Mark Halperin

I love all of Japan, but it would be, excuse me, it would be Tokyo.

My dad did a lot of stuff with Japan when he was in the government.

So we had Japanese people around us.

We would eat Japanese food.

And then in high school, just a fluke, confluence of three things.

One is my family's connection to Japan.

Two is Japan was a really hot story there, kind of the way China is now.

There was a book called Japan is Number One.

They bought Lincoln Center or Rockefeller Center.

And it seemed like...

Just as now a lot of people frame the future of the United States as an existential struggle with China, back then it was existential struggle with Japan.

Even though Japan was our ally and we had a strong relationship with them, their economic model and their cultural influence seemed like it was going to be something the United States was going to have to grapple with.

And then third,

And this really was an essential element.

Uh, the woman who was the head of the language department at my high school was a French teacher, but she, as a young woman had been one of general MacArthur's translators in Japan during the immediate aftermath of world war II.

And so she decided given all the interest in Japan to start teaching Japanese.

So from, uh, 10th, 11th, 12th grade in high school, public high school, I took Japanese and, um,

And that helped me get into Harvard, I'm sure, because I was probably one of the few people who applied who had Japanese.

And that was considered the way Arabic is now or Mandarin is now as something valuable and not very common amongst high school students.

And and I just I just stayed involved.