I lack both the qualifications and the words to comment in general geopolitical terms on the horrifying explosion of violence in Palestine and Israel this month. Other than that there is never any justification for intentionally killing civilians, no matter how good an excuse you say you have for doing it,

I do have some thoughts on what’s going on with drones.

Drones Still Don’t Wear Uniforms. And They Still Really, Really Should.

It’s 2023, and we still have no standard, universally accepted way to tell consumer drones apart in the air. Unlike the many mechanisms that allow people on the ground to figure out if a manned aircraft belongs to your side, the other side, or is piloted by a neutral actor, our tools for doing the same thing with drones are fragmented, brand-new, and distinctly untested in war time situations.

What’s more, current norms-based international humanitarian law that’s pertinent to air warfare largely doesn’t account for the existence of capable aircraft without a human pilot in them.

I’ve been worried about this issue for a long time: in 2018, I wrote a Foreign Policy article with a Palestinian colleague about drone mistaken identity, with the Gaza border protests of that era as the backdrop. At the time, Israel was piloting large DJI Matrice 100 drones (a model designed for film-making) that had been modified to drop tear gas canisters over the border into Gaza, a practice that brought up a rather large number of international humanitarian law questions.

Strikingly, then Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman attempted to attribute the death of a Palestinian photojournalist to the fact that he’d been using a drone, claiming “I don’t know who is or isn’t a photographer. Anyone who operates drones above IDF soldiers needs to understand he’s putting himself in danger.” (The journalist, Yasser Murtaja, was not using a drone at the time of his death, but Liberman didn’t know that).

In other words, Liberman was attempting to argue in 2018 that simply using a drone in airspace the IDF happens to be operating in is enough to make you a legitimate target – a legal argument that is worrisome indeed for the many reporters, humanitarian aid workers, and other civilians who now regularly operate drones in disaster and conflict today.

The IDF also was using commercial DJI Mavic drones as early as 2017 for border defense operations – and continued to do so even after the US Army officially banned its fighters from using the Chinese products. Insofar as I can determine (and I’d appreciate it if you let me know otherwise), the IDF is still using DJI products today. As just one example of their current use, Lebanon’s Hezbollah claimed in 2021 that it shot down an Israeli DJI Matrice 100 drone that was flying above the UN-imposed Blue Line (and Israel claims that it regularly takes down DJI drones piloted by Hezbollah).

Today, as I write this, this pressing question about drones, identity, and IHL remains unanswered. When the Ukraine War began in early 2022, I wrote an article for the ICRC’s website speculating on where small drones fit into IHL. Since then, I’ve come across many, many examples of friendly fire incidents related to small consumer drones from both Russian and Ukrainian sources – a picture that’s complicated even further by the massive proliferation of electronic warfare and other counter-drone systems on modern battlefields.

Until we take action to globally discuss where small drones fit into IHl and how we can tell them apart in contested airspace, every civilian who operates a drone in conflict settings is going to be at very enhanced risk. I worry about the journalists and aid workers who are flying them right now over the conflict in Israel and Palestine.

There are also new technological considerations that could be relevant to IHL as well, like Israel’s drones which it claims are capable of mimicking cell towers, allowing Israeli forces to install spyware on enemy phones and track people into buildings. (The actual capability of these tools in real-world settings versus the hype remains unknown, though).

I hope that the world will finally start realizing that we need better ways to sort out whose drone belongs to whom, quickly.

Drones As Evidence Tools in War Crimes Disputes – Al Ahli Hospital

Drones are a remarkably efficient and inexpensive tool for capturing super-high resolution 3D maps and models of the real world, and crime scene investigators have been using them in this capacity around the world for, at this point, over a decade. War crimes investigators are also starting to follow suit, like those who reportedly used drones to map large extents of the Ukrainian city of Bucha after Russia retreated in April 2022.

Investigators are also evaluating drone video of potential war crimes, like this drone imagery shot by a Ukrainian during the occupation of Bucha, which appears to show a military vehicle shooting at an unsuspecting person on a bicycle. The international war crimes investigation world is still trying to figure out best practices and protocols for integrating drone-collected data into official investigations, but it’s clear that the practice is absolutely here to stay.

The IDF reminded us of this on October 18th, when it released fairly high quality drone footage, collected by an unknown (but almost certainly military-type) aircraft, of the damaged Al-Ahli Hospital and parking lot in Gaza, where Hamas says hundreds of people were killed in an air attack on Oct 17th. Hamas claims the IDF intentionally targeted the hospital, which is a blatant violation of human rights law: the IDF, meanwhile, counters that the damage was caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket, and is using its drone video to bolster its argument.

The IDF’s release of this footage is a phenomenal example of how drone imagery has become a truly mainstream tool that both nations and individuals can wield to counter existing narratives, or create new ones of their own. It’s also an indicator of how drone footage is inevitably going to be used to litigate war crimes claims in the future, in ways that will take place outside of the confines of traditional, formal legal mechanisms of investigation.

Nor is this the only drone imagery that the IDF has shared on social media and with journalists. As just one example, the IDF has publicly released footage from its recent retaliatory drone strikes in Gaza (see below), and night-time drone footage of an airstrike on the home of Ayman Nofal, who they claim was a senior Hamas operative: it’s also shared drone footage of communities destroyed by the October 7th Hamas attacks.

