Hello Japan X! I am an American from Hawaii now living in San Diego, California. I'm grateful that X has made it possible to communicate with Japanese people through automatic translation and I wish to share a story from 2010 where I made a Japanese friend here in San Diego through Google Translate just after the Android Translate app had launched. It is amazing that 15 or 16 years later what occurred on a bar stool in San Diego through the Google Translate app is now a real time on X. I have appreciated reading your posts and learning more about your life and culture and I hope you will appreciate this story.  I was in law school in San Diego and frequented a local Irish bar. One night, the bar was crowded and a Japanese man dressed in a business suit came in. I was a waiter for many years in Hawaii and had served many Japanese guests so I recognized him as being Japanese and presumed he did not speak English well. The bar was packed but there was one bar stool open next to me. I signaled to him, pointed at the barstool and gestured for him to sit down. My Japanese is very limited and I know it was the incorrect thing to say because it was late at night but I said “Ohayo.” he was very surprised but also appreciative of the gesture and attempt to greet him in his language. He sat down next to me and looked lost. I asked the bartender for a menu and gave it to him. He looked at me and said “Whiskey.” I pointed to the area on the menu that listed the whiskey available. As he looked through it, I remembered that my wife had recently downloaded the Google Translate app on my phone. So I opened the app and typed a welcome message, translated it into Japanese and showed it to him. He was very surprised but also appreciative of the gesture. He read the message, took my phone, and wrote a message in Japanese that was translated into English. Over the course of perhaps one hour we had the equivalent of a 5-minute conversation. He told me he was an engineer brought to San Diego to meet with some business people to build a solution to make one machine speak to another machine. We spoke abput our mutual interest in mixed martial arts and especially how much we both respect Kazushi Sakuraba! Long story short, we made plans to eat dinner the next night at my favorite sushi restaurant, Kazumi, a mile up the street. He was staying at a hotel near where I lived so I told him to meet me at 7:00 at the hotel and we would catch a cab to the restaurant. I gave him my cell phone number. The next evening I went to the hotel but he was not there. I asked the hotel to call his room and they did but there was no answer. So I went home. 30 minutes later I got a phone call from an unknown number, answered it, and it was the staff at the sushi bar restaurant telling me that my friend, Toshiya, was that the restaurant with some business associates and wanted me to come. So I went to the restaurant. He was there with two other business associates, one of whom was apparently the big guy, and had ordered several hundred dollars worth of Wonderful food. We ate and enjoyed a wonderful evening, his business partners told me that they took him to a gun range so that he could shoot American firearms for the first time. We all had a great time.  After dinner he wanted to go back to the bar to try more oishi whiskey so we caught a cab to the bar, Stout Public House on 6th Avenue between B and C streets. After getting a couple of drinks we were sitting on the patio talking through Google Translate app. Suddenly he seemed very worried and afraid. He spent close to 20 minutes writing me a message on the app. In short, he said that the big man, the businessman, had put several ammunition cartridges in his pocket after the day at the range. He was very concerned because he did not know what to do with his ammunition. He was very concerned it was illegal. He was very worried about what to do with the ammunition. [Continues in comment]

He had a flight to catch early in the morning and he was very, very worried about having the ammunition. When he finally gave me back the phone and I could respond to his message I let him know that it was okay, this is America, ammunition is legal. I told him that I would take the ammunition from him so that he would have no worries and he could get to the airport safely. He was so relieved! I did so, I took the several ammunition cartridges home. We had a couple more drinks but my friend was very drunk. So myself and my Sardinian friend, mauricio, basically carried him up the hill to his hotel. We let the hotel staff knew that he needed a wake up call very early in the morning so he could catch his flight.  He emailed me a few days later from Japan letting me know that he got home safe, and he asked if everything was okay with the ammunition LOL. I told him it's okay it's America I would make use of the ammunition.  I hope my friend Toshiya from Niigata is well. Aloha to Japan from Hawaiian Ryan aka No Strollers in San Diego.  I am asking any Japanese person who reads this to click the link in my bio and translate and read the No Strollers Pamphlet and let me know what you think about it. Thank you very much PS: if there is any interest in this post I will share some of what we communicated with by email after he went back to japan. Thank you very much!!

I receive good insights as to why No Strollers is prohibitive from the 14% of parents with three or more children. (They make good points.) The 86% of American parents with two or less children make up most of the resistance and they need (and are positioned) to take No Strollers to heart and pracroce. The families with real adaptive physical and neurological challenges that make parenting, much less No Strollers, extremely difficult don't whinge much because in my experience they principally get the concept and, I think, desperately wish they could No Stroller their children. If you are at all physically able to No Stroller your kids DO IT. Read why here: drive.google.com/file/d/12qr…