Tag: Japan

Travel

Travel During Covid – From The US to Vietnam – Transit at Haneda Airport, Japan

by MQDuong3 Comments on Travel During Covid – From The US to Vietnam – Transit at Haneda Airport, Japan

I recently went back to Vietnam to visit friends and family. This is arguably the most exhausting trip that I have ever taken since I went overseas at 19 years old. I’ll share some of my experiences below that hopefully may be helpful with your upcoming travel. My post is for informational purposes only, so please do your own research.

Read up on travel restrictions and prepare in advance

Like many other countries, Vietnam requires visitors to be at least double-jabbed. If you are vaccinated in the US like me, the square vaccination card should be enough. Visitors must also show a negative PCR test result that has to be taken within 72 hours before arrival. There are many types of Covid tests; therefore, research what is accepted and take an appropriate test. For reference, my test was a Nasopharyngeal Swab taken at Total Wellness in Omaha, Nebraska. PCR tests for travel are pricey, to the tune of $220 each, but if you are insured, you should be covered. Taking a cheap rapid antigen test will save you some money, but since such a test is not usually accepted, you are putting your trip up for more risks. Once again, research on what is accepted by all destinations on your journey and take appropriate actions. Folks often receive their test results digitally, but I recommend that you print them out and have them stamped, if possible.

Trips from the US to Vietnam often include a transit to Japan. I couldn’t finish the check-in process on the United Airlines app. When we got to the Omaha airport, United Airlines told us that we must show a filled quarantine questionnaire. We were spooked. My fiancé flew from Vietnam to the US through Japan and she didn’t have to show that questionnaire. Did something change in between? We frantically checked everything we could about travel restrictions in Japan, but the only thing we could find was this passage from ANA.

Source: ANA

Since we were only transiting in Japan and our transit didn’t involve changing airports nor exceed 24 hours, according to ANA itself, we wouldn’t have to show any documents. But the United Airlines staff didn’t listen. She kept asking us for a completed questionnaire which mandates a quarantine address that we clearly do not have. After more than 30 minutes back and forth, she finally let us check in because the boarding time was coming, but implored us to finish the questionnaire before we landed in Japan. Once we got through the security check, I called United Airlines and was told that our interpretation of the situation is correct. Hence, if you are transiting in Japan and your transit doesn’t exceed 24 hours or involve a transfer between airports, you should not have to show any documents.

Transit at Haneda Airport in Japan

Barring any changes in the near future, if you transit at Haneda airport, you are likely to do so at Terminal 3. According to Haneda Airport‘s website, there are 38 stores at Terminal 3. Unfortunately, many of them are “temporarily closed” and some don’t open before 9am. If your flight lands there earlier than 9am, expect to see a lot of closed doors. The remaining open stores include mostly tax-free shops that sell perfumes, liquor, chocolate and some souvenirs. There are a few restaurants but the choices are limited and I couldn’t see any with sushi on the menu. The best option is to use a lounge. We used the ANA Lounge, whose access is worth 6,000 yen or about $50. Guests have unlimited access to a small buffet with good Japanese food. Liquor and wine are available only after 11am. I really enjoyed their soup as the broth was authentically delicious. I had nothing but praises for the staff. Even though they spoke limited English, their customer service was excellent. They brought food to our table and retrieved the empty trays for us. Promptly and unintrusively.

Only the stores with bright light are open. The rest are temporarily closed. You can se how limited the options are

In addition to the buffet, there are also areas where guests can rest, wind down and get some work done in silence. What made the Lounge great for us is the shower. Access to the shower is by appointments only and each appointment is capped at 20 minutes. The shower rooms are spacious with excellent facilities. From the hair dryer, the toilet to the shower itself. If you have a long transit, a shower is just what the doctor orders.

