HAMAMATSU, Japan - More than a decade after becoming the first Westerner to pass the highest level of Japan's notoriously difficult Kanji Aptitude Test, Bret Mayer has little interest in being known simply as "the kanji guy."
Instead, the 44-year-old American has spent the years since immersing himself in pursuits ranging from traditional tea making and Japanese speech contests to legal studies, driven less by a desire to collect achievements than by an enduring curiosity and a belief that the greatest satisfaction comes from continuing to learn.
At the tea-rolling dojo in Shizuoka Prefecture where he is learning the craft, no sooner have business cards been exchanged with this reporter and a photographer than Mayer points out the unusual reading of a kanji character in the photographer's name, a reminder that his fascination with the written language remains undimmed.
After introducing his instructor, Miwaji Suzuki, and his wife and another apprentice preparing for September's tea-rolling certification exam, Mayer leads the way inside.
Dressed in white work clothes, he steps up to a long wooden table covered with freshly steamed tea leaves.
The swish of the leaves across the tabletop becomes almost hypnotic. Mayer has spent years recording the sound, which he considers an essential part of the experience. A microphone sits on a nearby table.
"You move the leaves gently and let them twist into shape," he says, rolling them between his palms. "If you apply too much pressure early on, you'll smother the leaves."
As they gradually dry, his movements become slower and more deliberate.
"It becomes quite meditative when you get into that rhythm," he says.
The craft has occupied Mayer for the past six years, a world away from the thousands of handwritten kanji characters that first brought him national attention. Yet, like the language that once consumed him, tea has become another expression of the same restless curiosity that has shaped much of his life in Japan.
"It has a different kind of satisfaction," he says when asked whether the process reminds him of studying kanji. "I always did mental studying. This is the first physical craft I've really learned."
During the COVID pandemic, Mayer began searching for a new challenge.
"I thought, 'Why not tea?'" he recalls. Living in Japan's largest tea-producing region, it seemed the natural choice.
Tea also carried a more personal significance. Mayer's late father-in-law made green tea every morning, often serving it to him and, during visits from the United States, to his father. Despite sharing no common language, the two men bonded over cups of tea at the kitchen table.
"My father called him 'the green tea philosopher,'" Mayer says with a laugh. "Even though he couldn't understand a word he was saying."
Encouraged by his wife, Mayer enrolled in the Nihoncha (Japanese Tea) Instructor Certification Program before visiting a farmers' market in search of tea growers. Instead, he found an invitation.
Suzuki's wife was staffing one of the stalls.
"She said, 'Why don't you come to our place and just roll?'"
Six years later, Mayer has earned apprentice-level certification as a temomi (tea-rolling) artisan and is preparing for the instructor examination in September. He is also helping establish a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to preserving and promoting the art of temomi.
Long before tea, there was kanji.
As a high school student in the United States, Mayer became fascinated with Japanese animation and manga, with the character for "kame," or turtle, in the "Dragon Ball" series sparking his interest in kanji.
After moving to Japan in 2008, Mayer discovered the Kanji Aptitude Test, known as the Kanken, which tests knowledge of the Chinese characters that form a core part of the Japanese writing system and ranges from beginner Level 10 to the highest Level 1.
He began at Level 8, but one challenge led to the next until he reached Level 1.
While Level 2 covers the 2,136 everyday kanji, Level 1 requires knowledge of more than 6,000, including many obscure historical and literary characters.
Mayer's first attempt at the top level produced a score of just seven out of 200.
"One of the only kanji I got right was 'shakkuri' (hiccup)," he says.
"Actually going to the testing center and sitting the exam, even knowing I wasn't ready, helped dispel some of the mystery," he says. "The next time, it was like, 'I've done this before.'"
At the height of his preparation, Mayer studied for five or six hours a day, devoting his mornings to kanji before working as a translator, interpreter and English teacher.
"It did consume my life, but in a positive sense," he says.
He filled dozens of notebooks, writing each character repeatedly, sometimes 20 times over.
"I'd go to Starbucks, put on some music and just write," he recalls. "It was almost like meditating."
One of his favorite keepsakes from those years is neither a certificate nor a trophy, but a plastic Starbucks cup bearing a handwritten congratulatory message from a barista after he passed Level 1.
"She was one of the first people I told," he says. Before bringing it to the interview, he adds with a smile, he even tried to clean it.
On his fifth attempt in 2012, Mayer passed Level 1, becoming the first person from outside the Chinese character-using cultures of Japan, China and South Korea to achieve the feat.
Passing Level 1 led to translation work, interpreting assignments and television appearances across Japan. But for someone who had dreaded giving presentations at school, the attention proved almost as daunting as the exam itself.
"Radio, television -- they were always things I probably would have run away from," he says. "But I wasn't going to turn down opportunities like that. Eventually, I got comfortable speaking live."
"I enjoy being a beginner," he says. "Everything is new, and you improve really quickly. Then you hit the intermediate stage... intermediate sucks."
For Mayer, the frustration is something to push through, not a reason to quit. Drawing on an analogy from one of his public talks, he compares learning to a role-playing game in which progress seems invisible until you suddenly level up.
"You can't get too fixated on the destination," he says. "You'll reach it and then... now what?"
"Every destination is really just another milestone. The journey continues."
His latest challenge is Japan's administrative scrivener examination, a legal qualification he hopes will allow him to assist people navigating immigration procedures and international marriages, areas that have become increasingly important to him.
Artificial intelligence, he acknowledges, is already reshaping his translation work.
"Translation work is starting to dwindle," he says. "Having physical skills -- teaching in a classroom or rolling tea for a demonstration -- is going to be important."
Even so, he believes relying too heavily on technology comes at a cost.
"If technology disincentivizes you from growing in those ways, you're kind of cheating yourself," he says. "There's still value in improving yourself, even if it's just for your own peace of mind."
