"Chopsticks," she says, "are more than eating utensils. They are a respected part of Japanese culture, not to mention other cultures throughout Asia. You shouldn't take them lightly." "Me? Take chopsticks lightly? Why, there’s nothing I respect more. I would rather sit on a chopstick than disparage one." Her eyes roll. "You from the West can't understand. You have nothing to compare. Forks and spoons have no cultural echoes whatsoever."

This death by a thousand techno cuts has gone on for decades and was the inspiration for the 2014 Japan Times humor column below, which aims at payment cards, a form of e-money. Is high tech leading us ahead or pulling us back? Whichever, the noose is too damned tight. Below, then, is a bit of old coot fun involving my rebellion against a system that has been slowly killing me for years.

The new foreigner in my neighborhood is… Me. Yes, I’m new! At least from the chin up. Not so long ago, I wrote a column about losing my hair. Well, I've found it. On my face. I have grown a beard. I now look like Yosemite Sam. I even have his beady eyes. How this came about is not nearly as interesting as the effect it has had. After over three decades in Japan, I’ve been reborn as a foreign resident.

Last summer during vacation season, I paused from my reprints of Japan Times columns to present photos from various trips taken through the years. You can revisit those previous photos here. I have just returned from a journey abroad, so I thought to take another pause and post a line-up of my travels, not only of the recent trip, but of all my wanderings since that the "On the Road" publication in 2025. The title this time: "On the Road... Again."

This happened 22 years ago. Yet a death in the family cannot be counted in years. It’s always as if yesterday. With Japan’s season of obon just past, the time seems appropriate to look again at that somber “yesterday” when my wife’s mother passed away. Two years back, I posted a column that described her initial decline into failing health. To read that again, please click here. Never was she hospitalized. We had care workers dropping by the house daily. She died in her bedro

Mid-August is Japan's traditional ghost season, when the spirits of the dead are believed to return to visit their families. Japanese also believe that nothing takes the heat from a sweltering summer night better than a spine-chilling tale of ghosts. The story below, first published in The Japan Times, is my fictional tribute to that tradition.

The hardest thing I have ever done was to teach my own children English. Like with most international couples, my wife and I have secured dual citizenship for our kids, meaning that they themselves get to choose their nationality once they reach adulthood. Yet, long ago we realized that the choices we made for them when they were little would pave our son’s decisions. Emphasis on either language, we felt surely would point them in the direction of that culture.

If the old saw is correct and, "You are what you eat," then Takeru Kobayashi is a hot dog. In more ways than one. First, he is the brightest star in one of the world's fastest growing "sports" – competitive eating. And what he is most renowned for is his dominance of the "sports' " marquee event, Nathan's annual Fourth of July hot dog chow down in New York, an event he has won for six years running and where he once devoured 53 plus dogs in 12 minutes.

The concierge at my hotel had to ask me twice. "You want what?" "A bookstore," I said. Over my shoulder showed the never-sleeping glitz of the casino. "You want what?" she asked yet again. But then shook herself and said there had indeed been a bookstore on the strip in years past. Her pupils grew, as if she were gazing into history and the noble days of the Southern Paiutes. "But now you'll have to take a cab into the city." A notion I scoffed at.

I slouch on a rumpled cot in a hospital ward in the American Northwest. My second son lies out before me with tubes in his body and a packet of blood suspended above his head. A nurse wiping his brow tells me she too has a 21-year-old boy, a marine somewhere in the firestorm of Iraq. "He usually e-mails every day, but I haven't heard from him now in a week." There is a tremble to her lips.

I prefer this season not as one of tinsel, lights and storefront carols, but rather as one of quiet — a season of soft-falling snow, a season of anticipation, a season of memories. In this season I am haunted by the memory of a Christmas past, that of my very first Christmas in Japan in 1976. And like the Dickens messenger from the shadows of distant youth, the ghost that I welcome is not unfriendly at all.

Meet "Father Smith" -- silver hair, gentle smile and a voice so mellow that it flows with a grace from beyond. Maybe there’s a God and maybe there isn't, but when you're with Father Smith, you tend to believe there is. There's just one thing. He's as phony as hell. "I'm an English teacher," he says. "I marry people at a hotel chapel on weekends. I wear the robes, a cross, the whole nine yards. Nobody knows. And nobody cares." He smiles his smile. "Except for maybe me."

One of our family has become a Buddhist. The new Buddhist is not my Japanese wife, who professes Christianity. Nor is it her kin, who advance the sukiyaki approach to religious faith, as in: whatever adds a little flavor is welcome to the mix. No, the family Buddhist is my dog. The story behind this is approximately 14 years long. One third-grade morning, my second son found a frisky puppy outside his classroom window.

"The reason I love zombies…" The speaker has skin the hue of a soft-shell taco. At his jaw line, the taco has been ripped away to expose bleeding gums and skeletal teeth. His right cheek has been chewed into hamburger, the bloody bulge of which keeps his loose eyeball from popping out and rolling across the floor. All of this make-up. I think. "…is that I hate them so much." Love? Hate? Zombies? Sounds like the perfect Halloween romance!

Heroes, in a mythological sense, always need a guide — a spiritual beacon to lead them safely through the dark forest of doubt and then onwards to face the twin pressures of fear and fate. "And for dinner," says my guide, "how about Hooters?" Hooters? And heroism? Not a likely match, but perhaps you sense my dilemma: How should I play my first visit to the land of hamburgers and hot pants? Should I go highbrow? Or low?

The snake is perhaps more tacky than menacing. To others, it shows only my poor taste in decoration. To me, however, the snake symbolizes something beyond. It signifies the choice I made in opting to live my life in Japan. An eternal reminder that I am snake-bitten. "Get rid of it," says my son. I can't. The snake, in its evil coil, is a scaly link between my two homes, one here and one in the States. Which of these is "abroad," I can no longer say.

"Help!" she seems to whisper. She gestures with frantic eyes."The man behind me… He's got a gun in my back! Save me! Please!"

I was sitting in my office on the second floor of my home in Saitama, tapping away at the end of a draft for a future edition of this column

I have actually been to the Twilight Zone.

Time to take up the topic about which everybody moans, but no one ever writes columns about: the Tokyo heat.