Handed my MA dissertation in four years ago on this day. This article by Piller and Takahashi, "A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market" from @Lg_on_the_Move, directly inspired my dissertation and my subsequent PhD research. https://t.co/4i3gjY3UqJ

— Dr Owen Minns (@OTMinns) September 24, 2019

Teaching English in Japan

Even before I set foot in Japan, being a white, university-educated male from England gave me access to jobs at commercial language schools and teaching programs like the JET Program. The first school I taught at, a commercial language school (Eikaiwa in Japanese), advertised itself as a British English school. The company’s adverts featured pictures of young, white, smartly dressed teachers reflecting the trends identified by Piller and Takahashi. I later taught at a private high school where being a British passport holder was one of the requirements for employment. In this school, the foreign teachers were collectively addressed as “natives” by the Japanese teachers, and we had an ambivalent position in the school despite prominently featuring on the school’s website and at open days.

While being white, British, and male gave me privileged mobility to gain stable employment in Japan, both my employers offered little or no encouragement for Japanese learning. This meant that after 6 years of teaching in Japan, I developed a bittersweet relationship with Japanese, characterised by periods of both engagement and non-engagement with learning Japanese.

After returning to the UK to study for a master’s, reading Piller and Takahashi’s work connected many of the dots I had felt while in Japan. Throughout my time in Japan, I met teachers with varying Japanese proficiency levels. There were constant discussions about the need to speak Japanese and even some tension between teachers about their Japanese levels, but there was little institutional support for Japanese learning. Reading about the ideologies identified by Piller and Takahashi on learners led me to wonder how these forces influenced teachers in Japan when they were learning Japanese, so I made this goal of my Ph.D. research.

My research

Poster for an English language school in Japan (Image credit: Shinshin50)

I researched how two groups, newly arrived and long-term teachers learned Japanese. For the newly arrived teachers, 9 took part in a 6-month diary study in which they wrote weekly diaries about their Japanese language learning and participated in monthly interviews. For the long-term teachers, I interviewed 13 teachers who had made lives in Japan about their Japanese language learning histories.

The newly arrived teachers had to self-direct their learning while trying to find their position in the classroom, the school, and Japan. The newly arrived teachers found it challenging to develop consistent learning routines. While they had access to countless online self-study learning resources and approaches, they struggled to consistently use these resources and find appropriate face-to-face Japanese classes. One teacher felt she had to choose between her own mental well-being and Japanese learning, while other newly arrived teachers found managing Japanese learning alongside working and living in Japan caused them stress and mental health issues.

The long-term teachers also experienced trouble regulating Japanese language learning on a long-term basis. Some teachers were able to build long-term learning approaches that combined Japanese study with involvement with local communities, while others experienced more fluctuating Japanese learning, interspersing periods of engaged learning with periods of disengagement. Finding opportunities to use Japanese was a struggle for both groups of teachers as building connections with Japanese people depended on introductions from employers, connections teachers had before they arrived in Japan, or the areas they were placed in.

The deep impact of the desire for English in Japan on the lives of these foreign teachers could be seen in the lives of long-term foreign teachers in Japan. Often these teachers used English in romantic relationships, with one male teacher describing how marrying an English-speaking foreigner was seen as a way out of Japanese society by Japanese women. Due to the enduring desire for English in Japan, many long-term teachers with children in my study used English with their children to transfer their linguistic capital of being a native English speaker to their children. As they became long-term residents of Japan, the value of studying for academic and teaching qualifications that would help advance in their English teaching careers often trumped the symbolic capital Japanese learning gave them.

The key for both groups of teachers to sustaining Japanese learning and use was facilitative communities and individuals to use Japanese with. These individuals and communities often modified their Japanese and encouraged English teachers to learn and use Japanese. They were found within local areas, workplaces, and community groups. They invested in these teachers as Japanese speakers despite ideologies that saw foreign English teachers as short-term visitors to Japan and foreigners as deficient Japanese speakers. The depth and sustainability of each teacher’s Japanese engagement was strongly impacted by whether a learner had access to individuals and groups willing to invest in them as Japanese speakers.

The Future

Given the recent increases in migration to Japan, the importance of providing opportunities for migrants to learn Japanese will only increase in the coming years. Despite this, 70% of Japanese learning programs in Japan outside of the higher education sector are taught by community volunteers, many of whom do not have formal teaching qualifications. One recent study of Japanese foreign language programs in Tokyo found that in one large central ward of Tokyo, the lack of community-based classes meant that: “In 2020, Shibuya reported 10,597 foreign residents; if all of these residents want to complete the ward-sponsored courses, it would take more than 100 years”. Due to the “desire” of Japanese people to learn English, foreign English teachers will no doubt continue to live and work in Japan. Some teachers like me and the participants in my research in Japan will build lives in Japan. It remains to be seen whether there are the learning resources to meet the needs of migrants in Japan.

Being “the desired”

While being “the desired” in Japan gives English teachers “privileged mobility” to access jobs in Japan, the Japanese learning of the teachers in my study was dependent on each teacher’s own agency, their access to facilitative individuals and communities in Japan, and their ability to deal with the stress of learning Japanese while living and working in Japan. Being the “desired” for their English within Japan influenced the teachers in three significant ways: it mediated their access to communities of practice in which to use Japanese, it dictated the support English teachers had for their Japanese learning, and how English teachers and broader Japanese society valued Japanese learning.

One unintended consequence of my research was that it forced me to examine my relationship with Japanese learning and using Japanese. Examining how these teachers learned and used Japanese made me re-evaluate and change my approach to learning Japanese. These changes have allowed me to engage more with learning and using Japanese.

While I outlined some of the broader conclusions of my PhD here, because of the large amount of data I collected, there are even more insights to come from my research in the future.

References

Hatasa, Y. and Watanabe, T. (2017). Japanese as a Second Language Assessment in Japan: Current Issues and Future Directions. Language Assessment Quarterly, 14(3), pp.192-212. https://doi.org/10.1080/15434303.2017.1351565
Lee, S. J., & Niiya, M. (2021). Migrant oriented Japanese language programs in Tokyo: A qualitative study about language policy and language learners. Migration and Language Education, 2(1), 17–33. https://doi.org/10.29140/mle.v2n1.489
Minns, O. T. (2021). The teacher as a learner: English teachers learning Japanese in Japan [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Anglia Ruskin University. Available at: https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/id/eprint/707748
Piller, I., & Takahashi, K., 2006. A passion for English: Desire and the language market. In A. Pavlenko (ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, pp. 59 – 83.
Takahashi, K., 2013. Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Nagoya City poster titled “Pleasant Communication with Simple Japanese”. Note the play on words for “Nagoya” and “pleasant” (nagoyaka)

“Cheers, mate.” It’s a cold January night in Hokkaido, Japan, the snow is knee-high and we’re sheltering in a ramen shop. I am with friends visiting from Australia, and most had never seen snow until a few days ago.

We’re a mixed group. One of my friends is speaking clearly, slowly, pointing to the menu, adding in “arigatō” and bowing. Another talks as though he’s still in Australia, whether the other party speaks fluent English or only a few words. Just a few days prior the situation was reversed, and this same friend shook his head saying, “Why do they talk to me as though I speak Japanese?”

Obviously it goes both ways. And maybe these encounters are less a question of which language we speak, and more of how we think about those who don’t.

Over my seven years of living in Japan, almost every day has involved some type of multilingual interaction. I’ve seen people across languages either overcompensate or undercompensate for the other party’s perceived lack of understanding. In doing so, we tend to either ignore language barriers, or conversely imagine them up, yet both are problematic.

No one wants to be patronised as a competent language user, and no one wants to be ignored or even belittled as a language learner.

With occasional pride but usually chagrin, I’ve been on all sides of these assumptions at one point or another. Over recent years I’ve reflected on such encounters, including my own incorrect assumptions, and tend to hit upon a pattern of two main factors. The first is assumptions about the other person’s language ability. The second is our perceptions about how best to respond to people in light of those language abilities.

The first factor of assumptions can often be mitigated through an open-mind, by avoiding a priori judgements, and being proactive and observant enough to gauge someone’s language ability through their actual language use. By and large, this approach takes little more than practice, awareness and the willingness to stave off our assumptions.

The second issue of how best to respond, and especially how to cater for less confident language learners’ needs, is more complex. It’s also rarely discussed, at least beyond academic and pedagogical circles, and in the everyday lives of the people actually engaging in such interactions. What I will introduce today, therefore, are several practical examples of Japanese language support, in both its productive and counterproductive forms. For ease of comparison and to provide concrete examples, focus will be dominantly on written Japanese language.

Simplifying Language, Done Right

Let’s start with the concept of Yasashī Nihongo. Yasashī Nihongo (やさしい日本語) literally translates as easy or kind Japanese. It’s useful in situations where Japanese learners lack ready access to translations or interpreting services in their own languages. Other people may choose to interact with people or written texts in Japanese, but find this process easier with language support.

Sample article from NHK’s News Web and News Web Easy. News Web Easy title reads “Students Helping People in Wheelchairs in Event at Ise Shrine”

What then, does Yasashī Nihongo look like in practice? The bright yellow poster in Figure 1 from the Nagoya City website is a good example. In it, two rows of people hold up sketchbooks, each containing a difficult word or phrase. This may be a term in intermediate, formal Japanese, or a loanword requiring knowledge of English or other languages. Arrows point to everyday, simple expressions, which are more accessible for Japanese learners. Both the poster and the Nagoya City website publishing it highlight the value of such communication methods in everyday life, and during emergencies or natural disasters.

Beyond mere simplification of vocabulary, there are many ways to increase language accessibility. Another example is the NHK website News Web Easy. A quick visual comparison of one and the same article in its Yasashī Nihongo version and regular Japanese version shows differences in form and complexity,  even without an understanding of Japanese.

Font and line size adjustments have been made. Spaces, absent from most Japanese writing, have been added between words, and phonetic furigana readings are visible above the kanji (the more complex Chinese-based symbols, separate from the Japanese syllabaries). The text, and noticeably the title, have been simplified and shortened, making the whole Yasashī article 23% shorter than the original. Other changes include colour coding names, a hover over function showing definitions for underlined words, a reduced speed audio version of the text, and even additional images or graphics.

Remembering the concept of meeting learners’ needs in light of their language ability, a final feature of the website is adjustment options for the level of simplification. This includes hiding the colour coding and phonetic furigana readings, and links to view the original article in standard Japanese. This allows readers to tailor or gradually increase difficulty, similar to the scaffolding process in language learning.

