The salt tablet

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In one of the team-building exercises, we were given a scenario in which the airplane you were on crashed in the middle of the desert. There were about a dozen […]

New classmates

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The MBA program started in September. The first week was spent on orientation and getting to know one another. There were about fifty of us, and as the program promised, […]

Waning passion

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Stuart came to Japan for an annual business trip at the end of July, so I went to Tokyo to spend a week with him. I waited for his arrival […]

Grandmother – part 3

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My grandmother passed away four years later, a few months after the 2011 earthquake. My employer at the time worried about my mental state and let me call home from […]

The despairing fate of women

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My mother would drown herself in the work of “caring others.” She was a full-time kindergarten teacher. She had two daughters, but my sister and I were just like “additional […]

“IT”

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The afternoons in a rural village were almost soundless except for the noise of nature. There were still a couple of hours until my father returned and turned on the […]

Grandmother – part 2

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My grandmother is from a family who lived just a 15-minute walk from my grandfather’s house. My grandfather was a year senior in school, but they didn’t get married until […]

Grandmother – part 1

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I went downstairs to see my grandmother one afternoon while Hana was asleep on her parents’ bed. Grandmother was watching a period drama on TV. I sat on her bed […]

Homebound

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After the respite of spring with Stuart, I flew to Japan. My parents agreed to have me stay with them for a couple of months until I got the student […]

Faking confidence

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I received acceptance letters from Cass Business School (now Bayes) and Imperial Business School by early April. It wasn’t necessarily easy to gain the minimum GMAT score, write an essay, […]