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Are There Aliens In Our Oceans? An Objective Investigation

Note: This essay is written in the spirit of amused inquiry rather than firm conclusion. Human history is filled with reports of strange visions, unexplained lights, divine visitations, and unidentified aerial phenomena. The interpretation of such experiences has tended to shift with the cultural vocabulary of the time. Medieval Europeans often described encounters with saints or angels. In the twentieth century the language of extraterrestrials became available.

The psychologist Carl Jung famously suggested that UFO sightings may function partly as modern mythologies—symbolic attempts by societies to understand mysterious experiences in technological terms. Jung also observed, with characteristic dry humor, that UFOs often appear to be “somehow not photogenic.”

The present investigation was prompted by my brother Mike, who recently asserted via text message that extraterrestrials are currently residing in Earth’s oceans. His wife Coleen agreed. “They are everywhere,” she said. While this claim remains unverified, the oceans themselves are vast, poorly explored, and capable of sustaining a wide range of speculative hypotheses.

The purpose of the essay is therefore not to prove or disprove the existence of extraterrestrial life in the ocean. Rather, it is to examine why such ideas persist, how they resemble earlier historical visions—from medieval religious phenomena to modern UFO culture—and why the possibility continues to feel strangely plausible to otherwise reasonable adults.

Epigraph

There are aliens in our midst.

Wussy

The Jung Problem

At this point in the investigation one is reminded of a dry observation by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

Jung noted that UFOs possess a curious property: they are “somehow not photogenic.” Sightings multiply, witnesses speak with conviction, yet the documentation remains just slightly blurry.

Jung’s larger argument was that such phenomena often behave like modern myths. They appear at moments when societies are under stress, technological change is accelerating, and people are searching for new symbolic explanations of the world.

In other words, the sky fills with things.

Medieval Precedents

This pattern is not entirely new.

During certain periods of medieval Europe, particularly when grain supplies were contaminated by the fungus ergot, communities reported vivid religious visions: glowing figures in the sky, saints appearing in fields, the Virgin Mary materializing in unexpected places.

Ergot poisoning, now understood scientifically, can produce powerful hallucinations. But to the people experiencing them the visions were not chemical side effects. They were divine manifestations.

Entire crowds could witness miraculous shapes in the heavens or detect holy images in the crust of bread. A modern observer might diagnose environmental intoxication or collective suggestion. The participants experienced revelation.

The important point is that the content of the vision reflected the cultural vocabulary available at the time.

Medieval Europe saw saints. Modern America sees aliens.

One can see this dynamic clearly in the case of Joan of Arc. Joan reported hearing voices and receiving instructions from heavenly figures whom she identified as saints.

Historians generally accept that Joan sincerely believed these visions were divine communications.

But it is difficult not to notice that saints were the most advanced category of non-human intelligence available in fifteenth-century France. The conceptual vocabulary for extraterrestrials would not be invented for several hundred years.

Had Joan lived in the late twentieth century, it is at least possible that the same experience might have been interpreted somewhat differently.

She might have reported a craft.

The Cold War Sky

By the late 1940s the heavens had acquired a new cast of characters.

The famous incident near Roswell occurred in 1947, just as the Cold War was beginning to reorganize the world’s imagination. Reports of flying saucers multiplied. The mysterious visitors were described with increasing consistency: small grey beings with large heads and enormous eyes.

The explanation most often offered by the authorities was considerably less glamorous.

Weather balloons.

Strange objects falling from the sky during the early Cold War often turned out to be classified surveillance equipment. Unfortunately, the phrase “weather balloon” never fully satisfied the public imagination.

Aliens, after all, are much more interesting than meteorology.

The Mulder Doctrine

By the 1990s the entire mythology had been carefully systematized by American television.

The X-Files:

In the series, FBI agent Fox Mulder dedicates his career to investigating extraterrestrial activity after his sister Samantha is abducted from their home during childhood.

The abduction occurs at night. A strange light fills the room. The sister disappears.

Mulder spends the rest of his life attempting to prove that what he witnessed was real.

His partner, Dana Scully, is assigned to bring scientific skepticism to the enterprise. Their relationship gradually becomes one of the most beloved partnerships in television history, built on the productive tension between belief and doubt.

Entire generations of viewers absorbed the idea that somewhere in the sky—or possibly beneath the ocean—extraterrestrial activity might be quietly unfolding.

