Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.

Major power and telephone grids have long been controlled by computer networks, but now similar systems are embedded in such mundane objects as electric meters, alarm clocks, home refrigerators and thermostats, video cameras, bathroom scales, and Christmas-tree lights - all of which are, or soon will be, accessible remotely.

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.

The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names.

The human propensity is to believe that flukes of good fortune will never come to an end.

A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.