It’s still 72 degrees out on an August evening, humid as hell, I’m fresh off a bout of norovirus, and I’m making Japanese curry for dinner: a heavy spiced stew that’s one of my favorite dishes in the world on a chilly autumn night. Why?

I learned today that my college Japanese teacher, Takeko Minami, passed away. Her obituary is a wild ride. But I know her as the generous and enthusiastic teacher who kicked me out of the country, as she put it, and did a lot to make me the person I am today.

I started college in 1997 and wasn’t really ready for it. I have a vivid memory of going to freshman orientation and being sat down in a room to pick classes, and that was the first I’d even looked at the catalogue. I was like a kid in a candy store, but overwhelmed too. Even then, planning to major in engineering, I took it as a point of pride that I had a full interest in the humanities too. After all, it had really only been a nasty bout of bronchitis senior year that ultimately persuaded me to go into a technical field instead of musical theatre. So I read the whole damn catalogue and had something very much like menu paralysis. I have the dim recollection that I had intended to get back to studying German, which I’d done three years of in high school, but I’d cooled on it a bit. And then I saw “Japanese 1” in the course book. It wasn’t entirely alien to me: I’d taken Judo as a kid and thought Tetsuo, the Japanese grad student who was the assistant instructor, had been one of the coolest guys alive, able to pick up and throw the much bigger guy who was our other instructor. So what the hell, I signed up for Japanese 1.

Which is kind of all to say that I had no idea what I was in for when I walked up to the classroom on the first day. I think there were about twenty of us, though by Japanese 4 it would whittle down a bit. And up at the front of the room with a huge portfolio of hand-drawn pictures of pencils and desks and such, was Minami-sensei, short and in her late 60s, salt and pepper hair in curls (as I remember it) and absolutely _boundless_ enthusiasm. I don’t think I could tell you a damn thing about any of my other classes that year, but 27 years later I think I could go straight to my chair in that room and pick up one of her lessons in a heartbeat. I remember the pictures, the writing, the chorus of students following along: This is a pen. これはペンです。 That is a pencil.　それは鉛筆です。High literary stuff. All the while she carried the class along like an orchestra: pointing, gesturing, swapping out those hand-drawn pictures. She also gave us “new” names, transliterating for us. She chatted with us and occasionally gently made fun: like when I slipped on a patch of ice and fractured my arm, and she informed me, “That’s how old ladies get hurt.” Minami-sensei also made it clear from the beginning that what we were learning had a goal: She wanted to kick us out of the country to Japan.

There was an associated Japanese club that I never quite got my head around. I was a member, but as an engineering student I didn’t have a lot of time for its official activities. We had shirts that someone made with our names on it, even. Mine is too old to wear, but the spring 1999 shirt is framed in my office.

I don’t recall whether I was able to help with the direct fundraising for the club, or even what the funds went to other than T-shirts, but I’ve always been one for helping with setup. The yearly fundraiser involved us making a whole bunch of origami cranes to sell, which meant that once a year we went out to Minami-sensei’s house for two days in a row. The second day had a bunch of people crammed into every room, busily making origami and chatting, and eating: lots of stuff, including Japanese snacks, but I mostly remember sushi and Japanese curry.

Which meant that the first day was spent cooking. And those first days are some of my fondest memories. I remember I had to walk quite a ways to get there the first year; this was my hometown but a part of town I didn’t know much at all except that it was quite a hike: I’d take the PRT, walk over the bridge, past my high school, past a graveyard or park – at least, that’s how I remember it, I can’t find it on a map now. Only a relative handful of us showed up for the prep. I imagine we were probably more of a hindrance than a help, really. But this was part of our education, I realize now. Minami-sensei had the first rice cooker I’d ever seen, a big one, and had it churning out rice for sushi. She taught us how to dump it all out into the bamboo tray, and handed out fans for us to cool the rice down as she sloshed on the seasoned vinegar. Then a tea towel would be laid on top and it would go out on the porch overnight to finish cooling. The next day early on, we’d make a bunch of vegetarian rolls and bowls of chirashi sushi to feed the origami-folders.

The real star of the show, though, was the curry. It wasn’t anything fancy: beef, onion, potato, carrot. We peeled and cut and chopped, and in would go the blocks of curry roux. It smelled divine. And the cooking crew got to eat it fresh that night, and chat and just enjoy the evening. Was there beer too? Who’s to say.

After two years of that, I was very ready to go to Japan. It took some doing, and negotiating with my engineering advisor, but Minami-sensei helped a lot – she considered it her mission to kick us out of the country! – and I got accepted to Kansai Gaidai near Osaka where she grew up for the fall 1999 term.

I think relating how transformative that term was for me would be beyond a blog post. It shaped a lot of who I am today. The deal with the engineering school was that I’d get my humanities credits out of the way rather than attempt technical classes. Even then it set back my graduation, and put me out of step with my cohort. It was worth it, though. I’d never been far from home and family before, and there I was on the other side of the world. I took art, history, film. That film class exposed me to Akira Kurosawa’s work, and a paper I wrote for it ultimately lead to my novel RED NOISE. I learned about Zen, Miyamoto Musashi, the history of the area, and oh the food. We were around the corner from an okonomiyaki joint (and a sake vending machine, favorite of the Australian students…), and pretty much all of my comfort foods stem from that time of my life – except the one comfort food I already had at the time, the Japanese curry I’d order at the cafeteria when I started to miss home.

Going to Japan mostly marked the end of my career learning the language. There was a big mismatch in expectations of what I would have studied (and how well; remember that vending machine…) and my spring 2000 language classes went poorly. Anyway, I wasn’t with my cohort anymore, I had a ton of engineering classes to catch up on, and for various reasons I wouldn’t be eligible for an official minor in the language. I fell off, and didn’t go back.

But even getting rusty at the language itself, my experience helped me. Aside from the personal growth of living for a time in another country and bringing that distance back with me, it had practical use too. That time in Japan marked me as different from other applicants to grad school, and ultimately helped me get in. I was told when I interviewed with that grad school that I could take language classes, sure, and they thought it was great that I wanted to do that. I found in practice that it was strongly discouraged to take “unnecessary” classes, though, and by then I was rusty anyway. Rusty turned into outright disrepair, and I forgot a lot.

But even if I wasn’t studying the language, I had my comfort foods. The dawn of Internet shopping meant that I could splurge on a few things, like those curry roux blocks that made lots of leftovers. As a grad student it was both a comforting reminder of good times and a pretty darn cheap and tasty way to get by. A friend whose aunt passed away gave me her giant rice cooker, and between that and the curry blocks I did all right.

I did eventually get back to studying the language, after grad school and when my time working at a startup finally let up. I had kept my old textbooks, and course materials, including Minami-sensei’s handwritten material. I added online tools like WaniKani, Duolingo, etc. I can read it now better than I ever could, and (with the extensive use of a dictionary) can slowly read manga and play games. I even took and passed the JLPT N4 exam a few years ago. I did try a few times to contact my old professor to let her know I’d gotten back to it, but never had much luck after she retired and the people at the school who knew her moved on. Anyway I always kind of had the thought, how fun it would be to study just a little more and be able to write that email entirely in Japanese…

Well, you know now how that story ends: with a curry dinner in August, and the lost opportunity to express how I’ve gotten 25 years of enjoyment and personal growth out of a spur of the moment decision and one damn fine teacher.