I was fortunate to spend bunch of time working from Tokyo recently. After visiting three times prior for 1-2 week trips, spending extended time there deepened my understanding and appreciation for Japan. Here are a wide range of impressions and lessons from this fall:

Tokyo remains a world-class city — as clean, functional, and fun as ever. From my first visit in 2006 to today, Tokyo remains dynamic and vast and mysterious. The world’s largest city has always been a fun spot for adventurous tourists; these days, for those interested in longer stints of visiting or living, Google Maps + Google Translate + various on-the-ground evolutions makes Tokyo significantly more accessible to non-Japanese speaking expats than 20 years ago.

Now’s a good time go visit. It’s comparatively cheap. Go spend more time in Japan. Go spend time in Tokyo and just walk around the neighborhoods. Go spend some nights in ryokans and at onsens and in small towns and in the other larger cities. Go, go, go.

The Japanese smooth out the rough edges, in a quest for perfection. So much has been written about the Japanese aesthetic, quality of service, cleanliness. From the explicit exposition of someone like Noah Smith who called Tokyo the “world’s great city right now,” to the lyrical moods of Murakami (my various book reviews of his epic novels), or the poetic reflections of Pico Iyer, whose book A Beginner’s Guide to Japan I’ll quote at times in this post.

So let me share just one anecdote on the overall topic of Japanese perfection. On one of my first days in our private office in Tokyo, some light jazz music suddenly began playing out of a speaker built into the ceiling. I couldn’t figure out how or why the music started. 30 mins later, the music hadn’t stopped, and I grew concerned that what was supposed to be a quiet, private office in a coworking space actually was subject to some building-wide music system steered by a jazz aficionado building manager. (Hey, it could have been a worse genre of background music.)

I pulled out Google Translate and typed English sentences: “There is jazz music playing in my office. I did not turn it on. Why is it playing? Can you turn it off?” Google Translate spit out out the Japanese version and, clutching my iPhone, I swung open the door to my office to stomp to the front desk and inquire.

As it happens, two men were already standing outside my office in official, erect poses. What luck. I clicked “Play” in Google Translate to ask my pre-loaded question in Japanese. They micro head bowed as they listened — the micro bow where your head drops ever so slightly in rapid succession: the most common type of bow in Japan.

Then they spoke back into my phone: “Deep apologies,” Google’s translation’s said back to me. “The jazz music means the fire alarm system is working. We are conducting a test of the fire alarms in the building. The jazz music plays if the alarm is working. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.” They proceeded to deeply bow and walked off. Only then did I notice they were wearing fire department helmets.

It had never occurred to me that a fire alarm building test could be anything other than bone-tinglingly loud.

It turns out that the Japanese have figured out ways to smooth the jagged edges of modern living. Yes, there’s a dark side to smoothing out the edges in a question for perfection. Here’s Pico Iyer: “Perfection, in fact, is part of what makes Japan wonderfully welcoming to foreigners, and unyieldingly inhospitable, deep down.” But all visitors and most long-term visitors never get “deep down” — they just enjoy the wonderful surface. They exist in the mid-depth warm bath of perfection.

Singaporeans follow the rules because of laws. Japanese do so because of culture. In my observations of Singapore, I pointed out the cleanliness and orderliness of the society — and the frequent public signage reminding locals of the fines or caning that result from littering, excessive noise, taking photos up the skirts of women on the subway, or engaging in other uncouth conduct. In Japan, it’s as clean and orderly as Singapore, but there are no warning signs. I’m not even sure there are well understood laws around littering and noise. Yet the population upholds the norms perfectly and voluntarily. (There’s a neighborhood clean-up competition in Tokyo where people walk around and see who can pick up the most trash.)

How rules/norms are enforced illustrates a key difference between Japan and Singapore: Singapore is a 58 year old country with various immigrants from across Asia who cohere into a single society. Japan is a thousands-year-old culture that’s pure Japanese from top to bottom.

No jaywalking even if there are no cars — extrapolate this norm society-wide. There’s no jaywalking across the street on a red light. No matter if there are no cars to be seen and the sidewalk is a narrow distance. Wait until the hand turns green. Always follow the rules. This leads to some frustrating moments: Want to move a table around in a private room at a restaurant? Want to ask for someone at a hotel or serviced apartment to make an exception to some arcane building rule that doesn’t matter? Good luck.

When you follow the rules, you fit in. Here’s Iyer on fitting in: “Japanese couples on honeymoon traditionally plan matching outfits for every hour of their trip. Even girls on a Sunday shopping spree often sport the same hairstyles, false eyelashes and white boots. Fashion becomes less about standing out than fitting in, at least within the micro-group of which you are a part.”

