My coworker Hirai has called more than three hundred strangers in America. Always at night. Always the same five questions. He works in HR at our office in Tokyo. When we hire someone in America, he checks their references by phone. In Japan, a reference check takes two minutes. The old boss says, "He caused no problems." That is the highest praise we have. You hang up. In America, Hirai says, you do not hang up. You get comfortable. Some of his notes: "Is she reliable?" "Sir, in 2019 her car died in a blizzard and she walked four miles to open the store. Then she apologized for being late. Next question." "Would you hire him again?" "Hire him, adopt him, put him in my will. My wife is telling me to calm down. I won't." "Any weaknesses?" "He can't make coffee. We all tried to teach him. It isn't coffee. It's a cry for help." "How do you know her?" "I was her fourth-grade teacher. Haven't seen her in nineteen years. She was the one who sat with the new kid. Hire her." "Why did he leave your company?" "We closed. He was the last man out. He swept the floor of a building we'd already sold." Then came Tobias, applying to our office in Nashua, New Hampshire. His résumé had a two-year gap. In Japan, a gap ends the conversation. He had listed one reference. "Gwen Barlow (Mom). She'll tell you the truth." Nobody in our department had ever called somebody's mother. Hirai called anyway. 11 p.m., Tokyo time. She talked for forty minutes. He wrote down all of it. "He was in the Army. Two deployments. He came home and didn't say much for most of a year. He slept in his truck, in my driveway. I left the porch light on every night. Some mornings he came in for breakfast. Those were good mornings. Then one morning in June, I heard the mower. He did my lawn. Then the neighbor's. Then the whole street. No one asked. He just needed to finish something. That's what the gap is, honey. Him finding his way back to the lawn. He's back now. Please. Just meet him." Under her last sentence, Hirai wrote one word. "Hire." Tobias runs second shift now. Best attendance in the building. Every Saturday, he mows the strip of grass in front of the office. Nobody asked him to. Hirai has a note taped above his phone. He wrote it the night of that call. "In Japan, references tell you what a man did. In America, they tell you who he is." (Gwen has mailed our Tokyo office a Christmas card two years running. It is addressed to "Hirai, the Nice Man Who Called." HR has no idea where to file it.)

Our office has a jar now. A hundred yen every time somebody says "y'all." Blame my coworker. Twelve months in Tennessee turned him into a man who says "y'all" to our boss, holds doors for twelve people at a time, and tells juniors he's proud of them. Some of you remember him. It spread. So in September, Accounting did what Accounting does. They made rules. They taped a price list to the jar. "Y'all": ¥100 "All y'all": ¥200 "Fixin' to": ¥100 (Please state what you are fixing.) Holding the door for more than five people: ¥100 Asking the cleaning lady about her weekend, and then actually listening: ¥300 Telling a coworker you're proud of them: ¥500 (Covers tissues.) Making sweet tea in the kettle again: ¥1,000 (Cleaning fee. The kettle has not recovered.) The jar was supposed to stop it. Here is what happened instead. Week 1: My coworker paid ¥4,300. On Monday. He paid in advance for Tuesday. Week 2: The head of Accounting, who wrote the rules, said "y'all" on a call with a client in Osaka. The client said "y'all" back. Nobody knows how. The client now pays into our jar by bank transfer, with a memo line that just says "Y'ALL." Week 3: Mrs. Tsutsumi, who cleans our floor, asked what the jar was for. Somebody explained. She put in ¥1,000. "In advance," she said. She is 67. She has never been asked about her weekend this many times in her life, and she has decided she likes it. Her weekends have gotten noticeably more interesting. We suspect she is doing it for us. Week 4: Somebody added a line to the price list in pen. "Bless your heart: ¥1,000. (We found out what it means.)" Week 5: Our quietest new hire gave her first presentation. At the end, very softly, she said, "Thank y'all." Then she walked over and paid. Proudly. People clapped. She paid another ¥100 for the clapping, which was not a rule. She just wanted to. Week 6: The jar was too full to close. Accounting bought a bigger jar. Accounting said "y'all" while buying it. The receipt is taped to the new jar as evidence. Then, in week 7, my coworker stopped saying it. Not once. All week. The man who says "y'all" forty times before lunch went quiet. He held the door for nobody. He ate at his desk. The jar didn't get a single coin from him. It was the worst week the jar has ever had, and nobody was happy about it. Finally somebody asked him what was wrong. A tornado had gone through the little town where he lived in Tennessee. His old neighbor across the road is named Coy. Seventy-one. Volunteer fire chief for forty years. Never been paid a cent for it. Coy is the one who taught him "y'all." The one who taught him to hold the door, because "you never know who's carrying something heavy you can't see." And halfway through that year, when my coworker's father died in Japan, it was Coy who drove him to the airport in Nashville at 4 a.m. Coy wouldn't let him carry his own bag. At the curb, he