Ariel Slaughter

Ariel Slaughter’s fascination with Japan began in an unlikely place: her high-school Spanish class.

“I’m not going to lie. I didn’t care for Spanish,” says Slaughter, 22, who will graduate from Pitt today with B.A. degrees in communications and Japanese language and literature, as well as a certificate in Asian studies.

While Slaughter’s high school in St. Paul, Minn., offered an impressive variety of language classes—Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Latin, and the usual Romance languages—it didn’t offer Japanese. Which could be partly why Slaughter “really, really, really” wanted to learn Japanese, she says.

“I was thinking, ‘You don’t have this? Then this is what I want to take,” Slaughter recalls. “I guess I just wanted to be ‘anti.’”

Slaughter’s fascination with Japan would influence her choice of colleges. Having acquainted herself with Japanese pop music and architecture while still in high school, Slaughter set about finding a university where she could deepen her knowledge of Japan’s language and culture.

She found what she was looking for in Pitt’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Asian Studies Center (ASC)—one of only 15 such U.S. government-designated National Resource Centers—and Japanese was the first class she signed up for as a freshman.

Dianne Dakis, ASC’s assistant director for student affairs, recalls the excitement that Slaughter displayed from the moment she first set foot in ASC. “What you need to succeed here is enthusiasm and a love for the language,” Dakis observes. “And Ariel has plenty of both.”

Much of her work at Pitt—becoming reasonably fluent in Japanese, studying the culture of Japan, and reading its literature—lead to what Slaughter calls “the moment I had been waiting for forever”: arriving in Japan for her junior year abroad.

“I remember the first morning I was [in Tokyo]. I went out with my host family after breakfast, and then they went out to do their own thing. I decided to go for a walk by myself,” Slaughter says. “I was totally overwhelmed, because it’s always been my dream to go there. I didn’t know where to go, what to do.”

Tokyo’s skyscrapers, subways, noodle shops, and noisy streets swarming with people quickly became “no big deal,” Slaughter says. In fact, after showing only slight interest in the aftershock of an earthquake in a nearby city (“Hmm,” Slaughter observed while sitting in her Japanese university’s student union, “I’m not moving, but the ground is.”), Slaughter slept through subsequent earthquakes, inspiring a joking worry among her friends.

Just as she shrugged off earthquakes, Slaughter dealt well with being a conspicuous young African American woman in the largely homogenous Japanese landscape. Slaughter has a “bright spirit that doesn’t even consider allowing difficulties to get in her way,” says David Mills, a Pitt assistant professor of Japanese who has worked with her since she was a freshman.

Conscious of her role as a student “ambassador” in Japan, seeking to give a good impression of Americans, Slaughter attempted to widen Japanese conceptions of people from the United States. Some of the erroneous ideas—the notion that all Americans carry guns, for example—she could easily dispel.

But some of the other questions that Japanese people posed to her required a bit more diplomacy in answering. Slaughter often found herself pointing out that “experiences in America depended where and with whom you grew up.

“You have to be able to express yourself and know enough about your own culture, because people are going to ask you what it’s like,” Slaughter says. “How do you explain all of American culture to a person who has only seen movies or read books about it?”

It wasn’t always easy. The language barrier often inhibited verbal communication. And unspoken assumptions among the Japanese resulted in Slaughter almost daily finding herself getting dismissed as a mere tourist (by Slaughter’s definition, someone who would “just look and not engage” in a foreign culture) and standing out racially from the Japanese.

Despite such occasional frustrations, Slaughter remains as fascinated as ever with Japan. She returned this spring to visit friends, and next fall she will go back again to begin studying international relations at the International University of Japan. There, her studies will focus on how the media shape public perceptions, specifically how the media influence Japanese opinions of Americans, particularly African Americans.