowerPoint that ends with “further research is needed.”
There’s something refreshing about a domain where the earth keeps score. You don’t get to bluff soil. You don’t get to “narrative” your way through irrigation. You don’t get to announce a “framework” and then quietly re-label failure as progress. Either it works, or it doesn’t. That’s a kind of honesty the modern professional class has almost forgotten.
But this isn’t permanent. The irony is that this period of living in what people like to call “the developing world” has been one of the most direct engagements with reality I’ve had in a long time. And after it, I’ll be going back to what I’ll call—without romance—the real world: the West, with its money, its institutions, its politics, its moral panics, its endless arguments about abstractions, and its talent for turning simple questions into permanent bureaucracy.
The choice remains either Europe or the United States. I’ve lived long enough and watched enough to be under no illusion about either. Europe has immense cultural weight and a history that still matters, but it also has a growing habit of confusing regulation with virtue, and administration with achievement. The United States has all the failings everyone knows it has—loudness, vulgarity, internal contradictions, and a talent for exporting its domestic neuroses as global policy. But everything, the way things are going, points more towards America. There is still a pulse there—still room for building, still room for ambition that isn’t apologetic, still room for people who can do something rather than merely comment on it.
When that move happens, the long-term plan is simple, even if the road to it has been anything but. I will go back to teaching.
...
S. Tominaga, AKA CSW
Jan. 10, 2026
https://x.com/i/status/2009866331726975396
https://t.me/S_Tominaga/5197
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