Will Miss #7 - weird vending machines (reflection)

I didn't buy any of this, but I'm guessing it feels wet. (This machine was stocked a few months after the March 11, 2011 earthquake, when people were terrified of drinking tap water but the bottled water shortage had eased off.)


Japan is known the world over for its copious and odd vending machines. The neighborhood that I lived in in Japan, Asagaya, at one point had a vending machine full

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Random Memories #20

I'm not sure why the cat is the one sweating here, or why it is on a gift tag doing so.


It may be hard for people who have been to Japan to understand just how much it has changed in a short time. Sometimes, frankly, I find it difficult to believe or accurately remember. Fortunately, my 1987-88 books of memories are there to shake the cobwebs out of ancient memories and to remind me that

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Won't Miss #506 - vanishing Christmas decorations

Last night, my husband and I were walking around a street (in California) that is known for putting up elaborate Christmas displays. When we were finished looking at the beautiful displays in front of people's homes, I remarked to my husband that I was looking forward to the holiday displays living beyond the 25th. In Tokyo, every little sign of Christmas tended to vanish by midnight on

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Will Miss #505 - Sudare

I found some very old pictures of my apartment from the first 5 or so years that my husband and I lived there and noticed that we started out covering our windows with sudare, or rattan blinds. These blinds are cheap, easy to install and protect against both sun and heat. Just looking at them makes me feel a bit cooler for some reason. I'm sure that they are used in many Asian cultures, but I

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Random Memories #19

Click this photo to load a larger version which is legible.  (You may need to open link in new tab/window and magnify to load the full size which can be read.)


People may assume that business decisions are made rationally and in the best interests of furthering ones economic interests. In my experience in Japan, they were not made so much in accord with what was logical as what was perceived

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Won't Miss #7 - urban ugliness (reflection)

When I originally posted about how ugly Tokyo generally is, someone asked where I took the picture used in that original post. They could not believe that was a typical part of the city and thought that neighborhood had to reflect some sort of older, more impoverished time period in Tokyo's history. The truth is that much of the city areas are not pretty. My picture was not a misrepresentation

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Will Miss #6 - maneki neko (reflection)

When I first returned to the U.S., I was on a small island in Washington State and the only Japanese culture I saw there was overpriced botan ame and Pocky (chocolate only, of course). At that point in time, I figured I'd have to give up my Japanese snack blog for lack of food to review or spend a fortune getting things from importers or specialty shops. The view from there in terms of all

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Random Memories #18

One of the first things Americans are surprised at when it comes to vending machines in Japan is the fact that alcoholic beverages are available in them. The reason this is surprising is that anyone, including underage drinkers, can sneak up to one, buy some booze, and run off and get loaded. Most of these machines are within view of a store, but some of them are not. Even those that can be

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Won't Miss #505 - being seen as incapable

AKB48, a manufactured girl group (with over 90 members) that discards members when they get "too old". They are clearly the product of a highly sophisticated culture. If you don't appreciate them, it is only because you are to simple-minded to comprehend.


In my previous post, I mentioned that the Japanese readily forgive foreigners for their bad manners or cross-cultural ignorance. If you

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Will Miss #504 - being forgiven for bad manners

I haven't been to Europe, but I really would like to go some day when my collective blogging earns me more than about a dime a post. Those who have been there have told me that, when you commit a faux pas, especially in certain countries (I'm looking at you, France), that you are treated like the uncultured scum that you are believed to be. America, is, of course, no better, but what is good

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Random Memories #17

The first movie I ever saw in a theater in my life was "Snow White and the Three Stooges". Lest anyone believe that I'm old enough for a first run of that movie, let me saw that it was pretty antiquated even when I was a child. I don't recall how old I was, only that my aunt took me to it and that I had not yet started first grade.



The first movie that I saw in Japan was Wall Street,

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Won't Miss #5 - police harassment (reflection)

One thing that I can hardly go a day without reading or hearing someone talk about is "white privilege". The idea is, and it is certainly based on certain grim realities, that white folks walk around blithely reaping benefits from their pearly skin color without even realizing it. They get hired for jobs, accepted into schools, and are the beneficiaries of at least a couple of centuries of

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Will Miss #5 - funky shop names (reflection)

For disco dogs. No cats allowed.

I never took much notice of the way stores were named in the U.S. until I'd spent many years in Japan (mostly Tokyo). In the suburban California area that I currently live in and the neighboring areas that I have visited, I'm shocked at the bland and generic look and feel of most of the stores. Many of them are strip malls and shopping centers with nondescript

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Random Memories #16

Click this image to load a bigger one.

 Memory is a funny thing, and most people don't realize just how peculiar it is. For instance, did you know that the emotions of an experience are electrochemically stored with the memory of an experience? You cannot unlink the feelings you felt at the time of an experience and the details of the experience itself. You can process the feelings to less

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Won't Miss #504 - the Yasukuni flap

Yasukuni shrine is one of the few places in Japan that openly acknowledges that Japanese actually fought in the war (as opposed to simply being unwitting victims who got nuked for reasons that continue to mystify them). It enshrines the souls of soldiers, generals, and others who took part in all aspects of the fight. Unfortunately, some of those enshrined there were determined to be war

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Will Miss #503 - no obnoxious car lock sounds

I will admit that I didn't live in an area in Tokyo where everyone had a car. That being said, I did live next door to several people with cars as well as a stone's throw (literally) from a business which had about 8 vehicles coming and going from its lot all day. I also walked around Tokyo for hours and hours (likely thousands) and experienced many people parking their cars and presumably

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Random Memories #15

Above the logo, it says, "Hamburger, Just Dom Dom!" Okay... if you insist...

Some of my memories come second-hand via my husband, but that's okay. He doesn't mind my borrowing them and sharing them with my readers. This one comes from his second day on Japanese soil, August 8, 1987. He was in Okayama, which is about 336 miles or 542 km. from Tokyo, and taking part in training for his work for

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Won't Miss #4 - going to immigration (reflection)

Sometimes people talk to me about having worked in Japan as if it were a simple choice that I made and that the door would always be open to me. They are not familiar with the fact that I, as an American, do not have the right to simply waltz into any country I want and work there. These are people who have never had to tangle with visas, even though they are well aware of illegal immigrants

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Changes in Posting

When I finished my 1000 things, I wasn't sure how I'd continue this blog in terms of posting frequency so I decided to stick with the status quo. However, after a few weeks, I've decided to decrease posting frequency to three times a week and will be posting content on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

Of course, readers are welcome to come and check any time, but I've chosen those days

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Will Miss #4 - courier services (reflection)

When I returned to America, my husband and I lived for several months on Lopez Island in the San Juan Islands. Because we returned home with nothing more than 4 suitcases to our names, we had to start buying certain things to set up house in the U.S. One of the things I needed, for instance, was a monitor for the Mac Mini I'd carried back with me, so we did have a fair number of packages

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Won't Miss #503 - the "insult and smile"

It wasn't the least bit uncommon for Japanese people to say rude things about me to one another in Japanese. In some cases, I think they felt I could not understand and, in others, I think they didn't care if I did. It happened with such regularity that I started to take it in stride. That being said, there was another level of this behavior which did make me angry and that was when people

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Random Memories: Guest Post by Bryan Maine

These week, I'm offering up some memories from one of my readers who has written a book about his experiences in Japan and is raising money to have it published. When Bryan offered to share his experiences via my blog, I thought it might be interesting for my readers to see a perspective other than mine, particularly since he had two very large experiences that I did not. First of all, he was in

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Will Miss #502 - the censorhip of adult movies

I have to confess that I did not see this particular adult film, and that it was not exactly as commonly advertised as some of the ones featuring women.

Everybody knows that pornography is censored in Japan. Everybody doesn't know that it is utterly incongruous in a country in which pornographic movies are openly advertised in heavily trafficked areas of big cities and businessmen feel free

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Won't Miss #3 - rude older men (reflection)

The Japanese at the top says "men's No. 1", which seems appropriate since men are clearly #1 in Japan.


The area that I live in
in California right now has a bigger than average number of Asian folks.
In fact, there is a church near me which is a Japanese one that
conducts services in both English and Japanese. I'm guessing this is why
there is a Daiso Japan near me as well as Nijiya

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Will Miss #3 - my landlord (reflection)

 My husband and I never had to rent an apartment in the United States for various reasons up until recently. We had no idea what it was like to live in an apartment here until about a month ago. Apartment hunting in general is not fun in either Japan or America, and one of the reasons we stayed put in our apartment in Tokyo for 23 years was that fact, but the other was our gem of a landlord.

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Won't Miss 502# - the sense that it's not real

Since coming home to America, I've had the most unsettling sense that my life in Japan was all some sort of fantasy. It's as if life there wasn't "real" in some way and that I'm picking up on "reality" now that I'm back. I don't know if other people who have lived in Japan and come back feel this way, but this sense hit me shortly after I stepped off the plane in America. It's as if I lived

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Random Memories #14

One of the popular things that all of the old fogies on Facebook enjoy doing is posting a picture of some anachronistic item and asking people if they recognize it. When I say "old fogies", I mean people who are my age, because those who are a lot older than me aren't doing the Facebook thing beyond some modest cyber-stalking of their relatives.




Phone cards came in little plastic sleeves

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Will Miss #501 - marriage is a good thing

Throughout my life, marriage has been portrayed in Western culture (especially America) as a burden on men. There are jokes about the "old ball and chain" and the idea that men are giving up their precious freedom if they subject themselves to restrictions of this lifelong commitment. The message is crystal clear, marriage is bad news, particularly for men.

In Japan, the message is greatly

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Won't Miss #2 - the herd mentality (reflection)

"Steakhouse Satou" (in Kichijoji) with a huge line of people. For years, this fairly average meat shop has gathered long lines because of word of mouth about the quality of the meatballs they make. Your granny's meatloaf is likely as good or better, but the herd must gather at the proper places.

I grew up in a rural area, and the only types of "herds" I ever encountered consisted of large

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Will Miss #1 (reflection) - sembei varieties

It rather goes without saying that people won't be making fresh sembei hot on a charcoal grill for me now that I'm back in the U.S. This fellow was making them in Kamakura when I visited there. Warm sembei, freshly brushed with sauce, is a unique pleasure. 

