this is karai.com

Name: Chris Pearce
Location: Kobe, Hyogo, Japan
Occupation: Coordinator for International Relations, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan
Resume: Software Engineer & Japanese to English Translator
Email: clpearce@gmail.com

Fast Facts

• I was a software engineer at CyberMedia, Network Associates, and McAfee.com (and it was all the same job!)
• I have been studying Japanese for a long time now.
• I lived in Japan for two years. One year in Isahaya City, Nagasaki Prefecture and one year in Tokyo.
• I attented Nagasaki Wesleyan Junior College for a year, from the summer of 2000 to the summer of 2001, and I have a certificate of completion from their Japanese language and culture program.
• I attented Waseda University for a year, from the fall 2003 to the summer 2004, and I have a certificate of completion from their Center for International Education. I was part of the last class of the CIE. It has since been dismantled and turned into the School of International Liberal Studies.

I am also a tragic survivor of the dot com boom.

Ancient History (late 1970s-1996)

I was born in the American Southwest; a hot and desolate place. My parents decided we should move to a better climate, and when I was a year old my family settled on the west side of Portland, Oregon. We bounced around the area for a number of years until and finally settled into a new development in Aloha, Oregon.

I went to Mt. View Middle School, Aloha High School for half a year, and finished out high school at Beaverton High School (which is apparently one of the nation’s top 1000 high schools according to Newsweek magazine).

The Dot Com Era (1996-2000)

Everyone around me encouraged me to go straight to college, especially my mom and my teachers. But I have this terrible habit of doing only what I want to. I started working on the Internet. My first job was making webpages with Europa, an internet service provider in Portland, Oregon. I taught myself programming, first Visual Basic, and the C, and then Windows programming in C and C++. Because of my programming experience I got involved with a Europa spin-off company named Europa Software. They had made a popular web browser bookmarking utility for the Macintosh called “WebQuick”, and I made the Windows port of that software. After “WebQuick” I was involved in a project called “WebChaperone”, which was supposed to keep children safe from the evils on the Internet. They were a poor startup though, and nobody wanted to give us any venture capital. So when they couldn’t even pay me the miserly sum I was getting in December of 1997 I ended my relationship with them.

I applied to a job in the paper with a company called CyberMedia and started working there as a junior software engineer. CyberMedia was famous for its UnInstaller software. In the old days software from did not uninstall itself very well. DLLs and all manner of junk were left all over the computer. I learned a lot of interesting things working there, and my main project at the time was Internet Connection Repair. It was supposed to be a component of First Aid 2000, but I don’t remember if it ever made it in the product. Basically what it did was take snapshots of the sections of the registry that were related to networking. You could compare old snapshots and reload them.

Network Associates bought CyberMedia in 1999 and I was laid off. Two days later I was hired again, with a raise, because I was in charge of that Internet Connection Repair component. I guess someone didn’t think about what they were doing before they started firing people. We were put in the McAfee software group, First Aid 2000 was finalized and shipped, and we did busy work on the rest of the CyberMedia products, changing the name to McAfee, that sort of thing.

Someone realized that the Internet was the greatest thing in the world, and that we should take advantage of it by putting all that McAfee software on the Internet. I think his name was Srivats. This meant putting Uninstaller, First Aid, and Virus Scan into ActiveX controls and running them on a webpage. It was a good idea for Virus Scan at least. This is how McAfee.com was born. We got spun off into a independent subsidiary, and we had an IPO, and we all got some stock. But we didn’t get a lot of stock. People low on the totem like your average software engineer didn’t get much stock at all. It was still enough for a lot of people to buy a car though, especially if you sold right before the dot com bubble burst. I saved most of my money and used it to pay for college.

My favorite memory from McAfee.com was working on the new Virus Scan control. It was the last project I worked on before I quit my job. The Virus Scan control turned out very nicely, and it was also really fast. I timed it against the retail product and it was significantly faster. We all used the same virus scanning engine, so there really shouldn’t have been a reason why one would run faster than the other. Unless, of course, someone wasn’t using the virus scanning engine like it was supposed to be use. Which is why my Virus Scan control was faster. All I did was I followed the directions and used the virus scanning engine correctly.

I quit my McAfee.com job, moved to Japan, and haven’t worked in the software industry since. If I didn’t know better I would suspect that I had been blacklisted.

Discovering Japan (1996-present)

Just after high school my friend invited me to take a Japanese class, and I accepted. I went to the first day of class, got freaked out, and dropped the class immediately. I got interested in the Japanese language though, and I bought some books on Japanese and taught myself kana and simple conversation. I took an intensive summer course in Japanese at PCC, and I’ve been learning Japanese ever since.

I took my first trip to Japan as I was starting my second year of Japanese at school. I have my dot com job to thank for that. I made enough money travel to, from, and around Japan a number of times. The first trip was hard though. It was hard to get on a plane and travel to a foreign country completely alone. Even though I had studied Japanese, it’s never enough to prepare you for actually being in Japan. I survived and enjoyed my trip though. I traveled to Japan four times while I was working in the software industry. I was able to visit most of the major cities and I had a lot of fun. Plus I learned a lot about traveling itself.

In 2000 I took a chance and applied to a study abroad program through PCC. It was a hard program to get into because they only had one available spot for a male in the program. I got lucky. Even though I was the third choice to go on the program, the other applicants had issues with their applications, and I got to go. I quit my job and moved to Isahaya City in Nagasaki Prefecture.

I had a good time living in Isahaya. I made steady progress in my Japanese classes at Nagasaki Wesleyan Junior College. When I had free time I would go into Nagasaki City and wander around. I would often go up into the hills that ring the city. You can see a lot of interesting things when you get off the beaten path. Did you know there are crabs that live in the gutters on those hills? Or on the top of one of the hills is a giant pit that fires were lit in, and it was used a giant lighthouse? My fellow students and I also served as goodwill ambassadors. We would go to elementary schools where we would meet with and talk to the kids. This was often their first chance to get to meet a foreigner.

Then I came back home. While I was living in Isahaya the dot com world had been destroyed. I had expected that when I came back to America I would be able to enter the computer industry again. My expectation was wrong.

I finished my degree at PCC and then transferred to PSU. I continued studying Japanese and took advantage of the new classes that I could take, especially those in Japanese literature. I discovered that I really enjoy Japanese literature and translation. I was also eager to get back to Japan, so I applied to another study abroad program through PSU. I was lucky to get a scholarship and went back to Japan, this time studying at Waseda University.

Waseda was a much different experience than Isahaya. Living in Tokyo is a unique experience. The daily commute to school by train was brutal. But I was happy I was in a city full of good food and drink. I placed into the top Japanese class offered at Waseda, which was a bit of a surprise. I’ve always had a rather low opinion of my own language skills. The other classes were a little bit of a disappointment though. The schedules for the literature classes were very bad.

I met the love of my life, Izumi, while I was in Tokyo. We had our first date on January 1st, 2004. It was New Years, the biggest holiday in Japan, so Tokyo was almost deserted. We ended up eating in an Indian resturant. That’s one of the things I love about Indian resturants, they never seem to close. They’re the only restuarants I know of in America that are open on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Izumi and I have been together ever since. Of everything I’ve gotten from Japan in all these years, experiences, friends, adventures, I am most thankful for getting the chance to meet Izumi.

When the time came to leave Japan and come home, she came with me. We’ve been able to have a lot of interesting experiences both in Japan and in America. Our next goal is to start a life in Japan together.

The Future

I graduated cum laude from Portland State University on June 11, 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Foreign Languages: Japanese.

I currently live in Kobe, Japan.

Izumi and I got married on March 15, 2006.