The four counties of Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside roughly converge in a set of hilly suburbs surrounded by some of the worst freeway traffic and air pollution in the state.

It’s a place I associate with punishing 5 a.m. traffic jams and strip mall parking lots so large you can travel for miles without leaving them. But this area’s hefty parcels and panoramic valley views have become fertile grounds for massive religious monuments, a sacred landscape wrought by diaspora, permissive zoning and affordable land.

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AI billionaire accelerationists are wearing such heroic furrowed brows over the poverty their wealth-creation will cause! Yet I cannot find it within myself to swoon.

Last I checked we already have a permanent underclass created by tech disruption. What else would you call the millions of contract workers, ride-share and delivery drivers who live at the mercy of volatile platform fees without labor protections and benefits?

How can Silicon Valley be “bracing” for the underclass, as asserted by this insider-y-ish NY Times guest op-ed, when they are the architects of it? The underclass, if it is anything, is the semi-permanent labor force that lives and works within the intricate cage of apps and algorithmic surveillance that Silicon Valley not only designed but spent billions to defend in courtrooms and statehouses everywhere.

And now after decades of blowing up labor laws to satisfy venture return expectations, we’re to believe that they want to eliminate work and create lives of endless leisure by redistributing AI wealth? I read and reread both the NY Times piece and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay and couldn’t find anything signaling a desire to genuinely engage with the political mechanics of antipoverty measures and unemployment.

AI accelerationists are entering their performative male eras, and there’s no need to stand and applaud. It’ll pass. Happens to every billionaire eventually. There’s new panic because the destructive economics of tech wealth are starting to harm engineers and coders. But I’ve spent much of my career as a journalist in Los Angeles watching those same economics hollow out the block, squeezing brick-and-mortar businesses to the brink.

Algorithms have allowed factories in Shenzhen and drop-shippers in the U.K. to compete for the business of selling gifts, Joss paper and red envelopes once exclusive to Chinatown. My first stories as a journalist were for patch.com about the extinction of the taxi-cab industry in Los Angeles, which, for a decade or two, was a lifeline for Armenian and Iranian immigrants fleeing upheaval. Those cabbies drive for Lyft and Uber now, but if Waymo catches on their livelihoods will be stolen twice by tech disruption. There was no fund then, and there will be no fund now.

It’s disappointing that Amodei’s essay skips this recent history to instead theorize about how AI’s will affect widget production and the way farming equipment changed agrarian societies. The piece is 22,000-plus words of wobbling speculation larded with parentheticals, a sci-fi novel with the soul of an investor prospectus and all the style of a dictionary. Most of it is future-casting about AI’s massive, destabilizing threat to humanity - which of course Anthropic is uniquely equipped to defend us against. Just a few paragraphs directly address AI-related mass unemployment. And one of them contains this sentence:

“We are thus at risk of a situation where…AI is affecting people with certain intrinsic cognitive properties, namely lower intellectual ability (which is harder to change). It is not clear where these people will go or what they will do, and I am concerned that they could form an unemployed or very-low-wage “underclass.”

Amodei writes about people who are dumber than him as if they are underperforming assets to be reassigned. But in the future, people who are dumber than Dario Amodei will do as we have done in every age: we will eat, breathe, struggle, seek love and meaning and generally go about our lives enjoying rights that do not change based on the market value of our labor.

You don’t have to believe him to conclude that the shows of conscience in his January essay have been highly lucrative. A month after its publication, Anthropic’s $30 billion funding round left the company’s valuation at $380 billion, up from $60 billion in March last year.

Strange that being performative is so profitable. Amodei and other Anthropic founders have promised to give away 80 percent of their wealth. But if you plan to capture some large proportion of the world’s entire economy, isn’t keeping 20 percent of it for yourself unfathomably greedy?

Here’s a prediction: before generous billionaires decide to gift us all with lives of endless ease in which no one works while AI agents do everything in the background, we’ll have an economy in which only a few people can pay for that privilege. We’ll face a political environment in which a powerful minority will try to block any policy that places more money in the hands of the poor. And in this future no one will be handed anything, because that minority hates the very idea of redistribution and has built their political identity around it. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s the future we have now.

Even the most free-thinking of the techno-optimists are ending their flirtations with redistributive socialism. Just 2 hours drive from Anthropic headquarters in San Francisco, Stockton’s Universal Basic Income experiment ended in 2021 despite promising results. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey promised $1 billion to the cause but his foundation has not since issued another UBI grant. In April, the one-time apex predator of Silicon Valley’s performative males, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, told the Atlantic he “no longer believes in UBI” as much he once did. (If you’re curious OpenAI’s performative tech manifesto/investor prospectus is even worse, a 13-pager beginning with “Let’s Talk” in 48-point font)

Amodei discusses poverty and inequality more broadly in his previous essay, “Machines of Loving Grace,” a breezy read at 14,700-plus words. But even here Amodei prefers to discuss inequality as a grand global struggle, except for one bullet point, labeled “inequality within countries.” The only answer he offers is to the pesky problem of “inequality within countries” is to trust markets to bring down the cost of high-value technologies.

I do trust markets: to create paywalled products for which the monthly subscription fee steadily rises over time in a nontransparent way. Last month Anthropic removed access to Claude Code from its lowest paid tier amid user reports that the token cost of various computations has risen.

What would it look like if Silicon Valley care about poverty? If Claude becomes “a country of geniuses in a datacenter” as Amodei keeps threatening, at what point will those geniuses decide to take on the issue that in 2020 just 22 cents out of every dollar given to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families actually made it to needy families? How would exactly would an army of Claude agents ensure that progress in easing the poor’s access to public aid isn’t erased each time a conservative congressional majority gains power? If these AI founders are so public-minded and their models so beneficial tor society, why can they do nothing for the blocks and neighborhoods their headquarters are located in? And why are the employees who built the foundation for all of these billions so scared for their livelihoods?

AI accelerationists want us to believe that they are creating a future in which they will make our problems obsolete. But we already know the future they’re building because we live in it. That world contains both work and poverty.

If the accelerationists want to eliminate poverty to prove the worth of the billions of venture capital they’ve monopolized, I’m all for it. But I don’t think I’d want to live in a world without work. Not because I love capitalism or getting sweaty, but because in every era and age, having something to work for is what makes life worth living.

Work isn’t just a set of errands performed for benefits and salary. It’s also meaning, connection and identity. We work to make great art and realize dreams and ambitions; to afford better clothes, homeownership or a family; to feel a part of something bigger, to maintain important relationships and form new ones.

None of these are problems human society needs to solve. They are exactly the parts of my life that I would never give up or automate, the parts that let me know that I’m alive.

I grew up convinced that pursuing your dreams was the most important thing you could possibly do with your life.

And part of that had to do with the massive expansion of the coming-of-age genre during my formative years. I was raised on films, books and TV that valorized passions over professions; “Orange County” (2002) and “School of Rock” (2003) both written by Mike White and starring Jack Black, were especially memorable..

Friend of the newsletter Machiko recently recommended “The Big Year,” an charming, utterly sincere film in which Jack Black again fights the man, this time to realize his dream of becoming the number one-ranked bird watcher. The protagonists of these coming-of-age films were indie record label founders, architecture students, flower shop owners and aspiring chefs, writers and journalists. Following your heart and going broke for art was repeated as a character motivation so many times in so many mediums that it accidentally became a kind of vernacular gospel.

Now Mike White makes “White Lotus”, a show where art exists to signify status and anyone with any aspiration is the butt of the joke. AI has every creative industry at knifepoint; Anthropic’s CEO is calling it a macroeconomic problem so large it will require re-hauling the tax code to redistribute revenue from AI tokens and products. When I hear word “dream” during my daily short-form video scroll, I flinch, assuming it’s a preamble to an order form drop or subscription link. These days it’s harder than ever to be “obsessed men in pursuit of friends with feathers,” as the above-linked NYT review’s headline puts it.

And yet here I am. And down there, that’s my subscription link. But dreams aren’t really the goal here. I’d like to grow Lunch Box into a community that can support the adventurous food and cultural reporting that local publications can’t pay for any more. So if you’ve ever learned something interesting or useful from this newsletter, please support me however you can. You can also vote on the next direction of Lunch Box (details below).

I recently rewatched some of those old movies and I still love them, even that means making peace with the uncomfortably large influence that Jack Black roles have had on my life. The music and fashion choices are of course dated, but they’ll be cool again in a few years if we just wait. If your generation has to be associated with a cringey idea, it might as well be pursuing your dreams. How else are you going to pass the time?

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Hotel Dim Sum as recession indicator?

These are the turnip cakes at Crystal Palace at the Marriot Courtyard in Monterey Park. It’s one of two hotels that have added dedicated dim service in the SGV; the San Gabriel Hilton houses a dim sum operation branded as Five Star Seafood, the same name of the restaurant that used to occupy the top floor of Focus Plaza across the street. Technically it’s called Tawa Plaza now. Also, Tawa Gateway, or according to Google Maps, “Tawa (99) Gateway - Plaza.” It’s good to know the new ownership is preserving the tradition of making everyone confused about the name (long live the San Gabriel Square).

Crystal Palace’s name is more palatial than its settings, though it is a recently-built, naturally bright space that doesn’t get too loud. At 27 items, the selection of dim sum is very modest, and the service is slow, especially for a restaurant with around 100 seats. But the dumpling work was clean the day I went and the kitchen did an excellent job with the snow pea leaves entree we ordered. And of course if you come for dim sum here, you will never lack for micro-greens.

Fancy dim sum usually means sneaking gold foil, black truffle and micro-greens into places they don’t belong. But in steamers these formal ingredients wilt like tuxedos and ballgowns at the sauna. The only upside is the opportunity to complain about the spectacle of the price.

David Chan recently commented on Threads that dim sum isn’t really a strength of San Gabriel Valley Chinese dining. The scene has definitely lost a lot of heavy hitters over the years - my favorites were King Hua and Elite, which never reopened after the fire. Orange County Asian strip malls continue to siphon a lot of buzzy international chain openings. And Chinese tourism, study abroad and investment in the area have never recovered from their pandemic downturns. The hotels built during the boom years must search for new sources of revenue. At the San Gabriel Hilton, Five Star Seafood is advertising a 3.99 per-plate special on the weekdays.

Anyone know what this little box labeled “LIMINAL CAMERA” in Chinatown is?

It’s facing the tracks in a fenced yard north of Los Angeles State Historic Park, so I couldn’t get closer to it. I assume it’s art because the world “liminal” is being used. It’s certainly art when I use the word liminal.

Come see me on this panel with some amazing journalists for the Los Angeles Reporting Collective.

If you say hello, I’ll give you a sticker, while supplies last.

Vote to decide Lunch Box’s next story arc

I’m always generating ideas and executing an infinitely shrinking percentage of them. So it would really help to know what my readers would be most interested to see. Paid subscribers can vote below on four different editorial themes, each with some branching story ideas. And if you sign up for a paid subscription, it also comes with my blessing if you decide to steal (use!) any of these ideas in addition to voting in the poll. It also comes with this fold-and-staple ekiben zine I designed.

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Far eastern Los Angeles County is where car culture has achieved something like total victory. There are no less than 30 drive-thru’s within a 2 mile radius of my home. If you search “salad” here, Google Maps just laughs at you and pulls up five burger places.

It’s a flattened topography of aborted sidewalks and infrequent transit where bicyclists are heckled like public nuisances; neighborhoods that feel achingly empty unless you move above 35 miles an hour; mountains so tall everything in front of them looks two-dimensional and streetscapes with businesses set back so far you can’t tell what’s around you without looking online.

And this hypersprawl is where fast food’s biggest brands originate. McDonalds, In-N-Out, Taco Bell were all products of this suburban corridor, Los Angeles’s long demographic shadow stretching east to San Bernardino, once home to the fastest growing cities in America.

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There are so many drive-thrus in Southern California that civic leaders in Baldwin Park, Loma Linda, Carlsbad, South LA, Long Beach, San Luis Obispo and Santa Clarita have passed bans or additional restrictions on new construction, citing research connecting fast food with higher rates of obesity, pollution, traffic and pedestrian injury.

