I grew up in a family where Japanese electronics was the norm. Every time we visited someone who didn’t have a Sony TV I would feel irritated over the bad (non-Trinitron) picture. I learnt the ownership structure of the Japanese conglomerates before I even knew the names of all the countys of my homeland.

Whenever my dad talked about Japan regardless of topic (economics, population, Kurosawa, WWII) I would listen carefully (not that I didn’t always do that).

In fourth grade I wrote a school paper on Japan together with my classmate Jenny. It was way more ambitious than any of the other pupils created. They copied whatever text they had found about the country they had chose to write about onto paper and drew something onto it.

I, on the other hand, looked in a number of books and encyclopedias and wrote a coherent text where my classmates couldn’t produce more than short sentences full of spelling errors. The paper Jenny and (mostly) I wrote wasn’t handed in as a handwritten paper with pencil smears. Instead I spent some time on my father’s workplace to enter the text into a word processor, give it a multi-column layout and print it on a Canon (of course) laser printer.

Eight years later when I had to choose a subject for my special project in high school it was no surprise that I chose Japan, the Japanese post-war economic miracle to be more specific.

Despite my fascination of Japan, its culture, business, technology and history I have never been there. To fully appreciate it I think I have to learn the language as well as the customs. (Of course it could be fun to compete with my sister who studies Mandarin at university level.)