Sugoi!

Fourteen years ago today, Ryo Kanouya’s boss told him to go home: “By the time I got to my house, which was about one km [.5 miles] away from the coast, the time that the tsunami was supposed to hit had already passed. I looked outside toward the ocean through a window and I saw something like smoke rolling over the trees planted along the coast to stop sand coming from the beach. I wondered if it was fire. But it was spray of the tsunami wave.”

Kanouya’s lived in Namie, just a few minutes north of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on the east coast of Japan (just over three hours from Tokyo by car, four by train). His house was destroyed and he was nearly swept out to sea. He lost friends and loved ones. That day changed his life forever. For most of us, that was something that happened somewhere else about 43,917 news cycles ago. Many Americans didn’t even pay attention while it was happening – or if they did, they didn’t understand what they were being told. I lived on California’s Central Coast at the time, and I watched as people heard the tsunami warnings and… went to the beach.

Our brains are efficient meaning-making machines, and we probably don’t need to walk around with a conscious awareness that a tsunami in 2011 was caused by thrust faulting on the subduction zone plate boundary between the Pacific and North American plates, or that one-third of all large tsunamis on record have happened in Japan, whose language gave us the word for the phenomenon, a word which has also come to symbolize “widespread manifestation of strong feeling,” an understandably poignant observation from a culture connected with the sea that has also given us Hokusai’s iconic painting “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa,” or Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburō Ōe’s book Kōzui wa waga tamashii ni oyobi — translated as 'the floodwaters have come into my soul” (or “the flood invades my spirit”).

But we should at least know when to take cover.

Japan is closer than you think. Your friends like sushi and your kids watch anime and read manga. You had a futon in college. And later this week, the Los Angeles Dodgers & Chicago Cubs will kick off the Major League Baseball season – in Tokyo.

The French origin of the word education (applied to social customs in the 1530s and work in the early 1600s) has more to do with child-rearing and training animals than creating space for learning or fostering a love of truth and wisdom.

But education isn’t really about us. Education and schooling are what institutions do. Learning is what we do. And in the process of learning, we grow and (hopefully) become better versions of ourselves, who are capable of continuing the process of becoming long after the last school bell sets us free.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
-Marcel Proust

Traditional models of explicit direct instruction are typically good for leading students to conclusions based on accepted facts in evidence. But when the facts presented are social constructions, or products of culture wars, and when the near future is too complex or unpredictable to make an honest value proposition for the state-approved curriculum, we need to practice observing, analyzing, and evaluating the information around us.

Most of the time I write these newsletters with some sense of structure that supports a point I have in mind (the vestigial “write a clear thesis statement!”) or at least something I’m thinking about. Today I had to bite the aMCC bullet and do my taxes, so I took my brain to the online thinking park and let it off the leash. The ensuing dots connected themselves. See if you can follow the thread from top to bottom.

What happened the last time you let your mind wander? Drop me a line – I’m curious!

Curiosity is worth practicing. That’s how we get better at it. When it’s done particularly well, curiosity can be elevated to an art form. Curiosity makes life worth living. I am literally Curious AF. And now you can be too! Click HERE to unlock your free membership subscription.

Here is a taste of what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.

What I’m Looking At –

As I started writing about tsunamis, I looked at some old photographs and asked myself: “Why sepia? Everyone knows that’s what you do if you want to make a photo look old, but why did they start out that way?” Historyfacts dot com to the rescue: “Sepia-toned photography was not just an aesthetic preference, but a direct result of technological advancements aimed at improving the longevity and visual quality of photographs. As pioneers in the field experimented with ways to improve the durability of their images, sepia toning emerged as a practical and widely adopted solution. The process extended the lifespan of photographs, preventing fading and deterioration over time. As a result, sepia-toned prints dominated photography for several decades.”

In case you were wondering, sepia toning is named after the ink from the common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis). Since there was no universal formula for creating sepia-toned images, each photographer had to create their own chemical combination, which resulted in a range of nostalgically amber hues.

What I’m (Not Really) Listening To –

I was never a 311 fan, but today (see what I did there?) I spent a few minutes with their hit “Amber” (I did it there too). The song is a supermarket intercom nothing burger version of unlistenable with an equally vapid network TV commercial of a video that makes absolutely no sense until you realize it’s perfect for its intended market, and you’re not that. Kudos. Anyhoo, it fits today’s cognitive wandering so now it’s your problem if you click that link. I suggest self-restraint.

What I’m Noticing –

Sony Group began when a few Japanese businessmen stood in a burned-out warehouse after World War II and vowed to rebuild Japan and restore their country to greatness. The company’s first products were a rice cooker and something else I don’t remember (bean paste soup?), but eventually Sony created the Walkman and other electronics that made an indelible impression on my youth and launched the Earbud Age.

Sony has stayed true to its founders’ vision, branching out into entertainment and other businesses. Most recently, Sony announced its intention to launch a Bitcoin and crypto exchange. What company did it acquire for the purpose? You guessed it: Amber.

Quote I’m pondering —

Fall seven times, stand up eight.
– Japanese Proverb

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Best,