The Fushigi Times

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Control or Be Controlled: An Impossible Mission?

Hundreds of keys striking paper, each echoing across a cavernous warehouse in a top-secret location, fingers moving in manic yet precise choreography. It is, in every sense, absurdly theatrical.

The scene is from Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. Almost three hours of Tom Cruise-as-Ethan Hunt blockbuster action revealing a moment of bizarre brilliance:

Intelligence pulled from a maze of supposedly secret global computer systems, transcribed by human hands onto paper.

Not AI. Not imagined. Real humans, tangible ink, as permanent as it can be paper.

And yet, in all that cinematic exaggeration, there is truth lurking like a real-life spy under dim streetlamps, in the shadow of a café awning, taking notes while pretending to sip espresso. It is not meant as fearmongering or an invitation to strap yourself into a bunker for the next decade. It is a meditation on pace, control, and human agency in a world where speed, convenience, and artificial intelligence seem to have taken over like over-sugar-hyped toddlers in a candy store.

I have been thinking a lot about how we measure control. In our work, we are glued to screens, chasing updates, email responses, video calls, and the occasional existential dread ping.

And if intelligence — human or artificial — is always faster than our ability to process it, then we are not living. We are reacting.

Watching this scene, I was struck by a paradox. Slowing down, typing each letter with intention, can feel revolutionary, almost subversive, in a world addicted to speed. This episode of The Fushigi Times Podcast is about recognising that slow media is not old-fashioned, boring, or something your parents or grandparents used to do while wearing cardigans. It is a pre-emptive strategy. If we do not deliberately curate our engagement with technology, we risk being swept along, our attention manipulated, our memory overwritten, and our control quietly eroded.

And that, in the end, is scarier than any cinematic AI antagonist throwing fireballs in your living room.

The Rhythm of the Typewriter

A typewriter is not a machine in the modern sense. It is an instrument, a percussion orchestra of chaos and beauty. Every keystroke matters. Every carriage return is a dramatic pause worthy of its own cinematic score. Miss a keystroke, and there is no magical backspace erasing your sins. You must face the imperfection, adapt, and sometimes curse gently at the universe.

Contrast this with flick-scroll feeds, attention diluted across news bites, algorithmically curated videos, and real-time updates designed to make your emotions perform an Olympic sprint.

One is immersive and sensory, the other ephemeral and engineered for distraction. Choosing the typewriter is consciously walking the slow path. It is a form of rebellion.

Over the past few weeks, I have reinstated typewriting as a daily ritual. Morning drafts, handwritten letters, notes-to-self, podcast ideas — all the glamorous behind-the-scenes chaos you never see. These small acts anchor the mind, build memory, and instill discipline.

There is humour here. The clattering of keys is far from silent. Neighbours might imagine a tiny printing press operating in my studio.

I like to picture them peeking through the blinds, eyes wide, imagining industrial espionage. But I love the sound. It is beautiful. It is deliberate. It is very human.

Adopting this rhythmic tempo, I have noticed a recalibration of my attention. Words linger, thoughts deepen, ideas do not vanish at the ping of a notification. It is tactile, temporal, and immensely satisfying. For me, the typewriter is not nostalgia. It is practical, neurological, and quietly radical — a daily exercise in reclaiming control over speed, tempo, and thought in an increasingly accelerated digital environment.

From Flick-Scroll to Finger-Tap: The Medium Shapes the Mind

Despite mostly leaving social media, I’ve discovered that digital entanglement is surprisingly clingy. Work demands email replies, video conferences, and instant messaging. Alone, these tools are innocent enough. Together, they form a relentless torrent of attention-draining activity.

And here’s a question: how does the medium through which information flows dictate the way we think? Feeds, alerts, and push notifications fragment attention and reduce patience.

People get annoyed if you don’t respond almost immediately — as if the wellbeing of the universe itself were waiting for your thumb tap, without which the time–space continuum might be irreversibly disrupted!

By contrast, typing on a mechanical typewriter, writing a letter by hand, or reading a printed newspaper forces the mind to slow down, process, and synthesise.

And you’re not imagining it — typewriters are making a comeback. For those of us who grew up banging out memos, letters and broadcast news copy on clunky machines, returning to the typewriter isn’t nostalgia; it’s basic comfort. We remember what it’s like to have a machine that actually makes you slow down.

For Gen Z and younger men and women, who mostly know keyboards and tap screens as the gateway to TikTok, the typewriter is a curious, slightly rebellious novelty.

And this isn’t just my personal bias: publications like Typewriters.com, Saving Advice, and Verified Market Reports have noted a resurgence in analog writing, with cafés, workshops, and even online communities celebrating the medium.

The younger generations are discovering, with wide-eyed fascination, that writing can be deliberate, noisy, and joyously analog.

I now deliberately segregate parts of my workflow and times of reflection. For research, screens remain indispensable. But drafting, outlining, and thinking happen on paper. Each session begins with intention: what’s the purpose? What’s essential? What can wait?

These choices are subtle but transformative. They highlight the difference between reflexive consumption and deliberate creation — between being herded by technology and directing it with flair, occasionally punctuated by the clack sounds of a well-worn typebar.

Slow media is therefore not just slow for its own sake. It’s active. It’s conscious. It is the medium’s stance against an environment engineered for reactive, emotional, and often mindless interaction.

And I firmly believe the medium is inseparable from the message: tactile, deliberate media cultivates deliberate thought. And yes, sometimes it cultivates accidental ink splats, minor paper jams, and a sense of triumphant absurdity.

Embracing the Tactile as a Form of Resistance

In an era dominated by ephemeral screens, tactile engagement is a radical act. Mechanical typewriters, ink pens, printed books — they demand more than cursory interaction. They require attention, persistence, and patience. And by doing so, they resist the dopamine-engineered speed of digital media.

The tactile is a form of resistance against external and internal pressures. It is not merely nostalgic; it is strategic.

Every keystroke, every letter, is a physical record of thought. Memory is strengthened. Ideas are preserved. Reflection is unavoidable.

I have instituted these rituals. Notes are handwritten, drafts are typed, letters mailed. Even the act of choosing which pen or paper to use — my beloved Bortoletti glass pen included — becomes an exercise in conscious living. Modest interventions, yes, but transformative, creating anchors in an environment designed to fragment thought.

And humour sneaks in. Writing long letters in 2025 feels absurd. Yet it is joyful and effective. The tangible act of creation slows perception, allows reflection, and builds resilience in a world increasingly dictated by speed.

The Typewriter Revolution

Across the globe, the typewriter is making a quiet comeback. Cafés now feature clacking keys as ambient background noise, not just the hiss of espresso machines. For my generation, the ones who grew up with typewriters as the only formal communication apart from handwriting, returning to it is comforting and familiar. Nostalgia is part of it, but there is something deeper — a return to the tools we understand, a reclaiming of process.

For Gen Z and younger generations, this is entirely new. They have never pressed a typewriter key, never felt the deliberate resistance of paper under metal, never cursed at a sticky ribbon mid-sentence. They are discovering a tangible form of creation that cannot be auto-corrected or deleted in a cloud somewhere. And for many, the charm is intoxicating. There is a romance to this clattering ritual that digital interfaces just cannot replicate.

Watching this new generation experiment with typewriters, I can’t help but chuckle.

They peer at the keys like archeologists at an ancient relic, occasionally hitting the wrong row and recoiling in horror.

Yet they persist. And good on ‘em too.

This is the typewriter revolution. It is revolutionary, and it is absolutely wonderful.

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Survive AI

AI is neither villain nor saviour. It is a tool and a lens through which we confront our own agency. Dead Reckoning dramatises a scenario in which intelligence networks, manipulated by AI with the complicity of some very nasty people, threaten to overtake human control. Reality is not quite so fantastical, at least not yet, but the principle resonates.

Delegating judgement, attention, and synthesis entirely to algorithms is alluring. Efficiency, precision, speed. Yet each convenience carries a hidden cost. AI does not intend to control us—we think. Humans often relinquish that willingly, drawn by promises of optimisation and ease.

In practice, I limit AI-assisted work to discrete, controlled tasks. It curates data, summarises, automates repetitive work. But decisions, synthesis, and creative thought must remain human.

It is a deliberate partnership, not abdication. Slowness is preserved not by rejecting AI, but by setting boundaries: when, where, and how it participates.

Humour remains essential. Imagining an AI criticising my syntax while I type is oddly comforting. It reminds me that even if technology is advanced, human judgement and tactile engagement retain irreplaceable value.

Work and Play in the Fushigi Times Blue Zone

Country-Sea, Japan, is a world measured by tides, rice fields, and some pretty amazing sunrises over Onjuku Beach. The work rhythm — occasional travel into Tokyo, meetings, reporting — is harmonised against the slow coastal life we have chosen. Daily walks, long meals, and observation of seasonal changes act as anchors in a world designed to accelerate attention.

Slow media is therefore a lived, not theoretical, practice. Reading the FT Weekend over brunch on Sundays, sketching ideas on paper before touching a screen, observing the natural tempo of waves, wind, and sunlight — these rituals counterbalance the urgency of travel, emails, and meetings.

They are proof that slowness can coexist with productivity. These practices are practical, not ornamental.

They reduce cognitive load, build memory, and foster reflection. Blue Zone habits — long meals, social engagement, faith practices, physical activity — integrate seamlessly with slow media, illustrating that mental and physical rhythms are inseparable.

Digital Minimalism Without Digital Abstinence

Slow media is not anti-technology. Screens, software, and AI can be allies if boundaries are set. The art is curation, not abstinence.

In daily life, this means a deliberate choreography between devices and analogue tools. Work, reporting, research, and communications still require digital engagement.

Flight bookings, press releases, media production, emails, videoconferences — unavoidable. The difference lies in intentionality. Notifications are off by default. Incoming messages are met with conscious assessment, not with reflexive anxiety.

Social media, long demonised as the ultimate attention vampire, is handled similarly. I do not scroll endlessly.

I engage selectively with curated sources, journals, newsletters, colleagues, and occasionally the absurd corners of the internet. The rest is ignored.

Humour helps. Picture a room full of colleagues swiping, tapping, scrolling, and there I am, a lone figure with my 100-year-old Underwood Portable 3-Bank typewriter, clacking away in defiance of modernity. Functional absurdity, if you will.

The Sensory Paradox: Sound, Sight, and Human Attention

Sound is underappreciated as a vector of cognition. The clack of typewriter keys, the rustle of paper, the subtle scratch of pen on notebook — these are anchors, not distractions. They draw attention into the present.

In Dead Reckoning, the visual of hundreds of typists racing to transcribe intelligence is comically absurd, yet it illustrates the paradox: slowing attention through sensory engagement preserves control over your own mind and decisions.

Incorporating tactile, sensory stimuli into work and reflection is transformative. I time typewriting sessions with natural light, minimal noise.

The weight of the pen, the resistance of paper, the deliberate feedback of a typewriter key all act as attention anchors.

Watching someone manually type information available digitally in milliseconds seems ridiculous. Yet that absurdity is the point. Slowing allows us to reclaim perception and reassert control over our thoughts and work.

The Practicality of Slowing Down

Slow media is not a philosophy confined to journals or coffee-table essays. It manifests in small daily routines, each act anchoring cognition and fostering memory.

Mornings for writing, afternoons for reading, evenings for reflection. Notes, letters, typewritten drafts create tangible records, immune to deletion, algorithmic suppression, or accidental loss. Digital-only work evaporates, leaving fleeting traces. Balancing these worlds is humorous, yet a constant reminder of the human element that digital machines cannot replicate.

Slow media is survival, clarity, and efficacy wrapped into everyday practice. It is the art of making time for reflection and reclaiming control over mental and emotional bandwidth.

AI, Typewriters, and the Art of Keeping Your Mind

AI’s capabilities are awe-inspiring, but unchecked reliance upon on it can become a threat. Dead Reckoning dramatizes a worst-case scenario: an intelligence network leveraged by AI, co-opted by humans, imposing control. The cinematic exaggeration is absurd, yes, but it’s also unnervingly plausible.

It asks a question that is part sci-fi, part existential panic: what if AI becomes so powerful, so ubiquitous, that our only way to truly communicate, preserve thought, or assert our own control is to return to typewriters, pens and ink, and handwritten letters?

Curation and boundary-setting are the antidotes. No matter how advanced, AI cannot inhabit the tactile, reflective, and idiosyncratic world of human thought.

Modern slow media is not technophobia. It is a commitment to judgement, reflection, and deliberate engagement. AI may assist, but surrendering one’s mind is absolutely out of the question.

And so we return to the tactile. The clack of typewriter keys, the weight of ink on the nib of my Bortoletti glass pen, the friction of paper under your hand — these are tools of self-preservation.

Ideas linger longer, connections emerge more clearly, and decision-making improves. Writing by hand or on a typewriter demands intentionality, focus, and discipline, reinforcing memory and self-awareness.

In the improbable, slightly cinematic future where screens are enslaved to AI and attention is a luxury, this tactile resistance could be our only lifeline.

The tactile bridges mind and matter, thought and expression, reflection and action. It reminds us that human experience is inseparable from deliberate engagement with the world, whether via typewriter, fountain pen, or any medium that insists we slow down.

Dead Reckoning in Daily Life: The Slow Media Challenge

Slow media is a series of deliberate choices. Each day, I choose which tools to engage, when to pause, and how to structure time. Typewriters, pens, and paper form the backbone, digital tools serve a disciplined purpose.

Dead Reckoning becomes both metaphor and practice: navigation through the turbulent currents of technology, information, and AI. The map is drawn by deliberate, tactile, reflective engagement. The compass is attention. The destination is control, presence, and clarity.

This is slow media in action, my small rebellion against speed, distraction, and the digital rush.

Yes, it takes more time. Yes, it is more deliberate. But it is worth it. That extra time gives space to think through each word, each phrase and idea, in a more considered way.

And by the way, what you’re listening to (or reading) now is slow media in practice. Drafted with a fountain pen, typed on a mechanical typewriter, scanned, corrected, recorded, edited, and uploaded.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to slow down — to notice, to type or write with care. Should you (or anyone on your team) be discovered, you will not be disavowed. And this message will not self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck!

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This original content is part of our Slow Media canon — carefully crafted, independently produced. If you’d like to license, rebroadcast, or syndicate this podcast, let’s talk. We’re open to collaboration — as long as it stays thoughtful, grounded, properly credited… and paid for.

