Tokyo 1964: Gerald Curtis (6)

I entered Columbia's doctoral program in political science in 1963 and began to study Japanese. I had studied other foreign languages, but the Japanese language intrigued me in a way that no other language had. The writing system is interestingly complex, to say the least, and the sentence structure is so different from English that it seemed to require a different way of thinking. I also thought the spoken language was beautiful with its soft, rounded, and melodious sounds.