Restaurants that offer Japanese cuisine do not have sushi
Drinks from a vending machine are cheap. A coke costs a bit more than $1. I paid $5 for a bottle of water at Omaha airport

In short, we were fairly disappointed with the stores at Terminal 3 of Haneda Airport. If you have a long transit there, adjust your expectation on what you can actually do. Make sure you check out the Lounges! In my opinion, they are worth the money

Arrival in Vietnam

Vietnam just recently opened its borders after two years of completely being shut off from the world. The border control at Tan Son Nhat airport is strict and tiring. It’s imperative that you keep the boarding pass of the flight to Vietnam. Immigration officers in Vietnam will repeatedly ask for it; which was not there before Covid, if my memory doesn’t fail me. After disembarking from a plane, visitors will have to show that they adhere to the Covid restrictions before getting to the passport control. Proof includes their vaccination status, a negative Covid test that was taken no more than 72 hours before, and a declaration on tokhaiyte.vn. There is Wifi at the airport; therefore, don’t panic if you don’t fill out the declaration in advance. It’s actually better to declare right at the airport because it’s more up to date, but make sure you have digital access to your vaccination card or proof that you recovered from an infection. The lines can be very long, so take this into account when you make travel plans in Vietnam. We landed around 9pm local time and only left the airport 3 hours later.

The lines at Tan Son Nhat Airport

We didn’t have any rapid antigen test upon arrival at Tan Son Nhat airport. Hence, we only had to go through 3 days of self-quarantine at a hotel. We chose the Blue Diamond Luxury Hotel on Thi Sach street. The price for two people for 3 days, including 3 meals/day and a PCR test, was 7 million VND or about $300. The hotel is located in a quiet area of District 1. You are not disturbed by bars or heavy traffic. The food was actually better than I expected. The room was decent enough and the staff was nice. In hindsight, I don’t think that price was unreasonable.

We were told by a few friends and family members that a quarantine was not needed. I am not sure about that. We actually got a call from a local government official asking about our whereabouts and our test result. Being in quarantine is no fun, but I felt good that we followed the rules. We had time to recuperate after a long flight, slept to alleviate the jet lag and brought ourselves some peace of mind for not having to constantly look over our shoulders.

Covid cases in Vietnam have been rising after Lunar New Year. Hence, do yourself a favor and make sure you have hand sanitizers and masks with you at all time. I recommend that you have several masks and one of them is from paper. N95s offer great protection, but they can be hard on the ears after a while. Paper masks will be the break that your ears will desperately need.

Weekly readings

Weekly reading – 4th February 2022

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What I wrote last week

Apple’s financials through charts

Amazon’s financials through charts

Business

Hungarian Refugee Founded Car-Parts Maker Linamar in Canada. An amazing entrepreneurship story from an immigrant who slept on train station benches and had only a few dollars to himself. The so-called American Dream is not exclusive to America. It can happen anywhere if people have the will

Losses Mount for Startups Racing to Deliver Groceries Fast and Cheap. Food or grocery delivery market is competitive and cut-throat. If you don’t have the scale, you’ll have to spend lavishly in the beginning to acquire merchants and users. Hence, every order is a money loser. Surely, new comers add to competition for the incumbents, but how long the new comers can persist and compete is another matter

Why Japanese Businesses Are So Good at Surviving Crises. “Many companies are stuck in short-termism, focusing on a strategic plan for five years,” he says. “But a lot of Japanese companies think about 100 or 200 years from now and envision the kind of future they want to create. During the tsunami disaster, the key mindset of executives was: We have to empathize with others. And companies ought to do the same thing now, during the current crisis, empathizing with those who are suffering and trying to figure out how to help.”

Google Is Searching for a Way to Win the Cloud. It’s mind-blowing to me that Google has been spending much of the last three years on bolstering its reliability, yet there were still issues. It goes to show how difficult it is to build a service such as AWS, Azure or GCP.

Inside Spotify’s Joe Rogan Crisis. After Twitter, Facebook and Google, Spotify is another organization that has an unenviable task of dealing with content moderation. The Joe Rogan show is hugely popular and draws eyeballs which equate to money for Spotify. However, that puts Spotify in a bind because his controversial content is opposed by some employees and influential artists. Facebook, for example, has poured literally billions of dollars over the years into content moderation. I wonder how much the urge to strike a balance of business and, let’s say, civic responsibility will cost Spotify. More important, whether they will be able to strike that balance at all

Other stuff that I find interesting

Cracking a $2 million crypto wallet. A fascinating story with a happy ending. I was too close to losing my cryptos once. Luckily, I remembered my password and did my utmost to ensure that I won’t be in the same situation again. At least that’s what I think.