Simplifying Language, Done Wrong

There are other instances of Yasashī Nihongo that are less positive, and lack the multimodal accessibility of the previous example. Below is a sample from the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s website, “COVID-19 Vaccine Navi”. This website also has a Yasashī Nihongo option, indeed it is one of only three language options (the other two being Japanese and English).

Created during the pandemic, this website has developed since I first came across it in mid 2022, and was like many foreign nationals looking for vaccine information. At that time, the texts for the Yasashī Nihongo version and the regular Japanese version were identical. No simplification had taken place and while phonetic readings for kanji were included, these were in full-sized parentheses beside the original words.

2023 sample from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s website. Which text looks more approachable?

The result was a text linguistically no less confusing, but visually and structurally disjointed, and dauntingly twice the length. I consulted with other speakers of Japanese as a second language, and all agreed that we would rather read the original Japanese than the “easy” version.

Since this time, the Covid Navi website has thankfully improved. However, this was done in an inconsistent manner. Some sections have been paraphrased into simpler versions of the Japanese text, while others keep the same wording as the original. Some sections keep the phonetic readings for kanji in parenthesis, while others only have the phonetic readings, having removed the kanji characters entirely. Also absent from these pages are any different formatting techniques, such as spacing between words and lines, or a larger font size. These internal inconsistencies and missed potential for increased accessibility suggest there is still room for improvement for the website.

Implications

So what do these different instances of Yasashī Nihongo tell us? Clearly there are positive and negative ways of making language accessible. It is noteworthy that organisations, particularly governmental ones, are taking steps in the right direction, but how effective these steps are, and why they have taken so long, remains in question.

If we are not meeting the needs of language learners, it is a sign that we need better education about language learning processes and challenges, and more importantly, chances to hear the voices of language learners about their own accessibility needs. The earlier version of the corona vaccine information website strongly suggested to me (and those I shared it with) that no learner of Japanese as a second language had been consulted in its construction.

Providing language support is more than just ticking a box. While it is frustrating to be overcompensated for as an adept language user, it can be distressing and even have detrimental consequences to be neglected as a language learner. This is why language accessibility support in particular deserves attention, and not only in organisations publishing written materials. We have opportunities within our everyday interactions, both to be more vocal about our needs as language learners, and to consider the effects for other language learners, positive or negative, of how we communicate.

Referenced Websites

City of Nagoya. (2017, November 30). Yasashī nihongo no pēji [Easy Japanese page]. https://mt.adaptive-techs.com/httpadaptor/servlet/HttpAdaptor?.h0.=fp&.ui.=citynagoyahp&.ro.=kh&.st.=rb&.np.=/kurashi/category/395-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0.html
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. (2023). Shingata korona uirusu wakuchin o utte morau koto no oshirase [Information about receiving novel coronavirus vaccines]. Corona Vaccine Navi. https://v-sys.mhlw.go.jp/ja-pl/
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. (2023). Shingata korona uirusu wakuchin sesshu no sōgō an’nai [General information about novel coronavirus vaccine injections]. Corona Vaccine Navi. https://v-sys.mhlw.go.jp/
NHK. (2023, September 18). Isejingū kurumaisu demo kigaru ni sanpai o chūkōkōsei borantia ga kaijo [Ise Shrine: Easy access for shrine visits even in wheelchairs: Middle and high school students volunteer assistance]. NHK News Web. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20230918/k10014199131000.html
NHK. (2023, September 20). Isejingū de seito-tachi ga kurumaisu no hito o tetsudau ibento [“Students helping people in wheelchairs in event at Ise Shrine”]. NHK News Web Easy. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/k10014199131000/k10014199131000.html

“The Tosa dialect is fun!!” Notebook with characters representing the grammar of Tosaben, the dialect of the Kōchi prefecture in Shikoku. The cover also features popular landmarks of the prefecture.

Japan is often erroneously perceived as a monolingual country. This is not true and Japan is a multilingual and multicultural country where varied languages and traditions coexist.

This post explores Japan’s linguistic ecology by exploring the relationship between center and periphery. On our journey, we will see how linguistic resources change value, function and ownership as they move through an ideologically stratified system where the norms and criteria of appropriateness that emanate from the center influence those of peripheral and liminal territories.

Center

Our journey starts from the capital Tōkyō, the city that hosts the majority of the financial and political institutions of the country. Given its importance, it is not surprising that the city has had a central role in issues related to language as well.

Tōkyō has had a decisive impact on the ‘movement for the unification of the written and spoken language’ 言文一致運動 genbun itchi undō. Its goal was to replace older forms of the Japanese language with the vernacular variety of the time to facilitate literacy.

To achieve that, the Tōkyō variety (or “Edo”, as Tōkyō was called until the late 19^th century) was chosen as the base to envision a ‘national language’ 国語 kokugo.

150 years on and the political efforts that have been made to establish a common language can be considered largely successful. Communications in Japan have indeed been standardized, and Japan’s literacy rate is as high as 99%, one of the highest in the world.

Periphery

Standardization implies deviation. Therefore, all the other ways of speaking throughout the Japanese archipelago were categorized as dialects. Other varieties saw their usage severely curtailed, starting in schools which tried to stamp out anything other than Tōkyō Japanese.

Discouraged in official communication, dialects have become an expression of locality, part of the cultural identity associated with a specific place. This role has been embraced by prefectures and individuals alike. Institutional bodies such as museums and tourism boards use dialects as a means to promote local culture.

Sometimes grammar rules and words are turned into anthropomorphic characters and appear on souvenirs and merchandise like the notebook I have received at the University of Kōchi during my time there as an exchange student. The linguistic and cultural distance between center and periphery has been turned into a marketable commodity. Dialects are also used to portray characters in media for their ability to convey the stereotypes associated to them.

In real life, too, dialects enable people who do not wish to fit within mainstream language practices to inhabit a different ‘voice’, performing what has been called ‘dialect cosplay’ as an act of linguistic transgression.

Dialects may seem to assume playful roles in many occasions. However, it is not all fun and games as the necessity to confront the demands of standard language remains, and most young Japanese students know this well. The dreaded ‘exam hell’, a series of standardized examinations that Japanese students must take during their entire school lives, require mastery of the standard language as well as being able to produce it as part of an appropriate repertoire. The stakes are high and students, already under immense pressure, can afford little to no space for linguistic deviations.

Liminality

The more we head towards the borders of the country, the greater diversity we find, including a number of endangered languages. The languages of the Ainu people from the northernmost island of Hokkaidō, for instance, are on the verge of extinction. The same is true of languages spoken on the islands that dot Okinawa prefecture to the South and those of the Izu islands, an archipelago that stretches far into the Pacific Ocean east of Tōkyō.

In these areas, the demographic crisis is taking a heavy toll on the number of speakers, as young people leave rural areas in search of opportunities otherwise unavailable to them.

The center cannot hold

Meanwhile, Tōkyō has become super-diverse linguistically. It is no longer only the center of Japan but also a global city. Japanese is today used alongside English and a host of migrant languages. Against these, struggling peripheries are trying to find new ways to express their local identities through “authentic” language. They follow the center’s norms but occasionally playfully transcend and violate those norms.

Overall, Japan’s linguistic ecology is deeply rooted in the center-periphery dichotomy but the center and the peripheries are themselves changing.

Reference

Heinrich, Patrick. (2018). Dialect cosplay: Language use by the young generation. In Patrick Heinrich & Christian Galan (Eds.), Being Young in Super-Aging Japan: Formative Events and Cultural Reactions (pp. 166-182). London: Routledge.

Murakami’s Yesterday – a short story that forms one of the seven stories collected in a book titled Men without Women – constitutes a case in point. The story amused me as much as it took me back to some of my recent academic reading: “novelists and journalists constitute a cadre of producers or senders of metadiscursive messages about speech and accent in public space” (Agha, 2007, p. 302).

Novelists not only spread the indexical stereotypes of speech further among the public but also play with and suspend such indexical typification. Let me illustrate how Murakami achieves this via his story Yesterday (for a synopsis see here).

In the story, two young men change their accents to take on different social persona yet in different directions with divergent results. Tanimura, a native of Kansai picked up the standard Japanese language in Tokyo within the first month of his arrival at Waseda University. Clearly, he falls within the group of ‘normal’ people who switch to the standard Japanese in Tokyo.

By contrast, Kitaru, a Tokyo-born-and-bred high school graduate permanently metamorphoses himself into a Kansai dialect speaker. As you can guess, Tanimura fits well with his surroundings and happily starts his university life in cosmopolitan Tokyo without betraying any traces of his Kansai origin.

It is Kitaru with his new Kansai dialect who causes problems for people around him. His dialect use adds an air of eccentricity to his otherwise relatively unremarkable person. He is even described as weird and not normal by his girlfriend Erika, in response to which Kitaru retorts, pointing at Tanimura: “this guy’s pretty weird too, he’s from Ashiya [Kansai dialect area] but only speaks the Tokyo dialect”. Exasperated, Erika said: “that’s much more common, at least more common than the opposite”.

At this point it is helpful to take a short detour to look at how the Kansai dialect spoken mainly in Osaka and its adjacent areas is enregistered. A survey conducted by Södergren (2014) has shown that Kansai dialect was regarded as ‘straightforward’, ‘frank’, ‘expressive’ as well as ‘warm’ and the flipside of which equally applies as it is also seen as ‘rude/over-familiar’, ‘vulgar’, ‘sloppy’ and ‘too intense and too aggressive’. The researcher goes on to note the link between Kansai dialect and comedy. This is related to the boom of manzai, where a comic duo entertain their audience through a comic dialogue in Kansai dialect.

Conversely, the standard Japanese linked with Tokyo conjures up images of ‘new Japan’, advancement, internationalization, politeness and so forth. Clearly, such juxtapositions over-simplify the complexity and nuances of language use and attitudes since they are freely-floating decontextualized stereotypes. However, it is exactly these stereotypical indexicals of accents that are presupposed and reworked in the story Yesterday.

