In 2016, Mark Ledbetter returned to America after a forty year sojourn in Japan, raising a family and keeping an eye on America with both the knowledge of an insider and the eyes of an outsider, capping his career with three years as a visiting professor of linguistics at Hosei University in Tokyo. He arrived back in the United States in October of 2016, just in time to witness a political earthquake, one of those historical episodes rife with potential and danger, which give life, and sometimes death, to the story of a nation. Either way, he intends to monitor the process, doing what he can in his small way to save the Great American Experiment. He has written extensively on both linguistics and history, publishing in both English and Japanese.