So when I get in my car at the end of the day to drive two minutes to fast food, damaging my health, the environment and potentially the health of those around me, I comfort myself with the knowledge that I’m not just a slob but a victim. I’m only at the drive-thru because I’ve been compelled, abducted really, by the pernicious urbanism created by federally-subsidized road development and corporate franchise capitalism.

So for the past week I’ve just decided to embrace it. Drive-thrus can be both a public health menace and quintessential local experience. And that’s how I came to appreciate Baker’s Drive-Thru, a Mexican food and burger chain with 39 locations mostly in the Inland Empire.

Burgers and Mexican food are by now a ridiculously common combo in Southern California. But back in 1952 when Baker’s was founded, putting both on the menu counted as innovation. Neal Baker called it the twin kitchen concept. He set up the first Baker’s with separate drive-thru windows for Mexican food and cheeseburgers and made diners wait in line twice to get both.

Before fast food, Baker’s family operated a brickyard and helped build the original McDonald’s (13,800 locations) in San Bernardino. He and Glen Bell, the founder of Taco Bell (7,500 locations), were high school friends. He helped Bell build his first burger stand across from Mitla Cafe.

John Galardi, founder of Wienerschnitzel (320 locations) started his career at Baker’s Burger and Taco Bell. Ed Hackbarth worked for Baker before going on to start Del Taco (600 locations). So many of the architects of fast food’s postwar boom were just guys who knew or worked for Neal Baker.

There’s DNA from each of these chains in the menu at Baker’s. The burgers taste like pre-industrial McDonald’s. The ground beef quality is a bit higher and the buns are slightly denser.

Baker’s Mexican food is casual and homespun, suggesting an alternate future in which Taco Bell had never met the stoked-out marketing guys that cooked up Baja Blast and the talking chihuahua. And if Taco Bell is the guy who fell in with the wrong crowd, Baker’s is that dude who attended community college, found a job close to home and got married young. They’ve steadily expanded to 39 locations over decades.

Baker’s branding is practically norm-core in this modern era of fast-food shit-post marketing. Their late night menu looks like a buttoned-up version of a Cool Ranch Dorito’s chip bag. Their version of “Fire” sauce is called “hotter,” or “curl your tongue.”

Hard-shell tacos are popular here. The ground meat is pretty similar in taste and texture to Del Taco and Taco Bell, but the helping is smaller and the shell is a bit flimsier. Compared to Mitla Cafe’s original tacos dorados, they’re all on equally worse footing. It’s sloppy and imprecise as all food made at high speeds are.

Pictured far above was the taco burger, which tastes like a Mexican American sloppy Joe: ground beef, shredded lettuce, cheese and tomatoes between warmed buns. It’s been on the menu for a while and it’s easy to see why. There’s a brute transitive logic to taco ingredients in a burger that works in both directions. That fluidity between Mexican and American fast food is what the Baker’s menu is built on.

Below is the Monterey Double Baker, which comes with Monterey Jack cheese, mustard, and a butterflied Ortega chile pepper. It’s a more recent introduction to the menu that reflects the chain’s modern gourmet ambitions. The burger is neatly made and sit upright in the bag with a braced sleeve that leaves the top exposed, similar to the presentation at In-N-Out. The buns have been crisped on the griddle and the patties have crispy lacy edges.

The bean burritos are beloved and their best quality is probably their size. The beans would be a bit tasteless without the gobs of cheese. The tortilla exceeded my expectations, a bit thinner and stretchier than a typical fast-foot burrito wrapper. You can get two of them with fries and a drink for 8.25.

Baker’s fries have a starchy layer that imparts a bit of a durable crisp but also carries the taste of old grease. They remind me of the fries at Carl’s Jr, Jack in the Box or Wendy’s, but sliced at something closer to McDonalds’ thickness. You can also order something called the Frynormous - a paper sack stuffed with a half pound of fries.

Like all local chains in eyes of their most loyal fans, Baker’s used to be good. They’ve recently refreshed their menu and sparked some loud critics online. Carol Baker, Neal’s wife, passed away in 2017, and the new ownership has ousted longtime management staff and sparked a breach of contract lawsuit. But Baker’s survived the pandemic and still operates the same number of locations as when Neal ran the company.

Neal eventually gave in and let diners order both burgers and Mexican food from a single window, though the “Twin Kitchen” concept lives on in the form of a meal and membership program.

He never took on investment to launch the chain nationwide the way so many of his former employees and contemporaries did. He hated flying, according to a 2004 interview with the LA Times. But Baker also rejected the ideology of endless scale and constant expansion embraced by his contemporaries.

“When you have a successful business and you make more money than you can ever spend, why do you need to get bigger?” Baker said in a 2004 interview. “I’m very happy with the way things have turned out.”

Previously:

Everyone talks to strangers on the Coast Starlight and I think it’s just physics. In the dining car, we are seated four to a booth in the order of arrival and the mild friction of a conversation becomes the path of least resistance.

I join a young couple returning from spring break in San Francisco to college in San Luis Obispo. We nod and leave it at smiles until a woman in close-cropped silver hair completes our table and introduces herself. She’s so graceful in her chattiness that it’s catching, and we kept talking after she leaves for the bathroom. We were content to ignore each other, but just as content to socialize. Martha insisted, after all. That was her name.

If you board at Jack London Station in Oakland, breakfast starts immediately, because service ends just 20 minutes into the ride. There’s no wifi and most people are eager to discuss this once common/now rare experience of taking Amtrak.

Martha returns and cheerfully seizes the reins of the conversation. We don’t bother to resist, sensing that we’re in good hands. She’s a semi-retired psychologist from central California in a soft plaid shirt of robin’s egg blue, with no agenda beyond some light bragging about her sons, two of whom are professional musicians.

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I find her a welcome palate cleanser after a night in the San Francisco tech industrial complex. I was still shaking the dread from waking to the sight of a billboard with the phrase “That’s so Agentic.” But Martha had just taken Lyft to the station for the first time ever and was pretty thrilled it had worked. She was equally excited about the convenience of checking out eBooks from her local library.

She was most excited to discuss her local No Kings day protest yesterday - more than 1,500 people showed up in a town with a population of 25,000 or so. She took it as a sign that the longtime conservative town was turning against the Trump administration.

The boyfriend is impressed. He’d recently read that the community where the protest took place used to be a sundown town, one of about 100 across California that enforced expansive racial curfews. Martha frowns, and seems uncomfortable with the idea. She asks for an explanation, then changes the subject, walking both students through descriptions of their lives and studies.

He has wavy brown hair parted in the middle and a thick mustache, a type of vintage Bay Area-n that perpetually looks like they’d be at home in a Grateful Dead concert. The girlfriend, a journalism major, describes the drama program at her high school in Marin in encyclopedic detail with a high, musical voice that sounds like stirring wind chimes.

Our conversation ends up where most seem to these days; how strange things are. Strange to be on a train when a plane is available; to sit in front of each other before connecting through our phones; to form the words with our mouths instead of pasting from the chatbot window, to speak of majors and jobs and aspirations when so many forces are conspiring to make those things obsolete.

I asked everyone why they chose rail travel, and each spoke about the desire to move more slowly. It’s a surprisingly common sentiment now, if ridership on the Starlight is any indication: the route set new overall records in both 2024 and 2025.

Trains have run this route for about a hundred years. Before Amtrak’s Coast Starlight, there was the Southern Pacific’s Coast Daylight, a luxury express that connected Los Angeles to San Francisco, featuring parlor cars, a tavern and a diner. The Daylight, featuring black cars with streaks of red and orange, was marketed as the most beautiful passenger train in the world.

Martha says she’d like to get to know me better and invites me to lunch. We agreed to see each other back in the dining car at 12:45p.m.

I doze off in my cabin and wake up just a few minutes after our appointed time. At lunch Martha is already directing the conversation at a completed table.

I end up across a woman with oversized cream-colored glasses and a black polka dot dress, who tells me she has ridden almost the entire Amtrak network. I ask for her thoughts on the menu. She recommends the salad and the salmon, but the best food is along the Northeast Corridor. Still, nothing beats the Starlight’s scenery.

She travels most of the year, always by train, for an abstract financial concern encompassing real estate, foundation work, conventions, scholarships, hotel openings and charity work. She mentions multiple residences and turning down private jets while also conveying that prying questions - such as whether she is indeed a railroad heiress - would be unbearably provincial. I nod through the conversation in rhythm with the older woman next to me and we lapse into twin silences to chew on a response.

After the railroad heiress departs I find out that the woman next to me lives in South L.A. a few miles away from where I used to. I ask her why she chose the train, which became a long conversation about how much we hate LAX. The airport is like our collective shitty boyfriend that we’re dying to complain about, so we keep going after the plates are cleared, thumping on about the traffic in the turnaround, rideshare fees and the confusing time-suck at LAXit. She’s worked as statistics professor, a consultant, a call center employee, and a claims evaluator for a federal employment agency.

When I leave, Martha is still locked in conversation and in the midst of exchanging emails with her lunch party. Later, I spot her napping in the observation car. She wakes up, spies me and slides into my booth with a twinkle in her eye. She tells me the woman she exchanged emails with was a Taiwanese academic pursuing a graduate degree in criminal justice in London, on holiday in California. I listen to a long, dramatic story that is, in the end, about losing her retainer. Before she gets off at Paso Robles she asks for my email address too.

By now the Starlight has reached Pismo Beach, once the clamming capital of the world. This part of the route hugs the ocean for more than 100 miles before veering inland towards Union Station in Los Angeles. The coastline here is soft and yielding, baby waves and white sandy beaches backed by ambling hills carpeted in fine flowers and greenery.

My dinner seating is in just over an hour and I can feel my social batteries are losing charge. Three meals, with three sets of introductory niceties, in just over 8 hours has me yearning for the frictionless transactional nirvana of an iPad.

But at dinner I’m again seated with the lady from South L.A., which saves me some explaining. We both ignore our lunch partner’s recommendation and go for the flatiron steak.

The woman across from us is a dedicated Dodgers fan from Simi Valley who drives into the games and has sat all around the stadium. She’s been on the train for 24 hours already following a failed attempt at sorting her late mother’s possessions in Eugene, O.R., a massive archive of brittle tableware, dated furniture and photos of people they’ll never be able to identify; things of little value but impossible to throw away.

Our conversation keeps tripping into dark corners and lapsing. We try to change the subject to stadium food, but the woman from South L.A. isn’t much of a sports fan. I miss Martha.

I attempt to regale our party with facts about Amtrak’s Superliner trains, famous for elevated views and boasting double the carrying capacity of most other cars. The design was the product of an age of industrial maximalism, created for a future of rail ridership that never arrived. Nearly forty percent of the seats go unsold on the average Starlight run.

That design also forms the nucleus of a bruising American Disabilities Act lawsuit that has forced Amtrak to invest hundreds of millions in station upgrades, because wheelchairs struggle to ascend to the train’s second floor. The stacked layout also vexes ventilation, passenger flow, tunnel clearance and temperature control. Hauling heavy cars takes more fuel, and maintenance relies on fading institutional memory, because the original manufacturers have both gone bankrupt or been acquired.

The Superliners were originally designed by the Pullman Standard company and share a lineage with America’s golden era of rail. A redesign by the Canadian company Bombardier in the 90’s replaced wood and vinyl with molded plastic and low-pile carpeting. The feel of the modern Superliners is more airport gate area than diner.

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It’s a muted institutional style of grays and staid corporate blue that’s somehow aged into feeling retro-futurist. Everything clanks, creaks and squeaks because the Superliner’s height makes the ride bumpier. The tables are formica rimmed with black plastic, the food is largely reheated Aramark product and cafe stations in each car offer coffee of varying intensity and mileage. Roomette pullout tables feature built-in chessboards done in dimpled plastic. Chunky electronics cabinets protrude from the walls and remind me of the consoles from the spacecraft in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The oldest Superliners have traveled more than 7 million miles, the equivalent of circling the Earth nearly 300 times. In six years, Amtrak plans to retire them for a more fuel-efficient and ADA-compliant single-level design.

My party has gone quiet, and it’s at this moment I realize that I’ve become too much of a train dork to let it out in public.