In my very first "will miss" post, I said that I would miss the wide variety of sembei (rice crackers) in Japan. Now that I've been back

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Won't Miss # 501- hearing about "the bases"

The U.S. has military bases in Japan and occasionally, one of the people living there commits a crime. When this happens, the Japanese media has a field day pointing fingers at the bad Americans with their criminal behavior. Every day you read about (Japanese) parents murdering their children or old people being killed or killing people or babies being abandoned and left to die, but any crime

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Random Thoughts: Where I go from here

As of yesterday, I finished my 1000 things, 500 good points and 500 bad points. There were times when I thought I would not make it, and times when I was certain that I would. In terms of the full content, I'd say that I'm not happy with some, but am mostly happy with the vast majority of my posts. As Dave Barry used to say, and I paraphrase, 'they can't all be gems'. Not every post is an

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Will Miss #500 - living abroad

When I first got on to Facebook and started connecting with my former classmates from elementary school and high school, they saw me in a particular fashion because I was living in a foreign country. Automatically, my life was more interesting and everything I talked about was more exotic, even when I was talking about things which were present in American culture as well. The idea of living

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Won't Miss #500 - being a "gaijin"

While living in the United States, I am just a person. While living in Japan, I was turned into a "gaijin". This is an identity that was assigned to me by the Japanese and is given to everyone who does not suit the definition of "Japanese".  Even people who are actually Japanese, but don't look it, are given this identity. I've spent the last 23 years of my life being defined by my "

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Will Miss #499 - something to write about

I have yet to write about foot monkeys, but you can't cover everything... not even in 1000 posts.

One of my students aspired to be a writer. In fact, she had been trying to change her work from salesperson to something in the publishing industry for quite some time. The only problem was that she was a writer who didn't write. I encouraged her to blog, because you can hone your craft through

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Won't Miss #499 - no sense of "home"

This shirt actually has nothing to do with the topic of this post, but the graphic fits. 

One of the hardest things about living in Japan was knowing that it was not and never could be my "home". Sure, I could have applied for Japanese citizenship or residency. I might even have been granted the latter, but Japanese culture is not one which accepts occidental faces as Japanese. It doesn't

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Random Memories #13

Click this smaller image to load a bigger version.

I'm not sure, but outside of die-hard hoarders, I'm probably the only person on the planet with 24-year-old flyers from fast food places. It is a testimonial to my sense in 1987 that anything with Japanese writing on it was "neat" and therefore worth keeping. Well, it's also a reflection of the fact that anything my future husband sent me was

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Will Miss #498 - "only in Japan" moments

People love to post wacky pictures of strange things in Japan and then caption them as "only in Japan". However, there is strangeness all over the world and the main difference between what I saw there and what I see back home is not the look of the people and the type of pop cultural influence behind the funky self-presentation. For me, "only in Japan" has much more to do with individual acts

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Won't Miss #498 - being called a parasite

I talk a little about my background in the "About Me" section, but that's hardly the full picture. For instance, I worked at a Japanese office, and part of that job was teaching. Another part was that I created textbooks. I not only wrote content, but I did desktop publishing. To that end, I taught myself how to use Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. I not only learned them, but I did

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Will Miss #497 - reminders of shared humanity

No matter what your nationality, Martians will be happy to eat your head. It's a nightmare we all share.

Whether we realize it or not, we spend a lot of our time awake but "sleepwalking" through life. We're not aware of what is going on around us, particularly when we're not making a conscious effort to scrutinize our surroundings. One aspect of visiting a foreign country as a tourist is that

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Won't Miss #497 - open office plans

One of the cool things about teaching in Japan? No open office plan (usually)... though my husband's second job did have such a style. The noise was awful. This was one of the cubicles I taught in at my last job in Tokyo. Ah, luxury!


I can't speak for offices around the world because I only have experience with two countries - America and Japan. In the U.S., most people work in a private

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Random Memories #12

One of the only good things about having had a boyfriend in Japan while I suffered the difficulties of a long distance relationship was that the gifts were awesome. More than one of my female friends expressed envy and outright jealousy at what they saw as the opportunity afforded me by his location, especially in regards to KISS collectibles.The funny thing was that I was less interested in

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Will Miss #496 - furoshiki

A personalized furoshiki, given to me by a student as a goodbye gift. The paper is instructions on how to tie this beautiful cloth.


I remember watching cartoons when I was a kid which showed a hobo walking around with his bindle tied to a stick. The hobo, as someone who lacked funds, used this little folded up bit of cloth to carry his possessions. This was back in the days before we could

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Won't Miss #496 - fixation on blue eyes

Surely, the tears of angels fall from blue eyes.

I had many discussions with students about their preconceptions regarding Western people, and, to them, "Western" (occidental), meant "white". It meant not only white, but mostly blue-eyed white people. In fact, I was told on more than one occasion that they believed most of us have blue eyes. I learned a long time ago when I studied basic

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Will Miss #495 - volume control (personal)

I'm not saying everyone can control their personal volume. 

I'm a person who likes order. In fact, one of my pleasures in life is the sort of anal retentive organization that makes the Felix Ungers of the world "squee" with delight and the Oscar Madisons scoff with disdain. I enjoy knowing where things are enough to invest energy in setting up a special place for them and placing them in it

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Won't Miss #495 - "worn" = "dirty"

Yes, this is a real place in Tokyo (in Hamadayama). I don't know what it was all about, but the elaborate garbage placement nearly made it a work of art. 

I have a real ambivalence about the way things worked in Tokyo in terms of the constant renewal and the waste associated with it versus the pristine sense of things being clean and new. Since coming back to America, I have been struck by

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Random Memories #11

The scanner really picks up the tiny bits of dust embedded in the grooves. What looks so dirty and dull here looks very shiny, gold and clean in person.

One of the things which is clear from my memory books from 1988-89 is that Japan was a different place at that time. The positive effects of the economic bubble were still intact and a lot of things were more elaborate than they were after it

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Will Miss #494 - herbal "nodo ame"

Image pilfered from Kanro's web site.

The notions of too much or too little of anything are culturally relative. In Japan, they always served me too much rice by my estimations. They gave me too little protein. The medicine was too weak and the coffee was often like tar. Before undies are wadded at that coffee comment, I should say that I like strong coffee like Italian espresso, but what

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Won't Miss #494 - being hung up on (a lot)

Wrong numbers are a fact of life in any country. The main difference between getting a call from someone who is confused or dials incorrectly in Japan as compared to the U.S. is that, if you answer in English, and I always did because that was the language I expected my callers to speak, you will more often than not be immediately hung up on. This isn't just because you are speaking English as

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Will Miss - #493 drinking soup from a bowl

Since coming to America, my husband has refused to eat soup with a spoon. This is the result of having been "spoiled" by the Japanese custom of conveniently tipping the bowl up to ones mouth and taking a slurp. Though I have no problem at all with his doing this at home, I feel a little strange about the possibility of doing it in public. I'm going to blame the Europeans for creating

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Won't Miss #493 - castella

Castella is a kind of sticky, coarse-textured cake which is somewhat sweet and has no strong flavor. It is often sold in blocks or rectangular wedges and can be found pretty much everywhere in Tokyo including 100-yen shops that carry food, convenience stores, markets and tony department stores. Not only can you get this low quality cake pretty much anywhere, but it is frequently used as a

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Random Memories #10

Click any image to see a larger one.

For a good portion of my young adult life, the postal service was of incredible importance to me. At the age of 17, I had 19 pen pals. At 22, I was in a relationship with one, albeit not one of the 19 that I had known since I was 17. No, I fell in love with him within several months of having first heard from him. When lightning strikes, it hits hard and

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Will Miss #492 - my illusions about America

One of the reasons that I do this blog is that I want to show a more fully rounded perspective about life in Japan. Of course, that perspective is always subjective, but I am at least trying to find a balance by talking about the positives as well as the negatives. For many years in Japan, I also tried to be balanced about how I viewed America. One could never have accused me of being overly

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Won't Miss #492 - competitiveness about "correct" English

Before coming to Japan and encountering people from many other English-speaking countries, I never gave a second thought as to whether one type of English was "true" English. After working around people from England, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, I've come to realize that there is an attitude of competitiveness about which type of English is "correct". To me, "colour" and "color" are

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Will Miss #491 - high interpersonal tolerance

Recently, I had an exchange with someone that revealed something I knew based on experience in Japan, but hadn't conceptualized in a concrete manner or verbalized. We all hear again and again that Japan is an intolerant society. The phrase, "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down," is known by most people with even a marginal interest in Japanese culture. However, during my time in Japan

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Won't Miss #491 - weak medicine/fewer self-care options

A small crowd accumulating outside of Sun Drug, no doubt to purchase weak and ineffectual OTC medicine.


On many occasions, I spoke with students about over the counter (OTC) medication and my frustration with the impotence and high cost of it in Japan. They mentioned, quite rightfully so, that Japanese bodies are more petite than those of foreigners on average. However, it is also simply the

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Random Memories #9

The filter through which we interpret things changes as time goes by. One of the reasons that older folks tell us snot-nosed kids that we'll learn one day is that they remember when they were just as naive as we were and thought they knew it all and now realize they knew far less than they thought. One of the reasons that I lost patience with people who were newbies in Japan was that they

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Will Miss #490 - the refined style

One thing that I didn't appreciate enough about Japan when I was there was how refined the style of much of what I was presented with was. This is, no doubt, because of the demands of Japanese consumers and a big reason why Japan has a reputation for taking something another country's people invented and making it better. I have been noticing with increasing frequency that things in the U.S.

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Won't Miss #490 - cut out of the loop with no recourse

I've already mentioned that we had a pretty good landlord, but one thing I realized about him was that he did something that I experienced in other areas of my life in Japan (especially business). For the first 15 years of our time in the same apartment, he told us every little detail of work being done on the apartment building and surrounding area including when his wife would be sweeping up

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Will Miss #489 - ETC

During a large part of my time in Japan, I worked both as a freelance private tutor and in a Japanese office. To get private students, I worked with a referral company called ETC (English Telephone Club). There are many untrustworthy employers who cheat or change conditions on foreign employees or referral agencies that you sign up with that end up being a complete waste of time, but ETC is

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Won't Miss #489 - "I have black eyes."

If his eyes look black, it's because I have a crap camera, not because they actually are.

