I am sorry to report that this Independence Day is not full of cheer. It involved no firecrackers, no beer, no barbecue, no other Americans, no red or white. Only blue.

Not only have I lost one dog this year, I have now lost two. For those of you who knew Josie, the spastic yellow lab I’ve had since college, you know what a joy she was. Sometimes she was a joyous pain in the ass, like when she chewed my glasses and got into the trash all those times, but she was the greatest dog ever. Only a few weeks ago she was the healthiest dog in the world. Now she is dead from a sudden severe liver infection, lying in our bathtub at home waiting for my brother to come home and bury her. I had to find out from an email, the most eloquent and emotional email I have ever received. It was from my brother, the least likely of all people to be characterized as eloquent or emotional.

It makes me sick to think that the last time I saw her I was scrambling to pack everything I needed to come back to Japan, worrying more about whether I packed any Pepto Bismol than saying a proper goodbye to my favorite dog.

These are the times when I question my decision to move overseas.

Thanks to those friends who came to Josie’s "funeral."

Happy Independence Day.

More from… Tales From the Doctor’s Office!

Let’s see, where did I leave off? Oh yeah, Dr. Tamaki was telling me I was fat, dying, and semi-retarded. With that taken into consideration, I agreed to accept the medicine he prescribed to combat this brain thing he’s been trying to explain. My Japanese is getting better and better, but his English seems to be getting worse and worse. Today he said something like, "You eat this three times, for three days, several times, okay? And after two weeks this medication should be twice amount from last month."

HUH?!

So I asked my good buddy Sachiko, or "The Satch," as I like to call her, to interpret the directions on the medication and the notes in the margin that Dr. Tamaki wrote (medicine is distributed in little paper bags here instead of pill bottles). Her English far exceeds Dr. Tamaki’s, though she does make the occasional mistake involving articles and prepositions. "This medication says eat three times a day for three days, then eat as you need it for two weeks. Then if your brain is not better he will increase your medication."

"Ah. Okay. What do his notes say?" I asked.

"His note say you must eat the pills or you will die."

I thought she was kidding. Then I saw the pained look in her eyes.

"Susan, are you okay? Will you die?"

"Gosh, no," I said with an air of dismissal. "The worst that can happen is that I might be a little retarded." I thought surely she would know I was joking.

"Oh. Okay… that’s not as serious as dying," she said, as seriously as I’ve ever seen her, the exact same way Tamaki-san said it.

I guess you just have to live here to fully appreciate the way Japanese people think and talk. They never cease to amaze me with their calm, collected way of looking at the world.

The best part of the day, though, was when I was getting my blood drawn from Nurse Ogawa (which, incidentally, is the name of the Japanese nurse on Star Trek: The Next Generation! How funny is that? I have no idea how to communicate this piece of information to her, though). She doesn’t speak a word of English, so I get quite a bit of practice speaking Osaka-dialect with her. Another nurse caught my attention for a moment, and I saw through my peripheral vision another nurse asking Nurse Ogawa something. When I turned back to Nurse Ogawa, she said (in Japanese, of course), "That nurse just asked me if Japanese was your native language. You speak very well."

Wow! I was thrilled. Someone actually thought I might be a native speaker!

I’m going to ask The Satch how to say, "Your name is the same name as the nurse on Star Trek: The Next Generation." Oh, how impressed she will surely be!

For the past several weeks, I have incorporated a 2-3 kilometer run into my schedule. (Sorry, I should’ve warned you to brace yourselves for that piece of information, to those of you that know me.) I always hated running before, but ever since I bought The Runner’s Handbook and actually learned how to condition myself for the previously dreaded activity, I now look forward to it.

Four to five days a week, I don my running shoes and tattoo-revealing gym shorts and frolic around the neighborhood of Bentencho. It is a typical neighborhood in Osaka, though with probably a little more character than most, with its nooks and crannies of tiny apartments set back off the narrow road and houses with window gardens and no yards.

