Ten-year Nishimachi Vet Alyssa Smith ’04 Crafts a Career Out of Her Lifelong Love of Reading and Writing
by Michael S. Strickland
(The Internationalist 2023-2024 Vol 71)
The real rivals
Anyone who steps into Nishimachi’s gym during the warmer months of the year has Alyssa Smith to thank for the fact that, if they’re sweating, it’s due to their own exertions, not the sweltering ambience. “That was a major achievement during my tenure as president,” she recalls. “We pretty strongly campaigned to get air conditioning in the gym because we didn’t have that before.”
This hard fought campaign to cool down the gym was preceded by a hard fought campaign for student council president for the 2003–2004 academic year which saw Alyssa facing off against two other Nishimachi ninth-graders, Thomas Lewis and Arjun Mehta. “Arjun and I had been close friends since first grade or so,” she explains, “but there was a little bit of a competitive aspect as well. Tommy was also running, but Arjun and I thought of each other as the real rivals.”’
The campaign was not without its comical side. “To this day,” Alyssa laughs, “we still tease Arjun about the speech he wrote, because it wasn’t exactly a speech — it was a rap.”
Alyssa giving her campaign speech for student council president.
Not only did Arjun try to win votes by boosting his rhetoric with hip-hop, he also tried to faze Alyssa with a playful double-entendre backstage — which simply motivated her even more. Alyssa describes it thus: “Before we started our speeches, we were shaking hands and Arjun goes, ‘May the best man win.’ I was like, ‘Ah, man, I’m gonna to take you down.’ And I won.”
After winning, Alyssa’s duties as student council president included running weekly middle school meetings where the students discussed and organized upcoming events such as the school dances. “We also participated in the interview process for one of the principals,” she adds.
And there was no harm to her Nishimachi friendships. One summer during their high school years at the American School in Japan, for instance, the former rivals took driving classes together at Hinomaru in Ebisu. Alyssa also points out that Arjun is one of the many Nishimachi classmates she still keeps in touch with — “I went to his wedding last year in Turkey. It was gorgeous.”
Staying on top of the news
Alyssa’s talents for interviewing people, running meetings, and organizing projects that benefit the whole community, all the while keeping a sense of humor in the midst of friendly competition, are ideal qualities to bring to her current role in the Life & Culture section of The Japan Times.
“As Culture Editor,” she explains, “I’m responsible for basically all of our coverage related to film, music, art, stage, books, TV, and occasionally social media. It’s a wide range of topics to be responsible for, so it’s very busy.”
Alyssa handles some of the production aspects as well. “I’m designing the pages for print and also putting them online,” she continues. “I publish three pages a week, about six to eight articles total. My more entertainment-oriented pages run on Thursdays and Fridays. On Fridays I have the back page of the newspaper. It’s a little more splashy and it’s in color. That’s where our more high-profile stories go. I also have the Culture page on Saturdays.”
One recent three-day run of the paper contained three film reviews on Thursday, a review of the year’s anime output on Friday, and, on Saturday, an article on Japanese entertainment scandals along with a review of a streaming series.
“In my day to day,” Alyssa explains, “I’m talking to writers, I’m commissioning pieces, I’m editing those pieces, I’m doing additional research to make sure that we’re staying on top of the news.”
How she matches article to writer depends, Alyssa points out, on both the topic covered and the writer’s attributes. “I primarily work with freelancers,” she says, “and a lot of these freelancers have their beats, their areas of expertise. They’ll come to me with pitches for stories, and those pitches are often fully formed since they know what they’re doing and already have the knowledge and experience to write quite a complete article. And sometimes there’ll be major events like the Tokyo International Film Festival. In which case I might go out and find a writer to fit the story.”
Looking back at the six pieces on those three pages Alyssa recently published, two were picked up from The New York Times, while the remaining four were written by well established freelancers living in Japan.
The clay of the piece
“And then sometimes writers will come and we’ll have to craft the story a little bit more,” Alyssa continues, “just to give it an interesting angle, try to make it something that people haven’t already read a million times over.”
This crafting of the story may take the form of simply gathering more information. “Sometimes,” Alyssa explains, “it needs a little more depth here, a little more context, a little more research.”
