A long time resident in Nagasaki (I live in what used to be called the "foreign settlement"), I teach "international relations" in the Faculty of Economics of Nagasaki University to mostly Japanese students. This is an old red brick establishment going back a hundred years which survived the atomic bombing though not the "black rain." I also teach courses on Japanese society to visiting North American students at Nagasaki Foreign Languages University, a somewhat different game. As an even longer term resident or sojourner in some Southeast Asian countries, I mostly write and comment about these countries for Japan Focus as well as in other publications. Needless to say, I spend a lot of time in the field. Recent trips have taken me back to Laos and Vietnam, with a cycle of earlier trips to Indonesia and East Timor. Perhaps reflecting my research interests (and my audiences), some of my books have recently entered Indonesian, Portuguese and Chinese translations (virtually nothing in Japanese if you follow my logic). One of my recent books takes a broader optic, namely, First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange (1500-1800) [Roman & Littlefield, 2003]