One of the most common types of English lessons that I taught included asking students to describe themselves. This type of thing may seem a little silly in this day and age of digital phones with cameras and displays capable of showing pictures, but it is something that can come in handy if you're

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Random Memories #8

Three young women who posed appropriately for us outside of Budokan.



On April 21, 1988, I attended my first
concert in Japan at Nippon Budokan hall. This show coincidentally
occurred during a planned one-month vacation to “meet” my pen pal
boyfriend (and current husband of 23 years) for the first time. I had
been a KISS fan since around 1977, but my days as a “true” fan
had ended with my

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Will Miss #488 - people (usually) sit at concerts

The tiny figure in white and black in front of the Budokan was my boyfriend at the time, now, husband. It's the only time I'll put his "face" on the blog. ;-)


I didn't go to many concerts in Japan, so my observations may be inaccurate (or outdated), but one of the things I did experience when I went to them was that people stayed in their seats. One of the things I hated when I went to

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Won't Miss #488 - limited edition foreign imports

Strawberry corn flakes, probably there and gone, but thankfully so. ;-)

Sometime in early 2011, while still in Japan, I found a display of Celestial Seasonings specialty teas on offer at Queen's Isetan market in Koenji. I had never seen the flavors before (Chocolate Raspberry Bliss and Vanilla Strawberry Rose) and they cost about 400 yen ($4.43) a box. Since they were new and expensive, I

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Will Miss #487 - no clogs

I lived in the same apartment for 23 years in Tokyo and never once had to think about buying a plunger for the toilet. Maybe I was very lucky, but I also don't recall seeing plungers anywhere in office bathrooms that I worked at or visited. Perhaps the plungers were hidden or there was a magic pixie who lived in my septic system that made sure it was smooth sailing all the way, but for the

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Won't Miss #487 - wide stances

There are signs on Japanese trains telling people not to sit with their legs open wide because it is so common for men to sit as if it were imperative that they keep there knees as far apart from each other as a couple of angry, violence-prone weasels. My boss once expressed his frustration with these men by remarking that he'd love to ask them if their testicles were swollen. I am in no

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Random Memories #7

This beauty, so clean, fresh and lovely an appliance, was named the "Neo Queen", and was kept on a balcony that was favored by the more well-appointed cockroaches in Tokyo.

I have a lot of pictures of things which most people almost certainly do not have a picture of. For instance, I have a photo of the very first time I laid eyes on my husband, our first hug, and our first kiss. This was all

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Will Miss #486 - no leaf blowers

Oddly, leaves in Japan look much like those in any other country, though the drawing on the ground does have that simple look that Japanese drawing often has.


Perhaps I cannot say "no" leaf blowers as I lived mainly in Tokyo and traveled to various suburbs as well as tourist areas. There may indeed be small armies of people who get up every single day and loudly blow dust and errant dead

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Won't Miss #486 - "it's their country"

One of the things Japanophiles like to say to you if you are mistreated in Japan is that "it is their country." Essentially, they are telling you that the Japanese have every right to treat you like crap if they like because it is their country, not yours. This attitude is puzzling because it is rarely (if ever) used to justify mistreatment or prejudice against minorities or immigrants in

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Will Miss #485 - lack of public aggression

Since coming to California, my husband and I have experienced either directly or indirectly two public fits of pique in the U.S. In one case, two grown men got into a shouting match over behavior on a miniature golf course. In the other, an angry pedestrian who didn't like the timing of how our car crossed the crosswalk he was approaching smashed his fist down on the back of our car. In each

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Won't Miss #485 - the comparative narrative

One thing that continues to annoy me to this day when I visit forums or news sites devoted to Japan is the way in which no issue or problem in Japan can be discussed without dragging other countries, well, actually, America, into the mix. No matter what you say about a problem in Japan, the counter-argument is that it's "worse" in America. Here is the thing, it does not matter what it is like

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Random Memories #6

My first experience with Japanese money did not come along when I arrived at Narita airport for a vacation in 1988. In fact, I didn't take any American cash to Japan for exchange because of the unique circumstances under which I went there. My boyfriend at that time (now husband) was paying off borrowed money for college to his parents and I sent them my $500 and he reserved the equivalent

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Will Miss #484 - seasonal foods

Hot sake, which I always will associate with the New Year and winter in Japan.

In America, we have some things which are similar to seasonal food in Japan, though they tend to be tied to specific holidays rather than the calendar or weather. Marketers are also constantly trying to expand the timeline on everything. I recall, for instance, when marshmallow peeps were available only at Easter

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Won't Miss #484 - a lack of spontaneity

The flip-side of the fact that the Japanese have a ritual or guideline for how things should be done is that there is often a lack of spontaneity in interactions. People do what they're supposed to in the manner in which they are expected to do it and deviation from form or expectations is seen as poor manners, or worse. This is reflected in things like traditional Japanese culture such as

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Will Miss #483 - Ameyokocho

One of the oldest shopping streets or shotengai in Tokyo is located in Ueno. It is called either "Ameyoko" or "Ameyokocho" and has one of the most unique atmospheres of any shopping area in the city. There are a fair number of discount shops, a famous one at which a man stands outside and throws candy into a bag and tells you a discount price for the entire lot. There are also sellers who

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Won't Miss #483 - being treated like I'm stupid

I'd like to think the person who made this sign wasn't stupid, merely that he or she was careless.

There have been plenty of experiences in the U.S. since returning in which I have felt like I didn't know what was going on. Things like using a debit card at the supermarket were new experiences to me. The things which Americans have gotten used to over the years which did not happen in Japan

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Random Memories #5

As those who know the story of my romantic history from what I've shared on this blog, from late July 1987 to June 1988, my husband and I were conducting a long distance relationship between Tokyo and Pennsylvania via old-style correspondence. I have two enormous photo albums which I put together during our separation as well as a huge box of written correspondence. At the time that I was

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Will Miss #482 - offers of help

The short nature of a title will make this post easy to misunderstand if you don't read the body. Let me say that I don't mean to imply that Americans don't help each other. In fact, it's my feeling that Americans are more likely to pitch in and help each other in most situations because they are not afraid of taking charge of a crisis or problem. In Japan, the Japanese are loathe to help

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Won't Miss #482 - credit where none is due

People have not yet given Japan credit for the invention of sliced bread, but I'm sure someone will eventually. 

One of the great things about living in Japan was that the world was full of numerous curiosities. I lived in perpetual comparative state. From the way in which the cups are shaped to the manner in which people line up to the way the walls looked, it was all different and therefore

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Will Miss #481 - dislike of medication

Despite the fact that doctors love to over-prescribe medication every time a patient comes in with fatal toe jam or a bleeding hang nail, Japanese people in general are not the same sort of pill poppers as people in the U.S. One of the reasons that alternative medicine, including kampo (Chinese herbal treatments), acupuncture, and whatnot are so popular in Japan is that there is a general

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Won't Miss - #481 useless, pointless lying

Let me say right off the bat that everyone in every culture lies. The type of lying that is done is and the pervasiveness and social acceptance of lying is, however, different. One source of constant frustration for me is the frequency of useless (or marginally useful), pointless, and sometimes totally naked lying that occurs. In my former office job, we were lied to constantly about inane

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Random Memories #4

Click this image to see a much bigger one.


I remember when I found my first "Burger King" fast food joint in Tokyo. While McDonald's were everywhere, the fast food which I was most likely to eat back home was very scarce. When I finally found one, it turned out that memory was better than modern experience. The food really was not what I remembered, or my tastes had changed enough that it

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Will Miss #480 - chicken breast is cheapest

There have been quite a few shocks since coming back to the U.S. and one of them is how the price of turkey and white meat chicken have sky-rocketed. When I was living here before, these types and cuts of meat were cheaper because they were viewed as less flavorful. Personally, I don't like the stronger flavors or the texture of dark meat chicken. I realize that many people prefer them, and

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Won't Miss #480 - Edokko personalities

Before I get into this, let me say that I know and love many wonderful individuals who were born and raised in Tokyo. That being said, when you deal with the residents en masse, and as strangers, a certain character picture develops. Edokko (or people born and raised in Tokyo) tend to be reserved, feel they are more sophisticated and proper in their speech, and less welcoming of strangers and

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Will Miss #479 - hands aren't out everywhere

Things have really changed in the U.S. since I lived here in 1989, and one of them is that some supermarket employees ask you at check out if you want to give money to charity. I don't mind the appearance of a jar into which one can drop money or even a question printed on the payment screen asking if you'd like to donate before entering your payment. What I do mind is the clerk asking me if

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Won't #479 - "kisha club" journalism

During the most critical times of the Fukushima nuclear crisis, one could not trust any of the media outlets for reliable information. On the foreign side, there was alarmist reporting and a zeal for whipping up the greatest drama. On the Japanese side, there is a long history of "journalism" which is about telling the population what the bureaucracy and government wants them to hear rather

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Random Memories #4

The ribbon that I had to pin on my shirt to keep me categorized with my tour group.

Package tours are a big part of any tourist industry, but they are a rather different animal in Japan, at least in my experience. The whole purpose seems not to be to experience the sites or fully digest the atmosphere. It's an exercise in efficiency. How many places can be seen in the short amount of time

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Will Miss #478 - the lighting

One of my former Japanese coworkers was forever running around turning on extra lights in rooms that I happened to be in at work. I always told him that there was enough light for me to see, but he insisted that it was too dark. I don't know if there is any sort of difference between brown eyes and blue ones in terms of the need for light, but my blue-eyed boss also had a similar issue.

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Won't Miss #478 - kameboko

The kamaboko is on the left.

The most exciting time in Japan is at the beginning when all is new and wondrous. It's also the most dangerous from various points of view because you can't read or understand much of what is around you. You wander into a store and see all sorts of curiosities and wonder what is actually food and what might be a cleaning product or marital aid in disguise.

There

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Will Miss #477 - hagoita

In an age in which people seem to actively prefer items which are created with the precision capability of a machine, handicrafts may seem rather anachronistic. Also, sites like Regretsy show us that not all fruits of human hands are things of beauty. One of the many lovely crafts in Japan are hagoita. Originally, they were used to play a game similar to badminton (hanetsuki), but these days

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Won't Miss #477 - the pissing contests

One of the reasons that I have disallowed commenting on this blog to date (except for the new Wednesday feature, random memories) is that there is a strong tendency for foreign people to compete with other foreign people when it comes to proving how well they know Japan. This applies across the board to every aspect of the culture and life experiences. It extends to trivial things such as who

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Random Memories #3

Click to see a bigger version.

