If you're new here: hello. 🙇 A lot of you showed up over the last few weeks, and you brought your own jokes with you. One man wrote that he's stuck in a Wawa parking lot, because he can't drive while crying. (I'm very sorry. Wawa, please let him in.) One woman asked if I own stock in a tissue company. (I don't. I'm starting to think I should.) One reader said I make his cereal wet with tears. Another described himself as "a big refrigerator who gets weepy." So, a proper introduction, before anyone else's cereal gets ruined. I'm a Japanese office worker in Tokyo. 41. Married to a high school English teacher who corrects my posts with a red pen. Most of them get a B-minus. She has cried at three of them. She says that doesn't affect the grade. One more thing. Not once in my life have I been to America. That last part surprises people. When I was 13, I was the shortest kid in my grade. The one teachers forgot to call on. A farmer in Iowa, a man I had never met, sent me a letter that began, "DEAR BROTHER." He wrote to me for twenty-eight years. In pencil. In capital letters. He signed every one "MR. IOWA." He died in August. He never saw this account. I think he would have liked you. You write back. This account is my reply to him. Twenty-eight years late, and to a lot more people than I planned. What happens here: → Real moments between Americans and Japanese people. Names and details changed to protect the kind. → Japanese people trying to figure you out. (Applause on landing: solved. Ranch dressing: still under investigation.) → Questions for you. Once, 6,939 of you answered one question about long drives. I read them on the train for a week. I missed my stop twice. → A Japanese word now and then, when English runs out. Today's word is "en." English doesn't have it. It's the invisible thread between people who were always going to meet. When something brings two strangers together, we don't say "small world." We say, "There was en." A farmer in Iowa and the smallest boy in a Tokyo classroom. That was en. You, reading this right now, wherever you are. I think that's en too. Some of you found this at 3 a.m. Some of you found it in a hospital waiting room. A few of you wrote that being an American feels heavy lately. Whatever is happening on your end of the thread, I want you to know something. Somebody in Tokyo has this end. So tell me where the thread found you. Your state, and what you were doing when this account showed up. (Wawa parking lot counts.)