Cultural contrasts! Everywhere there are traps. I was late when I left home yesterday so I quickly kicked off my slippers as I ran out the door. Later, I returned with a Japanese friend. She laughed when she saw my slippers. "We would never do that!" she said. Do what? I asked. Of course. I should have arranged them neatly before leaving. Everything else in my apartment was in perfect order but my slippers marked me irrevocably as a gaijin.

How refreshing it is to have friends who will tell me these things! I remember my first cherry blossom party shortly after arriving in Japan. All day I spoke of the beautiful sakana, fish, instead of sakura, cherry blossoms. And nobody told me. They just said how well I spoke Japanese.

Here's another. I had once told a friend about how surprised I was to find dirty toilet rooms in a well-known Japanese hospital. A clean bath/toilet room is high on any list of Western, or at least American, priorities. She explained that the toilet in Japan is accepted as a dirty place. Of course the bath, which is a clean area, is separated from the toilet in a Japanese house; Japanese must wonder (shudder?) at the Western proclivity to put them together. She explained that in Japan, it is a matter of good etiquette to keep the toilet room door always closed. Dirty things should not be visible. She said when she lived in the U.S., she was told always to leave the door open. Otherwise, everyone would be waiting for whoever was in there to leave. But why close it? In America, the room is often a focus of artistic efforts; we like our bath/toilet rooms to be pretty, or interesting, we decorate them.