Okay, I’ve been meaning to write about trash and recycling since I got here in April. In Japan, even such a standard topic has its cultural twists and turns.

When I lived here 10 years ago, the trash and the recyclables were collected on different days, with all of the recyclables going out together in one bag, presumably to be sorted elsewhere. Every neighborhood had a spot where people just piled their bags of trash on the curb for pickup. After the trucks had come and gone, you’d see a local woman out there sweeping up the street around the collection point.

There was also what the ex-pats called Big Gomi day, gomi being ‘trash’ in Japanese, when everything from bicycles to TVs could be kicked to the curb and carted away. I once saw an electric organ being crushed into a garbage truck that was almost the same size as the organ. REALLY big gomi...

A lot of the time, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the stuff. It had just been replaced by newer models. I’ve heard stories of gaijin furnishing their apartments with Big Gomi day finds. I confess to having once rescued a guitar stand from the trash. Oh, yeah. I did grab a discarded bicycle, too, when I had a visitor that needed transportation. That could have actually caused me some trouble because it turns out the owner’s name was painted on the rear fender - like with most bicycles here, I found out - and all bicycles are supposed to be licensed. If I had been stopped by the police, I would have had some ‘splaining to do. Well, not me. My friend was riding it... This naming and licensing of bikes makes their abandonment at the train stations even more difficult to understand.

Anyway, now Big Gomi day seems to be a thing of the past. It’s been replaced by small pickup trucks cruising around with looped recorded messages saying, “Bring out your big gomi” or the equivalent. Very annoying, but I guess efficient enough.

The authorities were then also just starting to eliminate the use of black trash bags and require clear bags so that what was in the bags could be seen. That seemed like a hassle to me, not least of all because I had a new box of black bags and nowhere to use them. I couldn’t have imagined where it was all leading.

My first week back, I couldn’t find a place to leave my trash and it was starting to pile up a bit. I asked Yoh-san what I was missing and he came back with three or four pages of instructions for me on how to sort and send my trash.

First, it depended on which side of the tracks I lived on. We got that worked out and I found the trash storage area for my apartment under the back stairs. Now all I had to do was sort my trash into seven different categories and check the calendar every day to see which type of garbage the trashmen had agreed to receive that day.

The categories are basically burnable and nonburnable. Nonburnable, though, is divided into; recyclable plastic bottles (PET designated, whatever that means); other plastics; recyclable paper; glass; aluminum; batteries, light bulbs and thermometers (!); and miscellaneous such as hair dryers and knives, which are pictured on the printout to avoid confusion. That’s also how I know thermometers go with light bulbs instead of with miscellaneous. There's a picture of a thermometer in that category. Do NOT put the plastic bottle caps in with the plastic bottles, oh no, because they’re made from a different kind of plastic and, so, go with ‘other plastics’.

The paper needs to be tied into bundles and the rest has to be separated into two separate kinds of bags - clear bags for everything except burnable trash which is put into semi-clear bags. Why, you may ask? Haven’t the slightest idea, I would reply. I have a theory, but only a theory, that you can put trash into semi-clear bags because that’s the kind that you get from the supermarkets and it gives those bags an aftermarket use, if you’ll forgive the pun.

What would happen if you put burnable trash in a clear bag, I dare not think.

Of course, this necessitates a trip to the store to buy packages of the proper bags which cannot be distinguished between just by looking at the packages they come in. It requires some knowledge of kanji, of which I have little, and/or questions in Japanese, in which I can’t seem to make the problem understood, so I now have three packages of semi-clear bags, which I don’t need because I can use the supermarket bags, one package of bags which seems to fall somewhere between semi-clear and clear, which is confusing, and just two (2) individual clear bags which I need the most and can’t seem to buy.

One of the other American teachers at my university lives in an area that requires red and yellow bags in some other bizarre scheme that I don’t understand. Come to think of it, red and yellow would be better than clear and semi-clear. I have a feeling, though, that red and yellow bags are in addition to the clear and semi-clear ones, adding another layer to the mystery.

The pictures here, and the one at the top, are on the trash receptacles at the university. Basically, it’s the same process of sorting as I do at home, but these are a bit more specific. You can see where to dispose of your t-shirts and your 2X4s, your sweaters, your socks and your shoes. T-shirts and 2X4s go in the same bin for some reason, but sweaters and socks need to be separated from shoes. Well, of course.

Apparently, Japanese students are in the habit of throwing away their clothes and their construction leftovers at school and some order needed to be imposed on the process.

