Traveler from Japan would love to  share stories, his sauna as his improbable vanlife adventure rolls into Fort Bragg through Friday

AI will never give you Takano Miyaki. 

Only a human being can imagine something qw wacky and cool as the “world’s first mobile Japanese sauna and bath”. Imagining and living in the face of the odds makes us breathe as humans.

Always having wanted to visit America, Taka decided to come to America and take his Mitsubishi Senta on a trip across the country. Getting started cost him a year working in British Columbia as a landscaper before he could afford to get his truck shipped over from Japan. It’s a special truck, a cultural center, a bath and house all in one. You can enjoy a traditional Japanese bath in the sauna inside.  Linda and I met him outside Safeway. He will be in Fort Bragg for three days, then onto San Francisco, and then off to New York, to see William Least Moon’s America. William traveled America in his van across 18,000 miles of American backroads in the 1970s to write his book “Blue Highways”.  Least-Moon avoided all the Interstates and traveled to places like Fort Bragg on the thin little blue lines on the map. Taka wants to find just those kind of hidden places and hidden culture in a USA he always adored. And he wanted to  show us the culture of his homeland.

He sees and tells stories everywhere.  To literally drive home this point, Least-Moon, an Irish-English-indigenous Osage man, went back and wrote another book focused on just one Kansas county. No humans are too dull or a place too flat if you have a great eye and an open heart

Taka’s Go Fund Me page hasn’t exactly been a huge financial hit so far, but he has some great stories already. English is not his first language, but if you avoid using too many colloquialisms, he’s fun to talk to. Linda did better than I. We spent most of our time talking about my height, 6-8, and what it’s like to be so big.

Here is his page and story. He seemed to like talking and story telling so much he forgot to ask for money but it wouldn’t hurt to give him a twenty and live vicariously as he travels along.

When offered some very nice Mendocino green, he really opened up. He said he had never tried marijuana but had hung out with people on beaches who got great joy from it. He said he will likely never try it himself. He crossed the Pacificx but just can’t go there.  In Japan, everyone was browbeaten into thinking marijuana was bad, bad, bad. Not the Devil’s Lettuce as the squares here used to call it, but part of a rigorous conformity there that he was hoping to escape in the good old USA. As his trip started in Washington, he got a lukewarm reception among amazing viewscapes.

In Oregon, things turned darker.

“Everybody just wanted to move me along, to get rid of me,” he told Linda.

But crossing into Crescent City, he found the freedom he had been looking for. California!

“I love California,” he said. “People are very free and much friendlier.”

First were the laid back Natives of Crescent City, then  EUREKA!! the cool coolsters of Humboldt were great but Mendocino had been the best, not so many people and lots of tourists, some of which thought he was one of the attractions.  Several Braggers and one group of tourists came up and talked with him and told stories with him and us.

“I love this place here,” he said. People are very funny here and not worried about me.”

He’s going to The City by the Bay with hopes they like him there. I am not sure if Japantown will welcome him as much as Fort Bragg. I’m scared for him going through the middle of the country,  especially if he persists on seeing the Deep South. Charlie Daniels managed to escape a flat tire in Mississippi at the Dew Drop Inn in Uneasy Rider. If you have never heard this song or want a laugh for the ages, hit the blue writing.

I did something similar in my early 20s and had great memories for life. I used to go into colleges and shower in the men’s lockers when i was the same age as the students.  Different world! I’d be deported now, but no country would accept me!

If you are a lover of William Least-Moon like me, you might enjoy this take on him by an Asian American who traveled in Europe and missed America missed the wide open spaces and precious weirdness of America

“Nothing ever bridged the gulf between the man who left and the man who stayed behind.

—James Willwerth

I started the day writing dolfully about how a robotic AI had replaced my supervisor in one of my jobs. Very sad, and very wrong. It now assigns me work based solely on mathematics and my address and the places I need to go. But the human being knew the nuances that made all the difference in everything. I lost a job as a reporter on Wall Street to an AI. Everybody in that newsroom did in one day. Now there are pictures of bright young people of all ethnicities that are writing those stories. There are no such human beings. They are made up by AI so it can write news based on what the metrics say people want to hear and will click on. The people are the types of people the AI thinks will appeal, a vegan, a cowboy, a retired woman educator. All made up.  People don’t pay attention and never really did care much, understandably, about who the reporters were. Inside the “heads” of AI are all the great libraries of the world, all the encyclopedias, and everything else already known. They flow this into what is happening and write stories with sentences that are exactly the right number of words and are just what the target audience says it wants. 

While people like to talk about the many advances AI is bringing us, and they are huge, they are so minuscule compared to the horrors it is inflicting on creativity, growth, equity, freedom, art and imagination as to be invisible.

Moneymen, Elon Musk while with DOGE, enacted my new robot boss. They are a Borg collective that must control, must force every drop of individualism from each of us, in a misguided search for efficiency.  

But resistance is not futile!. We can only be controlled if we stop critical thinking and join the cult of AI and money worship. We MUST remember how raw, how sexual, how imaginative and artistic we can be. Humans have always stepped out into the abyss and let the chips fall where they may.  Doing the ridiculous and illogical is often the only logical path forward.

We dont want an AI to give us what databases say we need. We want to be alive, not unshakeably correct. They want to meet and learn from the likes of Taka. We can’t live in the cocoon of the past; we must have the courage to do what sounds ridiculous to others and which matches nothing in the encyclopedias. AI would probably tell Taka he should have stayed home and worked in a cubicle to make more AIs.

 William Least Moon had found the woman he loved and the job he loved. His life was set. Then his marriage broke down and he was eliminated from his college teaching job by budget cuts. 

Nothing he worked and lived for made sense anymore.
So he got into a van and drove and wrote. Nobody had thought of “van life” then. He helped invent it.  He was inspired by John Steinbeck’s midlife crisis book, Travels with Charlie, where the man who took us for a ride with Joad’s set out with his standard poodle and told about the humans he met along the Way as Jim Crow was ending and the 60s were raging to life. 

Very political in the 1930s, Steinbeck avoided taking a stand to let us see the stories unfold this time without the splendid but heavy hand he employed in The Grapes of Wrath. Taka looks to see and learn that way too.

Maybe Taka can give us a book someday on how we all look through his eyes and we will learn much. Or maybe he will find love and start a landscaping business and never leave Kansas. Life if life and humans are not an assemblage of math formulas in the brains of a gawdawful AI, at least for now.