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Sure

Hearing the story sucked all the air in the world into a volcano, and I started suffocating.

I know I should calm down and not be so dramatic.


Osamu has been waking up at 5 a.m. pretty regularly recently, and I've been crashing out on the living room floor with all the windows open because I'm in love with this season; rainy and humid all day, cool and humid all night, with sunsets that turn deep purple and sunrises at 4:15 a.m.


Kenzo and Osamu are catching on to my ways. First, Osamu comes downstairs and wakes me up, asking if there's kindergarten today, to which I often have to check and make sure.

Then Kenzo comes downstairs and hops on me like a Dr. Seuss character, instantly rendering my phone alarm obsolete.


I don't have a business mind, and I especially don't have a Japanese company business mind.

This is something my Japanese company boss, who is very skilled at businessy business, likes to remind me about sometimes. In business terms.

However, he's trying to help me these days. It's probably not his decision to have me as a manager working under him in this department, and given a choice he would probably choose somebody else. But someone above him made the call, so now he's stuck with me.

We're only one year apart in age, but we are very far apart in the way we think about business, company culture, teamwork—everything. Today, I received some advice again about ways I can improve my management skills. Objectively, I know his advice is sound, but I'm having trouble accepting and implementing it. Plus, I'm sort of a late bloomer with a lot of things in life, and one of them is entering management. I spent most of my career working in education, which is very different from what I'm doing now.

When Kenzo left school today to walk home, he was carrying his bug box with his newfound and freshly captured little beetle. This other boy, a classmate, comes up to him and says, "Hey, can I see your beetle?"

So Kenzo very happily says, "Sure," and hands over his beetle to his classmate, which is not unusual because all the kids play with each other's bugs all the time.

Then the kid throws the beetle on the ground and stomps on it.

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