こんにちは。はじめまして。私はダニエル・ファイトです。アメリカ人の留学生で、２８歳です。ニューヨーク市に生まれました。三年生で、オルバニーの州立大学で勉強しています。すみませんでしたが、日本語が少しだけ出来るので、英語で話します。どうぞよろしく。
[Translation: Good day. I'm glad to meet you. I am Daniel Feit. I am an American exchange student and I am 28 years old. I was born in New York City. I am a junior and I study at the State University at Albany. Excuse me, but I only speak a little Japanese so I will speak in English. I'm very pleased to meet you. This actually got a decent laugh because I went from introducing myself in Japanese to apologizing for my inability to speak Japanese. I think a key to Japanese humor is saying the unexpected.]
People have been asking me this question for five years now. Sometimes they laugh at me, other times they think I’m wasting my time. Most people who ask me about it really want to know the answer. Now that I’m here, Japanese people always ask me this question right away. Indeed, it’s a question I often ask myself. Why did I decide to come to Japan? Why do I want to study Japanese?
It’s a very hard question to answer but I know where it started: in my childhood. Growing up in a small suburban New York town in the 1980’s I was, like many of my friends, hooked on cartoons like Transformers and video games like Rockman.* I didn’t know it at the time, but everything I was enjoying as a child was actually from Japan. It may have been dubbed into English but this was actually the beginning of my exposure to Japanese culture.
In the 1990’s I entered high school and my interest in Japan continued in the same medium: pop culture. Video games were now speaking in Japanese and I began to ask myself what these games were trying to tell me. I didn’t watch cartoons anymore but then I learned about Japanese anime like らんま二分の一 [Ranma ½*] and 北斗の券 [Fist of the North Star*]。After much reluctance, I finally tried eating すし [sushi] and I discovered it was delicious. I still didn’t understand why but I realized that I wanted to learn more about Japan and the Japanese.
[*When referencing any pop culture I decided to use the Japanese title to better connect with the audience. It worked very well because they audibly responded to the things I mentioned, especially Ranma ½ which is still rerun on television.]
In the year 2000 I finally decided to act on my curiosity and I took an evening Japanese language class at New York’s Japan Society. In our first meeting, all we did was learn how to read ひらがな [hiragana] and カタカナ [katakana]。I can remember coming home later that evening, just looking around my apartment and discovering that I could now read some of the 漫画 [manga] my friends had shown me. I was so excited that it all started to make sense. I had studied foreign languages before but I had never stuck with it because I always got tired of learning something I couldn’t use. French and German were interesting in the classroom but in the “real world” I thought they were dull. Japanese, on the other hand, was the key to my understanding a foreign culture that had held my attention for fifteen years.
My class continued into the spring of 2001 when I decided I should go to Japan. I had never been on a vacation by myself before. I didn’t want to go there as just another tourist; I wanted to experience Japanese life and try to strengthen my new grip on the language. So I arranged a home stay through a private company and took a month off from my job at the Post Office. Everyone I worked with thought I was crazy. No one understood why I wanted to go to another country where I didn’t have any family. My friends and family, on the other hand, were very excited and looked forward to hearing how much I would learn about Japan.
I had no idea where in Japan to go and see. All I knew was I wanted to spend a month speaking Japanese and living a normal Japanese life, so I tried to pick a location that was in a small town where I hoped I wouldn’t meet anyone interested in English. As it turns out, the choice wasn’t up to me. There was only one host willing to have a guest in their home for a month that summer and she lived in 石巻宮城県 [Ishinomaki, Migaki]。I looked it up on a map and discovered it was a city in 東北 [Tôhoku] on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. It seemed like the perfect place to immerse myself in everything Japanese. And I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I arrived in Japan in late June 2001, right at the end of the rainy season. It rained every day all day. My host was an English conversation teacher so she always spoke to me in English and she would bring me along with her to help her with her lessons, which means I was speaking English everyday. Her house was very old and full of bugs (which I hate) and there was no running water in the toilet, like an indoor outhouse.* Worse yet, her television was old and didn’t work. By the end of the first week I caught a cold and I was depressed and angry. I felt like I had been ripped off because I wasn’t doing any of the things I wanted to do. Why had I spent so much money and effort to come here?
[*This is a bit of an over-simplification. Her toilet did flush but water did not collect in the basin. Anything that went into the toilet went straight to the outside. In fact, you could hear things hitting the ground when you were in there.]
Slowly, my mood began to improve. I started to realize that I was getting a rare opportunity to visit lots of different Japanese homes and meet new people everyday. I was introduced to people who took me sightseeing to 松島 [Matsushima] and 仙台 [Sendai]。I was, in fact, learning all about Japanese culture, it just wasn’t the culture I was expecting. What’s more, I found out I really enjoyed trying to teach English to the children because they wanted to learn about the United States just like I wanted to learn about Japan. I grew especially fond my host’s young grandchildren, さよちゃん [Sayo-chan] and とじくん [Toji-kun]。This surprised me because I normally didn’t like kids at all.
By the end of my stay I was completely enthralled by my experiences even though I hadn’t done anything I thought I would do. I didn’t get much Japanese practice or watch any anime and I hardly ever ate sushi. Instead, I had a profound experience that changed my entire perspective on what I was doing with my life. I decided that it was finally time to go back to school to get a degree and then return to Japan. I wanted to study Japanese so I could continue learning about Japanese culture as well as teach young people about my own language and culture. That decision is why I’m standing in front of you today. I did go back to school, even though it meant quitting my job, and I continue to study Japanese with the hopes of becoming a teacher after I graduate.
Which brings us back to the big question: “Why Japan?” It’s not pop culture or language or any of things I thought it would be. The truth is coming to Japan has given me the opportunities I needed to learn about myself. In New York, I spent so much time being me that I never stopped to wonder who I really was. The time I spend here in Japan is a crucial examination of that. That’s what’s important; not the “why” but the “who.” I hope everyone here has a chance to reflect on their lives like I have here in Japan. Thank you.
© Copyright 2005 Daniel Feit.
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