Japan is at once futuristic and stuck in the past. There’s a lot that’s quite analog in Japan. Starting with the emphasis on paper. Sign a lease for an apartment and you’ll have a million pieces of paper to sign. In that shuffle, one important piece of paper in the stack explains how to open your physical mailbox — to receive yet more paper. When you rent an office, one of the key features that gets explained? How to open your mailbox to receive print mail — to supplement your home mailbox. When you hire a tour guide, the first thing she does upon greeting you? Hand you 7 different pieces of paper explaining the different aspects of the upcoming tour. (The one place you won’t find paper — in public bathrooms, for drying your hand, because of the prominence of air blowers, which are the worst. )

On the other hand, Japan has a reputation for being a blade runner, robot friendly, futuristic country, too. I didn’t see too many robots. The most telling futuristic attribute of Japan today may be the invisible macro stuff: low birthrate and low religiosity, for example. Among the visible are its efficient mega cities. Tokyo and Osaka, with their small densely packed apartments and constant redevelopment, portends our increasingly urban future as we seek more energy efficient ways of living.

The reels that go viral on Instagram promote the wacky side of Japanese culture and there’s certainly some of that. These aspects of Japan feel neither forward looking nor backwards looking but rather an artifact of its singular, isolated culture that stands apart from the harmonized globalized soup of developed countries.

In our residential building in Tokyo, for example, there was a daydreaming competition in which several dozen people sat out in our courtyard and competed for who could daydream the longest without falling asleep. Local reality TV shows are truly bizarre and involve many similar types of “competitions.” Harajuku also offers an otter cafe (sit with real live otters).

And the weirdness may be a result of an inclination of Japanese people to retreat within versus engage with a broader, normalizing sphere. The Japanese have separate words for the self inside the home and the one that’s out on the streets. Here’s Iyer: “Nowhere else I’ve been, in fact, are individuals so disengaged from the political domain… they turn their backs on the public sphere, and make fantastic worlds out of their passions, counter-societies out of their hobbies.”

Will globally relevant startups be born in Japan? Unclear, with many reasons to be optimistic or pessimistic. The knock on Japan has long been its risk adverse, salaryman culture which stymies the freewheeling individualistic rebel who might otherwise aspire to be the next Steve Jobs. It has, indeed, been awhile since Japan birthed new innovative companies. The Panasonics and Sonys of the world are old. Rakuten is a more recent hit but there’s aren’t many.

Is there reason to be optimistic that startups could blossom in Japan? Based on my conversations and casual poking around on the ground, I’d say it’s decidedly unclear. On the positives:

– Japan’s highly skilled workforce appeals to companies seeking non-China options in this moment — it might lead Japan to be a natural deep tech manufacturing partner to Western allies. I could see semiconductor, deep tech, nuclear energy, and related startups flourishing in the next couple decades in Japan.

– A novel reason for optimism I heard from my friend Alex Rampell at a flashy a16z event in Tokyo this fall: if you can change the culture to be more risk seeking and entrepreneurial, you can change the entire culture all at once. It’s the silver living of a more “collective”, homogenous mentality: change could happen quickly and comprehensively if and when it happens at all.

– The government wants a thousand startups to flourish — a Japan business federation, with the endorsement of the ministry of economy, wants to see “100 unicorns by 2027”. Lots of governments try to stimulate the startup economy so this is not unique but helpful as a baseline. I suspect the government will pump considerable capital into venture funds and startups in the coming years.

– Finally, Tokyo benefits from Hong Kong’s decline in terms of attracting expats in search of a good, first-world base for doing work across Asia. Tokyo benefits not as much as Singapore in this respect but it’s the second biggest beneficiary. To some, Taipei is seen as too risky given China’s ambitions, and Seoul the same given the possibility of war on the Korean peninsula. The quality of life in Tokyo is spectacular and the weather is better than Singapore and it’s easier than ever to not speak Japanese and still find your way around. It’s easy to see founders and VCs from around the world who seek an Asia outpost might set up shop in Tokyo.

A central reason for pessimism, at a human behavior level, seems to be the cultural impediments that are by now well written about. A preponderance of risk-adverse cultural pressures from age zero to 18 squelch a lot of entrepreneurial instincts and it doesn’t seem like that’s changing.

Framed differently, there remains a reverence for authority and age-based seniority hierarchy that suffocates the opportunity for some creative youth to flex their wings. Pico Iyer: “In terms of wealth distribution, Japan in 2017 was ‘the most equal’ society on the planet; many CEOs in Japan earn less than some of their employees do. But in terms of the gulf in public status, Japan is much more unequal than the United States. There’s no overturning the hierarchy.”