Scientists Are Racing to Understand the Fury of Tonga’s Volcano. 10 million tons of TNT are just unfathomable to me. It’s amazing what Mother Nature can do. We are just too small and there are a lot to learn. This volcano eruption is one example

Inside Operation Warp Speed: A New Model for Industrial Policy. Whether you agree or disagree with the previous administration’s policies and ideology, the fact remains that Operation Warp Speed helped bring the much needed vaccines to the world. For that, it’s a success

Rafael Nadal: The ‘tough love’ that shaped a 21-time Grand Slam champion. The man with the most Grand Slams in history started his journey under a strict mentorship from his own uncle who taught Nadal the value of hard work and discipline.

Stats

Amazon bought 20% of all clean-energy purchases by global corporations in 2021

FTC reported that $770 million was lost to frauds initiated on social media in 2021

There were 9 million credit card non-prime originations in Q3 2021, up 75% YoY

“Of the mass shootings that took place from 1966 to 2019, 20% occurred in the last five years studied”

Weekly readings

Weekly reading – 28th August 2021

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What I wrote last week

My review of three books: 1/ Stray reflections; 2/ An ugly truth and 3/ Obviously awesome

Business

Facebook says post that cast doubt on covid-19 vaccine was most popular on the platform from January through March. The fact that this article was published on a Saturday means that Facebook doesn’t want too many people to see it. I honestly can see the bull case for Facebook. However, it will be remiss to not mention the monumental challenge of content moderation that the company has to face. Because when false information runs rampage on its platforms, it may affect the engagement of users; which in turn can adversely affect advertising that is Facebook’s bread and butter.

Why You Can’t Find Everything You Want at Grocery Stores. Retailers are suffering from supply shortages; which is exacerbated by higher-than-expected demand. But if these hiccups are overcome, it means that there will be a growing retail segment in the coming months and by extension, likely, a healthy economy.

Diem: A Dream Deferred? Facebook has a lot going to their advantage: almost limitless resources, four of the most popular social networks in the world, 1/3 of the global population are its users, a money printing machine that is growing at a scary clip. But there are a couple of challenges that Facebook will have a hard time to overcome. First, it’s content moderation. Should I say: content moderation without pissing off anybody. As you can see, the task sounds almost impossible. When you moderate content by people with vastly different ideologies, you are almost certain to upset somebody. Facebook doesn’t have the luxury of having upset users or lawmakers. Hence, it’s not a problem that Facebook will easily solve. Second, public trust. The company has been around for almost 20 years and it has not garnered a lot of trust. As long as it continues to rely on advertising, capturing data and more importantly be embroiled in misinformation, the public trust will likely continue to evade them. As the article from Coindesk pointed out, trust is paramount in the payments/finance world. How on Earth would Facebook succeed in it?

The Digital Payment Giant That Adds Up. Merchants are going down the omni-channel route that allows shoppers to shop in multiple ways. This will be the key to Adyen’s growth. I like the fact that they prefer building in-house and maintaining the one-ness of their platform to acquiring capabilities from other companies through M&A and bundling different tech stacks into one. Working at a company that suffers from systems not talking to each other, I know first-hand how that could become a significant problem in no time. In addition, I really look forward to Adyen coming to the U.S with a banking license. I am not sure the folks at Marqeta share my enthusiasm.

Buying a bank turned LendingClub around. Now the fintech industry is watching. It requires a lot of work and preparation to get a banking license. The benefits of owning a charter; however, include less dependency and more control over your own fate, margin and operations.

What I found interesting

Inside Afghanistan’s cryptocurrency underground as the country plunges into turmoil. One can argue that cryptocurrency can be a savior in crises like what is going on in Afghanistan. The thing is that if something requires there to be a crisis to drive adoption, I am not sure that something is as good or revolutionary as some may think.

An immense mystery older than Stonehenge. It’s profoundly impressive to me that prehistoric people could transport stones that weighed tons to the top of a hill 6000 years ago. Think about that for a second. They must not have had all the tools that we came up with up hundreds of years later. It’s just extraordinary. If I ever have enough money and time, Gobekli Tepe, Machu Picchu, Egypt and Greece are where I wish to go.

Bigger vehicles are directly resulting in more deaths of people walking. Take a trip to Europe and you’ll see how absurdly big vehicles in the U.S are compared to those in Europe. And the implications aren’t necessarily positive. I’d argue that it’s considerably better to have smaller vehicles or fewer vehicles on the roads.

European Sleeper Trains Make a Comeback. I really wish that Americans would share the same enthusiasm about travelling by train as Europeans do. Personally, I enjoyed the train ride from Chicago to Omaha. If there were a reliable Wifi, I’d take trains every single time over flights and especially driving.

