Jordan Schneider: Tobias, on the last show we did, Ishiba was on the ropes. Why don’t you pick the storyline up from late July 2025?
Tobias Harris: We last spoke during that weird interregnum. There had been some premature media reports saying Ishiba was going, which he then denied. After that, the pressure from within the LDP for him to leave just ratcheted up. He had lost two elections and lost the LDP’s control of the Diet — how could he not take responsibility? He managed to push that off for about a month.
Finally, in early September, the LDP released its Upper House election autopsy, analyzing what went wrong and how they got into this situation. The report’s overall conclusion was that the LDP had lost touch with too much of the electorate. There were sins of omission and sins of commission, but the bottom line was that Ishiba had not done enough to fix the situation. The subtext, of course, was that he was going to have to go. His situation became untenable, and within a few days, he was out.
Prime Minister Ishiba resigned on September 7, 2025. Source.
This led into September and a relatively more subdued leadership campaign compared to last year. We had five candidates instead of nine, though in practice, it was really a race among three. The campaign was shorter and involved less crisscrossing the country. The ambitions of the candidates seemed scaled back. It was just a very different experience compared to last year — and last year was not that long ago. The comparisons were very fresh and made it apparent just how much the party had changed in a year’s time.
Jordan Schneider: Who were the contestants?
Tobias Harris: All five had run last year. That was the other thing — we had heard from all of them, so what were they going to say that they didn’t last year?
We had, of course, the now-new Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae (高市 早苗). Koizumi Shinjiro (小泉 純一郎), who was Ishiba’s second agricultural minister, also ran again. We had the now-former Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi Yoshimasa (林 芳正), and Motegi Toshimitsu (茂木 敏充), who had been a foreign minister and senior cabinet minister for much of the second Abe administration and into the Suga administration. Rounding out the group was Kobayashi Takayuki (小林 鷹之), the young, generational-change candidate of the right wing.
We had all these familiar names and very familiar dynamics. It really ended up being a race between Hayashi, Takaichi, and Koizumi for the job.
Jordan Schneider: Was this a case of Koizumi dropping the ball? Did Takaichi really blossom this time around? How do you want to apportion the blame and the credit for how this election turned out?
Tobias Harris: It’s a mix of all of the above, which may be a dodge.
As a quick refresher on LDP elections, they had the option to use emergency rules but didn’t. They held a full election, which means every dues-paying member who meets certain qualifications gets to vote. Those votes determine proportionally how votes are distributed among the candidates, equaling the number of votes cast by the party’s national lawmakers. That’s the first round. If no candidate gets a majority, it goes to a runoff.
What ended up happening was that Takaichi, who is pretty popular with a plurality of the LDP’s rank-and-file, was poised to do well. She actually ended up outperforming her polling by anywhere between five and 10 points.
That was a pretty sizable polling miss. Either that, or there wasn’t a lot of polling in the final days of the campaign, and it’s possible many late-breaking, undecided voters broke for her. That’s certainly possible.
Even so, when you really look at it, Koizumi only underperformed slightly. I don’t think that’s ultimately why he lost. He lost because he wasn’t quite strong enough with the rank-and-file, and Hayashi ended up being a little too strong with them. When you look at their combined vote, they got around 47% together, compared to Takaichi’s 40%. The moderate part of the party just did a bad job strategically. If they had decided, “You know what, one of us has to be the person to inherit the mantle of Ishiba and Kishida, carry it forward, and we’ll join forces,” I don’t think Takaichi wins in that circumstance.
Before the race, there was a lot of talk about how Kobayashi would hurt Takaichi’s vote. That didn’t happen — Kobayashi wasn’t really a factor. But Hayashi and Koizumi were both strong enough to hurt each other, yet not strong enough individually to overwhelm Takaichi. That really is the story.
In fact, I went and crunched the numbers. Things could have gone very differently if just two or three thousand votes across the country had swung. It didn’t just matter that Takaichi won overall. It mattered where her votes were distributed. In the runoff, what matters is the 47 prefectural chapters, each of which has one vote. According to party rules, those votes are awarded to the candidate who wins the most votes in each prefecture.
Takaichi won 36 of the 47 prefectures. But when you look at the margins, there were something like 11 prefectures where Koizumi was within 500 votes of winning. If he had flipped those, it would have given him more votes. More importantly, a lot of the Diet members were following the results in their home prefectures. You probably had enough on-the-fence lawmakers who looked and thought, “Well, okay, the voters in my prefecture voted for Takaichi. Therefore, I guess that’s how I’m voting.”
If Koizumi flips more of those prefectural chapters, the race maybe looks different. It might have been an even closer race than it ended up being. It didn’t end up being that close in the second round, partly because many of those swing voters just went to Takaichi because she won the popular vote. But it could have been a very different race if the votes had been distributed just a little differently.
Jordan Schneider: What are the meta takeaways from this? Given your argument that there wasn’t a big shift in the electorate towards the right, is there a structural problem with the LDP moderates that they can’t get their act together? Do we just have two big egos? Of course, we have two big egos — these are people who want to be prime minister. What brought us down this path, aside from a handful of coin tosses?
Tobias Harris: Look, Ishiba won last year, so clearly the reformist, moderate part of the party has strength. One of the reasons it was surprising that Takaichi won is that the LDP’s electoral defeats last year and this year were concentrated among the right wing. The parts of the party that suffered most, like the former Abe faction, lost 40 or 50 members over the last two elections. There was every reason to think it would be difficult for Takaichi to even match her performance from last year because the parts of the party she needed were smaller. It certainly looked as if she was coming in with a disadvantage.
What ended up happening was not a big swing to the right. As we’ve established, she won because she had a unified plurality while the other part of the party was divided.
In that context, she also had an argument that was perhaps clearer than what either Koizumi or Hayashi were making. Her argument was, “Look, the reason why we’re suffering is that the party has moved too far to the center. We’ve lost the voters who were excited about Abe, and they’ve gone to Sanseitō and the Democratic Party for the People. The answer to our problem is simple — we just need to shift back to the right. Those voters will return, we’ll get them excited, and everything will be fine.”
Were enough voters convinced of that logic? I suppose you could say that. Koizumi’s answer was somewhat vague. I don’t think he had a clear, one-line explanation for how to fix what ailed the party. Hayashi, even more so, as Chief Cabinet Secretary under both Kishida and Ishiba, wasn’t really in a position to say, “We need dramatic change.” He was somewhat handicapped by having to be the continuity candidate.
In some ways, it’s hard to beat something with nothing. It’s not that Koizumi was offering nothing — it just wasn’t a clear, strong signal that could match what Takaichi was saying. Now, whether it works remains to be seen. There are real questions about whether that strategy will prove to be a cure-all. We’ll see what happens.
Takaichi’s Background, Rise, and Style
Jordan Schneider: Takaichi. Who is this person? What should we know about her?
Tobias Harris: She’s been in politics for a long time. She was elected the same year Abe was first elected, 1993. The “class of 1993” has now produced Abe as Prime Minister and Kishida as Prime Minister. It’s been around for a while.
She actually spent some time in parties other than the LDP early in her career because the ’90s were tumultuous. You had parties breaking apart, new parties forming, and the LDP was out of power when she first entered the Diet. It was a confusing time.
In the ’90s, she quickly gravitated towards Abe as part of this emerging group of new, young, ideological conservatives. They saw the end of the Cold War, the LDP being out of power, and the breaking of the economic bubble as an opportunity to make a new kind of politics and introduce wide-ranging reforms. She was quickly part of this group, wound up in the LDP, and really rode Abe’s coattails in some ways in her career.
She was pulled along when he became Prime Minister for the first time, and she was around him when he was “in the wilderness.” When he came back, she ended up in important roles throughout his second administration. He really was her patron. He helped her along and sponsored her. When she ran for the leadership for the first time in 2021, he was basically her campaign manager. She very much sees herself as committed to the same project, as carrying his work forward, dedicated to the “unfinished task of Abe-ism.” That’s very much who she is as a politician.
Takaichi celebrating her win of a Lower House seat as part of the “Class of ’93.” Source.
I will say, personality-wise and just who she is, she’s very different from Abe in a few important ways.
Unlike Abe, she is not a dynastic politician. He was a political blue blood through and through — grandson of a prime minister, son of a long-serving foreign minister who should have become prime minister. Abe felt he had inherited a political legacy he was responsible for carrying forward, which helped him move to the top of the LDP quickly.
Takaichi was not that. She’s from a more middle-class or working-class family in Nara and had to rise on her own. The expectation was that a college education wasn’t even appropriate for her. Her parents discouraged her from going to Tokyo. She really had to pull herself up and into politics. She did not have a parent helping her along and pushing her into the family business.
That makes her different in important ways. It gives her a more approachable charm and probably explains the pretty fanatical following she has among some of the grassroots. People really respond to her in ways that I think are quite genuine. She’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but for parts of the party, they really respond to the fact that she is, I guess you could say, more “salt of the earth.” Some people find that very appealing.
The other thing about her is that she’s really a policy wonk. She really commands the details of many different issues, through and through. She likes talking about it. When she has these conferences, she’ll speak at length and really likes to get down into the details.
This is very different from Abe. The thing about Abe was that he was a big-picture visionary — “This is the way I want to take the country,” and “This is how I think about what Japan needs to be.” With Takaichi, I find her visionary image-spinning can be a little derivative of Abe’s. She is much more comfortable when she starts getting into the details of policy. She’s a very, very different kind of politician in those ways.
Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk a little bit about having the first female prime minister.
Japan has a relatively low percentage of female Diet members compared to other democratic countries. Is it surprising that Japan’s first female prime minister comes from the right wing? How do we put all this together?
