Essay · 10 / 08 / 2026
Unspoken Rules
London, August 2026 — three weeks before leaving for university.
I am twenty one years old and stuck. Over the past five years — leaving the Japanese school system at fifteen, leaving home at eighteen, living alone across five cities in two countries, working in hospitality — I learned a set of unspoken rules about how the world actually works, as opposed to how it says it works. This essay is in four parts: what I learned, what it did to me, where it came from, and what I intend to do with it.
I. What I Learned
People love conditions, not existence. Nobody loves who you are underneath; they love your current reality. If someone's circumstances collapsed tomorrow, most love around them would not survive the year — which means it was attached to the condition, not the person. Family is the exception: blood loves by default. Romance has no such guarantee. Dating apps make this visible: every profile is a product with close substitutes. If you cannot say precisely why someone is special, they are not special. They are convenient.
People judge by situation, not by substance. Society repeats that nationality, occupation, race, and appearance do not matter. This is one of the biggest lies politely maintained in public. Everyone judges by exactly these things, constantly, within seconds. I wore a good watch to work, and colleagues assumed it was fake — not because of the watch, but because they knew roughly what I earned, and the numbers did not fit. A friend told me that in his country, a Rolex is presumed fake by default, because the country's numbers do not fit either. Job title, passport, face, clothes: these decide what you are allowed to credibly own, and how you are treated every day. Everyone denies this. Everyone acts on it.
Your current form is almost everything, and nobody cares how you got it. The effort, the years, the suffering — invisible. Only the present state renders.
II. What It Did to Me
These rules did not motivate me. They opened three cracks.
First: when I understood the market of love, I felt emptiness, not strategy. I do not want to join that race. And yet I still want love. I reject the game and want its prize.
Second: I concluded that credibility is everything — results should arrive before presentation does. I watched people perform lives their income could not support, and swore I would be different. Yet I dress well and wear the watch while my own results have not arrived. By my own standard, everything I wear is a promissory note.
Third, and deepest: I believe there is no essence — no fixed self underneath. What holds me together instead is my projection: ambition, and the refusal to stop improving. Languages, savings, a running streak past a hundred and fifty days. People tell me to someday put it all down and simply live. When I imagine doing that, I do not see freedom. I see nobody there. This is why rest never works. Any day I waste, guilt arrives without fail — not regret, guilt — because if the self is a list of achievements, then an unproductive day is not a slow day. It is a day I partly stopped existing.
III. Where the Rules Came From
At fifteen I gave up the shelter of belonging — a school, a place where showing up was enough. At eighteen I gave up home. Then five cities, and every move erased whatever I had been in the last one. Nobody in a new city remembers your effort; only your current form walks through the door. Live like that long enough and “the present state is everything” stops being a theory. It becomes your daily operating condition. Hospitality completed the education: I watched, night after night, how rooms full of successful people measured each other in seconds.
So the honest version is this: the rules are armor. I built them because I kept moving through places where no one was obligated to catch me. A person with a safety net can afford to believe love is unconditional and effort is always seen. A person without one learns to trust only what can be verified. The armor worked — I am still here. But armor does not come off by itself. And there is a difference between wearing armor and believing you are the armor. The first is strategy. The second is the mistake I have been making.
IV. What I Intend to Do
Contradictions do not delete. I have tried. What is possible is knowing which hand is on the wheel. So before I buy, post, or claim anything, I now run one test: would I still do this if no one could ever see it? If yes, the act is mine. If no, it belongs to the audience — and the audience is on a budget from now on.
Existence precedes essence. I used to read that sentence as an obligation: since nothing is underneath, build a self out of achievements before anyone notices. I am starting to read it the other way. If there is no fixed self, then nothing is lost when the list pauses. The self is not waiting at the end of the list, and it does not die in the gaps between its items. There is only the list, the hand that writes it, and the question of whether the hand can rest.
That question is the one I am taking with me.
Essay · 08 / 06 / 2026
The Floor
Four years on the service side.
I started working at seventeen. For four years — convenience stores, day labor, hotel restaurants, kitchens in Tokyo, Osaka, and London — I did the work a society quietly codes as low. I was always passing through. In September I leave for university in North America. But the four years were not wasted, and what I learned in them deserves to be written down. The people who write about labor rarely do it. The people who do it rarely write.
What Respect Tracks
We say all work deserves respect. We do not behave as if we mean it.
I felt the difference every day. The same person — me — was visible or invisible depending on what he was wearing. Thanked or instructed. Met or looked through. Respect in the room was not distributed according to how well anyone did their job. It was distributed according to where the job sat in an unspoken hierarchy.
My first reaction was resentment, and the resentment took a specific shape: this is unfair because I am capable of more than this. I was passing through. I knew where I was going. So the contempt felt aimed at someone it didn't apply to.
