For generations of Carls, studying the country’s culture, language, and history has cast light not just on East Asia but the broader world.
In 1891, Carleton awarded a diploma to an English major who would later crusade against booze in Japan.
Tsuneko (Tsune) Watanabe, Class of 1891, was born in Kobe, a cosmopolitan Japanese port city. She became an anti-alcohol campaigner, heading the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Kobe, teaching, and doing Congregational Church missionary work. Her several visits to the U.S. in the early twentieth century appeared in the WCTU’s publications.
This year she’s being commemorated on campus—not for her crusade against strong drink, but as a symbol of the College’s openness to the world. Watanabe was the first international student to earn a Carleton degree, and the new Global Cultures interest house has been named Watanabe House in her honor. Judith Pannell, Senior Director of Student Life, calls Watanabe’s cross-cultural life “perfectly aligned with the goals of the new house—fostering cultural sharing, building connections across different backgrounds, and advocating for the global community.”
In 1976, eight and a half decades after Watanabe graduated, the College’s Japanese garden, Jōryo-en (Garden of Quiet Listening) was completed. The garden—named one of the 10 best gardens outside of Japan by The Journal of Japanese Gardening—turns 50 this year, and programs being planned to mark the occasion include a garden-focused class and an oral history project.
Between them, Watanabe House and the garden symbolize the College’s interest in Japan, not only as a culture to be understood in its own right, but as a window on Asia and the rest of the world. The ways that Japan is studied and taught at Carleton shine a special light on the College’s commitment to liberal education, an approach to learning that began as an exclusive focus on the cultural heritage of the West, but has expanded to take in the achievements of other civilizations, including those of East Asia.
A Mission and a Milestone
Tsune Watanabe lived during one of the great eras of cultural change: Japan’s 40-year transition from a feudal state largely cut off from the rest of the world into a modern power with an East Asian empire. That empire, of course, would eventually wage war with the United States. During the early part of this period, though, Japan and America got along famously as Japan sent diplomats and students abroad and imported foreign experts, including Americans, to advise and teach, and missionary societies sent teachers and preachers to the “land of the rising sun.”
One of the results of this mission work was Kobe Girls’ School, a high school founded by Congregationalist women. Among Watanabe’s teachers at this Westernizing academy were two alumni of staunchly Congregationalist Carleton, and Watanabe learned enough about the College to set her sights on faraway Northfield for higher education. According to College history, Carleton had at least one and possibly two other students from Japan in the 1890s, out of 12 foreign students during that decade. Other Japanese students would follow, including, more recently, Japan’s current ambassador to the United States, Shigeo Yamada ’89.
As for Jōryo-en, it was a milestone in a process that Bardwell Smith began when he arrived on campus in 1960. Smith, with an academic specialty in Christian social ethics and a budding interest in Asia, was tapped to teach the religion department’s single course on Asian religions. He matured into a formidable scholar of Buddhism and other Asian traditions, a beloved teacher, and a promoter of social and ethnic diversity at the College. He took a leading role in establishing Carleton’s program in Asian studies (1968) and, in 1974, asked David Slawson, a Japanese literature scholar and a Japan-trained garden designer, to create the peaceful garden behind Watson Hall as an embodiment of East Asian spiritual values and artistic traditions.
These years were pivotal in the growth of Asian studies not only at Carleton but in liberal arts colleges generally. While many had made early connections with Asia, these were usually missionary endeavors by church-affiliated schools. Carleton, in fact, opened its Mission in China in the fall of 1903, a venture that would eventually produce a middle school and a hospital, along with opportunities for junior students to teach English—until the imminence of the communist victory ended it in 1948.
As for serious learning about Asia, it could be found here and there on American campuses in the first four decades of of the twentieth century (Carleton, for example, offered a course entitled The Far East in 1922), but it was the Second World War and the Cold War that really put Asia on the academic map, as American geopolitical interests embraced that continent. Research-oriented universities took the lead, but the focus filtered down to smaller colleges, too.
As historian Samuel Hideo Yamashita notes in an essay on the history of Asian studies in U.S. private colleges, by the 1960s and ’70s one after another was establishing majors in Asian subjects.
“No college proceeded more carefully than Carleton,” Yamashita writes. In 1966 Smith and the handful of other professors with Asian specialties established a committee that consulted widely with administrators, trustees, and faculty colleagues on how to build the presence of Asia in multiple areas, including language. The first Asian language officially taught at Carleton was Japanese.
