For the Record

Japan and America: Where the Twain Meet

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” Kipling wrote long ago, and even today that saying sums up the feelings of many Americans and Japanese toward each other. But William Brinker, a high school social studies teacher from Farmington Hills, Michigan, disagrees. “The gulf between our cultures exists, but it can be bridged. We just have to work harder at understanding one another.”