Monographs on Bilingualism No.

15

All Grown Up: The Bilingual Adult

Edited
by
Stacey
Tarvin­Isomura,
Mary
Goebel
Noguchi,



Amanda
Gillis­Furutaka


A collection of articles about the paths taken to achieve competence in

two or more languages, written from the perspectives of the individuals
concerned, their parents and researchers.

This
monograph
is
one
of
a
series
produced
by
the
Bilingualism
Special
Interest
Group
of
the

Japan
Association
for
Language
Teaching.

The
group
aims
to
encourage
research
projects
into

bilingualism
and
to
disseminate
their
findings.

It
also
acts
as
a
base
for
mutual
support
between

group
members.

このモノグラフは、全国語学教育学会バイリンガリズム研究部会が作りだしたシリーズの一
つです。この部会は、バイリンガリズムの調査計画や調査多角化を促進することを目的にし
ています。また、会員間の相互援助の基盤となる場所を提供します。



Produced by the Bilingualism Special Interest Group of the Japan Association for
Language Teaching © April, 2009. Kobe, Japan.


 1

 Table of Contents
Introduction ……………………………………………….. 4

Section 1: Multilingual/multicultural families

The Ratzlaffs: Living With Three Languages (One family’s story told from 3
perspectives)
The Mother’s Perspective

Françoise Ratzlaff ……………………………………………………. 5

The Oldest Child’s Perspective: Expressing Myself in Three Mother Tongues

Allicent Ratzlaff ……………………………………………………. 7

The Second Child’s View: Building an Identity in Three Languages and Cultures

Alexa Ratzlaff ……………………………………………………. 9

Growing Up With Four Languages

Debjani Ray …………………………………………………... 11

Section 2: Children of a monoracial couple living in another country

Negotiating Paths to Bilingualism
Marilyn Higgins …………………………………………………... 13
Acquiring English as a Japanese Living in America

Luke Ishihara …………………………………………………... 16

Section 3: Children of one Japanese and one non-Japanese parent

Two Languages, Two Children—Two Stories

Ms. A …………………………………………………... 24


 2

One Experience of Bilingual Child-Rearing in the Contemporary World
Charles Fox …………………………………………………... 25
A Bilingual Parent’s Mixed Success in Bringing Up Bilingual Children

Margaret Maeda …………………………………………………... 33

Listening to the “Experts” When Considering Adding a Second Language

Dennis K. McLean …………………………………………………... 36
A Long and Winding Road — With a Happy Ending

Mary Goebel Noguchi …………………………………………………... 38

Growing Up in an International Family in Japan: Assumptions, Expectations, and

Everyday Realities

Craig Smith …………………………………………………... 45

Once Upon a Time

Amanda & Kye Taura …………………………………………………... 48

Section 4: Studies of multilingual young people

Identities of Young Multicultural Adults

Erina Ogawa …………………………………………………... 51

Raising Children to Become Bilingual and Biliterate

Jimena Benosa Homma …………………………………………………... 62

Appendix

Call for Monograph Contributions: All grown up: The bilingual adult …………... 77


 3

Introduction

This monograph explores the paths that over thirty individuals and their families have
taken to achieve the ability to function effectively in two or more languages and in the
cultures where these languages are spoken. The monograph has been divided into four
sections to help readers locate topics of particular relevance to their own situation, but we
recommend that you read every story and research paper, as they all include fascinating
insights and practical suggestions.
The first section focuses on families and individuals who use three or more languages
in their daily lives. The focus of the second section is about the experiences of children of
monoracial couples who were raised in another country. The third section looks at the
issues faced by families in which one parent is Japanese. Most of the articles in these
three sections are first-hand accounts. The last section is somewhat different in that the
authors interviewed others and report their findings.
Throughout the monograph, there are a variety of voices. Some writers addressed the
questions sent out in the Call for Contributions (see Appendix on page 77.) Many articles
are written by parents of bilingual /mutilingual children looking back on their
experiences. For readers who don’t consider themselves bi- or multilingual, perhaps the
most fascinating articles will be those written by people who have acquired more than
one language.
The variety of experiences shared in these pages show that there is no one direct,
fool-proof route on the journey to becoming a competent speaker of more than one
language, but that there are many factors which contribute to reaching this goal. We hope
that you will find this monograph as informative and encouraging as we have, and we
recommend that you explore more deeply some of the issues touched upon in other
monographs published by the JALT Bilingualism Special Interest Group.
The Editors