Kitaru, a somewhat idiosyncratic young man who has failed college entrance exams and has ended up in cram schools while his girlfriend enjoys all the freshness a university life can offer, defies his Tokyo identity by uttering everything in Kansai dialect completely disregarding the consequences of such non-congruent linguistic practice in Tokyo. Tanimura aptly describes this strangeness caused by Kitaru’s Kansai dialect as:

Kitaru wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but he was pleasant looking enough. He wasn’t tall but he was slim, and his hair and clothes were simple and stylish. As long as he didn’t say anything you’d assume he was a sensitive, well-brought-up city boy. He and his girlfriend made a great-looking couple. His only possible defect was that his face, a bit too slender and delicate, could give the impression that he was lacking in personality or was wishy-washy. But the moment he opened his mouth, this overall positive effect collapsed like a sand castle under an exuberant Labrador retriever. People were dismayed by his Kansai dialect, which he delivered fluently, as if that weren’t enough, in a slightly piercing, high-pitched voice. The mismatch with his looks was overwhelming (p. 51).

What is animated here is the image of a language rather than a person. The object of representation is Kansai dialect through which the novelistic figure Kitaru is represented. This technique of foregrounding the image of dialect runs through the whole story and acts as a key motif to the extent that we can even argue that Kitaru is animated and created through the objectification of his accent.

Even more crucial for the portrayal of Kitaru are the mismatches in his identity: his looks, his hair, his place of origin do not match with his language. This mismatch is what makes him a misfit, despite its effectiveness in setting him free from the ‘shackles’ of his undesirable Tokyo life.

The discomfort and dismay caused by Kitaru’s incongruent semiotic practices challenges the default perception of an essentialized link between language and identity. Most importantly, his actions subvert the norm and lay bare the contested nature of the authoritative and near-universal use of the standard language in the nation’s capital.

In the process, Kitaru engages in the resignification of the social field, to borrow from Butler (1992). Multiplying the voices in a delimited and centripetal place is not without consequences.

Novelists are indeed the senders and producers of metadiscursive messages about accents. Yet, they also reveal the discursive processes through which we build and solidify our own sand castles to avoid communicational mishaps and social castigation.

References

Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, J. P. (1992). Contingent foundations: Feminism and the questions of “postmodernism”. In J. P. Butler & J. W. Scott (Eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge.
Södergren, S. (2014). “Metcha suki ya nen”: A sociolinguistic attitude survey concerning the Kansai dialect. BA thesis. Uppsala Uppsala University.

４月９日刊行予定『異文化コミュニケーションを問いなおす』イングリッド・ピラー[著]　カバー・帯写真：渡邊リカルド

Since its publication in 2011, Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction has been widely adopted as a textbook and it is exciting to see that our work is now more readily accessible to a Japanese audience.

The book is now available for pre-order on the publisher’s website as well as on several major online bookstores including amazon.co.jp and Rakuten.

***************

『異文化コミュニケーションを問いなおす　－　ディスコース分析・社会言語学的視点からの考察』刊行のお知らせ

イングリッド・ピラーのベストセラー「Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction」の日本語訳が４月９日に創元社より出版されることとなりました。英語原本は２０１１年の刊行から世界の大学で使用されており、日本語版は初の翻訳本です。

ご予約は創元社ウェブサイトまたはオンラインブックストアーからお申し込み頂けます：アマゾン、楽天ブック。お問い合わせはこちらで承っております。

著者：イングリッド・ピラー：マッコーリ大学言語学部教授（オーストラリア）。ドイツ、スイス、アラブ首長国、アメリカなどの大学で教えるなど、国際的に活躍。異文化コミュニケーション、社会言語学、言語習得学、多言語主義、バイリンガル教育が主な研究テーマ。自ら主宰する研究ウェブサイトLanguage on the Moveにて数々の論文やブログを一般公表している。

翻訳：高橋君江、渡辺幸倫、藤田ラウンド幸世、菅野素子、樋口くみ子、加藤明子、清水友子、田村亮、羽井佐昭彦、柳川浩三（順不同）

内容紹介：著者が長年研究テーマとしてきた「人権」、そして「社会的包摂」を対話の軸とした新しい形の異文化コミュニケーション学。「文化」「言語」「異文化コミュニケーション」といった概念が構築されてきた過程や影響を今までにないクリティカルな視点から考察する。グローバル化が進む中で生きる人々の経験や多国籍企業のビジネス戦略、移民や亡命者の体験など、世界各国から集められた資料を凝縮し、学習用、研究用に最適な好著。

本書を書こうとした動機の一つとして、この分野を現実の生活にある異文化コミュニケーションに対応させ、それを反映するものにしたいという願いがある。現実の異文化コミュニケーションは、経済的・社会的・文化的なグローバリゼーションや、国境を越えた移動や留学体験の中に組み込まれている。　第一章「はじめに」より

Written by Masaaki Sasaki of Sankei Shinbun, the article in question has the catchy title of “「Water」が通じない！？　東京五輪にも教訓 (They don’t understand “Water”!? A lesson for the Tokyo Olympic Games”. It reports on the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games under the slogan of “英語の通じない五輪 (Olympic Games Without English)”. Sasaki points out that due to the Soviet-style education system and to the delay in the internationalisation of Sochi as a whole, locals such as police and taxi drivers speak “only” Russian. The writer subsequently warns that Sochi’s language challenge is a good lesson for the organizers of the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games.

In the article, which has been featured in the special section on the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games on Yahoo Japan (www.sochi.yahoo.co.jp), an Austrian visitor was reportedly appalled at the inability of personnel to speak English at security checkpoints at train stations. A Japanese woman was apparently surprised that a local shop keeper couldn’t even understand “water”. And an American visitor, who is said to have been to 16 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, is quoted as saying “This is the first Olympic Games I visited where we can’t use English”.

Sasaki explains that this is the first time Sochi, a resort area frequented only by Russians, has been visited by a large number of international visitors. A survey conducted by a local agency last year found that 80% of residents didn’t possess basic knowledge of English.

The writer goes on to point out the growing concern among the International Olympic Committee regarding this language issue as the next few Games (2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, 2018 Winter Games in Korea and 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo) will be held in ‘non-English speaking’ countries. The article ends by suggesting the importance of a technology-based solution for Tokyo, such as smart phone applications allowing communication with foreign visitors.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s English bidding speech in Buenos Aires in September 2013. Credit: Reuters

Indeed, English language proficiency has been central to the discourse of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games from the beginning. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gained a great deal of public admiration when he gave a speech in English at the bidding meeting in Buenos Aires in September 2013. His “impressive” speech in English, which is considered as one of the key winning factors, is even used as learning material how to give presentations in English.

Having secured the right to host the 2020 Olympic Games, Japanese people from all walks of life have increasingly expressed their concern about Japanese people’s presumed ‘poor’ English. The former Tokyo Governor was so worried that last year he proposed to send 200 Japanese secondary school teachers of English overseas for a three-month training period every year. There is no doubt that English fever will further intensify in the years to come, as was the case for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games (Zhang, 2011).

It is against this context of the taken-for-granted belief that English is neceessary to host successful Olympic Games that many of the comments on the article about the Sochi 2014 Winter Games need to be understood. These comments reveal a wide range of deep-seated disagreement with, if not contempt of and disgust for, the English-centric mindset.

Published on 19 February 2014, the article attracted 1,170 comments on Yahoo Japan site by 25 February. Yahoo Japan allows you to see comments in five different ways; (1) timing of posts (latest to earliest), (2) agreement [no. of thumbs up), (3) disagreement [no. of thumbs down], (4) trending [no. of thumbs up + no. of thumbs down), and (5) sympathized (most to least) [no. of thumbs up minus no. of thumbs down]. I’ll introduce the top five most-agreed comments here.

“The flip side of this is egocentrism among English monolingual speakers”

The most agreed (and simultaneously most disagreed, trending and sympathized) comment of all was made by fre***** (handle name) as follows:

“裏を返せば、英語しか話せない連中の自己中 [The flip side of this is egocentrism among English monolingual speakers; my translation]”

fre*****’s comment has received 10,039 thumbs up and 1,760 thumbs down, attracting a whopping 172 replies. The replies are a site of intense debate, mixed between approval and disapproval.

The other four most-agreed comments are:

Number 2: “こんなのはさ、受け入れる側の国も最低限の英語を学ぶようにするのと同時に、行く人間も現地での挨拶くらい覚えてから行けよ。相互理解とか国際協調とかいうならそれが第一歩。[The issue like this, people in a host country should learn basic English, but at the same time visitors should learn local greetings before they go. That’s the first step towards mutual understanding and international corporation. My translation. 8,717 thumbs up; 454 thumbs down; 15 replies]

Number 3: さすがにWater位は日本人も分かるとは思うけど、案外同様のことが起こるかもね。戦後の日本で簡単な英会話本が結構売れたこともあったし、これからは自発的に簡単な会話が学べ、活用できる環境になれば良いと思う。 [Japanese would at least understand water, but something similar might happen. A lot of English conversation books have been sold after the war, and I hope an environment where we can learn basic conversation proactively and make use of it will be created. My translation. 3,415 thumbs up; 249 thumbs down; 31 replies]

Number 4: 「水」ぐらいは、ロシア語を覚えて行ってもいいんじゃないの？そんな、ソチの地元民からすれば、別に英語を話さなきゃいけない義務なんか無いだろ。[Shouldn’t they have learnt at least “Water” in Russian? It is not a duty of Sochi residents to speak English. My translation. 2,740 thumbs up; 124 thumbs down; 13 replies]

Number 5: 世界中どこでも英語が通じると思ってる方がバカでしょ！[Those who think English is used everywhere in the world are stupid! My translation. 2,865 thumbs up; 273 thumbs down; 24 replies]

Here, I’m not trying to demonstrate whether more or less people endorse or reject English as an Olympic language. Rather, I find an internet site such as Yahoo Japan an intriguing space to learn about wide ranging counter-discourses, including disgust for the hegemony of English as a global language and its resulting English-centric arrogance that often unfolds at international events such as the Olympic Games. These are the comments we have little chance of hearing face-to-face. Four out of the top five comments are critical of the hegemonic discourse of English as an international language and it is criticisms such as these that often remain unexpressed in other media, particularly in a country where English has long been equated to intelligence and hence academic, professional and personal success.

Furthermore, Number 2 and 4 most-agreed comments condemn the imposition on non-English speaking residents of an Olympic host city to accommodate visitors in English; at the same time, they are an expression of a multilingual mindset. Indeed, many other comments outside the top five suggest that the real issue is the fact that complaining visitors didn’t bother to learn basic Russian before they arrived, as in this comment:  “ロシアは英語圏じゃないから、通じないのは当たり前じゃん。逆になんて英語しかしゃべれないやつに合わせなあかんの？他国に行く事前に、相手国の最低限日常用語くらい勉強してから行け！英語イコール国際的じゃねーよ。勘違いすんな！！[Of course they don’t use English because Russia is not an English speaking country. Why do they have to accommodate English monolingual speakers? Learn basic everyday vocabularies of the country before you visit! English doesn’t equal being international. Don’t fool yourself!!]” These pro-multilingual comments constitute a sharp contrast to the discourse of monolingual or English-crazed Japan.