It’s nice to know that there is recycling going on here, even if it is hard for a foreigner (well, anyway, this foreigner) to figure out. I have to admit, it’s made me aware of the huge amount of trash I generate just by myself and with awareness will come improvement. At least, I hope so, for myself, for Japan and for the rest of the world.

Got on my gentsuki and rode today. It was a beautiful fall day. It was nice and bright and warm all afternoon and actually reminded me of California in the fall. However, as soon as the sun started going down it got chilly and I'm writing this in front of an electric heater. The fall colors are not generally California-like, either. The mountains turn red and gold in Japan this time of year.

The pictures here are from a place called Kamakitako. Kita is 'north' and 'ko' is lake. I think 'kama' refers to the iron pot used in a tea ceremony, maybe describing the look of the small, kind of round lake.

I went up there last month, thinking that the leaves would turn in October, but they didn't. I'm glad that today was such a nice day, and a Sunday, so I had the time and weather to go back. It's only 10 minutes from my apartment, anyway.

I got some nice shots and included a few of them here before going on to write a bit about language.

And here we go...

A while back there was a picture featured in a column in the LA Times of a store in Japan displaying a prominent sign that read 'American Guts'. There seemed to be some question (not to mention shock) as to just what the shop owner was trying to say and the columnist wanted to know what his readers made of it. Well, no problem. For 'Guts' just read 'Goods' and 'Goods', of course just means 'Things'. The sign was just saying that the shop sold stuff from the U.S.

I have to admit that my immediate comprehension of the ad was not due to any particular intellectual jump, but can be laid totally to experience. Having been an ESL instructor for the past 20 (!) years, I'm fairly fluent in English as a Second Language English.

I do enjoy the oddities, I have to admit. To be fair, misuse of English is by no means just the province of new speakers and when I get back from Japan, I’m planning on writing about things I hear in the U.S. that I find amusing, as well.

For now, I’ll stick with where I am and give you some examples of things I’ve found interesting here.

In a small town outside of Tokyo, close to where I live, there is the small, unprepossessing edifice with the humble name of the Hotel Bob. I, personally, find this very funny. Not realizing the inherent cultural casualness of the word 'Bob', the owner of this particular establishment probably just liked the name. It has an American flavor that he wanted for showing sophistication to his clients.

Sometimes things just get lost in the translation, if that's not too overworked a phrase. In the dining room at the Hotel Bob, the management has gone out of its way to create a menu in English. I guess it, too, has to be for the cachet. I seldom see other foreigners in the area and I can't believe it was done exclusively for me, although this falls under the same heading as train announcements in English and Jehovah’s Witnesses with signs in English that I wrote about earlier.

Anyway, about halfway down the breakfast side of the menu, you will come across the entree entry 'Fungus Omelette'. Well, someone had been looking up 'mushroom' in their bilingual dictionary and while it's not exactly incorrect, I'm sure you agree that this is not the type of comestible offering that will exactly get the taste buds tingling in one of the English-speaking persuasion.

There's probably not any sort of a mold subtext going on incountry, even though Japan can be damp in one way or another just about any time of the year, but that reminds me of this. A popular Japanese fast-food chain fashioned, in a fashion, after an American hamburger joint sports the decidedly unappetizing moniker of 'Mos Burger'. Spelling aside, it's not really a name to stir the appetite. Even though conjuring up the idea of a Mos Burger is unlikely to inspire a late night munchies run, it should be noted their hamburgers are actually very good.

Japanese companies that choose to name themselves in English often just seem to marching to a different drummer. In Kawagoe, a similar small city close to the Hotel Bob, you can find Smell Fashion Designers. I don't have a clue how they came up with that one.

Just down the street from them, there's a branch of the electronics chain Hard-Off. Insert your own joke here... and here. Actually, 'hard-off' refers to deeply discounted merchandise, as any Japanese consumer knows.

My personal favorite I just noticed from the window of a friend's car as we drove through the endlessly fascinating streets of Tokyo.

Let me set this up a little.

Some language professionals subscribe to the idea that English found in non-English speaking countries is just another dialect. After all, the English aren't all that happy with what Americans have done to the language, but we still call it English.

One thing that's done to the Mother Tongue on both sides of the Atlantic is to shorten words and change them in many ways in order to adapt to particular situations or tastes. Take the word 'wizard'. Since the days of Merlin, we've lopped off half of the word and changed the meaning to the point where 'wiz' now just means someone who is very good at something... and that other meaning.