Slow Media Needs Slow Money…

Angelino Schintu is a veteran journalist, broadcaster, and filmmaker based in Japan. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Fushigi Times — an independent Slow Media platform offering bold, reality-grounded perspectives on global affairs, cultural explorations, and creative thought.

COVID Vaccination: Roadmap to Truth — Or Detour to Data-Driven Power Grab?

Angelino Schintu — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 08:00:00 GMT

This Slow Media content is supported by [YOUR ORGANISATION NAME HERE] and is best viewed in a browser.

In This Episode

From Tokyo to Melbourne, the pandemic’s legacy isn’t retold through infection rates or political spin, but through the quieter reckoning now unfolding beneath the numbers.
Across courtrooms, parliaments, and family dinner tables, faith in “the science” gives way to a more difficult conversation about data, power, and the price of obedience (forced or otherwise).
In these fushigi times, the real contagion isn’t a virus, but whoever is wielding power in the numbers game.

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Post-Vax Reckoning: The Silence is Breaking

In the years since the initial roll‑out of the COVID‑19 vaccines, public discussion has never really gone quiet. What began as a crisis of infection morphed into a long‑running debate about mandates, data transparency, vaccine injuries, excess deaths, and above all, trust.

“In an age where data is king, truth often ends up in the dungeon.”

The conspiratorial fringe that was once dismissed as, well, fringe is now, in some parts, finding its concerns reframed in sober tones. The question no longer seems to be whether something went wrong, but how much, why, and who will take responsibility.

Here in Japan, the story has quietly shifted. While the government started out without coercion, there were no forced lockdowns or mandatory vaccinations, in mid‑2024 the tectonic plates beneath the public health narrative began to settle differently.

In March 2023, a government health panel formally stated that in the case of a 42‑year‑old woman who died following a booster shot of the Pfizer vaccine, a causal link “cannot be denied.” Later, in July of that year, a second case was acknowledged: a teenage girl who died after a third inoculation was deemed to have had an “undeniable” causal link.

To date, more than 2,000 reported deaths following vaccination have been evaluated but causality has only been officially acknowledged in those two cases.

Add to that a striking 2025 report noting a significant increase in excess deaths in Japan during 2022 and 2023, a period that overlaps with the highest uptake of mRNA booster shots. Meanwhile, further investigations show that only about 10 percent of the approximately 2,075 post-vaccination death cases were given autopsies capable of assessing causality.

The effects of this data gap are clear: public confidence is fracturing.

Internationally, the picture is equally complex.

In the European Union, over 11,000 deaths were reported after COVID-19 vaccination by mid-2023, most reportedly involving the Pfizer vaccine.

But officials there have not formally confirmed any causal link.

However, by late 2024, a new parliamentary question referenced a peer-reviewed study reviewing autopsy data from post-vaccine deaths. That study suggested a high likelihood of causal links and called for more research. The contrast between “no confirmed link” and “high likelihood of link” points to a tipping point in the health-policy discourse.

What all this means for our original theme, data versus dogma, is unsettling. The data landscape has grown more complex and far less certain.

The very populations once dismissed as conspiracy theorists are now pointing to real-world data gaps, under-reported autopsies, incomplete disclosure, and what they argue is a muted official response. At the same time, mainstream health authorities continue to insist that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks, especially for older or vulnerable populations.

In the context of this article / podcast, which critiques how data has been used (and misused) in pandemic policy, these Japanese and European developments add fresh urgency. They confirm that the question isn’t simply: did harm occur? But rather: how do we investigate, account for, assign responsibility, and learn from it?

If even a few governments now admit a causal link between vaccination and death, then the assumption that nothing significant happened is no longer tenable.

In short: what we were told in 2021—that vaccination is safe, and dogma is science—is now being questioned in 2025. And not by the fringe, but by mainstream institutions themselves.

The spreadsheet may not have wept for the lost lives. But the silence is now broken. And the conversation about who pays for it, and who implements accountability, is just beginning.

The Pandemic: Data or Dogma?

“But the data...” That is the usual argument—ah, the blessed data! It was the north star of every televised press conference, the divine scroll upon which public health decrees were etched.

From the very beginning, governments around the world insisted they were merely “following the science.” But science, in the real world, is rarely the solemn priest we imagine it to be. It is more often a scrappy academic in a torn blazer, arguing with itself in a hallway full of half-baked theories and evolving models. What we got instead was dogma in a lab coat.

“Science is not a static truth. It is a method. And when data is selectively interpreted to support a policy agenda, it stops being science and becomes something else entirely: propaganda.”

The Victoria Experiment: Policy Unleashes the Riot Police

In Australia, the state of Victoria offered a particularly vivid demonstration of what can happen when data is weaponised. Premier at the time Dan Andrews (more recently referred to as Dictator Dan) presided over one of the longest and harshest lockdown regimes in the Western world. What began as a public health concern quickly transformed into something more sinister.

Police were empowered to enforce restrictions with an enthusiasm that bordered on the performative.

Protests were banned outright. A pregnant woman was arrested in her home for promoting a demonstration on Facebook.

Citizens were prevented from traveling more than 5 km from home. And in case you missed the punchline: under Victorian public health orders, employers were required to collect and record their workers’ vaccination status and prevent unvaccinated staff from working on-site—unless exempt. Non-compliance wasn’t just discouraged; it came with fines up to:

$11,000 for individuals
$110,000 for corporations per breach.

A far cry from mere guidance—this was policy with Godzilla teeth!

Victoria didn’t just flatten the curve. It steamrolled civil liberties in the process.

At what point, exactly, did we decide that bodily autonomy was negotiable if an Excel spreadsheet said so?

While critics were initially dismissed as conspiracy theorists or selfish anti-vaxxers, several court challenges have since shown that police overreach did, in fact, occur.

But the damage was already done. Jobs were lost. Families fractured. Trust in institutions eroded.

This wasn’t just a heavy-handed misstep. It was contested in court. Victoria Police were formally challenged over their lockdown enforcement actions, with judges acknowledging breaches of human rights and the unlawful treatment of peaceful protesters.

One of the most visible cases was that of activist and independent journalist Monica Smit, who was arrested and detained for her role in organising anti-lockdown rallies. Her legal battle drew international attention, not only for its civil liberties implications, but for the precedent it threatened to set, that questioning government policy could be met with detention rather than debate.

Joining the ranks of those challenging Victoria’s heavy-handed approach was Rebel Media reporter Avi Yemini.

Like Monica Smit, Yemini found himself on the receiving end of the state’s zero-tolerance policy, arrested while doing what journalists are meant to do: report the news. His account reads like a dystopian script: cleared by police checkpoints, holding a microphone, then abruptly shoved to the ground and handcuffed without cause.

The ordeal didn’t end there; that same night, police visited his home to deliver a chilling warning.

He was told that he was under surveillance and on a “list.” Undeterred, Yemini took Victoria to its highest court, fighting not just for himself but for every citizen whose civil liberties have been trampled in the name of public health.

In a rare admission, Victoria Police publicly apologized in July 2022 for unlawfully arresting Yemini during protests in the previous two years, acknowledging that he was wrongfully detained while performing his journalistic duties and expressing regret for the distress caused.

What this made abundantly clear is that public health policy didn’t merely authorise force. It actively shielded it.

The data was selectively interpreted, rigidly enforced, and never open to public interrogation. It became both the sword and the armour.

Once again, the numbers were never on trial. Only the people were.

Meanwhile in Japan: Compliance Without Coercion

I’m reporting from Tokyo, where the Covid response followed a markedly different path. My experience (and the contrast with Victoria’s) couldn’t be starker.

Here in Japan, the Covid response was curiously different, less dramatic on the surface, but no less socially complex. The government lacks the legal power to force lockdowns or mandate vaccinations. Yet compliance was near-total. People masked up. They stayed home. They lined up for vaccines. Not because they were forced to, but because that’s what Japan’s social contract demanded.

And yet, cracks are beginning to form in the carefully curated image of a harmonious public health response.

On May 31, 2024, Kazuhiro Haraguchi, a former Japanese Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications and current member of the House of Representatives, delivered an emotional speech at a large protest in Tokyo.

Referencing an apparent rise in post-vaccination deaths, he expressed deep regret for the grief and loss felt by many families. Minister Haraguchi apologised for the deaths and injuries he attributed to Japan’s COVID-19 vaccination rollout in the following words:

“I apologise to all of you. So many have died, and they shouldn’t have.”

The statistics, so far, remain buried or conveniently “under investigation,” but public curiosity is growing. Even in societies built on quiet consensus, the silence eventually gives way to questions.

As with so much else in the Covid era, the data here isn’t the issue. It’s how it’s being handled. A culture of deference cannot forever protect institutions from transparency.

The Data Dilemma: Who Gets to Decide What’s ‘True’?

It’s easy, and dangerously tempting, to get caught up in whether the vaccine data was “right” or “wrong.” Were side effects underreported? Was efficacy oversold? Did boosters really provide measurable benefit after the fourth round?

These are all important questions, and some will no doubt fuel academic journals and parliamentary inquiries for years to come. But this obsession with empirical purity misses a more immediate and concerning reality: governments used contested data to justify uncontested powers.

“The real problem isn’t bad data. It’s the infallible authority granted to whoever claims to possess the ‘right’ data.”

Take the international debate over vaccinating children. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., once widely dismissed as the patron saint of ‘medical skepticism,’ and now one of the most prominent and controversial figures in the US health debate, has long advocated halting Covid vaccinations for people under 18.

While his views have been challenged and often mocked in the American media, his influence as a top health commentator cannot be ignored.

Around the same time Kennedy called for a pause, Australia quietly adopted a near-identical policy, reflecting a similar skepticism about the risk-to-benefit balance for younger children.

Whether this was a coincidence, a response to shifting political winds, or an indirect influence remains unclear.

Other nations, including the UK, EU members, and Japan, also took varied, often cautious stances on child vaccination, though none publicly credited advocacy voices akin to Kennedy’s.

This overlap reveals the unsettling fluidity of what we call “settled science,” showing how health policy can pivot rapidly in response to evolving data, public pressure, and influential personalities.

Data Can Be Moulded Like Clay

Back in the early 2000s, I was news director and presenter at InterFM, a Tokyo-based English-Japanese radio station. Our morning show, The Zoo, had been the city’s top-rated program in its time slot for almost seven years. We had the numbers to prove it—or rather, we had numbers.

A senior salesperson walked into the studio one day, eager to pitch a major corporate sponsor on airtime during our flagship show. I asked how the client would be convinced. His answer was as honest as it was alarming:

“Don’t worry. I’ll look through the research and ratings data and I’ll find the numbers we need to impress the client.”

Translation: Not make them up. Not fake them. Just find them. He knew that somewhere, buried in the statistics, there would be a data point that suited the narrative. That’s the thing about data: it’s rarely wrong, but it’s often too broad, too messy, and too manipulable to tell only one story. It tells many. And people, especially the ones with power, choose which data gets the spotlight.

Politicians and policymakers are no different than advertising executives. They want results.

And if the data doesn’t immediately back them up, they won’t change the policy—they’ll change the interpretation.

Dissent as Disease: The Unvaccinated as the New Untouchables

Perhaps the most egregious failure of the Covid era was not the missteps of policy, but the treatment of dissenters. The unvaccinated were painted not merely as medically irresponsible, but as socially toxic.

They were anti-science, anti-social, anti-everything. In many Western democracies, they became the pandemic’s political scapegoats.

In Australia their exclusion from workplaces, restaurants, and even basic services was systematic. The justification? Public safety. The implication?

Bodily autonomy was no longer sacred, just another cell in a spreadsheet, overwritten by consensus between public health bureaucrats and politically motivated policymakers.

It was never just about health. It was about obedience.

Dissent was framed not as a democratic right, but as a threat to the collective.

And once that logic takes hold, there are very few limits to what governments can (and will) do.

Truth vs. Usefulness: The Tyranny of ‘Actionable Data’

Governments don’t need accurate data to act. They just need actionable data. That’s information clear enough to justify a decision, ambiguous enough to dodge accountability, and politically useful enough to survive scrutiny, especially from fact-checkers and journalists asking the right questions.

We saw this pattern again and again during the pandemic. Data was used to enforce movement restrictions, determine employment eligibility, and create caste-like divisions in society. It was a world where the spreadsheet ruled, and anything that didn’t fit the pivot table was discarded.

And if you questioned the spreadsheet? You were accused of endangering lives.

What Now? Learning the Wrong Lessons

As the pandemic fades into memory a little more, a troubling trend persists: the policies it justified have set precedents. Emergency powers were normalised. Censorship was quietly encouraged. Civil liberties became bargaining chips. And all under the benevolent banner of public health.

If we don’t interrogate how data was used—not just whether it was true, but how its power was wielded—we are guaranteed to repeat the same mistakes.

Next time, the crisis may not be a virus, but climate change, terrorism, or some new frontier of digital or AI threat. The mechanism will be the same: data, fear, appeals to expert authority, shifts in government policy, new laws—and further erosion of the freedoms we once took for granted.

A Final Thought: The Spreadsheet Never Weeps

In the end, the real story of the pandemic is not one of virus and vaccine. It’s a story about control. About how easily freedom can be suspended when the right numbers are presented in the right way by the right people on the right podium.

“Spreadsheets don’t mourn lost jobs, broken families, or trampled freedoms. But history does.”

The remedy is clear: we must demand open disclosure of all the facts, warts and all, and allow the public to decide for themselves. No more data filtered through layers of political expediency. No more science weaponised as a blunt instrument. And no more silence around the hornet’s nest I’ve so far avoided mentioning: and that is commercial gain.

Transparency, honesty, and respect for individual rights cannot be the casualties of crisis management.

Restore Transparency, Restore Trust!

Only with full disclosure and open debate can democracy survive the next pandemic—or any other emergency disguised behind spreadsheets and data. Because in the end, truth, the actual facts must be a shared pursuit, not a tool of control.

Slow Media Needs Slow Money…

Angelino Schintu is a veteran journalist, broadcaster, and filmmaker based in Japan. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Fushigi Times — an independent Slow Media platform offering bold, reality-grounded perspectives on global affairs, cultural explorations, and creative thought.

No Quidditch in the Skies Over Our Sacred Shrine: Discovering the Wabi-Sabi of Leaf Sweeping!

Angelino Schintu — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:00:00 GMT

This Slow Media content is supported by [YOUR ORGANISATION NAME HERE] and is best viewed in a browser.

