His father wanted him to have an education, so Junast was sent to a local private school from the age of eight, where he studied Chinese and Mongolian, including the Confucian classics.
In 1951 he passed the entrance exam for the Hinggan Middle School in Ulan Hot, where he specialized in the Mongolian language, but in the autumn of the following year he was accepted into the newly established Mongolian Languages and Literature program at the Inner Mongolia Teachers College, despite having only been at high school for one year.
In March 1953 he joined the Chinese Communist Party, and in September he was sent to study Mongolian language at Beijing University.
[1][unreliable source] On the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, Junast was labelled a "May 16 element", and suffered beatings and abuse.
[2] In 1988 Junast was invited to teach in Japan, and he accepted a position as visiting professor at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, where he remained until the mid-2000s.