But my ramblings manage to provoke a remembrance from the woman from South LA. Her father was a locomotive engineer on Pennsylvania Rail and worked there long enough to earn a lifetime pass to ride across the network. On his days off, he’d take the family to New York, Philadelphia, Jersey and Delaware. She’s always associated riding the trains with her father, and fun days off.

Actually, eating in the dining car is especially meaningful to her because she never got to go as a girl. Black people weren’t allowed back then.

Well that’s just awful, isn’t it, says the woman from Simi Valley. That’s so terrible I don’t even know what to say.

I just nod, and ask if her father ever worked on the dining cars, which were always staffed by Black men, including on the Coast Daylight. Pullman was at one point the largest employer of Black men in the United States. Working as a porter on a Pullman dining car was one of the best jobs available at the time. It came with a brutal, physically punishing schedule that left little time for family.

Her father was always an enginner, but many of their family friends were porters, she replies.

I asked what they ate on their journeys instead of dining car food. I remembered a detail from the Isabel Wilkerson book “The Warmth of Other Suns”, about the boxes of fried chicken, biscuits and hardboiled eggs carried by African Americans migrating from the South after the Civil War.

She laughs and nods. Yep, we did the same, fried chicken in a shoebox. Her father used to call it “the shoebox special” and make the kids compete for the honor of carrying it. It was just food from home wrapped to go, but she was always thrilled when it was her turn.

Wilkerson also wrote that freed slaves took to calling the trains coming out of the South “Chicken Bone Specials.” Barred from the dining car, train cabs carrying Black people would arrive with discarded chicken bones littering the floor. But such indignities hardly registered amid the thrill of riding the train that would change their lives, Wilkerson wrote. “These great creatures on tracks…had grand, triumphant-sounding names - Silver Meteor, Broadway Limited - and took people to grand, triumphant-sounding places, and just a little bit of that prestige could rub off on them…”

I can feel the Starlight start to veer inland. We watch our window pane’s scenery change to freeways, suburbs and graffiti covered warehouses. The dining car is getting dark, and the silences long. We order our desserts to go and say our goodbyes.

At Union Station, I transfer to the Metrolink San Bernardino Line. The ride home is 90 minutes, but it felt longer that night, with no one to talk to.

Behind the paywall, a look at the fragile economics of the Amtrak Dining Car, as well as photos and reviews of everything I ate:

The Amtrak dining car has always run at a loss, but the exact economics are somewhat obscure because the meals are bundled with the price of a sleeper ticket. Amtrak’s accounting designates a portion of ticket sales as revenue for the dining car, but it’s not clear how that corresponds to the menu’s food and labor costs. A dining car can help drive ticket sales but there’s no clear formula for deciding by how much.

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I crouch with my bike in a triangle of shade at the Montclair Station and watch the tracks shimmer in the heat. It’s 87 degrees today and I’ve left my water at home. The nearest place is a 20 minute round trip and my train will be here in 18, so I wait.

I board the Metrolink bike car to find that a woman with a battered suitcase is cursing out all the male passengers. It was the type of tirade that was too angry to express itself in sentences and it seems she’d been at it a while, judging by everyone’s expressions: wincing smiles, resignation, restrained laughter.

“We all get baptized into this. That’s how you know you’re one of us,” one guy says over the “I think she’s schizophrenic,” says another guy, not unkindly, and everyone nods. They talk like they know each other. At the next stop, a woman gets on and starts up a conversation in the middle.

“So are you off now?”

“You better believe it.”

The San Bernardino Line has historically been the busiest rail corridor in Metrolink’s system by both total number of trains run and average ridership, connecting Union Station to the University of Redlands. But ridership on all Metrolink lines has fallen by nearly half since the pre-pandemic peak in 2019, and commuters now account for less than half of all trips thanks to the rise in remote work. Just over 5,000 people ride the SB Line each day, according to data from the end of last year.

I’m riding today because I’ve been reading about the history of railroad dining and discovered that a piece of it was preserved at San Bernardino Station. One of the Harvey Houses of the legendary Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe trackside dining network was located there.

But the museum is closed that day. After picking up some water from the Superior Grocer nearby, I board the Arrow service to Redlands Station.

What’s now the ailing eastern fringe of the Metrolink network was once the western outpost of an opulent rail empire. At Redlands, there’s a broad, vaulted colonnade that runs the length of the station, built for crowds the Arrow line has never seen. The stop is unmanned and there’s a “for lease” sign out front.

I get off and bike a loop of the Smiley Historic District. Olive Avenue might be one of the most beautiful streets in the whole state, a promenade of Victorian Queen Annes, Greco-Roman revivals, and Craftsman homes built in an era when the citrus boom had Redlands calling itself “The City of Millionaires.” On the way back I stop at Brick and Birch, a pizza parlor and coffee shop in a historic Fox Theatre.

I miss the last train east from Redlands as I’m admiring these details. But luckily it’s not a bad night to be waiting around at a bus stop in shorts and a t-shirt. It’s chilly but the heat of the day still radiates from the concrete of the bench and sidewalk.

When the bus arrives the driver is incredibly patient as I struggle to lock my bike onto the cradle at the bus’s front. His name is Mike, a born-again Christian and a second-generation East Los Angeles native who moved out to San Bernardino to drive the bus.

That night Mike was feeling talkative. He knew each passenger by name or sight and told them all he was praying for them so urgently that you had to believe it. This was the last trip before the end of his shift, so he was also feeling hungry. I told him I had recently moved to the area and he began to pepper me with food recommendations. As if by some unspoken agreement, every place we talked about served some kind of Mexican food.

The place he was most hyped about was Baqba Mexican Grill in Rialto, a Chipotle-style burrito shop that doesn’t skimp on the portion sizes. He liked to take his wife and kids to La Mexicana in Yucaipa. He told me to try Tacos Baja on Whittier Boulevard. He’s noticed crowds and lines at P & G Burger in Colton - he’s met passengers that have traveled far to eat there. He’s been meaning to try Mitla Cafe, the San Bernardino restaurant said to have inspired Taco Bell’s menu. I told him I used to live in Alhambra and we collectively admired the institutions known as Pharos Burgers (massive, yet neat breakfast burrito) and Pepe’s (Drive-thru Mexican food open until 3 a.m.).

I tried to volley some recommendations back but he just kept naming places, so after a while I just shut up and wrote things down. He sees a lot of interesting restaurants on his route and chats up passengers for their recommendations - one guy recommended Mario’s Pizza in Fontana. He worried out aloud about the youthful riders who don’t have a house to go to at night.

At the Fontana Station, I bid Mike goodbye, and he told me, for the fifth or sixth time, that I needed to try G and B Burger and/or Baqba.

“If you see me again, you’ll thank me!” he calls through the closing door.

It’s dark at the stop and I fail recognize the young Black guy asking me to take a seat as the bus driver, so he clowns me. “Damn, nobody respects the bus driver,” he said. “Is it because I’m young and handsome?” I laughed and gave him a mock salute to let him know I respected the magnificence of his authority.

Much like the Metrolink bike car, everyone on Omnitrans Route 66 seemed to know each other. It was a rowdy ride. The bus operator kept shouting loud, exuberant jokes back at this guy he kept calling sleepy - called that because he always forgets to press the stop request button. I later learn it’s because he’s always too stoned.

Sleepy is getting a rough talking-to from a Mexican guy with a grimy t-shirt in the next seat. And when Sleepy gets off, t-shirt guy looks at me and smirks. I avoid eye contact, but he smirks harder and starts explaining that Sleepy is his friend and just needed a lecture about healthy drug habits.

He keeps smirking, like he’s about to tell a joke. “Did you know I’m a quarter Korean?”

I smirk back and and say for real? How come I don’t believe you?

“Yeah my grandma’s Korean,” he says.

I laugh and say, yeah I guess it could happen. He acts theatrically offended like I’ve wounded his spirit with my failure to respect the remarkable diversity of his circumstances. Then he smirks again, harder, and asks if I’ve ever dated a Vietnamese girl. And suddenly I realize this is why he wanted to talk to me, that all the bullying bravado was a mask.

It turns out he dated a Vietnamese girl for three years and those were the sweetest memories of his young life, all 22 years of it. They’d met on Instagram and he caught real feelings for her, the only time he’s ever felt that way, emotions he didn’t have words for.

But her family disapproved. Once he got her pregnant and she had the abortion before they could discuss it. Actually, I reminded him of his ex-girlfriend’s disapproving older brother. That’s why he insisted on talking with me.

“Why didn’t they like me, you think?” he asks.

Probably because you got her pregnant and you guys were young, I reply. But Asian families get crazy, could be a lot of things.

They’d fought a lot, he admits.

Why’d you guys break up then? I ask.

“Vietnamese girls are crazy,” he said. That was why he liked them, and he smirked again.

I keep pressing him. Yeah, sure, but what happened? You’re still thinking about her and all. He’s quiet and grins again, but sheepishly.

You cheated on her? Come on, bro.

I’m loud and incredulous. Everyone on the bus has been listening and at this point there’s a whole chorus of scoffs and snorts and “tuh’s” Even the bus driver cuts in. “Nahhhh you fucked up bro.”

The 22-year-old keeps blaming the vaunted craziness of Vietnamese women. Apparently when she caught him cheating, they didn’t even talk. She just socked him in the eye and he never saw her ever again.

If they’re crazy why do you go for them, asks the guy in the seat in front of me, a white guy with dark tattoo sleeves and ear gauges.

Cause they’re hot, the 22-year-old says, and cackles.

“Lsten to me little bro,” said the guy in front. “I’m 37 years old. My body count is high. I’ve dated every kind of girl. Crazy is only fun for so long.”

And for a few stops, we talk about the dark and scary places relationships have taken us. The 22-year-old finally admits that he misses her and has been messaging her. So we put him on blast. The whole bus gets in on it, everyone taking the moment to collectively son this young man for failing to understand the consequences of his actions. We had such a good time with it that I almost forgot to press the touch strip for my stop.

The next day, I went to check out some of the places Mike recommended.

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UPLAND I’ve been hiking the San Gabriels after the rain and dabbling in fantasies of becoming one of those guys who knows the names of the plants. This one above is California dodder.

These sinister tangles of golden thread engulf plants and sap resources. But dodder is a valuable parasite, strengthening biodiversity, attacking overly dominant plants to free up resources for other species. Plants colonized by dodder can recover. It was a good reminder that what feels like destruction and loss is also room for new life.

This one is chilicothe, also known as wild cucumber, mandrake or marah macrocarpa, a weird plant with large underground tuber that can grow to the size of a man and weigh more than 400 pounds. I feel viscerally disgusted by that fact but also curious about how it might taste. In addition to the subterranean tuber-foot, chilicote also fruit these spiky round cucumber-things that swell and burst to release their seeds. Native Californians would char and grind the seeds into a paste that treated baldness.

Traveling always lets me look at home with new eyes. Even deep in the suburban boonies of LA County, there’s local culture in medians, freeway murals, street signs, and especially landscaping and shrubbery. Homes and apartments reflect the aesthetics uniformity of forgotten subdivisions and home developments. The ghost of Route 66 haunts the branding of all the businesses nearby. Towards the mountains, some streets have cobblestone gutter drainage studded with smooth river stones. City seals and strip mall branding almost always refer to the mountains and the areas agricultural past - citrus, walnuts, and strawberries.

Then there’s Narod, A railroad executive named A.E. Doran was saddled with the apparently torturous task of naming train stops along the Southern pacific. After naming one after himself he was fresh out of ideas and seemingly in a rush, so he reversed his name for the next one. Now 1,600 people can say they live in the unincorporated community of Narod. The name appears in Google, U.S. Geological Survey maps and in San Bernadino County records but I’m sure it doesn’t make it to anyone’s address. Here’s a story in which The Daily Bulletin interviews a genuine Narod citizen.

The geography of tacos: I’ve been eating a lot of Mexican food and noticing that all of my saved places cluster along Whittier Boulevard and along the Olympic Taco Row in East LA. Every third taco truck seems to be a birria place these days, the beef version, often served on tortillas of griddled cheese and dipped in consomme. But I also saw birria pizza, birria ramen, birria fries, mulitas and dipped tortas. It feels like birria is past trend, aging into a genre proper, entrenched in the streetscape like al pastor, carnitas and asada.