Tobias Harris: Given that the number of non-LDP prime ministers since 1955 is very small, the odds obviously favored someone from the LDP. The LDP, in particular, has few women. I was looking at these numbers today — the LDP has 38 female lawmakers between the two houses of the Diet, which is less than 10% of its 395 lawmakers. Apparently, between cabinet and sub-cabinet posts, a little more than 25% of those female lawmakers are now in the government in some form. There just aren’t a lot of women.
There’s something a little sui generis about Takaichi’s path. Not many women have endured as long as she has or successfully navigated LDP politics to get to a position where she could actually contend for the leadership. There haven’t been many female candidates for the leadership in the first place.
Did she get there entirely on her own? Clearly, she needed Abe’s patronage. I don’t think she gets to where she is without Abe giving her positions when he was able to do that. That’s not to diminish her political talents or her capabilities. She is a capable retail politician and has a strong command of many different policy issues. She’s formidable. But with the LDP being what it is, I don’t think that alone was sufficient to get her to the top, unfortunately. That’s just the reality.
Subsequently, whoever the next female prime minister ends up being may be able to do it by being a power in their own right, not someone who needed an Abe to pull them along. Or maybe Takaichi ends up being that patron herself. One thing to look at is how she’s using her power. Not so much the cabinet posts — only two of her 18 cabinet members are women — but more of the sub-cabinet posts are going to the younger generation of women. Clearly, she sees herself as being in a position to cultivate the next generation of female talent in the party and give them opportunities to develop those skills. So they won’t be as dependent on a powerful man using his power to help them along. It’s a little different, and it just reflects the time she was coming of age in Japanese politics. That was her pathway.
Jordan Schneider: She’s married to a parliamentarian who brought three kids from a prior marriage. Are any of them in politics? Is there a dynasty in the making?
Tobias Harris: I don’t get the sense that that’s what she’s trying to do. But if your father and stepmother are both Diet members, the chances you might be drawn into politics are probably high. Sometimes, though, the opposite happens. Abe’s older brother, for example, was exposed to it, hated it, and wanted nothing to do with it. It’s possible they might just find the whole thing repellent and have no interest.
One more note about Takaichi herself — she is a thoroughly political being. She is just so steeped in it — it really is her life. Yes, there are lots of stories about her hobbies — how she’s a fan of the Hanshin Tigers, she likes cars, and she had been a heavy metal drummer — but ultimately, this is someone who is thoroughly in the arena, a lot like Abe was. Ishiba teased her for her work ethic, the fact that she is really tireless, keeps long hours, and is just devoted to doing the work. That really is who she is as a politician in a lot of ways.
Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about some of her policies. We’ll start with international relations and national defense. What’s remarkable about her agenda?
Tobias Harris:She is a hawk through and through. There’s really no question about that. She sees the world as dangerous, which is pretty much a consensus position in Japanese politics now, but she sees it with a greater urgency and has been sounding the alarm for longer. She sees the risks Japan faces being on the front lines, facing off against three nuclear-armed states right in its neighborhood that are working increasingly close together.
She sees a world of challenges. That includes traditional military threats, but it’s also food security, energy security, economic security, supply chains — it’s all of that. She sees many threats that Japan must essentially steel itself and harden itself against. Both last year and this year, when you look at how she has campaigned, that has been the essence of her message — we need a strong Japan because it’s a dangerous world, and I’m going to do what it takes to meet those threats.
Jordan Schneider: ChatGPT told me that one of the kids is a prefectural assembly member in Fukui.
Tobias Harris: The prefectural assembly is usually a stepping stone to national politics, so I wouldn’t be surprised.
Jordan Schneider: Yes, around 40 years old. ChatGPT can find basically nothing about the two daughters. Good for the Japanese press for keeping them under wraps. Will it stay like that?
Tobias Harris: I don’t know if that state of affairs will last. In general, the first ladies and the family aren’t in the spotlight nearly as much as they are in the United States. When family members of prime ministers in Japan wind up in the press, it’s usually because something has gone wrong.
Abe’s wife, Akie, was involved in the scandal with a school getting a sweetheart deal on some land. She was a patron of it, which resulted in a lot of unfavorable attention on her and her associations. That wasn’t great. There was also the scandal with Prime Minister Kishida’s son, who was working as one of his father’s aides and basically using government resources to go on shopping trips. Generally speaking, when the children of leaders are in the public eye, it means things aren’t going well. Something’s wrong.
Jordan Schneider: It’s just such a split screen from Kamala’s step-kids and how out there they were, or Biden’s grandkids as well.
Tobias Harris: Maybe it tells you that America doesn’t have a monarch and yet treats its presidents’ families and presidential candidates’ families as if they are royal families, more so than Japan, which actually has an imperial family. The imperial family, of course, gets lots of press coverage and their goings-on get lots of attention. The media focuses on them instead of the family of the head of government.
Defense and Dealmaking
Jordan Schneider: Referring back to her agenda, what is her vision, and how, if at all, does it contrast with our most recent two prime ministers?
Tobias Harris: When you look at what she wants to do, a lot of it is putting Japan’s strengthening of its capabilities first, before anything else. Before cooperation with the United States, before cooperation with other countries, Japan has to do a lot more to defend itself. That means more defense spending, efforts to strengthen the Self-Defense Forces, and acquiring new capabilities for them.
One theme she’s been pretty insistent on for some time is Japan’s need for a proper equivalent of the CIA. You need a true national intelligence director. Right now, Japan has disparate intelligence functions spread across different parts of the government. She wants an intelligence agency directly under the cabinet and the Prime Minister, basically at the same level as the National Security Secretariat created at the beginning of Abe’s second administration. You’d have the National Security Advisor and, I guess, Japan’s DNI, for lack of a better term. She feels Japan has a real deficiency in its intelligence-gathering and analysis capabilities and needs to do more.
There’s a whole range of steps that need to be taken to raise Japan’s capabilities to another level, to complete the work of giving Japan a full national security establishment. I’ve argued in my book and elsewhere that building that establishment was one of Abe’s goals and accomplishments, but clearly, there was more to do. It took Kishida to get defense spending raised to another level. The intelligence apparatus questions were not really addressed systematically during the Abe years. There’s more to do, and she seems poised to move that to another level.
Jordan Schneider: We also have Koizumi as Defense Minister.
Tobias Harris: Yes, which is not bad for him and his resume. He’s done agricultural policy, he’s been the Environment Minister, and he’s done a lot of work in a party capacity on Social Security reform. He has not really had the foreign and national security policy portfolios. He is not necessarily a defense policy expert.
What we have seen in the Defense Ministry over the last several years is that the ministers are generally drawn from what are called “policy tribes” (zoku) in the LDP — groups of specialists in different policy areas. For the most part, with a couple of exceptions, the Defense Minister has been drawn from those ranks. Koizumi is not one of them.
He would probably say that because he comes from Yokosuka, which has a large U.S. Naval base and a large Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force base, he has an innate understanding of defense issues from being in the constituency and working with military authorities. But he’s going to be doing a lot of work to get up to speed. He’s going to be in a position of dealing with big questions with the United States, signaling Japan’s ability to spend more on its own defense. We’re going to be coming up on host-nation support talks in the not-too-distant future. These are big issues, and he’s going to have to step it up.
Jordan Schneider: What was her calculus in putting him there?
Tobias Harris: Both Hayashi, Koizumi, and Motegi are in the cabinet, and Kobayashi is in a senior party post. In the interest of party unity, she wanted to keep all the rival candidates on her side to try to head off some sort of anti-Takaichi movement headed by one of them. It’s the Lyndon Johnson line about wanting your enemies inside the tent.
Ultimately, it’s about giving them work to do, keeping them on board, and forcing them to be part of making the Takaichi government a success. Abe did this as well. He was always trying to co-opt his would-be rivals. This is an old technique.
Jordan Schneider: Can we be serious on national defense if Koizumi is running the defense establishment?
Tobias Harris: Look, it’s a parliamentary system. Oftentimes, you get people doing different jobs and building up expertise on their way up. There are very few political appointees in any ministry, so there’s a lot of dependence on the bureaucracy and, of course, increasingly on uniformed Self-Defense Forces personnel. That’s all just part of it being a parliamentary system — you do the jobs, and then you acquire the expertise and experience.
If it goes well, he can end up in a position where he now has this expertise in addition to his other experiences. I don’t think it’s necessarily cause for alarm, any more than some other, perhaps more concerning, Cabinet appointments we could talk about, maybe less from a national security standpoint.
If you listen to some parts of the Japanese commentary, there’s this idea that Koizumi is somehow not smart, that he’s...
Jordan Schneider: A lightweight.
Tobias Harris: Yes. I frankly have never understood that line. If anything, from the moment he arrived in the Diet, he has been very reluctant to buy his own hype and has repeatedly shown a willingness to put in the work. He’s done not-particularly-glamorous jobs and taken on things that are not the most high-profile positions.
We saw this when he became Agricultural Minister earlier this year. Deployed correctly, his star power and his ability to command media attention can be useful. He took over while the government was dealing with a rice price crisis, and he immediately threw himself into high-profile measures — “I’m going to sit down and talk to retailers.” He used his ability to command media attention to actually move the government’s agenda.
Deployed correctly, he could be a real asset. There’s just a tendency to write him off as just a pretty face, but I don’t actually think that’s true. He has shown an ability to learn, to do the work, and to try to become a more well-rounded political leader.
Jordan Schneider I’ll give him six months to bone up, but we’ll be expecting a ChinaTalk appearance. Apparently, he does speak halfway decent English. The offer is outstanding. We won’t go straight for the PM. We can start with the Defense Minister.
Koizumi Shinjirō: your ChinaTalk debut awaits. Source.
