It was during a trip to Israel that I learned a Japanese man named Sasaki took an interest in the Jewish languages, Yiddish and Hebrew. I learned that Mr. Sasaki had studied both Yiddish and Hebrew at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Born in Japan and still residing there, he returns each year to Bar-Ilan University, where he teaches courses in Yiddish and Hebrew. During a trip to Japan in 1997, I wished to make the acquaintance of this person with so extraordinary an itinerary. First of all, I wanted to know whether there are Jews in Japan and whether they are gathered into a community. Indeed, it is known that after the Second World War and afterward, there were Jewish refugees, survivors of the Shoah, who arrived in Japan mainly by way of China. We thought they were chiefly in Kyoto. In fact it was not possible to locate them in that city, perhaps because they are elderly people without descendants. My search continued and I was able to discover the existence of a Jewish community in Tokyo, which I tried to contact. Conversing by telephone in Hebrew and not in Yiddish, I learned that there is in Tokyo a Jewish community gathered in a center around a synagogue and a library. A remarkable fact: this library offers Yiddish courses to Japanese people, some of whom are not Jewish. The community even publishes a bulletin in Yiddish named der japan yid (“the Japanese Jew”). The director of the center and the editor of the review is named Yankel Halpern. The deputy director is precisely the Mr. Sasaki, first name Sukuya, of whom we spoke above. I contact Mr. Sukuya Sasaki by telephone and he proposes that I come to see him in Tokyo one Sunday to meet the non-Jewish Japanese people interested in Jewish culture. He says that he teaches from time to time in Tokyo, where he does not live, and that the other teacher is Mr. Halpern. I therefore decide to go to Tokyo the following Sunday. But I did not know all the difficulties that awaited me, mainly due to the fact that the addresses contain neither street name nor number. I took a taxi, hoping that by chance he might know the synagogue; but no — hence the idea of stopping passersby in the street to help us. A lady who, to my mind, might be Jewish offered to accompany me herself to the community center, given the directions I had. But as the distance was too great, I decided to continue by taxi, the lady having given the driver all the directions: the way and the landmark of the place. The driver dropped me nearby and I made the rest of the way on foot. I was well rewarded for my trouble upon my arrival at the center. Mr. Halpern was absent because of a wedding in another city. I found a few adult Japanese students, not Jewish, present for the weekly Yiddish course. In the absence of the usual teacher or of his substitute, I was able, in a manner of speaking, to give the Yiddish course and to talk a little with these people, unusual to say the least for the Parisian gentleman that I am. Among these people, one was called Junia Akaishi, and he is a poet. He wants to express his poetic feelings in the Yiddish language because he thinks that no language is beautiful enough to express them, and he regrets not yet knowing it well enough. The second person is a lady of thirty-eight who began to take an interest in the Yiddish language after learning of the Russian Subbotnik movement, which around the fourteenth century had, without conversion to Judaism, adopted the Sabbath as a day of rest. The learning of Yiddish satisfies her greatly and gives her the feeling of having attained one of the goals of her life. You can well imagine that this little adventure in Japan surprised me, to say the least, and did more than make me smile — I who am so attached to the Yiddish language, its literature and its poetry. This is only a little anecdote, but one that shows that a language is never forgotten. Moreover, if, like Yiddish, it can transmit literature, poetry, and philosophy, it attracts even non-Jewish people, and even in Japan.
Experience lived and reported by Mr. Zalc during a trip to Japan in 1997