In This Episode

Endless piles of leaves, a Japanese Houki broom, and a crisp November wind reveal that even the most menial tasks can carry lessons in patience, duty, and unexpected satisfaction.
From suburban Perth, Western Australia to a quiet shrine outside Tokyo, imagined flights of childhood collide with the realities of adult responsibility, culture, and ritual.
In these fushigi times, volunteering is more than chores and community expectation—it is a meditation on impermanence, connection, and the small acts that make life meaningful.

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Production Credits

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From Flying Nimbus Dreams to Shrine Duty Reality

At the time of writing and recording this episode, Japan’s all-too-short summer has disappeared like a magician’s wave of the wand and, poof! Gone. No illusion. Autumn has arrived. The cooling air threatens to strip away the hard-earned layers of suntan from this year’s life at the beach. It made me pause and think about how seasons mark more than just weather. They mark memories, routines and the small rituals that make life feel grounded.

It was a clear November morning, the kind that reminds you Japan is not just a land of skyscrapers and neon but a place where autumn insists on showing off. The air was sharp and sweet with falling leaves, and somewhere in the distance, the faint metallic chime of a shrine bell echoed across the neighbourhood.

Sunlight filtered through the branches of maples and ginkgo trees, casting dappled patterns on the stone pathways and the mossy edges of the shrine walls. I stood on the edge of the sacred precinct, a broom in hand, pretending, if only for a few moments, that I was mounting a vintage Nimbus and about to launch into flight.

No Quidditch in the skies today, alas. This was not Hogwarts. But the fantasy was irresistible.

The broom felt like it might obey my slightest whim; the leaves beneath, like miniature quidditch balls, responded to my sweeping with satisfying swishes. I imagined myself dipping and soaring, performing manoeuvres with a grace that would make even Harry Potter envious.

The faint smell of damp earth mixed with the crisp scent of fallen leaves, grounding the magic in reality. And then, of course, reality intruded: I was here to volunteer, not to indulge in childish flights of fancy.

Yet, even as my imagination soared, my mind wandered back to the beginning of this peculiar journey, almost seven or eight years earlier, when the universe (or more specifically, the local shrine committee) decided that an Australian expat with an epic beard might be just the person to help keep a small piece of Japan functioning.

It seemed improbable at the time, even laughable, but the way small decisions accumulate and traditions assert themselves often has a momentum that cannot be ignored.

Somehow, I was caught in it, about to discover a side of Japan that was patient, meticulous, and quietly enchanting.

The Men in Black Come A-Calling

Not long after we moved into our cluster of modest homes just outside Tokyo, there was a knock at the door. Two men, dressed in what I can only describe as official-looking black suits, appeared. My heart performed a small, embarrassed somersault. Had I been reported for something trivial and catastrophic, like not disposing of rubbish correctly? That is a thing here in Japan! I cautiously opened the door.

Their polished demeanour and the quiet authority in their voices suggested that no excuse would be sufficient. I braced myself.

The conversation that followed was an exercise in linguistic improvisation. I had to decide on the fly whether or not I was able to speak Japanese fluently or not at all.

Don’t tell anyone I said so, but sometimes it is beneficial not to speak the language.

In the end, I leaned on honesty sprinkled with charm. The two gentlemen, it turns out, were from the local shrine committee – who were seeking my participation as a volunteer. I was very reticent and, as they were speaking, my mind went into overdrive, thinking of ways to avoid this impending involuntary conscription to a cabal I wanted nothing to do with.

“Gentlemen, I really am very sorry. My work commitments, business travel… Oh! and I’m from the Christian tradition, so…” My personal beliefs were apparently quite acceptable to the god that inhabits the shrine. “All-comers are most welcome!”

As for my work schedule, well there was “not really much to do, apart from attending a few meetings”, and to appear with my epic beard at a few key events organised by the shrine committee. I was ensnared. To protest any further would have made me come across as extremely rude.

“You will take your place on the committee for a period of two years. But don’t worry, you don’t start your term of service for another two more years.”

I stared at them. They were organised. Impossibly organised. Their precision, their calm certainty, left me both impressed and mildly terrified.

The New Harvest Festival and the Japanese Houki

Fast forward to November two years later, and the beginning of my two-year term on the shrine committee. The first major assignment was the New Harvest Festival. Our task was simple in theory: sweep up the vast blanket of leaves carpeting the grounds. In practice, it was monumental, stretching across courtyards, pathways, and under the shade of ancient trees that had overseen decades of autumns.

Here’s where the magic and the temptation kicked in. The tools provided were Japanese Houki, traditional brooms so reminiscent of flying broomsticks in Harry Potter that it was impossible for me not to indulge in a little mischief. My inner child, the Aussie larrikin who had spent too many Saturday mornings raking suburban leaves, could not resist.

I strutted and swirled, imagined the Nimbus taking off, performed imaginary loops, and generally mucked around, laughing at myself even as the older volunteers gave quiet, bemused glances.

The other volunteers, mostly elderly and stoic, moved with a calm efficiency that spoke of decades of practice. I, in contrast, was a novice, fumbling between fantasy and chore. Soon, reality reasserted itself. The shrine grounds were immense, and the wind threatened to undo the careful mounds we were trying to create.

I realised that precision, patience, and teamwork mattered far more than creative flair or imagination in this small, sacred corner of the world.

But even amid the work, there was a rhythm. Sweeping, gathering, stacking—the motions became meditative. I began to notice the sound of the leaves as they scraped across stone paths, the faint smell of autumn decay, the occasional gust scattering them like confetti. The physicality of it, the simple, repetitive labour, was unexpectedly absorbing. Time seemed to stretch and bend, each moment a mixture of playful nostalgia and the quiet satisfaction of contributing to something larger than myself.

All For One, One For All!

It was during a morning tea break that I began to understand the deeper currents behind this volunteering. Most of the other participants were there out of a sense of duty rather than enthusiasm.

Peer pressure, community expectation, the quiet insistence of tradition. Those were the forces driving them.

When I asked about their motivation, there was a pause, a lot of teeth-sucking, and finally, a glimpse into their philosophy. I watched the steam rise from our teacups, smelled the faint aroma of roasted barley, and felt the crisp chill of the November air. A moment suspended between work and reflection.

One man, nearing eighty, wheeled a barrow full of leaves. “If everyone in the area takes a turn to do their bit,” he said, “you only have to do this once every fifteen years or so. This is my third and last time.” He smiled wryly. “I do this for everyone who lives around this area, not for myself only.” His voice was steady, quiet but resolute, carrying decades of accumulated habit and wisdom.

That, I realised, was the point. The work was not glamorous, not particularly fulfilling in the conventional sense, but it was meaningful. The very act of participating, of contributing to a shared space, created something beyond the individual. I thought of similar rituals back home, moments of communal effort that stitch neighbourhoods together, and recognised the subtle power of small, repeated acts of service.

This struck me as profoundly Japanese but also universally human.

In an ageing society, where the rhythms of daily life are measured in small acts of continuity, the shrine’s volunteers were keeping both culture and community alive.

Their work was quiet, almost invisible, but indispensable. It was a reminder that meaning often resides not in spectacle, but in the attention, care, and persistence applied to ordinary things.

From Leaf-Grumbling to Leaf-Glory

By the end of that November morning, I had learned more than I anticipated. Sweeping millions of leaves with a non-flying broom might not sound like enlightenment, but it was. I had started with resentment, imagining every excuse in the world not to participate. By the time we gathered for tea and shared sushi and beer (a surprising perk of the commitment) I had shifted my focus.

The warmth of the tea during the break, the taste of freshly prepared sushi at end, and the gentle camaraderie around the table made the morning feel complete.

Volunteering, I realised, was not about self. It was about connecting, contributing, and seeing the impact of the work ripple outward. The effect was immediate and, as it turns out, professionally beneficial. Being able to step outside myself, to help without expectation, cultivates empathy, patience, and perspective, qualities that serve any career, any human interaction, any cross-cultural encounter.

The physical work, the ritualised motions, and the shared goal created a quiet satisfaction that was tangible, almost meditative, and yet also energising.

And there was humour and absurdity everywhere.

The image of an Aussie, tattooed, ear-pierced, epically bearded man wrestling with a traditional Japanese broom in a sacred precinct was enough to make anyone grin.

Even the stoic elders, I suspect, appreciated the entertainment. It reminded me that community work does not always need solemnity; laughter, lightness, and small acts of playfulness are part of the rhythm that keeps traditions alive and makes participation memorable.

Blue Zone Secrets: Lessons for an Ageing Society

Japan’s ageing population is not just a statistic; it is lived, tactile, visible in the men and women tidying streets, pruning shrubs, and preparing shrines. Their movements are deliberate, almost ceremonial, each sweep of a broom or snip of a branch a quiet act of care. It is a reminder that civic life requires effort, attention, and continuity.

It also underscores the value of intergenerational exchange: young and old working together, sharing knowledge, and maintaining social infrastructure that is both physical and cultural. Observing them, I felt part of a system far larger than myself, one sustained by commitment, habit, and respect.

Volunteering in this context is a subtle form of social glue. It binds communities, preserves rituals, and reminds everyone that no one exists in isolation.

A simple act like sweeping leaves, organizing matsuri, tending a shrine becomes a metaphor for care, patience, and human connectedness.

There is a rhythm to the work that transcends language, nationality, or age, and in that rhythm, participants find both purpose and quiet satisfaction.

The analogy extends far beyond Japan. In urban centres worldwide, where social cohesion frays and civic engagement declines, there is a lesson here: meaningful contribution matters. Even small, menial tasks, undertaken consistently and collectively, sustain the invisible threads that make societies function.

And perhaps, in paying attention to these threads, we rediscover a form of community often lost in the hum of modern life, one that offers connection, continuity, and the rare, unexpected joy of shared accomplishment.

Beer, Sushi, and Flying Nimbus Dreams

As I surveyed the cleared grounds, the patterns of leaves long since swept into mounds, I was struck by the juxtaposition of the ephemeral and the enduring. Leaves fall and decay; seasons change; volunteers grow older, new residents arrive. Yet the shrine stands, and the work endures, replicated year after year. The wind rustled through the remaining branches, scattering a few stray leaves, as if to remind us that perfection is fleeting, and yet effort itself holds its own quiet reward.

It is a meditation on impermanence and continuity, a lesson in humility.

Watching others bend and sweep with careful precision, I recognised how small, deliberate actions accumulate into something larger than any individual. And perhaps, in its own way, it is a form of magic, the kind that does not require flight, spells, or broomsticks, but arises from shared purpose, quiet diligence, and the simple act of being present.

In these moments, community, tradition, and human connection seem to align, creating a sense of belonging that lingers long after the leaves are gone and the morning tea has been consumed. And Hey Presto! The mundane transforms into something quietly extraordinary, leaving both body and spirit unexpectedly uplifted.

By the time the morning ended, the sun had risen higher, shadows shortened, and the shrine was immaculate. The leaves were gone, the grounds pristine, and the sense of accomplishment surprisingly profound. There was a quiet satisfaction in seeing the results of collective effort, the invisible rhythm of many hands combining to produce something orderly and beautiful.

And yes, there was free beer, sushi, and laughter, a gentle, human reward for contributing to something larger than oneself. The clink of glasses, the chatter of volunteers, and the shared enjoyment of a job well done made the morning feel complete.

I never did actually fly on that Nimbus. But for a few hours, amidst the crisp autumn air, the swirl of leaves, and the quiet authority of my elders in arms, I felt a lift that no broomstick could provide.

The illusion of flight, the joy of play, and the satisfaction of meaningful labour merged into something wholly unexpected.

Volunteering is rarely glamorous. It is sometimes tedious, occasionally absurd, and almost always humbling. Yet it leaves an imprint, on the community, on the individual, and, if one allows it, on the imagination.

And that, for me, is enough to take off, even if only in spirit.

Beer and sushi and lots of beer!

Slow Media Needs Slow Money…

Angelino Schintu is a veteran journalist, broadcaster, and filmmaker based in Japan. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Fushigi Times — an independent Slow Media platform offering bold, reality-grounded perspectives on global affairs, cultural explorations, and creative thought.

‘Ooh, You Smell Like the Nineties’: Time to Come Back to the Future!

Angelino Schintu — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 08:00:00 GMT

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In This Edition

A single sniff can undo decades, revealing that scent is less about fragrance and more about memory, ego, and the people we once were.
From neon-lit Tokyo bars to late-night train rides, nostalgia drapes itself in cologne, posture, and the ghosts of ambition past.
In these fushigi times, looking back is not mere reflection but an act of survival, a reckoning with the selves we carry and the people close to us now.

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A Scent That Opens the Past

It was a casual, almost affectionate assassination. A line delivered offhandedly, without malice, but a lethal weapon all the same. My bestie, that’s my wife, and I were getting ready to head out for dinner with friends in Tokyo.

I’ve always enjoyed getting dressed. The brand name doesn’t matter much, just as long as it feels and looks good. And that goes for jeans and a T-shirt or a tailored suit. My grooming almost complete, it was time for the final flourish: the shu-shu of a cologne that had been a favourite for decades. Just a small amount. Not enough to announce myself like a teenage boy on the prowl, striding into a nightclub for the first time, shirt gaping to the belly button. Just enough to feel finished, a subconscious flare of a younger me saying, ‘Heads up: style inbound.’

She sniffed the air as I passed by, kind of crinkled her face and said it aloud:

“Ohh. You smell like the Nineties.”

And then, as if nothing had happened, she turned back to applying her lippy, unaware, or maybe very aware, of what she had just triggered. Because that sentence was not merely an observation.

It was a time machine, a trapdoor opening beneath me, releasing the ghosts of a whole decade.

An entire version of myself, crystallised in scent, memory, and perhaps a little touch of ego.

Now, if she had said I looked like the Nineties, I would have fought my corner. I no longer dress like I’m auditioning for a part in Trainspotting. My wardrobe holds no evidence of acid-wash denim, and my hair, removed by choice and replaced by the epic beard, means there’s no contending with the business-in-front, party-in-the-back mullet laws from the start of that decade. Musically, I’ve moved on. Spotify has scrubbed away the evidence of every poor decision made at Shinjuku’s Tower Records. But she was right. I did effuse the aroma of the Nineties.

Specifically, it was the smell of Chanel Antaeus, a cologne I once wore with unwavering loyalty throughout my twenties and thirties. In those years, living and working in Japan, Antaeus was one of my few stable companions, another being Michael, my personal manager in those days and still a close mate today. He introduced me to the cologne, which proved reliable, reassuring and a signature as clear as a business card.

