A boy grew up in Tidewater, Virginia in the USA, studied philosophy in college and then got a Ph.D. in anthropology (Cornell, 1973), for a dissertation on the symbolism of Daoist magic. Failing to get tenure in his first academic job, he followed his wife, a graduate student in Japanese literature at Yale, to Japan in 1980. To make a long story short, he found work in the fringes of the Japanese advertising world and in 1983 was hired by Hakuhodo, Japan's 2nd largest advertising company, as an English language copywriter. After leaving Hakuhodo in 1996, he joined his sagacious spouse as co-owner and partner in The Word Works, Ltd., a supplier of fine translation and copywriting services t...