Having lived and taught English in Japan for more than fifteen years, until last night I’d thought I’d seen it all. That was until I stumbled across the もし彼氏が外国人だったら英会話 (What if my Boyfriend was a Foreigner English Conversation [my translation]) iPhone application.

This application, as you might have guessed, is a novel new twist on foreign language ‘edutainment’. Consumers begin a virtual relationship with one of three characters, and as their romantic love story unfolds, English conversational ability is apparently enhanced! Wow!

 There are three virtual foreign boyfriends from which to choose from: First, there’s William, aged 20. He’s blonde haired and blue eyed, and sports a decisively British cricket vest. Or perhaps Daniel is more your speed? He’s 35, and a dead-ringer for Johnny Depp. Finally, there’s Keith. I’m not too sure what to make of Keith. At 25, he seems too young to carry off a yellow bowtie and pink sports coat. But then again, how would I know? Oh, and yes, of course William, Daniel, and Keith are all ‘white’.

If you get sick of the guy you first choose, no problem. He can be changed! (According to the blurb, ストーリーは選んだ相手により変化する。) Through daily telephone ‘conversations’ – which are actually just recordings of your ‘boyfriend’ talking – your listening ability is reportedly enhanced, and through a Quiz Mode, phrases from the ‘conversations’ can be practiced (毎日の電話会話でリスニング力を強化し、「クイズモード」で会話に出てきたフレーズ練習を行っていく。). Such cutting edge teaching indeed!

It’s no wonder there are so many glowing testimonials from satisfied consumers. According to one review, リスニングが楽しい♡, 単語じゃなくてフレーズとして覚えられるので使えそう！解説も丁寧で分かりやすい☆ (The listening is enjoyable. I can remember phrases and not just words, so it’s useful! The instructions are also really easy to understand.)

 So what are we to make of all this? There now exists, of course, an exciting body of literature articulating the way language learning and romantic desires are intertwined (see for example, Takahashi, 2010). The ‘language desires’ of the subjects in such studies are, of course, predicated on an idealized fantasy of what ‘foreign’ partners are supposed to be like, but they essentially are concerned with relationships between real people. In contrast, the iPhone app described here represents, as my friend and colleague from Senshu University, Peter Longcope, cleverly put it, an intriguing case of “Tamagotchi meets Rosetta Stone”. We are living in interesting times indeed!

Silly though it may seem, I never anticipated the day when the intertwinement of language learning, gender, race, and romance in the virtual world would emerge as a subject deserving of scholarly attention. Of course, the emergence of new forms of foreign language ‘edutainment’ such as the “What if my boyfriend was a Foreigner” iPhone app are significant because they are obviously perpetuating discourses about native speakers, nationalities, gender, and language learning that need to be challenged.

Takahashi, Kimie (2010). Multilingual couple talk: Romance,identity, and the political economy of language D. Nunan & J. Choi (Eds.), Language and culture: Reflective narratives and the emergence of identity. New York: Routledge, 199-207

Reza's well-used Japanese-Persian and English-Persian dictionaries

This is the first in a series of blog posts about my experiences undertaking an ongoing research project. In this series I will be detailing some of the methodological challenges I encounter as well as the strategies I adopt to deal with them. In this post I will explain how I came to meet one of my informants, the similarities and differences concerning our situations in Japan as foreigners, and how my interactions with him and his family provided me with the impetus for this research project.

I first met Reza (a pseudonym) in Osaka, Japan, about six or seven years ago. We were attending a BBQ for intermarried couples and their children that was being held in a local park. Superficially at least, the differences in our backgrounds couldn’t have been more striking. I hailed from Australia, while he was from Iran. I couldn’t (and still can’t) speak a word of his native Persian, and his proficiency in English has remained, over the years, virtually non-existent.

I’ve since located to a different part of Japan, but Reza and I have remained in contact. Although we meet less than once a year, we are invariably told by Japanese onlookers that the sight of the two of us using the brash, impetuous Osaka-ben (Osaka dialect of Japanese) – complete with a liberal peppering of the sorts of grammatical errors that only non-native speakers can make – as our lingua franca provides them with an immeasurable and endless amount of entertainment. I guess I’ve always been ambivalent about such attention and I don’t think of it as a performance. Moreover, while I’m not particularly concerned about whether or not Japanese onlookers necessarily perceive Reza and my “metroethnic” practices as “cool” (Maher, 2005; 2010), such behavior should, as Otsuji and Pennycook would have it, “lead us to question not only a one-to-one association among language, ethnicity, nation, and territory, but also the authenticity of ownership of language which is based on conventional language ideology” (2010, p. 241).

