Dear students, past, present, and prospective,

The words may sound cliché, but it truly is with a heavy heart that I announce the closure of Wiki Wiki Japanese after more than 8 years of operation in Honolulu.

I know everyone understands the kind of impact COVID-19 is having on the world, so I won't go into too much detail, but factors that influenced this decision include:

• Congregational, live nature of our instruction method / classes and inability to quickly or effectively adapt our method to an online template.
• Unsustainable losses, including 4 months already of lost fixed costs plus a minimum of 2 more lost months (community centers are closed through August) and likely longer given new infection rate projections.
• Likelihood that even when community centers are open again our student numbers will be impacted into the distant future, and we were already a very low profit-margin company just trying to break even for many classes before all this started.

I have spoken with all our teachers and everyone understands and is in agreement given the situation.

I started Wiki Wiki Japanese with 6 students I got together on CraigsList in 2011 and since then we have grown to be a much larger, highly-trusted source for live Japanese language education in Honolulu serving many hundreds of students.  I don't think any blood was involved, but a lot of sweat and a few tears went into producing a reliable environment for fun and successful Japanese learning.  And we have loved all our students.  There was never much money in it for us, so we have been truly lucky to attract wonderful students of great quality of character and kindness that have motivated us and each other over the years.  All our teachers have made similar comments to me over the years.  We love you all and will sincerely miss you.  I truly hope all of you stick together and keep up your Japanese studies if possible.  We all share a common bond of our interest and respect for the Japanese culture, people, and language, and those things have a special place in Hawaii.  And I'd like to sincerely thank our teachers for all of their very hard work preparing and teaching, rushing around in stressful rush hour traffic, and even sometimes giving up their personal time for the students for all these years.

I wish you all the best success and happiness and hope to cross paths again in the future.

Aloha kākou -- Mahalo nui loa --  E mālama pono

さようなら

Justin Ekins
General Manager

P.S. Please feel free to reach out to info@wikiwikijapanese.com with any questions or concerns.