Language and Education in Japan: Unequal Access to Bilingualism (Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities)

Language and Education in Japan Unequal Access to Bilingualism

Yasuko Kanno

Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities Series Editor: Gabrielle Hogan-Brun, University of Bristol, UK Titles include: Anne Judge LINGUISTIC POLICIES AND THE SURVIVAL OF REGIONAL LANGUAGES IN FRANCE AND BRITAIN Yasuko Kanno LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION IN JAPAN Unequal Access to Bilingualism Máiréad Nic Craith EUROPE AND THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE Citizens, Migrants and Outsiders Máiréad Nic Craith (editor) LANGUAGE, POWER AND IDENTITY POLITICS Anne Pauwels, Joanne Winter and Joseph Lo Bianco (editors) MAINTAINING MINORITY LANGUAGES IN TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS Australian and European Perspectives Glyn Williams SUSTAINING LANGUAGE DIVERSITY IN EUROPE Evidence from the Euromosaic project Forthcoming titles: Jean-Bernard Adey CONFLICT IN LANGUAGE POLICY Corsica in the French and European Context Maya Khemlani David, Vanithamani Saravanan and Peter Sercombe (editors) LANGUAGE, IDENTITIES AND EDUCATION IN ASIA Gabrielle Hogan-Brun (editor) MINORITY COMMUNITIES IN A CHANGING WORLD Nancy Hornberger (editor) CAN SCHOOLS SAVE INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES? Policy and Practice on Four Continents Dovid Katz YIDDISH AND POWER Ten Overhauls of a Stateless Language Vanessa Pupavac (editor) LANGUAGE RIGHTS IN CONFLICT Serbo-Croatian Language Politics Graham Hodson Turner A SOCIOLINGUISTIC HISTORY OF BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE

Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities Series Standing Order ISBN 1–4039–3732–X (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Language and Education in Japan Unequal Access to Bilingualism Yasuko Kanno Temple University, USA

© Yasuko Kanno 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230506947 hardback ISBN-10: 0230506941 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

The problem with many empirical data, empirically presented, is that they can be flat and uninteresting, a documentary of detail which does not connect with urgent issues. On the other hand the ‘big ideas’ are empty of people, feeling and experience. In my view well-grounded and illuminating analytic points flow only from bringing concepts into a relationship with the messiness of ordinary life, somehow recorded. Paul Willis, 2000, The Ethnographic Imagination

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Series Editor’s Preface

xii

1 Introduction Significance of the study Structure of the book

1 4 5

2 Framing the Study Japan’s diversity Bilingual education in Japan Theoretical framework Critical ethnography The process

9 9 13 21 28 30

3 Nichiei Immersion School ‘Children must be international!’ Hands-on instruction Listening to English, speaking Japanese Japanese classes for developing higher-order thinking skills The teacher’s job ‘This is a private school’ Junior high school

38 41 43 45

4 Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School Fostering Chinese identity The teaching of Chinese culture Traditional instruction JSL and EFL Active student participation Education is politics – literally Four generations in one school A non-accredited school Emphasis on Japanese in junior high school

59 60 61 63 67 69 72 73 78 80

vii

49 51 54 56

viii Language and Education in Japan

5 Hal International School ‘We are not a language school; we are a school’ F, S, and JNN Parents as stakeholders Japanese teachers as special subject teachers ‘Fruit are the students’

83 85 88 96 98 101

6 Sugino Public Elementary School JSL instruction Student-centered learning ‘A place to put a dresser’: Subtractive bilingualism School-wide academic underachievement Social integration, linguistic assimilation

104 106 111 114 118 121

7 Midori Public Elementary School JSL instruction Bilingual instruction in the JSL class Instruction in the homeroom class The use of instructional materials Language minority students in the homeroom class Laissez-faire attitude Parents

124 126 129 133 134 136 139 143

8 Imagined Communities, School Education, and Unequal Access to Bilingualism Elite bilingualism Subtractive bilingualism Imagining an alternative future Student bilingualism and identities Older students’ agency

145 145 153 163 168 174

9 Conclusion

177

Notes

183

References

189

Author Index

198

Subject Index

200

List of Tables and Figures Tables 2.1 Basic profile of the five schools 2.2 Summary of the fieldwork Figures 2.1 Number of foreign pupils/students who require Japanese language instruction 3.1 Percentages of Japanese and English instruction at Nichiei Immersion School 4.1 Percentages of Japanese and Chinese instruction at Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

ix

30 33

14 39 64

Acknowledgements When I completed my first book, I vowed to myself that I would write my second book much faster. In the end, however, it took just as long (when will I ever learn?), with the usual ups and downs, long hiatuses, and intensive ‘now or never!’ writing spurts. And during this long process, I benefited from support, encouragement, and insights from many people. First and foremost, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the teachers, students, and parents at the five schools. They were amazingly open in letting a total stranger come into their world and stay put for extended periods of time. The happiest moments in this project were the times I was sitting in their classrooms and observing teachers and students interacting. I would like to thank, in particular, the Director of the Immersion Program at Nichiei Immersion School, the Deputy Headmaster at Hal International School, and the Principal at Midori Public Elementary School for their thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of the chapters on their schools. Many colleagues and friends have contributed to this project. Although she probably does not know this, it was Bonny Norton’s very innocent question several years ago in one of our conversations that started this project: ‘So Yasuko, you’ve been back in Japan for some time now. What new project are you working on?’ At that point, I had not started any new project, and the shock of not having anything new to share with Bonny shamed me enough to start a new project. Aneta Pavlenko is another person who knows exactly how to push me enough so that I go a little bit further than I would normally go. Aneta put me in touch with Gabrielle Hogan-Brun, the series editor for the Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities. Aneta also read an earlier version of the introduction and Chapter 8 of this book, and it is on account of her feedback that the arguments presented in Chapter 8 are much tighter than they once were. Thomas Ricento and Terrence Wiley, the editors of the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, gave Bonny Norton and me an opportunity to edit the special issue on ‘imagined communities and educational possibilities’ for their journal (2003, vol. 2(4)). My single authored article (Kanno, 2003) in that issue served as a first thumbnail sketch of many of the ideas on which I have expanded in this book. Mary Goebel Noguchi wrote a x

Acknowledgements xi

letter of recommendation when I applied for the research grant that made this study possible. Mary has been a huge role model for me as a mother-hen figure for Japan-based scholars who work in the area of bilingualism. Tim Greer and Laurel Kamada, two such Japan-based scholars of bilingualism, invited me to be a plenary speaker and present on this book at the JALT conference in 2006. Xin Li, a long-time friend from OISE, checked my use of Chinese in the chapter on Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School. Sunao Fukunaga did research on the financing of public schools in Japan for me. Christian Stuart and Julie Dykema read and carefully copy-edited this book, giving me a really good feel for how well-educated graduate students who are not familiar with Japanese education would read this book. Gabrielle Hogan-Brun, the series editor, and Jill Lake and Melanie Blair at Palgrave Macmillan have been very supportive and professional – and patient! – in the production of this book, which has made the long and tedious process of book publishing much less onerous. The data collection phase of this study was supported by a Matsushita International Foundation research grant. A Junior Faculty Development Award from the University of Washington gave me a course release that allowed me extended time to focus on writing in the last phase of the project. My husband, Toby Walker, has had the misfortune of having to put up with the writing of two books in five years, and now that we have a child on top of that, he is in a constant state of attention-deprivation. I think I shall wait a while before I embark on a third book because Toby clearly deserves some attention. Our son, Kenji Walker, came along in the middle of this project, and although his arrival delayed the production of this book considerably (at least that is my excuse), he has made me a parent of a bilingual child, and the experience has added much needed depth to this study. At least now I know that even a three-year-old has his own will in regulating his bilingualism (e.g., ‘Mama, don’t speak in eigo, OK? But gakk¯o de eigo shabette ii – Mama, don’t speak in English [at home], OK? But it’s OK to speak English at school!’). So, with the hope that he will persist with both languages, this book is dedicated to Kenji. Yasuko Kanno

Series Editor’s Preface Worldwide migration and unprecedented economic, political and social integration in Europe present serious challenges to the nature and position of language minorities. Some communities enjoy protective legislation and active support from states through policies that promote and sustain cultural and linguistic diversity; others succumb to global homogenisation and assimilation. At the same time, discourses on diversity and emancipation have produced greater demands for the management of difference. This book series has been designed to bring together different strands of work on minority languages in regions with immigrant or traditional minorities or with shifting borders. We give prominence to case studies of particular language groups or varieties, focusing on their vitality, status and prospects within and beyond their communities. Considering this insider picture from a broader perspective, the series explores the effectiveness, desirability and viability of worldwide initiatives at various levels of policy and planning to promote cultural and linguistic pluralism. Thus it touches on cross-theme issues of citizenship, social inclusion and exclusion, empowerment and mutual tolerance. Work in the above areas is drawn together in this series to provide books that are interdisciplinary and international in scope, considering a wide range of minority contexts. Furthermore, by combining single and comparative case studies that provide in-depth analyses of particular aspects of the sociopolitical and cultural contexts in which languages are used, we intend to take significant steps towards the fusing of theoretical and practical discourses on linguistic and cultural heterogeneity. Gabrielle Hogan-Brun University of Bristol

xii

1 Introduction

Ms. Ayabe is busy teaching immigrant and refugee students in a pullout Japanese as a second language (JSL) class. She is a teacher in charge of teaching non-Japanese-speaking children at Sugino Public Elementary School. Although there are only four students in this JSL class, they are all at different Japanese proficiency levels and require individualized instruction. Ms. Ayabe quickly enlists me as a makeshift teaching assistant, pairing me up with Kim, a Vietnamese boy, while she herself works one-on-one with a Chinese girl, keeping an eye on two other students who are working on handwriting exercises. She is gentle and motherly towards her students, scaffolding their learning in a soothing voice and encouraging them to try just one more exercise. Most of the students are working on basic-level literacy, learning hiragana and katakana (two basic scripts in Japanese) and grades 1–2 level kanji (Chinese characters), although some are much older than grade 2. Kim, for instance, is a fifth grader and yet is barely reading at the grade 2 level in Japanese. When Ms. Ayabe talks about her JSL students’ academic progress, she sounds both resigned and frustrated: Nothing sticks. They can’t remember things. It’s not that they are not making an effort. When I came to this school, I talked to the previous JSL teacher. We initially said that maybe these kids have fewer drawers [in their heads]. But gradually, we started to say, Maybe it’s not the drawers but they don’t even have a place to put the dresser. The drawer metaphor she employs is self-explanatory: The more drawers children have in their heads, the more cognitive capacity they have. 1

2 Language and Education in Japan

But many of Sugino’s language minority students are losing their first language (L1) while not acquiring grade-level proficiency in Japanese. They do not have age-appropriate linguistic proficiency in either language, and their cognitive development is suffering as a result. What Ms. Ayabe is saying is that the cognitive deficiency of some of her language minority students is such that she and her predecessor started to suspect that perhaps it is not even a question of how many drawers these children have in their heads, but that the whole dresser may be altogether missing. As I heard Ms. Ayabe speak of her language minority students, I thought of another school – Hal International School – that I had visited earlier, where an entirely different scenario of bilingual development unfolds. A Japanese parent who has sent his three children to Hal describes its bilingual education well when he says: We chose [Hal International] because we wanted [our children] to be exposed to people of different cultures and to develop two languages they could use very comfortably    Our expectations about Hal were met. My children can read Shakespeare in English and Natsume S¯ oseki in Japanese.1 At Hal International, the children of Western diplomats and business executives as well as upper-middle-class Japanese children receive a richly multicultural education. They are challenged with a highly academic curriculum and are encouraged to think of themselves as citizens of the world. Many students develop high-level bilingual proficiency in Japanese and English and go on to attend elite colleges in North America and the UK. Many do indeed learn to read literary works in two languages. Why are some students allowed to become bilingual, appreciated for their advanced level proficiency in both languages, while others are subjected to life with two inadequately developed languages? What role do schools play in this linguistic stratification? Why is the kind of education Hal students enjoy not available to students at Sugino? These are some of the questions I address in this book. This book examines bilingual education in Japan, inquiring into the inequality in access to bilingualism that schools provide to students of different socioeconomic classes. By analyzing the policies and practices of five schools that serve very different groups of bilingual students, from the extremely privileged (Hal) to the extremely underprivileged (Sugino), I examine the role schools play in the linguistic stratification of bilingual students in Japan.

Introduction 3

Bilingual education is often understood, in lay language, to mean a form of education that provides half of the instruction in one language and the other half in another language. In this book, however, I use the term bilingual education more broadly to refer to school education that uses two languages as mediums of instruction, without necessarily implying that two languages are used in equal ratio. Some of the schools studied in this book use two languages more or less equally; others use one of the languages (e.g., language minority students’ L1) only for very limited, specific purposes. Thus, the term bilingual education is used as an umbrella term that includes both ‘strong’ forms of bilingual education, which aim to foster bilingualism and biliteracy, and ‘weak’ forms, which steer language minority students from their L1 to the society’s dominant language (Baker, 2006). Drawing on the notion of imagined communities (Anderson, 1991; Kanno and Norton, 2003; Norton, 2001) and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction (Bourdieu, 1977a, 1977b, 1991; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990), I argue in this book that schools create unequal access to bilingualism by envisioning different imagined communities for bilingual students of different socioeconomic classes and socializing them into these stratified imagined communities. Institutionally imagined communities – visions of the kinds of people students will grow up to socialize with, where they will live in the world, and the places they will occupy in society – have a large impact on schools’ policies and practices and ultimately shape students’ bilingualism and identities. Uppermiddle-class Japanese students and the children of Western professional expatriates are encouraged to develop an additive form of bilingualism in Japanese and English, because it will serve them well as linguistic capital as they become full and competitive members of the global community. On the other hand, with immigrant and refugee students, the priority is placed on the acquisition of Japanese and basic academic skills because schools tacitly assume that the best these groups of children can hope for is a modest but stable life without public assistance. Bilingualism is discouraged in these students because it is considered a luxury that they cannot afford. The limited roles and possibilities envisioned for these children lead to emphasis on basic skills and monolingualism in the society’s dominant language. In other words, I would argue that access to bilingualism is part of the cultural capital that schools distribute unevenly among students of different classes, cultural capital that they will use in order to obtain more education, find jobs, and build their social networks. In contemporary Japan, differential access to bilingualism is part of the social and cultural reproduction that schools help

4 Language and Education in Japan

sustain – the process of endowing the already privileged children with more linguistic and cultural capital while further depriving the already underprivileged children. At the same time, I argue that educators are capable of challenging the unequal power structures in society by preparing their students for more equitable and empowering imagined communities. They have the option of consciously resisting unequal future trajectories and instead envisioning alternative scenarios for their students. By envisioning an alternative imagined community that is more equitable and affirming for their students and striving to equip them with skills and knowledge they will need for such social participation, schools can help disadvantaged students develop additive bilingualism and learn to be competent and full members of a global and multilingual society.

Significance of the study This book is unique in several respects; it makes an important contribution to our understanding of the education of bilingual students in Japan and to the field of bilingual education in general. First, this is the first in-depth study of bilingual education in Japan. Although single case studies of several bilingual programs and edited collections of bilingual education exist (see Chapter 2), no study has compared different types of bilingual programs under a unified theoretical framework. The schools selected for this study are considered to be some of the ‘best of breed’ among educators and are highly visible in the media and scholarly literature. This book, therefore, represents state-of-the-art bilingual education in Japan. Second, this book offers a critical examination of the unequal distribution of bilingualism among students of different socioeconomic classes. No study, to my knowledge, has investigated how access to bilingualism as linguistic capital is unequally distributed among students of different socioeconomic classes and what role schools play in this stratification process in Japan. Several researchers have condemned the condition of education for language minority students in Japanese public schools (Chapter 2); however, none has considered why in a nation where so many working-class and poor immigrant and refugee students get stripped of their L1, there are other groups of more privileged students who are steadily building their bilingual capacity. In this study, access to bilingualism is viewed as part of the cultural capital that schools distribute unevenly among students of different classes.

Introduction 5

Third, the notion of institutionally imagined communities and their effects on school policies and practices has applicability beyond the Japanese context. In this study, I present the idea that schools have visions of imagined communities for students, which explicitly or implicitly guide their pedagogical practices. Depending on the kind of imagined communities they envision for their students, schools can expand or narrow the range of identities that students can adopt, and once a school delimits possible identities for a certain group of students, it is tremendously difficult for individual students to resist these imposed identities. Ultimately, many committed and highly skilled teachers fail to make a substantial difference in the education of disadvantaged language minority students because, while they may adjust their instructional methods or even the content of their instruction, they do not fundamentally question their imagined communities for their students. The idea that institutionally imagined communities for students influence school pedagogy and therefore student identities is useful in questioning why we educate our students the way we do, how we may be investing more in some students than in others, and how we rationalize our pedagogical choices.

Structure of the book Chapter 2 provides a detailed background and an in-depth discussion of the study’s theoretical and methodological framework. First, I offer a historical overview of the cultural and linguistic diversity in Japan, followed by a discussion of previous studies of bilingual education in Japan. I then discuss the theoretical framework of this study, explaining the concept of imagined communities and Bourdieu’s work on cultural reproduction and how they relate to this study. The chapter concludes with a detailed description of the study’s methodology. The following five chapters are school portraits. Chapter 3 is on Nichiei Immersion School. Nichiei offers a K–12 early partial English immersion program to Japanese mainstream students. Parents enroll their children in this program, hoping to give them advancedlevel English proficiency and an appreciation for international understanding. However, they also want to ensure that their children remain grounded in the Japanese education system, because they are expected to attend Japanese universities and pursue professional careers in Japan-based organizations. The school thus tries to strike a difficult balance between fostering high-level competence in English

6 Language and Education in Japan

and ensuring students’ competitiveness in the Japanese educational context. Chapter 4 is on Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School (grades K–9), which specializes in the education of ethnic Chinese students. Although its students are largely working-class language minority students, Zhonghua considers them to be future cultural bridges between Japan and China and provides them with a maintenance bilingual education program. The curriculum places a strong emphasis on the teaching of Chinese culture and the teachers stress the richness of Chinese culture and civilization. They encourage their students, many of whom experience discrimination in mainstream society because of their minority background, to take pride in their heritage. Chapter 5 is on Hal International School (grades K–9), which serves the children of Western diplomats and business executives as well as privileged Japanese children. As such, Hal provides a richly multicultural curriculum of high academic standards to prepare its students to become leaders in the global world. Most Hal graduates attend college outside of Japan. Since English is the language that directly impacts the students’ futures, the school gives clear priority to English over Japanese. Most teachers pitch their instruction at the proficiency level of English L1 students. Because this is a school where English is the main language of instruction and where English-speaking teachers hold power, some of the English L1 students do not develop conversational fluency in Japanese. On the other hand, Japanese students generally become highly proficient in English because they have to. Chapter 6 is on Sugino Public Elementary School (grades 1–6). More than 40 percent of Sugino’s students are of foreign origin and mostly permanent residents in Japan. On the one hand, Sugino strives to help their integration into Japanese society by integrating them fully into the school community. The school has a stated goal of valuing foreign-origin students as a resource rather than treating them as a problem. On the other hand, because the language minority students are expected to live in Japan permanently, teachers take for granted the primacy of Japanese in their education and provide little support for their L1 maintenance. Many students are undergoing L1 attrition and show reluctance to use their L1 in the classroom. Chapter 7 is on Midori Elementary School (grades 1–6). This is another public school, but with a markedly different approach to language minority students from that of Sugino. Unlike Sugino, most language minority students at Midori are the children of Brazilian and Peruvian migrant workers who plan to return to their home countries after a

Introduction 7

few years. Because of the temporary nature of their residence in Japan and their future trajectories back to South America, Midori is relatively supportive of language minority students’ L1 maintenance. On the other hand, the school is less committed to language minority students’ academic integration because they are not expected to go up the ladder in the Japanese education system. Newcomers are often left working on decontextualized drills in the mainstream classroom while their Japanese classmates learn academic content. Following the narratives of the five schools, Chapter 8 provides an in-depth comparison of the five schools’ approaches to bilingual education, analyzing the relationship among imagined communities, school pedagogy, and student identities. I first compare two schools (Nichiei and Hal) that provide elite bilingual education with two public schools (Sugino and Midori) whose language minority students tend to develop subtractive bilingualism, and consider how access to bilingualism is directed more to some groups of students than others through schooling. The key argument advanced here is that bilingualism is considered an important asset for Nichiei and Hal students’ futures but deemed irrelevant for Sugino and Midori students’ futures. Compared with children of privilege, immigrant and refugee students are socialized into impoverished imagined communities with more limited possibilities. I then discuss the example of Zhonghua, examining how imagining an alternative future changes a school’s approach to educating workingclass bilingual children. The last section of this chapter considers how students respond to these various programs. It is argued that once a school sets the range of identity options for its students, it is tremendously difficult for the students, especially the young students, to resist these assigned identities. Chapter 9 concludes the study, providing a summary of the main arguments and placing unequal access to bilingualism in the larger discussion of differentiated educational opportunities for children of different socioeconomic classes in Japan. One caveat is necessary about the dates of the descriptions. Accounts of the schools are narrated in the present tense. However, the ethnographic present in this book refers to the time of my fieldwork: that is, May 1999 to June 2001. Larger excerpts from interviews and field notes in the narrative chapters are dated so that the reader can identify the specific time to which I am referring. Much has changed in the five schools I studied since the years of my fieldwork: Administrators and teachers have switched schools, programs have gone through curriculum reforms, and children have moved on. What I describe in this book

8 Language and Education in Japan

therefore does not necessarily represent these schools as they are today. Whenever relevant, I provide updates throughout this study, but in order to preserve the integrity of my observation – since changing even one small element of a school’s practice has a ripple effect on other aspects – what I saw during my fieldwork is reported in the ethnographic present and clearly separated from the updates.

2 Framing the Study

This chapter frames the study and provides the rationale for its theoretical and methodological approach. First, I provide a historical overview of cultural and linguistic diversity in Japan, focusing in particular on the rapid increase of foreign nationals in the past two decades. This section is followed by a discussion of previous studies of bilingual education in Japan. I then discuss the theoretical framework of the study, which draws on the notion of imagined communities and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction. The chapter concludes with a detailed description of the process of the study.

Japan’s diversity Despite its persistent stereotype as a monolingual, monocultural nation, Japan has always contained some elements of linguistic and cultural diversity. For example, the Ainu people, indigenous to Hokkaido and the northern part of Honsh¯ u (the mainland), spoke their own language, which is believed to be only remotely related, if at all, to the Japanese language (Anderson and Iwasaki-Goodman, 2001). Similarly, the Ryukyuans/Okinawans residing in Okinawa, on the southernmost tip of Japan, were ethnically distinct from the mainland Japanese and had a separate kingdom with their own language and culture (Matsumori, 1995; Taira, 1997). Two ethnolinguistic minority groups that have lived in Japan for generations and that are directly relevant to this study are Korean and Chinese residents. As the largest non-Japanese group in Japan, the presence of Korean residents in contemporary Japan stems directly from Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula (1910–45). After the annexation, some Koreans came to Japan in search of jobs; others were shipped 9

10 Language and Education in Japan

to the mainland as wartime laborers in order to alleviate labor shortages at coal mines and construction sites (Cary, 2001). Between 1939 and 1945 alone, approximately 700,000 Koreans were conscripted as wartime laborers and were brought to Japan (Asahi Shimbun, 2006b). At the end of World War II, 2.4 million Koreans lived in Japan, four-fifths of whom returned to Korea after the war (Ryang, 1997). During the colonization, Koreans were made Japanese subjects, but upon the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty between Japan and the United States in 1952, those who remained in Japan were stripped of their Japanese citizenship (Tanaka, 1995). Ryang (1997) points out that the Japanese government’s decision to retract Japanese nationality from its former colonial subjects is unusual by international standards. However, this unilateral retraction of nationality apparently did not meet strong resistance from Koreans: Koreans, as well as the Japanese authorities, deemed nationality as more than merely a functional institution. To retain Japanese nationality for Koreans was out of the question, as they assumed it meant becoming Japanese in all senses; a change of nationality was generally taken as an alteration of one’s essence. (Ryang, 1997, p. 121) Indeed, although an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 ethnic Koreans have since naturalized to become Japanese citizens (Ryang, 1997), approximately 461,000 ethnic Koreans continue to live in Japan as ‘special permanent residents’ (Ny¯ ukanky¯ okai, 2005). Special permanent residents are eligible for various social benefits and can apply for a multiple reentry permit if they want to travel abroad (Ryang, 1997). As non-citizens, however, they have no voting rights. Korean residents now include second, third, and fourth generations, many of whom know Japan as their only home country, speak Japanese as their L1, and use Japanese-sounding names (ts¯ ush¯o-mei) in everyday life. Chinese residents have also lived in Japan for generations. The youngest in the Chinese communities are now in their fourth and fifth generations and like Koreans, many Chinese were transported to Japan during World War II: 40,000 from China and another 40,000 from Taiwan (Nagano, 1994; Vasishth, 1997). However, Japan has had a trading and cultural exchange with China practically since the beginning of its history, and much more diverse groups of Chinese – artisans, merchants, and students, and not just military laborers – had been present in Japan. Nagano (1994) argues that this difference in their origins of immigration makes current Chinese residents less

Framing the Study 11

antagonistic towards Japan and less torn about naturalization than Korean residents, who are mostly descendents of conscripted laborers. Nonetheless, the atrocities committed by the Japanese military authorities in China during the war and the discrimination they have endured in Japan since the Sino-Japanese War, make naturalization a loaded issue for Chinese residents as well. Currently, approximately 3,300 Chinese residents live in Japan as special permanent residents (Ny¯ ukanky¯ okai, 2005). Thus, contemporary Japan has a highly unusual multicultural situation in the world in that there are many Japanese-born ethnic Korean and Chinese people who, legally, remain ‘foreigners.’ For most of them, Japan is the only country they know. In other parts of the world, such individuals would have long been citizens of the nations in which they reside. They would be considered, say, Korean-Americans or ChinesePeruvians, as opposed to Korean nationals in the United States or Chinese nationals in Peru. But Japan follows the principle of jus sanguinis (the law of blood), rather than jus soli (the law of the soil), in bestowing citizenship: As long as both parents are non-Japanese, a child remains a non-Japanese citizen even if he or she was born in Japan. Thus, Korean and Chinese residents still remain, legally, as ‘aliens,’ regardless of how many generations their family goes back in history in Japan. Thus, linguistic and cultural diversity has long existed in Japan. However, it was not until the late 1980s that diversity – or more specifically, the presence of foreigners in their midst – emerged as a major social issue. The Ainu and Rykyuan languages had been suppressed to the point of near-extinction; younger generations of Korean and Chinese residents had been linguistically – and to a lesser extent, culturally – assimilated. Up until 1988, the percentage of foreign nationals in the total population had remained consistently at about 0.6 percent (Cornelius, 1994). However, Japan’s economic boom in the 1980s and an accompanying labor shortage attracted many foreigners from the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and Iran, who entered Japan with tourist visas and illegally engaged in menial jobs (Sellek, 1997). The Japanese government did not – and still officially does not – permit the entry of unskilled foreign workers. Nonetheless, the labor shortage became so severe that in order to alleviate the problem, the government revised the Immigration Control Law in 1990 to make it legal for Nikkeijin (descendents of Japanese emigrants abroad) and their spouses to work in unskilled job sectors (Sellek, 1997; Vaipae, 2001). The government reasoned that Nikkei people were much more acceptable than other foreigners ‘because they had “Japanese blood”

12 Language and Education in Japan

even if they could not speak Japanese and knew very little about Japan’ (Maher and Yashiro, 1995, p. 13). Under the current law, Nikkeijin and their spouses can live in Japan with no job restrictions up to three years, with virtually automatic visa renewal (Sellek, 1997). The number of Brazilian and Peruvians in Japan has jumped from 18,649 in 1989, to 145,614 in 1991 (Tanaka, 1995, p. 218) to 371, 700 in 2006 (H¯ omush¯ o, 2007). Many Nikkeijin work in the auto industry and are concentrated in relatively small company towns in the prefectures of Aichi Shizuoka, and Kanagawa. Another group that is much smaller than the Nikkeijin community but has a fairly distinct identity in the minds of many Japanese because of their media exposure is the Chinese ‘war orphans.’ They are Japanese children who were abandoned in China during the chaos of the Japanese retreat at the end of World War II (Tomozawa, 2001). Their repatriation started after the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations in 1972. But it was not until 1994, when a bill that was passed by the Diet placed the responsibility for the war orphans’ repatriation on the Japanese government, that their repatriation gained momentum. By 1997, 17,093 people had repatriated under government sponsorship, many of whom returned at their own expense (Tomozawa, 2001). Although the war orphans were of Japanese origin, most of them did not speak Japanese at the time of their repatriation. The spouses, children, and grandchildren they brought with them are Chinese.2 Meanwhile, Japan has also been one of the most popular destinations for Asian students and trainees for quite some time. Spurred by the Ministry of Education’s ‘100,000 Foreign Students Plan’ launched in 1983 (Vaipae, 2001), the number of foreign students increased from 10,428 in that year to 131,789 in 2006 (H¯ omush¯ o, 2007). More than 80 percent are from China and South Korea (ibid.). Similarly, the number of foreign trainees, who receive on-the-job training in Japanese companies, has steadily increased over the past two decades or so, from 14,388 in 1986 to 70,519 in 2006 (H¯ omush¯ o, 2007; Tanaka, 1995). The darker side of the story is that many of the foreign students and trainees are also in effect contributing to the unskilled labor force. The ‘trainee’ programs, in particular, have become a convenient way for small-sized companies and farms to secure cheap labor for menial jobs that most Japanese citizens will not take (Kajita, 1998; Sellek, 1997), and a number of cases of exploiting foreign laborers under the guise of trainee programs have been reported (Asahi Shimbun, 2006a). Thus, student and trainee visas are in many cases used as ‘back door’ and ‘side door’ options (Kajita, 1998) to gain easy entry to and employment in Japan.

Framing the Study 13

In sum, the latest figure for the number of foreign nationals legally living in Japan3 is 2,084,919, or 1.63 percent of the total population (H¯ omush¯ o, 2007). The number has increased by 47.3 percent in the past decade. Koreans, including the special permanent residents, constitute the largest group (28.7 percent), followed by Chinese nationals (26.9 percent) and Brazilians (15.0 percent). The foreign population in Japan is expected to continue to grow, because the Japanese economy has become structurally dependent on foreign workers. Japan is a rapidly ageing nation with one of the lowest fertility rates (1.25) in the world (K¯ oseir¯ od¯ osh¯ o, 2006). According to United Nations’ estimates, by 2050 there will be less than one person of working age for every person over 60 in Japan (Porter, 2004). If native-born Japanese cannot reproduce themselves to sustain their economy and support their retirees, it seems inevitable that they will need to actively import foreign workers, whether they like it or not.

Bilingual education in Japan The growing diversity in Japanese society cannot help but affect Japanese schools since many of the incoming foreign residents enroll their children in local schools. According to statistics available from the Japan Immigration Association (Ny¯ ukanky¯ okai, 2005), as of 2004 there were 120,417 foreign-national children aged 5 to 14 (the closest age category that the Association uses to the ages of compulsory education in Japan: ages 6–15).4 The figure corresponds to approximately 1 percent of the population of this age group in Japan. Also, according to statistics that the Ministry of Education released once only (Monbukagakush¯ o, 2005b), 70,345 foreign-national students attended public schools in 2004. The most commonly used figure to reference the extent of the growth of foreign-national students in public schools is the number of ‘foreign pupils/students who require Japanese language instruction’ (‘nihongoshid¯o ga hitsuy¯o na gaikokujin jid¯o/seito’ ), which is tallied every year by the Ministry of Education. Compared with the other two figures that I have given, this number is much smaller – 20,692 in 2005 (Monbukagakush¯ o, 2006b) – because it includes only those who are in public schools and are receiving intensive JSL instruction. Those who are not in public schools or those who have already been mainstreamed – but who may not have acquired grade-level academic proficiency in Japanese – are not counted. However, even this very conservative figure represents nearly a 400 percent increase since the Ministry started its tally in 1991 (5,463) (see Figure 2.1). Moreover, JSL students

14 Language and Education in Japan

25,000 20,000

17,296

18,585 18,432 19,250 18,734

19,678

20,692

15,000 10,450

11,553

10,000 5,463

5,000 0 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2000 2001 2002 2004 2005 Figure 2.1 Number of foreign pupils/students who require Japanese language instruction Sources: Vaipae (2001) and Monbukagakush¯ o (2006b).

are spread across 5,281 schools, or 13 percent of all public schools in Japan; thus, language minority education has become an issue that concerns all public schools. Brazilians, Chinese and Peruvians represent more than 70 percent of language minority students in public schools (Monbukagakush¯ o, 2006b). Research in the area of the education of non-Japanese-speaking students has grown correspondingly. It is one of the most active research areas in the field of education in Japan today. This body of literature is little known to the English-speaking world because the majority of study reports are written in Japanese.5 In this section, I first provide a brief review of the emerging literature on bilingual education in Japan and then discuss the lack of a comparative perspective in the literature. Language minority education in public schools In response to the rapid increase of non-Japanese-speaking students in public schools, in 1992 the Ministry of Education began allocating extra teachers to schools that had large numbers of language minority ¯ students to hold pullout JSL classes (Ota, 2002). This system continues to date: A budget is set aside to cover the salary of up to two extra teachers at each designated school, and the JSL teachers are chosen among the school’s existing staff. Nevertheless, Vaipae (2001), who conducted a large-scale multi-method study on the subject in the mid 1990s, reported flagrant neglect of language minority students in public schools. A vast majority of language minority students, scattered as they were throughout the country, received no JSL instruction. When

Framing the Study 15

JSL classes were available, they focused on basic conversational skills in Japanese rather than on academic literacy. Most JSL teachers were regular classroom teachers who happened to be assigned to that role, and few of them received professional training in second language acquisition, assessment, and language pedagogy after their designation as JSL teachers. Teachers and administrators denied that language minority students had special needs. And parents did not have a full grasp of the difficulties their children were experiencing. Summing up her findings, Vaipae concluded that ‘the only language education model apparent in our observation was submersion with the goal of assimilation’ (p. 199). More recent studies echo Vaipae’s (2001) report. By now various forms of JSL support have been implemented across the country, such as pullout JSL classes, team-teaching between homeroom and JSL teachers, and the Center School system (where language minority students from nearby schools are gathered in one school to receive JSL instruction on a regular basis) (Noyama, 2000). But Sakuma (2005) points out that even after two decades since the arrival of language minority students on the Japanese education scene, no systematic methodology of teaching JSL has been established. Pullout JSL classes focus on elementary-level Japanese, instruction centering on basic Japanese conversation skills, the learning of two basic scripts (hiragana and katakana), and grades 1–2 level Chinese characters (Nakanishi and Sat¯ o, 1995). While they are learning Japanese, language minority students’ academic learning is put on hold (Sat¯ o, 1995): They are either placed in the regular classroom where they do not understand the instruction, or pulled out for JSL instruction, in which they engage in cognitively undemanding, contentless language drills while their Japanese classmates march on with ¯ (2000), who conducted an ethnography of their academic learning. Ota language minority education in several Japanese public schools, points out, ‘Under the fundamental premise that in current Japanese language education, the medium of instruction is Japanese, it is considered regrettable but inevitable that language minority students cannot participate in subject matter learning until they acquire sufficient Japanese proficiency’ (p. 179; my translation). Since their subject matter learning is put on hold while they are learning Japanese, even for the rare language minority students who eventually manage to acquire academic Japanese, it is then far too late to catch up academically. Another aspect of language minority education that has attracted much attention in recent years is the non-schooling of many language ¯ (2005) have published an edited minority students. Miyajima and Ota volume on this topic, the first of its kind. At present no official statistics

16 Language and Education in Japan

¯ and Tsuboya (2005) estimate that 11.4 percent of are available, but Ota the compulsory education age (grades 1–9, ages 6–15) foreign-national students are not receiving any type of full-time schooling. In a country where virtually every child attends a full-time school, this is clearly an anomaly. The Ministry of Education, which has been slow in acknowledging this problem, has finally decided to investigate the state of nonschooled, foreign-national children in 2005 (Monbukagakush¯ o, 2005a). A critical factor contributing to the large number of non-schooled foreign children in Japan is the lack of foreign-national children’s rights to public education. Japanese-national children have a constitutional right to nine years of compulsory education: ‘All people [i.e., Japanese citizens] shall be obliged to have all boys and girls under their protection receive ordinary education as provided for by law’ (Japanese Constitution, Article 26). Japanese parents who fail to send their children to school are repeatedly and persistently warned by the local school boards, because it is their legal duty to ensure that their children receive compulsory education. However, this right does not extend to foreign children. In reality, most public elementary and junior high schools (i.e., compulsory education) accept foreign-national children if their parents wish to enroll them. But the fundamental aim of Japanese public education is to foster Japanese citizens; as such, providing education to non-Japanese children is seen as ‘doing a favor’ (Sakuma, 2006). The lack of legal obligation has led to a laissez-faire attitude both at the Ministry of Education level and at the level of local schools towards language minority children who stop coming to school or who do not enroll in the first place (Sakuma, 2006). Essentially, as far as Japanese schools are concerned, language minority students are admitted if their parents approach the schools, but they are also free to leave or not to come in the first place. Sakuma (2006) writes that the government policies regarding the schooling of non-Japanese students today derive directly from the government policies regarding the education of Korean residents after World War II. The year after the San Francisco Peace Treaty was signed and Koreans in Japan were no longer considered Japanese citizens, the Ministry of Education declared that compulsory education did not apply to foreign nationals, including Korean residents. Korean parents who wished to enroll their children in Japanese public schools were asked to sign a pledge that read, ‘Upon enrolling our child in this school, we will agree to abide by Japanese laws and never to burden the school with the cost of our child’s education. If we breach this agreement, we will not object to our child’s expulsion from the school’ (Sakuma, 2006,

Framing the Study 17

p. 183; my translation). These educational policies in the wake of the war were in effect designed to exclude Korean residents from Japanese public education, and their legacies continue today in the form of public schools’ lack of legal obligation to educate non-Japanese students. Ethnic school education For some language minority students, an alternative to public school education is ethnic school education. Historically, ethnic schools have been associated predominantly with Korean and Chinese residents. As I discussed above, after World War II, Korean and Chinese residents’ right to public education was seriously threatened by the Japanese government. In response, Korean and Chinese residents established their own schools where they could shield their offspring from discrimination and provide them with an education. Korean schools consist of two types: North Korean and South Korean. The North Korean education system is comprised of one university, 12 high schools, 56 middle schools, 83 elementary schools and 67 kindergartens, while there are four South Korean schools (Takekuma, 1998). Chinese schools are also divided into two types: People’s Republic of China schools and Taiwan schools (Takekuma, 1998). Traditionally, the central goal of these schools has been an ethnic education, providing newer generations with a sense of pride in their ethnic origin and knowledge of the language and culture of their homeland. Because these schools aim at ethnic education and do not follow the curricula specified by the Japanese Ministry of Education, most of them (except two South Korean schools) are not accredited by the Ministry as full-fledged schools and are categorized as ‘miscellaneous schools (kakushu gakkk¯o)’ (Sugimoto, 2003). But in fact, with the arrival of fourth and fifth generation children, these ethnic schools today are placing more emphasis on their participation in Japanese society, abandoning the, by now, unrealistic hope that one day these children will ‘return’ to the homeland (Ryang, 1997; Takekuma, 1998). More recently, the arrival of ‘newcomer’ foreign children has expanded the range of ethnic schools in Japan. For example, there are now 63 Brazilian schools in Japan (Ishikawa, 2005). The demand for ethnic schools is biggest among Brazilian and Peruvian populations because most South American families in Japan see their stay as temporary and want their children to maintain their L1 proficiency. Ishikawa (2005) writes that although these schools range in size and status – some are accredited by the ministry of education in their home country while others are not much more than makeshift classes hosted in private homes – what unites them all is an education that aims to

18 Language and Education in Japan

support smooth reintegration into the education system back home. The language of instruction is Portuguese/Spanish, and the curricula are similar to those used in Brazil and Peru. Attending these ethnic schools, however, does present its own set of problems (Ishikawa, 2005; Yamawaki, 2005). First of all, because these are private institutes, the tuition is expensive (40,000 to 50,000 yen, or roughly US $340–420, a month). Some families pull their children out of these schools and place them in Japanese public schools when their finances get tight, and they move them back to the ethnic schools when their financial situation improves. Such coming and going is disruptive to the children’s education. Also, unlike the fourth and fifth generation Korean and Chinese children, Brazilian and Peruvian children in Japan are not Japanese L1 speakers. By attending ethnic schools, they will not learn Japanese. This may not be a major problem if they do indeed return home in a few years as their parents intend. However, many South American families, despite their intention to return home in the near future, are prolonging their stay in Japan, turning into de facto permanent residents. If the children attend ethnic schools, the possibility of their advancing to Japanese higher education is virtually nil, and they do not learn enough Japanese to participate fully in Japanese society (Ishikawa, 2005; Yamawaki, 2005). International school education The children of Western diplomats and business executives who are transferred to Japan predominantly attend international schools. Given the temporary nature of their sojourn, and also because these expatriate professionals come to Japan primarily for business reasons and not for any inherent interest in Japanese society or culture, many of them choose to enroll their children in international schools where they can continue their education in their L1 or in English and follow a curriculum that is similar to the one at home. Japan has the largest number of international schools in the world (Wakabayashi, 2002), more than 20. While many are accredited by American and European associations, they are not recognized by the Japanese Ministry of Education as full-fledged schools. In other words, they are classified as ‘miscellaneous schools’ just like most ethnic schools. Despite their lack of accreditation, many upper-middle-class and upper-class Japanese parents also choose to send their children to international schools ‘because they view English acquisition, and consequently bilingualism, as an advantage for their children, and their conscious effort to promote it, a future investment’ (Wakabayashi, 2002, p. 634).

Framing the Study 19

There are not many studies of international schools in Japan. Willis (1993) notes that most international schools in Japan follow curricula similar to those used in US schools, because international schools in Japan, despite the diverse backgrounds of the students they cater to, are fundamentally a conservative institution that likes to follow the tried and true curricula. Ochs (1993) takes a more critical approach to the conservatism of the international school administrators, characterizing them as ‘lacking commitment to multicultural endeavours’ (p. 459). Although the school he studied had a diverse student body and called itself an ‘international school,’ the administrators were essentially concerned with running their school according to the North American model and were uninterested in, and unsupportive of, the multilingual and multicultural expressions of their diverse students. The North American (or British)-centered orientation of international schools in Japan also tends to treat the growing number of ESL students (i.e., Japanese mainstream children and children of mixed marriages) as a ‘problem’ that undermines the academic standards of the whole school (Willis, 1993). It is interesting that language majority children who come from a privileged background in the context of mainstream Japanese society are positioned on the margins in international schools in their own country much the same way as language minority children are positioned in Japanese public schools. I return to this point later in the book when I discuss Hal International School. Immersion education While there are certainly Japanese mainstream students in international schools, Japanese parents who send their children to international schools so that they will learn English remain a minority. More popular – and less radical – options for Japanese parents who want their children to start learning English early are (1) to send them to private schools that place an emphasis on English instruction, and (2) to have them attend private after-school English classes. Recently, however, another option is emerging: English immersion education. The pioneer in this area is Katoh Gakuen in Numazu, in the Shizuoka Prefecture. The school runs an early partial English immersion program, which starts in early kindergarten and goes up to the end of high school (Grade 12). Bostwick (1999), the director of the immersion program, tested Grade 5 students’ English and Japanese proficiency as well as their math ability. In both math and Japanese language, the immersion students performed as well as the non-immersion students, well above the national average. Perhaps because this is a partial immersion program, the Katoh students

20 Language and Education in Japan

did not seem to experience the initial lag in their primary language development that is reported in students in total immersion programs in North America (Swain, 1997). On the other hand, they also made steady progress in all skill areas in English, with listening comprehension being the strongest. Far exceeding their non-immersion counterparts, the Grade 5 immersion students approximated American students in early to middle third grade in their English skills. One concern that may keep mainstream Japanese parents from sending their children to an immersion program like Katoh’s may be that exposure to foreign instructors and foreign culture through the immersion program would make their children too ‘Westernized’ to fit comfortably into Japanese society. Downes (2001) has addressed this concern and examined the cultural identity of the Katoh immersion students. His survey results showed that the immersion students in fact displayed a stronger sense of Japanese cultural identity than the students in the comparison group who attended regular public schools. The results of his study thus suggest that attending an immersion program like Katoh’s, far from confusing the students’ cultural identity, may in fact nurture a stronger sense of being Japanese. Partly on the strength of the success of Katoh’s immersion experiment, the Ministry of Education has begun seriously considering English immersion: The Ministry has so far designated 101 high schools (both public and private, including the high school division of Katoh Gakuen) as ‘Super English Language High Schools’ in which some subjects are taught through the medium of English (Monbukagakush¯ o, 2005c).

Lack of comparative perspective This book builds on the growing body of literature on bilingual education in Japan that I have reviewed. However, a major gap in knowledge that I see in the existing body of research is the lack of a comparative perspective that brings together different kinds of bilingual education currently taking place in Japan. Although studies of various bilingual education programs exist, researchers in each area have tended to study only one kind of school. There has hardly been any dialogue between scholars who specialize in different kinds of bilingual education in Japan.6 Because they each focus on the education of the bilingual group of their choice and do not compare it to the education of other bilingual students, no one has asked the central questions of why access to bilingualism is so freely given to some students but not to others and what

Framing the Study 21

role schools play in this linguistic stratification process. More specifically, no scholar has ventured to investigate the access to bilingualism in terms of students’ socioeconomic classes, although even a cursory look across the literature suggests that the two are intimately connected.

