Tokyo Alumni Podcast

Episode 95 features two-time Newbery Medal winner Lois Lowry, author of The Giver and Number the Stars.

In the late 1940s, Lois arrived in post-WWII Tokyo as an American military kid. She remembers a city still recovering from war. Cars ran on charcoal burners. Kids were told not to eat ice cream because the water was said to be contaminated. Shibuya looked nothing like the Tokyo of today. Each morning a bus picked her up for seventh grade at what students then called the Meguro School, now the American School in Japan.

In this conversation, Lois shares:

• What it was like to be a blonde, blue-eyed kid who stood out everywhere she went in 1940s Tokyo
• The small victory of learning to ask for milk in Japanese
• The Japanese teacher and administrator who protected the school through the war
• The remarkable story connecting her to illustrator Allen Say
• A school bus driver she never forgot
• How her Tokyo years shaped her as a writer
• The Giver being challenged and banned in schools across America, and still reaching 27 languages and more than 12 million copies
• Her upcoming novel Building 903, a dystopian story about censorship and book banning, out September 29

We close with a rapid-fire round of quick questions, every one of them about books.

This is my final episode of the summer.

Only about 3-5% of podcasts make it to triple digits.... more episodes coming later this year, and Episode 100 is only five away.

Episode 94 features Don Lee, a Guggenheim Fellow and award-winning author whose novel Country of Origin won both the American Book Award and the Edgar Award. Don also edited the literary journal Ploughshares for nearly two decades.

Don grew up as the son of a US State Department officer in Tokyo and Seoul and attended ASIJ. We talk about growing up multicultural, his hope to be read as "a writer" rather than "an Asian writer," why Hawaii is where he feels he belongs most, and his advice from years of teaching creative writing (including "don't try too hard to be literary"). We also get into how AI has changed his process, and close with a rapid-fire round on books.

Listen now on Spotify.

There are very few Westerners who knew Osamu Tezuka, the god of manga, personally. Fred Schodt is one of them.

Fred arrived in Tokyo as a teenager in the 1960s and went on to become the godfather of English-language manga translation, the person who introduced the medium to the West with his 1983 book Manga! Manga!. He became Tezuka's friend and interpreter, and his translations, Astro Boy, Phoenix, Barefoot Gen, Ghost in the Shell, Urasawa's Pluto, are the versions a whole generation grew up reading. Japan awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun, and he sits in the Manga Publishing Hall of Fame.

In this episode we trace it back to the beginning: his ASIJ years, learning Japanese, and the college roommates who first handed him Tezuka's Phoenix. We talk about Dadakai, the short-lived translation group he formed with Jared Cook and friends Sakamoto Shinji and Ueda Midori, and how he and Jared later reunited to translate the full Phoenix series, work that continues today on a brand-new edition. We get into the near-impossible craft of carrying Japanese wordplay and onomatopoeia into English, his prescient early writing on Japanese robotics, an engineer's prediction that "in the end, software wins," and what it all says about today's AI moment and the future of translation.

A living bridge between Japan and the West, in his own words.

In Episode 92 I sit down with Adam Platt, chief restaurant critic at New York Magazine for 22 years, James Beard Award winner, and son of a US diplomat who grew up eating across Taiwan, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo before landing at ASIJ in the mid-1970s. We get into how he fell into food criticism, how the profession has changed across his career, and why ASIJ felt like a pocket of America inside Japan. We dig into the famous Bourdain claim that Tokyo is the best food city in the world, why Adam thinks it only overtook Paris around the 2010s, what makes Tokyo different from New York, and the twist from his upcoming book: many chefs now name Bangkok as the next great food capital. We also land on something every Tokyo international school grad knows, that feeling of leaving at 18 and realizing no American city quite matches the food you grew up with.

In episode 83 of the Tokyo Alumni Podcast, I had the pleasure of welcoming Joshua Thomson, a model, actor, and content creator who has hundreds of thousands of followers across various social media platforms. Joshua's videos, which have garnered tens of millions of views, resonate deeply with culturally and linguistically diverse individuals, especially those with international schooling backgrounds.