My very first exposure to teaching in Japan came second-hand through my husband's experiences. At the time that he was dipping into the world of ESL in Japan, he was my boyfriend rather than my legally recognized partner of 23 years. He signed on for a 1-year hitch at a company called AMVIC and it's safe to say that he operated rather cluelessly in the job for

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Will Miss #476 - no bumper stickers

Christians criticizing other Christians from the back of a truck.

The absence of something is never as easy to detect as the presence, though if the existence of something is especially irritating, you learn rapidly to appreciate when it's not there. One thing I've noticed since coming back home is that people seem to love to use their cars as a means of giving their views, boasting, or

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Won't Miss #476 - lack of a doggie bag culture

My husband and I have two anniversaries. One is the day we became a couple and the other is our wedding date. For the former, we went to a Turkish restaurant and it was only afterwards, when my husband asked to have the remainder of his meal wrapped up, that I remembered that you can do that here. In Japan, the custom is rather different because cleaning your plate reflects satisfaction with

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Will Miss #475 - "reverse" dubbing

If you grew up watching Godzilla movies and Ultraman after school, you have had plenty of experience watching dubbed movies where lips and words are completely out of sync. In fact, this is so well-known that you see it parodied in various T.V. shows. The Simpsons did a bit with radioactively-enhanced Pierre and Madame Curie stomping Tokyo which demonstrated this humor. Well, after years of

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Won't Miss #475 - deli options

Plenty to choose from, as long as you like your food breaded and deep fried!


The supermarkets in the U.S. are bigger than those in Japan. This, in and of itself, means that the deli sections are bigger than those in Japan (as are the bakeries). The problem I had with Japanese delis though wasn't necessarily the size, but rather the range of food options. If you were going to buy something

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Random Memories #3

There is a lot of criticism of American cigarette companies in Japan because they market more aggressively and sell their addictive tubes of tobacco more cheaply there than they do back home. That's not precisely true these days because each state has different prices. If you're talking about New York, where they are nearly $12 a pack, then, yeah, they're much cheaper in Japan. If you're

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Will Miss #474 - no number four

Image courtesy of Blogd. Used with permission. 

We're all familiar with the fact that some hotels used to skip the 13th floor in Western cultures. For all I know, some of them still do. The idea is that superstitious types don't want to be housed on that floor because of it is associated with bad luck. It's silly because it's still the 13th floor whether it is called that or not. I recently

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Won't Miss #474 - gaijin-crazy girls

There are some Japanese men who have a lot of hostility toward foreign men. One of the reasons they hate them is that some Japanese women love them so much. In fact, I've encountered no small number of women who go to language schools, travel abroad or hang out in certain places for the express purpose of snagging a foreign boyfriend. For such women, it isn't about being attracted to a

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Will Miss #473 - sabisu ("service")

A man offering a free bean cake to my husband while he rode in a rikshaw in Asakusa. 


There is an excellent Nepalese restaurant not too far from where I used to live in Tokyo. I made sure to go there several times  near the end of my stay and during one such visit, I wanted to order a particular special curry set of the day. I retracted a request for tea after I found out it wasn't included

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Won't Miss #473 - "the Japanese heart"

If there is one thing Japanese people seem to be convinced of, it is their own unique nature. Talk of "the Japanese heart" (– 日本人の心), a concept which is ambiguous enough that anyone can apply it to any action and claim it as a reflection of the notion, is not uncommon when folks try to express something about the essential nature of the Japanese character. It can mean kindness. It can mean an

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Random Memories #2

The item pictured above is a subway ticket. Those who live in Japan now may see it as slightly anachronistic because most people use pre-paid cards like Suica or Pasmo. Tickets are still used, of course. You can buy one from a machine, feed it into an automatic wicket on the way in and have it sucked into the machine on the way out. Close observers will note three things which make this ticket

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Will Miss #472 - the pedestrian crossings

This is another one of those things that I had no idea was going to be something I'd miss until I'd left it behind. The cars in Tokyo are more aggressive with pedestrians than American (or at least Californian) cars are. In fact, as someone who just took her test to get her driving license reinstated, I can say that the law says, "yield,  yield, yield" when instructing American cars, and they

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Won't Miss #472 - poor chain of communication

Bad communication can and does occur everywhere, but it is more likely to occur in Japan. Americans communicate clearly and like all details worked out and at least try to ensure that anyone who needs to know about something knows. Yeah, they fail sometimes. In Japan, vagueness is the order of the day. This, in and of itself, does not have to result in a poor chain of communication, but what

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Will Miss #471 - no political T.V. commercials

As America gears up for a presidential election, we are subjected to commercials letting us know just how horrid particular candidates are. Most of them want you to believe that voting for guy A will bring upon the apocalypse and voting for guy B will turn your life into sunshine, lollipops, and pretty, pretty rainbows with pots of tax-free gold at the end of them. In Japan, we were spared

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Won't Miss #471 - skinny guys, high, cinched waists

I'm not a superficial person for the most part, but some things strike me as aesthetically unpleasing. And I'll admit that some of the things I didn't like about life in Japan were pretty petty and this is absolutely one of them. Of course, many of the things we all dislike are of really no consequence, but we have our feelings about them anyway. One of the things which I found really

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Random Memories #1

I have two sets of memories of my life in Japan. Most of the posts that you see here reflect the view of it as someone who lived there for a long time and went through a lot of the stages that people love to say foreigners go through when living there. Basically, you start out infatuated and blind, turn bitter and disappointed, and eventually come to terms with the fact that Japan, like every

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Will Miss #470 - respect for older people (conditionally)

If I allowed comments, I'm sure I'd get a torrent of people talking about how the Japanese no longer surrender their seats to old people on trains and that the old style traditional respect has been vanishing. This would be true. However, in general, the Japanese still show more respect for the older members of their society than Americans as well as have more regard for those who are simply

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Won't Miss #470 - being asked if I went to the doctor

Who needs a doctor when you can just use a charm?

Like most people, I occasionally catch a cold, have a stomachache or some other minor problem. Back home, if I told people, "I had a cold last week," their response would never be, "I'm sorry to hear that," or "I hope you're feeling better. They would never ask, "did you go to the doctor?" In Japan, whenever I have a small, temporary health

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Will Miss #469 - everything is priced

It may be overpriced for consumer grade boozy chocolate bon bons, but at least it is priced.

Having been away from America for so long, there are some things I never would have imagined I'd miss about Japan because I didn't think or remember that they were absent here. I'm sure that's an assertion I've made before and will make again, but one of those things is stores that have a price on

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Won't Miss #469 - the humor gap

I fancy myself a pretty witty person and throughout my many years of adult life, I have been complimented on my turn of phrase. I can make people laugh, or at least I can make most people who share my native culture do so. One thing that you learn early on as a teacher in Japan is that you should probably try not to tell jokes. More often than not, there will be a hugely pregnant pause as you

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Will Miss #468 - songs with random English

If this is the proper embedded video, you'll see what I mean. If it's not, you'll wonder why this is here. The song is Inside Your Head by Daichi Miura.


It's pretty rare for me to listen to an English song and hear a random word in Japanese thrown into the lyrics unless that word is something for which the English is also the same as the Japanese (like "sushi"). In Japan, however, it was not

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Won't Miss #468 - "milk" flavor

I read a cooking blog post recently which offered a recipe for "vanilla ice cream, because "plain" is not a flavor." In Japan, "plain" is a flavor, and it is not a good one. A lot of people see "milk" in Japan and believe it means vanilla, but what it really means is one of several things depending on the quality of the product. It can be condensed milk, regular milk, or, at the very bottom of

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Will Miss #467 - the toilet doors

Some things are inexplicably exciting.

It's the little things in life which tend to matter most to those of us with the comforts of first world living. Our complaints are trivial, but they can detract from quality of life in niggling little ways. I took certain things for granted in Japan and one of those was that nearly every toilet door in public and private places had an indicator letting

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Won't Miss #467 - goya

The sign on the right is offering goya juice. Note the blender behind it, which is empty of residue from creating goya juice. I don't know why anyone would think it would be profitable to sell it, but I guess there must be some sort of market out there for it. 

"Goya" is the Japanese word for a bitter melon/gourd. It looks like a diseased cucumber in the incarnation it is commonly sold in in

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Will Miss #466 - ease of getting hired

Yeah, that's not me. I'm pretty sure she could get hired easily in any country even if her only skill is gnawing on a block of ice.


In the previous post, I wrote that it is hard to get just any type of job as a foreigner in Japan. This is true, but, as an American female, I was a valued and somewhat rare commodity. If I wanted a job that required a foreign employee, especially as an English

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Won't Miss #466 - limited range of jobs

No, I didn't want to be a mini castella vendor, but I probably couldn't have been had I wanted to.


Many people believe that the country is your oyster in terms of work if you learn to speak, read, and write Japanese and are a foreigner. Many people are wrong. Under certain circumstances and if you are completely fluent, you may be able to do a particular job or two that a Japanese person

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Will Miss #465 - "high" (big) noses are beautiful

One of my (American) coworkers was talking to me about plastic surgery and I mentioned that, when I was  younger, I would have had a nose job because I didn't like what I considered to be my "big" nose. That is not to say that I have an enormous schnoz, but rather that like many young women, I craved a petit nose and would have like to have had it bobbed to fit into a particular aesthetic

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Won't Miss #465 - guys with long nails

The camera didn't catch the shot because I couldn't really get a close up or use a flash, but he did have long fingernails and it was icky.


One of the things which I noticed in Japan which I don't see in America is that Japanese young men (usually teens to early 20's) often didn't trim their nails. It was first brought to my attention when a clerk at a local convenience store scratched my

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Will Miss #464 - "simple is best"

One of the reasons Japanese characters are seen as cute is that they are rendered very simply. Minimalism, which Japan is often over-credited for, is also about simplicity. Japanese food is often about simple tastes and keeping flavors clean and separated. Culture-wide, Japanese love simplicity. It's an aesthetic which isn't always followed, but tends to permeate the culture in pleasant and

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Won't Miss #464 - fear of being trapped on trains

It's higher than it looks here. 


