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It was 2008. The world as we knew it collapsed with Lehman Brothers. I was a secretary to an executive officer in a Japanese bank. I knew little about Lehman Brothers except the name and the snobby connotation it carried. I was not smart enough to know what it meant to the business but I was clever enough to know the ripple effect. Everyone was afraid that he or she would be downsized. I sure did not want to lose the job. I sacrificed so much for the position and my effort had not been paid off yet. Still, people were made redundant every day.

One day, a Filipina friend of my Filipina friend brought her Japanese husband to a church in Roppoingi for the first time in a long time. He was made redundant from a Japanese branch of an once-wealthy foreign bank and all of sudden he had nothing but time to spend with his wife. We heard him say ‘It was a blessing in disguise’. My brain could not register that. I just knew some had mortgage to pay, another had child or children to raise. Regardless of resources he or she might have, the source of income was ripped away from their life. Things were not looking bright in my world anyway with or without Lehman shock.

That was how I perceived the matters of social affairs go about. That was how I perceived the life, my resource and the source of our universe.