New Koreatown piece: I’ve got a new reported essay in the LA Local, a new startup modeled after the community journalism at Boyle Heights Beat. They launched sites covering Koreatown, Pico Union, Westlake, Inglewood, East L.A. and South L.A. in January - please go check them out and support local news. In the story I explore the histories of competing downtowns in Los Angeles and talk about how Koreatown expanded by accidentally becoming a enclave for immigrant communities.

An ekiben lecture (real): A few weeks ago I was a panelist at the Los Angeles Conservancy’s 2026 Historic Neighborhoods Conference and delivered a short talk on ekiben and cultural preservation called “Narrative texture, place marketing and the semiotic landscape.” It was a treat to be on the panel with who does great work documenting LA diners. Thanks to the Los Angeles Conservancy for having me, and big thanks to fellow panelist and longtime friend of the newsletter for the invite. Check out her project on historical businesses in Buenos Aires. And reach out if you’d like to bring the ekiben lecture to your class or conference.

The forgotten golden age of American railroad dining: I’m working on a pitch about why the food on American transit is terrible, so I’ve been researching Fred Harvey, a British immigrant who created a hospitality empire that helped birth the exotic American fantasy of the Southwest. Fred Harvey designers created that grand, always-closed-except-for-filming restaurant space inside Union Station. A sample menu: Broiled fresh northern fish, almondine; braised calf’s sweetbreads, country fried chicken with corn fritter, roast duck with spiced apple.

Harvey was a railroad executive who cornered the market on whistle-stop station restaurants, artifacts of a frontier era in which passengers had to finish their meals in a half hour. Harvey Houses were known for elaborate glass urns of strong coffee, fine Belfast linen, and a uniformed staff called the Harvey Girls, one of the nation’s all female workforces. Harvey was a finely-mannered railroadier, frontiersman and entrepreneur who constructed a personal mythology so powerful that his enterprise eventually expanded to dining cars, hotels, bookstores and eventually institutional dining and catering of all kinds. The book Appetite for America by Stephen Fried is an entertaining and detailed account of the Fred Harvey mythos.

Parts of the story don’t go down easy. His company built a Wild West tourism industry based on fantastic caricatures of Native American and Mexican life, offering private car tours of themed Native American environments staffed with actual tribal members. But El Tovar, the Harvey hotel at the edge of the Grand Canyon, is still one of the most sought-after bookings in the world. Harvey staffed his dining cars with an all-Black staff for aesthetic purposes. He chose Harvey Girls based on beauty and youth. And because the women worked and lived in overwhelmingly male towns, they also became the marriage and dating pool. They were immortalized in a 1946 film starring Judy Garland, which enshrined the Harvey Girls as an essentially civilizing influence on the West.

The Hokkaido series is complete. Parts 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 are free to read. Paid subscribers get access to the Hokkaido edition of the Lunch Box Atlas, which dropped this past Sunday. Writing about Japan is challenging as an outsider, but visiting is always so interesting that I can’t help but try. I really enjoyed this passage at the end of Alan Booth’s the Roads to Sata, a book about walking the length of Japan starting from Cape Soya.

The old man had asked me where I lived, and I told him I lived in Tokyo.

‘Tokyo is not Japan,’ he said. ‘You can’t understand Japan by living in Tokyo.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘That’s why I’m taking this time off to have a good look at the rest of it.’

‘You can’t understand Japan just by looking at it,’ the old man said.

‘No, not just by looking at it,’ I said. ‘Not by looking at it as a tourist might out of the window of a bus, but by walking through the whole length of it.’

‘You can’t understand Japan just by walking through it,’ the old man said.

‘Not just by walking through it,’ I argued, ‘but by talking to all the different people I meet.’

‘You can’t understand Japan just by talking to people,’ the old man said.

‘How do you suggest I try to understand Japan, then?’ I asked him.

He seemed surprised by the question, and a little hurt, and a little angry. ‘You can’t understand Japan,’ he said.

Why would anyone visit Hokkaido? One reason could be that most people don’t.

More than 42 million foreigners visited Japan last year and just one in 15 make it to Hokkaido according to Japan National Tourism Organization’s visit‑rate ranking. Most are South Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese tourists. A few westerners, mostly Australians, come during ski season. And the vast majority of these stay in Sapporo. So if you’re one of those people for who likes to avoid other tourists, consider Hokkaido.

Another reason to visit is that more than 29 million Japanese people do so every year and there’s probably a reason. Hokkaido has ranked as the most beautiful prefecture in a survey conducted every year since 2006. Japanese civilization is relatively new in Hokkaido, the ancient homeland of the Ainu people. Here you can still feel some of the rawness and isolation of the frontier.

Hokkaido was rapidly developed in the late 1800’s through prison labor and the tondenhei military colonizer initiative. The nationalist government sought to cultivate it as agricultural center under the guidance of American experts to establish a defensive buffer against Russian incursion. Today just over 5 million people live in Hokkaido, making it both the largest prefecture and the least populous.

Most people come for the snow: skiers and snowboarders report that the powder is fluffier and lighter thanks to lower average water content. But prepare for delays, infrequent trains, and bitter cold. At vending machines there’s hot canned coffee to put in your jacket pockets. Bring shoes with teeth that can bite into packed ice. Pick up a pair of gloves at the konbini that you can use your phone through. And take heart, because in such cold you’ll never rush to finish an ice cream cone and the onsen will feel transcendent.

MOL Sunflower Ferry

The Sunflower overnight ferry is probably the most interesting and affordable way to travel to Hokkaido from the Tokyo area.

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The architect Toyo Ito theorized that all domestic life would eventually dissolve into a dense commercial slurry that he called the simulated city.

Boom-era Japan wrought cities in which the average citizen had begun to spend most waking hours at work or in restaurants, bars, clubs, gyms and spas. The simulated city was the fictional environment between work and home in which everyone lived nomadically, paying by the hour for health, shelter, relaxation and companionship.

“Our families and jobs are all simulated; we now cannot distinguish reality from unreality,” he wrote in the 1992 essay Architecture in a Simulated City. “…all of society is being covered in a gigantic Saran Wrap film.”

Ito’s critique left room for awe. He was “enthralled” by Tokyo in the bubble era and visited Shinjuku almost every night in the 1980’s, he said in an interview. In “Pao: Dwellings for The Tokyo Nomad Woman, ” he envisioned Tokyoites living in homes of futuristic gauze, orbiting tents of translucent membranes that visualized flows of information and media. Data would arrive like wind in the sails of our screens, which would shelter, connect and inform us.

Modern Japan’s home for media-saturated nomads might be the architectural antithesis to the airy dwellings of “Pao.” Manga cafes are 24-hour lodgings crammed with shelves of graphic novels, computers, and particle-board enclosures. You pay hourly or in blocks for cushioned cubicles and access to drink machines, laundry, showers and some basic meals. The closest U.S. equivalent is probably a crowded university library during midterm week.

Manga cafes house a semi-permanent population of urban working poor called net cafe refugees or cyber nomads. A 2018 Tokyo Metropolitan Government survey found that between 4,000 and 17,000 people lived in cafes full or part time. Eighty-seven percent of those surveyed had jobs.

They’re one of the many new forms of minimum viable housing shaped by an age of global housing insecurity. Algorithms have resurrected our ancestral urge to shelter in caves and burrows, fueling social content that valorizes life in cheap dwellings; tiny houses, van life, container housing, converted school buses, sleeping pods for startup workers.

We fantasize of bypassing the housing market with side hustles and life hacks. But to succeed on social media poverty must be aspirational. So we shrink to fit the size of our circumstances and aestheticize the process for pennies. Soon we’ll all be lined up like nodes on a motherboard.

Both “Pao” and the manga cafe visualize the outsourcing of domestic life amid a contraction of private residence. But here, architecture exists only to to create a hierarchy of price points. Space is unitized with a standard aesthetic reflected across thousands of cafes: black pleather, wood laminate and the constant hum of computer fans, AC and ventilation.

In Japan I am always wedging into capsules, berths, bunks and other budget accommodations. There’s a perverse minimalist nirvana in the minimum viable dwelling; something monastic in subsisting on instant coffee, cup ramen and and free toast. A homeless Youtuber named Nomad Push found the manga cafe’s environs so comforting that he replicated them after moving into a van.

The manga cafe gets stuffy, smelly and loud. But after a 20-hour train delay and 4 more sleeping on the floor, my cubicle was like a palace. I’d spend the next day and night here waiting for delayed trains here at an hourly cost of about $1.50. The manga - none of it in English - was no distraction, and I’d picked up enough Japanese to switch the PC’s operating language to English. There was nothing to do but work and sleep.

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Manga cafes date back to 1979 in Nagoya, where a boom in textiles fueled a hyper-competitive cafe scene. The city, sometimes called the kissaten kingdom, has more than 4,000 cafes, totaling 41 percent of all restaurants, according to a Aichi Prefectural University student publication.

Operators added libraries of books, manga and other print materials to stand out. The rise of the internet came with a demand for privacy, quiet and anonymity prompting a redesign around the cubicle space. Now there are more than a thousand manga cafes across the country. Most still offer morning service, a free breakfast of buttered toast that originated in Ichinomiya just north of Nagoya.

Manga cafe companies also operate by-the-hour karaoke boxes, love hotels and overnight bathhouses, all of which can double as emergency housing. About 500 manga cafes belong to a single company called Kaikatsu Club, which itself is part of a conglomerate best known for affordable men’s suits.

By-the-hour accommodations have plenty of downsides. There’s very little space to store luggage and possessions nor can you access refrigerator space. Towels typically aren’t provided. Showers are cleaned after each use, which means that a crowded cafe might require an hour’s advance reservation.

A lot of people choose to stay in these places to avoid making a public declaration of homelessness. In Japan it’s common for the government to inform your family before disbursing any aid.

The manga cafe’s affordability can be its own poverty trap. An 8-hour overnight package at a manga cafe costs as little as $11. But paying that nightly could eat up more than a third of a wage-workers income and make it impossible to save up the key money necessary to rent a regular apartment.

Ito created “Pao” and “The Simulated City” at the beginning of his career, and senior colleagues critiqued the work for being too simplistic. He saw that our lives would be saturated by screens, data and media. But who could have predicted that the simulation would grow beyond the city? That our screens would project a fictional landscape that reaches into every aspect of our lives, one so oppressive that we’d pay by the hour for privacy and anonymity?

A key feature of the manga cafe is that no one ever talks or makes eye contact with you. There’s no public space to linger in and the aisles are so narrow I have to hunch my shoulders to pass. The rules explicitly ban conversation, even if your hands collide reaching for same manga volume. The only way to connect with another human is silently, through networked devices. A manga cafe is what you build to simulate a domestic life that’s been swallowed by the internet.

Later in his career Ito began to create spaces that might be the architectural antithesis to manga cafes. In 2001 Sendai Mediatheque, a library comprised of modular spaces with moveable furniture in which isolation is nearly impossible. It’s a light-filled glass-and-steel building supported by 13 columns which undulate like tree trunks or vines, housing elevators, staircases and ventilation. The reading room features radial seating in grey-foam benches shaped like clover leaves that cater equally to groups and individuals.

When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami hit northeastern Japan, Ito visited disaster areas and was humbled by how powerless it made him feel, he said in an interview. He was troubled by temporary relief housing, rows of uniform square boxes with no public gathering ground. He convened a group of architects to build community houses for the hundreds of thousands of people who lost their homes in a project called Home-For-All.

His design was a home comprised entirely of living rooms with no bedrooms or individual space. It’s a multi-story structure that resembles a watchtower built on pillars made of reclaimed, salt-damaged cedar trees.

“Architects tend to think that everyone wants to have privacy,” he said in an interview. “But people who have lost families want attachment to people. They want to have a place to gather and talk.”

It’s architecture for an age of simulated humanity. We are no longer reimagining domestic life, but trying to remember what it is.

