In Japan, almost nobody learns to drive from their parents. You go to a driving school. A man in a company jacket teaches you on a pretend road, inside a fence, with pretend traffic lights. You pay him. You thank him. You never see him again. Your father is not in the car. Your mother is not in the car. Nobody you love is ever in that passenger seat. So last month, I asked every American I know in Tokyo one question. "Who taught you to drive?" Twenty-three people. Twenty-two of them smiled before they answered. "My grandpa. On the farm. I was eleven. My feet didn't reach the pedals, so he put a phone book behind my back." (Nebraska, 38) "My mom. Dad said he 'couldn't take it.' Mom pressed her imaginary brake so hard for three months, she wore a hole in the floor mat." (Georgia, 29) "First lesson, Dad made me change a tire. Second lesson, check the oil. Third lesson, he handed me the keys and said, 'Now you can drive.'" (Texas, 52) "First snow of the year, Dad took me to the empty high school lot and told me to slam on the brakes. On purpose. 'Now you know what the car does when it stops listening to you.'" (Minnesota, 33) "My stepdad. He wasn't my dad yet. By the end of that summer, he was." (Oklahoma, 35) "The day I got my license, I drove home by myself. My dad followed me the whole way in his truck. He said he was 'just going the same way.' He was not going the same way." (Tennessee, 44) "Every day after school, Dad let me drive the truck to the end of our road to get the mail. I was nine. It was a quarter mile. Best quarter mile of my life." (Wyoming, 46) "My dad. Three hours in his pickup. He said one word the whole time: 'Easy.' I'm forty-two. I still hear it at every yellow light." (Iowa, 42) Not one of them talked about a class. They all talked about a person. Japan pays a professional so that nobody's parent ever has to sit in that seat. In America, a parent hands a fifteen-year-old the keys to a two-ton machine, sits down on the passenger side, and puts their own life in that kid's hands. You call it a driving lesson. I think it's the first time someone says to you, without saying it: I trust you with my life. And then there was the twenty-third. Colton. Kentucky. 38. He didn't smile when I asked. He looked at his coffee for a while first. His dad died when he was twelve. The truck sat in the barn for three years. A stick shift. Nobody touched it. His mom couldn't drive stick. The winter he turned fifteen, she started walking to the barn after he was in bed. Every night. The owner's manual open on the steering wheel. The dome light on. She stalled that truck, he figures, about four hundred times. He could hear it from his bedroom. He never said anything. Neither did she. One morning in March, she set the keys next to his cereal and said, "Boots on." She taught him in his father's truck, up and down their gravel lane. She sat on the passenger side, where her husband used to sit. He stalled it forty times. She never once mentioned it. "She learned the hardest thing she ever learned," Colton said, "so a stranger wouldn't have to teach me." Colton has a daughter now. She's fifteen. This summer, he started teaching her. Same truck. Same gravel lane. His mom insists on coming along. She sits in the back seat. She says somebody has to supervise. Somebody sat in that passenger seat for you. Who was it? (If it was your mom with the imaginary brake, she counts twice.)