At a more macro level, Japan’s population decline is what it is — likely devastating to long term growth — and seemingly impossible to solve without a massive overhaul to how the country thinks about foreigners + immigration. (Interestingly, Korea’s demographics are worse than Japan’s.) Meanwhile, it’s still impossible for immigrants of any kind to achieve authentic “Japanese” status in the eyes of locals. One friend who’s third generation Japan native (i.e he was born and raised in Japan, as were his parents and grandparents) — but who’s ethnically Taiwanese — told me he’s not considered truly Japanese by any local companies or investors. (Here’s a counter argument about why to expect more immigration to Japan.)

All in all, I wouldn’t bet on a startup revolution the next 10 years in Japan. Beyond that, it’s possible but hard to say.

Quiet envelops public spaces. I was admonished a couple times, by a shop owner, for talking too loudly on my cell phone standing outside a restaurant on a public sidewalk. It turns out people don’t talk on their cell phone at all in public. Malls are generally quiet. Honking is rare. Talking loudly on the subway never happens. You find yourself constantly embarrassed at how loud American tourists are.

So safe, so clean: Little children wander around on their own in the big city. You’ll see kids who are barely five years old walking alone on big city streets of Tokyo — wearing cute little hats and rectangular box backpacks. As in Singapore, children can walk around and lick the streets if they want without a care in the world. Leave your wallet somewhere, and someone will try to return it. Etc. Walking big city streets packed with people and not caring at all about your safety — what a feeling.

Sumo is fun. Try the practice session more than the tournament. We went to both the official sumo tournament in Tokyo and to a practice stable off-season. While the live match was a fun atmosphere — thousands of people in a big stadium — it’s pretty slow going, with each match taking mere seconds and various ritualis between each match taking many minutes. So, advice for tourists: Don’t sweat trying to figure out how to go to an actual tournament, just check out a practice stable workout. You can find many such tours online and you’ll get up close and personal with the wrestlers and see much more real action, one after the other, with no ritualistic delays included.

One fascinating moment from visiting a sumo stable was when the sumo master said his own son, of sumo age, is staying in school and not wrestling. This guy goes around the country to recruit young talent to stop out of school and wrestle full time…but to his own son, he says, “Get an education.”

Restaurant and food observations. Japan is such an incredible food country. Some general observations on restaurants and eating generally, followed by food specific comments:

• No matter how many people sit at a table, generally only one menu will be put down at the table, for the group to share. What could explain this cultural norm?
• There’s a bag container next to each table to put your briefcase or bag or jacket. Without fail — a bag container. Is it to keep your individual bag clean? Or to keep the floor clean and tidy for the collective aesthetic?
• Even in meals where they offer western cutlery, I encountered multiple instances of forks eschewed in favor of spoons. Spoons to eat a salad, for example. Always few knives — not as dramatic as in Singapore (which never offered knives) but still scarce.
• Too many tourists stress about finding “the best” ramen place, the best sushi, the best whatever. Don’t do that. Just wander around and walking into random restaurants that seem popular with locals and using Google Translate to scan the menu. Rolling the dice works in Tokyo.
• Many casual restaurants have table dividers to allow single patrons to eat alone without having to make eye contact with anyone else at a shared table. There’s something a bit eerie about a restaurant full of people — mostly businessmen — slurping their noodles in otherwise silence, head down, talking to nobody, even as they all share a table.

In terms of the food itself:

• I found myself newly appreciative of soba noodles, and of the “soba soup” you eat at the end that’s the broth that cooked the soba.
• I learned to love natto, the breakfast superfood that’s a sticky set of beans.
• Eating miso soup nearly every day — at breakfast, as part of set menus for lunch and dinner — gets you in touch with all the different styles of miso: the carrots or mushrooms or what have you on the inside; the clear or darker broth.
• Fruit is delicious and of a luxury variety, and what’s in season matters at lot. 7-11 carries the seasonal fruit.
• Nigiri sushi was quite good but not dominant in the diet. What you notice relative to Western sushi is the quality of the rice — the texture of each individual bead of rice. Sashimi is far more popular than nigiri.
• I hadn’t had high end tempura before until eating at this place. Quite a step up from the usual assorted tempura side dish served at U.S. sushi restaurants.
• You notice the lack of bread in the diet.

It’s all Japanese people, no immigrants (other than in convenience stores). In Tokyo, it’s Japanese people wearing suits and ties walking into epic skyscrapers. And it’s Japanese people cleaning hotel rooms, bathrooms, and dishes in the back of the restaurant. Japanese people working on the construction sites. The only place I reliably saw immigrants? Convenience store workers. Speaking of which…

Convenience stories rock and the meals are very much ready to microwave. It’s well known that 7-Eleven, Lawson’s, Family Mart, and Mini Stop all rock. And not just because, say, the triangle rice squares with salmon inside — onigiri — are addictive. What’s less well known is that all the fresh food and ready-to-heat meals — which get freshly delivered 3x/day to convenience stores in Tokyo — contain clear microwavable re-heating instructions for how long to heat the food at different wattage levels. Everyone microwaves their food in plastic containers. You’d easily see 20 people in line for lunch at a 7-11. There are more than 50,000 convenience stores in Japan, including convenience stores just for the elderly. (Convenience Store Woman is a fun novel and a bestseller in Japan.)

