I'll be returning to the United States late this week, after spending most of my time over the past three years in Asia. From my base in the Philippines, I've covered cloud computing and related developments throughout Southeast Asia and China, with the occasional opportunity to cover India, Japan, and South Korea. Now I'll be setting up close to Chicago, with frequent visits to the San Francisco Bay Area.

What have I learned during my time in Asia? Are we truly in the early decades of the "Asian Century"? Where does the US fit into the mix these days? I'll try to answer these and other questions in a series of columns before I leave.

I'll start by noting that Asia doesn't seem especially foreign to me. This is certainly due in great part to spending most of my time in the Philipines, where English is an official name and American influence is ubiquitous. But also, in all seriousness, when one has spent decades in the Bay Area, as I've been fortunate to do, seeing a lot of Asian names, faces, and restaurants, and hearing a range of Asian languages becomes as normal as bad traffic and overcrowding.

Those last two commodities are delivered full force in most parts of Asia. Combine it with a steambath environment in most places in summer and throughout Southeast Asia year-round, and you learn to throw out this Western notion of personal space and comfort. Once I arrive in Illinois this week, I'll finally be able to stop bitching about the heat, at least for a few months.

Yep, Lots of People
Asian population numbers are indeed impressive. If the Indian sub-continent were to be re-united (from present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), it would contain 1.5 billion people - more than China's present population of 1.3 billion+.

Add to that the 600 million people of Southeast Asia, the 200 million people of Japan and the Koreas, and other assorted millions from the region, and you get about 3.7 billion people. This is about 54 percent of the earth's total. (I'm not counting Russia and Central Asia into this mix, as these regions seem more closely tied with the Middle East.)

The Philippines, with more than 90 million people in an area two-thirds the size of California, is often cited as being overpopulated. Widespread poverty here contributes to that view. Yet the country is not as crowded as wealthy Japan and South Korea. India's another place that just seems to have too many darned people - yet its population density, even today, is less than that of The Netherlands.

Only Bangladesh, the gold standard, is more densely populated than any other nation of significant size.

These raw numbers don't tell the tale. The Philippines seems crowded because Manila is crowded - there are 12 million people in the unified Metro Manila area, and another 13 million in the surrounding "suburban" provinces. A total of 35 million are shoehorned into what is sometimes called "Mega Manila," a 15,000-square-mile, primarily urban sprawl.

This sort of incredible urban beast characterizes much of Asia. Whether riding in a Japanese shinkansen through endless miles of cityscape, navigating Jakarta's infinite crush, gazing with awe at a Mumbai that stretches to the horizon in every direction from its waterfront, or trying to grok the massive and often-gleaming infrastructures of Beijing and Shanghai through the haze, a Western visitor in Asia can be daunted, overwhelmed, even paralyzed.

But progress here comes in the smaller spaces: an international meeting in the ballroom of a local hotel, an introduction in a nicely air-conditioned high-rise boardroom or stifling alcove in an old government facility, a random exchange of business cards at an expat hangout somewhere.

The Unquiet American
Americans are usually too impatient, too assumptive, and too direct here, while also being seen as refreshingly unburdened by formality, enthusiastic, candid, and coming from a great nation.

It's this latter point that rankles. The people I've met throughout Asia uniformly offer unprompted praise of the great achievements of the US over the years, its innovative tradition, its great university system, and the opportunities it provides, invariably followed by an anecdote of a close relative or friend who has found great success there.

Most businesspeople are, of course, students of America to some degree. What they find puzzling is the vapidity of American TV media and coarseness of popular culture (if they've visited), or the intractable political gridlock and current economic malaise if they haven't. Despite having occasional concerns about US military bravado, the people I've met here wish for a strong and smart America, one that will continue to offer inspiration, technological ingenuity, and a big, big market for their goods.

Next: America: Are the Good Times Really Over for Good?

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