Back in the late nineties, I was lucky enough to get hold of that most prized of possessions, a Hotmail address with my christian name first, my surname second, and no dots, dashes, numbers or anything else extraneous in between. Purely for illustrative purposes, let's pretend that my real name is Billy Nugget, and that the address in question was billynugget@hotmail.com

Even then, there were already scores of other Billy Nuggets using Hotmail, but I just happened to sign up at the precise moment the original Billy Nugget either decided not to use Hotmail any more and cancelled his account, or died in a freak dog grooming accident. As I'm sure you can understand, I was very pleased about this fortuitous turn of events (fortuitous for me, that is, not necessarily for Mr Nugget). Partly for convenience sake, and partly because I couldn't bear the thought of giving up something so easy to remember, I kept hold of this holy grail of email addresses, and in the intervening years have become well acquainted with the idiosyncracies of Hotmail's service, of which there are many.

For example, allow me to introduce those of you who are not familiar with Hotmail to its 'Contacts' feature:

Like other free email accounts (and indeed mobile phones. And indeed, er, address books), Hotmail allows you to store your friends' / colleagues' / acquaintances' / stalkers' contact details alphabetically. Should you happen to email someone you have not emailed before, or should someone non-suspicious happen to email you, Hotmail will even ask if you would like to add that person's name and details to your contact list. So far so good, and after more than a decade with Hotmail, I now have getting on for two hundred contacts, some of whom I email regularly, some occasionally, and some I will probably never have reason to email again for the rest of my natural life.

Anyway, let's assume I want to send an email to one of those occasionals; one of the people whose email address - and this is a key point - I don't happen to know off the top of my head. As usual, I click on the 'New' option on my Hotmail page and a blank email appears. In the 'To:' box, I begin to type my friend's name - once again, and purely for illustrative purposes, let's call him Harry Pratt. Almost instantaneously, a drop-down menu appears listing everyone on my contacts list whose email address begins with an H: harold.bobbins@gmail.com, horatio-nelson@britishnavy.net, humbert_humbert@lolita.xxx, and so on and so forth. The trouble is, now that I come to think of it, Harry is a bit of a joker, so rather than harry.pratt@gmail.com or harry-pratt1971@yahoo.co.jp or even pratt_harry@dyno-rod.co.uk, his email address begins with crazyharry or bonkersharry or madcappratt or something similarly 'hilarious'.

Now you would think, wouldn't you, that the whole point of a contact list - particularly the contact list for an email account - would be to allow the user to quickly access his or her friends' email addresses merely via the use of their christian name or surname. As anyone with any sense will tell you, it's far easier to remember a couple of key words like, say, 'Harry' or 'Pratt' than it is to remember something far longer and more complicated, like xiekdgijdkaoed.23856308386.harold_h-pratt.jr_the-3rd@itsonthetipofmytongue.org, for example. The mind-bogglingly infuriating thing about the Hotmail contact list, however, is that even though Harry's email address is stored along with his name therein, it is not possible to access that name at the precise moment you need to do so. In other words, the drop-down menu that automatically appears when you begin to type in the 'To:' box is not a list of your friends' names that start with that letter, but merely a list of the email addresses on your contact list that start with that letter, which two things, as we've already discussed, have no intrinsic connection.

What I actually have to do in order to get Harry's email address into the 'To:' box of the aforementioned email is to:

1) Save a draft of the email
2) Go to my contact list
3) Go to the H section of my contact list
4) Find the name 'Harry Pratt' halfway down the page
5) Click on said name
6) When Harry's contact details appear, manually copy his email address [my italics]
7) Go back to my inbox
8) Go to my drafts folder
9) Click on the drafted email
10) Paste Harry's email address into the 'To:' box

Now if you'll just excuse me, I need to pause for a moment and use some punctuation:

#$&'%(")&='~}*<+{>?????!!!!!

Call me a remorseless pedant if you like, but surely, after well over a decade of running what is still one of the most utilised email services in the world, the good people at MSN might have figured out that this small but significant glitch in their system could do with being fixed. More to the point, they have probably received complaints numbering in the tens of millions from disgruntled and remorseless pedants like myself: enough complaints, in fact, to make them realise that perhaps the time may have come to sort things out.

One of the obituaries for the recently deceased Steve Jobs claimed that he had a reputation for prioritising 'form over function', but whoever wrote this had clearly never used a single Apple product. Sure, I have had my fair share of problems with the various Macs I have owned - malfunctioning CD drives, crashed hard drives, dodgy keyboards etc. - but that never stopped them from a) looking good and b) being easy to use. PCs, on the other hand, a) look ugly and b) are not easy to use, and for this, Mr Jobs deserves at least a modicum of retrospective credit.

