Will Miss #523 - no "gluten-free"

The irony is that a lot of food in Japan is naturally gluten-free due to the "rice culture".

One of my former coworkers asked me what I was doing during the March 11, 2011 earthquake and I told him that I was baking muffins. He said, "I bet you were," in a way which patronizingly said, 'you prairie muffin housewife, you'. When men become chefs of all sorts, they are masters who are

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Random Memories #45

This is a continuation of a story I've been telling in multiple parts. The other parts are here: 1, 2, 3

In my last post, I talked about the president of my former company and how his idiosyncrasies made life difficult for the employees. In fact, if one reads through the rather long laundry list of the things he did which showed his lack of trust and disrespect for the foreign staff, it

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Won't Miss #31 - culture of victim-hood (reflection)

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you know that I'm a person who favors balanced perspective. I have mentioned "yin" and "yang" many times in posts and I find it far more difficult to believe in the starkness of "good" and "bad". I think that the world would be a far better place if we taught people perspective-taking in school. By that, I mean that we helped them place themselves

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Will Miss #30 - saying anything in public (reflection)

I assumed when I came home that doing things like swearing in public would be off the table for me. Certainly, talking out loud about anything that was going on around me would be off limits. Well, I was wrong. There were a few things that I didn't account for when making my assumptions about life back home.

The primary one was just how few people actually walk around outdoors in the U.S. It

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Random Memories #44

This is a continuation of a sequence of stories on working in a Japanese office, an experience that I had over 12 of my 23 years in Japan. Here are parts 1 and 2.

In the previous post, I introduced information about my former company, which I believe was like a lot of little companies in Japan in that it operated as the private fiefdom of the man who ran it. The company survived, in part, on

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Won't Miss #523 - plodding meticulousness

One day, while I was in the post office in Japan to mail a few letters. There were three postal workers and three customers. It took more than 7 minutes per customer because the postal workers moved at glacial speed and paused to check every little detail as they went. One of the customers was filling out a single simple customs form and another was simply buying some stamps. This sort of

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Will Miss #522 - metric measuring

A B5 notepad. I'm more familiar with A3, B4, A4, etc. than I am with things like "letter" size thanks to having done more work in publishing in Japan than in America.

When any discussion about the metric system vs. whatever the hell America uses* comes up, the smug Europeans go on about how superior the former is and talk about how we should change. Let me say right now that it's attitudes

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Random Memories #43

Note: This is a continuation of a post from last week. Part 1 is here. 

My former company was established in the same year as Apple computer, 1976. It started as a dinky operation in a rundown part of Nishi-Shinjuku and expanded along with Japan's economic bubble. Mr. and Mrs. O, as we often referred to the president and his wife, had an idea for marketing correspondence English lesson

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Won't Miss #30 - Japanese cheese (reflection)

The type of food you enjoy is entirely a subjective matter. Whether we want to believe it or not, most of us like what we are used to. Though the human brain is designed to desire certain types of things more than others, namely, sweet, fatty, and salty food, the degree to which we like these things is governed by experience rather than any sort of objective measure. Whether you like subtle

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Will Miss #29 - statues of the Colonel (reflection)

Continuity can be a potent cultural touchstone, and one of the ones that I loved most in Japan were the statues of Colonel Sanders that were place outside of Japanese branches of KFC. I can't say that a reproduction of him graced every outlet, but it was at most of them in Tokyo. The Colonel is even part of local folklore in that there is supposedly a curse associated with a statue of him in

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Random Memories #42

If the internet is any reflection of what people think about Japan, it would seem that, when most foreigners conceptualize Japanese men, they seem to embrace one of two stereotypes. The first is the wacky-weirdo-otaku (geek) who dresses funny, plays with toys, watches anime, or does some such man-boy activities. These are the guys whose pictures show up in various photo memes demonstrating

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Won't Miss #522 - my neighbors

The yellow and fake brick building had our former apartment. The cement wall defines the edge of our neighbors home. Their front door was about a meter (about three feet) from the edge of the wall closest to us.

It should be noted before I indulge in this particular whinging session that I lived in Tokyo for the duration of my 23 years. I'm sure that living in other places would have

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Will Miss #521 - the limited selection

A refreshingly puny selection of products for lightening your coffee. Also, "Creap" is an awesome name for a product.

Studies have shown that giving people more than three choices creates stress for them, yet every time I walk into a supermarket in America, there are umpteen variations to choose from for almost every popular product. When I first arrived here, it was like a wonderland, but

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