[originaltext]W: Steve in which year did you come to Japan?M: Uh, let me see,

W: Steve in which year did you come to Japan?
M: Uh, let me see, 1969, yeah. More than thirty years ago.
W: 59, 69, 79, 89, 99—79, 89, 99, 2009 would be forty. And you’re from the States?
M: Yeah, Michigan. Michigan is famous for lakes. It has many lakes—the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Unfortunately, pollution enters and moves through the Great Lakes region. The mission of the Michigan Great Lakes Protection Fund is to provide a source of reliable funding for new research and demonstration projects to preserve, enhance, and restore the Great Lakes and its component ecosystems.
W: Yeah, emphasis is placed on work that results in needed policy development or significant near-term improvement in water quality, environmental health, and ecosystem restoration. By the way, is Michigan up on the Canadian border?
M: Right.
W: The Northeast.
M: North—well, Midwest. It’s called the Midwest.
W: But it’s the Northeast of the country. Why is that?
M: Well, originally the West—the country wasn’t so big. And so Michigan was not quite all the way west, but it was pretty far west, yeah, when it became a state.
W: Hang on a minute, hang on a minute.
M: Yeah?
W: What do you mean "the country wasn’t so big?" The country’s always been the same size, hasn’t it?
M: No. It started off real little. It was just a little strip on the East coast, and it started kind of, uh, spreading like a fungus or a virus, or something. And it spread across. And when Michigan became a state, it was pretty far west, but it wasn’t all the way west, so they called that part of the country the Midwest. And the other parts out there would be the Far West, and California was just something altogether different, I guess.
W: So, the idea of "west" shifted gradually west, with time.
M: Yeah, originally, you know, the Appalachian mountains would’ve been the west side of the country and now, it’s way far east. And the Frontier. That was called the Frontier. It was a big deal.
W: When you say America was a thin sliver on the East Coast, where did it start? Was it New York or Philadelphia?
M: A bit north of there, Massachusetts.