In December of 2001 when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited Japan, and the newspapers reported of official talks between the two nations to boost economic ties, 36-year-old Prajakta Gupte, member of a traditional middle-class Maharashtrian joint family, with a job as an auditor with the BMC, made up her mind to learn Japanese. Not because she saw in it an opportunity for herself, but because, as she says, she wanted to forge a path for her then 10-year-old daughter. “People were sending their kids to America, which was too costly. I thought we should find something new. Besides, I loved languages,” Gupte, who has an MA in Marathi Literature, tells us.  

Mumbai at the time did not have many Japanese language learning institutes. Since the Japan Consulate’s classes in South Mumbai were not viable for the Borivali East resident, she enrolled in classes in Andheri with one Mrs Manik Kamat who had lived in Japan for two years and picked up the language there. The classes were expensive, and Gupte recalls how the family had to withdraw their National Savings Certificate to pay for them, without, as she points out, “any idea or guarantee of what opportunities it could bring”. But Gupte worked diligently, cleared two international levels for language proficiency in the same year and began assisting Mrs Kamat with teaching responsibilities at the institute. An approach she devised at the time — one she still uses to teach Japanese to her students—is to apply stories and elements from Indian myths to relate to the Japanese picture script. “We can match elements of our own culture with that of theirs,” she tells us. To demonstrate, she correlates the Hindi words for the days of the week with their Japanese counterparts. “Shanivaar”, for example, is broken down into “shani” and “vaar” (yōbi in Japanese). The Hindu deity Shani is associated with black, a colour that can also call to mind the volcanic soil of Japan. Since the word for soil in Japanese is ‘Dojō’, the association can help learners remember the word ‘Doyōbi’ for Saturday.