 4

 Section 1: Multilingual/multicultural families

The Ratzlaffs:
Living With Three Languages

Editors’ Note: The first three articles were written by members of the same family,
and offer special insight for three reasons. First, they allow us to see the perspective
of both a parent and children in a multilingual family; second, they offer insight into
dealing with more than two languages, and third, they provide the perspective a
family in which both parents are foreign-born. Our portrayal of the Ratzlaff family
begins with the mother’s perspective, as Françoise Ratzlaff answers the questions
posed in our Call for Contributions. The questions are presented in bold type, with
Françoise’s answers following them in regular type.

The Mother’s Perspective: Françoise Ratzlaff’s Answers

1. What is your background? Briefly describe your family, the languages you used
while your children were growing up and the languages you use now.
I come from France. My husband is American. We both spoke each other’s
language, but only our own mother tongue to our two daughters, who were born in Osaka
and spoke only Japanese in school. We still function the same way when we meet. No
language mixing. When we are in France, we often use Japanese as a secret language on
the street.

2. Did you have a specific plan for bilingualism from the beginning, for example,
minority language at home or one parent one language, or did you create your
path as you went along?
We wanted our children to speak, read and write three languages.

3. How do you relate to your adult children now?

We meet twice a year and often talk on Skype.


 5

 How have the language dynamics changed?
Still the same.

Are you and your children living in the same country now?
No. We live in Japan. One daughter lives in France, one daughter in England

If you are all in Japan, for example, and your adult daughter has married a
monolingual Japanese man, how does your family's minority language fit into
your daughter's life now?
There is no such problem. We all speak the boyfriend’s language.

Are you afraid of your child losing his or her minority language and then losing
part of your connection?

I guess I would learn the language I need to know .

4. If your children have children, are they raising them in more than one language?
What is your role, if any, in raising your grandchildren in your language?
We still do not have grandchildren.

5. Many parents of young children worry about their children not being able to
communicate as an adult in either language. What advice would you give to
them?
Do not hesitate to teach your child your mother tongue, even if you live in Japan and
Japanese is overpowering it. For example, send your child to an English-speaking
country, to an English-speaking friend’s house. Read fun books in English to him, watch
a lot of kids’ movies.


 6

 The Oldest Child’s Perspective: Allicent Ratzlaff’s Story
Expressing Myself in Three Mother Tongues

My father is American and my mother is French. When they came to Japan in 1973,
they had no idea of what would happen later: raising a trilingual, tricultural family. My
sister and I were given a chance to speak, read and write three languages, and, for my
part, I am very grateful to them for having done that.
My parents were strict about having us speak only English to Daddy, French to
Mommy, and coping with the Japanese educational system on our own. They had and
still have much interest in the Japanese language and culture. They are both linguists,
and for many years, they have dedicated themselves to Japanese culture; my mother
learnt ceramics, my father, Japanese enka. They did their best to make us fit into Japanese
life, too—especially me, the oldest daughter, who had to face not only all the good sides
of this kind of education, but also some difficulties which I now feel were spared my
younger sister, who didn’t have to clear the way.
As foreigners, my parents approached their new style of life in Japan from above; that
is, they were completely aware of their need to try to reach the core of that culture which
was so different from their own. On top of that, they already had the experience of having
had to adapt to each other’s cultures because of their two nationalities. They felt quite at
ease living in this new culture because their married life had made them ready to
approach another culture. I must admit they did a very good job of adapting to Japan. For
them it was just another game—a quite pleasant way to enrich their perspectives on life.
For me, their first child, the story was quite different. I was born in Osaka. I had a
wonderful Japanese grandmother to take care of me when my parents were working. I
was sent very early to hoikusho, the nursery school ten minutes away from home. I was
literally soaked in Japanese culture, like all Japanese children were, with the difference
being that alongside this Japanese immersion, I was also influenced by my parents’ views
on Japan as a foreign country.
This carried with it some “surprising” aspects, which were for me both completely
familiar (I felt myself completely Japanese), but also different when seen from my
family’s point of view, which I respected and trusted as a child. For example, cheese is
not a Japanese specialty, and processed cheese, presented in a wrapper like candy, was
not my mother’s idea of cheese. When I had to take a bento to school, my mother did her
best to include a few Japanese items, but, since she is French, she would add a piece of
camembert or some home-made quiche, which of course I loved, but which made the
bento look very different from the standard type. My onigiri were made of brown rice,
which was in those days considered as food for the poor. Things have changed in Japan,
and this might not anymore be the case. At that time, sandwiches were also out of the
question, although, six years later, they started being fashionable and sometimes replaced
onigiri. These changes had taken place by the time my sister went to elementary school.
Now, even a bento from a convenience store is probably accepted! At the time, however,
my bento meals were always surprising to my classmates.
I had trouble keeping my balance. I had two main worlds to deal with, and, one of
them was already double: the two countries my parents come from are, as a matter of

