| Sep 14, 2001

Disney domination

by Suzanne Kamata

I should have known that Disney characters would one day take over my home. When my husband Yoshi and I married eight years ago, one of our wedding presents was a framed, stained-glass picture of Donald and Daisy Duck, our names and date of ...

| Aug 10, 2001

We are family . . .

by Charles E. Mcjilton

My seven brothers and sisters testify to the reality that families come in all sizes, shapes and colors. We range in shades from straight coffee to cafe latte to cream. My daughter’s mother is Japanese, and since birth my daughter has had two households. ...

| Jul 13, 2001

Whatever can go wrong . . .

by Mark Schilling

Writers of how-to articles about traveling with kids usually talk about Baby’s ears popping in airplanes and keeping little Junior and Sis amused on long drives so they don’t refight the Macedonian War in the back seat. Older kids, these writers seem to assume, ...

| Jun 22, 2001

Sho-chan's send-off

by Barbara Sumner

In Japan, leave-takings are marked with fanfare. Parties, gifts, speeches, photos, train-platform farewells, never-ending waves goodbye and bows — the Japanese really know how to say sayonara. As a long-term resident of Japan, I have been on the receiving end of these rituals many ...

| May 18, 2001

A journey with two routes

by Barbara Sumner

Like every other woman crammed into the waiting-room couches at the infertility clinic, I was desperate to conceive a child. Trying to become pregnant through artificial means had consumed my emotional and physical energy for over three years. Every time a heavily pregnant woman, ...

| May 4, 2001

Big threat in a small box

by Steve McClure

I’m sure I speak for many parents out there who have had to deal with a threat to their children’s mental and physical well-being more terrifying than television, more pernicious than pornography and more insidious than ijime. I speak, of course, of the frightening ...

| Apr 27, 2001

Being completely fair

by Alice Gordenker

When I brought my children to Japan a year ago, I expected they’d pick up on certain things faster than me. I did not, however, anticipate that they’d so quickly succumb to the Japanese national obsession with janken. Granted, janken is not unique to ...