Conan Grames, Former Instructor of Japanese, University of Utah

“Hajimemashite. Watakushi no namae wa Grames desu. Dōzo yoroshiku onegai shimasu.” These were the first words of Japanese I ever learned—“Hello, my name is Grames. I am pleased to meet you.” I learned how to say this while riding in the car on the way from Haneda Airport to Minami Azabu in Tokyo. It was 1966. I was 19 years old and had volunteered to be a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). When I opened my assignment letter from the church, it read, “You are hereby called to serve in the Northern Far East Mission.” My first thought was, “New England!” But when I read that the headquarters was in Tokyo, I knew I was in for a real adventure.

When I boarded the Japan Airlines flight in San Francisco destined for Tokyo, I had my first look at Japanese writing. It was about an hour into the flight. The flight attendants changed into kimonos (this was very cool) and passed out menus. One side of the menu was in English; the other in Japanese. Knowing that my Japanese study would begin in a few hours, I intently examined the Japanese side of the menu. The more I studied, the more discouraged I became. It looked more like chicken scratches than “chicken parmesan.” But after a careful review of the page, I began to recognize one character which appeared over and over again. It looked like this: の.When the flight attendant came to take my food order; I explained that I was going to be studying Japanese when I arrived in Japan and would she please tell me the meaning of の. Her reply: “Oh, this character is pronounced ‘no,’ but it has no meaning.” Well, I have to tell you I was now very discouraged. This was going to be impossible. Of course, a few days later I learned that の actually has meaning and a very useful function, but ever since my ride on Japan Airlines, I have called the character “No meaning ‘no’.” It has become my symbol of why we shouldn’t be discouraged when we start learning the language.

When we got off the plane at Haneda Airport, we were met by the assistants to the president of the mission who were to drive us into Tokyo. I was sitting in the back seat when one of the assistants informed us we would now start our study of Japanese by learning how to introduce ourselves. When we arrived at the mission home, we would each introduce ourselves—in Japanese!!—to the mission president. Well, we did just that, and I can tell you I was scared. Thus began my study of a language which I had never seen nor heard, but would change my life forever.

There was no school for our missionaries in those days. The next morning I was handed four phrase cards which contained a blessing on the food. The assistants gave us a little help on the pronunciation and then left us to memorize the four sentences. When I went down for breakfast, I was called on to say grace in Japanese. I was shaking all over, but this is how we learned. After breakfast we were given seven more cards, which we tried to memorize, and were then taken to Meiji Shrine to practice what we would preach. I still remember the kind, white-haired gentleman whom I stopped and asked if I could speak to him. He listened with great patience as I inflicted my day-old Japanese on him.

Later that evening we went to our first church gathering. I sat in the back and listened to a talk of some kind. I could not even tell where one word stopped and the next one started. I thought to myself, “This is going to be a very long two years.”

But with patience, perseverance, some help from the other missionaries, and a lot of memorization, I slowly began to speak the language. Understanding the language was another thing. When people began to speak to me, I was often totally lost even though I could recite all my memorized cards with ease. I learned to nod my head and say a very useful phrase—“Sō desu, ne.” One day I gave my introduction, quite fluently I thought, and the gentleman began to speak back. Trying not to look clueless, I nodded and answered, “Sō desu ne. Sō desu ne.” After he left, I asked the missionary working with me, “What did he say?” With a grimace, he explained, “He was telling you how good your Japanese was, and you were saying, ‘Oh yes, that’s right, isn’t it.’” What a faux pas! Japanese culture prohibits any kind of bragging about oneself. Perhaps the lesson here is as that we all have to suffer a little embarrassment as we learn a new language, but we need not only to learn words but culture.

Little by little things became clearer. After six months, I had all our missionary lessons memorized and could even understand most of the questions and comments that came up as we talked with people. As we went house to house, I noticed that every home had a small sign above the door with the name of the family. This is called a nafuda. I was working with a Japanese missionary at the time who patiently told me the name of each family. It was exciting. I decided it was time to study kanji (the Chinese characters used by the Japanese) so I bought a box of five hundred flash cards and gave it a go. I worked on them for a couple of hours each morning. At the end of a week, I didn’t know all the pronunciations and nuances, but I could recognize all 500 kanji, so I bought three more boxes. I was hooked. Little did I know that this would become an addiction—one I never could or would want to quit.