My Hokkaido series Part 1: Hokkaido Stews and Curries Part 2: Station Inn Hirafu Part 3: The memorializing of cardinal extremities in Wakkanai. Part 4: Snowed out in Sapporo Plus, I’ve updated the Japanese Trains edition of the Atlas with info on four new routes.

My Hokkaido series concludes this Sunday. Part 1: Hokkaido Stews and Curries Part 2: Station Inn Hirafu Part 3: The memorializing of cardinal extremities in Wakkanai. Plus, I’ve updated the Japanese Trains edition of the Atlas with info on four new routes.

SAPPORO The longest train delay I’ve ever experienced was Amtrak from Tuscon to Los Angeles: 20 hours on a battered wooden pew at a historic train depot totally bare of amenities.

Freight companies own the vast majority of the tracks used by Amtrak riders and can endlessly prioritize their own trains, which means one-hour delays can metastasize to 24 hours or more.

I broke that record riding Japan Rail from Wakkanai to Sapporo. I’d larked off to the northernmost point in Japan during a historic storm that broke snowfall records last set in 1986, and was punished accordingly. I left Wakkanai Station the morning at 6:30 a.m. and didn’t arrive in Sapporo until past 3 a.m. the next day. Snowfall figures in the city had nearly doubled as my train faltered south, inching across tracks that had to be cleared by plows every hour or so.

It was the type of travel delay that strips away the human ego and leaves an animal dread of pain and discomfort. In America I could righteously blame capitalism, but here I could only think to shake my fist at the snow - at first, beautiful, then painful, then genuinely dangerous.

The train’s heaters were set at maximum to keep passengers safe in from subzero temperatures. But every few kilometers the train would be forced to stop and wait for plows and the lack of circulation made the cabins even hotter. The restrooms were inaccessible because the aisles were packed with other stranded passengers. Those of us with heated seats couldn’t vacate them and were doomed to braise in our berths.

At some stations we stopped for passengers who’d smartly decided to give up on their rides. That left time for the konbini, so I drowned my sorrows in the 7-11 Cup Deli, a new series of side dishes and main courses featuring some of the best spicy cucumber salad I’ve ever had. By the time we reached Sapporo even this small mercy would be unavailable.

The snow hadn’t just shut down the trains. Planes, busses, cars and trucks had all ground to a halt. When we arrived in Sapporo every konbini walkable from the station was out of prepared food. Every room in every nearby hotel was booked, and the same was true for every cubicle at every internet cafe. Even the karaoke bar was turning people away.

It was 8 degrees but there was no central heating perhaps because the station was under renovation. People were unpacking their suitcases, putting on all of their clothes and sleeping in bundles along the walls. One older man had simply sat down in the middle of a walkway and refused to get up. Delayed trains kept arriving and disgorging more people. Railway authorities announced that more than 960 train trips were canceled that night and the following day, affecting an estimated 330,000 people.

I was surprised at how unprepared authorities were for all of the stranded passengers . I’d built up such a mythology of Japanese efficiency that I assumed there would be some basic emergency shelter for stranded riders. But the underground mall was closed for cleaning. Hotels wouldn’t allow anyone to wait in their lobbies. The only way to get a warm room for the night was to get a taxi into the suburbs, so hundreds of people lined up in the cold and dark.

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It felt like a modest humanitarian crisis. But when I checked Japanese news streams I found clips of people volunteering to shovel walkways at the temple, kids building snowmen and more than a few interviews featuring the word sugoi, for amazing or cool. One channel showed stranded passengers at the New Chitose Airport, where airport employees were handing out sleeping mats and sleeping bags.

At Sapporo Station they didn’t even turn on the street lamps for people dragging their suitcases through the the craters of fresh and half-melted ice encrusting the sidewalk. Just two ticket counters were open, choked with lines winding the length of the station. A few guys stood around in emergency-colored jump suits but it’s unclear what their job was, because they weren’t able to help passengers. What finally broke me was learning that the ekiben vending machine had strict operating hours which happened to exclude the entire predawn period I was stranded.

I parked myself at a bench and layered up with two shirts, two flannels, a corduroy, a sweater, scarf, gloves and my winter jacket, but it was still too cold to fall asleep. I booked tickets on a 8 a.m. train but more delays were a virtual certainty. I genuinely don’t know what I would have done if the employees of a manga cafe had not allowed several of us to sleep on the floor of the lobby.

Later I realized that I should have just picked a line and wait. My years in Los Angeles have installed within me the firm belief that all forms of line are a pyramid scheme. But amid a historic Japanese snowstorm, lines were the only way to reduce the pain of the even greater inconveniences that awaited. And if you didn’t get in a line there was simply nothing for you and there was nothing anyone could do.

I probably would have grasped this sooner if I could understand the emergency announcements. The Japanese broadcasts were detailed instructions read live, but the English consisted of generic, pre-recorded phrases like “The train is delayed” “we apologize for the inconvenience.” It was too noisy to run live translate on my phone and with thousands using it simultaneously, data and wifi speeds were slow.

Eventually I realized that everyone who piled up for the ticket counter got booked on an earlier train in a better seat. The taxi queue was horrifyingly slow-moving, but it would have gotten me into a bed sooner than my own choices. And for the first time I began to understand some of the claustrophobia and helplessness that might come with living in a society so governed by lines.

From the warmth of the manga cafe, I read that this was one of the worst snowstorms to ever hit Northern Japan. The Japan Times found that at least 46 people died and more than 540 more were injured. There were reports of deaths from house collapses, falling snow, snow-clearing accidents and stranded motorists, prompting the deployment of the military.

Zooming out, it’s easy to imagine that snow-clearing resources were exhausted after weeks of record-breaking storms. Perhaps the viewership numbers of Hokkaido snow broadcasts couldn’t justify sending a team to Sapporo Station. Maybe the only crisis I had encountered was not knowing the correct line to wait in.

I found no evidence that anyone was endangered by the conditions at Sapporo Station that night. The snowstorm that wrecked my itinerary was harsh but it was not a blizzard. For everyone else it was just January.

For visitors, Japan is an enchanted mirror that shows us the society we wish we lived in. Once the spell is broken we realize that our focus on our own reflections has obscured the reality that the mirror is a window. And what happens, on both sides of the glass, is the product of a constant and ongoing conversation.

Legends of Japanese industrial efficiency, for example, bear the indelible mark of William Edwards Deming, an Iowa-born business theorist whose lectures on statistical quality control helped revolutionize Japanese industry in the postwar period. And since 1951 the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers has annually recognized exemplars of outstanding corporate quality management with the Deming Prize. The architects of Hokkaido’s fabled dairy industry enlisted an American rancher as a consultant, and now Japanese matcha and Hokkaido milk lattes dominate suburban cafes in the U.S.

In Arizona I dealt with the pain of a massive train delay by demanding a refund and collecting 100 dollars in points that expired long before I could use them. In Sapporo I paid 35 dollars to stay in a cushioned cubicle for a night and found it to be something like paradise.

Installment one was on the carb-heavy local foods created to combat the Hokkaido cold. Part two addresses the origins of the strangely monotonous natural landscape and describes a stay at a train station guesthouse on a dying train line. Part 4 is coming Wednesday. And for paid readers, check out my ultimate guide to riding rare Japanese trains, which includes a spreadsheet of all limited express and themed trains.

More than half a million people visit Wakkanai each year, a town of just over 30,000 people whose major attractions include a fish market, a welcome center and a harbor cruise.

No small proportion of visitors go just to say they have been and I was no different. I shared the evening Limited Express Okhotsk with a dozen-odd die-hard rail fans. I recognized them by the ruthless efficiency of their ticket-wallet solutions, futuristic velcro body wear which made my Keio train coin purse look painfully unserious. As soon as we stepped off, we all queued for the station stamp, or shachihata, a holy grail for train otakus.

Wakkanai Station is the northernmost rail stop in Japan. And once I realized I could reach it with the Japan Rail Pass by riding the longest single express train route in Japan, it was hard to resist.

There’s a potent if predictable allure to visiting the edge of the map. From a purely cartographic standpoint the city looks terribly adventurous - an improbably slim finger of civilization surrounded on three sides by ice-encrusted ocean. The place feels culturally arctic, closer to how I imagine Alaska feels than any Asian country. Wakkanai’s port was once connected by ferry ride to the contested Russian territory of Sakhalin.

But the plain truth is that there’s nothing at the edges of the map that you won’t find in greater quantity and quality in towards the center. And once you arrive in this powerfully empty place, where there’s little else open in the evening besides izakayas and the pachinko parlor, you too will have to confront the question that waits in the cold: some version what the hell am I doing here?

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My plan for reckoning with this howling vacuum was simple: retreat at first opportunity. I reserved a ticket on an overnight bus back to Sapporo leaving in a few hours, then sledded my suitcase through the thickening snow to the only thing open within walking distance, a small hostel with a nicely-appointed waiting room.

I settled in with some instant coffee and began to translate the hostel’s guestbooks with my phone; two thick spiral bound notebooks filled with dense blocks of text in mostly Japanese, Chinese and English, many accompanied by illustrations.

The entries were long and startlingly intimate. The remote geography seemed to offer a level of anonymity that aided in confessions. I was validated to read that no one else seemed in possession of a particularly meaningful purpose in traveling to Wakkanai.

“I’m here at the northernmost point for reasons that may seem even more trivial to others,” wrote one man. “I wanted to feel the winds of northern Hokkaido.”

His entry went on for two pages and comprised three entries. He wrote of reaching an age where life had become a series of big, lonely questions. Should he put his parents in a nursing home? Was he satisfied with his career and personal life? Would his childhood self be happy with the future he had chosen?

“I don’t want to make a big mistake. So instead I make a lot of small ones. I don’t have the courage to make a big mistake.”

Professional Japan explainers like to distinguish between public and private spheres of truth. Tatemae is what you’ll confess publicly and it’s determined by your social instincts and goals. Honne translates to “true sounds” and represents the feelings in your heart.

The guestbook seemed to blend the two. It was an conspicuously public venue filled with private diaristic confessions. I was surprised to find that it was the Japanese messages which were the longest and most intimate. The English, Chinese, Tagalog and Thai writers mostly left short missives describing their trips

He was concerned that that his caution was sabotaging his ambition, he wrote. His life of small risks and small failures had not brought much success. He kept getting the feeling that nothing he did worked out.

He wrote of searching for fateful signs in leaping deer, fortuitous train transfers and the presence of the hostel across the street. Before the trip he had visited a fortune teller. He had began to subscribe to a cosmology of fortuitous directions. It’s a belief system that divides the compass into zones of varying fortune and misfortune based on the planet’s celestial alignment. I could the see the appeal of a philosophy in which luck is as simple as moving in the right cardinal direction. The fortune teller told him to go north. Hence Wakkanai.

Cape Soya is part of the four monuments that mark the extremities of Japan - the others are Capa Sata, the southernmost point near Kagoshima ; Cape Nossappu in eastern Hokkaido, and Cape Irizaki, on the island of Okinawa. It turns out I’ve been within few hours ride of each compass point. But I’ve never felt the compulsion to collect the prestige of visiting the monuments themselves.

The architects behind Cape Soya have planned for the traveler’s ambivalence at the significance of its geography. The park contains more than ten monuments to stimulate the feeling of narrative completion that every traveler craves.

They memorialize the following; a popular henka song associated with the area; the 500,000th dairy cattle and the millionth ton of milk produced in Hokkaido; a Korean Airlines flight shot down nearby by the Soviet Air Force in 1983 and the 269 passengers killed; a downed American submarine, a defunct gas station; a Japanese explorer known for mapping Sakhalin (known as Karafuto when it was under Japanese control), as well as the French explorer credited for ‘discovering’ the strait between Hokkaido and Sakhalin. And there’s one more cow-related commemoration, a tribute to a species of dairy cattle specifically bred for Hokkaido’s frigid conditions. It’s clear that the key to creating a monumental sense of occasion is just more monuments.

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Wakkanai is also the testing site for the wilderness exam you must pass in order to be certified as a hunter working on government pest control programs, according to one young hunter‘s entry. I texted Kohei, who I introduced in the previous post, and he confirmed that it wasn’t him - he had slept in his car when made the trip.