Theoretical framework Imagined communities At the center of the theoretical framework of this book is the concept of imagined communities, which refers to ‘groups of people, not immediately tangible and accessible, with whom we connect through the power of the imagination’ (Kanno and Norton, 2003, p. 241). The term imagined communities was first coined by Benedict Anderson (1991) in his discussion of nationalism. Anderson argued that nations are best conceived of as imagined political communities ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (p. 6). We forge our sense of belonging and loyalty to our nations chiefly through the power of our imagination. The nation as an imagined community does not make it any less real for us than much smaller communities in which we recognize most members’ faces. In fact, Anderson argues that almost all communities beyond those of the scale of face-to-face contact are imagined. Thus, the nation, albeit an imagined construct, is a real community, one that inspires a sense of ‘a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (p. 7). It is these deeply felt ties to the imagined communities, Anderson notes, that has ultimately compelled millions of people to sacrifice their lives to their nations (p. 7). Imagined ties can extend both spatially and temporally. Anderson (1991) was concerned with spatial imaginings, our ability to bond with our fellow compatriots across space through imagination and perceive those ties just as real as any of our daily face-to-face contacts. More recently, Norton (2001) and Kanno and Norton (2003) have expanded the concept by exploring our imagined ties with the future. It was Norton (2001) who first employed the concept of imagined communities in the field of applied linguistics. She argued that individual L2 learners have images of the communities in which they want to participate in the future, and that these ‘imagined communities’ have a large impact on their current learning. They are not yet members of such communities, but they aspire to gain access to them one day. According to Norton, whether or not the learners see the learning of L2 as leading them closer to their imagined communities influences their current investment in

22 Language and Education in Japan

learning: ‘A learner’s imagined community invites an imagined identity, and a learner’s investment in the target language must be understood within this context’ (2001, p. 166). In speaking of imagined communities, Norton (2001) was primarily concerned with individual learners. Her central argument, essentially, was that individual learners are capable of imagining a future self, an imagined identity that can be a powerful drive for their current learning. But learners are not the only ones who imagine their future identities and future affiliations; so do people around them. Many parents, for instance, have visions of imagined communities for their children, and these visions often guide their educational decisions for them (e.g., Dagenais, 2003). Similarly, schools have imagined communities for the students they serve. While individual learners aspire to certain imagined identities and membership in certain communities of imagination, schools also envision future affiliations for students: what kinds of adults they will grow up to be, what communities they will join in the future, and what roles they will play in those communities. Just as individual L2 learners’ investment in their current learning is influenced by their imagined communities, so too are schools’ policies and practices shaped by their visions of imagined future affiliations for their students. At this stage, a couple of points need to be made about the notion of institutionally imagined communities. First, a school may not have a unified, coherent vision of imagined communities for its students. In fact, teachers’ and administrators’ visions of imagined communities for their students are often in conflict with the visions that the students hold for themselves or their parents wish for their children. Different versions of imagined communities that different stakeholders espouse are constantly negotiated within a school. By speaking of institutional visions of imagined communities, therefore, I am not implying a unified, stable, and coherent vision; rather, multiple and conflicting visions are likely to be present within a school, always in tension, vying for legitimacy. Second, imagined communities depend on the power of active imagination: They are a product of human agency. I am certainly not the first person to claim a relationship between school policy and practice and students’ futures. As I discuss in the next section, scholars of social reproduction theories (e.g., Althusser, 1971; Bowles and Gintis, 1976) have explored the role of schools in producing and reproducing the kinds of workers that capitalist society needs. Social reproduction theories predict that working-class children are educated to become workingclass adults whereas middle-class children are destined for middle-class

Framing the Study 23

occupations. According to this view, the role of the school is to ensure that the existing class differences are reproduced through education. Although I believe that there is much truth in this view of the function of schooling, what differentiates the theory of imagined communities from social reproduction theories is the role that human agency plays in mediating the reproduction of social inequalities. The models of social reproduction afford little room for the power of the agency of educators to mediate the demands of capitalist society and are thus extremely deterministic. In contrast, the theory of schools’ visions of imagined communities grants more faith to the power of human agency. Surely, if educators simply accept the existing societal power relations and the future possibilities that the status quo predicts for their students, schools will be nothing but a part of the mechanism of social reproduction. However, educators are capable of challenging future trajectories that the unequal power structure in society predicts for their students. By imagining alternative future affiliations and aligning their current practices to equip their students with the skills and knowledge they will need for such community participation, educators and schools can play a critical role in breaking the cycle of social reproduction. Theory of cultural reproduction Another major component of my theoretical framework is Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction. In order to explain Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction, it is useful to start with theories of social reproduction. Early models of social reproduction (e.g., Althusser, 1971; Bowles and Gintis, 1976) posited schools as directly responding to the needs of capitalist society: that is, schools produce and reproduce the labor power demanded by the capitalist economic structure. According to these models, schools inculcate in students skills, knowledge, and attitudes commensurate with the culture of the kind of workplace they would encounter in the future: The educational system helps integrate youth into the economic system, we believe, through a structural correspondence between its social relations and those of production. The structure of social relations in education not only inures the student to the discipline of the work place, but develops the types of personal demeanor, modes of self-presentation, self-image, and social-class identifications which are the crucial ingredients of job adequacy. Specifically, the social relationships of education – the relationships between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and students, and

24 Language and Education in Japan

students and their work – replicate the hierarchical division of labor. (Bowles and Gintis, 1976, p. 131) According to this theory, working-class students learn to be punctual, to find virtue in the repetitive and manual nature of their work, and not to question authority. Elite-class pupils are taught the concept of noblesse oblige, higher order thinking skills, and how to lead (May, 1994). The major contribution of social reproduction theories is that they have raised awareness about the stratification functions of schooling, shattering the myth that schools are a great equalizer, rewarding merit and effort regardless of race, class, and gender. However, the social reproduction models came under heavy criticism for conceptualizing the link between schooling and the economic system as too direct and the processes of reproduction as overly deterministic (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1993; Giroux, 2001; Willis, 1977). Critics argued that schools have too strong an internal logic and culture to simply mirror and reproduce the outside economic and class structures: Even though it may be difficult to contest that schools exist in a particular relationship to the industrial order, this insight is not quite the same as assuming that the relationship is simply one of correspondence or cause-and-effect. Furthermore, in many of these accounts there is not only little understanding of the contradictions and social spaces that promote oppositional tendencies and behavior in schools, there is also a one-dimensional view of socialization. Students and teacher [sic] do not simply comply with the oppressive features of schooling    In no sense do teachers and students uniformly function in schools as simply the passive reflex of the logic of capital. (Giroux, 2001, p. 58) Positing a less direct and more complex relationship between the economic and class structures and the reproductive functions of schooling, Pierre Bourdieu (1977a, 1977b, 1991; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990) speaks of cultural reproduction as opposed to social reproduction. In differentiating Bourdieu’s ideas from theories of social reproduction, Swartz (1997) points out that ‘Bourdieu’s particular contribution is to show that schools are neither neutral nor merely reflective of broader sets of power relations, but play a complex, indirect, mediating role in maintaining and enhancing them’ (p. 191, emphasis added). Bourdieu argues that schools privilege cultural practices of the dominant class of

Framing the Study 25

society. By treating them as the norm and assuming that such practices are available to every child, schools disadvantage those children whose primary socialization in the family does not include inculcation of such practices. Central to Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction is the concept of cultural capital. Capital, he defines, is resources that are ‘capable of conferring strength, power and consequently profit on their holder’ (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 3). In other words, capital is resources that bring power to the owner. Capital can take several forms, cultural (knowledge, skills, and educational qualifications), symbolic (status and legitimacy), social (networks and connections), as well as economic (money and property). Depending on the situation, one form of capital can be converted into another (Bourdieu, 1986, 1991; Calhoun, 1993; Swartz, 1997). For example, a bachelor’s degree from a reputable university (cultural capital) makes it much easier to find a professional position with a decent salary and benefits (economic capital and symbolic capital) than a high school diploma. Cultural capital is a key to the mechanism of cultural reproduction, since middle-class and upper-class children who enter school with abundant cultural capital are advantageously positioned to understand and benefit from the school curriculum and therefore are likely to end their schooling with an even larger share of cultural capital (i.e., academic success and educational qualifications) than their workingclass peers. As Bourdieu (1991) argues: The educational market is strictly dominated by the linguistic products of the dominant class and tends to sanction the pre-existing differences in capital. The combined effect of low cultural capital and the associated low propensity to increase it through educational investment condemns the least favoured classes to the negative sanctions of the scholastic market. (p. 62) This way, whereas schools enjoy relative autonomy (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990) from society and do not necessarily respond directly to the demands of the capitalist market, they nonetheless play a major role in the reproduction of social classes ‘by contributing to the reproduction of the structure of the distribution of cultural capital among those classes’ (Bourdieu, 1977a, p. 487). Although facility with language is usually subsumed under the category of cultural capital, when Bourdieu is focusing particularly on language, he also speaks of linguistic capital. Bourdieu’s discussion of

26 Language and Education in Japan

linguistic capital is deeply embedded in his exploration of class differences in France and centers around ‘the different uses of the same language’ (1991, p. 53). In other words, speaking of linguistic capital, Bourdieu is primarily concerned with different varieties of a language and how speaking the prestigious variety of a language confers legitimacy to the speaker. He argues that the acquisition of such linguistic capital takes place first in the home; schooling builds on this early training by ‘transforming practical mastery into explicit, self-conscious mastery’ (p. 659). Those who come from families where acquisition of the legitimate language is not possible are therefore handicapped from the beginning: Accomplished mastery is opposed both to the simple dispossession of those who have not benefited from the appropriate pedagogical actions (primary, at home, and secondary, at school) and to the subtle imperfect mastery obtained by entirely scholastic acquisition. (p. 659) That is, schooling solidifies linguistic capital whose seeds were sown early in the primary socialization in the family. The linguistic accomplishments of those who have been able to benefit from both ‘appropriate’ family inculcation and school reinforcement are distinguished from the linguistic competence of those who have benefited from neither or of those who had to learn what they could only from schooling. But Bourdieu’s ideas for linguistic capital can also be applied to competence in a particular language, for the ability to use a language with high market value, just like the ability to employ the prestigious variety of a language, confers legitimacy and power to the user. English immediately comes to mind as a language that enjoys particularly high currency around the world. Also in Japan, German and French as well as English were traditionally taught as foreign languages at the university as they were considered the foreign languages with the most prestige and market value. However, with the rise of China as a super economic power, Chinese is gaining popularity in university as a foreign language of choice, probably surpassing the popularity of German and French. In other words, the value of proficiency in Chinese as linguistic capital is rapidly increasing. What is important to remember here is that the value and legitimacy of competence in a particular language is not absolute but ‘functions as linguistic capital in relationship with a certain market’ (Bourdieu, 1977b, p. 651). Competence in Japanese obviously functions as the linguistic capital of primary importance in Japan, but

Framing the Study 27

its currency as linguistic capital dramatically diminishes if one goes to the United States, since in that context, Japanese is ‘merely’ one of many minority languages and not even one with a large number of speakers. Similarly, if an English-speaking child were enrolled in a Japanese public school, her further development of English would be considered secondary to her quick acquisition of Japanese, since in that milieu, Japanese has more legitimacy as the medium of instruction than English. Influential as his work has been in critical pedagogy and critical ethnography, Bourdieu is not without his critics (Canagarajah, 1999; Collins, 1993; Heller and Martin-Jones, 2001). Just like theories of social reproduction, Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction has also been criticized as being deterministic. While his theory recognizes the relative autonomy of schools from larger economic and political forces compared with social reproduction theories, it nonetheless reaches more or less the same conclusion: that social classes are reproduced in part through schooling. There is little room for the human agency of teachers and students or for contradictions inherent in any school to disrupt the flow of class reproduction7 : [The] notion of the school’s relative autonomy from the economic and political institutions provides greater complexity to the reproductive process. But the culturalist models fail to exploit this detachment of the school to consider how it may function as an oppositional site to help change social institutions. (Canagarajah, 1999, p. 28; emphasis in original) Bourdieu’s cultural reproduction theory is useful in analyzing how the five schools socialize bilingual children differently and how their education results in the linguistic stratification of these children. However, I remain mindful of his critics’ assertion that his theory is overly deterministic and undermines the power of individual teachers’ and students’ ability to resist dominance. To me, what mediates the existing socioeconomic hierarchy in society and the policies and practices that take place within the school is the educators’ ability to imagine different, more just and equitable future social participation for the students they teach. If teachers simply accept, consciously or unconsciously, unequal relations of power in society and imagine their students’ future affiliations along the lines of the current power structures, schools will find themselves to be an active and effective agent of social and cultural reproduction. However, if educators consciously resist socializing their students into

28 Language and Education in Japan

futures that the existing unequal power relations predict for them and instead align their practices with alternative imagined communities in which their students will participate as able and respected members, schools can serve as a powerful agent for breaking the reproductive cycle. In the following chapters, we see examples of both scenarios.

Critical ethnography The basic mode of inquiry in this book is that of critical ethnography. Critical ethnography shares with traditional ethnography a commitment to providing a thick description of the culture of a local community in a way that makes it comprehensible to outsiders. But critical ethnography distinguishes itself from conventional ethnography in its awareness of broader political forces and their impact on local practices. While conventional ethnography regards the culture of a local community as a complete unit of analysis (Marcus, 1998), critical ethnography starts with the assumption that local practices are invariably influenced by the ideologies and power relations of the broader society (Canagarajah, 1999). As a result, for critical ethnographers who study schools, the discussion of what schools do for – and against – students must be informed by sociopolitical ideologies and issues of power. To infuse a micro-level analysis of a particular school with macrolevel theories of political and economic forces is to examine how issues of power and inequalities in society at large come to shape concrete practices, choices, and meaning making in the school. Accordingly, one of the central goals of critical ethnography is to examine ‘how schools [serve] to reproduce rather than transform existing structural inequalities’ (Levinson and Holland, 1996, p. 5, emphasis in original). In doing so, critical ethnography tends to cast a pessimistic gaze on what schools can do in the education of the already marginalized. In theory, critical ethnographers should be ‘sensitive to the dialectal relationship between the social structural constraints on human actors and the relative autonomy of human agency’ (Anderson, 1989, p. 249, emphasis added). In practice, however, many ethnographers fall into the j’accuse mode, concentrating on analyzing problems and failures, while being relatively oblivious to attempts by individual teachers or schools to reverse unequal relations of power.8 In our poststructuralist thinking, we are now much more willing to grant complexity and contradictions to an individual’s identity. Indeed, we speak of ‘identities’ to highlight the multiplicity, changes, and

Framing the Study 29

fragmentation in the life each of us leads (Kanno, 2003b; Norton Peirce, 1995; Pavlenko, 2002). In contrast, we are still apt to characterize institutions one-dimensionally: A school may be labeled ‘effective,’ ‘empowering,’ ‘oppressive,’ and so on – monolithic characterizations that would certainly prompt criticism as overly simplistic if applied to individuals. However, because institutions are impersonal, somehow these simplistic labels appear more acceptable when applied to institutions. Schools are in fact enormously complex communities that defy simple characterization. Within a school, there are multiple stakeholders who express, and struggle to realize, their visions and desires. Practices that support disadvantaged children and those that are exclusionary often coexist side by side. For example, Gitlin, Buendía, Crosland and Doumbia’s (2003) study highlighted the contradictory nature of school education by documenting a school’s treatment of ESL students: ‘What we found at Kousanar [School] is that the school did not act in a unified way. Some policies, practices, and discursive representations were welcoming and inclusive, while others were unwelcoming and exclusive toward ESL students’ (p. 117). Because at least some of the school policies and practices were welcoming and gave the impression that the school was doing its part to include ESL students, student success or failure was seen as a matter of individual merit (or lack thereof), masking some of the other policies and practices that were exclusionary. Similarly, in this study, I diverge from the approach of most critical ethnographers in my attempt to strike a greater balance between being critical and highlighting the power of human agency to challenge and resist social and educational inequalities. In other words, I align myself with critical ethnographers’ commitment to social justice; a central goal of this study is to reveal the role schools play in a reproduction of class differences by contributing to the linguistic stratification of bilingual students. However, I also take the position that the school constitutes a complex and contradictory sociopolitical milieu, so that no school is entirely empowering or disabling. Unequal power relations that reflect inequality in the larger society coexist side by side with practices that strive to counter it. Viewing the school as a complex sociopolitical milieu and expecting to encounter contradictory policies, practices, and discourses allows an outside researcher such as myself a more nuanced approach that strives to identify systemic injustices that operate in schools while remaining vigilant so as to recognize good practices that take place within the same milieu.

30 Language and Education in Japan

The process In order to capture the range of bilingual education that is available in Japan, I chose five schools that cater to different groups of bilingual children (see Table 2.1 for a summary of school information). • Nichiei Immersion School (grades K–12) offers an early partial English immersion program to Japanese ‘mainstream’ students. • Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School (grades K–9) specializes in the education of the children of Chinese residents in Japan. • Hal International School (grades K–9) caters to the children of Western business and government personnel stationed in Japan and uppermiddle-class Japanese children whose parents wish to provide them with an international education. • Sugino Public Elementary School (grades 1–6) serves a large number of immigrant and refugee children from China and Southeast Asia. Most of these children intend to live in Japan permanently. • Midori Public Elementary School (grades 1–6) has a sizable number of children of South American migrant workers, mainly from Brazil and Peru, the majority of whom intend to return to their home countries after several years. These five schools are all well-known schools that are considered pioneers in the education of bilingual students in Japan. I deliberately chose these ‘model’ schools because I wanted to know what the ‘best’ education that Japan has to offer to bilingual students

Table 2.1 Basic profile of the five schools Grades

Nichiei Immersion Zhonghua Chinese Hal International Sugino Elementary Midori Elementary a

K–12 K–9 K–9 1–6 1–6

Program in place since

Student population

Class sized

1992a 1898 1949 1992b 1990b

538c 383 400 226 896

8–24 20–35 8–25 19–36e 33–40e

The year the immersion program started; b the year the JSL program started; c the number of immersion students from grades K–11. Non-immersion students are not included; d the range is from the smallest to the largest class I observed; e JSL classes are much smaller: typically three to six students.

Framing the Study 31

at this point in history looks like. Thus, the schools included in this study are by no means representative of the kind of education most bilingual children in Japan are receiving; rather, it is a portrait of what may be considered the ‘state-of-the-art’ bilingual education in Japan. I selected the five schools on the basis of information available in academic reports and various media, and also on the basis of recommendations of educators and parents I knew personally and who were knowledgeable about schools that bilingual children attended. The first three schools (i.e., an immersion school, an ethnic school, and an international school) were relatively easy to identify. As long as I consulted people who were members of each bilingual community, it was a straightforward process to find a ‘pioneering’ school in each category since there were not many schools in each category to begin with, and still fewer with an explicitly stated goal of bilingualism. More challenging was finding public schools with a strong commitment to language minority education. I was aware of the names of a dozen public schools with a reputation for a strong commitment to the education of foreign-national children. Not surprisingly, they were located in areas where foreign residents were concentrated. The question was which of these schools to approach. Administrators and teachers in public schools rotate frequently. The fact that one school was reported to be active in the education of culturally and linguistically diverse students one year does not mean that the same education continues the next year. When a new principal arrives, in particular, the whole climate and policies of a school can change in a very short time. I needed to identify schools with a continued and current commitment to linguistic and cultural diversity. For this reason, I consulted three municipal boards of education in areas with a high concentration of foreign nationals. Among their recommendations were Sugino and Midori. I do not claim, however, that the five schools included in this study are the best in their respective categories. Another researcher might choose a different set of schools and claim it to be a better sample of truly pioneering schools of bilingual education in Japan. However, judging from the number of times that these schools’ names have appeared in scholarly reports, national newspaper, and magazine articles, and the number of visitors – teachers and administrators from other schools, university researchers, and policy makers – visiting these schools for observation, I am confident that these five schools are regarded by many as being at the forefront of bilingual education in Japan.

32 Language and Education in Japan

In seeking entry, I was prepared to face a number of rejections. In Japan, when researchers go into schools, they tend to bring in questionnaires and tests (Morita, 2002). Their engagement is short. Few schools are accustomed to ethnographers who stay put. I had assumed that many schools would be reluctant to be subjected to close scrutiny, and it was therefore a pleasant surprise to discover that most schools I contacted were willing to open their doors to me. Of the seven schools I ultimately contacted, five agreed to participate. One school declined, saying that it was in the middle of a major curriculum reform and did not have the time and energy to accommodate an outside researcher. The principal of another school told me that her school was not an appropriate venue for my study since it did not provide a ‘bilingual’ program. The other five schools accepted me readily when I fully explained the project and why I wanted their cooperation. And once they agreed to take part, they were extremely open. Rarely was I declined when I made a request to observe a class or to conduct a personal interview.9 I had no prior connection to any of these schools, and I had to take the utmost care in initiating contact. I first sent a letter – either in Japanese or English depending on which language was appropriate – to the principal of a target school or the director of its bilingual program, inviting the school to participate in the study and explaining why I was interested in the school. Attached to the letter was a brief project proposal and a copy of my curriculum vitae. A few days after sending my letter, I followed up by calling the school and speaking to the principal or the program director. Usually, this first phone call led to the first face-to-face meeting at the school. At Nichiei, my initial negotiation was entirely with the director of the immersion program, because he was the one who ran the program. At Hal International, I presented my project to the steering committee (consisting of administrators, language coordinators, and a few senior teachers), which made most of the major educational decisions for the school. Once I ‘passed’ these initial meetings – every time I went to one of those meetings, it felt like a test to me – they were willing to let me into their world. My fieldwork took place from May 1999 to June 2001. I spent 9–19 days at each school over the course of two to four months (see Table 2.2 for a summary of my fieldwork). Each visit was typically a full-day visit: I generally arrived around 8 am and stayed until 4–5 pm. At each school, I observed classes in each grade as well as pullout classes such as JSL classes. I interviewed teachers, administrators, and bilingual instructional aides, and collected relevant documents such as lists of teachers, student demographics, timetables, school newsletters, and class handouts. I was able to interview 8–20 parents at each site, except

Framing the Study 33 Table 2.2 Summary of the fieldwork Name of school

Type of school

First negotiation of entry

Period of fieldwork

Number of visits

Nichiei Immersion Immersion School

02/26/99

05/15/99–07/03/99

9

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

Ethnic

09/25/99

09/28/00–12/17/99

9

Hal International School

International

10/21/99

01/13/00–03/31/00

19

Sugino Elementary School

Public

10/14/00

10/16/00–02/08/01

10

Midori Elementary School

Public

05/29/01

06/11/01–06/27/01

10

for Sugino.10 Formal interviews with students were also conducted, and some of the comments the students, especially the older ones, made were very revealing. However, because of their young age, they often had difficulty abstracting information from their daily experiences when placed in a formal interview setting.11 In such cases, much more informative were the informal conversations I had with them during lunch, recess, and after school. Because these conversations took place in their natural surroundings and were in the present, what the students spontaneously said to me and to one another better reflected who they were and how they perceived their environment. Teachers were extremely open and accommodating. Practically everyone I approached found time in their busy schedules to sit down and talk to me. I found most of them candid in expressing their views on the education that took place in their school and sharing their experiences. Their intensity surprised me. They did not mince words, even when they had a tape recorder rolling in front of them. But of course, no matter how accommodating the staff may be, as an ethnographer, one always feels like an intruder. For the whole time I was on site, I was intensely conscious of my outsider status and was constantly monitoring myself to be on my best behavior. I greeted everyone I met cheerfully but politely. In the staff room, I made sure that the chair I sat on was not meant to be occupied by someone else that day. I ate school lunch when

34 Language and Education in Japan

it was offered to me even when it was not particularly tasty (although, surprisingly, it was often very good). In observing classes, I developed a reflex to predict the teacher’s movement and could almost instinctively move out of his or her way. I wore shoes with rubber soles so as not to make any noise when I moved about in the classroom. In observing their classes, I was largely a non-participant, sitting at the back of the room and taking detailed notes. Children were very curious to see what I was scribbling so furiously and often came up to me during recess to look at my notebook. I believe that teachers were equally curious but they were more restrained in expressing their curiosity. When activities were individual- or group-based, I was free to circulate around the room and interact with individual students. Often, teachers enlisted me as their teaching assistant – all of the schools had visitors on a regular basis and teachers were adept at turning them into makeshift instructional aides. Whenever such an opportunity arose, I relished the role since it gave me a chance to work with individual children and learn what the lesson looked like from their perspective. When the teacher stayed in his or her classroom and ate lunch with the students, which is a common practice in Japanese schools, I sat among the children and ate lunch with them. Videotaping was generally not done because I was moving frequently from one classroom to another, and teachers preferred a minimum of intrusion in their classes. The fact that an outside researcher was there taking notes was already enough of a distraction for the children (some teachers told me that the children were a little more ‘wired’ than usual when I was there), and bringing in a camcorder would have been even more so. The only exception was Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School, where I had a research assistant videotape two days’ worth of Chinese-medium classes because my Chinese is too elementary to absorb detailed information in these classes. I was later assisted by a Chinese doctoral student specializing in language education in analyzing these tapes. I should also say a few words about my identity in relation to the teachers and students in these schools, since how they perceived me had a bearing on what they chose to share with me. I am a Japanese L1/English L2 speaker. I used both languages at Nichiei and Hal, and mostly Japanese at the other three schools. I studied Chinese briefly in preparation for my fieldwork at Zhonghua, and what little I learned was extremely useful (and since Japanese uses Chinese characters, I was able to make sense of much of the written Chinese I saw in the school, especially in the early grades). But in that school, I relied mostly on

Framing the Study 35

the participants’ ability to speak Japanese and also on the Chinesespeaking research assistant’s translation of Chinese-medium classes that I videotaped. At the beginning of the fieldwork, I was affiliated with a Japanese university, and in the first two schools (Nichiei and Zhonghua), my main identity was that of a researcher from a Japanese university. By the time I arrived in the third school (Hal), I had become an adjunct instructor at the Tokyo branch of an American university. At Hal, where both teachers and students categorized themselves in terms of their L1, my identity as Japanese and a Japanese speaker was much more pronounced than my affiliation with an American university. In contrast, my identity as a professor from an American university – although at that time I hardly felt like one, based as I was in Tokyo – was an object of curiosity and attention at Sugino and Midori. Teachers would say, ‘Everyone, you can ask Kanno-sensei what schools are like in America,’ (and I would inwardly say, ‘Great, I have never attended one’) and children would ask me to pronounce some words in English. After each school visit, I wrote my field notes immediately. Lareau (2000) confesses that during her ethnographic work for her doctoral dissertation, she sometimes fell behind in writing up her field notes: Writing up field notes immediately is one of the sacred obligations of field work. Yet workers I have known well all confessed that they fell behind in their field notes at one time or another. Researchers are human: – we get sick; we have an extra glass of wine; we get into fights with our spouses   ; or we simply don’t feel like writing up field notes immediately after an interview or a participant-observation session. (p. 216) I entirely agree with Lareau that writing up field notes after a long day of fieldwork is a definite challenge; there are certainly many other things that one would rather be doing – many other things one needs to be doing because so much of one’s time is already taken doing fieldwork. I found fieldwork itself utterly exhausting: The schools I studied were not necessarily conveniently located in relation to my home and I often had to wake at 5:30 am to get to the school by 8 am; then I would have a whole day of meeting new people, interviewing and observing, being on my best possible behavior, avoiding getting in the way of teachers, and trying not to miss anything of critical importance. Moreover, during the fieldwork, I was sick all the time: visiting elementary schools brought

36 Language and Education in Japan

me into contact with all kinds of viruses that my immune system was not trained to deal with, and I found myself nursing a minor illness of one kind or another all of the time. Nevertheless, I did write up my field notes immediately after my fieldwork – every time. I had learned from my own dissertation work (Kanno, 2003b), that even one day of delay significantly alters what I can recall and negatively impacts the quality of field notes I can write. For this work, therefore, I disciplined myself to write and complete my field notes by the end of the day of the fieldwork at the latest – this was one rule I had promised myself never to breach in otherwise very flexible and evolving ethnographic work. I often started writing on the train home, precariously balancing my computer on my lap and typing furiously on the keyboard, and continued when I got home. Data analysis took place largely in three stages. The first-level analysis was intermingled with description. When I wrote my field notes, my focus was primarily on recording a detailed description of my observation. But I also wrote down my initial interpretations of the events I observed. This preliminary analysis helped identify what I still needed to observe and whom I needed to interview at the site. Second, every time I completed my fieldwork at one school, I reread all of the data that I had collected and took notes on the prominent themes that emerged. This second-level analysis became the basis on which I wrote a report that I sent to each school. Third, after I had completed all the fieldwork, I started a more formal coding. Using the constant comparative method of data analysis (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), that is, constantly comparing a data unit against another to see if they can be grouped together to form a meaningful category, I extracted a set of themes that characterized each school. While discovering general patterns was a central task, it was also important at this stage to identify contradictions and exceptions. Given that one of my goals was to capture a complex picture of each school, when contradictory remarks were made by two parties, for instance, it was critical not to smooth them over by adopting one and ignoring the other, but to note both as competing views. Also, identifying exceptions and asking why such exceptions existed – for example, when disruptive language minority students were generally viewed negatively by classroom teachers but a few got away with misbehaving by being perceived as ‘cute’ – helped refine the general patterns I was constructing. This within-case analysis was followed by a cross-case analysis (Merriam, 1998). Data for each school were coded separately, but because of my particular focus in this study and because they were all schools, many

Framing the Study 37

common themes across the five cases emerged: Themes such as bilingualism, regular classes, student identity, Japanese teachers/non-Japanese teachers, and parents/home appeared across the board. The main task in the cross-case analysis was to identify local variations within each common theme and to consider how these local variations were related to the central concepts in my theoretical framework, that is, imagined communities, cultural/linguistic capital, and cultural reproduction. In other words, while much of the within-case analysis concerned itself with the generation of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), at the stage of the cross-case analysis, the focus was more on the interaction between the top-down and bottom-up analyses, that is, an examination of how the categories that emerged from the grounded theory ultimately helped answer the theoretical questions I posed in the study. In this book, the names of people, schools, and places have been changed. I also have eliminated a number of identifiers in order to further protect the confidentiality of the participants. However, it is important to acknowledge that because of the uniqueness of their programs, it is almost impossible to entirely hide the real identities of the schools involved. Some of the schools are easily recognizable to those who know them. This point was explicitly brought up when I negotiated entry with each school, and it was with the understanding that such a risk was involved in participating in this project that each school agreed to cooperate. I nonetheless use pseudonyms, first of all in order to protect the participants’ confidentiality to the extent that I can, but also to make a point that it is not the actual identities of the schools that matter but the ideals and realities of bilingual education that these schools represent.

3 Nichiei Immersion School

Nichiei Immersion School is a private school that offers a K–12 early partial English immersion program (K–8 at the time of my fieldwork). The immersion program is paired with a regular (i.e., non-immersion) program. The majority of the immersion students are native Japanesespeaking children who have never lived abroad and come into the program with little or no English proficiency. The students in grades 1–2 receive approximately two thirds of the instruction in English (math, science, social studies, music, fine arts, physical education, and computer) and one third in Japanese (language arts). In grade 3, music is switched to Japanese, taught by a specialist. From grade 4, social studies and fine art are added to the Japanese component, bringing the proportion of Japanese instruction up to approximately 50 percent (see Figure 3.1). The immersion students use an English translation of the textbooks that the students in the regular program use. After the completion of each unit, students in both programs are given the same test in Japanese. The school has the atmosphere of a private school. To me, it looks much warmer than the cold, nondescript public schools that I attended as a child, although the buildings themselves are not particularly luxurious. Its warmth has to do with the well-kept flowerbeds that line the buildings (there are bilingual signs that say both ‘summer’ and ‘natsu’ [summer]), the open-plan structure inside (many of the classrooms are about twice the size of regular classrooms in public schools, and some of the rooms have an irregular shape), the carpets – a bit threadbare – on the floors, and the displays of student works in the hallways and in the classrooms. Many classrooms, especially the English rooms, look more like classrooms in North America, with displays, books, cushions on the floor, and reading corners. Dr. Harry McKenzie, the Immersion Program 38

Nichiei Immersion School 39

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

G ra de 1 G ra de 2 G ra de 3 G ra de 4 G ra de 5 G ra de 6 G ra de 7 G ra de 8 G ra de 9

0%

Japanese

English

Figure 3.1 Percentages of Japanese and English instruction at Nichiei Immersion School

Director, told me that the classrooms in the non-immersion program are more like regular Japanese classrooms, but that immersion teachers tend to organize their rooms in ‘Western style.’ The class size in the immersion program is officially 20–25 students per class, which is quite small compared with the maximum of 40 students per class in public schools. However, English classes in the early grades are often even smaller. Because there are two or three immersion teachers in grades 1–3, they often split a class into two or three groups depending on the activities. Some classes are as small as eight students, allowing individual attention for each student. For each grade, one or two immersion teachers and one Japanese teacher constitute a teaching team. Immersion teachers come from English-speaking countries around the world, such as the United States, Canada, England, Australia, and New Zealand. Although most immersion teachers are native speakers of English, the school does not limit the positions to native speakers. One Japanese woman who received her PhD from an American university is teaching as an immersion teacher. Immersion teachers speak only English to students, and Japanese teachers only Japanese. Although in the prototypical immersion program, teachers are bilingual (Swain and Johnson, 1997), nonJapanese teachers at Nichiei possess varying degrees of Japanese language proficiency. The program director, Dr. McKenzie, is quite proficient in

40 Language and Education in Japan

Japanese (e.g., he can hold a parent orientation meeting in Japanese) although his use of keigo (the formal and honorific register) is a little inconsistent at times. But some teachers speak virtually no Japanese. Most Japanese teachers are at least conversational in English – necessarily so, since they often act as intermediaries between immersion teachers and parents. The program started in 1992, partly in order to boost the declining student enrollment and partly out of frustration with the existing English program. Nichiei had always been known for its strong English curriculum and attracted parents who wanted to place an emphasis on English in their children’s education. Dr. McKenzie believes that the fact that there was already a good foundation in English education contributed to the ultimate success of the immersion program. But as Dr. Takahiko Matsumoto, the president of the school put it, ‘After six years [of learning English], or even starting in kindergarten, students could not read the newspaper, could not understand the radio    And I asked myself, “What kind of English proficiency is that?” ’ Dr. Matsumoto thus formed a committee to investigate various bilingual programs in the United States, and after he visited an immersion program in Oregon himself, he was sold on the idea. He immediately decided to launch a similar immersion program in his school. From a management perspective, he was taking a high risk: Although he and his team conducted meticulous research on immersion education and visited several programs in the United States, there was no guarantee that such a program would work in an entirely different sociocultural and educational context such as Japan. What if, say, after a few years, the whole idea collapsed? However, according to Dr. McKenzie, Dr. Matsumoto ‘likes innovation. And he likes to be the first one. So the chance to be the first immersion school in Japan was also pretty tempting for him.’ That was October 1991, and Dr. Matsumoto decided that the first immersion class would start the following April.12 Students for the next grade 1 class had already been accepted. When the idea of starting an immersion program was first announced, the staff had strong reservations. ‘There was, basically, just dead silence,’ recalled Dr. McKenzie. But after all, Nichiei is a private school and it belongs to Dr. Matsumoto, and thus he forged ahead with his plans. According to Dr. McKenzie: When we came [to talk to the staff], it wasn’t to ask them their thoughts on this. We came to say, ‘This is what we’re going to do.

Nichiei Immersion School 41

Harry is going to explain what the program is. And we’re going to do this from April. Does anybody have any questions?’ (IN 05/15/99)13 Such a unilateral decision-making style runs the risk of failing to secure the necessary cooperation of the staff in a Japanese context. But what prevents this strong-willed president from being perceived as too dictatorial is his long-term vision and willingness to take risks, which seem to command respect from his staff. When I asked Ms. Kozue, a veteran Japanese teacher who has seen the evolution of the immersion program from its inception, what she liked about working at Nichiei, she thought about it for a moment and then said: That the president likes new things? (laughter) He has an ability to see far ahead. He was bold enough to bring in and implement this strange thing called immersion seven, eight years ago when nobody had heard of it. So that’s exciting. [Kanno: Do you think he is a visionary?] I do. People working under him have a tough time, though, because he comes up with ideas, but it’s us, the homeroom teachers and immersion teachers, who actually execute. So that’s the challenging part. (IN 06/29/99 J)

‘Children must be international!’ Since Nichiei was the first school to start an English immersion program in Japan, it has attracted a great deal of media attention. Most of these media reports emphasize the ‘English-speaking’ students and the ‘international’ atmosphere of the school. One magazine article notes, ‘By the first year in junior high school, the students speak English like native speakers. They answer teachers’ questions as eagerly as Western students’ (my translation). It is this international image of the program, in addition to the promise of high English proficiency, that attracts prospective parents to the program in the first place. The rhetoric of ‘preparing children for the 21st century,’ although a cliché, was frequently mentioned when I asked a group of parents about their reasons for choosing the program. They noted that they hoped being in this school would help their children become more appreciative of different cultures. ‘Children must be international!’ declared one assertive mother. At the same time – and this is where the idea of imagined communities comes in with regard to this story – Nichiei parents expect their children to advance to Japanese universities, rather than universities abroad, and to pursue their careers in Japan-based organizations. In other words,

42 Language and Education in Japan

parents expect their children to become global players but at the same time to remain firmly grounded in Japanese society. As such they like the fact that their children can receive instruction in English within the larger context of a Japanese school. As Dr. McKenzie said: Parents here don’t want an international school. They want a Japanese school that gives their children some proficiency in English and a more open-minded sense of the world. They are not looking for their children to become little foreigners, you know. (IN 05/15/99) The school’s priorities, thus, are Japanese literacy and knowledge of subject matter; English is not meant to be learned at the expense of Japanese. Dr. McKenzie explained: The initial years, the program was really more focused on making sure that students’ academic – they had academic achievement in place, because the parents could never evaluate a program as being successful if we didn’t. That’s sort of basic. If we’re not doing math, then, they’d be pulling their kids out of the program. (IN 05/15/99) The curriculum is carefully planned to ensure that the students will learn what members of Japanese society need to know in addition to developing a sense of international understanding and a high-level proficiency in English. For example, it was decided that music will be taught in Japanese when it becomes an independent subject in grade 3, because the parents wanted to make sure that their children would learn standard ¯ Japanese children’s songs. A grade 6 teacher, Mr. Ota, recalled, ‘Parents expressed their preference. They said that they’d hate to see their children grow up to be Japanese adults who do not know standard Japanese children’s songs.’ What the parents were expressing in this request was their imagined communities for their children: The children are to grow up to be members of Japanese society, and for that there are certain aspects of Japanese culture that need to be learned and assimilated. The fact that the immersion program is paired with a non-immersion program also helps to ground the immersion program solidly in the Ministry of Education approved curriculum and offers a sense of security to the parents. However, there are certain disadvantages to the dual track model. Having two parallel programs naturally creates a sense of in-group and out-group among the students and divides them socially (although, remarkably, not among the staff). Also, although a large portion of instruction within the immersion program takes place in

Nichiei Immersion School 43

English, the program is housed in a Japanese school. Once the immersion students step out of the program, they are surrounded by Japanese within the school, which, to use Dr. McKenzie’s words, ‘dilutes the message’ that they ought to be learning and using English. Tarone and Swain (1995) have noted that immersion classrooms often turn into a diglossic situation in which the target language serves academic functions and students’ L1 becomes the vernacular code for social interactions. One would assume that having almost all extracurricular activities such as activity clubs and the track and field day happening in Japanese only exacerbates the diglossia because it highlights to the immersion students that English does not have a social function outside of their program in this school. Nonetheless, making the immersion program run parallel to the non-immersion program keeps it from becoming a non-Japanese program, which would be unacceptable to the parents.

Hands-on instruction Long before immersion was implemented at Nichiei, the school was known for its student-centered and hands-on education. The handson, experiential education is what characterizes the regular (i.e., nonimmersion) program at Nichiei, and even in the immersion track the focus on creativity and individualization has considerable allure for the parents. A mother I interviewed who has a child in the kindergarten said that when she came to an open house, she saw children making necklaces with macaroni: This may be something quite natural for Westerners, but it just doesn’t occur to most Japanese to use macaroni for making a necklace. But once you see it done, it makes sense: Macaroni has a hole in it and you can string them together. So I wanted my child to learn to see the essential nature of things, not to be confined by fixed ideas, a child who can take a piece of macaroni and see something else. (FN 05/18/99 J) Nichiei’s educational philosophy is Piagetian. The term used at Nichiei to describe the school’s focus on hands-on instruction is gutai s¯osa, or concrete operations, a stage in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, in which a child learns to apply logic to solve concrete, observable problems but not yet to abstract or hypothetical problems (Wadsworth,

44 Language and Education in Japan

1989). Because the elementary school years (ages 6–12) roughly correspond to the stage of concrete operations (ages 7–11), the school’s philosophy is to provide children with opportunities to engage with concrete, hands-on activities. Thus, when first graders learn about butterflies in Japanese language arts, they do not simply read the textbook and go through comprehension questions. Rather, they make models of butterflies and flowers out of colored construction paper and learn with their body how they fly and feed: As Ms. Kozue reads aloud a passage in the textbook, she asks the children to act out the description. For instance, when she reads, ‘The butterfly is perched on the red flower,’ the children put their butterfly on the red flower on the model [they created with colored construction paper]. The description is fairly technical. When a butterfly sucks honey from a flower, it extends its tube but when it flies again, it recoils the tube, and the children act this out with the tube of their butterflies, made of pipe cleaners. Inevitably, some of the pipe cleaners are not glued securely and some come off. When that happens, the children look rather upset. (FN 05/29/99) This focus on experiential learning – another one of Dr. Matsumoto’s ideas – permeates the immersion program and serves as a foundation on which to build immersion education. For it is well known that visual cues and concrete contexts help make linguistic input comprehensible, which in turn aids second language acquisition (Echevarria, Vogt and Short, 2000; Krashen, 1985). Had Nichiei exercised a more traditional, teacher-centered model of instruction, the implementation of the immersion program would have necessitated not only the change in the language of instruction but a radical shift in instructional methods. The fact that the student-centered, hands-on approach to education was already firmly in place in the education at Nichiei, Dr. McKenzie said, facilitated the transition to immersion. Nevertheless, visual aids, gestures, and concrete activities go only so far in making input comprehensible to five-year-olds who enter the program with zero English. Moving lessons along while maintaining classroom order in an L2 poses an enormous challenge to immersion teachers, especially in early years when there is yet so little L2 knowledge base on which to rely. Immersion teachers in early grades therefore sometimes have to present their relationship with their children in more black-and-white terms than they wish. In a kindergarten class,

Nichiei Immersion School 45

Ms. White, the lead teacher, employs a happy/sad face approach to discipline: When a child misbehaves and does not respond to Ms. White’s warning, she puts a ‘sad face’ in his pocket [there is a clear plastic wall hanger in front of the room with a pocket designated to each child], calling out in a slightly scornful ‘that’s-a-shame’ tone of voice: ‘Takuya, sad face!’ Since happy faces are pink and sad faces orange, one can immediately tell how many happy and sad faces each child has received. When a child has accumulated three sad faces, she is to sit in a corner for a timeout. Three happy faces, on the other hand, gets the child a candy. During my observation, one boy got three sad faces and he was put in the corner chair facing the wall for a couple of minutes of timeout. Although it was a very short time, its intent was clear to the child and he started to cry in shame. (FN 05/18/99) Ms. White later said to me, ‘This is all against what I believe in.’ At the same time she acknowledges that given the communication barrier between herself and the children, this is a simple system that sends a clear message to them about what is and is not acceptable behavior.

Listening to English, speaking Japanese The Nichiei immersion program produces students who have high receptive skills in English coupled with somewhat weaker speaking and writing abilities. According to an extensive quantitative study Dr. McKenzie conducted, the fourth year immersion students’ receptive English skills on average approximated those of second graders in the United States: 2.5 for reading (meaning, the equivalent of US second graders in their fifth month of second grade) and 2.9 for listening. This is a remarkable achievement considering that their exposure to English is limited mostly to within the program and that the program itself is partial immersion. In terms of speaking, however, they were rated as limited English speakers in relation to English speakers of their age: Their speech exhibited a number of grammatical errors and incomplete mastery of basic structures, although they were able to communicate their intended message. These results are consistent with past studies of immersion education, which too have found that students in immersion programs tend to approach native-like proficiency in receptive skills but not in productive skills (Genesee, 1995; Lapkin, Swain and Shapson, 1990; Swain, 1997). It was interesting,

46 Language and Education in Japan

however, to observe qualitatively how such competence develops over time and how teachers strategize their instruction in order to accommodate the students’ proficiency at each level. In kindergarten and first grade immersion classes, the assumption is, as Ms. Kozue puts it, ‘None of what I am saying [in English] is understood.’ As such the teachers use a variety of techniques to make verbal input comprehensible (Krashen, 1985). The happy and sad face system that I described above is one such strategy; in addition, teachers make extensive use of routinized discourse patterns and class structures as well as scaffolding their interaction with the children so that the latter can respond in a more or less ‘fill-in-the-blank’ fashion: [On a Saturday morning, the first-graders] get together with Ms. Rogers and they do the usual ‘Good morning, Ms. Rogers,’ ‘Good morning, Children’ routine. Ms. Rogers sings out, ‘Where is Emi? Where is Tomoki?’ to which children respond with ‘Here I am.’    Ms. Rogers is focusing on numbers, days of the week, and months in this homeroom session. She reads aloud days of the week, and says, ‘Goodbye, Friday. Hello, Saturday.’ And then she shifts to the weather. She sings out, ‘How’s-the-wea-ther?’ to which children automatically sing back, ‘I-t’s-sun-ny,’ in unison. Ms. Rogers laughs at this automatic response and says, ‘It’s not sunny today, a little bit cloudy,’ and repeats the same routine. This time, the children manage to say, ‘It’s cloudy.’ Then they go over the three requests, ‘May I get a drink of water, please?’ ‘May I go to the bathroom, please?’ and ‘May I go outside, please?’ (FN 05/29/99) The first graders’ initial automatic response ‘It’s sunny’ to Ms. Rogers’s question about the weather when in fact it is cloudy indicates that at this stage, the children are not fully processing the meaning of the teacher’s message; rather, they are simply responding to the routine that has been established. In the initial stages of learning, immersion teachers rely heavily on such routinized discourses so that they can at least have some semblance of dialogue in English with their students. To these routines, individual variations (e.g., ‘It’s cloudy’) are gradually introduced to make the interaction more meaningful. By third grade, students are able to follow the whole-class instructions competently, but not yet individualized directions. For example, in one class, third graders were starting to prepare for a session of readers’ theater. Some of the instructions the teacher, Ms. Evans, gave were fairly complex for this level: for example, ‘Go get a yellow crayon and a

Nichiei Immersion School 47

regular pencil.’ But when the directions were given to the whole class, everyone immediately followed them. However, when the directions were individualized, as in when Ms. Evans assigned roles and told each child to highlight their part, some children had difficulty following her, and she spent close to 30 minutes on this task. This suggests that some of the students at this stage of development follow the whole class instructions by observing and imitating others rather than processing linguistic input. By fourth or fifth grade, however, students handle both whole-class and individualized instructions with ease and accuracy. When I observed a Grade 4 math class, the speed with which the students processed numbers in English was particularly impressive – after 25 years of speaking English, I still do all my math in Japanese. The teacher, Mr. Honoré, had his students play a game using the concept of rounding: Mr. Honoré gathers all the children in front, divides them into five groups, and tells them to line up. The students follow his directions and line up in front of the blackboard. Obviously they have done this game before since there is no confusion about what to do and the students get ready very fast. They are very excited. The task is to round the numbers which Mr. Honoré reads aloud and to write their answers on the board as quickly as possible. The teacher starts with a two digit number – ‘Rounding to the nearest 10. “Thirtyfour!” ’ – works up to 10,000, and then goes back to 10. In my head I try to calculate as fast as the students but cannot possibly compete. The students do this with lightening speed, so fast that sometimes Mr. Honoré cannot tell which group got it first, and the children complain that he got the order wrong. When told to round to the nearest 100, a clever student writes ‘00’ on the board in advance, and others follow suit. Mr. Honoré laughs and tells them to erase the 0s. (FN 05/18/99) Producing English, however, is another matter. Most of the media coverage on Nichiei’s immersion program emphasizes how much English students speak; observing many classes across grades, I was surprised by how little English they actually spoke. Several teachers point out that students are reluctant to pronounce English words clearly for fear of making a mistake and embarrassing themselves in front of others. When I said that I am doing a study of bilingual schools in Japan, Ms. Mishima, who is the only Japanese person serving as an immersion teacher, remarked, ‘I don’t think this is a bilingual school. I feel like

48 Language and Education in Japan

I am in a Japanese immersion school,’ noting that most of the time she is the only one in the class speaking English. There are mainly three strategies that students use to avoid or minimize the speaking of English. One is to respond to the teacher’s questions in Japanese. The following is an example of this strategy: In this situation, Mitsuru, a third grader, has been given a timeout by his immersion teacher, Mr. Jones. While other students are doing math problems, Mitsuru is told to observe and draw a picture of a plant. Several times, he attempts to get Mr. Jones to lift the timeout by claiming that he has finished the task. Mr. Jones from a distance calls out: Jones: Mark the height [of the plant]. Mitsuru: E? (Huh?) J: Estimate the height. M: Kore? (This?) [pointing to the plant.] J. Yes. (FN 06/07/99) Both carry on this bilingual conversation matter-of-factly. Towards the end of the class, Mitsuru complains, ‘Mr. Johhn-zoo, Finish-shitansukedo’ (I’m finished), to which Mr. Jones responds unfazed, ‘No, you haven’t finished.’ Obviously, each understands the other perfectly but will not budge out of his own linguistic territory. In this case, Mr. Jones speaks enough Japanese to understand what Mitsuru is saying. But children speak Japanese to immersion teachers regardless of whether the teachers understand Japanese or not. One could say that they are in fact emulating the behavior of their teachers. For the immersion teachers speak English to their students from the very beginning, with a hope that with the aid of enough contextual cues, gestures, and visuals, they will somehow get their message across. The children on their part seem to be implicitly saying, The teachers speak their language and expect us to understand; well, why can’t we do the same? The other two strategies that immersion students frequently employ in order to minimize the use of English are to nod or shake their heads in response, and when this does not suffice, to mumble a few words in English. Both strategies were observed in Mr. Austin’s grade 5 English class, in which he was checking students’ workbooks individually: [Mr. Austin] gives encouragements and mild rebuffs: ‘I want you to fix this, this, and this,’ ‘You are doing a good job!,’ ‘Look at this! Not done, not done.’ I am struck by the lack of verbal responses from the students. Most children respond to the teacher with a nod or shaking

Nichiei Immersion School 49

of their head. Occasionally, they say, ‘Thank you.’ Sometimes, they seem to whisper to Mr. Austin, but sitting at the back of the room, I cannot hear what they are saying. All I hear is Mr. Austin’s monologue: It’s rather like listening to one end of a telephone conversation. (FN 06/07/99) Responding minimally in the target language seems to be a common pattern in immersion programs. Swain (1996) writes that in the grade 6 class she observed, only 14 percent of the student talk was longer than a clause. De Courcy (1997) categorized student output in immersion classes into four kinds: (1) answering a teacher’s question; (2) initiating dialogue with the teacher for clarification and soliciting help; (3) doing a presentation in front of the whole class; and (4) being involved in a whole group discussion (p. 54). My observation notes contain a number of examples of answering and presentations. In contrast, there are few instances of initiating dialog and whole-group discussions. Students approach immersion teachers all the time, but they typically address them in Japanese. Students are asked to work or discuss in groups, but they usually speak Japanese. The whole-group discussion, when it happens, is so heavily moderated by the teacher that it practically becomes an exercise in answering the teacher’s questions.14

Japanese classes for developing higher-order thinking skills Unlike in English classes, where teachers do the most of the talking (at least in English), in Japanese classes, students cannot wait to get their turns to speak up. When I followed the same set of students from an English class to a Japanese class, I was struck by the contrast between their hesitant and mumbling voices in the English class and their confident enunciation in the Japanese class. More active participation by the students allows Japanese teachers two luxuries that immersion teachers are denied. First, they can incorporate student input into class activities. For instance, when I observed Mr. Yamazaki’s grade 3 Japanese language arts class, he told the class that he had hoped to do some origami with them that morning but could not find any origami paper in the storage. Just as he was about to propose an alternative plan, a few students told him that the teacher next door, Ms. Morita, usually had plenty of origami paper on hand. Mr. Yamazaki went off to the next classroom and a few minutes later returned with an abundant supply of origami paper. The class then continued with the origami lesson. One does not see this kind of negotiation of activities and

50 Language and Education in Japan

student input in the English part of the program. Because of linguistic constraints, students rarely approach English teachers and give them information they do not know. A second advantage for Japanese teachers is that they are able to ask how and why questions which call for lengthy, elaborate responses. This ¯ is most evident in Mr. Ota’s grade 6 social studies class. He and his students were working on the Nara period (710–784) in Japanese history. ¯ told the class that the width of the central street At one point, Mr. Ota of the Heij¯ oky¯ o capital was 90 meters, and asked why they made such a wide street. The students offered answers such as ‘Carrying materials for the statue of Great Buddha, you need a lot of space. So, that’s why,’ and ‘to show the Emperor’s great power.’ Such elaborate and free articulation of one’s ideas is much less common in English classes. Many of us assume – at least I did – that immersion teachers teach in a student-centered, interactive way, whereas Japanese teachers engage in the traditional chalk-and-talk. In fact, I found the Japanese teachers at Nichiei to be even more student-centered and inquiry-oriented than the immersion teachers. It could be that Japanese teachers, who tend to stay much longer than immersion teachers, have incorporated many of the best immersion practices they have witnessed over the years into their teaching, as Ms. Kozue told me. She said: For example, Canadians or Americans come here, and for them there’s nothing particularly special [about the way they teach], but for me, there are lots of ‘Oh my, is that how you do it?’ moments. So I guess that’s the cultural difference, but it’s really fascinating. There are many things I can incorporate into my language arts class. So to watch them and to incorporate some of what they do into my class is really interesting (laughter). (IN 06/29/99 J) Or perhaps, stereotypes are wrong after all and many Japanese elementary school teachers do promote self-expression and original thinking, as some of the recent studies suggest (Lee, Graham and Stevenson, 1998; Lewis, 1995; Tsuchida and Lewis, 1998). In sum, immersion students are engaged in teacher-centered interaction in English-medium classes in which they see their role as supplying short, phrasal answers whereas Japanese-medium classes demand much more of their higher-order thinking skills and linguistic expression of their logical reasoning. This is not a result of deliberate curriculum planning on the part of the school. Rather, it is a result of the combination of the nature of immersion education, students’ linguistic facility

Nichiei Immersion School 51

and preference, and teachers’ varying levels of teaching skills. Nonetheless, the centrality of Japanese education in this immersion program is consistent with their future trajectories as well as being facilitative of their English acquisition. It is by now widely acknowledged among researchers of bilingual education that a strong foundation in L1 facilitates success in L2 acquisition (Cummins, 1986; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1981; Thomas and Collier, 1997, 2002). It is thus reasonable to assume that the fact that Nichiei immersion students are given plenty of opportunity for cognitive development in Japanese has a positive impact on their English acquisition. But more importantly, that Japanese-medium instruction plays an indispensable role in the students’ cognitive development within the context of immersion education is in line with the school’s and the parents’ vision of imagined communities for their children. If the children are to grow up to become mainstream members of Japanese society, they need to develop sophisticated skills in both oral and written Japanese.