When you live in Tokyo, you spend a fair amount of your life on trains. This is what happens when you live in a place with a very convenient, efficient, and punctual public transport system and very expensive parking. After the March 11, 2011 earthquake, my feeling about stepping onto a train changed. The trains automatically stop when a strong quake happens.

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Will Miss #463 - paying to pick fruit

A fairly typical in-season price for berries is 350-500 yen ($4.36-$6.24). Why pay less and get them the easy way?


When I was a child, I used to go strawberry picking with my grandmother. The purpose of this was to make a little extra cash because we were paid 25 cents a pint to pick them. It was hot, back-breaking work, but we did it for several summers because it was one of the few ways

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Won't Miss #463 - baker unfriendly butter

Image from Meg Milk's Snow Brand butter page. 


This is one of those dumb little things that probably matters more to me than nearly anyone else for a variety of reasons, but it remains a personal point nonetheless. I lived in Japan long enough to leave extended tourist mode and live a normal life. Part of normal life for me is cooking and baking for myself. One of the things about butter

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Will Miss #462 - the blending of the old and new

Tatami beds, an interesting blend of the old with the new. 

Photo courtesy of Luis Poza at BlogD (used with permission). 




I used to do desktop publishing, editing, and writing of textbooks that included CDs with dialogues for people studying English. One of the questions related to a portion of the dialogue which asked a foreign visitor about a notable point about Japan and the answer was

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Won't Miss #462 - "kusai mono ni wa futa o shiro"

I guess covering your nose might also keep the smell out, but it doesn't quite accomplish the same goal. 


The Japanese have a saying (kusai mono ni wa futa o shiro) which means "if it smells bad, cover it up/put a lid on it." This goes beyond common attempts to cover up ones mistakes or to turn a blind eye to bad behavior as it commonly and casually occurs in American culture. It's about not

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Will Miss #461 - great money design

I'm annoyed that I didn't have any other bills to show (because this was all I had left from my Japaense cash), but you can see more of them here. 


My in-laws recently returned from a trip to Spain and showed me the design of the Euro. It's pretty good because each bill is a different size and appeared to have various colors. This is compared to American cash which is all pretty much the

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Won't Miss #461 - speaking English to each other

I didn't mind it when Japanese people who were trying to help me for whatever reason spoke English to me. It may have been slightly presumptuous of them to assume that I spoke English, but their intentions were always kind. I did mind it when one of a pair of random strangers who were both Japanese and speaking Japanese to each other suddenly started to speak English at the sight of me. I'm

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Will Miss #460 - lack of prudishness

One of the first things I learned about Japan was that their regard for sexual behavior is quite different from that of Westerners. I was told, and this was a notion that was reinforced as the years went by, that sexual acts were regarded as a biological necessity, much like the need to urinate or eat. This was offered as an explanation as to why some Japanese women would tell their husbands

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Won't Miss #460 - contracts not being followed

In America, where people do what is required by law rather than what is reasonable or best, we have a culture in which contracts are specific and followed to the letter. This provides a sense of comfort since it stops people from being taken advantage of, especially in the workplace and in business transactions. In Japan, contracts are not seen as concrete. They are seen as the beginning of a

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Will Miss #459 - feeling smarter than I am

One of the aspects of living in a foreign country and Japan in particular is that you have the chance to present yourself as an authority on whatever you choose to expound upon. When teaching, I overheard plenty of gas bags who loved nothing more than to "teach" by telling students "the truth" about whatever. Sometimes, the things I heard people say were so ridiculously wrong that it made me

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Won't Miss #459 - organ donation hypocrisy

There was a television show called "L.A. Law" back in the mid 80's to early 90's which had an episode about kidney transplants. In the story, a wealthy Japanese businessman essentially "bought" an organ and a dying woman of more modest means who was higher on the donation recipients list was contesting his right to do so. At the time, I thought no further than the notion that a Japanese man

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Will Miss #458 - quieter eating

This was a Chinese meal in Japan. My husband forgot to take a picture until he'd consumed most of it. Usually, we get a shot before we start eating.


There are some things about life in America which I never realized were the case until I was removed from the environment long enough to forget that they were natural. My husband and I ate at a Chinese restaurant in America for the first time

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Won't Miss #458 - high fat food

A lot of people believe that Japanese food is healthier than other food, but I don't necessarily believe that is true. I think that Japanese people tend to eat less than people in other countries and that they make better food choices with an eye toward a good nutritional balance, but looking at the overall options for eating, Japanese cuisine doesn't really stack up better than many other

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Will Miss #457 - low sugar food

Though I'm using a picture which talks about "health", I'm pretty sure that the lack of sugar bombs in most Japanese food has less to do with health and more to do with tastes based on food culture. 

Each country has its particular cuisine and preferences, and America loves its sugar. This is not a genetic defect or some sort of lack of restraint in the face of an option to choose sweets.

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Won't Miss #457 - air conditioner energy wastage

A Roppongi Hills restaurant the summer of 2011, with the doors wide open to the outside and air conditioners blasting.

The summer after the Great Tohoku Earthquake, the number of people who were carted off to the hospital for heat stroke tripled. This was because the damage to the Fukushima power plant created an energy shortage and everyone was encouraged to reduce energy consumption by

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Will Miss #456 - subtle complaining

Click this image to see a larger, more readable one. This is their nice way of saying, "don't be an ass when you come here."

Many foreign folks believe that Japanese people don't complain. While it's true that Japanese people don't like to complain, and often don't mention trivial annoyances, they do complain; they simply don't tend to do it in an overt or "in your face" manner. If you're not

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Won't Miss #456 - helter skelter street layout/addressing

One of my students told me that Tokyo has a labyrinth of small streets snaking all around and carving the blocks up into triangles and trapezoids because those streets were once small waterways and streams that helped the locals conduct the business of living with a steady water supply. I'm going to take her word for that as I have never researched the history of the topography of Tokyo. I

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Will Miss #455 - cut-up food

Among the many failings that American's possess in the eyes of their European and Euro-centric neighbors is the manner in which they cut their food up. We fail in one of two ways. The primary way is that we swap hands to use the knife and fork so that we are eating with the dominant hand. This is apparently inferior to the European manner in which one keeps the knife attached in one hand and

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Won't Miss #455 - cold water

Sometimes having to use a short title really forces me to mislead the reader. I know there is "cold water" everywhere in the world. In fact, there's more cold than hot because it comes naturally in that state. What I'm talking about is the possibility of warm water in places like public restrooms or even in offices. When I first came to Japan, some of my foreign coworkers told me that the

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Will Miss #454 - (more) willing redistribution of wealth

One thing about a lot of attitudes in America which upsets me is the preoccupation people have with how their taxes are distributed at times to people they view as deadbeats or as having chosen irresponsible paths. While in Japan this attitude does apply to homeless people and there is not the greatest sympathy for the unemployed, it doesn't tend to apply to society at large.There are a

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Won't Miss #454 - the sandwiches

The sandwiches don't really look like this.

No culture can do everything right. Conversely, no culture can do everything wrong, though many would  have you believe that America does. At any rate, I can't say that America does sandwiches "right" as many of them are gooey, overloaded with meat, and enormous. That being said, I can say that, in my opinion, Japan definitely does them "wrong".

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Will Miss #453 - shiny happy people

My shiny, happy bit of Japan that travels with me, debu neko in the San Juan Islands.


One of the things about America that seems to have happened since the 60's is that being positive and happy is seen as a negative thing. People enjoy bursting bubbles and being cynical and sarcastic is elevated above being peppy and positive. It's just not cool to be happy and anyone who overtly displays it

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Won't Miss #453 - "yuru-kyara"

Rinkaru, the mascot of the Rinkai line.

There are copious blog posts by foreigners in Japan writing about the various mascots invented to lend color and personality to various aspects of Japanese society. These characters are called "yuyu-kyara" in Japan. The police, firehouses, shopping areas, and even various train stations have their own characters. In many cases, possibly most, these

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Will Miss #452 - no "straight jacket"

Though I lived in a
country which is seen (often justifiably) as a conformity factory,
all countries and even individuals expect you to react and behave in a
certain manner within that culture. Even a highly individualistic culture like that in the
United States has expectations of people. The main difference between Japan and the U.S. is that individuals have their own ideas about how you

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Won't Miss #452 - not being fully literate

OK, I'm pretty sure I can read these boxes. 

Some people are going to react with incredulity that I spent such a long time in Japan and never became fully literate. Well, judge away, my friends, if that is what you need to do to elevate your estimation of yourself above your estimation of someone who writes a little blog on the internet. Before you bang your little gavel and pronounce me a

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Will Miss #451 - bizarrely inappropriate English lessons

An infamous video lesson teaching people the phrase "I've got a bad case of diarrhea". 

One of the textbooks that I used to teach from had a lesson about slicing cheese. A waggish teacher crossed out "slicing" and changed it to "cutting". When the students did the pattern practice, they would mechanically talk about cutting the cheese as the teachers sat by and tried not to laugh. The thing

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Won't Miss #451 - my racism

If you travel, and you think that train stations are a snapshot of ethnic diversity in Japan, you're forming the wrong impression. You see more concentrations of foreigners in public transport areas than in real life. 

When I first came to Japan, I was, like most Americans, thoroughly entrenched in the idea that people were all the same aside from external appearances. As someone who grew up

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Will Miss #450 - solid identities

When I was growing up, I was a rabid KISS fan. Some of my more attentive readers with good memories may recall this fact from some of my previous ramblings. One of the reasons I loved being a KISS fan and found it so hard to stop being one long past the point of actually liking the band was that a huge part of my identity was wrapped up in my association with the group. Like many young

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Random Thoughts: Hi, My Name Is Loco and I Am a Racist

Shortly after returning to the U.S., I went into a little shop that sold panini and wine. It was small and had one long bar with about 8 stools around it. It was the type of tiny little place that wine lovers and tourists visit for a quaint experience with somewhat upscale cuisine. There were only 3 panini on the menu, and each had a long list of ingredients that were a cut above the usual

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Won't Miss #450 - narrow market aisles

Yes, this is a store, despite the fact that it resembles a warehouse. Shops in Tokyo often optimize their display and storage space but putting open boxes of products in front of shelves or at the end caps, taking up valuable real estate that those annoying customers might take advantage of.