Apparently, there is a 2021 Global Crypto Adoption Index and Vietnam is ranked as #1. Below are the two reasons that experts say are why Vietnam’s adoption is so high. I am not sure how I should feel about it. On one hand, this index is not negative in nature. Hence, the #1 ranking certainly feels good. On the other hand, the alleged reason that young people don’t know what to do with ETF is alarming. That implies a lack of understanding in investing and a tendency to gamble in cryptocurrencies.

“We heard from experts that people in Vietnam have a history of gambling, and the young, tech-savvy people don’t have much to do with their funds in terms of investing in a traditional ETF, both of which drive crypto adoption,”

Source: CNBC

Stats that may interest you

In 2019, 70% of music in Japan was consumed via CDs

eCommerce made up 13.3% of total retail sales in the U.S in the 2nd quarter of 2021, indicating that the Covid effect has tapered off

46% of retail BNPL shoppers didn’t use their credit cards because they wanted to avoid high interest rates

The U.S online lottery ticket market will reach $2.3 billion by the end of 2021, a 25% YoY growth

Weekly readings

Weekly reading – 7/10/2021

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What I wrote last week

I wrote about Clear Secure, which just recently went public

Business

Japan launches bid to regain its semiconductor crown. “Japan’s plans are less about boosting output than about avoiding being caught in the crosshairs of global tensions, notably the fierce competition between the US and China for dominance of future technologies.” It will be hard to play catch-up in the semiconductor industry, but I wouldn’t rule out Japan.

Starting April 22, 2022, Visa will lower interchange rates for Card-Not-Present tokenized transactions and increase rates for some Card-Not-Present untokenized ones. In layman’s terms, it means that merchants will get to keep more money (maximum 10 basis points) if they encourage customers to pay online with mobile wallets such as Apple Pay or PayPal. Nothing spurs actions like incentives.

Universal films will head exclusively to Amazon Prime Video after their run on Peacock. Amazon has been aggressively investing in content on Prime Video. First it secured rights to stream NFL Thursday games starting next year. Then, it bought MGM Studios. Now, it will bring over Universal films after the initial premiere on Peacock. Amazon has been on the record pleased with Prime Video as an acquisition and retention tool for their lucrative Prime customer base. The Prime customer base in the US, since streaming rights are geographically dependent anyway, should be big enough to justify Amazon’s outlay.

FACT SHEET: Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy. I like what I saw from this Executive Order. I hope that the responsible Departments will soon introduce and implement policies. I, for one, would love to have another Internet provider in my building, in addition to Cox

Didi Tried Balancing Pressure From China and Investors. It Satisfied Neither. “The regulators in Beijing were under the impression Didi would pause its initial public offering while it addressed data-security concerns, according to people familiar with the company’s conversations with regulators. In New York, Didi offered assurances that Beijing had given it the green light, said people close to the listing process.”. It sounds like Didi wasn’t honest and straightforward with investors; which you know is a crime. On a side note, unless somebody lives in China or really understand what goes on in the country, for the life of me, I don’t understand why they will invest in Chinese companies. Just look at Didi and Alibaba as examples.

What I found interesting

The Senator Who Decided to Tell the Truth. I’d have a beer with this Senator. As a GOP politician, he was brave to tell the uncomfortable truth when his constituents didn’t want that truth. Whether you agree with his report, we definitely need more truth-telling and honest people like McBroom

A new road to an inaccessible land. An awesome write-up on the highly remote Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan. The area looks pristine and beautiful. I love this kind of exploratory pieces that can educate people on places that they would not hear about

Steve Jobs in Kyoto. Just a beautiful story on Steve Jobs. He made the world a better place and was gone too soon. But he is still an inspiration to many now and in the future.

Casualties of Perfection. “If your job is to be creative and think through a tough problem, then time spent wandering around a park or aimlessly lounging on a couch might be your most valuable hours. A little inefficiency is wonderful.”