The teacher’s job For each grade, one or two immersion teachers and one Japanese teacher constitute a teaching team. Because of the program setup, no teacher can shut the door behind them and work in isolation at Nichiei: Western and Japanese teachers in the same team need to coordinate their teaching and share information about their students daily. Team-teaching is challenging even when you are working with another teacher who shares a similar linguistic and cultural background and teacher training: Differences in teaching philosophy, values, and personality are likely to surface in such close collaboration and conflicts need to be worked out (Keefe and Moore, 2004). When you team-teach with someone who comes from an entirely different sociocultural and educational background, the challenges are multiplied. One of the recurring conflicts between Japanese and immersion teachers at Nichiei concerns what constitutes a teacher’s job. Japanese teachers note that in Japan, teachers are expected not only to teach subject matter but also to take responsibility for all of a child’s school life. They are to act as a teacher/counselor/nurse all in one. As Ms. Kozue put it: For example, OK, so who looks after the children when they eat lunch? Japanese teachers take it for granted that it is the homeroom teacher’s job – because we saw our homeroom teachers eat their lunch

52 Language and Education in Japan

with us when we were growing up. So we just believe that’s how it is, but immersion teachers tend to say, ‘Why do we have to look after them even when they are eating lunch?’ Also, [they say,] ‘Why do we have to clean the classrooms?’15 They don’t think cleaning is part of their job. When you get down to really small things, like a child not being able to keep his cubby and drawer tidy, if we said, ‘Do you think you can look after that too?’ immersion teachers would say, ‘That’s the child’s responsibility.’ ‘Why should we look after their cubbies? It is their responsibility. If something goes missing or if it breaks, that’s not our concern’ (laughter). For them, what happens outside lessons is the children’s responsibility. (IN 06/29/99 J) How we teach is in large measure influenced by how we were taught when we were students – what Lortie (1975) calls the ‘apprenticeship of observation.’ Both Japanese and immersion teachers draw on their own apprenticeships of observation, which leads to very different ideas of where the boundaries of a teacher’s job lie. The immersion teachers I interviewed generally seem to believe that a teacher’s job is to teach classes and to do it well. Ms. Hanecom, an immersion teacher, who had taught at international schools outside of Japan before she came to this school articulates this belief, which shows a great contrast to the Japanese teachers’ perspective that Ms. Kozue outlined: Rather than spending my time playing outside, I might decide that I want to make more interesting lessons. [In an international school] they’ll probably say, ‘Let the kids play. Let them be themselves. Let them have fun. It’s their time. And it’s our time to relax. So that’s the difference. You see here in the morning, when they come, you see all the [Japanese] teachers playing, and there are very few immersion teachers out there playing, because our time, we show our rapport within the class. That part is different. (IN 06/21/99, original emphasis) There does not seem to be an easy compromise. Ms. Kozue, one of the senior teachers in the immersion program, is sympathetic to the adjustments that immersion teachers have to make. Nonetheless, when it comes to the question of who should adjust, she is unequivocal: ‘I tell them, “This is a Japanese school, so do what is expected.” ’ On the other hand, Ms. Hanecom does not seem to feel guilty about not sharing some of these chores: ‘It’s their [i.e., Japanese teachers’] choice to be playing outside.’

Nichiei Immersion School 53

It is interesting that Ms. Kozue rationalizes the privileging of the Japanese model of teaching on the claim that Nichiei is a Japanese school. While some immersion teachers would contest the teacher’s duties the way Ms. Kozue conceives them, as Ms. Hanekom does, none of them seem to challenge the very notion that this is a Japanese school. Some immersion teachers choose to work for Nichiei precisely because they want to experience a Japanese school. More often than not, however, having to adjust to the culture of a Japanese school becomes a source of fatigue in the long run for many immersion teachers and is one of the central reasons for their high turnover. The average length of employment for immersion teachers is less than two years.16 Because of the high turnover among immersion teachers, the task of long-term curriculum development and the ultimate accountability to students and parents fall on the shoulders of the program director ¯ and Japanese teachers. Mr. Ota, who has been involved in the program from its inception along with Ms. Kozue, seems resigned to playing a supportive role: ‘I believe that one of the major jobs of the Japanese teachers is to create an environment where immersion teachers can concentrate on classroom teaching.’ When I asked him if there is no frustration for Japanese teachers to take on what appears to be more than their fair share of the work, he replied, ‘For the first few years, there was. Of course 50/50 is the ideal, but as I get older, I’ve come to think more recently that, in the larger scheme of things, if the Japanese teachers don’t do that, realistically, the continuation of the program would be difficult.’ However, there is a danger in stretching the goodwill of Japanese teachers, as Mr. Jones points out: The good thing here is that the Japanese staff is very good. I’ve always been impressed by their professionalism. In grade 1, there’s only one Japanese teacher [i.e., Ms. Kozue] and three English teachers    And there, I think, is a real stress factor, stretching the Japanese good will and of course their professionalism. Mariko [Kozue] can do it because she’s like a super being. I’ve hardly met people like that in my career, maybe one or two in 15 years. But the other staff are good, but not that good. When it comes to second grade, third grade, what happens to sixth grade? Forty-eight kids? And no one has really thought about that, and I think we should. And I think it’s unfair for her to take that now. And she’ll make it look reasonably easy, as she always does, but who else is gonna take it? The whole program rests, really, on the good will of the Japanese staff here. (IN 06/21/99, original emphasis)

54 Language and Education in Japan

‘This is a private school’ A refrain one hears in this school is, ‘This is a private school.’ Both the administrators and the teachers are acutely aware that if they cannot sustain a sufficient level of enrollment every year, their jobs will simply disappear. Nichiei tuition fees are higher than those of any other private schools in the city17 : The monthly tuition is 42,500 yen (approximately $350) for the regular program and 62,500 yen ($510) for the immersion program. Thus, as Mr. Ueno, the elementary school principal, noted, ‘Students won’t come [to our school] unless there is something extra, and for a school like us that charges high tuition, that something extra has to be very substantial.’ Hands-on instruction for both the regular and the immersion program, and immersion education for the immersion program (for which the tuition fee is higher than for the regular program) serve as this ‘added value,’ which justifies their high tuition fee. Before my fieldwork, I had assumed that Nichiei competed with international schools for the recruitment of students. But clearly, they cater to a different clientele. Parents who enroll their children in Nichiei are first and foremost expecting their children to become mainstream members of Japanese society, whereas parents who send their children to international schools are seeking a more direct and immediate contact with the international community, especially the Western world. In offering immersion education, Nichiei is trying to differentiate itself, not so much from international schools, but from other private and public schools. That Nichiei charges the highest tuition fees in the city means that in order to send their children to this school, the parents must be at least comfortably middle class, if not upper middle class. The Nichiei parents do not look obviously wealthy. They do not exude wealth in the way many parents at Hal International School do, as I describe in Chapter 5. But every now and then the underlying wealth surfaces. One mother casually mentioned that she has two houses, one in Tokyo and the other near this school; since she did not want to bring up a child in a large city, she and her child had moved to this area, leaving her husband in Tokyo. Nichiei parents are highly education-conscious – they must be in order to choose a still unconventional immersion program for their children – and are eager to be involved in the children’s learning in school. Classroom observations, PTA meetings, and parent-teacher conferences are very well attended (it is, however, almost exclusively mothers who attend these meetings). The mothers that I met seemed, on the whole,

Nichiei Immersion School 55

quite satisfied with the school. They said that they like the individual attention they are receiving from the school: They can always come and observe a class; they are free to contact the homeroom teachers to discuss any issue and the homeroom teachers will contact them if they notice a problem. The mother of a fourth grader said, ‘This is a school you can entrust your child to.’ The way the mothers talked about various aspects of the immersion program suggested that they are very comfortable with the culture and discourses of the school and keep a close eye on the program. Three mothers I interviewed have more than one child in the immersion program, and they shared with me their observations of the evolution of the program. For example, they said that initially the teachers did not teach grammar explicitly; however, upon realizing that the children were not learning enough grammar, they decided to introduce grammar in grade 6 from the second cohort of students on. Now there is an even stronger emphasis on grammar instruction, which currently starts in grade 4. In addition, multiplication was first introduced in English, but now it is introduced in Japanese first. Much of the information these mothers gave me was not new to me; I had heard it in my conversations with the program director and other teachers. But their extensive knowledge of the changes made in the program over the years did tell me that they are deeply involved in their children’s school education – with a sense of both commitment and entitlement. Teachers also seem to assume parents’ active participation in their children’s school education and their coordinating efforts in the home. For example, at the end of one parent-observation class, Ms. Kozue handed back artwork that the children had made. Called a ‘smoky train kit,’ it was based on a story they had read in class. The ‘kit’ consisted of paper cut-outs of a train, logs, a shooting star, a headband with a man’s face on it, and a script. Ms. Kozue told the parents, ‘With this, you can act out the story. So please try it out several times at home.’ Such direct requests for parents to follow up on class instruction at home and to assist with the children’s homework are commonplace at Nichiei and Hal International, suggesting these schools consider parents’ active involvement to be an integral part of their students’ education. In contrast, such requests are noticeably absent in the other three schools serving working-class children. Of course, parents’ active participation in their children’s school education means that the same parents expect the school to accommodate their desires and needs. Nichiei parents do not aggressively

56 Language and Education in Japan

intervene in the school’s policies and practices the way Hal International parents do, which I describe in Chapter 5. But it is nonetheless clear that administrators and teachers are keenly aware of parents’ high expectations for their children’s academic performance and feel the need to respond to those demands. For example, Mr. Ueno, the principal, pointed out: In the Japanese school curriculum, the curriculum guidelines are very demanding even at the elementary school level. Even so, if we don’t bring the students’ academic performance to a certain level, we cannot function as a private school after all. No matter how wonderful our education may be, if our test scores fell below the 50th percentile – that’s the [national] average – the parents would not accept that. So it is necessary to bring our academic performance up to a certain level. (IN 07/05/99 J) In other words, from the parents’ point of view, it is not sufficient for Nichiei to provide immersion education while doing an ‘average’ job, as measured by test scores, in helping the children’s Japanese development and academic learning. The school must provide immersion education and at the same time enable the children to have superior performance in Japanese and academic learning.

Junior high school When children enter Nichiei’s immersion program in kindergarten or in grade 1, it is their parents who make that decision. But it is the children who must accept the consequences of that decision and are faced with the task of learning another language. According to Nichiei teachers, most children enjoy the task when they are young because at that stage it still feels like a game. Indeed, while playing with a puzzle together, I asked a group of first grade girls whether they liked English. Many of them enthusiastically cried out, ‘Eigo daisuki!’ (I love English!). One girl elaborated that she likes the feeling of remembering various words; another girl claimed that while her favorite subject is Japanese, she loves English too. But as immersion students become older and adolescent self-consciousness sets in, and as content learning in an L2 becomes increasingly more complex and demanding, some students begin to question why they are in the ¯ immersion program at all. Mr. Ota, the grade 6 homeroom teacher, noted:

Nichiei Immersion School 57

What comes up often is, ‘Why do we have to do English?’ When they are young, it’s all fun. But eventually the issue of having to deal with both English and Japanese does come up, and in reality some kids start to wonder why they have to learn things in English when it would be much easier to learn in Japanese. About 10 percent of the students think that way; if there are 40 students, maybe 4 or 5. So it is important to take care of these students’ feelings. (IN 07/03/99 J) The reticence to speak English and the avoidance of English, which are present from the very beginning, seem to worsen towards the end of elementary school (grade 6). It is particularly noticeable when one takes into account the verbal energy the same students exhibit in the Japanese side of the program: These are students who are extremely articulate in L1. Their growing reluctance to speak English is consistent with the trend Tarone and Swain (1995) observed in immersion students in North America. They point out that students in the upper primary grades in many immersion programs tend to use less of their L2 than those in the lower grade levels. They attribute it to the fact that immersion students are only exposed to academic registers in the target language and do not learn the slang and informal speech that native speakers of the target language their age use. As students enter adolescence and the desire to use slang and informal speech grows, they become increasingly reluctant to speak the L2 in which they would sound more like teachers than teenagers: Preadolescents and adolescents need a vernacular style as a way of signaling their identities. They tend to mark their identity and identification with one another as adolescents in a number of ways: in their mode of dress, their hairstyles, their music preferences – and their use of vernacular language. It becomes important to most preadolescents and adolescents to present the right image and to ‘talk the right talk.’ (Tarone and Swain, 1995, p. 169) At that age, the last thing they want to do is sound like their teachers. Accordingly, for social interaction they revert to their L1, in which they have access to the age-appropriate vernacular. It is also, I would argue, a question of imagined communities. At the beginning, it is essentially the parents’ and the teachers’ visions of imagined communities for these children that drive their English learning. When they are very young, their desire to please their parents and teachers and the intrinsic enjoyment of engaging in puzzle-like

58 Language and Education in Japan

activities with new sounds and shapes may be enough to sustain their motivation. But eventually they need to recognize the value of learning English for their own future. Norton (2001) argues that ‘a learner’s imagined community invites an imagined identity, and a learner’s investment in the target language must be understood within this context’ (p. 166). However, if the learners are still too young to have concrete images of their future identities (but no longer young enough to be simply satisfied with pleasing their teachers and parents), with their understanding of the connection between their imagined communities and English proficiency even vaguer, it is not surprising that some of them just do not see the point of investing in learning English. Interestingly, however, once they move to junior high school, Nichiei immersion students appear to become more willing to engage in English. When I observed a grade 7 class, I noticed that the students are responding in sentences rather than in words. They are not necessarily formulating complete or accurate sentences, but they are showing more willingness to enter into conversation with their teacher in English. It could be that their teacher, Mr. Burns, is particularly effective at, and insistent on, his students’ using English in the classroom – corroborating a remark that Dr. Mackenzie made earlier about the relationship between a teacher’s effectiveness and students’ willingness to use more English. Students in this class informed me that Mr. Burns is in the habit of drawing five lines on the board at the beginning of the day, and every time he hears Japanese spoken in class, he erases one line. If, by the end of the day all the five lines are gone, the students receive extra homework. The fear of extra homework seems to encourage the students to adhere to English as much as possible. But their restored willingness to speak English may also be related to the choice they have made in remaining in the program at the time of making a transition from elementary to junior high school. If immersion students do not want to remain in the program, a logical point to transfer out is at the end of elementary school (grade 6). In moving to junior high school, these grade 7 students thus had a chance to consider another venue. Approximately 80 percent of the students decided to continue in the immersion track. Henceforth, then, the decision to pursue immersion education had become their own. Dr. McKenzie said that the awareness that they had a choice in the matter this time seemed to make the junior high school students take more responsibility for their own learning of English and hence, more active participation, in English, in the classroom.

4 Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School (grades K–9) is physically a tiny school. Although it houses more than 300 students, it has only one dilapidated five-story building with a small additional center for kindergarten. Both the classrooms and hallways are packed with students. On the floors with the younger graders, in particular, you need considerable physical dexterity to dodge kids who come shooting your way. They bump into each other with alarming force – both boys and girls – but as far as they are concerned, observers like me who look relatively young and are eminently lacking an air of authority are also fair game. Their uncomplicated affection was hard to resist, but it did result in a bruise or two. The school yard is equally small: If you stand in front of the building, you have a view of the entire yard – plus a view of the Japanese elementary school next door. It is customary at this school for students to go outside and participate in a group exercise during the morning recess, but the school yard is so small that elementary and junior high school students have to exercise on alternate days. Historically, ethnic Chinese – along with ethnic Koreans – have been the subject of discrimination in Japan. Zhonghua has served generations of ethnic Chinese students as a sanctuary where they could receive an education without discrimination. Mr. Li Xin, the vice principal of the school told me that the occupations available to Chinese nationals in Japan before 1972, the year of the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations, were represented by ‘three knives’: the cook’s knives, the hairstylist’s scissors, and the tailor’s scissors. ‘Whether you had a university degree – an English major or an Animal Husbandry major or whatever – you ended up in a Chinese restaurant,’ he said. Now, while discrimination against the ethnic Chinese still certainly exists, there is a growing recognition in mainstream Japanese society of the increasingly powerful 59

60 Language and Education in Japan

presence of China in the global economy and the market value of the Chinese language. Accordingly, Zhonghua graduates are now penetrating into the professional world, their Chinese and Japanese bilingual proficiency much in demand. Also, some Japanese parents who have no connection to China or ethnic Chinese now want to place their children in Zhonghua because they see Chinese language proficiency as ascending linguistic capital, much in the same way Nichiei parents enroll their children in the English immersion program. Although a majority (60 percent) of the student population at Zhonghua are still children of ‘old-timer’ ethnic Chinese – by now in their fourth and fifth generations – 30 percent are ‘newcomer’ immigrants from mainland China and Taiwan, and the remaining 10 percent are ‘mainstream’ Japanese students with no ethnic connection to China. One of the veteran teachers told me that the focus of the school has shifted from ethnic education to language education over the years. A 20-something Ms. Min, the first grade homeroom teacher, who is a graduate of this school, seems mesmerized by the difference between the student population of her time and the composition of the first graders she is teaching: ‘In the old days, China was one China, so we tended to say to our classmates, “Which province are you from?” But now, it’s more like, “Where are you from?” ’ The staff consists of 24 teachers: Six are from mainland China, six are Japanese, and the rest are ethnic Chinese, most of whom are graduates of this school. The class size is roughly comparable to that of public elementary schools: The smallest class I observed had 20 students, the largest 35. But because of the lack of physical space, every classroom feels as if it is packed with children.

Fostering Chinese identity Before I started studying Zhonghua, I had a vague notion that this school catered to Chinese children from mainland China who spoke Chinese as their L1, much like Japanese or American schools abroad. But clearly this assumption was wrong: 70 percent of the students at Zhonghua are Japanese-born and speak Japanese as their L1. One of the central missions of Zhonghua, then, is to foster a strong Chinese identity in the children, the majority of whom have never lived in China and perhaps never will. Many teachers identify strongly with both the local Chinese community and the larger transnational Chinese community and are eager to pass on to the children in their charge a sense of membership in, and responsibility towards, those imagined communities. When I

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

61

asked the principal, Mr. Wu Zhigang, what kind of social contribution he wanted Zhonghua graduates to make, he said: We want them to become the kind of people who can get along in both Japan and China; who, to exaggerate a little, can contribute to both and can participate competently in both countries. In fact – of course, from now on, it’s best if you add English to this – but, the Chinese language is also quite widespread in the world, as you know. You can do the Internet in Chinese. So at the basic level, [we are aiming for] individuals who can participate in the two countries, but in fact I want them to thrive globally. (IN 12/17/99 J) In other words, the educational policy at Zhonghua is radically different from that of Japanese public schools with respect to language minority students. The goal is emphatically not assimilation into the Japanese language and culture; rather its mission is the preservation of the Chinese language, culture, and identity in children who are likely to spend most of their lives outside of China. Their bilingualism is not regarded as a problem as in so many public schools, but rather important linguistic capital that will help them find their place in the world. Maher (1995), in his study of ethnic Chinese in Japan, cites a Chinese teacher who comments, ‘Look, you have to remember that for a Chinese you don’t just stop being Chinese. Even if you change your nationality’ (p. 133). It is this strong, transnational Chinese identity, one that transcends physical location and nationality, that Zhonghua aspires to nurture.

The teaching of Chinese culture The school places a strong emphasis on the teaching of Chinese culture. The program’s emphasis on culture contrasts with a more instrumental approach to L2 learning at Nichiei. At Zhonghua, teaching and learning the Chinese language is motivated by integrative reasons (e.g., affinity with China) as well as instrumental reasons (e.g., advantages in job hunting), and as such the concomitant teaching of Chinese culture is considered critical. Red lanterns, decorations with Chinese motifs, and beautiful photos of China adorn the classrooms and hallways. When I observed classes, fifth graders were singing a song called ‘My Chinese Soul,’ a beautiful tune sung in a minor key. Teachers remind students of the grandeur and superiority of Chinese culture and history at every turn. In a grade 6 language arts class, for example, the teacher

62 Language and Education in Japan

referred to the long history of Chinese civilization in explaining the difference between haojiu and youjiu (both signifying a long period of time). Ms. Wang explained that youjiu connotes a very long time, much longer than haojiu, adding, ‘In China we have 4,000 years of history; that’s youjiu. We cannot say we have a haojiu history.’ The underlying message was unmistakable: You are part of the great civilization with one of the oldest histories and richest cultures in the world. Be proud. Chinese culture is also passed on in the form of stories the teachers tell. In explaining her teaching philosophy, Ms. Wang, a veteran teacher who is originally from mainland China, said: Elementary school children often ask their teachers what their favourite word is. When they ask me, ‘What do you like?’ I tell them I like lotuses and pine trees. They say, ‘Really? Why?’ Well, lotuses live in the mud; they grow in the mud. But even when you spend your whole life in the mud, you stay pure white. So no matter what environment you are in, even if you come in contact with evil, you mustn’t let that contaminate you. So that’s why I like lotuses. ‘Well then, why do you like pine trees?’ Well, life is full of ups and downs, but pine trees, whether it’s hot or cold, through the four seasons, always stand straight and stay green. So for me, I always strive to live like lotuses and pine trees. (IN 12/07/99 J) May (1969) argues that humans communicate in two ways. One is through discursive language, which is specific, objective, and is used to describe facts. The other is through myth: ‘a story which begins in history but then takes on the special character of a way of orienting oneself to reality’ (p. 189). According to May, the myth captures the values of a community and helps individuals ground their selfidentity in those values. Parables and stories that Ms. Wang and other teachers tell their students, then, provide an important means by which Zhonghua students come to identify themselves as Chinese – a socialization process to which Chinese students who attend the regular public school next door, for example, have no access. The principal, Mr. Wu, noted that the school wants to give equal weight to both Chinese and Japanese cultures – after all, his goal is to educate students who can function in both cultures. However, he said, in practice, because the outside world is dominated by Japanese culture, they need to counterbalance it by placing more emphasis on Chinese culture within the school. Mr. Wu argues that this ‘slant’

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

63

towards Chinese culture does not disadvantage Japanese mainstream students who are enrolled in the school: What really impresses me is that – there are a number of Japanese students who have graduated from this school. There are kids who have since gone abroad, kids who have become lawyers. By studying here, they actually become more self-aware that they are Japanese. Not just any Japanese, but hopefully, Japanese who have an appreciation of China. (IN 12/17/99 J) One example of the primacy of Chinese culture over Japanese culture in the school concerns the pronunciation of names. Both Japanese and Chinese use Chinese characters in writing, but the pronunciation of the same character is usually very different, to the point of being mutually unintelligible. In mainstream Japanese society, the standard practice is to pronounce Chinese names in the Japanese way: For example, Mao Zedong is known as M¯o Takut¯o. But inside this school, all student and staff names, including Japanese names, are pronounced in Chinese. Thus, a Japanese student called Suzuki (written as bell and tree) would be called Lingmu. One Japanese parent told me that the first culture shock her daughter encountered when she enrolled in grade 1 was that her name was pronounced in Chinese. She apparently had no idea that the teacher was calling her. This mother added that she found it amusing that although her daughter now has no reservation calling other Japanese students by their ‘Chinese’ names, she still cannot bring herself to pronounce her own name in Chinese.

Traditional instruction The school has a clear vision of what kind of bilingualism it is aiming for. Mr. Li stated that the students’ Japanese proficiency must be comparable to that of mainstream Japanese students; as for Chinese, they are aiming for Level 6 in Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK), the most widely used Chinese proficiency test for non-native speakers. Level 6 is what is required of foreign students to attend arts and humanities universities in China. In other words, ‘We are aiming for the kind of bilinguals who have a complete mastery of each of the four skill areas, listening, speaking, reading, and writing – in both languages,’ said Mr. Li. With these lofty goals in mind, in grade 1, 76 percent of the instructional time is spent in Chinese as opposed to 24 percent in Japanese. All subjects except Japanese language arts and fine arts (whose teacher happens not to speak

64 Language and Education in Japan

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

G ra de 1 G ra de 2 G ra de 3 G ra de 4 G ra de 5 G ra de 6 G ra de 7 G ra de 8 G ra de 9

0%

Japanese

English

Figure 4.1 Percentages of Japanese and Chinese instruction at Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

Chinese) are taught in Chinese. In grade 3, science and Japanese social studies are added to the Japanese component, increasing the proportion of Japanese instruction to 37 percent. By grade 6, the proportion of Japanese increases to 45 percent with an introduction of subjects such as science and Japanese social studies (see Figure 4.1). The instruction at Zhonghua is traditional. Students sit in rows and all face the teacher in front. Each class starts and ends with a ‘qili, jingli, zuoxia’ (stand up, bow, and sit down) routine, the command given by the monitor student18 of the day. Boys have black school bags; girls have red bags. Teachers teach in a teacher-centered, decontextualized manner. In fact, compared with teachers at the other schools, the range of classroom activities that Zhonghua teachers employ is rather limited. The typical instructional routine consists of (1) the teacher lecturing in front and writing a question on the board; (2) the teacher and students reading the question aloud – there is a heavy emphasis on choral reading in this school; (3) the students solving the problem individually while the teacher circulates around the room; and (4) the whole class checks the answer. The teachers do not provide many visual cues except for the Chinese characters they write on the board. One thing most teachers at Zhonghua consistently apply as a result of a recent curriculum reform, however, is what in the West would be called a ‘language across the curriculum’ policy, although Zhonghua teachers

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

65

do not identify it as such. The second-grade math lesson I observed is a good example of this practice: Ms. Ye writes a word problem from the textbook on the board. As soon as she starts writing, the children read it aloud in chorus. After finishing writing the problem, Ms. Ye gets the students to read it again. The problem is ‘On the playground, there are 12 people playing with balls and 18 people jumping rope. How many people are there all together?’    She then asks one student to formulate a slightly different word problem. This student says, ‘How many more people are playing with balls than with ropes?’ Ms. Ye writes this on the board. But this is wrong because there are fewer people playing with balls than those jumping rope. Some students express their disagreement    [One] boy points out that it should be shao duoshao (how many fewer), not duo duoshao (how many more). Ms. Ye then goes over the original statement and has the students read it aloud with her. She asks whether it should be ‘how many more’ or ‘how many less’ and most students shout ‘how many less’. She then asks, in order to ask ‘how many more’, how the first part of the question has to be formulated, and the children tell her without any difficulty that the order has to be reversed. This then becomes a lesson in Chinese as well as a lesson in math. (FN 11/12/99) As this example illustrates, regardless of the subjects they teach, Zhonghua teachers, especially those who teach Chinese-medium classes, are aware that their job is to help students learn language as well as to teach the subject matter. They emphasize choral reading and draw students’ attention to subject-specific vocabulary words. In other words, at Zhonghua, the idea that every teacher is a language teacher is supported and practiced. It is only that many of the teachers do not have a chance to familiarize themselves with the latest methods of language teaching. The instruction at Zhonghua, thus, is on the whole traditional, and from the standpoint of the current theories of L2 language pedagogy, rather outdated. Even so, Mr. Li pointed out that language instruction at Zhonghua today is much more communicatively oriented than before. Six years prior, Zhonghua launched a major curriculum reform whose central goal was to promote better communicative competence in Chinese. The teachers realized that they had not sufficiently supported the linguistic development of students whose exposure to Chinese was limited to their school time. As a result, even after several years, the

66 Language and Education in Japan

students remained reluctant to use Chinese. Mr. Li, who spearheaded the reform, explained: It was exactly the same as English education in Japan: you can listen but cannot speak; you can read but cannot write. Their productive competence was low. Unless you think of it as second language teaching, the instruction doesn’t change. The only way to foster the children’s productive proficiency is to get them to speak    It was not taught as a means of communication. So our starting point was, Let’s put speaking at the center of our instruction. (IN 09/28/99 J) The teachers set out to write their own Chinese language arts textbooks and workbooks that would meet the specific needs of Zhonghua students and trained themselves to incorporate plenty of linguistic practice in every subject. Ms. Ye, who is a graduate and had been teaching at Zhonghua for over two decades, observed that students’ communicative competence has noticeably improved since the curriculum reform: It used to be that we expected students to start speaking Chinese in grade 3. But now some classes start speaking Chinese as early as in the second half of grade 1. They still speak Japanese with one another because of this environment, but in one-on-one interactions with teachers, many first graders speak Chinese quite well. So that’s a major difference from before. (IN 01/19/99 J) Yet, there are many signs that teachers have not entirely made a transition to communicative language teaching in their instruction. Teachers continue to teach in a teacher-centered, decontextualized manner. The new curriculum stresses the importance of cooperative learning and group/pair work. However, during one morning of grade 2 classes I observed, the children were engaged in only 14 minutes of pair work out of 180 minutes; the rest was either teacher talk or student individual work. This was a consistent pattern throughout my observation. Also, while the new curriculum clearly specifies that Chinese-medium classes be taught entirely in Chinese and Japanese-medium classes entirely in Japanese, in reality some teachers continue to mix Japanese words and sentences in Chinese-medium classes. In immersion education, this is generally not a recommended practice since students then tend to wait for translations in their L1 and neglect to try to understand input in

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

67

their L2 (Baker, 2006). Mr. Li acknowledges the gap between theory and practice: There was a time when we used Japanese because we could not communicate with children in Chinese. But we have come to realize that that is wrong. Now [our policy is that] we never use Japanese. But that’s not yet completely enforced, and many teachers still use Japanese. They don’t have the awareness that that is harming the children. (IN 09/28/99 J) The challenge is how to change the linguistic behavior of ethnicChinese teachers who are themselves graduates of this school. Teachers from mainland China have no problem adhering to Chinese in their instruction because it is their dominant language, and Japanese teachers likewise have no problem limiting themselves to Japanese in their classes. But for ethnic-Chinese teachers, their L1 is Japanese although their Chinese proficiency is certainly advanced enough to deliver their instruction entirely in Chinese. More importantly, they are being asked to teach in a way different from the way they had been taught while they were students at Zhonghua. In other words, this is a situation in which the teachers’ ‘apprenticeship of observation’ (Lortie, 1975) clashes with the demands of a new curriculum.

JSL and EFL In addition to offering Chinese-Japanese bilingual education, Zhonghua also provides pull-out JSL instruction to recent arrivals from China, and regular English classes to all junior high school level students (grades 7–9), just like Japanese public schools. The junior high English classes follow the Japanese Ministry of Education approved curriculum and textbooks that are used in regular public junior high schools. The medium of instruction in these classes is Japanese and the teacher is a monolingual Japanese speaker. Compared with instruction in Chinese, which, despite its traces of audiolingualism, is used communicatively by virtue of being used as a medium of instruction and partly because of the curriculum reform the school is forging, JSL instruction and EFL classes appear stuck somewhere between the grammar-translation era and audiolingualism. Both classes rely heavily on mechanical drills. In a JSL class I observed, two students, a third grader and a sixth grader, were working with the JSL teacher, Ms. Wan, on how to form negative sentences. In order to practice the formal

68 Language and Education in Japan

form of the negative, Ms. Wan pointed to her wallet and requested the students to say, ‘Kore wa keshigomu dewa arimasen’ (This is not an eraser) and ‘Kore wa hon dewa arimasen’ (This is not a book). Another common exercise was memorization of short dialogues: Ms. Wan first read the textbook together with the students, had them role play the dialogue, and then told them to close the book and recite the dialogue. Not surprisingly, this kind of mechanical drill does not sustain the students’ interest: By the middle of the second period [these two students had double JSL sessions that day], the kids get quite bored, especially the boy, who fidgets increasingly at his desk and sometimes does not follow the teacher’s instructions to either repeat or recite the dialogue.    When the teacher notices that the kids are a bit tired and bored, she says, ‘Ja, chotto ky¯ ukei shimash¯o – OK, let’s have a short break.’ It is funny that the boy [who arrived in Japan three months ago] knows and reacts to this word immediately, gets excited that he is going to get a break. Kids learn words that are useful to them. (FN 11/22/99) In a grade 8 English class, a similar identical mechanical drill was going on. [Ms. Takahashi] then grabs some objects in the classroom and asks the students to make comparative sentences such as ‘This ruler is longer than that ruler,’ and ‘This book is bigger than that book.’ I wonder how many times in real life situations you would ever say, ‘This ruler is longer than that ruler.’    Ms. Takahashi then gets one tall, solidly built girl to come to the front and tells the class to compare her own height – she is quite petite – and this student’s height. Students find this vastly amusing and there is a lot of laughter. When sending this student back to her seat, the teacher comments in Japanese, ‘We won’t get into which one of us is the more beautiful and all that,’ and one boy responds, ‘It’s hard to say’ – another big burst of laughter. (FN 12/02/99) Although the English class was made more entertaining than the JSL class by the teacher’s wit, the fundamental pedagogical approach employed in both classes was the same: They were both grammar-based and relied heavily on mechanical and isolated drills. Clearly, the communicative language teaching that the school has started to implement in Chinese instruction has not yet reached the school’s JSL and EFL components.

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

69

The use of outdated language teaching methods at this school is due in large part to the school’s isolation from the Japanese education system and the lack of financial resources. As I discuss shortly, Zhonghua is not a Japanese Ministry of Education accredited school and therefore does not benefit from professional development opportunities that teachers at public schools have. As an independent school that receives close to zero support from the Japanese government or any Japanese municipalities (it receives some support from the Chinese government mainly in the area of Chinese curriculum development and recruitment of Chinese teachers), the school has to manage its own curriculum and teacher development. This would not be an impossible task if money were of no concern: Hal International School, which I discuss in the next chapter is also a non-accredited school, but because it is in a position to be able to charge much higher tuition fees, it has a much easier time keeping up with the latest educational theories and providing in-service education in-house. But Zhonghua is poor. Because its resources are limited, the school has so far, wisely, focused on improving its pedagogy in the area that matters most: Chinese-medium instruction.

Active student participation Despite the teacher-centered instruction, many students seem equally fluent in Chinese and Japanese, at least at the elementary school level. Perhaps, the total Chinese environment – unlike Nichiei, the entire school is devoted to giving students maximum exposure to the Chinese language and culture – and the presence of Chinese L1 peers help the development of the collective Chinese proficiency. Perhaps, it is the relative linguistic proximity between Chinese and Japanese: Although grammar differs significantly, both languages use Chinese characters and share many cognates, especially in academic vocabulary. Unlike at Nichiei, where the language of instruction makes a clear difference in the students’ participation level, at Zhonghua the quality of communication in Chinese-medium classes does not suffer noticeably compared with Japanese-medium classes. Students are quite vocal during Chinesemedium classes: They often speak up voluntarily to ask questions, offer comments, and make jokes. Many students speak to each other in Japanese, often with a heavy mixing of Chinese words. In this sense, the diglossia typical of immersion classes that Tarone and Swain (1995) have observed exists in this school as well. But in Chinese-medium classes, the students always speak to the teacher in Chinese. The long and involved discussion between the teacher and students that I observed in a grade 6

70 Language and Education in Japan

history class is quite typical of this school. The topic of the class is Zheng Cheng Gong, a popular 17th-century hero who liberated Taiwan from Dutch occupation, and the teacher, Mr. Liu, is from mainland China: After explaining two battles in which the Dutch were defeated, Mr. Liu asks students whether the Dutch could still live in Taiwan. Four students raise their hands to vote yes, others say no. Liu says, ‘Can you explain your reasons?’ One of the students in the ‘No’ camp says, ‘Because if they live there, they will be killed.’ The teacher then asks the ‘Yes’ group to present their argument. One student offers, ‘They can live there as slaves,’ but this opinion is quickly shot down by others who shout, ‘Who would want to live there [as slaves]?’ Another student points out, ‘But they can still fight again!’ Mr. Liu responds, ‘Yeah, they could. But Zheng would not allow them to fight again.’ But this student insists that the Dutch can still fight from the sea. The teacher finds this idea interesting, and demonstrates the student’s point by holding his attendance book high to represent the Taiwan Island with one hand while moving the other hand around it to imitate the movement of the Dutch boats. A student shouts, ‘They can send a spy to him [i.e., Zheng]!’ Mr. Liu smiles and says, ‘Oh, at that time they didn’t know that they could do that.’ (FN 11/19/99)19 Students who are good at Chinese tend to speak up more in class. This itself is an expected and unremarkable phenomenon. But its significance becomes more apparent when one considers an alternative form of education these children might be receiving. If they were attending a regular Japanese public school, they would most likely be identified as Chinese or ethnic Chinese students, and their language deficiency, rather than their bilingualism, would be highlighted. In contrast, this is a school where Chinese-speaking students can shine. In one class, for example, Qiao Fei, a mischievous and bright second grader aces all the math problems, points out a mistake in Ms. Ye’s writing on the board, and offers sometimes witty and sometimes obnoxious side comments – all in Chinese. The confidence and ease with which he expresses himself in Chinese suggests that he clearly knows that he is recognized as a bright member of the class. If he attended a regular public school, he would not have all these opportunities to exhibit his Chinese proficiency and be recognized for it. The sense of self-esteem that students like Qiao Fei can develop by being in Zhonghua may ultimately be a more important result of their education than their Chinese language proficiency per se. Indeed, when I asked Ms. Ye whether she thought

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

71

that Chinese-origin students should attend Zhonghua if at all possible, she was unequivocal: I think it is better for their future. [Kanno: In what sense?] Here, there is a place for them to shine, in terms of their Chinese language. Also, they won’t forget that they are Chinese. People often talk about ‘cosmopolite (kokusaijin),’ don’t they. But a real cosmopolite is, at least at this stage, we have nations, so for instance, it’s a problem if your last name is Chinese and yet you don’t speak Chinese and you don’t know anything about China.    Especially, if you don’t know the language of your country, I think at a certain age you will face the question, Who am I? (IN 11/19/99 J) Ms. Ye added that many mainland Chinese parents initially tend to enroll their children in Japanese public schools. But after a few years when they realize that their children are losing their Chinese, they transfer their children to Zhonghua: When the father’s business becomes established here and the family gets a financial reprieve, that’s when they suddenly realize that the child is not speaking Chinese anymore. The financial conditions are one factor, but the parents’ psychological state plays a role too: Whether they can actually afford to think of their children’s future makes a difference. Once their business expands, they might have a chance to go back to China, whether it’s for a trip or to visit their relatives. In many ways, you are still connected to China. So if you take all that into consideration, there is this [Chinese] school here, why not send your child here? (IN 11/19/99 J) Again, both of Ms. Ye’s comments reflect the school’s policy to position its students as transnationals ‘who in much of their lives feel more allegiance and affinity to these communities than they do to the national states in which they reside’ (Block, 2006, p. 16). While it is important to ensure that they can function as members of Japanese society given the fact that the majority are likely to spend most of their lives there, Zhonghua teachers consider it equally critical to educate them to be able to continue to participate in the transnational Chinese community. Thus, the imagined communities that Zhonghua envisions for its students are in sharp contrast to the imagined community Japanese public schools such as Sugino Public Elementary School envisions for its Chinese students, as we see in Chapter 6. At Sugino,

72 Language and Education in Japan

Chinese students who share very similar backgrounds and circumstances of immigration to mainland-Chinese students at Zhonghua are positioned as permanent residents of Japan, not as transnational Chinese, and as such they are seen as in need of fast assimilation to the Japanese language and the Japanese education system. While students at Zhonghua tend to use Japanese to speak with one another, they code-still switch quite liberally. The children seem to associate certain categories of words exclusively with Chinese. For example, in my observation, the word Chinese (as in the language) was always referred to as zhongwen, never ch¯ugokugo. Kinship terms also tend to be exclusively in Chinese among younger children. When I observed a group of second graders doing their homework after school,20 one girl said to me, ‘WO no ie dewa ne, WO no GEGE ga ijiwaru surundakedo, MAMA ni okorareruto sugu ¯en te nakuno’ (At home, my elder brother is mean to me, but when Mom scolds him, he just cries wah-wah; Chinese words in capital letters). The multiplication table is another item that is memorized in Chinese. In the same homework session, they were working on an algebra worksheet. Although they were chatting in Japanese, they consistently switched to Chinese when reading the questions and reciting the multiplication table. It was also interesting to observe that they seemed to categorize adults around them as Chinese or Japanese speakers and switched their languages accordingly. They spoke to me in Japanese, having figured out earlier in the day that I did not speak Chinese. But when Ms. Ye, their homeroom teacher, walked in, they switched immediately to Chinese to speak to her. This is in part the result of the school’s careful language policy: No teacher teaches the same set of students in both languages. Ms. Ye, for example, teaches her class of second graders entirely in Chinese. For their Japanese language arts, Ms. Ye’s class gets Ms. Min, the first grade homeroom teacher. In return, Ms. Ye goes to Ms. Min’s first grade class to teach Japanese language arts. In other words, although both Ms. Ye and Ms. Min teach in both languages, their students associate them only with one language or the other: For second graders, Ms. Ye is a Chinese speaker, Ms. Min a Japanese speaker; for first graders, their linguistic identities are reversed.

Education is politics – literally Chinese ethnic schools in Japan are either affiliated with the People’s Republic of China (i.e., mainland China) or Taiwanese Guomindang (Vasishth, 1997). Zhonghua is a mainland-China affiliated school, and

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

73

the vast majority of its Chinese students have ethnic ties with the PRC. But there is another, Taiwan-affiliated, school nearby. While the relationship between the two schools is not openly hostile, it is not warm either. Likewise, the local Chinese community is split into two factions: mainland Chinese and Taiwanese. Although some members of the community, like Mr. Li, wish for more unity in the whole Chinese community, there is considerable tension between the two groups. For example, the mainland Chinese community holds its annual parade on the PRC’s National Day on October 1, while the Taiwanese community holds a separate parade a mere 10 days later on October 10, Taiwan’s Double Tenth National Day. The ambivalence that each community holds towards the other – on one level they are all Chinese within the context of Japan, and on another level there is a clear rift between the two communities – as well as the larger political tension between mainland China and Taiwan is reflected in the daily experience of Zhonghua children. It sometimes manifests itself as real empathy with Taiwan – as in a call for donations for the victim of the recent earthquake in Taiwan. Other times, it turns into an overt political campaign against the Taiwanese government in class. In a unit on Taiwan in the grade 6 history class, one student asked point blank, ‘Are the Taiwanese Chinese?’ to which the teacher, Mr. Liu, did not miss a beat in answering, ‘Of course they are Chinese. But the problem is that the president of Taiwan wants to separate Taiwan from China and make two Chinas. That’s not good. From the Ming Dynasty, Taiwan was part of China.’ It is by no means unusual for political ideologies to subtly influence classroom instruction, because education is politics (Shor and Freire, 1987). But Zhonghua was the only school among the five where some teachers had a clear political agenda and incorporated it into their instruction without reservation. Nevertheless, it did not happen very frequently at Zhonghua: I only encountered two occasions in which teachers declared to the students that Taiwan was part of China. However, when it happened, the message was communicated in no uncertain terms.

Four generations in one school Zhonghua has more than 100 years of history. One important characteristic of the school is that three generations of its graduates serve as teachers. For instance, the young Ms. Min was a student of Mr. Li, the vice principal. Mr. Li in turn was a student of Mr. Wu, the principal.

74 Language and Education in Japan

Learning with three generations of the school’s graduates, students, as the fourth generation of the school, have concrete role models: They are not only told to learn to contribute to both China and Japan, but also are in daily contact with adults who embody those very values. Older teachers often mention the changes they have witnessed over the years, with a touch of nostalgia about the old times. ‘[In my time] when Chinese delegations came to Japan, they visited our school. As delegations of our motherland, they meant a lot to us, especially because we were outside [China]. We felt we expatriate Chinese (kaky¯o) had to stand united and we had an overwhelming sense of patriotism,’ said Ms. Ye. She continued: Now Sino-Japanese relations have normalized, and our students, whether they are Chinese or whatever nationality, are really well loved by everyone when they move to Japanese high schools. Their teachers love them, their friends are good to them, and they are thriving. In the old days, we tended to turn inward, united, and hurried back to this school because when we ventured out, we were bullied. I think that [i.e., the change] is something we should be pleased about. On the other hand, there is less of a sense of duty among our graduates that they must come back and contribute to this school. They probably don’t feel that as much    The sense that you have to protect this school with your life has perhaps diminished (IN 11/19/99 J). Ms. Ye added that in her time, when the school invited its graduates to serve as teachers, there was no such thing as negotiation of the salary and benefits: You simply accepted the position out of your loyalty to the school. As overt discrimination against Chinese residents in Japan diminishes, and as Zhonghua graduates consequently find many more opportunities for their careers, such an uncomplicated sense of allegiance to the school is perhaps a thing of the past. Zhonghua teachers nonetheless continue to approach their students, not simply as their school teachers, but as old timers trying to educate future generations of their own community. They take it as their responsibility to guide the children to become respectable and committed members of the community. Mr. Li contrasted the strict discipline and heavy guidance that they provide at Zhonghua – which he calls the Chinese way – with individualism that has become the mainstay of Japanese education:

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

75

The Chinese way of thinking is that before we start talking about developing individual children’s abilities, both parents and teachers think long and hard about what the children should be doing. That’s the core part of education. I don’t think it works that way in Japan. ‘Think for yourself,’ they say. But we wonder how children can think for themselves when they are a blank slate. (IN 09/28/99 J) It is interesting to note how the emphasis on adult guidance translates into actual instruction. In math classes, for example, teachers stress the importance of logical thinking and the process of arriving at an answer to a problem. But while Japanese schools are moving in the direction of exploring individual children’s own creativity and reasoning in solving a problem (Stigler, Fernandez, and Yoshida, 1998; see also Chapter 6), Zhonghua teachers choose to teach one correct way of reasoning and arriving at the answer and make sure that students memorize it. In teaching a grade 8 math class (in Japanese), Mr. Li first had a group of six students read aloud a word problem. Next, he called on one student to articulate the first step they had to take in order to solve the problem. But he provided such heavy scaffolding that the student was practically repeating what he said. Mr. Li then told the rest of the class to repeat the answer verbatim with their neighbors. He repeated the process in each step of the way until the whole problem was solved. As the driving force behind the curriculum reform, Mr. Li employed group work and pair work more frequently than any other teachers I observed at Zhonghua. But, often, cooperative learning in his class was used to reinforce his teaching; usually pairs of students repeating with each other a solution that he had just presented or the group leaders monitoring that everyone in their group understood what he had just taught. In other words, although, in form, pair and group work was used frequently in his class, in spirit, his teaching was still very much teacher-centered. Mr. Li’s math class was conducted in Japanese, but I also observed another math class in Chinese (grade 5) which followed exactly the same procedure: The teacher modeled the proof and the students repeated it verbatim. On one level, this highly prescriptive mode of instruction helps students to learn to use math-specific expressions such as therefore and it follows that both in Chinese and Japanese. But it seems to me that it is more than a matter of language pedagogy: it reflects deepseated cultural beliefs about what it means to teach. Scollon (1999), in comparing the Confucian and the Socratic method of teaching, points out that the goal of the Socratic method is a search for truth through

76 Language and Education in Japan

dialogue between teacher and students whereas the Confucian philosophy is much more concerned with action. The purpose of education is ‘to be able to do what is right’ (p. 17). Because of its emphasis on the consequences of one’s actions, the Confucian approach to teaching expects students to be true to, rather than question, knowledge transmitted by the teacher. In this sense, Zhonghua teachers are deeply Confucian in their approach to teaching. In the same vein, in this school, adult authority over children is simply a given (at least at the elementary school level. At the junior high school level, students start showing some resistance as I discuss later in the chapter). When Mr. Li takes visitors on a tour of the school and wants to show them the textbooks and workbooks they use, he simply picks them up from a student’s desk or from a student’s hands: no ‘Excuse me,’ no ‘May I show them your textbook?’ In addition, any challenge to the teacher’s authority is severely reprimanded. In the following episode, Fanluan, a fifth grader, does not follow the directions of Ms. Tao, the music teacher, and refuses to sing the song the class is learning: The teacher gets really angry and severely reprimands Fanluan and the boy sitting in front of him. But Fanluan refuses to comply, with a sneer on his face as if mocking the teacher. She walks up to him and tries to pull him up out of his seat, but since Fanluan is a fifth grader with a solid frame, she doesn’t manage. Other boys shout, ‘Puroresu d¯a!’ (It’s wrestling time!). Ms. Tao gives up making him stand up but instead slaps him hard on the back    She gets another boy to fetch Mr. Wan [their homeroom teacher]. At this point, other students seem to realize the seriousness of the situation and quiet down. But Ms. Tao is still furious, so she gets the five misbehaving boys to stand up and severely lectures them. Mr. Wan arrives and Ms. Tao reports what happened. Mr. Wan listens sympathetically, but doesn’t say a word to the students and lets Ms. Tao handle the situation. Gradually Ms. Tao calms down a little, after having made each of the five boys apologize, and resumes the singing lesson. But even then, she hits the keyboard really, really hard. You can tell that she is still fuming. (FN 12/17/99) I should note that although teachers are occasionally stern, they are usually very warm and motherly/fatherly towards the children, and the children respond in kind. Even in a tense moment such as the above, other children still felt enough tolerance in the air to venture the side comment ‘Puroresu d¯a!’ (It’s wrestling time!). Students, especially

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

77

boys, seem to feel free enough to speak up whenever they want. Thus, during a grade 2 math lesson, Qiao Fei, despite Ms. Ye’s earlier warning to keep his mouth shut for a while, raised his hand insistently and reported in a very loud voice that a boy near the window had a baby tooth falling out (a fairly common occurrence when you are dealing with 7–8-year-olds). Ms. Ye waved her hand and replied, ‘You don’t have to shout.’ She then turned to the boy with the loose tooth and said matter-of-factly, ‘You just go out and get rid of it.’ Other children found this very funny. Qiao Fei gestured swallowing the tooth, while the boy hurried out of the room with his hand on his mouth, which invited more laughter. In this way, classes are often filled with laughter, and the exchange of jokes between teachers and students is very common. Parents, too, seem to trust the teachers and the school deeply. They take part in the running of the school in many forms. Some parents are on the board of directors and are directly involved in the management of the school. Because the school is in a perpetual state of financial hardship, whenever there is a school event, a group of parents get together to make boxed lunches and sweets and donate a portion of the sales to the school. Representatives from homeroom classes hold a board meeting once a month. Many parents visit the school routinely. One mother I interviewed said, ‘In terms of teachers, parents, and students – everything, this school exceeded my original expectations.’ Such enthusiastic endorsements of the school are often accompanied by tacit criticisms of public schools. Another mother, Mrs. Nirekawa, told me: I am so glad that we chose this school, especially when I hear other parents in the neighborhood who send their children to Japanese public schools. They are full of complaints. They say things like, ‘We can’t complain to the school too much because they have our kids held hostage.’ That’s just unthinkable to me. (FN 11/02/99 J, original emphasis) Mrs. Nirekawa also talked about the stereotype that mainstream Japanese around her hold towards Zhonghua: that this is a school for Chineseorigin children. She said that her friends and neighbors accepted without question that her son would attend Zhonghua because her husband is Chinese (she herself is Japanese); but when a friend of hers, a Japanese woman with no connections to China, also decided to enroll

78 Language and Education in Japan

her child here because she was impressed by Mrs. Nirekawa’s description of the school, people around her were scandalized, telling her, ‘Why on earth would you send your child to a Chinese school, when you have no relation whatsoever to China?’ This experience renewed Mrs. Nirekawa’s awareness that discrimination against Chinese residents has not disappeared.

