Even in the midst of my fixation with katakana, I sensed there was something boringly predictable about dwelling on this aspect of Japanese. Certainly I feel it now. I think about all of those people from Anglophone cultures who have visited Japan and have regaled me endlessly with examples of the nonsense English they’ve seen splashed across T-shirts, pencil cases and signs; similarly, I’ve conversed with any number of Japanese people whose first comment on their adventures abroad, before any reflections on how the country or the people were, was about the sushi restaurant where the lantern reading irrashaimasse was hanging upside down, or where all the employees were Chinese or Korean. Come on, I want to say, what about all the other stuff? Surely the ways in which your language or your culinary culture has been used or misused is less interesting than almost everything else about that nation, and the experience you had there? Whoever was doing it, this cultural navel-gazing seemed to me to reveal an inner miserliness, a horrible pedantry of the soul.