758 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 5 SEPTEMBER 2021
ability to play golf. Never having played the game, he signed up for lessons,
and Ellen happened to be in the same golf class. Clearly something
clicked, as two years later, in 1994, they got married in Bretton Woods,
New Hampshire, at the same hotel where the Bretton Woods Agreement
was negotiated. Their reason for choosing the hotel had nothing to do with
a famous international agreement, or a connection to the state, or the
location of the hotel. Instead, in a rather uncharacteristically whimsical
moment, they chose it because the hotel building reminded them of a
giant wedding cake!
Law school was also the time that Jan’s obsession with new computing
technology emerged. Jan was the only student to show up to his first-year
classes with a laptop computer: a Toshiba T3100 PC that weighed 15 pounds
and could only display text in orange. At first, his law school friends thought
he was incredibly cutting-edge, but they eventually realized that the laptop
was an absolute necessity because Jan couldn’t read his own handwriting.
Over the years, Jan switched his allegiance to Apple and became an early
adopter of all things Mac—iMac, MacBook, iPhone, Apple Watch and, his
favourite, the iPad. One of Jan’s colleagues recalls an appearance before the
Supreme Court of Canada shortly after the iPad was unveiled. Jan had
already purchased one and brought it to the hearing. When his colleague
was asked questions by the court about a passage from a case that he did not
have with him at the podium, Jan calmly reached over and handed him his
iPad with the exact portion of the passage that his colleague needed already
highlighted. His colleague will never forget the deep sense of relief he felt
when this magical device suddenly appeared!
After law school, Ellen and Jan moved to Ottawa, where Jan clerked at
the Federal Court of Appeal for Justice James K. Hugessen. Justice
Hugessen was a very dear mentor to Jan. His clerkship exposed Jan to federal
Crown law practice and inspired him to apply for a job at the Department
of Justice. Jan joined the Civil Litigation Section in Ottawa in 1997
and loved it from the start.
While they were in Ottawa, Jan and Ellen’s family expanded with the
birth of their daughter Justine in 2003. Ellen is third-generation Japanese
Canadian, and her parents were interned in British Columbia during the
Second World War. They have shared with Jan many of their painful but
inspiring stories of dealing with systemic racism as they built their lives in
a country they continued to love in spite of the deep injustice its government
inflicted on their families. Justine’s biracial heritage has afforded Jan
a glimpse into the complexities of living as a mixed-race person in a society
where having a single racial characterization is still the norm.