the qualia journal

This summer, a strange phenomenon is happening to me. I seem to be growing out of beers. Ever since I started enjoying alco...

Last evening, I was giving a public lecture jointly with my best friend Ryo Hatoh at the Academy Hills in Tokyo. In the ...

It used to be that I held my breath and was hurt by every negative comment that I encountered on the web. Well, not any more. I yawn when...

Talk given by Ken Mogi at TED Long Beach on 29th February, 2012, 10 days before the 1st anniversary of the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake of...

The 14th of February is a day on which the hearts of many Japanese men throb, in (literally) sweet expectations of pleasures to come. The da...

When I was a kid, it used to be that the prime minister was considered the nation’s top job. A boy often had the aspiration to become one so...

Last night, I was having drinks with my best friend and literary agent Hamish Macaskill, in a Tokyo wine bar. While we were waiting for the ...

First of all, happy holidays, everyone! This is a season of goodwill. So it is with a spirit of goodwill that I jot down the confessions bel...

The “dear leader” of North Korea, Kim Jong-il is dead. The dictator could not control his own heart condition. All the king's horses and...

With the advent of e-books and e-book readers (right now I am an avid user of the kindle reader on iPad), my childhood habit of being turned...

I have been using the Flipboard on iPad for a week. Yes, I am VERY late to arrive on this. I am like that sometimes, failing to register an ...

I used to have the notion that natural language processing was lousy and unreliable by default. And it was not simply a Luddite sentiment. W...

I have made several visits to the tsunami devastated areas in Tohoku. The damages have been tremendous and heartbreaking. Now that the sorro...

I still cannot find a useful angle to come to terms with Facebook. I am not a heavy user. I should say I am perhaps not an active user at al...

On a day when a cold rain started to fall, I met with the famed writer Clive Williams Nicol. The severe weather was fitting, as Mr. Nicol is...

There is nothing more interesting than the enigma of time. The future becomes the present, and the present turns into the past. Once the tra...

This morning, I woke up to find a world without iPhone 5. The revision to iPhone 4S was a good and sensible one, although my enthusiasm at t...

It is difficult to characterize a particular era, especially when one is living in it. The last couple of decades have been marked by many u...

The novelist Yoshinori Shimizu once wrote a masterpiece titled "Don't talk about entropy on your date". This humorous short st...

The great Fireworks Festival of Nagaoka started, I learned on my last visit, after the city was burned to ashes during the Second World War....