I've been shopping in a relatively smallish supermarket since returning to the U.S. My guess is that

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Will Miss #449 - fewer food chemicals

I'm not really talking about this kind of food (processed food). I'm talking about things like bread, cured meat, etc. I'm sure these are relatively chemical cornucopias. 

I used to scoff at the idea that Japanese food in general was any purer or fresher than American food, especially considering the distance it took for most of it to reach us in Tokyo. It doesn't help that the origin of a

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Won't Miss #449 - and, and, and

One of the things I had to repeatedly correct with my students when I was teaching English, both in writing and when speaking, was how to use "and". Despite what I'm sure are years of studying English grammar rules, students seemed to think that you should put "and" between each noun that you were stringing together in a sentence. For example, a student would say, "I have been to Italy and

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Will Miss #448 - cash-based culture

Every several months, applications for automatic payment of various utility bills were put in my mailbox. Every several months, I recycled the forms. Though the Suica and Pasmo pre-paid cards are changing, to some extent, the amount of cash used in Japan, it is still largely a cash-based culture and I prefer this. It's not that I like handling money and I do realize that electronic handling of

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Won't Miss #448 - the shampoo

I'm not saying it'll turn your hair green, but just using this picture because this lovely woman has awesome hair.

Back when I first started working in Japan, one of my British coworkers at Nova was having a conversation about going about ones daily life in Japan. She mentioned that she had to spend a lot of money on shampoo because she had to buy imports or have things sent over from England

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Will Miss #447 - newness

Now that I'm back in the U.S., use of the future tense in these posts seems a bit odd, but I'm sticking with it for the sake of consistency. I've done over 800 posts in the future tense and swapping now just feels wrong. If it helps, you can pretend I'm still in Japan, or figure that I'll miss these things later but I'm too shell-shocked by being home after 23 years to know what I think and

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Won't Miss #447 - the bananas

Hawaiian sumo wrestler and former champion (ozeki), Konishiki, once said in an interview that he found the bananas in Japan very disappointing. He said that they were relatively flavorless and paled in comparison to those he could get back home. In my youth, that is to say, up until I was 24, I never really ate bananas much nor paid attention to the flavor of them. I didn't start eating them

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Will Miss #446 - Osaka personalites

If you've lived in Japan long enough, and especially if you have lived in Tokyo as I have, you know the instant you are dealing with someone who was born in Osaka. The way in which they communicate with you is faster, freer, and more friendly. When you visit the city of Osaka, people walk faster and look where they are going (as opposed to Tokyo where they are oblivious to all and sundry) far

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Won't Miss #446 - "you should go to an onsen"

Obviously, having never been to an onsen, I don't have a picture of one. However, this is a picture of water located in Japan. Theoretically, one could bath in it. Sorry, it's the best I can do.

Japanese people almost universally love onsen (hot springs) and every time I asked someone what they did over a vacation or weekend and they said they went to an onsen, I had to have the same exchange

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Will Miss #445 - Ultraman

Ultraman soft drinks being sold in a vending machine in Tokyo.


When I was a kid, there were two Japanese things which I saw on television on a regular basis. One was the Saturday afternoon Godzilla movies which set the stage for hundreds of jokes about Japanese people's mouths moving out of sync with their words. The other was "Ultraman", who had no mouth so we didn't know if his words

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Won't Miss #445 - banal imperial family news

A recent headline asserted that the Emperor played tennis for the first time since his heart bypass operation. This is what passes for news in Japan when it comes to the royal family because the mainstream press is strictly controlled in regards to what they can say about them. They cannot criticize them (like how wasteful the imperial system is and how it does nothing for Japan) and they

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Will Miss #444 - Koenji Awaodori

A poster for the Koenji Awaodori festival, which takes place in the sweatiest time of year.

Now that I no longer live in Japan and have to worry less about overtly revealing my location, I can say that I used to live midway between Asagaya and Koenji. For those who never lived in Japan, that means nothing, but it would have been a juicy nugget for my stalkers. Though honestly, I'm sure any

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Won't Miss #444 - dani bugs

Obviously, this is a spider, not a dani bug. Strangely enough, they didn't feature animatronic dani bugs at the local tanabata festival. This was the closest I could come to a picture of an annoying insect that infests your living space and bites you.


When I was a kid, we had problems with certain types of insects, but never bed bugs or things that lived where we slept. Of course, it helps

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Will Miss #443 - the souvenirs

I'm currently living in an area which is more of a vacation/resort area in which many people spend their summers at second homes. It's a quaint little area full of nice people, nature, and herds of deer that enjoy roaming the area in front of our cabin and occasionally forage for leaves on the deck. However, one thing I've noticed is how tacky all of the souvenirs are. I will grant that

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Won't Miss #443 - "muzukashii"

I'm not sure what the most dreaded word in the English language is. It might be "audit" or, depending on your feelings about such things, "marriage" or "pregnant". The latter of those would certainly fill me with terror, though marriage for me has always been a delight. After writing this post, but before showing it to him, I asked my husband what he believed was the word we really  hated to

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Will Miss #442 - kintsuba

You can see by the illustration that my description of isn't inaccurate.


Imagine that you are walking down the street and you see miscellaneous blobs of food in different colors and someone offers you a sample and says, "here, eat this." The blob is brownish with things in it and coated in a milky white stuff and you ask what it is and they say, "just try it". Would you gleefully just stuff

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Won't Miss #442 - vacationing is difficult

I'm mentioned about a million times before that I can't speak to any other person's experiences in Japan. It's not only about the subjective nature of experience and how feelings and perceptions vary from person to person, but also how we all have different experiences. No one can live the life you live no matter how hard they try. So, when I say that "vacationing is difficult" in Japan, I'm

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Will Miss #441 - Japanese stamps

Some things become more awesome because they are unfamiliar. It's stupid, in a way, but it remains true. Stamps from most countries are pretty cool regardless of where they come from, but the kawaii (cute) and often elegant or particular nature of many Japanese designs makes them see that much more precious, beautiful or adorable (whether they are "Hello Kitty" or not). It probably helps that

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Will Miss #440 - group exercising

Shortly before my husband and I left Japan and were dealing with the hassle of getting an address change, we were led up to the super secret sorting area of the main ward post office. The time at which we were taken there was during the lunch hour and as we sat waiting for people to work out how to handle our (apparently) unreasonable request to have our mail sent to an address other than

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Won't Miss #441 - inconsistent nutrition information

Nutrition information should be standardized so that customers can operate from a common framework when dealing with food. I've been told that it is common in Europe to offer information per 100 grams. In Japan, there appears to be no standardization, even across products that are extremely similar and from the same manufacturer. Drink data, for example, is sometimes given per 100 ml. and

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Won't Miss #440 - soup slurping

This is Soup Curry from Dominika in Shinjuku. It is awesome, and unslurpable... at least until you eat all the big pieces. 


Ethnocentrism makes itself most obvious at the dinner table. It's one of the few places that people can feel 100% justified in their disapproval. It seems that humans decided a long time ago that the consumption of food must be full of rules and every culture has

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Will Miss #439 - McDonald's weird burgers

A "sakura teritama" burger. It's a ginger teriyaki pork burger with lemon sauce. The "sakura" part doesn't mean it's stuffed with cherry blossoms, but rather that there's a pale pink sauce which is supposedly infused with sakura flavor and it's like biting into spring. I'm not sure what spring tastes like, but there you go.

I try hard not to think something is strange because it suits

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Won't Miss #439 - electrical current issues

When my husband and I first came to Japan, my mother insisted on giving us a gift to take with us. It was a talking digital clock. These days, electronic devices seem to be incapable of shutting up, but 23 years ago, that was an unusual gadget. We took it with us and plugged it in. It seemed to still work, but it kept losing vast amounts of time. It seemed that the power differences between

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Will Miss #438 - business minding

I knew when I returned to America that a lot of things I'd never thought of when I was living in Japan would come to mind in terms of what I would and would not miss. One of the things that I never dreamed of being something I'd miss is the way in which Japanese people tended not to stick their nose in my business when I was going about the city. On very rare occasions, someone would walk up

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Won't Miss #438 - "power spots"

I'm all for New Age spirituality. In fact, I'm really pretty good with any spiritual belief system folks want to embrace. The thing I'm not such a fan of (besides pushing your faith onto others) is blatant expansion of a belief system in order to make a quick buck. That would include things like velvet Jesus paintings and the virgin Mary nightlights as well as power spots. The notion of

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Random Thoughts: Reverse Culture Shock

I once read an article written by a woman who spent three years in Germany and talked about how horrible it was for her to come home and face reverse culture shock. Though I don't want to engage in a reverse culture shock pissing contest, I have to say that it is hard not to snort derisively at the notion that three years in a Western culture is going to compare to the shock of returning after

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Will Miss #437 - the Edo/Tokyo Museum

A life-size life-size reproduction of an Edo-era building (that's a real person in front).


The level of indoctrination into a culture that one experiences has a profound effect on interest levels. When I was a kid, I didn't care much about museums or history because I had already been overexposed to tales of George Washington and his wooden teeth or Abraham Lincoln and his log cabin (what's

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Won't Miss #437 - "Mrs. (My Last Name)"

The confusion that Japanese people have with foreign names and first and last names is understandable given the differences in how family and first (given) names are offered in respective cultures. When students called me "Mrs. Shari", I knew why. However, there is another layer of complexity which I struggled with and my students never seemed to understand or act upon even when they actually

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Will Miss #436 - psychics

A fortune teller and her customer in a cubicle in the Nakano Broadway shopping arcade. 

There are psychics or fortune tellers in nearly every culture. The main difference is not their presence, but how they are regarded and how their presence is made. In Tokyo, psychics are a part of everyday life. They have cubicles in shopping areas, sometimes in department stores. They set up little tables

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Won't Miss #436 - cycling cell phone users

She looks like she's standing still here, but she was actually riding around with her phone glued to her ear.

I always loved the idea of people riding bicycles in a country instead of taking cars and originally, it was a great point about living in Tokyo. As the years went by though, things got to the point where both being a cyclist and encountering them became increasingly frustrating. Bike

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Will Miss #435 - fearless piracy

I can't exactly show a bunch of bits flying through a phone line, but I can show this bootleg Disney backpack.