put both hands on my coworker's shoulders and said, "You go be with your mama. We'll be right here." That night, after the tornado passed, Coy didn't go check on the fire hall first. He walked his own road with a flashlight, knocking on every door, the way he always does. Every house. Every widow. Every dog. Then he went to see about the fire hall. Coy was okay. His trucks were okay. The roof of the fire hall was gone. Nobody in our office called a meeting. Nobody voted. The head of Accounting walked to the jar, picked it up with both arms like a baby, and carried it to my coworker's desk. ¥186,400. Then people started getting up. The director put in a ¥10,000 bill and said, very clearly, "Y'all." Then another one. "Y'all." Then a third. He claimed this was "per the rules." It was not per the rules. He knew. He did it anyway, looking straight ahead, so nobody would see his face. Mrs. Tsutsumi brought an envelope from her locker. She didn't say how much was in it. She put it in and went back to work. The quiet new hire put in the envelope her grandmother had given her when she got this job. Still sealed. Somebody in Accounting tried to pay with a single American dollar he'd kept since a trip to Hawaii in 2009. Accounting accepted it at an exchange rate of ¥10,000. Nobody objected. We sent ¥820,000. About five and a half thousand dollars. To a volunteer fire department in a town in Tennessee most of us can't pronounce. There's a Japanese custom for hard times and goodbyes: everyone writes a message on one big square card. So we did that too. Forty-one people. Japanese and English. Some of the English was very bad. Mrs. Tsutsumi wrote hers in Japanese and then underneath, in letters she copied one by one off her phone: "THANK YOU FOR THE WEEKENDS." Last week, Coy emailed us a photo. A fire hall with a new roof, half finished, under a blue sky. Six volunteer firefighters out front in their gear. Coy in the middle, in his white chief's helmet. Behind them, on the wall, our card. Hung right next to the American flag. And above the big garage door, somebody had painted a sign, by hand, in very uneven letters: "THANK Y'ALL, TOKIO." That's how it's spelled now. We've voted. It was the first vote we've had about any of this. Under the photo was a note from Coy. My coworker read it to us out loud. He made it about halfway, and then the head of Accounting finished it for him. "Tell everybody we said thank you. Tell the lady about the weekends that she's welcome at our fish fry anytime. And tell your boss the boys have been bowing to each other all week. I don't know where they picked it up. It's getting out of hand. They bow at the gas station. They bowed at a funeral. Ricky bowed at a deer. So I put a jar on the counter. A dollar a bow. Every dime goes back to y'all." There's a jar in Tokyo that fills up with "y'alls." There's a jar in Tennessee that fills up with bows. Neither one is working. Nobody's trying to fix them.

In 31 years as a quality inspector, Tachibana, who sits behind me at work, has never given anything a perfect score. Not a part. Not a factory. Not, according to his wife, their wedding. In Japan, he is the man who says no. He has rejected bolts for being one-tenth of a millimeter shy. He has rejected a supplier over the font on their packaging. In September, he spent two weeks in Texas. A customer's plants. Houston to San Antonio and back. Every day on the highway with an engineer named Wendell Ray Tubbs, who goes by Bo. Tachibana has no off switch. So, on day one, he made a form. A4 paper. Twenty criteria. One hundred points. Clipboard. He inspected every American restroom on Interstate 10. For the record, Japan has some of the cleanest public restrooms on Earth. Our toilets have heated seats, a bidet, and more settings than my car. Some of them play music. He was not grading on a curve. He showed me the forms. I am sharing some with permission. He insisted I include the scores. GAS STATION, NAME WITHHELD Score: 31. "Door would not lock. Instead, a sign: KNOCK. I did not want to knock. Someone knocked on me." HIGHWAY REST AREA Score: 44. "A man was shaving in the sink at 6 a.m. He said, 'Mornin', partner.' Courtesy: 10 out of 10. Everything else: I am not able to write it." BARBECUE RESTAURANT Score: 66. "No lock. But a large man I did not know stood outside and held the door shut for me without being asked. 'I got you, buddy.' Lock: 0. Security: 100. I was protected like a president." CHURCH FELLOWSHIP HALL (invited to a potluck) Score: 71. "Sign: JIGGLE HANDLE. The handle has been jiggled since 1987. Everyone in the congregation knows the jiggle. A woman named Miss Inez, 84, came in to show me the jiggle. She did not knock. The jiggle is passed down like a family recipe." FAST FOOD Score: 12. "I will not discuss this. Bo says this one is 'a rite of passage.'" By day five, Bo was texting the scores to his wife. His wife was texting them to her Bible study. By Wednesday, twenty-two women in Baytown, Texas, were waiting for the restroom report every evening. Then Tachibana noticed the billboards. A cartoon beaver in a red cap. Smiling. Counting down the miles. Making jokes about how much longer you'd have to hold it. Bo saw him looking. His whole face changed. He got very quiet, the way a man gets quiet before church. "Brother," he said. "You are about to see something." Buc-ee's. If