Were there other remarkable aspects of her Cabinet announcement or her first few days on the throne?
Tobias Harris: We can talk overall about the Cabinet. This goes back to her including Hayashi and Koizumi in it. There are a lot of different philosophies about forming a cabinet. Ishiba’s cabinet, for example, relied heavily on friends and allies. In some ways, that might have done him in. He did not reach out to Takaichi to give her a high-profile job, nor did he reach out to the right wing of the party. His cabinet was very much, “I want to be in power with the people I trust most. I feel like I can’t trust anyone else.” It ended up being Ishiba surrounded by his lieutenants.
I don’t know if that ultimately did him any favors. It meant a lot of his most vociferous opponents were not in jobs that restricted their ability to speak out. He ultimately had this persistent bloc of the party that had nothing better to do than criticize how he was governing. That didn’t work well for him.
Takaichi, perhaps recognizing that her victory was not as overwhelming and preponderant as it seemed, reached out to Koizumi and Hayashi. There’s a pretty broad balance of distribution among members of various former factions, representing all different stripes. This is not just a bunch of right-wingers.
One thing I have flagged, though, is relevant to how Japanese governments work. The composition of the cabinet matters a lot for political reasons. But if you want to look at how the government is actually going to work, you have to look at the Prime Minister’s Office (the Kantei) and who is in the jobs most immediately around the prime minister. That tells you who the sounding board is, who’s sitting around the table making decisions and setting priorities, who’s delivering the prime minister’s will directly to the bureaucrats, and who’s deciding how the government communicates its messages.
That group is much more conservative. The people around her — her Chief Cabinet Secretary, her Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretaries, the aides and advisors — are much more uniformly from the right wing of the party. For the cabinet posts, she did the politically expedient thing. She brought in rivals and people who had to be rewarded. But when you look at who’s in the key decision-making roles, it’s a much more conservative group.
Jordan Schneider: How are you expecting her conservatism (and that of her team) to manifest?
Tobias Harris: The most obvious thing will be on a couple of issues. One is national security. To some extent, there’s a consensus here. Kishida was the one who got the deal done to get defense spending to 2% of GDP in the first place. He pushed through changes that allow Japan to acquire strike capabilities. There’s a pretty broad consensus in the party. This isn’t necessarily a conservatives-versus-moderates issue.
Will having this conservative team give it more of an edge, a little more stridency, a willingness to push harder and faster? Yes. She has already talked about how she wants to move up the timeline for revising the three strategy documents, which outline, among other things, the five-year plan for defense spending. On the normal schedule, that wouldn’t be until 2027. She said at her first press conference yesterday that she wants to do that sooner.
Had Koizumi or Hayashi won, I don’t think they would be talking like that. The tone is different on that score. In general, you can see what she is doing that Ishiba was not. Pressing on the gas pedal on defense is one thing.
The other thing: to be a conservative in the LDP now is to be a fiscal dove. She tried to tone back some of the rhetoric. Last year, she ran as practically a modern monetary theorist. This year, she tried to trim it back and at least gesture in the direction of fiscal responsibility. But fundamentally, she still thinks deficits don’t really matter — that there are urgent needs, and if it means running bigger deficits to spend more on defense and other things, then we’ll do that.
That is something that absolutely differentiates her from pretty much any other candidate who might have become prime minister. Everyone else was much more cautious about it. Ishiba was very cautious. The question is whether she’s going to be able to get away with that, given the condition of the bond market already. The bond vigilantes are keeping a watch out. That’s going to be one of the major questions that determines her durability. It’s a major difference and something that will color how she governs.
Other things that might make her different — clearly, even though the consensus within the LDP and across parties on foreign population issues has changed, she centered that in her campaign more than any other candidate. She talked about the need to get foreign tourists to “behave themselves” more and cracking down on lawbreaking by foreign residents. She took a much more strident stance on that, has already created a cabinet portfolio to deal with these issues, and will likely be setting up a headquarters to oversee them. She’s going to move in a more strident direction, partly because she’s trying to head off a threat from the LDP’s right, from Sanseitō as well. She has to have an answer to these issues. That’s another area where she’s going to lean into taking a more hawkish stance compared to others.
Coalition Challenges
Jordan Schneider: Let’s jump forward to her policy agenda. The LDP doesn’t have a majority on its own, so she’s in a coalition government. She swapped. We have a new partner. What is that dynamic? How stable is this all likely to be, Tobias?
Tobias Harris: We have to step back. This has been one of those months where a decade’s worth of events seem to have happened. From the moment she won on October 4, less than a week later, six days later, the LDP’s 26-year-old coalition with Komeito ended. Komeito is a centrist, nominally pacifist Buddhist party that supported the LDP both in government and during their three years in opposition. That coalition broke down.
To some extent, the writing had been on the wall for a while. Komeito’s electoral strength had been declining, and plenty of people on the LDP’s right had tired of relying on a party that consciously described itself as a “brake” on the LDP’s more right-wing tendencies. There was a sense that the coalition would break sooner or later.
This immediately created a problem for Takaichi. By not bringing Komeito into the government, instead of going into the prime ministerial vote with a minimum of 220 votes (13 shy of a majority in the lower house), she was 37 votes shy. This was a much trickier challenge. It created a window of opportunity for opposition parties to try to organize a campaign for someone else to become Prime Minister. The talks got started and looked like they were making progress in overcoming policy differences, but they ultimately failed.
They failed because the LDP managed to pry away one of those parties — Ishin no Kai (日本維新の会), the Japan Innovation Party. This is the Osaka-based party. You could describe it as neoliberal, quasi-populist, or conservative. Ishin had been in talks to possibly elect Tamaki Yuichiro (玉木 雄一郎) as Prime Minister. Then, they got a call from the LDP saying, “We’ll talk.” Within a couple of days, it became clear there would be an arrangement between Ishin no Kai and the LDP to ensure Takaichi would become Prime Minister.
Jordan Schneider: Are they just hanging out in bars? How is this actually going down in real time?
Tobias Harris: There’s a lot of that in Japanese politics. In the back alleys of Nagatacho and Akasaka, near the Diet members’ office buildings, a lot of business gets conducted in drinking establishments. Does it exclusively happen there? Not necessarily. Some of it is formal conferences, and some of it is text logs and surreptitious messages. My understanding is the dialogue between Takaichi and Ishin actually started with a text, which then led to more formal discussions. Politics is politics, right? Same anywhere.
The thing that was uncertain is that Ishin is a weird party. I’ll freely admit I struggle with them because I don’t know Osaka. I’ve spent loads of time in Tokyo. Every time I’ve lived in Japan, it’s been in the greater Tokyo area. I’ve been to Osaka, but never for long, so it’s a mystery to me. Ishin no Kai has had almost a monopoly on power in greater Osaka for 15 years now. I don’t entirely understand how they’ve made it work.
I wrote a review of a Japanese book I read on the first decade of Ishin no Kai. I was trying to understand their ups and downs. It seems they have these periods where they look like they’re booming, expanding nationally, and becoming a major third party to challenge the LDP from the right. Then, everything collapses, they retreat to Osaka, and they have to fight to hold on to it. A couple of years later, they have another boom. This has happened two or three times. It’s a very strange party, and I don’t understand how they’ve endured in Osaka as they have. But that’s who the LDP is now relying on.
It’s not a straightforward coalition. It wasn’t a one-for-one swap because Ishin decided they didn’t want any cabinet posts. They have an “external cooperation agreement.” As far as I know, looking at the text, all they promised to do was vote for Takaichi to become Prime Minister, which they did. Now they are in a position to say, “You’re not doing what you promised,” regarding a lengthy document listing all the policies the LDP has now promised to implement.
In most cases, the promises are vague — “We’ll study this,” or “We’ll set up a headquarters to study that.” But some promises are very specific and have specific timetables. If the LDP backs away, the barriers to exit for Ishin are very low.
I should note, it has been two days. They signed this on Monday — it’s Wednesday. One of the leaders of Ishin has already come out saying, “If we feel the LDP is not living up to its bargain, we will leave.” Takaichi has been Prime Minister for one day, and her partner is already threatening to quit.
Jordan Schneider: What happens if they do?
Tobias Harris: In practice, nothing. You just have a minority government. Technically, they are a minority government now. Unlike in other democracies with external partners, this is not a “confidence and supply” agreement, as far as I know. Ishin has not promised to side with the government on a no-confidence motion. It has not promised to vote for the government’s budget. All of its support is conditional. It is entirely conditional on Ishin feeling that the LDP is acting in good faith to implement the policies it wants.
In theory, they could leave, and Takaichi would still be Prime Minister and her government wouldn’t collapse. The question becomes, would they feel so bitter over the LDP’s breach of faith that they would support a no-confidence motion? That’s the real question.
If it happened before the budget passes, it would be a crisis. We can presume the assumption is that Ishin will vote for the budget next year. The government will ensure Ishin’s preferences are included when drafting it. But if Ishin is dissatisfied before then, all of that is up in the air. What does the budget look like? Where will the LDP get the votes? That becomes the most important question. But that’s only if Ishin leaves before late March.
Takaichi and Yoshimura Hirofumi (co-leader of Ishin no Kai) hold up the pact signed between their two parties. October 20, 2025. Source.
Jordan Schneider: Okay, so the coalition splits off, it’s a minority government, and they can’t pass a budget. Do we get elections? What happens next?
Tobias Harris: If things are so bad they can’t pass a budget, yes, we’d likely get a no-confidence motion that passes, which would trigger an election. They would “fight it out” at the polls. That would be my presumption if the relationship with Ishin broke down that badly.
