Author: Lee Matz

Milwaukee may feel far removed from the upheavals that once swept through East Asia, but the stress signals emerging in the local economy today echo patterns that were visible in South Korea months before its 1997 financial collapse. Long before headlines labeled it a crisis, ordinary people in Seoul sensed that something was shifting beneath the surface. The warning signs were subtle but persistent, and they formed a pattern that only became clear in hindsight. Those early indicators offer a framework for understanding the consequences of federal tariff policies now pressing against Milwaukee’s industrial base, agricultural sector, and consumer...

Sekigahara is a rural stretch of land in central Japan, but its significance far exceeds its quiet landscape. For Milwaukee, the relevance of this place becomes clearer when viewed through two familiar frameworks: the role of strategic geography in shaping regional identity, and the way societies preserve and interpret battlefields as sites of national memory. These are not emotional or moral comparisons. Instead, they offer practical context for understanding why a distant valley continues to carry weight in Japan’s historical consciousness. The Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 is widely regarded as the moment that unified Japan under the Tokugawa...

I have often written about how Japan influenced me growing up, mostly from its culture of entertainment and history. But I never expected the persistent companionship of Japanese music to find me later in life, and remain for more than 30 years. In the late 1990s, before algorithms defined taste, before platforms flattened culture into recommended rows of thumbnails, music discovery still relied on randomness. Napster was messy, mislabeled, and held together by half-broken MP3s uploaded from who-knows-where. Nobody trusted it for accuracy, but we trusted it for possibility. I wasn’t looking for Japanese music. I wasn’t looking for...