A non-accredited school Because Zhonghua is seen as a school for Chinese-national students rather than for Japanese – although evidently many Japanese-national students do attend the school – it is not accredited by Monbukagakush¯ o, the Japanese Ministry of Education. The school is not recognized as a full-fledged school as defined in Article 1 of the School Education Law. The lack of accreditation presents three major problems. First, it is technically illegal for Japanese-national parents to send their children to a non-accredited school because it is considered to be a violation of their legal responsibility to have their children receive compulsory education (Article 26 of the Japanese Constitution). Japanese-national parents who send their children to non-accredited schools, such as ethnic schools and international schools, can receive a warning from the district board of education. As ethnic Chinese are increasingly accepted in mainstream Japanese society, more are marrying mainstream Japanese nationals, resulting in their children being Japanese citizens. In this school alone, more than 95 percent of its graduates marry Japanese citizens. It is also becoming increasingly common for new immigrants from China to obtain Japanese citizenship. Consequently, a rapidly growing proportion of the ethnically Chinese students at Zhonghua hold Japanese citizenship. Today, more than 50 percent of the children who enter Zhonghua at the kindergarten level are Japanese citizens. This constitutes a major dilemma for the school. On the one hand, the growing percentage of ethnic Chinese with Japanese citizenship in this school and in Japanese society at large represents a greater acceptance of ethnic Chinese in mainstream society, a cause to which the school is committed; on the other hand, it also means that more than half of the parents at Zhonghua are, technically, breaking the law. As Mr. Wu put it: ‘As descendents of the Chinese Diaspora (kaky¯o) obtain Japanese citizenship, coming to this school to study becomes illegal.’ He continued, ‘If you are an average citizen, you will be surprised if you receive a warning from your municipality, won’t you? The police may come visit you too. Your child will be marked as “missing” in his reference school.’ The principal is quite

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

79

concerned that the non-accredited status of the school may scare more and more parents away from sending their children to this school in the future, even if they want to. A second problem associated with the non-accredited status is that Zhonghua, unlike accredited private schools, cannot receive any funding from the Japanese national government (they receive a negligible amount of funding from the city and the prefecture in which it is located). The tuition fee, 17,500 yen ($168) a month for elementary school and 18,500 yen ($178) a month for junior high school, is intentionally kept low21 so that any child of Chinese origin can attend this school if they wish. The school depends for its survival on private donations from Chinese-related companies and individual Chinese donors in the community, but the school is not an attractive option for donors because donations made to non-accredited schools are not taxdeductible. All of this means that Zhonghua is in a perpetual state of financial crisis. Signs of hardship are hard to miss. The mattresses that first graders use for physical education are dirty and the stuffing is coming out in several places. Even in this age of recycling, no one would complain if they simply disposed of them. Handouts given to students are often printed on coarse, inexpensive brown copy paper. The lack of accreditation in effect constitutes financial discrimination against ethnic minority populations such as Chinese and Korean residents who send their children to ethnic schools: ‘We are paying taxes just like Japanese citizens, but because our school system is not recognized, we receive only a quarter or a fifth of what a normal school would receive,’ said Mr. Li.22 He also noted the indignity of the situation in which a school that has over 100 years of history is denied the status of being a school by a law that came into being half a century later: The School Education Law, which defines Zhonghua as a nonArticle 1 school, was prescribed in 1947. Mr. Wu, who as the principal of the school is in charge of the school’s finances, told me that the Japanese government ‘doesn’t kill us, but they don’t help us live either. Most definitely they don’t help us live.’ He added that he is aware of speaking in terms of ‘survival’ (sonzoku) rather than ‘development’ (hatten) because of the dire financial situation they are in. A third difficulty is that the lack of accreditation poses a major block to the further education of Zhonghua graduates. The school had closed its high school division about 15 years before since many Japanese universities refused to admit graduates of non-accredited schools. High schools are easier to enter for graduates of non-accredited ethnic schools, since at that level it is at the discretion of the principals whether or not

80 Language and Education in Japan

to accept such students. Whether high school principals accept ethnic school graduates or not depends on the area, explained Mr. Li. ‘We really think it’s sheer discrimination, but schools in areas where many Koreans live do not accept our students, the reason being that if they admit Chinese [students] they have to admit Koreans too. It’s that blatant.’ Nonetheless, virtually all Zhonghua students now advance to regular Japanese high schools, and with the high school diplomas they receive from the Japanese high schools, they then become eligible to apply to Japanese universities.23

Emphasis on Japanese in junior high school The fact that most Zhonghua students move onto regular Japanese high schools means that they must compete with mainstream Japanese students in high school entrance examinations. Along with cultivating a strong Chinese identity, then, another central mission of the school is to prepare its students for integration into the Japanese education system. As Mr. Li states, Zhonghua Ethnic Chinese School has, on the one hand, the mission to preserve Chinese culture and, on the other hand, the necessity to ensure sufficient academic competitiveness for our junior high school students to be able to pass the [Japanese] high school exam. For the past 100 years, these two missions have persisted. (IN 09/28/99 J) The school seems to deal with this dilemma rather pragmatically. At the primary level, the emphasis is more on the fostering of Chinese identity; at the secondary level, weight shifts towards Japanese instruction and preparation for the high school entrance examination, which in turn leads to the reduction of Chinese instruction. In grade 6, the last year of elementary school, the ratios of instructional time in Japanese and Chinese is roughly 50:50. In contrast, in the first year of junior high school (i.e., grade 7), Chinese is reduced to 25 percent. Notably, math is switched to Japanese from grade 7 on so that students will not have problems with the high school entrance examinations. The shift of priority from Chinese to Japanese at the junior high school level can also be seen in the timetables. At the primary level, Chinese-medium classes come in the early periods of the day, when students’ minds are still fresh. In junior high school, in contrast, English (taught in Japanese), math, and Japanese language arts dominate the first two periods of the morning, while Chinese is pushed back to the periods after lunch.

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

81

Correspondingly, language use among junior high students shifts more towards Japanese compared with elementary school children, both in their academic studies and in their conversations with peers. And it is here that the teacher-centered instruction that most Zhonghua teachers employ becomes a real issue. When I observed a grade 8 Chinese language arts class taught by Ms. Wang, the only Chinesemedium class for grade 8 students that day, I wrote in my field notes: [Ms. Wang’s] class consisted of her talking almost non-stop and there was very little evidence of lengthy participation on the part of the students. The atmosphere of the class was relaxed and friendly, but she kept on talking and, other than when asked to provide short answers, few students spoke up voluntarily or ventured lengthy responses. Since this is the only period today in which the medium of instruction is Chinese, I wonder whether the students are getting enough opportunity to produce Chinese to continue to develop their proficiency. (FN 12/02/99) The instruction at the elementary level is also very teacher-centered, but because younger children speak up frequently and willingly, and also because there are many more Chinese-medium classes, elementary school students have plenty of opportunities to produce Chinese. In contrast, Chinese-medium instruction at the secondary level is much more limited, and what little they receive is teacher-centered. The level of exposure that Chinese junior high school students receive is not sufficient to support linguistic development commensurate with their ever-expanding world. Then, there are shifting attitudes towards the use of Chinese on the part of the students as well. The same reticence to use L2 among older students that we observed in Nichiei is noticeable in this school as well, especially in peer conversation. Ms. Wang observed, ‘As they grow older, the scope of their conversation expands, and they don’t have enough vocabulary. They feel embarrassed about using their poor Chinese, so Japanese is more convenient for them.’ Indeed, their reticence to use Chinese seems part of the growing self-consciousness particular to the adolescent age group. Some junior high students develop an ‘attitude’: When called upon by the teacher, some students respond minimally in a very quiet, mumbling voice with a half sneer on their face. They do not always follow the teacher’s directions promptly. When Mr. Li told his math class to separate their desks in preparation for a quiz, one male

82 Language and Education in Japan

student draped his upper body languidly on his desk and did not move. Mr. Li walked up to his desk: Li: Tomoki-kun, a little bit further [Li physically moves Tomoki’s desk away from his neighbor’s]. Tomoki: [He adjusts his chair slightly] L: Your chair is not straight. T: [He pulls in his chair ever so slightly] L: A bit more. One more push. T: [He moves his chair a little more] (FN 12/02/99) Mr. Li was firm in his attitude, insisting that Tomoki move as he was told. But Tomoki’s resistance was just as firm: Although he moved his chair slightly every time he was told to do so, he never uttered a word in response to Mr. Li’s directives. I had wondered whether the transition to Japanese high schools poses a major culture shock to the students, but the atmosphere in the junior high school is so Japanese, including students’ language use and their resistance to teacher authority, that I doubt that they will encounter any shock. Although their transfer to Japanese high schools is inevitable given the current status of the school, Mr. Li wonders whether it is too premature to let them go: At age 15 their visions and awareness are still unstable. It is a pity that we have to send them off to Japanese society before the most important period of high school, before you can really communicate your views about life and the world to them. (IN 09/28/99 J)

5 Hal International School

Hal International School (grades K–9) is located in a wealthy expatriate community in a large urban city. This is a unique part of Japan where the buzz of English mixes with the sound of Japanese – where outside cafés are just as likely to be filled with fashionably dressed Westerners as they are with expensively clad Japanese. Tasteful art galleries, slick fashion buildings, and Italian outdoor cafés near the subway station let visitors share a taste of the neighborhood’s upper middle class lifestyle. But it is the beauty and tranquility of the residential area – away from the commotion of the commercial area near the station – that make it clear that this is an area reserved for the privileged. Behind tree-lined streets – rare in urban cities in Japan – one finds luxurious apartment buildings designed for foreign expatriates. Every time I visit this area I am amazed at the abundance of greenery and space right in the middle of an otherwise extremely densely populated city. On the way to Hal, in a huge park with a duck pond surrounded by cherry trees, which turn into pink clouds in the month of March, several Japanese and Western mothers were letting their toddlers play on the swings and slides, sharing the space but staying in their own groups. A few Filipino nannies were pushing the strollers of their Caucasian charges. Hal International School is tucked away in a corner of the residential area. The first time I visited the school, I asked two Caucasian women for directions. They both knew the school and correctly directed me to my destination. It occurred to me later that this was the first time in this project that I had asked for directions to a school in English to non-Japanese passers-by. For a school that houses some 400 students in grades ranging from K to 9, the premises are tiny – reflecting the exorbitant price of real 83

84 Language and Education in Japan

estate in this area. Three-story concrete buildings surround a minuscule courtyard that barely fits one basketball court, one jungle gym, several pull-up bars, and some trees. Although each classroom is spacious and does not feel cramped, there is hardly room for anything else. Space is so limited that during recess, children in each grade are assigned to a designated area, on a rotating schedule, so that they do not concentrate in one area. The physical smallness of the school coupled with its location in an ‘idyllic’ part of the city creates a sense of a community that is both intimate and protective of its children. In an early stage of my fieldwork, I asked Ms. Kaufman, a language coordinator of the school – there are two of them, one for English and another for Japanese – why there is no high school at Hal. She said, Well, there never was, and I think it’s important that students experience different worlds. It gets too small here with tightly knit groups of friends. It is hard enough as it is for them to move onto different schools, so if they stayed here until the end of high school, the transition would be even harder. (FN 12/15/99) Given its location, Hal caters largely to the children of Western diplomats and executives of multinational corporations. However, because of its longstanding reputation of having strong Japanese programs, the school also attracts a relatively large number of Japanese children and children of international marriages – children from affluent families that can afford the expensive education at Hal. There are 413 students representing 22 countries, with the largest two groups being American (46 percent) and Japanese (32 percent). Thirty-six percent of the children hold dual or multiple citizenships. The faculty is also diverse, though less so than the student population. Of the 57 faculty members, 21 are US citizens, 18 are Japanese, and 18 are of other nationalities. Japanese teachers who teach Japanese classes for native-speaking students are Monbukagakush¯ o (Japanese Ministry of Education)-certified, while many of those who teach Japanese classes for non-native speakers are Japanese as a second language specialists, either with formal training in this area or with many years of experience. International teachers are all certified in their countries of origin; about a quarter hold advanced degrees. This is a school where the conventional wisdom about which language to speak to whom often fails. At the beginning, I found myself addressing Japanese-looking children in Japanese and Caucasian-looking children in English. Stereotypical though it may be, it is a strategy that works

Hal International School

85

reasonably well in mainstream Japanese society. But at Hal, a ‘Japaneselooking’ child may very well be a Japanese-American who speaks little Japanese while a ‘Caucasian-looking’ child may speak flawless Japanese. A first grader whom I addressed in English first answered my question in English. But then he switched to Japanese and chastised me by saying, ‘Boku nihonjin dayo’ (I’m Japanese, you know). Also, these days with so many Japanese parents – especially among the upper and upper-middle classes – feeling the pressure to have their children learn English from a very young age, the fact that both parents are Japanese L1 speakers does not automatically mean that the child’s L1 is also Japanese. One or both parents may choose to speak English to the child; they may choose to send their child to an English-medium preschool. Hal’s admissions policy – it is a very competitive school to enter at the kindergarten level – is to select children who have a solid foundation in one language over those with two underdeveloped languages. As Mr. Christopher Allen, the acting principal puts it, ‘Our experience tells us that if you have good strong skills in one language then    you can transfer those skills to the other language.’

‘We are not a language school; we are a school’ The central educational goal of Hal International School is to ‘educate both Japanese and foreign students to be international and independent thinkers.’ The school offers dual language education in English and Japanese, and all students are required to take Japanese. However, the school gives clear priority to English over Japanese because English is the language that directly impacts the students’ future. Virtually all Hal graduates go to college, and about 75 percent attend American universities, including elite institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, while less than 15 percent choose Japanese universities. For the majority of Hal students, then, their imagined communities are located in the English-speaking world. All classes except Japanese language arts (in all grades) and Japanese social studies (at the junior-high level) are taught in English. For Japanese-medium classes, which occupy one-sixth of the instructional time (45 minutes a day), the students are divided into F (for first language Japanese) and S (second language Japanese). To these two existing categories, a middle category, JNN (Japanese near-native), has recently been added to address the needs of an increasing number of students who are conversationally fluent in Japanese but do not have the literacy skills and cultural background of native-Japanese-speaking

86 Language and Education in Japan

students. Another way of looking at this categorization is that F students are generally English L2 students, S students English L1 students, and JNN students generally more dominant in English than in Japanese. The school has made a conscious decision not to let these categories dictate the overall curriculum. Consequently, English-medium classes, in which students spend five-sixths of their school time, are not streamed in terms of language proficiency levels. Several years prior, when the school hired two prominent Western applied linguists as consultants, one recommended that the school be divided into two separate tracks: Japanese immersion and English immersion. The school rejected the idea. Mr. Allen recalls, ‘[One consultant] said, “You’ve got to work your day like this,” and we said, “No we cannot, because your premise is that language is the most important.” ’ While bilingualism is an important goal at Hal, the school’s policy is not to let language instruction undermine a more important mission of fostering international citizens. ‘We are not a language school, though. We are a school,’ adds Mr. Allen. Hal’s curriculum is rich in multicultural materials. In a unit on Japanese food, for example, first graders were offered sushi rolls that they had bought during their field trip to a nearby shopping area, and afterward they wrote their impressions of the sushi in their journals: After they move to the tables, the children are told not to touch the food yet. They are told to observe what it looks like first. They then taste kappamaki (sushi rolls with cucumber inside) first. Most children seem to have eaten them before and they eat with gusto, producing a happy sound, ‘Mmm!’ Ms. Cole [a first grade teacher] smiles and comments, ‘Hmm, I see lots of happy faces.’ Tekkamaki (rolls with tuna) is a bit more challenging because the rolls have raw tuna fish inside. Some children hesitate or downright refuse to eat them. Ms. Cole patiently encourages them to at least try a taste of them, complimenting the children who do. Monica refuses to eat both of them. Alec deconstructs his tekkamaki and eats the seaweed and rice first and then the tuna. Ms. Tabuchi [bilingual instructional aide] brings in more sushi, and when she asks who wants some more, hands shoot up in the air. Most children in the end eat three or four pieces. (FN 01/25/00) Students in other grades are similarly engaged in exploration of various cultures and ways of life around the world: Third graders were learning the culture and society of Papua New Guinea, and fourth-grade students

Hal International School

87

were making presentations on Chinese dynasties. By grade 6, students were no longer simply introduced to various cultures but were encouraged to synthesize, evaluate, and apply information. In a social studies class, for example, the teacher, Ms. Kelley-Brown, was supposed to discuss the role of Israeli women as compared with that of Arab women. But she and her students quickly digressed from the textbook and engaged themselves in a free-flowing discussion that moved from the dowry in India to Islamic extremists to a recent hijacking in England by a group of Afghans to Elián González, the Cuban boy who was rescued on the coast of Florida and whose fate became hugely controversial in the US–Cuba relationship: Elián González also seems to draw a lot of questions from girls. Ms. Kelley-Brown mentions this boy when she is trying to help a student remember a story she wants to tell, and quickly tries to move on because she does not want to take more time with digressions. But one girl begs Ms. Kelley-Brown to tell the story and others join her, so the teacher laughs and gives in. She asks one girl to explain the story first and then follows up afterwards. The girls ask all kinds of questions, such as ‘What kind of boat did they use?’ ‘What do the US and Cuban governments want?’ ‘Why isn’t the father’ – as opposed to the grandmothers – ‘coming to the States if he wants the boy back?’ and ‘Why were the grandmothers allowed to come?’ When they talk about the father of the boy, one girl exclaims, ‘The father isn’t acting in the best interest of the boy!’ and other girls cheer. While they discuss the political positions of the two governments, one boy at the back of the room makes a snarky running commentary about how the American government never seems to make any decisions. Compared with the girls, who are caught up in the discussion of the fate of the Cuban boy, this male student remains detached and plays the role of a commentator. (FN 02/16/00) Although in the end Ms. Kelley-Brown made very little progress on the topic of the role of Israeli women, she seemed happy with how the discussion turned out. She told me afterwards that at the beginning of the year these students were not able to carry on a discussion like this. The school also takes very seriously its mission to nurture independent thinkers. It was my consistent impression that at Hal, more than any other schools in this study, each child is given enough space and attention to be a unique individual. Being original and different is a good thing at Hal. When a student presents a well-constructed argument,

88 Language and Education in Japan

even if his or her opinion is different from the teacher’s, the teacher is not afraid to acknowledge that the student is right. This is evident in the following grade 5 session on a public opinion survey about the perfect vacation. The class was discussing the questions to be included in the survey and the wording of the questions. Once the questionnaire was completed, the class planned to administer it school-wide: For the question about who you want to travel with, one of the choices given is ‘Pet.’ Mr. Reddy [their fifth grade teacher] first wants to eliminate the choice because he is concerned that respondents (other students in the school) might get silly and say they want to take their crocodile or monkey or whatever. However, Danny raises his hand and makes an argument against Mr. Reddy. He says, ‘But because it’s your perfect vacation and you really, really want to take your pet with you.’ Mr. Reddy thinks that this is a good argument and asks other students if they could think of a counterargument. When no one raises their hand, Mr. Reddy decides to include the choice after all. (FN 03/17/00, original emphasis) As a teacher, I know that when a student challenges you in front of the whole class, it puts you in a vulnerable position, because it feels like it is a challenge to your authority. It takes a certain amount of courage to admit that the student’s opinion is better than yours. I never saw this kind of exchange in the other schools; even an opportunity to present an argument – as opposed to just an idea or an opinion – was rarely given to students. However, at Hal, I saw teachers adopting their students’ arguments over their own in this manner several times. As one teacher said to her students, ‘It’s OK to have an opinion; just back it up.’

F, S, and JNN One characteristic of Hal International – and it is also a challenge facing this school – is that it serves several distinct groups of students with different linguistic needs and future trajectories. There are at least four different groups: (1) expatriate children who stay in Japan only for a few years; (2) the children of non-Japanese parents who have made a longterm commitment to Japan; (3) the children of international marriages; and (4) children whose parents are both Japanese. In terms of their Japanese proficiency, as a rule, expatriate children are S (Japanese L2) students; Japan-based, non-Japanese children and biracial children are JNN ( Japanese near-native) or sometimes F ( Japanese L1); and Japanese

Hal International School

89

children are F. Although the school tries to restrict these categories to Japanese classes, they are nonetheless pervasive categories that both the staff and the students use to talk about the school curriculum and make sense of their experiences at Hal. F students F students are typically those whose parents are both Japanese and who speak Japanese at home.24 Eighteen of the 50 kindergarteners are categorized as F students, including three who came in with zero English. The business of educating Japanese students, especially those whose parents are both Japanese, in an international school involves complex linguistic, cultural, and identity issues. The flip side of the ambition to develop strong bilingualism and biliteracy is the fear of producing children with two underdeveloped languages. Ms. Tabuchi, bilingual aide in grade 1, who has worked at Hal for 17 years, observed: What we need to be most careful about at Hal is when we accept genuinely (junsui-na) Japanese children. If we are not careful, there is a risk that they’ll get caught in the middle and find themselves belonging nowhere. In Japanese society they can’t function as Japanese, because they have become too Westernized, being here. Japanese culture, you know, tastes, manners, and language. They can speak [ Japanese], but if they can’t read and write, if they can’t read at least newspapers, they won’t be accepted in Japanese society. But then, they go to America, and no matter how much English they can speak, they will never be American.25 There is a strong possibility that they will end up not knowing which way to turn. So I tell Japanese mothers, ‘If you want to enroll your child here, you have to make a firm commitment to help them learn Japanese at home. I don’t want them to become incomplete (ch¯utohanpa-na) Japanese. I want them to be proficient in Japanese, and speak English in addition.’ (IN 01/21/00 J) There is school-wide recognition that ESL – meaning Japanese L1 – students’ needs are not adequately met. Dr. Craig Lee, Deputy Headmaster, told me that some ESL students lag behind academically as well as being limited in their knowledge of grammar and vocabulary. In dealing with the ESL issues, the administration’s policy is to advocate the idea that all teachers are language teachers. But many classroom teachers argue that this is impractical, calling for specialized ESL instruction. One grade 2 teacher said that she has three children in her class who entered kindergarten with zero English, and that although she recognizes their

90 Language and Education in Japan

difficulties, she cannot concentrate on the needs of just a few children when she has 15 other children whose language development she also needs to ensure. Another points out, ‘If you take students who speak no English when they come in, you should do something about their ESL.’ When asked whether separate ESL classes are needed, Ms. Doran, a grade 4 teacher, who is pursuing a Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics said thoughtfully: I think to fix the problems that we already have, we may need that. But we need to look at the way we structure each class and I was reading another article that says, ‘Every lesson is a language lesson,’ and I think more teachers need to have that kind of workshop or awareness, knowing how to approach that, so that every lesson will include some type of language objectives, or a language lesson. By doing that from kindergarten on    we can prevent this serious ESL problem from happening. And if we can avoid it from happening, then we don’t need ESL classes, or pullout or pull-in, or whatever. Right now, we may need it as a ‘band-aid’ solution. (IN 02/14/00, original emphasis) Although many teachers acknowledge that ESL students in their charge lag behind, few seem to know how to adjust their instructional methods. Instruction at Hal is often abstract and decontextualized. Compared with classes in the other schools, I was surprised at the level and complexity of the materials that Hal students, even first and second graders, are expected to learn. But instruction in most classes is clearly geared towards English L1 students. Few teachers employ techniques that are known to help ESL students’ comprehension and language development, such as a slower rate of speech, paraphrasing, and the use of visuals and body language (Echevarria, Vogt, and Short, 2000). Hal teachers are skilled at, and enjoy, engaging their students in extended discussions. However, such discussions are conducted with the assumption that the students already possess the linguistic means to participate. As a result, English L2 students without adequate linguistic tools are theoretically invited to participate just as much as English L1 students but in reality cope by remaining silent when such discussions take place. A grade 8 social studies class illustrates this problem. Out of the six English L1 students, five students spoke up more than three times and one student spoke once (for a total of 18 times among the six). In contrast, out of the nine Japanese L1 students, five of them did not speak at all and four of them spoke once, all prompted by the

Hal International School

91

teacher, Mr. Taylor, who made an effort to get Japanese L1 students to speak up several times. When more vocal English L1 students tried to give their answers over a Japanese L1 student, he interrupted them gently by saying, ‘Come on, you’ve got to give more time to Y¯ usaku to formulate his thoughts.’ But the Japanese L1 students, when called on, seemed almost overwhelmed by the attention they were receiving and looked very uncomfortable. When they spoke, they tended to answer only in a couple of words, which rendered a distinct IRE (teacher initiation-student response-teacher evaluation) (Cazden, 2001) flavor to their interaction with Mr. Taylor. In contrast, many of the English L1 students’ responses were long and elaborate, and became part of a dialogue with the teacher. At Hal, the linguistic expectation that everyone speaks English is coupled with the cultural expectation that assumes American culture – and more broadly Western culture – as the norm. The linguistic and cultural expectations go in tandem and show parallel patterns. For example, when a Japanese teacher reads a Japanese picture book to first graders, she interrupts her reading periodically to insert comments or questions in English to facilitate S children’s linguistic comprehension. However, when an English-speaking teacher reads an English picture book, no such scaffolding in Japanese is made available to F children. Similarly, aspects of Japanese culture, especially food, holidays, and artifacts, are often explicitly introduced and explained for the benefit of S students. The fact that first graders are introduced to sushi and other traditional Japanese food suggests that the school considers this aspect of Japanese culture to be unfamiliar to most students and therefore a viable component of ‘multicultural education,’ although in fact 50 percent of first graders are F students. In contrast, when an aspect of American culture, a custom or a holiday tradition, that may not be familiar to F students is mentioned, it often goes unexplained because the assumption is that the children already know. While learning English, F students at Hal also have their L1 to develop. Only one sixth of the instructional time – 45 minutes every day – is devoted to Japanese. Compared with 306 lessons (45 minutes a lesson) a year devoted to Japanese language arts in Japanese public elementary schools, Hal offers approximately 175 class hours of Japanese a year. Nonetheless, both parents and the administration expect F students to maintain grade-level Japanese. This exerts tremendous pressure on both F teachers and students. They follow the Monbukagakush¯ o curriculum and textbooks, but since they obviously do not have enough time, what they cannot cover in class results in a massive amount of homework for

92 Language and Education in Japan

F students. One Japanese mother told me that when she plans an outing with other mothers who have their children in S classes, the latter are always amazed how much homework her daughter brings home which she has to supervise everyday. ‘There is no way I can hold a full-time job,’ said this mother. Also, the Monbukagakush¯ o curriculum is set up with the assumption that the children spend the entire school day in Japanese. Without the support and reinforcement of other subject-matter classes taught in Japanese, F students are not exposed to the range of vocabulary in Japanese that the Monbukagakush¯ o curriculum assumes they know. Returning from a class, Ms. Tani, a grade 1 Japanese F teacher, told me that she had just discovered that some of her students did not know the word daiku-san (carpenters who are skilled at building traditional Japanese houses). Even the children who laughed at those who confessed their ignorance could not define it adequately, one saying vaguely, ‘Well, someone who does construction work.’ Tani, who had moved to Hal from a regular Japanese school at the beginning of the year, said that she has changed her strategies and now teaches with the assumption that children do not know, rather than that they do. An obvious question to ask is whether the Monbukagakush¯ o Japanese curriculum is appropriate for students such as those at Hal. Some of the F teachers pose that question as well as the acting principal, Mr. Allen. Ms. Mizoguchi, one of the veteran Japanese teachers, said, ‘The goal of the Monbukagakush¯ o curriculum is to foster “the next generation of Japanese.” There’s no point in fostering the next generation of Japanese in this school.’ However, the use of the Monbukagakush¯ o textbooks is one selling point of Hal that appeals to Japanese parents who want to place their children in an international school but still want to ensure strong Japanese language development. If the school dropped the Monbukagakush¯ o curriculum, as one teacher told me, Hal ‘would not be able to differentiate itself from other international schools.’ Mr. Allen interprets Japanese parents’ psychology of holding onto the Monbukagakush¯ o-approved curriculum as the last crutch: They are willing to take the risk of placing their children in an international school, but the knowledge that Hal follows the Monbukagakush¯ o curriculum in Japanese gives them peace of mind. S students The S students at Hal, those who are English L1 speakers, lead a considerably different linguistic life from F students under the same roof.

Hal International School

93

Japanese teachers point out that the primary language at Hal is indisputably English; Japanese is ‘just’ one of the subjects. As such, English L1 students, particularly the children of Western expatriates who are in Japan only temporarily, do not seem to feel the pressure to become fluent in Japanese. This is hardly surprising as these students come to Japan not of their own will but because of their parents’ job transfers; they attend a school where they can get by very comfortably both academically and socially speaking only English; and in a few years’ time they will be leaving Japan. Thus, during a library visit with first graders, I spotted an S student who was looking at a Japanese book – first graders are allowed to take out one English and one Japanese book every week – and I read the lines on the page she had opened. But she said flatly, ‘I am not an F; I am an S,’ meaning that she did not understand Japanese. The way she said it also implied that she thought it was legitimate for her not to understand Japanese because she was an S student. English is the primary language of the school, and the children know it. Japanese L1 students would never make the claim that it is acceptable for them not to understand English because they are F students. The low level of S students’ Japanese proficiency is strikingly clear when one observes Japanese S classes. In a grade 6 class with eight students, Ms. Kogawa had the students write customer comment cards from a supermarket they had visited the previous week – a good authentic language activity. The problem was that many of the students’ Japanese proficiency was too elementary to write their comments in Japanese. Many of the students did not know simple words such as j¯usho (address), denwa (telephone), and bang¯o (number), nor were they able to read out Hal’s phone number in Japanese. In many cases, Ms. Kogawa ended up translating the students’ English messages into Japanese. In this class, as well as in all S classes, all S students in the same grade, regardless of their proficiency level in Japanese and length of residence in Japan, are placed in the same class. This means that in one class, students who have been living in Japan since kindergarten might be put together with those who arrived last month. This, together with only 45 minutes of instructional time each day, presents a tremendous challenge to S teachers. Moreover, once S students step out of the school, they live in a closed, relatively self-sufficient expatriate community in which they can function perfectly well in English – linguistic conditions akin to those surrounding Nichiei students, except that in this case the language is English. Ms. Kogawa told me that even clerks at the supermarket her class visited typically address their Western-looking customers in English. When they go for a field trip, therefore, she has to

94 Language and Education in Japan

call the store in advance to ask them to speak Japanese with her students. Ms. Kaufman, a language coordinator, commented, ‘Being in [this city], you don’t have to speak Japanese if you choose not to. You don’t have to read Japanese, you don’t have to speak Japanese. I know many many many many people who don’t – not a word!’ (original emphasis). The 45 minutes of Japanese each day cannot counter the overwhelming dominance of English in S students’ lives. When I asked Ms. Kaufman whether the quality of instruction in the S program needs to improve, she objected to the way I phrased the question: It’s time, it’s not quality. That’s not possible. One period a day. What can you do? You can do a little, but without additional outside work and without real immersion, I mean, you really can’t become a functional bilingual for a long time. (IN 03/08/00, original emphasis) It turns out, however, that S students are often capable of expressing themselves in Japanese if they are pushed and given a little scaffolding. Some S teachers are more persistent than others in having students speak Japanese during Japanese S classes. For instance, Ms. Mizoguchi, who has been in this school for over three decades, absolutely insists that her students speak Japanese in her class: The students often try to get away with speaking English, but Ms. Mizoguchi immediately reprimands by saying, ‘Eigo!’ (English!) and commands them to speak in Japanese.    When addressing Ms. Mizoguchi, some students ask in advance, ‘Eigo de ittemo iidesuka?’ (May I say it in English)? but she responds invariably, ‘Nihongo de d¯ozo’ (In Japanese, please). The tone of her voice is so stern that the students do not dare continue in English.    A boy called Rob comes in late because he went to see the school nurse about an injured leg. When he comes in, he says to Ms. Mizoguchi, ‘Sensei, you have to check this.’ Ms. Mizoguchi says immediately, ‘Rob, sonomae ni nanika iukoto arudesh¯o. D¯oshite okuremashitaka?’ (Rob, isn’t there something you should tell me first? Why are you late?) Rob responds, ‘I went to the nurse.’ Mizoguchi insists, ‘N¯asu ni?’ (To the nurse?) Then Rob switches to Japanese and says, ‘N¯asu ni ikimashita’ (I went to the nurse). (FN 02/04/00) Ms. Mizoguchi, although she can at times sound harsh, creates an environment – rare at Hal – where students have no choice but to speak Japanese.

Hal International School

95

However, teacher control, in terms of which language students are allowed to speak in a given class, becomes harder to maintain as students get older. In a grade 4 class, students are more likely to comply. But older students seem more frustrated at the teachers’ admonition to speak Japanese when it is perfectly clear that their teachers understand their English. In the grade 6 class with Ms. Kogawa above, she told one student, Sam, to repeat what he had just said in English in Japanese. But Sam waved his hand irritably, as if to say, ‘Never mind.’ JNN students Then there are JNN students, who have much stronger skills in Japanese than the average S students – in fact, many of them are indeed ‘nearnative’ – but lack the literacy skills and cultural background of F students. These are mostly the children of international marriages in which one parent is a Japanese L1 speaker, and the children of Western residents who have made a long-term commitment to Japan. The categories F and JNN form a continuum rather than a distinct dichotomy. In contrast, there is a relatively clear difference between JNN and S students, in that S students typically do not use Japanese outside of the school and are not conversationally fluent. Just casually speaking with the children, it is hard to tell who is an F student and who is a JNN student because they all sound fluent in Japanese on the surface. And, as I have already mentioned, in this school, a child’s physical appearance is not an accurate indication of his or her language background. Nonetheless, I encountered a few instances in which a student’s language use gave away clues to his ‘near-native’ as opposed to ‘native’ Japanese proficiency. For example, Philip, a first grader, is quarter Japanese and his father, half Japanese, speaks the Japanese language fluently. When Philip showed me something that his father gave him, he said, ‘Ot¯osan ga boku ni agetano’ (My dad gave it to me), when a native-speaking child of his age would say kuretano instead of agetano. From the context, the meaning of his sentence was clear, but his use of grammar was inaccurate.26 This is characteristic of the Japanese of those students who fall into the JNN category. In order to meet the needs of such students, the school first intended to create a ‘B’ – as in bilingual – class which would sit between the F and S categories. The original plan was to pull struggling students from the F class and advanced-level students from the S class and place them together in the B class. However, many (English-speaking) parents,

96 Language and Education in Japan

whose children were in the F class and who were told that their children would be moved to the B class, saw the move as a ‘move down’ rather than a ‘move over.’ One American mother, whose daughter was in the F class, explained to me that in introducing the B class, the administration employed the rhetoric that in this class, higher-level students such as her daughter could help lower-level students. She said, ‘I’m sorry, but I am paying too much money to this school for my child to be helping out lower-level kids. That just doesn’t cut the mustard.’ Some parents, politically savvy and assertive, orchestrated a campaign to block the institution of the B class. After intense negotiations with unhappy parents, Hal decided to institute a ‘near-native’ class, to which only students from the F class would be moved and whose curriculum would be more in line with the F program. The class would still follow the Monbukagakush¯ o textbooks; however, a stronger emphasis would be placed on oral proficiency than in the F class to give more immersion experience to those who do not have enough exposure to Japanese outside the school. Also, whereas JNN students are expected to be able to read grade-level Chinese characters, they are expected to be able to write only up to grade 4-level characters.

Parents as stakeholders Like Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School, Hal is also not accredited by Monbukagakush¯ o (it is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges27 ). The lack of Monbukagakush¯ o accreditation prevents Hal from receiving financial support from the Japanese government.28 Hal is also not an attractive option for donors, because donations to non-accredited schools are not tax deductible in Japan. All of this means that Hal’s operational costs are largely met by tuition fees, which in turn results in very expensive fees (the yearly fee is 1,800,000 yen (approximately $16,700)). Mr. Allen is concerned that the current fee structure allows only the children of expatriates whose employers subsidize their children’s tuition or children from affluent Japanese families to attend the school, which he thinks should not be the case. Not all parents who send their children to Hal are affluent. Some parents, particularly of international marriages, choose to shoulder a substantial financial burden to enroll their children in the school. But it is also true that many parents, especially the Japanese parents who have to pay the tuition fees out of their own pocket, are wealthy. One morning, as I approached the school entrance, a Mercedes stopped in front of me. A kindergartener jumped out of the chauffeured car followed

Hal International School

97

by his father, who was clad in an obviously expensive, full-length black coat. As Ms. Tabuchi later said to me, ‘Mercedes is the norm here.’ A veteran teacher pointed out that many Hal parents are ‘the first generation upper-middle-class.’ As such, their drive to succeed and their expectations for their children are enormous. This sometimes creates tension with other parents who come from ‘old money’ and want a more liberal and relaxed education for their children. For the latter group of parents, it does not really matter whether their children succeed in school in a conventional sense since they have independent sources of income. Interestingly, some Japanese parents are masters of Japanese traditional arts such as kabuki, the noh play, and ikebana (flower arrangement).29 There is, for example, a third grader who has already made his debut as a kabuki actor. At first, it may seem odd that families who pursue such traditional arts send their children to an international school. But teachers explained to me that because these children are already destined to inherit family traditions, conventional academic success is irrelevant for them. From their parents’ perspective, it is more useful for these children to learn to speak English and to be exposed to cultural diversity early on, since as the next generation of Japanese traditional arts masters, they will certainly be performing abroad and dealing with foreign clientele in the future. The parents’ wealth and power create a certain backdrop for Hal’s education. For example, one day a kindergartner’s mother, who is an ikebana master, brought in all kinds of flowers and vases to the kindergarten class so that the children could experiment with this traditional art form. She also sent a troop of her disciples to assist the children. That day, the kindergarten room transformed into a garden of flowers with 50 arrangements that actually looked respectably like ikebana. Also, it is a school policy that kindergarteners be dropped off in the morning and picked up in the early afternoon by a parent or another caregiver. However, it is not possible to pick up your child at 2:30 pm every day if you work full-time. This means that the school assumes the presence of a stay-at-home parent (this being, almost without an exception, the mother) or, if both parents elect to work, the financial capability to hire a nanny in addition to paying the school tuition fee. Also, as previously noted, several mothers mentioned that given the amount of homework and projects that they are supposed to supervise at home, it is practically impossible for them to work full-time. Parents are highly involved in Hal’s education and constitute a powerful stakeholder. Since Hal is well-staffed academically, few parents work as volunteers in the classroom, but they provide a

98 Language and Education in Japan

variety of much needed services to the school. They hold an annual auction dinner and raise 10 million yen (approximately $92,900) each time. The more memorable auction items include a dinner at a foreign ambassador’s residence. They also put on an international food fair each year, which has become a major community event. When the school held its 50th anniversary, it was the mothers who made 500 cupcakes to distribute to all of the students. The parent group consists of a variety of committees – auction, hospitality, newcomer welcoming, parent education, and after school activities, among others. In one meeting, Mrs. Hutchinson, the ever-so-energetic chair of the parent group, nudged mothers to volunteer to serve on various committees. She exclaimed, ‘Just remember, ladies, it’s all for our children!’ She then turned to me and added, ‘That’s what we say, Yasuko, when we want someone to do work for the parent group.’ The parents support the school actively and effectively, but in return they also expect a major say in decision making. The parents in this school, more than parents at any other school in this study, are secure in their sense of entitlement, and it shows in the way they aggressively intervene in school policies they do not support. The parents’ campaign to block the institution of the Japanese B program is a good example of parental intervention. Mrs. Hutchinson, for one, was absolutely determined to keep her daughter in the F program. Although she called Hal a ‘phenomenal school’ and said that she had planned to enroll her daughter in this school ever since she became pregnant, she also claimed that if the school did not allow her daughter to stay in the F class, she would pull her out of the school. It was rather surprising to hear the chair of the parent organization of a school publicly and passionately criticize a major reform that the school was advancing.

Japanese teachers as special subject teachers At Hal, it is the Steering Committee (SC) that presides over educational policies and curricular decisions. The headmaster is Japanese, but he is largely involved with the management and public relations side of the operation, leaving most pedagogical decisions to the SC. The SC consists of the deputy headmaster, the acting principal, the two language coordinators, and a few classroom teachers. All but one, Ms. Mori, who is one of the language coordinators, are non-Japanese. The composition of the SC is a good indication of the power balance between international and Japanese teachers. Although Mr. Allen insists that Japanese teachers

Hal International School

99

are just as responsible for Hal students’ overall educational experiences as international, homeroom teachers, most of the Japanese teachers I talked to seem to consider themselves, and be treated by homeroom teachers, as special subject teachers, just like PE and music teachers. The relationship between international and Japanese teachers is cordial, but they tend to socialize separately. In the lunch room, international teachers sit at one table, Japanese teachers at another, chatting in their respective language. This is partly because of the structure of the curriculum: Japanese teachers are in the classrooms when English teachers are having lunch or preparing for their classes. For the same reason, even though for each grade level, one Japanese teacher and two or three international teachers constitute a team, they do not have a built-in time to conference with each other. As a result, while homeroom teachers in the same grade are in close communication with one another, there is more distance between them and their Japanese partner. Japanese teachers generally have less authority with children. The first-grade class starts its day with circle time, in which the teachers take attendance and perhaps read a book or tell a little story. When an English-speaking homeroom teacher leads circle time, the children are extremely well behaved, sitting on the floor and listening carefully to their teacher. When the Japanese teacher is in charge of the session, the children are more likely to fidget and chat with their neighbors. One day, when Ms. Tani is leading the circle time, the noise level became such that Ms. Cole had to step in and scold the children: ‘It’s not time to talk. If you don’t understand everything, then you have to listen to words that you do understand.’ Mr. Allen attributes Japanese teachers’ lack of authority with children to the newness of some of the teachers. Four new Japanese teachers had been hired that year – an unusually high number. They are still adjusting to the school, and this may be the reason why they are not yet as effective as homeroom teachers, he told me. But a grade 2 homeroom teacher had another explanation: Children know that if they misbehave in front of Japanese teachers, there will be few consequences because their contact time is limited; on the other hand, if they do not heed their homeroom teachers, the price they have to pay is much higher. Just like in any setting where people are divided into groups, there is a sense of ‘us versus them’ about the way international and Japanese staff talk about each other. In faculty meetings, while international teachers eagerly and eloquently articulate their opinions, Japanese teachers tend to remain quiet – echoing the pattern of Japanese F students’ classroom

100

Language and Education in Japan

participation. This is not entirely a language issue since some of the Japanese teachers are fluent in English, and most have enough command of English to express themselves. Mr. Allen interpreted their reticence to come forward: I would say maybe it’s just self-confidence, of what they are doing is right or not. Because I think they have heard quite clearly that maybe how we’re teaching Japanese isn’t the best way to be done over the last six years or something. So we don’t necessarily have 100 percent – previously we’ve had people going through the classes and [could say to them,] ‘This is how Japanese is taught.’ But other schools are increasing, and we still have the prestige, if you like, but maybe not the prestige, we’re managing to keep it, but we’re not actually sure that we are better in any way, and there may be other ways of teaching in a more effective way. (IN 03/31/00) At this point he stopped himself and judged that he was not being fair to the Japanese staff. So he added, ‘But they are doing a good job. I’ve seen students who really, really grow. Maybe we are being too critical, with only 45 minutes a day, and [the Japanese teachers] have a more realistic understanding and have become a bit protective of it.’ The Japanese teachers, feeling criticized, seem to have decided to withdraw from open contestation and instead to quietly guard their territory. Among themselves, the Japanese teachers voice their opinions about the school’s policies and practices just as vociferously as the international teachers. In a workshop I conducted for Japanese teachers at the request of the SC, I was caught off guard by the intensity with which they expressed their dissatisfaction with the status quo. About the integrated curriculum, which is a cornerstone of the education at Hal, for instance, Ms. Mizoguchi said: Integration is really meaningless. English teachers are teaching Papua New Guinea based on what they read in books. That’s not what it means to teach. What it means to teach is for someone who is already knowledgeable to teach a fraction of what he or she knows. It’s meaningless to read a book today and teach it tomorrow. (FN 04/10/00 J) In addition, Japanese teachers’ reaction to the institution of the JNN class was markedly different from that of the English-speaking administration. What the administration saw as a compromise they had to make because of parental opposition to the Bilingual class, the Japanese

Hal International School 101

teachers considered a welcome turn of events. Ms. Mori, the Japanese language coordinator, appeared very happy with the result. She said that the JNN program was actually closer to what the Japanese staff had originally envisioned because what they really wanted was to give near-native students in the F class more opportunities to practice. She and other Japanese teachers saw the institution of the JNN class as a rare occasion in which their preference came through.

‘Fruit are the students’ Students at Hal code-switch liberally. Sometimes they do so in order to compensate for their lack of vocabulary in one language or the other, but more often in response to sociocultural cues and in expression of their complex identities. As I helped Edward, a first grader, write his journal, he wrote two names on the cover of his journal: ‘Toshiki’ in hiragana and ‘Edwar’ – leaving out the last ‘d’ – in the alphabet. I asked him why, and he told me that he has an English name and a Japanese name, which he called nihongo-jin no namae ( Japanese-language person’s name). His family are all Japanese, he explained, but since he was born in the United States, he has dual nationality. His mother and sister call him Edward, his father Toshiki, he added. He code-switched with amazing dexterity: One moment he asked a peer nearby, ‘Are you going to write the same one as me?’ and the next moment turned to me and said, ‘Kore de iinokana?’ (Is this all right?). Following the same group of students from one class to another reveals their complex identity management strategies. In a grade 6 Japanese class, I observed three boys and four girls. Although they were supposed to work individually on their book reports, they chatted with one another throughout the whole class. The girls talked mostly in English with frequent code-switching, while the boys adhered to Japanese. But I followed them to the next class, which was a math class taught in English, and suddenly the girls switched to Japanese. Haruka, who had been chatting away in English in the Japanese class, came up to the board, and as she wrote her answer to a question on the board, she whispered, ‘K¯o dato omou’ (I think this is right). When I shared this vignette with their homeroom teacher, Ms. Kelley-Brown, she laughed and said, ‘Now, you figure that one out!’ My speculation is that the girls’ code-switching is an expression of their identity in each class. In the English-medium class they are positioned and probably identify themselves as ‘Japanese’ and they enact that identity by speaking Japanese. In the Japanese F class, however, they are considerably more of an

102

Language and Education in Japan

‘English speaker’ than the boys and they play the role by speaking English. Teachers do their best to encourage students to interact across the linguistic line, by mixing F and S students in group work, for example. But when allowed to arrange themselves, students split neatly into Japanese L1 and English L1 groups, with those biracial children who are relatively comfortable in both languages in the middle. Katie, an insightful grade 7 student, observed: On ski trips they are always like, try and put us with friends, but they also put us with someone who doesn’t speak the language, people you don’t hang out with, supposedly ‘cause they want to make us friends. But it doesn’t really work, because we just choose beds, like your friends and you all choose the beds altogether. The Japanese go to the other side of the room (laughter). So it’s kind of like – it really doesn’t work. (IN 03/21/00) She adds, ‘But that’s not the point of the school (laughter)’ (original emphasis). The students’ socialization pattern echoes that of the teachers and the parents. They too cluster into Japanese-speaking and Englishspeaking groups. In the younger grades, gender is equally, if not more, important a factor in peer group formation. When grade 3 students are told to sit in a circle in a music class, they cluster into English L1 girls, English L1 boys, Japanese L1 girls, and Japanese L1 boys. As Alyssa, a third grader, explained eloquently, boys and girls tend to split up, ‘because boys say jokes that we find gross, and we say jokes they find boring’ (original emphasis). However, in junior high school, where the number of English L1 students drops, language background becomes a stronger factor in determining peer groups. Katie gives the example of an English L1 student who is in a class with no other English L1 girls: ‘But actually, Erin, she can’t speak much Japanese at all, so she sits with [English L1] boys    She’d rather speak English and sit with boys than sit with girls and speak Japanese.’ The students’ collective social language in the early grades is English, but by junior high school it switches to Japanese. The shift seems to take place around grade 3. Thus, when a Japanese third grader, Tatsumi, finds someone’s pen on his table, he calls out to everyone, ‘Kore dare no desuka?’ (Whose is this?), then immediately switches to English, ‘Whose this?’ (sic) because in this grade it makes sense to make announcements in both languages. Younger expatriate students tend to leave Japan

Hal International School 103

after a few years, and students who arrive at an older age often attend another international school with a high school division (Hal goes only up to grade 9). As a result, in the upper grades at Hal, only Japan-based students remain, shifting the social language to Japanese. In elementary school (grades K–5), about a half of the students are F students; in junior high school (grades 6–9), the ratio jumps to almost 70 percent.30 Junior high school teachers are often heard telling students to ‘speak English’ – an admonition that is rarely heard in elementary grades because there it is not necessary. Mr. Allen is concerned that with so much communication among junior high school students happening in Japanese, Japanese L1 students may not be getting enough exposure to English. The school is considering taking fewer Japanese speakers in kindergarten, so that junior high school would be more balanced: ‘We are looking at our demographics now,’ said Mr. Allen: We find in the junior high, we have a predominance of Japanese nationals, or Japanese speakers. And we are trying to really redress this by looking for a balanced school, which may be skewing things in the lower grades, taking fewer Japanese at the beginning because they’re gonna stay and then the balance would be better later, because we have a feeling that it’s affecting the comfort language or the cultural language. The social language for the majority of students is Japanese. And our role is to support and value Japanese, but in order to develop the students’ English language skills, they need lots of experience using it. (IN 01/13/00) At the same time, he reminded me and also himself that students’ bilingual development does not have to be completed by the end of grade 9: ‘Fruit are the students but they are not ripe when they leave here. They are ready to ripen later in the right environment. And we shouldn’t expect them to ripen and know all the words.’

