Opening Messages

Mari Hirotsuru

President & Executive Director, Summer in JAPAN

Opening Speech Summer in JAPAN 2026

Distinguished guests, our partners from local government, our mentors from Harvard, and, most of all, our students, and parents, who’ve traveled here from across Japan and around the world.

Welcome to Summer in JAPAN 2026. Welcome to Oita. Are you excited? Yes, me too.

Quick question: How many languages do you speak? Fingers up. Shout it out. Ready, set, go!

Thank you. I speak three myself. But I will start my story with the teacher who taught me the number was never really the point.

His name was Nishie Masayuki. He taught us Linguistics and Anthropology at a university in Tokyo. Since he always traveled around the earth for his study, one day, a student asked him, “Professor, how many languages do you speak?” Take a guess.

He said, “I’ve never counted, but more than sixty. Most of them, I taught myself.” Then, he added, “Enjoy the food and culture with local people. Stay curious about what people need language for.” I wasn’t stunned by sixty. I realized I’d been doing the same thing all along – communicating first, without worrying about mistakes.

Many years ago in Italy, with my daughter Sumire, I found myself on a tour bus with lots of global tourists, translating English and Chinese into Italian for our driver. Sumire asked, “Mom, how many languages do you speak?” I said, “I’ve never counted, but my thinking process is: One, I want to help. Two, do I know this? Three, just speak up.” I didn’t convey everything perfectly. But we shared the joy of reaching across the gap, and that became the memory that lasts.

Today, things have changed. No one is astonished by sixty languages anymore, when AI translation makes instant communication almost ordinary. There’s even a married couple. He speaks only English, she speaks only Mandarin Chinese. They’ve been using a translation app for every conversation, and it works well.

For a long time I searched for words to describe this style of learning, until I found them in Haruki Murakami’s newest novel, Kaho. In it, the main character meets an anteater who reads people’s minds so she asks how it works. The anteater answers: “Words? No. We share our whole thoughts, all at once, unfiltered, as a single package so there’s no such thing as language barriers.”

I am not like Japan’s two language giants, but I think what I have been chasing is a bit similar to theirs: a world with no barrier, where peace could finally be certain.

But here’s the strange part. If we could know every thought in someone’s head, all at once, with nothing missing, we wouldn’t need to talk anymore. No more asking questions, because nothing would be left to ask. No more reaching out to understand each other, which is actually the fun part. So a “perfect” world without a language barrier might also be a world with no real conversation left in it.

While I spent my life trying to be an anteater, I also enjoy the gap between language and culture. It’s fun to catch myself missing another culture’s joke. That style serves me well at SIJ: taking people from different backgrounds and creating something new through their encounters.

For fourteen years now at SIJ, I’ve watched that chemistry happen, young minds from different cultures sparking ideas off each other until those ideas become something tangible.

So I invite everyone, our Harvard team, and all of our students, to our final day, the Pitch and Showcase, where you’ll share what you’ve built together, seen from new perspectives you’ve gained this summer.

Welcome, once again, to Summer in JAPAN 2026. Let’s begin.