The confluences of his story, like the exposition of some postmodern riddle, is an appropriate paradigm of the most dominant force in today's world-globalization. Driven by the engine of technology, this embattled movement is shaping all societies by relegating every system of earning and enterprise into a single, highly competitive global market. And with silicon chips in America and Japan getting faster by the week, the frenzy of technological change threatens the livelihood of those most removed from its props. The UN's Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Project in Mongolia, which Yanai coordinates, aims to defuse these threats by helping the country tap this global market's great web of connection.

One of three groups in the program, Yanai's team focuses on stimulating a contingent of teachers and e-professionals in Ulaabaatar, the capital city where he lives and works. This professional consortium will serve as a future resource for knowledge-based industries. Imparting the very technology that has allowed Yanai to work across the globe, they conduct learning sessions on Internet use, web design, and general computer skills.

As project coordinator, Yanai is responsible for financial and human resource management. He also develops and drafts proposals and says the skills he refined in Hampden-Sydney's rhetoric program have been crucial to his success in attracting interest from the local media, IT firms, and educational institutions.

Despite some inefficiency at the local level, Yanai is excited about the progress they have made. The nascent project has already helped support globally recognized certification programs for IT technicians as well as IT venture grant projects. They have developed a web site for their project, and the fruits of their web development-training program were evident at the 2003 Mongolian Web Awards.

In addition to the ICT project, Yanai coordinates a WHO adolescent health program in the area and is putting together a partnership for assistance to the disabled, who he says are largely neglected in Mongolia.

Yanai's global loyalties are rooted mainly in his experiences as a deracinated Japanese teenager in New York. He quickly mastered the language and immersed himself in American culture, but rather than casting off his Asian identity for a Western one, Yanai developed a transnational individualism, taking a particular interest in reading international periodicals. Yanai's movement south to Hampden-Sydney, where he was one of the only Asians not just on campus but also in the entire area, constituted another significant cultural experience for him. But it was one that Yanai says was markedly positive. "I was the only Japanese student at Hampden-Sydney, but I always felt welcome. It was like I was an ambassador for my country."

After graduating with a degree in political science, Yanai went to work at a small publishing company in New York, where he was the associate editor of a magazine for Japanese expatriates in the US. He soon entered graduate school at Columbia University and studied international security policy, focusing specifically on Israel. After receiving a master's in international affairs, he went back to Japan briefly before becoming a Junior Professional Officer at UNV headquarters in Bonn, Germany. He spent the next three years as a program specialist in the Asia-Pacific-Europe Commonwealth of Independent States (APEC), responsible specifically for administering projects in the Pacific Islands.

Hideo Yanai '93, (in blue shirt) celebrates Tsagaan Sar (Lunar New Year) with a Mongolian family.

In 2000 he went back to Japan and worked at the American Chamber of Commerce. Eager to live and work in a developing country, he applied for a post in Mongolia and took over the ICT project's portfolio in 2002. While Yanai is uncertain how long he will stay there, his future plans include moving back to Japan to work in foreign policy.

Regardless of where he eventually settles or what his passport may decree, Yanai is, to use a convenient tag, a global citizen. "I consider myself Japanese," he says, "but I also consider myself a New Yorker, and a Hampden-Sydney man." And if his background is in fact something of a postmodern riddle, then his example-that of a committed volunteer who finds synergy in tradition and progress, ideals and practicality, human and machine, local and global-offers the clues to a promising solution. In a world blurred by the cultural centrifuge of technology, it is a solution that will prove increasingly pivotal to the human experience.