The shop in question, the one I observed from the car a few sentences back, was obviously trying for the first association. Unfortunately, it seemed to specialize in items connected to the canine species and there above the front windows, in letters approximately 6 feet high, were the words 'Dog Wiz'. Someone HASN’T been looking in their bilingual slang dictionary.

That makes rather a good segue to product names...

Such as Calpis Water... This Japanese soft drink sounds only vaguely disgusting, but I don't believe an American marketing research company would say 'Yeah. sure. Go ahead with that name. Sounds good to me'. Then add to that the fact that it is a soft drink which boasts milk as its main ingredient . Rather surprisingly, this too is pretty tasty. I much prefer it to Pocari Sweat. Yep, that's a name for another drink. Since it's a sports drink akin to Gatorade, you can see the logic behind the christening. Nothing like a nice cold bottle of Sweat after a good workout. We should consider the fact that Gatorade probably seems like kind of an odd name to the Japanese. I seem to remember it sounded strange to Americans when it first came out, too.

I once saw an a Japanese pencil case shaped and designed like an enlarged roll of lozenges that had the arresting slogan 'With a fresh pine taste'. In the U.S., of course, we reserve pine for scent alone and it has this connection with bathrooms that may tend to take away one's appetite. Displayed among other small oddities on a shelf at my house, you can see a box of Tobacco Candy. Just so there is no misunderstanding, the label also includes the words 'Tobacco Flavor'. Apparently it's a diet candy, because the makers also marked it clearly as 'non-sugar'. Of course. Who would want to eat sugar with their tobacco?

You may have noticed that the examples I'm coming up with here aren't really broken English, but just English that is used differently than you might expect. It's a big culture thing, the way language is used and you can't say it's being used wrongly, just ... oddly.

More next time...

One of the perks of working in a university in Japan is the time off. For instance, there were no classes last week because of the Komasai, the annual student festival.

Since I was going to be off from Friday to Friday, I decided to travel somewhere for at least a few days. I immediately ran into a problem, which should come as no surprise if you’ve actually been reading this blog.

The problem this time was that I couldn’t make hotel reservations online because I didn’t have a credit card. Let me rephrase that. I had a credit card, but it had been canceled. Why? Well, in accordance with some apparently divine plan to mess up everything I tried to do to come to Japan this time, my credit union had merged with another credit union and all cards had been canceled and reissued.

The problem was, no one bothered to tell me about it. I had gotten some information in the mail, I found out later, but of course that information was sitting on the kitchen table 5,000 miles away.

It took some time to get straightened out, but I had the card activated and put in the mail to Japan. However, the numbers wouldn’t work online for some reason. I didn’t really want to venture too far without a reservation or even a credit card. When I think about that, I realize how much I’ve changed. I once slept in a circus tent and lived on sausage and hard rolls for three days in London waiting for my flight home after I had overstayed my budget. I arrived back in L.A. without enough money to make a phone call for someone to come and pick me up. Come to think of it, that may be why I don’t want to do that anymore.

Anyway, there was plenty to see and do on day trips around Tokyo and I made my plans accordingly. On Saturday, I went to a huge book fair in Kanda, the used book store area of Tokyo. I buy and sell books in California in my spare time, so this was just great for me. I bought a nice book on Japanese art and culture from 1940 and saw a few tons of other books and had a nice day at it.

On Sunday, some friends took me out to an Italian restaurant for lunch and when I mentioned having gone to the book fair, they insisted on giving me a set of 12 ukio e (an old style of Japanese art) books that they were going to throw out. Throw out! I spend a lot of time trying to find books like that. There’s a different trash/recycle mentality here that I’ll have to get into at a later time. Anyway, that was another good day for me.

On Tuesday, I undertook a train trip to a place called Mt. Takao or Takao-san as the Japanese call it. It’s actually considered part of Tokyo, but it’s three-hour train ride for me - each way. There’s an online trip planner for trains in Japan, so it was relatively easy for me to figure out how to get there.

I got off to kind of a late start mostly because I don’t like getting up early, so I didn’t arrive until early afternoon. Let’s see - walk, train, change trains, change train, wait, change train, change train, wait again, change train, walk, cable car, Mt. Takao - yeah, about three hours.

The first thing you see from the mountaintop is a tremendous view across the Kanto plain all the way back to Tokyo proper. It really is an amazing view. Pictures can’t do it justice.