6 Sugino Public Elementary School

Sugino Public Elementary School is located in a large subsidized housing project. Because of its location and the subsidized apartments, the school has an unusually high proportion of foreign-national students for a public school. Of the 226 students, 99 (or 43 percent) are language minority students (66 are of foreign nationalities and 33 naturalized Japanese). Fifty-three percent of the foreign-national students are Chinese, and the others are mostly the children of war refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The majority came to Japan at a young age or were born in Japan. The Chinese children are mostly family members and relatives of war orphans, who are given priority in settling in the housing project. The high concentration of refugees – a small portion of the foreign population in Japan – in the housing project has to do with the existence of a refugee settlement center in the vicinity. Although the center closed several years before, many of the Indochinese refugees, who spent their first days in Japan at the center, have since settled and found jobs in the area. Many of Sugino’s children, both Japanese and non-Japanese, come from single-parent homes and families on welfare, since eligibility for the housing project is limited to low-income families. The first time I walked to the school from the nearby train station, I wondered why I was passing by so many people in wheelchairs. I later learned that people with disabilities are also given priority in living in the housing project. Many of the Sugino parents, especially of foreign nationalities, are blue-collar workers. Fathers typically work in small subsidiary companies and factories of major automobile corporations in the area while mothers hold part-time jobs in small, family owned operations such as dry cleaners and stores that prepare inexpensive boxed lunches. Many work in shifts and are not always able to spend their evenings with their 104

Sugino Public Elementary School 105

children. With the Japanese economy in deep recession, the constant fear of being laid off threatens the stability in their lives. Although the high-rise apartment buildings are by no means luxurious, they are clean and well-maintained. No graffiti or broken windows are visible. I felt no sense of danger walking through the project after dark. The school feels equally safe and well maintained. At its peak, Sugino accommodated 2,000 students, and now that the student population has decreased to a 10th of that size – Japan is a rapidly ageing society – the school enjoys an abundance of space unusual in an urban school in this country. Many of the original classrooms have been expanded into larger rooms for special purposes such as a computer laboratory and meeting spaces. The major bulk of the south wing, where all of the homeroom classrooms are located, has been renovated. A fresh coat of cream-colored paint has been applied, and with wide windows facing south, the place feels airy and bright. Fresh flowers are placed in the hallways and in the classrooms. I never found out who brings them and replaces the old flowers, but flowers are always there. Student artwork adorns the walls in the hallways. Each homeroom class is assigned two classrooms, one for regular instruction and another for storage and group work. Because of the abundant space, amid the usual noises of elementary school, one can find moments of serenity. Going from one meeting to another, I sometimes stopped in the hallway to take a breath, and was often struck by how quiet it was. Sugino has an official policy of celebrating multiculturalism. One of the three central educational goals of the school, posted outside the staffroom, reads in Japanese: ‘To foster children who can appreciate each other’s differences and strive to live together’ (kodomo ga tagai no chigai o mitomeai tomo ni ikiteik¯o to suru sugata o taisetsu ni shimasu). Most of the language minority students at Sugino plan to live permanently in Japan; many hope to obtain Japanese citizenship as soon as possible. The challenge of Sugino Elementary thus is how to help these immigrant children become members of Japanese society, a point Ms. Takano Emiko, the principal, emphasizes: People who live here are permanent residents; they are the people who are going to live permanently in Japanese society. So we have to help [the children] gain enough power to be able to survive in Japan. We want to guarantee academic abilities that become the foundation of that power    So our role as an elementary school is to make them learn the basics. (IN 11/24/00 J)

106

Language and Education in Japan

A plump, middle-aged woman, Ms. Takano is a mother-hen figure in the school. Both the principal and the vice principal are women,31 which helps make this relatively small school an intimate, warm community. But Ms. Takano also exudes leadership. She is always immaculately dressed in suits and dresses in bright colors with matching accessories, a contrast to the functional, machine-washable clothes of classroom teachers. She arrived three years before as a first-time principal and made it clear that under her leadership, this school was going to be transformed: This may come across as a criticism of the previous principal, but he thought of the large number of foreigners in this school negatively    Basically, his attitude was, ‘We don’t need any more foreigners in this school.’ But I decided to run this school under the premise that the large number of foreign students is an asset. That’s the biggest difference. (IN 11/24/00 J) While Japanese public schools are still tightly controlled by the central government, in recent years, the Ministry of Education started to give the principals of individual schools considerable freedom and power to address their local needs. Relishing this freedom, Ms. Takano has worked hard to strengthen the school’s ties with the local community in order to make both language minority students and parents feel welcome in the school.

JSL instruction Thirty-two language minority students at Sugino receive pull-out instruction in the JSL classroom. The JSL students from the same homeroom class, usually four or five students, are pulled out together, three to four times a week. Two JSL teachers, Ms. Ayabe and Mr. Nakamura, are in charge of the JSL classes. Although both teachers used to be regular homeroom teachers, by now they are seasoned JSL specialists. Ms. Ayabe was a JSL teacher in her previous post; Mr. Nakamura has lived in Taiwan and speaks Chinese. Both of them receive in-service training in JSL education on a regular basis from the city and prefectural boards of education. Most JSL classes involve reading aloud or copying down passages from the grade-level language arts textbook, practicing grades 1–3 kanji (Chinese characters), and playing games with hiragana and katakana

Sugino Public Elementary School 107

(basic scripts) flash cards. I helped Kim, a grade 5 Vietnamese boy, read out loud a passage in the textbook: [Kim] is actually not bad at reading out loud, but it is very clear that he is just reading it without paying any attention to the content. When I ask him the meaning of a passage, he says, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m not good at kokugo (Japanese language arts).’ The passage is about the history of humankind in terms of the history of the earth: If you liken the life time of the earth to a day, the human species did not appear until three in the afternoon. When I try to explain the content, Kim nods half-heartedly, obviously wanting to move on, so that he can do something more fun after the work as a reward. He goes on to the kanji list at the back of the textbook, and starts reading – again, without paying attention to the meaning. I call out to Ms. Ayabe and ask if I am just supposed to help him read the text out loud (without understanding the content), and she says that at this stage that is all that is expected. (FN 10/16/00) To an outsider like myself, it appears that the activities in the pull-out classes can be made more intellectually stimulating. However, Ms. Ayabe explains that considering where these children started, the fact that they are now at least willing to look at the textbook at all is a major improvement. She says that language minority students tend to be quiet and well behaved and therefore slip away from the homeroom teachers’ attention, but that it does not mean that they are happy to be there. When she arrived at Sugino three years before, the first thing she witnessed as she invited language minority students into the JSL classroom was a massive fight among them: It really stunned me. At first I had no idea what was going on, but I guess it was a sign that they were starting to express themselves. But it was a horrendous fight, you know – grabbing and kicking (laugh). They called one another every name under the sun, using all kinds of profanities in Japanese. (IN 10/16/00 J) It took the language minority students about a year, she says, to release all the frustration and anger they had bottled up and to calm down and trust her enough to start learning. She and Mr. Nakamura installed a rug in one corner of the JSL classroom – rare in a Japanese public school – so that JSL students could lie down or sit on the floor and still engage in

108

Language and Education in Japan

activities if they would not or could not sit still at the desk. They then embarked on a long process of helping them learn what it means to learn in school, by first getting them to sit at the desk for a short time, then helping them engage in activities that were quick and easy, and gradually challenging them with tasks that took longer and required focus. Ms. Ayabe recalls: To show that this is a place for learning, we started by playing games. As soon as a worksheet entered their field of vision, they escaped, so we had to cajole them into doing them by saying, ‘OK, this is an easy one. Let’s do just one, just the front side, shall we?’ (laughter). So we started that way, and when they were in a good mood, we would say, ‘OK, why don’t we do this one too?’ and gradually went on to putting off play until the work was finished. But the kids resisted hard. If you showed them a double-sided worksheet, you could count on it that they’d escape (laughter). So we would start with just doing the front of a worksheet that had pictures. (IN 10/16/00 J) Given the path they have traveled, for both JSL teachers, making the JSL classroom a safe haven for language minority students is more of a priority than actual Japanese language instruction. As Mr. Nakamura puts it, ‘If the JSL class added more stress, then they would have nowhere to go.’ Indeed, the language minority children seem to take comfort in the existence of this place. Even when it is not their time to come, they poke their heads in during recess just to say hello to Ms. Ayabe and Mr. Nakamura. Relieved to know that the teachers are there, they go back to their homeroom. The criteria for pull-out instruction also center on the goal of securing a safe place for language minority children. When I asked Ms. Ayabe how she decides who to pull out and when to exit students from the JSL classes, she said, ‘It basically depends on the child’s feelings.’ She then elaborated to tell me that some children want to linger on even when she and Mr. Nakamura feel they are ready to exit, while others tell them that they are ready to leave: So basically, we observe them and to those who have started to show initiative in their own learning, we suggest that it’s time for them to graduate [from JSL]. If they say, ‘But   ’ we let them stay on (laughter); if they say, ‘Great,’ we say, ‘Congratulations, you are graduating!’ (IN 10/16/00 J)

Sugino Public Elementary School 109

One notable characteristic of JSL instruction at Sugino is its incorporation of computer-assisted language learning (CALL). The school received a grant from a corporate foundation and with that implemented CALL in the JSL classroom. On the benefits of computer-mediated instruction, Mr. Nakamura comments: There are children who come in without speaking any Japanese. If you can communicate, that’s good, but there are children with whom you just cannot communicate [because of the lack of a mutually shared language], and that’s an enormous stress for both the student and the teacher. I speak a bit of Chinese, so I can deal with Chinese-speaking children, but when a Vietnamese child or a Cambodian child arrives, we just kind of sit there silently (laughter). You teach them the basic sounds or say a few words, but they just look confused. So, in such cases if we have computer software that provides pictures and sounds, it really softens the tension of ‘What do we do with each other?’ We can both look at the screen and learn the meaning of a word. It has pictures and it also provides pronunciation. (IN 11/21/00 J) Now that the school has more computer terminals, these have been moved to the computer room, which is open to all students. Initially, however, the access to computers was limited to JSL students. It is remarkable that in this school, access to a valued commodity such as computers was first given to a group of students who in other public ¯ schools are often marginalized (Ota, 2000; Vaipae, 2001). Recent arrivals who are not yet conversational in Japanese are pulled out to attend bilingual JSL classes with instructional aides who are native-speakers of their L1. Unlike the monolingual JSL classroom, which is a recently renovated, bright room in the south wing of the school building, the bilingual JSL classes are held in an old art studio in the north wing. Special education classes are also housed in that wing. The bilingual JSL classroom is dark and cold and feels removed from the homeroom classrooms. When I observed a class, Ms. Sugi, a former Cambodian refugee who has been living in Japan for 15 years, was working one-on-one with Tak, a grade 2 Cambodian boy who arrived in Japan two months before. Ms. Sugi used Japanese most of the time, but when giving instruction and explaining the meaning of a word, she sometimes switched very briefly to Cambodian. It was odd to see two native speakers of Cambodian conversing

110

Language and Education in Japan

in Japanese, which one of them hardly spoke. As in the monolingual JSL class, decontextualized, drill-type exercises are common in this class (e.g., convert ‘I am eating an apple’ to ‘I want to eat an apple’). The existence of the two JSL classes and their respective locations in the school suggest complex identity management in this school. Both classes focus exclusively on the development of Japanese, and both employ decontextualized drill-type methods of teaching Japanese. But the monolingual JSL class, taught entirely in Japanese by licensed teachers, thereby seen as promoting a ‘mainstream’ Japanese identity, enjoys a more legitimate status than the bilingual class. As far as the monolingual JSL class is concerned, I did not sense any of the secretive ¯ or shameful connotations associated with JSL classes that Ota (2000) reports in his study. Language minority students move between the monolingual JSL and regular classes freely; other students know where they are when they are not in the homeroom. In contrast, many Japanese homeroom teachers do not entirely support the use of students’ L1 in the bilingual JSL class, and their lack of support is reflected in the isolated location of the classroom. Going into the bilingual JSL classroom in the north wing, through a hallway, does feel as if one were stepping out of the regular part of the school. At the same time, the very distance of the bilingual JSL class, and of the monolingual JSL class to a lesser extent, from homeroom classrooms, serves to create a sanctuary for language minority students. The students are appropriating the isolation of the JSL classes as a way to give themselves space to express identities that are hard to express in the regular classroom. Many of the language minority students, even those who are no longer taking JSL classes, simply ‘hang out’ in both JSL classrooms. Also, during one JSL class, I heard two fourth graders talking enthusiastically to Mr. Nakamura about their experience in Vietnam. When I moved to their table, the two boys pulled out a picture book on Vietnam from the shelf – by this point any pretence to work on their kanji exercise sheet had been completely dropped – and started to explain the photos to us. When they found a photo of Ho Chi Minh City in the book, one of them exclaimed, ‘I know where it is! I’ve been there!’ followed by the other boy’s ‘Me too!’ I could relate to their enthusiasm because earlier I had found another picture book on Canada, a country where I lived for a long time, and thought to myself, ‘I can show the kids where I used to live.’ For adults and children alike, to be able to talk about where they have lived is an affirmation of their personal history, and therefore their identity. The two boys’ show-and-tell about Ho Chi Minh City even led

Sugino Public Elementary School 111

to stories about their experience in the refugee settlement center where they had spent their first days in Japan. However, I did not witness such an open display of enthusiasm about their native countries outside of the JSL classrooms.

Student-centered learning Homeroom teachers, who teach most of the classes, vary in their attention to language development across the curriculum. Mr. Sait¯ o, a grade 2 homeroom teacher, stands out in this regard. He is skilled at making students aware of their own language use. Grade 1 and 2 classes were planning to cook sweet potatoes they had harvested in their science classes. The students split into four groups, each making a different dish. Sait¯ o was in charge of the group making daigakuimo (candied potatoes): After discussing how many potatoes they need for their part, they realize that they need to know how many the other groups are going to need – after all there are only so many potatoes. So Sait¯ o-sensei dispatches several students to the other three groups to find out. But before he sends them away, he has the students practice how they might go about asking the question. Sh¯ ota [a Chinese boy] offers, ‘How many potatoes do you need?’ but the teacher points out that people would be taken aback if he just turned up in their classroom and asked the question out of the blue. Other children suggest that he should start with ‘I am Sh¯ ota from the daigakuimo group.’ The teacher is happy with this self-introduction and makes each member rehearse the entire sequence of questions before letting them go. (FN 11/21/00) This way, the first and second graders learned how to ask a question in an appropriate manner in the context of a science project. Although this mini-lesson was improvised chiefly for Sh¯ ota’s benefit, other children also took part by offering their ideas of socially acceptable ways of asking a question and going over the flow of the discourse that they are supposed to follow. In the same session, something else happened. The potato cooking project was a joint project among four classes, and Motoe, a Chinese girl in one class, discovered that Sh¯ ota, who belongs to another class, was also Chinese. She said to him, in Japanese, ‘Oh, you are Chinese too?’ Mr. Sait¯ o capitalized on the situation and asked the whole class a series

112

Language and Education in Japan

of questions: ‘Who among you are Chinese?’ ‘Who speaks Chinese at home?’ ‘Who can understand videos in Chinese?’ and ‘Who can understand Chinese and Sign Language?’ The last question was for Sh¯ ota, whose parents are both deaf. Every time Mr. Sait¯ o asked a question, many hands shot up in the air. He greeted the enthusiastic responses with the equally energetic ‘That’s great!’ and ‘Wonderful!’ He sounded so genuinely thrilled that even the children who spoke no Chinese or probably had no idea what sign language was raised their hands to be included. As the potato harvesting and the subsequent cooking project indicate, the curriculum at Sugino is rich in hands-on, student-centered activities. With not so fond memories of my own public school education some three decades ago, I had expected classes to be full of fact cramming and memorization. On the contrary, I found students engaged in hands-on projects in which they have a large degree of freedom to make decisions. Teachers facilitate their work and make suggestions, but they respect the decisions the students make. The grade 3 class, for instance, spent a whole term growing a plant called kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus), which is supposed to be environmentally friendly. Once the plants had grown tall and the flowers had bloomed, the students conducted various group projects with them: One group used the flowers to dye cloth; another dried leaves to make tea, and so on. One group of two girls used the pulp to experiment with paper making: They have already extracted the pulp out of the kenaf stalks (apparently a major ordeal to get to this point). Today they mix the pulp and water and put it in the blender. The school has a special wooden frame for paper making. They are expecting to make four pieces of paper using the frame, so they first divide the solution into four glasses. The two girls take turns and take this job extremely seriously, pouring only a tiny bit into each glass at a time to make sure that each glass is getting an equal amount. After measuring the four cups ever so carefully, it turns out that one cup just does not have enough pulp to make a sheet of paper the size of a postcard. After pouring two cups [onto the frame], it still does not look like enough. Ms. Sumi [their teacher] then asks the two girls what they want to do. She does not tell them what to do but rather solicits their opinion. The girls decide that they are probably better off pouring all four cups onto one frame. They do this, and while it is wet, it looks like thinly spread wool. But when they take it out of the frame and iron it between two

Sugino Public Elementary School 113

dish towels, it comes out looking like paper. Several other children come to admire their œuvre d’art. (FN 11/24/00) In sum, after 40 minutes of careful work, the girls produced a single sheet of paper the size of a postcard. To me, it was a beautiful work of art, but for some reason it failed to meet the students’ expectations. They wanted to do it all over again. I inwardly said, ‘Oh no!’ thinking of all the cumbersome and messy steps it took to produce that tiny piece of paper. But Ms. Sumi said to them with a gentle smile, ‘OK, if you would like to do it again, let’s do it,’ and the two girls in fact repeated the whole process. Students are given a large degree of freedom to direct their own learning, but they are also expected to be responsible for their actions and explain themselves in appropriate language. Every student, from grade 1 on, is expected to announce his or her name and class (e.g., ‘I am Sh¯ ota from the second-grade class’) when entering the staff room and addressing a teacher and to explain his or her business clearly. I once tried to speak for a second grader who was too excited to report a minor accident to the vice principal, but the vice principal stopped me firmly, saying that the student needs to be able to speak for herself. In addition, Mr. Sait¯ o and a few other teachers note that Sugino children tend to speak ‘Sugino-ese,’ an informal register used in the housing project, which could sound coarse or vulgar in some contexts. For language minority children who have spent their entire life in Japan in this housing project, Suginoese is the only variety of Japanese to which they have been exposed. Teachers at Sugino pay particular attention to helping their students learn a formal register in Japanese more appropriate to the school setting. For example, in the potato-cooking lesson mentioned above, Sh¯ ota, in looking at a particularly big potato, exclaims, ‘Dek¯e!’ – a slang word for big. Mr. Sait¯ o notices this and without missing a beat tells him, ‘OK, let’s rephrase that.’ But Sh¯ ota can only produce the unconjugated form of dek¯e: ‘Dekai.’ Mr. Sait¯ o further corrects it by saying that the proper word is o¯kii. As Lisa Delpit (1995) writes in relation to the education of African American students, it is necessary for minority students to be able to employ formal language – the language of power (Bourdieu, 1977b) – effectively both for academic success in school and also for negotiating identity in the larger society. Sugino teachers provide such training in a disciplined, yet caring manner. Among other activities I observed, particularly notable were sixth graders’ projects on wars. Mr. Mikami, grade 6 homeroom teacher, pointed out to me that war is the underlying cause for virtually all of

114

Language and Education in Japan

Sugino’s language minority students’ residence in Japan: The Chinese students are grandchildren and relatives of ‘war orphans’; the children from Southeast Asia are refugees who have escaped civil wars in their countries. Grade 6 students investigated the wars that were most relevant to them and interviewed family members and people in the local community about their war experiences. Projects such as this can be seen as the beginning of an effort to promote critical literacy: All students are encouraged to reflect on their sociopolitical environments and language minority students are able to assume identities of authority as information sources who know more than majority students about a topic that is deemed important in the academic curriculum. Similarly, community members are for once also construed as experts whose knowledge and experience have much to offer to all students. Each time a class conducts a project such as this, they present the results to the whole school and sometimes invite guests from the community as well.

‘A place to put a dresser’: Subtractive bilingualism Relatively few of the language minority students at Sugino are recent arrivals. The majority came to Japan at a very young age or were born in Japan. With little systematic support for L1 maintenance, many are rapidly losing their L1, while at the same time not acquiring the gradelevel Japanese language proficiency – a classic case of subtractive bilingualism (Lambert, 1975). Ms. Ayabe, a JSL teacher, is worried about the negative effects of L1 attrition on the students’ cognitive development. Being in close contact with the JSL students, she is acutely aware of the difficulties they are experiencing in academic learning: Nothing sticks. They can’t remember things. It’s not that they are not making an effort. When I came to this school, I talked to the previous JSL teacher. We initially said that maybe these kids have fewer drawers [in their heads]. But gradually, we started to say, Maybe it’s not the drawers but they don’t even have a place to put the dresser. (IN 10/16/00 J) She notes that bilingual students generally have difficulty moving beyond ¯ (2000). grade 2-level Japanese literacy, a tendency also observed by Ota Ms. Ayabe suspects that there is a qualitative difference between the grades 2 and 3 materials in terms of the cognitive sophistication they demand: Concepts to be learned become more abstract and complex

Sugino Public Elementary School 115

in grade 3. Those students who are losing their L1 may not have enough cognitive maturity to handle the age-appropriate curriculum in Japanese, she says. In the Sugino community, language minority students’ L1 plays very little role. The only place where their L1 is given an official function in academic instruction is the bilingual JSL classes. However, even there the use of students’ native language is restricted. Only when the student does not understand instruction in Japanese, does the bilingual aide switch to the L1. Ms. Ayabe, who herself is a proponent of L1 maintenance, tells me that even this level of L1 use was initially difficult to introduce: Homeroom teachers did not recognize the point of introducing the students’ L1 into the school curriculum. Ms. Ayabe says, in defense of the homeroom teachers: I don’t think they are aware of the necessity [of L1]    If I were a regular homeroom teacher, I would probably think the same way; I would want the children to learn the Japanese school’s way of doing things, learn Japanese as fast as possible, learn to act in harmony with other children. It’s not ill-intentioned, but you just believe that what the children need most of all is Japanese, and their L1 can be taken care of at home. (IN 10/16/00 J) In my interaction with teachers and administrators, I found that while they support students’ cultural diversity, when it comes to bilingualism, most teachers prefer the ‘division of labor’ principle: that is, the school supports students’ L2 development while the family can help maintain their L1 at home. Ms. Takano states clearly: In a public school I don’t think it is necessary to look after [bilingual students’] mother tongue, not unless you can afford to. So if the parents think that mother tongue education is necessary, they can teach it at home or make use of classes run by volunteer groups, of which there are many. (IN 01/24/01 J) It is not that she is against L1 maintenance or against introducing other languages into her school. In fact, she talks concretely about her ambition to introduce Chinese into the curriculum slowly, not only for Chinese L1 students but for all Sugino students: One thing I can say is that within the framework of the [newly implemented] integrated study, we should be thinking about holding a

116

Language and Education in Japan

Chinese lesson one hour a week – fortunately we have lots of potential instructors [in the community] – or creating a Chinese language club, not so much to teach a mother tongue but to foster interest in other languages. I think it would be wonderful if Sugino became a kind of school where, if you came here, you’d learn to speak Chinese at a certain level. (IN 11/24/00 J) Nonetheless, as the principal of a Japanese public school that holds a large number of language minority students who are going to stay permanently in Japan, she is unambiguous about her linguistic priority. This division of labor principle might be reasonable in theory but in practice proves problematic for many students. An abstract idea such as attending a heritage language class has to be translated into a set of concrete conditions, such as availability, distance, and time, to be feasible. The principal referred to the existence of heritage language classes in the neighborhood. It is true that such classes exist.32 But Mai, a Vietnamese fifth grader whom I interviewed, told me that she had attended a Vietnamese class but had stopped going because she needed to take a bus and a train to get to the class. Her parents considered such a trip too dangerous for an 11-year-old. A heritage language class appropriate for each student may not be located in the vicinity of the housing project, and given the young age of these children, many parents are reluctant to send them to a class far away. In such cases, the task of L1 maintenance falls entirely on the shoulders of the parents, many of whom are away from home most of the day in an effort to make ends meet. Even when it is possible for parents to foster L1 maintenance in the home, it may not be wholly approved of by the teachers. At Sugino, contradictory ideologies surround language minority students’ use of L1 in the home. Officially, it is considered desirable for parents to speak to their children in their L1 and encourage L1 maintenance/development in the home. Less officially, some teachers believe that language minority students’ use of L1 hinders their Japanese development. Mr. Nakamura wrote, in the lesson plan of a class he taught on an open house day: It takes [language minority students] a long time to acquire Japanese because their opportunities to learn Japanese are limited to school and interactions with friends. Because they tend to use their mother tongue at home, while they have the advantage of speaking two languages, they tend to be behind in literacy skills. (D 10/13/00 J)

Sugino Public Elementary School 117

This type of discourse is widely shared among the teachers and appears and reappears in the remarks they make about the home–school connection. As the last sentence in the above quote exemplifies, usually the opportunity to learn two languages is duly noted; however, the main emphasis is on limited exposure to Japanese. Thus, while couched in neutral language, it reveals a deficit orientation to bilingualism that Sugino teachers seem to share tacitly while simultaneously espousing the goal of multiculturalism on a more conscious level. The lack of opportunity to use Japanese in the home is often identified as a root cause of the students’ slow progress in Japanese, which in turn becomes a rationale for even more focused instruction in Japanese in school. At the beginning of this chapter, I cited Ms. Takano’s statement about the school’s goal for language minority students: ‘Our role as an elementary school is to make them learn the basics (kiso kihon).’ Now that we have seen Sugino’s orientations towards Japanese development and L1 maintenance, it becomes clearer what is exactly meant by ‘the basics.’ Given that the language minority students at Sugino are permanent residents in Japan, Ms. Takano and her staff consider it imperative for the students to learn Japanese as quickly as possible. And they consider that the best way to achieve this is to maximize the students’ exposure to Japanese. The monolingual JSL class, which is seen as promoting Japanese proficiency by providing intensive instruction in Japanese fits this ideology and thus occupies a legitimate place both in physical space and in the curriculum. Teachers are much more ambivalent about the bilingual JSL class and L1 use in the home because they contradict the teachers’ belief about the necessity of maximum exposure to Japanese for language minority students. It is important to note that living permanently in Japan in this case is equated with a monolingual destiny. But of course, such an equation is not made for all bilingual children in Japan: Japanese students at Nichiei Immersion School are as much permanent residents of Japan as language minority students at Sugino, but for Nichiei students, living permanently in Japan is not seen as being at odds with becoming bilingual. In fact, with them, it is aggressively promoted because they are expected to grow up to assume professional positions for which the knowledge of another language is a clear asset, even a necessity. In contrast, for Sugino’s language minority children, in order to live in Japan, only Japanese is deemed necessary. They are expected to grow up to occupy a different socioeconomic rung from Nichiei children, the

118

Language and Education in Japan

working-class rung where proficiency in Japanese alone is assumed to be of use.

School-wide academic underachievement Stepping out of the JSL classroom, it does not take long for a visitor to realize that underachievement is not limited to language minority students but is a school-wide phenomenon at Sugino. The academic level of the school, as judged by the standardized tests the city administers every year, is considerably lower than the city’s average. The vice principal declined to specify by how much the school lags behind, but the principal acknowledged the seriousness of the problem: What is more serious is academic learning. You wonder why they just don’t remember things. It’s not only with foreign children. It’s a serious issue here. I have worked at several schools, and I have never seen teachers who prepare each class so diligently and address each student’s needs so carefully as teachers in this school. But they tell me that [no matter what they teach] by the next day the children have forgotten everything. They say there’s no word to describe their sense of frustration. (IN 11/24/00 J) Mathematics is a subject in which the achievement gap for some students is most visible, because the knowledge they need to gain is cumulative. For example, I observed a grade 4 class in which students were learning calculations that combined multiplication and addition: The class itself is quite well done and this teacher is a good teacher. When solving a word problem (‘You have eight loaves of bread for 130 yen apiece and eight pieces of cake for 270 yen apiece. How much is it all together?’), Mr. Chiba gets students to come up with their own solutions – and the students propose as many as eight solutions – and asks them to explain why they came up with their particular ideas. The student who comes up with the correct answer is a Chinese student, and Mr. Chiba compliments him by saying, ‘You did great! You came up with an idea nobody else did!’ (FN 10/19/00) As in other Sugino classes, Mr. Chiba teaches mathematics with in a student-centered focus. The way he focuses on the process of solving the problem is in line with the observation Stigler, Fernandez, and Yoshida (1998) made of mathematical instruction in Japanese elementary

Sugino Public Elementary School 119

schools: ‘The culture of mathematics in the Japanese classroom more closely resembles that of professional mathematics. Japanese teachers go to great lengths to get their students to focus on the process of problem solving instead of on the answer’ (p. 218). However, no matter how good a teacher may be, 34 students in one class is simply too many for him or her to make sure that everyone learns the lesson. I noticed two students sitting in front of me who just could not keep up and ended up tuning out: The girl was doodling in her notebook while the boy was coloring the side of a pencil with a marker. In other words, those who ought to be paying attention are tuning out and those who are on top of things and can probably afford to tune out every now and then are listening attentively. The seriousness of the students’ underachievement becomes more apparent in the upper grades. In one math class, sixth graders took an end-of-unit test: Some are making incredibly simple mistakes. For instance, in solving a problem that asks the surface area of the side of a cylinder, a boy simply multiplies the diameter of the cylinder by its height. Some are having difficulty coming up with an answer for 4 times 9. Mr. Mikami [the homeroom teacher] estimates that probably a fifth of the students cannot recite the multiplication table correctly. He also says that when he asked the class the formula for calculating the area of a triangle, only a third of the students got it right. (FN 12/08/00) When I hear the word ‘test,’ I tend to think of students’ answering questions unassisted. However, in this instance, Mr. Mikami provided a considerable amount of help. The review of the section they had done just before the test was intentionally left on the board: there was a large poster on the wall, with a list of various formulae for calculating areas and volumes; and Mr. Mikami told the students to circle the word volume and area in the word problems, so that they would not get the two confused. Even with all this support, he predicted that on average the class would get half the answers wrong. Speaking of the gap between the demands of the grade 6 curriculum and the students’ abilities, Mr. Mikami summed up: ‘It’s like going to a store to buy a fur coat with 10 yen in hand.’ The teachers blame poverty, parental neglect, and lack of discipline in the home as the causes of students’ underachievement. Some teachers talk in a sympathetic manner about the difficult situations many families are in, noting that many Sugino children come from

120

Language and Education in Japan

single-parent homes on welfare. A grade 1 teacher observes that it would be insensitive to teach the lifestyle of the prototypical Japanese family (e.g., two parents with two children, the father working for a company and the mother staying at home to take care of the children) in this school as if it were some kind of archetype, considering how few of the Sugino children come from such families. Other teachers are more critical of parents’ neglect of their children. The children’s homes are often characterized in terms of inadequacies, another common discourse utilized by many teachers. For example, speaking of his impression of home visits,33 Mr. Sait¯ o comments, ‘It seems to me that many kids are growing up surrounded by loud noises. For example, the TV is always on. I noticed it when I visited their homes, even when I am there, the TV is on. The Chinese video is on.’ Mr. Mikami says, ‘These kids don’t go to juku [cram school] after school, and it’s not as if their parents are in when the kids come home either. So, many of them are just left by themselves.’ Language minority parents are portrayed as cooperative but essentially uninformed about Japanese schooling. Mr. Sait¯ o notes: [Language minority] parents are cooperative. Or it’s more like, ‘We’re not familiar with school, so we count on you.’ ‘We are not very good at reading and writing Japanese, so we count on you.’ Compared with other schools, more parents seem to have that attitude here. (IN 11/21/00 J) Ms. Takano offers an interesting twist to the ‘blame the family’ discourse. She tells me that language minority children lead a more regulated life and that their parents have higher academic expectations for them than their Japanese counterparts. Once the bilingual students overcome the linguistic hurdles, she says, they tend to outstrip their Japanese peers academically and start taking leadership roles in class: Those Vietnamese students who are doing well come from homes where the amount of TV watching is strictly limited. I wonder if the Japanese families are doing the same. Likewise, I hear that Chinese families – I suppose this would be the ones that are not doing parttime work – eat dinner together. Many foreign families remind me of the older days in Japan – call it ‘dignified poverty’ (seihin) – where people were poor but led a disciplined, beautiful life. (IN 11/24/00 J) Ms. Takano’s comment is interesting because she is making a claim that middle-class values that some students bring to the school are in the end

Sugino Public Elementary School 121

a stronger determiner of their academic success than native/nonnative proficiency in Japanese. Parents of language minority students may be placed at the bottom rung of the socioeconomic hierarchy in Japan, but back in their native countries many were professionals. It is an extremely well-documented phenomenon that middle-class students are more advantaged in school performance than working-class students because the culture of the school reflects the values of the middle-class (e.g., Bourdieu, 1977a; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Feldman, 2001; Heath, 1983; McCallum and Demie, 2001; Shannon, 1996; White, 1982). The class factor is often difficult to distinguish from the ethnic and linguistic factors since more often than not language minority children belong to the working class. However, Ms. Takano is suggesting that school success is ultimately a class issue, rather than a linguistic or ethnic issue. Those students who can access middle-class cultural capital either from their past or present are more likely to achieve school ‘success,’ so that language minority students who come from a former middle-class background may in the end be at a greater advantage than working-class Japanese-native-speaking students.

Social integration, linguistic assimilation Most teachers I talked to claimed that students in this school take multiculturalism for granted; that being different is part of their everyday life. Because many have grown up in the housing complex where the community is so diverse – not just culturally and linguistically but also in terms of physical abilities and family structures – diversity is what is ‘normal’ for these children. It is the adults who are overly sensitive about ethnic issues, claimed the teachers. Indeed, although bullying the weak does happen in this school as in any other school, children at Sugino do not seem to be bullied because of their foreignness, a phenomenon which has been reported in other public schools (Vaipae, 2001). In grades 5 and 6, especially, the more socially powerful members of the classes are language minority students, and anyone who dares to utter racist remarks would quickly be sanctioned. Furthermore, ethnicity or language background do not seem to play a major role in the children’s socialization patterns. A student’s best friend may well be someone from the same ethnic background, but I did not observe in this school a noticeable Japanese/non-Japanese fault line among the students that I have seen in other schools. Because most students are Asian, in any homeroom class I found it extremely difficult to tell who is Japanese and who is not unless the

122

Language and Education in Japan

teacher specifically pointed them out to me. Some faces might strike me as somewhat darker or with deeper features, but so are many ‘mainstream’ Japanese. Most students speak Japanese fluently, at least on the surface, with no discernible accent. And some students have adopted Japanese names. Physically, few students stand out. The atmosphere of the school is so color-blind that some teachers are concerned about the lack of awareness among the students. ‘They are astonishingly unaware of their backgrounds,’ Ms. Imanishi, the grade 5 homeroom teacher told me. For example, she said, she was watching a TV show on a Sunday in which foreigners were portrayed in a caricatured, stereotypical manner. The show made a highly exaggerated and derisive portrayal of the Vietnamese. Given the fact that she has Vietnamese students in her class, she was deeply offended. But the next morning she found some Vietnamese students re-enacting the skits from the show with glee. They thought it was hilarious. ‘They are just not aware of it at all,’ said Ms. Imanishi. I wondered, however, if the students are entirely unaware of ethnicity as the teachers claimed. One thing I noticed in this school is that students ask where I am from. The most common question they ask me in this school as in the other schools is what I am recording in my notebook. However, the second most common question is ‘What nationality are you?’ (Sensei, nanijin?), which I have seldom been asked in the other schools. When I tell them that I am Japanese but have lived in Canada for a long time, they often respond by saying where they come from. Also, when I talked to Billy, a vivacious second grader from Indonesia, during lunch, he told me that he brings lunch from home on the days pork is served at school because he is a Muslim. Although his teacher, Mr. Sait¯ o, approves of it, some classmates call him ‘Sekoi’ for this, he said. Sekoi is slang for stingy or cheap, but in ‘Suginoese’ it serves as an all-purpose word to express general disapproval. Billy appears vindicated that his teacher is on his side. Nonetheless, it suggests that children themselves create an exclusionary atmosphere that encourages sameness. However, the most remarkable aspect of this school is its linguistic homogeneity. Throughout my fieldwork I never heard bilingual students speak their L1, except on a few occasions when the teachers solicited it. Even among children of the same language background, they converse with one other in Japanese. As a result, sometimes even students from the same country do not realize their shared background, as the earlier example of Motoe and Sh¯ ota shows. Even so, younger children seem

Sugino Public Elementary School 123

to like it when an opportunity presents itself for them to display their L1 competence. In an ‘international understanding’ (kokusai rikai) class, which is a mixture of conversational English and the introduction of various cultures, the instructor, Ms. Cho, is Chinese. Although in principle she is supposed to teach the class in English, she sometimes incorporates some basic Chinese expressions effectively. One day she taught a short Chinese song. The Chinese students in the class were obviously able to sing it better than the others. Billy said exasperatedly to a nearby Chinese girl, ‘Rika, it’s normal you can do this because you’re Chinese!’ Rika bobbed her head with a satisfied grin on her face. As they become older, however, students grow more reluctant to display their L1. Ms. Imanishi says, somewhat contradicting her earlier remarks about students’ lack of awareness, that the bilingual students in her class do not like it when she singles them out and asks them, for instance, ‘How do you call this in Vietnamese?’ It is hard to know whether they do not like being singled out this way because they do not know the appropriate words in their L1 or because they do not want to be identified as speakers of a minority language. My suspicion is that it is both. Since most of the bilingual students in this school have been living in Japan since a young age, older students have been away from their homeland longer than younger students. In an environment with little support for their L1, many are undergoing L1 attrition. It is also likely that by the time they reach the upper grades they have assimilated society’s message that their L1 has little value as linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991) in Japan.

7 Midori Public Elementary School

Midori Town is a small, industrial town – it is a rather sleepy place. Its economy is supported by a couple of large manufacturing companies and their small subsidiary factories. Streets are wide with tall, lush trees – something not seen in more urban cities in Japan. The only train, which has but three cars, that connects this town to the next provides an hourly service. I rode the train again and again with a group of high school girls with ash dyed-blonde hair and blue, almost theatrical, eye shadow: a look that had been popular among girls in Tokyo the previous year. It is mostly students who use the train; most adults drive to go places. Indeed, it is difficult to live in Midori Town without access to a car. Large shopping malls are located on the outskirts of the town. And in this small town, 14 percent of the approximately 43,000 residents are foreign nationals, predominantly Brazilians. Back in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when the Japanese economy was booming, many small companies had difficulty securing an adequate labor force. Japanese workers shied away from menial labor. In 1990, in order to help alleviate the labor shortage, the Japanese government revised the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law, relaxing immigration restrictions for foreign nationals of Japanese heritage – such as Japanese Brazilians – and their families (Vaipae, 2001). At that time, the owners of small-sized companies in Midori Town launched a campaign to recruit temporary workers from South America. They provided housing, services in Portuguese and Spanish, and developed a ‘no unemployment’ policy whereby extraneous foreign workers at one company were quickly reassigned to another company so that the migrant workers would not lose jobs. Japanese Brazilians poured into the town. 124

Midori Public Elementary School 125

Even after the Japanese economy collapsed, South American workingclass families continued to arrive in Midori Town, since ethnic communities and an infrastructure for their employment had been established. Today, one routinely sees South Americans in light gray factory uniforms walking or cycling to work in the morning. South American teenagers hang out on the street. Grocery stores and restaurants with signs in Portuguese and Spanish sit next to Japanese stores. According to the latest available figures (2003), 620 school-age (grades 1–9) children of foreign nationalities live in Midori Town. Of these students, 296, or 47.7 percent, are enrolled in the town’s public elementary and junior high schools. Another 13.6 percent attend the full-time private Brazilian school, called São Paulo School, in the vicinity. The remaining 38.7 percent either attend privately run, parttime Portuguese classes or no school at all. Midori Public Elementary School is one of several public elementary schools in this town. With close to 900 students, Midori Elementary is a relatively large school. If Sugino Elementary has the feel of an intimate community where the principal knows every child by name, Midori, by virtue of its size, feels more like an ‘institution’ that needs to be managed professionally. Although three-quarters of the 34 full-time teachers (all Japanese) are female, both the principal and vice principal are male, which also adds to the feel of a traditional school. The three-story building is divided into two wings, one for lower grades (grades 1–3) and the other for upper grades (grades 4–6). Each grade has four or five classes, up to 40 students in each class: the standard maximum class size in Japanese public schools.34 As one enters the building, past the rows of shoe boxes where students change their outside shoes to inside shoes and visitors are asked to change their shoes to green vinyl slippers, there is a sign pointing to the direction of the staff room. The sign is bilingual in Japanese and Portuguese. The school has a huge playground where all 900 children can spread out comfortably to do group exercise called rajio tais¯o (‘radio exercise’ – so called because it is done to the tune of an exercise program on the radio) in the morning. Sixty-five, or 7.3 percent, of the 896 students at Midori are of foreign nationalities: 47 from Brazil, 8 from Peru, and the remaining 10 from various other countries. This means that the vast majority of the language minority students at Midori Elementary are the children of South American migrant workers. As such, unlike the language minority students at Sugino, most of whom are permanent residents, the language minority students at Midori are expected to return home one day.

126

Language and Education in Japan

The imagined communities for these children seem to influence school policies in two ways. On the one hand, their L1 maintenance, if not exactly institutionally supported, is at least not frowned upon. In fact, as explained below, the pullout JSL class is regularly conducted bilingually. On the other hand, there is also less emphasis on the academic integration of language minority students. Since these students are expected to leave Japan one day, the school seems less concerned about their learning the Japanese school curriculum than the Japanese students. In short, because of the imagined communities for this particular group of students, Midori Elementary is more open to their L1 maintenance than Sugino is, but is also less committed to their academic integration into the Japanese education system.

JSL instruction ‘Kiritsu!’ (Stand!), ‘Ky¯otsuke!’ (Stand at attention!), ‘Korekara nihongo no benky¯o o hajimemasu’ (We now start the study of Japanese). ‘Rei!’ (Bow!) – thus starts every JSL class. The commands are given by one of the students, and all the students and adults in the room bow on cue. If a student comes in late, he is not allowed to sit down until the ritual is repeated with the JSL teacher. At the end of a class, they stand up again to repeat the same ritual but with a different announcement: ‘Korede nihongo no benky¯o o owarimasu. Arigat¯o gozaimashita’ – ‘We now end the study of Japanese. Thank you very much.’ Of the 65 foreign-national children at Midori, 20 attend pullout JSL classes. The criteria for pullout instruction according to the official policies are strictly linguistic: Recent arrivals with zero proficiency are pulled out for five 45-minute periods each week, while students who are conversationally fluent in Japanese and are literate in hiragana and katakana are pulled out only one period each week, with varying degrees of proficiency and extents of JSL instruction in between these two extremes. In reality, the decision about which students to pull out is made on an individual basis and involves not just their linguistic development but their cultural and social adjustment and overall well-being. This is consistent with the Japanese elementary school’s emphasis on educating the whole child rather than focusing on specific skills (Lewis, 1995; Tsuneyoshi, 2001). For example, a sixth grader who is already conversationally fluent in Japanese is nonetheless pulled out once a week because he is somewhat isolated in his homeroom class and deemed likely to benefit from extra individual attention in the JSL class. However, space availability is also a major

Midori Public Elementary School 127

factor. Up to four students are pulled out in any given period; thus when a student arrives with little Japanese proficiency and needs five periods of JSL instruction a week, more fluent children are taken out in order to make room for her. In short, the JSL students whose linguistic, cultural, and emotional needs are deemed the greatest receive priority. The JSL classroom is next to a grade 6 class at the end of a hallway, bright and exceptionally tidy – reflecting the personality of Ms. Shinohara, the JSL teacher. The room is the same size as a regular classroom, and with each class consisting of only three or four students, the room looks ridiculously large. Desks are arranged in rows facing the front as in regular classrooms. The usual requisite items for a JSL class adorn the room: a list of hiragana and katakana, a multiplication table, and a list of the names of the days of the week and the months. Half of the board at the back of the room functions as a monthly calendar where important events of the month such as the open house and the beginning of the swimming season are listed. But there are also items that suggest the background of JSL students in this school: a large map of South America and bilingual lists of basic greetings in both Portuguese and Spanish. Interestingly, the Portuguese and Spanish greetings are written, not in the Roman alphabet, but in katakana (the script that is used to transliterate foreign words), suggesting that these signs are meant for Japanese teachers, students, and visitors like myself, rather than for the JSL students. The JSL class is mixed level (both in grade and proficiency levels) and has a well-developed curriculum in the form of more than 200 exercise sheets that range from a basic self-introduction, greetings and hiragana to particle use and complex sentence structures: a product of the intense curriculum development when the school was designated by the Education Ministry as a research school for JSL education back in the mid-1990s. At the beginning level, the focus is on the introduction of basic vocabulary in combination with the learning of basic scripts (hiragana and katakana). There is a strong emphasis on school-related words and expressions. For example, as early as in the second unit, right after the self-introduction, classroom commands such as kiritsu (stand up), kiotsuke (stand at attention), and rei (bow) are introduced. Once sentence structures are introduced, the curriculum is entirely grammarbased, moving from simple declarative sentences (e.g., ‘I go to school’) to complex sentences with subordinate clauses (‘If I don’t study, I will have a problem’). Students work individually on the exercise sheets of their level with the help of Ms. Shinohara and one of the two instructional

128

Language and Education in Japan

aides who speak both Spanish and Portuguese. Judging from the exercise sheets on which students are working, it seems that beginning level materials are much more heavily used, with more advanced students exiting the JSL program before they ever reach exercises on complex structures. In one class I observed, some children were engaged in learning how to write hiragana and katakana – admittedly a dull and mechanical exercise for both the doer and the observer. However, watching Akira, a fourth grader who had moved from São Paulo School only two weeks before, I was made aware how difficult it was for a child from an alphabet script background to learn an entirely different script. What adult Japanese L1 writers take for granted – long strokes, short strokes, slants, hooks, where to place a character in a square (in Japanese schools, youngsters practice their handwriting in notebooks with grids) – all of these need to be taught explicitly. In addition to the penmanship exercise, Akira also worked on basic vocabulary such as kokuban (blackboard), tokei (clock), honbako (book shelves), terebi (television), and ch¯oku (chalk). A girl called Mitsue was learning place names such as shokuinshitsu (staffroom), k¯och¯o-shitsu (principal’s office), taiikukan (gym), r¯oka (hallway) and toire (bathroom). In other words, JSL instruction focuses on the kind of vocabulary language minority students need in order to survive in the Japanese school environment. Doing school is at the heart of JSL. Ms. Shinohara is in her third year of being in charge of JSL classes. Generally, regular teachers rotate every two years to be in charge of JSL instruction; any teacher, except very novice teachers, can be assigned to the role. No special qualifications are required. When asked if it is not overwhelming to be suddenly assigned to teach JSL classes when they have no background in JSL education or second language acquisition, Ms. Shinohara responds that the curriculum is so well laid out that ‘anyone can be in charge of Japanese instruction.’ Also, she adds, since most teachers have prior exposure to JSL students as regular homeroom teachers, it is not as if they encountered JSL students for the first time when they were designated as JSL teachers. Even though Ms. Shinohara has no particular JSL background and claims that the curriculum is teacher-proof, she is a supremely competent teacher. She circulates among the students, focusing on one child at a time but has enough control of the class as a whole to have everyone on task. I felt that the students’ time away from regular classes was well justified. Although it is true that the curriculum is grammarbased and no communicative activities take place in the class – everyone

Midori Public Elementary School 129

is working on his or her own exercise sheet – JSL students are nonetheless constantly engaged in substantial work, which, as I discuss below, is not always the case in the regular classes. Ms. Shinohara is firm and does not let her students fool around, as some of the regular teachers do in their homeroom classes. At the same time she is softly spoken and extremely patient with them, even when they are not motivated. For example, she gives enough space to Akira’s sister, a grade 1 girl named Claudia, who is unhappy to be placed in a Japanese school and who puts up her resistance at every turn: [Claudia] does not come on time, and Mr. Nagase [a bilingual aide] has to fetch her from her homeroom class. Even so, she is most reluctant to come. She has her long blonde hair braided in several strands and tied with colorful rubber bands. She is always dressed very cutely, but she is quite large and looks always hot for that reason. After doing some hiragana exercise, she gets bored and refuses to work with the hiragana cards Ms. Shinohara assigns her. She continues to grimace. It is an extremely frustrating situation and watching them is painful. Ms. Shinohara is extremely patient with her, and instead of forcing her, she hands her the cards, telling her gently, ‘OK, why don’t you do this alone?’ and lets her be, while the teacher herself goes on to look after Kurio [another first grader]. Claudia fiddles with the cards, and for a while it looks as if she is doing nothing, but it turns out that she is reorganizing the cards according to the order of hiragana. (FN 06/27/01)

Bilingual instruction in the JSL class As I noted above, because of the language minority students’ expected return home one day, Midori is relatively open to their L1 maintenance. One important way that suggests Midori’s relatively favorable orientation to the children’s L1 is the use of Portuguese and Spanish in the JSL class. Unlike at Sugino, where there are monolingual and bilingual JSL classes, Midori has only one kind of JSL class, a class in which at least one bilingual aide as well as the lead teacher is always present. As part of teacher development, Ms. Shinohara attends a Portuguese language class once a week, and she is often heard using basic Portuguese words with Brazilian children. However, L1 support comes mostly from two instructional aides. They provide L1 support in JSL classes as well as serving as liaisons between the South American parents and the teachers. Mr. Nagase, a Japanese L1 speaker, is a full-time

130

Language and Education in Japan

instructional aide, while Mr. Hasegawa, a second-generation JapaneseArgentine, works part-time. Judging from his speech, Mr. Nagase, who is self-taught in both languages, speaks broken Spanish and Portuguese and is constantly looking up words in the various dog-eared dictionaries he carries. But clearly, students understand what he says in their L1. When Ms. Shinohara explains something to new arrivals, Mr. Nagase translates more or less automatically. For example, when Akira was not following the model as he worked on his hiragana, Ms. Shinohara said, ‘Compare your writing with the model, and if they are different, try changing yours.’ Obviously, Akira did not understand this in Japanese, but thanks to Mr. Nagase, there was instant communication between Ms. Shinohara and the boy. Although there is always at least one instructional aide in the JSL class along with Ms. Shinohara, and the aides work closely with individual students, there is no confusion as to who is in charge. It is Ms. Shinohara who decides which student should work with Mr. Nagase or Mr. Hasegawa and on what task. While students are affectionate and work readily with either of the instructional aides (and visitors like myself), they clearly differentiate the ‘real teacher’ from the ‘helpers.’ At the end of every exercise, they always take their work to Ms. Shinohara for a final check. As far as they are concerned, work is not complete until they receive red circles35 from Ms. Shinohara on all their answers. The red pen is the prerogative of the teacher. The availability of L1 support is particularly crucial when students work on math in the JSL class. Although strictly speaking, math is not within the scope of JSL education, some children arrive in Japan without having learned those aspects of math that Japanese students of their age have already learned. The JSL class therefore offers some basic algebra instruction in addition to Japanese. Ms. Shinohara said: It’s more like we have no choice but teach it. I do say that this is the place for language instruction, but if they don’t memorize the multiplication table (kuku) by grade 3, they will have a real problem. So we do teach the multiplication table and other things. (IN 06/11/01 J). When content such as math is taught, the JSL class at Midori in effect takes on the characteristics of transitional bilingual education. Because of the presence of the bilingual aides, concepts and methods can be taught in the students’ L1, which, according to Ms. Shinohara, is of

Midori Public Elementary School 131

great help to those students who have difficulty understanding math instruction in the regular classroom: I tend to think that math is universal but, for example, this child [shifting through files], she doesn’t seem to understand math in the regular class. So the other instructional aide [Mr. Hasegawa] – not the one who was here – is a native of Argentina. So he explained all this [material to her in Spanish]. He explained how to do subtraction with numbers above 10, and this student really understood then. So [if we follow up like that] she may be able to understand better in the regular class. (IN 006/11/01 J) As a result, math exercises are a regular feature of the JSL class along with Japanese language instruction. For example, after half an hour of kanji exercises, Alyce, a third grader from Chile, started on her subtraction exercise: a three-digit number minus a three-digit number: She is quite fast and focused    I find it amusing that she uses her fingers to do subtraction. I wonder how on earth you use your 10 fingers to do a subtraction equation that involves more than 10 (e.g., 13 minus 6), and so I observe her finger movements carefully. It turns out that for 13 minus 6, she first subtracts 6 out of 10 (using her fingers) and then adds the remaining 4 fingers to 3 fingers. It seems like a very complex system, but Ms. Shinohara later tells me that this is the basic pattern for this kind of subtraction. Alyce manages to do 20 [questions] first and then insists on doing another 10 close to the end of the class, saying that she calculates very fast. (But then she leaves the class complaining that her next class is math again.) (FN 06/12/11) When I spoke to the head of instruction of the municipal board of education, he insisted that it was ‘impossible’ to offer instruction in Portuguese in Japanese schools. Within Midori, however, teachers generally seem positively inclined towards the limited use of L1 in instruction within the school. At least, at Midori, I did not witness the kind of ambivalence and occasional overt criticism towards the use of L1 that I observed at Sugino. Plenty of Midori teachers lament the limited Japanese proficiency of the language minority students, but none attribute it to the students’ use of L1 either at home or in school. Nor are the two instructional aides at Midori isolated from regular teachers in the workplace the way the L1-speaking instructional aides at Sugino are. Mr. Nagase

132

Language and Education in Japan

and Mr. Hasegawa are clearly differentiated from regular teachers – they are aides, not licensed teachers – but they are treated as an integral part of the educational staff. Because the aides speak their L1s, JSL students show no inhibition to speak Portuguese or Spanish in the JSL class (in contrast, they rarely speak their L1 in the regular classrooms). Two first graders, Kurio and Alberto, spoke Spanish to each other and to any adults in the room, including me, regardless of whether or not we understood them: They are quite competitive with each other with Kurio being slightly more advanced in Japanese and also more talkative. He shows off his progress to Alberto, claiming that he is smarter. I work mostly with Alberto on hiragana, and notice that he is better at writing than remembering the sounds. We mostly work on na, ni, nu, ne, no, but he just cannot remember the sound of nu. He keeps on speaking to me in Spanish, completely unfazed by the fact that I have no idea what he is saying. We use flashcards for hiragana, and although he has memorized the first line of hiragana, a, i, u, e, o, the next line, ka, ki, ku, ke, ko are yet to be learned. After several attempts, Alberto grabs hold of the cards, flips them (the pronunciations are written in the alphabet on the back of the cards), reading them ‘la ka,’ ‘la ke,’ ‘la ko,’ and finding it greatly amusing. (FN 06/12/01) The presence of other students from their home country, instructional aides who speak their L1, and the use of their L1 in instruction all contribute to the students’ active use of L1 in the JSL classroom. Although Ms. Shinohara keeps students on task and many of the worksheets are tedious and boring, if useful, there are many smiles, a great deal of laughter, and cheerfulness in this classroom. Generally, students seem to like coming to this class. Watching language minority students talking up a storm in Portuguese and Spanish in the ¯ JSL classroom, I was reminded of Ota’s (2000) remark that ‘the only place where [language minority] children can speak their L1 is the Japanese language [i.e., JSL] classroom’ (p. 173; my translation). In his study of public schools in the T¯ okai region with large numbers of Brazilian ¯ students, Ota found the pullout JSL class functioned as a sanctuary for language minority students: ‘It seems to me that they come to the Japanese language class not so much to learn Japanese but to regain their sense of self’ (p. 176; my translation). The JSL class at Midori serves a similar function.

