One aspect of Japanese culture that has, perhaps unfortunately, established itself as a permanent feature of our family regardless of geographical location is the shoe thing. Yes, I am bound by a unique interpretation of Japanese footwear regulations in my own American home.
The porch functions as a genkan, which makes sense. This is the main footwear change-up area for the transition from house slippers to outside shoes or vice versa. There are no guest slippers because guests are exempt from all the shoe rules, within the bounds of "common sense". I need to go out the back door into the yard with the dog several times a day so there is another little shoe station in front of the sliding glass door, complete with it's own shoe rack. I have a pair of low cut Bean boots that Shiro picked up for $3 at Goodwill that I wear to take the dog out into the yard. Slippers are worn throughout the first floor and up the stairs to the second floor but are removed before entering either of the bedrooms. Those rooms are bare feet or socks only areas.
These rules are, of course, devised by Shiro because I still don't really appreciate the full complexity of the Japanese inside/outside paradigm enough to have done it. It's an inconvenience at times, but nothing worse than that so I comply. Although I'm finding the sanctity of inside cleanliness concept a little ironic now as I sit inhaling the fumes near Shiro's very botched attempt at restoring the staircase by applying several bottles of Citristrip and stripping six decades worth of paint off the stairs to finally realize that it would have been easier just to paint over what was there or else rip out the old boards and replace them with new ones. Guess we just moved up a notch on the home owner's learning curve the hard way.