Why I Learned Japanese

People often ask me, why I decided to learn Japanese. Well . . .

I went to college at the height of the Bubble Economy, when Americans fears of a Japanese takeover were fanned by the Japanese purchasing ever signature building in New York City, and the New York Times had three or four pages of classified want ads desperately seeking people who could speak even the tiniest bit of Japanese. All around me at Harvard, people were studying Japanese, hoping to cash in on the Japanese wave.

One of those people was my girlfriend, Joanne. Between our sophomore and junior years of college, Joanne got a summer job in Okayama through the Japanese department's internship program. During that summer, she would write me letters telling me how much she loved Japan and how she would be going back there after college to work before going to business school. During that summer, I had a crummy job back in New Jersey, none of my high school friends were around, I had absolutely nothing to do, and I convinced myself that Joanne was The Girl, even though we had actually broken up just before the summer break.

By that time, I already knew that I wanted to work for a while after college, and I had always wanted to live abroad. Given my newly discovered desire to follow Joanne to the ends of the earth, I thought to myself, "I'll go to Japan with Joanne." Having made that decision, I thought I had better start cracking on the Japanese studies.

Of course, a couple of months after I started studying Japanese, Joanne and I broke up. But I kept studying Japanese, because I found it fascinating. It was utterly different than the French and Latin I had studied before. I was also kind of tickled at the idea of learning a language that few Americans could speak.

When it came time to graduate, I still wanted to work rather than head straight to graduate school. But, it was 1991 -- the midst of the first Bush recession -- and not even Harvard grads were getting jobs. I decided to try my luck in Japan, and began applying for jobs before graduation, eventually landing the Canon internship and the Look Japan editing job before I even left the U.S.

As it happened, in 1990, Germany reunified and Joanne dropped Japanese like a hot potato and started studying German. I ran into her years later in New York -- ironically, at a Japanese restaurant -- and she told me she had never returned to Japan after that internship. I wound up with a lifelong interest in Japan and a Japanese wife because of Joanne, and Joanne never did anything with her Japanese interests. Funny how life works out.