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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