Overall, interactive sites such as these demonstrate that the role of English as a global language may be much more contested than it seems on the basis of mainstream media discourses.

Zhang, J (2011). Language Policy and Planning for the 2008 Beijing Olympics: An Investigation of the Discursive Construction of an Olympic City and a Global Population PhD thesis, Macquarie University, Sydney.

These are the kinds of comments I have been hearing ever since the Guardian published an article last month on sexless young Japanese as the reason behind the nation’s low birth rate. As these reports went viral on social media, several people asked me for my thoughts on sexless Japan.

The gist of the currently trending discourse is this: The world’s third biggest economy’s population is shrinking and aging rapidly. By 2060, Japan’s current population of 126 million is predicted to drop by one-third because fewer and fewer babies are being born each year. These articles claim that the reason behind Japan’s declining birth rate is that many young Japanese are not having sex while others are in paid-for relationships with virtual anime girlfriends.

In her Guardian article, Abigail Haworth begins with an interview with sex and relationship therapist Ai Aoyama, aka Queen Love, who is photographed in her red kinky outfit, standing next to a middle-aged male client cuddling a small dog. Queen Love is quoted as saying “Both men and women say to me they don’t see the point of love. They don’t believe it can lead anywhere… Relationships have become too hard.”

Citing recent official statistics on young people preferring to stay single and losing interest in sex, Haworth goes on to report on the views of career-oriented women who claim that a marriage would only jeopardize their professional and private lives, as well as those of so-called soshoku danshi (“grass-eating men”) who have little sexual appetite and regard relationships as ‘troublesome’. Both groups are presented as having little to no interest in sex and, consequently, their generation is single-handedly leading their nation to the brink of extinction.

Anita Rani, the presenter of the BBC documentary series “No Sex Please, We’re Japanese” has a different group in the same generation of young adult Japanese to blame, namely Japan’s ultra geeks, known as otaku. In her article Japanese men who prefer virtual girlfriends to sex, Rani explains that otaku find real relationships troublesome and are instead enjoying virtual relationships with Nintendo-computer game characters. The reporter also cites ‘several surveys’ that show that even when men and women are in relationships, they barely have sex, and only 27% claim to have sex every week.

Then Rani claims that Japan’s shrinking birth-rate is a time-bomb and the country’s reluctance to accept migrants is another serious, contributing factor. This leads Rani to ponder: “Japan has managed to preserve its unique culture in an increasingly globalised world but could that very sense of identity stand in the way of solving its population problems?”

So, what do I make of all this?

Orientalist discourses of exotic Japan and its weird inhabitants are centuries- old. Unfortunately, they continue to be disguised as scientific facts and are increasingly commodified for media outlets’ profits in today’s digital age. In the global media, sex sells, weird Japan sells, and combining these two discourses sells big time. Journalists such as Haworth and Rani may well have been physically in Japan, but their analysis was obviously done through a stereotypical way of seeing and with the stereotypes of their Western audiences – and the dollar sign – in mind.

Have sex or not have sex, Japanese are never normal from the perspective of ill-informed journalists and researchers. Their sex life has become a commodified concern, and this ‘concern’ is deeply patronizing and racist as Beckie Smith argues in her recent article in The Independent:

We have a kind of voyeuristic fascination with Japan’s strangeness, spurred on by irresponsible journalism and sensationalised headlines. These stories gain traction because they support a simplistic view of East Asia which is at best patronising and at worst overtly racist. Lazy journalism supports these prejudices; every poorly written puff piece and ill-researched documentary serves, as one viewer charmingly put it, as “confirmation of Japanese weirdness”.

But if it is not heartless, materialist Japanese women, grass-eating Japanese men without any sex drive and creepy otaku that are behind the nation’s falling birth rate, what is? Well, Japan has slipped to 105^th place among 136 countries in the gender equality list; 25% of pregnant women have experience in being harassed in their workplace; 22,000 children are on waiting lists for day-care centres; and all five awardees of the Order of Culture and all 15 Persons of Cultural Merit selected by the Japanese government this year are male. Unfortunately, for women having children is largely incompatible with holding a job and the stay-at-home mum is an increasingly unattractive and economically unfeasible option.

A series of ethnographic research conducted by Ingrid Piller and myself with single Japanese women of this generation fleshes out this perspective further.

The women we interviewed in Australia mentioned sexism and gender inequality in the workplace as the main reasons why they had left Japan in the first place. Although all of them were seeking love and romance, most of our participants continue to remain unmarried and childless. This has nothing to do with the fact that they are all hard-nosed career women – they are not – and everything to do with the fact that ‘flexible’ mobile jobs such as those in the hospitality industry are incompatible with raising a family.

For instance, the bilingual Japanese flight attendants in their 20s and 30s we spoke to for research that has just been published in Language, migration and social Inequalities: A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work (Duchêne, Moyer and Roberts, 2013) had limited opportunities to pursue romantic goals due to their irregular shift work and frequent absence from their social networks. Their long-term goal was to marry, have children and quit their job. However, as their jobs did not enable them to save and the job was incompatible with that goal, the only scenario that made this a likely outcome was to find a bread-winner husband and revert to traditional gender roles.

In a neoliberal employment regime – of which low-cost airlines provide a prototypical example – there is less and less opportunity and time to enjoy intimacy, to care for children and to nurture family relationships. The women we spoke to were under continuous pressure to compete and to be ever more productive. They were well aware that their jobs were perpetually on the line in Japan’s ageist, sexist and cut-throat job market where the tradition of life-long employment has long gone.

Young adult Japanese women may have sex but they don’t want to procreate. Does that make them so different from their globally mobile but economically insecure peers in other countries? I don’t think so. It is not only this generation of Japanese that is opting out of starting families; the same is true internationally: Generation On-the-Move is trapped in perpetual insecurity and competition (aka ‘flexibility’), and the stability necessary to raise a family becomes increasingly difficult to achieve.

In addition to gender inequality and socio-economic insecurity, there is another way of looking at the issue of the shrinking Japanese population. Put in the bigger picture, a smaller population is more sustainable on a planet with limited resources. Ultimately, a sustainable approach needs to undergird the engagement with the root cause of perpetual gender inequality; it also needs to involve rethinking the issue of the shrinking national population itself in light of the world’s overpopulation and the promotion of multicultural Japan.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2006). A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market. In A. Pavlenko (Ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation (pp. 59-83). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2010). At the intersection of gender, language and transnationalism. In N. Coupland (Ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalization (pp. 540-554): Blackwell.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2012). Japanese on the Move: Life Stories of Transmigration. Retrieved from http://languageonthemove.com/japanese-on-the-move

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2013). Language work aboard the low-cost airline. In A. Duchêne, M. Moyer & C. Robers (Eds.), Language, Migration and Social (In)equality. A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Takahashi, K. (2012). Multilingualism and Gender. In M. Martin-Jones, A. Blackledge & A. Creese (Eds.), Handbook of Multilingualism (pp. 419 – 435). London: Routledge.

Takahashi, K. (2013). Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Mariko Watanabe and Ingrid Piller celebrate their reunion at Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

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In early July, YM Fashion’s CEO Mariko Watanabe flew in from Tokyo to Bangkok. She was scheduled to meet Ingrid Piller, who, on the way back from the Middle East to Australia, also just arrived in Bangkok to deliver a plenary speech at the H.I.S. Research and Industry Forum on Linguistic Diversity and Tourism in Amazing Thailand at Assumption University.

Mariko and Ingrid first met in Tokyo back in 2010 when YM Fashion Co., Ltd. became an official supporter of Language on the Move. Collaboration between the fashion industry and academics is unique, originating from the company’s increasing interest in the role of language and communication in their global business operation.

The day after the Forum, the CEO and the sociolinguist celebrated the success of the event in Chit Lom, one of Bangkok’s most fashionable neighbourhoods. Their conversation soon turned to YM Fashion’s first overseas venture in Thailand, which began some 26 years ago and was a trail-blazing endeavour in Japanese-Thai joint ventures.

In 2012, Thailand overtook the US for the first time and ranked second, after China, as the most desired destination for international joint ventures by Japanese companies (Japan External Trade Organization, 2013). At the time of Mariko’s first visit in the 1980s, however, the situation was quite different and only a handful of large-sized Japanese companies had manufacturing operations in Thailand. Mariko says “Bangkok back then was a small touristy city without much of its skyscrapers, glamorous shopping centers and the Skytrains. During the rainy season, it once took us three days by taxi to get to the airport.”

Japanese Business on the Move

The survey points at an assumption that has long been present in the minds of the Japanese – to succeed overseas you need English. In the context of global business, the Japanese language is often considered as useless because, in the mentality of many Japanese companies, it is assumed to be only spoken by the Japanese in Japan. The trajectory of Mariko’s company in Thailand, however, is a story that not only challenges this myth but also highlights the importance of setting aside pre-conceptions about linguistic deficits and of embracing cultural and linguistic diversity.

Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

Mariko established YM Fashion in Tokyo in 1979 with her husband Isamu Watanabe and their long-time friend Yasuko Hayata. Ten years later, YM Fashion International Thailand was set up in 1990 with a young Thai partner. At the time of the launch of their business in Bangkok, none of the founders or their staff spoke English or Thai on a functional level. How did a Japanese medium-sized fashion retail company manage to find a local contact, secure a partnership, hire and train employees, and grow to operate a 7,000sqm factory with 400 employees and 10 retail shops in central Bangkok today? Mariko explains that the opportunity to expand YM Fashion and develop its trademark brand Yaccomaricard in Thailand originally came through an informal international network of hippies in the late 1980s. And their story in Thailand is a story of languages on the move, beginning with a business proposal from unlikely collaborators.

Hippie Connections

Back in the 1980s in Tokyo, two German internationalists, Guy and Helga Pachet, were producing European-style baby clothes at home. After a long trip around the world in the 60s and the 70s, the couple had settled in Tokyo where their first baby was born. As their home-made European children’s clothes gained popularity in their local area, they wanted to commercialise their production. They turned to their friend Mariko to explore collaborative business opportunities.

Mariko initially turned down their proposal. Communication was a problem. Guy spoke German, French and English but had very little Japanese at the time. Mariko and her staff couldn’t speak English, let alone German or French.