For twelve years, an American at a bar near my office has been drinking ginger ale out of a whiskey glass. Nobody was supposed to know. That was the whole point. The bar has eight seats, under the train tracks. When a train goes over, the glasses hum. The owner, Mr. Tamura, is 74. He has poured drinks there for 46 years. He says a bartender's job is to listen, and to remember who takes ice. The American is Arlo. Sixty-four. From a mill town in Oregon. Big hands. Bad knees. Starts laughing at his own jokes two lines before the punchline. He came to Tokyo in 2003 to sell Oregon lumber to Japanese homebuilders. That was the official reason. The real reason, he told me, was that Tokyo was the farthest place he could find from what he'd done. Arlo was a drinker. The funniest man in the room at nine. A different man at midnight. He missed things. His son Nate built a volcano for the third-grade science fair. It didn't erupt. Arlo wasn't there to see it not erupt. And one night, when Nate was eleven, Arlo drove him home after six beers and put the truck through a neighbor's fence. Nobody was hurt. Nate didn't cry. He didn't talk. He just sat in the passenger seat and looked at his father. Arlo still sees that look. Every day. His wife took Nate the next week. Arlo didn't fight it. He said he didn't deserve to. So he came here. And for eleven years, he sat at Tamura's bar and drank the way he always had. In Japan, a bartender doesn't stop a regular. It isn't his place. Tamura's own older brother drank himself to death at 49. Tamura poured him his last glass. He has never said whether that has anything to do with what happened next. He doesn't have to. One night in March 2014, Arlo came in and showed Tamura a photo on his phone. Nate's college graduation. Cap and gown. Big smile. Nobody had told Arlo. Nobody had needed to. He sat there for an hour with his glass. He didn't touch it. Then he slid it away from himself and said, "Tamura-san. Something with nothing in it." Here is what Tamura knew, that Arlo didn't. In Japan, when a regular quits drinking, he usually stops coming. He loses his seat. His people. His whole evening. He goes home alone to a quiet apartment. And a lot of those men start again. Tamura did not want Arlo to lose his seat. So he took Arlo's usual glass. The heavy one. Put in the big round ice, same as always. Filled it with ginger ale. Set it on Arlo's coaster. And charged him the same price as the whiskey. Arlo says it's the most expensive ginger ale in Japan, and the best deal he ever made. In Japanese bars, regulars can keep their own bottle on the shelf with their name on a little tag. The next week, between forty bottles of whiskey, there was a new one. Ginger ale. The tag said ARLO. The office workers saw a big American drink "whiskey" all night, every night, and never get drunk. He became a legend. A department manager challenged him one Friday. The manager went home in a taxi at ten. Arlo walked to the train. Arlo never corrected anyone. Neither did Tamura. In 46 years, that bar has kept exactly one secret. It's a good one. Arlo found a meeting. At his first one, he stood up and said what you say there: "Hi, I'm Arlo. I'm an alcoholic." And the whole room answered, "Hi, Arlo." He told Tamura about it. Tamura, who speaks maybe a dozen words of English, dried the same glass for a full minute. The next night, when Arlo walked in, Tamura looked up from the ice and said: "Hi, Arlo." He has said it every night since. Every year, the meeting gives Arlo a bronze coin with a number on it. He gives each one to Tamura, who keeps them in a small sake cup on the shelf, right in front of Arlo's bottle. There are twelve now. Two years in, Arlo wrote Nate a letter. That's part of it too. You try to make things right, if you can. "I'm not asking you to forgive me. I just want you to know I'm not drinking, and where to find me." At the bottom, he didn't write his apartment. He wrote the address of the bar. Nate never wrote back. The bar's mail comes in the afternoon. Every night for ten years, when Arlo sat down, Tamura shook his head. "Nothing, Arlo." "That's okay," Arlo said. Every night. This spring, an envelope came. Oregon postmark. Tamura didn't wait for Arlo to sit down. He met him at the door with it. "Dad. I'm 33. I'm an alcoholic. I kept your letter in my sock drawer for ten years. I never answered. I didn't know how. Last October I put my truck through a fence. Same as you. Nobody got hurt. I sat there in the dark and thought about you looking at me. Then I found a meeting. This October I get my one-year coin. In my group, somebody who matters to you hands it to you. I'd like it to be you." Arlo read it twice. Then his shoulders folded in, he bent over the bar like something had hit him, and he made a sound Tamura had never heard a man make in 46 years. And Tamura did something he had never done. He came out from behind his own bar, sat on the stool next to Arlo, and put one hand on his back. They stayed like that until the last train. Last month, in a meeting room behind a church in Oregon, thirty people sat in a circle with bad coffee in paper cups. When they called for one year, Nate stood up. Arlo walked across the room. His knees were bad. It took a while. Nobody rushed him. He held out the coin. His hand shook so hard that Nate had to steady it with both of his. Arlo tried to say something. Nothing came. So he said the words he'd said at every meeting for twelve years. "Hi. I'm Arlo. I'm an alcoholic. And this is my son." Thirty strangers answered, all together, "Hi, Arlo." Then Nate told the room: "My dad's been sober twelve years. Five thousand miles away. By himself. I figured if he could do it there, I could do it here." The next night, a photo came to Tamura's phone. Two paper cups of coffee, touching, like a toast. Tamura printed it and taped it to the shelf. The day after that, there was a second bottle of ginger ale up there, next to Arlo's. A new tag, in careful capital letters: NATE. "Everybody needs a place," Tamura told me. On the top shelf of a tiny bar under the train tracks in Tokyo, between forty bottles of whiskey, there are two bottles of ginger ale now. Same last name.

