On June 7, The New York Times' op-ed columnist Bob Herbert wrote an intriguing piece about the United States in 1968, recalling the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy exactly 40 years ago, and also referring to Sen. Barack Obama clinching the 2008 Democratic Party nomination for the presidency.

"The United States in 1968," he wrote, "was a stunningly different place from the country we know now, so different that most of today's young people would have trouble imagining it."

This got me to thinking about 1968 in Japan, my second year of living in this country.