Several graduating seniors wrote of the seishun kippu, a ticket designed for high schoolers who want to cheaply travel Japan before they head off to college. It’s called the 18 ticket but anyone of any age can buy it if they’re willing to restrict their travel to slow, unreserved local trains. The ticket - which costs about 12,000 yen and is valid over 5 days - pairs well with a vast network of youth hostels that offer cheap accommodations as well as structured activities and a lively atmosphere.

One entry described a hostel on Rebun Island a 2-hour ferry’s ride west that’s known for an 8-hour walking tour titled the Love and Romance course. It’s a hike with a cult following built from a highly communal atmosphere, apparently. One retiree wrote of feeling so emotionally overwhelmed by his experience of it that he was unable to stop crying on the ferry ride back.

“I sorted out my thoughts about this trip, and I realized that I am, after all, a traveler. My journey doesn’t end when I return to Chiba. It continues forever,” he concluded.

Work anxieties bled onto the page. A 24-year-old medical worker who works with rehab patients came to Wakkanai to confront this feeling that he had forgotten her bright, vague childhood dreams.

“I’ve started to lose track of why I’m working. I’m worried that I’ll just work and earn money for no particular reason and end up living a mundane life.”

I’ll spare you the details of my own entry. I assure you it was no less trite and self-aggrandizing as the rest.

Purpose is something every traveler needs eventually. Pleasure, leisure, and curiosity are fine pretexts but the longer you stay on the road, the more you crave something with greater descriptive power, force enough to give your narrative some shape and meaning. Wakkanai offers that if nothing else.

I looked up to find that it was past midnight. Either the storm had masked the noise of my bus’s arrival or it had been canceled. There’d be no escaping the void tonight. And tomorrow would bring the worst snowstorm Northern Japan had seen in 40 years.

HOKKAIDO, JAPAN A single powered train car chugs through deepening cobalt dusk. When I step off at Hirafu Station at little after 6 p.m., an unmanned stop north Niseko, a ski resort town, it’s completely dark. The train rushes off to Otaru and soon it’s quiet besides the wind’s keening and the crunch of ice beneath my boots.

There’s nothing I could walk to at this station besides a few private residences and a road that leads to Niseko. But inside where the ticket office once stood there’s a hostel called Station Inn Hirafu.

Kohei greets me at the door, the hostel’s 37-year-old manager, a lanky, bearded part-time hunter with long hair and a trimmed goatee who rolls his own cigarettes.

The hostel is located in one of 42 stations that Japan Rail Hokkaido has targeted for potential closure because the average rate of daily passenger crossings has fallen below three per day. Hirafu has escaped closure so far but train service will end when the shinkansen to Sapporo arrives, closing nearly every station along the Hakodate Line between Oshamambe and Otaru.

There’s still time, is Kohei’s read on the situation. He feeds another log into the black iron stove and offers me some spring water from Mount Yotei from an plastic cooler jug. In the kitchen hangs a commemorative towel listing the date of the shinkansen’s previous planned arrival date in 2033, followed by a question mark. Last year in March, train officials pushed back the shinkansen’s opening to March 2039.

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Rail service in Hokkaido has always been in some form of jeopardy. More than half of the 2500 km rail network loses money and Japan Rail Hokkaido’s operating losses often tally upwards of 50 billion yen. The red ink has spread beyond the reach of the fund set up to bolster it and the two other the ‘island JR’ agencies formed during Japan’s era of railway privatization. Kyushu, where the shinkansen was completed in 2011, is now profitable. But Shikoku and Hokkaido are losing not just money but population density as young people leave their hometowns for places better connected to opportunity. In places where people risk being outnumbered by animals, the challenges of the frontier are returning.

Kohei is from Obihiro, where the population recently fell below 160,000 for the first time in 40 years. As a hunter on a government-sponsored pest elimination squad, knows what it means to live in a perilous equilibrium sustained by constant intervention.

For more than a hundred years wolves have been extinct in Japan, forcing the government to enlist hunters to manage the ecosystem derangements that stem from the loss of an apex predator. An Ohio rancher named Edwin Dun hired to advise the Hokkaido government on modern agricultural techniques led a systematic poisoning campaign that involved poisoning horse carcasses with strychnine. Eradicating wolves took less than a year. Dun was named the United States envoy to Japan.

Hokkaido University researchers found that the absence of wolves caused an explosion in both the population and range of deer all over Japan. Their constant grazing causes billions of yen of damage to farms every year and makes it harder for tree species diversity to recover.

Now humans must be the wolves. But even with rifles, modern traps, and GPS, hunters can only do a fraction of the ecosystem maintenance done by the Ezo wolf. Deer will never fear humans as they did wolves, which extend a unique influence over the environment that ecologists have deemed a “landscape of fear.” Some local governments in Hokkaido have even tested the use of a howling robot wolf with gleaming red eyes to chase animals from farms and urban areas.

The wolf’s extinction has also distorted the behavior of Japan’s largest terrestrial mammals. Thirteen people died to bear attacks in Japan in 2025 and 200 more were injured, the worst year for such attacks on record. Officials have labeled bear attacks a public emergency and relaxed the controls on where and when hunters may fire guns.

Wolf kills were a primary source of calories for the Hokkaido Brown Bear, Japan’s largest terrestrial mammal, and the Japanese Black Bear, found in Honshu and Shikoku. Hungry deer now outcompete the bears for acorns, nuts, fruits and berries. Bears, having lost their fear of human beings, ranging further into cities every year.

This fragile, managed equilibrium is what creates Hokkaido’s beautiful, monotonous scenery, which can resemble a forest rendered by a graphics engine. About 70 percent of Hokkaido’s woodlands are natural, but most of the trees you see from the train are plantation monocultures of fir, spruce and larch, cultivated in a grid and selected for straight trunks to aid in lumber harvesting. I saw herds of leaping deer from the train. After the thrill faded, I noticed that in the snow, there were no other animals’ tracks besides the heart-shaped marks left by their cloven hooves. They’ve thrived in the heavy quiet of a landscape cleansed of fear.

Kohei feels mostly regret when he has to kill an animal. He’s only seen a Hokkaido bear once, two years ago, and he shows me the size of its head with both arms. But Obihiro is an agricultural center and he’s seen what ranging deer do to farmers’ harvests.

There are never enough hunters because owning weapons is difficult and expensive. There are separate exams, fees and licenses for using traps, owning guns and hunting. And to join the government hunting team there’s a wilderness test in at the frozen northern tip of Japan in Wakkanai. Ammunition purchases must be reported to local police. Shotgun shells are 300 yen each and bullets for the rifle can cost up 1000 yen a piece. Every time Kohei misses, he imagines packs of ramen noodles flying out of the end of his gun.

Kohei originally trained as a sushi chef in Tokyo, and he came to Niseko a few years ago to start a food delivery service. He became interested in hunting because during his apprenticeship, he had the banal yet profound epiphany that the food we eat is alive. He had bought a fish from his local supermarket to practice preparing it as sashimi. When he cut into its belly, dozens of tiny fish spilled out.

Kohei’s mentor told him that he had accidentally bought a fish that had been prepared for cooking rather than sashimi. The smaller animals that spilled from the fish’s belly were not its children, but its food.

“Although I understand intellectually how a fish reproduces, that moment gave me many small but profound shocks,” Kohei said.

Kohei says being a hunter is an acknowledgement that someone must kill all of the meat that humans eat. He doesn’t consider the job done unless the meat is sold and otherwise prepared for consumption. He’d like to turn the station into a hunter’s lodge, where people can deepen their relationship with nature and learn about the work done by the Kutchan hunting crew.

“For us, nature is a blessing, and a powerful force that we must negotiate with daily,” Kohei said.

At the moment Hirafu Station Inn’s primary customer is the train otaku. The station is famous for being the only Japan Rail stop that allows open-air barbecues directly on the platform with a view of the ski resort in Niseko. Much of the memorabilia decorating the walls was brought by guests, who have been anticipating the station’s closure since 2012, when plans for the Hokkaido shinkansen’s route was finalized. The hostels rooms are named for the area’s famous sleeper trains, Hokutosei and Cassiopeia, which were both retired from service a decade ago.

Kohei isn’t much of a train otaku but he understands being a nerd. He was heavily into fashion as a young man and there’s a KAWS statue replica filled with sand from a distant beach sitting on a folding table next to the inn’s entrance. I told him I own the Nike Blazers that the same artist partnered with a Tokyo fashion label to create a few years ago. He’s been known to spend entire weekends at the manga kissa. He shows me a well-thumbed volume of Oishinbo, my favorite anime - it’s a story about the honeypot ant.

The log in the stove cracks, sizzles and collapses in a shower of orange sparks. Another group of passengers arrives around 8 p.m. Because the station is unstaffed and Kohei would rather not abandon stranded passengers, he often does double duty as volunteer station master. He’s posted the train schedule and set up a tablet to ring an alarm a few minutes before each train is set to arrive.

Hirafu Station is 120 years old and its fate has been in question for a least a few decades. The nearby municipalities probably wouldn’t mind if Hirafu was shut down. They’ve announced plans to raise funds to preserve two nearby train stations, Kohei said, but nothing about Hirafu. And the Niseko tourism map I picked up in Oshamambe Station doesn’t mention Station Inn Hirafu.

But Hirafu still gets busy in the summers because of the barbecues. And Kohei intentionally operates the guest house during the snowy season to try to boost the station’s ridership numbers. Snow shuts down the Hakodate Line between Oshamambe and Otaru several times a season. Sometimes Kohei picks up stranded guests in his car, if the roads are clear.

He knows these efforts aren’t sustainable. But every few years, the shinkansen’s completion date gets pushed back again. And until the station’s fate is sealed, there’s still time.

This morning all I can feel is a sense of overwhelming grief. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered by ICE officers as they were defending my and my family’s right to be Americans. And even as I mourn them, I know that mourning cannot be the only thing I do.

But what choice do any of us have except go to Minnesota and be shot by the gestapo? If we pack the streets and the ballot boxes will that change the fact that Trump has packed the courts, police and military with liars and cronies? If a hundred more new mothers, doting grandsons and kindly doctors are killed, will ICE put the guns away? What can arguments accomplish without a moral conscience to appeal to? What democratic mechanisms for change still exist?

You can dunk on me for not knowing. But if you educate me I promise I will listen. All I know is we can’t accomplish anything by tearing each other apart.

A common reaction in times like this is to critique newspaper headlines and the words used in TV broadcasts. I do understand the impulse. Maybe we hope to regain some control of reality by exercising command over the language used to describe it. But we do this because we know that our media is one of the last institutions that might be responsive to our grief and outrage. And an institution that responds to us is not our enemy. The people sincerely trying to report the news are not required to use the language that best reflects our rage and grief. If the headlines called Trump a puerile dictator and ICE an unaccountable secret police, what would that change?

Another common reaction in this time is to start posting a lot and yell at the people who aren’t posting about this as much as you. This is an understandable reaction also aimed at regaining some control over reality. It is important to speak up and speak loudly. But it is always arrogant and wrong to assume that you are the only one with a conscience. What cause are you serving by tearing people down that wouldn’t be better served by sitting down with them?

And I’d also ask you to articulate what you think posting accomplishes from a practical standpoint. Is it to create social momentum that pressure more powerful voices to join us in speaking up? Is it because speaking up is just the right thing to do and gets us started on figuring out a better plan?

It’s important to come up with an answer. And it is time to stop assuming that it is the job of people with bigger platforms than you to have all the answers. This administration’s corruption and abuses of power are totally unprecedented. All we can do now is put our heads together and combine our thoughts. There is no one to yell at about this besides people who might be your allies.

I say post what you want. As long as you understand this is not just some news cycle that can be weathered with a vaguely attentive gesture. This is the new reality that every post going forward exists in.

I spent hours watching videos of Renee Good’s murder from every angle. It was not that I doubted the New York Times’s or anyone else’s analysis of the moment. The first seconds of the first clip I watched made it absolutely clear that she was murdered by an angry and resentful ICE officer for no good reason.

But I kept watching because I was trying to see what the video looks like through unsympathetic eyes. I wanted to see if I could relate to the thoughts circulating on conservative media and the people who watch it.

