Introducing Yumi (and How We Met)

Many of you already know or have at least met Yumi, but I thought that this was a good time to officially "introduce" her.

Yumiko, aka Yumi, was born outside of Hiroshima in (year deleted by Yumi) and has one older sister, Yukiko who is now married and lives nearby with her husband and 3 sons.

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After attending a local elementary school, Yumi attended Jogakuin, a prestigious, private, Protestant school for grades 7-12. During her junior year of high school, Yumi won a scholarship from Youth for Understanding to study abroad at a high school in Michigan.

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After high school, she attended the private, Catholic Sophia University in Tokyo, which she often reminds me is "the Princeton of Japan." There she studied business. She stayed on in Tokyo for 5 years at a company which makes GPS systems.

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Yumi had a big life change the next year. She quit her job and volunteered for a year with the Never Again Campaign. She split the year between Minneapolis, Minnesota and Rhode Island. She lived with host families and made appointments to speak at schools, churches, and civic organizations about nuclear weapons and proliferation.

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The experiences in the United States led her to seek two masters degrees in Peace Studies from the University of Bradford in northern England. She won a very generous and prestigious scholarship through the Rotary Foundation which funded the entire two years of living and studying.

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After finishing the degrees, Yumi took a job with a Japanese NGO in Indonesia to help rebuild villages physically and psychologically after a recent earthquake. She was project managing several projects at once. Interestingly, with her time in Indonesia and my recent move to Japan, we have both now lived in 4 countries: the U.S., Japan, the U.K., and Papua New Guinea for me and next door Indonesia for her.

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By then, we had decided we wanted to be together, so we both moved to Japan and Yumi took up a job at a semi-governmental organization which takes people from developing countries and brings them to Japan for 2-week (in most cases) training sessions on various aspects of development including economic and environmental standards. She is in charge of organizing the lectures and providing the logistics for 20 or more participants to fly to Japan and stay.

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Of course, she's more than just a resume. She's smart, and graceful, funny, and beautiful. She's idealistic and adventurous and I could go on. Suffice it to say that she's great, I love her, and I'm a pretty lucky guy.

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Incidentally, I want to publicly say that my friend from Belfast, Wilson said about 2 years ago, that if I didn't marry Yumi, I was a pillock. While I still may be a pillock for other reasons, I am glad to say it it not for failing to marry Yumi.

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As for how we met, it was at the International Pugwash* Conference on Science and World Affairs in Hiroshima in late July, 2005. At the time, Yumi was studying for her masters in northern England and I was working towards the Ph.D. in Belfast, Northern Ireland. We first met at the Young Pugwash pre-conference and hit it off right away. We spent a lot of time together during the week of the pre-conference and the senior conference which followed.

*Pugwash is the co-1995 Nobel Peace Laureate along with the late Joseph Rotblat who was one of the 11 founders in 1955 along with Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell. I dedicated my Ph.D. dissertation to Prof. Rotblat who I was fortunate to meet twice. He is the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project (to build the atomic bomb). Incidentally Pugwash is named for the town in Nova Scotia, Canada where they held the first conference.