Two thirtyish Japanese junior execs both applied for an opening at "Worldbeater Tech," a subsidiary of an offshoot of a spinoff of a fat-cat blue-chip company. Candidate A had 10 years of first-class experience, well-honed communication skills and was respected by both colleagues and customers ...
The week before Christmas 1989, I sat in an outpatient ward in Kumamoto University Hospital waiting for the doctor to take a look at a head cold that threatened to ruin my holidays. Down the hall walked a friend, a doctor from Bangladesh, who greeted ...
It was one of those sharp, pithy statements that raise the hair on the back of your neck. Similar perhaps to "Godzilla Lives!" or "The Creature Walks Among Us!" or "Quayle for President!" Only in my case, the words prickled not only the hair on ...
The Japanese are renowned for their kindness to foreigners. I tell myself this late at night as I shiver in my pajamas, my wife having once again swiped all the bed covers. And as the chatter of my teeth quickly makes it too noisy ...
"Dad, could you show me how to make a jump shot?" So my younger son once requested as we stood beneath a hoop in his junior-high playground. I cradled the ball in my hand, lectured on proper wrist snap and follow-through, then sprang up and ...
My wife takes a scalpel to her schedule and carves up blocks of time. First to go are the hours she spends teaching Japanese, the hours she rides the commuter train, and then the additional hours and hours she uses for preparation. Next comes the ...
I've heard that the greatest challenge facing linguists today lies not in understanding how the brain encodes language, nor in mapping the lexicons of the world's vanishing dialects, nor in any other such grinding academic chore. For the No. 1 linguistic challenge is a world ...
I am sitting in a pub with two other foreign husbands of Japanese women. We are about the same age and build, with the same twitchy faces of men who have lived too long as outsiders in a nation full of insiders. We look alike, ...
My elder son sits across from me during supper and clubs me with the following questions: "Why can't Japanese die, Dad? How come it's so hard for them?" Not your usual dinnertime poser, perhaps, but we dads have to be ready for anything. I ...
"All the world's a stage," a well-known English playwright declared in "As You Like It," adding: "And all the men and women merely players . . . " Crisp, time-honored words that yet fall short of an even keener truth -- which is that some ...
