Word: taxies
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...Joji Obara was born in 1952 to an impoverished Korean family in postwar Osaka. His father had been a scrap collector, then a taxi driver who worked his way into owning a fleet of cars and a string of pachinko parlors from which he amassed a fortune. Perhaps mindful of the discrimination faced by Koreans, when the young Obara - then known by his Korean name Kim - was asked to pen a farewell sentiment in his junior-high class yearbook, he wrote: "Upbringing is more important than family name...
...NICK OREDSON: INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST The taxi deposited me at Newark International with an impossibly large pile of stuff. Multiple pairs of skis, poles, clothing, waxes and a portable ski bench only rounded out half the load. The other half included various shooting accessories including, of course, my rifle. During my years of working summers in Alaska I transported firearms regularly during travels to the last frontier. However, no matter how many times you do it, there is nothing like walking through a crowded airport with a fully functional firearm and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in your bags. It never...
...What do you think of Japan?" is also how ritual exchanges between less celebrated Westerners and Japanese taxi drivers begin. The required answer is as bound by ritual as the question. Certain stock phrases are to be avoided. Admiration of samurai, kimono, Mount Fuji or geisha is, on the whole, not well received. For, like those wrong-headed textbooks, this might suggest that modern, international, metropolitan Japan is not sufficiently appreciated...
...books with "geisha" in the title, it is understandable that contemporary Japanese are a little touchy about what some call "the Fujiyama-geisha view of Japan." It is indeed patronizing to admire a country only for stereotypical images of the past. To be sure, anyone who tells a Japanese taxi driver that he is from Chicago will be subjected to remarks about gangsters, and Dutch visitors will hear more about tulips and windmills than they might wish, but that is different. They are not Japanese...
...when the Tokyo taxi driver, the reporter at Narita airport or the anxious newspaper pollster abroad asks Westerners what they think about Japan, they do not expect a sharp analysis or some illuminating insight. They want a token of admiration for the performance of modern Japan. When taxi drivers or pollsters stop asking that question, when Japanese don't give a damn anymore about what foreigners think of them, we will know that something fundamental has changed. But until that day, which I do not expect to see soon, the country-cousin anxiety will remain as an integral part...