Israeli journalists and other actors have released drone footage of the aftermath of the Hamas attacks over the border within Israel, like this haunting aerial footage of the devastated Re’im music festival grounds, which was shot by an Israeli first responder organization. During conflict, the aerial view can be wielded in multiple ways.

Of course, drone footage is also coming out of Gaza.

Drone pilots there, including journalists and other actors, have released a constant stream of horrifying aerial footage of damage to civilian buildings from Israeli attacks, often sharing it on platforms like Telegram – footage which, like the Israeli drone videos, receives constant play in international media, highlighting the massive destruction Israel has already wrought in Gaza.

Like the IDF, Hamas has also intentionally released video of its own drone attacks on Israeli targets, in an effort to demonstrate its own technical expertise and command of modern tools. In this case, we see a grenade dropped by a small, likely Chinese (possibly DJI) drone, echoing the tactics we’ve seen over and over again since early 2022 in Ukraine and Russia.

While global media inevitably pays the most attention to drone warfare that involves grenades, no one should be ignoring how drone warfare is waged with information, either.

_{interesting drone meme from a pro-Hamas source.}

Just How Much Did Hamas Learn About Drones From Telegram?

Most every news story I’ve seen about how Hamas used small drones on October 7th converges on one key question: where did they learn to do that? Some sources claim that they learned it from Iran. Others, including a Ukrainian official, claim that Hamas fighters were trained in the modern art of consumer drone warfare by Russians, passing on information honed in battle since 2022.

While I certainly don’t know enough to discount any of these theories at this time, I do want to say this: it’s plausible that Hamas learned to fight with small drones, at least to the level it just demonstrated that it’s capable of, primarily by paying attention to Telegram.

As you probably know, I’ve constantly monitored both Russian and Ukrainian Telegram sources on small drone warfare since the conflict there began in February 2022. There’s a truly dizzying array of battle-tested information on drone warfare available there for anyone to view, from super detailed tactical breakdowns to open-source DJI drone hacks designed to counter electronic-warfare tools to a sea of instructional videos.

A relatively clever person familiar with Telegram and the relevant drone-centric sources could probably piece together a reasonably decent battle-drone strategy from this information alone. They’d also be able to find plenty useful information and highly relevant DJI hacks on the open Internet – many of them are posted on Github.

While foreign trainers familar with the tactics would certainly be helpful – especially for more complex practices, like building and piloting small FPV kamikaze drones – they might not necessarily be required. Maybe it’s really not that surprising that Hamas knew how to (for example) disable RTH mode on the DJI drones they used to drop grenades on Israeli targets on October 7th. All it takes is someone on your side who’s reasonably good at Google.

Arguably, we can chalk up our present day dirt-cheap-drone revolution on the battlefield to two components: the existence of inexpensive and very easy to acquire consumer drone technology, and a social media world where it’s extremely easy to track down the inspiration and information you need to start fighting with them.

The IDF Has Been Using FPV Racing Drones For a Long Time

The IDF has been using consumer DJI products for a long time, but it’s also been taking advantage of cheap, hyper-fast and notoriously hard to pilot FPV racing drones for way longer than most people realize, too.

Back in 2018, the IDF was confronted with the thread of hundreds of “fire balloons” or kites launched from the Gaza Strip, low-tech explosive devices that nevertheless presented a major security headache. They hit on a then-novel idea: they’d recruit Israel’s best hobby FPV (first person view) racing drone pilots, and train them to use their cheap, nimble aircraft to smash into the balloons, reducing the threat.

Ultimately, they were able to recruit 15 drone pilots who had both the fast reflexes and the prior drone racing expertise to successfully do the job.

_{Wolverine Gen2 Multi-Mission UAS (MMU)}

The drone pilots eventually launched their own startup company, Xtend, which builds small racing-type drones for explicitly military purposes – and have become so popular that the American armed forces are reportedly using them too.

What I don’t know is the price of these drones, which are almost certainly considerably more expensive than the $400 models put together with Superglue that have proven so effective in Ukraine and in Russia.

And as that war has demonstrated, being really, really goddamn cheap may be the single most crucial feature a small battle-drone can offer in 2022.

I have long been fascinated by why people are so disquieted by drones. While pretty much every one alive in 2019 experiences some degree of acute tech anxiety, drones, as a category of objects, still inspire an unusual amount of disquiet – much more so than, say, an iPhone. This distrust extends to both consumer drones you can buy at the mall and to enormous militarized drones: anything with the word ‘drone’ appended to it inspires clickbaity headlines and nervous conversations at bars. Some of this, I think, can be attributed to the fact that we still lack widely-agreed upon modifiers for the word ‘drone’ in our society, which differentiate between objects in the overall ‘drone’ category – which means that it’s easy for people to assume that a $500 multirotor you can buy at the mall and a Predator drone are actually somewhat similar objects.

But that’s not all that’s going on. It is apparent to me that there isn’t a single, easily-explained reason why people distrust and fear drones as a general category of things. There are actually many interlocking reasons, ranging from the very obvious (there isn’t a person in them and some of them can be used to blow things up) to those that are more subtle.

What I want to do with this series of blog posts is to describe some of the reasons for drone-distrust that I’ve come across or conjectured about. This is both for my own amusement, and for a more practical reason: public distrust of drones drives me and my drone sector colleagues absolutely nuts, and the first step towards figuring out ways to address the public fears is clearly describing what they are. So let’s begin with this reason: Drones are inscrutable.