I came home two years later speaking and reading the language and loving it, although my Japanese was far from perfect. I often thought how much easier it would have been if I could have taken classes from a real teacher. Even when I went back to the University of Utah, there were no classes in Japanese. We found a native Japanese professor at the university, and we persuaded him to teach a class on reading. There were five students who had been to Japan as I had. The only time we could find that was open for all of us was 6:30AM! Honestly, there are not too many things that would get me up that early in the morning. As it turns out, it was the only class I have ever had in Japanese. Our teacher, Soga Sensei, transferred to another university. As the years have passed I have envied high school and college students who have been able to take classes from trained teachers.

But my interest in and dedication to the Japanese language paid off. Soga Sensei persuaded me to apply to be a guide for the U.S. Pavilion at Expo ’70, the World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan. I was accepted and spent six months giving tours in Japanese through a space exhibit which contained a real lunar landing module and a moon rock. There was also modern art from the Metropolitan Museum, Andy Warhol pop art, Shaker folk art, American Indian art, baseball memorabilia, and other interesting exhibits, all of which had to be explained in Japanese. Most of this vocabulary I have never needed again, but it was so much fun to know it and use it. I remember one day in the space exhibit, after answering questions from the crowd, thinking to myself, “Did I say that in English or in Japanese?” We gaijin (outsiders) can actually get that comfortable with this language.

About this time, Japanese language learning was starting to be popular in the U.S., and the University of Utah decided to start a class in beginning Japanese. Yours truly was asked to teach the class. It paid for my tuition during the last two years of college. It was not much of a program—I was the only teacher. To this day I joke that “I was the head of the Japanese language department at the University of Utah.” Today they have a full blown Japanese language curriculum.

That job led to two summers as a teaching assistant in an intensive Japanese language program at Middlebury College. The summer of 1971, I drove from Utah to Vermont, stopping in Cambridge, Massachusetts to stay with friends who lived a short walk from Harvard University. For a boy from Utah, this was pretty exciting. I walked past a building which said, “Harvard Law School,” and something clicked in my head—international law. This would be the way to use my Japanese language and actually make a living. Since it was June most of the offices were closed, but I found a secretary at the Yen Ching Institute, Harvard’s East Asian Studies program. I told her I was interested in law and Japan and asked if I could teach Japanese part time to support myself. She kindly advised me that only graduate students in Japanese were allowed to teach at the Institute, but she suggested that if I was interested in law and Japan I should call Professor Jerome Cohen at the law school, the head of the East Asian Legal Studies program. She wrote down his number on a scrap of paper for me.

As I sat by the telephone later, I thought, “Why would he want to talk to me?” But I summoned the courage and dialed the number. It was probably providence that Professor Cohen actually answered the phone since it was summer vacation. Going to law school was such a new thought in my head; I hardly knew what to say. But when I explained that I was on my way to teach Japanese at Middlebury College and that I was interested in law school, his answer was, “Don’t you leave town without coming to see me!” I went! And I learned that Mitsubishi Corporation had just donated $1 million to Harvard Law School to establish a chair of Japanese law. Professor Cohen was looking for students for this new program.

In my first month at Harvard, Rex Coleman, an alumnus of the law school and senior partner in the Tokyo office of Baker & McKenzie, came to Harvard and spoke at a brown bag lunch on practicing law in Japan. At the end, he extended an invitation: “If anyone is interested in working in Tokyo, I will be interviewing after lunch.” This was another new thought for me, but I decided, “Why not?” When my turn came to go into the department library with Mr. Coleman, it was clear he wanted someone who could speak the language as he conducted the interview in Japanese. Then he asked if I could read Japanese and handed me a pamphlet off the table. I looked at it and told him it was in Chinese. His response was, “It doesn’t matter, just read me the kanji in Japanese.” I did, and he hired me.

I worked for Baker & McKenzie in Tokyo for six years. What an experience! I helped defend McDonald’s when a little boy got his hand caught in a hamburger vending machine. (It turned out not to be a McDonald’s machine!) I helped represent Steve McQueen in a suit against a major Japanese electronics company that had used scenes from “The Great Escape” to advertise their TVs. I helped set up Amway’s business in Japan. I worked with baseball players, jockeys, and singers. Space won’t allow me to enumerate the adventures I had—speaking and reading Japanese every day, side-by-side with Japanese lawyers, learning new vocabulary about Japan’s foreign exchange control law, and other esoteric aspects of Japanese law.

One day I got a call from a headhunter. A major American pharmaceutical company was looking for an American lawyer with five or six year’s experience—AND who could speak Japanese. This was 1981. There may have been four or five such lawyers in the United States in those days. I think I knew them all, and some of them were very good, but as it turned out, I got the job. This began a 17-year career with Bristol-Myers Squibb, first as Asia-Pacific counsel based in Japan, and then as head of the international law department in Princeton, New Jersey. I was responsible for all the company’s legal work outside the United States, but best of all, it took me back to Japan often, and I got to speak frequently to my colleagues there.