A Modern Lens

Seen from a slightly greater distance, the pattern begins to look familiar.

Medieval villagers saw saints because saints were the explanatory language available to them. Cold War Americans saw aliens because aliens had become the new vocabulary of the unknown.

Both phenomena may reflect the same basic human impulse: when confronted with mysterious experiences, we populate the heavens with the most compelling figures our culture provides.

Which brings us back to Mike.

So Are There Aliens In Our Oceans?

It must be admitted that if an advanced civilization from another planet wished to observe humanity without attracting attention, the deep ocean would offer several practical advantages. The environment is dark, difficult to access, and rarely visited by surface-dwelling primates equipped with submarines that can only remain operational for limited periods of time.

From a strategic standpoint, it would be an excellent hiding place.

This possibility has occurred to more than one observer, including my friend Mason, who recently suggested that a technologically sophisticated off-world civilization might simply have decided that the bottom of the ocean was the most convenient place to avoid the rest of us.

Provisional Conclusions

My brother Mike believes there are aliens in the ocean.

Carl Jung might have suggested that mysterious phenomena often adopt the symbolic clothing of their era. The Middle Ages had saints. The twentieth century produced extraterrestrials.

Mike has simply moved the story offshore.

The oceans remain vast and poorly explored. The woods remain dark and occasionally unsettling at night. Both environments have the correct atmospheric conditions for unexpected encounters.

If extraterrestrials are present, they may well prefer the sea.

But it would be a mistake to rule out the woods.

In either case, it seems wise to remain polite.

Footnote: The Ocean Logic

It must be admitted that if extraterrestrials wished to establish a long-term observational presence on Earth, the ocean would offer several advantages. Humans rarely visit the deep sea, and when we do we tend to leave fairly quickly due to crushing pressure, darkness, and the general inconvenience of breathing water.

From the perspective of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization attempting to avoid unnecessary interaction with our species, the ocean may therefore represent the single most sensible real estate on the planet.

Mike may, in other words, be thinking strategically.

POSTSCRIPT: Supplemental Testimony

Shortly after the investigation began, the primary witness—my brother Mike—provided additional clarification regarding his position.

According to Mike, extraterrestrial life has not only visited Earth’s oceans but has been present there for a considerable period of time. The aliens, he explained, appear to prefer the environment and have constructed bases beneath the sea.

When asked for supporting evidence, Mike cited the well-known Navy pilot videos showing unidentified aerial objects performing unusual maneuvers.

These videos—often referred to as the “Tic Tac” incidents—have circulated widely in recent years and are frequently interpreted as evidence of advanced technology of unknown origin.

Mike considers them decisive.

A second observer, his wife Colleen, agreed with this general assessment while expanding the hypothesis somewhat.

In her view, extraterrestrials may not be confined to the ocean at all. Rather, they may be present around us at all times.

According to Colleen, it is entirely possible that aliens walk among us.

At this stage of the investigation, these claims remain under review.

Dedication: For my brother Mike. I love you bro, but I still thinks them shits are in the woods.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below, which also discuss the famous psychologist Carl Jung.

Carl Jung’s Collected Works: I
Jungian Intimations: I
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On The Dubious Anna Delvey

Note: This essay reflects on the curious cultural figure of Anna Delvey, whose rise and fall in the New York art and social scene became one of the stranger morality plays of the late 2010s. Delvey—born Anna Sorokin in Russia—gained notoriety for presenting herself as a wealthy European heiress while attempting to secure loans and social capital for an ambitious but largely imaginary cultural venture known as the Anna Delvey Foundation.

The events described here draw on widely reported elements of the case: Delvey’s years moving through luxury hotels in Manhattan, her efforts to obtain financing for a private art and social club, the unraveling of her financial claims, and the now-famous trip to Dubai in which a friend—later a magazine writer documenting the experience—was left responsible for an enormous hotel bill after promised funds failed to appear.

The piece does not attempt investigative reporting. Instead, it approaches the story in a spirit of cultural anthropology. Cities like New York have always attracted individuals engaged in various forms of self-invention. The line between ambition, performance, exaggeration, and outright fraud can sometimes appear only after events have run their course. Delvey’s story is compelling partly because it dramatizes this thin boundary in unusually vivid form.