They’re the best fans in baseball. All the fans singing the same song at the same time, for different players, is also quintessentially Japanese: united, orderly, respectful.

Rituals over philosophy. A gym has a million little rules about where you can wear your shoes, how you change, etc. And an onsen has even more. The Japanese love rules, processes, and — in a grander sense — rituals. Here’s Iyer: “When he gives lectures in the West, I heard the Dalai Lama say, the audience tunes out the minute he starts speaking about ritual and comes to life as soon as he speaks about philosophy; in Japan, the formula is reversed.”

And on religion: “Shinto has no texts or doctrines; Buddhism in Japan is so much a matter of rites and recitations that for centuries no one even bothered to translate many of its canonical texts into Japanese… “The most important things in our practice,” said the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, “are our physical posture and our way of breathing. We are not concerned about a deep understanding of Buddhism.”

Other random observations and odds and ends:

• Colors and culture: Taxis in Tokyo show a red light on the front of the car to indicate their availability, and a green light to show they’re full. Similarly, in Japan (and in China and Korea perhaps elsewhere), when a stock is going up, a news finance TV show will show it in red font, whereas when a stock is plunging in value, it’ll show in green. Red = good fortune and success.
• As a train pulls into a metro stop in Tokyo, the station plays a distinct jingle so that passengers who aren’t paying visual attention can know it’s time to get off for their stop.
• The Japanese seem obsessed with golf. Golf stores and ranges at every corner at in Tokyo, seemingly. At the gym, I saw a lot of people working with their trainers on golf-specific movements and strength exercises.
• Shoehorns are everywhere next to sitting/shoes areas. Shoehorns are also included in business class amenity kits in Japanese airlines. Part and parcel with a shoes-off-inside culture, but it’s not something I’ve noticed elsewhere in the Asia (the shoehorns per capita, that is).
• Summers in Tokyo are hot and sticky. The Japanese society isn’t built around A/C in the way that Singapore is. So the humidity can get to you in summer. One government initiative is called “Cool Biz” — encouraging folks to dress more casually in the summer to stay cool, and forego the suit and dress shirt look that 99% of businessmen wear to work year-round.
• Single use plastics everywhere. Individual, single bananas wrapped in its own plastic. Individual rice crackers — perhaps 30-40 of them in a package, all individually plastic wrapped! Saltine crackers in packets of four, each wrapped in plastic. Apples wrapped in plastic. On and on.
• Toranomon Hills is an up and coming and terrific neighborhood for expats. The Mori buildings are phenomenal. And the neighboring Shimbashi district is great.
• Dogs treated are as children, adorned with luxury clothing and strollers.
• Napping in public seems socially acceptable. I saw literally hundreds of different people nap in public during lunch hours or early afternoon siesta hours.
• The dense web design in Japan is fascinating. Locals prefer what to to my eye are super overwhelming pages, stuffed with content from top to bottom.
• Twitter is so popular here. Look over someone’s shoulder on the metro — and they’re on Twitter. Japan is the second most active market for Twitter after the U.S.
• Japanese people seem very into stretching. There’s a great chain in Tokyo called Dr. Stretch in which Foot Locker-dressed trainer will stretch you out. Better than a massage! At the gym, many personal training sessions involved a trainer on the floor stretching out their client.
• This nine minute history of Japan is amazing and remains one of the best history videos on YouTube.

I spent a bunch of time in Singapore this summer. What a wonderful city state. And a remarkable achievement by its founders to build such a thriving metropolis over the 58 years it has been independent.

Here are some assorted impressions. I incorporate a few quotes from Jeevan Vasagar, author of the excellent Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia.

Most of the stereotypes are true. It’s spotless — just impeccably clean. There are lots of laws and people follow the laws. Everything works, from baggage claim at the airport to trash pickup to public transit. The food is incredible. It’s insanely humid all the time. And so on. Stereotype accuracy strikes again.

Startups set up HQ here and then serve the region. They do so to take advantage of the rule of law and investor-friendly atmosphere of Singapore. But one challenge with this approach is that, for regional companies, their labor costs, office space, etc. are absorbed in Singapore (expensive!) even as their revenue comes from much poorer markets like Indonesia. Grab, for example, pays thousands of people in Singapore who help support a business that generates a lot of revenue in neighboring, poorer markets. (Overall, the startup ecosystem is thriving in Singapore, with several very good VCs who are actively investing.)