To me, it was less a fragrance than a badge of style maturity, proof that I had crossed into the sort of sophistication you might expect from a man of growing sartorial elegance.

The sort of man you could spot in the finer quarters of London, Paris, New York, or Tokyo. After all, nothing says worldliness like dousing yourself in a scent advertised by a man with a jawline sharp enough to slice through glass. Who didn’t want to be that feller?

So to have that era returned to me in a single, unsolicited remark was oddly jarring. Not insulting, not even nostalgic in the sweet sense, but dislocating. As if the past had been bottled, corked, and stored on a shelf, waiting for me to uncork it on a Thursday evening.

I realised, in that moment, that I had not merely kept buying this dark glass bottle for convenience. I had been carrying the past in tangible, nose-bound form, a past that announced itself as clearly as the Nokia ringtone from 2003. One spritz and I was back in that smokey Omote Sando cigar bar, the late-night ramen joint outside the Jingu Stadium where all the taxi drivers congregated around midnight, those long train rides on the Yamanote where, in my head, I created my epic future.

But the problem with secret codes is that sometimes you are the only one left who knows what they mean.

Scent is treacherous like that. You can ignore an old song. You can choose not to watch a film you loved when you were twenty. You can keep your youthful wardrobe buried at the back of a cupboard and pretend you no longer recognise the person who wore it. But you cannot escape smell.

Scent finds you, bypasses reason, crashes through memory, forces you to confront the version of yourself you thought was safely archived.

In that single remark from my wife, I heard more than an aromatic critique. I heard the accusation that perhaps I had not outgrown that decade as fully as I had believed. That some part of me still wanted to be tethered to the young man who wore Antaeus with the smug certainty of immortality. Why else would I have kept buying that same little bottle for so many years? Why else would I, in a fit of misplaced loyalty, apply it before dinner, as though the Nineties could be decanted in liquid form and worn like a fitted Emporio Armani T-shirt?

It made me wonder how many of us are still scented with our own private pasts. Maybe not with cologne, but with traces of old selves that cling despite our best efforts. A watch from a defunct brand. Shoes that no longer fit the decade. Even a ringtone, embarrassingly out of place, lurking on a phone. We preserve these things because they remind us of who we were, and admitting they no longer belong feels a bit like betrayal.

Yes, she was right. I did smell like the Nineties. And once she said it out loud, I could no longer pretend it was just cologne. It was a signal, a confession, a reminiscent form of time travel.

Antaeus: A Baritone in a Choir of Tenors

Antaeus is not subtle. It never was. Launched in 1981, named after the minor Greek demigod son of Poseidon, it belongs firmly to the era before fragrances hid behind euphemisms like “aqua,” “sport,” or “fresh.” Antaeus was thick with leather, oakmoss, labdanum, and something that smelled suspiciously as though it had spent three decades locked inside a mahogany filing cabinet in a law firm that never updated its furniture.

If the modern male fragrance world is a polite chorus of citrusy tenors mumbling about cleanliness, Antaeus is a baritone clearing his throat at the back of the room. This was a scent designed for arrival, not for background ambience. It announced. It projected. It lingered like an unwanted guest at the end of a dinner party. Jacques Polge, who created Antaeus, once described it as “a perfume of power and seduction.” Translation: wear this and people will either move closer or move to another room, but they will not ignore you.

I wore it religiously through the 1990s. For me, it wasn’t just a fragrance. It was costume, posture, energy. Doors seemed to open half a beat earlier. Strangers glanced up with a flicker of curiosity. Even ordering a beer felt upgraded, as though the scent tipped the bartender that I was not there to drink quietly.

If you were in your twenties in Tokyo, trying to signal seriousness, adulthood, danger, and possibly European flair—even if you were none of those things—Antaeus did the trick. I didn’t understand its composition, but I understood its effect. And it wasn’t just internal.

Women noticed. Sometimes directly: “What are you wearing?” Other times, more elliptically: a pause, a lean closer, or a cheeky note slipped into my hand on that same Yamanote Line train, reading simply, “Wow, that cologne,” accompanied by a telephone number and a smile. By decade’s end, I associated Antaeus with magnetism. Not that it made me different, but it suggested I might be. The scent told a story, even if that story wasn’t entirely true yet.

Science corroborates it. A 2009 study published in Physiology & Behavior found that scents like musk, amber, and oakmoss trigger subconscious perceptions of strength and virility. My perceived charm was, at least in part, chemistry masquerading as charisma.

Yet, for all the science, for all the performance, Antaeus was also a costume. Spray enough and you could walk into a room as an international man of mystery, not a journalist scraping deadlines. Perfume companies understand this: in the 80s and 90s, ads didn’t sell fragrance. They sold permission slips to inhabit an identity. Antaeus, with its leather-and-moss presence, sold the role of “the serious man.” A baritone in a choir of tenors.

Tokyo, Celebrity, and Myth-Making in the Nineties

The 1990s were strange in Tokyo. The city metabolised the bubble economy’s excess. Buildings glittered with glass and neon, yet the mood was quieter than the frenetic 1980s. Precision, rhythm, and subtle gestures defined daily life.

In media, it felt like being in the eye of a storm. It was not chaos, but controlled, high-energy cultural and technological transformation. I moved across TV, radio, and glossy print, sometimes unsure how I had earned a press pass or a seat at the right table. Urgency was measured and deliberate, with pauses to consider nuance. Stories were filed with care. Meetings were held over real paper and real whisky. Interviews unfolded in hotel lobbies with lacquered furniture and carefully considered silences. Nothing was flattened by email, algorithms, or Zoom fatigue.

Being young, foreign, and ambitious added a kind of mystique. Before expats became content creators or social-media fixtures, you could move quietly, live fully, and feel part of a larger, almost mythic narrative. The Japanese language, with its coded nuance, trained you to observe more than you declared, a useful inversion of instinct for someone in media and entertainment.

I was part of a small minority of foreigners in the 1990s and 2000s. Every public appearance carried weight. People noticed, everywhere, all the time. Not casually, but in a way that implied a live audience, even if composed of strangers. Women were attuned to subtle cues: presence, posture, scent. A casual walk over Shibuya crossing or through Roppongi to Azabu became a public appraisal. Exhilarating, unnerving, a blend of opportunity and exposure.

I was a DJ on Tokyo’s top-rating morning radio show for six and a half years. Small team, enormous impact, and we changed the trajectory of Japanese broadcasting history forever. Television, modelling, narration: I navigated it all, constantly observed, learning the choreography of attention.

Antaeus was part of that script, not just a fragrance but a tool in self-performance. Scent carried confidence, desire, the aura of being noticed.

It became shorthand for aspiration, a chemical punctuation mark on the sentences of identity I was writing as I reinvented myself again and again.

By the end of that decade, Tokyo rewarded preparation, attention, and audacity. And Antaeus found its moment, scenting ambition in equal measure.

Memory and Nostalgia: Down the Rabbit-hole We Go

After I left Tokyo, I evolved. I stopped being that version of myself, the one who believed a spritz of Antaeus could rearrange the universe.

Scent memory is hardwired. Unlike visual or auditory memory, it bypasses the thalamus—headlong to the limbic system. An edition of Frontiers in Psychology, from 2014, notes olfactory-triggered memories are emotionally potent, persistent. The nose remembers before the mind does.

Scent does more than recall, it romanticises. A faint whiff today distils highlights: recognition in cafés, photo opportunities with fans, autograph requests, nights electric with possibility, attention as currency. It does not recall missed trains, awkward silences, taxi rides steeped in neon-lit regret, even stalkers at the apartment door late at night. Time filters the rough edges, leaving only gold-plated memories.

Male nostalgia is aspirational. We do not merely remember youth; we mourn it, envy it, mythologise it in exile. Rituals that once defined our youth, like clothing, scent, gestures, quietly repeat, echoing former life. Cologne spritzed on a Tuesday evening in 2025 is invocation. Reconnection. A reminder of who I was and how the world responded.

This raises a subtle, uncomfortable question: is it fair to my bestie, my partner, that I occasionally reach backward into a past that predates her? Perhaps it is harmless homage. Perhaps it is unconscious prioritisation of memory over presence. Awareness is unavoidable once scent enters the room.

Memory, nostalgia, and scent form alchemy. They allow a man to revisit his mythological self, play the same scenes, wear the same costume, even if the stage has changed. Seductive, comforting, disruptive.

The trap: mistaking the echo for today’s reality.

Memory in the Age of the Algorithm

Fast forward to the end of 2025. Memory no longer lives in boxes, diaries, or coat pockets. It lives in phones. “On This Day” reminders arrive uninvited, merciless. Digital memory flattens experience into content. Context, nuance, significance all seem secondary. Likes, shares, comments replace quiet reflection.

Holding onto a cologne becomes deliberate. Tangible. Immune to algorithms. Antaeus is a vessel of memory, pulling you bodily, emotionally, unpredictably. One whiff and you’re back in Roppongi’s Motown Bar, or on a late-night train, catching fleeting attention. Unlike Instagram, scent immerses you fully. A small, aromatic time machine.

In a world of algorithmic recollection, unsullied scent becomes radical. It cannot be cropped, filtered, or deleted. That is why, decades later, I occasionally reached for it: not to relive, but to feel, to measure, to remind myself what memory is outside of a smartphone screen.

Memory is fine. Revisiting the past, briefly, is fine. Living there isn’t.

The version of me who wore Antaeus daily was real. He worked hard, navigated a foreign country, learned rules, bent a few, got lucky. Sometimes lonely, always hungry for more. That version belongs exactly where it is—in the past.

The danger lies in needing to be him again. That cologne, James Dean hair, rider’s jacket, Alpha posture. They’re seductive because they carry memory.

The moment usually arrives with quiet reflection, when you realise your sense of self no longer hinges on fleeting approval. Glances and compliments are enjoyable, and there are plenty of them still, thanks to the epic beard. But out here in country-sea Japan, the young bodycon dancers at Julianna’s Tokyo have been replaced by the character-lined faces of women pushing ninety at the local fruit and veg market.

The former is no longer essential. The tools once necessary have done their job. Continuing to use them when they are no longer fit for purpose preserves a shadow self, refusing evolution.

Nostalgia teaches, delights, and reminds, but it can also trap. Memory is a resource, not a residence.

Antaeus serves as a bookmark. It allows me to revisit, to savour, to laugh, to feel just a little longing, but it is not an invitation to reinhabit the past.

Here in Chiba, on Japan’s Pacific Coast near Onjuku Beach, mornings are slow. Coffee, waves, horizon. Blue-zone living. The present is grounded, and there is no need for scented stagecraft. Antaeus is now shelf décor, a memory artefact. The aroma drifts, a smile rises. I honour the past, but live in the present.

Letting Go Without Losing It

I know who I am now. I know how I walk into a room and why I’m there. I’m not hunting, not performing. And I like that man. I trust him. He’s present in 2025, coffee in hand, Google Maps open, searching for a local Izakaya yet untasted.

The scent I wear now is different. Still stylish, but subtle, clean, ordinary. It carries honesty, presence, reality. The past is treasure, an artefact. It reminds me who I was, what I accomplished, what I believed possible. It is no longer a guide, no longer a tool. It is evidence, not instruction.

The grounded man I am now is enough. Lessons, laughter, experience, without the weight of performance. The past was necessary, the rituals were necessary, the attention turned out to be a teacher, not a trophy.

My past was glorious, absurd, thrilling. Worth remembering. But it is not the stage on which today unfolds.

The ordinary, unpretentious, fully present version of myself is the one that really matters.

This is the room I walk into now. And it is more than enough.

Slow Media Needs Slow Money…

Angelino Schintu is a veteran journalist, broadcaster, and filmmaker based in Japan. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Fushigi Times — an independent Slow Media platform offering bold, reality-grounded perspectives on global affairs, cultural explorations, and creative thought.

...Meanwhile in Australia: Monkeys Run the Zoo, and ‘Blokes in Frocks’ Rule the Courts

Angelino Schintu — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 08:00:00 GMT

This Slow Media content is supported by [YOUR ORGANISATION NAME HERE] and is best viewed in a browser.

In This Edition

When the scales of justice are swapped for movable goalposts, absurdity ceases to be theatre and becomes law.
From Caesars in togas to judges in wigs, history proves being a frocked feller is no crime, yet free speech now stands in the dock.
In these fushigi times, defending satire and plain speech is no longer comedy but it is civilisation’s closing argument.

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Reporting from the Hoity-Toity-Heidi-High Court

Here outside the grand, rather flamboyantly titled, Hoity-Toity-Heidi-High Court of Irreproachable Decorum in London, the Kirralie Smith case appealing the judgment handed down by an Australian court that found her guilty of unlawful vilification, otherwise known as hate speech is about to begin. The point of contention? Her social media description of a transgender athlete as a… ‘bloke in a frock.’ Yes, you heard that correctly. For the uninitiated: that’s local slang for a feller in a skirt, a dude in ball gown, a man in a dress.

The case has somehow found its way here, to London’s most grandiloquent court, a place where wigs are taller than toddlers and titles are longer than legal judgments, a fitting stage for an appeal that began in the comparatively modest confines of Sydney's local court.

What makes today particularly noteworthy is the person representing Ms Smith. No, it’s not the Lincoln Lawyer, nor Boston’s silver-tongued, primetime television legal virtuoso, Alan Shore. It is The Fushigi Times editor-in-chief, Angelino Schintu, whose decades in journalism, broadcasting and occasional stage and screen turns in barrister’s and priest’s frocks, have endowed him with the eloquence and courtroom flair to argue the merits of this case.

It's one that has captured attention far beyond the usual legal circles, because it isn’t just about a single phrase or social media post. It touches on freedom of speech, satire, and, frankly, common sense. Kirralie Smith’s supporters argue she was merely stating an obvious biological reality, in a typically Australian, colloquial style. Her critics say the language was offensive. Either way, the Commonwealth, and now this court, is about to weigh in.

Inside the Courtroom

All rise! The Most Honourable Montague St John Fairfax-Blythe, Third Earl of Tittingford-on-Thames, Viscount Wexbridge, Baron Alderleigh, Keeper of the King’s Benchlands, Lord High Steward of the Thames Marshes, Grand Arbiter of Silken Robes and Ceremonial Sashes, Defender of Historic Frock Protocols, and Supreme Chancellor of the Hoity-Toity-Heidi-High Court of Irreproachable Decorum presiding.