By that, I mean that it is very hard  for people to know how much a drone knows, or how smart it is, just by looking at it. Most people do not know very much about drones as a general category of flying objects. Certainly they haven’t (and have no desire to) delve into the various technical details regarding each platform’s specific capacities. Nor is it likely that this is going to change much. Despite the lofty hopes of many consumer drone companies, we do not presently and probably never will live in a world where the average person has much use for a drone, beyond their obvious utility as a last-minute present for Father’s Day. While civil service and public utility drones are becoming much more common, they’re still nowhere near typical, as boring and unnoticeable as a city truck with its flashers on. Nor do most people know much about, or have reason to think much about, the distinctions between a cheap consumer drone and, say, a massively expensive Reaper UAS used by the military to zap people on other continents. This understandable lack of public familiarity with drones leaves plenty of room for confusion, misapprehension, and outside influence.

The average person’s knowledge gap around drones is then reinforced by our media (writ large), which absolutely loves to portray drones – even small, cheap-looking ones – as much more intelligent and sophisticated than they actually are today. (This is also why my loved ones hate watching TV with me now). TV and movies today are absolutely lousy with small drones that can: fly for days at a time, stealthily and silently track people both inside and outside of buildings, shrug off terrible weather and the occasional bullet, and can make complicated strategic decisions on their own, without human input. TV and movie drones are majestically capable, terrifying devices. They make real drones, the kind I actually fly, look like total delicate dumbshits.

Which, let’s be frank, they are. Real drones are dumb and fragile as hell, especially when we compare them to their fictional brethren.  In Real Life, my (nice!) $1200 quadcopter drone is not capable of: reliably navigating around trees, following me in an area that isn’t an open field, avoiding taking photos of things I don’t want it to take photos of, being controlled from more than about a mile and a half away, and reliably avoiding plummeting into a lake or something if it loses radio signal. Its battery lasts for approximately 25 minutes if I’m lucky, and it makes a sound somewhere between a dentist drill and a demented, enormous bumblebee. It cannot fly in rain or snow beyond a gentle drizzle, or navigate winds above 20 miles an hour. While it can navigate a pre-programmed flight path using GPS capability, and take photographs at pre-determined intervals (both very cool features), it’s still not capable of making its own value judgements about where to go or what to photograph.

It has no autonomy, but instead just does exactly what I  tell it. Drone facial recognition software, while a frightening possibility, remains mostly theoretical and is prone to even more errors than the already horrifyingly-error ridden terrestrial type of facial recognition tools. While there are fancier small drones on the market, they’re really not capable of doing much more than mine can. But again, the average person doesn’t know much about the actual dumbshitness of civilian drones, and doesn’t really have a good way to know that, unless they use drones themselves. Certainly drone companies aren’t eager to brag about how stupid their drones actually are, and ‘Drone Fails to Do Anything Exciting’ is not a compelling tech magazine headline.

This leaves people to draw their own conclusions about drones, and what I think they often conclude is that drones are much more intelligent and capable than they actually are. However, the actual parameters of that smartness are also confused, because these media drone portrayals often vary widely in what they show drones doing. Taken together, this means that people know 1. Drones are smart and capable and 2. It’s unclear exactly how smart and capable they are, or what that actually means in practice, which is scary. In other words, to most people, drones are inscrutable.

This inscrutability is compounded by a few factors. For starters, consider that a drone, visually, betrays almost no information about what it is up to or who is flying it to the average schmo on the ground. Police and fire vehicles, even news helicopters, usually have some kind of marking on them that gives us a hint about where they’re from and what they’re up to. Drones do not, and even if they did, they’re so small and so distant that it would be hard for us to see it. We still lack any system that might allow someone on the ground to identify a drone, or at least read off a drone license number: the only way to know what a drone is for is to find the pilot. There’s no clear means of determining exactly who is looking through the computerized eyes of a drone, and what they’re looking for. Or what is looking through the drones eyes, because we are also uncertain about the degree to which drones have minds of their own.

While no one relishes the idea of being spied upon by a person, being spied upon by a creepy human being with a telescope is not a particularly novel or shocking idea. A human being, even a creepy one, operates within human parameters and can presumably be subject to human reason and justice. Being spied upon by a machine, however, is much more disturbing. A good old-fashioned creeper, in the pre-Internet era, had a limited ability to disseminate imagery of you in your underpants far and wide. A machine-equipped creeper has the ability to disseminate those images to everyone on the planet with a pulse in 15 minutes, before you’ve even known that it’s happened. This is terrifying. Even more terrifying, perhaps, is the idea of a machine itself making the decision to disseminate those images – or perhaps making the decision in collaboration with a creepy human being.

To be sure, this human concern over what it means to have a machine mediating our perception of the world is a relatively old one, an anxiety that ebbs and flows in our culture. Andre Bazin wrote, in 1945: “Originality in photography as distinct from originality in painting lies in the essentially objective character of photography. For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent… All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.”

Drone photography take this modern dynamic that Bazin describes even further, because a human being is by definition absent (or at least, is in control of the situation from very far away) when a drone snaps a picture. Perhaps even more importantly,  we – living as we do in an era of AI hype – may not be entirely confident that a drone *is* a “nonliving agent.” AI is new, and so are drones, and there is plenty of kerfuffle in the media about AI being attached to drones.

