My house is stacked with gadgets — from computers to cameras to game machines to bathroom scales that voice my weight, and more. Most of these gizmos work fine. Except when I really need them. At that point, they either freeze up, smell like smoke, or, ...
Foreign visitors adapting to life in modern Japan have scores of advantages that travelers of the past could never have envisioned, even in their wildest dreams. Like e-mail, Skype, YouTube and the general all-encompassing mesh of the Internet. But now there is a further boon. ...
"How do you do?" The man greets her in Japanese and bows in his doorway. He wears the same teasing grin and the same rumpled shirt as always. Even the cookie crumbs on his collar seem the same. "My name is Stanley," he says as ...
Several weeks ago a poll from the Marist Institute of Public Opinion — one that was slingshot quickly across the Internet — listed "whatever" as the most annoying of all English words. Like, you know, it outpolled a whole glossary of other irksome conversational nuts ...
"Two's company, three's a crowd and four is a party." Or so the saying goes: But I wonder then . . . What's five? What's five when "three" and "four" have already lain claim to group identity? Well, in people-packed Japan, I say, "Five is a beehive." ...
Man cannot live by bread alone. No, he must also have lists. For these days all kinds of lists are running amuck throughout every variety of media, sort of like . . . Well, like this . . . The Three Best Metaphors to Describe the ...
Sometimes beauty resides not to the eye of the beholder. Instead, it lives in the ear of the listener. "Can you hear? Isn't it lovely?" The speaker is my wife. The time is late on an early autumn night. And the sound is not a lullaby ...
John Steinbeck's 1952 novel, "East of Eden," is a tale of two families and one city — Salinas, Calif. — with the plot hinging on the sibling rivalry of a pair of brothers. The movie came along in 1955, winning James Dean a posthumous ...
I don't notice much during my hours of commuting across the Kanto Plain and at the same time I notice everything. For it's mostly all the same . . . The same accordion crunch of passengers . . . The same draped adds for tattle-tale ...
Some people like to slam Japan as being non-innovative. The Japanese, these people say, can take anyone else's idea and make it better. Better cars, better cameras, better reality TV. And so on. But when it comes to inventing things themselves, the contention goes, what ...
