Some email and online comments in response to Thomas Dillon's last "When East Marries West" column:
I can really feel for the gent from Iowa who has been living in Japan for 25 years and now wants to go back home. I was an eikaiwa ESL teacher in Tokyo in the 1980s. I thought that when we went back home to Virginia in 1989 the world would be knocking on my door to hire me. Instead, I went through a horrendous reverse culture shock and living off my retirement savings from a previous U.S. job as well as working five part-time jobs for two years until one of them finally went full-time. I'm still in that job.
It was a completely new area — distance education — that a friend was heading up and hired me for as I was passing by his office in a university one day. All completely by chance!