Passing a no-confidence motion is hard. There’s a reason Ishiba didn’t actually face one — only one party, the Constitutional Democrats (CDP), is big enough to submit one independently, and they were reluctant. No other party wanted to take the lead. Ishiba escaped without one. You still have to get all the opposition parties on the same page, agreeing, “Yes, this is the time.” It also depends on Takaichi’s popularity. Are things going her way? (Presumably, if the coalition falls apart, they aren’t.) There’s no guarantee, but that would be the mechanism.
The reason one of Ishin’s leaders is already threatening to quit is that they made compromises that are causing friction. The LDP and Komeito broke up, proximately, over political finance reform. This was the fallout of this slush fund scandal that destroyed the factions, at least nominally, and really dragged down the LDP support. The party was supposed to really commit to tightening up regulations on donations — basically who can donate, who can receive donations, how should they be reported.
Earlier, at the start of this year, there had been some pretty extensive debates between the government and the opposition parties about what that should look like. Those talks ultimately broke down because on the one hand you had parties like the CDP and Ishin no Kai calling for basically a total ban on corporate political donations. The LDP is saying, “No, we can’t do that, that’s too much, but we should have a bunch of rules to increase transparency, much more accessible reporting, lower thresholds for reporting and things like that.”
Then you had this middle solution that Komeito and the Democratic Party for the People came up with, which was, “Well, we don’t want an outright ban, but it’s not enough to just do more transparency. Let’s limit the organizations that can receive donations.” Instead of every politician having their little fundraising support group, if corporations want to give money, it has to be to either the national party or prefectural party. That was the compromise proposal.
In the coalition talks, Komeito said, “Hey, we have this proposal. We want you to sign on to it. We want to make this happen.” Takaichi generally has just thought the LDP didn’t have to reform anything — this was not a real issue, not a serious issue. It might also have to do with the fact that the right wing of the party is where the slush fund scandal originated from, and the people implicated in it tend to be her supporters. She was maybe constrained in taking a more aggressive approach to this issue. That ultimately is what led Komeito to say, “Okay, fine, we’re done. We can’t join the government because you won’t sign on to this.”
Enter Ishin no Kai, which has an even more hardline position on this. The LDP is like, “We just pushed away our longtime coalition partner, who was offering a more modest proposal. Sorry, your proposal for a total ban is a complete non-starter.” Ishin no Kai says, “Okay, fine.”
Jordan Schneider: Why do they want corporate money in politics? Why is it important to the LDP?
Tobias Harris: Elections are expensive, and the LDP is really good at raising corporate money. Those majorities don’t fund themselves. If you have an overwhelming advantage in fundraising, are you going to unilaterally disarm? It makes sense that smaller parties want restrictions — they are more dependent on public funding, while the LDP supplements public funding with private funding.
The LDP told Ishin the ban was a non-starter. Ishin then turned around and said, “Okay, if we can’t do that, we have another core political reform idea: there are too many Diet members. Let’s eliminate 10%.”
Jordan Schneider: I love this as an idea.
Tobias Harris: I actually hate it. When you do the math, the lawmaker-per-capita number in Japan is much better (fewer voters per representative) than in the United States, which has three times as many people. Having worked for a Diet member, I’ve seen the relative lack of distance between national lawmakers and voters, and I think that’s a good thing. When that ratio is lower, you have more opportunities to actually see your representatives, interact with them, and be listened to by them. Frankly, there’s no reason for Japan to cut the number of lawmakers.
For Ishin, this is partly about the urban-rural split. There’s been some correction, but urban Japan (where Ishin is centered) is still relatively underrepresented. They see too many seats for rural Japan, and this is a blunt instrument for fixing that.
They came back with this counterproposal and said, “We’re not going to accept, ‘we’ll study it.’ It has to be done during the Diet session that started yesterday.” You have until the end of the year to draw up this legislation and get it done. Takaichi said, “Fine, we’ll do it.”
She didn’t run this by her party. Immediately, LDP members were saying, “Wait a second. What seats do you plan on cutting? Whose seats are on the chopping block?” You immediately got pushback. You have the Secretary-General of the LDP saying yesterday — one day after signing the agreement — that this is going to be difficult to do. You also have pushback from other parties saying you can’t make a change like this without all-party buy-in. This is too big of a reform to just be something that “we’re the government and therefore we can just at a stroke get rid of a bunch of seats.”
They are setting up a pretty brutal fight within the LDP, between the LDP and Ishin, and between the government and the opposition. Public opinion hasn’t weighed in yet because basically they had a week to process this. Some of those voters who may feel like they’re going to lose representation may have thoughts about this.
Jordan Schneider: How do they kick people off the island? That was why I was so excited about this — the Hunger Games nature of it.
Tobias Harris: It wouldn’t happen until the next election. It’s like redistricting between elections. They just eliminate a district and say, “Good luck finding another,” which does create these “Survivor” situations. In depopulating prefectures, they’ll say, “You had four constituencies, now you only have three.” That means…
Jordan Schneider: Whoever gets the most donations from Toshiba gets to…
Tobias Harris: You end up with these scrambles. It’s not just the incumbent — other parties had candidates in that constituency who also want to run. You get a musical chairs situation where they’re taking a chair away.
There’s talk that if they do it, they would mostly eliminate seats from the proportional representation (PR) lists, not the constituencies. The electoral systems are mixed. This has small parties really upset because they rely on PR seats. The LDP would probably stand to gain the most, even more than Ishin, because the LDP does best in the single-seat constituencies. Small parties have a hard time winning those.
The interests slice in many different directions. It is a big change to spring on everyone, and they only have two months to figure it out. We’ll see.
Jordan Schneider: Any other dynamics to watch? “Japan First”?
Tobias Harris: We haven’t really talked much about the United States. Trump will be in Japan in less than a week. A week from now, he’ll be on his way home. This is a test for Takaichi right out of the gate.
There has been a lot of fretting, particularly in articles over the last couple of weeks, when it was unclear whether Japan would even have a new prime minister. The Foreign Ministry was worried the new leader wouldn’t have enough time to be briefed properly. When Ishiba first met Trump earlier this year, he had about 36 hours of briefings, and the ministry wanted the new prime minister to have at least that much. They needed the new leader in place by a specific date to get that done. It’ll probably be fine.
There’s already talk that this will be an “Abe nostalgia tour” for Trump. They’re expected to go to many of the same stops he visited with Abe in 2019, and Trump is scheduled to meet with Abe’s widow, Akie. Takaichi, at least in the near term, will be able to play that “Abe card.” The fact that she was so close to him means they can bond over their shared affection, which will play a part in ensuring this initial meeting goes well.
This probably explains why she immediately said, “We’re going to move quickly to raise defense spending.” In practice, working out the details will still take time, but being able to tell Trump, “Hey, last week I became prime minister, and the first thing I announced was raising defense spending,” is not a bad opening line.
Her team is also positioned for this. She made Motegi foreign minister, and his calling card has been “I negotiated a trade deal with Trump during the first Trump administration and he called me a tough negotiator. I’m going to be able to really build a good relationship.” The relationship’s in good hands. Akazawa, who negotiated the trade deal for Ishiba, is still in the cabinet in a different role, but will still probably be a channel for communication. In the near term things will probably be okay.
The bigger questions remain — How interested is this administration in Asia in the first place? How durable is the commitment to defend Japan? How committed is Trump to a mutually beneficial trading relationship? There are real questions about the implementation of the trade deal that was signed.
All those questions are for after next week. Next week is about the immediate rapport. Will they get along? What relationship will they have off the bat? I suspect it will be fine.
Jordan Schneider: It’s helpful that she’s a politician through and through. She knows she just has to subsume herself to this. She presumably has plenty of experience subsuming herself to horrific male egos over the course of her career. Having to hold that for two days... I don’t know. We’re rooting for her. I feel like she’s got this.
Tobias Harris: Yes, it will be nerve-wracking, and everyone will be watching to see what the rapport is like. But just from what we’ve seen of Trump — to the extent we can understand his feelings — the way he talks about Abe suggests a real, genuine affection, to the extent he feels genuine affection for anyone. There does seem to be real sentiment there. The fact that Takaichi certainly shares that affection will go a long way.
Even if Abe were alive and somehow Prime Minister again, he wouldn’t have gotten a pass on the tough negotiations. He still would have had to negotiate and find a package that would make Trump happy. The result probably would have looked very similar to what Japan ended up getting under Ishiba. Ultimately, Japan’s interests are Japan’s interests, and any Japanese government would try to hold the line in much the same way Ishiba did.
Takaichi, to the extent that she does what this administration wants — raising defense spending, contributing more to host-nation support, signing up for economic security measures regarding China — can minimize friction.
The question is, will there be a point at which the Trump administration asks for things Japan doesn’t want to do? As Takaichi herself said during the LDP leadership campaign, is there a point — like this idea of Japan giving the U.S. $550 billion — where the actual mechanics are very unfair to Japan? Is there a point where it becomes very hard for Takaichi, or any Japanese leader, to say, “No, we can’t go along with this”? We don’t know yet because we’re still waiting for the details, but that’s a real question.
Takaichi is a nationalist. She wants to stand up for a strong Japan. That includes saying “no” if the United States does something that makes Japan look weak or harms its interests.
This is the duality of the Japanese right-wing. They are very committed to the U.S. alliance. There’s an appreciation that the alliance is the best pathway to bolster Japan’s strength and relevance, and practically, Japan needs the U.S. for regional security. On the other hand, in some corners, there is outright anti-Americanism. In other corners, it’s more “America-frustration” or skepticism, recognizing that the two countries are not aligned 100% on everything.