The Court is now in session for the appeal of Ms Kirralie Smith against the decision by the Deputy Chief Magistrate of the local court in Sydney, Australia, who found Ms. Smith guilty of unlawful vilification in relation to her description of a transgender athlete as a ‘bloke in a frock.’

Arguing for the Defence: Opening Statement

Your Honour – I mean, Your Emanent Lordship, esteemed members of the court, and all assembled, I rise today to address a ruling that defies not just logic, but history, reason, and frankly, the collective memory of Western civilisation’s wardrobe choices.

My client, Ms Kirralie Smith, a woman of sharp wit, impeccable timing, and enviable sartorial taste, has been found guilty of unlawful vilification for referring to two male-born athletes as… well... men. In case you missed it, this decision was rendered by the Deputy Chief Magistrate Sharon Freund of the New South Wales local court in Sydney, Australia.

Now, one might assume, in a properly functioning world, that the observation that two biological males are men would be wholly uncontroversial. Yet here we are, Your Worship, forced to waste the court’s indulgence wrestling not with a matter of law, but with absurdity.

Exhibit A: Antiquity, and Where It All Began

Mi’Lord, if you’ll indulge me for the briefest of moments, let us commence with a little history. Consider ancient Rome. Everyone’s in a frock. Julius Caesar, Augustus, even the skirt-wearing gladiators when they weren’t shirtless, because, apparently, chest hair and biceps alone were insufficient for the Senate’s approval. The toga: a giant bed sheet you wore like you’d lost a bet in a particularly cruel hazing incident or frat house challenge. And somehow, this improvised garment became the uniform of world domination. One wonders if the fearsome Gauls, you know – Astérix and Obélix - paused mid-charge to look downward toward their loins and critique their pleats.

And ancient Greece. Equally fabulous. Finish a naked, sweaty wrestling match, towel yourself off, slip into a chiton, which is essentially a summer dress, and then head out to invent democracy. Imagine Socrates philosophising in flowing linen while debating whether sandals or bare feet best convey moral superiority.

What about in Biblical times. I’ll pause to satirise my own faith for a moment. Mi’Lord can be certain Moses did not part the Red Sea in cargo shorts. No, he was in a frock. And what about Jesus? Sandals, robe, beard. Basically, a first-century hipster in a linen maxi dress. The wedding at Cana? Water miraculously turned into wine. Less a ‘banquet of manliness’ and more ‘H&M summer collection launch meets miracle catering.’

Shakespeare’s plays. Women were forbidden on stage, so all female roles were portrayed by? Yes. Men in dresses! Imagine the passion of Romeo with his Juliet or Ophelia, performed by – yes, Mi’Lord – blokes in frocks, delivering tragic lines to an audience of Elizabethan gentlemen, who themselves were likely sporting ruffs so stiff they could double as neck armour.

And let’s not forget Japan’s Kabuki theatre, where even today, the onnagata, male actors specialising in female roles, perform in elaborate kimonos and makeup. From London’s Globe to Tokyo’s Kabuki-za, theatrical frocks and gender-bending performance have a long, illustrious lineage.

And what about the Celts? Those were Frocks. Vikings? Tunics to the knees. Samurai? Hakama trousers so wide they might as well be pleated skirts. Blokes in frocks, everywhere you look.

Exhibit B: Warriors of the World

Now, Your Lordship, consider the world’s warriors. Indeed, you yourself come from a long line of skirted warriors, do you not? Scottish Highlanders storming into battle wearing kilts. That’s a skirt. Braveheart? Less about the war, more about the freedom to accessorise with tartan. Then there are the Romans again: their soldiers wore short tunics, suspiciously like miniskirts. They conquered half the known world while flashing a bit of bum-cheek, pardon me Mi’Lord, …whilst displaying a flash of errant thigh.

Then there are The Knights Templar. Long white robes with giant red crosses. Basically, medieval nighties. And they terrified people. Imagine being conquered by a crusader in what looks like a hospital gown cosplay. The Maasai of East Africa wear the shúkà, a wrap of vibrant red cloth. Elegant, powerful, frocked-up, Your Worship.

And what about the Japanese samurai with their hakama? Nothing says Ima kara kubi o kiru zo (今から首を切るぞ) ‘I’m about to decapitate you’ while looking like you’ve just walked off a Paris fashion show runway.

Exhibit C: Religions of the World: Frock Central

Religion may be the world’s largest frock convention. Catholic priests in cassocks, bishops in mitres (or holy dunce caps as I’ve heard them described) and embroidered robes. The Pope? The undisputed heavyweight champion of frockery. Hats taller than toddlers, gold trim glinting under Vatican lights. The Archbishop of Canterbury? Regional manager of frocks there, definitely auditioning for Britain’s Next Top Holy Traffic Cone in a frock!

Orthodox priests. Floor-length black gowns, swishing about in the midst of all the bells and smells with more drama than a Shakespearean cast performing the forbidden-to-be-named-aloud Scottish play.

Buddhist monks, Hindu sadhus, Druids. Draped, robed, saffroned, or moonlit in white. Combine all of them in one room and you’d swear you stumbled into Italy’s Pitti Uomo: The Eternal Collection.

Exhibit D: Kings, Queens and Aristocrats: Frock Royalty by Any Other Name

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French aristocrats: drag queens with power. Louis XIV, the Sun King, looking like RuPaul’s personal stylist went rogue. Wigs, powder, lace, high heels.

British judges, pardon me Your Lordship, are still wearing wigs and gowns. The law, still comparable to Monty Python in serious voices.

And what about Graduation ceremonies? Hogwarts cosplay for everyone.

Coronation robes. Velvet, ermine, crowns, but the frocks steal the show every time.

Exhibit E: The Accidental Frocks of Modern Life

Hospital gowns, bathrobes, the Snuggie – all examples of modern accidental frocks. Boxers, wrestlers, MMA fighters entering the ring - in the blue corner – in sequinned robes. Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan, Mike Tyson, all frocked up, intimidating, yet undeniably fabulous. Nothing says ‘fear me’ like arriving for a fight in silk and sequins.

Exhibit F: The World of Entertainment and Comedy

Your Eminence, let us consider the British pantomime. The Dame is usually a bloke in an over-the-top frock bellowing jokes and egging the audience on to ever more excited ‘oh, yes he is’ to his ‘oh, no he’s not banter!’

Monty Python. Half the sketches are men in dresses shrieking things like ‘No! He's not the Messiah. He's a very naughty boy!’

The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Tim Curry as Dr Frank-N-Furter is the Shakespeare of fishnets.

And Hollywood loves it: Robin Williams is the amazing Mrs Doubtfire, Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, not to forget Jack Lemmon, Tyler Perry, Eddie Murphy, all performing genders like a theatrical Olympics, each frock a gold medal in comedic mastery.

And, of course, we must mention Australia’s own Dame Edna Everage. From average suburban Melbourne housewife to the glitz and glamour of Royal Command performances at London’s Albert Hall. Barry Humphries, adorned in purple hair, rhinestones, and razor-sharp wit, proved that a bloke in a frock could dominate comedy stages, television, and the hearts of millions for decades.

Music. David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Prince, Harry Styles. If you haven’t worn a frock at least once, are you even a rock star?

Exhibit G: Fashion and the Normalisation of the Frock

At Paris Fashion Week and at Florence’s Pitti Uomo: men in skirts. Jean-Paul Gaultier, Marc Jacobs, Thom Browne, frocking constantly. Conor McGregor wore a kilt, bagpipes in hand, teeth intact, and still KOed the opposition.

Half of the Pacific and South-East Asia wear sarongs daily, and civilisation hasn’t collapsed yet. Fabric is tied, untied, admired, and life moves on.

Exhibit H: The Everyday Bloke in a Frock

The point, Your Worship, is that frocks are everywhere. Every culture, class, and continent. From Moses to McGregor, Aristotle to Eddie Izzard, Braveheart to bathrobe. And the scandal? Pretending this is new, shocking, or dangerous. Mi’Lord, it is not. History is laughing at us from behind its flowing robes and frocks.

Closing Argument: From Satire to Reality

Your Emminent, Hoity-Toity Lordship, for all this glorious history of frocks, one might think society would simply shrug and go on with its day-to-day. A ‘bloke in a frock’ has been, and continues to be, an historical constant, theatrical flourish, sartorial choice. But recently, in New South Wales, Australia – a nation whose Constitution is still so young the ink has barely dried – the courts would have us believe that centuries of culture do not inoculate a phrase from scrutiny. Kirralie Smith, for noting biological males are men, was found guilty of unlawful vilification – hate speech – by Deputy Chief Magistrate Sharon Freund. Simple observations, once humorous turns of phrase, are now, apparently, matters for legal judgment. We’ll leave the Victorian Premier Dictator Dan’s handing of the Covid 19 lockdown regime for another day, but hasn’t there been enough authoritarian overreach into the lives of the Australian citizenry?

Reality Check: Absurdity in Context

Mi’Lord history, humour, and the law have dramatically collided in what can only be described as baffling nonsensical wokery in the judgement handed down against my client. The same world tolerating emperors in togas, Scottish warriors in kilts, Monty Python in dresses and fake bosoms, even the Emperor’s New Clothes now gets to weigh in on a social media post. Context matters. Culture collides with the law in ways that are, quite literally, surreal.

What About Freedom of Speech?

Beneath frocks, jokes, and theatricality, the New South Wales court case cuts deeper: this was not a debate about men in women’s sports. But that’s what it should have been about – a case about a man born with the usual male tackle between his legs, who insists on prancing about in a frock and playing where he doesn’t belong.

To clarify: this court case and its incredible judgment was an absolute travesty. A full-frontal attack on freedom of speech. The defendant, Kirralie Smith, took a very Aussie, colloquial shot, simply observing biological reality, stating a most obvious and clear truth: these are blokes in frocks, and that’s fine – they are allowed to be. But there is no place for them on women’s sports fields. She was viciously penalised for stating her valid opinion.

The Monkeys have taken over the zoo, Your Lordship. Overturn this insane, egregious ruling. The legal system, under the guise of civility, stifles public discourse. In her ruling, the Deputy Chief Magistrate displayed what can only be described as hateful behaviour toward the defendant, policing words rather than addressing where genuine harm is being done. This ruling upholds a woke, namby-pamby stance that satire, commentary, even blunt opinion, can be legally censured if it offends one of the more fragile humans perceived sensibilities. Australia, embarrassingly lags behind the global movement away from Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) overreach. It shows how easily speech is being curtailed, leaving truth and debate at risk.

After centuries of men in dresses (blokes in frocks), kilts, togas, cassocks and Snuggies, history’s lessons in levity still clash violently with nonsensical liberal legal wokery.

Freedom of speech, which is the lifeblood of satire, dissent, and cultural dialogue, is endangered by those meant to protect it. The most absurd reality is not about calling someone a bloke in a frock, but that speaking plainly, even irreverently, in public debate is treated as a crime. The truth, the facts, are not moveable goalposts and deserve to linger long after the laughter fades.

Mr Bean, Blackadder: Rowan Atkinson on Free Speech

In the words of comic royalty, Rowan Atkinson:

"The strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression, it is more speech."

Atkinson’s advocacy underscores the importance of robust dialogue and the right to offend as essential components of a free society. It highlights, with elegant clarity, the absurdity of the New South Wales court’s decision. Attempting to police speech under the guise of civility risks silencing truth, satire, and the very commentary that keeps society honest — journalism itself.

In the end, history shows us that men in dresses are nothing new. What is new, and deeply troubling, is a society that punishes speech for merely describing that historical, cultural, and theatrical fact. Satire, commentary, and even blunt opinion are vital to a healthy democracy.

No 'bloke in a frock,' no court ruling, and no DEI department should be allowed to take that away. And so, Mi’Lord, as we rise from the theatre of absurdity that has been this courtroom, let us remember: defending the right to speak plainly, to laugh, to comment, even irreverently, or to state a global majority position for a cause – that there is no place in women’s sports for biological men - in this case, 'blokes in frocks' on a women's soccer field – is not just a defence of freedom. It is, in fact, a defence of civilisation itself, one bloke in a frock at a time.

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Angelino Schintu is a veteran journalist, broadcaster, and filmmaker based in Japan. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Fushigi Times — an independent Slow Media platform offering bold, reality-grounded perspectives on global affairs, cultural explorations, and creative thought.

Iran’s Alternate 1985: The Future That Should Have Been and Could Still Be

Angelino Schintu — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:00:00 GMT

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In This Edition

Iran’s freedom clock stopped in 1979 — but history reminds us that missed futures don’t have to disappear.
From nukes reduced to rubble to proxies in retreat, a regime built on defiance now faces the slow truth of its own undoing.
In these fushigi times, Iran’s DeLorean moment flickers — a chance to trade dogma for dignity, exile for ingenuity, and detour for destiny.

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88 Miles Per Hour Into the Alternate Iran

Mid-2025 marked a dramatic escalation of regional tensions as Israeli fighter jets launched a precision strike deep inside Iran, knocking out nuclear enrichment facilities. The raid shattered Iran’s air-defence shield and sent shockwaves across the Middle East.

While Iranian state media downplayed the damage, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed significant disruption.

News Report: Israeli officials claimed the operation set Iran’s nuclear ambitions back by years and killed senior Quds Force commanders. Tehran denied the deaths, but international media reported the Israeli claims widely.

The attack was part of a longer arc that began with Hamas’s cross-border assault on Israel in October 2023. Intelligence leaks later confirmed Iran’s involvement through its covert Palestine Corps, turning whispers of support into hard evidence.

This time, Israel didn’t wait for consensus. President Trump joined the fray days later, ordering direct U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. For Washington, the era of strategic ambiguity is over. Israel now leads the charge — and Tehran faces a new reality.

A geopolitical reset is underway. Iran must decide: evolve or be left behind.

Proxy Empire in Liquidation

Iran’s web of proxies, once the envy and terror of Middle Eastern geopolitics, unravelled faster than most analysts expected.

News Report: Hezbollah, once Iran’s most formidable proxy, was battered by Israel’s sustained northern campaign. Its leadership went into hiding, its strongholds reduced to rubble, and its rocket fire scattered and desperate. Once a quasi-state actor, it is increasingly a guerrilla force — and its regional stature is fading.