I did this because I don’t know any other way of changing a relationship except by communicating. And I no longer have the desire to scorch my ideological enemies with the flames of my correct opinions.

Now, I would know them and speak with them if I could. I would share this pain with them and ask if it means anything at all. And if I can get them to recognize my grief as human, then I’ll count that as the first step to making the loss of Alex and Renee’s lives mean something.

🚆🚊🚉🚇🛤️💺🚞🚋🚃🚂🚈🚅🚄🚟🚝

Riding trains in Japan is one of the most satisfying and challenging travel experiences there is. Beyond the dozen-odd public and private railways serving Tokyo, there’s a whole universe of themed experiences: retro-modern railcars hugging sheer ocean cliffs and coastlines; seasonal services for cherry blossoms, changing leaves and drifting sea ice; vintage steam locomotives chugging through internationally recognized marshlands and nostalgic countryside. Then there’s funiculars, rope cars, trolleys, sleeper services and the wider world of transit station culture. And I’ve already written extensively about the thousands of rare and unsual ekiben along the track.

Paid subscribers get tips on where to sit, how to book and what you can see. I’ve also included a link to a spreadsheet of more than 100 different fascinating and unusual trains you can research yourself.

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PREPARATIONS

Gird yourself to compete with the most dedicated rail fans in the world. Make an obnoxiously detailed itinerary and decide all you’d like to see, do and eat, on which day, at which time. Train bookings open 30 days in advance, and popular trains, routes and times of day sell out within hours.

1. Scenic/themed/special trains almost all require advance reservations and typically run a few months a year, on weekends, once or twice a day. The special routes are often located at less-traveled parts of Japan in order to help stimulate ridership over the whole network, so you’ll likely have to step off the well-trod tourist routes to get them.

2. You can typically research which parts of the scenic routes have the best views and choose where to sit (and when to be awake) based on which side faces the ocean, forest, mountain, etc. Target locals outside of rush hours when you can be assured of a window seat. Reserve limited express trains in advance to get a seat.

3. Bookings open at 10 a.m. Japan time, so if you live on the West Coast, you have to log in at 5 p.m. Pacific Time the day before to really get dibs.

4. Train bookings are often the toughest reservation hurdle, so book rail tickets first and then find accommodations based on the routes you’ve locked in.

TYPES OF TRAINS

1. Local/Rapid Trains 🚃: Local indicates that the train stops at each station along the line and rapid means it skips most stops. You typically don’t have to reserve a seat but some rides might offer more comfortable seats if you do reserve, like the green car on the Tokyo’s Rapid Chuo Line. Most locals aren’t worth going out of your way for, but certain remote rural lines are among the most scenic and affordable experiences you can have. Example: Tsugaru Railway east of Aomori runs a stove train in the winter, with a wood-burning stove in each cabin where passengers can enjoy freshly grilled squid and cuttlefish. In the summer it becomes a furin (Japanese blown-glass wind chime) train.

2. Limited Express 🚇: Regional commuter trains with fewer stops and more comfortable seating, covering greater distances and offering longer rides. Some have unique names and histories, like the Limited Express Okhotsk in Hokkaido, which offers a views of leaping deer, frozen lakes and icefishers at the northernmost coast of Japan. “Limited” in a train’s name typically means reserved seats that you can book online, in person, or at the ticket machines before the gates, but there are non-reserved seats and cars. The limited seat reservation sometimes requires an extra fee, but not always.

   1. Pay attention to train names, which reference local nature and culture and help you identify where the trains go. The Limited Express Tokachi is named for the fertile plain around the city of Obihiro, an agricultural breadbasket in Hokkaido, as well as an Ainu word that means marsh.

3. Upgraded limited express 🚆: Fancier, comfier trains running along the regular limited express routes operated by both private and public companies, such the LaView Limited Express from Ikebukuro to Chichibu, a Seibu Railways train designed by Kazuo Sejima, Pritzker Prize-winning architect. You can reserve in advance or buy day of, paying a modest fee on top of the regular fare. A Japan Rail Pass option is Saphir Odoriko, which runs along the southern coast from Tokyo to the scenic Izu Peninsula.

4. Steam Locomotives 🚂: The nostalgia factor makes these routes extremely competitive. Some are publicly operated as excursion trains and bookable with the Japan Rail Pass, but there’s also preservation-oriented operations like Oigawa Railway between Shizuoka and Hamamatsu, which operates regular steam trains on private tracks, with reasonable ticket prices.

5. Excursion/Joyful/Storytelling Trains 🚞: These trains have unique designs created by famous architects and designers meant to highlight local culture and design. Some of them are restaurants on wheels, and others cater to bikers, stargazers, hikers, children and other tourism categories. Most run just a few months a year and are located at remote parts of the rail network to help stimulate overall ridership.

   1. Each Japan Rail agency (Kyushu, Hokkaido, East, West, Central and Shikoku) might have a different name and booking method for their themed trains. In Kyushu, ‘design and storytelling’ trains are upgraded limited express, rapid and local trains that run on the same tracks as regular commuter routes. Shikoku ‘sightseeing’ trains are booked in a separate reservation system. JR Hokkaido themed trains can be booked with the Japan Rail Pass. JR East calls them joyful trains, and you might also find them labeled as ‘excursion’ or ‘tourist’ trains.

   2. Private railways also run special themed trains with their own websites and reservation systems. These tickets aren’t covered by the pass.

   3. Themed and special trains typically release their schedules as a PDF on individual websites one month in advance. Their websites might change from year to year because struggling or low-ridership excursion trains get repainted and rebranded. Locating the schedule is the first step.

6. Luxury Trains 🚋: These trains operate like land cruises, bundling meals, sleeper accommodations and sightseeing over several days. The Seven Stars Kyushu was designed by famed train designer Eiji Mitooka and does two and four day tours through Kyushu. For some of these trains the only way to book them is to enter a lottery and hope, and if you do win the prices are astronomical. A ride on the Twilight Mizukaze costs more than 400,000 yen.

DO I NEED THE JAPAN RAIL PASS?

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MURORAN, HOKKAIDO Today I learned that winds must blow faster 35 miles per hour for a snowstorm to be classified a blizzard, according to U.S. weather standards. In Muroran the winds were a balmy 32 mph, so my weather app forecast “a wintry mix.”

Not much separates a blizzard from a wintry mix, I decided, as I paced and shivered in the walkway over the tracks after my train left early and stranded me at Wanishi Station, an unheated, unmanned station with no bathroom.

I had walked here in a snowstorm blowing with so much horizontal force that it felt I was charging uphill against an encamped machine gun. The wheels on my suitcase were immobilized by ice so I dragged it like a toboggan. When I made it to the station, the storm howled and banged on the windows and doors, infiltrating tiny gaps to leave snowdrifts on every surface.

I came here to pick up Bokoi-meshi, an rare surf clam ekiben on a remote stop along the Muroran line that’s only made in quantities of 40 per day, as well as attempt to interview its creators. But I encountered a cold of such force and undeniable power that the immediate priority became survival. This is easily the coldest place I’ve ever been, but by Hokkaido standards, Muroran is mild. The cold temperature records are all set further north and inland among mountain towns.

This part of the Muroran Line in Hokkaido is a funny little railroad that is a very bad place to get trapped because the trains run so infrequently. The technical term is branch line reversal with a stub terminus. Trains roll backwards at Higashi-Muroran station to serve these four stops along this mountainous cape in Southern Hokkaido, which happens to be the home of Japan Steel, one of the only five companies in the world that can make steel strong enough for nuclear reactors.

Japan Steelworks was founded here to take advantage of a natural deepwater harbor here that aids in shipping heavy materials. Muroran feels like the Pittsburgh of Japan but with an ocean view. Much of the population and economic activity gravitates towards Higashi Muroran Station, which is connected to the trunk of the Muroran Line and sees much more foot traffic.

Hokkaido, with a population of about 5 million, is cold, remote and difficult to access by rail. But I love coming here in January because people live thrillingly close to nature here and any functioning rail network in such hostile weather feels like a miracle of engineering. Plus, there are so few opportunities to wear a big jacket if you live in Southern California. In Hokkaido you get to watch these squat, powerful trains called Red Bears barrel down the tracks, sending enormous plumes of white to either side. You learn to grandma-shuffle across the ice, stepping on the crunchy white bits instead of the mysteriously slippery dark spots.

Hokkaido Rail is heavily subsidized by the national government because it’s far more costly to run. Ridership is low, the cold degrades equipment faster and like most of Japan, the population is aging and declining rapidly. The agency recently proposed shutting more than 40 unmanned stations to save money. Most of the region doesn’t yet have a shinkansen connection and you can sense how rail can make or break local economies. Around Oshamambe Station, there are anticipatory promotional materials for aborted shinkansen openings in 2030, 2031, 2035 and 2038. The latest estimates say 2039.

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The sun feels like it’s always and never shining. The skies glow gold, but in winter, low-hanging snow, fog and cloud cover diffuse and reflect the light in such a way that you might never see the source. When it does appear the sun is cowled in a blurry glaring halo and I hardly recognize it. As a California resident it is truly strange to look at the sun and feel none of its heat.

The cold changes what people eat, and Hokkaido residents say that people tend to gain weight when they visit or move here. The body needs calories that can quickly convert to heat, which means carbohydrates, starches and fats. You start craving highly filling food that also warms you. What that adds up to is a lot of curry, stew and fried foods, often all of them together.

Sapporo soup curry (not pictured, yet) is a broth thickened with curry and served with various stewed or deep-fried components. It’s served separately from the rice, and the curry dish is often crammed to the brim with thick, chunky cuts of pumpkin, lotus root, carrot, and your choice of meat. There are more than a hundred soup curry restaurants in Sapporo, where the dish originated in 1970 as a staff meal with a medicinal purpose made with a heavier spice mix than typical Japanese curry. But it’s common throughout Hokkaido and also available elsewhere in Japan.

In Obihiro, there’s an Indian-style curry that’s tart and creamy like butter chicken, served in tureens reminiscent of British colonial tableware. This dish is served around Hokkaido but it originates with an Obihiro restaurant chain called Curry Shop Indian, which is said to be modeled after a similar shop in Tokyo that has since closed. It’s a beef curry but you can order it with hamburger, cheese, tonkatsu or veggies. This is probably my favorite Japanese curry dish.

Obihiro is also known for butadon, a grilled pork rice bowl topped with peas, seasoned with a deep, dark tare with mild bitter/burnt notes that reminded me a bit of coffee. The city is an agricultural breadbasket, known for corn and sweet potatoes in addition to being the region’s original pork producer. The creator of the dish wanted to serve broiled eel over rice with tare, but found eel was difficult to source so far up north, so he used pork belly and loin.

Muroran is known for Muroran curry ramen, created at Ajinodaiō in 1965, a few steps from Muroran Station. It was closed the day I braved the not-quite-blizzard to go, so I ended up at a place called Rantantei outside Wanishi Station. This dish was popularized through a Muroran City tourism promotional effort in 2006, and it’s served at a majority of ramen restaurants in the area, according to the city’s tourism site. Aside from the curry, it’s a pretty typical ramen with a smoky flavor, served with green onions, bean sprouts and chashu pork. Nissin also added an instant Muroran Curry Ramen flavor in 2010.

Perched on the chopstick cups at Rantantei and at various surprising locations around Muroran, you’ll find the local character Bolta. It’s a sculpture made from nails, nuts, washers and other industrial parts, bent and welded into more than 100 different collectible poses, a nod to the steel heritage here. There’s a workshop where you can see Boltas being assembled outside Wanishi Station.

In Kushiro to the east, there’s a yoshoku dish called supakatsu, which is spaghetti topped with tonkatsu and drowned in marinara sauce, served sizzling on an iron plate. Kushiro is also known for zanji, a fried chicken dish with a stronger and spicier marinade than karaage. I ordered both because when it was negative 10 degrees Celsius in Kushiro that day and it seemed like a truly fantastic idea.

The name zangi is adapted from the Chinese word for fried chicken, zaji, with an n-sound added for good luck. In Japanese the「ん」character often appears at the end of created words because it makes them feel more rounded and complete. Many food words end in that nasal syllable, like tendon, udon, ramen, and oden.