One of the down sides to living in a foreign country, as I've mentioned before, is that you aren't in touch with the pop culture back home. It's not the least bit uncommon for me to be on a Skype call with friends or family and have people talk about how much they enjoy a T.V. show

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Won't Miss #435 - long lines (qualified)

I understand that there are long lines everywhere at popular attractions around the world. This is a given and Japan's long lines at places like Tokyo Disneyland are understandable.What is less understandable is the random long lines at little places at which there is no special product or limited supply. In the picture above, some sundry goods are being sold in front of Ito Yokado. There was

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Will Miss #434 - (special) memory cues

My first month in Japan was spent in Kita-Senju, and going there always awakens a lot of good memories.

If you could live in a place which connected you to the absolute best time of your life on a regular basis, wouldn't you want to live there? I wrote about how I originally came to Japan back in 1988 and spent a month with my then boyfriend (now husband) on a vacation which was so wonderful

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Won't Miss #434 - Sakura-flavor

When spring rolls around, which apparently is any time between February and April depending on who you speak with, the sakura-flavored food starts rolling out. Sakura means "cherry blossom", not "cherry". The taste of sakura runs the gamut, but it is often a bit on the soapy side and overly floral. It's not a bad taste really. However, it's not one that I find especially good. I would say that

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Will Miss #433 - tsukune

As part of my goodbye socializing, I went to a teppanyaki resturant with a few of my former students, now my friends. Teppanyaki, incidentally, is when meat and vegetables are prepared on a large flat grill in front of you by a skilled chef. I think it tends to be rather theatrical in America and is merely carried out with great skill in Japan. However, I'm not a big meat eater so I have

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Random Thoughts: Leaving as a solid citizen

Foreigners are often roundly criticized for coming to Japan and not acting as "good citizens". This means that they don't pay their city taxes, health insurance, etc. nor do they sort trash according to the strict rules and guidelines of their areas. Unlike small cultural issues like cooking smelly food or being too loud, these things are more about government regulations than simply irksome

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Won't Miss #433 - no 3-day weekends

When I first started working in Japan, I had Sundays and Mondays off. Even though I worked in an office for 12 years, I still worked an odd schedule because I was a foreigner and my services needed to be applied differently. This was okay in terms of national holidays for some time as they fell wherever during the week, but one day the Japanese government decided that it had to move almost

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Will Miss #432 - no apocalyptic mumbo jumbo

Even the demons are cute in Japan.


All of my life, I have been hearing stories of the end of the world. When I was a little kid, my maternal grandmother liked to talk about the signs of the Rapture and how they were starting to manifest. She did so with a little smile which made it seem as though this was good news, but it scared the hell out of me when I was young. Similarly, I heard about

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Won't Miss #432 - reassuring people about their English

Everyone knows the loaded question that women supposedly ask their husband's about a dress making them look fat. The idea is that whatever the man answers, he loses. If he says she does, she will be angry that he is saying she's fat and doesn't look good. If he says she doesn't, she'll say he's lying to make her feel better. The equivalent of that in Japan is the oft-made assertion, "my

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Will Miss #431 - intuiting what you mean

Japanese have a culture of "reading the air". It's a skill that not only is one encouraged to develop, but those who lack it find themselves derided and labeled as "kuuki wo yomenai hito" (people who can't read the air). While this sort of thing can be maddening if you aren't skilled in decrypting what people are trying to say to you (and I have not been for the vast majority of my time in

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Won't Miss #431 - "reading the air" expectation

Part of what hinders communication between foreign folks and Japanese is that it is common in Japanese culture to "read the air" or to intuit what is meant rather that attending to what is actually said. At higher levels of communication, this goes beyond "it's difficult" (muzukashii) meaning "no way!" It can often mean very involved or sophisticated things, but without experience with the

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Will Miss #430 - constant personal challenge

One aspect of being in a foreign culture with very different values than yours is that your are either in a near constant state of frustration and anger, or you learn to cope. It may seem based on my talking every other posts about things that annoy me that I run around mad all of the time, but that's an illusion that comes from the simple act of talking about such things. My awareness of them

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Won't Miss #430 - backwards names insistence

Ethnocentrism is sometimes reflected in big actions, but sometimes in the tiniest things. At the root of it all on the benign side is an inability to see that "familiar" does not mean "better". On the less appealing side is the notion that all that originates from ones own culture is inherently superior to that which comes from others. The latter comes from cultural insecurity. 



One of

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Will Miss #429 - Kamakura

I've got a beautiful, desktop-wallpaper-quality picture of the big Buddha statue in Kamakura, but so does everyone else out there. Therefore, I am giving you this cheesy souvenir shop item instead. 

Kamakura is the home of the "daibutsu" or "great Buddha" statue. While it isn't the biggest one in Japan, it is one of the most appealing. It's serene countenance is one reason. Another is that

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Won't Miss #429 - cell phone earthquake alarms

There was a psychology study done on a boy dubbed "little Albert" in which a loud noise was played each time he was shown a white rat. After awhile, he started to turn away and scream when he saw the rat. Later, he generalized his fear of the rat (which was generated by the loud noise) to all white things. If I had remained in Japan long enough, there is a good chance that I'd have my own "

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Will Miss #428 - impetus to develop culinary skills

A lot of people think that a foreigner wanting to eat foods from home is a tacit rejection of Japanese cuisine. It's not. You can enjoy all of the lovely food around you in Japan as an addition to what you knew and loved back home. It doesn't have to be a wholesale replacement one way or another. That being said, you really can't easily get things here that you can back home, like whole wheat

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Won't Miss #428 - Japanese sports figures worship

I hate to watch the Olympics and the biggest reason for that is I dislike the blatant favoritism of athletes based on shared nationality. I have always disliked the way medal counts are tallied up according to country with the underlying idea that those with the most medals represent a country with somehow superior people and those with smaller numbers are inferior. I felt this long before I

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Will Miss #427 - warabi mochi

Many people write about the stages that foreigners go through when they come to Japan. Generally, they capture the flavor of what people go through, but are overly simplified and a generalization. Still, generalizations do have their place in helping provide a framework from which we can understand a situation better. For me, the food in Japan has followed a very odd pattern of approach. At

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Won't Miss #427 - "Wao"

This lovely lady at a local festival did not say "wao", but she did have the right expression to convey the idea. Please do not believe I am lumping her in with the rude people I describe below. I'm sure she's a model of politeness and grace.

Let me begin by saying that "wao" (wah-oh) is what the Japanese see the English exclamation "wow" as. You see it written as "wao", but sometimes "wow",

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Will Miss #426 - perspective on thinness

I'm going to let you in on two secrets. First, this is a personal blog. The presentation may obscure that fact, but it is about me, my experiences, and my feelings as much as it is about Japan. Second, I have had an eating disorder for most of my life. Part of that disorder is the distorted notion that having the right body (i.e., a thin one) will cure all of life's problems. If you are thin

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Won't Miss #426- Japanese education system

I'm sure these three school girls with the Mickey Mouse hairdos are an exception to the non-critical-thinking rule.

All education systems are means to an end. The culture decides what that end is. I'm going to admit to being ethnocentric in this post and say that I believe the goals of education are to produce people who are literate, generally knowledgeable, and capable of critical thinking.

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Will Miss #425 - "sojourning"

One of the things my husband and I love to do is pick an area of Tokyo or the surrounding cities (Yokohama, Saitama, Chiba, etc.) and just explore it. Sometimes, it's one of the major areas that is attractive to tourists or locals, but at others, it's just some minor stop which isn't particularly well-known or famous. Taking a day and spending hours (sometimes as many as 6 or 8) just walking

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Won't Miss #425 - guided tours in Japan

Actual tour guide with flag followed by actual tourists, but I wasn't a part of the group. 



When it comes to taking guided tours in Japan, I've gone on two. The first was when I first arrived in Japan in 1988 for a vacation and went to Nikko. It was a whirlwind of dashing from place to place with little time to see much of anything and they insisted that my husband and I not touch each

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Will Miss #424 - language school advertisements

Shane? He's a little on the quiet side, and he keeps a big knife under his pillow, but I'm sure he's really a stand-up guy. 


All advertising is misleading and an attempt to use your psychological tendencies against you. If you're an insider at a business or have a lot of experience with it, the ways in which ads attempt to manipulate potential customers is far more transparent. Language

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Won't Miss #424 - being treated like a dictionary

My husband and I have played a certain video game for well over a decade. Part of this game is facing stacks of creatures with ambiguous descriptions of their size like "lots", "several", and "pack". There's a guide online that tells you the number each one of those represents and my husband learned what they meant long ago. As for me, I just ask him every time and never learned for myself. I

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Random Thoughts: A Moment of Ethnocentrism, An Hour of Analysis

When you deal with various cultures, the word "ethnocentrism" gets tossed around more as an accusation than an observation of a quite reasonable reaction as a result of the interactions of individuals from different backgrounds. It is offered as a finger stabbing at someone in judgment for their ignorance and lack of understanding. I want it to be clear that I'm not using the word in a

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Will Miss #423 - naivete about crime

I was discussing crime with one of my students and asked her if she had ever been a victim of it. She said that someone had attempted to break into her house, but failed when they couldn't breach her window screens. They broke the glass and gave up. One of her friends, however, was robbed twice, by a couple of sisters, no less. She said that friend was now afraid to ever take a vacation. I

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Won't Miss #423 - non-deodorant wearers

I realize there are people who stink everywhere in the world, but I encounter far more people with intense B.O. in Tokyo than I have anywhere else. The reason for this is that most Japanese assume they don't stink when they sweat and therefore do not need deodorant. In fact, many believe that only foreigners are capable of smelling bad when they sweat. There was once a sign near deodorant in a

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Will Miss #422 - "death by fan" warnings

Definitely the wrong kind of fan and not about fun...


You can read all of the books and web sites you want about a foreign culture, but chances are that you'll find the reality will catch you off guard sooner rather than later. One day, you'll be talking about the summer heat and how to best cope with it and a student will say that it's just too cold using the air conditioner all night.

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Won't Miss #422 - Japanese fitting rooms

I can't speak for every single fitting room in Japan, just the ones I've tried. Since clothes here aren't exactly made for my foreign body, I am not exactly the most experienced person in this regard. That being said, I can say that at least some of them require you to remove your shoes before entering them. In fact, that is the way in which you indicate the room is occupied in some cases.

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Will Miss #421 - "analog" signs on T.V.

