Tim "13th Witness" McGurr with some of the most famous designer legends in Tokyo. 13th Witness

BI: You went to Japan after high school and you ended up staying for 4 years. What's the story behind that?

TM: In high school I started to kind of f--- around. My father thought that it would be a good idea for me to maybe take a trip to Japan. I was close to not graduating high school because of attendance [and] other issues. [But] I made a push and graduated. And then two weeks later, I was out to Fukuoka, Japan, to do a homestay with a family.

After a couple of weeks I was like, "Man this place is special." I was really immersed in the culture. It just made so much sense to me, and I didn't want to leave. And then I met a Japanese girl and that's when everything kind of took a turn, you know, because I stopped working. On a return flight from a trip to Hawaii I remember trying to come back to Tokyo, and I was in line at immigration and they just came up behind me. They had a printout of every entry and exit over the last couple of years. They had me in a room to question me and they wanted to know what was happening, was I working illegally?

BI: They got you doing visa runs.

TM: Yeah. Over the course of several years.

BI: And then you're out.