Coming to America

As the United States celebrates its founding this month, non-American Club Members explain how time spent in the US affected their later lives.

These are the times that try men’s souls” the pamphlet declared in its opening line. Innocuously titled Common Sense, the anonymously penned pamphlet helped stoke the flames of the American Revolution. And the writer was English.

“Without the pen of the author of ‘Common Sense,’ the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain,” wrote US President John Adams.
Raised in a small village in Norfolk, Thomas Paine had lived in Philadelphia for only a year when 500,000 copies of his incendiary pamphlet were disseminated and read aloud in taverns.

“I do not choose to be a common person,” Paine later wrote about his reasons for abandoning England for the American Colonies. “I want to take the calculated risk—to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed.”

Ever since Common Sense was published in 1776, immigrants from all corners of the world have regarded America as the land of opportunity. When he was sworn in as secretary of state in 1973, Henry Kissinger, who had fled Nazi Germany with his family, said, “There is no country in the world where it is conceivable that a man of my origin could be standing here next to the president of the United States.”

Today more than 1 million international students study in the United States, twice as many as the UK, the next largest host. Club Member Shiran Dias, a native of the Sri Lankan capital city of Colombo, says higher education in the US is “second to none, globally.”

An “average” high school student, Dias never dreamed that he would one day graduate with a master’s from Harvard University. Completing his undergrad at the University of Oregon, Dias says once he arrived in Eugene he felt able to “achieve great things.”

“One thing I learned there is if you show people your hard work, everyone is given a fair opportunity,” says the 54-year-old.

With support from his teachers, Dias graduated from Oregon in three years and moved to the opposite coast to attend Boston University. With his sights set on the institution across the Charles River, Dias regularly met with Harvard professors and admissions officers. Despite not being “the most qualified applicant,” he persevered and was accepted.

Dias, who attended last year’s Independence Day Celebration with his family, embarked on a 25-year investment banking career that included a stint on Wall Street.

“This is a tough business and to survive for so long you have to be resilient and mentally tough,” he says. “There is something called the American dream in some sense. Anyone can make it there. You just go for it.”

Fellow Member Tomomi Fujita, a certified teacher, also attended the University of Oregon, where she taught an undergrad Japanese class. For one year, she lived with a family outside of Eugene. She remembers the 13 chickens the family raised and the croak of the bull frogs in the fields.

“I was brought up in Shimbashi, and every day there are drunk guys yelling and noise, and I am totally fine falling asleep,” she says. “I was so scared of the bull frog sound.”

But home life was radically different from Tokyo. She was surprised to find uninvited neighbors rummaging through the family’s refrigerator for milk. Ten people gathered around the table for family dinners. Fujita learned that if she wanted her voice heard, she needed to be able to interrupt the flow of conversation. She also learned not to worry about grammar miscues.

“Making a mistake is huge [in Japan]. A lot of Japanese people don’t speak out. The big reason is they don’t want to make a mistake grammatically,” says Fujita, 44. “English is a tool. If I didn’t go to the States, I [wouldn’t be] working in a foreign firm.”

Member Mai Nagashima, whose parents both studied in the States, had to overcome her fear of failure to join discussions in classes at the University of Texas, where participation was graded.

“When you just try, people are really nice. People don’t judge you for making mistakes,” says Nagashima, 31. “Being open-minded and being positive and not being too afraid of failure—that’s the important lesson I learned.”

By the time she graduated, she was working as a translator for Japanese bands at Austin’s famous South by Southwest arts festival. Nagashima also changed her career outlook, joining a Japanese bank. While working in New York City, she was impressed by the number of coworkers who balanced work and home life.

“People put their family as a priority and they don’t mind saying that openly,” says Nagashima, a Tokyo native. “They don’t really discriminate just because you are not American or [because] you are a woman. You can be yourself and if you work hard, there will always be opportunities for you.”

Graduating from Harvard Business School, Member Tatsuo Kawasaki worked for a tech startup in the early days of Silicon Valley. But his most enduring American memories, he says, are from his time as a high school exchange student in a small town outside Kalamazoo, Michigan.

While living with a blue-collar family in a town of 5,000 on the shore of Lake Michigan, Kawasaki saw fellow 18-year-olds planning careers, joining the military or skipping town to choose their own path.

It was a departure from life back in Japan, where Kawasaki and his family followed his father as he was transferred around the country with his company. A common corporate existence in Japan.

“Because I had been to America, I didn’t have to think this is the box and I need to fit in this box.” says Kawasaki, 53. “I didn’t want to be a nuisance to society, but I wanted to be my own person.”

In 1996, Kawasaki was researching the burgeoning Internet industry for an American consultancy. Two years later, he joined an online credit card company that was operating on a three-month cash reserve.

“Everybody was very optimistic,” says Kawasaki. “Underneath the tie-dyed T-shirts, they are hard-working, gung-ho-type personalities. Very few I came across cared where you came from. You are here, and are you going to add value to this company?”

Kawasaki moved back to Tokyo before the dot-com bubble burst and co-founded a first-of-its-kind private equity firm. Part of his success he puts down to his experience working with those sanguine venture capitalists in San Francisco.

“We wanted to call our shots,” says Kawasaki. “To start a business from scratch, it requires a little bit of effort. It takes a little bit of independent thinking.”

Michael Ostern felt a similar freedom during his time in the United States. The Goethe University Frankfurt grad chose to continue his studies in the Midwest as opposed to another big city. As his plane glided over the cornfields surrounding Iowa City, he says the isolation he felt at his hometown university evaporated.

There were plenty of firsts for Ostern while attending the University of Iowa’s MBA program. He was surprised at the informal way in which students and professors interacted, and team projects and presentations were new academic experiences.

“You have to get out of your comfort zone because you cannot hide anymore,” says the 46-year-old Member. “But if you work as a team, the stronger you are.”
He took those lessons to his Wall Street internship, where the focus was always the performance of the team.

“I thought the culture fits my [personality] quite well, and that affected my decision to join a US company here in Japan,” says Ostern. “And also join Tokyo American Club to keep those ties and memories alive.”

A sentiment Thomas Paine would have understood.

Stars & Stripes Dinner
July 2–4 | American Bar & Grill and Traders' Bar

Words: Nick Narigon