If the tone here sometimes drifts toward sympathy rather than condemnation, that is intentional. Many urban cultural scenes—especially art worlds—operate on the energy of strivers who are, in one way or another, attempting to become something slightly larger than their present circumstances allow. Most of them eventually succeed or quietly disappear. A very small number, like Delvey, collapse in public.

Their stories reveal something not only about themselves, but about the environments that briefly believed in them.

Epigraph

“For all the crazy people who can never get it right.”
— Drugstore

I. The Entrance

There is a certain kind of person who arrives in a city not merely to live there but to declare themselves into existence. Cities like New York attract them the way bright lights attract moths. They arrive with luggage, ideas, clothes that signal belonging, and an almost reckless confidence that the future will eventually arrange itself around their intentions.

Anna Delvey was one of these people.

When she appeared in the New York art scene, she seemed to possess the basic ingredients required for entry into that peculiar ecosystem: style, confidence, and an air of European mystery. She wore expensive-looking dresses and shoes. She wore aa lot of make up and had her hair done at expensive salons. She seemed for a while to ooze money. She spoke casually about ambitious cultural projects. She moved through hotels and restaurants as if she had always belonged to that world. In New York, that is often enough.

The city runs on confidence performances. Every ambitious young person who arrives there is, in some sense, performing the life they intend to have. The art world especially is full of people who are not yet what they claim to be but are working very hard to become it.

Delvey fit into that theater perfectly.

II. The Vision

The striking thing about Delvey was that she didn’t simply want to attend the art scene. She wanted to build something inside it. Her idea was the Anna Delvey Foundation: a kind of private cultural club and exhibition space in downtown Manhattan. It would combine gallery spaces, social rooms, events, artists, patrons, and the atmosphere of a private cultural salon. A place where the city’s creative and wealthy classes might gather.

The plan was grand. But it also had a strange plausibility. New York is full of institutions that began with the ambition of a single person who simply decided that something should exist and then spent years convincing others to believe in it.

Delvey spoke about the project with total conviction. She behaved like someone who already possessed the financial backing required to make such a thing happen. And because she behaved that way, many people assumed the money must exist somewhere.

This is one of the basic mechanics of social confidence. If someone carries themselves like a person whose financial arrangements have already been verified by someone else, most people will not ask too many questions.

III. Hotels

Hotels played a central role in the Delvey story.

Luxury hotels are perfect environments for people living inside ambitious performances. They operate on the assumption that their guests are legitimate. The bill will eventually be settled. The credit line exists somewhere. The guest’s presence itself is treated as evidence of solvency.

Delvey floated through some of New York’s most expensive hotels as if she were simply another wealthy European visitor temporarily residing there while arranging various cultural affairs. The lobbies, the restaurants, the rooms—all of it provided a stage set that reinforced the story she was telling.

Hotels also create a particular social atmosphere. Everyone is temporarily suspended between identities. People are traveling, negotiating, arriving, leaving. It is a place where someone can exist slightly outside the ordinary structures of verification.

For a while, the performance worked.

IV. The Father

Like many figures who construct elaborate new identities, Delvey carried with her a somewhat murky origin story.

She spoke of family wealth. Of connections. Of a background that seemed to hover somewhere between Russia and Germany, between modest beginnings and more glamorous narratives.

Her real childhood was more ambiguous. Her father had worked as a truck driver and later operated a heating and cooling business. It was a respectable, ordinary life. But it did not contain the European aristocratic wealth that sometimes appeared in Delvey’s stories.

This kind of ambiguity is not unusual among people attempting radical self-invention. The past becomes something flexible, something that can be rearranged slightly in order to support the person one intends to become.

In cities like New York, such reinvention is practically a tradition.

V. Dubai

The most extraordinary episode in the Delvey saga took place far from Manhattan, on a trip to Dubai. Delvey traveled there with a friend—a magazine writer who was documenting the glamorous world that Delvey seemed to inhabit. The trip was meant to be luxurious: private villas, elaborate dinners, the kind of extravagant travel that confirms a person’s social status.

For a few days everything unfolded according to the script. And then the bill arrived. The charges for the trip reached roughly $60,000. Delvey’s payment arrangements suddenly failed. The promised wire transfers did not appear. The hotel demanded settlement.

