My 77-year-old mother taps out e-mails on her iPhone no sweat, but she still asks me, “Will my e-mail address work on that computer?”

The traditional inn nestled amid the mountainous countryside offered all the luxurious comforts for which these old-style hotels are famous.

After 10 months at a U.S. boarding school, it’s as if the Japanese words stored in his brain have been replaced with English ones that flow forth freely every time he opens his mouth.

My friends in New York City laugh at me when I tell them of my latest fear: dying alone and not being discovered for weeks.

I got a lot of kudos recently for finishing the Tokyo Marathon, my first long race.

The letters on my nails have nearly grown out, but I can still read them.

The woman at the lost baggage counter at the Portland, Oregon, airport took down my information matter-of-factly and told me my luggage would be delivered overnight.

“Is it dangerous here?” my 12-year-old son asks me as we walk down a street in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan

“What are you going to say if I don’t make it?” my son asked me before he left for a long-distance ocean swim required by his school.

Imagine seeing your office building swept away in a wave and then spending all night on a freezing rooftop watching your beloved fishing boat on fire drifting back and forth in a murky ocean gone wild.

A surreal chorus of clipped buzzing noises pierced the silence on my rush hour commuter train one morning this week.

As I sat down with my laptop that evening, some hours after the massive earthquake had struck Japan, my cellphone emitted a grating squeal.

A few weeks ago, I casually agreed to join a group of mothers who wanted to wear kimonos to our children’s elementary school graduation ceremony.

“There’s a beautiful, beautiful goddess in the toilet. Clean it every day, and you’ll be beautiful like the goddess.”

I was blown away when my son told me he wanted to do his sixth grade research project on Japan’s human torpedoes, the manned missiles that crashed themselves into enemy ships toward the end of World War II.

Racial profiling had never struck me as a personal issue.

The drizzly weather didn’t dampen the excitement at the annual spring imperial party last month as the royal family strolled along Tokyo’s Akasaka Palace grounds.

The postcard-sized paper my son brought home from school had four imposing Chinese characters written vertically down the middle.

When I e-mailed a school mother to congratulate her on her daughter’s prize-winning report, she wrote back that she didn’t know anything about it.

As I gazed up enthralled at the ornate, pink columns in the ancient city of Petra, I heard the annoying chant again: “Chi chi no cement.”