There are dozens, possibly hundreds of books out there written by westerners living in Japan. They all attempt to capture the essence of the experience—the oddities, the wonders, the feeling of spending time as a gaijin (the Japanese word for foreigner, which literally translates as "outside person"). But no gaijin I know thinks ANY of the "this is what it's like to be a gaijin" books describes his or her experience. If you know people who've lived in Japan ask them ... I bet they say that all the "living in Japan" books are wrong.

One day I was hanging around my friend Mike's Tokyo apartment (a place so small that even a Henny Youngman one-liner would be too big for it) and we were talking about how we wished someone would write a book that we could give to our friends and relatives to let them understand what our lives were like.

"You know, man," Mike said to me, "you should just do a book of cartoons about it."

Hmmmmm ... not a bad idea, I thought. And so I went home to try it. For some reason, I wasn't satisfied with the results, so I put the idea away. But it came back up again about a year later, so I tried again. Again I was disappointed. The cartoons were funny enough ... but they really didn't capture the feelings I wanted them to.

Looking back at it, I think I might just have been too close to the subject to write effectively. What I should have done was tackle this project about 3 months after coming back to the U.S. .... when the experience was still fresh in my mind, but I was no longer in that immediate situation. As it turns out, though, I just put the cartoons away and never picked them up again. And now I think I'm too far away from the situation to accurately capture it ... I'd just make another book that the current crop of gaijin would look at and say, "Man! Has this guy ever even been in Japan?"

So here, for the first time anywhere are the 7 test strips for a collection I wanted to call "English In Action."