"What's it like living in Japan?" my friends back home often ask me. It's a hard question to answer. So instead, I'll describe what I did today, a typical day in Japan for me.
In the morning, I wake up to the community alarm clock -- the chime. It wakes up everyone on our island, including the fish.
In the summertime, most people are up well before 6 o'clock so the chime is really for those of us who oversleep. Then I do what all the housewives in Japan do at 6 a.m., I sweep the front walk. This is such a ritual in Japan that I suppose Japanese people do it out of habit even when they stay at motels.