Quote

Many young Japanese were hearing for the first time the words of Native people from the West.

The Japanese keenly learned from Western civilisation in a bid to modernize and preserve the nation.

My parents were language teachers. They talked about teaching all the time and all their friends were teachers. It was considered a pre-ordained thing that I would go into teaching.

I took Japanese in high school. I'm Chinese, though, and I just fell in love with the language and the culture.

You know, even growing up going to school, I had teachers that were against bilingual teaching. I never understood that. My parents always had me speak Spanish first knowing I was going to speak English in school.

I taught English, first at a Catholic school and then at El Toro High School in Lake Forest, Calif.

My dad was an English professor.

I lived in San Pedro, California, which is, you know, on the west side of California, and it's where many, many Japanese lived.

Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English.

Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.