When I was at an university, I was learning Russian language as my major.
I'm always asked why I had decided to choose Russian, anytime I say that I learnt Russian as my major at the university.
In Japan, English is the most common choice for almost all the students and some of students take other lnguages, such as Spanish, French, Chinese and so on. And Russian is not so popular for Japanese people. 

Actually I have several reasons to take a Russian class. First of all, my grandfather was a captive of the Soviet Union after WW2. Many Japaneses were cought by the Soviet Union as a captive and they were ordered to work hard in a terrible enviroment like Siberia because Japan had lost in WW2. My grandfather had been working several years in Siberia,  and he saw many Japanese people died there because of hard working and cold temperature. So he decided to learn Russian for negotiating them to improve their working enviroment. It was just for surviving but He became fluent in Russian as a result. Although he spent a terrible time in Siberia as a captive, and he already passed away about 10 years ago, he had always asked me not to hate Russia since I was a little child. So I was interested what our neighborhood, Russians are like.

The second reason. To be honest, the relationship between Japan and Russia is difficult to say. It's a little bit complicated. Some of Japanese don't like Russian because of WW2 and a territory problem. And normally Japanese don't know about Russian culture very much even if we are neighbor each other. So I thought I wanted to learn about my neighbor's language and culture. So I choosed Russian as my major at the university.

Unfortunately It already took long time since I had learnt Russian at my university. My Russian is totally rusty now.
So I'm thinkng to brush up on my Russian in the near future. I have to learn English first though.