She uses Indian myths to teach the Japanese picture script! Meet the Maharashtrian woman who has been running affordable Japanese classes for suburban Mumbaikars for 20 years
In 2003, along with husband Sandip, Gupte set up the Professional Foreign Language Centre. Pic/Sayyed Sameer Abedi
In December of 2001 when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited Japan, and the newspapers reported of official talks between the two nations to boost economic ties, 36-year-old Prajakta Gupte, member of a traditional middle-class Maharashtrian joint family, with a job as an auditor with the BMC, made up her mind to learn Japanese. Not because she saw in it an opportunity for herself, but because, as she says, she wanted to forge a path for her then 10-year-old daughter. “People were sending their kids to America, which was too costly. I thought we should find something new. Besides, I loved languages,” Gupte, who has an MA in Marathi Literature, tells us.
Mumbai at the time did not have many Japanese language learning institutes. Since the Japan Consulate’s classes in South Mumbai were not viable for the Borivali East resident, she enrolled in classes in Andheri with one Mrs Manik Kamat who had lived in Japan for two years and picked up the language there. The classes were expensive, and Gupte recalls how the family had to withdraw their National Savings Certificate to pay for them, without, as she points out, “any idea or guarantee of what opportunities it could bring”. But Gupte worked diligently, cleared two international levels for language proficiency in the same year and began assisting Mrs Kamat with teaching responsibilities at the institute. An approach she devised at the time — one she still uses to teach Japanese to her students—is to apply stories and elements from Indian myths to relate to the Japanese picture script. “We can match elements of our own culture with that of theirs,” she tells us. To demonstrate, she correlates the Hindi words for the days of the week with their Japanese counterparts. “Shanivaar”, for example, is broken down into “shani” and “vaar” (yōbi in Japanese). The Hindu deity Shani is associated with black, a colour that can also call to mind the volcanic soil of Japan. Since the word for soil in Japanese is ‘Dojō’, the association can help learners remember the word ‘Doyōbi’ for Saturday.
On board the Sagano Romantic Train, a popular tourist ride in Kyoto’s scenic Arashiyama area. Gupte began leading cultural trips to Japan in 2018
In 2003, along with her entrepreneur husband Sandip, she set up her own institute, the Professional Foreign Language Centre (PFLC), to provide affordable classes to middle-class suburban residents. Pune was beginning to emerge as a major hub for Japanese learning and Gupte made several trips to that city’s Japanese Language Teachers’ Association to acquire CDs, test papers and other learning materials, eventually assembling her own books for learners studying at different levels at her institute. “Things were different back then,” she tells us. “The learning material remained in the hands of very few. Today, there is a lot of material coming in from Korea. There are many more language institutes in Mumbai and test papers are freely available. There is of course the internet with a plethora of language content. For the younger generations, anime becomes an entry point into Japanese language
and culture.”
When Gupte set up her institute, many wondered about the functionality of learning Japanese. But she brought in new enrollees, most of whom were her neighbours, relatives and local friends, suggesting they take it up as a hobby the way they might take up mehndi or beautician’s courses. Some of these women are now instructors who teach alongside her at her institute. “The men have gone on to find jobs in companies like Unikaihatsu, Hitachi, and BNP Paribas, while the women, while handling household responsibilities, teach here and also run translation companies of their own,” Gupte shares. It is a community that the Guptes have managed to foster around the institute where alongside the 70-100 admissions each year, there is career counselling and the active sharing of information about job openings, all with an eye to placing students successfully in companies.
In 2008, Teiichi Torikai, Consul at the Consulate General of Japan in Mumbai visited Gupte’s institute and encouraged her to apply for a two-month Teacher Training Scholarship in Japan which she won along with five other Indians. “It was the first time I took a plane,” she recalls. “It was a tough stint. While I understood the language well, my conversational Japanese was not at par with that of the others in the cohort, and left me feeling isolated in the programme. I decided then to turn towards conversational Japanese in earnest.” The stay in the country, she says, transformed the way she viewed conversational Japanese, inspiring her to design a course for her students upon her return that focused on interviewing skills, body language, use of proverbs and phrases in conversation, and particularities of Japanese etiquette, attire, protocols and social customs.
The experience also gave her ideas for the trips she designs today for Vihaan Travels, her travel company that she named after her grandson. Gupte led her first educational trip to Japan in 2018, staying with her students in dormitories, urging them to use local transport and decode the linguistic and cultural nuances of the country as they travelled through places like Tokyo, Yokohama, Kamakura, Hiroshima and Kyoto. When parents began urging her to take
them along, she expanded the trips to include comfortable stays and provisions for Indian food for vegetarians. She has since taken several groups to Japan, accompanied by her husband and sister and partner Vrunda Pradhan, peppering each trip with anecdotes, cues and recommendations picked up from her own long association with the country and its people. What have been her biggest learnings from the Japanese, we ask her. “Patience, empathy, punctuality and a quiet dignity that is channelled towards remedying mistakes rather than offering excuses. I hope to pass some of these on to the younger generations,” says the 60-year-old who lights up every time she speaks of Japan or switches to Japanese.
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