At the Wellesley Tokyo Club event, I had the chance to hear from alums from the class of ‘81. Hope Anderson was one of these alums, but I did not have a chance to speak with her at the event. While she is currently based in Los Angeles, she spent a large part of her childhood in Tokyo and majored in East Asian Studies and History at Wellesley. On a funny note, she mentioned Professor James Kodera as an influential figure during her college years. Professor Kodera is still teaching at Wellesley, and while I’ve never taken a class with him, I still do hear about him through friends who have taken classes with him or by virtue of participating in events related to the Japanese department.

 

Japan

Actually, the East Asian Languages and Cultures department did not exist during Hope’s time at Wellesley. They didn’t even teach Japanese language courses, so she had to take Japanese classes at Harvard. She did research and even took graduate level courses in fields such as Japanese literature, politics, and history. This helped her become known in the field of Japanese studies, which aided her acceptance into graduate study at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the only student accepted to their PhD program that year. Hope explained that one of the reasons that she did not finish the program was that while she felt that she was skilled in making history accessible through storytelling, she was frustrated by the restrictions of academic writing.

Film and documentaries

Hope explained to me that she has always loved film, even serving as a film critic for the Wellesley news. She spent 10 years writing on a number of subjects, including film, and has even produced documentary films. While she loves film, Hope told me that the film industry of the 80s and 90s was male-dominated, so she pivoted to documentaries. She also described documentaries as a medium that is much more accessible in terms of production in addition to being a medium that can reach and educate a wider audience in a way that academia cannot.

 

Reflection

Hearing about Hope’s fascinating journey provided me with some relief into my own career path. She told me that plans do not always work out because life has a way of interrupting and that your decisions after college are not life or death, nor do you have to accomplish everything by the ripe age of 25. She also told me to stay open and when faced with the question about what one can do with a history degree, she asked, “What can’t you do?” In her words, Wellesley’s liberal arts education taught her how to think and do other jobs. 

I am unsure about what I want to do after graduation, especially because people tend to ask what I am going to do with a degree in the humanities from a liberal arts college. However, I felt encouraged by Hope’s advice to seek out my passions.