Leadership Network member’s life a love letter to Japan

In 2011, Marcus returned to Japan to teach kindergarten and primary-school-aged children via the JET programme

Born and raised in Christchurch, he knew his outward-looking disposition would one day take him abroad. Through a series of happenstance events, a teenage Marcus set his sights on Japan and never looked back.

Unlike most 11-year-olds, for his eleventh birthday Marcus requested a 12-month subscription to the National Geographic magazine. “I just loved reading stuff about the world and different places, but we were never as a family able to go overseas”, Marcus says.

He got a deeper taste of overseas onshore when in year 9, he got to study modules of te reo Māori, French, and Japanese. He realised he loved to learn languages and was particularly fascinated by the completely different writing system learning Japanese offered.

15-year-old Marcus with his host family in Tokyo

He stuck with Japanese learning, and in his third year of high school, he got his big break. Marcus and 30 other students from Christchurch’s St Bede’s College headed off to the Buddhist Setagaya Gakuen, their sister school in Tokyo, for one life changing week.

When they got to Tokyo, Marcus became the unlikely benefactor of a strange twist of fate. As the students were being paired up with their homestay family from the sister school, it got to the end of the line and Marcus was the only one left with no more families to pair him up with. He was told, “Unfortunately, we couldn’t get you another family, so we’ve had to put you in a Buddhist temple with this family who are good friends with the school principal”.

So there he was. A 15-year-old boy who had scarcely left Christchurch, staying with monks in a Tokyo temple, right next to a cemetery. As Marcus recounts, “I could barely speak Japanese, and they could barely speak English”. He continues, “I felt in a way I was luckier than the other students to experience it”. 

Marcus in Japan in 2004 (left) and in 2023 with 93-year-old survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Bun Hashizume

A week later he was back in New Zealand. Freshly picked up from the airport, one of the first things he said to his dad was, “I’m so going back there”.

His next taste of Japan came with the help of a second strike of serendipity. At high school, there weren’t enough people to run Japanese lessons, so he had to learn via correspondence. “It was really difficult to learn by myself and it got to the point where I wanted to just give it up”.

But then, in typical Kiwi fashion, “My piano teacher put me in touch with one of her students who was Japanese, who knew this Japanese tutor who lived literally just around the corner from me”.

At the end of high school, Marcus returned to Setagaya Gakuen High School for a three-month exchange

He continued to learn until the end of high school, after which he headed back to Setagaya Gakuen in Japan for a three-month stint by himself as an exchange student. Bizarrely enough, his homestay was once again in a Buddhist temple — a different one, he clarifies. This time round, he was totally thrown out of his comfort zone.

“I remember my homestay dad, the monk, took me all the way across the other side of Tokyo via three different trains. And he drew this map with the train lines on a piece of paper.

"When we got to the school, he said, ‘So here’s the directions, we’ll see you when you get home’. With no phone back then, I was bricking it. What should’ve taken an hour to get home took me about three. But I did get home!”

Through fish-out-of-water experiences like that, he fell more in love with Japan. He took this passion to the University of Canterbury, where he studied a Bachelor of Arts in Japanese Studies.

During university, he gained a deeper understanding of the history and culture entrenched in the language. “With my Japanese degree, I wasn’t just learning language”, Marcus says.

Marcus with students at Bunkyo University in 2010

Marcus ended up back in Japan during his third year of university for a one-year exchange programme at Bunkyo University just outside of Tokyo. He was the only native English speaker in the whole university.

There, he was exposed to a diversity of Asian cultures. The international student body included Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, two German exchange students, and one Christchurch Kiwi. Interestingly, “The singular mode of communication, our lingua franca, was Japanese, which was challenging yet rewarding”.

Back in New Zealand and graduating university, Marcus applied for a space on The Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET) — a teaching programme sponsored by the Japanese government that brings university graduates to Japan as assistant language teachers.

He found out he was successful and set to head back to Japan in 2011. Unfortunately, 2011 was also the year of the Christchurch earthquakes and the Japan Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. He arrived in Japan three months after witnessing the mass-scale destruction that unfolded in both the places he called home.

Marcus describes the all-consuming darkness of Tokyo at the time. “You’re usually surrounded by these brightly lit skyscrapers, but they were just black because of the energy crisis”.

Marcus enjoying a night out with colleagues in during his stint as an English teacher

This time round, Marcus headed to a tiny town of just 5,000 inhabitants in rural Gunma Prefecture to teach English. He was teaching every single day at a different place. “I was doing four different kindergartens, a daycare, and four different primary schools”, he says.

With no prior teaching experience, he was swept up into a world of heads, shoulders, knees, and toes, Old MacDonald, and freelance translation work outside of classroom hours. He also made time to travel to China, Myanmar, South and North Korea. This was his life for three years.

After his JET programme ended, he decided to stay in Japan. He settled down in Tokyo and worked as a human resources coordinator and translator for three more years. He was living and breathing Japanese — using his language at work, and even reaching the top level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

A yearning for home and a slower pace of life brought Marcus back to New Zealand at the end of 2017. But his connection to Japan would endure. He decided to pursue a Master’s of International relations, with a thesis on the collective memory and forgetting of Japanese war crimes in East Asia.

His time in Japan planted the seeds for his research. By another moment of chance, at 18, he met the 90-year-old mother of his homestay who witnessed the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Her story stuck with him and was reinforced by his visits to Hiroshima throughout his time on the JET programme.

His master’s research led him to a nuclear disarmament group based in Christchurch: The Disarmament and Security Centre, run by Dr. Kate Dewes and Commander Robert Green. They are prominent anti-nuclear activists, operating from their home in Riccarton for nearly 40 years, and have forged strong links to Japan and Japanese atomic bomb survivors.

Anti-nuclear activists Dr. Kate Dewes and Commander Robert Green provided Marcus with a wealth of material and support towards his master's research.

They just so happened to have a whole garage of things they were digitising to be gifted to the Macmillan Brown Archives at the University of Canterbury. Marcus says, “They asked if I wanted to help them out with that as a part time job. It was like discovering a gold mine”.

His PhD took shape from there, chronicling the pursuit of a nuclear free world through the stories and insights of activists from home and abroad. Much of his research involved documenting the links between Japanese and New Zealand peacemakers. He was privileged enough to interview a 93-year-old survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima whose story he retells in his thesis.

He’ll defend his PhD thesis in an oral examination this month. Soon after, he’ll be moving to the Philippines to live with his fiancé while pursuing research projects on international relations issues in Asia.

So a predilection for understanding the world, armed with a National Geographic magazine subscription, set off a chain of events that would author the seasons of Marcus Coll’s life. In his own words, Marcus’ story has been about “all kinds of chance encounters that led me to where I am”.

The Asia New Zealand Foundation Leadership Network equips New Zealand’s next generation of Kiwi leaders to thrive in Asia. We provide members with the connections, knowledge and confidence to lead New Zealand’s future relationship with the region.