Again, with the...

...T. R. Reid:

We used to watch a Japanese quiz show on TV that featured strange or wonderful sights from around the world. There would be a video of something fascinating, and then the panelists were supposed to guess where on earth this could be. One week, the program's host, a clever, engaging comedian who calls himself Tokoro George (that is, "George Location"), was shown camping out in a bright orange tent on a broad green meadow. "Ah, this is the life," Tokoro George declared from the tent door. "Out here in the wide open spaces of..." And that was the gimmick: the panel had to guess where Tokoro-san was. Nobody could get the answer, though, and eventually the camera began to pan back, away from the tent. Now we saw more green grass, trees, shrubs, and eventually, perhaps fifty feet from the tent, a medium-sized brick house. It was a residential house on a fairly normal residential street on the west side of Seattle. The strange and wonderful thing was that this ordinary residence in America had a yard -- both a front yard and a back yard, in fact. "And you know what?" Tokoro George said from his tent. "This is completely normal in America!" (With that, the camera spun around and spotted something else on the lawn that was normal in America: a small metal sign reading "Warning! This home protected by Acme Security Services." This, too, was amazing to the Japanese, and Tokoro George had to explain that Americans routinely install burglar alarms because they are afraid of thieves.)