Will Miss #510 - torii

There was nothing in Japan that said, "hey, I'm in Japan," as much as the torii or gates that herald the entrances to sacred spaces (usually Shinto shrines). Despite having lived there for 23 years and having seen a lot of these gates everywhere, they never failed to catch my eye. In fact, one of the things which often caught my interest was how often you'd see a torii in the middle of a

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Random Thoughts: Default assumptions

One of my former students works in the fashion industry. She had been working for an Italy-based maker of sophisticated and simple clothing and during much of the time I taught her, she made multiple trips to that country. For several years, my job mainly was to help her improve her English for those trips.



After quite a few years at the same company, and no small amount of difficulty with

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Won't Miss #14 - maid fetishists (reflection)

I'm fully cognizant of the fact that my geographic circumstances strongly affect my experiences here in the U.S. as they did in Japan. Nonetheless, my subjective reality is as valid as any other. They may not be generalizable, but they are fair. When I discuss life in Japan for me as opposed to life in America for me, I speak anecdotally, but that doesn't mean it's not a reflection of a truth

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Will Miss #13 - Akihabara's mega stores (reflection)

Akihabara used to be a mecca for me back in the days when I was an Apple computer fan. I used to go there and drool over the latest hardware and even buy the occasional Japanese Mac Fan magazine and do my best to read through it as well as install some of the shareware and demos on the discs (which were often in English because they hadn't been translated into Japanese). By the time I left

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Random Thoughts - The Lost Horizon

You can just feel the peace and harmony.


There is a 1937 movie made by Frank Capra called "Lost Horizon" which has been on my mind lately. For those who are too young or non-trivia-minded to realize this, he's the man responsible for "It's a Wonderful Life." That fact may make you want to lay Christmas flowers on his grave or go and stomp on it while cursing wildly. It all depends on how you

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Won't Miss #510 - weak glasses prescriptions

Yes, this is an eyeglasses shop, and, in fact, was where I got my last pair of glasses before leaving Tokyo. It doesn't usually look like this. This was during a festival.



I didn't buy glasses terribly often in Japan, but when I did, I found that every time my visual clarity was not great. It seemed that the optometrists always gave me a prescription that was as weak as possible while still

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Will Miss #509 - neighborly behavior

Some qualities of an experience are so subtle and hard to describe that language, no matter how precise, will mislead the reader. I've found this to be the case many times while writing this blog, especially when it comes to titles. Brevity is a virtue, and I think many writers would do well to say less than they do, but it also increases the chance that one will be misunderstood. This topic

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Random Memories #25

Bukkurando (Book Land). Those who have lived in Japan may recognize the tiny logo in the upper left as the Tsutaya logo. I have no idea why a video shop was named this way, and I don't know when Tsutaya changed it's name/focus. And though it was called "Book Land", we were only renting videos there and I don't recall any books being there at all. 


When my grandparents or parents used to talk

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Won't Miss #13 - cell phone zombies (reflection)

Cherry blossom viewing is soooo boring that one needs to spice things up a bit with the excitement of texting.


When I originally posted this, in the early days of this blog, people told me that this problem existed everywhere in the world, not just Japan. People who mindlessly walked or stood around staring at their cell phones while tuning out the rest of the world weren't only a scourge in

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Will Miss #12 - the kitler at the local liquor store (reflection)

One of the things I infrequently mentioned about returning to life in the U.S. was that I would be looking forward to being in a situation in which we could, in good conscience, have a cat. Though we stayed in Japan for 23 years, we were never sure when we'd leave. Though, had we gotten a cat the minute we arrived, it would have died long before we left, we never planned to stay that long.

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Randoms Thoughts: The Pitfalls of Interpretation

These were hanging from the roof of a Toyota exhibition in Odaiba. You may interpret their presence as you see fit. My guess was giant tribbles were taking over Japan, but they could just as easily be prototypes for a new Donald Trump hairpiece or steel wool pads for cleaning the pots of giants. 


Recently, I read an article about family therapy in Japan. It was published in an academic

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Won't Miss #509 - foreigners who don't want foreign friends

There's a knee jerk reaction that some (usually long-term) foreigners have toward other foreigners. They say that they don't want foreign friends and don't associate with other foreigners. Some of them have what sound like reasonable excuses, like they don't want to spend all of their time speaking English. Trust me when I say that no one spends so much time with a friend that opportunities to

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