And the friend—the magazine writer who had been invited along for the ride—found herself responsible for the enormous bill. So Delvey left her there. Super bad business Anna baby.

It was a moment that perfectly captured the strange mechanics of confidence artistry. The performance works right up until the moment when reality insists on payment.

Someone, eventually, must pay the bill.

VI. Collapse

Once the financial machinery began to fail, the unraveling accelerated. Banks wanted documentation. Hotels wanted payment. Institutions that had briefly entertained the idea of supporting Delvey’s foundation began to ask more detailed questions about the supposed trust fund that would finance it.

The answers did not exist. The performance collapsed. Delvey was eventually arrested, tried, and convicted of fraud.

VII. The Strange Sympathy

And yet the Delvey story produced a strangely sympathetic public response. Perhaps it was because she had not simply been extracting money for luxury purchases. She had been trying, in her own improbable way, to create something. A cultural institution. A social space. A downtown hub for art and ambition.

The plan was impossible, but the ambition was recognizable. Many people—especially those drawn to cities like New York—understand the impulse to reinvent oneself, to construct a future through sheer force of belief. Delvey simply pushed that impulse far beyond the point where the arithmetic could sustain it.

VIII. Coda

In the end, the most interesting thing about Anna Delvey may not be that she fooled people. New York has always been full of people attempting improbable social performances. The interesting thing is that, for a moment, she came very close to building the life she imagined. And perhaps that is why stories like hers continue to fascinate us. They remind us that the line between visionary and impostor is often visible only in hindsight.

Dedication: For Anna baby (you’re hot BTW) and all the beautiful strivers out there. May your world-curated art spaces someday come true.

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On George Santos (aka The Fabulous Kitara)

Note: This piece uses the figure of George Santos as a kind of cultural parable. The story of Santos—his improbable congressional run on Long Island, the famous unraveling of his résumé (including the legendary and totally outta control Baruch volleyball claim), the rapid collapse of political support from fellow New York Republicans, his eventual expulsion from Congress, and his strange second act as a Cameo celebrity—forms one of the more surreal public morality plays of recent American politics.

The apartment story that frames the essay is not meant as a literal equivalence. Kitara is not Santos, and roommates are not members of Congress. The comparison operates at the level of archetype: the charismatic figure who arrives full of sunshine, quickly becomes central to a small social world, and then—through one small but revealing detail—forces everyone around them to confront the uneasy coexistence of charm and opportunism.

The name “Kitara,” Santos’ drag name from back in Brazil where he if from (Santos is gay of course) is used here in the spirit of narrative shorthand rather than biography. Anyone who has lived with roommates long enough will recognize the basic situation. Shared apartments are small republics built on trust, improvisation, and the quiet hope that everyone involved is playing roughly the same game. Most of the time that hope is justified. Occasionally it is not.

If the tone of the piece drifts toward amusement, and even affection, rather than outrage, that is deliberate. Characters like Santos—and the occasional fabulous roommate—have a peculiar ability to provoke both exasperation and reluctant admiration. The performance can be infuriating. But it can also be oddly entertaining.

Such people rarely disappear completely. They simply move on to the next stage. Sometimes that stage is Congress. Sometimes it is Cameo (get that scratch Georgie baby!). And sometimes it is just the memory of a roommate who once seemed almost too good to be true.

Epigraph

“People seldom do what they believe in.
They just do what is convenient, then repent.”
— Bob Dylan

I. The Fabulous Roommate

Every apartment has its mythology.

The quiet one who never emerges from his room except to microwave things at strange hours. The earnest one who tries to establish chore charts that everyone pretends to follow for about ten days. The one who adopts pets with a confidence that suggests the rest of the household has already agreed to care for them.

And then, once in a while, there is the fabulous roommate. Kitara was that roommate.

She arrived with the sort of personality that immediately rearranges the emotional furniture of a place. Cheerful without being cloying. Social without being exhausting. Organized without being smug about it. She seemed to understand, instinctively, the delicate social contract of shared living: when to chat, when to disappear, when to clean something quietly so no one felt guilty.

Visitors loved her. Friends who came by would inevitably say some version of the same thing: “Your roommate is amazing.”

And she was. At least at first.