Speaking Japanese, Discovering the World
Today Japanese and Chinese language instruction is the responsibility of the Asian Languages and Literatures department (ALL), while an interdisciplinary Asian Studies program draws faculty from it and from other departments, including Anthropology, Art and Art History, English, History, Music, Political Science, Religion, and Sociology.
For Lei Yang, professor of Chinese and head of ALL, Asian studies are very much of the moment at Carleton because they are a good fit for the three pillars articulated in the College’s 10-year strategic plan: Community, Curiosity, and Impact.
An in-depth look at a very different civilization, she says, naturally broadens understanding of others in the global community and prompts curiosity, while studying the languages and values of very different cultures gives students tools to operate in a globalized world with impact—which Yang glosses as “applying the knowledge acquired at the college to good purposes.” Language is important for that, she adds. “If you learn how to greet a person in Chinese or Japanese, you can make a friend in five minutes. Knowing these languages means you will be able to speak at some level to at least one-fifth of the population in the world.”
Two students who made friends in Japan with the aid of the language are Lucas Schattenmann ’26 and Kamalani Aipa ’26. Both are “special majors” in Japanese. (Carleton offers a Japanese minor within the ALL department, but majoring requires a petition.) And both took part in a study-abroad opportunity, the Associated Kyoto Program, administered by Doshisha University in that ancient city. The experience that Schattenmann had in the program, which includes advanced language study and daily classes in a range of Japanese subjects, inspired him.
“My family wants to reconnect with their heritage, but they’re busy, they don’t have the time. I’m glad that I can form a bridge for them.”
“I spent some of the most fun months of my life in the Kyoto Program,” he says. “After that, I just wanted to keep studying this language. Being close to Japanese peers and the faculty was a big help as well. And so, at some point, I thought I might as well take the leap into the major.”
Schattenmann is now taking 300-level courses, in which students read demanding texts and discuss major issues, entirely in Japanese. He recently led a classroom discussion of a complex story by Haruki Murakami about mirrors and personal identity. “It was pretty incredible,” he says, “that I could get by talking about things that I feel I shouldn’t have any business being able to talk about in Japanese.”
He’s double-majoring in computer science, and has already secured a winter term job as a TA in a vocational school in Japan. He points to other opportunities for Carls with Japanese language training, including the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) program, which places recent graduates in English-teaching positions and jobs with governmental bodies as interpreters and translators.
Aipa is considering applying for a JET position after taking a post-graduate year off. In the meantime, the Hawaii-born senior sees her studies as helping her family get in touch with its Japanese heritage. “We’re very Americanized,” she says. “We do some Japanese new year’s rituals, but culture and religion? I feel like we’re lacking in that area. My family wants to reconnect with their heritage, but they’re busy, they don’t have the time. I’m glad that I can form a bridge for them.”
Comic Books, Tea, and the Liberal Arts
Popular culture has given Japan a special role in connecting young Americans with Asia, regardless of their ethnic background, says Noboru Tomonari, ALL’s senior professor of Japanese. He points to the popularity of Japanese comic books (manga) and animated storytelling (anime) since the 1990s. “If you go to any Barnes & Noble today, there’s a wide array of translated manga,” he says. “Some students who enjoyed it in high school have decided to do something more challenging and take the Japanese language, or our content courses on literature and popular culture.”
As part of a school focused on the liberal arts, his department isn’t necessarily training students to become Japan specialists, he points out, “but rather giving them a way to experience something of the world. And to improve their skills in writing, reading, listening, and speaking, which is what I understand liberal arts education to be about.”
Tomonari teaches courses in Japanese popular culture, and so does Brooke Okazaki of the music department, focusing on pop music, films, and film music. Her assessment of the value of Japan for broadening students’ horizons parallels Tomonari’s.
“Japan is an ideal starting point for people who know nothing about Asian culture and history,” she says. “It’s easy for Americans, especially, to find some sort of common ground in Japanese studies and to work from there, toward looking more closely at Korea, China, or Taiwan. That’s what makes Japan studies so fascinating to me, and maybe to students as well.” (She acknowledges, however, that as far as popular music goes, Korea, home of supergroups like Blackpink and BTS, is more of a magnet than Japan. “I think people take my J-pop course because we don’t offer a K-pop course,” she says with a smile.)
Kathleen Ryor, Carleton’s Tanaka Memorial Professor of International Understanding, brings her students to Japanese civilization by a high-culture route. The art historian, whose specialties are Chinese art and East Asian garden traditions, regularly teaches garden design, garden history, and allied arts, and she has a strong interest in ceramics. This year she’s co-teaching the fourth installment of a course on the Japanese tea ceremony (cha no yu) in collaboration with ceramicist and art professor Kelly Connole. The 700-year-old tradition established convivial tea-drinking as a kind of refined performance art to which many other art forms make contributions. The professors’ approach combines hands-on studio practice—the throwing of tea bowls—with study of the contexts in which the practice has evolved, from the aesthetic to the political.