 7

fact, extremely different. At home, I felt these differences between the United States and
France: Thanksgiving, Halloween stories, etc… versus la galette des rois, la chandeleur,
les crèpes.
Also, I was annoyed by constantly being reminded of my being different: being tall
with blond hair and three languages. What was “I” different from? I myself was not a
“different” person. I was a person like everybody else. Children don’t have a sense of
borders, nations, of belonging to one culture—even to the one they are said to belong to.
A Greek child hears, “we have all we need in Greece: olives, tomatoes…” A French child
hears, “we live well in our country, we have got everything we need: cheese, wine…” I
never heard anything of that sort. In fact I loved the “Wizard of Oz” and its final phrase,
“there is no place like home.” Home for me was my house with my family, my piano and
my cat. As a small child, I did not have the slightest idea of cultural differences, of who is
Asian, African, European or American. What does it all matter? In fact, I still don’t have
a good answer to that question. I can say, though, that I tried to understand and find an
answer.
Still, I struggled. I felt terribly lost in my Japanese middle school, which had
disciplinary practices similar to those in the military service. We learnt during gym class
how to turn like soldiers when they change direction. (I guess that school was especially
hard because many of my Japanese friends also bitterly complained). One night at 2
A.M., I ended up begging my parents to let me escape the Japanese school system and
change to an international school. They agreed, and I switched to the Canadian
Academy, two hours away from home.
Commuting to Kobe was nothing compared to the new kind of air I could breathe. I
was among classmates from various backgrounds; also, with many Japanese. In order to
perfect my English, my parents forbade me to speak Japanese at school. They wanted me
to be accepted in the more advanced class of English monolinguals. I did not have any
understanding of that and would have preferred to keep speaking Japanese because,
outside of the house, my life had always been in Japanese.
I later changed schools again, this time to Osaka International School, which had just
opened, and enjoyed the fact that the school was just a few minutes away from home.
However, upon graduating, after so much schooling in “just English,” I decided to perfect
my “written” French, because my language triangle hadn’t been completed. I had
attended school in one oriental language, one occidental language, but not in my third
language. I decided to go to Paris. I thought it would make my education complete.
There, I first studied piano, and then a couple of years later I entered the Sorbonne to
follow the entire stepladder, until, last year, I obtained my doctoral degree with highest
distinction in French Literature. My research was done on a French poet of the 19th
century, Jules Laforgue. So maybe, I can say now that I feel like I have a total grasp of all
three languages.
And then there is piano. I have always practised a lot of piano, along with my studies
at the university. This long period where I applied myself to thinking, reasoning about
literature, art, philosophy, and language—all these years convinced me that too much of
one language can become suffocating. I need three—or maybe just one: The language
that unites all people and has no borders is really the “language” of music, which, luckily,