Nevertheless, the dissimilarities between Reza and I run deeper than just our mutual inability to speak each other’s native language. I think it’s fair to say that, as permanent residents, our experiences of Japan have been markedly different. I’m a ‘white’, tertiary-educated speaker of a language that enjoys a particularly privileged status in Japan; moreover, I have been able to forge a rather lucrative lifestyle for myself and my family in my adopted homeland primarily because of simply being able to speak that language. Conversely, Reza has done it tough here. As a non-English speaking foreigner, his employment prospects have been, in comparison to mine, somewhat limited. He has worked for many years in the construction industry, often for wages lower than his Japanese coworkers. As an Iranian in Japan, he has also had to deal with the sorts of racist, negative stereotypes that I have not been subjected to (McNeill, 2010).

Yet Reza and I also have much in common. We are both permanent residents. We both have Japanese partners. We both enjoy living in Japan immensely, and we also both enjoy, from time to time, a therapeutic whine about what we don’t like about the place. Significantly for this blog post at least, we are both ‘foreign’ fathers attempting to raise our children in a culture quite different from the cultures of our home countries. We both want our children to grow up well-adjusted, happy kids, and we both are finding the challenges of bilingual child-rearing considerably more difficult than we had first imagined.

Stay tuned…

Maher, J. C. (2005). Metroethnicity, language and the principle of cool International Journal of the Sociology of Languages (175-176)

McNeill, D. (Nov 9, 2010). Muslims in shock over police terror leak: Japan residents named in document want explanation – and apology – from Tokyo police force. Japan Times, p. 15.

Otsuji, E. and Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism, fixity, fluidity, and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7(3), 240-253.

“Japanese guys aren’t the most popular creatures on earth when it comes to romance. Sad but true.”

That’s the claim of Meiko Mochizuki Swartz, self-professed bilingual, bicultural ‘expert’ and author of an online book titled Nihonjin no Otoko wa Motenai (Japanese guys aren’t popular) that I recently stumbled across. The book is essentially billed as a guide to assist Japanese men establish and maintain relationships with ‘foreign’ (read here ‘western’) women. It claims to offer instructional advice regarding such things as:

• How to read facial expressions and body language
• How to read verbal clues in English
• How to make a good impression even with weak English skills
• Where to go and what to do on a first date
• Learning when a good-night kiss is appropriate
• How to apologize

The Japanese web page has several glowing testimonials from satisfied readers. T-san, with 20 years’ experience living the United States, for example, is quoted as stating

「これ、東京のアメリカ大使館のビザ申請窓口に積み上げて無料配布するべきです。モテなくて人生無駄にする人が多すぎる。男がだらしないから可愛い日本人の女の子はみんなアメリカ人に取られちゃうし。」(This [book] should be placed free at the visa application counter of the American Embassy in Tokyo. There are too many guys wasting their lives. Because of such slovenly blokes, the Americans are taking all our cute Japanese girls [my translation].)

While the subject matter and underpinning premises that seem to drive Nihonjin no Otoko wa Motenai are perplexing enough, the warning posted on the book’s web page left me gob-smacked. In red font (!), it cautions that the book

“…is written entirely in Japanese. If you don’t read Japanese, this book is not for you…But let us emphasize again, if you don’t read Japanese at a native level, this book is useless for you. We only have this information page in English because the US-based store system requires us to have it. This page is not meant to invite non-Japanese speakers to purchase the book. If you are one of our potential readers, we invite you to go to our Japanese page…”

Huh?!? This must be the oddest blurb in publishing history! Why would any publisher go to such lengths to dissuade a potential customer?

I, for one, was intrigued! Their website got me thinking about how interlingual relationships are frequently portrayed in Japan. As Piller and Takahashi (2006, p. 60) point out, Japanese women’s relationships with western men have received substantial interdisciplinary attention in both the academic and popular literatures. In such discourses the women have frequently been problematized as possessing questionable sexual morals (as per Shoko Ieda’s (1991) yellow cab motif) for seeking relationships with foreign men. The western men in these relationships have also been the object of derision. Charisma Man, a comic strip character of an expat magazine in Japan, for example, is a skinny, ineffectual, sexually inexperienced, nerdish loser from Canada who suddenly transforms himself into a handsome, desirable stud when he comes to Japan to work as an English conversation teacher (Bailey, 2007; Appleby, 2009a, 2009b). Substantially less contemptuous in tone, Oguri Saori’s (2001) best-selling Daarin wa Gaikokujin (My Darling is a Foreigner) series uses a comic strip format as the medium through which to both romanticize and unveil the seemingly impenetrable mysteries of international relationships. Incidentally, Oguri’s book has recently been adapted into a film and is enjoying solid commercial success.