Food. One of the best food cities in the world, obviously. Peranakan cuisine is tasty (beef rendang FTW!) and I wasn’t as familiar with it before. The malls have great restaurants and locals eat there all the time, though good luck trying to navigate through the gazillion escalators and elevators connecting literally 50-100+ distinct restaurants in some of the larger buildings. Hawker centers, while famous and cool, are not quite as awesome as advertised IMO. They’re not air conditioned and that, combined with all the on-site cooking, means it’s a sweat fest. It’s also hard to eat healthy at hawkers. That said, it’s tasty and cheap (because the government subsidies them). Singaporeans don’t cook much so the eating out culture is best in class.

If you’re talented, you work for the government, and government works stunningly well. If you graduate at the top of your class out of university, you land a job in the Singapore government apparatus. The public sector is exceptionally well staffed with the best and brightest in the country. In fact, a private sector VC who’s Singaporean told me that some of his classmates who now work in government look down upon him as not having “made it” — because he works in the private sector! To resist corruption, government workers in Singapore are among the highest paid in the world; the head of state earns a $2.2 million USD salary, the highest paid of any president.

The immigration/visa office in Singapore is one example of the how all this talent makes government work well. When you walk into the office, you’re greeted by a wall of “customer testimonials” — legit quotes from residents attesting to their positive experience working with the immigration office. They’ve also posted their KPIs and goals for timeliness and an update on how well they’ve met their goals. The contrast with a DMV in America couldn’t be starker.

Moral nudges are ubiquitous. The signage around the city is quite amusing, constantly extolling proper moral behavior. Give up your seat on the metro. Don’t play your music so loud. Pick up your trash. Etc. In Singapore, the nudges are explicit and enforced and threatened with the force of law (caning, death, etc). Another example of the government thinking about morality: it’s okay for foreigners to go into casinos but more expensive and harder for locals to do so. They’ll gladly take tourists’ money but they want their own people free of those vices. Also, alcohol is taxed heavily. Vasagar: “Like an overprotective parent, Singapore’s rulers have constantly fussed over their people, alternately cajoling or threatening in order to tip them in the desired direction.”

A/C infrastructure is legit. The planet is warming. But Singapore has been warm forever and is warm year-round. This means its air conditioning infrastructure is legit. You’re never a few steps away from A/C. Yes, Singapore becoming even hotter will present challenges in the decades ahead. But as compared to parts of the world newly dealing with warmness (see the heat waves in Europe this summer), I’d say Singapore is well positioned to offer a comfortable quality of life. By the way, you can get used to the humidity. It still sucks but you grow accustomed to it and adapt accordingly.

Trees and greenery everywhere. Trees here, trees there, trees everywhere in Singapore. Lots of hotels and office buildings buildings sport cool greenery/bushes/shrubbery built into their architecture. And the law is that if you remove a tree somewhere, you have to place one in its place. (I think.) The greenery of Singapore is underappreciated!

Singaporeans love deals, upsells, and unique discount structures. Almost every gym/fitness club (of which there are many — fitness culture is big in Singapore) offers some sort of “starter package” of discounted pricing. Many restaurants offer set menus and different deal combinations. When stores or restaurants offer pop up deals — often advertised via Instagram — queues form immediately from locals looking for a deal. Relatedly, many beauty shops will try to upsell you on whatever you’re buying in real time. “Pay $10 and get XYZ!” While I wouldn’t say Singapore buzzes with hustler energy in general (relative to a place like Ho Chi Minh), there is a persistent quest for deals.

Lee Kuan Yew is legendary yet invisible in the physical world. There are no statues of the man anywhere. Only one public policy school is named after him. By design, there are no homages to the man on the streets of Singapore.

Democracy slowly coming? I read the local newspaper in English every day. It was more critical of the government than I expected. “Its democracy may be hemmed in, but it does hold meaningful elections. And in recent years, a substantial political opposition has emerged. The PAP has won every election in Singapore since 1959. In 2020, it took eighty-three of the ninety-three seats in parliament. But the Workers’ Party, which criticises the PAP from the left, won ten seats in that year’s election, the biggest gain ever made by an opposition party.”

Does it deserve its high economic freedom rankings? There are low taxes in Singapore. It’s business friendly. And open to trade. So Singapore frequently ranks as one of the most economically free in the world. At the same time, ~80% of people live in government owned housing. And this: “Singaporeans are forced to contribute a fifth of their salaries to pay for retirement, as well as healthcare and housing purchases. The savings, along with contributions from their employer, go into a personal fund, known as the Central Provident Fund (CPF). Unlike other defined contribution pensions worldwide, which are typically invested in the stock market and a range of other assets including bonds and commercial property, the funds are invested in government bonds which have been specially issued for that purpose.”

No-shame Instagram culture. In workout classes, many of the younger folks would whip out their phones at the end of class and take sweaty selfies. Sometimes teachers encouraged it! “Time to take your photo for Instagram!” Plenty of attractions throughout the city would have signage to indicate a particular place was Instagrammable.