Mariko: “I didn’t think it would be possible to work together if they couldn’t speak Japanese. I asked him to learn Japanese first. I promised that, in the meantime, we would try to learn English. But he learned Japanese better and faster than I ever learned English [laughs].”

As Guy quickly taught himself Japanese, the couple and YM Fashion began collaborating, and soon their new brand, Annya and Besna, became a hit among fashion-conscious mothers in the upmarket town of Denenchofu, Tokyo. As sales increased, the need to secure a production site devoted to Annya and Besna emerged. The couple decided to turn to their old hippie connections in Bangkok, Thailand.

Passion for Success

From left: Mariko Watanabe, Helga and Guy Pachet, and Punsuri Revirava in Yawara, Bangkok, 1989

In 1989, the Pachets and Mariko flew to Bangkok to meet Punsuri Revirava, whom they knew from their travels during their hippie years. The three parties, the Pachets, YM Fashion and Punsuri, co-founded a company, Clair Moda. Punsuri, who is Chinese-Thai, provided a manufacturing site within her family-owned shop house and initially secured six seamstresses for the production. Mariko was responsible for teaching the six young Thai women how to sew and produce clothes that would satisfy the desires and tastes of highly discerning Japanese consumers. She recalls that in terms of language, training the Thai workers was not a problem.

Mariko: “I couldn’t speak Thai, and these girls are from rural areas in Thailand, so they could speak neither English nor Japanese. Basically I taught these girls everything by using Japanese and through body language. These women still work for us today, and 26 years on at our factory, they have become leaders and teach apprentices how to sew using Japanese technical terms.”

A year later, YM Fashion bought out Clair Moda in order to set up YM Fashion International Thailand. That was also when they invited a young Thai woman, Ichaya Khamala, to come on board as co-owner and CEO. Under Thai business law, a foreign company must have a Thai partner who maintains a significant share in the company. While majoring in Business Studies with a minor in Japanese at Thammasat University, Ichaya had worked as a part-time interpreter for Mariko in the previous year. 22-year-old Ichaya had limited work experience and no experience whatsoever in running a company. Mariko recalls that it was unheard of for a Japanese company to partner with a fresh university graduate, and a woman to boot. However, she had no hesitation:

Mariko: “What she had instead of experience was language proficiencies in Thai, Japanese and English and a passion for business success in her country on the verge of an economic boom. She had so much passion and desire to learn and grow with us.”

As their collaboration began, Mariko taught Ichaya everything she knew about production and business management, and for all these years, Japanese has remained the language of their transnational partnership. From the beginning, Mariko not only instructed Ichaya how to do business, but also helped her improve her spoken and written Japanese.

At the same time, all the YM Fashion employees who have been transferred from Japan to Thailand to oversee the production are required to undertake a three-month intensive course in Thai immediately upon their arrival. As Mariko explains: “How can Japanese managers win the heart of their Thai workers if they can’t speak Thai?”

Global Expansion and Family

The day before the Forum: Sei and Mariko Watanabe select outfits for Ingrid’s keynote speech at Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

On her trip to Bangkok this time, Mariko was accompanied by her daughter, Sei Watanabe. Together with her younger brother Kari, Sei established YM Fashion UK in 1997 and managed the operation until her return to Japan in 2012. The siblings will take over YM Fashion in Japan in the near future as Mariko and Isamu ready themselves for retirement. As the mother of a young girl herself, Ingrid asked Mariko how she had managed to raise her children while building a successful fashion company and expanding overseas.

Mariko explained that she always took her children along on her business trips, letting them directly experience culture and language of other countries so that they would develop a deep appreciation for diversity. It was also important for Mariko and Isamu to raise their children multilingually:

Mariko: “After the war, we wanted to study English, but English education in Japan was really inadequate at that time. Early on in our overseas ventures, we did everything we could to succeed without English, but we always thought that our children must learn English AND other important languages to thrive even more in the 21^st century.”

Starting with English as a second language, their children went on to also learn French and Thai. While making sure their children learnt English is unsurprising, the insistence on French and Thai, too, is unusual. Mariko argues that French is the language of global fashion and continues to be important in international business negotiations and Thai is the language of their close partner and first overseas expansion.

Not only did Mariko work to instil an appreciation of cultural and linguistic diversity in her own children but she’s also committed to ensure that the children of production workers have similar opportunities. The nursery school that is located within the Thai production site, was established to cater for the young children of workers. The nursery teaches not only Thai but also English and the library provides children’s books in different languages.

Over her long career Mariko has remained a passionate internationalist: “We live in Japan, we live in Asia and we live in the world. Our perspective is global.” She never let herself be held back by the limited opportunities available to women of her generation: where she lacked language resources, she responded with flexibility by drawing on Japanese, her passion for fashion, her commitment to capacity building in Thailand and the common humanity that binds us all.

Carrying on the legacy of the pioneering founders, the next generation of YM Fashion – Sei, Kari and Ichaya – are equipped not only with many more language resources, but also an appreciation of linguistic and cultural diversity characteristic of the 21^st century business world in which they operate.

____

MARIKO WATANABE | Founder and CEO of YM Fashion Co., Ltd, Japan

Mariko Watanabe

Mariko was born in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1938. Having studied at the Kuwasawa Design Institute in 1957, Mariko worked as a freelance buyer, importing second-hand clothes to Japan, and later opened a vintage European clothes shop in Keio Limone Harajuku in 1975.

Mariko launched a new women’s brand, Yaccomaricard, with Yasuko Hayata and Isamu Watanabe in 1977 and established YM Fashion Co., Ltd. in 1979.

Having celebrated its 35^th anniversary in 2012, YM Fashion today has 24 direct shops and 120 wholesale shops in Japan, 11 direct shops in the UK and Thailand, and 42 wholesale shops in Europe and the US.

 

Migrant children studying in a Brazilian school in Japan (Source: Japan Times)

A recent study of the educational pathways of the children of Brazilian migrants in Japan offers a most welcome addition to the literature on the educational outcomes of migrant children, which has to date focussed mostly on migrant children in North America and Western Europe. The authors, Hirohisa Takenoshita, Yoshimi Chitose, Shigehiro Ikegami and Eunice Akemi Ishikawa, investigate the factors that influence whether migrant children enrol in high school or not.

The Japanese educational system consists of nine years of compulsory schooling, comprised of six years of elementary school and three years of middle school. These are followed by three years of high school, which is not compulsory. Even so, in practice, almost all Japanese children attend high school. However, among the children of migrants, the high school enrolment rate is only 71%. It is thus obvious that migrant children are educationally disadvantaged vis-à-vis their Japanese peers.

On the basis of a survey of 203 adolescent and young adult second-generation residents in Shizuoka prefecture, Takenoshita et al. (2013) explore the family characteristics and characteristics of the local context that distinguish those who were enrolled in high school from those who were not.

Parental education and employment

It is well known that parental level of education is a key determinant of children’s educational achievement both in migrant and non-migrant populations. However, the researchers found that the correlation between Brazilian parents’ educational level and their children’s high school enrolment was much more modest than is usually the case. That means that parental educational level gets devalued in the process of migration. The devaluation of educational credentials in the migration process with regard to the labour market is not surprising. What is surprising is their devaluation also with regard to parental ability to transmit their educational achievements to their children.

The relative unimportance of parental education can be explained with the way Brazilian migrants are incorporated into the Japanese labour market. Irrespective of their educational level and other characteristics, Brazilian migrants are incorporated into the irregular labour market working unskilled or low-skilled jobs. The regular Japanese labour market, from which Brazilian migrants are largely excluded, is characterised by strong company-based labour unions, lifetime employment, seniority earnings and, overall, a high level of labour protection and stability. However, in Japan, as elsewhere, globalization has involved a concerted assault on labour and the regular labour market has been shrinking fast while irregular jobs have been mushrooming. And that’s where Brazilian migrants find themselves. They are typically employed through agencies in temporary, unstable and poorly paid jobs without benefits.

90% of Brazilian migrants work unskilled or low-skilled jobs under irregular conditions. By contrast, only 30% of all Japanese workers are employed in such jobs and, at only 12%, that figure is even lower for male Japanese workers. As a result of their precarious employment status, migrants work longer hours than their native-born counterparts. This is significant as more time spent at work means less time spent with children – a fact that disadvantages the children of the working poor from Day 1, as Barry (2005) demonstrates.

Indeed, parental employment turned out to be the most significant factor distinguishing enrolled from unenrolled children: having a father employed in standard work was the most significant factor that correlated positively with migrant children’s high school enrolment.

Gender

Gender was also highly significant but in surprising ways: a number of studies have found that, in North America and Europe, migrants girls are doing better in school than boys. However, for Brazilian migrants in Japan it is the other way round: boys are more likely to be enrolled in high school than girls. The authors explain this with persistent gender discrimination in Japan: it is more rational for migrants to invest what limited resources they may have into the education of their sons as girls, by comparison, are not likely to get very far in education and employment anyway. Additionally, when parents both have to work long and irregular hours, girls are often deployed to look after siblings and the household more generally.

Race

On the basis of other studies that had shown that non-Japanese and non-Western children are often bullied in Japanese schools, the authors hypothesized that race might influence high school enrolment, too. Therefore, they distinguished between nikkei and non-nikkei migrant children. The former are born to two parents of Japanese descent and would thus look phenotypically similar to native-born Japanese children while the latter are born to at least one parent who is not of Japanese descent.

It turned out that race played no role in high school enrolment and that nikkei migrant children had no advantage vis-à-vis non-nikkei migrant children. In fact, both groups were equally disadvantaged vis-à-vis their native-born Japanese peers. The authors explain this finding with regard to Japan’s myth as a homogeneous nation and the collective denial that Japan has become an immigration country.

Age at migration and transnationalism

Like comparable studies in other contexts, the authors found that the 1.5 generation is the most educationally disadvantaged: those who had migrated at age 10 or above (the maximum age for inclusion in the study was 14 at the time of migration) were least likely to be enrolled in high school. By contrast, the enrolment rates of those who were 4 years or younger at the time of migration or who had been born in Japan were almost as high as those of their Japanese peers.

When it comes to the educational success of migrant children, younger is clearly better as these children had more exposure not only to the Japanese language but also to the Japanese education system.

By the same token, children whose parents moved frequently back and forth between Japan and Brazil found their exposure to the Japanese language and the Japanese education system frequently interrupted and these interruptions significantly reduced their likelihood of high school enrolment. Children of parents who had no history of re-migration to Brazil were four times more likely to be enrolled in high school than those who moved back to Brazil for an extended period one or more times.