Getting a picture of a television program showing a cardboard sign is much harder than it might seem.


Japan is undoubtedly one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. In fact, I've seen computer chips embedded in traffic cones. Machinery is sometimes integrated at a level that would make a Borg mama proud. Given the deep level of technological sophistication that you see

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Won't #421 - walking with my head down

After my thyroid surgery, my doctor asked me how my neck mobility was coming along after several weeks of restricted movement. He asked me to look up and I apparently could not look up as far as I should have been able to. One thing I realized when this happened was that I wasn't so sure that I could really look up very well before the surgery because I constantly walk around Tokyo with my

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Will Miss #420 - women who wear little make-up

Few women use this power as much as the woman in this ad. 


One thing that is the case by and large in Japan is that Japanese women don't wear much make-up. Occasionally, you see someone who is sporting enough maquillage to make a clown envious, but the general aesthetic is closer to looking natural. Most of my female students wear foundation and aside from those who go for spider lashes,

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Won't Miss #420 - talking to people in masks

I think it's quaint and somewhat endearing that you see Japanese people running around wearing surgical masks. It speaks to a certain meticulousness, paranoia, and, yes, even consideration for others. It's also the only way people ever seem capable of covering their mouths when they cough and sneeze. On the flip side though, there is an issue when they keep wearing them even when they are

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Will Miss #419 - 108 bell chimes

At or around midnight on New Year's Eve, temples in Japan ring a bell 108 times to rid themselves of their desires and "sins" from the previous year. It's symbolizes a sort of spiritual cleansing so people go into the next year purged of negativity. I think most Japanese people don't know what it means and few think deeply about the meaning. As a custom and a mindset, I like the idea that you

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Won't Miss #419 - only 2 burners

A lot of short-timers in Japan never really do much in the way of cooking. For them, a toaster oven and one lonely gas burner is more than enough to sustain them between "konbini" (convenience store) sandwiches and rice balls (onigiri) and dinners of UFO yakisoba and instant ramen. For me, as someone who cooks and cooks a lot, having a mere 2 burners on a gas table requires a lot of messing

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Will Miss #418 - Japanese snowmen

It may seem a strange thing, but, yes, even the snowmen in Japan are different. For reasons I am not entirely sure of, Japanese snowmen consist of two balls of snow (a head and a body) whereas American ones have three segments (head, torso, "legs"). I've talked to Japanese folks about this, and they believe it follows the general form of dolls in Japan such as kokeshi. I should note that

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Won't Miss #418 - "Whiplash Wangs"

I'm guessing that the people with filthier minds are going to be sorely disappointed by the content of this post because "Whiplash Wang" does not refer to a male appendage-related issue, but an episode of the old T.V. series M*A*S*H. On the show (and possibly in real life, I don't know),  that was a term for a Korean person during the war who would jump in front of an army vehicle, sustain an

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Will Miss #417 - tsukemono

Every time my husband and I go out to eat at a restaurant that serves any sort of Japanese food, I am pleased to receive a little side dish of pickles. When I get curry from Cocoichibanya, one of my great pleasures is taking the compartment full of pickles and mixing them with the spicy pork curry. The odd thing is that I never actually buy them myself despite having ample access to a great

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Won't Miss #417 - black sambo-style images

I've said before that Japanese people aren't politically sensitive and that they also often do not realize when they are being racist (which is why activists are valuable as they can act to educate them on such matters). Nothing reminds me more of the cluelessness that Japanese people have about racism than seeing "Little Black Sambo" artwork (or similar types of drawings) around Tokyo. It's

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Will Miss #416 - setsubun

Most foreign folks tend to notice the big holidays (New Year's, Golden Week), and the transplanted ones like Christmas and Valentine's Day, the most. Setsubun is one of those holidays which foreigners rarely understand or pay attention to for a variety of reasons. One is that the Japanese don't talk about it much. This is because they don't get the day off and many will say it's not even a "

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Won't Miss #416 - free-range children

As I mentioned in the previous post, kids in Japan can run around by themselves and there are few cases in which it ends in tragedy. At this point in time, there just isn't much risk that kids will be abducted (fortunately). However, it is very common for parents to take their children's safety for granted, particularly when they are with them. I've seen uncountable numbers of parents with

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Will Miss #415 - unescorted children

The little boy pictured above got on the JR (Japan Railway) train when I was headed to work in the early afternoon one day. He bounced around the car a bit and I realized that he was all alone and that this was not a rare situation. Little kids in Tokyo ride the train alone as well as walk around various neighborhoods. Kids in Tokyo can do this because there is little fear of child abduction

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Won't Miss #415 - grizzled Japan veterans

Clearly, these happy fellows are neither grizzled nor veterans, but they do appear to be non-Japanese.

Technically, I should be a "grizzled Japan vet", but I'm only so chronologically and in terms of sheer volume of experience. The "grizzled vets" of whom I speak are the people who have spent a fair amount of time here (often more than 10 years), who think they now know it "all". They are

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Will Miss #414 - Japanese construction workers

They mean that literally, not figuratively. This was a site with a lot of wood lying around.


I've lived in Tokyo for 23 years, and I've seen a lot of buildings go up and down as this is a city that doesn't value age so much as newness (fortunately for us, that means earthquake-resistant structures). Construction workers are ever-present in my life with rarely a day going by in which I don't

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Random Thoughts: Leaving On a Jet Plane

The two faces of Japan. For that much, the same two faces are present in every country. 


Some time ago, my husband and I started talking about leaving Japan. That was, to the best of my foggy recollection, at least six years ago. As I may have mentioned in one of the over 800 posts I've written for this blog so far, or in another personal blog some time ago, we knew we were never going to be

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Won't Miss #414 - beating around the bush

One of the difficult things about communication in Japan is its indirectness. In fact, the goal in Japan often seems to be sure that you take as long as possible to get to the point, and, if you are truly masterful, to never actually make the point. The goal seems to be to speak only of trivialities (like the weather) or to  talk around it in enough circles for long enough that the other

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Will Miss #413 - Akiho

The experience of living anywhere is both small and big, personal and impersonal, and subjective with objective elements. People sometimes ask me why I write this blog and there are many reasons. One is to remember this time in my life with attention to my experiences and thoughts and feelings about them. That means that there are things which are unique to where I live that no one else will

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Won't Miss #413 - cutting/adding sounds

Sometimes I have to really reach for a picture, especially when I'm talking about sounds. So, we have this extremely tenuous connection here. 

One correction I've made to students' English about a million times by now is the addition of an "a" at the end of the word "salad". This is because Japanese, with a few exceptions, operates with consonant vowel pairs (e.g., ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, but not

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Will Miss #412 - gobo

Delicious Dominica soup curry with many well-prepared vegetables including a tasty bit of burdock. 

"Gobo" means "burdock" in Japanese. Before coming here, burdock was something that I had to pick off my clothes after a childhood romp through the field behind my rural home. It was certainly not something that was included in a delicious salad that could be purchased in nearly every deli and

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Won't Miss #412 - Tokyo fur wearers

My students, who think America does not have four distinct seasons and each area experiences a very limited range of weather, often can't conceive of the idea that I've lived in a place with an actual winter "like Japan". Never mind that Tokyo does not get very cold and sees about one, possibly two days of light snow per year, if that. I grew up in an area along the same latitude as Hokkaido

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Will Miss #411 - anthropomorphizing dolls

A doll thrown into the pile of items to be burned at a shrine during New Year's holidays. 

When we're children, we often anthropomorphize our dolls and toys. The entire concept of Toy Story is based on the idea that we all once felt our toys were real and capable of feeling. That being said, as a culture, and particularly as adults, we don't view dolls as anything other than memories of

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Won't Miss #411 - "Tarzan" speak

Some English teachers operate under the dubious philosophy that if they speak English poorly, their students with comprehension problems will have an easier time understanding. Sitting next to one of these teachers provides one with a steady stream of dropped articles ("a", "the", "an"), plurals that lost their s's, and adjectives subbing for adverbs. An example would be something like, "boy

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Will Miss #410 - bad dancing

One of my students loves Michael Jackson. Well, there's a very good chance that more than one of them loves him as he has been super popular in Japan since his death. At any rate, there was a tribute performance to him that included performers of various nationalities including, of course, Japanese. She praised the Koreans and the Americans, but said little about her countrymen. I asked her

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Won't #410 - disbelief of American poverty

One of my students recently told me that she went to an Italian restaurant which was offering venison as a special dish. She asked me if I'd ever tried deer meat, and I told her that, because I grew up very poor, I indeed had eaten venison because sometimes my family had no money for food and my father would have to kill deer, rabbits, and, even squirrels, so we'd have food to eat. This

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Will Miss #409 -orderliness

I have spent a long time pondering what it is that essentially makes American culture different from Japanese culture. While I do not flatter myself sufficiently to believe I have anything resembling a full understanding, I think that one essential aspect of Japanese culture is that there is a very high valuation of order. This is why there are so many rules and relatively rigid thinking.

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Won't Miss #409 - (illogical) rigidity

I know that all cultures have "rules", but Japan has more than I grew up with and they apply to the smallest things. For instance, you can't serve certain dishes with certain foods. It's not that they don't taste good together, but it is simply "not done". This is particularly so among the older set, but I've had younger people complain about things like women putting on make-up on trains.

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Shameless (Non-Self) Promotion

Most people are familiar with the Rashomon effect either by that particular term or as the old statement about there being three sides to every story, yours, mine, and the truth. In Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon movie, he attempted to illustrate this concept in his own inimitable way. Personally, I think some "truths" are too big to be known or understood by any one person and that such truths are

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Will Miss #408 - oshibori

"Oshibori" are wet towels, sometimes hot, sometimes not, and sometimes real cloth and sometimes a paper towel, that you are given at the beginning of a meal in restaurants in Japan. They are given to allow you to approach your food with clean hands. One of my students once mentioned their absence in restaurants in the U.S. and said she didn't know what people did to make sure they had clean

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Won't Miss #408 - fear of America

I've said before and I'm sure I'll say it again and again; context is everything. I've been in Japan a long time and haven't been home for 20 years. As a result of this, I've started to absorb a lot of the negative, skewed and distorted perspectives about life in America that the Japanese have. They talk incessantly about guns, violence, crime, and safety as if you risk getting mugged on every

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