I met with Dr. Sanae Eda, Director of the Middlebury School in Japan program that I’m participating in. This was the first interview I conducted entirely in Japanese! 

 

Career Path and Education

 

Eda-sensei attended college at Hiroshima University with an interest in becoming a language teacher and potentially going abroad. After graduating, she did indeed go abroad, and received a scholarship to teach Japanese in Puerto Rico in a program not dissimilar to the JET program. The teacher who trained her had studied linguistics, and Eda-sensei realized that even though she was a native Japanese speaker, she didn’t know the “reason” or grammatical pattern behind certain grammatical structures in Japanese, or at least couldn’t explain them. She decided to study linguistics as a grad student at the University of Puerto Rico, and got her TESOL certification. 

 

She then attended three more years of grad school to get a second master’s degree in linguistics at Ohio State University, where she then went on to get her PhD. As she took classes, she worked as a TA teaching Japanese. 

 

After getting her PhD, she worked at the University of Kansas for seven years as a Japanese language and linguistics professor, after which point she got her current job at Middlebury Schools Abroad, which she has done for fifteen years. Prior to that job and simultaneous to her postgrad studies, she taught at Middlebury language schools during the summers. 

 

According to her, the Middlebury summer programs are very hard on both students and teachers, but students progress immensely during that time. In contrast, programs abroad provide less of a “bubble” for students, but it can be harder to form friendships in a more “real” scenario. 

 

Current Work

 

Eda-sensei currently works as the Director of the Middlebury School in Japan here at ICU. She is frequently very busy, but her schedule depends on the week. It takes a lot of work to prepare for orientation and trips by coordinating train tickets and activities, not to mention the orientation week itself. Other weeks may be more relaxed, but even during the semester she’s the go-to person the Middlebury program can rely on. 

 

During summers and winter semesters at ICU, Eda-sensei works on her own research. She is currently writing an English language sociolinguistics paper on how textbook Japanese is different from spoken Japanese. She is also receiving funding to work on research regarding an endangered Taiwanese creole with influence from Japanese, Chinese, and the Amis language of Taiwan. In terms of sociolinguistic topics, she has a particular interest in how youth in Japan use respectful language and how this has changed (/is “incorrect”) compared to how the older generation talks. She wants to write about this during the winter term. 

 

Advice

 

Eda-sensei’s advice was to do what you love, and to love what you do. She said if I had a choice between work on a topic I was interested in, and work I wasn’t interested in, I should pursue my passion– but that many people have jobs unrelated to their majors, and that’s alright as well. If that’s the case, she said, one should try their very best at their work and to do a good job or make good work out of it. 

 

She shared that she didn’t expect to have a job related to studying abroad because she didn’t know that was a job. I think that’s a common thing to hear about people’s career paths, and it’s an important reminder to me to keep an open mind about future roles even if I haven’t heard of them.