Dungarees In Japan

06/01/2026

I got over 50 reactions on my posts last week! Thanks everyone for your support! 🎉

06/01/2026

No Japanese? No problem... or is it? 🇯🇵

Tokyo’s corporate scene loves promoting the “English-First” trend. Ever since Rakuten launched its “Englishnization” mandate back in 2010, a wave of tech giants, AI startups, and robotics firms have ditched Japanese fluency requirements on paper, pushing employees to hit high TOEIC benchmarks to globalize overnight.

But let’s be totally honest: mandating a language doesn’t magically make a workforce fluent. Talk to anyone on the ground, and they’ll tell you the unfiltered reality often looks a lot more like “Janglish,” silent meetings, and decision-making that still happens entirely in Japanese behind closed doors once the official English presentations are over.

While tech and product bubbles are genuinely opening up to global talent, traditional operations still run deep.
Are these English-first mandates a true global shift, or just clever corporate PR? Let me know your thoughts below! 👇

05/31/2026

A senior at Sasebo Naval Base is the first DODEA student from the Pacific region to receive a Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation scholarship in over a decade.

05/30/2026

05/28/2026

Think you have to pack your bags and move all the way to Tokyo to build a career with a Japanese global giant? Think again. 🇯🇵💼

Right now, Japanese corporations are among the single largest foreign job creators in the United States, investing billions into regional hubs and local communities. From massive engineering and manufacturing footprints in states like Ohio and Alabama to corporate headquarters, finance, and tech hubs across major US cities, the pipeline back to Japan is already right in your backyard. You don’t need a new passport—you just need to know where to look.

05/27/2026

Imagine living inside a floating steel pressure cooker. 😳 Deep in Hiroshima Prefecture, the city of Kure has a literal 2,000-ton, decommissioned diesel submarine—the Akishio—parked right on giant steel stilts on the sidewalk.

The best part? It’s 100% free to enter. You can walk right into the hull, squeeze through the cramped crew quarters, and look through a real, functioning optical periscope out over the bay. If you want to feel the raw, iron soul of Japan’s modern maritime defense, this is the place.

Would you look through that periscope, or do cramped spaces freak you out? Let me know in the comments.👋⚓️

05/27/2026

I was barely 22 years old in this photo. I had just wrapped up an intense, eye-opening 24-month tour of duty forward-deployed to Japan and was finishing up on a guided missile cruiser out of San Diego. Even though I was walking through the streets of California, Japan still lived entirely in my mind, body, and soul.

A photographer caught me on the ship, and this shot ended up in my hometown newspaper back in South Carolina, The Greer Citizen. To the folks back home, it was a profile about a small-town kid navigating a massive city during the biggest Naval event in the country, learning how to grow up and become a responsible man.

But to anyone who actually served in that era, you’ll recognize what I’m wearing. This was the “holy grail” uniform. It was that one immaculate, perfectly stenciled set of dungarees that lived in the dark corners of your stand-up locker next to your Cracker Jacks. It never saw a single drop of haze gray paint or ship grease. You only broke it out for a uniform inspection—or, in this case, when a media camera was rolling.

Looking back, that crisp denim didn’t just represent shipboard pride; it marked a massive turning point in who I was becoming. Little did that 22-year-old kid know, his journey with Japan was only just beginning.

To anyone who ever had to heavy-iron a pair of bell bottoms or stencil their name in perfect alignment—salute. 🫡