Reflections of a Long-Term Japanese Studies Student

With more luggage than one person probably needs, I boarded my flight to Tokyo on the 21st of March, arriving on the 22nd in time to start the new semester at Waseda University. I’m currently in a share house living situation, and although I planned to start my search for more permanent accommodation right away, a surprising mandatory week of self-isolation has put that on hold.

On the brighter side, I’ve been enjoying the milder, warm and windy weather in the brief pockets I’ve been outside. Even in under a week, I can feel the difference between living here and visiting as a tourist. While I rarely took the initiative five years ago to speak in Japanese, now in the year 2022 I’ve become a lot more pro-active to better navigate around the quiet suburbs of Waseda.

I’ve been using some of this unexpected quarantine time to reflect on my interest in Japan and Japanese Studies. Last September, I started off my MA in Global Japanese Literary and Cultural Studies online from the UK, as international travel wasn’t possible at the time. I applied for the Daiwa Scholarship in Japanese Studies this January, around the time where my first six months at Waseda came to a close. Neither my application to Waseda or the Scholarship would have been possible if I hadn’t made the decision ten years ago to study Japanese.

I started my language studies alone, aged thirteen, armed with a single language book and rudimentary hiragana knowledge. At a time where only a few popular works would be regularly released and sold overseas and Netflix wasn’t around yet, I relied heavily on fan translations to enjoy a lot of my favourite shows. Eventually I grew impatient with the wait times. The most natural solution to my problems, I thought, was to learn Japanese. No more wait times, and I’d be able to enjoy the same content right down to the original source.

I announced my decision to my father, and he obliged with buying me a fairly small but stocky “Japanese for Beginners” book. The material in the book better served an employee on their yearly Japan business trip than a teenager wanting to understand the second season of Boys Over Flowers, and with no one or nothing else to rely on for questions, my independent study didn’t last long. So then came two years without much development, although I had not given up consuming copious amounts of dubiously-uploaded content on YouTube.

I’d say that my studies truly began at fifteen. Japanese GCSE, along with Latin GCSE, were “twilight courses” at my school, meaning the lessons occurred out of normal school hours. The class was small as a result, taught under the guidance of a very forgiving teacher, considering the amount of homework I left undone. I thoroughly enjoyed studying Japanese as a group, and my memories from this time ultimately influenced me to begin another academic journey in Japanese Studies. But this realisation didn’t happen immediately; I chose to pursue animation after my A Levels, relegating Japanese to the side. I made the decision under the condition that I wouldn’t give up studying Japanese altogether, and the Japanese Language Proficiency Test would become my next target after the last of my exams.

By the third and final year of my degree, I’d passed N1. I had come this far studying Japanese in the gaps between my animation classes; there being little reason or opportunity to bring it into my academic studies. This was also the time I got into translation, my initial interest having much to do with wanting to meet the same demand I had as a young teenager. I never really intended for it to happen, but translation and Japanese language learning were now just hobbies, that needed to remain separate from my major studies. This however changed when I was twenty-one.

In making the subject of my extended research (the final written project all animation students were required to do) about kawaii culture and Japanese subculture, what had become a hidden interest in time resurfaced in my academic studies. The title of the piece, “Cute Sentimentality in Japanese Subcultures”, was my way of exploring what on the surface looks like superficial, emotional indulgence, and how animation as a medium presents or engages in cute culture.  I even won an award for the essay. It was at the animations department’s “Cecil’s”, a yearly end of year award show for soon-to-be graduates, in new animation-related research. I was shocked. I’d come to think of myself as an arty person, and that post-graduation I’d be working at a studio as an animator somewhere. But this experience tugged me in the direction of humanities, and from there came an MA in Japanese Studies at SOAS, and then the start of two years at Waseda.

SOAS was where I formally studied translation, which was quite different from what I’d been doing during my animation degree. Learning that there was such a thing as translation theory and that numerous translations of the same works co-exist and are read simultaneously came as a huge surprise, but made for a great learning experience.

A year-long degree goes by fairly quickly. Towards the end, I found myself dissatisfied not with my research or my classes, but with the amount. So by the time I received the results of my dissertation, I had applied for my second Master’s, this time looking outside of the UK, and to Japan. Thinking I’d be able to travel soon, I quickly made my preparations only for the opposite to happen. The first six months of my degree at Waseda were done from the comfort of my bedroom. All that comfort was promptly sucked away by the eight/nine-hour time difference. I would wake up earliest at 3am to start at 4.

At twenty-three however, I was all too familiar to the phenomenon of “staying up way after one’s bedtime”, and would get my recommended eight hours of sleep in the daytime. To keep up my motivation through the long nights, I’d often think to myself, “This is temporary. I’ll be able to study in person eventually.” I exercised, put aside time for my hobbies, and ate my favourite things if I was feeling particularly down. And although I’d say those six months were more than challenging, it also gave me the confidence that studying at Waseda was something that I really wanted to do, no matter the location.

Kanbun became one of my favourite subjects to study that semester. And my proposed research on kawaii as “globalised community” took its first step.

This is only a condensation of my experiences with Japanese Studies over the years. It wouldn’t be as interesting to pull apart each year in unnecessary detail, so maybe this alone can suffice.

Looking towards this spring semester at Waseda, I am going to make my formal descent into academic Japanese (wish me luck!). I will also make the library my second home, along with all the other facilities I couldn’t experience when I was studying online. Lastly, I want to find a new approach in my Japanese language studies – change isn’t so bad if you initiate it! I’d like to engage more with others, and feel confident that I’m being understood in Japanese. For so long speaking has been low on my priority list, but now that I’m living in Japan there’s all the more reason for me to try.

If I achieve all these things and more, maybe by the time I’m twenty-five I’ll have a lot more to share.

Written by Taniesha Kadiri, Daiwa Scholar in Japanese Studies 2022 
(March 2022)