Or it may involve fine-tuning a translation. “Let’s say one of our writers interviewed someone in Japanese,” Alyssa observes. “They might come to me with their translation and the original Japanese and be like, ‘Hey, am I getting the nuance right? Is there something I’m missing?’” Alyssa will use her fluent Japanese to help the writer English the quotation just right.
Or the crafting may take a direct, almost tactile approach. “Sometimes,” Alyssa specifies, “it’s like restructuring the article so there’s a clearer theme to it, a clearer hook, so readers will know why they should be interested in this particular piece. It’s like taking the clay of the piece and rebuilding it. Not to change what the writer is saying, exactly, but to make it more interesting for people to read.”
Emphasizing this collaborative aspect of the editor-writer relationship, Alyssa also points out another side. “I’m the editor,” she states, “but I’m coming to the piece as a reader as well.”
Competitive reading
Alyssa has been a reader since even before she entered Nishimachi kindergarten back in 1994. She recounts how reading was an important part of family life. “Every night my dad would read us a book before we went to bed. My mom was a huge part of that as well. When I was four or five, we were living in New York for a bit, and she would sit down with me and take me through every single word of the book we were reading. Love of literature just came very early on.”
When it came time to take the entrance exam for Nishimachi, that love of literature was already well in evidence. “The teachers examining me were surprised because I already knew how to read,” Alyssa recalls. “I have a distinct memory of reading a book. A teacher came up to me and said, ‘Oh, do you like the pictures?’ ‘No, I’m reading it,’ I replied. I think that was unusual for the time.”
Also unusual for the time, perhaps, was how soon she joined the Bookworm Club. “I think I was one of the youngest members to join,” Alyssa says. “I was in kindergarten or first grade. You would log how many books you read in a month. That made reading a competitive thing for me. I was like, ‘Oh, if I read a lot, I’ll win an award.’”
Alyssa doesn’t recall exactly what award she won, but the practice of consistent reading — founded in family togetherness, developed through friendly competition — continues to inform her abiding love of literature. In a podcast she hosted in December 2022, for example, Alyssa states that, while her end of year plans include spending time with her family, she’s also “four books away from reaching my goal to read 50 books in 2022. So, I want to settle in with a blanket and do nothing but read for a while.”
Reading unapologetically
Nishimachi nurtured Alyssa’s love of reading in other ways as well. “I feel like we would come to the library pretty regularly,” she says. “It was just part of the curriculum. I remember in fourth grade or so, some girlfriends and I got really interested in witches. And somewhere in a corner of the library we found some books vaguely related to witches. We became obsessed and were trying to read as much as we could about that. We’d go out and find sticks in the playground and pretend to cast spells.”
Alyssa specifies that this was around the time the Harry Potter books came out. The first in the series came out in the UK in June 1997, just before Alyssa entered third grade, and was published in the US in September 1998, when she was in fourth grade. The second, third, and fourth books subsequently came out yearly, but the fifth didn’t come out until June 2003, just before Alyssa entered ninth grade at Nishimachi.
“Speaking of Harry Potter,” Alyssa adds, “we got really really into it. I remember when the last book came out — Molly or Arjun or someone got a copy of the book and we were passing it around. One person would read it in a day or so and pass it on. There was so much excitement around it.”
Alyssa recalls how she and her classmates also looked forward to the annual Scholastic Book Fair held in Nishimachi’s multipurpose room. “There were tables piled with books you could buy,” she reminisces, “and we’d ask each other, ‘Oh, what did you get?’ And show each other our loot.”
One year, however, a well-meaning but misguided adult forgot the adage about not judging a book by its cover. The loot Alyssa craved was the second installment of Louise Rennison’s zany series, The Confessions of Georgia Nicolson, entitled On the Bright Side, I’m Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God.
“I was trying to buy this book,” Alyssa recalls, “it’s for young adults, right? But my friend’s mom says, ‘Oh, honey, this is inappropriate,’ and I felt so embarrassed. I don’t think I ever got around to reading it even though it’s part of a very popular YA series.”
Alyssa’s advice to young readers is to spurn such embarrassments: “Whatever is interesting to you, embrace it. Don’t be self-conscious about what it is you’re reading. Maybe there’s pressure that you’re supposed to be reading the ‘classics’ or the most well-known authors. But if, for instance, you’re interested in sci-fi — read sci-fi, unapologetically.”
