I've never been to Japan. I've always wanted to go, though. When I was little my best friend was Japanese. Her father was the president of a shipping company, and when we were ten she returned to the country she hadn't even visited much less lived in since age three. We kept in touch until we were about 25 years old, and our lives were somehow very different but at the same time very similar.

In Learning to Bow, Bruce Feiler writes about his year teaching junior high school in a small town in rural Japan in the late 1980s. The stories he tells reveal the profound differences between Japanese and American culture, without losing sight of the fact that we are all the same underneath.