Syria has slipped from Tehran’s grasp. Assad’s regime collapsed in late 2024 under pressure from opposition groups backed by shifting coalitions. Iranian military sites were destroyed or seized, and Russia, distracted by Ukraine and unrest at home, offered no rescue. The Damascus-Tehran-Moscow triangle is broken.

In the south, Yemen’s Houthis have been hit hard by Israeli and U.S. strikes. Once a threat to Red Sea shipping, they now resemble a fractured insurgency — isolated, depleted, and increasingly irrelevant.

“They exported revolution like it was oil. Now the market’s collapsed.”
— a Gulf diplomat quipped on the sidelines of a recent international summit.

The once-invisible Quds Force is in disarray. Tehran’s proxy web — from Baghdad to Beirut — is rapidly unravelling.

What remains is a diminished Iran, hemmed in by sanctions, battlefield losses, and eroding regional trust.

The era of Iran as a formidable regional powerbroker is collapsing in the vacuum left by its ‘88 mile per hour’ retreat.

The Alternate 1985, Persian Edition

History is shaped as much by the paths not taken as by those chosen. In 1979, Iran stood at a crossroads. The Shah, though an autocrat wielding the repressive Savak secret police, presided over a state heavily investing in education, science, women’s rights, and infrastructure. Cities like Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz were vibrant, cosmopolitan hubs pulsating with art, culture, and intellectual discourse. Mini-skirts were a common sight; women held positions in government cabinets, drove cars freely, and attended universities in large numbers.

By the mid-1970s, Iran boasted one of the highest female literacy rates in the Middle East. Women accounted for over 40% of university enrolments. Family law reforms gave women legal avenues in marriage and divorce. Farrokhroo Parsa broke barriers as the first female cabinet minister, serving as Minister of Education. Shirin Ebadi, who would later win a Nobel Peace Prize, was a respected judge.

“Women were visible everywhere: in universities, on television, in parliament. It was not a perfect system, but it was changing fast.”
—Former Tehran MP Mehrangiz Kar.

Many believed Iran might follow the path of South Korea: harnessing oil wealth to build a modern, outward-facing economy aligned strategically with the West. Iranian universities gained global recognition, and an emerging middle class swelled with technocrats, entrepreneurs, and artists.

In this alternate reality, Iran would have become a key regional hub for innovation and cultural exchange — a Muslim-majority country blending tradition and modernity, thriving economically without succumbing to either Soviet-style communism or brutal Islamic theocracy.

Iranian cinema, literature, and music would have flourished on the global stage, from Cannes to Hollywood, while Tehran’s tech sector rose as the region’s Silicon Valley.

But then came Ayatollah Khomeini. The Islamic Revolution overthrew not only the Shah but Iran’s entire developmental trajectory. The clerics established the velayat-e faqih — a system of absolute theocratic rule masquerading as republicanism. Oil revenues were redirected to regional proxy wars rather than domestic development. Women were forced into veils and segregated spaces. Music, once a cherished art form, was suppressed. Dissent was crushed under heavy-handed security apparatuses. The dream of joining the First World was abandoned in favour of a revolutionary bunker mentality.

The consequences have been severe: a massive brain drain, economic stagnation worsened by sanctions and corruption, and a profound alienation among Iran’s youth.

The Women, Life, Freedom protests in 2022 and 2023 — sparked by the tragic killing of Mahsa Amini in custody — were not spontaneous riots but a profound cry for dignity and human rights.

Had Iran taken the South Korean path, it would today boast a GDP multiple times its current size, diversified industries, a flourishing arts scene, and far less reliance on geopolitical brinkmanship. Instead, Iran is trapped in a self-imposed isolation, holding onto a myth of resistance while its youth dream of escape.

Some analysts believe the revolution erased more than reform. It erased a potential future timeline for entire generations.

Other nations in the region, once far less developed than Iran in the mid-1970s, have instead filled the void it left behind. The United Arab Emirates, for instance, has transformed from dusty Gulf outposts into high-tech cities of glass and ambition.

Dubai and Abu Dhabi boast world-class infrastructure, thriving financial sectors, and a brand of state-directed capitalism that markets itself with cosmopolitan flair. Qatar has parlayed its gas wealth into global media influence via Al Jazeera and soft power diplomacy through sports and culture. Even Saudi Arabia, long the poster child for religious conservatism, is now attempting a radical modernisation under Vision 2030 — legalising music festivals, empowering women, and courting foreign investment.

None of these states are democratic. But they have grasped a simple truth: legitimacy in the 21st century is earned not through ideological purity or military adventurism, but through prosperity, stability, and international integration.

Iran, once the region’s intellectual and cultural lodestar, has found itself outpaced by its neighbours, not because it lacked potential, but because the Islamic zealots chose revolution over reform, dogma over development.

Tehran’s June 2025: Daylight After Shockwaves

With bombs falling ever closer, Iran has faced a reckoning. The June 2025 Israeli strikes were both precise and symbolic. Iran’s nuclear programme (long a national obsession and technological stand-in for sovereignty and deterrence) was exposed as vulnerable. The destruction inflicted with minimal resistance was not only a military humiliation, but also a profound psychological blow.

Regional powers watch cautiously. Gulf monarchies, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia, publicly condemn escalation but privately welcome the weakening of their main rival. Russia, preoccupied with Ukraine and internal challenges, has failed to assist either Syria or Tehran. China hedges its bets, balancing strategic interests against regional instability while eyeing infrastructure investments opportunistically.

Inside Iran, the economic outlook is bleak. Inflation is hovering around 35–40%, youth unemployment stands at approximately 22%, and corruption remains endemic throughout government.

The Associated Press and Reuters have reported the rial’s plunge to record lows in unofficial markets, while a recent Financial Times analysis noted longstanding weakness amid sanctions and parallel-market clampdowns. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has entrenched itself across critical sectors of the economy, including telecommunications, petrochemicals, construction, and illicit oil exports.

Reuters reporting confirms that the Guards now control large portions of Iran’s export economy, bypassing official state structures and redirecting revenue into a shadow economy.

This entrenchment is not just about profit: it’s about regime preservation.

The Islamic Republic remains a state at war with its own citizenry.

An underground Persian poll leaked in mid-2024 showed over 75% of respondents favouring “major constitutional change.” The regime responded with swift arrests of poll organisers. The Islamic Republic’s legitimacy is rapidly eroding.

Iran’s domestic turmoil compounds its geopolitical setbacks. Faced with rising street protests, economic implosion, and now external military pressure, the regime’s survival instincts become increasingly erratic. Crackdowns intensify, but the more repression mounts, the louder the calls for reform grow. This is not simply a regime vs. people conflict; it is a civilisational clash between a generation shackled by clerical decrees and a youth yearning for a digital future.

The DeLorean Moment — Still Possible?

Despite its troubles, Iran’s future is not written in stone. Nearby examples offer hope. The UAE, once a desert backwater, evolved into a global commercial and tourism hub by blending economic liberalism with political control. Iran, endowed with a rich culture, youthful population, and strategic geography, could surpass that trajectory.

Its diaspora boasts Silicon Valley–level capital and influence. Iranian youth are highly educated and tech savvy, plugged into global networks and ideas. Its intellectual traditions, from Persian poetry to philosophy, remain profound and enduring.

All that is lacking is leadership with the courage to trade ideological rigidity for pragmatic ambition — and to see the past four decades not as sacred, but as a costly detour into an alternate reality that should never have been.

Nuclear weapons will not secure Iran’s future, nor will endless proxy wars. The country needs economic stability, political legitimacy, and reintegration into the international community.

That change may arise from grassroots movements or a regime willing to reform before collapse becomes inevitable.

“The Islamic Republic isn’t immortal. It’s just heavily armed and out of ideas,” said a Tehran-based academic, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Even some establishment figures quietly speculate about constitutional reform.”

As young Iranians learn more about the country’s pre 1979 history — not the Shah’s propaganda, but a flawed yet modernising society — they increasingly see the current regime as a detour rather than destiny.

In private conversations with reformist figures, one cleric urged Iranians to consider Indonesia, often cited for its “Islam Nusantara” tradition balancing piety, pluralism, and democracy, as an aspirational model.

Enter Reza Pahlavi: the eldest son of the last shah, now based in the United States, who has positioned himself as a leadership alternative. In late June, during an extended media push that included remarks to Western journalists in Washington and Paris, Pahlavi declared the Islamic Republic’s end “near”, calling this a potential “Berlin Wall moment”. At a press conference in Paris on 23 June, he urged a democratic transition and argued that dismantling Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was insufficient.

“Only a democratic transition in Iran can ensure lasting peace”.

A coalition presented at the Munich Convergence Summit in February 2025 has endorsed him as the leader of a proposed transitional government, to take shape should the regime fall. Since the June airstrikes between Israel and Iran, Pahlavi has intensified his messaging: encouraging domestic uprisings, claiming Iran’s Supreme Leader is in hiding, and stating that a 100-day roadmap is in place and ready for implementation.

His supporters point to his organisational readiness and increasingly public role in international diplomacy. Sceptics, meanwhile, question his legitimacy within Iran itself, noting that decades of exile have left him disconnected from the realities on the ground. Still, Pahlavi’s growing prominence signals something deeper: a readiness among segments of the diaspora — and even some internal reformists — to revisit the notion of monarchy, or at least transitional stewardship, not as nostalgia but as a mechanism for national repair.

Whether that route will be taken remains uncertain, but the shift in narrative is itself a form of DeLorean-style time travel: a rewriting of what the future might plausibly contain.

Iran’s vast underground economy, creative entrepreneurial spirit, and burgeoning tech hubs hint at an alternative reality just beneath the surface. In that sense, the “DeLorean moment,” a leap back to reclaim a lost trajectory, is both a metaphor and a possibility. It requires reengaging with a modernity that embraces pluralism and openness rather than exile and dogma.

Flux Capacitor Energised: Persia’s DeLorean Awaits

Back to the Future ends with a jolt and a choice. Marty McFly sets the time circuits to 21 October 2015 — a date that became pop culture shorthand for imagined futures, hoverboards, and the tantalising idea that timelines can be rewritten.

The Hill Valley clock tower was struck by lightning on 11 November 1955, while Iran’s own clock stopped on 11 February 1979, when the Islamic Revolution seized control and rerouted the nation’s trajectory. That was when the time circuits jammed: futures erased, and a generation’s dreams consigned to black-and-white television, war, and theocratic rule.

In an alternate 1985 — Persian edition — the DeLorean never came. But now, in the wake of the June 2025 airstrikes and decades of squandered potential, a different kind of time machine hums beneath the surface. Iran’s youth — educated, connected, and disillusioned — aren’t waiting for Doc Brown. They’re rewriting the future themselves — not with plutonium and flux capacitors, but with defiance, bootleg cinema, VPNs, and a quiet conviction that change, however fragile, is inevitable.

Tehran’s rulers may double down on repression, but the people watch and whisper.

Because a generation raised on Instagram yearns not for martyrdom, but for Wi-Fi, dignity, and opportunity.

Iran squandered one future in 1979. A second chance now flickers amid the rubble — a shot at a future that trades ideology for ingenuity, fatwas for fibre optics, martyrdom for meritocracy.

Now more than ever, Iran needs its own Marty McFly — a courageous figure willing to slide across the hood into the driver’s seat, engage the time circuits for a leap beyond dogma, and pilot the nation toward a modern, inclusive destiny.

Time circuits ready. Destination: 21 October, year? TBA — but this time, forward!

Slow Media Needs Slow Money…

Angelino Schintu is a veteran journalist, broadcaster, and filmmaker based in Japan. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Fushigi Times — an independent Slow Media platform offering bold, reality-grounded perspectives on global affairs, cultural explorations, and creative thought.

Rusting Civilisations: The End of Everything, and a New Hope

Angelino Schintu — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:01:23 GMT

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In This Edition

Rust never hurries, it just reminds us that nothing we build, own, or inherit was ever really permanent.
From empty Japanese ski lodges to rust-streaked shipyards, decay is not collapse but the slow truth we try not to see.
In these fushigi times, rust becomes a teacher, urging us to shift from inheritance to stewardship, from panic to care.

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At the Edge of Time and Salt!

Somewhere near the edge of Onjuku Beach, on the Pacific Coast of Chiba, Japan beside a sun-faded vending machine that still clunks out cans of lukewarm Boss Coffee, a rusted railing curls like dried kelp. Nobody remembers when it was installed. Nobody is responsible for removing it. And yet, day after day, it holds the same chipped stance against the Pacific wind, its metal flaking into powder with every shift of humidity.

Rust does not hurry. That is what makes it unsettling.

I have been thinking a lot about rust lately, not as an engineering problem but as a kind of quiet truth-teller. It shows up uninvited, stains everything it touches, and slowly reminds us that ownership is temporary, maintenance is eternal, and most of the things we think we possess are simply on loan until the elements take them back.

Rust is not here to depress us. It is here to focus us. To sharpen the value of what remains, like a frame around a photograph.

Japan, of course, is rust-friendly. The air is wet, the coasts are salted, and there is more ageing infrastructure here than most places know what to do with. Trains do run on time, of course, with immediate apology announcements on the intercom if a Shinkansen is even a few seconds late. But the rural stations served by local trains are often ghostly: corrugated roofs held up by posts corroding from the inside out. Behind them, forgotten bicycles lean like skeletons in long grass. You do not have to look hard to see it. Rust is Japan’s second skin, especially out here, where the sheen of Tokyo does not quite reach. On some back roads around Chiba’s Minami Boso, a row of old guardrails has sagged into the weeds, their once-white paint a memory. A fisherman in Wakayama ties his boat with rope patched three times over, beside cleats that crumble at the edges. Even the signs warning of landslides bear the freckles of brown, as if time itself has begun to erase the warning.

The Politics of Oxidation

In a way, rust is more honest than most governments. It does not promise to make anything great again. It does not hide behind branding or legacy. It simply shows up and tells the truth: this will not last. Your flags, your condos, your high-speed internet, your sovereign currency. Give it time. Give it weather. It will decay.

It can be seen in the suburbs of Detroit, the sinking edges of Venice, the fishing docks in Vladivostok, and the alleys of Yokohama’s Chinatown. Not total collapse, but corrosion. One door that no longer shuts. One shutter that has not opened in years. Cities do not fall apart dramatically, they fade. And in a world still obsessed with GDP graphs and innovation indexes, rust quietly laughs and goes about its business.

“Where is the ministry for maintenance? Who funds the Department of Things We Already Have That Need Looking After?”

