It is often said that long-time married couples grow so close they can actually read each other's minds, but either that's hooey or my wife and I are out of synch, ESP-wise. For her part, she claims reading my mind would be about as productive ...
In our marriage, my Japanese wife and I have met and resolved oodles of cultural issues, but one fairly thorny matter remains . . . how to face that ultimate marital crisis: death. My wife insists she wants to die in Japan and be cremated ...
The pressure builds. Feel it? I sure do. An annual tension that visits late each June and -- for a day at least -- smothers me with stress. The day? Why, the most anxious moment of the year -- Father's Day. What else? The burden? ...
"Do I smell?" My Japanese wife can tell the question is loaded. She squints at me and wonders if I am not the same. "No worse than usual," she answers, her eyes wary. "Then do I have bad breath?" I lean over and breathe on her. She ...
"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air." A few years ago, upon reciting these lines from Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," I tried to impress my younger son by telling him Gray's poem ...
Men are from Mars and women are from Venus -- but my wife is from Kagoshima. That means she doesn't speak Japanese the way most people do. She carries a wee accent. Wee to me, for I more or less jam the entire Japanese language ...
After 20 years of wedlock, my Japanese wife and I usually see things eyeball-to-eyeball, especially when staring at each other. Yet, there is one case where we match up like sushi and whipped cream. Nope, this conflict has nothing to do with daily life, diet, ...
According to a survey from late last year, over 80 percent of the Japanese population has some difficulty reading katakana, the syllabary specially used for foreign terms. Normally such a glitch would raise the hair on Japanese conservatives who love to grumble that younger generations ...
While dashing through the headlines the other day, I came across a story about a researcher in Scotland who has discovered yet another ailment of modern man: Hurry Sickness. As described in the article, Hurry Sickness is the feeling of being controlled by time. Of ...
"Life ain't easy for a foreigner in Japan." That's a line I love to lay on my Japanese wife, especially right before my birthday or Christmas. The self-sacrifice card, subtly played with the right mix of puppy-dog eyes and puffy lower lip, might earn me ...