Mt. Takao is known for its fall scenery and since it’s fall and Tuesday was a national holiday as well as a day off for my university, it was a bit crowded. There were even a few gainjin (foreigners), which I never see in my home area. On the mountain, the main destination is a temple that’s been there since forever, I guess. I wandered around until I found it and was duly impressed. After that I just took off walking to see what I could see. I wasn’t worried about where I was because I realized long ago that you can’t get lost if you don’t know where you’re going in the first place. That’s been my philosophy of life. You may think that sounds a bit shallow, but it’s worked out for me so far.

So I walked and walked and thought about turning around and going back the way I had come and heading home, but I kept wanting to see what was around the next bend. That’s a corollary to my personal philosophy, by the way. Well, what I found around the last bend was the picture you see on this page.

I didn’t even know I was anywhere close to Mt. Fuji (Fuji-san) and was rather startled to see it off in the distance. What a reward for a long walk and a long day. The picture was taken with a telephoto, but the color is what my camera recorded, unaltered. It was just before sunset. That’s what gives the mountain its shine.

It was beginning to get dark so I turned round and headed back to the cable car. As I walked down the steps back by the temple, I noticed a group of people standing in the middle of the walkway with their cameras out. When I got to where they were, I saw what had stopped them. There was a full moon rising over Tokyo.

It was twilight on the mountain in the trees, but still daylight on the Kanto plain. What the combination of dark and light and city and moon and trees and mountain created was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. It was surreal. I took several pictures, hoping to capture the scene, but when I looked at them later, none of them had come out. Something with the distance and the differing light caused bad exposures

and longer exposures which I hadn’t kept still enough for. I was very disappointed, but the picture you see here can give you some idea of what it looked like. This one was taken further down the trail when it was getting darker. It was still beautiful, but I missed capturing that golden scene at the first stop and I’ll always regret that.

Well, as I said, it was getting dark. Everyone was leaving the mountain and there was a wait for the cable car to get back down. After that, it was the train ride in reverse and three hours later, I was walking up the five flights of stairs to my apartment. Not quite like climbing up to a temple...

The next day there were still no classes. I went to school in the afternoon to start to get ready for Friday, but it was still an easy schedule for the last couple of days off.

The thing about living in the midst of a different culture is that every day has the possibility of showing you something new. My week off showed me the magic of the unexpected and made me realize. I live in Japan.

This is another picture from my balcony. You can see a little bit of what I mean about the overhead wires.

That's the train station in the front. At the back of the picture is a pachinko parlor, one of two in the immediate area.

The second pachinko parlor across the parking lot from me moved into the ground floor of my apartment building while I was gone in August. The move included various sprucing up of the building - painting, new signs, general remodeling - so it’s not all bad. It does get a little noisy occasionally as the late-night players are removed from the premises so that the place can get cleaned up for the next day’s business. I don’t know why a move of about 20 yards should make the clientele louder, but it seems to have done so.

I’m guessing they moved just because the space is a bit larger. Apparently pachinko parlors aren’t suffering because of the economy the way Las Vegas is. Oh, yeah. Maybe some of you don’t know pachinko is a gambling game... of sorts.

What it is, as near as I can tell, is a kind of pinball game. The way it works is that the players shoot what look like small ball bearings through a vertical pinball-like table that is more the size of a slot machine. Getting the balls to go in the right place triggers a payoff of more balls, the object being to accumulate as many of the balls as you can. That’s it.

This shooting of the balls is rapid-fire, not just one at a time like in a standard pinball game. Now imagine a room full of people throwing a bunch of steel ball bearings into machines made of glass and metal and catching the cascading steel balls in buckets. The noise level is hard to believe. There is some serious sound-proofing going on in pachinko halls that keeps the noise in or else they wouldn’t be able to exist in the residential neighborhoods like they do. Lucky for me, too, being that I’m a mere four floors above one. That’s a positive point of living on the fifth floor, I guess.

I like to take people who come to visit me through a pachinko parlor just so they can hear what it’s like. We usually last about about two minutes before heading back to the quiet, peaceful traffic in the streets. The pachinko patrons, though, spend hours at a time watching those little balls rolling down the boards.

You might wonder, as I did, how these people could stand the noise for such long periods of time. Well, it turns out that the pachinko balls fit perfectly into one’s ears and if you look, you’ll see that everyone in the place is using a pair of them as stainless-steel earplugs.

Often when I’m walking past a pachinko parlor early in the morning, I see people lined up outside waiting for the place to open. It reminds me of when I was working in a pub in London. The legal opening hour was 11 a.m. and every day, people would be lined up outside waiting to get in. If we were even one minute late they would start pounding on the doors and complain quite bitterly to us once they made it in.

