Everything We’re Not Teaching Each Other

Kyouhei Yamamoto moved from Tokyo to Berlin because he was bored, which I find genuinely admirable. Born in Okayama in 1988, he spent years in the capital shooting photographs—girls, dogs, trees—then decided Tokyo wasn’t holding his interest anymore and turned up in Berlin, where he was working at a Japanese restaurant in Kreuzberg while figuring out what came next. Why anyone finds Tokyo boring is beyond me, but I respect the logic of needing out.

We became language-exchange partners. The deal was clean on paper: he teaches me Japanese, I teach him German. My motivation was concrete—I was planning to spend a year in Japan for a project I was developing at the time—and so, in theory, was his. What neither of us fully accounted for is that I am both a terrible student and a terrible teacher, and these two qualities don’t cancel each other out. They just take turns humiliating me.

Our sessions played out like this: we met somewhere, spoke in English, talked about Berghain and cheeseburgers and Mount Fuji for an hour and a half, and then every twenty minutes or so, by accident, one of us taught the other a word. Käse is cheese in German? Yes. And 弁護士 means lawyer in Japanese? Apparently. Ninety-nine percent conversation, one percent language acquisition—a fine ratio for friendship and catastrophic for anything else.

I called him Kyo sometimes. The nickname appeared one afternoon and stuck. He had a photographer’s quiet attentiveness, the kind of person who notices things without making a performance of noticing, which made him genuinely good company in a city that rewards exactly that quality. Whether any of it produced functional Japanese on my end is a separate, embarrassing question. Whether those afternoons were worth it is not a question at all.