“And if you want to be a good writer,” she adds, “you also have to be intentional about your reading. So that you’re not just absorbing it, but are looking for things like, what is this author doing? why do they choose this phrase? how is the pacing moving along in this way? Looking for those kinds of things makes you a better writer.”
Part of her being
Like many writers, Alyssa feels that writing has been a part of her being for as long as she can remember. “I’ve always been interested in writing,” she says, “and my teachers here at Nishimachi nurtured that.”
One of her first published pieces, for instance, was in a national children’s newspaper in Japan. “One of my Japanese teachers,” she explains, “took a sakubun [作文, essay] that I wrote about some story involving myself, my brothers, and missing candy and submitted it to the paper. I think that was maybe in second grade.”
Alyssa recently found a batch of poems she and her third-grade classmates wrote as an exercise in using all five senses to express something usually associated with only one sense. “The theme was the color red,” she recalls. “So everyone was writing about red in their own way. Mine was a poem about tomato juice — it was a very physical kind of piece.” (See below, “What is red?”)
What is red?
Red is the salty tomato juice my father likes to drink.
Yuck!
It’s sticky and smells. Red is the color I get on my face
when my brother messes my room.
I shout and I scream. I feel like biting.
I try to keep calm but I can’t keep it in.
Red is also the red sports car
that booms like thunder.
It’s so low that maybe the driver will
have to lie flat.
Blood is red.
Warm and sticky.
It drips from my knee where I fell and got a cut.
It hurts and when I lick it
it tastes bad. Gluck!
Alyssa Smith
“And then, I remember,” Alyssa continues, “one of my teachers in fourth or fifth grade wrote in my Ayumi, ‘I can’t wait to read your first book!’ So that interest in writing was always there.”
Alyssa took that lifelong interest in writing through high school at ASIJ to Tufts University in Boston, where she went in 2007. “But because I had this multicultural background,” she says, “I was also interested in maybe going into diplomacy. Tufts is one of the top ten universities in the US for international relations. That was my major until I got to senior year, when I felt I’d regret graduating without having a degree in English as well. So I crammed a second degree into my senior year and graduated with double majors in English and international relations.”
After cramming so much into her final year of college, it is understandable that she might have felt like taking a breather after graduating in 2011. “I was a little bit exhausted,” Alyssa laughs. “I was trying to figure out how to pursue my career in writing, but I also wanted to give myself a grace period.”
Having maintained contacts at Nishimachi, Alyssa was able to work part-time in the IT Office and also as an assistant in the Administrative Office. Then, in 2012, Nishimachi’s head of school asked Alyssa if she was interested in working full-time as an assistant teacher in the kindergarten. “I said I would love to!” she exclaims.
Alyssa admits to being very impressed by the literacy level of the kindergartners she worked with from September 2012 to August 2013. “Even though a lot of them were coming into the school structure for the first time,” she says, “already they were being taught how to write pieces that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. I don’t remember doing something that advanced when I was in kindergarten!”
The winding road
After two years at Nishimachi, Alyssa continues, “I went back to Boston to work as a freelance writer for a bit. I did odd jobs, such as working in a stationery design company, writing little descriptions of their products, helping them put together their pamphlets. I also worked in the MIT news office, fielding inquiries from journalists who wanted to speak to certain professors.”
In the spring of 2014, Alyssa began writing content for a digital development company based in Kichijoji, T-Mark International Inc. “They were developing a travel app ahead of the Olympics,” Alyssa explains. “They asked me to write all the English content about things to do in Japan, descriptions of restaurants, and such.
“I was doing that from Boston,” Alyssa continues, “and then my bosses said, ‘You know, it would be so much more useful to us if you moved back to Tokyo and worked for us full time.’ I did that but then the app was scrapped because there was too much competition and my bosses said, ‘We don’t have a writing position for you anymore, but we’d like for you to be a project manager.’”
One of Alyssa’s roles as project manager was to act as bilingual go-between the computer engineers in Japan and clients elsewhere in the world. Alyssa admits that, after two years in that position, she “wasn’t thrilled with the direction my career was heading in. So I started looking for jobs and found, I think, three openings at The Japan Times. And,” she laughs, “I applied to all of them.”