So what does this all have to do with Japan, I hear you ask? Not much really, except to say that had Bill Gates been born Japanese, PC and Windows users might all be a lot more satisfied with their Microsoft product user experience, and I might more readily be able to access the email addresses of my contacts, thus allowing me to waste even more of my time on Facebook, Twitter and Badass of the Week.

Some of you may not be aware that I once wrote a book about Japan, and that for a short while, a publisher was sufficiently interested in it to give me some editorial notes and ask for a re-write. In the end they didn’t feel they could sell enough copies to justify the investment of printing and promotion, but I may still self-publish as an e-book for the Kindle / iPad market, and the notes themselves made a very telling point about my first draft, one that I want to take into account as much as possible when writing this blog. I can’t remember the exact phrase, but their verdict on the overall tone of the book was that it was dangerously close to being that of a ‘whining’, ‘complaining’ foreigner, and on reflection, not only do I believe they were correct in saying this, but I can also see that it is an easy trap to fall into for any expat, and one that is very much in evidence on the internet.

But why would anyone who has chosen to move to a foreign country – quite possibly because they loved what they saw of it from afar and had a romantic view of what it was like to live there – be so quick to criticise?

Well, first and foremost there is culture shock, which affects everyone to a greater or lesser extent. Once the honeymoon period of wide-eyed awe is over, the expat begins to miss his home comforts and the cultural security blanket that most people have wrapped around them at all times. He becomes overly sensitive to inconvenience or difficulty of any kind, and frankly, at that point almost everything seems alien and annoying.

Secondly, it is in our nature to compare, and while many Japan / UK comparisons come out in favour of the former – the trains run on time, the vending machines work, the streets are crime free etc. – there will always be some that come out against: the almost complete absence of workers’ and women’s rights, for example, the over reliance on bureaucracy, or the still smoky atmosphere in most bars and restaurants.

Thirdly and most importantly, there is the language gap: one is always more likely to criticise or find fault with something one does not understand, or into which one does not have a proper insight. When you’re living in your own country, not only do you have the advantage of being a native speaker, but you have a lifetime of knowledge and experience with which to back that up: cultural reference points, customs and manners, education and upbringing, and so on and so forth. If you arrive in a foreign country with just a few basic phrases at your disposal – ‘Hello’, ‘Pleased to meet you’, ‘Can I have a beer, please?’ – you are completely helpless. It's like being a baby all over again: you can't understand what people are saying, nor can you read something as simple as a road sign, and to compound the problem, you cannot express even your most basic needs. What to do when you need to catch a bus, buy a plane ticket, or turn on your air conditioner? The trouble is, no matter how amenable or empathetic you might be, there is an innate human tendency to view everything as someone else’s fault, so even if the problem arises from the inability of two people to speak each other’s languages (and let’s face it, when a foreigner comes to the UK, it is much more likely to be the former who can make him or herself understood by the latter, and not vice versa), in the opinion of the expat, it is the native speaker who is being awkward, or ignorant, or obstructive.

Be it on paper or on the internet, what these three things give rise to is a lot of writing that instead of celebrating what’s cool, interesting or great about Japan, focuses on what’s regressive, inconvenient or unfair. My favourite J-Blog of all, Tokyo Damage Report, has often been often guilty of this, and along with the book Dogs And Demons, whose author Alex Kerr is an expat of sorts, it served as possibly my biggest influence when I made my bid for travel literature immortality. I’m certainly not saying that foreigners should refrain from criticising Japan, but I do believe they should think twice before doing so, and ponder whether they are in fact contributing to an overall atmosphere of what the current jargon calls snark – ie. a bitchy, critical writing style that has become all too prevalent in today’s Facebook / Twitter / blog-heavy virtual world.

On my current visit to Japan, I have tried as much as I can not only to look for the positive in what I encounter, but also to look for its negative equivalent in my own culture, or at least to balance out one negative with another. For example, while Japan isn’t exactly a world leader when it comes to protecting the environment, neither is the UK. Where Japan’s landscape is blighted with concrete, the UK too has become a homogeneous suburban wasteland, in which out-of-town superstores and four-lane bypasses are rapidly replacing rolling hills and village greens. In the same way that everything in Japan claims to be eco, green or energy saving when it is often nothing of the sort, so everyone British with an ad budget and a product to sell has been jumping on the environmental bandwagon, whether they have the credentials to back it up or not – in fact, given Japan’s record for innovation, if a solution to global warming can be found, it is more likely to come from the East than the West.

So if you, dear reader, ever find the balance of this blog tipping too far into the realm of the snark, please encourage me to restrain myself, as my aim – my manifesto, even – is to avoid such negativity.