S. McIntire Allen

Steven McIntire Allen was born in Rangoon, Burma, now called Yangon, Myanmar, in 1963. After a couple graduations in Western New York, he bought a motorcycle and drove across country to work at a hotel at a ski resort in Utah. He toured the Western United States on his motorcycle, and eventually went to work in Europe in 1987. He worked as a ski guide in the Tyrol, and taught water skiing on a small island in the Aegean. He also worked as a motorcycle courier in London, an assembly line worker in Sweden, and a migrant labourer in Spain.

After returning to the United States, he crewed an historical sailing vessel, a 1920's Grand Banks Schooner, around the Caribbean. Eventually, in part thanks to a nice Jewish couple living on an island off Mexico, he came to the conclusion that he had to get a real job. Because he enjoyed interacting with different cultures and peoples, his parents suggested studying a foreign language, specifically Japanese. He began studying Japanese as a non-matriculating student, and continued to study after entering law school. People then began calling him McIntire, rather than Steve.

After his first year of law school he took a leave of absence to spend a year teaching on the JET Program at a high school in Northeastern rural Japan. Spring vacation of that year was spent hitchhiking around Southeast Asia, and visiting family friends in Yangon. Unfortunately, if he had spent more than one year away, he would have had to repeat his first year of law school, so he went back to Connecticut for a semester of law school. He then returned to Japan for a semester of law school. That summer he worked at a think tank in Akasaka Mitsuke.

In 1996 he moved to New York City, and sat for the New York Bar. While working as a project attorney, he was invited to Los Angeles to work for a video game company. He was not called to the Virginia Bar, but he sat for the California Bar twice. In 2001 he was hired by a law firm in Tokyo. In 2005 he moved to Osaka to work for another law firm. In 2012 he returned to live in Tokyo.