On Sunday it was time for our family’s Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, I know, whoever heard of an American having Thanksgiving in December, but both my kids were in the middle of studying for important tests at school, and I was asked by the family in general if we could delay things a week or two. We had all kinds of Costco-enabled good things to eat, from chicken to mashed potatoes to what my wife described as a “bucket of tiramisu” for dessert, which was so large and so delicious and so cheap that it’s receiving quite a lot of buzz in the Japanese blogosphere. I think that there’s something about living in a foreign country that makes a person more flexible than they’d otherwise be, as you realize that the cultural ideas we all take for granted don’t always need to be adhered to that closely. If I ever become leader of the world, I’ll make a law that says that all young people must live for at least a year in some other country, to give them some much-needed perspective on their own lives.
“American” Tiramisu compared with Japanese. This picture encapsulates things nicely.