Hong Kong’s decline is Singapore’s gain. So many have re-located from Hong Kong to Singapore the past couple years. The prices of apartments have surged as a result. Singapore is the new capital of English-speaking, capitalistic Asia.

Tourist attractions/advice: Botanic gardens, Marina Bay Sands, and Gardens by the Bay are lovely. The zoo is overrated, I’d say, and this is coming from someone who’s probably visited 15 zoos around the world. Wandering through the malls of Orchard is worth a spin. Cultivate awe at how clean everything is and how everything just works. Make each meal special.

Raising kids in Singapore is attractive thanks to live-in help and cultural norms. The ability to secure relatively inexpensive nanny help is a game changer for the parents I met in Singapore. It’s not just the cost compared to America, though that’s a big part of it. It’s also the cultural norms around getting help — in America, “outsourcing” parenting tasks is more greatly stigmatized. In Singapore (and much of Asia and Latin American ad perhaps beyond, to be sure) it’s very much the norm. No one judges you for having a nanny work long hours every day, including weekends. In Singapore specifically, beyond nanny culture, parents love knowing that their kids can run around and it’s totally safe and clean and they can lick the ground in the subway station.

The airport is the best in the world. I’ve had the opportunity to fly through most of the larger airline hubs in the world, for most on multiple occasions: Frankfurt, Doha, Dubai, Tokyo, San Francisco, Chicago, Hong Kong, Toronto, Dallas, Seoul, Atlanta, Amsterdam, Paris, Los Angeles, New York, London, Istanbul, and others. (Haven’t been to Abu Dhabi.) Singapore’s airport is the best. The immigration procedures/lines are exceptional. Baggage claim, wayfinding, food opportunities, the way the gates are organized, water dispensers and bathrooms, etc. are peerless.

Smaller observations

• There are rarely knives served at meals — just forks and spoons. Singapore also doesn’t usually serve “normal” thick napkins at restaurants. Bring your own napkins or make do with tissues. (As a funny little analogous example — in Tokyo, they only bring one menu to the table, even if you’re a party of two.)
• Cars are taxed at very high rates so most people don’t have cars and those who do flaunt it as a status symbol.
• Tap water is offered inconsistently at restaurants. Some restaurants offer it. Some claim they can only offer bottled water.
• Locals support capital punishment for drug offenses. The issue that’s made Singapore the source of much global criticism remains popular among their own people.
• Many coffee shops don’t open before 9am. Given the climate, it’s more of a nighttime city.
• My favorite Singaporean expression: “Can!” Example: “Are you able to come back to fix my internet router later?” “Can”
• Durian season is special — the local go nuts over it!
• The Japanese occupation is loathed in history books and museum. Yet they worship Japanese design, “made in Japan”, Japanese quality etc. — it’s all over the local advertising.
• Many expats I spoke to were nervous about their kids absorbing severe risk aversion attitudes in local schools.
• Badminton is the national sport. Amusing.
• Telegram is big in Singapore. Group chats occur on Telegram.
• I loved seeing new local businesses receive bouquets of congratulatory flowers after they opened. Local businesses and construction firms would send “Congratulations!” gifts and they’d pile up outside the newly opened business. Is this a Chinese norm?

Other highlights from Lion City are below.

To understand modern Singapore, it is necessary to go back to the year it all began: 1965. Forget the Singapore of mirrored office towers, the city of elevators and air conditioning. Conjure a low-rise city with walls stained grey by cooking fires, bustling with street traders hawking their wares in a babble of Asian languages – a trading settlement with a cluster of colonial buildings surrounded by merchants’ shophouses and then a sprawl of shanty towns.

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The island lacked natural resources, and was reliant on the neighbouring Malay peninsula even for its water. Its ethnic mix, a Chinese majority with Malay and Indian minorities, made it unique and conspicuous in a region with a history of anti-Chinese xenophobia.

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The whole system bears the deep imprint of one man’s personality. There are no statues of Lee in the city he built, and only one institution named after him – a school of public policy – but anyone who wants to see his monument has only to look around them. Lee held power as prime minister from 1959, when Singapore was granted internal self-government under British rule, to 1990, when he stepped down. After quitting as premier, he remained in cabinet, first as senior minister then with the title of minister mentor, until 2011.

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The Japanese occupied Singapore from February 1942 to September 1945, when the British officially resumed control a month after Japan’s surrender.

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While both countries are made up of the same ethnic mix – Malay, Chinese and Tamil – their politics is very different. Malaya was dominated by Malays, the traditional inhabitants of an archipelago stretching across Southeast Asia, and in 1963 the country was predominantly rural. Singapore had a Chinese majority, many of them recently arrived in the region, and was largely urban. Under colonial rule, Malaya’s occupations had been roughly divided on ethnic lines; Indian immigrants and their descendants worked on rubber plantations and in government offices, the Malays worked the land. The Chinese worked in tin mines and factories, while some prospered in commerce.