I saw it in Manila years ago, on my way to eat and be entertained at The Singing Cooks and Waiters on Roxas Boulevard. A new mall had recently opened beside a crumbling overpass, the two structures separated by a single decade and yet worlds apart in optimism. In Lisbon, the tiles on old houses lose their glaze, a gentle surrender to Atlantic storms. This is not disaster. It is the slow, daily retreat of ambition.

The Ownership Illusion

There is a strange confidence in how people talk about what they own. My house. My land. My country. My legacy. But rust knows better. Rust reminds us: we are not the final owner. You and I are the interim tenants. We are the one watering the plants before the next person forgets to.

Walk through an old industrial port, it does not matter where, and you will find the remains of empires that once spoke in spreadsheets and steel. Now they speak in oxidation. In Kobe, rust creeps along decommissioned shipyards. In Baltimore, the old grain elevators glow orange under a low sun, barely upright. In Sardinia, where my own family roots run deep into the Ghilarza rock, many of the olive presses are long silent, their iron bellies bloated and split by time. In Perth, Australia, where I grew up, a half‑dismantled factory fence in one of the eastern industrial suburbs rattles in the Fremantle Doctor’s afternoon breeze, its paint blistered by decades of searing summer heat.

“Permanence is fiction. The best we can do is use what we have wisely before it flakes back into earth, just like we will.”

Japan’s Quiet Collapse

Here is the thing about Japan: it is not dying loudly. There is no revolution, no riots, no dystopian futurescape. It is just ageing. Shrinking. Rusting, in the way that all highly developed things eventually do.

You can hear it in the silence of rural towns. Hardly any kids, no new businesses. Just a kojin shōten — a half-stocked variety store with a taped-up window and a stereo still playing Enka from 1977 or occasionally something more modern like Keisuke Kuwata’s Southern All Stars 1989 hit, Sayonara Baby. The streets are clean. The buses are still running (mostly). But something is missing and it is not coming back.

On the Shikoku coast, a once-busy ferry terminal is now a shelter for stray cats, the ticket windows dusted in salt. In the mountains of Akita, a ski lodge stands empty every winter, its roof streaked brown, waiting for skiers who will likely never return.

And in Kiyosato, Nagano, once famous for its ice cream and packed with throngs of teenagers on school trips in the 1990s, the footpaths now echo. Shops stand shuttered, souvenir signs fading, and the once-busy lookout is silent but for the wind off the plateau. What was once a summer pilgrimage in my racing green Mazda Roadster, top down, Sweet Soul Revue by Pizzicato Five blasting from the FM radio, is now a postcard of absence.

More than 1,200 towns and villages across Japan are now considered marginal communities, where over half of the population is 65 or older. Some are on the brink of disappearing altogether. Houses, known as Akiya, stand empty and unsold, not because nobody wants them but because there is no-one left who can. This is not a collapse. It is a slow vanishing. Rust is just the most visible narrator. And it is not Japan’s burden alone.

Rust Around the World

Rust is borderless. In India, abandoned railway sidings blend into red earth, trains overtaken by weeds. In America’s Midwest, towns live in the shadows of old silos and smokestacks, relics of production lines that no longer produce. Even in the tech-obsessed corners of China, ghost cities sprawl with buildings unfinished or unoccupied, iron fittings already flaking before the windows are installed. On the edges of Athens, a stadium built for an Olympic moment now lies cracked and rust-streaked, weeds claiming its bleachers.

Rust does not erase life. It just roughens its edges.

Maintenance as Resistance

There is a quiet nobility in fixing things that are already breaking. Not upgrading them, fixing them. Wiping the dust off an old tool. Replacing a hinge. Repainting a railing you know will peel again next year.

Nobody celebrates this kind of labour. It is too slow. Too humble. Too unmarketable. But in a rusting world, maintenance might be one of the last meaningful acts left to us.

“What if the real counterculture now is the opposite? Staying put. Looking after things. Choosing not to abandon them just because they are no longer shiny.”

Living With the Rust

Of course, we cannot stop decay. That is not the point. But we can live inside of it, mindfully. We can learn to see the beauty in surfaces that have lived a little. A kettle with a faint ring of rust still boils water. A bicycle with scuffed paint still carries a child to school. A footbridge with a stained railing still crosses the river, linking lives that would otherwise remain apart.

I think about my father’s Sardinia sometimes, not the postcards, but the rhythm. The way things age there and are allowed to age. The gates that screech, the walls that crumble in the corners, the wine presses made before electricity. There is a kind of dignity in it. Things are not constantly replaced, they are accepted. A kind of everyday intimacy with time.

In Oristano, a small coastal city on Sardinia’s western shore, there's an ancient chest still in use in an old fisherman’s house, its hinges well-oiled but rusted with age, yet the lid closing true, a quiet emblem of the island’s long memory and salt‑of‑the‑earth people.

Where Does the Rust Leave Us?

If everything is rusting, our cities, our bodies, our democracies, what is the point?

The answer, I think, is to do what people have always done: make something of the time we get. Build less, tend more. Pay attention to what is already here. We do not get to keep the world. But we do get to shape it while we are here. If nothing lasts forever, then everything matters now. Every conversation, every act of care, every small decision not to walk away. A mended fence, a cleaned window, a remembered story, they are all resistance against forgetting.

In my slow reading of a favourite collection, the Archaeological Study Bible (NIV, 2011), I came across these words:

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.”
— Matthew 6:19

Those words sit quietly alongside these thoughts, a reminder that what we hold too tightly will always slip away, but what we tend in love and memory may endure far beyond us.

Rust isn’t ugly. There is a kind of beauty about it, a softness that only appears after years of hard weather and human absence. Walk down a Shutter Dori on the Pacific coast here in Chiba, the kind of street where every shopfront is sealed behind a corrugated shutter, and you see it. The steel is flaking, the paint has gone, but the surfaces have bloomed into streaks of orange and brown, accidental abstract paintings made by salt air and time.

Out here in the countryside, an old train carriage sits in a field of weeds, its panels split and stained. On paper it is a ruin, but stand there in the late afternoon light and you see something else: the colour of rust glowing like lacquer, the quiet dignity of a machine allowed to age. Rust takes away, yes, but it also gives, texture, depth, a reminder that even endings can be beautiful.

Inheritance vs. Stewardship

There is this peculiar fantasy we all buy into at some point, usually between mortgage paperwork and an online will template, that we will one day pass things down. That our stuff, our land, our legacy, will mean something because we managed to hoard it for so long.

But here is the twist: almost nobody actually owns anything. We are just borrowing it until we die, or until the rust eats through the floorboards. Try telling that to a man showing off a meticulously cased coin collection in his narrow upstairs shop in Tokyo’s Jinbōchō, the kind of place where rust is the enemy and provenance is everything, and it will not go down well.

But stewardship? That is different. Stewardship says: I do not own this, but I will look after it while it is mine. It is less glamorous. It does not make for a brag-worthy inheritance party or a third vacation home. But it is how things last longer than they should. It is what separates the rusted ruins from the lived-in relics.

Stewardship is repainting the old family gate not because it will sell better, but because it squeaks when your grandmother walks past it and she complains about it each time she does.

It is teaching your child how to fix something instead of replacing it. It is not legacy in the grand, marble plaque sense. It is quieter. More useful. Less tax-deductible. And it asks harder questions: Do we care for what we cannot keep? Can we pass on more than property, like values, attention, patience, or at the very least, a working kettle?
The modern world is addicted to inheritance. But maybe it is stewardship that holds us together. Especially when rust is always watching.

Rust and Time: Where Endings Are Beginnings

So maybe the rust is not the enemy. Maybe it is the reminder. That everything is borrowed. That nothing works forever. That beauty fades and wood splinters and metal oxidises and yes, even vending machines grow old. But also, that while we are here, we can tend to the rusting things. Not to stop the decay, but to show we noticed. That we cared. That even as it all corrodes, we still found time to live.

And perhaps it is in the smallest acts that we keep that care alive. I think of the time it takes to handwrite a letter with my favourite Venetian Bortoletti glass pen, dipping the nib into an ink pot encased in ancient white bronze, waiting as the words dry, then melting a stick of wax and pressing down my seal until it cools. It is a small ritual, imperfect and deliberate, and somehow it feels like tending something beyond the page. These are not grand gestures. They are quiet resistances, reminders that even in a world that rusts, there are beginnings to be found in how we choose to spend our time.

To Everything There Is a Season

We do not need to panic. Decay is not a cliff edge; it is a slow slope. Rust works patiently, and most of what surrounds us does not collapse overnight. That realisation changes how we might choose to live.

It is not only a way of thinking, it is something we can practice. A different rhythm, even in a world that rewards urgency. Some reclaim it in small, deliberate ways: sitting with a printed newspaper at the weekend instead of another flick-scroll through smartphone notifications, turning the pages of a book rather than clicking between tabs on a browser window, taking time to write letters instead of firing off another disposable electronic message.

A letter written by hand carries a deeper thought than any email, because we must pause to imagine the person half a world away who will hold it between their fingers.

On a sloping writing board, a simple slice of wood, aged and darkened by hand, resting on an old leaf-top desk, writing becomes a ritual. A vintage letter rack holds the paper. The twisted nib of a glass pen dips into ink, and each line takes time. Even errors remain, because they belong. It is a kind of wabi-sabi in practice, the Japanese acceptance that nothing needs to be perfect, because everything is moving, slowly, toward imperfection anyway.

“Perhaps this is what living alongside rust can teach: that slowness is not indulgence but care.”

And it raises another question: why do we, as humans, seem to love the old? Why are we still moved by the crackle of a record needle biting the groove of a spinning vinyl disc, the memory of that faded yellow Chrysler Valiant we once rode in as children, windows roll down and keys left in the ignition 24/7 without fear of anyone thinking to steal it, or the feel of that old blue dragster push bike beneath our feet on the pedals? Mine, complete with a space-blue banana seat and sissy bar, clocked up many a mile delivering newspapers in the mornings and medicines to the old and infirm in my neighbourhood during the afternoons.

It’s not just nostalgia. It’s the recognition that age carries a texture that newness never can.

Rust reminds us that beauty lives not only in what is preserved, but also in what has weathered.

A world that is rusting, slowly and beautifully, invites us to slow down too: to notice, to care, and to live with a gentler sense of passing time.

Slow Media Needs Slow Money…

Angelino Schintu is a veteran journalist, broadcaster, and filmmaker based in Japan. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Fushigi Times — an independent Slow Media platform offering bold, reality-grounded perspectives on global affairs, cultural explorations, and creative thought.

Slow News / Good News: Inside the Flick-Scroll Feed That’s Hijacking Your Soul!

Angelino Schintu — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 08:01:29 GMT

This Slow Media content is supported by [YOUR ORGANISATION NAME HERE] and is best viewed in a browser.

In This Edition

We start with a headline in the form of a question: what happens when speed, volume, and outrage replace memory, meaning, and fact?
In an era hooked on push alerts and instant takes, we’re slowing the tempo to examine how the flick-scroll feed itself became the nightmare.
From the birth of 24-hour news to the rise of churnalism, it’s reporting built for people who think in paragraphs, not taps and swipes.

Scroll down to read the FULL article

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This Slow Media content is supported by [YOUR ORGANISATION NAME HERE]

The Fushigi Times is committed to offering thoughtful, independent, reality-grounded perspectives on global affairs, cultural explorations, and creative thought—made possible with the occasional support from like-minded partners.

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Info-Anxiety Is a Feature, Not a Bug!

You’ve heard the saying you are what you eat — but I’d argue we are what we think about, what we pay attention to. Thought doesn’t just arise from nowhere; it assembles itself from fragments: headlines glimpsed between subway stops, posts skimmed at traffic lights. Our informational diet is shaping us — and most of us are gorging on noise.

In a world where the dominant rhythm is speed, most media consumption now resembles a blur. We’re exposed to more “news” than any generation in human history, yet somehow understand less. Awareness is measured in quantity, not quality. The inbox never empties. The feed never ends. And we keep scrolling, despite the creeping suspicion that it’s all making us just a bit more fragmented, anxious, and maybe even less human.

But what if the problem isn’t just the content?
What if the tempo itself is toxic?

The Birth of Speed: Enter the 24-Hour News Cycle

The real acceleration began long before Instagram, TikTok or X. It started with cable television.

In 1980, CNN launched with the then-radical idea that news could be continuous. Twenty-four hours a day. Around the clock. No need to wait for the morning paper or the six o’clock bulletin. Information could be updated live — and endlessly.

At first, it seemed like a triumph for transparency. But the economics quickly revealed a darker logic. News needed to be produced not when something important happened, but constantly — even when nothing did. The result was a seismic editorial shift: from journalism as verification, to journalism as performance.

Fear, crime, outrage — these had stamina. They filled time, kept eyeballs, and rarely required follow-up.

The phrase “If it bleeds, it leads” became less a cynical joke and more an editorial strategy. Catastrophe became choreography. Analysis was replaced with live speculation, panellists with pundits, facts with feelings.

And the public?
We stopped waiting for updates and started living inside them.

But filling 24 hours doesn’t just demand more stories — it demands faster stories. News had to be produced on demand, even when there was little to report. The result was an industrial shift inside newsrooms that has proven far more corrosive than many realise.

Original reporting gave way to aggregation. Press releases replaced reporting. Journalists were given quotas. Speed trumped substance.

This is what I’ve long called Churnalism — not journalism, but the mass production of regurgitated content.

It clogs the public discourse with half-baked articles, hollow analysis, and rehashed updates designed to simulate information rather than provide it.

Churnalism isn’t simply bad reporting. It’s the absence of reporting altogether.

The greatest casualty of the 24-hour model wasn’t accuracy, though that’s certainly suffered. It was memory. When news is constant, nothing lingers. Every scandal is replaced by another. Every tragedy is overwritten before the mourning ends.

When The “Feed” Ate Google

If the 24-hour cycle created the demand for constant news, smartphones ensured we’d never be without supply.

There was a time — not so long ago — when looking something up meant sitting at a desk. You typed queries into AltaVista, Yahoo or you “asked” Jeeves, or later, Google. You had to intend to find information. It was an act, not a reflex.

But once the iPhone arrived, information stopped being something we sought. It became something that sought us.

We don’t search anymore — we flick-scroll. We don’t choose — we receive.

The flick-scroll became the primary gesture of our era, a nervous tic disguised as curiosity.