“The tea ceremony is about human relationships,” says Ryor, “but it also brings together gardens, architecture, ceramics, metalwork, paintings and calligraphy, and flower arranging. It shows how, in Japan, different kinds of relationships and meanings were formed through the arts: spiritual, religious, political, social, aesthetic.”
“Carls can learn to be themselves, but also stretch themselves.”
Ryor, as chairperson of the Japanese Garden Advisory Committee, is also responsible for overseeing Jōryo-en’s upkeep and programming, and she’s in the preliminary planning process for celebrating the garden’s golden anniversary in fall 2026. She expects to coordinate a class on East Asian gardens with the celebrations, and intends to set in motion plans to compile an oral history of Jōryo-en.
“Bardwell has passed. David Slawson has passed,” she says. “The fiftieth is an opportunity to get oral histories before others pass, particularly the volunteers who’ve helped maintain the garden.” She hopes to involve history classes in the endeavor.
As these plans come together, as students come together in Watanabe House, and as Japan continues to show up in many areas of instruction and student life, learning about the Asian nation will continue to be one of the major ways that Carls can, in Lei Yang’s words, “have a more balanced understanding of the entire world, be provoked to be more creative in many dimensions, break old patterns and customs. To be themselves, but also stretch themselves.”
Shigeo Yamada ’89
While Carleton is serious about the study of Japan, it has also introduced Japanese students to American life and the American approach to liberal education. The Ambassador of Japan to the United States is a notable case in point. Shigeo Yamada ’89 entered the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1986, during his last year at Keio University in Tokyo. He graduated in 1987 with a BA in law, and that same year, he headed to the U.S. for two years of study.
The U.S. State Department has language schools around the world for its diplomats, but Japan lacks such a network. So the Japanese foreign service sends its young diplomats-in-training to a selected country to become familiar with and learn its language. “I thought that in order to fulfill that mission, it would be better not to go to a graduate school, where I might spend most of my time with international students, but to a small liberal arts college where I could spend that time with Americans,” he says. He looked around at various colleges, and saw that Carleton had a good reputation and a strong support system for international students.
He came to Northfield with no training in spoken or written English, and he credits the faculty and the College’s student tutors with going out of their way to help him. As his language skills and his first-hand experience of American life grew, he augmented courses in his major, political science, with others, including an introduction to world religions. “This was so helpful,” he says. “Although we have two major faiths, Buddhism and Shinto, Japanese society as a whole is not very religious. But understanding what Christianity is, what Judaism is, what Islam is, contributes to understanding what the United States is.”
By the time he graduated, he was prepared for postings in Washington, London, and Beijing. His pathway to the ambassadorship, to which he was appointed in 2023, has also included service as deputy minister for foreign policy, deputy director general for North American affairs, director for Northeast Asia, director for Southeast Asia, director for the Status of U.S. Forces Agreement, and cabinet councilor in the national security secretariat in the prime minister’s office.
Ayako Nakajima Nomizu ’91
Having spent time with her family in the United States before college, Ayako Nomizu ’91 found herself gravitating toward the American philosophy of post-secondary education when it came time for her to pursue a BA. “In Japan, the curriculum is strictly divided into specialties,” she says, “but in the United States you have greater opportunities to explore different realms of knowledge.” She considered Carleton’s liberal-arts mission a particularly attractive version of this orientation, and became a Carl with the support of the Grew Bancroft Foundation, which offers four-year undergraduate scholarships for Japanese students attending liberal arts colleges. Carleton has joined Knox, Wesleyan, Grinnell, and 42 other schools in hosting Grew Bancroft scholars since the program’s founding in 1933.
“Thanks to Carleton’s liberal arts education, I was able to develop critical thinking and communication skills, but also to broaden my perspective and cultivate passion for continuous learning,” she says. “These skills and qualities helped me navigate through career changes over the past almost 35 years.”
Her career included stints as a business and financial consultant, an analyst at an international credit-rating agency, and the director of Grew Bancroft—she serves on its board of directors today. Since 2019, she has been an Asia-focused manager at Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI), one of the five networks of investors committed to Climate Action 100+, a UN-sponsored initiative urging the largest corporate emitters of greenhouse gases to take action to limit climate change.
Jon Spayde is a St. Paul–based writer.
Sanae Sugimoto is an artist based in Fukuoka, Japan.