Meet Dr. Nelson

    Image of man in front of a trees.

    はじめまして！My name is Andrew Nelson, and I am elated to join the Department of Asian Studies at St. Olaf this fall. 

    I have been fascinated with the study of languages since I was a little kid. I devoured fantasy novels and felt, when I first started learning French in fifth grade, that being able to say just the right thing in the right way at the right time in order to bring about little changes in the world was just like the magic spells I enjoyed reading about. I was hooked, studying German in high school, Russian and Japanese in college, and finally Korean and Mandarin Chinese in graduate school. 

    Through some happy twists of fate, it is Japanese that has proven to exert a particularly strong pull on my curiosity. One such twist was the largely unplanned experience on the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program in rural Niigata Prefecture, where I made many wonderful friends and spent my days “ridiculously happy,” as I recall writing to my family at the time. It didn’t take long after returning to the US that I began to wonder how I might connect my life to Japan and Japanese in a more permanent way. 

    I moved to New York to pursue a Master’s degree in Regional Studies: East Asia, at Columbia University. While working during the period between the JET Program and the master’s program, I had been taking Japanese lessons at a local Japanese language school, where we used the same textbooks that Japanese junior high school students use in their kokugo—possibly translated as “national language”—classes. I was surprised by how many of the short stories and essays were actually not about Japan at all, but depicted characters and settings from elsewhere in the world. Such representations became the focus of my Master’s thesis. During this project, a nagging curiosity about the word kokugo continued from my time in Niigata, where I had wondered why Japanese class wasn’t called nihongo, which students of Japanese learn first as the word for “Japanese language.”

    Thanks to the encouragement of my Columbia professors, I was able to dive even more deeply into the kokugo question at Stanford University, where I completed my PhD. In order to understand how “national language” came about, I felt it important to understand what “language” itself has meant over time. By the time I proposed my dissertation topic, I had been taking coding classes (in the heart of Silicon Valley, there was a little bit of a “when in Rome . . .” mindset), gotten involved with Stanford’s digital humanities center, tried my hand at translation, and strengthened my foundations in reading classical Japanese, all while completing broad coursework in general linguistics, Japanese language pedagogy, and East Asian history. All of these would come together in my dissertation, “Late Meiji concepts of language: a historical, semantic, and translation analysis.”

    It is a great privilege to share what I’ve been thinking about and reading about these past years in a course I am teaching this fall. ASIAN 200, “How to Construct a Language: Kokugo and Nihongo from the Meiji Period to Today,” introduces theories on the relationship between language, ideology, and power; explores language ideology and policy in Japanese history, with particular attention to script reform, dialect management, and state language pedagogy; and connects the history of language ideologies to present-day language topics, including gendered language, formality, the status of minority languages, and second language acquisition. This course counts toward the Asian Studies and Japanese majors, and the concentrations in Applied Linguistics, Asian Studies, and Linguistic Studies. 

    Whereas ASIAN 200 investigates the historical development of concepts related to Japanese, my J-term course—ASIAN 126: “Language in Japanese Society”—dives into the results of inquiries into the language (and languages!) spoken in Japan. This course explores the linguistic diversity in Japan, from language change to regional dialects, from code switching to innovations in written forms. I envision ASIAN 200 and 126 as complementary courses; it is not required to take one in order to take the other, but they are mutually informing. 

    In addition, I am very excited to join the team of Japanese language instructors. In the fall, I will teach JAPAN 301: “Advanced Japanese I.” In the spring, I will teach JAPAN 112: “Beginning Japanese II.”

    I look forward to meeting everyone in the fall, and contributing to the exploration of language in its many facets. よろしくお願いします。