Hello from Japan, where the pound key on a phone (#) is called “sharp” (as in a musical note) and where screwdrivers come in “plus” and “minus” varieties.
Whenever I’m in the U.S., I like to “surf” the culture shock I naturally experience as a result of having lived for so long in Japan; it’s fun to observe the differences between the two countries, from the size of a “small” drink to foods that really don’t need to exist, like Chocolate Marshmallows. During my last trip, though, I was actually surprised at how many things I saw in San Diego that were quite familiar to me. First there was Book Off, a used book store chain serving the Japanese community of San Diego, which took me by surprise since they’re all over the place here in Japan. Later I saw a sign advertising Gulliver, a Japanese company that buys used cars and resells them through its own network of dealers, a business model that makes sense in Japan, where there is no tradition of selling your own car through the Auto Trader. My wife and I went to the store to buy milk and found Yakult, the popular Japanese yogurt drink that’s such an institution, they have their own baseball team (the Yakult Swallows), and in a movie theatre, we observed that they’d started showing commercials before films, another import from Japan (there’s nothing like watching a commercial for Parliament cigarettes before a movie). But one of the biggest surprises came when we went to our local Costco. One of the employees heard us speaking Japanese, so he approached us and started reciting the prayer to Buddha, namyo horen gekyo, and told us that he was a member of Sokka Gakkai, the evangelical Japanese Buddhist religion which was founded in 1930 and which now has a presence all around the world. We came away from Costco with edamame beans and mikan (those little Japanese oranges), so we were feeling quite at home by the end of the day.