you are not from Texas: calling it a gas station is like calling the Grand Canyon a ditch. More than a hundred pumps. A store the size of an airport. A wall of jerky. A man dead center of the store chopping brisket and shouting "BRISKET! FRESH BRISKET!" like he's announcing a birth. Tachibana walked past all of it. He had a job to do. He went into the restroom with his clipboard. Bo waited outside. Ten minutes. Twenty. At thirty, a small crowd of men had gathered around Bo. At forty, one of them went in to check. He came back out. "He's on his knees," he reported, "looking at the grout." At forty-four minutes, Tachibana came out. Pale. He held up the form. 100. The first 100 of his career. The men around Bo did not know what was happening. They clapped anyway. For a restroom. One of them shook Tachibana's hand and said, "Congratulations," and then asked Bo, quietly, "On what?" Then Tachibana asked to meet the person responsible. In Japan, quality is not a company. Quality is somebody. The manager went and got her. Her name is Gloria. She's 61. Nine years on those restrooms. Nights and weekends. Ballcap. Rubber gloves. Readers hanging from a beaded cord. She thought she was in trouble. She raised three grandkids on that job. Two of them are in college now. "My grandbabies are getting educated on these floors," she told Bo. She said it like a woman pointing at a cathedral she built. Bo asked her how she kept it like this. Every hour. For nine years. "My mama cleaned motel rooms in Beaumont for forty years," Gloria said. "She told me one thing. Clean every room like somebody's mama is about to walk in." Tachibana read it on his translation app. He went very still. What Bo didn't know yet, what none of us at the office knew, was this. His father cleaned the restrooms at a train station in Tokyo. Thirty years. Every night. Nobody ever thanked him. As a teenager, Tachibana was ashamed of it. He never once told his friends what his father did. He became an inspector, he said, so somebody would finally look closely at the work nobody looks at. His father died before he could tell him that. Tachibana didn't say any of that. He just bowed. Deep. The way we bow to a teacher. Then he held out his form the way a Japanese company presents an award. Arms straight. Paper facing her. Gloria looked at Bo. "What's he doing?" "Ma'am," Bo said, "I think he's giving you an award." Tachibana typed into his phone and turned the screen to her. "My father did your work. Nobody ever gave him this. Please take it for him." Gloria read it. Then she let her readers drop on their cord, put both arms around a Japanese quality inspector in the middle of Buc-ee's, and held on. His clipboard stayed out to one side, perfectly level, for the entire hug. An inspector does not drop the clipboard. Twenty-two women in a Bible study in Baytown got that report at 6 p.m. Bo says the group text has not recovered. Tachibana is back in Tokyo now, rejecting things. Last month, he inspected our office restroom. The building is from 1971. It scored a 58. Then he did something new. In 31 years, his form had never had this line. He added it just beneath the score. "Person responsible: Mrs. Kurosu. 100." She has cleaned our floor for twenty-nine years. Before last month, I'm ashamed to say, none of us knew her name. He says Texas taught him to score them separately.

My friend Hayase has spent nine years taking pictures of the tops of American graduation caps. She works in the international office at a university in Morgantown, West Virginia. In Japan, everyone graduates in the same black suit, and nobody decorates anything. So every May, she climbs to the top row with her phone. She has hundreds. Some of them: "I'M JUST HERE SO MY GRANDMA CAN CRY" "MOM, WE DID IT. (MOSTLY YOU.)" "FIRST IN MY FAMILY. SECOND ATTEMPT." "DAD, YOU CAN RETIRE NOW. JUST KIDDING. I'M AN ART MAJOR." "6 YEARS. 3 MAJORS. 1 DEGREE. NO REFUNDS." The Japanese students who come through her office all ask her one question. "Isn't that embarrassing?" Yes, she tells them. That's the point. The one who said it loudest was Minori. Minori came from Osaka at sixteen as an exchange student. One year with the Caudill family, in a town of 800 people, two hours south. Then she came back for college. Four years in Hayase's office. Perfect grades. Never once raised her hand. Every May, Hayase showed her the new caps. Every May, Minori said the same word. "Embarrassing." This May, from the top row, Hayase saw a map of West Virginia in gold glitter. One tiny heart, on a town of 800 people. Underneath, in small letters: "MY OTHER HOMETOWN." When they called Minori's name, the back rows exploded. Forty-one people. From a town of 800. They had come up that morning in the church bus. In the middle sat Mrs. Caudill's mother. Ninety-one. Wearing a T-shirt she had made herself. "NOT MY GRANDDAUGHTER. DON'T CARE. CRYING ANYWAY." In Osaka, it was 11 p.m. Minori's mother was watching the livestream on her phone. Afterward, she called Hayase with one question. "Who are all those people?" Hayase said, "Her family." After the ceremony, Hayase found Minori outside, still holding the cap, glitter all over her hands. "Isn't that embarrassing?" Hayase asked. "Yes," Minori said. "That's the point." In Japan, a graduation celebrates the school. In West Virginia, they celebrate who carried you there.

