Feb. 13, 2006 issue - Donald Richie has been living in Japan for half a century. The American writer, translator and film scholar has spent most of that time explaining Japan to the English-speaking world. But lately he's found himself, somewhat disconcertingly, in an entirely new role—as an interpreter of Japan to the Japanese.

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The Tokyo university students who attend his lectures on the great postwar filmmaker Yasujiro Ozuno longer understand the world portrayed in the 1953 classic "Tokyo Story." They don't know anything about the family system because the family system doesn't exist anymore," says Richie. "So I have to reconstruct it for them." They can still understand the traditional, intricately polite version of Japanese used in the movies, but that language sounds alien, as if it comes from a "vanished" world, he says.

Vanished. That word crops up often in Japan these days. Before my family and I arrived here in September 2004, we weren't really sure what to expect. My head was filled with lingering images from the Japan-bashing 1980s, and Japan was still widely cast in the West as unique and alien. I wondered whether we could expect a land clinging to its differences: its lifetime employment, its company songs, its shocking lack of lawyers and criminals. Guidebooks still warned about the finely gradated social hierarchies expressed in perfectly calibrated bows. Japan was said to be hungrily assimilating world culture, yet still stubbornly traditional.

What I have found, instead, is another prosperous and modern Western country with some interesting quirks—an Asian nation that would not feel out of place if it were suddenly dropped inside the borders of Europe. "When my other expat friends and I get together, we often find ourselves talking about the really weird things that you see," says one European friend who's lived in Tokyo for more than a decade. "But that's because the weird things are getting fewer and weirder."

Our most striking surprise was that the image of Japan as a profoundly inward place no longer applies. My stepbrother, Michael, vividly recalls the year he spent in Kyoto in the late 1960s, when an American schoolchild could still be scrutinized as an exotic rarity. Our experience could not have been more different: we moved into our new house and soon found ourselves preparing for our first bizarre Japanese holiday: Halloween. No question, we live in a cosmopolitan part of Tokyo. But we were still shocked by the hundreds of trick-or-treaters, the enthusiasm, the imagination behind the costumes. The vast majority of those who took part in this festival, with its ancient Celtic roots, were Japanese. It was our first insight into the vast capacity of the Japanese to assimilate foreign habits—and to welcome foreigners.

To someone who has lived for long periods in America and Western Europe, there is nothing particularly challenging about Japan, not anymore. All the familiar landmarks of urban life are there: the same suicidal bike messengers, the same seasonal store sales, the same credit cards. To be sure, the language is tough. But in recent years, all signs in the subway and many in the streets have been printed in English as well as in Japanese, so navigating Tokyo is no longer a bewildering slog through a maze of kanji characters. There are three well-edited newspapers and countless Web publications in English, and the Japanese have used technology to further demystify themselves to foreigners. Almost every business in Tokyo offers customized maps that you can print out from their Web sites.

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