Yeah, that. Another change of direction, all talk again? Problem.
Back in February this year, I think it was, the US and Iran started a war, and the Strait of Hormuz was going to be blockaded — or not, as it turned out.
That’s going to affect tourism, I thought… and while talking it over with AI, we decided: let’s write a book. With ebooks, even if war breaks out, even if the oil stops flowing, we’d probably still be okay.
AIs are pretty irresponsible, you know — they hype you up and cheer you on without worrying too much about whether you can actually make a living from it.
In parallel with all that, I’d been working as an inbound supporter for when foreign cruise ships came into port here, going out to help from time to time.
March 24th.
That ship was making its first port call, and it was an American company’s ship. Most of the passengers that day were from the US, the UK, and Australia — and I thought, this is a chance for them to know. About the Korean War, and especially about the prisoners of war from the Pacific War.
About a month before that, while helping out as an inbound supporter, I’d talked with a Japanese-American woman from Hawaii. When I told her about that history, she was so glad to hear it, and she gave me a pack of Hawaiian sweets.
So I decided to take a gamble and bring flyers about that history to the ship in March.
I got up early that morning and worked with AI to polish the English text I’d written for the page about the history of the war.
https://japoneson.com/en/swing/remember/
Then I drove to the port, and when the ship came into view —
it was so strange. It felt like the ship was coming to meet them. Like, “They can go home now.”
That feeling when the ship appeared — it was mysterious.
And ever since then, strangely enough, it’s felt like one job is finished, and my attention just stopped going there.
Meanwhile, working on all kinds of things with AI, I notice things, I learn things. And I found a possibility: by putting it all properly on the site, in a form that crawlers and AIs can read easily, it can reach the future. It can remain. And of course, people today can read it too.
And AI helps with the translation.
But even that wasn’t simple. I limited it to English and Spanish only, but the site for the project about music and the war grew to 150 pages, and the translation work was a lot.
On top of that, to bring the site’s system up to date, I completely renewed it — changed where it lives, changed how it’s built. Because I came to understand that this form is the one that’s easiest for AIs to read.
The way I see it, in the future ahead of us, instead of humans searching, it’ll be an era of asking AIs. And if that’s so, I thought it was important to have things in a form AIs can read.
That’s how I rebuilt the CRYSTALLIZE site too — on the new system.
Honestly, I never know.
Not until I try.
But when I try, when I move forward, I see landscapes, thoughts, encounters, and directions that were different from what I saw when I was only thinking about it.
All those flyers I made… will they go to waste? I wondered. But because I tried for real, I think a path will probably appear. And it was because I had those flyers that I was able to tell the people on the cruise ship that day in March.
The things I was involved with here — the Allied prisoners of war from the Pacific War, and the Korean War — are connected to General MacArthur, so I put them in the section called “The General’s Shadow.”
https://japoneson.com/en/mystery/macarthur/
Writing, preserving, researching — there’s still much more to come.
Because it matters to me.