I am not squeamish by nature. "Oh, yes you are," says my wife. Nonsense. I can put up with yucky and uncomfortable moments as well as the next person. "As long as," my wife continues, "by 'the next person' you mean a screaming 3-year-old." Such defining insights aside, ...
It's not reality TV. It's reality. Yet I too am a survivor. True, I have not been secluded on a desert island. I have not had to overcome boomerang matches, fire-making contests and knockout votes. Instead my challenges list like this: Struggling doggedly with another language and culture, ...
Here's a challenge for you: You're faced with an elderly woman with beach-ball breasts that shake like jelly. She also smells sourly similar to your dog. Her arms are thrown wide, her lips are puckered and she has just called you "sweetie." You have never seen her ...
"Beware of Japanese bearing gifts!" These words were twitched to me at a reception years ago when I first arrived in Japan. The twitcher was a foreign housewife who gripped my arm with fingernails just long enough to dig through flesh into bone. Her eyes shimmered ...
On the train, the guy to my left is telling a friend the following: "What a goofy-looking 'gaijin.' What say we go tie him to a tree and force-feed him some 'natto'?" Meanwhile, on my other side a woman is saying: "So then I fix my hairdresser ...
I don't mind putting my foot in my mouth. That's one way to keep it clean. So here goes . . . I say the trickiest adjustment to living in Japan is not in learning to successfully miscommunicate in Japanese . . . nor in developing ...
When Julia Child retired in 2001, someone asked what she thought would be the next great taste treat to take the Western world by storm. The renowned chef paused. And while her listeners anticipated the naming of some peculiar ethnic delicacy, Julia's face scrunched into ...
Each month my house is the site of a battle. Call it what you will -- East against West, old against new, the "stamp" of authority against the voice of dissent, or whatever -- it is still a battle I can never win. On one side ...
"Oh really?" the girl says to me -- with the "r" stretched so painfully the word sounds as if it has been ripped from the back of her throat. Her eyes, too, seem to expand as if being pushed from within, by a brain cortex ...
The only woman who has ever chased me was a willowy Japanese waitress who trailed me half a block from her restaurant door. "Sir," she panted, "I'm sorry . . . but you forgot your change!" Oh . . . So I waltzed off 100 yen ...
