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+--- Thread: Nobunaga's Little Essays on X (/thread-21248.html)
Nobunaga's Little Essays on X - Yazata - Sep 3, 2026
Nobunaga is a Japanese man who has lived in the United States for some time, mostly in Missouri I think. And he's an extraordinarily talented writer. He's aided by AI since he writes in Japanese and the AI translates his essays. Whether it's his own work (I think it is) or the AI, the products are often moving and beautiful. He has a real talent for capturing the unique and increasingly endangered culture of middle America. Kind of a middle aged Asian Freddy.
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In Nebraska I was told a number. I did not believe it. I have since checked it, and I still do not believe it.
The football stadium in Lincoln has sold every seat, for every home game, since November 3, 1962.
Every game. Not the good years. Every game. Through seasons the state would rather not discuss. Through blizzards. Through years when leaving early would have been reasonable, and nobody left.
I asked a man named Gary how two million people keep a promise for that long.
He said, "You buy the ticket."
I asked what if the team is bad.
"You buy the ticket."
I asked what if it is snowing.
He looked at me with real patience. "You buy the ticket."
Here is the part that undid me. The first game of the streak, in 1962, they lost. Thirty-six thousand people came out the week after the Cuban Missile Crisis ended, watched their team lose to Missouri, and came back for the next one anyway. And the next. It has not stopped.
The streak began with a loss. Nobody in Nebraska finds this ironic. They find it obvious.
This summer there was worry. Ticket sales were slow. People wrote articles asking whether it would finally end. I read them in a diner over a slice of pie I did not finish, and I confess I was afraid for a state I do not live in.
Then this week they announced the opener is sold out. Four hundred and eleven in a row.
In my land, a lord who kept his word for sixty years was written into the temple records.
Nebraska has kept its word since the Cuban Missile Crisis. There is no temple. There are eighty-five thousand people who bought the ticket.
Gary is going Saturday. It is not snowing. He would go if it were.
A promise is easy in a winning season.
Nebraska has kept one through every other kind.
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I drove forty miles across Texas and counted flags.
Sixty-one. I counted again on the way back and got sixty-three, because two had gone up while I was gone.
A car dealership had one the size of a house. A plumber's truck had one on each door. A porch. A bikini, at the lake. A mailbox. A coffin, being carried into a church, and then, at the gas station across the street, a hat.
In my country the flag belongs to the state. It flies on government buildings on holidays and is put away by a man with a key.
Here I could not find the man with the key.
The salesman at the dealership said the flag was theirs. The plumber said his was his. A woman on her porch said, "Honey, it's mine," in a tone that closed the subject.
Nobody had been issued one. Everybody had bought their own.
I bought one. A neighbor showed me the rules, which nobody had ever written down for him either. Up at dawn. Down at dusk, or lit. Never the ground. Folded thirteen times into a triangle. He did the folds with me four times until my hands knew them. He said, "There you go," and did not say why he knew.
I have folded it four hundred times since. There is a light I could buy. I have not bought the light.
In my country the flag belongs to the state.
In Texas it belongs to a plumber named Ray, and to the dealership, and to the woman on the porch, and to a bikini at the lake, and on holidays the state has to ask to borrow it.
They lend it gladly. They have sixty-three.
RE: Nobunaga's Little Essays on X - Yazata - Sep 6, 2026
An American traveler got off the bullet train at Kyoto Station.
Thirty seconds after the doors closed, his stomach dropped:
His leather wallet was still in the seatback pocket of Car 7, Seat 14-A.
Cash, credit cards, passport — everything.
The train was already accelerating out of the station at 180 miles per hour,
heading for Tokyo.
In panic, he ran to the station attendant, stammering through broken Japanese.
The attendant didn't roll his eyes.
He didn't hand the traveler a claims brochure and say "Check our website in two weeks."
He pulled out a radio.
He called the train's head conductor while the train was traveling at full speed through the mountains.
The conductor walked to Car 7, retrieved the wallet from seat 14-A,
verified the name on the ID over the radio,
and placed it in a secure pouch.
When the train stopped at Nagoya — forty minutes away —
a station officer was standing precisely at the car door.
The wallet was handed off, placed on the very next Kyoto-bound train,
and within 90 minutes,
the traveler was holding his wallet on the Kyoto platform.
Not a single dollar was missing.
Not a single credit card touched.
When the traveler tried to bow and give the attendant cash as a reward,
the attendant stepped back, bowed lower, and smiled:
"Welcome to Japan. Please enjoy your trip."
RE: Nobunaga's Little Essays on X - Yazata - Sep 14, 2026
A boy mowed my lawn without being asked, and when I tried to pay him he took a step back like I had drawn something.
"It's free."
"That is not a price."
"It's free."
I asked who sent him. Nobody sent him. I asked who his master was. He said, "What?"
Then he pointed at his shirt. The shirt was orange.
White is where you start. Orange at ten lawns. Green at twenty. Blue at thirty. Red at forty. Black at fifty.
I want to be clear about what I was looking at in my own yard.
That is a belt system.
Fifty lawns, free, for the elderly, the disabled, single parents and veterans, and at fifty a man gets in a car in Alabama and drives to wherever you live and hands you the black shirt himself, along with a new mower, a blower and a trimmer.
I asked how to enroll. You send a photograph of yourself holding a sign that reads I ACCEPT THE 50 YARD CHALLENGE.
I made the sign. I made it well. I used a straightedge.
The age range is seven to seventeen.
I accepted the ruling. I didn't argue. A gate is a gate.
Then I went to find out who runs the school, because I assumed some old general with a lineage behind him.
His name is Rodney Smith Jr. He is not old. He was a college student in Huntsville, Alabama, when he drove past an elderly neighbor fighting with a mower and pulled over. He set himself a target of forty lawns and passed it in about six weeks.
He didn't grow up here. He came from Bermuda for school. He has said he learned about veterans after he arrived, what they had done, and that he wanted to do something about it.
He has also said, and I have thought about this a great deal, that he hated mowing lawns.
The founder of the mowing school hates mowing.
There are six thousand children in it now, in every state. Some of them are eleven years old and two of them share one mower a neighbor gave them, and when he hears about that he gets in the car.
I cut four lawns on my street this summer. Nobody asked me to. I have no shirt and I am not eligible for one.
The black shirt isn't sold anywhere. You can't buy it, you can't order it, and it does not come in the mail.
A man has to drive to your house and put it in your hands.
https://weareraisingmen.com/the-50-yard-challenge/