A few columns ago I wrote about pen pals. A Japanese woman who had spent many years in the United States found readjustment to Japan difficult. She discovered she had little in common with her former Japanese friends; to them, she was a foreigner. Her American friends wanted to communicate by e-mail but she wasn't ready for even the first step into computerization. I suggested that she shouldn't resist the wonderful world of computers and should explore new horizons, and that the pen-pal concept has become outdated by new technology. I reported that some people misuse pen-pal organizations and prey upon the loneliness of those who choose to write letters to strangers, and that it might be better to find ways of making friends through social or volunteer organizations.

Oops!

Readers have written in defense of correspondence with pen pals. A teacher of English writes, "I understand your point about e-mail. I too find it very useful. However, the pen pal via old-fashioned letters is not entirely out of the picture. Many of my university students do not yet own or even have access to a computer. For them, written letters are still a valid means of making friends in foreign countries. I believe the cautions you suggested (that some people use pen pals to promote questionable businesses or relationships) apply even more to e-mail since authors can easily assume an identity without revealing themselves in any way."

Yes, I must agree. I never had the pen-pal experience, but obviously many others have. I think you too will be convinced by this letter from a gentleman who treasures his pen-pal memories:

"Sunday morning, sitting at my desk, a cup of coffee, catching up on my e-mail and other correspondence, your column in today's Japan Times on the changes communication technologies have wrought on a gentler world of pen pals and written correspondence gave me pause for reflection.

"Among my e-mail was a birthday card from a very dear, old friend I have known for some 40 years. She is now 97 years old and would agree with you that it is far easier to use a computer than to write letters by hand.

"At the same time, I was opening my postal mail with an old brass letter opener. It is not a particularly attractive one with its representation of Jeanne d'Arc on the handle, but somehow it has survived some 30 years of traveling abroad with me. As I look at it, it takes me back some 45 years when I received it from a French pen friend, Jean-Claude in Clermont-Ferrand. For an Australian then, "overseas" was exotically distant. To travel abroad was an enviable luxury for a few, and was done mostly by passenger ship; direct, real-time, multimedia coverage was limited to such things as radio commentary on 'The Ashes' from England.

"Pen pals then were a personal exposure to an outside world that was so frustratingly distant. These letters also contributed to stamp collections and brought this outside world alive with new and interesting perspectives. They certainly stimulated my own interest, and compulsion to live and work abroad.

"I wonder what happened to Jean-Claude. And I must add that writing this makes me feel very old."

I wonder where it starts, this inbred determination to live somewhere else, some exotic foreign land. For me, I think it began at a great aunt's house. She traveled around the world with her big-game-hunting husband. Here is a picture of him with a rhinoceros, over there with a lion. She brought me a compact (I was a child, I was thrilled to have a beauty tool) with vivid blue butterfly wings from South America. She had a cabinet filled with tiny, exquisite mementos of faraway places. I coveted them all and wanted to go everywhere, see everything.

But perhaps it started even earlier. I recently rediscovered a box from my mother, things she had put aside for me before she died. There was a towel, my first embroidery. A note said that I chose the pattern myself. The stitches are awkward; I was very young. They outline a Japanese woman in kimono with a baby on her back and holding a parasol. I have no memory of it whatsoever, but the curiosity about somewhere else must already have been apparent. I suppose my friends, who are still in South Bend, Indiana, must have embroidered kittens and daffodils.