But what’s the score concerning interlingual relationships involving Japanese men and foreign women? Such discourses deserve our attention too, because, despite the dominant stereotype, the majority of foreign spouses in Japan are women (Jones & Shen, 2008, p. 12). These wives of Japanese men originate primarily from Korea, China, Thailand and Brazil. Many of them are so-called nooson hanayome (non-Japanese Asian wives of Japanese farmers) who are expected to ‘learn’ how to be just like a Japanese wife (Piper, 2003; Suzuki, 2005). To be sure, Tokyo Terebi’s Okusama wa gaikokujin (The wife is a foreigner!) was a popular television program that ran in a weekly prime time slot for several years. Each episode featured a Japanese man and his foreign wife. The program’s format was simple – it focused on how the couple met, an evaluation of how well the foreign wife had become accustomed to life in Japan and the extent to which she could meet the needs of her Japanese husband. Each episode included a cooking challenge in which the foreign wife was presented with 10,000 yen from which she had to prepare a dinner party for the interviewer and invited guests. At the close of the show, a well-known celebrity invariably offered some pious, painfully condescending and patronizing advice to the foreign wife that would supposedly help her better adjust to life in Japan (“It is important to wash before getting in the bath” “Japanese people take their shoes off inside” etc…).

As I have argued elsewhere (Jackson 2009, pp. 43-44), discourses of interlingual relationships are also noticeably racialized. Japanese-hakujin (white, Caucasian) unions seem to imply a presumed social status (i.e. English-speaking, romantic) not associated with relationships with non-whites. In contrast, non-white foreigners in interlingual relationships are often portrayed as economically poor opportunists who exchange reproductive, sexual and domestic labour with Japanese partners in order to alleviate their own economic hardships (Piper, 1997, Kojima, 2001).

The book mentioned at the start of this blog is somewhat different from the dominant discourse of Japanese men-foreign women in that it insists that Japanese men have to improve themselves if they are to ‘get’ western women. And one way to ‘get’ western women, the book suggests, is through language (“reading verbal clues in English”). Here’s the deal: non-western women in relationships with Japanese men are expected to learn Japanese, while Japanese men who want a western partner will need to utilize English in supposedly skillful and complex ways. Go figure!

I’m glad the publisher doesn’t want me to spend $25 on Nihon no otoko wa motenai because I can do without this concoction of essentialism, sexism, and racism all tied up with English language teaching. I’ll be happy to ‘endorse’ this book in English and Japanese: Don’t buy this book! この本を購入しないでください！

References:

Appleby, R. J. (2009a). Charisma Man: Discourses of desire and western men in Japan. Discourses and Cultural Practices Conference. University of Sydney, July.

Appleby, R. J. (2009b). Reflections on ‘Charisma Man’. The Teaching-Learning Dialogue: An Active Mirror. 35^th Annual international Conference of Japan Association of Language Teaching. Shizuoka, Japan. November.

Bailey, K. (2007). Akogare, ideology, and the ‘Charisma Man’ mythology: Reflections on ethnographic research in English language schools in Japan. Gender, Place & Culture 14(5), pp. 585-608.

Ieda, S. (1991). Ieroo Kyabuu: Narita wo tobitatta onnatachi. Tokyo: Kodansha.

Jackson, L. (2010). Bilingual child-rearing in linguistic intermarriage: Negotiating language, power, and identities between English-speaking fathers and Japanese-speaking mothers in Japan. Unpublished PhD thesis, The University of Queensland.

Jones, G. & Shen, H. (2008). International marriage in East and South-East Asia: trends and research emphases. Citizenship Studies 12(1), 9-25.

Kojima, Y. (2001). In the business of cultural reproduction: Theoretical implications of the mail-order bride phenomenon. Women’s Studies International Forum, 24(2), 199-210.

Piller, Ingrid & Takahashi, Kimie (2006). A passion for English: desire and the language market Aneta Pavlenko. Ed. Bilingual minds: Emotional experience, expression, and representation (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 59-83

Piper, N. (1997). International marriage in Japan: ‘Race’ and ‘gender’ perspectives. Gender, Place, and Culture, 4(3), 321-338.

Piper, N. (2003). Wife or worker? Marriage and cross-border migration in contemporary Japan. International Journal of Population Geography, 9(6), 457-469.

Suzuki, N. (2005). Tripartite desires: Filipina-Japanese marriages and fantasies of transnational traversal. In N. Constable (Ed.), Cross-border marriages: Gender and mobility in transnational Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.