She was the sort of person who made the apartment feel like a small, cheerful republic. There were occasional dinners, occasional drinks, occasional pets that appeared temporarily in the orbit of the household. Nothing dramatic. Just the easy, slightly improvised domestic life that happens when a handful of semi-adults share a roof and try to keep the machinery of living running smoothly.

There are people who move through life like that—people who bring lightness with them. People who make small environments work better simply by being present. You think, when you meet someone like this: what a lucky break.

II. The Sunshine Personality

There is another category of person, however, that resembles the fabulous roommate from a distance. These people also arrive with sunshine. They are charming. They are energetic. They seem to know how to move through rooms with effortless confidence. They shake hands warmly. They remember names. They tell stories. They radiate the sort of friendliness that makes everyone feel briefly like a co-conspirator in something cheerful.

The difference is subtle, and it often takes time to notice. These are not merely charming people.

These are the performers. And, one of the most remarkable recent examples of this type in American public life was George Santos.

Santos appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in the political ecosystem of Long Island. His run for Congress was, at least initially, improbable in the way that many modern political stories can be. The district had long been competitive, but his rise through the local Republican apparatus was unusually smooth. There was little serious opposition within the party. The campaign itself unfolded with the sort of confident momentum that often accompanies candidates who seem, at least on paper, to possess a compelling life story.

And what a life story it was.

Santos presented himself as the son of immigrants who had risen through the financial world, a man with an impressive résumé and a philanthropic sensibility. He spoke of professional success, cultural fluency, and various achievements that painted a portrait of upward mobility and cosmopolitan competence.

The voters of Long Island sent him to Congress. And then, almost immediately, the details began to unravel.

III. The Volleyball Player

The first cracks appeared through the ordinary mechanism of local journalism. Reporters from Long Island newspapers began to do what reporters traditionally do: verify things.

The résumé turned out to be an imaginative document. The professional history did not quite match reality. The educational claims were questionable. Various details that had seemed impressive during the campaign began to dissolve under scrutiny.

One of the most memorable revelations involved an oddly specific athletic claim. Santos had described himself as a standout volleyball player during his time at Baruch College. Not merely a participant, but something close to a star—someone whose record-setting performance had been part of his biography.

There was just one problem. Baruch College had no record of him playing volleyball. None at all. Outta control. The story collapsed on that small detail. It is often the small details that do that.

A résumé can contain many large claims, and those claims can hover in a kind of vague plausibility for a surprisingly long time. But one precise, checkable fact—the volleyball team roster, the game statistics, the athletic department archives—can puncture an entire narrative.

The reporters pulled the thread and the sweater unraveled.

IV. The Grifter Archetype

Once the unraveling began, it accelerated. Claims about employment at major financial firms proved dubious. Educational credentials evaporated. Personal history mutated in various directions depending on which previous statement one examined.

Soon the story had migrated from the political pages into the broader theater of American spectacle. Late-night comedians noticed. Cable news panels convened. Social media filled with the strange, almost baroque details of the saga. Members of his own party began to distance themselves.

Several Republican members of the New York congressional delegation—figures who had initially welcomed a new colleague—publicly called for him to resign as the scope of the fabrications became clear. The situation became untenable. The House of Representatives eventually voted to expel him, a rare and historically notable step.

It was a dramatic fall.

And yet even during the collapse, Santos retained something remarkable.

Charm.

He gave interviews. He sparred with reporters. He adopted, at times, an almost mischievous tone about the entire affair. There was a faint air of theatricality to the proceedings, as though the story had become a kind of performance art about the boundaries of credibility.

The grifter archetype has a peculiar resilience. Even when the illusion collapses, the performer often remains oddly entertaining.

V. The Apartment

Watching the Santos saga unfold, I found myself thinking more about Kitara.

Because the thing about grifters is not simply that they deceive.

It is that they charm.

They charm their way into rooms, into institutions, into social networks. They radiate warmth. They build small communities of goodwill around themselves. And for quite a while, everything feels perfectly normal.

Until one day something small happens. Something missing.

In the apartment it was GM’s silver. Not a vast treasure. Not an heirloom of historic significance. Just a small, familiar object that lived in a particular drawer and had always lived there.

One morning it was gone. The initial reaction in situations like this is always practical. Maybe you moved it. Maybe it fell behind something. Maybe someone borrowed it.

The mind runs through a series of benign explanations, each one slightly less convincing than the last.