I eventually took early retirement from the company and went back to Japan for three years, this time as the president for the Mormon mission in Sendai where I gave talks every few days in Japanese, read handwritten letters from the Japanese missionaries, and just had a very good time. My family went with me. They also learned the language and loved the country.

When I came home I was asked to head up the international section of a Utah law firm. The job took me back to Japan on a business trip. I gave a courtesy call to a Japanese lawyer I had known for years. He was very excited to get my call. His words were, “Grames San, I have been looking for you. We need you for a case in America. My client (a Japanese company) has a big problem. I told them you are the only lawyer in America who can handle this case.” That was an exaggeration, of course. By this time there were many American lawyers who could speak Japanese fluently, but he knew that I was one of the pioneers. I represented this client in a case against a major American pharmaceutical company. It was complex and contentious, but I had the great pleasure of trying to explain in Japanese the elements of the dispute to the management of my client. I became the bridge between cultures in settling the case.

One other experience is worth mentioning here. In 2006, I was offered a job in Washington, DC, for which 350 lawyers had applied. I became General Counsel of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA)—the pharmaceutical lobby in Washington. I had thought, “I will never get this job. I am getting old, and I am a Japan specialist. This job focuses on U.S. law and policy related to the U.S. pharmaceutical industry.” When I was hired, they told me, “You got the job because you have been in the industry a long time (that solved the age problem), and you know Japan and speak the language. Japan is the second largest pharmaceutical market in the world, and we want someone who knows that market.” It had not been on the job description, but out of 350 lawyers, I was the only one who had that experience, and I stood out from the crowd.

There are other stories, but the fact is that every job I have had in my very fun career has come to me because of my Japanese language and my experience in Japan. I hope these personal stories paint a picture for you of some of the ways the study of Japanese can set you apart and give you some tools which will open doors for you in a world where jobs are hard to find and it takes something a little extra to get people’s attention.

I learned Japanese the hard way—mostly studying on my own without the formal educational opportunity that most of you now have, mainly because it just wasn’t a popular field of study when I got started. I know that even with the best of teachers and text books, Japanese is a difficult language for native English speakers to learn. It can be discouraging. I often tell students that I have done three difficult things in my life—learn chemistry, learn law, and learn Japanese. Of the three, learning Japanese was the most difficult.

But it was also the most fun. When people ask me what my hobbies are, my standard answer is “tennis, trumpet, and talking Japanese.” There are 127 million people in Japan. Now many of them speak fluent English, but how fun it is to be able to talk to them in their language. They are bright, educated, hard working, and friendly. And almost always they appreciate the effort we put in to speak their language.

The world is different now than it was in 1966. There are many more Americans who speak Japanese, and the Japanese speak more English. Also, the emphasis has shifted back to China and its exploding economy. Are there opportunities now for those of us who have struggled to learn Japanese? Without question! Although business with China is booming, Americans still trade far more with Japan than with China—or any other nation, for that matter. All major international companies have offices in Japan. And the Japanese still appreciate an American (or any other gaijin) who can speak their language. Although they may speak better English than you can speak Japanese, it demonstrates that you are interested in them and their country and their business. There are exceptions, but most Japanese business people would rather do business with someone who can speak their language, provided you are otherwise competent in your profession.

My story only illustrates some of the opportunities for you if you are diligent in your study of the language. There are many more. My advice to students is to be “three dimensional.” First, you must have educational substance. Whatever major you have chosen, be good at it, whether you are a lawyer, accountant, engineer, or tour guide. No one wants to go to an incompetent consultant no matter how good their Japanese may be. Second, learn an industry. In my case it was pharmaceuticals. In my experience, most hiring managers look at this first. “How much do you know about my business?” This is important to them. Normally this comes with on-the-job training and many new graduates may not have any. So third is your geographical specialty—your Japanese language and knowledge of Japan. This makes you different than other graduates. All other things being equal, your Japanese language can be the icing on the cake.

Some of you may not be studying Japanese for career purposes. Even if Japanese had never helped in my profession, I would do it all again (in spite of how hard it was). Japanese has enriched my life. It has brought me friends. It has stretched my mind. It has shown me an ancient and beautiful culture. I can read anime in the original, and I can read the signs on the restroom door in Japan, China, and several surrounding countries. It has been fun and it introduced me to sushi! Well, most of you already know sushi, but no one in Utah had heard of it in 1966 when I first said, “Hajimemashite, watakushi no namae wa Grames desu.” I guarantee that if you learn this language, you will have your own stories to tell. Ganbatte kudasai!

(February 2010)