"Be the American that Japanese people think you are." I've seen this sentence on your feed a thousand times. And every time, the replies ask the same thing. "Okay, but what DO they think we are?" Fine. I'm Japanese. I'll tell you. Honestly. Here is what Japan thinks Americans are. Every single one of them is true. That's the problem. WE THINK: Americans are loud. WHAT WE SAW: An American tourist in Kyoto walked past an old monk sweeping leaves outside a temple at six in the morning and shouted "GOOD MORNING!" like they were old friends. The monk is 70. He has swept that path for forty years. No one had ever said good morning to him. He said it back. He says it to everyone now. In English. WE THINK: Americans smile at strangers for no reason. WHAT WE SAW: My friend finally asked one why. A man at a gas station in Iowa. He thought about it for a second and said, "In case somebody needs one." WE THINK: Americans are terrible at geography. WHAT WE SAW: A man in Tennessee once asked my coworker whether Tokyo was the capital of Japan, or the other way around. Two years later, an earthquake hit my coworker's hometown on the Japan Sea coast. That same man found the town on a map in four minutes, mailed a check, and taped the map to his refrigerator. It's still there. He still isn't sure about Tokyo. WE THINK: Americans all think they're the main character. WHAT WE SAW: Yes. You walk into a room like the music just started. But the second a stranger drops a bag of groceries in a parking lot, five Americans come sprinting in from off-screen like extras who have been waiting their whole lives for this scene. WE THINK: Americans can't use chopsticks. WHAT WE SAW: My uncle watched an American man fight a bowl of ramen in Osaka for twenty minutes. He lost every round. When the old owner finally brought him a fork, the man shook his head. "No, sir. Your house, your rules." He kept fighting. The owner gave him free dumplings. Nobody gets free dumplings from that man. WE THINK: Americans are way too confident. WHAT WE SAW: A twelve-year-old in Texas told my friend's son, "I'm going to the NBA." Then he looked at my friend's son, who was Japanese and four-foot-nine, and said, "You are too, bro." That boy is now on his high school basketball team in Japan. He is five-foot-two. He still believes it. We blame Texas. WE THINK: Americans will talk to anybody. WHAT WE SAW: An American woman sat next to my neighbor, Mrs. Kondo, on a train in Tokyo and talked to her for forty minutes. About grandchildren. About knees. About nothing. Mrs. Kondo had not had a real conversation with a stranger since her husband died. She missed her stop by two stations. She says it was the best mistake she made all year. WE THINK: Americans cry way too easily. This one, I have to tell you properly. Every summer in Japan, there is a national high school baseball tournament at a stadium called Koshien. It's sacred to us. And when a team loses, the players kneel down on the field, and scoop the dirt into little bags to take home. Last summer, my uncle was in the stands for a game. The team from a small town lost in the last inning. The boys were crying. The stands were silent. That's how we do it. We hold it in. Next to my uncle sat a huge American man in a St. Louis Cardinals cap. He didn't know the rules. He didn't know the teams. When the losing boys knelt down and started scooping up the dirt, he turned to my uncle and asked, "What are they doing?" My uncle's English is not good. He did his best. "They take the ground home. So they don't forget." The big man looked at the field for a long moment. Then he put both hands over his face and cried. Out loud. In the middle of a silent Japanese stadium. Shoulders shaking. Then he stood up. Alone. And he started clapping for the team that lost. My uncle has never cried in public in his life. He's 74. He told me that when he touched his face, it was wet. Then the man on his other side stood up. Then the row behind them. Then the section. My uncle said he understood something that day. "He cried for the whole stadium," he told me. "So the rest of us didn't have to pretend." So, America. We think you're loud. You are. We think you smile at strangers for no reason. You do. We think you cry too easily. You do. Please don't stop. Be exactly the Americans Japanese people think you are. It turns out we were right about you all along. We just didn't know it was a compliment.