My Opposite Number 16 3 31 (18) 25 1 20

Well I do know a few men in Japan: people I got to meet through my business life like for example the very nice guy a Mr Kindaichi who was once my host, a somewhat reluctant host because I embarrassed him right off by choosing a Japanese restaurant for our venue for our dinner engagement, he the Japanese President of the parent company together with the President of their Dutch subsidiary who made up our threesome...Owing to the absence of a colleague of mine, the MD of our selling company for their goods the 3 of us just talked neutral matters like how we are liked cooking and he ended the evening by giving the restaurant 10 out 10...  

And then when, after attending my elder son's graduation ceremony at Sussex University and he was jetting out to Japan to take up a Teaching appointment for a year, who should be sitting next to me on my return flight home but this Japanese guy called Takehiko, a fellow Chemist, whom I got to know quite well over the next few years because he was staying in Scandinavia on a year's sabbatical and we would visit him and his wife Sanae and they would visit us...

Then there was a guy called Takuji, mis-spelt Takugi in my translation, who had a patent similar to one of mine which appeared 6 months before mine but which, by the time they were examined in the Japanese Patent Office 7 years later, he had allowed his patent to lapse, presumably as being of no commercial merit worthy of its financial upkeep, whilst mine was still pending. So mine became a full patent whilst his could no longer be considered prior art, at least not in Japan... in a sense my opposite number who succeeded in having my European Patent declared non-inventive by virtue of a shorter pending period before examination here in the West..?

But the opposite number I wish to talk about today is this guy Yukio who is my daughter-in-law's father. During Easter my daughter-in-law Sa told this story about how aged 19 she visited Osaka with her father and people there warned her off being with a man more than twice her age when she they considered to be a minor of maybe no more than 14 years of age.   

We had been looking at pictures of our two families and in particular this pic of Sa, her older sister Is, her Mom Yo, and her Da Yu. Amazingly Sa looks now like her Mom looked then, whilst Is had a remarkable resemblance to her father who it occurs to me now looks like an extraordinarily handsome Japanese man, but who is totally different to his equally handsome wife and younger daughter in the pic.

So Sa told these people she was with her father and then later when they still disbelieved her she protested “It is true I am his daughter and I am not a child I am an adult and am reading Law in University: if you don’t believe me I can prove it with my student id…” Thereafter she showed her id when they were gob-smacked. Unfortunately I cannot tell the story as well as Sa did. She added how her father just laughed at the whole proceedings with his enormous `cow eyes´ even hinting that may be they were correct in their speculation, which was attended with even more uproarious laughter...

Sa at great length told how the people of Osaka are renowned for their intrusiveness but it was nice to hear her story and nice to know she got to visit places with her Da as a young woman.

My younger son P lives with his Scandinavian wife in UK and of course we don’t get to see as much of them as we would if they lived nearer whilst Sa of course doesn’t get to see as much as she would like of her Japanese family living here with an even greater distance between Scandinavia and her home country. Have a good day everyone as I get to feel the lucky one compared to my number 1 Japanese Opposite number.