Series: Christmas Letter

It is hard to believe, but this past September marked three years since I transferred to Tokyo.  I am entering my seventh year with my current employer, meaning that I have now worked in the Tokyo office longer than I did in New York.

How time flies.

Life is interesting in that you remember important milestones in your

As I look back on the past year, which flew by even faster than usual, the biggest news for me was the retirement of The Honorable Peter E. Doyne, the Assignment Judge of the Bergen Vicinage of the Superior Court of New Jersey.

Judge Doyne was my first boss and mentor.  I became his law clerk

If I were to pick one phrase to describe the past year, it would be “The Year of Changes.”

On the professional front, I left Shearman & Sterling in May after seven and a half years at the firm in order to join Amazon in Japan. The jump from being an experienced lawyer at a

This past year, I thought about “time” quite a bit.

In June and September, two of my college roommates got married, and their wedding ceremonies became an occasion for the four roommates to get together for the first time in years. As we bantered much in the same way as we had in college, I

Perhaps because I spent most of 2017 thinking about time and how there is never enough of it, I dedicated 2018 to making the most of my limited time seeking to accomplish something new and concrete outside of my day job.

This year, I’d like to talk a bit about shogi, the Japanese variation of chess.  You may be thinking “but you do that every year,” but this year I hope to give some context to my annual report on how I continuously fail to raise my shogi skill level.

My life motto is “Things happen, life happens,” but even I couldn’t have imagined living through a pandemic.

It’s times like these that make you contemplate life.

It’s quite unlike me, but this year I’d like to talk a bit about my work.

My current job involves working to persuade the Japanese public sector to adopt the use of cloud services.  Governments tend to be beholden to past practices, and Japan is no different.  It takes a lot of

This spring, I was promoted at work.  I must confess, it took a bit longer than I expected.

No doubt my general carefree attitude contributed to the delay.  For the longest time, the most I wanted to get out of my job was to work on worthy initiatives with great people.  Beyond that

This past spring, my maternal grandfather died at the age of 103.  I thought about writing about him and his incredible life, but I have great difficulty dealing and thinking about death.  Because of that, instead of writing about my thoughts on my grandfather’s death, I decided to write about my thoughts on

2024 was a year in which I learned a lot from two projects that I put a lot of heart and soul into yet didn’t go as I had hoped.

This year, I am thrilled to report on two major accomplishments.

First, I achieved the rank of shodan in shogi (Japanese chess).  For those who are familiar with martial arts, this is equivalent to first-degree black belt.  It’s enough of an achievement that the Japan Shogi Association issued a certificate which officially certified me as such.