 8

I had studied from my earlier years. Music is intellectual and physical, multicultural and
universal.
I remember how shy I had been, often worrying that my language ability might not
equal that of monolinguals. However, I was able to give piano concerts in Paris and
obtained three prizes. This helped me gain a lot of confidence to help overcome the
“differences”. I realized that I have to be a real individual to cope with the difficulties.
Now, playing piano in public is my way to feel solid in three cultures—in fact, in all
cultures I meet. I also feel comfortable trying new languages, the ones I must learn! They
help me be myself.
Also, I avoid talking about my background. I sometimes don’t even tell people that I
was born and raised in Japan, because “differences” seem to provide a chance for exotic
interest and false knowledge. Being reminded of my ability to communicate in three
languages made me question if it was a good thing or a bad thing. Trying to express
myself in new languages and playing music really helped me balance out the triangle.
Playing Rachmaninov’s 1st piano sonata in a concert hall, or trying to understand a new
language—in fact, all of my experiences—have gradually increased my self-esteem.
Without them, my consciousness of being multicultural and multilingual could have
taken another course and made me lead an artificial life—made of me a gaijin of the
world.
I would like to recommend to parents of multicultural children to give their children a
chance to learn various kinds of arts or sports, to let them develop a passion that will for
sure put them on the right track to find their own individual “un-divided” person. This is
the way to give them the chance to express themselves completely. I must add that the
complexity at the start will ease later and as a whole become quite rewarding. This has
been the exhilarating experience of multilingualism and multiculturalism which I have
been able to draw upon in my life so far.

The Second Child’s View: Alexa Ratzlaff’s Story

Building an Identity in Three Languages and Cultures

I
was
born
and
raised
in
Osaka,
and
having
a
French
mother
and
an
American

father,
I
grew
up
speaking
three
languages
fluently.

I
went
to
a
local
Japanese
public

school,
where
I
was
completely
immersed
in
Japanese
culture,
until
I
was
13.


Although
I
spoke
French
and
English
with
my
parents
and
frequently
went
on

holiday
to
France
and
to
the
U.S.,
my
dominant
language
was
Japanese.

In
order
to

learn
to
write
in
the
other
two
languages,
I
changed
to
an
International
School
in

Mino.

While
the
transfer
was
hard
for
the
first
two
years,
as
a
13
year
old,
I
adapted

quickly
and
soon
felt
confident
reading
and
writing—first
in
English,
then
in
French.

(The
International
School
was
very
small
and
offered
little
French,
so
it
was



 9

essential
for
me
to
take
additional
correspondence
courses
through
a
French
high

school
in
France.)




When
I
was
19,
I
passed
my
IB
(International
Baccalaureate),
which
opened
the

possibility
for
me
to
go
to
college
either
in
the
U.S.
or
in
France.

I
decided
to
go
to

Bryn
Mawr
College
in
Pennsylvania,
a
strong
liberal
arts
college
that
offered
courses

in
Architecture.

Thanks
to
my
SAT
scores
in
French
and
my
IB
scores,
I
managed
to

earn
a
year’s
worth
of
advanced
placement
credits,
and
that
helped
me
finish
my

college
education
in
three
years.
This
then
gave
me
the
opportunity
to
attend

supplementary
classes
at
universities
such
as
the
University
of
Pennsylvania,

Columbia
University,
and
the
University
of
Copenhagen.

After
completing
my
BA,

magna
cum
laude,
I
decided
to
move
to
Paris
to
pursue
my
career
in
Architecture.


While
in
the
process
of
acquiring
my
architecture
license,
I
worked
for
several

architecture
offices
as
an
apprentice.
My
three
languages
gave
me
the
opportunity
to

work
for
local
firms
and
international
ones,
such
as
for
the
Japanese
architect

Shigeru
Ban,
who
was
designing
the
Pompidou
Museum
in
Metz
at
the
time.

In
this

firm,
I
was
able
to
take
advantage
of
my
language
ability
to
the
fullest,
successfully

juggling
French,
English
and
Japanese.


In
2005,
I
received
my
French
architecture
license.

In
that
same
year,
I
met
my

partner,
David,
who
is
an
English
architect.

He
convinced
me
to
move
to
England,

where
I
live
and
work
now.


Although
I
mostly
speak
English
while
in
England,
I
usually
only
speak
French

and
Japanese
on
the
phone
with
my
family
and
friends.

There
are
very
few
French

and
Japanese
people
where
I
live
in
England,
and
sometimes
I
feel
like
I
am
the
only

one
of
my
kind
and
that
I
am
not
taking
full
advantage
of
my
language
skills.