In Japan, when a woman has her first baby, she goes home to her mother. For a month, sometimes two. Her mother cooks, takes the baby at night, and makes sure she sleeps. We call it satogaeri. My wife's cousin Ayane had her first baby in Tokyo last fall. Her mother couldn't come. She had broken her hip that summer and was stuck in a hospital bed in Hokkaido. So she wrote everything down. Thirty days of rules, in Japanese, in a school notebook. Ayane's husband, Reid, translated it into English and mailed it to the only other mother he knew. His. Marlys. Sixty-three. South Dakota. She had never been farther from home than Rapid City. She flew to Tokyo with the notebook in her purse. Every night, she wrote back in pen, under each rule. Ayane let me read it. "Do not let her lift anything heavier than the baby." Got it. I carried her laundry, her groceries, and once, her. Up the stairs. She weighs about two bags of feed. I've carried worse. "Make okayu. Soft rice porridge. Every morning." Made it. Also made biscuits and gravy, just in case. She ate both. I'm calling it a tie. "No cold drinks. Warm water only." She asked for ice water. I said the book says no. The book and I are a team now. "A neighbor will bring a gift. Bow. Do not keep her long." Mrs. Natsume brought a gift. I hugged her. She has not recovered. The next morning she was back with another gift. I think I'm doing this wrong. "Let her sleep. Take the baby at night." Done. Every night, him and me and the Weather Channel app. He likes the radar. Takes after his grandpa. "Do not let her cry alone." She cried at 2 a.m. because she missed her mom. So I cried too. Now nobody's alone. Day 30 was the last page. Her mother had written it before Marlys ever landed. "When the month ends, the mother always cries when her daughter goes home. That is normal. I am sorry it will not be me." Under it, in pen, Marlys wrote: "Book was right. Your girl is safe. I didn't do anything you wouldn't have done. I just did it louder." In April, Ayane's mother walked again. Before she even went home, she took the train to Tokyo and asked for the notebook. Reid translated every note. It took all afternoon. She laughed at the gravy. She cried at 2 a.m. Then she wrote one more page and asked Reid to mail it to South Dakota. "Day 31. When this baby has a baby, we go together." Marlys mailed back a postcard. Three words. "Deal. I'll drive."

Americans leave the best things in Tokyo taxis. I know because my friend Okamura drives one. Twenty-eight years. And in Japan, whatever you leave in a cab comes back to you. Wallets. Phones. Envelopes of cash. Nobody has to enforce it. It's just what we do. Okamura has returned over two thousand lost items. He writes every one in a notebook. The Americans get their own page. He let me pick his top eight. 8. A cowboy hat. The owner came back for it forty minutes later. He had taken the train to six different stations looking for my friend's cab. When Okamura handed it to him, he hugged it like a puppy and said, "I've lost two wives. Never this hat." His third wife was standing right next to him. She did not laugh. Okamura did, and regrets it. 7. Half a sandwich. Wrapped carefully in a napkin. On the napkin, in pen: "FOR THE DRIVER. IT'S GOOD. I CHECKED." It was good. He returned the napkin. 6. A pacifier. Five minutes after the drop-off, a father came sprinting down the street after the cab. Full speed. Arms pumping. Okamura says he has never seen a man run like that. He was not running for a pacifier. He was running for the next six hours of his life. 5. Upper dentures. In a napkin. Okamura found them at a red light and almost had a heart attack. The owner was 81, from Georgia, and laughed so hard when he got them back that he had to lower himself onto the curb. Then he put them in, right there, smiled with all of them, and said, "Son, you just saved my steak dinner." 4. A phone with eleven hundred photos of grandkids. When Okamura returned it, the grandfather asked if he'd looked. Okamura admitted he had. The grandfather asked which grandkid was the cutest. Okamura pointed at one. The grandfather squinted at the photo forever and said, "Wrong. But I'll allow it." That grandkid is now known in a family in Ohio as "the one the Japanese guy picked." She's six. She mentions it at every holiday. 3. A Bible. Forty years of handwritten notes in the margins. A pastor from Alabama. When he got it back, he cried a little. Then he opened the front cover, where there's a list he's been keeping since 1986 called "People to Pray For," and wrote at the bottom: "Mr. Okamura, Tokyo. Taxi." Okamura is not Christian. He says he can feel it anyway. On bad nights, he says, it helps. 