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

Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.

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

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

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

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

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.