I
also

often
feel
homesick
for
my
native
country,
Japan.


However,
being
a
trilingual
has
always
provided
opportunities,
and
I
am
very

grateful
for
having
grown
up
speaking
three
languages.

Because
I
speak
them

fluently,
they
are
all
my
“mother
tongues”,
and
I
believe
that
each
culture
has
built

me
into
what
I
am
now—especially
the
Japanese
culture,
which
is
ingrained
in
my

character
and
mannerisms.

I
do
not
know
what
the
future
holds
for
me.

I
hope
to
someday
run
my
own

architecture
practice
with
my
partner,
either
in
Europe
or
in
Asia.

I
also
hope
that

my
children
will
benefit
from
my
trilingual
background
and
experiences,
and
that

they,
too,
will
someday
seek
to
speak
multiple
languages.



Note:

Alexa
Ratzlaff
participated
in
the
roundtable
discussion
at
JALT
1997
which

was
transcribed
in
monograph
6:

Growing
Up
Bilingually:

The
Pleasures
and
Pains.


More
of
her
thoughts
on
growing
up
with
three
languages
are
provided
there.



 10

 Growing Up With Four Languages

Debjani Ray

This article is about a Japanese-Romanian adult who was raised with two main
languages—Japanese and English—plus two European languages as his family moved
between Japan and several countries in Europe. I would like to describe how his
languages developed during various stages of his life. At the same time, this is also the
story of a European woman who married a Japanese man and raised a child bilingually.
This case study is based on an interview I conducted with a woman who I will call Anna
Noguchi. To protect the privacy of the family, real names will not be revealed here.
First, I’ll give a brief description of Anna’s background to show the language
dynamics of her own life and of her husband’s as well. Born in Romania to a Hungarian
mother and a Romanian father, Anna was raised in Hungary until she was six, and she
considers Hungarian to be her first language. About the time she was ready to enter
elementary school, her family moved back to Romania, where she started schooling. She
began learning Romanian at primary school, then a year later, English was added as a
foreign language. After her college graduation in Romania, Anna worked in that country
until she met her husband and came to Japan with him. She began learning Japanese in
her mid-twenties in Japan.
Anna’s husband, Toshio, is a Japanese national who was born and brought up in
Japan. His first language is Japanese and he learnt English as a foreign language at
school. He studied Romanian before going to Romania for his job. After their marriage,
Toshio and Anna lived in England for two years and Germany for four years. When they
had a son, Tomoyuki (henceforth “Tomo”), they agreed to raise him bilingually. Tomo is
now twenty-six and can deal with Japanese and English in any given situation, while he
also has intermediate proficiency in German and Hungarian.
Now I’ll describe the process of Tomo’s language development through his
upbringing. He was born in Japan and started speaking both Japanese and English at
home. Anna and Toshio followed a rather lenient one parent - one language policy, not
worrying too much about consistency because both of them were able to speak more than
one language themselves. Tomo grew up speaking Japanese with his grandparents and
neighborhood children. He used Japanese and sometimes English with his father. He
spoke English with his mother and with some American neighbors. He also used
Hungarian with his mother sometimes. However, Anna did not force him to learn
Hungarian because she felt three languages might be a little too much for a child to cope
with, and she did not want him to use it as an excuse for not learning English. She
preferred that he learn English more than any other language, as she felt that it was more
useful as an international language.
Before he entered kindergarten, Tomo started taking English lessons at a local
language school in Japan. Basically, these lessons involved doing different activities and
projects with the school’s native English teachers.
Then the family moved to Germany with for two years. There, Tomo attended a local
kindergarten, which was basically a playschool where the children were under no