2. An engagement ring. Still in the box. The man came back white as rice, twenty minutes before his reservation. Okamura drove him to the restaurant with the meter off and waited outside. She said yes. The man came running out to the sidewalk and hugged him. They sent him a Christmas card from Kentucky. Two years in a row now. This year there's a baby on it. 1. A leg. Last summer, at about 11 p.m., a very large American with a very short haircut got out of Okamura's cab at a hotel in Shinjuku. Okamura noticed the thing on the back seat two hours later, as his shift ended. It was a prosthetic leg. Not a regular one. A sports leg. Carbon fiber. Built for climbing. There was a sticker on it. An eagle, a globe, and an anchor. Okamura couldn't read it. He could tell it mattered. He drove back to the hotel. The man had checked out at 3 a.m. He'd joined a group of disabled American veterans on a bus to climb Mount Fuji. They were starting from the trailhead at sunrise. Okamura looked at the leg. He looked at his gas gauge. Twenty-eight years, and not one lost item had ever made him drive out of Tokyo. Umbrellas wait. Wallets wait. They go to the police box and the owner picks them up the next day. I asked him why this one couldn't wait. "A man who already gave one leg," he said, "should not climb Japan's mountain on the wrong one." So he drove two and a half hours through the dark, off the clock, to the fifth station of Mount Fuji, with a stranger's leg buckled into his passenger seat. He says he buckled it in. He says it felt rude not to. He got there as the sky was turning gray. Eleven veterans were stretching in the parking lot. Two in wheelchairs. One with no arms below the elbow. One who had brought his service dog up a mountain, and the dog seemed fine with it. The man from his cab was getting ready to climb on his everyday leg, a walking leg, the wrong one for a mountain, because, as he explained later, "Marines adapt." Okamura walked up and held out the climbing leg the way you'd offer someone a sword. The Marine stared at it. Then at Okamura. Then at it again. Then he started laughing. A huge laugh. The whole group turned around. "Sir," he said, "I lost a leg in Helmand in 2011. You are the first person to ever bring one back." The other ten figured out what had happened. Nobody gave an order. Nobody said a word. At sunrise, on the side of Mount Fuji, eleven American veterans came to attention. The two in wheelchairs sat up as straight as they could. The dog sat too. For a taxi driver. Okamura had no idea how you answer that. So he bowed. Deep. Longer than he meant to. He says it was because he didn't want them to see his face. Then the Marine dropped onto a rock, put on his leg, stood up, shook Okamura's hand, typed his number into Okamura's phone, and climbed Mount Fuji. Okamura slept in his cab in the parking lot. That afternoon, a photo came in. Eleven veterans on the summit of Mount Fuji, above the clouds. Two wheelchairs that had been carried up by everyone else. One dog. Front and center, a big man sticking one carbon-fiber leg straight out toward the camera. Under it, a text: "YOUR LEG GOT TO THE TOP FIRST. SEMPER FI, BROTHER." It's taped to his dashboard now. Okamura has picked up exactly two words since then that aren't Japanese. He thinks they're English. They're Latin. Nobody has volunteered to break it to him. When an American gets into his cab now, especially a big one with a short haircut, he looks in the mirror and says them. "Semper Fi." He tells me about half of them cry. The other half say it back.

In March, my washing machine died. That's how I found out what a Japanese coin laundry is like at night. It's the quietest room in Japan. Fluorescent lights. Plastic chairs. Eight strangers watching eight dryers go around. Nobody speaks. Nobody looks up. You fold your clothes facing the wall, like you're doing something slightly shameful, and you leave. Except on Thursdays. On Thursdays, there's Lucius. Lucius Pettigrew. 66. From Macon, Georgia. Retired U.S. Army. Twenty-two years, three of them as a drill sergeant at Fort Benning. Married a woman from Tokyo named Michiko in 1991. Lives four blocks away. He has a perfectly good washing machine. But on Thursday nights, Michiko's three sisters come over for karaoke. So on Thursday nights, Lucius does laundry. "Strategic withdrawal," he told me. The first Thursday I was there, he walked in with one basket and a thermos and announced, to the entire silent room, "Evening, everybody." Eight people looked at the floor. He didn't mind. He talked to the dryers instead. "Come on, number six. You got this. Dig deep." Number six finished early. "Outstanding." Number four quit halfway through with his towels still wet. Lucius gave it a long look. "I'm not mad, four. I'm disappointed." There was a college kid in a hoodie. A night-shift nurse who fell asleep in a plastic chair every single week. A tired young mom, toddler on one hip. A salaryman who never took off his tie. And there was Mr. Akutsu. 78. Every Thursday, the same corner. His wife, Hisako, passed two winters ago. In fifty-one years of marriage, he had never once done laundry. You could tell. Every one of his white shirts had gone pale pink. His one wool sweater had shrunk to the size of a child's. My mother knows his sister. She told me why he comes. Not for the laundry. His apartment is too quiet. He still puts out two teacups in the morning, then puts one back. He folded everything like he was angry at it. Then he sat with his hands on his knees and stared at nothing. On the fourth Thursday, Lucius pulled a chair over beside him. "Sir," he said. "Permission to show you something." Mr. Akutsu doesn't speak English. But "sir" seems to work in any language when it comes from a man that size. Lucius picked up a pink shirt and folded it the Army way. Sharp. Square. Every edge like a blade. Then he held up