Sometimes, particularly (but not only) when Democrats are president, there’s a feeling that US values are not necessarily Japanese values. For the right wing, this often surfaces around historical issues. Republicans have criticized Japan over historical issues. The George W. Bush administration and Abe had a fight over the “comfort women” issue. Republicans in Congress were criticizing Abe for his statements about that issue. The bottom line is that the Japanese right has a complicated relationship with America.
Jordan Schneider: I started listening to this meta-podcast called The r/BillSimmons Podcast about The BS Report, about how Bill Simmons’s podcasting has changed and gotten worse over time. One of the main critiques is that basically he doesn’t watch the games anymore. His heart’s not in it. He doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. He’s just making dumb jokes.
Whenever I do a show with you about Japan, Tobias, I feel like I’m inhabiting that post-pandemic Bill Simmons energy. On the tech and China stuff, I actually know what I’m talking about, but not at all when it comes to the minutiae of intra-Japanese party drama.
I’d like to thank you, Tobias, for your patience, and thank the audience as well for their patience as I go on this long journey to understand this country better. Thank you to the US-Japan Foundation for sponsoring this podcast.
Tobias, it’s always a pleasure. I learn a ton and I can’t wait to check in in a few months — once the government falls apart, or not. To be sure, there will be plenty more drama to come.
我们跟着游行队伍在苏黎世最传统的左翼街区穿行，大家一起用法语喊出反法西斯和international solidarity（霸王花注：跨越国界的声援和支持）这样的口号，还有“from river to the see Palestine will be free”（霸王花注：从约旦河到地中海，巴勒斯坦将获得自由），终于把自己愤怒的声音从胸口中吐纳了出来，让它在苏黎世的城市楼宇之间回荡。
苏黎世的wiedikon（霸王花注：苏黎世西南部的一个区域）拥有着最多地道的国外餐厅、咖啡店、小酒吧，和最多的城市嬉皮，混杂着不同肤色的各国移民，也是历史悠久的犹太人聚居区。有些人从窗口伸出头跟着游行队伍一起大喊“free palestine”，高举双臂鼓掌，我还看到了一个年轻的亚洲学生对着游行队伍拍完照之后也加入了进来。事后，我小心翼翼地问那个巴勒斯坦女性为何来到瑞士？她告诉我，她从小就在约旦的难民营长大，之后有了机会去埃及读大学，认识了现在的丈夫跟着他才到了瑞士。我在一个叫We’re Not Kidding with Mehdi & Friends的播客节目中听到一个叫Alana Hadid的巴勒斯坦裔女性电影制作人说，所有海外巴勒斯坦人的命运都是一样的，1948年之后被迫迁移，从一个难民营到另一个难民营，浮萍一样流散，再也不能回到故土，即便那里早已面目全非。
在连无国界医生和Unicef（霸王花注：United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund，联合国儿童基金会）这样的国际救援组织都一再称以色列在加沙进行种族灭绝之后，我的伴侣才放弃原来的中立立场。一年前我们一起看了一部半岛电视台出的深度调查纪录片《Octorber7》，在全世界为之愤怒的2023年10月7号那天到底发生了什么，纪录片里显示以色列国防安全部门一早就知道哈马斯行动并且一再警告防御，却没有得到以色列军方回应，哈马斯在行动前的每一天都在社交媒体上公开展示自己的训练，而以色列在巴勒斯坦人民居住区所设的摄像头更是数不胜数，更早前《纽约时报》里有一篇时评引用来自以色列谴责内塔亚胡贪腐的调查报告里写道，内塔亚胡长期通过卡塔尔给哈马斯输送现金，以确保哈马斯的军事力量。
更让我厌恶和无法抑制愤怒的是，我没有想到在苏黎世这样绿党占多数，最左倾具有进步意识的城市里，人们对于以巴问题这么最基础的对于人类道德底线的认知竟然会有如此巨大的分歧。我朋友的男朋友是做风投的banker，他支持以色列，他非常自信地说，他关注以巴冲突十年了，是巴勒斯坦三次拒绝了两国方案，“There is no fucking solution”，这是他对我朋友说的原话。
那天游行队伍有条不紊的从火车站广场一路用法语喊着反法西斯的口号，唱着国际歌，走向市政广场前，所有商铺都正常运营，市政广场中心位置的路边摊还因此收获了比往日更多的生意，摊主也热情地送出了还烫手的西班牙油条到邻近的游行者手上，当时只听见一个年老的男性声音用扩音器说，游行人群现在散去，不然警察就要出来维护秩序了。前面领头的游行小团体组织大概觉得不能再停在市政楼广场，就摆手让后面的人都跟上，转到左手边那一条街上，但那条街的两侧街道都被全副武装的警察堵死了，再往前走就有催泪弹和水枪径直瞄准了人群，所有人都猝不及防，我听到好多女孩惊叫，哭泣。所有人都靠着彼此往后退，转向另一头的时候又见到一排的警察，早有准备穿着防护服的游行者在前面围成了一道人墙来保护后面的人。黑色烟雾笼罩着伯尔尼阴郁的城市，形成了一场风暴，空气里都是臭氧的味道，我慌忙地把头缩在人和人的身体之间，在催泪弹和情绪被激发的双重作用下抑制不住地哭了，我旁边三个非常年轻的女孩子用很有经验的语气跟我说，“It will be over”，她们都用巴勒斯坦的围巾keffiyeh遮住了半张脸，其中一个女孩在人群慌乱移动的时候一直紧紧拉着我的手，她们一起抱住我跟着一波人群走出了那一条街。
“they want your activism to be non-disruptive, they want your protest to have a permit，they want your grief to remain palatable, but causing discomfort is not the same as casuing harm, the comfort have never liberated the oppressed.”
John brown，最为反抗两个多世纪的奴隶制的黑人领袖声称，如果政府行不公义之事，那么人们有权拿起武器，最后John Brown被判国罪处以绞刑。但同样后来诞生的白人K3党自称是骑士，却随意进入黑人家里施暴。在历史的进步与退步循环之间，John brown在美国又从左派的进步领袖，变成了现在特朗普这个极其Racist政权鼓吹的极端暴力的形象。
（2005年，英国的匿名街头艺术家Banksy在巴勒斯坦西岸的隔离墙留下涂鸦，在2017年成立名叫The Walled Off Hotel“被围起来的酒店”的酒店，酒店窗外风景是以色列设立的隔离墙和Banksy在墙上留下的象征free Palestine的涂鸦。）
另外推荐Guardian今年去以色列采访出的的纪录短片《Along the Green Line》，还有土耳其裔美国活动家Aysenur Ezgi Eygi在巴勒斯坦的活动和经历《Under an Olive Tree》以及荣获2025年奥斯卡最佳纪录片奖的《No Other Land》，记录了以色列军队在西岸地区强行拆除巴勒斯坦村庄的过程。
推荐我今天听的端传媒在Spotify上的播客《圆桌｜人类命运不共同？四位学者的思辨》。还有一本去年出版澳大利亚记者，犹太作家的《The Palestine Laboratory》，讲的是以色列利用占领加沙这个全世界最大的Open air prison（露天监狱）制造军事武器、无人机、高科技监控技术，以反恐为目的给自己的经济利益打广告，形成了一条全球军事技术产业链。
在美国，医生是个高收入职业。有一首很有名的乡村歌曲《Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys》。这首歌流行了半个多世纪。《妈妈们，别让你的孩子长大了当牛仔》。不当牛仔，可以理解，因为干活辛苦，挣钱少，而且经常上路赶牲口，一年到头不在家。那么，不当牛仔，长大了当什么呢？这首歌也说的很清楚：
Zilan Qian is a fellow at the Oxford China Policy Lab and an MSc student at the Oxford Internet Institute.
This “AGI Bar” recently opened in Shanghai, where people openly poke fun at the hype surrounding AGI by stating that this bar is “all about bubbles.”
Many big tech, VC, and AI startups like ByteDance, ZhenFund, and Z. ai sent congratulatory flower baskets when the AGI bar opened.
Not many people would point to this bar and say that China is racing towards AGI. Otherwise, the U.S. has zero chance of winning, because AGI is diffused to even bars in China. AGI is a buzzword for business in this context, period.
This is the consideration needed for people who want to know whether China is taking AGI seriously. Before you ask anyone who works on China and AI how AGI-pilled China is, ask yourself two questions: what do you mean by AGI, and who do you mean by China?
This post provides one piece to the picture by looking into a giant AGI wiki made by an open-source community in China. As this piece will show that, for AI hobbyists in China, “AGI” stands for Western tech aura and a desire for quick money.
What is “Way to AGI”?
Created in April 2023, the “Way to AGI” wiki is a collaborative knowledge hub hosted on the Bytedance-developed platform Feishu 飞书 (known internationally as Lark). It functions much like a shared giant Notion workspace — users can upload documents,1 create events, and leave comments on each other’s posts.
Since its launch, the wiki has attracted over 2 million unique visitors and generated 4.5 million total views for its front page. For context, the actual Wikipedia page on “artificial general intelligence” received about 2.1 million views globally during the same period.
The wiki is maintained by the Way to AGI community, an open-source AI collective boasting 8 million members interested in AI and 200,000 active developers,2 according to data published on its community forum. While slightly smaller than the largest AI-focused subreddit, r/ChatGPT (11.2 million members), it far exceeds r/OpenAI (2.5 million members) and the r/agi subreddit (82,000 members)3. The community appears to receive implicit support from tech companies, notably ByteDance — which owns both the Feishu platform and Coze, an AI app frequently discussed on the wiki. It also claims to form collaborations with other tech organizations and AI startups like Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, Zhipu AI, and Moonshot AI.4
Driven by the belief that “AI will reshape the thinking and learning methods of everyone, and bring them unprecedented powers,” the group shares a wide range of AI-related resources on this wiki as part of its collective journey — the “way to AGI.”
