A young lawyer on her own in Tokyo, Pamela Weinsaft feels securely independent and completely at home here. She first came to Japan in 1995 to study for a semester at Temple University Law School in Tokyo. She said: "Perhaps 10 years ago, Japan seemed more 'exotic,' but I think one of the things that strikes me now is that it is not so different. Lawyers are very similar in a lot of ways -- I don't know whether that is good or bad. This time everything was so familiar that I felt I was coming home."
Pam was born in Brooklyn, her mother's home borough in New York, and grew up elsewhere on Long Island. She is the youngest of three sisters, although her twin is only four minutes her senior. Her father, originally a European, is a Holocaust survivor.
As a young boy he experienced conditions in a labor camp, and rough resistance living in a forest, then postwar placement in a camp for dispersed people. An uncle living in America, whom the boy didn't know, found and claimed him. "My father had nothing when he arrived in America," Pam said. "He studied in night school, joined a company, and worked his way up to become vice president: an American story."