Politics & Power Quote by Chiaki Kuriyama

Kuriyama nails a truth about language learning that textbooks love to ignore: “motivation” is often just a polite word for pressure. Her phrasing keeps circling necessity like a gravitational pull - in America, English isn’t a self-improvement hobby, it’s the cost of admission. Back in Japan, that cost disappears, and so does the adrenaline. The honesty lands because it punctures the feel-good narrative that fluency comes down to willpower. She’s describing an economy of attention: urgency buys effort, comfort refunds it.

The subtext is less about English than about identity management. In the U.S., she’s positioned as the outsider who must translate herself to be legible - socially, professionally, culturally. That creates a “great sense” of wanting to learn: not curiosity, but survival mixed with ambition. Returning home flips the script. She regains linguistic dominance, and with it the freedom to stop performing comprehension for others. Enthusiasm “vanishes” because the audience vanishes.

There’s also a quietly sharp comment here on global asymmetry. Japanese speakers can live a full life in Japan without English; Americans can often do the same abroad, because English travels with power. Kuriyama’s dilemma isn’t personal failure so much as a structural rhythm of modern mobility: desire follows need, and need follows where the world decides the center is.