LOS ANGELES — A funny thing happened to Tokyo's Masahiro Kohara after he arrived in Los Angeles almost 2 1/2 years ago: He felt right at home.
The intellectually elegant Japanese diplomat had been expecting to feel like a fish out of water. But, taking over as the deputy consul general in Los Angeles, Kohara quickly found his footing as he more or less found himself every other day — and night — at some community get-together or cultural event.
And he was never really bored: Southern California didn't seem half as superficial as had been advertised. Though well briefed at the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo about the well-known diversity on the West Coast of America, he was astonished by the panoramic panoply of demographic cosmopolitanism that was spread out all before him. Asians were everywhere, Japanese Americans were everywhere, and so Kohara felt as if he were swimming in warm and friendly waters.