And then a thought appears.

Quietly.

Oh shit.

VI. The Knowledge You Don’t Want

Roommate life operates on a fragile form of trust.

You share space. You share kitchens. Sometimes you share pets, groceries, furniture, phone bills, music, stories. The arrangement functions because everyone tacitly agrees not to test the boundaries of that trust too aggressively.

When something disappears, the entire structure trembles.

But there is another complication.

Sometimes you realize what probably happened. And you also realize that confirming it would destroy the social equilibrium of the apartment.

So you do a strange psychological maneuver.

You know. But you decide not to know.

Life continues.

The dishes are washed. Conversations occur. The roommate remains charming. The apartment continues to function as a small republic of semi-functional adults.

But a hairline crack now runs through the arrangement.

VII. The Fall

For Santos the crack widened into a canyon.

The congressional investigation intensified. Ethical questions multiplied. Party support evaporated. Eventually the House voted to expel him, ending one of the most surreal political tenures in recent memory.

Yet even after the fall, Santos demonstrated a familiar trait of the charismatic grifter.

He adapted. He appeared on podcasts. He commented on political scandals involving others. He expressed a certain moral indignation about the ethical lapses of fellow politicians—including members of his own party—sometimes with a tone that was almost hilariously sanctimonious given the circumstances.

The performer remained on stage. And then came the truly modern twist.

Santos joined Cameo. And he’s fucking great on it!

For a fee, he would record personalized video messages: birthday greetings, congratulations, small performances of his peculiar brand of post-scandal celebrity.

The internet, as it often does, embraced the absurdity.

VIII. The Cameo

At some point I watched a few of his videos.

There he was, smiling warmly into the camera, delivering a cheerful greeting to a stranger somewhere in America. The tone was friendly, relaxed, slightly mischievous.

And I laughed.

Because the performance was genuinely funny. The charm, infuriatingly, still worked. It reminded me of the old fable about the scorpion and the frog.

The scorpion asks for a ride across the river. The frog hesitates, noting that scorpions have a reputation for stinging frogs. The scorpion assures him that such a thing would be irrational; if he stung the frog mid-crossing, both of them would drown.

The frog agrees.

Halfway across the river the scorpion stings him.

“Why?” the frog asks as they sink.

“I can’t help it,” the scorpion replies. “It’s my nature.”

The scorpion cannot help himself.

But every now and then the scorpion also sends someone a birthday message on Cameo, smiling warmly and wishing them a fantastic year ahead.

And you find yourself laughing anyway.

The truth about characters like Santos—and perhaps about certain roommates—is that their charm is not an illusion.

It’s real.

The trouble is that it coexists quite comfortably with everything else.

Dedication:

For Kitara. May you make a fucking mint on Cameo and look totally gorgeous while doing it.

Note: If you enjoyed this story, you might also enjoy these other pieces about American grifters.

On The Dubious Anna Delvey
On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks V: Rod Blagojevich
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Why It Is So Hard to Get Breakfast in Japan (with a dream cameo from the Gemini Donald Trump)

New Note (2025): Since this piece was first published, Japanese Breakfast the band has gotten even bigger, Michelle Zauner wrote another book, and the cultural universe has shifted enough times that some aspects of this essay may be outdated. I’ve kept the original text intact because the dream-logic and breakfast-logic still stand.

I live in Kyoto, Japan, and after many years here I’ve traveled pretty widely—especially in the greater Tokyo area. Traveling in Japan is pretty easy as long as you can manage a little spoken Japanese and read a train map. The trains are famously efficient and connect most of the country, including every major city.

I haven’t driven a car here in more than fifteen years and don’t miss it at all. Trains and taxis get the job done just fine. Overall, I love traveling in Japan and I love exploring Tokyo, a city that contains worlds within worlds. I have almost no complaints about Japanese travel.

Except for one.

It is nearly impossible to get a good breakfast—or really any breakfast—when you’re on the road.

Now, it’s not that Japanese people don’t eat breakfast. They do. The archetypal morning meal—rice, miso soup, maybe a little fish—is as recognizable in its way as the “full English” of sausages and beans. But the Japanese breakfast is overwhelmingly a home operation. Once you’re traveling, the options narrow to two—two and a half, if we’re being generous.