the flat little brick of a shirt like a magician. Mr. Akutsu stared at it. Then he picked up another shirt and folded it. Exactly the same. Lucius studied it. Turned it over. Checked the corners. "Son," he said, to a man of seventy-eight, "I trained a thousand recruits. You might be the best I ever had." Mr. Akutsu caught none of it. He bowed anyway. Then he refolded the shirt, slightly better. After that, every Thursday was basic training. "Whites. Colors. Never the twain shall meet. That's how we lost the shirts, sir. Red sock. Every war in history started with a red sock." Hospital corners on a towel. Socks rolled the Army way. At nine sharp, Lucius would bark, "INSPECTION," and a Japanese widower of seventy-eight would spring up from his plastic chair and stand at attention beside his stack. Lucius explained it to me once, outside, over his thermos. "I was eighteen. Skinny. Mad at everybody. Nobody in Macon ever expected one thing out of me. First week of basic, my drill sergeant ripped my bunk apart and made me do it over. Eleven times." He laughed. "Took me twenty years to figure out what he was telling me." "What was he telling you?" "That I was worth the trouble." Mr. Akutsu, being Japanese, took it further than any recruit Lucius ever had. By June he was folding fitted sheets. No human being has ever successfully folded a fitted sheet. Lucius watched him do it and had to go stand outside for a minute. The room started to change. The nurse woke up one night to find her scrubs folded in a perfect stack next to her. She looked at Mr. Akutsu. He looked at the wall. She bowed to the wall. The toddler started napping on Mr. Akutsu's towels. Lucius promoted him to Private. The toddler saluted back with a sock. The salaryman loosened his tie. Then, one Thursday, he took it off and asked Lucius about Georgia. They talked for an hour. He forgot his laundry in dryer number four. Lucius said four had it coming. By summer, the quietest room in Japan had a coffee thermos, nine chairs in a circle, and one rule on an index card, taped above the folding table. The English was in Lucius's block capitals. The Japanese underneath was in Mr. Akutsu's careful brush hand. NOBODY FOLDS ALONE. Then, in September, Mr. Akutsu came in carrying something different. A cardigan. Lavender. Hand-knit. Hisako's. He had never washed it. Two years. It still smelled like her. He just kept it on her chair. He held it out to Lucius. No English. He didn't need any. The question was all over his face. Is it time? Lucius didn't answer right away. He took the cardigan in both of his huge hands. "Wool," he said quietly. "You don't put wool in a machine. This one, you do by hand." They washed it in the little sink in the back. Together. Slowly. Cool water. One drop of soap. A drill sergeant from Georgia and a widower from Tokyo, bent over a sink, not saying a word. Nobody else in the laundromat said a word either. The nurse was wide awake. The college kid had taken out his earbuds. The toddler, for once in his life, was perfectly still. They laid it flat on a clean towel to dry. Then Mr. Akutsu folded it. Not the Army way. Her way. Sleeves in, then thirds. Soft. Small. The way she had folded it a thousand times. Lucius had never seen that fold before. He watched the whole thing standing at attention. When it was done, a retired drill sergeant who had not saluted anyone in eighteen years raised his hand to his brow and held it there. "Best fold I ever saw," he said. Michiko's sisters heard about the laundromat in October. Now they come on Thursdays too. Thursdays have karaoke again. Lucius is reconsidering his strategy. My new washing machine came in April. On Thursdays, it takes the night off.

My friend Kyosuke counted Americans for a year. He's an engineer. He doesn't trust feelings. He trusts data. So when his company posted him to Reno, Nevada, he carried a notebook and a pencil, and he kept score. Every single day. These are his final numbers. Strangers who complimented my shirt and then walked away forever: 37 Men I met named Mike: 34. I needed a system. Big Mike, Truck Mike, Church Mike, Other Mike. Kids who asked if I know karate: 31. I do not. Strangers at red lights who rolled down their window to tell me my gas cap was open: 6. It was open all six times. I am an engineer. Saturdays I walked past a man standing in his open garage, doing nothing, completely happy: all 52. People who asked where I'm from: 96. People who said "Welcome" right after: 96. Americans who told me someone in their family was stationed in Japan: 88. Every one of them said, "He loved it there." Dinners I was invited to at an American home: 19. Times they said grace first: 17. Times my name was in it: 17. Times I locked my keys in my car: 2. Strangers who waited with me for the locksmith: 2. Same man both times. Mr. Szymanski, from across the street. He says I'm his project now. Flags on my street: 23. Houses on my street: 22. Mr. Szymanski has two. One is for his son, who is in the Navy, stationed in Japan. He says that makes us even. The very last line has no number. "Times I felt like a foreigner:" He left it blank for a whole year. He was waiting for it to happen. On his last day, he finally wrote a number. 0. Then, because he's an engineer, he checked his work. Still 0.

