Quote Originally Posted by JapaMisawa_BR View Post
How many countries share borders with Japan??
Irrelevant to my point, which was meant to be taken in an abstract philosophical way rather than a concrete geographical way.

When I was a kid growing up in West Tennessee, I lived on an island. It was an island of the mind, circumscribed by the limits of my normal activities. In other words, any area that was beyond the area in which I normally moved, for all practical purposes, may as well have been separated from me by an ocean. There wouldn't have been any difference as regarded me as an individual.

As an adult, I live on a very tiny island of the mind which is physically located on a portion of Honshu. If the actual seashore were just a few kilometers north of my home here in Gunma, it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference to my daily life. Everything and everybody on the other side of the boundary of where I normally travel may as well be 1000 miles, 10,000 miles, or a million miles away.

You've probably heard of people who were born, lived their lives, and died without ever traveling more than a few miles. What difference would it have made to them if the area had been bordered by water? That was as far as they were going anyway.

We all live on islands....we just don't all realize it.