Why I Chose to Study Japanese

I wish that my reasons for studying Japanese were simple--something benign, like wanting to speak to my Japanese friend's grandmother, or be more polite whenever I eat at a ramen shop. While I should be happy that my interest in the language and culture of Japan extends beyond the cliches and dubious usefulness of anime and manga, if this were the case, it would certainly make explaining my reasoning less time-consuming. With neither of those being the case, my logic is as follows.

Despite spending almost a year at the American School in Tokyo, my knowledge of the Japanese language is tenuous, at best. For all intents and purposes, I existed in an English-speaking bubble, despite living in a foreign nation with one of the most distinct linguistic systems on Earth. At the time, my interest in Japanese culture and history was minimal; my chiefest academic interests were in American and Western history. Yet, as years went by, and my personal course of historical study widened in breadth, it became clear that an understanding of Western affairs is incomplete without a thorough knowledge of the West's influence across the world. The history of interaction between the West and Africa, South America, and North America, is one of significant power imbalances and Western domination. Despite Western spheres of influence in China during the late nineteenth century, East Asia (what was once imperialistically called "the Orient") stands out as the exception; Japan stands out even more as the exception amongst these exceptions. Despite attempts to, and occasional progress toward, establishing Western hegemony in Japan, the island nation retained total independence, and despite the encroachment of both industrial and modern philosophies and practices, maintains traditional mores and attitudes that, in some cases, predate the Roman Empire. Language being intrinsic to the fullest-possible understanding of a nation's culture, it is thus necessary for me to study Japanese formally and to the best of my ability, if my goal is to contextualize and understand Japan's success in resisting foreign influence for so long, and to investigate further the rare flash-points that have occurred in the history of Japan's relationship toward its most immediate neighbors and the distant Western powers. Through this, I aspire to make a career in foreign service, applying a firm academic and practical understanding of Japanese culture and history to modern alliance-building efforts between the United States and Japan and resolving localized geopolitical issues which affect American interests in East Asia. 

Thus far, my efforts have had mixed results. It is supremely difficult to move from a life spent studying Latin and Latin-based languages to a language that shares no common root with the languages of Europe. It is not so much for its complexity that Japanese confounds me, but for its simplicity; for the simplest colloquialism in classical Latin, there are dozens of rules which dictate where each part-of-speech goes where--in fact, I have broken a Latin rule just now, by ending the previous sentence with a participle. Japanese, meanwhile, is streamlined, and the placement of its nouns, particles, and verbs is simple and intuitive. Latin pains its students with six tenses, each having either an active or passive form, while Japanese makes use of only four tenses, and no differentiation between which noun each is applied to. It has required, and will continue to require, that I, in essence, ignore the red flags that a brain raised on Romance languages has a tendency to raise when a sentence is too simple. Nonetheless, this immediate difference is already representative of the cause for my fascination with Japanese. The language has utterly unique origins, and these lend themselves to a novel sentence structure and manner of expression--to say nothing of the Japanese writing systems. It is rather like a puzzle to read and write in Japanese. It certainly offers the same sense of self-satisfaction in translating a paragraph as does solving a jigsaw puzzle--and I greatly look forward to more. 

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ヘンリー