"Twenty-five" seems a fine number for the necessary hours in a day or an easy-to-find shoe size in centimeters, yet for me that digit has now garnered a special significance. It marks the number of years I have lived in Japan, soon to inch one step forward to 26 -- more than a quarter of a century.
These are not consecutive years, mind you, but when patchworked together they all add up. Looking back to the day I first stepped off a KAL flight at old Haneda Airport, I see I have survived 17 prime ministers, 15 sumo grand champions and seven attacks by Godzilla. I arrived in Japan before videos and CDs, before Walkmen and Gameboys, before convenience stores and telephone cards, before pop icons like Ayumi Hamazaki and Hidetoshi Nakata were even born, back in the days when there was only one McDonald's in all of Kyushu, the island of my then residence, and -- I feel certain -- only one Western-style toilet there as well. I visited both often.
So when a friend recently asked what haven't I done in all these years in Japan, I had to answer first with a long pause. For -- naturally -- when you live in a place for a considerable time, you cannot help but accumulate experiences, sort of the way a navel gathers lint. It took several minutes then to come up with the following list -- my Neverland of nonaccomplishments in Japan.