That was in the summer of 2017. While she was determined to work in any of the three positions, one in particular appealed to her. “The Life & Culture section felt like an environment that I really wanted to be in,” Alyssa specifies. “I started as an Assistant Editor there, and then, during the early days of the pandemic, got promoted to Culture Editor. So, for the last six and a half years, that’s where I’ve been — the Life & Culture section of The Japan Times. It was a bit of a winding road to get there.”
Alyssa proudly shows her front page article at The Japan Times office.
Putting herself out there
Alyssa admits that being Culture Editor means that she doesn’t get to write as much as she would like to. “But I do have other opportunities to put myself out there,” she adds.
There is, for instance, the newspaper’s ongoing podcast, Deep Dive, currently up to its 181st episode. “So occasionally,” Alyssa explains, “I’ll come onto the podcast as either a host or someone who’s part of the conversation and I’ll talk about culture events in Japan. We also, a couple years back, did a project related to the Rugby World Cup where we created travel videos about what to do, where to go in each of the host cities around Japan where the matches were taking place.”
Alyssa appears in at least three of those videos — “A weekend in Kobe,” “A weekend in Osaka,” and “A weekend in Yokohama.” These pieces were also published in The Japan Times Travel section.
“At the end of 2020,” Alyssa adds, “we did a special podcast series called Recultured. It’s a four-part series where we talked about events connected to the pandemic and pop culture. I’m really proud of that. We put a lot of work into it.”
A lot of work also goes into another part of the newspaper. “I do have a soft spot for my Books section,” Alyssa admits, “just because, you know, I’ve loved books since I was very little. I think that’s one of the things I look forward to the most.”
Alyssa explains that the Books section has featured several interviews with translators. “It’s really nice to see that Japanese literature is being appreciated abroad,” she says. “A lot of this is because of the strength of the translators.”
And yet, despite all the time and energy taken up by podcasts and editorial tasks, Alyssa’s pen, so to speak, has not been entirely idle. A look at The Japan Times website, for instance, turns up at least 50 pieces she’s written since starting there (see sidebar). And that number doesn’t include her Deep Dive podcasts (10) or her Terrace House recaps (23).
Still, there’s another direction Alyssa would love to go in if she ever got the time and opportunity to do so. “In the future,” she says, “I want to put things into my own words.”
Multicultural kids
Alyssa describes the contrast she sees between the fantasy and the reality of growing up as a multicultural kid. “The way multicultural kids are represented in things like novels, TV shows, and movies,” she explains, is different from her experience at Nishimachi, where “being multilingual, being multicultural, is not just recognized, but supported and celebrated.”
Alyssa’s mother grew up on Awajishima, and then, when she was 18, moved to Tokyo where she met Alyssa’s father, who’s from Salt Lake City. “My dad was going to law school and my mom was going to university,” Alyssa says. “She was an English major and taking English lessons and my dad was the TA for one of the lessons.”
Alyssa explains that she was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and that, though her family moved back and forth between Tokyo and the US because of her father’s job as a lawyer for American International Group, a multinational insurance firm, she mostly grew up in Tokyo.
Alyssa reading in fourth grade. Image from the 1998-1999 Ayumi.
She also points out that, even though her father’s American, he “is fluent in Japanese as well. They spoke both languages to us growing up, but it was primarily in English. So when we moved back to Tokyo,” Alyssa laughs, “I kind of relearned my Japanese by watching Sailor Moon.”
Once she entered Nishimachi, being bilingual became even more a part of her life. “Nishimachi has Japanese classes every day,” Alyssa says. “Also, it’s a very small school, very intimate, and a lot of the friendships I’ve had here have carried out into my adult life. There’s a sense of community which makes this school really special.”
“Many of the stories I see now about people who are bicultural or multicultural,” Alyssa continues, “seem like a fantasy of what these people’s lives might be like. They’re portrayed as outsiders, as being different from everyone else because everyone else looks different from them or is only thinking in one language or something like that.
“But growing up here, so many of the kids I went to school with looked like me. So it never even occurred to me that, for instance, I would go out to the US or something and someone would find how I look confusing or not understand what my background is.
“So if I were to write something about my upbringing, I want more of the stories that I can see myself in to be out there. A lot of multicultural people would be interested in those kinds of stories, too. Being multilingual, being multicultural doesn’t have to be something that makes you feel alienated or different — it can be a very positive and important part of you that you can treasure.”