Hands-on: How to edit PDFs with iPhone and iPad in the iOS 15 Files app

It’s Official. We Can Now Harvest Usable Lithium From Seawater. The science is there. The experiments were tried. I now look forward to the implementation in the real world. If we can get lithium from seawater and inexpensively, that’ll be a major plus for the world

A short movie on Japan

Stats that may interest you

Cleaner air has contributed one-fifth of U.S. maize and soybean yield gains since 1999

Apple stores 8 million TBs on Google Cloud

The number of mobile wallets in use worldwide is expected to reach 4.8 billion in 2025, up from 2.8 billion in 2020

Fincog Overview of BNPL Providers, Ranked by Size
Source: Fintechnews
Food, life

A 750-year-old soy sauce secret and an iconic product design

by MQDuong4 Comments on A 750-year-old soy sauce secret and an iconic product design

As an Asian, I love soy sauce. That’s what I grew up with and continue to use it regularly in my own cooking. So it was a pleasant surprise that I came across two very interesting clips. The first one talks about how a method to make soy sauce has survived centuries and generations in the birthplace of soy sauce in Japan. The second one discusses the iconic product design of Kikkoman. Not only is their dispenser’s design recognizable without any logo or branding, but it also bolsters customer experience.

Isn’t the world interesting? The design that we usually take for granted took the original designer, Kenji Ekuan, several years to develop. The sauce that we dip our sushi or pour on our food has been around for centuries. This is the main reason why I want to travel the world, to learn about new things.

Weekly readings

Weekly reading – 24th April 2021

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What I wrote last week

On Apple’s new product: AirTag

Apple TV+, Netflix and the battle between Walmart and Amazon

Business

Google used ‘double-Irish’ to shift $75.4bn in profits out of Ireland. It’s good to know that 2020 was the last year that the “double Irish” loophole could still be exploited. I am curious to see the impact that the phase-out has on US corporations.

WSJ’s short profile of Korea’s “King of Ramen”

AirTag location trackers are smart, capable and very Apple

The Future of Apple Podcasts

Etsy SEO: How to Optimize Your Shop & Listings for Search

How Netflix and social media helped F1 buck a global sports sponsorship slump. F1 is an extraordinary sport and deserves to be the pinnacle of motorsports around the world. If you look below this entry, you’ll see a graphic showing how F1 cars can go into corners at a speed that we travel on a highway. On the straights, F1 cars can hit 360kmh. The technology that goes into building these cars and the skills that go into driving them are the best in the world. Yet, I still feel that F1 isn’t as popular as it should be. “Drive to Survive” and the resilience shown during 2020 really helped the sport become better known

What I find interesting

Typography at U7 station in Berlin

You can pay at Whole Foods Market with your palm now. While it is incredibly cool and convenient, I don’t think I will jump at the chance to use it soon. Amazon isn’t really known for their privacy practices. I am not too willing to give away my biometrics to them yet.

F1 cars can slow down by 144kmh in 1 or 2 seconds and carry over 150kmh into corners. Just think about that for a second. These cars drive into cars at the speed that is often the top you can reach on the highway

Source: F1

Stats that may interest you

Morning Brew has 3 million subscribers. It’s amazing what you can do with great writing skills and consistency

iPhone 12 models accounted for 61% of US iPhone sales in fiscal Q2 2021

Weekly readings

Weekly reading – 30th January 2021

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What I wrote last week

What I like about Apple Fitness+

Business

An excellent write-up on the state of news outlets or local journalism in America. It’s astounding that half of the local news outlets are now owned by private equity, hedge funds or other investment firms

SoftBank’s plan to sell Arm to NVIDIA is hitting antitrust wall around the world

Brexit has major implications. Whether the net benefits are positive or not remains to be seen, but this new development doesn’t seem to benefit consumers: Mastercard is hiking fees

AirBnb conducted a new survey that said: One in five want their destination to be within driving distance of home. Not a very good sign for airlines

N26 got 7 million customers

Apple published a document that outlines its imminent privacy policies

Some notable data from a letter from YouTube CEO

Over the last three years, we’ve paid more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media companies.

YouTube Gaming had 100 billion hours of content in 2020

Our Music and Premium Subscriptions have been growing quickly, reaching more than 30 million paid Members in the third quarter of last year.

Source: YouTube

Technology

A glimpse into JPMorgan Chase’s $12 billion annual tech budget. There are quite some interesting features that the interviewee shared

CB Insights has a write-up on 40 companies that are working on autonomous vehicles

A long but great list of big ideas from ARK

What I found interesting

How homogeneous is Japan

What does the night sky look like on Mars?

A French-Vietnamese woman is fighting for justice for victims of war crimes. It’s crazy that US and Korean veterans received compensations from chemical companies because their products which were used in the Vietnam War had life-altering effects. Yet, Vietnamese victims have not received any.