It took me too long to see the problem with that thought.
If the disrespect was unjust because I happened to be capable of more, then I was conceding it would be just for someone who wasn't — someone whose ceiling really was the floor I was standing on. I was not objecting to the hierarchy. I was objecting to my place in it.
Michael Sandel calls this the tyranny of merit: the belief that people get what they deserve, that position reflects worth. I had read him. I had agreed with him. And the first time the system put me on the wrong side, my instinct was not to reject the logic but to plead an exception. Not me. I'm different.
That is the most honest thing I can say about myself from those four years. The meritocratic reflex is not something other people have. Under pressure, it was the first thing out of me.
Respect is owed to persons. Not to positions. The moment you make it conditional — respect for the capable, contempt for the rest — you have rebuilt the hierarchy you were criticizing.
Respect Is Not Pride
But I want to make a second distinction the first essay collapsed.
Respect is owed to persons. Universally. Without condition.
Pride has to be earned. By craft. By difficulty. By skill that took years to build and that not everyone can build.
The dangerous move is to take pride from the position itself — as if the title did the work. I watched many managers in hospitality do exactly this. Imperious to subordinates. Indignant when questioned. Proud in a way the role itself never authorized.
Restaurant manager is not, structurally, a hard thing to become. The path is short, the barriers are low, the skills can be learned in months. None of which makes the work worthless. It makes pride from the title alone — separate from any actual mastery — a category error.
The analogy that made it clear to me: speaking English in London. The skill is universal there. If a Londoner boasted of it, he would be laughed at. Pride should be calibrated to the environment's baseline. What everyone around you can do is not what distinguishes you.
This does not undo respect for the work. A great waiter who has mastered attention, anticipation, and grace under pressure has earned pride — fully, and on the same terms as a great surgeon. Mastery is universal as a ground for pride. Position is not. The error is reading the position as if it were the mastery.
I say this carefully because I am about to enter finance — a field with its own version of this confusion. Investment bankers, too, mistake titles for accomplishments. If I do it later, this critique should come back at me.
Same Age, Different Stakes
The inequality I could see most clearly was not about talent. It was about starting points.
I worked beside people my exact age. One was earning tuition. Every shift was the difference between continuing his education and stopping. Another was earning pocket money. Same shift, same wage, but it changed nothing about his life either way.
Same task. Same hourly rate. Completely different meaning.
You cannot understand this from outside. You have to stand at the same sink and watch what the money means to the person beside you. I am glad I learned, in my body, exactly how hard it is to earn.
Language and Hierarchy
I worked in two countries. The sharpest difference was not the food or the hours. It was how far you were allowed to speak upward.
In London, a manager could be argued with. You could disagree to his face, push back, say the thing directly. The relationship survived it. In Japan, that conversation is almost structurally impossible. The hierarchy is steeper, and it is built into the language itself. The grammar of deference does half the work of keeping you in your place before anyone decides anything.
I am not going to tell you which is better. I will say: until I worked in two languages, I did not understand how much of a culture's hierarchy is carried inside its grammar.
Four Kinds of People on the Floor
Spend four years on the same kind of floor and you start to see that there are roughly four kinds of people on it.
The first is people like me. Passing through. Working to fund something on the other side — tuition, a visa, a move, a plan. The work is a means; the horizon is elsewhere; you can see it in the way they move.
The second is the kind I thought about most. People who say they have a dream, or are looking for the "real" job, but who never seem to be moving toward either. They complain about the work. They complain about the London market. They have been complaining for years. They have not opened a book or sent a serious application in months. What they have is a vocabulary of complaint sophisticated enough to cover the gap between what they say they are doing and what they are actually doing.
I will not pretend I respected this. The market they cited was real. The difficulty was real. The structural conditions were real. But the conditions had not chosen for them. They had chosen — to not study, to not apply, to not change anything — and were calling it being chosen for. The structural language gave them an alibi. It made an active surrender sound like a passive outcome.
The third is people who take pride in the work, treat it seriously, call themselves professionals. Some of them have earned it: real craft, real attention, skill that took years to build. Others are proud of the title alone. The same role houses both. The difference is whether the pride points at something they have actually built — or only at where they have landed. This is the distinction the previous section was about, walking around in human form.
The fourth is rarer, and was the most impressive to me. The same as the third — craft, seriousness, command of the work — but with no need to display it. Quiet. Humble. The best workers in the room, and the least invested in being seen that way. You only notice how good they are if you watch them long enough. They are the ones I still think about.
The Structural Alibi
Here I have to push against my own previous argument.
Foucault taught us to see industries like the one I was working in as machines that produce a certain kind of worker. Uniforms. Time-clocks. Bodies arranged under managerial gaze. Subjects who know where to stand and what to call whom. The hospitality industry, like any disciplinary system, produces a subject. The shape of that subject is structural, not personal. This is the correct first move. I have made it in everything else I have written about work.
