The Job

My job is the reason I'm here in Japan, so I suppose it bears mentioning.

I'm working on holograms. The term "hologram" means more things than you think it does, but what I'm working on is perhaps the least daunting of all possibilities: a little moving image printed on a flat surface. It can do some neat things, and the company that hired me is gearing up to foist it on the public.

The holograms have a lot in common with those old hologram baseball cards, actually, except instead of two images switching back and forth as you move your head, you get a progression of images, like a short movie. I'm not totally wowed, but I’ll admit that the image quality is, all things considered, pretty amazing.

A picture wouldn't do it justice, as you might imagine.

Don't expect me to explain how it works, by the way. I'm on the English-language content team; the tech team's all Japanese. As for how I got involved... let's just say I was in the right place at the right time and I got scooped up by the company's net. In this metaphor, the net is made of money, and I am a fish who likes to eat at restaurants and get nice haircuts.

Honestly, I see where they're coming from with this big push to get creative talent behind the technology. I just don’t see these holograms becoming a canon entertainment medium. I don't really even see them becoming a fad - they’re gimmicky, right?

Agree with me on this, so I can grumble about my job.

That having been said, if anyone’s going to do something amazing with these things, you bet your ass it’s gonna be me. And my team, I guess. They’ve all got non-refundable tickets to ride my Genius Train.

And I’ll leave you with this: apparently our entire universe might be a hologram! So that’s something to hold onto if I ever get fed up with this job. And just think – those old hologram cards where you turn them and it looks like a baseball player is hitting a ball? Those are tiny universes, and that little man and that little ball are the entirety of that universe’s grand cosmic ballet.

[Reader take note: this blog has held its breath for too long, and this post is its first great gasp as it slips into a dizzy, oxygen-deprived dream of embellishment and utter fiction. Posts containing observations of Japanese culture will continue to be largely true; posts concerning the author's personal and work life, this one included, will be irresponsible fabrications.