>Personally, I don't care what you say about it, but as an expat myself
>I do wonder why you choose to remain in a place you loathe so much.
I used to know a guy who's spent almost all the time since his 1975 graduation from Carleton College in Japan - he was a friend of my first wife's, and would stay with us for a few days every year or two. One of his visits came just after I'd read Karel van Wolferen's hypercritical book on the country - I wondered throughout why he'd stayed in Japan for years despite apparently hating it. I brought this up with our visitor, who said that that was a common thing among expats in Japan. They'd get together, kvetch endlessly about the place, and stay anyway. Of course, there's no ideology of assimilation in Japan, but I wonder if that's common with expats elsewhere, and Woj is just a particularly vocal example.
Doug