Tradition

For workers at the popular Tsukiji fish market, the final indignity may have been when the intoxicated British tourist licked the head of a frozen tuna. In the now-notorious incident, captured by a Japanese TV crew, an irate market official shouted in English, "Get out! Get out!" as the man patted the tuna's gills. Every day, hundreds of sightseers gather in the predawn gloom to witness one of the most popular events on the Tokyo tourist agenda: the daily tuna auction.

It outlasted Elvis, the Rat Pack, the mob, the Atomic Age and the Stardust, Dunes and Sands casinos. It helped cement the showgirl as Sin City ambassador -- the mayor often appears with one on each arm -- and as pop culture shorthand for glittery, sexy Las Vegas. But months shy of its 50th year, "Les Folies Bergere" will soon close, a victim of slumping revenue and changing tastes.

Standing outside his hookah station at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Glendale, Alfonso "Abou Salim" Ramirez grabbed a red apple and, using a sharp knife, sliced off the top. He flipped the apple over and made four quick incisions, creating a small square. "This is my secret," Ramirez said, jabbing a finger into the square to pop out the core. He then stuffed red, apple-flavored tobacco into the hole and covered it with a piece of tin foil.

Last summer, the tranquil English village of Kentisbeare woke up to find a dagger piercing its heart. The man who ran the neighborhood pub, the Wyndham Arms, had decided to call it quits. Hit by hard times, he locked up one evening and never came back, leaving the village bereft of its "local," the watering hole down the road where, for more than 200 years, the good folk here could always drop in for a pint, a pie or a piece of gossip.

The motley caravan of boats, their engines popping in staccato rhythm, headed out to sea sounding like a platoon of sputtering lawn mowers. Painted bright red, turquoise and orange, they carried a dozen men wearing baseball caps and T-shirts fashioned as turbans to block the equatorial sun. Johnny Aralaji perched on the pointed bow of one of the craft, his sun-creased face frowning in concentration. He was born on a boat like this. His family wandered, allowing the currents to lead them.

Sadie couldn't wait to welcome in the Lunar New Year. She helped her parents decorate their home with red and gold banners for luck, picked out a red embroidered outfit to wear to school and made sure to tidy her blue-walled room to sweep out evil spirits. It is the Year of the Ox, the first time that zodiac sign has appeared since the year she was born, thousands of miles away in China's Hunan province.

The stocking repairman is long dead, the hat seller is gone too, but down Via Merulana the sparks still fly around Sergio Zoppo, his hands, the color of ore, skimming knife blades across grindstones. The steel heats and hums, a kind of music in the late morning air, coiling through the roar of buses, the whine of motorini. He looks up, glasses dangling on a string around his neck, his blue smock smeared with minerals and grime.

Even before the morning dew dried on the knolls of Rose Hills Memorial Park and Mortuary in Whittier on Saturday, hundreds of Chinese families were lined up outside the gate, their cars packed with bountiful offerings: fruit, noodle and vegetable dishes, whole roasted pigs. The long procession of cars -- 15,000 to 20,000 are expected through this afternoon -- meandered up the steep pathways to the west side of the cemetery, where many of Southern California's Chinese are buried.

Pedigree matters in a country where politics is often a family business. Take a look at the top echelon of Japanese politics: Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is the son of a prime minister. His predecessor was the grandson of a prime minister. So was the man he defeated to win his party's leadership last fall. And when he looks across the aisle in parliament, he sees yet another second-generation politician leading the opposition. They are just the tip of Japan's hereditary iceberg.

Cars, bank notes and TVs were going up in flames one chilly winter morning in the parking lot of Universal Chung Wah Funeral Home in Alhambra. Thirteen white-clad relatives of Dam Lam, 87, formed a circle, each cradling a stack of paper models: a foot-long 747 jetliner, a black-and-gold car sitting in the courtyard of a 2-foot-tall, red-tiled paper mansion. One by one, the items were thrown into the fire licking out of a 4-by-4-foot wheeled container, charred from years of use.