I. The Hotel Breakfast

Mid-price and nicer hotels usually offer a breakfast buffet with “Japanese” (rice, miso, maybe grilled fish) and “Western” (toast, jam, and some ambivalent eggs) selections. Except at the truly top-tier hotels, these buffets manage to be both overpriced and bad. A traveler is lucky to escape for ¥1,500–¥1,800 (about fifteen dollars before the yen weakened), and more commonly pays north of ¥2,000 for a pretty uninspired spread.

Budget hotels often don’t offer breakfast at all.

In my experience, Japanese hotel breakfasts are among the weakest anywhere in the world. I take this as symptomatic of a broader truth: Japanese people simply don’t care about breakfast when they’re on the road—and maybe not all that much at home either.

II. The Convenience Store (“Combini”) Breakfast

When I have raised the issue of the lack of decent breakfast in Japan, Japanese people usually point me to the convenience store. And it’s true: you can purchase food and coffee at any of the ubiquitous combinis—Family Mart, 7/11, Daily, Lawson, and the rest. They’re open 24 hours, and they stock a range of items that theoretically qualify as breakfast. Hard-boiled eggs, yogurt, rice balls, steamed buns, fried chicken, sometimes bananas, and of course hot and cold coffee.

I’ve certainly been in situations where I had no choice but to fall back on the combini for breakfast while traveling. And this is…fine, to an extent. But most combinis have nowhere to actually sit and eat, and in any case you can’t really call a combini breakfast nice.

Most Japanese folks seem to regard a combini breakfast as perfectly acceptable—desirable even. And while one can admire the low expectations, or the cultural pragmatism behind them, it’s possible to admire those qualities and still wish for more.

III. Starbucks or a Local Coffee Shop

Starbucks are fairly common in major cities and usually open at 7 a.m. (if you’re lucky) or, more commonly, 8 a.m. They should really open at 6. The food offerings are overpriced, and Starbucks has never truly figured out its food—which remains baffling. Still, one can grab a few combini items and smuggle them in, or settle for a four-dollar fragment of quiche with your Americano. I would not classify Starbucks as having breakfast, per se, but they are pleasant enough to sit in, and one can create a simulacrum of breakfast there.

Then there are the local coffee shops. These, fortunately, often open at 7 a.m. or even earlier, and serve strong coffee—often brewed by hand at the counter with a drip filter—and a breakfast that nearly always consists of a single piece of white toast and an egg. White toast, egg, and handmade coffee with old guys reading the paper around you is, I admit, at least an approximation of breakfast, and I have certainly relied on this setup while on the road.

But it’s still not quite what we are looking for if we want a hearty, balanced breakfast. There is no French toast, no fruit bowl, no omelette, and only very occasionally a strip of bacon. None of the staples one might reasonably expect from a decent, full breakfast.

And that’s more or less the list. You can also find 24-hour beef-bowl restaurants, but they are cheap as and not exactly the sort of thing you look forward to when greeting the day. Beyond that, most restaurants simply don’t open until 11:00 or 11:30 for lunch. The concept of brunch—dicey even under ideal circumstances—barely exists outside the swankiest of upmarket hotels.

It is, put bluntly, really hard to find a proper breakfast in Japan unless you make it yourself. And that fact continues to puzzle me. I understand that most people here eat rice and miso at home, or grab something at the convenience store. Fine. But metropolitan Tokyo has roughly 30 million people. None of these 30 million want a real breakfast at 7:00 or 7:30 a.m.? Not even a few hundred thousand?

It seems incomprehensible. And yet, incomprehensible or not, this is simply the reality. There is no broad Japanese market for breakfast. I mean, I’m in the market—but apparently one man does not a demographic make.

Go figure.

Now, I’ve covered the issue of Japanese breakfast—its scarcity, its odd cultural positioning—to the best of my ability. But before we move on, I want to add a few details that may seem unrelated. Let’s see if we can get them to connect.

Because the truth is, I dream about getting breakfast in Japan. And in a surprising number of these dreams, the Trumpster shows up.

More precisely: the dreams focus on the fact that the Trumpster and I share a birthday (June 14th), which makes us both late Geminis. Late Geminis, I have good reason to believe, are uniquely dangerous and slippery. But in my dreams the Trumpster isn’t dangerous at all. He shows up as basically an empty suit.

