Why I Chose to Study Japanese
When I was growing up, I would often go with my family to visit my cousins in New York City. They weren't actually my cousins, but our fathers had gone to college together back in Nigeria, which meant that we were as good as family--especially now that their dad had become a diplomat and found himself stationed at the Nigerian Embassy in New York, and my family had moved to the United States permanently. In a lot of ways, these not-quite-cousins were the only relatives I ever knew. If nothing else, they were the only ones I knew to any meaningful degree.
At the time that we first met, there were three kids in their family and two kids in ours. If you were to line us up by age, it would have been me, the youngest, followed by cousin Jerry, my older brother Bobby, cousin Josh, and at the farthest end, cousin Dawi, who was at least ten years older than me.
Our visits were awkward at first. The oldest of us weren't quite sure how to deal with energy of the youngest, and the youngest of us weren't quite sure how to navigate the moods of the oldest. But there was one thing that could reliably and definitively bring our fractured clan together: video games.
Whenever my family would go to visit our relatives in Pelham, my brother and I would bond with our cousins over days-long PlayStation 2 marathons. High on the list of favorites were Japanese titles; Dragon-Ball Z, Kingdom Hearts, and Final Fantasy became the sites for many of our most epic adventures, our greatest failures, and our best inside jokes. Combine those family reunions with an almost-obsessive interest in Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokémon, Naruto, and the various other anime and manga streamed to my television and computer screen from across the Pacific, and you have fertile ground for a burgeoning Orientalism.
Now that I'm older, the interest has been refined; Saturday-morning anime has been replaced by Sunday-morning meditation, a fascination with nō and kabuki theatre, a love for Studio Ghibli movies, and Friday-night anime. So when I came to my junior year at Columbia and found that I still hadn't completed my language requirement, it only made sense to study the language that I'd been brushing elbows with since before I could really appreciate its company: Japanese.
At the time that we first met, there were three kids in their family and two kids in ours. If you were to line us up by age, it would have been me, the youngest, followed by cousin Jerry, my older brother Bobby, cousin Josh, and at the farthest end, cousin Dawi, who was at least ten years older than me.
Our visits were awkward at first. The oldest of us weren't quite sure how to deal with energy of the youngest, and the youngest of us weren't quite sure how to navigate the moods of the oldest. But there was one thing that could reliably and definitively bring our fractured clan together: video games.
Whenever my family would go to visit our relatives in Pelham, my brother and I would bond with our cousins over days-long PlayStation 2 marathons. High on the list of favorites were Japanese titles; Dragon-Ball Z, Kingdom Hearts, and Final Fantasy became the sites for many of our most epic adventures, our greatest failures, and our best inside jokes. Combine those family reunions with an almost-obsessive interest in Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokémon, Naruto, and the various other anime and manga streamed to my television and computer screen from across the Pacific, and you have fertile ground for a burgeoning Orientalism.
Now that I'm older, the interest has been refined; Saturday-morning anime has been replaced by Sunday-morning meditation, a fascination with nō and kabuki theatre, a love for Studio Ghibli movies, and Friday-night anime. So when I came to my junior year at Columbia and found that I still hadn't completed my language requirement, it only made sense to study the language that I'd been brushing elbows with since before I could really appreciate its company: Japanese.
アリスチィーブさん、おはようございます。わたしはルルゴンです。It's great to see that you have shared a lot of stories. がんばってください！
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