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The state would be vigilant about maintaining racial harmony. Its National Pledge, written in 1966, declares that Singaporeans are ‘one united people, regardless of race, language or religion’. It is recited in school assemblies, with a fist clenched above the heart. Singapore championed the ideal of meritocracy, in contrast with Malaysia’s approach to levelling up through affirmative action.

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Singapore’s elite wanted to create a new kind of society which would absorb technical knowledge and skills from the West while remaining culturally Eastern. But many of the leaders were themselves products of English-language schools and elite overseas universities, and were most comfortable speaking in English. They could prophesy about a promised land that combined East and West, but could never be part of it themselves.

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There’s a shorthand for this kind of aspiration – the 5Cs: career, car, credit card, condominium and country club. It’s not entirely clear where the expression 5Cs came from, but every Singaporean knows it. Each of the Cs represents a successive level of aspiration.

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The creation of new land from the sea has been extraordinary; between 1965 and 2019, Singapore grew from 581.5 square kilometres to 728 square kilometres. Lacking its own supply of sand for this construction work, Singapore has become the world’s biggest sand importer. Marina Bay Sands, the landmark hotel shaped like a wicket, is built on reclaimed land, but so is much else in modern Singapore.

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Admonishing the public not to drop litter was backed up with the threat of fines and public shaming. The names of adult litterbugs were published in the press, while errant children were reported to their schools. People caught dropping litter could be made to clean the streets under ‘Corrective Work Orders’, a punishment which remains in force. Offenders can be seen sweeping up while wearing luminous pink and yellow vests as a badge of their shame.

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The policy of integrating races in each neighbourhood and public housing block ensures that Singapore does not have racial ghettos, but it also curtails individual choice of where to live.

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But climate control has reshaped the city’s architecture, making it a less human place. Instead of arranging rooms around the natural ventilation of a courtyard, air conditioning has encouraged tightly stacked flats and offices. By blasting heated air out of buildings, it intensifies the heat on the streets, driving people to seek shelter indoors.

This is the yard of the tour guide who showed us around Angkor Wat yesterday:

He has 10 siblings. He’s the only one who graduated from high school and he makes by far the most money in his family. He sends money to his family members — most of whom are tuk tuk taxi drivers — when he can. As an English speaking tour guide in Siem Reap, our guide is likely among the top earners in the area. And yet, he still lives in tin roof shack surrounded by rubbish.

Point being: He’s better off than where he started in life but he’s still very poor.

I asked the guide which tour booking platform he prefers for leads — TripAdvisor, Viator, Airbnb Experiences, etc. He said he prefers Airbnb because they are willing to hold his earnings for up to $1,000 USD before transferring the money to him. Other platforms distribute funds to him after each tour, which is a problem because he pays a hefty Western Union fee each transaction. He’d prefer for the booking platform to hold the money as long as possible and transfer it in one lump sum.

Presumably, our guide doesn’t have an interest bearing bank account of his own nor an easy, low fee way of receiving funds electronically. So he’s effectively using Airbnb as a bank account to safely keep his earnings.

Of course, this all goes against the normal logic in fintech, where companies want to keep your money as long as possible and consumers want the money transferred to them as quickly as possible — each side sensitive to the interest-earning time value of money. “Playing the float” is the phrase that explains this dynamic.

Except, in poor areas with a vast unbanked population like in Cambodia, the consumer and company (Airbnb) are aligned. It’s a bit sad but it makes sense once you think about it.

It was a reminder of the lesson that it’s hard to understand certain on-the-ground consumer behaviors from afar. I highly doubt the product managers at Airbnb Experiences ever seriously contemplated that slow money transfer would be seen as a perk for some of their guides.

Much of my travel these days takes me back to places I’ve already been. The past couple years I’ve made repeat visits to UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Singapore, Saudi, Germany, Austria, Chile, Mexico. There’s a certain confidence that springs from familiarity: you cross the immigration checkpoint and walk the foreign streets with a comforting foreknowledge.

The past couple years I’ve also had the singular experience of arriving in several countries for the first time: Uganda, Kenya, Seychelles, New Zealand, Finland, Bolivia. A country moves onto the “places I’ve visited” list only once, of course, and the physical act that allows for this designation is a small but memorable sequence — the final set of doors opening from the airport, stepping onto the curbside outside the international arrivals terminal, and ahhh…. breathing in fresh outdoor air after hours of indoor air only.