I’m sure pachinko has addictive qualities similar to alcohol and gambling. And it is gambling, but in a uniquely Japanese way.

In fact, gambling is illegal in Japan. There are no casinos in the entire country. Online gambling is against the law as well, with no money transfers from banks to gambling sites allowed. So, for pachinko, they give prizes for the number of ball bearings that a customer accumulates. It’s not considered gambling to compete for prizes. BUT then what they do is take the prizes to a little window located somewhere close by outside, in the same building, mind you. There they sell the prizes back to the pachinko parlor and walk off with the cash. I’ve had a couple of students tell me they can make good money playing pachinko.

Good money, eh? And here I am living right over a pachinko parlor. All I would have to do after a hard day of pachinkoing would be to stagger up five flights of stairs. Hmmm...

The picture here is of my view to the west from my balcony. It can be very pretty and transcends the often tacky-feeling urban landscape.

The view of the town is actually interesting to me. With the overhanging wires and the houses crowded together as they are, if I were in California, I would consider it much differently. The novelty of the Japanese urban landscape, to me anyway, gives it charm. It won’t let me forget the corresponding novelty of just where I am in this world.

The second picture is looking down on the street in front of my apartment building. The streets in Japan can be, often are, very narrow. Even in Tokyo, they can seem more like alleys to North Americans. In addition, sidewalks are often lacking. This puts life right in the streets. It’s not unusual to have someone walking on each side of the street, a car going each way, and a scooter or bicycle threading its way between them. I don't know why the streets aren't littered with wrecks and bodies, but everyone seems to know what everyone else is doing - everyone except me, that is.

All that activity is something that I have to get used to in addition to driving on the left. It’s much more complicated than it seems. No one reacts in a manner that one used to driving elsewhere would expect.

Just the other day I was waiting on my scooter to make a right turn. There was someone coming towards me in the opposite lane and he made a left on the same street that I was going to turn on. There was a car following him and I waited for that one to pass and then accelerated into my turn only to find that the car that had turned before me had stopped 10 feet up the street, in my lane, to let someone out. This put me in the position of having to go from acceleration to a dead stop in about 1 second flat. I did it, but I had some choice California driving expressions for the guy.

I’ve adopted the Japanese habit of riding scooters in the rain, too, at least on occasion. I’ve mentioned before that it’s done all the time here. Yesterday, on my way to work, I saw three different people riding their scooters in the rain carrying umbrellas. I don’t even know how that works. You have to keep one hand on the throttle, of course. How can you brake? I learned the hard way when I was in 6th grade that you don’t hit your brakes even on a bicycle unless you have both hands on the handlebars. I’ve got the scars to remind me of that particular lesson.

Another thing I can’t get used to is the attitude of pedestrians.

Today I was driving along, rather slowly because there were pedestrians, and a university student started to walk into the street in

front of me without even looking to his right - the direction I was coming from. I thought, “Wow. How did he get to that stage of his life with a lack of a sense of self-preservation like that?” As he stepped in front of me, he turned and looked me in the eye and I thought, okay, he sees me and he’ll stop. Nope. He looked at me and continued to walk right in front of my moving scooter. Apparently, he expected me to stop, and I did, but it seems to me that a pedestrian would not count on a driver and vehicle being so obliging. He’s the one that’s going to suffer if it doesn’t work out the way he hopes.

That particular kind of incident has happened to me before. When I told my Japanese friends these stories, they agreed that the actions were dangerous and said that they, personally, wouldn’t do anything like that, but that they are common occurrences.

It’s culture again. Somehow, the people in the cars and on the scooters and bikes and those walking along the streets anticipate what all of the others are going to do. The constant movement in the streets, as well as the overall crowding, seems to give people almost like a sixth sense.

I’m sure it doesn’t always end happily, but I’ve only seen two accidents in my time in Japan, and I was in one of them. The first time I lived here, about 15 years ago, driving a scooter on an international permit, I got run off the road by a woman in a car coming towards me who looked me right in the eye and made a turn in front of me anyway. We were obviously working on different signals.

It makes me worry about Japanese students and tourists visiting the U.S. They have to unlearn quickly what they know about traffic in Japan in order to stay safe and it goes well beyond just driving on the opposite side of the road.

By the way, did I mention that I’m now living over a pachinko parlor? Stay tuned.

I’ve mentioned convenience stores in Japan before. Let me add a little detail.