We therefore shouldn’t be surprised if some people also assume that all drones are equipped to some degree of AI that is much more sophisticated (and frightening) than what is actually possible today, as part of their overestimation of the general abilities of the technology. Insofar as they are aware, a drone may very well be looking at you – and making choices about following you – in and of itself, without being explicitly guided in its every action by a human being.

The drone is turned into something less like a ‘dumb’ remote controlled airplane and much more into something more like a trained attack dog, or even a trained spy. It may be carrying out sinister directives at the behest of someone else, but it is also capable of making its own choices in the process. It is an object that has been imbued with an unusual amount of agency: one could argue that it has become an agent in and of itself. If we look at this from the lens of actor-network theory, drone of uncertain (and currently impossible) intelligence is an entity that exists in a weird  place, somewhere between being an artifact and being a social actor in and of itself. We don’t know that it isn’t exerting a certain amount of automated capacity to choose, or to act.

It is a thing that is ontologically uncertain, and mostly, we don’t like that. (I wouldn’t either, if I didn’t know about drones). This makes sense. After all, it is considerably harder to outsmart something that wants to hurt you or spy on you that is imbued with its own intelligence and autonomy than it is to outsmart a remote-controlled machine controlled by a far-away human that can only see so much ‘through’ the eyes of their mechanical avatar. While we may distrust the motives of the people who made our Amazon Echo or our iPhone, we generally don’t think that the object itself has bad intentions. Yet I often get the sense that people who distrust drones are imbuing the drone itself with bad motives or intent, because they suspect that the drone is capable of doing such a thing.

In another sense, our uncertainty about what drones are up to and how much they know makes us animists, leads us to anthropomorphize them to an extent that we do not anthropomorphize, say, our smart thermostat or our iPad. My drone is not very smart, but its blinking lights and what I interpret as its occasionally temperamental opinions about the conditions it will operate under lead me – even though I know better – to treat it more like a pet at times than like a tool. (I’ve certainly found myself talking to it).

Multirotor drones even move in ways that suggest living objects, more like darting hummingbirds than like conventional aircraft. When I’m bringing my drone in for a landing, it hovers expectantly in front of me: it is an object, but it’s definitely not inanimate. The fact that drones move, too, is another source of distrust. Even if we distrust our Amazon Echo or our iPhone, they are un-moving objects that stay where we’ve put them. Drones, though – they move, and presumably might be able to do so without human input. Creepy.

So then, if drones are inscrutable: what can we do to make them less inscrutable, to make their motives more apparent? Time will certainly help, in that we generally become less frightened of technologies as we grow more accustomed to them. The development of systems that will permit the average person to get a sense of what a drone is up to – perhaps by pointing their phone at it to pull a “license plate,” or something of that nature – will help as well. Still, I don’t see this central ontological issue with drones as something that we are somehow going to fix, or explain away.  They are human, and therefore we are going to have to learn to live with them.

We regularly drive from Boston to Southern Vermont to visit my partner’s family, up through the Green Mountains. The little two-lane road is deeply atmospheric, in that creepy Ichabod-Crane sort of way: it passes through a few little villages with economies that appear to be largely dependent on flea markets and small-batch artisan pottery. It was as we passed thorough one of these towns that I spotted the Patriotic Lobster, slapped confidently on the side of an otherwise mundane home. It was a wooden lobster painted in red, white, and blue colors, with a bit of rustic flair, the sort of thing you could imagine an old, half-blind lobsterman lovingly crafting in a shack. I had to have it.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find one. You can buy so many weird things in so many places online, but there is one thing you cannot buy online, and that is a hideous red-white-and blue lobster wall-hanging that I can offend my neighbors with. Sometimes when I can’t sleep at night, I think about stealing that Patriotic Lobster, right off the side of the house: I imagine creeping up in a ski-mask and snatching it, then vanishing into the night. I could also, I guess, knock on the door and offer to buy it, a roll of $20s in my hand. (I don’t know what the market value of a wooden Patriotic Lobster is, but it’s priceless to me). But no. I won’t steal it, and I won’t buy it, either. I don’t have the heart, the ruthlessness, to deprive someone of their own horrible lobster.

I have to keep looking.

While I haven’t found my very own Patriotic Lobster, I have found lots of other patriotic lobster products. So many that I could probably open up my own highly specialized boutique. Flags. Clothing. Onesies for children. Semi-tasteful wall hangings (which are, obviously, not what I’m searching for). Some even featured crabs or shrimp or crawfish. But the vast majority centered around lobsters, proving that Americans surely must consider lobsters the most patriotic of our native sea-bugs. Lobsters have actually been linked to rah-rah patriotism before, overcoming their initial cultural status as dubious sea-bugs fit only for the tables of the desperate.

During World War II, the U.S. Government found itself with a hefty supply of surplus lobster on its hands, due to the collapse of the export market: the Fisheries Department put out an advertising campaign framing consuming the leggy beasts as an act of patriotism. A 1918 issue of Munsey’s Magazine (which is a danged good name for a publication) noted that it “is a patriot’s duty nowadays to eat lobster,” as a person who consumes less lobster must necessarily eat less pork, beef, and wheat. I also was able to dig up this postcard from early 1900s, which appears to be a French pun about Americans who, you know, ride gigantic lobsters about on the summer shores of Southern France.