Other studies have argued that a family’s transnational lifestyle influences children’s educational achievement favourably and equips them to thrive in more than one national context. However, Takenoshita et al. (2013) clearly demonstrate that this is not uniformly the case and the value or otherwise of transnationalism depends on the socioeconomic circumstances in which it takes place.

Where migrants are incorporated into the lower and temporary segments of the labour market, as Brazilian migrants are in Japan, their transnationalism is usually related to the vagaries of their employment. Consequently, transnationalism hinders children’s schooling in this case.

Local context of reception

The researchers also explored the local context of reception as a factor in migrant children’s educational outcomes. Throughout Shizuoka prefecture migrants find themselves in highly diverse circumstances as regards the targeted services available to them. The largest concentration of Brazilians in Shizuoka lives in Hamamatsu, an industrial city. Hamamatsu municipal government has provided a variety of special education programs targeting migrant children since the 1990s, including the provision of Portuguese-, Spanish- and Chinese-speaking tutors to provide Japanese language support. Additionally, Hamamatsu municipal government subsidizes private ethnic schools and organizations devoted to the education of migrant children.

Consequently, it is reasonable to assume that migrant children in Hamamatsu are more likely to be enrolled in high school than their counterparts living elsewhere in Shizuoka. This is indeed what the researchers found: residency in Hamamatsu with its targeted services was favourably associated with high school enrolment.

Parental Japanese language proficiency

I have left parental proficiency in Japanese for last because the effect turned out to be relatively small. Unsurprisingly, there is a positive correlation between higher levels of self-reported parental Japanese proficiency and children’s high school enrolment but it is one of the smallest correlations examined by the researchers.

The most important positive factors are the regular employment of the father and residence in Hamamatsu. The most important negative factors are female gender, having been aged 10 or older at the time of migration and having experienced multiple migrations between Brazil and Japan.

It is a frequent trope in discourses about migrant achievement that learning the language of the destination country matters most. Migrants are continuously exhorted to learn Japanese (or English or German or whatever the national language may be). Learning the destination language is supposed to be a matter of personal responsibility and integration into the labour market and educational advancement are supposed to be conditional on language learning.

Linguists have known all along that language learning is more complicated than the mantra of personal responsibility suggests. However, even if it were that simple to learn a new language as an adult, the evidence presented in Takenoshita et al. (2013) shows that it actually doesn’t matter all that much. What matters is the material base:

Notably, the family’s economic resources facilitate their children’s enrolment in high school. In other words, Brazilian children’s schooling is impeded by employment instability among their parents. (p. 11)

Barry, B. (2005). Why social justice matters. Oxford, Polity.

Takenoshita, H., Y. Chitose, et al. (2013). Segmented Assimilation, Transnationalism, and Educational Attainment of Brazilian Migrant Children in Japan International Migration DOI: http://dx..org/10.1111/imig.12057

Hiroshi Mikitani, Englishnization in Marketplace 3.0 (Source: gettyimages.co.uk)

The business and self-help section of my local Kinokuniya bookstore is currently featuring shelves and shelves of Marketplace 3.0: Rewriting the rules of borderless business by Hiroshi Mikitani, the founder and CEO of e-commerce giant Rakuten. I’m not a fan of books in the “how to improve your business” genre and mostly Marketplace 3.0 seems to be a (poorly written) run-of-the-mill text about empowering your business through KPIs. It is also the self-aggrandizing account of an egomaniac. However, the first chapter is absolutely unique to the genre as it is devoted to Rakuten’s language policy: entitled “Englishnization,” it describes how Mikitani decided in May 2010 from one day to the next, “without consulting anyone,” to change the company language from Japanese (and other national languages spoken in subsidiaries outside Japan) to English.

I had, of course, heard about the Rakuten English-Only language policy before in the media so I was keen to read the inside story and to learn what happened after the announcement. However, Mikitani tells the reader at length about his decision to introduce English but is rather coy about what happened next, particularly in the medium term. Mikitani imposed English so that communication within the company would be faster. Not surprising in a world where speed is money. But did it really work? Are they really faster at Rakuten because they speak English? Mikitani only says that the first board meeting after the introduction of English was twice as long as usual leaving the reader to assume that this slow-down was a one-off and communication has significantly sped up since.

How is communicating in English supposed to be faster than communicating in Japanese? To begin with, Mikitani argues that the need for linguistic mediation – translating and interpreting – falls away. Second, as employees gain confidence in English, they no longer send e-mails to the USA but pick up the phone and call. Finally, Mikitani believes that English communication is faster per se because it is supposed to be a more egalitarian language than Japanese and so employees are forced to stop prevaricating in the face of superiors.

“Englishnization” thus is a collection of more or less common language ideologies: linguistic diversity as a barrier to be overcome by an English-Only policy is a throw-back to the Tower of Babel myth and English as more direct is the stock-in-trade of popular forms of linguistic relativism.

So, how does such a radical language policy play out at Rakuten? Well, Mikitani is not saying. He says that Rakuten is much more widely known now because the English-Only policy caught the attention of the global media and even the Harvard Business School. But that is not really due to their English-Only policy per se but to a clever press release about it.

The only indicator of how English at Rakuten is going comes from the claim that 90% of employees had met the language test score required for their level within a year. The remaining 10% were excused because of the 2011 tsunami and given an extension. Personally, I’m guessing that most Rakuten employees had pretty good English to begin with and the few who hadn’t, well, they couldn’t do much about it. Language learning after all is time-consuming business.

That language learning takes time lies at the crux of evaluating a monolingual language policy: if you have a cohort of proficient speakers, then making them use the common language makes perfect sense but if you have to train them up first, then you are not only not speeding things up but slowing them down considerably. This point is unfortunately overlooked in many contemporary decisions to turn transnational institutions into English-Only institutions.

At a time when more and more transnational institutions, similarly to Rakuten, turn to English-Only an assessment of the effectiveness of the European Union’s multilingual provision is particularly timely. Having been committed to multilingual provision through translating and interpreting for many decades, the EU model is often dismissed as too costly and thus inefficient and unaffordable for other transnational organizations such as ASEAN.

Unfortunately, the dismissal of the EU’s multilingual language policy as costly and inefficient is wrong, as Gazzola and Grin explain in a new article in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics. They show that the EU’s language bill for translating and interpreting is Euro 1.1 billion per year. That may seem a lot until you see that this amounts to less than 1% of the EU’s annual budget of €147.2 billion. That means that the expenditure for the EU’s current multilingual language policy is €2.2 per person per year; about the price of a cup of coffee and clearly not so astronomical …

Despite this small amount, it is true that it would be even cheaper if the EU abolished all translating and interpreting and adopted an English-Only policy. Anyone advancing that argument has to bear in mind that the language costs would not be entirely eliminated because language services to make sure all those documents are well written and legally watertight would still be needed. Cost would shift from translators and interpreters to ghost-writers, copy-editors and proof-readers.

But the overall cost could still be brought down from one cup of coffee to say half a cup of coffee?

Well, no, actually not. Under an English-Only regime, most Europeans would be paying much, much more than the equivalent of a cup of coffee for linguistic provision. The British and the Irish would not be paying at all. Those 7% of continental Europeans who already speak “very good” English would not be paying, either. That leaves everyone else – around 80% of Europeans – out of pocket for English language learning if they wanted to exercise their democratic right to understand what is going on in the European parliament and to participate in the European project in any other way. The cost for those 80% of Europeans to bring their English up to scratch would be less for some (those who already have “good” or “modest” English) and astronomical for those adults who have no English – for all these individuals it would be much, much higher than is currently the case.

Turning language costs from a public expense to personal language learning expenses is, of course, totally unfair and undemocratic. Not only would it make participation in the European project contingent about an individual’s financial capacity to invest in language learning, it would also be unfair for continental vis-à-vis English native speakers in Ireland and the UK who would not have to invest in language learning. Already receiving huge language subsidies by everyone learning their language, they could completely withdraw from sharing the costs of linguistic provision in the EU.

Rakuten’s Englishnization includes a similar cost transfer from the company to employees: Mikitani made them learn English in their own time and at their own cost. Viewed this way, Englishnization is nothing more than a billionaire’s trick to socialize cost (language learning) to employees and privatise profits (derived from eliminating linguistic provision) to himself.

The evidence is clear: the EU’s multilingual provision is more cost-effective and fairer than an English-Only policy would be.

Every language policy maker in a multilingual environment should have a copy of Mazzola’s and Grin’s article on their desk.

Gazzola, M., & Grin, F. (2013). Is ELF more effective and fair than translation? An evaluation of the EU’s multilingual regime International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 23 (1), 93-107 DOI: 10.1111/ijal.12014

Kimie Takahashi (2013) Language learning, gender and desire: Japanese women on the move. Multilingual Matters.

It’s Valentine’s Day today. Valentine’s Day is a truly global event inextricably linking the emotional life of individuals with the capitalist world order. Young women around the world dream of romantic love and many men do their best to meet those dreams, showing how much they care by buying flowers, chocolates, lingerie, jewellery or any of the other consumer goods that have come to symbolize romantic love. Those that do not engage in the consumption bonanza also find their lives touched by Valentine’s Day: for instance, an estimated 198 million red roses are grown specifically for Valentine’s Day and that’s a huge amount of one particular crop to get ready, to harvest and to bring to market for one single day: the socio-economic structure of whole counties in Kenya, Colombia or Ecuador has been changed to make way for this floral industry.

Given the deep connections between individual emotions and the socio-economic order, it is not surprising that English, too, has found its way into this mix. A timely new book, Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move* by Kimie Takahashi, explains exactly those connections.

Following a group of young adult Japanese women studying overseas in Sydney, the book shows how, during their teenage years, the romantic desires of these young women had been shaped by Hollywood movies and other popular media. Teenage crushes on media stars are nothing unusual and each generation seems to have their own idols. However, for the Japanese women in the study the pop stars they had teenage crushes on (men like Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt) had a salient characteristic: they were white native speakers of English.

As a result, they ended up making a deep emotional connection between romantic attractiveness, Whiteness and English. While they outgrew their teenage crushes, their desire for white English-speaking men lingered on.

As the study shows, this was not only an idiosyncratic romantic desire that the five women who were the study’s main participants happened to develop. Rather, the association between learning English, going abroad and falling in love is actively fostered in many discourses promoting English language learning, from women’s magazines to language school advertising. Indeed, teaching ‘the language of love’ – Relationship English or Renai English – has become a form of English for Specific Purposes that is addressed in specific language learning materials and courses.