For starters, they’re everywhere, in great variety. There’s Lawson Station, Daily Yamazaki, New Days, Familymart, Sunkus - which is part of Circle K, of which I’ve also seen a couple - and still others, including, of course, 7-Eleven.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the picture. 7-Eleven in Japan is now known as 7&iHoldings.

Why would they do that? The name 7-Eleven is short and clever, even though an anachronism since the advent of the 24-hour store, and it’s a world brand. With its subsidiaries, 7-Eleven is now the largest distribution and retailing business in Japan and the largest chain store in the world. 7&iHoldings sounds just like what it is - a holding company.

It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? “Honey, could you run down to the 7&iHoldings and get a quart of milk?”

I trace this change to language cultural differences. When business people in the U.S. start something new, one of the biggest things they consider is the name. It has to be catchy, it has to be clever, it has to be memorable.

Now I agree that 7&iHoldings is memorable, but not in a good way. I think that when the company got taken over by Japanese owners, the American penchant for creative brand names was not understood, language-wise.

Japanese companies go by different rules. They’ve got a chain of convenience stores called Sunkus and a gum called Xylish, for crying out loud. Those words don’t mean anything in any language.

I believe this is the same process at work as the one that puts nonsense English phrases on t-shirts and names cars Naked. There is just not the feel for the language that comes with being brought up in the culture.

As I’ve mentioned before, this isn’t so much criticism as observation. I am well aware that I can’t convey the same feeling in my Japanese that a native speaker can. No matter what languages we’re speaking about, it’s extremely hard to get to the point where a person sounds like a native speaker. When you add culture to that mix, it becomes even more difficult.

On the one hand, in Japan, it doesn’t matter if 7&iHoldings sounds and looks odd to English speakers. Most of the people who see the signs don’t have the feeling for the language, either, so it makes no difference to them. On the other hand, it’s a world-wide name and I don’t think it will fly in English-speaking countries.

My prediction is that the name will revert to 7-Eleven before long or at least that 7&iHoldings will never be on any stores in countries where English is the first language.

Names aside, however, patronizing a convenience store in Japan is a different experience from going into one in the States.

The first thing you’ll notice is that when you walk in, all of the employees will greet you, often at the same time. The greeting is “Irasshaimase”, usually said rather loudly, and since you’re not the only one entering the store, the greeting is echoing around the place the entire time you’re shopping. (Actually, this will happen in all stores and restaurants.)

Being naturally polite, I have the feeling that I should be walking around the store and saying ‘Thank you. I’m glad to be here’ to everyone.

It’s a stronger feeling after I make my purchase and the entire staff thanks me on my way out (Arigato gozaimashita). I have a hard time not saying ‘You’re welcome’ to each person I pass.

There’s a little bit of insincerity in this because while the employees are walking around doing their jobs, every once in a while they just suddenly come out with the greetings and the thank yous. If someone says ‘Welcome’, that’s a cue for everyone to echo it. The same is true for thank you. When the first clerk says thank you, everyone jumps in. You get the feeling that they don’t really mean it after a while. Still, it’s a polite insincerity.

I can’t help comparing it to clerks in the U.S. saying ‘Have a nice day’. Can you imagine all of the workers repeating that as you’re walking out the door? For me, it’s annoying enough for one person to say it. I’ll be glad when that expression dies a natural death, although I don’t think it’s going to be any time soon. It’s been around for going on 40 years already.

Embarrassingly, I remember having a ‘Have a nice day’ sticker on my backpack when I first went to Europe in 1973. I was only using it to cover up the insignia on my Official Boy Scout backpack, which I felt was more embarrassing, but even then it was getting to feel overdone. In my defense, it was not a Smiley face sticker, but had a more artistically designed smiling sun. That’s at least marginally better, but there's a reason that I still remember it after 36 years. I'm embarrassed in retrospect.

I know the phrase is trite and has outlived it’s usefulness and original intent because when I go to stores in the U.S., the checkout people always say ‘Have a nice day’ no matter what time it is. To me, it’s blindingly incongruous, as well as annoying, to say this to someone at six or seven p.m. That’s an example of insincerity if ever there was one. My response is always “Too late for that”, but no one ever seems to get it.

Now, even though the call-and-response in convenience stores here seems a little overdone on occasion, the clerks are unfailingly polite and helpful, even to one of the non-Japanese speaking persuasion. It’s a pleasure shopping there and I wind up in one or another almost every day, often to buy another umbrella (see my earlier postings). They’re very... convenient.