Trump/ Breakfast Dream I:

I am at a breakfast buffet in Japan. This is at a hotel that I am not staying at, and I may indeed be attempting to crash the buffet while masquerading as a hotel guest. Trump is there with an entourage, and he sees me staking out the buffet. I make a comment to him that we are both late Gemini, and he nods, curtly but with some minimal consideration. He sees me trying to steal the breakfast, does not care, and would probably provide cover if it came to that. He and I are not aligned, but nor are we enemies.

Trump/ Breakfast Dream II:

I am outside in the morning, standing on a dock or something of that nature. I am looking for breakfast, and not finding it. There is a commotion above me to the east, and I realize that Trump is being rolled out, literally on like coaster wheels, for a speech. He is on some kind of sliding seat and when this seat hits the balcony he stands up and postures about like Mussolini. I am watching and he sees me watching, but continues with his Mussolini act. I realize quickly that this is a total act and that he doesn’t even want to be there. He is not dangerous in this moment or in this speech, just faintly ridiculous. Still, no breakfast.

=====

What do Trump and breakfast have to do with one another? I’m not sure yet. But I do know that Trump, although maligned by nearly everyone I know (I know a bunch of liberals), and apart from being an egotistical, mafia-adjacent, easily flattered, shape-shifting sociopath, is also pretty funny. Before I lose half of my readership, I’ll just nod to the comedian Shane Gillis, who made this point several months after Trump left office.

Has enough time passed that we can admit Trump was funny? Can we finally admit that he was funny? (…) He was funny (…) I saw it. I’d show my friends I’d say look at that. They’d be like “what?”

“It’s funny.”

“There’s nothing funny about Donald Trump.”

I don’t know, during Hurricane Dorian he was like “maybe we should nuke it” (…) Like that was a real suggestion from the President (…) “Hey we got a big storm coming, you want me to blow it up?”

They were like “no, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“I don’t know, I fuck around dude. It’s what I do.”

“I fuck around, it’s what I do,” is a great summary of Trump’s whole approach to governing. Now, is there anything funny about his terrible immigration policies, his attempted pressure of the Georgia secretary of state to “find” 1800 votes, his total disregard of democratic norms? No, not really. But is there anything funny about his speculation that maybe a little light and a little bleach could cure COVID? Why yes, there is. Is there anything funny about his noting that Frederick Douglas is getting bigger and bigger these days? Yes indeed. Is the way he pronounces “huge” funny? It’s funny to me anyway. And in my dreams, the two above being part of a series of about four or five total Trump breakfast dreams, he always shows up as semi-defanged, basically neutered, and non-dangerous. I think this is because, as a fellow late Gemini, I kind of have Trump’s number. It takes a late Gemini to know one, and I know this guy. In fact, I see right through him, to the extent that I know he’s not even there.

One other salient piece of data, there is an indie rock band called Japanese Breakfast that is getting bigger and bigger these days (they tell me “sir, this Japanese Breakfast is getting bigger and bigger these days, and I say look at that, wow, this Japanese Breakfast is really getting huge”). I don’t know them that well, but they sound like the kind of band I would like. I do wonder though if their name is not an ironic nod to the fact that Japanese breakfast is not a thing. Is the band name self-effacing, or even self-erasing? Does Japanese Breakfast the band exist at all? Does Trump? There is a way in which the Trump presidential term has come to feel like a fever dream or collective delusion, a set of events that cannot really have occurred as we recall them. In this sense, the Trump presidency may in the future be subject to Phantom Time Hypothesis speculation. And he and his handlers have already played right into this speculation what with their first lady doubles, the totally unhinged press conferences with the ubiquitous helicopter waiting in the wings, and the classic Trumpism, “we’ll see what happens.”

Here is what I think. Japanese Breakfast as a band exists. The Trumpster exists, but his wife spent most of her time in the White House being doubled. Trump and I are dream doubles, and I have his number. Japanese people don’t care about breakfast. And I am always starving at around 9 AM when on the road in Japan. Someone should look into the matter. I hear the Trumpster is free these days, maybe he’s the guy for the job.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also deal with American politics, albeit from a slightly different angle.

https://thekyotokibbitzer.wordpress.com/2025/11/25/on-the-federal-age-of-consent-a-reply-to-alan-dershowitz/

The Splinter Fraction: On Trans Issues, A Working Position