When Theres No More Belgium

Over the past 10 years, besides regularly visiting friends and family, I have taken countless train rides through and around Belgium.  Looking out the window from the quiet and comfortable SNCB trains at the beautiful green fields that stretch as far as the eye can see. Not quite as perfect and manicured as the Netherlands, not quite as spacious as France, no one could argue that in any part of Belgium there is great beauty to be seen and experienced.  This beauty extends beyond a nice looking bit of scenery, as this small nation is in many ways the heart of Europe, multicultural and multilingual, having overcome a sad history of wars and conflicts to build a country that at the very least, has achieved a quality of life for the average person that other people throughout the world can only dream of.

Problems? Sure they’ve got a fine list of economic, social, and political problems. Some that seem to get worse (like the national debt), some that are just made to sound worse by leaders who benefit from fear, anger, or some other form of rabid regional patriotism.

Even with these problems, the nation is still has a long list of successes and virtues, that would be the envy of pretty much any other continent on the planet.  Take any sector, from health to agriculture, to science and beyond, you’ll find plenty of achievements in Belgium.

Despite all this, we still sit ever closer to what seems like the break up of the nation. With every passing election, it feels like a loud majority have forgotten what a great place they live in, and all that they have in common with their neighbors.  Instead they believe the solution to all their problems will come with the end of Belgium. Putting an end to one of the most unique and beautiful nations the world has ever known.

ctrp339 Sharing Culture in Japan

Yuuki Aki is no ordinary Japanese writer. He’s been living and writing an issue that many westerners wouldn’t believe would be so contreversial in such a modern place: room sharing.

In an unexpected podcast conversation, Aki takes us to post-war Japan where the country adopted a tradition of renting only single rooms or apartments for people unless they were married. As a result the idea of having a roomate, or living together with someone without getting married, is not only unheard of, its considered unacceptable by many landlords.

Then came the television program Friends along with a whole generation of Japanese young professionals who had lived abroad, they wanted to live with roomates and had to find ways to get past cultural restrictions. Aki tells the story of how this movement came to be and what kinds of situations they find themselves in. In between we also learn a whole lot more about Japanese urban culture.

Roomshare Japan (classifieds)
Roomshare Guide (online guide. Japanese)
The Book “Roomshare suru seikatsu“(A Life in Roomsharing)

Vlogging the Ger District

While recording the podcast of the Ger district tour, these images were also captured.  This video doesn’t include the detail and background info that you can hear in the podcast, but I think the images speak for themselves.

Another Nail in the Dutch Coffin

There’s what people think the Netherlands is like and then there’s what the Netherlands is actually like. Reality does not always fit the internationally renowned fantasy. From drugs, to prostitution and now to squatting; much of what the world claims to know about the land of orange, stopped being true some time ago.

The latest victim on the list of celebrated traditions that exist in few other places the way they exist in Amsterdam is the tradition of squatting.  At the height of squatting in the 1980’s, in Amsterdam alone there were at least 20,000 residents living in occupied buildings. Long after the city and private owners had left buildings abandoned and in disrepair, this community of hands-on, do-it yourself individuals took the initiative to not only take over these buildings, but to repair them and create a new community around them.  An empty hospital, a forgotten warehouse, an obsolete police station, a crumbling school house, no matter where you look in the beautiful city of Amsterdam, there is surely a squat that has been repaired and re-purposed by groups of artists, activists, and other creative types. And they don’t stop at housing, in the city of Amsterdam alone squats are home to organic vegetarian restaurants, affordable atelier space for artists, live performance spaces, film houses, saunas and more.

Yet despite the unique and incalculable contribution squatting brings to a city such as Amsterdam, in the halls of city and national government there has apparently not been enough voice to defend that tradition.  As June 1st, 2010 came and went, Dutch parliament passed a law making squatting illegal, in effect turning hundreds if not thousands of citizens  into instant criminals. This comes only days before a parliamentary election where the ruling parties are expected to lose badly, the very political elites who have led the charge against squatting.

A bizarre juxtaposition, as governments throughout the world sit around having meetings about how to attract the “creative class” to their cities. They spend millions on urban planning consultants and sociologists who subscribe to the Richard Florida school of finding ways to bring smart people to your town, thus creating vibrant and interesting cities for work, life, and visiting.  These same decision makers who dedicate so many resources to trying to make a city special, now stand by idly- or worse, lead the charge, to turn one the most innovative urban movements on the planet, into a collection of criminals forced to leave the hubs of creative energy and homes that have been part of the urban social fabric for more than 50 years.

ctrp338 The Story of the Living Planet Fund

What happens when a someone living in the big money banking sector one day quits it all and tries out the world of environmental activism and conservation? Chiew Y. Chong did just that over 18 years ago when he joined the WWF.

As we strolled through the beautiful gardens in the Chinsan-zo area of Tokyo, Chiew told the story of how once he got to WWF, he had some ideas that had never been tried before by that organization… a sustainable investment fund. He explained the goal of such a fund and what makes it unique. Beyond all that, with a wise and curious spirit, Chiew tells more than a story about a fund, he tells the story of a personal evolution that he believes has been and will continue to spread throughout the planet like wildfire.

To read more about the Living Planet Fund, visit their website.

Cat Interlude

Greetings once again from the neon streets of Tokyo. The TBLI conference is in full swing here and that means yours truely is working hard to make sure technology works during this two day event. Therefore I shall interrupt the serious citizen journalism with a little interlude worthy of the worst and most distracting entertainment websites on the internet today. Yes as of this post, I too am guilty of promoting cat humor.

The following is what I believe to be a very unique cultural experience here in Tokyo, a place where those who cannot or do not own cats can pay a small fee and go spend time in a wonderland of felines.  Here they can sit for hours just watching cats or actively petting and playing with them.  Why? Who cares? All these questions are valid, and as your intrepid reporter, I considered these questions.  With help from my Japan anthropologist friend Semisara, here is what we learned in the form of a video entry.