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.

"Hey… Get that!" A simple husband-to-wife request in what had been the hush of a peaceful weekend morning. "Get what?" she said. "What do you mean, 'Get what!?'" For at that moment our tea kettle was foaming at its metal mouth and peeping a tune so shrill it could both wake the dead and make them regret the experience. A screech I found I could only illustrate by adding a particular emphasis – by declaring that our about-to-burst kettle was… "Screaming like a banshee!"

On the morning of his son's wedding, Frank Gibbs, the neighborly physician in Thorton Wilder's Our Town, confesses to his wife that his chief concern in the early days of their own marriage was how to make small talk with his bride. "I was afraid," he tells her, "we wouldn't have material for conversation more'n'd last us a few weeks." Spin the world and switch sleepy Grover's Corners for wide-awake Tokyo, and I admit I had a similar anxiety when my wife and I married in 19

Two years ago, I had a bet going with my younger son about who could lose 10 kg faster. So I bought a Wii Fit unit.

There are rules in love stories.

She figured the last sight she would ever see would be that of a bear-sized American soldier chopping at her with a bayonet.

Sometimes love does find a way. Sometimes it is the only thing that can.

I asked my future wife to marry me while we were in the ofuro.

Most Japanese serve rice at every meal and feel a meal is incomplete without it. Many also assume that Westerners think the same about bread

I am sometimes asked how I met my wife. I like to say this unknown girl rushed up and tackled me. My wife’s version is different