This afternoon I was jogging down the street and came upon a nook wherein a group of ten or twelve kids were playing dodge ball. They couldn’t have been more than five or six years old and were supervised by a couple of moms. When I jogged by, one of the little boys nailed me in the shoulder with the ball. They all thought it was hilarious, including the moms, but their laughter quickly turned to "Oh shit" silence when they realized I was a foreigner. They undoubtedly see so few of them.

I grabbed the ball and threw it back at the kid, hitting him on the leg, and the laughter once again ensued. I resumed my run.

On my second loop through the neighborhood, the kids were once again feeling froggy. Another kid decided to nail me again, in almost the exact same spot, and this time I knew it was on. I grabbed the ball and took off running. I hadn’t intended to steal the ball; I was going to run half a block and then maybe sneak back up on them and nail one of the kids, in manner of Adam Sandler in the movie Billy Madison.

I ran about half a block and looked back. What I saw would have sent shivers of terror up a lesser person’s spine.

I was being chased by a mob of angry Japanese kids. They were running at top speed, no match for the seasoned runner I’ve become but still viable competitors, screaming in kid-Japanese for me to stop. The mothers were half-jogging as well, laughing so hard they could barely keep up. I realized just then that I had to take action.

At the next corner, I turned and hid behind the garbage can of a small mom-and-pop grocery store. The kids skidded around the corner, stopped abruptly, and surely wondered where the thieving foreigner had disappeared to. I was trying to breathe as quietly as possible, but one of the little boys –the first assailant, actually- sensed my presence and turned around. He pointed at me violently and screamed something inaudible, stirring the vengeful emotions of the other midget vigilantes.

I took off in a sprint in the same direction I had just come. I didn’t bother looking back. I heard the shouts and feared that if I looked back I might see some torches or sickles or something. I ran around the next corner, this time to the left. I waited.

Three seconds later the first assailant appeared. I didn’t wait for another assault. I struck with the force of a woman desperate and cornered, determined not to lose my hard-fought battle to a bunch of five-year-old brutes daring enough to strike an unsuspecting jogger. I hit that kid square in the forehead.

Had it not been one of those plastic Dollar-Tree type balls, I would’ve feared the wrath of the observing mothers. As it were, the ball bounced off his head with little repercussion except for a bruised ego and an obvious resolve to get revenge.

I heard the mothers laughing all the way to the next block. I bolted down the street after my assault, and didn’t look back until three blocks later when I had to make a turn. I glanced back before I rounded the corner, but thankfully there was no mob.

There was, however, a lone little boy standing in the middle of the street with a pink plastic ball in his hand. When he saw me look back and our eyes met even all that distance apart, he darted in my direction at full speed.

I could see it in his eyes, the little voice that propelled him forward.

It’s on, it said.

I have a friend named Sakiko, a university student, who is just the most adorable Japanese diva I know. She speaks brilliant English (with the exception of a few expressions, such as "Eat my dust" and "Would you like fries with that?" which I taught her tonight) and believes no foreign man in Japan is to be trusted. One can clearly see why we get along so well.

We went to the Outback here in Osaka, a place famed in America for its Australian cuisine but which no Aussie has ever heard of. We had a great time teaching each other valuable expressions in each other’s languages. She already knew quite a few, and was quite proud of her knowledge, as demonstrated by her frequent use of the phrase, "Shut the f--- up!" I just love her.

Anyway, I am still on this fruitless quest to learn Kanji, the system of characters used by the Japanese and Chinese, which is damn near impossible to decipher by the foreign eye. One reason it is so hard to learn is because one symbol can mean many different things. When by itself, a symbol could mean something like, "plant." When used in conjunction with another symbol, it could mean something like, "venereal disease." And when used with yet another symbol, it could mean something like, "Those soybeans are awaiting your consumption." I could go on.

I came back from the crapper and asked her what the symbols were on the toilet flush handle. "I know the first one means ‘big’," I said, "and the other one means ‘river.’ But what does that have to do with flushing a toilet?" (I obviously didn’t think about it too hard before I asked. I’d had a few beers.)

"This symbol…" she drew one on a napkin to demonstrate, "… means big flush. And this one… means little flush."