There’s actually quite a bit you learn about a country in the first 10 minutes. You notice the ethnicities of the local staff waiting in the jetway to wheelchair out of the plane those needing extra assistance: that ethnic group is usually the ethnic group that runs the hourly wage part of the economy. You notice the norms around how locals exit off an aircraft and queue in immigration lines — the orderliness or lack thereof, which predicts for rule-following norms writ large. You notice the degree to which local taxi drivers try to hustle and scam you, respecting tout laws or not. You notice how nice the airport bathrooms are — your first glimpse at the wealth of the country.

Recently, I arrived in Bolivia for the first time. It was actually an overland crossing, which is rare for me. When we drove from San Pedro de Atacama in Chile into Bolivia, the first person to greet us — before even having arrived at the immigration checkpoint — was a tour guide woman who was waiting for someone else. Nonetheless, she flashed a big smile and exclaimed: “Welcome to Bolivia!!!” It was such a personality contrast from the Chileans who guided us until that point. Chile is a country I adore and lived in for close to a year but no one would characterize Chileans as jovial. Bolivians, in direct contrast, bubble with energy and friendliness. (At least it’s true of those who work in the hospitality industry in Bolivia.)

The immigration crossing itself into Bolivia also provided instant insight. Our guide escorted us to the immigration checkpoint which was stationed in a tent which was stationed on a dusty unpaved road at 14,000 feet elevation. He then “suggested” we offer the border patrol officer an extra $20 USD, personally, as a thank you for processing our visa-on-arrival so quickly. We did so, with gratitude. Yay for old fashioned hospitality and generosity!

Bolivia is a uniquely beautiful place. To be sure, we didn’t see La Paz or anywhere outside of the area immediately across from northern Chile and the Uyuni salt flats. But the desert wilderness near the salt flats, and the salt flat itself, is truly spectacular. I’ve seen many incredible mountain ranges, beaches, churches, mosques, rivers, skyscrapers, waterfalls, deserts, open savannahs, etc. The truth is many of those can blur together in your mind — they are remarkable but not totally distinct from other remarkable insatiations of that same thing somewhere else in the world. But, I’ve never seen anything like the Uyuni salt flat.

Finally, who knew Bolivia is one of the world’s largest exporters of quinoa, arguably the second best grain after farro? Quinoa fields as far as the eye can see.

I could see Bolivia breaking out and becoming a top tourist destination in the coming decade. More luxury hotels will proliferate, and the salt flat — in all its Instagrammable glory — provides the ultimate draw.

Lawrence Wright, a writer I’ll read no matter the topic, has new piece in the New Yorker “The Elephant in the Courtroom” that explores whether an elephant in the Bronx zoo should be granted personhood legal rights. It’s a fascinating deep dive into the state of animal rights more generally. And it includes sentences like the following which will tug at the heart of anyone who has one:

Orcas have no natural predators, other than humans, and yet one population in the Pacific Northwest is critically endangered—at last count, it had only seventy-three residents. They are threatened by overfishing, pollution, and noise disturbance from boats that interferes with echolocation, which they use to forage. A new calf was born in 2018—thought to be the first in three years—but lived for less than a day. The grieving mother, surrounded by other females in her pod, carried the calf’s body with her for seventeen days, across a thousand miles of ocean. It would be going too far to say that the mother knew her loss was a step toward the extinction of her community, but it might also be going too far to say that she didn’t.

I’ve become a lot more interested in these topics over the years. As Wright points out, as pet ownership has boomed in America, our natural affinity towards animals has risen in turn. Having a dog myself (his name is Oreo and he is very good, as you can tell from the photo below) has certainly made me more attuned to the potential richness of the inner life of animals, more sympathetic to animal rights causes, more interested in learning more about endangered species around the world.

Social media has also magnified scenes of animals at their best and perhaps caused a greater attention to animal welfare. We can’t get enough of cute animal pics and videos which go viral on the regular on TikTok and Instagram and the like — especially if it’s two different species of animals who have become “friends”. I find myself frequently binging on Instagram reels of dogs.

But the most likely transformative event in one’s journey toward love of animals is visiting them in the wild. Recently, I was lucky to visit many endangered animals in the wild in some unforgettable places:

• Arabian oryx in the deserts of UAE, which have an interesting conservation story. (By the way, the Al Maha hotel is pretty spectacular and an easy 60 minute Uber ride from downtown Dubai.)
• Mountain gorillas in Uganda. Two days of trekking to visit with two different families of our closest cousins. Worth doing if you’re under ~50 years old — strenuous hikes, but unforgettable. And there are only 1000 mountain gorillas left in Uganda/Rwanda/Congo.
• Various epic wildlife in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, including black rhinos. (If you haven’t already read Sam Anderson’s amazing piece about the last Northern White Rhino, you should.)
• Dizzying array of fish and coral in the Seychelles islands

So many beautiful scenes. And also so many tragic stories of poaching and human-caused destruction of natural habitat. I hope to learn more in the years ahead and learn how to make a positive difference.