Midori Public Elementary School 133

Instruction in the homeroom class Outside of the JSL class, the instruction at Midori is, on the whole, quite traditional. I encountered many practices there that reminded me of the kind of public school education I had received 30 years before. This is in contrast with the lessons I observed at Sugino Elementary, where the curriculum is student-centered and project-based, suggesting that despite the perception that Japanese public education is heavily centralized and standardized – and on one level this is quite true – a substantial variation exists across schools. In less inspiring lessons, teachers at Midori seem to focus purely on decoding the textbook. For example, in a grade 5 language arts class that dealt with the text on how the human body regulates its temperature – a topic that can be made potentially very interesting – the teacher followed the text paragraph by paragraph, asking a series of knowninformation questions such as ‘What is the “production of heat”?’ ‘Where does the definition appear?’ and ‘What are the parts of the body that produce heat?’ For each question, the teacher had the students raise their hands, called on one of them, and when the answer was correct, instructed the class to underline the relevant part of the text in red. It was clearly an exercise in identifying correct sentences in the text, so much so that when the teacher asked what happened next, one student offered, ‘Sensei, it’s written on page 43, at the bottom.’ Some teachers, however, do make an attempt to make the material more relevant to the children’s life, and when they do, the class comes alive. The topic of a grade 2 language arts class was ‘the Wisdom of Birds.’ After reading a paragraph, Ms. Mochida asked the children to act out the content of the paragraph: a crow deliberately dropping a nut on the ground to crack the shell, and in the case of a particularly hard nut, waiting for a car to run over it: Many kids volunteer. They love to perform as well as to watch others’ performances. There is a great deal of laughter. When a boy called Riku comes up to the front, Ms. Mochida announces, ‘Please watch Riku the Crow very carefully,’ which the children find very funny. When Riku drops the paper cup [standing in for a nut] he was holding in his mouth, kids ask, ‘Is it broken?’ Riku says, ‘No.’ The teacher then asks, ‘Well, if it’s not broken, what do you do?’ To this, Riku goes on to pick up the cup and drops it again – as he is supposed to. (FN 06/14/01)

134

Language and Education in Japan

The acting was an excellent way to make the children understand the content of the paragraph, a lesson that benefited both JSL and Japanese L1 children. Although there are such moments of creativity, in the classroom with 40 students, the overall emphasis is on uniformity and standardization. Students are expected to perform the same task in a certain order at a certain rate. Individual expressions that fall outside of the teachers’ expectations tend to be sanctioned rather than valued. There is a Japanese boy, Satoshi, who is doing very poorly in the math class but is rather artistic with his brush in a Chinese calligraphy class. However, Mr. Kawasaki, the calligraphy teacher, obviously disapproves of him, telling him to behave and follow his instructions. While girls seem to conform more readily, some other boys also write their name disproportionately large or add an interesting touch to their calligraphy. But they are supposed to write their name small in a straight line on the left side of the paper, and Mr. Kawasaki circulates among desks, telling off the children who do not follow the model. Similarly, in a grade 1 class, children were told to draw a grapefruit. When some children started to draw lines in the circle, indicating grapefruit sections inside, Ms. Kasei chided them by saying, ‘You don’t have to draw the inside; draw the outside.’ Watching the children erase what they had started to draw after hearing Ms. Kasei’s comments, I wondered if being original was a luxury that public school children in such a large class could not afford. In an environment where uniformity and standardization are the norm, language minority students who have not yet acquired sufficient language proficiency to follow instruction in Japanese have a particularly hard time participating in class. In a grade 1 math class, Claudia is approximately three steps behind her peers. While other children arrange their plastic blocks in a neat row according to the question, hold them up to show that they have done it, and write the whole equation in their notebooks, Claudia has only started to arrange her blocks. She seems to understand the concept of addition and is in the end perfectly capable of the calculation. But she has failed in an equally important job of performing the task in symphony with other children.

The use of instructional materials The above examples of a math class and a calligraphy class involve the use of counting blocks and calligraphy brushes. Indeed, attending

Midori Public Elementary School 135

a Japanese public elementary school involves purchasing and using many school supplies called ky¯ozai (instructional materials). All first graders have identical school kits consisting of a box of crayons, small glass pebbles called ohajiki, a pair of scissors, a pair of castanets, and a wooden 30-centimeter ruler, all neatly arranged – at least when they first purchase them – in an identical yellow tray that fits under their desks. Parents purchase these supplies as a set from the school-specified vendor: thus, not any 30-centimeter ruler will do; it has to be a specific ruler by a specific maker. By the time other standardized items such as notebooks for each subject, inside shoes, a math set, a water color paint box, a calligraphy set, among others, are added, the whole ‘starter kit’ costs 30,000 yen (approximately $250) – not an insignificant expense for any parent, but especially for those who choose public schools primarily for economic reasons.36 The use of specific and uniform supplies in class sometimes aids language minority students’ learning and at other times hinders it. For example, Akira was very much isolated during lunch in his grade 4 classroom. Desks are clustered in groups during lunch time, and there was much chatting both inside and across the groups. But no one talked to Akira, nor did he talk to anyone. It was not so much that the children deliberately ostracized him, but rather that they did not know what to do with a person who did not share the same language. However, in the science class that afternoon, he fared much better interacting with other boys because of the battery-powered toy trucks they were assembling. Everyone had the same kit. Akira was very skilled at this type of activity; he finished his truck before many of his classmates, and with the help of another student (who was asked by their teacher to assist Akira), he connected the headlight to a battery as a finishing touch. With a physical ‘thing’ to mediate, he and his classmates seemed to communicate much better. That afternoon, he was very much part of a group of boys who were showing off and field-testing their assembled trucks. But sometimes, the lack of the ‘right’ tools hinders language minority students’ learning, as in the following example of a grade 2 math unit: The second class is math. Today’s objective is to draw lines of specific lengths using a ruler – a lesson that sounds jokingly easy for adults but surprisingly difficult for second graders. One thing I notice is that when a child does not have a standard tool – as in the 30-centimeter ruler that everyone is using in this class – it does seriously hamper

136

Language and Education in Japan

her learning. For instance, while most others have a 30-centimeter wooden ruler, Manuela [a Brazilian girl] does not have one. She only has a flimsy, 15-centimeter plastic one. Since Ms. Mochida teaches with the assumption that everyone is using the same ruler and sometimes asks them to draw a line longer than 15 centimeters, not having one makes the task more complicated – not something you would want to add to the lack of language proficiency. (FN 06/14/01) Again, it is important to point out that it is not always or not only language minority students who do not have the required tools. Plenty of Japanese students forget or lose what they are supposed to bring, and many language minority students, especially those considered ‘bright,’ have the ‘right’ tools neatly arranged on their desk, ready to go. In the context of Japanese public schools, having the right tools at the right time is part of school readiness or even of academic talent. Those who are academically more advanced, who therefore would manage without the aid of these tools, have them; it is those with additional difficulties such as recently arrived language minority students like Manuela and struggling Japanese students, who would benefit from visual and handson tools, that usually do not have them.

Language minority students in the homeroom class Whenever I ask the teachers about general trends or characteristics of language minority students, they always remind me that each child is unique and different. When asked his philosophy on educating language minority students, Mr. Tokunaga, vice principal, remarks, ‘Every child is precious, regardless of whether they are foreign nationals or not.’ This seems to be a commonly shared discourse, at least publicly, among teachers. Indeed, language minority children – and Japanese students – at Midori Elementary exhibit a tremendous variety of identities and wide-ranging motivations. Kurio, a first grader from Peru, for example, with his big brown eyes, disarming smile, and sunny disposition, is a general favorite among his first-grade classmates and his homeroom teacher, Ms. Motoki. His popularity and his foreign identity in a way allow him to get away with the kind of mischief that Japanese children would not be allowed. He is a talented artist, a gift that both his teacher and classmates recognize, and given that his Japanese proficiency is quite elementary, he is apt to focus on drawing superhero figures in his notebook regardless of whatever activities the rest of the class is engaged in. Every now

Midori Public Elementary School 137

and then the teaching assistant37 spots his drawing and makes him stop, but two minutes later Kurio pulls out his notebook and resumes drawing. At least while he is drawing, Kurio is quiet and seated at his desk. But in a music class, Kurio simply stands up, walks up to the front, and grasps the hand of the teacher. Ms. Motoki good-naturedly smiles, holds his hand, and continues on with her instruction. The fact that other children do not at all react to this scene suggests that this is a recurring incident. Ms. Motoki later tells me that if she does not hold his hand, Kurio would start playing on her organ. He plays his melodica whenever he wants, wanders around the room, fiddles with the play dough on the shelf near the window, and draws pictures – all according to his own whim. It was interesting to observe that in the JSL class, Ms. Shinohara is much firmer with Kurio, and therefore he is much more on task. Obviously, he is testing his boundaries. In my talk with Ms. Motoki and the teaching assistant, I was surprised by how positive both of them are about Kurio – this despite the fact that he is so disruptive in class that practically the entire energy of the assistant is devoted to his care. Ms. Motoki emphasized how much progress Kurio has made, that she is trying to ‘increase the number of things he can do.’ At the same time, she admitted that she tends to be more lenient with non-Japanese students. It is also interesting to note that in his homeroom class, Kurio is silent: he has not begun to speak Japanese but neither does he speak Spanish the way he does in the JSL class. Obviously in his mind, Spanish has no role to play in the regular classroom. He goes on ‘quietly’ with his business, disarming everyone with his smiles and drawings instead. Despite the considerable disruption he is causing in class, Kurio in the two, short months of his school career has established the identity of an adorable, mischievous boy. Misbehavior, however, can be interpreted more harshly. Claudia, Akira’s sister, who has recently been moved from the nearby São Paulo School to Midori, is extremely unhappy with the move and shows resistance at every opportunity. Even in the JSL class, Claudia shows a total lack of motivation. But at least in this context, Ms. Shinohara is able to pay more individual attention to her, and Mr. Nagase can communicate with her in Portuguese. In the context of the regular classroom with 40 students, however, lack of cooperation and occasional outright hostility on Claudia’s part does not make her teachers enamored of her. One day in June, all 163 grade 1 children had their first assembly outside. The whole purpose

138

Language and Education in Japan

of the assembly was to get the first graders accustomed to group behavior outside; thus, the central activity was a simple ball game. Each of the five classes formed two lines, one for boys and one for girls. Lining up according to their height – from the shortest to the tallest – the children were supposed to pass a ball from front to back as fast as possible. When the ball reached the last person in line, he or she was supposed to run to the front of the line to indicate that the group was finished. Claudia was at the end of the girls’ line of her class because she was the tallest girl, and while children at the end of other lines ran with all their might to the front when they received the ball, Claudia moved her heavy body slowly and reluctantly, practically pushed by Ms. Kasei, her homeroom teacher. Compared with other children’s enthusiasm and ganbaru (do one’s best) spirit, it was easy to see how Claudia’s slow movement and grimace could frustrate her teachers. That said, once a child is labeled a ‘problem’ and her identity as such is institutionalized in the discourses teachers share, almost everything that child does from that point on is interpreted as just one more example of her misbehavior. And, although Japanese children can misbehave just as often, when foreign-national children, especially Caucasian children as in the case of Claudia, deviate from expected behaviors, their physical differences mark them and it is easy to attribute their misbehavior to their foreigner identity. Earlier that day, Ms. Kasei had expressed her concern that now that Claudia had joined her class, she and another Brazilian boy who was apt to misbehave might gang up together and lure others into misbehavior. Ms. Kasei and I met that morning, and this talk about the possibility of two Brazilian children causing chaos in her class was practically the first thing she said to me about her class. Although every child is ‘unique and precious’ according to the official school discourse – and I do not doubt that the teachers sincerely believe it in some contexts – in other contexts, foreignness is clearly marked as a sign of ‘high maintenance,’ a part of the shared school discourse that teachers employ to talk about problems in their class. Ms. Shinohara explains: Some [regular] teachers are struggling with foreign-national students. They are higher maintenance than other kids    kids who mess up a class, kids who are totally unmotivated, those who don’t bring things they are supposed to. That kind of thing is a real burden on the [homeroom] teachers. (IN 06/11/01 J)

Midori Public Elementary School 139

At the other end of the spectrum, there are language minority students who play the role of a model student, such as Oscar, a fifth grader: He tells me that he came to Japan when he was one-and-a-half years old. He is clearly a native speaker of Japanese. He looks somewhat Caucasian, with dark brown hair, paler skin, and a slightly plump body. It is clear that he is the academic star of the class. Whenever Ms. Abe [the homeroom teacher] asks a question of the class, he raises his hand first, responding with a crisp ‘Hai!’ (Yes!). When he stands up to answer a question, he pushes his chair inside his desk and stands upright – as the poster on the correct posture to answer questions that is pasted above the black board tells students to do. When Ms. Abe tells them to highlight texts, Oscar uses a ruler to draw an exact, straight line, when many boys doodle messy lines. In other words, he is a model student through and through – in a highly ‘Japanese’ sense. It is eerie to watch a half-Caucasian boy behaving in a highly exaggerated Japanese model student fashion. (FN 06/26/01) In the above excerpt, I comment on the ‘eeriness’ of a half-Caucasian boy playing the part of a quintessential Japanese model student. But I made that comment with the eyes of an outsider. Once one acclimatizes oneself to the environment and starts to see the students the way teachers do, it is rather eerie in another sense to realize how language minority students’ physical differences seems to ‘disappear’ once they learn to speak fluent Japanese and adopt the appropriate classroom behavior. It is only when they deviate from the linguistic and sociocultural norms that their physical differences mark them. Thus, there is another first grader from Brazil, Iris, who has light brown curly hair and clear blue eyes – physical features as far removed as possible from those of ethnically Japanese children. And yet, because she is a fluent speaker of Japanese and behaves like other Japanese first graders, it took much longer for me to register her as a language minority student than Kurio and Claudia.

Laissez-faire attitude In contrast to the concerted efforts in the JSL class to help language minority students catch up linguistically and academically, there is little evidence in the regular classroom to highlight and recognize their linguistic and cultural diversity. During my observation, I did not

140

Language and Education in Japan

witness a single case in which a teacher asked a language minority student how to say a word in Portuguese or what the equivalent situation would be like in Brazil – although opportunities for such mini-multicultural lessons abounded. For example, a unit in the grade 4 language arts class was on different dialects in Japan. When the teacher, Mr. Oguri, asked his students whether any of them spoke another dialect at home, he could have easily asked whether any of them spoke another language at home, which would have legitimated language minority students’ L1 use in the home and would have taught language majority children an important lesson in linguistic diversity in their own community. But he did not. Perhaps, when there are only a few minority students among 40, as opposed to a half or one-third of the class, the teachers do not feel that they have to make particular adjustments for minority children. Moreover, at Midori there is something of a laissez-faire attitude towards language minority students’ academic progress. Many teachers note that these students lag behind academically; but I do not sense any urgency on their part to address the problem. Language minority students, especially recent arrivals, tend to be given intellectually undemanding tasks such as penmanship exercises during regular classes while the rest of the class learns the curriculum: While other grade 4 students learn the division of three-digit numbers by two-digit numbers, Akira, who arrived last month, works on his katakana penmanship, set up by Ms. Une [the homeroom teacher]. It must be incredibly boring to spend the entire 45 minutes writing the same katakana over and over again without any feedback, but Akira perseveres impressively, with occasional yawning and arm stretching. I wonder what is happening to his math learning while he works on his penmanship. Even for Japanese children, this is not a particularly easy unit. (FN 06/25/01) In this way, the gap between Akira and his Japanese peers seems to widen, rather than narrow. To be fair to the teachers, catering to the special needs of a few language minority students in the context of a class with 40 students poses a tremendous challenge. The public school curriculum, although it has recently come under attack for being diluted and undemanding (Asahi Shimbun Ky¯ oiku Shuzai Han, 2003), is nonetheless still challenging to many students. The teachers are under pressure to cover all the material on time. However, the school on the whole seems

Midori Public Elementary School 141

to apply different standards to non-Japanese students from Japanese students. According to one survey report recently issued by the Midori Town Board of Education, 38.7 percent of school-age foreign-national children (grades 1–9) who reside in this town are not attending any full-time school. Moreover, even for those who are attending full-time Japanese schools, dropping out during junior high school is extremely common. In the same survey, 70 percent of junior high schoolage students who are not attending full-time schools have attended elementary schools, suggesting that at some point, Japanese schools failed them. Ms. Shinohara said, ‘[For language minority students] to stay in junior high for three years is apparently a tremendous challenge.’ As the detached tone of her comment suggests, however, the general attitude at Midori is to shrug off language minority students’ low academic achievement and high dropout rate as problems that cannot be helped. Two reasons could account for their laissez-faire attitude: the temporary nature of South American children’s residence in Japan, and the perceived lack of parental involvement. In many teachers’ minds, it seems, these two factors are intertwined. The language minority students at Midori are the children of migrant workers and as such are expected to leave Japan one day. In other words, they are temporary sojourners, not permanent residents. (However, as I mention below, many of the ‘migrant workers’ are becoming de facto permanent residents, as their stay in Japan is prolonged and their life becomes increasingly rooted, both materially and psychologically, in Japan.) When the children’s future is deemed to lie in their home country rather than in Japan, it may seem less critical for teachers to ensure language minority students’ advancement in the Japanese education system. Mr. Tokunaga, the vice principal, said: As long as they learn to speak Japanese, that would be fine. Their performance in other subjects cannot really be evaluated. Whenever possible, we ask the parents how long they intend to stay in Japan, and it depends on that too. For one thing, foreign parents, they come to Japan in order to work, to make money. I think they put their kids in Japanese schools because they don’t have anywhere else to leave them. It’s not that they want their kids to learn Japanese. (IN 06/27/01 J) In this interview excerpt, Mr. Tokunaga starts to explain the relationship between the school’s educational policies with regard to language

142

Language and Education in Japan

minority students and the students’ indeterminate future trajectories. What he seems to be saying is that if a child is supposed to stay in Japan only for a limited time, it would be unreasonable to expect her to learn the Japanese school curriculum. But note how, in the middle of the excerpt, his focus shifts to irresponsible parents, which is the second reason for the teachers’ laissez-faire attitude: If the parents don’t care, why should we? Many teachers comment on lax and what they consider irresponsible attitudes on the part of the parents. They note that some South American children simply do not show up in school when it rains or snows, on Saturdays, or when there is an activity they do not like, such as swimming. Mr. Tokunaga comments that South American parents have become better at coming up with a legitimate excuse – ‘Hiroshi is staying home today because he has a headache,’ even though Hiroshi’s migraine seems to occur regularly and mysteriously on Saturdays only. The teachers attribute the South American children’s erratic attendance to cultural differences: According to them, there is less emphasis on education in South America, and it is an accepted practice to let your child skip school when it rains. In contrast, in Japanese schools, they stress, children are supposed to attend every day and when they have to stay home for a ‘legitimate’ reason such as illness, the parents are supposed to report to the child’s homeroom teacher. If a child’s absence is unaccounted for, the teacher calls her home. Beneath the veneer of the discourse of cultural relativism, however, there seems to lie unarticulated but collectively shared ethnocentrism. On the surface, the teachers are saying, ‘Education in Japan is like this; education in Brazil is like that.’ But what they really mean seems to be, ‘Here in Japan, we are serious about educating our children and we know what is good for them, whereas in Brazil, education is not a serious business and these parents do not know what is good for their children.’ Almost every teacher expresses extreme frustration that South American parents are mistaking Japanese schools as ‘daycare’ (takujisho). A senior administrator said with obvious contempt, ‘The first question they ask when they approach us is “Until what time can you keep our child? – Nanji made azukatte moraemasuka?” ’ ‘In one JSL class, Ms. Shinohara said to a misbehaving Claudia, ‘In the Japanese school one studies for the entire class period – Nihon no gakk¯o de wa ichijikan chanto obenky¯o shimasu.’ I could not help wondering why she had to say, ‘in the Japanese school,’ using the contrastive particle wa (as in nihon no gakk¯o de wa), which suggests that things may be otherwise elsewhere.

Midori Public Elementary School 143

Parents Many of the migrant workers in Midori Town who originally came to Japan with the intention of staying for only long enough to make enough money are now prolonging their stay. According to a survey the town conducted in 1991, 98 percent of the foreign residents had lived in Japan for less than three years. Nine years later, in 2000, 83.7 percent of the foreign residents had lived in Japan for longer than three years. Also, in 1991, only 43 percent of the residents were with their families, but the figure had risen to 69.3 percent in 2000. These figures suggest that many of the South American migrant workers in Midori Town are in effect turning into permanent residents. This is a trend that is happening not only in this town but across the nation (Ishikawa, 2005; Sekiguchi, 2003). Nonetheless, many of the South American residents seem to retain what may be called a ‘temporary sojourner mentality.’38 Their purpose in coming to Japan was to make money; learning the Japanese language and culture and social integration are not necessarily their goals. Their workplaces often operate entirely in Portuguese or Spanish; they can watch Brazilian TV programs through cable; magazines from home arrive only three days late; they can catch up with news back home on the Internet. In short, they have self-sufficient communities of their own. When I met several South American parents at Midori, I was surprised how little Japanese most of them speak – except for the secondgeneration Japanese-Brazilian mothers. Even those who have lived in Japan for over a decade need Mr. Nagase’s translation to communicate with their children’s teachers. On the whole, and in contrast to the teachers’ stereotyped notions, these parents are highly education-conscious. I had an opportunity to interview eight parents. Many, especially those who see their future in Japan, expressed their wish to send their children to high school and to university, thus suggesting a gap between their imagined communities for their children and those of the school. However, those who take time to be interviewed by an outside researcher naturally constitute a self-selected group. Their opinion may not have been representative of that of all parents. Another issue that several parents raised was that of bullying. I myself did not witness any incident of bullying at Midori, and in my conversation with the teachers, they never mentioned it. But the parents said that their children have been the subject of discrimination and bullying. The mother of a sixth-grade girl, Mari, who seemed well integrated

144

Language and Education in Japan

in her class when I observed her earlier, said that when her daughter won a running race at a track-and-field day, her classmates told her, ‘Gaijin (foreigners) mustn’t win.’ Mrs. Higashiyama, the mother of a fourth grade girl, pointed out that in Brazil, children are more physically expressive, and that her daughter’s physical expressions were sometimes mistaken for an invitation for a fight and led to repeated incidents of bullying by her Japanese classmates. Mrs. Higashiyama said that she had told her daughter, ‘You’ve got to be strong.’ I was struck by the number of times that the word frio (cold) was used by these parents to describe their impressions of Japanese schools. The school certainly does not consider these parents as partners in the education of their children. Teachers complain about Japanese parents’ lack of parenting skills and cooperative attitudes; South American parents are often characterized as downright irresponsible. South American parents for their part seem mostly to stay out of school. They do not aggressively pursue their demands to make schooling work for their children like Hal parents do, or closely monitor what is going on with the curriculum like Nichiei parents do. Some parents clearly wish their children to go onto higher education eventually, but even so, their desire does not seem to lead to closer interaction with teachers to ensure that their children are learning academic content. The teachers, thinking of non-Japanese parents more of a hindrance to their children’s education than an asset, do not encourage more participation. As a result, the school’s vision of imagined communities for language minority students – that is, these children are going to return home one day – influences policies and practices regarding language minority students much more than that of the parents.

8 Imagined Communities, School Education, and Unequal Access to Bilingualism

While the previous five chapters provided detailed narratives of the policies and practices of each of the five schools, this chapter takes a step back and compares the five schools. By analyzing the relationship among imagined communities, school policies and practices, and student bilingualism and identities, I aim to provide insights as to why access to bilingualism is given freely to some children but not to others. The structure of the chapter is as follows. First, I discuss Nichiei and Hal, two schools that promote additive bilingualism in Japanese and English. I highlight commonalities between the two schools in terms of the ways in which they foster elite forms of bilingualism, as well as examining differences between them. In the second section, I offer a similar analysis of the two public schools, Sugino and Midori, where language minority students tend to develop subtractive forms of bilingualism. The third section analyzes the program at Zhonghua, which offers alternative imagined communities, and therefore an alternative form of education, to language minority students. The final two sections discuss the bilingualism and identities that students in these five schools are developing.

Elite bilingualism In one corner of the kindergarten class at Hal, children are busy working on their art projects. Their task that day is to paint pictures à la Picasso. The teacher, Ms. Thompson, shows the children many samples of Picasso’s work as a source of inspiration, and explains that Picasso had his ‘Blue Period’, in which he painted a lot of sad pictures with 145

146

Language and Education in Japan

cold colors, but that he also had his Rose Period, in which his paintings were much happier and warmer. As the children set out to paint, Ethan asks Ms. Thompson, ‘Can I paint what he looks like?’ Delighted by his original idea, Ms. Thompson responds enthusiastically, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea! Nobody has asked me that. Thank you!’ Jill proposes to draw a picture of a garden with flowers that she thinks Picasso would like to paint. Each child then explores his or her own idea and goes on to produce an original painting that is unique but at the same time uncannily Picasso-like. At schools such as Hal and Nichiei that serve privileged children, both teachers and parents expect students to grow up to be full members of their society and to thrive in the competitive global world. Preparation for such futures takes many forms. Introduction to high culture as the above example illustrates is one important aspect of their socialization process (Bourdieu, 1977a). Being introduced to various forms of high culture – art, classical music, literature, and so on – from an early age and consistently would lead to these children’s facility with and ownership of high culture in their adulthood in a way that is wholly inaccessible to less privileged children. Other aspects of socialization to participate in privileged, global imagined communities include an academically demanding curriculum, multicultural education, and encouragement of independent thinking. And at schools such as Nichiei and Hal, becoming additively bilingual in two socially prestigious languages is also a central part of such socialization. If there is one commonality that unites Nichiei and Hal, it is their strong orientation to bilingualism as a resource (Ruíz, 1984): a shared belief that bilingualism is a good thing, that becoming bilingual adds an important advantage to one’s life. Some teachers and parents were worried about whether it is in fact possible to foster additive bilingualism through schooling, but the goodness of additive bilingualism itself was never questioned. This is the fundamental difference between the elite bilingualism of privileged children and the bilingualism of underprivileged children. Privileged children are given ample opportunity to become additively bilingual in two socially prestigious languages, and once they become bilingual, their bilingualism provides them with further advantages. In contrast, underprivileged children’s bilingualism, a combination of a non-English L1 and society’s majority language as L2, is generally devalued, and their bilingualism itself is often seen as the cause of their academic underachievement and cultural maladjustment in school. At Nichiei and Hal, no one calls bilingualism a ‘problem.’

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 147

To truly appreciate how much Nichiei and Hal parents – especially Japanese parents – are invested in the Japanese-English bilingualism of their children, one needs to place foreign language learning in the context of non-English-speaking countries. It is true that even in the United States, middle-class, education-conscious, English-speaking parents are increasingly seeking opportunities to expose their children to a foreign language at an early age. This partly accounts for the rapid growth of dual-language immersion programs across the country (Center for Applied Linguistics, 2005) as well as private language classes for toddlers (Amoroso, 1999; King and Fogle, 2006; Nyhan, 2006). But the English-speaking parents’ wish to have their children learn a foreign language does not seem to be fueled by a pragmatic, instrumental motivation to make their children learn another language in order to be successful in a competitive global market. Since their own L1 is the world’s most dominant international language, they know that their language will take them anywhere in the world they want to go. Their desire for their children’s foreign language learning, then, seems more motivated by the knowledge that bilingualism stimulates cognitive development (King and Fogle, 2006) and by abstract and idealistic goals such as helping them become well-rounded individuals and fostering cultural sensitivity. In that sense, learning a foreign language is similar to other ‘early-enrichment-for-achievement’ (King and Fogle, 2006, p. 707) activities such as swimming lessons, music and movement classes for toddlers, and baby sign language instruction. This is true of some of the Western parents who enroll their children at Hal as well: Rather than viewing the learning of Japanese as a real necessity, these parents want their English-speaking children to learn another language as a form of enrichment. In contrast, the mindset of middle-class, education-conscious parents in a non-English-speaking country like Japan is quite different. They do not believe that their L1 constitutes sufficient linguistic capital for global participation; in fact, most Japanese believe that their language has little currency once they step out of their small island country. Combined with this belief is another ideology: Anyone who aspires to pursue a career that has anything to do with other nations must learn English; in fact, even if one’s career is confined to Japan, English may still be a necessary skill given the increasing interconnectedness of the world economy. There is a sense of urgency on the part of middle-class Japanese parents for their children to develop proficiency in English if they are to gain enough linguistic capital and be competitive in the global and domestic job market. That is what compels many Japanese

148

Language and Education in Japan

parents at Nichiei and Hal to enroll their children in these schools so that they will become highly proficient in English. Differences between Nichiei and Hal While both Nichiei and Hal strongly promote additive bilingualism in Japanese and English, there are also clear differences between the two schools with regard to the ultimate shape of bilingualism they are aiming for. This is again due to the different imagined communities to which their respective students are directed. Nichiei is a school for Japanese mainstream students. Their parents and teachers expect them to become, above all, mainstream members of Japanese society. The majority of Nichiei students go to university in Japan. Being children of the middle class at the beginning of the 21st century, their future is not confined to Japan, but their projected global future must be grounded firmly in their membership as Japanese citizens. As Dr. McKenzie reminded me, these parents are ‘not looking for their children to become little foreigners.’ Thus, many checks and balances are in place to keep Nichiei from turning into another international school. Having a regular (non-immersion) program running parallel to the immersion program ensures that the latter remains compatible with the Ministry of Education’s curriculum guidelines. The regular program helps to ensure, and to convince the parents, that the immersion program meets all the requirements of the Ministry of Education-approved Japanese school curriculum, and that it incorporates effective English instruction in addition to, not at the expense of, the already enriched Japanese school curriculum that the parents expect from a private school. Also, the regular program offers a safety net for immersion students. Although very few students transfer from the immersion to the regular program in practice, the existence of a nonimmersion program whose academic content is virtually the same as the immersion version gives parents peace of mind that, should immersion education not work out for their children, they could transfer to another, very similar, program within the same school. The active and visible roles that Japanese teachers play in the immersion program further help ground the program in the Japanese curriculum and ensure that immersion students grow up to be legitimate and competent members of Japanese society. Research on immersion education has paid little attention to the role of L1-speaking teachers in the program. My search for the literature on this topic yielded not even one single study whose central focus was on how teachers who teach students’ L1 contribute to immersion education. But at Nichiei,

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 149

the role of Japanese teachers is absolutely critical: They provide much needed opportunities for students to engage in higher-order thinking skills, which the English-medium classes do not always provide; they enable students to talk about their personal and academic problems in Japanese; and they serve as liaisons for parents who may not speak fluent English. Of course, one could argue that the fact that students can turn to Japanese teachers to discuss academic and personal problems further dilutes the message that students ought to be using English whenever they can. However, the integral role of Japanese teachers in the immersion program helps to anchor the program in the Japanese context by promoting students’ Japanese academic proficiency, taking care of their emotional needs in Japanese, and making the content of the program accessible to Japanese parents. Thus, the Nichiei immersion program is a program for Japanese L1 students for whom learning English as an international language is seen as an important investment (Norton, 2000; Norton Peirce, 1995). Some immersion teachers experience cultural conflicts with the Japanese norms and expectations of the program. This partly accounts for their high turnover. But other immersion teachers are attracted to the idea that students can learn English without being stripped of their Japanese identity. While he had much to criticize about the school, Mr. Jones, one of the immersion teachers, acknowledged that one thing that Nichiei does well is give priority to Japanese students. He compared it to an international school where he used to work, which treated Japanese students as second-class citizens: [At the international school] Japanese students I found were losing out, heavily. I find that very very disturbing, in that students from their own country to be first losing their identity and their culture, even when they are surrounded by it outside. I thought that education was one of the keys to open that up and not to close it. (IN 06/21/99) Also, there is a definite lack of emphasis on the teaching of Anglophone cultures at Nichiei. Of course, as soon as one starts talking about teaching ‘Anglophone cultures,’ there is the question of exactly which Anglophone culture one is supposed to teach. But the multiplicity of Anglophone cultures does not stop Hal from adopting an American school curriculum or introducing many aspects of American and British cultures there. But at Nichiei, the learning of English is motivated by instrumental purposes: The goal is not acculturation to Western

150

Language and Education in Japan

values, but to give Japanese mainstream students a high level of English proficiency.39 Hal also shares Nichiei’s collective orientation towards bilingualism as a resource. But the specific type of bilingualism Hal aims for is different from that of Nichiei. If at Nichiei, there is a clear recognition of Japanese as the students’ primary language, Hal just as unambiguously places English as the central language that will carry its students into their projected futures. Approximately half of the students are English L1 students and the majority of Hal students go on to Englishspeaking countries to attend college. The student demographics and their future trajectories give Hal different linguistic priorities from those of Nichiei. Although everyone is required to take Japanese classes, only one-sixth of the total instructional time is spent in Japanese. While most Japanese students become highly bilingual, many English L1 students do not achieve conversational fluency in Japanese and remain essentially monolingual. The fact that Japanese L1 students are often referred to as ESL students among the staff is a clear indication of the primacy of English in this school and the school’s language ideologies as distinct from Japanese society at large. Officially, students’ language background is referred to in terms of their Japanese proficiency: F for Japanese L1 students and S for Japanese L2 students, which itself is an interesting contradiction to the actual dominance of English in this school. But among the teachers, the term ESL students is used very frequently, especially when they are referring to Japanese L1 students’ difficulty with English. Sears (1998) tells us that this is a common linguistic orientation in international schools: It is interesting that the term bilingual is rarely heard in international schools except in association with host country language programmes for English speakers. Teachers and administrators refer to speakers of languages other than English as second language or ESOL children, seldom as bilinguals. The very fact that we use the term ESL, ESOL, EFL (English as a Foreign Language) or EAL (English as an Additional Language), suggests that we think of second language speakers in terms of their command of English rather than as bilinguals. (p. 44) In other words, international schools, despite their name, reflect a worldview in which English sits on top of the hierarchy of all languages, and both teachers and students are categorized in terms of their command of English. At least at Hal, the term bilingual is heard very often. But just as often, teachers call Japanese L1 students ESL students and focus on their

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 151

lack of English proficiency rather than on their additive bilingualism – almost despite themselves. Thus the great irony of the status of Japanese L1 students at Hal is that, despite their privileged status in Japanese society, which allows them to attend this school in the first place, within the school they are often positioned as ESL students, not unlike the way language minority students in US schools are. In this sense, it is accurate to call Japanese L1 students at Hal ESL students rather than EFL students. Just as most English language learners (ELLs) in US public schools have no option of not learning English, within the four walls of Hal, Japanese L1 students similarly have no option of not learning English. Their learning of English, in other words, does not have the sense of being optional that foreign language learning often implies. Japanese L1 students’ position as ESL students and English L1 students’ monolingualism are influenced by the current dominance of English in the world. English holds so much power and social value globally that even in a non-English speaking country, there are schools like Hal where English is positioned higher than the society’s majority language. Indeed, it is considered acceptable for monolingual English L1 students – and teachers – at Hal not to learn Japanese if they choose not to. Many English L1 students – but not so many teachers – do learn Japanese, at least to a certain degree, and when they do, they are commended for their effort. But English L1 students at Hal are not expected to learn Japanese the way Japanese L1 students are expected to learn English. In large part, their right not to learn Japanese stems from the power and prestige that their L1 enjoys in the world. They know that on a global scale, their L1 is a much more powerful language than Japanese,40 and combined with their future trajectories back to English-speaking countries, it makes sense from their point of view that they should consider the learning of Japanese to be of limited value. Parents as clients Annette Lareau (2000), in Home Advantage, discusses how the relationship between schools and parents varies across the social classes of the parents. She argues that the relationship between upper-middleclass parents and schools is characterized by ‘interconnectedness’ (p. 8): ‘There are much tighter linkages between upper-middle-class parents and the school than between working-class parents and the school because upper-middle-class parents closely supervise and frequently intervene in their children’s schooling’ (p. 9). The same can be said

152

Language and Education in Japan

of the school-parent relationships at Hal and Nichiei. We have seen Nichiei parents talk knowledgeably and comfortably about their children’s education and Hal parents intervene aggressively in a school policy they did not like. At these schools, parents demand to be equal partners in their children’s schooling. Their symbolic capital is such that the teachers, whether they like it or not, have to accept the parents’ role as such. These parents are at home with school culture and feel entitled to be part of it. At these schools, both the teachers and parents are well aware of the economic exchange in the form of tuition fees that positions them in a service provider–client relationship. Ms. Kozue at Nichiei, in referring to the open house the school holds every year for prospective parents, noted, ‘Public schools are free, you know. We are competing with free schooling, so unless we really perform, we don’t get enough customers.’ Similarly, coming from the parent side of the relationship, one American mother at Hal complained about the school’s proposal to place her daughter in another Japanese class with children whose Japanese language proficiency levels she considered lower than that of her daughter: ‘I’m sorry, but I’m paying too much money to this school for my child to be helping out lower-level kids.’ Both remarks, though coming from the opposite sides of the table, suggest that both parties are well aware of, and to a large extent accept, the ‘education as a service industry’ orientation. Teachers at Nichiei and Hal sometimes expressed concerns about the unduly high expectations some parents have for their children, in terms of both bilingualism and academic performance. Mr. Allen related how different parents react differently when their children’s bilingualism does not progress as smoothly as they had hoped: Some parents can cope with that and some can’t. Some parents, you know, have a positive attitude – ‘When they’ve got this far, that’s great, and I can’t expect any more. And it’s gonna happen later.’ And another parent can be, ‘What can I do? What specific things do I have to do? Just tell me and I’ll do it. I’ll get – I’ll do anything you say.’ But they’re not things you can input. (IN 01/13/00) The teachers occasionally hinted at their displeasure with aggressive parents who ‘bully’ their way through the system to get what they want for their children. But no teachers at these schools accuse the parents of lack of involvement. They expect the parents to supervise their children’s homework and reinforce at home what they learn in

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 153

school. If there is a problem, the teachers expect the parents to respond immediately. And, on the whole, the teachers’ expectations are met.

Subtractive bilingualism Public schools that serve low-income bilingual children do not expect them to grow up to be competitive players in the global market the way Nichiei and Hal teachers expect their students to be. The imagined communities that are institutionally available for such students are much more modest: perhaps, a solid working-class existence in whatever country in which they will be permanent residents. Limited imagined communities lead to more modest educational goals. The focus for this class of bilingual students tends to be the acquisition of basic skills that become the foundation of their socioeconomic independence, as Ms. Takano noted: ‘We have to help [the children] gain enough power to be able to survive in Japan. We want to guarantee academic abilities that become the foundation of that power.    So our role as an elementary school is to make them learn the basics.’ In this context, bilingualism is implicitly regarded as a problem (Ruíz, 1984) that hampers students’ acquisition of Japanese and therefore their academic learning. Once bilingualism is considered a problem, the natural solution is to eradicate it by promoting assimilation into the majority language (Baker, 2006; Ruíz, 1984). The view that bilingualism is a resource that opens up children’s futures and gives them a distinct advantage, which is so taken for granted at Nichiei and Hal, is entirely absent at Sugino and Midori. Imagined communities that Sugino and Midori teachers assume for their students show up in casual comments they make in their interaction with students. For example, Mr. Mikami, the grade 6 teacher at Sugino, told me that after he discovered that his sixth graders were relying on calculators to add single-digit numbers, he said to them, ‘You guys, with that kind of ability, you won’t be able to even get a part-time job at a convenience store.’ I am not blaming Mr. Mikami for saying this to his sixth graders: In the context of Sugino, it makes perfect sense. But his words do illuminate his and probably his colleagues’ assumptions about what social standing their students will occupy in the future and what kinds of jobs are viable options for them. One would not hear Nichiei and Hal teachers make such a remark simply because they would never imagine their students working in convenience stores.

154

Language and Education in Japan

Differences between Sugino and Midori Just as Nichiei and Hal differ from each other in the kinds of additive bilingual programs they offer, Sugino and Midori are also distinct from each other in significant ways while sharing many commonalities. Language minority students at Sugino are immigrants and refugees who are going to live permanently in Japan; language minority students at Midori, on the other hand, are the children of migrant workers who are planning to spend only a few years in Japan and then return to their home countries – although in reality, many of them in the end stay in Japan indefinitely. Accordingly, Sugino emphasizes integrating their language minority students into the Japanese education system, but in this process, efforts to support their L1 maintenance take a backseat. Midori, in contrast, tries to support language minority students’ L1 maintenance but their academic success within the Japanese education system is less of a priority. Sugino teachers are genuinely committed to helping their language minority students catch up linguistically (in Japanese, that is) and academically. Since these students are permanent members of Japanese society, the Sugino teachers strive to help them integrate into society by first integrating them into the school community. Language minority students at Sugino are full participants in the regular classroom activities, which are often designed to showcase their cultural knowledge. The atmosphere of the school is so culturally inclusive that many social leaders in the upper grades are language minority students. Their full academic and social participation in the school itself makes this school unique among public schools in Japan. Research predominantly shows that the default treatment that language minority students can expect from Japanese public schools is marginalization, ¯ ¯ isolation, or at best benign neglect (e.g., Ota, 2000, 2002; Ota and Tsuboya, 2005; Shimizu, 2002; Vaipae, 2001). Sugino’s achievements in this respect cannot be overemphasized. That is why so many teachers and administrators from other schools come to visit this school. However, Sugino’s commitment to integrating language minority students into the Japanese education system comes with the expectation of linguistic assimilation. The linguistic ideology that couples education with the acquisition of Japanese is tacit: No Sugino teachers openly declared to me that language minority students ought to learn Japanese at the exclusion of all other languages. Nonetheless, such an ideology underlies many of Sugino’s commonly shared discourses and practices.

