| Japan in the family
Photo by Jeff Watts |
For Ethan Merritt, a love of Japan runs in the family. It may be true that his heritage goes back to Scotland, where the study abroad advisor will be traveling this week to visit AU Abroad sites. But it’s Japan—another country he covers on his job—that has caught the imagination of two generations of Merritts. His parents were teaching English in Japan in the 1960s when a pottery class changed their lives. Merritt’s father apprenticed to a master potter and ended up as a professional potter, with work displayed at the Smithsonian. “Growing up, it was a neat home environment—a lot of artwork, a lot of talk about Japan,” Merritt says. It seems the fascination was hereditary. Merritt studied Japanese in college and moved there after graduation to teach English—a family tradition now being followed by his two sisters. Merritt was drawn to Washington for a job at the Japanese embassy, down the street from AU. He did cultural programming, worked with school children, and advised Americans as they prepared to work and study in Japan. In time, he moved on to a job with a consulting firm—also, of course, Japan-related—that provided advisory services to professionals. “That was definitely a valuable experience, but I really missed working with students,” he says. That’s when he applied to work at AU. “As luck would have it, that was right around the time AU itself was starting to really transform the study abroad program,” he says. Formerly called the World Capitals Program, “it was really at the beginning of a changeover, and the office was expanding.” AU Abroad offers more than 80 programs in 33 locations, from South Africa to Costa Rica to Beijing. There are now four advisors at AU Abroad, and Merritt’s territory covers Asia—including Japan, Korea, and China—and European sites in Prague, England, Scotland, and Ireland. Merritt had been a high school exchange student in Europe and was eager to cover the British Isles to learn more about his family’s heritage. The School of International Service (SIS) has a long-standing exchange program with Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, which has a separate advisor, so Merritt isn’t the advisor for all AU students traveling to Japan. But he’s involved with a program recently set up in Tokyo, traveled to China for the first time in 2004 to visit the program in Beijing, and has visited programs in London and Prague. The AU Abroad program sends around 800 students overseas each year, and around 60 percent of all AU students have a study abroad experience before graduation. Merritt works with about 90 each semester. For his work, he is currently visiting six partner universities in London and Ireland. In his spare time, he continues to study Japanese language and history and has even taught a bit of the language to his wife, Lori. “My experience had such an impact on me,” he says. “It’s such a large part of who I became, and who I am. I want others to have that experience.” —SA |
