Leaving the New York office of the Japanese trade agency JETRO after 44 years of employment is an occasion to look back.
I arrived here in the fateful 1968. The year started with Martin Luther King Jr. shot dead, and ended with three American astronauts flying around the moon and returning to Earth. In between, Robert F. Kennedy, running for president, was shot dead, and Chicago police violence at the Democratic Party Convention was televised.
Next spring I was hired by JETRO. A young American couple had sponsored me, and I'd come here on a tourist visa. But the rules on such things were not as uptight as they are today. The immigration act that abolished racial and ethnic preferences and has since transformed America's demographic contour had become law just four years earlier.
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