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 155

The teachers’ lack of support for the bilingual JSL class and their ambivalence about language minority students’ use of L1 in the home are but two examples of the bilingualism-as-problem orientation implicit in the school’s ideology. In an interesting contrast, teachers at Midori are more open to language minority students’ L1 maintenance. The prospect of their eventual return home makes the school more sensitive to such students’ need for L1 maintenance. It should be noted that the need for their L1 maintenance is associated with their future outside of Japan. Their support does not mean that the teachers see Portuguese and Spanish as relevant languages within Japan or recognize the importance of a solid L1 foundation for the children’s cognitive development or L2 acquisition. The teachers support their L1 maintenance because they view these children as eventually going home. Nonetheless, it is true that there is more support for, and actual use of, students’ L1 as a medium of instruction at Midori. Unlike at Sugino, there is no differentiation and hierarchical ordering of monolingual and bilingual JSL classes at Midori. Bilingual aides are seen as an integral part of the school and play a critical role in the JSL class. There is liberal use of Portuguese and Spanish as mediums of instruction in the JSL class, and although the JSL class is in principle supposed to focus solely on the development of Japanese, in practice Ms. Shinohara and her bilingual aides also teach some mathematics using Portuguese and Spanish to explain content material to students. In other words, the JSL class at Midori functions somewhat like a transitional bilingual program in the United States. As in transitional bilingual programs generally, the active maintenance of language minority students’ L1 is not a goal (Baker, 2006), but at least within the context of the JSL class, there is ample support for students’ L1. For this reason, the students do not hesitate to use their L1 in the JSL class. At the same time, the awareness of the temporary nature of the South American students’ residence in Japan makes teachers less invested in their academic integration into the Japanese education system. The school seems to apply different standards to Japanese and non-Japanese students in the regular classroom setting. Because they are not expected to stay permanently, it is not considered necessary to hold language minority students to the same academic standards as Japanese students. The few students whose Japanese proficiency has developed to the level that enables them to participate in regular class activities without accommodations are academically integrated. They become ‘unmarked’ and are treated ‘just like’ Japanese students (Shimizu, 2002). Some, like Oscar,

156

Language and Education in Japan

even become star students. But the vast majority who still need accommodations are not particularly expected to follow the regular curriculum content nor are they supported in this endeavor. They are given separate, intellectually unstimulating work, whose primary objective is to keep them occupied and quiet so that the teacher can concentrate on teaching 30 other students who need to learn the regular content. The result is that the gap between the language minority students and the Japanese students widens rather than narrows over time. If they drop out, typically in junior high school, it is considered the students’ and their parents’ own choice, rather than a consequence of the low-level education they ¯ and Tsuboya, 2005). had been receiving (Ota In sum, the education at Sugino and Midori suggests that public education currently offers only either-or options for language minority education. That is, immigrant students who are projected to become permanent members of Japanese society may be given strong support to participate in the Japanese education system but are asked to replace their L1 with Japanese; those migrant students who are seen as remaining strongly tied to their country of origin may be given approval for maintaining their L1 but are not accorded the same level of commitment as that given to Japanese children to help them continue with their education while they are in Japan. In contrast, upper-middleclass Japanese language majority students enjoy wider identity options: Their mainstream membership in the Japanese education system and in Japanese society is assumed but they are also encouraged to see themselves as legitimate and contributing members of the global world by becoming Japanese-English bilinguals. In other words, more privileged children are given both-and options for global participation combined with full membership in their own society. Quality versus quantity of instruction One of the paradoxes that puzzled me for a long time in this study was, Why at Sugino, is students’ underachievement so pronounced when the quality of instruction is so high? It would be more straightforward to argue that poor and working-class students do not achieve as well as middle- and upper-middle-class students because they receive a lesser education. But my observations did not support this theory. It is true that at Midori, some of the lessons I observed paled in comparison to the pedagogical practices at Nichiei and Hal. At Midori, I encountered several disheartening instances in which students’ individual expressions were explicitly discouraged (e.g., ‘No, you may not draw the inside of a grapefruit; you are supposed to draw what it looks like from the

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 157

outside’). But to be fair to Midori teachers, they have much larger classes than at Nichiei and Hal: the class size at Midori ranges from 33 to 40 students as opposed to 8 to 25 at the private schools. When a teacher has 40 students in her class and fixed curriculum materials she has to cover in a lesson, 40 Picasso-esque renditions of a grapefruit may not be exactly what she is looking for. In contrast, the quality of instruction at Sugino is quite high. It compares quite favorably to that of Nichiei and Hal. In fact, some of the best lessons I observed in this study – lessons that truly impressed me with their originality, the teacher’s instructional skills, and students’ active participation – took place at Sugino. Nichiei prides itself – justifiably – on its student-centered, hands-on instruction. But instruction at Sugino is just as creative and student-centered. I have described several instances of creative lessons in Chapter 6. But the following excerpt is another example of how Sugino teachers make instructional material accessible to students and push them to think for themselves. The topic of this grade 5 social studies class is barcodes and how stores use barcodes to collect necessary information to observe sales trends. For this lesson, Ms. Imanishi takes a huge photocopy of the receipt of a purchase she had made at a convenience store and pastes it across the board. Pointing out that the receipt contains detailed information on each of the items she bought (e.g., a rice ball she bought is not just labeled ‘rice ball’ (onigiri) but ‘red-bean, sticky rice ball’ (osekihan okowa onigiri)), she asks why you need so much information on a receipt from a convenient store. A conversation between Ms. Imanishi and the students ensues: Student 1: Because if you get poisoned, then you can tell which food it came from [this remark reflects the past summer’s numerous incidents of food poisoning in Japan]. Teacher: OK, that’s more about the customer’s benefit. That’s true, but what about the benefits for the store? S2: You can tell the sales. S3: It’s easy to calculate the money. T: Yes, but then you would need only the total sum of what is bought, wouldn’t you? Why leave such a detailed record? S4: To tell whether this item sells well. T: That’s right; then next time you can restock more of that item. S4: Oh, I got it, if it’s not popular, then you don’t restock it? T: Maybe not stop restocking it altogether, but maybe get fewer of it next time. (FN 12/06/00 J)

158

Language and Education in Japan

As this example shows, many Sugino teachers encourage students to think for themselves and articulate their ideas.41 In projects in which students take the lead, teachers respect their decisions – even if it means undoing hours of work and repeating the same process all over again as the example of paper making in Chapter 6 illustrated. One thing I should note at this stage is that in Japan, public schools that serve low-income students are not necessarily underfunded. Descriptions of US inner-city schools are full of images of dilapidated buildings and ghetto conditions (e.g., Kozol, 1991; Leistyna, 2002). Such images of inner-city schools are so commonplace in the United States that some of my colleagues who have read my work seem to transpose these images on Sugino and Midori. But this is not at all the case. Although many of the children they serve are from low-income families, Sugino and Midori themselves are well-financed schools, no less adequately funded than other public schools in wealthier areas in the same municipalities.42 Further, Sugino receives additional funding because it is designated by the Ministry of Education as a ‘school with educational difficulty’ (ky¯oiku konnan-k¯o) due to its exceptionally high ratio of foreign-national students. The school is given one extra teacher in addition to the two JSL teachers it already receives. With three extra teachers, Sugino has 15 fulltime teachers (excluding the principal and vice principal, who do not teach) for 226 students at Sugino, which translates into 15.1 students for every teacher, quite a respectable ratio for any school. Although Sugino’s class size is still larger than those at Nichiei and Hal – in my observation, the Sugino class size ranged from 19 to 36 – Sugino is in a better position to provide its students with individualized attention than are many public schools. Sugino thus is a well-staffed, well-financed school that provides highquality instruction. It therefore does not make sense to attribute its students’ low academic achievement to the school’s quality of instruction. And yet, Sugino’s students – not only non-Japanese students but also Japanese students – underachieve; its student underachievement is the most pronounced of the five schools in this study. The question is why. Part of the answer, I would argue, lies in the overall quantity of academic instruction that students receive over the course of their waking hours. At private schools like Nichiei and Hal, academic learning simply does not end when a child leaves school every afternoon; it continues well into the evening hours at home in the form of homework, follow-up tutoring by parents or hired tutors, and an

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 159

emphasis on reading, among others. Private schools, especially those that use two languages as mediums of instruction, factor in the close monitoring of homework and coordinated academic reinforcement in the home as an integral part of their education. Without parents’ coordinated efforts in the home, it would be difficult to have students – even upper-middle-class students who arrive in school with abundant cultural capital – keep up with an academically demanding curriculum in two languages. When F children’s mothers at Hal say that given the amount of homework their children bring from school – the homework they would have to supervise – it would be impossible for them to hold a full-time position, they mean it. Moreover, if a child encounters an academic problem, her parents, in close coordination with her teachers, would address the problem immediately: If necessary, extra help at home is provided, by way of either parents’ (usually the mother) spending extra hours with the child and/or private tutoring. The problems that these students encounter are dealt with promptly before they accumulate into an insurmountable hurdle. The parents have material resources, time, and motivation to keep their children on track. For many children at Sugino and Midori, in contrast, the school presents the only opportunity that they have for academic learning. They do not have enough adults at home to provide them with the individualized attention they need. Their parents, many of whom work full-time or hold multiple jobs in order to support their family, do not have the time or energy to monitor their children’s school work so closely. Added to this is the parents’ alienation from school. As I discuss in the next section, teachers at Sugino and Midori do not necessarily regard parents as partners in their children’s school education; rather, many of them seem to believe that the best thing the parents can do is simply to let them, the professional educators, take care of their children’s academic learning. If the parents are feeling estranged from the school in the first place, the school does not make it easier for them to feel more connected. In short, at Sugino and Midori, school work does not carry over seamlessly to the home in the way it does at Nichiei and Hal. Thus, even when the quality or quantity of instruction that poor and workingclass children receive in school does not suffer materially in comparison with that received by private school children (and that itself is not always a given), if we look at their opportunities for academic learning within the context of their total waking hours, they tend to receive

160

Language and Education in Japan

much less academic instruction overall because they lack the reinforcement in the home that higher-class status children receive. And yet it is they who need longer instructional time and more support to learn, because they do not come from the middle-class culture and practices on which school learning is founded (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). Moreover, in the case of language minority students in public schools, their chance and time to learn academic content is further reduced. One common characteristic that unites the three schools – Nichiei, Hal, and Zhonghua – where the students do not suffer from underachievement is that they combine academic instruction with language learning: Students learn the curriculum through the target languages. The major advantage of this approach is that the time students need to learn languages does not have to compete with the time for academic learning because they are one and the same. In contrast, for language minority students at Sugino and Midori, their time for learning Japanese competes with their time for learning academic content. The time they are pulled out for JSL instruction, no matter how effective that instruction may be, is the time they are absent from their regular classroom, where their Japanese-speaking peers continue with their academic learning. Thomas and Collier (1997, 2002) explain, in relation to English language learners (ELLs) in the United States, that these students typically score around the 10th and 11th percentile when first tested in English (after one or two years of living in the United States). This means that they must close a 40-percentile gap in order to be on a par with average native-English speakers of their age (the average score for native-speaking students is the 50th percentile). The problem here is that while they are trying to catch up, their native-speaking peers are not standing still: They are on average making ‘ten months’ progress in ten months’ time’ (1997, p. 45–6). If ELLs make ten months’ progress in ten months’ time as their native-speaking peers do, although this itself is a major accomplishment to achieve in their L2, their initial gap will not close. According to Thomas and Collier (2002), in order to close the initial 40-percentile gap, ELLs ‘must make fifteen months of progress for each ten months of progress that the native-English speaker is making each year of school, and they must do this for six consecutive years to eventually reach the 50th percentile – a dramatic accomplishment!’ (pp. 19–20). Using the same logic, we can assume that language minority students in Japan who are learning Japanese need more instruction and support

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 161

than their Japanese L1 peers if they are to catch up with their Japanesespeaking peers academically. If they receive the same amount and quality of education in Japanese that Japanese students receive, they are highly unlikely to ever close the initial gap. And yet, JSL students at Sugino and Midori receive less academic instruction than Japanese students receive because they are placed in pullout classes. The result is obvious. In the words of Mr. Miyajima, a JSL teacher at the neighboring Murata Junior High School, to which most Sugino graduates advance: For those who arrive in Japan in the middle of elementary school, Japanese language instruction takes the priority, which means that subject matter learning is put on hold. And the students arrive in junior high school without having filled in the missing pieces. When they arrive in junior high and come face to face with even more difficult instruction, they are totally lost. (IN 02/08/2001 J) Parents as enemies Given the importance of academic reinforcement in the home, one would think that Sugino and Midori teachers would be aggressively soliciting the cooperation of parents in helping their children learn. In reality, however, teachers at Sugino and Midori seem to consider parents, and the home environment they provide for their children, at best not adding to, and at worst detracting from, the education they are trying to provide at school. There was no evidence of parental involvement outside of the PTA meetings, parent-teacher conferences, and class observations that the school periodically provides. The close and regular parent-teacher contact I saw at Nichiei and Hal is simply absent at Sugino and Midori: The fact that I had only a single opportunity to talk to parents at Midori and none at all at Sugino, despite my close to four-month stay there, reflects the lack of parental presence within these schools. The teachers at the public schools do not spare Japanese parents from their criticism. Their lack of basic parenting skills and self-centeredness are popular topics of conversation among the teachers. Mr. Tokunaga, vice principal at Midori, observed with contempt: Parents are busy. [In many families] both parents are working, and they don’t have time. Now there are more cases of child abuse. Many parents are juvenile themselves, and they want to have fun; they

162

Language and Education in Japan

want time for themselves – or whatever, I don’t know – rather than looking after their kids. (IN 06/27/01 J) In this excerpt, Mr. Tokunaga mentions that in many families, both parents are working. This, interestingly, is often noted by teachers at both Sugino and Midori – and also at Zhonghua – as a serious problem that leads to the neglect of children in the home. There is a definite irony in Japanese public school teachers’ problematizing both parents – or more specifically, mothers – working because many of them are working mothers themselves. In Japanese public elementary schools, 63 percent of the teachers are women (Monbukagakush¯ o, 2006a), and many are married and have children. And yet, such are their criticisms. The criticisms are particularly severe when the parents are perceived to be working in order to satisfy their materialistic wants rather than to make a living. For example, Mr. Mikami at Sugino once said to me, ‘I notice a 28-inch-screen TV in their apartments when I visit them,’ suggesting that perhaps parents may not need to work such long hours if they did not focus so much on their own materialistic desires. In addition, some complaints are leveled specifically against the language minority parents, such as treating the school as a day-care facility, failing to bring lunch fees and designated school supplies, and not taking care of their children’s hygiene. Again, Mr. Tokunaga notes: When a child has strong body odor, no matter how often we teachers say, ‘Don’t discriminate,’ ‘Treat everyone equally,’ it’s hard to tolerate that. Especially since it’s going to get hot from now on, you know. So kids will say, ‘So-And-So smells.’ So, whichever country you are in, it’s your responsibility as a parent to take care of the basic life needs of your child. (IN 06/27/01 J) The teachers typically refrain from blaming the children for their poor academic performance or social maladjustment (with the exception, I should note, of students like Claudia, who show angry resistance and are perceived as rejecting teachers’ efforts to help). The focus on effort over innate ability and the concept of learning as the responsibility of the whole school community are the cornerstones of Japanese elementary school education (Lewis, 1995; Rohlen and LeTendre, 1998; Sato, 1998; Tsuchida and Lewis, 1998). These ideologies seem to prevent the teachers from sliding into blaming the children for their failure. But since the teachers cannot blame the children, they blame the parents

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 163

instead, for the frustration they feel with their students’ lack of academic progress, and in the case of language minority children, with their snailpaced acquisition of academic Japanese. The Sugino and Midori teachers, thus, do not entirely seem to mind the lack of parental involvement. Parents-as-enemy, although no one puts it so starkly, is an attitude that teachers often adopt. They seem to feel that at least while the children are in school, they can provide the education they feel that the children need without interference from the home. One serious consequence of the lack of communication between teachers and language minority parents – apart from the obvious point that the parents cannot serve as their children’s advocates within the school system – is that the parents’ visions for their children’ futures are not incorporated into the schools’ institutional visions. It is not uncommon for language minority parents at these public schools to wish a college education for their children. Kim, the Grade 5 Vietnamese boy I helped out during a JSL class, told me in an interview, ‘My dad would kill me if I didn’t go to college!’ Also, the majority of the eight parents I interviewed at Midori explicitly stated that they want their children to advance to higher education. But such parental visions and hopes – unlike at Nichiei and Hal, where the parents make sure that the teachers know what they want – are hardly ever communicated to the teachers. The teachers continue to portray language minority parents as either uninterested in their children’s education or poorly informed about the Japanese education system. Given the lack of input from the parents in terms of their imagined communities for their children, the schools’ institutionally imagined communities for these children remain in line with reproductive forces of the larger society: that is, if their parents are working poor, relying heavily on public assistance, perhaps the best these children can hope for is a solidly working-class existence, achieving a clean break from public assistance.

Imagining an alternative future Thus far, the pattern that is emerging from this analysis is that access to bilingualism depends highly on the economic capital that the families of students possess in the first place, and that the bilingualism students achieve, or fail to achieve, through schooling results in different levels of cultural capital with which the students exit school – the cultural capital that can in turn convert back into economic capital. In other

164

Language and Education in Japan

words, differential access to bilingualism is part of the social and cultural reproduction to which schools contribute. However, the education that takes place at Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School shows the power of imagining an alternative future. The majority of the students at Zhonghua are ethnic and/or linguistic minority students who are permanent residents of Japan. As such, if placed in public schools, they would be destined to Japanese monolingualism as Sugino students are. But teachers at Zhonghua do not limit their projection of their students’ future within Japan; rather, they imagine their students as becoming cultural and social bridges between Japan and China. The principal’s vision for his students’ futures reflects this ambition: We want them to become the kind of people who can get along in both Japan and China; who, to exaggerate a little, can contribute to and can participate competently in both countries. In fact – of course, from now on, it’s best if you add English to this – but, the Chinese language is also quite widespread in the world, as you know. You can do the Internet in Chinese. So at the basic level, [we are aiming for] individuals who can participate in the two countries, but in fact I want them to thrive globally. (IN 12/17/99 J) Because teachers at Zhonghua imagine their students as becoming cultural and social bridges between Japan and China, their orientation to bilingualism is entirely different from that of teachers at the public schools. With the rise of China as an economic superpower and the corresponding appreciation of the value of Chinese language proficiency, bilingualism as a resource is the dominant orientation at Zhonghua. Zhonghua teachers see their charges as future global players, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, with their Chinese proficiency as powerful linguistic capital that would set them apart from potential competitors. And they are right: College-educated individuals – since many Zhonghua graduates do attend college – who are fluent and literate in Chinese and who have deep familiarity with Chinese culture, would make very strong job candidates in today’s Japan, and would certainly be very attractive to multinational corporations operating in the Asia-Pacific region. In other words, despite their ethnic, linguistic, and in many cases, working-class backgrounds, the students at Zhonghua are given the both-and option. They can grow up to be full-fledged members of Japanese society, and they can also participate in the transnational network of overseas Chinese nationals and become

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 165

powerful participants in the global economy. In this sense, the bilingual education at Zhonghua is much more similar to the bilingual education at Nichiei than to language minority education at Sugino and Midori. What Zhonghua attempts is essentially a form of social experiment in which ethnic/linguistic minority children are given a bilingual education that is usually reserved for children of more affluent backgrounds. Just as the primacy of English at Hal is sustained by the dominance of English around the world, Zhonghua’s institutional imagination for its children and the role of the Chinese language in this vision are also partly fueled by the existence of transnational Chinese communities around the world. That is, Zhonghua’s imagined communities for its students are not solely the creation of its staff; rather, they reflect the ‘way of being Chinese’ at the beginning of the 21st century (Nonini and Ong, 1997). There is no question that part of the identity of ethnic Chinese in Japan is that of being an ethnic minority with a history of discrimination. However, Chinese residents in Japan also have the option of taking on an alternative identity, that of being part of the transnational network of prosperous overseas Chinese. This alternative identity is much more positive and dynamic, a collective identity that enables its members to recognize the power of being Chinese, as the following remark by the chairman of the first World Chinese Entrepreneur Convention held in Singapore in 1991 attested: Today, there are some twenty-five million ethnic Chinese outside of China, the bulk of whom are concentrated around the fast-growing Pacific Rim. Individually and collectively, they are well-placed to play a key role in realizing the potential and promise of globalization, particularly in making the Pacific Century come true. (Nonini and Ong, 1997, p. 4) As the welcoming address to the participants of such a convention, these words are obviously self-laudatory. Nonetheless, they exemplify a discourse shared among overseas Chinese around the Asia-Pacific region that provides them with an alternative, more attractive, identity to that of being a powerless ethnic minority in a host society. When Mr. Wu refers to his students as future cultural bridges between China and Japan and active participants in the international community, he is drawing on this shared imagined community of overseas Chinese. Without the support network of transnational overseas Chinese, it would be difficult to sustain such a grand vision within a small ethnic school in Japan.

166

Language and Education in Japan

Underlying the education that children receive at Zhonghua, is the collective ethnic pride in the grandeur and superiority of Chinese culture. It is not hard to discern a bit of the ‘Middle Kingdom’43 mentality in the way Zhonghua teachers lecture in front of the children. Sitting in the classroom, I often felt that compared with China, Japan is a tiny, provincial nation that owes most of its cultural and linguistic heritage to China. The teachers are never derogatory towards Japan, but take genuine pride in China as one of the oldest and richest civilizations in the world. When they say that Chinese history is youjiu (very long, almost eternal), they genuinely mean it. ‘Of course, we come from a superior culture. Don’t be silly,’ is the message that is passed on, in so many different lessons and in so many examples, from the adults of the community to its next generation. They possess an alternative, powerful identity of transnational Chinese that they can present to their students as ‘real’ because it is shared by millions of expatriate Chinese around the Asia-Pacific region. School is a particularly effective social agent to provide such an alternative imagined community. In socializing ethnic- and linguistic-minority children, there is a limit to how much individual families can do to help them to see the richness and depth of their heritage. Parents can teach their children the heritage language, read them books, and show them videos and TV programs. They can also take them on extended trips to their country of origin and invite their relatives to come and stay with them. But individual families, even when they have the financial means to do all this, cannot match the resources and structured learning environment of a school, which can provide a comprehensive socialization process for a child. When a school decides to churn its energy into presenting a more positive and powerful image of an ethnic community and invites its children to identify themselves as members of that community, as Zhonghua does, it can take minority children to a place where their parents individually cannot hope to take them. Compensating for the lack of resources in the home Zhonghua’s orientation to its parents is closer to those of Sugino and Midori than those of Nichiei and Hal, except in one respect: Zhonghua parents are involved in many school activities. Because the school is financially deprived, it needs the parents’ cooperation in order to sustain itself, such as through fundraising by selling homemade sweets and boxed lunches on the days of school events. Also, the school has a board of directors consisting of parent representatives, community leaders, as well as school administrators. As the board has considerable power

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 167

over the school’s policies, some parental input finds its way into school policies through board recommendations. Nonetheless, the Zhonghua teachers’ relationship with the parents is more similar to those at Sugino and Midori than those at Nichiei and Hal: The teachers do not seem pressured to accommodate the parents’ wishes or appear particularly concerned about how they are evaluated by them. When I talked to some of the Zhonghua mothers, I was struck by their lack of criticism. Articulate in their praises of the school, they were clearly very appreciative of what the school was doing for their children. The only thing they mentioned as a problem was that the facilities are old and in poor condition, a problem they know that the school cannot be faulted for because of its financial situation. The critical appraisal and monitoring of school activities in which Nichiei and Hal mothers engage was not perceptible from Zhonghua mothers: Rather, they seem to play the role of grateful recipients of the education their children are receiving. Indeed, the impression I received from them was one of overall gratitude towards the school. Teachers, on the other hand, seem to feel free to evaluate the parents. When I asked Mr. Wu, the principal, his impression of the students, he skipped the children altogether and launched directly into a long criticism of the parents: To be honest, I think it’s the parents who are lacking. [Kanno: In what way?] We have our vision of how we want to raise the children: We want them to grow up to become independent, autonomous beings. But the question is, Do the parents share the same vision? Are they doing enough to lead their children in that direction?    Say, if you find that a child is wanting in some way, chances are that you find his parents wanting in exactly the same way. So, we have many cases where the parents need to be corrected first. (IN 12/17/99 J) Similarly, some teachers are rather critical of the parents who ‘neglect’ their children by working long hours outside the home. Ms. Ye was one of them: Children whose parents are absent [because they work long hours] do not develop enough language, not just language but their social development gets stunted too.    The kind of interaction that those fathers and mothers have with their children tends to be limited to, ‘Have you done your work?’ ‘Go to sleep,’ ‘Finish your homework’ – in other words, the only language they use with their kids is for

168

Language and Education in Japan

monitoring and scolding. More and more kids are like that. So when kids like that grow up, first of all, they won’t be able to make friends well because of language issues, and of course they won’t be able to achieve well academically, and worst of all, they will get involved in bad activities behind their parents’ back. And once their parents find out, it will be too late. (IN 11/19/99 J) Once again, I was struck by the obvious contradiction: Ms. Ye taught at Zhonghua full-time throughout the years she and her husband were bringing up their children. If anyone was sympathetic to the challenges of working mothers, one would expect that she would be. Also, as a community member, she knows very well that many parents have no choice but to work long hours to support themselves. Nonetheless, in expressing her frustration, she seems to resort to the discourse of absent parents who are more interested in making money than looking after their children. In short, the discourse of ‘home as a deficient environment’ that is prevalent at the public schools is also present at Zhonghua. The difference is that Zhonghua tries to do something about it. Rather than simply sending students home after school, knowing that they are going to spend much of the afternoon alone watching TV, Zhonghua teachers keep them at school in an informal after-school program. Every child eats lunch at school, and although they have classes in the afternoon only once and twice a week respectively, first and second graders are allowed to stay in the school until 3pm either to play or to do homework. This informal arrangement is intentional on the part of the school – the teachers prefer to keep them in school after school rather than sending them back to empty homes. Many children choose to work on their homework, often working and helping each other. Teachers come in every so often to monitor them. Also, on some weekdays, Chinese-speaking parents come to school to give extra Chinese lessons to Japanese students, and Japanese parents volunteer to give extra Japanese lessons to recent arrivals from China. This way, although not many children at Zhonghua have the advantage of a parent or a private tutor who can closely monitor their work at home, they receive the extra support at school that more privileged children receive in the home.

Student bilingualism and identities There is no question that the imagined communities the five schools offer to students and the policies and practices they adopt have

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 169

enormous consequences for the kinds of bilingualism and identities that the students develop. Observation of these schools suggests that student bilingualism and identities are largely consistent with the policies and practices that schools adopt. That is, schools set the range of identities students can assume, and it is rare for a student to challenge these boundaries and assert a different identity. Thus, on the one hand, students at Nichiei, Hal, and Zhonghua develop additive bilingualism to varying degrees, knowing that it is an important form of linguistic capital in a rapidly globalizing world. On the other hand, students at Sugino and Midori generally experience subtractive forms of bilingualism, gradually assimilating detrimental identities such as ‘underachievers,’ ‘at-risk students on the verge of dropping out,’ and ‘burdens on the teachers and the system.’ Growing up as bilingual speakers Students at Nichiei and Hal enjoy ample opportunities to use both languages throughout their school day and accordingly show no inhibition to use them in school. They are growing up as bilingual speakers, their two languages affirmed as legitimate for both public and private use. Not only do they use both languages but also they code-switch frequently. Their code-switching demonstrates their highly developed metalinguistic awareness and their ability to combine words from both languages to achieve an aesthetic effect in their language play (Belz, 2002; Broner and Tarone, 2001; Cook, 2000). For instance, during circle time at Nichiei, Ms. Mishima showed her first graders a photo of a coyote, pronouncing the word carefully (‘Co-yo-te’) so that the children could hear each syllable. One boy immediately made an association with a similar sounding word in Japanese and playfully responded, ‘E, ka-y¯o-bi?’ (Oh, Tuesday?). Similarly, when Ms. Mishima showed another photo of a car crushed by a giant cactus, another boy gleefully shouted, ‘Saboten car da!’ (It’s a cactus car!), combining words from both languages he knew to describe the elements in the photo. A first grader at Hal – an English L1 student in fact – was even more articulate in demonstrating his metalinguistic awareness. In preparation for a fieldtrip to a local market, every child composed two questions in Japanese to ask vendors. This boy wanted to ask, ‘D¯oshite jagaimo no hikkonderutokoro wa “me” to iuno desuka. Soshite d¯oshite, amerikajin mo “eye” to iu no desuka?’ (Why do you call dimples on a potato “me” [in Japanese] and why is it that Americans also call them “eyes”?). What he was referring to was the following: In Japanese me indeed refers to dark spots on a potato where new shoots sprout out, but it is also the

170

Language and Education in Japan

same sound as eye in Japanese. These are simply homonyms with no connection to each other, but this child mistakenly thought that there was a connection between the two and was intrigued by why one uses the word for eye in both Japanese and English to describe those potato dimples. This example indicates his ability to compare and contrast the two languages and to articulate his metalinguistic observation. At Zhonghua, students also use two languages freely throughout the school. Unlike at Nichiei, where students’ class participation drops noticeably when a class is taught in English, at Zhonghua, students participate in Chinese-medium classes just as actively as they do in Japanese-medium classes. Moreover, Zhonghua students speak Chinese to Chinese-speaking teachers and Japanese to Japanese-speaking teachers. They seem to adopt a ‘one person, one language’ principle, switching languages according to the people to whom they are speaking. For example, second graders always spoke to me in Japanese, having quickly figured out that I was a non-Chinese speaker; but the same students always spoke Chinese to Ms. Ye, even outside of class. In this school, I did not witness a language mismatch – a teacher speaking one language and a student speaking another – the way I did at Nichiei. Given that over 60 percent of classes in the elementary grades are conducted in Chinese, this means that students spend a significant portion of their school time not only listening to, but producing Chinese. Students at Zhonghua receive up to 10 years of an alternative form of education in which they are positioned as full and legitimate members of the school community and in which speaking fluent Chinese can enhance, rather than downgrade, their social status. Freeman (1998), in describing the education at Oyster Bilingual School, which offers a Spanish-English dual-language program to language minority children in Washington, DC, describes how schools that position minority students as legitimate members of the school community can equip the students to challenge social injustice in society at large: The minority students gain the right to participate in the institutional discourse    by acquiring an interactional history through their socializing experience at Oyster Bilingual school in which they are positioned as having that right, and by learning to refuse discourses in which they are positioned as not having the right to participate. (p. 79) Similarly, by the time students leave Zhonghua, hopefully they will have internalized a social identity that is robust enough to reject efforts to

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 171

marginalize them. For they already know what it is like to be treated as full and respected members of an institution. In sum, what unites Nichiei, Hal, and Zhonghua in terms of student bilingualism and identities is that the schools provide an environment in which students can practice being additive bilinguals. They gain experience in using two languages to claim legitimacy and authority while they also hone their code-switching skills appropriately according to the context and even get to engage in language play. These are all very important skills to function effectively as bilingual speakers in an increasingly diverse world, and it is indisputably an advantage to have ample opportunities to practice these skills so early in one’s life in a protected environment. Learning to view L1 as an illegitimate language Language minority students at Midori and Sugino also exhibit bilingualism and identities consistent with the school policies and practices. But since in these cases, the school policies and practices marginalize their L1, complying with these policies and practices means learning to view their L1 as an illegitimate language. It is true that the JSL classroom at Midori provides an environment that is relatively supportive of L1 maintenance. Because of the presence of two bilingual aides who use their L1 for instruction, language minority students are not at all inhibited to speak Portuguese and Spanish in their JSL class. Even with adults such as myself, who clearly did not understand their L1, they still spoke the language, appearing quite unfazed. However, the same students – even younger students in the early grades such as Kurio and Alberto, who are vivacious and talk up a storm in Spanish in the JSL class – choose to remain silent in their homeroom classrooms. They may remain vivacious in their physical behavior but they elect not to employ their L1 for self-expression. Those who have conversational skills in Japanese use Japanese in the regular classroom; those such as Kurio who are still too new to start speaking Japanese remain silent and express themselves through non-verbal means such as smiles, wandering about, and drawing. It is not as if anyone in the homeroom class prohibited them from speaking Portuguese or Spanish. But the students know that their L1 is not a legitimate language to use in the context of their regular classroom. Language minority students’ conversion to Japanese monolingualism is more noticeable at Sugino than at Midori, and this again corresponds to the lesser role their L1 plays in Sugino’s curriculum. The only place

172

Language and Education in Japan

that the students’ L1 is used as part of Sugino’s curriculum is in the bilingual JSL class for very recent arrivals. Even then, the use of the students’ L1 is limited to situations in which communication in Japanese is not possible. Apart from this tiny bilingual class, the school as a whole is a very monolingual environment, and the language minority students respond by converting to monolingualism. As previously mentioned, language minority students in this school converse with each other in Japanese even when they share an L1 (e.g., Chinese, Vietnamese), and as they become older, they show more reluctance to be singled out for their linguistic origins. The question to ask at this point is why the children concede to the language policies set by the adults. Why do they not rebel more aggressively against the marginalization of their L1? McDermott (1987) asks a similar question in relation to minority students’ academic underachievement in the United States. He asks why it is that those children who are assigned to the lowest ability group generally accept that assignment ‘as if it makes sense’ (pp. 182–3). McDermott then offers some insights into the situation: The reason is that the teacher generally assigns children to groups according to the same criteria that the children themselves use in their dealings with each other, and the same criteria that the children’s parents and the rest of their community use in their dealings with the children. In short, the teacher handles the children in a way the children are used to being handled. (p. 183) Similarly, I would argue that when language minority children adopt the strategy of compartmentalizing the use of each language in particular contexts or simply stop using their L1 in school, they do so because they use the same criteria that the adults use in judging the value and appropriateness of their L1. In other words, language minority students have internalized the lesser value of their L1 as linguistic capital as compared to the value of Japanese in the school community. Once the students themselves start viewing their L1 as an illegitimate language for schooling and stop using it voluntarily while they are in school, the school then no longer has to actively impose their monolingual policy. The only case of active revolt that I witnessed during my fieldwork was that of Claudia at Midori. She had been transferred against her will from a private full-time Brazilian school in the area to Midori, and she made her unhappiness known by refusing to cooperate with

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 173

the teachers. Claudia even refused at times to attend the pullout JSL class, which most language minority students seemed to enjoy. I once saw Mr. Nagase trying to physically move Claudia, who was holding onto the railing of a staircase with all her strength, as she refused to budge. But the cost of such outright rebellion is high. Ms. Shinohara was still tolerant and patient with Claudia – again, because of the smaller size of the JSL class, she could afford to be. However, her homeroom teacher and other teachers of the early grades were not so sympathetic, and Claudia had quickly established a reputation as ‘not a very sweet kid’ (kawaiku-nai ko) As such, she was less likely to win the teachers’ support and accommodation than the likes of Kurio, who could be just as disruptive but still managed to charm his teachers and classmates. Sometimes, when we see an educational situation that is clearly unjust or clearly not meeting the needs of the students, we actually want to see evidence of student resistance, as if we could take solace in the children’s agency to challenge the system that we adults cannot change or refuse to change. However, it is clearly unfair to place such a burden on the students. McDermott, Goldman, and Varenne (2006) cite Toni Morrison in their discussion of the problem of making individual children the focus of research on educational inequalities. Morrison, two decades after publishing The Bluest Eye, in which she focused on the plight of a severely abused African American girl who was reduced to longing for a set of blue eyes, criticized herself for concentrating on the child without explicitly challenging the system of discrimination acting upon her: [T]he weight of the novel’s inquiry on so delicate and vulnerable a character could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying her rather than into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing    many readers remain touched but not moved. (Morrison, 1994, p. 211, cited in McDermott et al., p. 12) By focusing on the child, the reader can settle for sympathizing with the girl rather than engaging in the more complex and demanding task of interrogating the underlying systemic discrimination in society. In the same way, it would be a misdirected effort to focus on language minority students’ resistance to institutionalized marginalization as if it were the beginning of a solution, as opposed to challenging the institutionalized marginalization itself. Chances are that such students would

174

Language and Education in Japan

be sanctioned and further marginalized for their active resistance rather than being rewarded, as Claudia’s case suggests.

Older students’ agency What we see, then, is much compliance on the part of bilingual students to the language policies set forth by the schools and very little open resistance. This is particularly true of younger children, whose desire to please their caregivers is a significant factor in regulating their behavior. How older students respond to the adults’ effort to shape their bilingualism, then, is an interesting phenomenon to observe. At all three schools where adults want students to become bilingual (i.e., Nichiei, Hal, and Zhonghua), older students increasingly revert to Japanese in their peer interaction and resist the teachers’ admonition to use the other language. Diglossia (Tarone and Swain, 1995) becomes more pronounced in the older grades, with Japanese being the social language and the other language (English or Chinese) being the language of instruction. At Nichiei, while younger students seem to enjoy learning a new language, some older students – about ¯ – question the whole idea 10 percent of the class, according to Mr. Ota of having to ‘do’ school in a foreign language. They ask – quite reasonably, I must add – why they have to learn everything in English when they are living in Japan and most of their age mates are doing ¯ school in Japanese. It then falls on Japanese teachers such as Mr. Ota and Ms. Kozue to help such students understand the whole point of immersion education. Similarly, while younger Zhonghua students are remarkably bilingual, older students are noticeably more dominant in Japanese. The gap between what they want to say and what they can say in Chinese widens. As a result, they rely increasingly on Japanese, which in turn further reduces their chances of developing their Chinese. At Hal, the social language in the early grades is English. But as more English L1 children leave the school upon their parents’ completion of their job assignments in Japan, the social language becomes bilingual around grade 3. It then further shifts completely to Japanese by junior high school. Hence the junior high teachers’ frequent admonition: ‘Speak English!’ Having students of different L1s socialize with each other is always a challenge. Despite Hal’s efforts to promote international understanding, students of all grades generally cluster around L1 groups. But while younger children sometimes cross over the linguistic boundary to play

Communities, Schools and Access to Bilingualism 175

with other children of the same gender – girls with girls, and boys with boys – junior high school students arrange themselves strictly according to their L1, so that the only English L1 girl in a class would rather socialize with English L1 boys in the class than with Japanese L1 girls. By junior high school, the students become mostly immune to their teachers’ efforts to mix students across language groups. The teachers might intentionally place students of different L1 backgrounds in the same room at a camp, but as the seventh grader, Katie, pointed out, ‘We just choose beds, like your friends and you all choose the beds altogether. The Japanese go to the other side of the room (laughter). So it’s kind of like – it really doesn’t work.’ Given the older students’ resistance to the adults’ attempt to engineer their bilingualism, the Nichiei students’ change of attitude – for the better, that is – towards the learning of English around the time of their transition from elementary to junior high school is worth noting. After showing reluctance to speak English in the upper elementary grades, Nichiei students seem to start taking more initiative in using English in junior high school. Dr. McKenzie attributes junior high students’ more active engagement with English to the increased control they had over the decision to continue with the immersion program. Unlike elementary-level immersion students, whose enrollment in the program reflects their parents’ choice rather than their own, the junior high students had at least a partial say in whether or not to continue with the program when they moved from the elementary to the middle school. Since they had more control over the decision this time, the onus now falls on them to take more responsibility for their learning of the target language. This raises an important question about when the baton has to be passed on. Parents often make decisions about their children’s education based on their own educational experiences: Reflections on what opportunities they enjoyed and what they wish they had had inform their choices. They seek a program that can socialize their children into their vision of an imagined community for the children. Several parents at Nichiei, Hal, and Zhonghua told me that they chose these particular programs because they did not want their children to experience the difficulty and frustration of learning another language that they had, or that they had oral proficiency in their heritage language but were not literate in it and wanted their children to become biliterate as well as bilingual. However, at some point, the children must take over the imagining and start connecting, however vaguely at first, their future and their current language learning. For, after all, it is the children who

176

Language and Education in Japan

do the learning. Older Nichiei, Hal, and Zhonghua students’ changing attitudes towards bilingualism, then, must be understood within the context of inserting agency into their own imagined identities. They are growing out of the imagined communities set by their parents and teachers and coming into their own. And depending on their own imagined communities, learning the target language may or may not be worth the investment.

9 Conclusion

I have with me a close-up photo of three first graders that I took while I was visiting one of the schools. Two of the children are missing their front teeth, and their broad, toothless smiles are disarming. At whichever school I visited, several of the first graders had some of their baby teeth missing, their adult teeth yet to emerge. The photo served as an important reminder for me that no matter what situation they were in, they were all six and seven years old, at the same stage of physical and cognitive development. This was important to remember, because what was considered ‘normal’ varied so widely among the five schools that it was easy to forget that these schools were serving children of the same age group with the same ability to become bilingual. Every parent knows that six- and seven-year olds are still very, very young; their baby teeth have not completely fallen out. And yet, they are already firmly entrenched in a system that stratifies them educationally and linguistically. In this book, I provided an in-depth analysis of the education of bilingual students in Japan. Based on critical ethnographic case studies of five schools, I argued that schools have visions of imagined communities for students: the kind of networks of people and society in which children will grow up to participate, and the places they will occupy in the world. I further argued that such institutionally imagined communities have a large impact on schools’ policies and practices and ultimately on students’ bilingualism and identities. Schools contribute to the linguistic stratification of bilingual students of different socioeconomic classes by first imagining different future affiliations and possibilities for their students based on their current social standing, and then by aligning their policies and practices with these imagined communities. 177

178

Language and Education in Japan

Upper-middle-class children are prepared to lead an elite life, and the development of proficiency in two languages of high prestige is part of this preparation. Teachers at Nichiei Immersion School and Hal International take it as a given that their students will grow up to be full members of their own countries and possibly become leaders in various sectors on a global scale. They provide students with a cosmopolitan education and encourage them to develop additive bilingualism in Japanese and English, a type of bilingualism which has high market value in the segments of society which they will inhabit. In contrast, underprivileged children are prepared to participate in diminished imagined communities, in which only Japanese language proficiency and basic academic skills are considered relevant. What these students receive is essentially remedial education that is designed to fill in the gaps. In the context of trying to endow enough cultural capital in terms of basic academic skills and educational credentials to these students so that they will achieve a minimum level of economic independence and security in the future, bilingualism is eliminated as a luxury that they cannot afford. Thus, conversion to Japanese monolingualism is the outcome, if not the intended goal, of the language minority education at Sugino Public Elementary, where language minority students are permanent residents of Japan. In a slight variation on the theme, teachers at Midori Public Elementary are more open to their language minority students’ L1 maintenance because of their future trajectories back to their home countries. However, its language minority students are not given enough support to integrate academically into the Japanese education system because it is assumed that their life in Japan is temporary. In short, economically disadvantaged language minority students are given only either-or options: Either they can grow up to be monolingual Japanese speakers and become members of Japanese society, or they can maintain their L1 and eventually return to their own country – but not both. The possibility of their further developing their bilingual and multicultural capacity to become transnational citizens who will play key roles in international relations 20 or 30 years later is simply not contemplated and therefore not given as an identity option to these students. More privileged children, however, are expected to become both full members of their own nation and of the international community, and bilingualism is seen as an asset, if not a necessary qualification, for such a future. But this study also aimed to highlight the complexity and contradictions of school practices that are not necessarily consistent with these

Conclusion 179

overall patterns of linguistic stratification. As Bourdieu (in Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990) and Canagarajah (1999) remind us, schools are not entirely at the mercy of the pressure from capitalist society to reproduce the existing power structure; rather, they have their own cultures, which are often internally contradictory and not always consistent with society’s expectations. Thus, schools that aspire to foster additive bilingualism are not entirely without risks and compromises. Nichiei is successful in producing high levels of receptive skills in English while keeping its students firmly grounded in the Japanese language and culture, but its intentional focus on the Japanese language and the Japanese school curriculum prevents it from fostering in its students the equivalent levels of proficiency in the areas of speaking and writing English. Hal may bring its Japanese students to higher levels of overall proficiency in English than does Nichiei, but immersion in the English language and Anglophone cultures in this school is so intense that in the process, Japanese students may risk being alienated from their own language and culture while living in their own country. Similarly, schools that language minority students attend do not necessarily reduce their possibilities by providing substandard education. Many of the teachers at Sugino and Midori are both talented and committed. By these criteria, they do not come out short in comparison with teachers at Nichiei and Hal. Some of the best lessons I observed in this study took place at Sugino. There, the teachers strove to make content material accessible to students, valued multiple ways of thinking and creative answers, and respected students’ autonomy. They most emphatically did not teach their students to obey authority or to get used to monotonous and repetitive tasks, as Bowles and Gintis (1976) would have them do. Unfortunately, teachers’ good intentions and abilities to teach good lessons are not always sufficient to make an impact on reversing pervasive social inequalities, as Oakes (2005) writes: I believe that [teachers] want their students to achieve academically and to develop personally and socially in positive and healthy ways. I believe that they mean their students to become responsible and productive members of society. And I believe that what they do and what they have students do in school are intended to contribute toward these ends. But I also believe the old saying about where at least one road paved with good intentions can lead. (p. 5)

180

Language and Education in Japan

Ultimately, Sugino and Midori teachers, despite their good intentions, fail to prevent their language minority students from sliding into subtractive bilingualism because they do not question the very imagined communities that society at large predicts for such students. They do not stop and challenge the assumptions that permanent residence in Japan means that learning Japanese is absolutely the top priority or that the eventual return to Brazil renders achieving academic competitiveness in the Japanese school context irrelevant. Above all, they do not question their own assumption that the kinds of students they serve have limited futures, and this way, they end up contributing to the self-fulfilling prophecy by socializing them into such futures. However, this study also demonstrated what happens when members of a school community exert their agency to challenge the existing power relations in society by imagining an alternative future for disadvantaged students. The majority of students at Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School would be considered ethnic- and linguistic-minority students and would be destined to Japanese monolingualism if placed in a public school. However, instead of assuming that their students are going to stay at the bottom rung of society with limited life chances, Zhonghua envisions that its students will become members of the transnational Chinese community and will serve as cultural bridges between Japan and China. Zhonghua teachers ask themselves what kind of education they need to provide in order to realize such imagined identities. Alternative imagined communities lead to alternative policies and practices. In order to help students develop a strong sense of pride in their Chinese identity and become highly proficient in both Japanese and Chinese, Zhonghua provides a bilingual education that highlights the value of Chinese culture and language. In other words, exceptional for this class of children, students at Zhonghua are given the bothand option: They can grow up to be members of Japanese society but they can also participate in the transnational community of expatriate Chinese. Education at Zhonghua provides an important example of how imagining an alternative, more promising, future for a group of disadvantaged children can lead to concrete actions that go a long way in helping them fulfill their potential. Yet, the current educational structure in Japan makes it extremely challenging for ethnic schools like Zhonghua to survive and maintain high standards of education. Because of their lack of accreditation, ethnic schools receive no funding from the central government and very little from local governments. Furthermore, unlike international schools, ethnic schools are not in a position to charge a high tuition

Conclusion 181

if they want to make their education accessible to the target ethnic families regardless of their socioeconomic status. Zhonghua, then, is the most materially deprived of the five schools in this study. Their material poverty manifests itself in the physical conditions of the school, but it also constrains what the school can achieve: Zhonghua’s large class size, outdated pedagogical methods, and absence of media literacy education can in the end be attributed to lack of funding. As the Zhonghua principal noted, ‘The Japanese government doesn’t kill us, but they don’t help us live either. Most definitely they don’t help us live.’ It is almost as if the school were punished by the Japanese government for disturbing the expected patterns of distribution of linguistic capital by helping working-class language minority students become additive bilinguals. This book, then, has been a study of how the Japanese education system unevenly distributes access to bilingualism in a way that further advantages the already privileged. Just like other forms of cultural capital, in the Japanese context, the opportunity to become bilingual is given preferentially to those who enter school with a head start; once developed, bilingual proficiency serves to further widen the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Traditionally, Japanese school education has been considered a system that does not distribute students into future roles until quite late: not until nine years of compulsory education are completed. Based on ethnographic cross-cultural comparisons among Japan, Germany, and the United States that were conducted in the mid 1990s, LeTendre, Hofer, and Shimizu (2003) observe: [Most Japanese] appear to believe that all children should have a very similar education – until high school. There is widespread acceptance that education must be differentiated, but the point in time is considerably delayed, as compared with that in Germany. The delay seems congruent with beliefs about the role of effort as opposed to ability in determining such outcomes (Stevenson and Stigler, 1992), as students are given longer to demonstrate their competencies before the sorting occurs. (pp. 77–8) More recently, however, sociologists have begun to note a growing divide between the wealthy and the poor in Japanese society (Miura, 2005; Tachibanaki, 1998, 2006); similarly, educational researchers have started to find a relationship between educational opportunities and students’ socioeconomic classes (Hashimoto, 2000; Kariya, 2001;

182

Language and Education in Japan

Miyadera, 2006). Kariya (2001), in what is considered a ground-breaking book in this area, asserts: In recent years, the following mechanism has started to operate [in the Japanese education system]: Students from lower social classes gain self-esteem by opting out of the ‘success through education’ narrative. Obtaining a sense of self-efficacy in this manner in turn alienates them further from education. (p. 24; my translation) In other words, an awareness is emerging that the Japanese education system does not in fact provide equal opportunities to everyone; rather, it sorts youths into different segments of society and future roles based on their class backgrounds. But research in bilingual education in Japan has yet to assimilate such a critical awareness into its analysis: It has not yet conceived of access to bilingualism as part of the educational resources that schools distribute unevenly among children of different socioeconomic classes. It is my hope, then, that this book will mark the beginning of a research program in Japan that investigates how bilingualism is yet another form of cultural capital that schools distribute differentially and how, in this way, schools contribute to the linguistic stratification of the next generation of Japanese and world citizens.

Notes

1

Introduction

1. This comment did not come from interviews with parents that I personally conducted but appeared in one of the Hal school brochures. However, I know this parent personally and have heard him make the same comment.

2

Framing the Study 2. Tanaka (1995) points out that both South American Nikkeijin and Chinese war orphans are legacies of the period in the early 20th century, when Japan was a major exporter, rather than an importer, of the foreign labor force. Nikkeijin and war orphans who are now ‘returning’ to Japan are descendents of Japanese emigrants who headed for new lands in search of a better life in the first half of the 20th century. 3. In addition to these foreign nationals legally residing in Japan, there are also 193,745 illegal immigrants (H¯ omush¯ o, 2006). If we include both the legal and illegal residents, foreign nationals represent 1.72 percent of the total population in Japan. 4. This figure includes Korean and Chinese resident children who are Japaneseborn and are native speakers of Japanese but nationality-wise are non-Japanese. 5. However, half a dozen studies are available in English (Hirakata, Koishi and Kat¯ o, 2001; Kanno, 2003a, 2004; Morita, 2002; Vaipae, 2001). For an overview of the literature on language minority education in Japan, see Kanno (in press). 6. There are two books that have attempted to provide an overview of bilingual education in Japan: Masayo Yamamoto’s (2000) ‘Nihon no bairinguru ky¯oiku (Bilingual Education in Japan)’ and Noguchi and Fotos’ (2001) ‘Studies in Japanese Bilingualism.’ But these are edited volumes: Individual contributors of the volumes are again focusing on one kind of bilingual group, and there is no meta-analysis of the different cases presented. 7. May (1994) is critical of those who characterize Bourdieu’s work as reductionist and deterministic, noting that scholars in the English-speaking world have not kept up with the development of his thought because of the large time lag between the original publication of his studies in French and the appearance of their English translation. 8. However, see May (1994) for a critical ethnography that, for once, credits administrators and teachers for fighting for social justice through the power of education. 9. However, Morita (2002), who also conducted ethnographic fieldwork at two Japanese schools, had a very different experience. She had to rely on personal 183

184

Language and Education in Japan

connections to secure entry into the schools. Even after she managed to enter the schools, some of the administrators were deeply suspicious of a researcher from the United States and restricted her activities. Although a native Japanese and a graduate of one of the elementary schools she studied, she was systematically positioned as an outsider of lower status. Although all employees, including non-teaching staff (e.g., clerical workers and a janitor), were referred to as sensei, the title of a teacher, she was consistently called ‘Morita-san,’ which highlighted her non-teacher, outsider status. 10. At each school, I interviewed parents as they came to the school for parentteacher conferences, PTA meetings, and class observations. During the period in which I was visiting Sugino, it so happened that there were no such meetings that called parents to the school. Because most language minority parents at Sugino worked full-time, it was not feasible to visit them in their homes. 11. Lareau (2003), who conducted an intensive ethnographic study of the impact of class differences on child rearing practices, also notes the difficulty of conducting formal interviews with 10-year-olds (p. 260).

3

Nichiei Immersion School

12. The school year runs from April to March in Japan. 13. Excerpts from interview transcripts are identified by IN, followed by the date of the interview. Field notes are indicated by FN, and documents by D. If the original is in Japanese, this is noted as J after the date. All of the translations are mine. 14. Dr. Mackenzie, in his feedback, noted that how much English students use depends in large part on immersion teachers’ instructional approaches. He noted that the teachers who were teaching in the year when I visited the school might not have encouraged the students to speak English in the classroom as much as they could have. 15. It is customary in Japanese schools for teachers and students to clean their classrooms and hallways after lunch. 16. There are other reasons for their high turnover, including: • • • • •

having to teach on Saturdays; a shorter summer break; the ‘wanderlust’ of international teachers: They typically look for a twoto three-year stint in a school; the communication barrier with students, parents, and non-immersion Japanese teachers; a somewhat less competitive salary compared with international schools, with which Nichiei often competes for qualified teachers.

17. And of course public school education is free (except for fees for school supplies and lunch). Thus, in order for parents to choose a tuition-paying private school over a neighborhood public school, they must see enough added value in the education of the particular private school to consider the higher tuition fees worth the investment.

Notes 185

4

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

18. In this school, as well as in regular Japanese schools, students take turns in being monitors (called nicchoku in Japanese) of the day. Monitors play the role of student leaders and help teachers by announcing the beginning and end of a class, leading meetings, and sometimes even mediating disputes among classmates (Lewis, 1995). 19. My Japanese research assistant, who videotaped this class, informed me that in Japanese schools, Zheng Cheng Gong’s liberation of Taiwan is a topic that one would encounter only if one takes world history at the high school level. The fact that sixth graders are taught this topic is another example of the opportunity that Zhonghua students have to learn more about Chinese history and culture. 20. Although first and second graders have only morning classes except for Thursdays, they are allowed to stay until 3pm because many of their parents work. They thus often do their homework together after school. 21. According to the principal, this is approximately a half to a third of the tuition of the private schools in the area. 22. Japanese private schools, although called ‘private’ in fact receive up to approximately 50 percent of their budget from the government as long as they are considered Article 1 schools. Non-Article 1 schools such as Zhonghua and Hal International (in Chapter 5), in contrast, are excluded from such funding. 23. In 2003, Monbukagakush¯ o revised its policies and now recognizes graduates of international schools, Chinese and South Korean ethnic schools (but, significantly, not North Korean schools) as legitimate high school graduates. This means that the graduates of these schools are now eligible to take the entrance exams of national universities (many private universities have long considered them eligible) just like graduates of Article 1 schools. Prior to this policy change, graduates of ethnic schools had to take the University Entrance Qualification Examination (daigaku ny¯ugaku shikaku kentei), a qualifying examination for those who did not receive formal high school education, such as high school dropouts and those who were home-schooled, to earn eligibility to take the national university entrance examinations. However, North Korean schools have been excluded from this policy change. Monbukagakush¯ o’s claim is that because Japan has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, the Ministry cannot evaluate the curriculum of North Korean schools.

5

Hal International School

24. Before the institution of the JNN class, some non-Japanese students and biracial students who spoke fluent Japanese were also placed in F. As I describe shortly, when the school proposed to institute a B – bilingual – class, it was the parents of these children who objected vehemently, because they saw their children’s move from the F class to the B class a ‘move down.’ 25. In reading an earlier draft of this chapter, Dr. Craig Lee, the deputy headmaster at the time of my fieldwork and who later became the headmaster, questioned Ms. Tabuchi’s assumptions here. He wrote, ‘I actually

186

26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

6

Language and Education in Japan believe that foreigners who immigrate to America can become American. At least in California [where he is from] it is hard to define what an American looks like.’ Thus, here are two different views on what it takes to become a legitimate member of a society: one based on birth, native culture, and L1, and the other based on the individual’s agency and later-life experiences. In Japanese, the concept of to give is expressed in three different verbs: ageru, kureru, and yaru. When the recipient of giving is oneself, one cannot use the verb ageru, but needs to use kureru. Because in English there is only one verb, to give, to describe this concept, English L1 speakers tend to overuse ageru for all occasions of giving. The Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) is one of the six associations that accredit K–12 schools, colleges, and universities in the United States. International schools in the Asia-Pacific region can also apply for accreditation. It receives very limited funding from the local government, which amounts to less than a third of 1 percent of the school’s total budget. Many of these traditional art forms go back hundreds of years, and families that assume the position of masters, which are inherited from one generation to the next, have enormous power in their world. Their power is also often accompanied by wealth and fame. In grades K–5, there were 150 F students (51 percent) and 125 S students (42 percent), with the remaining 17 students (5 percent) categorized as Bilingual. In contrast, in grades 6–9, there were 83 F students (69 percent) as opposed to 38 S students (31 percent).

