Last Tuesday, my American neighbors committed a crime against time, and invited me to it. Bryan. Yes, the chair one. At 6:30 p.m., his wife Kristen called over the balcony: "Come eat with us! It's breakfast for dinner!" I came, because I assumed I had misheard. I had not misheard. On the table: pancakes. Bacon. Scrambled eggs. A bottle of syrup the size of a fire extinguisher. Outside the window, the sun was going down. Their kids were screaming with joy, like the circus had arrived. Inside their own kitchen. In Japan, the day has an order. Rice and fish in the morning. Noodles at noon. At night, something with a sauce. My grandmother kept that order for eighty years. She would have called the police. I turned to their son, Hudson. Seven years old. He seemed to be in charge. "Is this allowed?" "It's Tuesday." That was the entire answer. "Does the morning know?" Hudson looked at me the way a priest looks at a man who has asked for God's phone number. "You just eat it." "Then what will you eat tomorrow morning?" "Cereal." "Is cereal breakfast?" "Cereal doesn't have a time." I wrote that down. I have thought about it every day since. Cereal doesn't have a time. "Who decides when it is breakfast for dinner?" Bryan answered this one. Quietly. Without looking up from his eggs. "Mom. When Mom's tired." Kristen did not deny it. So it is not a menu. It is a holiday. A holiday any tired mother in America may declare at any moment, without warning, and her children cheer her surrender like a touchdown. In Japan, a tired mother still makes three side dishes and apologizes for the fourth. In America, she turns the clock upside down, and everybody wins. I am a man who has eaten grilled fish at 7 a.m. for forty-four years. I picked up the syrup. "Hudson. Is it permitted to put this on the bacon?" The table went silent. Bryan put down his fork. He looked at me with something very close to love. "Brother," he said. "That's the whole point." I poured. Sweet. Salty. Morning. Night. Everything I had been taught to keep apart, on one fork. My ancestors did not stop me. I think they were watching. I think they wanted some. Then Hudson's little sister, four, pulled my sleeve and whispered the final rule. "You have to wear jammies." Everyone at the table was in pajamas. Bryan, who is six foot three, was in flannel pajamas covered in tiny moose. Kristen handed me a spare pair of his. I rolled up the legs four times. It was the best meal of my life, and I could not see my feet. The next Tuesday, I told my wife we were having breakfast for dinner. She made rice. Miso soup. Grilled fish. Pickles. We sat down. We looked at it. And we realized something terrible. A Japanese breakfast and a Japanese dinner are almost the same meal. We have been having breakfast for dinner for a thousand years. Nobody told us. Nobody cheered. Next Tuesday, I'm buying syrup.