Why I Study Japanese

As it says in my previous post, I'm a graduate student in Chinese history at Columbia University. Some of East Asia's best universities are in Japan, and much of the world's best scholarship on China comes out of Japan. A steady trickle of translated scholarship moves between the Japanese and English languages, but serious academics interested in access to the Japanese academy cannot depend on the translations of others. Better still: they should be able to make their own translations of work they consider valuable, as Columbia's own Conrad Schirokauer did with the work of Miyazaki Ichisada.

For these reasons, Columbia's East Asian Languages & Cultures program requires its students of Chinese history, religion, and literature to learn Japanese as well. (And because the written Japanese language has its origins in classical Chinese, the obverse is also true.) As a starting PhD student, its past time for me to begin my effort to gain access to Japanese scholarship - though I have not even completed my effort to gain reading proficiency in modern Chinese.

As a student who already earned an MA in Columbia's East Asian Languages & Cultures program, this is far from the first exposure I've had to Japanese, however. One year ago I learned such abstruse truths as that feudalism/封建 is pronounced ほうけん in Japanese, before I knew the genuine pronunciation of such common American anglicizations as "konichiwa" and "sayonara." I learned rough approximations of the names of schools of historical scholarship in early 20th century Japan, before learning how to say "scholarship" in Japanese - 學術 in traditional Chinese characters; がくじゅつ in Hiragana.

Over the course of the coming year, especially during a summer in Japan, I'll learn the more day-to-day practical aspects of the Japanese language. One year from now, it will be back to the language's ivory tower as I learn "academic Japanese" for a year. If all goes well, and I can then read Japanese academic texts, the rest of my language study will have to come the way my Chinese will after this year as well: by exposure as I spend time in Taiwan, Japan, and mainland China doing research toward my dissertation on the early Ming dynasty of China (1368-1457).