My father-in-law has been president of the residents' association in his apartment building in Yokohama for nineteen years. He writes every notice on the board by the mailboxes himself. By hand. Perfect handwriting. No exclamation points. No smiling. His notices are famous in that building. "Please close the door quietly." "Umbrellas belong in the umbrella stand. Not near it. In it." "The owner of the blue bicycle knows what he has done." Eighteen months ago, a family from Jacksonville, Florida, moved into Room 302. Darrin, Misty, three kids, and a laugh that reaches the fifth floor. My wife has been sending me photos of the board ever since. Here they are, in order. I translated. NOTICE, April 6 Welcome to the new residents of Room 302. Please note that garbage in this building is separated into six categories. An English chart is attached. The board stayed up until 2 a.m. making it. NOTICE, April 20 To all residents. Room 302 has left a bottle of homemade datil pepper sauce outside every door. The board attempted to return it. Room 302 refused. Please be careful. The board's mouth is still burning. The board would like to know where to get more. NOTICE, June 8 Room 302's children have been knocking on doors asking if anyone wants to "come out and play." They are playing a game called kickball in the parking lot. The board has reviewed the rules of kickball. There are no rules. Mr. Ogino in 501 is 81. He said yes. He is now the pitcher. The board has also been asked to play. The board is considering it. NOTICE, July 5 Several residents have asked whether the large American flag on the balcony of Room 302 is permitted. The board has checked the rules. There is no rule against it. The board president was also observed standing very straight in the parking lot while it was raised. This is unrelated. NOTICE, August 2 Room 302 has purchased a generator. For typhoon season. The board has seen forty typhoons in this building. The board does not see the need. Room 302's father says Japanese typhoons are "cute." The board reminds him that this is not a competition. Then, in September, the typhoon came. It knocked out the power for the whole neighborhood. Four days. No lights. No elevator. No fridges. In a building like that, no power also means no water above the second floor. On the first night, Darrin carried the generator into the parking lot, pulled the cord, and started knocking on doors with a flashlight. He wasn't asking if people were okay. He was asking something he'd learned after hurricanes back home. "Anybody got medicine that needs to stay cold?" By midnight, there was one refrigerator running in the parking lot, plugged into the generator nobody needed. Inside were insulin pens, eye drops, a baby's medicine, and Mr. Ogino's heart medicine. Every one labeled with a strip of duct tape and a name in Sharpie. Darrin sat next to it on a cooler all night. Every night. He said if it shut off, he wanted to hear it. None of us knew that my wife's mother has diabetes. She takes insulin. My father-in-law had never told anyone in the building. Not in nineteen years. In Japan, you don't make your private problems the building's problem. On the second night, around 3 a.m., my father-in-law came down the stairs in the dark, holding her insulin in both hands. Darrin asked nothing. He tore off a piece of duct tape, wrote HOSOKAWA on it, and held the fridge door open. My father-in-law put it inside. He didn't move right away. "Night, boss," Darrin said. My father-in-law went back upstairs. Then he came back down with two cans of coffee and sat on the curb next to him until it got light. They did that every night until the power came back. One of them speaks no English. The other speaks no Japanese. Later, my wife asked her father what they could possibly have talked about for four nights. "Typhoons," he said. "His are bigger." Then, after a while: "And his mother." On the first night, using a phone app and a flashlight, my father-in-law had asked him why a man four months into Japan would buy a generator. In 2017, Hurricane Irma took Darrin's neighborhood's power for six days. His mother is diabetic. Her insulin was going to go bad. The family next door ran a cord across the yard from their generator to her refrigerator and kept it running for six days. They didn't ask for anything. They wouldn't take gas money. Darrin was twenty-two. He promised himself that wherever he ended up living, he would be the guy next door with the cord. Every time. He just hadn't expected it to be Yokohama. Here is the next notice. It's the longest one my father-in-law has ever written. NOTICE, September 14 To all residents. During the power outage, Room 302 kept the medicine of eleven residents of this building cold for ninety-one hours. One of those residents is my wife. In August, the board said this building did not need a generator. The board was wrong. The board apologizes to Room 302. The board also apologizes to the generator. NOTICE, October 6 At 3:40 a.m. on Monday, a man in Room 302 screamed. The board went upstairs to investigate. The Jacksonville Jaguars had scored. The board was invited in. The board stayed for the fourth quarter. The Jaguars lost. The board is very upset and would like to know who is responsible. NOTICE, October 24 On October 31, children may knock on doors for candy. Residents who wish to take part should hang a paper pumpkin on their door. The board has made twenty-two paper pumpkins. This building has twenty-two doors. Thank you for your cooperation. The board president will be dressed as a jaguar. He was not consulted. NOTICE, March 2 Room 302's company is transferring them back to Florida. They depart on March 21. Residents are asked to gather in the lobby at seven in the morning. Crying is permitted. The board president will not be crying. The board president has allergies. On March 21, all twenty-two doors were in the lobby. Mr. Ogino brought the kickball. My father-in-law handed Darrin a residents' association armband. The real one. Honorary member, for life. Dues waived. Then my wife's mother stepped forward with a small package wrapped in cloth. "For your mother." Inside was a pouch for carrying insulin pens. She has sewn her own for two decades. This one was teal and black. Jaguars colors. She had asked my wife to look them up. Darrin read the note pinned to it. My wife had helped with the English. "From one diabetic mother to another. Thank you for your son." Darrin is six-foot-three and a former high school linebacker. His legs quit. He ended up sitting on the lobby floor. Once he was back on his feet, he put the armband on over his Jaguars jersey and saluted my father-in-law. My father-in-law bowed. Then Darrin hugged him. The president of the residents' association, who has not been hugged by a man since his own father, let him. According to my wife's mother, the allergies were very bad that morning. Here is the last notice. It went up that afternoon. NOTICE, March 21 Room 302 has returned to Florida. The board thanks all residents for their cooperation. The board will continue to make twenty-two paper pumpkins. Under that, in English. In pencil. Not in his perfect handwriting. He'd done it without a dictionary. "Night, boss." Notices on that board come down after seven days. That's a rule. He wrote it. That one has been up for eight months.

