Japanese Lecturer Shiori Koizumi vividly remembers riding a dimly lit Joey two years ago with one of her students as she hid under her hat. Standing in the shadows, Koizumi overheard the student badmouthing a particularly rigorous teacher, using the Japanese phrase for "too many homeworks."
"I knew at that moment who she was talking about," Koizumi said, laughing.
Koizumi, who teaches elementary Japanese, knows how to take anything with a grain of salt. Her sense of humor toward such a sensitive topic stems from resilience she has built up over years of living as a foreigner in an assortment of different countries.
Born in Tokyo as the daughter of a Japanese diplomat, the language instructor spent most of her childhood traveling amongst countries in Europe and Africa with her parents and younger sister.
"I remember I went to a daycare center in France," she said. "I clearly remember other children in the daycare were really afraid to talk to me because that was the late '50s, so Asians were totally aliens."
Things weren't so different for the Tokyo native when Koizumi moved to Massachusetts to study music nearly 30 years later in 1987.
"Once you hear my accent, people [say things like,] 'Do you know [what] bathroom mean? B-A-T-H? It's same as the ladies' room,'" Koizumi said, once again jovially recounting tales of her immersion into American culture.
With little knowledge of the English language, Koizumi enrolled in ESL classes while attending both Harvard and the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, where she trained with a mentor in the hopes of becoming a concert pianist.
"Boston is a very competitive place to study music ... she [my teacher] was kind of a second mother to me," Koizumi said. "[She was] very strict, but I learned how to express myself through piano performance."
But in spite of her position as a student at some of the most prestigious schools in the world, Koizumi remembers feeling somewhat lost when she was apart from her piano.
"It's really difficult ... You have to adjust to American life in Boston," she said. And Koizumi is still making adjustments today.
"I tried to read newspapers," she said. "But it's really hard for me to get on in real life. Just dealing with people, or negotiating, or expressing complaints or frustrations or even sadness. Certain expressions I hear through radio or mass media I don't really use. My speaking is maybe less than junior high school level."
Instead of returning to Japan, however, Koizumi opted to take her difficulties and turn them into an opportunity to teach American students - and subsequently earn a living.
"When I came here, there were no jobs for music unless you were doing gigs," she said. "So I thought, 'I really need to have a good, regular income.'"
Koizumi began teaching Japanese at the Japanese Language School in Medford on Saturdays, slowly shifting her focus from the piano to the chalkboard. Koizumi was then hired at Harvard, where she spent six years learning the ropes of college teaching before coming to Tufts.
"That was a good experience," she said. "It was really challenging."
In two decades living in America as a visitor, a student, a musician and finally a teacher, Koizumi has witnessed a significant shift in Western interest in Asian culture and economy. Unlike languages such as Arabic, which has experienced a large increase in enrollment, Japanese language classes have declined in popularity over the last decade.
"The highlight was [in the] late '80s and '90s," Koizumi said. "The Japanese economy really bubbled, and then this bubble burst."
Notably, first year Harvard students filled up eight sections of Japanese during Koizumi's teaching experience there in the early and mid '90s, while today at Tufts, only three or four sections are offered each semester.
According to Koizumi, this is a result of a cultural interest as opposed to an economic one.
"A lot of students are saying, 'I'm interested in Japanese culture and animation.' But before, I could see, 'I'm interested in Japanese culture and animation, but I'm also interested in the economy and literature,'" she said. "Most of them became scholars, and I don't see it these days."
Koizumi also said that while there is a market for students of the Japanese language to get involved in teaching English abroad, she has noticed a decline in students traveling to Japan to participate in research. Instead, they use their knowledge of Japan and Japanese to enjoy the country's culture and for simple pleasure.
"[Studying Japanese for] culture and pleasure - maybe that's a good idea," she said. "It's broad. A little shallow, but broad."
