Lessons Abroad

I was reading up about you and you had a really interesting background. I understand that prior to attending law school, you studied in Kyoto, Japan, and you worked in international relations for the city of Wakayama, Japan. Why Japan?

So it’s funny. So, I’m not ethnically Japanese, but spent a lot of time in Japan when I was young. My parents viewed international travel as a part of education. So, it was a tradition in our family that for each of us, our first big international trip was to Japan. I totally fell in love.
I went when I was 11, and then decided that I was going to study Japanese at some point. So I’d been in a school that taught French from kindergarten on and stayed with that through high school, but then switched to Japanese in college. And that led me to a year in Kyoto and then a job for the Japanese government after that.

And I would imagine that kind of diverse background, having lived and studied in Japan, how did that influence your desire to become a corporate lawyer? Or did it? And if so, what were some of the experiences that you brought from that international experience to what you do now in the legal world?

Well, I quickly learned that I was not a particularly good interpreter or translator, so I had to set that aside.

Cross that off.

And in some ways, that job, my first job out of college, working for the city of Wakayama, in some ways was the hardest job I ever had. I think part of it was youth, just being in an office environment for the first time, but layering on top, you know, operating in a language that I’d studied but wasn’t truly fluent in. And then the cultural differences. And even having spent time in Japan, so much of it was new, and it really taught me not to make assumptions.
And I remember in particular, there was one other American in my work environment, and my office referred to him as “our Robert.” In Japanese, they called him “our Robert,” and they referred to me as Uchinoko, which is just “our child.”

Oh.

Right, exactly. So, I remember saying to…When I studied in Kyoto, I did a homestay, which just this amazing Japanese family. And I remember saying to my homestay, mother, “Oh, gosh, can you believe that? I mean, they call him our Robert and they call me our child.” And she said, “No, you don’t understand. You should view that as a compliment. That means that they view you more as an insider. That’s not a bad thing.”
And so that was a really important lesson for me to not kind of apply my cultural assumptions to other people’s intent. And that’s a lesson that I’ve carried through all of my roles and in life.