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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