At Japanese baseball games, beer comes to you. Young women in bright uniforms run up and down the stadium stairs all night with a beer keg strapped to their backs. Fifteen kilos. A thousand steps a night. They pour it right at your seat. They're called "uriko." Sellers. My wife's niece, Momoka, was one for four summers at Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, to pay her own way through college. Her section was the one the Americans from Yokota Air Base always sat in. She is 23 now. She kept a list on her phone. "Things I Learned About Americans With a Keg on My Back." 1. Japanese fans buy one beer. Americans buy for the row. A man from Texas once bought 31 beers and drank none of them. He just pointed. "Him. Her. That grandpa. The grandpa's friend." When she told him it was too many, he said, "Ma'am, it's for America." 2. Japanese fans pay and turn back to the game. Americans ask your name. Then they use it. All season. Loudly. From three sections away. Like you're the one they came to see. 3. In Japan, every team has an official cheering section, brass band and all, with a different song for every single player. Americans learn every song in one game. By the eighth inning, they are louder than the cheering section. The cheering section has complained about this formally. One airman now knows the song for a backup infielder better than the backup infielder's mother does. 4. Americans cannot sit still when a child is crying. Every time, some big man two rows away starts making faces. She has never once seen it fail. One man did a full seagull. The child stopped crying. Everyone else started. 5. An old American man and an old Japanese man sat side by side one night. No common language. Both keeping score with a pencil. By the fifth inning, they were checking each other's scorecards. By the seventh, they were arguing about an error. Pointing. Shaking heads. At the end, they shook hands. Neither knows who won the argument. (It was the Japanese man.) 6. Japanese fans say "thank you." Americans say "thank you" and then "attagirl!" like she just stole second base. No Japanese person has ever called her attagirl. She looked it up. She did not hate it. 7. Every season, one uriko is crowned top seller. Momoka never won. She was the smallest girl on the crew, with the slowest legs. Her best season, she finished 14th out of 40. She told herself it didn't matter. 8. Her third summer, there was an airman from Ohio. Nineteen. Had never been farther from home than Columbus. Too young to drink in Japan, so she poured him cola from her own cooler, every game. She called him "Ohio." Months later, he admitted something. In the whole country, nobody else had called him anything at all. He never forgot it. Then there's number nine. She needed a whole page for it. Her last night was the final home game of her fourth summer. In July, on the stairs, she had told Ohio one small thing. Just small talk. Before she quit, she wanted to beat her own record. Once. Not first place. Just her own best. So she'd have one thing in her life she was the best at. She needed 61 more beers than she had ever sold in one night. She never said it to anyone else. In the third inning, she came up the stairs and the whole American section stood up. Forty airmen. Every one holding up a paper cup. Empty. "Ma'am," Ohio said. "We'd like a refill." They bought her keg empty. She ran down for another. They bought that one empty too. And the next. Airmen were waving in buddies from other sections. A woman from Texas no one recognized appeared with a fistful of yen and bought four beers for a row of total strangers. And then the cheering section heard what was happening. The same cheering section. The one that had filed the complaint. Between innings, the brass band turned around, faced her section and played her a fanfare. By the seventh inning, Momoka had broken her record by 30. Nobody drank that much. They passed cups down the rows to the whole section. Japanese fans who had never spoken to an American in their lives were handed a free beer by a large man in an Air Force cap who said "kanpai" wrong and spilled half of it on himself. After the game, Momoka sat down on the stairs with her empty keg and cried. Still in uniform. With everybody watching. Uriko don't do that. Ohio sat down two steps below her. "You climbed a thousand stairs a night for us," he said. "Figured we could make you tired early. Just once." She works at a bank now. She is very good at it. Number nine has a title. One line. "Americans remember the number you only said once."