Chanpon

A few months back, Time magazine Asia had a large cover story summing up Japan's troubles, "Japan: Rising No Longer." A dire, bleak, unsettling overview of the economy and mood in Japan, as we've come to expect from Western journalism. They seem to have increasing numbers of anecdotes and statistics to prove their case.

My favourite part of this series is Japan's Dream Drain, an article by British writer David Mitchell who speaks of being a foreigner in Japan. He is married to a Japanese woman and he has some high hopes and serious reservations about raising a bicultural child in Japan. He hopes to see more tolerance, and as part of that, he proposes an important linguistic shift:

"Ah, so your child will be a Half," I was told by my colleagues when they learned of my wife's pregnancy. "No," I said, "my child will be a Both."