In sum, a range of powerful media discourses worked to inculcate particular emotional sensibilities in these women, which included a conflation of going abroad, learning English, and romantic desires.

Once in Sydney, of course, a different reality quickly hit: establishing contacts and relationships with locals (and particularly the kinds of locals they desired) was far from easy; becoming fluent in English was not as easy as they had imagined it would be once they were in Australia; and few of the men they met conformed to the chivalrous image of Westerners they had formed in their minds.

Each of the participants has her own life story and had to face her own trials and tribulations in Sydney. However, their emotional experiences are deeply shaped by the role of English as both an object of desire and a consumer commodity.

If you are looking for some academic reading this Valentine’s Day, Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move is the one. Don Kulick’s endorsement of the book sums up the reading experience you can expect:

Romance blossoms, hearts break, and lives change as Japanese women go troppo in the Antipodes and tell the author all about their dreams, adventures and experiences of learning English as a second language. This delightful book is the definitive answer to the question, ‘Is the concept of “desire” useful to students of language?’. The ethnography is wacky, the analysis is insightful and the writing is engaging and crisp. An absolute must-read for everyone interested in language and desire, language and learning, and language and globalization.

Enjoy! And Happy Valentine’s Day!

*In the interest of full disclosure: I was the supervisor of the PhD research the book is based on.

Takahashi, Kimie (2013). Language learning, gender and desire: Japanese women on the move Multilingual Matters

Montessori preschoolers in Tokyo preparing a feast

Anyone who has young children attending pre-school or participating in other similar programs will be acquainted with birthday rituals in group settings such as these. In Australia, they most likely take the form of the sharing of a home-made or bought ‘treat’ provided by the family of the birthday child, probably a familiar children’s favourite of some kind. If there are any stipulations at all, these are usually limited to requests that the treat should be free of nuts or other common allergens, in order to ensure that no-one is excluded from the celebration. Montessori and other pre-schools may go one step further and involve the child and their friends in the actual process of baking a simple birthday cake. Based on my own experience when my son spent one term in an Australian Montessori pre-school before moving to Japan and on conversations with friends whose children attended other schools, this was the range of meaning conjured up in my mind by the term ‘birthday party’ in the context of pre-school aged children in a formal group setting.

My son’s fourth birthday fell within a few months of starting his Japanese Montessori pre-school. By that time, I had learned that each month an ‘o-tanjokai’, usually rendered in English as ‘birthday party’, was held for the children whose birthdays fell during that month. I had heard about a special lunch prepared by the children themselves, with the menu devised by the mothers of the birthday children. I had also watched my son make birthday gifts and cards to be presented to his classmates. Clearly, the rituals here were somewhat more elaborate than those I was accustomed to.

Eventually, I read in the weekly newsletter that my son’s birthday celebration would be held the following month, along with one other child. Soon after, I was approached by the mother of his classmate suggesting that we discuss possible menus. It was then that I learned that the birthday lunch had to consist of three courses and that the menu had to be approved in advance by the teacher. Her criteria were fourfold: the meal should be nutritionally balanced; it should not include processed foods unless absolutely no alternative was available; it should involve plenty of peeling, chopping and other tasks requiring time and dexterity to accomplish; and it should not be anything that has been made at the school within the last three years – a notebook detailing the contents of previous birthday lunch menus was available for our consultation. A budget of around AU$20.00 was allocated to feed seventeen children and five adults. By now, I was struggling to equate the term ‘birthday party’ with the word ‘o-tanjokai’ in the pre-school setting.

Given that this was a rather more complex affair than the baking of a simple birthday cake, I naturally assumed that the whole day would be dedicated to the proceedings. However, as I was to discover, the preparation of the birthday lunch did not replace the regular activities of the children. Rather, it was simply an extra event incorporated into the day’s timetable.

The first year I attended, for my son’s fourth birthday, I donned my apron and stood as instructed in the appointed place in the tiny apartment that functioned as a classroom, watching as the children began carrying out their normal activities. Other than the absence of a few children and one assistant who had gone to the pre-school’s allotment a short walk away to pick some vegetables, there was absolutely no sign that today was different from any other day. Occasionally, I would glance at the clock, sure that any minute now the activities would be put away and the lunch preparations would begin. Ten o’clock came … ten-thirty … eleven o’clock. Still the children went about their daily Montessori ‘work’ tasks. I felt something akin to a sense of panic, afraid that the children would not be able to get the lunch ready for noon, concerned that the teacher may have lost track of the time, wondering whether I should offer a discreet reminder. Since there was no custom of bringing morning snacks, the children would have had nothing to eat since breakfast and I was sure that they must be ravenous by now. I myself had to fight hard to suppress the rumblings of my stomach from being heard in the confined space of the room. Finally at mid-day, when the children would normally be sitting down to eat their packed lunches, they were asked to gather round to hear the parents explain the day’s menu and go through the preparation and cooking directions. The children were also asked to identify the ingredients, one by one. Much to the chagrin of my son, I was asked to repeat each step of the process in English as well as teach the children the English names of the vegetables.

Every step of the food preparation process barring the use of the stove was assigned to the children. Seemingly unperturbed by hunger pangs, which were surely exacerbated by the sight and smells of the food in front of them, they set to work washing, peeling, chopping and mixing. Even the youngest children, three or four years old, were entrusted with the task of chopping vegetables – including tear-inducing onions – with kitchen knives on their own miniature boards. So captivated was I by the buzz of organized activity, so enthralled by the obvious enjoyment with which they went about their allotted jobs, so impressed by their ability to sustain focus and concentration, that my own hunger pangs were quickly forgotten.

The birthday lunch was eventually dished up at around 1:30 pm, an hour before the children were due to go home. While I do not recall the details of that particular year’s menu, my son’s fifth birthday lunch the following year consisted of curried rice vermicelli, Chinese vegetable soup, and hyokako (an unusual Japanese sweet potato dessert originating in the southern island of Kyushu) with fruit and ice-cream. The ingredients for this feast included twelve different types of vegetables and fruits, as well as pork, eggs, rice vermicelli and a variety of seasonings.

After the lunch had been consumed with relish by all (with some coming back for seconds!), the children sat patiently as they took it in turn to present their hand-made gifts and cards. Then came the universal Montessori ritual of the birthday children walking slowly along an elliptical line carrying a globe around a candle that represents the sun, four times for my son to symbolize four years of his life. Finally, an arrangement of candles was blown out, a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ was sung and a new badge was pinned on to the children’s shirts, proclaiming their promotion through the ranks to the next age group.

Having celebrated three of my son’s birthdays in this way, ‘o-tanjokai’ in the pre-school context is now etched in my consciousness as a concept that the term ‘birthday party’ cannot begin to encompass. The occasion provided yet another catalyst to challenge my culturally entrenched views of the needs and capabilities of young children, forcing me to push beyond the narrow boundaries of my comfort zone and offering precious new insights into a culture that I had believed I knew so well already.

The completed calendar, rolled up and secured with a rubber band

When my son was six years old, he came home from his Japanese Montessori pre-school one day saying that his teacher had given him a homework assignment. The task involved cutting up a wall-calendar into fifty-two weeks and joining them together end-to-end in a long strip. The strip was to be rolled up, secured with a rubber band and taken to school the following day. In keeping with the Montessori philosophy, the task had to be completed without adult help.

He explained all this in fluent Japanese. I insisted that he must have misunderstood. He was adamant that he had not. I insisted some more. What parent would agree to cutting up their calendar? What family would have a spare calendar lying around the house? Were we expected to go out and buy a calendar for the purpose? And even if a calendar were available, the assignment would surely be incredibly time-consuming, hardly something he could fit in between dinner, bath and bed ready to hand in the next day. It just didn’t sound like a reasonable request for his teacher to have made. In fact, it sounded quite bizarre. He had clearly misunderstood.

Eventually, I managed to persuade my son that he must be mistaken and sent him off to school the next day empty-handed, asking him to find out what he was expected to do. When I picked him up later that day he looked crestfallen. He had been the only one who had not done as he was asked. Everyone had taken their rolled-up calendar strips to school that day and had fun rolling them out side by side in the main hall. He told the teacher that he had not been able to do it because his mum had not believed him. The teacher, well aware of my proficiency in Japanese, assumed that he simply had not conveyed the instructions properly and told him to be sure to complete the assignment and bring it in the following day.

I tried to picture the spectacle of thirty-nine ‘years’ being unfurled along the floor, imagining my son’s dismay and feeling his sense of bewilderment when his candid excuse was dismissed out of hand as a failure to make himself understood. Linguistically speaking, I had comprehended perfectly the information he had communicated. However, my cultural mindset was such that the concept described simply could not register. So far removed from my lived experience was the thing he was being asked to do that he may as well have been speaking an entirely unfamiliar tongue.

On the way home that afternoon we went and bought a calendar and cancelled all other plans for the rest of the day. As requested, my son insisted on doing the task himself, refusing my occasional attempts to speed up the proceedings. Cutting precisely along the lines that separated each week of the twelve months and meticulously pasting them back together in the new format demanded extraordinary patience and perseverance. The painstaking process took him close to three hours, breaking only once for a drink of grape juice and a biscuit. When it was finished, the ‘year’ stretched almost the entire length of our apartment.

Finally, I understood. My son’s words now had real meaning. He had suffered the indignity of being doubted by his teacher and would have to present his ‘year’ strip one day later than the rest of the class. But he had succeeded in shifting his mother’s culturally bound perceptions and narrowing the gap between language and lived experience. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Professor Ingrid Piller

The 50^th Anniversary Australia-Japan Joint Business Conference was held in Sydney this week. As Australia-Japan Foundation (AJF) grant holders, Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr Kimie Takahashi were invited to attend the conference and had dinner with the Prime Minister, the Honourable Julia Gillard MP, who was the guest of honour.

It was wonderful to see our research project, Japanese on the Move, recognized as an important contribution to the bilateral relationship between Australia and Japan.

The dinner began with a message from the Prime Minister of Japan, His Excellency Mr. Yoshihiko Noda, read by His Excellency Mr. Shigekazu Sato, Ambassador of Japan to Australia. Ambassador Sato was also one of the participants in our interview project: watch him speak about personal aspects of the Australia-Japan relationship here.

