One duty of all foreign residents of Japan is to pick up a bunch of Japanese "things." You know, the knickknack, bric-a-brac, give-the-junk-a-home type of stuff that is probably cluttering up your dwelling even now.

Perhaps you have a yellowed calligraphy scroll hanging on your wall, one that you can't read and -- in fact -- no one can read, for it was scrawled two centuries ago on a night when the artist fell under the inspiration of eight flasks of sake. Yet you pretend to understand in order to impress guests and make them yearn for similar inscrutable scribbles.

Or maybe you have a cupboard full of stylish Japanese pottery, dishware that you scramble to protect with every teensy earth tremor, but otherwise only touch when you dust.