But the structural reading has a limit, and the limit matters.
Of the four kinds I described, three need no further comment. People passing through, people who have built real craft, people who hold the work quietly and well — the structural analysis applies to all of them, respect is owed to all of them, and I have nothing to add about their choices.
The case I want to speak to is the second. Someone who has a dream, and who uses the structural conditions of the work — the lack of prospects, the short horizon, the difficult market — as the reason to abandon that dream.
To them I want to say: I understand. And no.
I want to say no for three reasons. They come from three different thinkers.
Sartre called this mauvaise foi — bad faith. The move of hiding behind your conditions as if your conditions were your essence. The role I am playing is not who I am. The industry I am in is not the limit of what I can become. To say "the work has no future, so my dream has no future" is to let the structure name you. L'existence précède l'essence — existence precedes essence. The structure has no authority to write your essence in advance. Giving it that authority is the most ordinary form of self-betrayal there is.
Nietzsche called the person who has surrendered aspiration der letzte Mensch — the last man. The one who invented happiness without striving. The one who shrinks his horizon until comfort and aspiration cannot conflict. The structural conditions of low-prospect work make this shrinking easy. The horizon is short, the comfort is real, the reasons not to try are always available. Nietzsche's warning: this is a way of going extinct without noticing.
Camus answered the same problem differently. Sisyphus rolls the rock up the hill knowing it will fall. The conditions are absolute. The rock is real. There is no exit. And yet Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy — not because the absurd is overcome, but because Sisyphus chooses, again and again, to push. The lucid acceptance of the conditions is itself the rebellion. The opposite of Sisyphus is not the person who fails. It is the person who stopped pushing because the conditions said he should.
Three thinkers, one position. The structure is real (Foucault). The conditions do not write your essence (Sartre). Letting them is how you become small (Nietzsche). The right answer to real constraint is conscious continuation, not surrender (Camus).
I respect every reason a person has for being in this work. I do not respect — and will not pretend to respect — using the work's conditions as an alibi for letting a dream die. That is the one place the structural reading goes wrong. It is true as analysis. It becomes false the moment it is used as permission.
What I Keep
Two things survive the four years.
One is a distinction. Respect is owed to persons, universally, without condition. Pride is earned by craft, not by position. Most of what I saw confused them in both directions. Respect withheld from people whose positions were low. Pride claimed by people whose positions were undemanding. The day I confuse them again, I will have learned nothing.
The other is a sharper question. Not who works hard — almost everyone on that floor worked harder than the people who looked down on them. The question is: who designed the room so that the same effort means tuition for one person and pocket money for another? And the question after that: what within that room is mine to refuse, even when refusal costs? The first question is why I am leaving to study. The second I will be answering for the rest of my life.
Essay · 13 / 04 / 2026
Cultural Capital and Instagram
Not bad taste. Different constraints.
I noticed a pattern on Instagram: people from developing countries post more luxury brands, more wealth displays, more selfies.
The common reaction: "Cringe."
I'd call it rational.
What is Cultural Capital?
Cultural capital is what money can't buy. The "right" accent. The "right" school. Knowing that talking about money is vulgar. Knowing that logos are tacky. Knowing that selfies should look accidental, not posed.
Some people learn these rules at home. Others learn by being laughed at.
Two Games
There are two games being played on the same platform.
Game A: Nobody knows you. Your credentials don't translate. Your background doesn't speak for you. Silence means invisibility. So you show. Wealth, face, proof you exist.
Game B: Everybody knows you. Your background has already spoken. Your family name, your school, your network—these establish credibility before you post anything.
The Paradox
Game B players show wealth too. A watch visible in the corner of a photo. A location tag from Saint-Tropez. A "casual" mention of where they summered.
But when they see a Game A post—luxury bag front and center, posed selfie, explicit display—they ask: "Why so obvious?"
Because they have to be. You didn't.
The Insight
When someone says "cringe," what they often mean is: "You're performing in a way I was taught to hide."
Every feed is a performance. Some just have better camouflage. And camouflage, too, is learned—taught by families, schools, and networks that Game A players don't have access to.
The difference isn't taste. It's constraint.
Positionality
I'm Japanese. Based in London. Sometimes insider. Sometimes outsider.
Enough to see both games—and to know when not to play.
Essay · 12 / 04 / 2026
What I Submitted to UBC
In March 2026, I received admission to the University of British Columbia. Below are the three essays I submitted as part of my application. I'm publishing them here not as advice—I don't know if they're "good" essays—but as a record of what I wrote at twenty, after four years of trying to figure out what I wanted to study and why. The prompts asked three questions: who I am, what matters to me, and what I've learned through work. I answered honestly.
