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.

This Japan Times column from 2014 is about “stage fright,” not capybara. Yet, keep reading. I tie things together in the end. As for stage fright, I have suffered my share, especially when addressing groups in Japanese. At those times, I long to drop my text and dash for the door. And I am not alone. Many of my countrymen get the willies when speaking before groups, thus the stage fright nickname: the American disease. In my first few years in Japan, I was invited to speak of

Hello. My name is Tom Dillon and I am a tofuholic. Yes, I fork down tofu by the saucerload. I slice it and dice it into salads and dump it wholesale into sukiyaki. I spear it up from the misty depths of my miso soup and snarf the deep-fried variety like candy. When I raid the fridge late at night and find a tofu tub quivering in fear behind jars of jam and wrappings of "chikuwa," I offer no mercy.

Gaijin/immigrants and their issues are catching attention now, as a growing nationalist movement searches for bogeymen in regard to various Japanese woes, with foreign residents being an easy, defenseless and largely innocent target. Sound familiar with headlines elsewhere? I have long years at this and know few immigrants mean anyone any harm. We all gain our footing little-by-little, one step at a time, often tripping, but always rising back, as we strive to find our way i

Here's a fun fact to sweeten your life: The average Japanese consumes about 1.1 kg of chocolate per year. Meanwhile, your typical American gobbles down five times that amount -- which is still nothing compared to the 10 kg snarfed away by your average Swiss or German. The sugary hook on the modest Japanese figure is this: Sixty percent of the total consumption centers around one specific day. And what day is that?

"This month we cheer the Olympic team. Like this: 'Go for broke, Japan! Go for broke!'" She raises her arms and rattles her bracelets. The waiter glances our way and I signal for more wine. Urgently. She lowers her arms. "You don't like it? Why?" I gulp my wine. I have been here before. "Listen, Mariko, your dialog's fine. But people don't talk this way. No one screams, 'Go for broke' these days. Especially as a group. We'd just say, 'Go, Japan, go!' " She wrinkles her n

The Japanese calendar is salted with weird and wacky days from start to finish. Many of these have commercial angles, while others focus on public awareness. And some are just nuts. Still, I would much rather be nuts and celebrate than work, work, work. Take Jan. 7 for example. That was national "Nail Clipping Day," my personal favorite, which I celebrated in due fashion. Too bad it comes but once a year. What follows then is my personal primer of the lesser holiday highl

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.

She jiggled in blue-striped pajamas before the bathroom mirror. She looked a fright, a witch, a hag. Her eyes were packed in red, her hair a ratted ball, and her face sallow and lifeless and above all old! She stuck out her tongue. Of course, it was caked! She put a cold hand to her throat and said, “La, la, la…” The sounds croaked out. Oh she was sick! How could she possibly, possibly sing?

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."

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?

Yes, my fellow competitors... it's cockroach season. And the pressure to exterminate is on. First, if you've never had the pleasure of coming face to head with a Japanese roach, let me describe the enemy: They're big. They're ugly. They're bugs. What more do you need to know?

Smoke, as they say, gets in your eyes. Not to mention your clothes, hair, nose, lungs, taste buds, teeth, gums and (if you are a smoker) your pocketbook. Yet, this well-hammered health hazard remains Japan's vice of choice -- a pastime to die for. Literally.

In the heart of downtown Shinjuku there's a land -- far over the rainbow -- where dreams really do come true. That is, if your dream involves a bowel movement. Fittingly, it’s called the Toto Super Space, a showroom for bathroom fixtures set on the lofty 26th and 27th floors of the L-Tower Building, a place where visitors can flush their troubles away. And -- if they are perhaps so inclined -- their little dog too.

I learned to swear as a boy. It was the only thing my father ever taught me. He compensated for his lack of attention in other matters by instructing me well in this. And if you think that there is nothing therapeutic, nothing enriching, nothing self-purging about a decent five-second binge of bile, then I can only advise that you try it.

"If there's one thing I've learned from life in Japan," I tell my wife over a pot of black coffee, "it's how to worry."

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

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

This duck story is special. For my duck belonged to the Japanese Emperor.