What I find is that it is often these kinds of multiple small mispriced insights that overtime compound to form a business which is very defensible and very difficult to replicate. The discovery of those multiple small insights really requires a bottom-up organic idiosyncratic investment process.

Source: Interview with Mark Walker from Tollymore Investment Partners
Food, Today I learned (TIL)

A bit about matcha, how it can benefit your health and why it’s expensive

by MQDuong1 Comment on A bit about matcha, how it can benefit your health and why it’s expensive

I have recently taken up a habit of consuming matcha. It is refreshing in this hot weather to drink an iced latte matcha that mixes plant-based milk such as soy or almond milk with the green matcha powder. Apparently, matcha can be pretty good for your health for several reasons, as follows:

Each food has been measured for their antioxidant capacities, in a unit called ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity). List of ORAC-rich food items – Source: matcha

It can be expensive

There are two main and popular grades of matcha: ceremonial and culinary. Ceremonial grade is the highest grade of matcha that is made of very young tea leaves and requires a lot more care during the process. Hence, it’s quite expensive. Ceremonial grade matcha reportedly has a delicate flavor and should be used in tea ceremonies only. On the other hand, culinary grade match is cheaper because it reportedly is made of tea leaves that are young, yet older than those used to make ceremonial grade. Culinary grade can be used in baking, cooking and beverages.

To get a sense of how expensive matcha can be, take a look at the listings on Amazon for “matcha green tea powder” keyword

Source: Amazon

I buy my matcha from a local shop called The Tea Smith in Omaha. One ounce of culinary grade matcha from The Tea Smith costs $4.5. There is a cheaper alternative that costs only $2.5 per ounce. It is cheaper because it mixes matcha powder with sugar cane. It baffled me as to why matcha is expensive. I did a little research and apparently, the process of producing matcha is quite laborious and unique. Tea leaves have to be shaded from sunlight a couple of weeks at least before they are picked. After they are picked, they go through several steps of steaming, air-drying and removing stems & old leave parts. In the end, there are only soft particles left, which weighs about 1/10 of the original leaves. The particles are then stone-grounded, using uniquely crafted and carefully maintained stone mills. Each mill produces only one ounce or 30-40 gram of matcha per hour.

There is also a Chasen

A Chasen is a whisk specially used to mix matcha powder with water. I bought my whisk for $18.5! I was shocked at the price at first, but would soon understand the reason why after I learned how Chasens are made. Watch the videos below to know how they are created. Trust me, you’ll be blown away by the craftsmanship, patience and incredible talent of the Japanese

This video touches a little bit more on the hachiku bamboos used in the matcha whisks.

In sum, even though regular consumption of matcha can cost a bit, I do think I will continue with this habit in the future, unless there are scientific studies proving that matcha is hazardous to humans. I think given that matcha is linked with a lot of health benefits, it’s a cheap investment into the most valuable asset one can have. Also, as I learned about the art of producing matcha and Chasen, my already big admiration and respect for the Japanese craftsmanship and culture only grew bigger.

Let me know what you think about matcha. Stay safe and have a nice weekend!

Today I learned (TIL)

Today I learned – Miso

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Admittedly, even though I usually order a miso soup when at a Japanese restaurant, today is the first time I learned that miso refers to the name of a paste, not the soup itself. The fermentation process of making miso is highly complex, time-consuming and demanding. Depending on the flavors required by consumers, some miso can take 3 years to be ready for consumption. It’s interesting to see how it evolved over time, adopting technology and changes in modern life. Nowadays, consumers can drink miso soup like coffee or make miso balls which dissolve in hot water, making instant delicious and nutritious soup.

Today I learned (TIL)

Today I learned – Japanese earthquake resistant architecture

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Earthquake is a part of life in Japan. To adapt the inevitable presence of earthquakes, the Japanese have come up with ingenious, intelligent and skillful ways to make buildings and architecture as earthquake-resistant as possible. It’s amazing that they could build wooden structures hundreds of years ago and they are still standing strong today, despite countless shakings over time. The idea is itself remarkably admirable, but the craftsmanship that goes into building constructions is truly outstanding. Smaller models took years to be built. Wooden pieces were crafted by hands so that they could slot into one another without nails. Concrete is checked and poured carefully to have the perfect spread. I was overwhelmed with admiration for the Japanese folks while watching the genius at work. Highly recommend this eye-opening clip