For foreign residents, life in Japan can be a roller coaster of ups and downs -- quite often at the exact same time. Now, if you're paradoxed out by that clear absurdity, it means two things: 1. You haven't been here long enough; and 2. ...
"Twenty-five" seems a fine number for the necessary hours in a day or an easy-to-find shoe size in centimeters, yet for me that digit has now garnered a special significance. It marks the number of years I have lived in Japan, soon to inch ...
"If there's one thing I've learned from my life in Japan," I tell my wife over a pot of black coffee, "it's how to worry." She frames me with narrow eyes. "Oh, right. You needed to learn how to worry like a fish needs to ...
Out on the straight freeways of higher enlightenment, many an astute Japan watcher has tied the cautious, noncommittal qualities of Japanese personality to various cultural and linguistic features, such as tightknit group society and ambiguous language structure. Yet I think there may be a far ...
I don't expect much from life, but I do assume that when I shake myself up from my dreams in the morning, I will at least be returning to those dreams at night. But that's not guaranteed. For sooner or later all earthly dreams come ...
The man towers over my life like Atlas holding up an entire Earth's worth of responsibility. He checks my work. He checks my fashion and manners. He then not too tactfully gushes advice on my family and my future. This river of admonition flows every ...
Having spent much of my life perplexed by Japan, I admit to a little "payback" delight whenever I catch Japan perplexed by the West. It seems it doesn't happen so often. Of course we Westerners are not without a few unfathomable mysteries of our own. ...
Every decent country needs some weird mystery in order to ooh and awe the young and attract feeble-minded tourists. Thus in America we have Bigfoot, or a sasquatch, or the Shaq or whatever you wish to call it. Nepal, then, has those abominable Yeti, Scotland has ...
Out on the hometown golf links with an old high school chum, I soon ended up in trouble -- for our initial drives found me in ankle deep rough and him sitting pretty on a small rise in the center of the fairway. Before ...
Here's the story . . . It was the girl's very first day of her first part-time job ever -- working as a summer waitress in a typical family-style restaurant. More than anything, she just wanted to do her best and get through the day ...
