journal features

first meeting

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2019.12.10

First thing I crossed the city center from Kameido to Shinjuku to go to a book store that I knew had English-language map books. That left me with some time that I put to re-orienting myself. A LOT seems to have changed in the nine years I've been away, but the changes are positive: Tokyo is clearly booming.

I met with my first headhunters of this trip. They're an executive search business located in an office in an out-of-the-way place just central enough to suit such a business but not so well placed that it would be too expensive. They told me that I'd be well served to move to Tokyo and start a search from there, and to expect said search to take months. They also wanted to look into some of the largish retail firms such as Rakuten and Amazon Japan, which are operating largely in English.

We'll see.

rand()m quote

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.

—Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.