I could not hold in my laughter. How clever of the Japanese, I thought, to use the symbol for ‘big’ for number two and the symbol for ‘river’ for number one.

"Which one did you press?" she asked.

"The big one!" I said through my tears. "But it was probably a good thing, because it was a hell of a river!"

We laughed so hard our guts hurt. "What do they do in America? Is there no big flush and little flush?"

"Nope!" I squeaked.

"Then what happens when you need a big flush, but it doesn’t go down?" she asked with complete sincerity.

"You either flush twice, or if you’re my dad, you leave it for the next person’s viewing pleasure."

The disgusted look on her face sent me over the edge. I was breathless for the next several minutes. When she asked me what exactly numbers one and two were a moment later, I couldn’t get the words out. I had to wipe my eyes and then draw a little doodle, which was shaky because I couldn’t quit laughing.

"Ah, I see," she said. "Susan, I think you are a really good English teacher. You explain things to me that no other teacher would ever explain. Thank you."

And with that, we chugged the rest of our beers, paid our bar tab, and went to go take a giant number one.

I had to go back to Dr. Nishimura today, my ear, nose and throat doctor. Dr. Tamaki evidently called him and told him I was going to die or become retarded if I didn’t take my medication, because he eyed me suspiciously when I walked into his office.

"We need to look at your brain, so please open your mouth," he said. His English is scarcely better than that of Dr. Tamaki.

"Uh… are you serious? You can you see my brain from looking in my mouth?" I said. Was this some kind of joke?

He sighed and shook his head like I was the biggest dipshit he’d ever met. "I must first look at your throat. Say ‘Ah’." He peered into my throat and gagged me with his nasty tongue-depressor, the one that tastes like number two. "Now I must look up your nose." He stuck that spaghetti-like wire, the one my doctor in the States always used, up my nose and down my throat. I gagged again. "Please stop gagging!" he said.

"Then quit sticking things in my body!" I wanted to yell, but I refrained. I had to refrain; I couldn’t speak. I could only grunt.

"Now I must stick this needle into your ear. This may be painful, so please focus your attention on something other than this needle. Like baseball," he added. He brandished a needle the size of a harpoon and proceeded to poke my brain with it. Memories of last fall came rushing back… I had again become the human pin cushion. How could I be expected to think about baseball at a time like this?

I decided to focus my attention on his crotch. It was right in front of me, perfectly in my line of sight and just begging to be stared at. He was wearing some tight little white doctor’s pants, leaving very little to the foreign imagination, and obviously had a preference for the right side of life, if you take my meaning.

As he pushed and pulled the harpoon in and out of my ear, searing my innards like an alien trying to extract information with a soldering iron, I stared at my doctor’s package like a deer caught in very painful headlights. It was massive. I can finally say that I now know the stereotype of Japanese men to be false, unless Dr. Nishimura has been stuffing some gauze bandages down there for safe keeping.

After it was over and my ear was bleeding like a stuck pig, one of the nurses put some gel in it and instructed me to hold a small heat lamp over my ear for five minutes. Other people were doing it too. It was all very odd. I’d never seen any ear, nose and throat clinic quite like this one, and believe me, I’ve seen my share.

Then I was instructed to hold a weird-looking two-pronged plastic contraption up to my nose for a few minutes. I was familiar with this routine, having performed this maneuver each time I’d been to see Dr. Nishimura, but I never quite figured it out. Cold air flowed through the ends and into my nostrils, leaving me with a pleasant sensation that I imagine to be similar to snorting a line of cocaine. I wouldn’t know, of course… I’m just going on what I overheard in a girls’ bathroom in San Antonio.

And to make this Tale From the Doctor’s Office even more strangely un-American-like, my wallet was lying on one of the couches in the waiting room, exactly where I had forgotten it before coming back to the doctor’s chair. It was untouched and all my money was there.

You know you’ve lived in Japan too long when you find yourself leaving your wallet on public benches and staring at doctor’s crotches. I have to stop doing that before I go back to the States.