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.

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

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 was diagnosed in the summer, ten days prior to my 71st birthday. The finding hit like an anvil dropped from the sky. Not due to my condition. I felt and feel fine. But rather for the shock to the spirit and the heavy fate the word “cancer” implies. And that it came at a moment when our very planet sits grim and benumbed. Wars, threats, shouting, violence – it seemed that our entire world had been diagnosed. With circumstances implying that it was far more than my own life

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.