Or so they believe they are. This is a “Way to AGI” if and only if the following formula holds:
1. AGI = Silicon Valley
“When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you.”
The AGI community may not be AGI-pilled, but they are definitely Silicon Valley-pilled. Discussions, learning paths, and citations overwhelmingly reference Western, especially Silicon Valley, sources. “AI leaders”, recommended podcasts, and must-listen talks come predominantly from the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
Proof 1: Silicon Valley > Nobel/Turing Prize > Chinese CEOs >> Musk: Ranking the AI leaders
The wiki has a “top AI leader” leaderboard, which is regularly updated to include the top voices of what are perceived as “AI leaders” worldwide.5 On this board, Silicon Valley dominates by a landslide. Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman lead the rankings, with Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li placed even higher than the three canonical AI “godfathers” — Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio.
The first China-based figure on the leaderboard is Robin Li 李彦宏, Baidu’s CEO, ranked ninth (Times AI 100 2023). His high position is somewhat surprising, given that ERNIE, Baidu’s flagship LLM, isn’t considered China’s strongest model. But Baidu has been an OG player in China’s AI ecosystem, investing in research long before the current LLM wave. It has also invested in full-stack AI development, including the recent open-source AI platforms PaddlePaddle 5.0 and Baige 4.0.
Other Chinese names on the list include:
Liang Wenfeng 梁文峰— CEO of DeepSeek (Times AI 100 2025)
Zeng Yi 曾毅— Professor on AI ethics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Times AI 100 2023)
Wang Xingxing 王兴兴— CEO, Unitree Robotics (Times AI 100 2025)
In total, seven people from China made the top 26 list compiled by Chinese AGI watchers themselves, with mostly CEOs from private tech companies, and several do not explicitly focus on frontier AI research. The list is likely also heavily influenced by Western rankings, as at least 23 of the 26 have appeared in the Times 100 AI rankings during 2023-2025. (’s Metis list does not appear to be an influence…). Profile photos of Clem Delangue and Marc Raibert are also directly taken from Times 100 AI 2023. However, the latest updated date (July) is before the release of Times 100 AI 2025, so the ranking foresaw Liang Wenfeng and Wang Xingxing’s debut on the 100 AI list.
Among all people listed, Elon stands out. He is the only one with a unique non-professional picture taken from a 2018 prank post for the release of the Tesla Model 3.
Despite many of these “leaders” being AGI-pilled, the ranking itself is not. With each leader having one selected quote to highlight their beliefs in AI, only two of the 26 selected quotes discuss AGI. Others focus on AI’s commercial promise, industry potential, and future trends. For instance, the selected quote from Liang Wenfeng, likely one of the most prominent voices in China advocating for AGI, is about open source as a strategy for both commercial value and brand reputation.
Proof 2: Commercial Success > Technical Depth >> AGI Research: Curating Western AI Voices
While hero-worshipping Silicon Valley leaders might be dismissed as superficial fandom, the community’s choice of information sources reveals deeper structural biases.
The section of “recommended foreign information outlets” has 129 sources, with 24 starred as must-read recommendations. Stratechery tops the list, while Lex edges out Dwarkesh. Most of the recommended sources have deep Silicon Valley associations, with one-third focusing on investment. The rest are C-suite executives or top researchers from big-name tech companies like OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia. Although some of the figures from big tech are AGI-focused, the list itself does not appear to be curated for AGI expertise. Rather, the even distribution of top profiles from big tech, mixed with prominent VC voices, reads more like a collection of Silicon Valley’s most commercially successful figures.
The 24 “must-read” outlets.
When we zoom out to the full list, the AGI flavor dissipates further. Among the remaining 105 sources, approximately 25-30% focus on investment, while 35-40% feature key figures from big tech companies and AI startups. About 15-20% come from U.S. universities, predominantly California institutions like Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Caltech. Around 10% consists of journalism and media outlets covering Silicon Valley and venture capital culture, while only a handful represent more independent technical sources like Stephen Wolfram, Nathan Lambert, Lex Fridman, Sebastian Raschka, and SemiAnalysis.6
Out of 129 total sources in a wiki titled “Way to AGI,” only three are explicitly AGI-focused: Eliezer Yudkowsky (founder of MIRI and LessWrong), Ben Goertzel (who helped popularize the term AGI), and John Schulman (chief scientist at Thinking Machines Lab and co-founder of OpenAI), with perhaps two others (Demis Hassabis and Ilya Sutskever) operating in AGI-adjacent territory. Thus, if one wants to “study AGI” through these sources, they are probably learning how big names in Silicon Valley think about AI. And while Silicon Valley thinks about AI in many ways, the most appealing one to this community seems to be how AI can be used to make money.
2. AGI = Quick Money Knowledge:
But emulating Silicon Valley success requires significant time and capital investment. For users seeking faster returns, the wiki pivots from Western voices to Chinese practice: offering step-by-step guides for building and monetizing AI products domestically. Eager novices come here for quick profits, while the “AI pros” they aspire to become are simultaneously seeking to profit from them.
Step 1: Learn just enough
Following the “syllabus” of this wiki, the first step is an introduction to AI, where it uses “what is ChatGPT…and why does it work” as a basic guide. From there, you then learn how to install and subscribe to ChatGPT (step-by-step from how to register a Google account to how to add your credit card, and of course, using a VPN7). There are seven “must-read” entry-level documents, six of which are Chinese translations of English sources, from the book “What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?” to articles explaining transformer, stable diffusion, and diffusion models for video generation. The only original content is the seventh section, “Easily Understand 20 AI concepts,” which uses only two or three sentences in Chinese metaphor to explain each concept related to AI, from the chain of thought to the chatbot arena.
The 20th concept: hallucination, briefly explained as AI making up stories. The example goes: “You: Who was China’s first president? LLM: “Li Bai (Chinese poet in 700 AD).” You: What’s your evidence? LLM: “I dreamed of it.
Not every introductory content is that introductory, but they are definitely “quick to learn” and extremely “practical”. You can master “Python + AI Without Coding Experience in 20 Minutes,” or know how to “gather LLM Data” through a 400-word article. For some reason, knowing how to select the best GPUs for model reasoning through comparing 38 kinds of Nvidia’s chips, including the H100 and A100, is also categorized as “entry-level content.”
A partial screenshot of the guide.
Step 2: Developing “skills”
After (supposedly) mastering these “introductory” concepts, you can then dive into area-specific learning: AI agents, AI drawing, AI video, AI music, AI character + audio combination, AI 3D, ComfyUI workflow, or AI coding. Let us take “AI agents”, which seems to be one of the trending focuses for developers on their way to AGI now. Here, you will start with a Chinese translation of Maarten Grootendorst’s A Visual Guide to LLM Agents.
Then you will read guides on how to create your own simple “AI agents” without any coding through ByteDance’s Coze platform by only prompting a few lines of description of the agent’s characteristics. The guide will not teach you to create the next autonomous system that can navigate complex real-world tasks. Instead, it mostly shows you how to build AI chatbots that act like a language teacher, or an AI workflow that generates outreach emails based on company profiles.
Interested in building, but have no idea what to build? There are loads of examples and analyses showing you the potential of integrating these “AI agents” into different real-life scenarios, as well as analyses of what’s trending in the AI agent market right now. Here, AI chatbots, workflows, and agents literally mean the same thing. Participation matters more than precision under the buzzing excitement of AGI.
Coze’s platform with different “agents,” which are not very agentic.
Step 3: Practice in contests
After learning how to create your AI “agent”, you can participate in various “Agent co-learning pop-up contests (智能体共学快闪比赛)” to exchange with other people about how to build better bots/agents. Some smaller contests and workshops usually range from a few hours to a day online, with participants entering their own “agents” and experienced developers as judges to see who the winners are. Winners of these small skill contests receive a virtual certificate of “the coolest AI agent.”
The certificate of the winning “agent,” an “anti-scam assistant for parents,” in the May 2024 contest.
Meatier contests also exist, such as the “AI Agent Olympics 2025.” This “global” contest was co-hosted by Rednote, Weibo, Z.ai (which builds the frontier LLM GLM-4.5), and flowith.ai, with “Way to AGI” as one of the guest collaborators. Branding itself as “the first AI agent creation contest in 2025 worldwide,” the contest offers winners monetary awards (15000 RMB, or about US$2100) as well as social media exposure (via Weibo and Rednote). Despite sponsorship from Z.ai — the only AI startup in China openly claiming to be interested in AGI besides DeepSeek — and “Way to AGI,” there is no single mention of “AGI” on the contest website. Instead, the contest’s organizers state that “the rights to intelligence (智能) should not belong to any corporation, but instead should belong to a community of mankind (人类共同体),” with the last phrase strikingly similar to the CCP’s diction “a community of shared future for mankind (人类命运共同体).”
Don’t expect to see some crazily AGI-pilled individuals or the next DeepSeek founder in this contest. According to the bios of group members published on the platform, your peers will likely have some professional background related to AI, perhaps as a prompt engineer, as a product manager at a big Chinese tech firm, or as a full-stack developer. But you will also likely see people who were previously working as graphic designers, visual editors, or real estate agents — jobs that are very susceptible to AI replacement and were hit hard by China’s economic crisis — asking to form groups for related competitions. The poster of the AI Agent Olympics 2025.
Step 4: Believe that you can monetize your agents, while actually being monetized yourself
The way to AGI may be important, but perhaps the way to money is more important. The final step tackles the question of how to quickly monetize your new knowledge. Massive materials on product management are available in this section: how to understand and create demand for agents, where AI agents integrate into companies’ workflows, and experiences shared by so-called “AI agent product managers.” However, even with this general knowledge, there is still a real gap between your immature “AI agents” and AI products that can actually earn money.
