Great figures who went through “Language barrier”

Figures who went through this

• Hitomi Kinue — Aloof? I Never Could Be

  "When I lose, what kind of face will the people of Japan have when they look at me?" At nineteen, setting out alone for Sweden, that was what frightened her most. The story of the first Japanese woman to win an Olympic medal, who could never stay aloof.

• Koizumi Setsu — The Storyteller Who Never Gave Her Name

  "Looking at a book, no good. It must be only your story, your words, your thoughts." That is what a husband said to his wife when she told him old tales with a book in her hand. Most of the stories in Kwaidan, his book of Japanese ghost stories, were told to him by her. Her name is not on the cover.

• Nakahama Manjiro — The Man Who Became Japanese with Chopsticks

  "We could not understand anything about them, except that they were hungry." That is how an American captain described a drifting boy in his logbook. Ten years later the boy came home having forgotten Japanese, and was accepted as Japanese because he could use two chopsticks. The life of the man known as John Manjiro, a samurai who stayed a sailor to the end.

• Tsuda Umeko — Her Own Country's Language

  My hands and feet are tied. I cannot hear, and I cannot speak. A seventeen-year-old girl wrote this from inside her own family's house, in the country where she was born. The life of the woman now on Japan's new 5,000-yen bill, who kept searching for a place to belong.