I always enjoy the books of Mr. Forward, both the fiction and the science articles. I recommend this book to people who like hard science fiction.However, looking on page 214,we read his character's description of hiragana "...A single Japanese hiragana character can be either a word or a long phrase..." There is more, and this is simply wrong. Each hiragana is a simple character, and a student could easily learn the entire hiragana set in one day. Each hiragana character represents a simple sound and nothing else. Examples are ka, ki, ku, ke, ko. Mr. Forward is confusing hiragana with kanji! Other than that, a good job.