But while there is a certain linkage between lobster and heady feelings of country-love, I don’t think this adequately explains the existence of all the patriotic lobster-crap you can buy on the Internet. What message are these object’s makers trying to send here, exactly? Does hanging a flag outside your home with a red and white blue lobster simply symbolize a smidgen of coastal pride, a fondness for lobster rolls? (Which does not explain why one of these Patriotic Lobsters would show up in darkest, landlocked Vermont). Or does it really mean that you love America so much that you’d like to crack its hard exterior exoskeleton and devour the tender flesh within it? Do we wish to extract the essence of America and serve it with some drawn butter on a picnic table in Cape Cod?

God, I don’t know.

All I can say with confidence is that something lurks within the American psyche – within my psyche, I’ll freely confess – that makes us want to make and buy shit with festive red-and-white crustaceans on it. Come with me on a journey through the world of Patriotic Shellfish.

It was the summer of 1999, and innovation was in the air. A Cuffy’s of Cape Cod employee had a brilliant, scandalous idea. You can buy this vintage, “pre-worn” item on eBay.

Your father always did have his lucky lobster-clutching-things collection of belts, for all evening occasions and relevant superstitions. A lobster clutching a Christmas ornament. A lobster clutching a shamrock. A lobster clutching a skull (for Halloween). And then there was this, for the Fourth of July. You hated that belt. Also, I am unsettled by the fact that this product is labeled as “‘patriotic pinchers.”

OK, but what does wearing a tank top with a patriotic lobster on it say about one’s heterosexual masculinity? Is it a straight-up expression of country-love, or sort of a leering joke? Who goes out and specifically orders this sort of thing? Have I just not spent enough time in Maine to understand? I would like to hear your theories.

This is another exceedingly masculine patriotic lobster t-shirt, except it’s a spiny lobster and not the more mundane, less dangerous-to-wrangle American Lobster, which are of course exclusively fished and consumed by delicate pansy wimp-boys. I’ve probably just entirely made up a whole macho rivalry around people who fish for different sorts of lobsters – but what if I haven’t? What if it’s real?

My Patriotic Lobster has taught me this: Americans are absolutely ecstatic over the possibility of dressing their offspring in patriotic crustaceans. I find it a bit tragic, in a way. Why is it assumed that anyone over the age of 10 must surely have too much dignity to adorn themselves in a bunch of nationalistic sea-bugs? Perhaps I too would enjoy a summer swimming set with color-coordinated lobsters. You don’t know me.

If you’d like your little boy to adopt an air of masculine, casual coolness to the world – set him on that path towards success – then you must dress him in inspiring Patriotic Lobsters. I guess this is a thing, for some people.

A number of different outfits sell this patriotic lobster garden flag, which leads me to believe that an actual human being – maybe multiple human beings – has bought one before. I will probably do the same. It calls to me.

This is the best thing I found, of course. It’s an actual, living crawfish that was born patriotic, rendered that way by the semi-benevolent hand of human selective breeding. While I can’t exactly stick it on my wall (that would be mean to the crayfish), I could absolutely buy one of these beauties, put it in a tank, and make all my friends admire it whenever they come over. But I would also have to keep it alive, which is a bigger responsibility than just owning some terrible art. My search will probably continue, but I’m glad to know this guy is at least an option.

I found out about Narisawa a while ago on one of those Best Restaurants in The World For Terrible Snobs websites. I’d been looking for high-end restaurants in Tokyo for our upcoming family trip, and was struck by a picture that appeared to show people eating a mossy chunk of bracken in the forest. It was actually a picture of one of chef Yoshihiro Narisawa’s better known creations, named “The Essence of the Forest,” featuring scattered local ingredients meant to resemble the forest floor, as well as a bamboo cup of purified, oak-infused water from a forest spring. Narisawa explicitly wanted to make his high-end diners scrabble for little tidbits through leaves on the forest floor, like a foraging badger.

I read more about him, and was charmed by his down-to-earth reliance on local ingredients, and self-confident (but well-considered) weirdness. He calls his food “Innovative Satoyama”: the word “Satoyama” in Japanese refers to the liminal zone between mountainous foothils and the flat land where most people live. Narisawa interprets this term as a reflection of human coexistence with, and proximity to, nature and natural ingredients. The food the restaurant serves is meant to be a visual expression of these values, something he describes as “Satoyama Scenery.” I wanted to see what it was that he was talking about, and also, I just wanted to eat that fucking forest bracken. Luckily my family did, too.

Narisawa has two Michelin stars and has been getting a lot of press recently thanks to Chef Narisawa’s recent appearance on that “Final Table” show on Netflix. Reservations can be a challenge, both due to its popularity and the fact that there’s only one dinner service a night. They do mercifully open their reservations up to a month in advance, freeing you from having to make concrete dinner reservations a year out. The restaurant is located in central Tokyo, in a pretty modernist building, with an entrance that faces away from the street and towards a small garden. The dining room is fairly austere (as is often the case in fine Japanese restaurants), because the focus is meant to be on the food, as well as on the open picture window that shows the chefs darting around the kitchen during the dinner service

The lighting was excellent, which I appreciate. So many of today’s nice restaurants have dank and forbidding lighting. If I’m going to do an many-course tasting menu at a place like this, I really like it when I can actually see the food. The lighting also made it very easy to take nice-looking photographs of the food, which may even be intentional – without asking, the servers would cheerfully tilt dishes towards my iPhone camera so I could catch a better angle. How vindicating! Chef Narisawa was there in the kitchen, overseeing the dinner service (we watched through the window), and he in fact came out to say hello to us and to ask us if we were enjoying the food midway through our meal.

