A Harvard bridge to Japan
Part of a series about Harvard’s deep ties to Asia. TOKYO — Carl Kay still doesn’t know the source of his passion for Japanese. When he came to Harvard in 1974 as an introverted, philosophical teenager from Marblehead with an inexplicable fervor for the language, he thought he’d become a mathematician. He considered himself good at math, after all, and the subject seemed, well, practical. But he soon thought he was in over his head with math, while his Japanese classes excited him. “It’s mysterious to me,” said Kay, who today is a businessman in Tokyo and president of the Harvard Club of Japan. “It caught my attention.” Kay went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in 1978 with a concentration in East Asian languages and civilizations; for his senior thesis, he translated a dozen classical Japanese poems and compared and contrasted his work with existing translations. He graduated without much of a career plan,...