 11

pressure to learn anything. Tomo played happily there with local German children. After
two years, the family came back to Japan for a year. This time, Tomo went to a private
kindergarten where he was enrolled in a special English program.
After a year, however, Toshio’s job pulled the family back to Germany, where Tomo
spent his first two years of elementary school. Anna says Tomo learnt German swiftly
and easily and had no trouble with school or classmates.
When the family returned to Japan after this second stay in Germany, Tomo faced
initial adjustment problems, but nothing too serious. Anna says that at first, Tomo would
not speak in Japanese at school, or in any other language either. In other words, he would
not speak at all. Then slowly, he started speaking in Japanese, and when he did, he started
speaking mostly in Japanese, including at home. He finished his elementary education
without much trouble and went on to a private junior and senior high school in Japan. At
this school, students could choose which of several foreign languages they wanted to
study; Tomo chose to study English.
During the long summer and winter school holidays during elementary school and
junior high school, Tomo often went abroad with his parents or just with his mother to
spend time with relatives in Hungary and visit other places in Europe. His Hungarian
language proficiency developed a great deal during these visits, and he also spoke in
German when needed. This pattern of spending vacations in Europe continued for about
seven years. Tomo’s favorite pastime there was going fishing with the neighborhood
children or playing around the nearby farm.
Then one year when he was in junior high school, Tomo participated in a camp in the
United States, and after that, he chose to go to the States during his vacations, as these
trips were “parent-free” and allowed him to make a lot of friends. These visits to America
boosted his English ability.
As a child, Tomo had difficulties expressing his thoughts and especially, his feelings,
in his different languages. Each language has a set of sophisticated vocabulary describing
and explaining different complicated feelings and emotions. Often they cannot be
translated directly from one language to another. They are not easy to internalize by any
standard. For a child it must have been hard to deal with all of these very different
languages, so Anna says that Tomo did not talk much about his feelings. By the time he
graduated from high school, however, he had somewhat outgrown these difficulties and
was much more confident. Now Tomo is an adult who has the skill to juggle several very
different languages.
As an adult, Tomo has less verbal communication with his parents. When he speaks,
it is usually in Japanese, even if his mother speaks in English or Hungarian to him as
before. Nonetheless, he reads more books in English on his own now. Sometimes Tomo
and his parents talk about sports, movies, books, or current events and, depending on the
topic, the language changes from Japanese to English and vice versa.
When Tomo was little, Anna sometimes faced a dilemma. She was concerned about
his becoming “too” Japanese and was afraid that she might lose him. At the same time
she was very worried about his developing a non-Japanese personality and having
difficulties fitting into Japanese society because of it. Fortunately, Tomo did not have


 12

much trouble adjusting in Japan after he moved back from Europe. He managed to adjust
to life as a bilingual/bicultural person in Japan quite well. He has maintained a healthy
relationship with his parents and continues to be a bilingual—or more accurately, a
multilingual. Anna says that this did not happen overnight and added that parents of
bilingual children have to be patient and should give their children as many opportunities
as possible.
This is a brief description of the language development of Tomo during the different
stages of his life. He and his parents made every effort to ensure successful language
acquisition. He learned to use four languages through play as well as serious study. To
become proficient in different languages at an advanced level is not easy and is rather
time consuming. It seems that allocating a lot of time and energy to continue studying
languages is the key to success. It can be said that it is important for parents to give
opportunities to their children and it is important for children to maintain their efforts to
take advantage of these opportunities. At the same time, Anna warned, parents must not
forget that their children are not mere tools for research on languages and social behavior.

Section 2: Children of a monoracial couple living in another country

Negotiating Paths to Bilingualism

Marilyn Higgins

It was 30 years ago that my husband and I, both Americans of European heritage,
arrived from the United States with our two sons (then 7 and 3) to take up a job teaching
English as a second language in Western Japan. Today, our children (including our
daughter, who was born two years after we arrived in Japan) live and work comfortably
and competently in either Japanese or English. We are sometimes asked how we
negotiated their path to bilingualism when we, ourselves, are not particularly fluent in the
Japanese language. In this short piece, I reflect on the turning points as I remember them.
Speaking on the topic of bilingualism, I recall one speaker at a JALT conference
making the point that children seem to become more (or less) fluent in languages
depending on how the expectations about the purpose of their language learning are
conveyed by their parents and in their community of learning. Our children often heard us
say that they were “ambassadors” and “bridges between East and West.” The expectation
of fluency in both Japanese and English was natural within our circle of friends. We
know a number of excellent role models who operate seamlessly between the languages,
and we worked to the extent we could to gain proficiency ourselves. We cheered the
children on as their fluency far surpassed ours early on. While they seemed to pick up