There are many “AI pros” who first offer some free learning materials claiming to fill that gap. They will share some introductory content that showcases the great potential of the AI agent market and how easy it is for people with no background to make a profit. Later, they introduce paid core lessons that they argue offer “systemic structure, professional guidance, personalized plans, and feedback” for more efficient learning. Effectively, this so-called “open-source AGI community” becomes the first step for some people to hook novices into their closed-source AI coaching business.
Some titles of AI pros: “Top blogger for the RedNote-AI drawing course; officially partnered content creator with MidJourney; Senior design expert at a Fortune 500 company; former Creativity Lead and VP at a Fortune 500 company; guest lecturer for Posts & Telecommunications Press; and author of MidJourney AI Drawing: Business Case, Creativity, and Practice”
For example, in the AI Agent co-learning section, one member “shares” a piece of great paid content she “recently came across” (she is likely the person who runs the paid course). The screenshot below is how she justifies having paid for lessons (up to 5000 RMB/700 USD) in the open-source community: “It is like exercising in your home or going to the gym for guidance. Different people have different demands. The open-source community offers a wealth of resources suitable for disciplined self-learners. Recently, there have been many new entries to this community, and everyone is asking if there are suitable entry-level courses. Compared to learning from the text in the wiki, most people prefer the teachers to teach step-by-step.”
3. AGI ≠ Deep and Grand Knowledge: The Abandoned Projects
The emphasis on quick monetization comes at a cost. Buried beneath the layers of get-rich-quick content lie the remnants of more ambitious intellectual projects, which now serve as evidence of the roads not taken on the way to AGI.
AGI≠ AI Research
This community did attempt serious scholarship. Early projects included comprehensive translations of Google DeepMind research papers, philosophical explorations tracing the concept of “agent” back to ancient Greece, and an ambitious database cataloging AI agent papers from research groups worldwide, complete with translated Chinese abstracts.
But these initiatives couldn’t compete with monetized content for sustained attention. The AI agent paper database, launched in mid-2023, aimed to index AI agent research papers, provide reviews, and translate English abstracts into Chinese, but was abandoned by December 2023.
AGI ≠ AI Governance
Another abandoned project is the “Global AI Law Handbook (全球AI法规手册).” Originally conceived as an ambitious project to track, summarize, and translate AI-related legislation worldwide, it ceased updating Chinese regulations in mid-2024 and coverage of other jurisdictions by late 2023. Lost within its archived pages are translations of significant policy documents: the official EU AI Act interpretation from 2023, the UK Parliament’s pro-innovation AI regulation framework, Biden’s AI safety and security standards, and the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. Some of these regulations remain active today; others, like the project itself, have been abandoned.
The handbook section has since pivoted toward narrower, more commercially oriented content — focusing on practical AI copyright guidance in China, including analysis of AI-generated artwork copyright disputes, while increasingly hinting at paid legal consultation services for users.
AGI ≠ AGI: the missing debate
Perhaps the most telling irony of this massive “AGI wiki” is what’s conspicuously absent: any serious discussion of AGI itself. Among hundreds of documents covering everything from GPU comparisons to monetization strategies, only two articles specifically address AGI as a concept — both written by the same author reviewing industry trends in 2023 and forecasting those in 2024.
The 2023 review reveals the community’s priorities starkly: the author spent literally zero percent of the text explaining what AGI actually is, and dedicated one brief section to “the Road to AGI (迈向AGI之路)”, mainly to forecasting GPT-5’s 2024 release and near-AGI capability (both did not happen), synthetic data training, and emergent behaviors. Then he dives into five detailed sections on development trends and business opportunities.
The 2024 forecast still devotes its main content to analyzing business and investment trends in AI products. After devoting 75% of the article to business trends and 20% to geopolitics, the author finally begins to discuss how actors might control and monopolize AGI technology. However, this discussion ends up going nowhere, with the author pointing out how individual voices are increasingly unheard under grand narratives put forward to celebrate the promise of AI. “I don’t want to talk more about the problems of AGI, because there is no point simply talking about this problem.”
This article captures the irony of “Way to AGI” well. Even though this wiki is titled “Way to AGI,” serious analyses of AGI are packaged in massive amounts of business buzzwords to attract attention. Only glittering investment bubbles and Western tech jargon can survive along the way to AGI, while more serious learning finds no way out.
Rather than leading to AGI, this wiki serves as a way for individuals to feel empowered and hopeful by engaging in AI discussions driven mostly by business interests. The motivation that drives many to this platform — the economic anxiety from AI disruption and China’s macroeconomic recession — gets buried beneath the promise that “AI will reshape the thinking and learning methods of everyone, and bring them unprecedented powers.”
The deeper paradox is: while “Way to AGI” promises to empower people through AI and make the path to AGI accessible to everyone, the only serious discussion of AGI feels profoundly disempowered. The community’s only AGI analysis retreats from complexity and laments powerlessness in the face of larger forces. To some extent, this AGI wiki is similar to the AGI bar, where people indulge in bubbles and avoid reality. Perhaps only by avoiding serious engagement with AGI itself can people maintain the promise and excitement that AGI represents. The moment AGI becomes real, with its implications for power, control, and human agency, the bubble begins to burst.
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However, this figure should be interpreted with caution. The community’s definition of ‘active developers’ likely includes users who create AI-generated content (videos, audio, images) and those who use no-code/low-code AI tools, rather than exclusively traditional programmers.
It is likely that these relationships are not formal “collaboration” per se, but more informal and minor associations like sponsoring one event hosted by the community.
Using a credit card online might seem like a basic skill for most Westerners, but it is not often encountered in China. People usually use other digital payment methods, mostly commonly scanning QR codes.
Last month, Irene and Lily went to South Korea to report on a twinset of robotics conferences. Here are a few notes from their travels.
On Korean Beauty
Irene:
Hallyu — the “Korean Wave” of pop culture that began spreading internationally in the 2000s — taught my generation of Asian Americans/Canadians how to style ourselves. We grew up with few relatable points of reference in mainstream Western culture, as our physical features rarely aligned with American beauty standards. K-pop built an alternative, affordable framework during our coming-of-age, and it was impossible to miss its influence even if you (like me) never consumed much of the music or TV dramas.
Goryeo (the royal dynasty that ruled the Korean Peninsula from 918 to 1392) began sending women by the hundreds as tributary gifts to the Chinese empire during the Tang dynasty. The Middle Kingdom, from then on, routinely scoured the Peninsula for beauties. The third Ming emperor, Yongle, was recorded to have favored a concubine surnamed Kwon from Joseon (the dynasty that followed Goryeo). After Kwon died at the age of 20 in 1410, the Yongle Emperor sentenced perhaps thousands of women from his harem to death on suspicion of poisoning Kwon, according to one Korean chronicle.
Japan’s colonial rule forced between 50,000 and 200,000 Korean girls and women into sexual slavery as “comfort women” for the army. After the Second World War, another vast sex trade sprang up around American-led army bases across South Korea, with girls and women trafficked by their own government to provide “morale” to UN troops and bring in millions of foreign money for the economy.
Beauty remains one of Korea’s most prominent exports. Multilingual advertisements for plastic surgery sprawl throughout Seoul’s affluent Gangnam neighborhood. There is seemingly an Olive Young on every street corner and endless high-end options in shining department stores. The industry works hard to conceal the dark historical context behind Korea’s coerced preoccupation with female beauty, while continuing to push what sociologist Rosalind Gill calls the “surveillant gaze”: symbolic images of measuring tapes, cameras, and microscopes that incite women to constantly monitor and regulate themselves. K-pop labels routinely debut girls as young as fourteen to appeal to teens, both locally and internationally. Appearance-based discrimination is endemic; journalist Elise Hu writes in Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital that for Korean women in the 21st century, looking pretty is “the price of entry in the labor market.”
Lily:
I’m a size small in America, a medium in Taiwan, and a large in South Korea.
For a country with such a famous beauty industry, the selection of lip colors and finishes is extremely limited. Nearly every Korean lip product is sheer, glossy, and pink, formulated to stain your lips for a longer-lasting effect. Eyeshadow palettes lack pigment and are similarly uninspired. While American makeup brands market their products as tools of self-expression, cosmetic advertisements in Korea use words like “perfection” 완벽 and “improvement” 개선 to draw consumers’ attention.
We found this book in Seoul’s Starfield Library, which was overflowing with influencers.
Korean sunscreen, however, is excellent, as are the face masks and jelly foundation cushions (provided you can find one in your shade). The products are very affordable compared to American cosmetics. I browsed many Olive Young stores that were packed with shoppers, yet the single aisle dedicated to American and European brands was always totally desolate.
An example of a Korean foundation cushion. Idols and cartoon characters are prominently featured in cosmetic advertising/packaging. Source.
Dark, matte, opaque lip colors like this are very rare in Korea. Source.
Similarly, people seem to prefer beige or pink nail polish. I got a set of dark red gel nails done during my trip, and while the service was very fast with lots of attention paid to cuticle care, the final product was unfortunately lacking due to the technician’s lack of experience shaping stiletto (pointed) nails.
People don’t wear much color here either, and instead opt overwhelmingly for beige, white, black, brown, or muted shades of blue.
A storefront in Hongdae.
On Korean Food
Korea excels at making coffee taste good, and Korean people love coffee so much that we saw people sitting in cafes drinking coffee at 9 o’clock at night. In a similar vein, this country doesn’t rise particularly early — most businesses (including many coffee shops/cafes) don’t open until 10 or 11 am. Survey data indicates that South Koreans are highly sleep-deprived compared to other developed nations.