We arrived for the earliest seating, and behind us were a group of Americans who we were pretty sure were from a band, except none of us were cool enough to know who they were. We’d picked the middle option for the tasting menu, which came out to a dozen courses focused on different Japanese ingredients and regions of the country. The menu is variable and extremely seasonal: we were eating the “Winter Collection,” which differs markedly from what you might be served during other times during the year. . One of us selected the wine pairing, and one of us selected the sake pairing as well: the wine pairing featured exclusively Japanese wines (which were pretty good, but the sakes, unsurprisingly, are better). The sake selection is truly remarkable, and I enjoyed trying varieties I’d never heard of before.

Here’s the “Satoyama Scenery and Essence of the Forest.” The forest bracken on a plate! I loved this. They encourage you to eat this with your hands, much to the horror of some of the usual jerkholes on TripAdvisor. I didn’t actually lick the plate, but I probably could have, if I really had no sense of shame.

This was followed by Japanese Yam from Saga and Botargo from Fukuoka. This was served hot in a sheet of paper, and we ate them fast, which is why I don’t have a photograph. Our waiter told us the dish was meant to evoke the handheld wintery street-food of the chef’s youth. It was a surprisingly delicious, comforting bite, with the fishy quality of the roe matching nicely with the dense, carby yam.

These are skewers of soft-shelled turtle from Shizuoka, brushed with a light teriyaki sauce and with just a bit of buzz from the Japanese equivalent of Sichuan peppercorns. “You are fine with eating turtle?” the waiter asked us at the beginning of the meal, just in case we were turtlephobes. (We were not. We hail from New Orleans, where we take angry, hissing bog turtles and turn them into refined soups).

This was a turnip from Shizuoka was filled with crab from Hokkaido. This was the best turnip I’ve ever had. It made me want to eat more turnips, except I know very well that any turnip I cook will not be filled with butter and Hokkaido crab. All my future turnips shall pale in comparison with this perfect, Ur-Turnip. My turnip life has peaked.

Spanish mackerel from Yamaguchi was served with mixed grains from Gifu. Like the finest high-end breakfast cereal you’ll ever taste. Some unnoticeable detail with the sauce was wrong on my plate, so the waiter apologized profusely and brought me a new one (I hadn’t noticed anything was wrong, so I didn’t ask). Impressive!

This is rosy seabass from Ishikawa served with kombu (seaweed) from Rebun Island off Hokkaido.

Free range chicken from Shizuoka with wild mushrooms from Hokkaido. It is a known thing that a very good restaurant that dares to have chicken on the menu will make exceptionally good chicken. By their chicken, ye shall judge them.

This langoustine hails from Shizuoka and was part of a dish named “Luxury Essence 2007″: the crustacean is served in a truly remarkable broth, which apparently is made from chicken, pork, and ham. It is now among the Two Best Langoustines I’ve Ever Eaten. The first was a langoustine I ate back in 2009 at Extebarri, the famous Basque all-grill restaurant. Eating that was like being punched in the front teeth by a delectably smoky mantis shrimp.

The Narisawa langoustine was totally different from that langoustine, much more subtle and aromatic, but it was equally sublime: eating it was more like being gently caressed by a mantis shrimp. I dismembered my langoustine with extreme throughness. It died for my sins, after all. I also dismembered my mother’s langoustine, as she is not nearly as committed as I am to digging for very tiny pieces of meat inside of multiple layers of hard chitin. I ended up with a fairly large boneyard of langoustine parts on my plate, and a profound sense of happiness with the world, in that particular moment. (How many good langoustines does one life get, I wonder?)

This was eel from Aichi with fresh wasabi from Shizuoka. The eel was delicious, although at this point in the meal we were starting to flag, and it was just a little dry.

This was the piece de resistance, the biggest fanciest thing: the “Sumi 2008” Kobe beef from Hyogo, which is served to you as a gigantic carbonized thing that looks like a space rock from Planet Zarg that might be cursed. It is the most delicious cursed alien space rock you will ever eat. The black charcoal on the exterior of the meat is carbonized leek. I looked up a recipe for the carbonized umami leek dust and I’m pretending I’m going to try to replicate it someday.

The beef was sliced and served to us with a single piece of steamed taro, and a drop of an extraordinarily densely-flavored reduction sauce, with notes of soy and vinegar.

A strawberry from Fukuoka was served with deliciously light magnolia sorbet from Gifu. Intensely essence-of-strawberry flavored here – I loved it. Japan does strawberries much better than anywhere else.

Finally, we were served whiskey ice cream in a whole pear (like the turnip!), with walnuts from Yamagata. The waiter politely told us that we shouldn’t eat the walnuts. I bet they’ve had some fucking guy at Narisawa before who shrugged and tried to eat the walnuts. Tragedy ensured. Christ, don’t eat the walnuts. Please. One of my walnuts rolled on the table, because I am very clumsy and bad at eating, and I had another thought. About the walnuts. Has someone, some déclassé couple perhaps, got into an actual hissing and spitting fight here, right at the point that the walnut course is served? Has anyone yeeted a whole entire walnut at their spouse’s face at Narisawa before? I hope they haven’t, as the restaurant is so nice and the staff are so nice, but you have to wonder, when a place serves people who’ve gone through six or seven wine pairings little hard projectiles on a plate.

