Lower Merion School District has been offering Japanese for over 20 years, influencing and expanding the global citizenship and passions of students. As of 2024, the Lower Merion Board of School Directors wish to remove the course from the school's optional languages. This decision would leave French, Latin, and Spanish as the only available languages for students to take. Japanese is the only language offered that allows students to explore beyond a centralized Western European worldview. 
Japanese is the only Asian language taught in a school district that consists of an 11.5% Asian student body. While these students may feel like a minority elsewhere in the school, having a course that embraces and welcomes them and their diversity gives them a place to feel secure and represented.

The importance of having a wide and reflective course roster cannot be understated. When students take an Asian language, they are given an opportunity to introduce and teach their peers their own culture, regardless of what the language is. Culturally, Asian languages are very different from Western languages, which gives students an opportunity to expand their lens of the world from the Eurocentric courses often taught. Lower Merion School District also prides itself on preparing its students for where life opportunities may take them. Japanese is a fundamental language in the world of Business, and a foundation in it can help greatly with those planning to continue their learnings into college and possibly even abroad.

Our teacher, Nakamura-Sensei, had been teaching in LMSD for almost 10 years up to her passing. She would always come in to class with a smile on her face, regardless of the battle with cancer she was facing in her private life. She brought so much life to our classes, dancing and singing around the room. She taught us multiple traditional Japanese dishes, and went to great ends to make the class as engaging and fun as possible. Her loss is still fresh to the LMSD community, and removing the one reminder of her from the school on the heels of her death, only four months out, has hurt the people still grieving her loss greatly. The Japanese course is her legacy. The students of Lower Merion School District are not willing to let the one class that still ties us back to her go out without a fight.