Sugino Public Elementary School

31. At the elementary school level in Japan, 16.5 percent of the principals and 22.4 percent of the vice principals are female (Monbukagakush¯ o, 2003). Thus, the combination of a female principal and a female vice principal in the same school, though not extremely rare, is still rather uncommon. 32. According to Ishikawa (Noyama, 2000, p. 205), around the time of my fieldwork, there were approximately 40 L1 maintenance classes in the prefecture where Sugino Elementary is located. 33. Japanese public elementary school teachers visit their children’s homes once a year.

7

Midori Public Elementary School

34. The fact that the maximum number of students per class is 40 does not mean that each class in fact has 40 or close to 40 students. If there are 41 students in a grade, for example, they will be split into two classes of 20 and 21 students each. The actual class size at Midori ranges from 33 to 40 students. 35. In Japan, correct answers are circled rather than checked.

Notes 187 36. I should note, however, that low-income families, including non-Japanese families, are eligible to receive financial assistance with various school fees such as lunch, materials, and field trips. 37. Each first grade class is assigned one teaching assistant, a young university graduate who hopes to become a full-time teacher. 38. Minoura (1979) noted a similar mentality, which she called karizumai ishiki, among Japanese sojourners of the professional class in the United States.

8 Imagined Communities, School Education, and Unequal Access to Bilingualism 39. Because the immersion program targets mainstream Japanese students for whom English is an L2, the program may not be suitable for children who are English L1 speakers because it does not provide enough support for English L1 development. In fact, Ms. Hanekom, one of the immersion teachers, told me that her daughter, who is an English L1 speaker, used to attend Nichiei, but has since transferred to an international school, because she felt that Nichiei did not provide her daughter enough English training as a native speaker. Ms. Hanekom seemed to feel slightly guilty for teaching in one school and sending her own daughter to another school. But given her daughter’s linguistic needs, her choice is entirely reasonable: Nichiei is a wonderful school for Japanese children who need to develop Japanese language proficiency as native speakers and who want to add some English proficiency to their repertoire; but for someone like Ms. Hanekom’s daughter, who is growing up as a native speaker of English, the level of English the immersion students achieve is not high enough. Interestingly enough, Ms. Hanekom said that by attending Nichiei, her daughter ‘did get a solid background in Japanese’ (emphasis added). 40. Interestingly, Ms. Ayabe of Sugino Elementary, observed a similar phenomenon with English L1 children who attended another public school she had worked for before she moved to Sugino. She said that these Englishspeaking students were much more reluctant to learn Japanese – some even looking down on the language – while taking much more pride in their L1 and desiring to maintain it more than Asian students at Sugino. This is again an example of the relative market value of various L1s as linguistic capital in the global marketplace. 41. One can also say, however, that this lesson is an example of how Sugino is preparing its students for the kinds of jobs that they are likely to assume in the future (i.e., by teaching them how barcodes at the convenience store are used). It would be reasonable to assume that at Nichiei or Hal, this lesson would develop into a larger discussion of the capitalist economy or how our buying habits impact the environment. But the discussion at Sugino stayed at the concrete level of the function of barcodes. (I am grateful to Julie Dykema for this observation.) 42. Funding for Japanese public education is quite equitably distributed. A third of teacher salaries and benefits are supplied by the national government, while the other two-thirds come from prefectural revenues. Within the same prefecture, the salary of a teacher working at a school in a poor neighborhood

188

Language and Education in Japan

is no different from that of a teacher teaching in a wealthier community, provided that their qualifications are similar. Non-salary expenditures, such as operation and maintenance of buildings, school supplies, and library books, are funded by local municipalities. Beyond the baseline budget that is given to every school, the rest of the available funds are distributed among the schools in a municipality mainly based on the number of homeroom classes and the number of students in each school. A municipality can encompass quite a large area: Sugino, for example, is located in a city of 3.6 million people. If a school in a poor or working-class neighborhood is located in a municipality that includes more middle-class areas, as is the case with both Sugino and Midori, this school does not suffer from lack of funding. (This information on the public school financing system in Japan was provided by Sunao Fukunaga, a graduate student at the University of Washington and a former Japanese public school teacher, who did research for me while she was back in Japan.) 43. Zhongguo, the Mandarin Chinese word for China, combines a character for ‘middle’ or ‘center’ with a word for ‘country’ or ‘kingdom.’ China therefore calls itself Central Kingdom.

References Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays (B. Brewster, trans.). New York: Monthly Review Press. Amoroso, M. (1999, October 24). World citizens from the start: Infants and toddlers are taking classes in foreign language. The Record, p. L01. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. edn). London: Verso. Anderson, F.E. and Iwasaki-Goodman, M. (2001). Language and culture revitalization in a Hokkaido Ainu community. In M.G. Noguchi and S. Fotos (eds), Studies in Japanese bilingualism (pp. 45–67). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Anderson, G.L. (1989). Critical ethnography in education: Origins, current status, and new directions. Review of Educational Research, 59(3), 249–70. Aronowitz, S. and Giroux, H.A. (1993). Education still under siege (2nd edn). Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Asahi Shimbun. (2006a, October 14). Akushitsu kigy¯ o eno bassoku ky¯ oka, gaikokujin kensh¯ u ukeire [Stricter penalty for companies abusing foreigner trainee programs]. Retrieved December 18, 2006, from <www.asahi.com/job/ news/TKY200610130402.html>. Asahi Shimbun. (2006b, December 21). Ima sagasu ch¯ oyo no ikotsu [In search of the remains of Koreans conscripted during the wartime], p. 15. Asahi Shimbun Ky¯ oiku Shuzai Han. (2003). Tenki no ky¯oiku [Education at a turning point]. Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun Sha. Baker, C. (2006). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism (4th edn). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Belz, J.A. (2002). Second language play as a representation of the multicompetence self in foreign language study. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 1(1), 13–39. Block, D. (2006). Multilingual identities in a global city: London stories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bostwick, R.M. (1999). A study of an elementary English language immersion school in Japan. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Temple University, Tokyo. Bourdieu, P. (1977a). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In J. Karabel and A.H. Halsey (eds), Power and ideology in education (pp. 487–511). New York: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977b). The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information, 16(6), 645–68. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J.G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–58). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Bourdieu, P. (1987). What makes a social class? On the theoretical and practical existence of groups. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 32, 1–8. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (G. Raymond and M. Adamson, trans., J.B. Thompson ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.-C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture (R. Nice, trans., 2nd edn). London: Sage. 189

190

Language and Education in Japan

Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Education reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York: Basic Books. Broner, M.A. and Tarone, E. (2001). Is it fun? Language play in a fifth-grade Spanish immersion classroom. Modern Language Journal, 85(3), 363–79. Calhoun, C. (1993). Habitus, field, and capital: The question of historical specificity. In C. Calhoun, E. LiPuma, and M. Postone (eds), Bourdieu: Critical perspectives (pp. 61–88). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Canagarajah, A.S. (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cary, A.B. (2001). Affiliation, not assimilation: Resident Koreans and ethnic education. In M.G. Noguchi and S. Fotos (eds), Studies in Japanese bilingualism (pp. 98–132). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Cazden, C.B. (2001). Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning (2nd edn). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Center for Applied Linguistics. (2005). Directory of two-way bilingual immersion programs in the United States. Retrieved September 8, 2006, from <www.cal.org/ twi/directory/twigrow.htm>. Collins, J. (1993). Determination and contradiction: An appreciation and critique of the work of Pierre Bourdieu on language and education. In C. Calhoun, E. LiPuma, and M. Postone (eds), Bourdieu: Critical perspectives (pp. 116–38). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cook, G. (2000). Language play, language learning. New York: Oxford University Press. Cornelius, W.A. (1994). Japan: The illusion of immigration control. In W.A. Cornelius, P.L. Martin, and J.F. Hollifield (eds), Controlling immigration: A global perspective (pp. 375–410). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cummins, J. (1986). Empowering minority students: A framework for intervention. Harvard Educational Review, 56, 18–36. Dagenais, D. (2003). Accessing imagined communities through multilingualism and immersion education. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2(4), 269–83. de Courcy, M. (1997). Benowa High: A decade of French immersion in Australia. In M. Swain and R.K. Johnson (eds), Immersion education: International perspectives (pp. 44–62). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York: New Press. Downes, S. (2001). Sense of Japanese cultural identity within an English partial immersion programme: Should parents worry? International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 4(3), 165–80. Echevarria, J., Vogt, M., and Short, D.J. (2000). Making content comprehensible for English language learners: The SIOP model. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Feldman, S. (2001). Closing the achievement gap. American Educator, 25(3), 7–9. Freeman, R.D. (1998). Bilingual education and social change. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Genesee, F. (1995). The Canadian second language immersion programme. In O. García and C. Baker (eds), Policy and practice in bilingual education (pp. 118–33). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Giroux, H.A. (2001). Theory and resistance in education: Towards a pedagogy for the opposition (Revised and expanded edn). Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

References 191 Gitlin, A., Buendía, E., Crosland, K., and Doumbia, F. (2003). The production of margin and center: Welcoming-unwelcoming of immigrant students. American Educational Research Journal, 40(1), 91–122. Glaser, B.G. and Strauss, A.L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Hashimoto, K. (2000, January). Ky¯ oiku kikai no fuby¯ od¯ o to kais¯ o kakusa no koteika [Inequality in educational opportunities and the establishment of the social class divide]. Seikatsu Keizai Seisaku, pp. 6–10. Heath, S.B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heller, M. and Martin-Jones, M. (2001). Symbolic domination, education, and linguistic difference. In M. Heller and M. Martin-Jones (eds), Voices of authority: Education and linguistic difference (pp. 1–28). Westport, CT: Ablex. Hirakata, F., Koishi, A., and Kat¯ o, Y. (2001). On the language environment of Brazilian immigrants in Fujisawa City. In M.G. Noguchi and S. Fotos (eds), Studies in Japanese bilingualism (pp. 164–83). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. H¯ omush¯ o [Ministry of Justice, Japan]. (2007). Heisei 18 nendomatsu genzai ni okeru gaikokujin t¯orokusha t¯okei ni tsuite [Results of the 2006 survey on registered foreign residents]. Retrieved July 16, 2007, from <www.moj. go.jp/PRESS/070516-1.pdf>. H¯ omush¯ o. (2006). Honp¯ o ni okeru fuh¯ o zairy¯ usha-s¯ u ni tsuite [On the number of illegal aliens in Japan]. Retrieved July 13, 2006, from <www.moj.go.jp/PRESS/060324-2/060324-2.pdf>. Ishikawa, E.A. (2005). Kazoku wa kodomo no ky¯oiku ni d¯o kakawaruka [How families ¯ involve themselves in their children’s education]. In T. Miyajima and H. Ota (eds.), Gaikokujin no kodomo to nihon no ky¯oiku [Foreign children and Japan’s education system] (pp. 77–96). Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai. Kajita, T. (1998). The challenge of incorporating foreigners in Japan: ‘Ethnic Japanese’ and ‘sociological Japanese.’ In M. Weiner and T. Hanami (eds), Temporary workers or future citizens?: Japanese and US migration policies (pp. 120–47). New York: New York University Press. Kanno, Y. (2003a). Imagined communities, school visions, and the education of bilingual students in Japan. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2(4), 285–300. Kanno, Y. (2003b). Negotiating bilingual and bicultural identities: Japanese returnees betwixt two worlds. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kanno, Y. (2004). Sending mixed messages: Language minority education at a Japanese public elementary school. In A. Pavlenko and A. Blackledge (eds), Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts (pp. 316–38). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Kanno, Y. (in press). Language minority education in Japan. In P. Martin, A. Creese, and N. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of language and education, 2nd edition, volume 9: Ecology of language. Norwell, MA: Springer. Kanno, Y. and Norton, B. (2003). Imagined communities and educational possibilities: Introduction. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2(4), 241–9. Kariya, T. (2001). Kais¯oka nihon to ky¯oiku kiki [Education in crisis and a stratified Japan]. Tokyo: Y¯ ushindo. Keefe, E.B. and Moore, V. (2004). The challenge of co-teaching in inclusive classrooms at the high school level: What the teachers told us. American Secondary Education, 32(3), 77–88.

192

Language and Education in Japan

King, K. and Fogle, L. (2006). Bilingual parenting as good parenting: Parents’ perspectives on family language policy for additive bilingualism. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(6), 695–712. K¯ oseir¯ od¯ osh¯ o [Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, Japan]. (2006). Heisei 17 nendo jink¯o d¯otai t¯okei gep¯o nenkei no gaiky¯o [Monthly report on demographic trends in 2005]. Retrieved September 10, 2006, from <www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/geppo/nengai05/dl/gaikyou.pdf>. Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools. New York: Harper Perennial. Krashen, S. (1985). The input hypothesis: Issues and implications. London: Prentice Hall. Lambert, W. (1975). Culture and language as factors in learning and education. In A. Wolfgang (ed.), Education of immigrant students: Issues and answers (pp. 55–83). Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Lapkin, S., Swain, M., and Shapson, S.M. (1990). French immersion research agenda for the 90s. Canadian Modern Language Review, 46(4), 638–74. Lareau, A. (2000). Home advantage: Social class and parental intervention in elementary education (2nd edn). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lee, S.-Y., Graham, T., and Stevenson, H.W. (1998). Teachers and teaching: Elementary schools in Japan and the United States. In T. Rohlen and G. LeTendre (eds), Teaching and learning in Japan (pp. 157–89). New York: Cambridge University Press. Leistyna, P. (2002). Scapegoating bilingual education: Getting the whole story from the trenches. Bilingual Research Journal, 26(2), 339–65. LeTendre, G.K., Hofer, B.K., and Shimizu, H. (2003). What is tracking? Cultural expectations in the United States, Germany, and Japan. American Educational Research Journal, 40(1), 43–89. Levinson, B.A. and Holland, D.C. (1996). The cultural production of the educated person: An introduction. In B.A. Levinson, D.E. Foley, and D.C. Holland (eds), The cultural production of the educated person (pp. 1–54). New York: State University of New York Press. Lewis, C.C. (1995). Educating hearts and minds: Reflections on Japanese preschool and elementary education. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lortie, D. (1975). School teacher: A sociological study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maher, J.C. (1995). The Kakyo: Chinese in Japan. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 16(1–2), 125–38. Maher, J.C. and Yashiro, K. (1995). Multilingual Japan: An introduction. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 16(1–2), 1–17. Marcus, G. (1998). Ethnography through thick and thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Matsumori, A. (1995). Ryukyuan: Past, present and future. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 16(1–2), 19–44. May, R. (1969). Reality beyond rationalism. In G.K. Smith (ed.), Agony and promise: Current issues in higher education 1969 (pp. 189–93). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. May, S. (1994). Making multicultural education work. Clevedon/Toronto: Multilingual Matters/Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

References 193 McCallum, I. and Demie, F. (2001). Social class, ethnicity and educational performance. Educational Research, 43(2), 147–59. McDermott, R. (1987). Achieving school failure: An anthropological approach to illiteracy and social stratification. In G. Spindler (ed.), Education and cultural process: Anthropological approach (2nd edn, pp. 173–209). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. McDermott, R., Goldman, S., and Varenne, H. (2006). The cultural work of learning disabilities. Educational Researcher, 35(6), 12–17. Merriam, S.B. (1998). Qualitative research and case study applications in education (2nd edn). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Minoura, Y. (1979). Life in-between: The acquisition of cultural identity among Japanese children living in the United States. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles. Miura, A. (2005). Kary¯ u shakai: Aratana kais¯o sh¯udan no shutsugen [Lower class society: The emergence of a new social class]. Tokyo: K¯ obunsha. Miyadera, A. (2006). Ky¯oiku no bunpairon: K¯osei na n¯oryoku kaihatsu towa nanika [On educational distribution: What is a fair development of ability?]. Tokyo: Keis¯ o Shob¯ o. ¯ Miyajima, T. and Ota, H. (eds) (2005). Gaikokujin no kodomo to nihon no ky¯oiku [Foreign children and Japan’s education system]. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai. Monbukagakush¯ o [Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan]. (2003). Heisei 13 nendo gakk¯o ky¯oin t¯okei ch¯osa [The 2001 statistics on school teachers]. Retrieved January 15, 2005, from <www.mext.go. jp/b_menu/toukei/001/002/2002/gaiyou.htm#01>. Monbukagakush¯ o. (2005a). Fush¯ugaku gaikokujin jid¯o seito shien jigy¯o [A project on supporting foreign-national students who are not attending school]. Retrieved September 10, 2006, from <www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/houdou/ 17/06/05072601/001.pdf>. Monbukagakush¯ o. (2005b). Gaikokujin jid¯o seito ky¯oiku no genjy¯o to torikumi [The situation of and response to foreign student education]. Retrieved July 13, 2006, from <www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chousa/shotou/029/shiryo/ 05070501/s014.pdf>. Monbukagakush¯ o. (2005c). Heisei 17 nendo sup¯a ingurissh rang¯eji hai suk¯ uru (SELHi) no kettei ni tsuite [On the 2005 designation of super Englishlanguage high schools]. Retrieved October 20, 2005, from <www.mext. go.jp/b_menu/houdou/17/04/05040502.htm>. Monbukagakush¯ o. (2006a). Heisei 18 nendo gakk¯o kihon ch¯osa s¯okuh¯o [The 2006 basic school survey report]. Retrieved November 29, 2006, from <www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/toukei/001/06080115/index.htm>. Monbukagakush¯ o. (2006b). Nihongoshid¯o ga hitsuy¯o na gaikokujin jid¯o-seito no ukeire j¯okyo t¯o ni kansuru ch¯osa (Heisei 17 nendo) no kekka [Results of the 2005 survey on the acceptance and instruction of foreign children and students needing Japanese language education]. Retrieved July 13, 2006, from <www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/houdou/18/04/06042520/001.htm>. Morita, K. (2002). Negotiating identity politics: Exploring Brazilian children’s experiences at a Japanese school. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Nagano, T. (1994). Zainichi ch¯ugokujin: Rekishi to aidentiti [Resident Chinese: History and identity]. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten.

194

Language and Education in Japan

Nakanishi, A. and Sat¯ o, G. (1995). Gakk¯ o no ky¯ osei ni mukete [Towards coexistence in school]. In A. Nakanishi and G. Sat¯ o (eds), Gaikokujin jid¯o/seito ky¯oiku eno torikumi [Efforts on the education of foreign pupils/students] (pp. 185–96). Tokyo: Ky¯ oiku Shuppan. Noguchi, M.G. and Fotos, S. (eds). (2001). Studies in Japanese bilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Nonini, D.M. and Ong, A. (1997). Chinese transnationalism as an alternative modernity. In A. Ong and D.M. Nonini (eds), Ungrounded empires: The cultural politics of modern Chinese transnationalism (pp. 3–33). New York: Routledge. Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity and educational change. Harlow: Longman/Pearson Education. Norton, B. (2001). Non-participation, imagined communities, and the language classroom. In M. P. Breen (ed.), Learner contributions to language learning: New directions in research (pp. 159–71). Harlow: Longman. Norton Peirce, B. (1995). Social identity, investment, and language learning. TESOL Quarterly, 29(1), 9–29. Noyama, H. (2000). Chiiki-shakai ni okeru nensh¯ o-sha eno nihongo-ky¯ oiku no genj¯ o to kadai [Issues and state of Japanese language education for minors in local communities]. In M. Yamamoto (ed.), Nihon no bairingaru ky¯oiku [Bilingual education in Japan] (pp. 163–212). Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. Nyhan, P. (2006, May 23). It’s all Greek to them – well, Chinese actually: New language school trains kids up to 5 years when brains are ‘spongy.’ Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p. B3. Ny¯ ukanky¯ okai [Japan Immigration Association]. (2005). Heisei 17nenban zairy¯ u gaikokujin t¯okei [The 2005 statistics on the foreigners registered in Japan]. Tokyo: Zaidanh¯ ojin Ny¯ ukanky¯ okai. Oakes, J. (2005). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality (2nd edn). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ochs, T. (1993). ‘Why can’t we speak Tagalog?’ The problematic status of multilingualism in the international school. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 14(6), 447–62. ¯ Ota, H. (2000). Nyukam¯a no kodomo to nihon no gakk¯o [Newcomer children in Japanese public schools]. Tokyo: Kokusai Shoin. ¯ Ota, H. (2002). Ky¯ oiku tassei ni okeru nihongo to bogo [Japanese and first language in academic achievement]. In T. Miyajima and H. K¯ ono (eds), Heny¯o suru nihonshakai to bunka: Kokusai shakai II [Changes in Japanese culture and society] (pp. 93–118). Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai. ¯ Ota, H. and Tsuboya, M. (2005). Gakk¯ o ni kayowanai kodomotachi [Children ¯ who do not attend school]. In T. Miyajima and H. Ota (eds), Gaikokujin no kodomo to nihon no ky¯oiku [Foreign children and Japan’s education system] (pp. 17–36). Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai. Pavlenko, A. (2002). Poststructuralist approaches to the study of social factors in second language learning and use. In V. Cook (ed.), Portraits of the L2 user (pp. 275–302). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Porter, E. (2004, August 29). Old, in the way and hard at work. New York Times, p. 12. Rohlen, T.P. and LeTendre, G.K. (1998). Conclusions: Themes in Japanese culture of learning. In T.P. Rohlen and G.K. LeTendre (eds), Teaching and learning in Japan (pp. 369–76). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References 195 Ruíz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal, 8(2), 15–34. Ryang, S. (1997). North Koreans in Japan: Language, ideology, and identity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sakuma, K. (2005). Tabunka ni hirakareta ky¯ oiku ni mukete [Towards multicul¯ (eds), Gaikokujin no kodomo to nihon tural education]. In T. Miyajima and H. Ota no ky¯oiku [Foreign children and Japan’s education system] (pp. 217–38). Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai. Sakuma, K. (2006). Gaikokujin no kodomono fush¯ ugaku [Non-school-enrollment of foreign national children]. Tokyo: Keis¯ o Shob¯ o. Sat¯ o, G. (1995). Ima ky¯ oshitachi wa [Now, teachers are]. In A. Nakanishi and G. Sat¯ o (eds), Gaikokujin jid¯o/seito ky¯oiku e no torikumi [Efforts on the education of foreign children/students] (pp. 43–70). Tokyo: Ky¯ oiku Shuppan. Sat¯ o, N. (1998). Honoring the individual. In T.P. Rohlen and G.K. LeTendre (eds), Teaching and learning in Japan (pp. 119–53). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scollon, S. (1999). Not to waste words or students: Confucian and Socratic discourse in the tertiary classroom. In E. Hinkel (ed.), Culture in second language teaching and learning (pp. 13–27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sears, C. (1998). Second language students in mainstream classrooms: A handbook for teachers in international schools. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Sekiguchi, T. (2003). Zainichi nikkei burajirujin no kodomotachi: Ibunkakan ni sodatsu kodomo no aidentiti keisei [Children of Japanese Brazilians: Identity formation of children growing up in an intercultural space]. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. Sellek, Y. (1997). Nikkeijin: The phenomenon of return migration. In M. Weiner (ed.), Japan’s minorities: The illusion of homogeneity (pp. 178–210). London: Routledge. Shannon, P. (1996). Poverty, literacy, and politics: Living in the USA. Journal of Literacy Research, 28(3), 429–49. Shimizu, K. (2002). Gakk¯ o sekai no tabunkaka [Multiculturalization of Japanese schools]. In T. Miyajima and H. Kan¯ o (eds), Heny¯o suru nihon shakai to bunka: Kokusai shakai II [Changes in Japanese culture and society] (pp. 69–92). Tokyo: Tokyo University Press. Shor, I. and Freire, P. (1987). A pedagogy for liberation: Dialogues on transforming education. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1981). Bilingualism or not: The education of minorities. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Stigler, J.W., Fernandez, C., and Yoshida, M. (1998). Culture of mathematics instruction in Japanese and American elementary classrooms. In T.P. Rohlen and G.K. LeTendre (eds), Teaching and learning in Japan (pp. 213–47). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sugimoto, Y. (2003). An introduction to Japanese society (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swain, M. (1996). Integrating language and content in immersion classrooms. Canadian Modern Language Review, 52(4), 529–48. Swain, M. (1997). French immersion programmes in Canada. In J. Cummins and D. Corson (eds), Encyclopedia of language and education, volume 5: Bilingual education. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Swain, M. and Johnson, R.K. (1997). Immersion education: A category within bilingual education. In R.K. Johnson and M. Swain (eds), Immersion education: International perspective (pp. 1–16). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

196

Language and Education in Japan

Swartz, D. (1997). Culture and power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tachibanaki, T. (1998). Nihon no keizai kakusa: Shotoku to shisan kara kangaeru [Economic divide in Japan: From the perspective of income and properties]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Tachibanaki, T. (2006). Kakusa shakai: Nani ga mondai nanoka [Stratified society: What’s the problem?]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Taira, K. (1997). Troubled national identity: The Ryukyuans/Okinawans. In M. Weiner (ed.), Japan’s minorities: The illusion of homogeneity (pp. 140–77). London: Routledge. Takekuma, H. (1998). Nihon ni okeru minzoku gakk¯ o seido [The ethnic school system in Japan]. In K. Ebuchi (ed.), Toransukaruchurarizumu no kenky¯u [A study of transculturalism] (pp. 303–22). Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. Tanaka, H. (1995). Zainichi gaikokujin: H¯o no kabe, kokoro no mizo [Foreign residents in Japan: legal barriers, psychological distance]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Tarone, E. and Swain, M. (1995). A sociolinguistic perspective on second language use in immersion classrooms. Modern Language Journal, 79(2), 166–78. Thomas, W.P. and Collier, V. (1997). School effectiveness for language minority students. Washington, DC: National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education. Thomas, W.P. and Collier, V.P. (2002). Accelerated schooling for all students: Research findings on education in multilingual communities. In S. Shaw (ed), Intercultural education in European classrooms: Intercultural education partnership (pp. 15–35). Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Tomozawa, A. (2001). Japan’s hidden bilinguals: The languages of ‘war orphans’ and their families after repatriation from China. In M.G. Noguchi and S. Fotos (eds), Studies in Japanese bilingualism (pp. 133–63). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Tsuchida, I. and Lewis, C.C. (1998). Responsibility and learning: Some preliminary hypotheses about Japanese elementary schools. In T.P. Rohlen and G.K. LeTendre (eds), Teaching and learning in Japan (pp. 190–212). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tsuneyoshi, R. (2001). The Japanese model of schooling: Comparisons with the United States. New York: Routledge Falmer. Vaipae, S.S. (2001). Language minority students in Japanese public schools. In M.G. Noguchi and S. Fotos (eds), Studies in Japanese bilingualism (pp. 184–233). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Vasishth, A. (1997). A model minority: The Chinese community in Japan. In M. Weiner (ed.), Japan’s minorities: The illusion of homogeneity (pp. 108–39). London: Routledge. Wadsworth, B.J. (1989). Piaget’s theory of cognitive and affective development (4th edn). New York: Longman. Wakabayashi, T. (2002). Bilingualism as a future investment: The case of Japanese high school students at an international school in Japan. Bilingual Research Journal, 26(3), 631–58. White, K. (1982). The relation between socioeconomic status and academic achievement. Psychological Bulletin, 91(461–81). Willis, D.B. (1993). Fukug¯ o bunka to tanitsu bunka: Nihon no kokusai gakk¯ o to tabunka ky¯ oiku [Mixed cultures and mono-cultures: Multicultural education and international schools in Japan]. Ibunkakan Ky¯oiku, 7, 85–100.

References 197 Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs. New York: Columbia University Press. Willis, P. (2000). The ethnographic imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press. Yamamoto, M. (ed.). (2000). Nihon no bairingaru ky¯oiku [Bilingual education in Japan]. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. Yamawaki, C. (2005). Nihon no gakk¯ o to esunikku gakk¯ o [Japanese schools and ¯ (eds), Gaikokujin no kodomo to nihon ethnic schools]. In T. Miyajima and H. Ota no ky¯oiku [Foreign children and Japan’s education system] (pp. 97–115). Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai.

Author Index Althusser, L., 22–3 Amoroso, M., 147 Anderson, B., 3, 21 Anderson, F.E., 9 Anderson, G.L., 28 Aronowitz, S., 24 Asahi Shimbun, 10, 12 Asahi Shimbun Ky¯ oiku Shuzai Han, 140 Baker, C., 3, 153, 155 Belz, J.A., 169 Block, D., 71 Bostwick, R.M., 19–20 Bourdieu, P., 3, 5, 9, 24–7, 113, 121, 123, 146, 160, 179 Bowles, S., 22–4, 179 Broner, M.A., 169 Buendía, E., 29 Calhoun, C., 25 Canagarajah, A.S., 27, 28, 179 Cary, A.B., 10 Cazden, C.B., 91 Center for Applied Linguistics, 147 Collier, V.P., 51, 160 Collins, J., 27 Cook, G., 169 Cornelius, W.A., 11 Crosland, K., 29 Cummins, J., 51 Dagenais, D., 22 de Courcy, M., 49 Delpit, L., 113 Demie, F., 121 Doumbia, F., 29 Downes, S., 20 Echevarria, J., 44, 90 Feldman, S., 121 Fernandez, C., 75, 118–19

Fogle, L., 147 Fotos, S., 183 Freeman, R.D., 170 Freire, P., 73 Genesee, F., 45 Gintis, H., 22–4, 179 Giroux, H.A., 24 Gitlin, A., 29 Glaser, B.G., 36, 37 Goldman, S., 173 Graham, T., 50 Hashimoto, K., 181 Heath, S.B., 121 Heller, M., 27 Hirakata, F., 183 Hofer, B.K., 181 Holland, D.C., 28 H¯ omush¯ o, 12, 13, 183 Ishikawa, E.A., 17–18, 143 Iwasaki-Goodman, M., 9 Johnson, R.K., 39 Kajita, T., 12 Kanno, Y., 3, 21, 29, 36, 183 Kariya, T., 181, 182 Kat¯ o, Y., 183 Keefe, E.B., 51 King, K., 147 Koishi, A., 183 K¯ oseir¯ od¯ osh¯ o, 13 Kozol, J., 158 Krashen, S., 44, 45 Lambert, W., 114 Lapkin, S., 45 Lareau, A., 35, 151, 184 Lee, S.-Y., 50 Leistyna, P., 158 LeTendre, G.K., 162, 181 198

Author Index 199 Levinson, B.A., 28 Lewis, C.C., 50, 126, 162, 185 Lortie, D., 52, 67 Maher, J.C., 12, 61 Marcus, G., 28 Martin-Jones, M., 27 Matsumori, A., 9 May, R., 62 May, S., 24, 183 McCallum, I., 121 McDermott, R., 172, 173 Merriam, S.B., 36 Minoura, Y., 187 Miura, A., 181 Miyadera, A., 182 Miyajima, T., 15 Monbukagakush¯ o, 13–14, 16, 20, 162 Moore, V., 51 Morita, K., 32, 183–4 Morrison, T., 173 Nagano, T., 10 Nakanishi, A., 15 Noguchi, M.G., 183 Nonini, D.M., 165 Norton, B., 3, 21–2, 58, 149 Norton Peirce, B., 29, 149 Noyama, H., 15, 186 Nyhan, P., 147 Ny¯ ukanky¯ okai, 10, 11, 13 Oakes, J., 179 Ochs, T., 19 Ong, A., 165 ¯ Ota, H., 14, 15–16, 109, 110, 114, 132, 154, 156 Passeron, J.-C., 3, 24, 25, 121, 160, 179 Pavlenko, A., 29 Porter, E., 13 Rohlen, T.P., 162 Ruíz, R., 146, 153 Ryang, S., 10, 17 Sakuma, K., 15, 16–17 Sat¯ o, G., 15

Sat¯ o, N., 162 Scollon, S., 75–6 Sears, C., 150 Sekiguchi, T., 143 Sellek, Y., 11, 12 Shannon, P., 121 Shapson, S.M., 45 Shimizu, H. 181 Shimizu, K., 154, 155 Shor, I., 73 Short, D.J., 44, 90 Skutnabb-Kangas, T., 51 Stevenson, H.W., 50 Stigler, J.W., 75, 118–19 Strauss, A.L., 36, 37 Sugimoto, Y., 17 Swain, M., 20, 39, 43, 45, 49, 57, 69, 174 Swartz, D., 24, 25 Tachibanaki, T., 181 Taira, K., 9 Takekuma, H., 17 Tanaka, H., 10, 12, 183 Tarone, E., 43, 57, 69, 169, 174 Thomas, W.P., 51, 160 Tomozawa, A., 12 Tsuboya, M., 16, 154, 156 Tsuchida, I., 50, 162 Tsuneyoshi, R., 126 Vaipae, S.S., 11, 12, 14–15, 109, 121, 124, 154, 183 Varenne, H., 173 Vasishth, A., 10, 72 Vogt, M., 44, 90 Wadsworth, B.J., 43–4 Wakabayashi, T., 18 White, K., 121 Willis, D.B., 19 Willis, P., v, 24 Yamamoto, M., 183 Yamawaki, C., 18 Yashiro, K., 12, 118–19 Yoshida, M., 75

Subject Index

academic skills, 3 additive bilingualism, 2, 4, 145–53, 169–71, 178 compare subtractive bilingualism adolescence and attitudes towards learning languages, 57, 81–2, 174–5 agency, 22, 58, 175–6 Ainu, 9 apprenticeship of observation, 52, 67 assimilation, 15, 121–3, 154 bilingual education comparative perspective, 4, 145–76 definition, 3 in Japan, 4, 183 strong forms, 3, 160, 170 weak forms, 3 bilingualism as enrichment, 147 Japanese-English bilingualism, 3, 147–8, 178 for privileged children, 7, 145–53, 169–71 as problem, 146, 153, 154–5 as resource, 146, 150, 153, 164 for under privileged children, 7, 146, 153–63, 170–4 unequal access, 2, 3, 4, 7, 177, 181, 182 biliteracy, 175 Brazilians in Japan, 12, 14, 124–44 immigration laws, 11–12 in Midori Town, 124–5 becoming permanent residents, 18, 143 ethnic education, 17–18 temporary residents, 17, 125–6, 141–2, 154 tuition fees in ethnic schools, 18 bullying, 121, 143

case studies, 4 Chinese in Japan, 9, 10–11, 14, 59–82, 104–23 career prospects, 164 discrimination, 59 ethnic education, 17–18 historical background, 10–11 Japanese-born 11 special permanent residents, 11 see also war orphans code-switching, 72, 101–2, 169–70 comparative perspective, 4, 20–1, 145–76 compulsory education, 16 different rights of citizens and non-citizens, 16 parents’ responsibilities, 16, 78 critical ethnography, 28–9 j’accuse mode, 28 accentuating the positive, 29 cultural capital, 3, 25, 163, 182 cultural reproduction, 3, 23–8, 164 criticisms, 27 difference from social reproduction, 24 deficit model of education, 117, 168 diglossia, 43, 174 discrimination, 59, 79, 122, 173 drill exercises, 15, 66–8, 107, 110, 140 economic capital, 163 English as a second language (ESL), 89–91, 150 English language learners (ELLs), 160 achievement gap, 160 ethnic schools, 17–18, 59–82 non-accreditation by Monbukagakush¯o, 17, 69 ethnographic present, 7–8 200

Subject Index 201 first language maintenance, 114–17, 126, 129–32, 146 five participating schools selection criteria, 30–31 summary, 30 foreign language learning, 147–8 foreign-national children not attending school, 15–16, 139–42 rights to public education, 16 statistics, 13 funding, 79 gender, 102, 174–5 Hal International School, 2, 6, 30, 83–103, 145–53, 169–70, 174–5, 178, 179 Mr. Allen (acting principal), 85, 86, 92, 96, 98, 99, 100, 103, 152 American culture as the norm, 91 B (bilingual) class, 95–6 code-switching, 101–2 comparison with Nichiei, 145–53 educational goals, 85 English-Japanese ratio, 85 English-medium classes, 86 ESL, 89–91, 150–1 F (Japanese L1) students, 85–6, 88–92, 150–1 homework, 91–2 Mrs. Hutchinson (chair of parent group), 98 ikebana lesson, 97 independent thinker, 85, 87 Japanese culture, 91 Japanese program, 84, 91–2, 93–5 Japanese teachers, 84, 93, 98–101 JNN (Japanese near-native) students, 85–6, 88–9, 95–6, 100–1 junior high school, 102–3 Ms. Kaufman (language coordinator), 84, 94 Dr. Lee (deputy headmaster), 89, 185 Ms. Mizoguchi (grade 3 Japanese teacher), 92, 94, 100 Monbukagakush¯o curriculum, 91–2 multicultural education, 86–7, 100

non-accreditation by Monbukagakush¯o, 96 parents, 92, 95–6, 96–8, 152 Picasso lesson, 145–6 S (Japanese L2) students, 85–6, 88–9, 92–5, 151 social language, 102–3, 174 Steering Committee, 98, 100 student demographics, 84 student identities, 101–2 Ms. Tabuchi (grade 1 bilingual aide), 89, 97, 185 teacher demographics, 84 tuition fees, 96 wealth of parents, 96–7 high culture, 145–6 identities identity options, 156 institutional identities, 29 multiplicity, 28 possible identities, 4 range of, 7 researcher identity, 34–5 student identities, 4, 101–2, 121–3, 156, 168–76 illegal immigrants, 183 imagined communities, 3, 4, 21–3, 41–2, 60, 85, 88, 126, 141–2, 144, 150, 153, 156, 168–9, 177, 179 agency, 22, 175–6 alternative imagined communities, 23, 27, 163–8, 180 definition, 21, 177 difference from social reproduction theories, 22 future affiliations, 21, 146, 150, 151 Hal, 85, 88 imagined communities as nations, 21 institutionally imagined communities, 4, 22, 141–2, 144, 163, 178 and investment, 21, 176 Midori, 126, 141–2, 143 Nichiei, 41–42, 57–8 parents’ visions, 143, 163, 175 for privileged children, 117–18, 146, 178

202

Language and Education in Japan

imagined communities – continued and school policies and practices, 3, 23, 41–3, 61–3, 105, 126, 141–2, 144, 150, 153, 156, 177 and student identities, 168–9 student visions, 57–8, 175–6 Sugino, 105, 117–18 teachers’ visions, 179 for underprivileged children, 117–18, 153, 156, 163, 178, 179 Zhonghua, 61 immersion education, 19–20, 38–58 role of L1 teachers, 148–9 immigrant students, 3, 7, 104, 154 see also language minority students instruction quality versus quantity, 156–61 international schools, 18–19, 83–103 conservative nature, 19 criticisms, 19, 149 English education, 18 ESL (English as a second language) students, 18, 89–91, 150–1 non-accreditation by Monbukagakush¯o, 18 upper-middle-class Japanese students, 18 investment, 56–8, 149, 176 Japan, 21–2 ‘backdoor’ and ‘side door’ immigration entries, 12 colonization of Korea and Taiwan, 10 ethnic minorities, 9 immigration law, 11–12 international students, 12 Japanese-born foreign nationals, 11 linguistic and cultural diversity, 9, 11 monolingual and monocultural stereotype, 9 recent immigration patterns, 11, 12 registered foreigners, statistics, 13 trainee programs, 12 wartime laborers, 10 World War II, 10, 12 see also Brazilians in Japan; Chinese in Japan; Koreans in Japan;

Nikkeijin; Peruvians in Japan; war orphans Japanese as a second language (JSL), 13–15 see also JSL classes Japanese education educational divide, 181–2 tracking, 181 Japanese language instruction see Japanese as a second language JSL classes, 14, 15, 67–8, 106–11, 126–32, 160, 173 academically undemanding, 15, 106–7 mechanical drills, 15 sanctuary for language minority students, 108, 110, 132 subject matter learning in, 130–1 Sugino, 106–11 Midori, 126–32 Zhonghua, 67–8 junior high schools, 56–8, 102–3 jus sanguinis/jus soli, 11 Katoh Gakuen, 19–20 Korean in Japan, 9 discrimination, 80, 185 education in public schools, 16–17 ethnic education, 17 historical background, 9–10, 11 Japanese-born, 11 nationality, 10 special permanent residents, 10 ts¯ ush¯o-mei, 10 L1 maintenance see first language maintenance language majority students, 14 both-and options, 156, 178 language minority education, 14–15, 61, 104–23, 124–44, 178, 179 both-end options, 164, 180 either-or options, 156, 178 language minority students, 3, 7, 61, 104, 106–8, 110–11, 113, 121–3, 125–6, 128, 132, 136–9, 140–1, 154–63, 160–1, 170, 178 academic learning, 3, 15, 126, 140, 154, 155–6, 160–1

Subject Index 203 not attending school, 15–16, 141 first language maintenance, 114–17, 126, 129–32, 146 as high maintenance, 138 and instructional materials, 135–6 as model students, 139 monolingualism, 3, 117, 122–3, 164, 171–2 permanent residents, 154, 164 temporary residents, 125–6, 141–2, 154 compare language majority students see also Japanese as a second language linguistic capital, 4, 25–7, 60, 147, 172, 187 Chinese as linguistic capital, 60 English as linguistic capital, 41, 147 and market value, 26–7, 187 linguistic stratification, 2, 3, 177–82 low-income families, 104 math lessons, 47, 65, 75, 118–19, 134, 135 in JSL classes, 130–1 metalinguistic awareness, 169–70 methodology confidentiality, 37 data analysis, 36–7 field notes, 35–6 fieldwork, 32–3, 183–4 illness, 35–6 languages used, 34–35 negotiating entry, 32 observation, 34 pseudonyms, 37 researcher identity, 34–5 school selection criteria, 31 videotaping, 34 Middle Kingdom, 166, 188 Midori Public Elementary School, 6–7, 30, 124–44, 153–63, 169–70, 171, 178, 179, 180 academic support (lack of), 134, 139–42, 155–6 Akira (grade 4 Brazilian student), 128, 135, 140

bilingual instructional aides, 127–8, 131–2, 155 bullying, 143–4 Caucasian children, 138, 139 Claudia (grade 1 Brazilian student, Akira’s sister), 129, 134, 137–8, 139, 142, 162, 172–3 comparison with Sugino, 131, 153–6 conformity, 134, 137–8, 139, 140 daycare (takujisho), 142, 162 first language support, 129–32, 154, 155, 171 foreign population, 124 foreign workers, 124–5 instructional materials, 134–6 JSL, 126–32, 173 Ms. Kasei, (grade 1 teacher), 134, 138 Kurio (grade 1 Peruvian student), 132, 136–7, 171 laissez-faire attitude, 139–42 language minority students, 132, 136–9, 140–1, Mr. Nagase (bilingual aide), 129–30, 131–2, 137, 173 Oscar (grade 5 model student), 139, 155 parents, 141–2, 143–4, 152 quality of instruction, 133, 156 school-age foreign children, 125 Ms. Shinohara (JSL teacher), 127, 128–32, 138, 142, 155, 173 student demographics, 125 teacher demographics, 125 Mr. Tokunaga (vice principal), 136, 141–2, 161–2 traditional instruction, 133 Midori Town foreign population, 124 foreign workers, 124–5 migrant workers, 124–5, 143 Monbukagakush¯o (Ministry of Education. Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan), 13, 14, 16, 18, 158 English education policies, 20 non-accreditation by, 69, 78–80, 96, 180–1, 185

204

Language and Education in Japan

Morrison, Toni, 173 Murata Junior High School, 161 music lessons, 61, 76 Nichiei Immersion School, 4–5, 30, 38–58, 145–53, 174, 178, 179 assessment, 45 class size, 39 comparison with Hal, 143–53 comparison with Sugino, 117–18, 157 culture, 149 curriculum, 42 diglossia, 43 English-Japanese ratio, 38, 39 English proficiency of students, 45–9 hands-on instruction, 43–5 happy/sad face, 45 high teacher turnover, 53, 149, 184 higher order thinking skills, 49–51, 149 history, 40 Japanese instruction, 49–51 Japanese teachers, 50, 51–3, 148–9 Ms. Hanekom (grade 3 immersion teacher), 52–3, 187 Mr. Jones (grade 3 immersion teacher), 48, 53, 149 Ms. Kozue (grade 1 Japanese teacher), 41, 44, 51–2, 53, 55 Dr. Matsumoto (president), 40–1, 42 Dr. McKenzie (immersion program director), 38–9, 45, 58, 148, 175, 184 immersion teachers, 39–40, 51–3, 184 and international schools, 54, 149 math lessons, 47 non-immersion program, 42–3, 148 ¯ (grade 6 Japanese teacher), Mr. Ota 50, 53, 56–7 parents’ expectations, 41–2, 54–6, 148 Piaget, 43 private school, 54–6 publicity, 41 reluctance to speak English, 47–9, 57

students’ attitudes towards English, 56–8, 175 team-teaching, 51–3 tuition fees, 54 Nikkeijin, 11–12, 183 Okinawa/Ry¯ uk¯ u, 9 Oyster Bilingual School, 170 parents alienation from schools, 159, 161 as clients, 151–3 cooperation, 55, 97–8, 152–3, 159, 166–7, 168 as enemies, 161–3 expectations for bilingualism, 153, 175 expectations for schools, 41–2, 54–6, 92, 95–6, 98, 148, 152 gratitude towards schools, 77, 167 intervention by, 96, 98, 152 sense of entitlement, 55, 96, 98, 152 teachers’ criticisms of, 119–20, 141–2, 152, 161–3, 167–8 upper-middle-class, 151–2 working-class, 159 working parents, 161–2, 167–8 permanent residents, 105, 116 Peruvians in Japan, 12, 14 becoming permanent residents, 18 temporary stay in Japan, 17 private schools, 38, 54–6, 159 privileged children, 4, 7, 158–61 academic learning at home, 158–9 compare underprivileged children public schools funding, 158, 187–8 refugees, 3, 104 see also immigrant students relative autonomy, 25, 27 resistance, 172–3, 174 school lunch, 33–4 schools complex and contradictory nature, 29, 178–9 see also five participating schools

Subject Index 205 social reproduction theories, 22–3, 23–4, 164 lack of human agency, 23 criticisms, 23, 24 socioeconomic classes, 2, 3, 26, 117–18 and education, 25–6, 121, 147–8, 181–2 poor, 104, 119–20 middle class, 22, 147–8 and social reproduction theories, 22–3 upper middle class, 2, 3, 18, 24, 25, 54–6, 96–7, 147–8, 156, 178 working class, 22, 24, 104–5, 117–18, 156, 178, 181 South Americans in Japan, 17 access to education, 18 attitudes towards education, 142 becoming permanent residents, 18 Japanese proficiency, 143 L1 maintenance, 17 temporary stay in Japan, 17, 125–6, 141–2, 154 see also Brazilians in Japan; Peruvians in Japan; Nikkeijin students agency, 22, 58, 175–6 identities, 4, 101–2, 121–3, 156, 168–76 imagined communities, 57–8, 175–6 resistance, 172–3, 174 subtractive bilingualism, 1–2, 114–18, 153–63, 179 dresser metaphor, 1, 114 and literacy, 114 compare additive bilingualism submersion, 15 Sugino Public Elementary School, 1–2, 6, 30, 71–2, 104–23, 153–63, 171–2, 178, 179, 180 assimilation, 121–2, 154–4 Ms. Ayabe (JSL teacher), 1–2, 106, 107–8, 114, 115, 187 bilingual instructional aides, 109 bilingual JSL classes, 109–10 ‘blame the family,’ 119–20

CALL (computer-assisted language learning), 109 class size, 158 color blindness, 122 community involvement, 106, 114 comparison with Midori, 153–6 comparison with Nichiei, 117–18 comparison with Zhonghua, 71–2 deficit model of education, 117, 120 educational goals, 105–6 first language support (lack of), 114, 115–17, 123, 154–5 funding, 158, 187–8 hands-on instruction, 111–13, 157 heritage language classes, 115–16 home languages, 116–17 homeroom teachers, 111, 115 housing project, 104, 105, 121 Ms. Imanishi (grade 5 teacher), 122, 123, 157–8 JSL, 106–11 Kim (grade 5 Vietnamese student), 1, 107, 163 language minority students, 105, 106–8, 109–11, 113, 116, 117, 171–2 linguistic homogeneity, 122–3 literacy, 114–15, 116 low-income families, 104–5 math lessons, 118–19 Mr. Mikami (grade 6 teacher), 113–14, 119, 120, 153, 162 multiculturalism, 105, 115, 121 Mr. Nakamura, 106, 108, 109, 110–11, 116 paper-making lesson, 112–13, 158 parents, 104–5, 119–21 permanent residents, 105, 116, 117 potato lesson, 111 quality of instruction, 156, 157–8 Mr. Sait¯ o (grade 2 teacher), 111–12, 113, 122 Sh¯ ota, (grade 2 Chinese student), 111–12, 113, 120, 122 student demographics, 104 student identities, 110, 121–3 subtractive bilingualism, 114–18 Suginoese, 113, 122

206

Language and Education in Japan

Sugino Public Elementary School – continued Ms. Takano (principal), 105–6, 115–16, 117, 118, 120–1 underachievement, 118–21, 156–61 wars, 113–14 Super English Language High Schools, 20 team-teaching at Hal, 98–100 at Nichiei, 51–3 between regular and JSL teachers, 15 transnationalism, 60, 71, 165 tuition fees Hal, 96 Nichiei, 54 Zhonghua, 79 underachievement, 118–21, 156–61 underprivileged children, 4, 117–18, 156–61 academic learning at home (lack of), 159 compare privileged children unequal power relations, 29 war orphans, 12, 104, 114, 183 Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School, 6, 30, 59–82, 163–8, 170, 174, 180–1 after-school program, 168 bilingualism of students, 69–71, 81 Chinese culture, 61–3, 166 Chinese identity, 60–1 Chinese-Japanese ratio, 63–4, 80 Chinese community, 73, 74 Chinese proficiency of students, 66, 69–71 Chinese versus Japanese schools, 74–5, 77–8 code-switching, 72, 169–70 comparison with Nichiei, 170

curriculum reform, 65–6 discrimination, 59, 77–8, 80 English as a foreign language (EFL) classes, 67–8 financial hardship, 79, 181 funding, 79 high school, 79–80 haojiu/youjiu, 62, 166 Japanese as a second language (JSL) classes, 67–8 Japanese mainstream students, 60, 63 Japanese names pronounced Chinese way, 63 Japanese use of junior high school students, 81 junior high school, 80–2 Kaky¯o (expatriate Chinese), 74, 78 language across the curriculum, 64–5 Mr. Li (vice principal), 59, 65–6, 67, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81–2 math lessons, 65, 75 music lessons, 42, 61, 76 non-accreditation by Monbukagakush¯o, 69, 78–80, 180–1 parents, 71, 77–8, 166–8 People’s Republic of China, 72–3 teacher authority, 76 three knives, 59 tuition fees, 79 student demographics, 60 teacher demographics, 60 Taiwan, 70, 73 traditional instruction, 64–5, 67–8 transnational Chinese community, 60, 71, 165 Mr. Wu (principal), 61, 62–3, 73, 78, 79, 164, 165, 167, 181 Ms. Ye (grade 2 Chinese teacher), 65, 66, 72, 74, 77, 167–8