Finally, we ended with some subtle tea cookies made with yame matcha from Fukuoka and Azuki beans from Kyoto.
Our meal at Narisawa was incredible, and it was interesting as well. Interesting is the highest compliment i can give a restaurant: I mean that it is a place that works with local ingredients that I have never tried before and does things with them I have never experienced before. It is a perfect way to sample the flavors of Japan at a restaurant that is actively engaging with modern, international food culture.

“I just don’t understand why you young people complain about high rent in the city – you could just move to the Midwest and buy a big house, if you’d get over yourselves.”

You’ve heard this argument before if you live in a city. It is usually delivered by some horrible relative who is holding a strong alcoholic beverage in one hand and a cocktail shrimp in the other, delivered with that particular type of sloshed bravado particular to horrible relatives. The Magical Cornfield Solution is one of those arguments that is so intrinsically, obviously stupid that it is hard to believe people are sincere about it . But they are. These people really believe that young American’s problems with finding housing and decently-paying work would magically vanish if we all just moved to a very attractively-priced soybean field somewhere near the geographic center of the country. They are convinced that young people are paying ever-spiraling urban rents because we are too proud, too fancy for life in a place without bizarrely-colored lattes and metaphysical yoga classes. 

Here are some reasons why moving to the country is not a magical panacea for high rents and housing inequality. I cannot believe I have to explain this, but then again, it is 2018, and I am always disappointed.

Rural areas are also experiencing housing shortages and affordability crises. We just never hear about them – I certainly didn’t know this until I began researching this blog post. A young person who lives in an expensive area and spends a lot on rent who moves to a rural area (as your shitty Uncle Chad advises)  will almost certainly be penalized by a lower-income job: it is by no means guaranteed that they’ll be able to buy a home in return.  While housing is cheaper in rural areas, incomes are also lower, which means that many people don’t have the resources to improve the housing they’re already in. Some scenic rural areas suffer from affordability problems caused by second-home buyers, who buy properties that working families might live in year-round. Completely unsurprisingly, the declining economic activity and populations in rural areas are also linked to declines in home-building, home improvement, and the availability of home loans. While Nebraska has plenty of jobs, there’s not enough housing for people who might move to fill them – yes, that’s right, there’s a housing shortage in rural Nebraska.  Making matters worse, low-income new arrivals in rural and remote areas add to already over-burdened health and social services: this article looks at how this is playing out in rural Canada, a country with socialized health-care, unlike some other countries we know. 

Lots of people are from cities, and they’d like to stay in those cities. There is a certain type of smug soybean-field-pusher who assumes that everyone in the entire country is originally  from a picket-fence small town or a suburb.  This is a problem, because a lot of people are born in cities and stay in those cities. Which are the same places where their families are. The U.S. Census Bureau inconveniently doesn’t collect data on whether people were born in the cities that they live in, but it does collect data on whether people were born in the same state as the city they currently reside in. 58.5% of Chicago’s residents (to use one example) were born in Illinois, while 70% of Philadelphia’s residents were born in Pennsylvania. 2016 data from New York University’s Furman Center found that 47.9% of New York City residents were born in the state of New York. We can safely extrapolate from this that there’s a lot of people out there who’ve never known anything but city life.

  A lot of people are not white, cis-gendered,  born in the United States, or heterosexual. Many of these people would like to live in places where they will not be isolated from others like them. Hate crimes are becoming more common in the Trump era, and groups that don’t fit the white, straight norm likely are finding it more important than ever to be amongst their own communities.  2010 U.S. Census Data found that a whopping 78% percent of the population in rural and small-town American communities was white and non-Hispanic. Immigrant groups in small communities may lack access to the resources they need to combat hate, as this article on rural South Asians describes. The U.S. census doesn’t collect information on LGBTQ people, but there’s evidence that LGBTQ Americans – especially youth – find rural and small-town life a challenge. A 2016 study from a University of Kansas professor on gender and sexual minority youth in nonmetropolitan communities identified four areas of particular need:  “reduction in isolation, social acceptance and visibility, emotional support and safety, and GSM identity development.” White, straight Americans shouldn’t assume that rural America is as welcoming to everyone as it is to them.  

Urban areas have infrastructure. That includes fast Internet and mobile service. You’re not going to be able to work that well-paying remote job your horrible relatives assume you can get in Real Rural America if you can’t get a fast Internet connection or mobile reception. The Internet crisis in rural America is acute: a whopping 39% of rural Americans lack broadband service, as opposed to just 4% of urban Americans, and the sordid death of Net Neutrality means that this shameful problem is unlikely to get better anytime soon. Rural areas have the highest healthcare premiums in the United States, which is linked to higher healthcare costs due to a lack of doctors and hospitals. The rural doctor shortage, a long-time problem, is expected to worsen thanks to the Trump administration’s idiotic and racist visa policies. Groceries may actually be cheaper in big cities, as opposed to smaller ones. You’ve got to own a car, and you’ve got to regularly gas it up. And what exactly should people who can’t drive do if they find it harder and harder to afford living in an urban area? Rural areas in the United States are, after all, not exactly known for their public transit – though some groups are wisely working to change this.

