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everyone's lived in Japan

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2014.04.14

While munching on a burger at Queen and Spadina today, I watched the people go by. At 43, I'm starting to find it sometimes difficult to tell the youngsters boy from girl. It's this hipster thing. Noticing that the woman next to me was roughly my age, I commented on it and we struck up a conversation.

When I compared the street styles to those of Tokyo, she agreed and it turned out that she'd lived in Kobe for a year or two, working for a company founded by two Americans that orders needful things for expats who want a taste of home.

It's one of the odd things about talking about life in Japan. It seems that an awful lot of people in Toronto have done it. I meet them at events, through work, through friends. Routinely!

rand()m quote

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

—Steven J. Gould