Writes an American in Japan: "I've been an ex pat for 16 years, so it's rare for me to hear native English being spoken by real people anymore. Sometimes I watch Hollywood movies or US television, but those don't count, since people in movies and television (including TV news) are not real. "One day at a coffee shop in Tokyo, a conversation in English cut through the background of Japanese. A young American man was giving an older Japanese man an English lesson a few tables away from me. I tuned back out, but embarrassingly eavesdropped again when I heard the older man ask about America. He said that he knew little about American history and culture and asked the young man if he could teach him a little about them. The young man perked right up, saying that he fancied himself to be a history buff. He became very animated and started writing dates on a paper, then began his outline on American history, adding dates to his list as he worked his way from 1776 to the present.

"The young man presented American history as a continuous series of wars, in chronological order, one after another, war after war. There was the Revolutionary War, the Barbary Wars, the War of 1812, the Creek War, the Mexican-American war, the Civil War, the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, Bosnia, the Iraq War, and he ended with the War on Terror. There were a few other wars in there that I can't recall, so he certainly knew his wars.

"The older man sat in silence. I felt a little uncomfortable, too, like I was listening to a dark comedy. Finally, the old man said, 'That's many wars.'

"He asked the young man, 'And American culture?' The young man was dumbfounded and stumbled for an answer. He offered up television and sports, but the old man said every country had that. His final answer before changing the topic was that 'foreign countries had culture.'"