Thomas Dillon - The Japan Times

December 21, 2024

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Thomas Dillon

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Feb 24, 2002

Going places depends on where you're from

Two thirtyish Japanese junior execs both applied for an opening at "Worldbeater Tech," a subsidiary of an offshoot of a spinoff of a fat-cat blue-chip company.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Feb 10, 2002

Beans of wisdom from a hospital waiting room

The week before Christmas 1989, I sat in an outpatient ward in Kumamoto University Hospital waiting for the doctor to take a look at a head cold that threatened to ruin my holidays.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Jan 27, 2002

You've got mail

It was one of those sharp, pithy statements that raise the hair on the back of your neck. Similar perhaps to "Godzilla Lives!" or "The Creature Walks Among Us!" or "Quayle for President!"

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Jan 13, 2002

If we could all so depend on the kindness of strangers . . .

The Japanese are renowned for their kindness to foreigners. I tell myself this late at night as I shiver in my pajamas, my wife having once again swiped all the bed covers. And as the chatter of my teeth quickly makes it too noisy to sleep, I remember that many foreigners -- especially those from non-Western...

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Dec 23, 2001

Beating the game -- at last

"Dad, could you show me how to make a jump shot?" So my younger son once requested as we stood beneath a hoop in his junior-high playground.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Dec 9, 2001

Sharing your daze with a studyholic

My wife takes a scalpel to her schedule and carves up blocks of time. First to go are the hours she spends teaching Japanese, the hours she rides the commuter train, and then the additional hours and hours she uses for preparation.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Nov 18, 2001

Next stop . . . the Twilight Zone

I've heard that the greatest challenge facing linguists today lies not in understanding how the brain encodes language, nor in mapping the lexicons of the world's vanishing dialects, nor in any other such grinding academic chore.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Nov 4, 2001

Just cloning around

I am sitting in a pub with two other foreign husbands of Japanese women. We are about the same age and build, with the same twitchy faces of men who have lived too long as outsiders in a nation full of insiders.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Oct 21, 2001

Like father, like son

My elder son sits across from me during supper and clubs me with the following questions: "Why can't Japanese die, Dad? How come it's so hard for them?" Not your usual dinnertime poser, perhaps, but we dads have to be ready for anything. I pause only briefly before delivering what I consider to be a...

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Oct 7, 2001

Ichiro, Ichiro, Ichinooo!

"All the world's a stage," a well-known English playwright declared in "As You Like It," adding: "And all the men and women merely players . . . "

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Sep 16, 2001

Come together, right now

"East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet," Rudyard Kipling once wrote.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Sep 2, 2001

'P' words fly over boorish behavior

"Men," my wife announces, "are nothing but pigs."

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Aug 19, 2001

Survival of the cutest at sweltering summer weddings

For most Japanese, the broiling heat of August evokes images of shaved ice, cold watermelon, chilled beer and ghosts -- all of which are supposed to add a shiver to the season.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Aug 5, 2001

When love breaks down

Yes -- I was beachball-eyed with love.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Jul 22, 2001

Breaking up (all that fat) is so very hard to do

While my stomach is not particularly gregarious, neither would one call it meek.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Jul 1, 2001

The importance of getting the vote out

Reality rarely bites my brain until I have downed my first cup of morning coffee, and sometimes not even several such cups are enough to juice me from dream mode out into open-eyed awareness.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Jun 17, 2001

"Look at it this way," one of my mother's cornier friends blabbed to her when she learned of my engagement, "You're not losing a son, you're gaining a daughter."

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

Jun 3, 2001

Lessons in crisis mismanagement

All my life I have been behind the times. I wore my bell-bottoms for years after the fashion had died, and in fact only abandoned them after they had shrunk up and become sort of bell-knickers.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

May 20, 2001

Audrey Hepburn's neck

"I don't understand cats and I don't understand women," confessed a foreign friend, half to me and half to his mug of beer. I leaned in closer to listen.

COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST

May 6, 2001

Don't forget your TOEFL

With my older son now poking his way through the college-application process, pursuing schools mostly in the States and often being mistaken for a nonnative English speaker, I am uneasily reminded of a time 20 years past when I too applied for higher education from within Japan.

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Yasuyuki Yoshida stirs a brew in a fermentation tank at his brewery in Hakusan.

The quake that shook Noto's sake brewing tradition

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Azabudai Hills, Tokyo’s green new downtown ‘village’

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