Images of Japanese summer are seen everywhere: elementary school kids doing "rajio taiso" (exercises broadcast on the radio every morning at school), watermelons, baseball games on TV, beer and "edamame" (boiled green soybeans), etc. Since I moved to Tokyo, these images appears frequently on TV and on the sides of buses, in newspapers, etc. But are these images real? When you're little, you take it for granted that everything you and your family do is the way everyone else does it, too. Everyone eats fried eggs with fermented soy beans on it, everyone has their own rice bowl, their own miso soup bowl, and their own chopsticks, everyone takes care NOT to eat "mochi" (rice cake) on New Years day, etc. But then I grew up and came to Tokyo, and the reality I knew changed; TV brainwashes you about what a "typical" Japanese person does. I read that the human brain has a very strange function: if you're continuously told that you did something ...