"What have you been doing in Japan?"

The man in the seat next to me in the airplane tried to start a conversation by using this standard opening. It was late April 1998, and we were on our way back to Europe.

"My wife Mary and I ran a race between Nagoya and Kanazawa,"

The man looked confused, so I figured that more explanation was needed. Then I opened the airline magazine and looked up the page with the map of that airline’s all international routes, and started to tell the story about what Mary and I had been through in Japan.