When a partner attorney at Uryu & Itoga, the law firm where I work as paralegal, recommended to me to go to Temple Law School (Japan campus) to earn an LL.M. degree in U.S. law, I was overjoyed and literally grabbed the chance. Studying at a U.S. law school and earning an LL.M. degree had been my dream for as long as I could remember. My father was one of the earliest Japanese legal professionals to earn an LL.M. degree at a U.S. law school in recent Japanese history. He studied at Michigan Law School in the early 1970s, and while Mitsui & Co. is presently known as one of the major international Japanese trading companies to dispatch legal personnel overseas, he was the first legal employee to actually succeed in earning an LL.M. degree from that company, having been dispatched to the U.S. law school with high expectations from his colleagues. Partly due to the influence of my father, I was so deeply interested in U.S. law that I studied Anglo-American common law and …