NEW YORK — So Roger Cohen, a relatively new columnist with The New York Times, concluded after a brief stay in Tokyo earlier this month that Japan is a society laid low by "a tremendous conformity" and trivialized by "otaku" ("Japanese Obsessions," Dec. 14).

I don't remember when American transients in Japan started taking delight in characterizing Japanese society as conformist, but it certainly is not recent. I wrote a piece on this topic more than two decades ago. The surprise is that there remain people who resort to that mantra.

Still, one thing in Cohen's report struck me — an example he gave as a sign of Japanese conformity. "On Sundays, when traffic is closed around the Imperial Palace," he wrote, "I saw lines of people waiting for pedestrian lights to change even though there were no cars." Really?