Ah, yeah, @ChrisJValdez and I were yukking it up over in Nacogdoches at Stephen F. Austin in 02.
I joke I visited a friend at UT for Spring Break in 2003 and just never left. Slightly overstated, but basically true. I just went there to hang out with him, but ended up realising I should have gone there in the first place. I'm just lucky to have found a last-minute back door in, on the merits I shouldn't have been able to even do that much--competition being what it was.
FWIW, I think the ruling class is losing on this issue. People are not stupid. My neighbors have been nothing but welcoming, because they can do basic math--and the math is it is impossible to repopulate towns like this with children from the elderly who still live here or robbing peter to pay paul by poaching native Japanese of childbearing age from other areas.
@jamesrg Oh, btw, the pure centre and the impure periphery?
That shit isn't even Japanese. It's Neoconfucianism and was stolen from the Chinese.
Literally, Neo-Confucianist scholars (this would be the predecessors to where my masters studies started, so think 1600s and 1700s) basically said "Naw, China isn't the middle kingdom. Japan was the real middle kingdom the whole time!"
Japan has always been really, really, REALLY good about bringing stuff from the periphery into the centre and then claiming "ACKSHUALLY, it's ours!" All the way up to KFC and cake for Christmas.
Stolen from the British, via the Imperial Navy from its training exercises with the Royal Navy in the time around the Russo-Japanese war, who themselves stole it from India.