Many well-paying and fulfilling careers require you to live in cities, at least for a while. (I don’t mean “fabulous wealth and power” here, either, I mean ‘you’re not absolutely miserable and you can afford health insurance’).  Good jobs are increasingly clustered into a few metro areas, especially in the comically lucrative tech world, and most of those metro areas are relatively expensive. Some of these good careers, careers which help all of humanity sometimes, are limited to one or two cities in the entire world: if you don’t want to live in those cities, you are welcome to fuck off and do something else. You are going to have a very hard time advancing to better-paid and more responsible positions if you do not live in these expensive cities. Many of the young people currently living in expensive cities appear to be interested in leaving once they’ve got the money to buy a house somewhere cheaper (though it’s debatable if cities have really hit “peak millennial” or not). 

Most people probably don’t move because they want more unicorn lattes (or other amenities).  2017 data from the US Census Bureau found that the largest group of millenials (18.0% percent) moved because they wanted to establish their own household, followed by 16.1% who wanted new or better housing, and 11.9% who moved for a new job or a job transfer.  People are moving much less than they used to in general. In 2017, America’s household mobility rate was 10.9%, which is the lowest since the Census Bureau started keeping track 50 years ago. This is not actually a good thing, Uncle Chad the Idiot Trump Voter, it’s yet another disturbing sign that America is stratifying into a lousy place where rich, educated people live in cities and continue to get richer, while poor people get stuck in more rural areas with fewer opportunities. Much-maligned flighty millennials are actually moving less than prior generations of young adults, per Pew Research, for a number of reasons that no one seems to be able to agree upon. Pew’s Richard Fry theorizes that this is because millennials are still suffering from the economic impact of the Great Recession, and still aren’t finding job opportunities worth making a move for. Relocation subsidies have also become a thing of the past, making it financially harder to move for a job. 

Opportunity clusters. It just does, even in our Internet era. We live in a stupid and comically non-meritocratic world in which networking and running into people at parties is paramount to success (or just economic stability and comfort), and that is a whole lot easier when all the people who can help you advance are in the same geographic area as you, and are thus easier to access. One recent study found that people who attend college in big cities go on to make more money in life: the operating theory is that this is because big-city universities offer superior networking opportunities.

Most jobs (and networking) still can’t be done “from anywhere,” at least not long-term. Many companies still regard telework with extreme suspicion, and teleworkers are still penalized when it comes to advancement upward.  Location also matters to freelancers, and I know, because I’ve been one, like every other sentient being under the age of 30 in 2018.  Even freelance writers – a famously antisocial and isolated species – have got to meet and interact with people who will publish and promote them, at least some of the time. This doesn’t have to mean living in that particular bit of Brooklyn that is (far as I have read) absolutely jam-packed with tiresome men who write big fancy novels about insecure professors with sexual problems, and thank God for that, but it often does mean living in some sort of urban area with a media scene. There are a lot less of those outside of the urban United States.

Insofar as I am aware, there are few friendly hiring managers who are already two margaritas in and know this guy who happens to be looking for someone with your exact skill-set wandering the vast and empty plains of middle-America. There are no migratory herds of avuncular mentors who will help you get that meeting with his friend Roberta the Nicest CEO, though I mean, that sort of ecological destruction is just what you get when you decimate our formerly mighty long-grass prairies. 

City living is the way of the future. I don’t mean that in that depressing dystopian cyberpunk way, that particular vision that is weirdly shared by every single “serious” science fiction show: you know, everything’s grimy, everyone has mohawks, people are eating cyber-rats out of desperation. That’s not real, but the advantages of urban dwelling are. Larger, denser cities are widely considered to be more energy efficient: emissions appear to reduce as metros grow larger. Productive cities that can attract more people get more productive in turn, contributing more to GDP. There’s a well-proven, direct relationship between city density and human capital. The benefits aren’t just economic. There’s a reason so many famous art and social movements originated in cities: cities allow creative and diverse people to find one another and come up with new concepts and ways of living, in ways that still can’t be replaced by the quotidian delights of social media. Cities drive economic growth, though, as this research shows, they don’t have to be ginormous mega cities. Even small cities produce economic benefit in “developing” nations. It is not realistic or desirable for every American to reside on 10 acres of isolated farmland, even if it’s really, really cheap to live there. (Build your own shack! Defend yourself against the roving night-coyotes!).

Advising young people to stop their whining and move out of the city, where they can be isolated from one another and from centers of culture and political power, is remarkably short-sighted. It is ahistorical, to an extent that makes me extremely suspicious. Venerating the noble countryside can really be taken too far: I wonder how many of the horrible uncles promoting a millennial exodus to Missouri are aware of how that particular experiment went for Mao Tse-Tung, or for the Khmer Rouge. Nothing good comes from these naive, dangerous demands to empty the cities, to stop putting on airs. Moving to cities is one of humanity’s most persistent historical trends: that of clustering and aggregation and great cities rising and doing great and awful things. Uncle Chad is not going to somehow stop this millennia drive toward urbanization by braying about how inexpensive possum-filled mansions are in his town in East Dakota. Do not put up with Uncle Chad.