Dr. Kimie Takahashi, Prof. Ingrid Piller, Dr Masahiro Kohara, Ms. Yuri Takahashi and Mr. Mike Nock (from left to right)

Then the Chairman of the Australia-Japan Foundation, Mr. Murray McLean OAM, who for many years was the Australian ambassador to Japan, introduced the Prime Minister and she delivered the Australia-Japan Foundation’s Annual Address. She spoke about the maturity of the relationship between the two countries and highlighted in particular the fact that she was the first foreign prime minister to visit the tsunami-affected area in Tohoku after the March 2011 disaster. Indeed, as a testimony to the strong commitment of Australia to aid in disaster recovery, two majors from towns destroyed by the disaster were also in attendance.

During the dinner, we had the opportunity to share our work with the Prime Minister. We also presented her with a copy of the Japanese on the Move DVD, a copy of Ingrid Piller’s book about Intercultural Communication and a gift from our fashion sponsor Yaccomaricard.

At the dinner we also got a chance to catch up with Dr Kohara, Consul General of Japan in Sydney, who delivered a keynote address at the Japanese on the Move launch in May this year as well as another Japanese-on-the-Move participant, Yuri Takahashi, and her husband, jazz musician Mike Nock.

Ad for ‘English for travel’ classes ( www.gaba.co.jp/ad)

A few weeks ago, my family and I went to Jim Thompson’s special sales at BITEC in Bang Na, a short train ride from central Bangkok. The special shuttle bus waiting at the station for bargain hunters was full of Japanese JT fans, and I struck up a conversation with an elderly Japanese couple. As they looked ‘non-tourist’ and at ease with the surroundings, I first thought that they were retirees living in Thailand. It turned out that they were actually tourists, and the main aim of their trip was to stay at the newly-opened prestigious Okura Hotel. They were enjoying the hotel, but “we actually prefer the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. We stay there every time we come to Thailand”. Curious about “every time”, I asked how many times they’d visited. They looked unsure, replying “We’ve lost count…”. Finally, they figured that, since their first trip some 20 years ago, the husband, a retired real estate sales manager, had visited about 30 times, and his wife, a retired bank worker, over 40 times!

Seeing my disbelief, Mrs. Tanaka (pseudonym) enthusiastically explained how easy and pleasurable each of their visits had been. They quickly added that neither of them could speak English or Thai, but they have never had a serious problem or unpleasant experience. They love Thai culture and for Mrs. Tanaka, “Bangkok has become home”. Before we parted, they also talked about their wish to move to Thailand permanently, but that would happen, they explained, only after they had fully fulfilled their duty to farewell Mr. Tanaka’s elderly mother, who is 100 years old.

Although they claimed that they can’t speak any English, it’s probably the case that they can communicate in English to some extent. After all, they were able to get to the sales venue by themselves by using the BTS Skytrain where information signs are mostly in Thai and English. At the same time, their multiple trips to Thailand and their sense of belonging to the country despite their claimed lack of English or the local language, challenge the discourse of トラベル/旅行英会話 (English for Travel Purposes), a multimillion-dollar branch of the huge English teaching industry in Japan.

Compared to English for Academic Purposes, the king of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), English for Travel Purposes (ETP) has received less scholarly attention. But ETP provides an amazing variety of courses and materials and has a strong hold on the psyche of many Japanese. What we find in cyberspace, for example, are countless numbers of ETP-related publications, websites of private language schools, vocational schools and universities that offer ETP courses, free and paid online lessons, seminars conducted by major travel agencies, websites run by travel English experts and enthusiasts, etc. Many 英会話学校 (English conversation schools) such as the three major schools, AEON, ECC and Gaba, offer ETP courses, and the discourse in the ads of these three schools is strikingly similar: ETP courses are for people who wish to make their overseas trip more enjoyable.

Gaba, for instance, recommends their ETP course for those who desire to (1) travel alone, (2) travel without guidebooks and (3) communicate with local people. Furthermore, ECC teacher Mika Fukube explains that ‘good English’ rather than ‘broken English’ will get tourists better service overseas:

海外旅行先でのホテルやレストランなどではブロークンな英語ではなく、しっかりとした英会話を話すことで、より良いサービスが提供されます.  (If you can communicate in proper English, not in broken English, you will be able to receive good service at hotels and restaurants in your destination.) [my translation]

Then, how much and how long does a tourist need to invest in getting that better, service-winning English? AEON offers a one-year ETP course and charges JPY118,440 for a weekly group lesson (plus the registration fee of JPY 30,000 and possibly extra for textbooks), while Gaba’s one-on-one course over 8 months is pricier with JPY437,850 for 60 lessons (plus JPY 18,900 for textbooks).

All in all, the ETP business in Japan thrives on promoting the idea of English as a magical tool to make overseas travel safer, more fun and meaningful.

The flip side of the discourse, however, works to instil a profound sense of anxiety and helplessness in prospective travellers as travelling overseas without English emerges as hard and dangerous, if not impossible. I’ve lost count of the Japanese people I’ve met, who shyly or anxiously claimed “I’m scared of going overseas because I can’t speak English.”

None of this linguistic burden, anxiety or any sense of exclusion was evident in my hour-long conversation with the Tanakas. They marveled at the land of smiles and all things Thai – its people, food and cultures – that are found alongside the wide variety of Japanese signs, products and services to which they can turn should the need arise.

Bangkok was recently named the world’s third top tourism destination for 2012, after London and Paris. Hedrick-Wong, MasterCard Worldwide’s global economic advisor, pointed out Bangkok’s “tolerant culture” as the winning aspect. In light of the Tanakas’ experience, Bangkok obviously offers more than ‘cultural tolerance’. It is a multilingual city where an elderly Japanese couple are able to enjoy their stay on their own, to have meaningful contact with the locals, and to be highly mobile, all without that so-called ‘service-winning proper’ English.

Indeed, the discourse of ETP makes little sense in the ‘real’ Bangkok as an overseas tourism destination; its linguistic landscape and multilingual service provisions help to make visitors welcome and demonstrate that in contemporary Asia you can get fantastic service without English.

Does bilingualism cause temper tantrums? (Source: ehow.com)

My husband and I are raising our children (aged five and two) to be trilingual in English (my L1), Spanish (my husband’s L1) and Japanese (the majority language of our community). For the most part, reactions to our children’s language background have been generally positive with many people showing a genuine interest, particularly regarding the future opportunities that they believe may be open to our children thanks to their language abilities. Unfortunately, the other day we encountered our first negative attitude incident, concerning my two-year-old son.

As any parent will tell you, being two years old is sometimes quite tough. You can’t always express in words what it is that you want to say, you may have difficulty coming to terms with people who won’t let you do what you want and you sometimes have such strong emotions that the only thing you can do is lie down on the floor and scream your little head off. Hence the existence of terms such as “the terrible twos” in English and “ma no nisai” (literally “two-year-old demon”) in Japanese. Now imagine that multiplied by 18 and you can get a rough idea of what life must be like in the two-year-old class at my children’s daycare nursery. During the course of any one day there will be a number of conflicts, usually over some toy or other, often resulting in one child hitting, pushing, kicking or biting another child. The carers at the nursery generally do a pretty good job of keeping the peace but it’s inevitable that they won’t be able to catch all the disputes before they escalate into full-blown ‘fights’.

The other day when my husband picked up my son, one of his carers, let’s call her Mrs. X, came over to apologize for the bite mark on my son’s arm. (My first reaction to this was actually ‘Phew! Thank goodness he wasn’t the biter!’ which although off the point illustrates how common this kind of thing is at our nursery.) My son it seems had been involved in a fight over a toy bike and had come out the worse for it. Mrs. X then went on to explain how this kind of thing is just part of normal development and often occurs because two-year olds don’t yet have a good enough command of Japanese to be able to resolve their disputes through the use of verbal communication, so they have to resort to physical force. Then came the whammy: “Of course in your son’s case, this is probably exacerbated by the use of two other languages at home.”

Under other circumstances I might have actually started to believe Mrs. X and started spiraling down the tunnel of self-doubt, worrying whether raising my children in three languages was actually the right thing to do and what kind of long-term effects it was going to have on their behaviour, but fortunately this time we had a star witness. My five-year-old daughter had witnessed the whole ‘fight’ and relished in giving us all the gory details of the incident, including all the pushing, hair-pulling and biting and a pretty convincing impression of my son yelling at the other little boy. According to my daughter he had been shouting in Japanese “kore wa Leo-kun no! kore wa Leo-kun no!” (loosely translated into English as “This is mine! This is mine!”), as he had tried to wrestle the toy from the other child. If we are to believe my daughter’s account, then my son had not been using physical force to compensate for his lack of language skills, as Mrs. X had argued, but had actually been using Japanese quite effectively to stake his claim to the toy bike. Of course the toy bike was not his and the other little boy had been playing with it first, so my son was by no means an innocent party in this fight, but to blame my son’s behaviour on multilingualism, rather than the usual two-year-old problems of not understanding that not everything is yours, that you must wait for your turn and that you should be nice to other people, seems bizarre to say the least. How on earth had Mrs. X managed to link my son’s fight to a condemnation of trilingualism? And furthermore, how had she managed to overlook the fact that my son had actually been using Japanese as part of the fight?

When I mentioned this incident to a psychology professor colleague of mine, she suggested that I look at it in terms of Leon Festinger’s (1957) “cognitive dissonance theory”. According to this social psychology theory, our minds contain a mechanism that “creates an uncomfortable feeling of dissonance, or lack of harmony, when we sense some inconsistency among the various attitudes, beliefs, and items of knowledge that constitute our mental store” (Gray 2007: 493). In order to avoid this dissonance, people may choose to focus only on information that supports their attitudes and beliefs and avoid or ignore information that may contradict those beliefs. If we look at Mrs. X’s behavior from this perspective we can assume that Mrs. X holds a belief somewhere along the lines of ‘trilingualism can harm the social development of the child because it can prevent the child from developing adequate Japanese communication skills’. However, as my son’s use of Japanese as part of the fight is in conflict with her belief, her mind conveniently ignored it in order to avoid dissonance. She had also conveniently been able to ignore other contradictory evidence against her belief, such as the fact that the most fluent Japanese speaker in my son’s class comes from a bilingual home and that my son’s five-year-old sister had also been one of the most fluent Japanese speakers in her class at the same age.

Trying to understand why Mrs. X came to the conclusion she did, however, is only part of the battle. My next challenge is to help her change her beliefs and attitudes towards trilingualism. This one I assume is going to be a little more difficult, possibly even more difficult than raising my children with three languages.

References
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.
Gray, P. (2007). Psychology. 5th ed. New York: Worth.