October is the peak month for gejang, raw crab seasoned with soy sauce. I was skeptical at first, but the crab we ate was incredibly fresh with a delicate and complex flavor.
Gejang with a side of raw shrimp.
One of my favorite dishes was North Korean-style cold noodles 물냉면, which are made of buckwheat and would fall apart if served hot. They come with julienned apples and a boiled egg, and are served in a refreshing broth with a bit of vinegar.
America supplied the ROK with food aid during the Korean War, and as a result, South Korea developed a serious taste for corn. Convenience stores carry cream-filled cornbread, corn-flavored ice cream, corn-flake-filled granola bars, corn chips, and rice balls full of corn and tuna. Teas made from roasted corn and corn silk are also popular beverages. Only 1% of this corn is actually grown in Korea — the vast majority is imported from the US.
Korea also consumes a truly staggering amount of fake sugar — ice cream proudly labeled “low sugar” is packed with stevia. The yogurt drinks and matcha lattes I ordered in cafes were sweetened with stevia by default, as were bottled teas and protein shakes in convenience stores.
Korean convenience stores have wonderful smoothie machines. For 3,000 KRW (US$2.10), you can pick out a cup of frozen fruit and have it blended in front of you. Be sure to purchase your fruit cup before you blend it to avoid violating smoothie procedure.
Chinese people have a joke that when you vacation in Korea, you get constipated due to the lack of green leafy vegetables. This joke ignores Kimchi and salads, of course — but it’s rare to find blanched greens of the sort that are ubiquitous in China and Taiwan.
Irene’s travelogue in Gwangju
I read Anton Hur 허정범’s 2022 short story “Escape from America” on the bus from Seoul to Gwangju. The great translator of contemporary Korean fiction writes his own dystopian tale: in a not-so-distant future, politics force him and his husband to flee America for South Korea, where democracy persists but their marriage is not recognized — a “reverse-Miss Saigon scenario,” the narrator notes sardonically. Fears of martial law, borders, gender wars — it all felt eerily prescient in the first months of new presidential administrations in both Korea and the US.
Korea’s Gwangju Uprising is often forgotten as an early chapter in the waves of pro-democracy movements that shaped postwar Asia. In part, that’s because the news simply didn’t get out. Only one Western reporter — Jürgen Hinzpeter for West Germany’s public broadcaster, whose experience was dramatized in 2017 by the film A Taxi Driver — was on site when troops began violently containing protesters on May 18th, 1980. Korean media was heavily censored at the time, and many outside South Jeolla Province, of which Gwangju was then the capital, did not learn of the killings until much later. The military dictatorship installed an effective blockade of the city for ten days, cutting off roads and phone lines, while local students and workers built a short-lived self-governance commune and organized themselves into citizens’ battalions.
Chun Doo-hwan 전두환, then-lieutenant general of the military and the main orchestrator of the massacre, officially became president three months later in 1980 and remained in power until 1988. For years after the massacre, Gwangju was a forbidden topic. The novelist Han Kang 한강, who became Gwangju’s most famous daughter with her Nobel Literature win in 2024, was in Seoul in 1980 and only found out about the atrocities from her father’s secret album of Hintzpeter’s photographs years later. The official death toll stands at 164 civilians, but many more disappeared or were not identified in time; the actual number of deaths may be in the thousands. An “unknown martyr” grave in the Gwangju May 18 National Cemetery contains the body of a 4-year-old child shot in the neck.
“That afternoon there was a rush of positive identifications, and there ended up being several different shrouding ceremonies going on at the same time, at various places along the corridor. The national anthem rang out like a circular refrain, one verse clashing with another against the constant background of weeping, and you listened with bated breath to the subtle dissonance this created. As though this, finally, might help you understand what the nation really was.”
— Human Acts, Han Kang (trans. Deborah Smith)
The “gwang”/광 in Gwangju corresponds to the Chinese character 光, which means light; Gwangju, then, is the Land of Light. I’ve never been to a city with as many commemorative statues as Gwangju. There is an entire park dedicated to statues in the western part of the main city, the government having commissioned artists to explore and immortalize the city’s history. A walk through the park crescendos with a large metal depiction of three students, their arms reaching forward and their faces bearing solemn expressions in a surprisingly socialist-realist style. Under their bodies is an entrance to an underground chamber, in which the names of all known victims surround another statue, this one of a mother holding the body of an agonizingly young teen — a modern Korean Pietà.
Gwangju is not just expressive about its past; it is passionately, thoroughly meticulous. The Jeonil Building, one of the city’s most iconic structures, has been renamed Jeonil 245 after the 245 bullet traces found on its top floors. The directions and depths of each trace conclusively prove that paratroopers shot at people from helicopters, a fact often disputed by those seeking to minimize the extent of cruelty inflicted on Gwangju’s people. Jeonil 245 contains an entire exhibition dedicated to repudiating false claims about Gwangju, including the oft-repeated far-right conspiracy that North Korea instigated the uprising. The nearby 518 Archives is a ten-floor building that houses documents about the events of May 1980. The top floor allows visitors to watch traffic underneath from the exact same windows where Catholic clergymen watched the military brutalize young students marching from Chonnam University. Some of those clergymen would later stage hunger strikes for democracy and clemency for protestors throughout the 1980s. The Old South Jeolla Provincial Hall, where resistance forces staged their last desperate fight, is currently being restored. Every single exhibit I went to was free to enter and had decent-to-excellent English signage.
This is because Gwangju knows its memory can be inconvenient. In the South Korean narrative, Gwangju’s dead are now martyrs who gave their lives for today’s democracy, but that extraordinary achievement does not feel complete. President Yoon Suk-yeol 윤석열, who demanded the death penalty for Chun Doo-hwan while a law student in the 1980s, briefly imposed martial law of his own in December 2024. Korean politics today, haunted by the North-South division, still struggles to move past Red Scare paranoia. On the American side, Washington’s complicity in the Gwangju Massacre is a delicate topic for the US-ROK alliance. President Jimmy Carter’s administration, judging maintenance of the security status quo in the Peninsula to be more important than its people’s democratic aspirations, authorized the use of South Korean troops under the Combined Forces Command against protestors. Declassified documents show that US intelligence judged the protests to be “riots” caused in part by “deep-seated historical, provincial antagonisms” in Jeolla, and feared exploitation by Pyongyang even without any evidence of North Korean instigation. Gwangju became one of the darkest, yet most obscure, chapters of the Carter years; the legacy he left in Asia was barely acknowledged when he passed away at the end of 2024. And finally, across the East China Sea, Gwangju strikes too obvious a parallel with China’s own event that must not be named. Han Kang’s Human Acts has never been translated into Simplified Chinese by any mainland publishing house, so Chinese readers have to resort to pirating the Taiwanese translation.
Efforts by public history institutions and civil society have allowed the year 1980 to persist in Korean popular memory, even before Han Kang’s recent Nobel win. UNESCO officially listed documents of the Gwangju Uprising on the Memory of the World Register in 2011, prompting a wave of public commemoration. In 2013, the K-pop boy band SPEED released a two-part music video set in Gwangju for their song “That’s my fault” 슬픈약속, to popular acclaim. Note how, at the 11:30 timestamp mark, the second video directly quotes the last broadcast made by Gwangju’s citizen militia at the end of the Uprising:
Protest songs from the Gwangju era have also outlived the Uprising. March for Our Beloved (임을 위한 행진곡), the most well-known one, is now a social movement ritual across Asia, having been adapted by activists in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and mainland China for a variety of causes. Citizens in Seoul once again sung it while protesting Yoon Suk-yeol’s martial law declaration in December 2024:
Gwangju today is known as Korea’s progressive hotspot, and there is indeed a Portlandia-esque energy coursing through the city. Hipster cafes, lush green parks, and private museums weave around statues of death and survival across the city’s main arteries. The central square, where protestors gathered again to call for the ousting of Park Geun-hye 박근혜 during the 2017 Candlelight Revolution, doubles as a futuristic plaza for the Asian Culture Center (ACC), which showcases experimental art from across the continent. I visited on a rain-drenched day, and there were still large crowds at the ACC enjoying a pan-Asian food festival and open-air dance film screening. The ACC’s ten-year anniversary exhibition, Manifesto of Spring, sports a headline piece with a brassy premise: in a not-too-distant future, democracy collapses in the West and a political refugee tries to immigrate to “Seoul Land” by participating in a population growth program.
The Land of Light, like the rest of us, is surrounded by the haunted fires of history. It insists on sifting through the ashes.
“Why are we walking in the dark, let’s go over there, where the flowers are blooming.”
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Tourism in Seoul
Lily:
Seoul is an underrated tourist destination. The city is full of beautiful green spaces connected by excellent public transit, and the early October weather was perfect for long strolls through the sloping streets.
Bongeunsa Temple.
“Etiquette is an unchanging form of respect.” Seoul’s metro mascot, an anthropomorphized train named Ddota (또타), reminds you not to run on the escalators or let your children misbehave.
The Korean writing system is a joy to learn, and just a little bit of study can really enrich your experience in Korea. It’s phonetic, and the letters elegantly fit together to form syllable blocks. The shape of the letters is also roughly based on the shape of your mouth when pronouncing each sound (for example, “ㄱ” makes a hard “g” sound, “ㄴ” makes the “n” sound, and “ㅈ” makes the “ch” sound). Irene and I had a great time sounding out menu items, buttons on appliances, and public transport signs, discovering tons of cognates with Chinese in the process. If you add a Korean keyboard to your phone, you can use the letter “ㅗ” to give someone the middle finger over text, and represent crying faces with “ㅠㅠ” and “ㅜㅜ”.
A statue of King Sejong, the inventor of the Korean writing system.
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