Susan Schmidt is a former editor at the University of Tokyo Press who spent 20 years living and raising a family in Japan up until the mid-1990s. She is now executive director of the U.S.-based, 1,500-member Alliance of Associations of Teachers of Japanese — a role in which she has not only helped explain Japan, its people and language to the rest of the world, but also fostered interest among Americans about this country and its cultures.

Recently in Japan to receive the Japan Foundation Award 2009 on behalf of the AATJ in recognition of its work, the Illinois native and mother of two daughters made an impassioned speech at the ceremony — in Japanese — on the history, present situation and future of Japanese-language education in the United States.

As Schmidt, 63, stated on that occasion, there is a long history of Japanese- language education in the U.S., with huge numbers of Japanese migrating there at the turn of the 20th century and thousands of Americans trained "to understand the enemy" during World War II.