Raising a child in Japan really makes me angry sometimes.

Let me explain. Before my wife and I moved with our son to Japan two years ago, I was slightly intimidated by the thought of raising a child here. Cemented on my brain was a stereotyped image of Japanese children as robots that minded their manners, paraded off to nurseries in sailor uniforms, and who spent hours folding origami cranes.

Things didn't get off to a good start. Our first week here, Jack, about to have his first birthday, threw up in the back seat of a taxi. I was sure that was going to get us deported, for the driver wore a gray uniform with white gloves and a little cap that made him look like Jeeves the Butler. The backseat was covered with a pearl-white slipcover, and on the seat beside the driver was a feather duster he used to clean his steering wheel and dashboard. Baby spit-up definitely clashed with the decor.

Japan wasn't turning out to be the child-friendly country I thought it would be. The commuter rail system in Tokyo is convenient, clean, and easy to navigate, unless you are a child in a stroller. It was only a few months before we arrived, in fact, that baby carriages were even allowed on the subway. Then there are the restaurants. One Sunday afternoon, we set our sights on eating gyoza (dumplings) in a decidedly downscale, greasy spoon joint with benches and paper plates. No dice: kids weren't allowed. We ended up buying buy takeout and fed Jack in the street from a paper bag.

Don't even get me started on the cost of things. A little box of plastic Lego blocks? The equivalent of $70! It's no wonder no one wants to have babies!

So before too long, I was ready to conclude that Japan was anti-children, that despite its propaganda urging parental refuseniks to reverse the alarmingly low fertility rate, deep down, children just annoyed the Japanese. That's what I meant when I said having a child here makes me angry.

Then something started to happen, and I began to see things through a different set of eyes: my son's. I'd take Jack to the Children's Castle, a multistory giant playroom (admission was less than $5), on rainy Sunday afternoons. In one big room there are blocks and stuffed animals and big things to climb on. In the music room there are pianos kids can bang away on, drums to pound, and tambourines to jangle. The art room has a large board where Jack could splash paint all over like some miniature Jackson Pollock. And I could sit on the sidelines and snooze with the rest of the exhausted dads while our kids romped to their hearts content.

Tokyo has lots of stuff that make it a fantasy world for a little boy hooked on big machinery. There are trains of every size and shape, and after Jack started talking, he quickly began reciting the names of train stations before he could recite the ABCs: Yamanote, Shimbashi, Shinjuku, Asagiri and Shinkansen. And since Japan has yet to find a public works project it didn't love, there are diggers and excavators and dump trucks and cement mixers on every other street. In the United States, where we're from, they aren't all painted the same uniform shade of marigold. They're purple, green ... even pink. It's like they were made to please a child.

Jack also took a liking to Japanese food. At the age of 2, he had his first sushi (raw tuna and ikura are his favorites). I discovered how easy it was to feed him on the run without ever having to give in to McDonald's, because there is so much convenient, tasty, healthy and cheap food around, such as inari (deep-fried tofu), onigiri (hand-rolled sushi), and yakitori (chicken, beef or seafood on a stick). So what if the restaurants wouldn't seat us. We could always explore the boisterous food halls in the basements of the department stores, where the kindly vendors never fail to give Jack free samples of whatever he wants. It's where we discovered he likes the taste of seaweed.

Tokyo, I was slowly starting to discover, was a pretty nice place to be a young child. A safe and secure place where the taxi drivers might growl at you when your kid scuffs his precious seat covers, but where the same taxi driver is never going to cheat you out of a fare. When I leave our home in the morning, I don't worry about whether I've locked the door. My wife can walk through the city after dark without looking over her shoulder every other second. On those same stroller-intolerant subways, there are always schoolkids, not more than six years old, traveling by themselves. All the defense mechanisms we Americans learn to carry with us like necessary pieces of a wardrobe? Those have all been discarded. Shortly before we left the America to move to Asia, more than seven years ago, a couple of thugs tried to break into our house in Washington, D.C. It was a frightening 10 minutes of terror while the two guys tried to break down the back door and I begged the police operator to send help. We didn't have a peaceful night's sleep for years afterward. But here in Japan, we sleep at night. We don't worry about schoolyard massacres and kidnappings and muggings and random drive-by shootings.

Yes, raising a child in Japan makes me angry sometimes. It makes me angry that someday, when we go back to the U.S., we'll have to teach Jack to keep his guard up and to be suspicious of strangers. We'll have to tell him that his new home, in America, isn't like his old home, in Japan.