Next Thursday, June 12, Robin Maynard will celebrate his 59th birthday. In October he will mark 25 continuous years of living and working in Japan. Recently he secured permanent residence here. Next year, he said, after 26 years, "I will be the longest-serving-ever insurance expat Englishman in Japan." In counting years and Anglo-Japanese connections, Robin has one particularly arresting claim. His first wife's great-grandfather worked as a trader in Yokohama and Kobe from the late 1800s to 1905. "He was a member of the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club. Our family has a huge collection of period photos and hand-painted postcards," Robin reported. "My son played rugby for YCAC. It was a strange feeling for him to be with the same club that his great-great-grandfather was involved with 100 years earlier."

Robin was born in a village in southeast English, his birth hastened, he said, by a German bomb that was off-loaded in a nearby field. He grew up in the same locality. In common with many of his friends of the time, he didn't know what he wanted to do in life. "One of the old boys from my school happened to be in the insurance business. He thought my character suited me for insurance broking," he said. "I got into it and just plodded on."

For 15 years he learned the business whilst he was in the employ of different companies. Delight took over when in 1978 the Sedgwick Group asked him to be its liaison representative for 18 months in Japan. "It was an astonishing surprise," he said. "They were the days when we were still transacting business without fax machines or e-mail. I remember my very first taxi ride on my first day at the office here. My driver sang 'Rule Britannia' to me."