Tell us about who you are. (Maximum 1500 characters)
My family would describe me as someone who questions what others unreflectively accept-sometimes to my detriment. At fifteen, I picked up Descartes, asking questions grounded in skepticism about how things are ordered. By age sixteen, I left a traditional high school for an online high school programme, which left my father and me arguing for weeks. By eighteen, I left home.
I left in part after reading Michael Sandel's critique of meritocracy. His work made me question assumptions I had not yet examined, namely that hard work alone explained success and that outcomes were determined by choices, not structures. Working in hospitality, I met colleagues from many countries who held professional degrees but did the same work as me. Watching people so capable take jobs far below their training stayed with me.
I am most proud of my determination and drive, and the challenges that have helped shape my thinking. For instance, due to my tattoos, I was rejected at nearly every job interview in Japan. As a result, I incurred a large debt. When I finally found employment, I worked 54 consecutive days to pay down my debt. By the end, this had also reinforced my earlier engagement with Sandel: effort alone is not sufficient. Structure shapes how far effort can reach.
This is what I bring to academic study: a willingness to question and an ability to connect those questions to contemporary issues and lived realities.
What is important to you? And why? (Maximum 1500 characters)
What matters most to me is understanding how individuals face systematically unequal chances-and how institutional design can reduce such gaps.
This question emerged from experience. In London, I worked alongside two groups: international students supported by family resources, and colleagues from India and Eastern Europe whose professional qualifications were dismissed in their new state. Same kitchen. Disparate worlds. At first, it just felt wrong. Only later did I see these as outcomes of how systems classify individuals-not failures of individuals, but failures of design.
A large reason I care about this is that, at 18 years old, entry-level work was my only option. For nearly two years, I lived without financial support from my family. Yet I knew that if I reached a breaking point, I had somewhere to return. When I accepted their support, I learned how access to a safety net shapes how people negotiate constraints and power.
I am interested in institutional mechanics: how policies sort people, how design choices produce exclusion. I study institutions not to dismiss personal responsibility, but to understand how policy can widen the space where effort pays off-and to learn, through Co-op, what that looks like in practice.
Tell us more about ONE or TWO activities most important to you. (Maximum 2100 characters)
At eighteen, I secured a job at a hotel cafe in Okinawa before I arrived-that job was why I initially moved there. I had limited work experience and no local connections. Over two years, I moved through five cities: cooking at Blue Port Cafe, banquet service at Tokyo Marriott, luxury events at W Hotel Osaka, and restaurant service in London.
My responsibilities evolved with each role. At Blue Port Cafe, I arrived early, off the clock, to learn basic cooking techniques. During one shift, a guest collapsed from what appeared to be a serious medical emergency. While a colleague called emergency services, I accompanied him in the ambulance, contacted his American family using his phone, and helped coordinate with hospital staff.
At Tokyo Marriott, I later took on an informal team leader role during high-volume service periods. Across workplaces, this willingness to learn and take responsibility was consistently recognised. That experience showed me that service work requires judgment and cross-cultural communication under pressure, not just routine execution.
What I learned extends beyond hospitality. One colleague had been a talented graphic designer in India. In London, he set tables. I often complained about the gap between my ambitions and my daily tasks. He never did. Every day, he showed up and worked with quiet seriousness. That contrast stayed with me-his persistence made me reconsider what professionalism actually means.
This is why I want to study institutional design: not from textbooks first, but with questions formed beside people whose capabilities were not recognised by the systems they entered. Beyond what I hope to learn, I bring perspectives from having worked alongside people from over twenty countries in high-pressure environments. In discussions of policy design, I can offer grounded observations about how abstract principles play out for real people navigating systems.
A Note on Structure and Agency
These essays emphasize structural determinism—the idea that systems, not individual choices, primarily shape outcomes. This reflects what I was reading at the time (Sandel) and what I observed in London.
But it's not the complete picture.
Structures constrain and enable. They determine how far effort can reach. But within those constraints, individual choice remains real. The colleague who set tables in London chose to show up with dignity every day. I chose to leave home, to work 54 consecutive days, to stop drinking, to apply to university.
Both matter. Structure explains why equal effort produces unequal outcomes. Agency explains what individuals do within the space systems leave them.
I wrote these essays emphasizing structure because individuals are too often blamed for outcomes shaped by design. But I should acknowledge: neither structure nor agency alone explains human outcomes. They interact.
The balance between them is what I'm still learning to understand.
London, April 2026
Essay · 01 / 04 / 2026
Take One Step Forward
At seventeen, I realized I was born with privilege. At eighteen, I tried to give it up. Privilege is responsibility, not guilt.
This essay is published in full on the original journal. Open it to continue reading.
Read “Take One Step Forward” on riki-asai.com →