Welcome to Episode 82 of the Tokyo Alumni Podcast.

There is no way Steve Harris could have predicted he would spend 43 years in Japan.  

His talent for foreign languages would emerge during his years of study of Spanish at San Rafael High School, where at the age of 16 he would also meet his future wife, a Japanese girl from Tokyo who happened to be studying there for one year. The relationship prompted him to begin studying Japanese upon entering the University of California at Berkeley in 1976.   

He enjoyed his Japanese studies so much that he declared Japanese as his major and took advantage of Berkeley’ study-abroad program to spend a year at ICU in Tokyo during his junior year. Though he spent his last year back at Berkeley, the appeal of Tokyo was so strong for him that he decided to try to find work there right after graduation in the summer of 1980.   This led to a 17-year stint as a freelance translator and interpreter and then a 17-year stint as a Japanese language teacher at The American School in Japan.   

He left ASIJ in June of 2014 and has since been freelancing from his home, which is walking distance from the ASIJ campus.  

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Taeuk Kang (KISJ 2022)

Stanford University student

Taeuk Kang was born in Gyeongnam but moved to Jeju, where he attended Korea International School, Jeju Campus for 11 years. He plans to spend the next four years at Stanford University, CA studying Computer Science. He was awarded the Talent Award of Korea in 2020 among 100 Korean citizens for their exemplary talents.

His early interest in computers led him to software development. Since then, he has developed multiple projects and apps for both open source and businesses. One of his most recent projects is the LiveCorona Map, an open source COVID visualization tool and information source. As one of the project leads, he automated the statistic collections and created a public pharmacy mask map. The project had been adopted by the Jeju government as the COVID status website early on during the pandemic. He also enjoys creating hobby projects such as a multi-source language dictionary and a failed cloud hosting reseller startup.

Now, Taeuk is preparing to study Computer Science at Stanford University, specializing in the Artificial Intelligence area. He wishes to pursue a professional career in a related field.

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1:35 - Introduction

3:18 - Why choose Stanford University over Harvard University?

7:45 - How to get into Stanford, Harvard and Columbia University? Are hagwons and consultants worth it?

9:40 - What gave you an edge over other applicants? Are sports and extracurriculars needed to get into a prestigious University?

17:04 - How do you find something you are genuinely passionate in?

25:50 - Attending Korea International School Jeju / life in the GEC

34:10 - The advantage of attending international school over public school

36:55 - What do you envision doing ten years from now (2032)

Amelia Juhl (Seisen 1998)

Amelia is a Design Research Director at IDEO Tokyo. She brings more than 20 years of experience leading creative projects of all sizes. At IDEO, she has worked on projects such as redesigning medical products for the elderly, new beauty experiences for millennials, and systemic redesigns for agriculture. Previously, she worked as a Strategic Planner at a marketing agency, working on CRM or campaigns for global companies such as Nissan, Microsoft and P&G.   Her current passion is in adding life-centered principles to her human-centered approach. She is excited to lend her expertise in innovation to help businesses be more regenerative by design for the next decade.  

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Alexander Minami Redhead

Today our guest is a Portfolio Manager at Montrachet Capital. Today our guest attended St. Mary's International School for 13 years (Class of 2003), he later went to study at Tufts University where he earned a dual degree in Mathematics and Psychology. Prior to his current role, he worked at several investment banks in Tokyo and New York including Lehman Brothers, Credit Suisse, and Nomura Securities.   

In 2019, he joined Montrachet Capital, a multi-family office in Singapore, and runs the portfolio management group, helping wealthy individuals invest for the future. During his time in Singapore, he became a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ practitioner, interviewed and translated several books in Japanese for the legendary investor Jim Rogers, and helped numerous clients immigrate from Japan.   

He is currently active within the St. Mary's Alumni Association (SMAA), heading the Finance Group as well as the Singapore chapter, and enjoys sharing his no bullsh*t opinion to those seeking career advice. He looks forward to resuming 11-aside football when COVID measures are eased, but enjoys Crossfit and Tennis in the meantime.   

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