Supakatsu, also romanized as Spakatsu, was invented at Izumiya in Kushiro. It’s a four-story European-themed restaurant with such impeccably kitschy vibes that I realized I actually don’t need to visit Europe. I want to visit the fantasy of Europe in the Japanese imagination, a gravy-drenched place with deliciously blurry cultural borders, where the parmesan cheese drops the pretense and just calls itself powdered.

Hello! Thanks again for being such a staunch supporter of this newsletter and my work. Drop your address in this form and I’ll mail you a copy of the Phenomenological Guide to Ekiben that I’ll get printed at Staples. The economics of that don’t make a whole lot of sense, but since Dim Sum Club members are the few and the proud, I wanted you guys to be able to get some of my work in your hands. I’ll also be sending the sticker badges.

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If you’d rather print it yourself, or just read it digitally, below is the PDF. It’s designed as a bifold, so you can just select landscape mode in printer settings and ask it to print two pages per sheet, double-sided. Then, fold and staple down the middle. I can also send along the sticker badge images if you are so interested - just ask!

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Thanks as always for your support. I hope you have some fun with this. First, here’s the 8.15 x 11 magazine version.

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This is the last free edition of the Lunch Box Anniversary promotion. Paywalls to Atlas and Letter are going back up in 2026, and a new edition of the Atlas, called Views, is on the way. Thanks for reading, and hope to see you back here soon.

Recently I learned to clip the background from an image using the auto select/magic wand tool in Procreate. I’ve tried sites that lob the image to a server where a generative model spits it out after collecting my data, with uneven results. ChatGPT Ghiblifies the image in bizarre ways to gain a better score. And it’s $20 a month to unlock the tool in Canva.

Learning, in this case, was easier and cheaper than taking the shortcut. And I’d argue - as someone who has been learning to design, edit video, record voiceover and illustrate - the scenic route has never felt faster. LLM’s can deploy the resources of the internet in a way that makes learning to be a better writer, artist or editor feel nearly frictionless.

There’s a version of this future where LLM’s help everyone become smarter and more skilled. Instead we have an ocean of slop that threatens to completely drown out human-made expression by sometime next year maybe.

What I hate most about the default settings of chatGPT is the way they encourage you to forgo the creative process. It smuggles this ethic of outsourcing and optimization that ultimately trivializes the work it takes to make art. It wants you to believe you can consume artistry and authorship like a candy bar. Plus, everything it makes kind of sucks.

My bet is that slop can only do numbers for so long. There’s a serious glut of LLM content on our feeds and a massive bottleneck forming around the content creation/media industry as AI puts people out of work. Through sheer repetition, this flood of new content has transformed so many phrases that were merely well-worn into cloying, rotted cliches. AI writing grates on the ear like never before as we all get better at recognizing it. Every em-dash and “not this, but that” phrase inflicts new trauma on my battered psyche.

Lazy uses of AI tools can only create easily imitated products. And there’s a unspoken inhumanity in it all that is so off-putting to me, like people sending out the body-snatchers version of themselves to run their errands and live their lives. I struggle to respond to a ChatGPT-written email as if it’s anything more than someone’s digital fart cloud.

The irony is that LLM’s do make it easier than ever to overcome the tiny frustrations and tripwires that eventually defeat your desire to learn a new skill. You could have the AI write your emails for you. Or, you could ask the AI to help you with the equally important and longer-lasting work of learning to express yourself clearly and according to the circumstances - helpful outside the inbox in the real world where we all live.

ChatGPT helped me figure out that in the free version of Canva, you can select the background and mess with the sliders to make the image background disappear. After a few repetitions I was fast enough that www.clipanyimage.com seemed a gruesome hassle.

Here’s another data point: I’ve probably worked more of this holiday season than I have in a decade. I’m urgent to publish in a way that feels almost existential. I keep thinking, what if these next few months or years as a writer are my last? I’m seized by a desire to compress everything I’ve ever wanted to make in my career into a few months or years. I can’t describe how perverse it feels, to read and write all day of the encroachment of robot labor and AI, then lose sleep trying to slightly increase my expertise at Procreate and Capcut, while trying to work on a novel, essays, op-eds, a documentary, freelance work, a zine.

Most of this work does not come with any guarantee of financial reward. But what I gain is fluency in a new format, and perhaps another chance at continuing to tell stories for a living. Each new creative practice cultivates a new way perceiving the world and heightens my sensitivity to what good work looks like.

Amittedly much of what keeps me up over the keyboard at night is stubbornness. I think there’s a point in every creative person’s life when they become so incensed by the metric weight of absolute crap out there that they decide to finally get off their ass and make something. And if this is a fight or flight moment, I won’t be running. I’ve always been a slow walker.

I couldn’t describe myself as fighting AI. I use ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude for research constantly, but usually with Google in a tab, so I can actually verify the sites the LLM’s pull from. I don’t pay and I never use it to write. I firmly believe you will never create anything great through copy and paste.

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I strip away the personhood affectations and instruct it to generate text using mainly quotes, always with links. I use it as an initial shot-gun blast search of content and information; as a quick way to drill down on a detail; and at times like a dowsing rod, testing hypotheses and floating thoughts to see what generates.

In every use-case, what makes LLM’s powerful is not anything OpenAI did, but the internet itself; this tangled network of data that people created and decided to upload one day; not for views necessarily, but because it was awesome, or useful, or interesting. I started to use ChatGPT way less after discovering it hides links and sources and instead tries to generate a bunch of text so it can look better according to some arcane engagement metric.

I’m not afraid of these tools any more. But I fear the world we’re creating by using them in lazy, selfish and shortsighted ways. Three years into the widespread deployment of AI as free LLM’s, it’s safe to say there’s no creative or productive renaissance on the way.

What we have instead are jobs and industries being eliminated and a new, excellent pretext for layoffs. Weird, uncanny McDonald’s ads and clanky, unnatural lines in the script of Stranger Things. A Youtube in which one out of every five videos shown to new users was AI, according to the Guardian. An internet where at one point more articles were being generated by AI than written by humans. An insidious ideology of excessive ease, shaping not just what kind of content we make but also what we’re willing to consume.

This is a world that still badly needs writers, artists and thinkers; not just to identify good art, but to show people how it’s made, and what it costs, which is never nothing.

I MADE A ZINE: Did I mention it enough times above? I made an zine: it’s the Phenomenological Guide to Ekiben as an expanded, illustrated version with a map, prefectural checklist, ekiben log and coloring book, as well as a set of sticker badges to track your progress. It’s modeled after the stamp rally booklets I saw in Japan, as well as the Pokemon League Passport booklet you used to get at Toys R Us for playing the card game there. $5/month subscribers will get the 16-page version as a free PDF, which you can print as 4 pages and staple as a 4-inch by 5.5-inch booklet. $10/month subscribers get the 20-page expanded bifold. Details here.

I WROTE A HISTORY OF LA CHILI: I was so happy to have a story in the issue 4 of Synonym Magazine. This magazine is a beautiful, passionate work of artistry and community. Great things usually happen when people just decide to make an awesome thing for the sake of it, and when they do you, my advice is try to get in on the ground floor of it, which was I was trying to do here. I got to work with one of my best friends and photographic idols Bethany Mollenkof on this piece, but I unfortunately dreamed up the ugliest possible assignment to visualize. She did amazing with it anyway. I was surprised to learn of the Greek origins to the burger stands that popularized chili in LA, and tracked the story to South Gate.

AROUND JAPAN IN 180 EKIBEN is the documentary I’ve been chipping away at and here’s my trailer. Paid subscribers will get updates and sneak peeks as well as help encourage me through the hundreds of hours of editing it will take to get done.

AI VOICE in NYT MAG: Sam Kriss is a pretty good writer, isn’t he? Commissioning this piece felt like sending the shogun’s most skilled samurai to face an armed rifle contingent (or perhaps carrier-launched drone missile). All told, I thought it was an incredible display of skill and precision, the writerly equivalent of slicing a hail of bullets in half while reciting battle poetry. He dissects AI cliches and reassembles the parts to reveal them for the shambling reanimated corpses they are. He can decapitate a robot sentence so cleanly that it’ll take to paragraphs to notice. But I felt like crying at the end. Because with AI writing’s corpse twitching at his feet, even Kriss knelt and admitted that defeat was probably inevitable.

Lyn Foulkes died: This man is one of the authors of the moment I really began to fall in love with Los Angeles. A decade ago some friends were visiting from the Bay Area and we were visiting LACMA, just trying to go to the bathroom, when we saw Lyn playing his instrument, “the Machine.” We ended up just standing there and holding our pee for half an hour, basking in that weird aura that this man put out. What was this? Why was this? These questions could not be answered with a simple Google and that seemed to be the point. In a place like Los Angeles that sometimes demands that you be entertaining, Lyn showed me that it is brave and interesting to be yourself, even if when that is downright confusing.

Happy holidays! Today I’m releasing the trailer for “Around Japan in 180 Ekiben”, the documentary series I’ve been putting together about the month or so I spent on trains in Japan, collecting ekiben and their stories. It’s called “Windows.” Look at this guy, naming a trailer.

Episode One, out next year, will cover the Keio Ekiben Tournament, the Seto Sleeper, and ekiben between Tokyo and Okayama. Making videos and content has been a fun and painful journey I hope write more about here. Plus…

I made an ekiben zine!

My $5-a-month subscribers will be getting a separate email on Dec. 31 with a digital download for 16-page zine version of The Phenomenological Guide to Ekiben with new original illustrations, photography and updated articles. It’ll be 8.5 x 11-inch PDF that I’ll lay out for a 4.75 x 8.5-inch zine that can be folded and stapled from four double-sided color pages. You can also have it printed at Staples for a few bucks as a bifold or as a magazine.

If you subscribe at a paid tier before the email goes out next week, you get the PDF of the zine for free.

Dim Sum Club members - my premium tier at $10 a month - will get an expanded edition with 20 pages including ekiben tracker, coloring book, crossword puzzle of common terms, and a set of sticker badges to mark your progress. This is redesigned as a bi-fold with as a 5.5 x 8.5 inch booklet.

I designed it as a handbook with a collecting mechanic inspired by the stamp rally print products I saw in Japan. Every eight ekiben you record earns you a new rank and a badge. This version also has a prefectural checklist and a map with the location of Bokoi-meshi, an ultra-rare Hokkaido ekiben produced in quantities of just 40 per day.

If you sign for a Dim Sum Club membership before I send out the email on Dec 31, I’ll send you a working version of the print version of Phenomenological Guide. I’ll also send you, while supplies last, print-offs of the sticker badges from my personal supply.

TO GET THE PRINT ZINE: Sign up for a Dim Sum Club subscription. Then enter your shipping info in the link that I’ll send on Dec. 31 with the Dim Sum Club email, which will also contain the download link for the PDF, which is free with the subscription.

I’d like to offer this as a more official print product. I’m imagining something passport sized like the Japan Rail Pass, something with enough heft to act as pocket reference and meal diary for a few trips. I’m hoping it will work like a Pokedex for ekiben. I’d love to make something like the interactive print booklets I collected as a kid; like the Pokemon League Passport that Toys R’ Us gave you for playing the card game there; or the themed, illustrated diaries you’d find in the stationary section at the grocery store.

Paid subscribers will get updates and first look at the print product when it arrives. Dim Sum Club members will also get dibs, as well as sneak peaks at Episode One of Around Japan in 180 Ekiben.

Thanks to everyone for one year of Lunch Box. Here’s to another!

So before you settle in, I recommend you go on an epic holiday pantry run. The focus here is not on the meal itself but the leftover period where the real eating is done. It’s about catering the laziest time of year with the best food to eat lazily. And with traffic so forgiving, Los Angeles feels like a small town. People working stores and restaurants have time to chat, and you notice little things, like how all the heavy cream and the sharp, mild and Colby cheddar disappears from certain Ralph’s locations.

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This is my holiday pantry run, but it’s always changing, and I recommend you develop your own.

Below is a map link with all the picks for paid subscribers.

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