And while we gained convenience, we lost context. News wasn’t a destination anymore — it was a presence. A constant hum in the pocket. An ambient anxiety generator.

Manufactured Crisis: The Cost of Emotional Acceleration

The emotional tempo of modern media mirrors its technological one. As content speeds up, so does feeling — and not in a good way.

We live under a regime of engineered agitation. News is no longer about information — it’s about activation. Each headline is written to elicit outrage, fear, urgency.

The model is no longer ‘inform the public.’ It’s ‘trigger the limbic system’.

And while this is profitable, it’s also exhausting.

The more we consume, the more we tense up. Our bodies keep the score: raised cortisol, shallow breath, digital fatigue masquerading as attention.

The reasonable voice — the nuanced view, the considered take — is drowned out.

We don’t just argue about facts.
We argue about whether facts even exist.

The Agenda Behind the Outrage

It would be naïve to think all this chaos is unintended.

The outrage economy isn’t accidental — it’s cultivated. Because in a media landscape ruled by clicks, outrage travels furthest. Anger boosts engagement. Misinformation outperforms correction. And platforms profit from the churn.

Viral is the goal. Clickbait is the tactic. Outrage is the outcome.

But it’s not just tech companies that benefit. Politicians, influencers, activists — and yes, even some journalists — have learned to game the system.

A political issue becomes a merch drop. A tragedy becomes a marketing campaign. A protest becomes a platform.

There’s always someone with something to gain from your attention.

And the more emotionally compromised you are, the easier you are to steer.

When Flick-Scroll Becomes the Story

We don’t “read the news” anymore. We experience it through flicks, loops, reels. You liked sadness? Here’s 30 more flavours!

Even I — a veteran journalist — wasn’t immune. Despite decades in media, I fell prey to the infinite scroll. Not for headlines, but for the hit. The duration. The algorithmic drip-feed.

Eventually, I did something once unthinkable: I deleted every social account. Facebook remains — but only to stay in touch with family. For now.

It wasn’t a detox.
It was an exit.

Beyond Panic: The Case for Slow News

Once the background noise quietened, I realised how deeply I’d internalised the speed of news.

No article was long enough. No headline could hold my attention past the first swipe.

But in the silence, I found mental space.

I began reading slowly. Printed editions. Weekend reviews. Long-form essays. At first, it felt awkward — like learning to chew again after years of gulping.

But soon, it became clarity.

Why the Blue Zones Don’t Flick-Scroll

Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones (Netflix) hit differently. Not just because of the olive oil, Minestrone di Verdure con Fregola, or Pane Frattau (if you're not familiar with those two amazing dishes from Sardegna, Italy, search them out, make them, and revel!) — but because of the calm.

Living “Blue Zone” meant news arrived slowly. Over meals. Through people. It wasn't content. It was context.

That simplicity hit like a slap. Not because it's quaint — but because it’s sane.

I work all over Japan, mostly in Tokyo. But I now live on the Pacific Coast in Chiba Prefecture.

Life here is measured by the tides at Onjuku Beach and the rice-growing season, not news alerts. It’s rural rhythms and editorial rewiring. Each Sunday, the FT Weekend lands in my letterbox. During the week, I skim the FT digital print edition on my tablet, check Reuters headlines, and browse a few favourite Substacks.

No app notifications. No ambient panic.

I use my favourite Bortoletti glass pen. I handwrite letters in ink. Seal them in wax. Send them by post. It’s as absurd as it sounds — and as satisfying.

This, to me, is Slow Media.
Not a brand. Not a style.
A stance.

The Economy of Distraction

The media isn’t fast because of curiosity. It’s fast because of capitalism.

Your attention is being sliced, packaged, and sold in real-time, like tuna at Tsukiji.

What’s the result?
A kind of cognitive strip mining.
Even grief is monetised now.
This isn’t journalism. It’s marketing dressed as concern.

Fatigue Is the Point

We like to think we’re informed. But really, we’re saturated. Numb.
Emotionally exhausted.

Distraction is not the side effect of modern media — it is the product.

A distracted public doesn’t organise. It doesn’t resist. It doomscrolls into apathy.

And who benefits from that?

Memory, Meaning, and the Flattening of Everything

When everything is content, nothing is sacred.
A genocide becomes a hashtag.
A revolution becomes a trending sound.

Fast media doesn’t just erode our patience. It erodes meaning.

Slow Media respects memory.
It assumes you might want to read something twice.
It believes meaning takes time.

The Biology of Slow Thought

This isn’t just cultural — it’s neurological.
Research confirms: deep reading activates empathy. Synthesis. Thought.
Skimming and flicking? Not so much.

Fast content lights up the limbic system. Pure dopamine. Pure reaction.

Slow reading isn’t a luxury.
It’s medicine.

Who Are We When We’re Not Reacting?

When I left the feed, I didn’t just regain attention. I regained discernment.
I stopped thinking in bullet points. I started thinking in paragraphs.

Slow Media is not a retreat. It’s a return — to agency, to clarity, to care.

How to Practise Slow Media

This isn’t about purity. It’s about pattern.

Turn off alerts. If it matters, it will find you.
Read one long piece a day — FT Weekend, The Atlantic, or a good Substack (like The Fushigi Times).
Engage with the spiritual. Pick up a Bible. Read a few Proverbs. Ponder…
Write about what you read. Just for yourself. Letters. Notes. Clarity.
Delete what numbs you. Apps. Feeds. People.

Slow Media isn’t self-denial.
It’s self-direction.

Read Slowly. Think Clearly. Live Intentionally.

Fast media produces reactivity.
Slow Media builds readers — and citizens.
People who can sit with complexity.
People who think in context.
Who resist the reflexive.

These are the people who rebuild worlds.

The Future That Still Exists

We’re not doomed. Not yet.

We can still choose journalism that investigates instead of entertains.

It’s not mainstream — but it’s growing. Quietly. Intentionally.
Slow Media isn’t just possible.
It’s necessary.

And it starts with what you read today. Maybe it starts for you with this very substack publication!

We were told faster was better. That knowing everything all the time was wise.
It’s not.
It’s noise.

Slow Media says: read less, but read better. React less, think more.

Because the old truth still holds.
Maybe now more than ever:
Good things — including good news — take time.

Slow Media Needs Slow Money…

Angelino Schintu is a veteran journalist, broadcaster, and filmmaker based in Japan. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Fushigi Times — an independent Slow Media platform offering bold, reality-grounded perspectives on global affairs, cultural explorations, and creative thought.

Welcome to a Global Voice From Japan — The Fushigi Instinct

Angelino Schintu — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 08:00:00 GMT

This Slow Media content is supported by [YOUR ORGANISATION NAME HERE] and is best viewed in a browser.

In This Episode

We start with one word — fushigi — a Japanese word you can’t quite translate, but it shapes everything about the way we tell stories.
In a world hooked on speed and hot takes, we’re escaping the flick-scroll and slowing the news right down.
From Tokyo, it’s bold, curiosity-driven stories that — hopefully — make you stop… think… and see things a little differently.

Scroll down to read the FULL article

Production Credits

PARTNERSHIP OPPORTUNITY

This Slow Media content is supported by [YOUR ORGANISATION NAME HERE]

The Fushigi Times is committed to offering thoughtful, independent, reality-grounded perspectives on global affairs, cultural explorations, and creative thought—made possible with the occasional support from like-minded partners.

...brief Sponsor description...

What’s in a Name?

When Fushigi Labs launched this publication, we weren’t looking for a name that explained itself. We weren’t looking for clarity, efficiency, or “keyword optimisation.” In fact, we leaned into the opposite. We chose mystery. Or rather, we chose Fushigi.

We chose a word that resists tidy translation, because we believe ideas worth exploring often resist it too.

ふしぎ is a Japanese word that slips through translation. It can mean mysterious, uncanny, wondrous. But even those feel like approximations. Fushigi is a feeling — the sense that something doesn’t quite fit into what you know. It makes you lean forward, squint slightly, ask questions. That lean? That’s curiosity. And that’s what this publication is built on.

Fushigi captures the spark that flickers in a child's eyes the first time they see snowfall, or the pause you take when a phrase in a foreign language says something better than your own. It is the sense of standing at the threshold of insight, where logic alone cannot explain the feeling. And crucially, it’s not about arriving at the destination, the end of the journey. It’s about continuing to look when you think you might have.

We weren’t chasing cleverness. We were chasing resonance.

Fushigi is not about answers. It’s about paying attention.

It’s the instinct that pulls you off the main road, into the alley. That pause before the plot makes sense. The little hum in the air when something doesn’t compute. That, for us, is the real signal. That’s where stories start. And for many of us, that sense of wonder — once dismissed as naïve — is now our compass.

Why Slow Media, and Why Now?

Let’s face it: media isn’t exactly having a golden age. There’s more content than ever, but somehow less substance. More noise, less resonance. We live in a time that rewards certainty — instant opinions, hot takes, dopamine-driven flick-scrolls. Everything is fast, reactive, and constantly re-optimising for your attention.

But beneath all that motion is a deeper hunger. A desire to slow down, reflect, feel something beyond the headline. That’s where Slow Media comes in. Not just slow for the sake of being slow — but slow as a form of resistance. Intentional, careful, human.

We’re not anti-technology. We’re anti-hyper.

The Slow Media movement is about restoring dignity to the pace of thought. It’s not nostalgic, but it is sceptical. Sceptical of constant optimisation, of informational sugar highs, of storytelling stripped of soul.

In recent years, more readers have grown tired of the churn. “Content fatigue” is real, and it’s measurable — attention spans are collapsing under the weight of speed. Academic studies and user data alike point to rising anxiety, lowered comprehension, and burnout from constant feeds. We believe the antidote isn’t silence — it’s depth.

At The Fushigi Times, we believe the slow read is the real read. The one that makes you underline a sentence or pause to breathe before you continue. The kind you return to days later and still find meaning in.

Speed is for machines. Meaning takes time.

This is why our format privileges thought over trend. We’re not reactive — we’re reflective. Whether it's a meditation on the symbolism of post-war design or a dispatch from a city in flux, the focus remains the same: telling stories that allow for breathing space.

The Fushigi Approach

We write about global affairs, culture, and creative thought — not to tell you what to think, but to explore what’s possible. Some of our stories are grounded in international reporting. Others lean into philosophy, aesthetics, or the occasional historical rabbit hole. What ties it all together is tone: bold but nuanced, witty but serious, sarcastic when needed, but never cynical. Think FT Weekend or The Atlantic with a touch of C.S. Lewis — curious, profound, and full of wonder.

And yes, there will be footnotes. Possibly even parentheticals. Definitely curious maps.

Our editorial choices are global in scope, but rooted in Tokyo — a city that feels like a living contradiction. Where seasonal shrines exist two blocks from an AI-powered capsule hotel. That paradox? We live with it, question it, and reimagine it daily. It isn't just the backdrop — it's the tension that shapes how we see and what we say. And the other side of that coin? We regularly escape the Tokyo city lights, heading to the country-sea rhythm of the Pacific Coast in Chiba — where everything slows down into the kind of Blue Zone lifestyle many crave but rarely touch: unhurried, embodied, quietly radiant.

We believe that journalism should provoke thought, not just emotion. Curiosity matters more than the grip of clickbaity nonsense.

Our contributors come from backgrounds in journalism, filmmaking, architecture, fashion, and the arts. We believe the most compelling stories emerge where disciplines intersect. A piece on Iran’s 1979 revolution — imagined as a Back to the Future-style alternate 1985 — might reference French cinema of the 1960s. An essay on AI might begin with a haiku.

Whether we’re covering the geopolitics of rare earth metals in Africa or Central Asia or the sociology of Kyoto café culture, we aim for the same goal: to tell stories that stretch your thinking without snapping your patience.

Curiosity as Method

Most media today confuses curiosity with consumption. Click, skim, swipe, repeat! We think real curiosity is slower, more durable. It’s the thing that makes you linger on a sentence. Re-read a paragraph. Forward something to a friend with a “huh.”

Curiosity is not a data point. It’s a mindset.

The world isn’t suffering from a lack of information. It’s drowning in it. What’s scarce is context. Thoughtfulness. Sincerity. The ability to say, “We’re not sure yet — but here’s why we’re asking.”

Curiosity, in our view, is a muscle. One that atrophies under the weight of algorithmic certainty. So we’re here to exercise it — with wonder, with humour, with just the right amount of intellectual mischief.

A good question is worth more than a rushed answer.

We believe in cultivating the kind of attentiveness that goes beyond headlines. Reading, here, is not passive. It’s an act of co-creation — between writer and reader, insight and openness. The best kind of curiosity is the kind that loops back, that builds, that sustains.

This isn’t media as performance. This is media as process.

We don’t chase certainty. We sit with complexity.

Reality-Grounded, Not Reality-Doomed

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the state of the world. Climate crisis, data dystopias, culture wars that feel more like content strategies. But The Fushigi Times doesn’t exist to add to your despair. We’re grounded in reality — but reality isn’t always grim. It’s also absurd, beautiful, tragic, and filled with moments of wonder. Our job is to surface that wonder with integrity.

We traffic in perspective, not panic.

We’re interested in the edges — in what doesn’t get covered because it’s not trending. The stories hiding in plain sight. The “why” behind the “what.” We think these overlooked moments are where the world often reveals itself.

We may examine global shifts in power, but we’ll also pay attention to street-level humanity — how people mourn, eat, invent, adapt. We’ll cover macroeconomics and micro-joys in the same breath. We don’t flatten. We expand.

Yes, we’ll cover serious issues. But we’ll also explore the everyday marvels of life. The rituals of overlooked communities. The buried meanings in architecture. The sociology of vending machines. If it makes you pause and go “wait, what?” — it’s probably Fushigi material.

Our Invitation

If you feel the pull of that kind of curiosity — the kind that doesn’t flinch from complexity or contradiction — then you’re in the right place. We’re not here to explain the world. We’re here to dwell in its richness.

This publication is reader-supported. If you value what we’re building — a slower, more intentional, and deeply curious kind of media — consider subscribing. Free or paid, all are welcome.

Think of us less as a newsletter and more as a quiet revelation — the kind that suddenly opens into something exhilarating, like stumbling into an unexpected dinner party for your brain.

So pour yourself something. Scroll slowly. Read fully. And if you feel that fushigi instinct — that subtle lean towards the unknown — follow it!

Welcome to The Fushigi Times.

Slow Media Needs Slow Money…