I like to read. A lot. My parents read to me every night when I was a little kid. I was reading chapter books while a lot of the kids in my class were still working through See Spot Run. So you can imagine how disorienting it is to live in a world when I am functionally illiterate.
When I'm out on town I go into restaurants with names I cannot read. Then I am handed a menu that I hope has pictures so I can know what I am ordering. I look across the street and see advertisements written in incomprehensible Kanji. When I am handed my bill I look at the numbers to make sure they charged me the correct amount. I have no idea at all what they charged me for. All of this is disconcerting. But the absolutely most horrible experience of culture shock comes from standing in the middle of a bookstore surrounded by books I cannot read.
The front of the book is on the back - the Japanese read right to left. The letters run down the page - they also read from top to bottom in many cases. Even the most basic children's cardboard book is beyond my comprehension.
These kids 
Could read any one of these novels before I puzzled out the title.
While at the bookstore I saw a book on display. It had a silhouette of an air craft carrier on the cover. The silhouette was ornamented by a nuclear hazard symbol. Never have I wanted so badly to read anything. But I couldn't. In Japan I am less educated than a first grader. I know nothing.
Is that scary to me? You bet. If I didn't want to learn Japanese before, I do now.
I leave you today with a quote from Alvin Toffler, "The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn."
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