When Ursula Smith, my publisher friend up in Vermont, wrote to say, "I can't close without offering some (futile) form of apology, as one national to another, for that unfortunate accident off Hawaii," I said there was no need to apologize to me. It was an accident, and I wasn't too clear about the meaning of one national apologizing to another in a situation like this. Besides, having lived in the United States for more than 30 years to savor many facets of its society, I have largely lost the culturally definable sense of nationality.

I told Ursula that what bewildered most people, American and Japanese, must have been the discovery that a submarine built to fight a nuclear war wasn't able to detect what lay 130 meters above it. In fact, when she wrote to me, The New York Times had just carried a cartoon satirizing that aspect of the accident.

So, when my young colleague, Donald Howard, asked if I planned to write about the matter, I said no. When another colleague, Watanabe, asked if I'd noticed that the U.S. media persisted in calling the Ehime Maru a "fishing boat" or a "trawler" when it was in fact a training ship, I was puzzled.