Dear Alice, I was on a two-week home stay in the countryside of Japan when a visitor came to the house. I don’t think he was expected, but my home-stay mother greeted him like an old friend and fetched a plastic drawer-box from the ...

Dear Alice, This may seem like a stupid question, or too trivial a subject for you, but what the heck is the symbol that precedes the post code on every piece of domestic mail I receive here in Japan? I’m sure you know what ...

Although photography entered Japan in the mid-19th century, it took time to spread beyond the few port cities permitted to engage in trade with the West at that time. As a result, it was several decades before this imported Western technology reached outlying districts, ...

Dear Alice, I live in a medium-size city in Saitama Prefecture and am puzzled by a speaker system mounted on a huge pole right outside my apartment. Every evening at 5 p.m., music plays from the speakers for 20 or 30 seconds and then ...

Dear Alice, I’m curious about the prevalence of white gloves in Japan. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, all sorts of people wear white gloves on the job here, including taxi drivers, police officers and elevator girls. I have no idea if this is true, ...

Dear Alice, I was out for a walk with my camera the other day and came across a puzzling scene. I saw people putting what I thought were squares of dark paper onto easels in the sun, as if to dry. But when I ...

Dear Alice, My Japanese mother-in-law is very traditional and spends at lot of time maintaining the family butsudan, the cabinet-like Buddhist altar in the main room of her home. It is part of her daily routine to light candles, pray and make small offerings ...

Dear Alice, Thank you as always for your interesting column. I have a question about those temporary bulletin boards that crop up from time to time, the ones with the blank squares with numbers in the center. One appeared recently near my home, soon ...

Dear Alice, I’ve lived in Japan for four years and although I speak a fair amount of Japanese, I can’t make out what the heck ambulance crews are saying on their loudspeakers when they’re trying to get through traffic. Are those set phrases or ...

Dear Alice, My question is about those straw belts that get wrapped around the trunks of pine trees a meter or so above the ground. I know they have something to do with fooling insects into laying their eggs in the straw instead of ...

“Made in Japan” is a such a simple phrase, yet it instantly evokes an image of exceptional design and high-quality production. Japan today is known for creating some of the most stylish, innovative and whimsical products in the world. Tokyo-based architect and writer Naomi ...

Dear Alice, I travel a lot within Japan, and often come across a dated sort of tourist attraction that I don’t know quite how to describe. They are wooden façades, often hand-painted and rather amateurish, depicting a person or persons with a hole where ...