 13

Japanese without “barriers,” our brains put up “rational roadblocks” trying to reason
through the new grammar and sounds.
But even before coming to Japan we had begun the language learning process in a
spirit of adventure and enjoyment. I remember posting labels around the house: “isu” on
the chair, “tsukue” on the desk, “reizoko” on the fridge. I remember the great laughter of
the children when they learned that in Japanese “haha” meant “mother” and “mama”
meant “so-so!”
We thought we’d learn along with them and after we got to Japan, we tried to work
on their homework together. The most important point is that there was the expectation
that learning assignments should be done as well as possible. Soon their proficiency was
beyond ours, and we were not able to help as much. But we could and did arrange for
competent native help as needed.
On the English side of things, within three months of our arrival of Japan, we noticed
that our older son—who had been reading and writing at above grade level in the school
he attended in the U.S.—had forgotten how to even write his own name in English. We
therefore instituted English focus times each day. Most of the day they could play and
communicate in Japanese or English as they wished, but at the dinner table, the only
acceptable language at our house (unless we had Japanese guests) was English. This new
rule meant that there were times when dinner was a bit quiet! Nevertheless, nearly all of
our conversation with the children was in English. We had early morning prayers and
consultation in English, as well as after-dinner English story time and writing exercises in
English. We did our best to provide an English environment for at least part of each day.
We also tried to take advantage of what little English TV was available for kids in
Japan at that time. Even back in 1978, when we arrived in Japan, NHK broadcast Sesame
Street in English. There were occasional English movies. Our daughter was three years
old when we were able to buy our first video machine (1983), and broadcast satellite TV
brought wonderful new language selection possibilities to us. We sometimes joke that our
daughter’s first English teacher was Mel Brooks, because at that time we loved “de-
stressing” while watching his hilarious movies. She would pick up phrases from the films
and repeat them with sometimes surprising (occasionally embarrassing, but always
humorous) results at odd times.
In our area (Yamaguchi) there were no international schools. That was fine with us,
as we were happy to send the kids to the local Japanese schools—at least in their early
years. After elementary school, we found we had to be more selective, after our first son
became embroiled in a school that was rife with bullying. After a year of trying to work
with the school to ameliorate the increasingly serious problem, we decided our best path
was home-schooling through high school for him. That meant that we had to do some
intensive work at home bringing his English level up to the level needed for his
assignments.
During what would be considered his “junior year” in high school (11th grade, or 2nd
year of high school) he did spend one year in the U.S. and attended a public school.
During that year he developed a passion for photography. With that strong sense of
mission, he returned to Japan, finished up his home-schooling course, then applied to and
was accepted at the Japanese university of his choice. He graduated from that college

 14

with honors four years later. He became a photo-journalist and is fully capable of writing
and/or translating as needed in both languages.
Today, he works in Tokyo and his photos and writing regularly appear in national
Japanese magazines. He has a Japanese wife who has some English fluency, and they
have two children. The language in their home is mostly Japanese, although English is
often used as an “alternate” language and is spoken quite naturally with English-speaking
guests who are not fluent in Japanese. English books, videos and other media are enjoyed
by the children and the family in general. Their children (age 10 and 6) attend weekly
English lessons and are able to use simple English, though at this point their receptive
ability exceeds their English language production. As grandparents, my husband and I are
encouraged to speak as much English as possible with them, and we believe that time and
experience will lead each of them to be able to function quite well in English as well as
their native Japanese.
Our second son chose to stay in the Japanese school system until he graduated from
junior high school. (We had moved to another town about that time, and the junior high
he attended did not have the dysfunctional elements that had led to bullying in his older
brother’s school.) In fact, because he observed how to build unity with his school-mates
and avoid or overcome the teasing that can turn into full-blown conflict, our second son
was elected the student-body president and became known throughout Japan (thanks to
the media) as the “aoi-me seito kaicho” (blue-eyed student body president).
For high school, he was able to go to an international school in Canada. He then went
to China to study Chinese, and after a year or so, he returned to Japan to attend
university. Halfway through his university course in Japan, however, he felt he was not
making the progress he was looking for, so he transferred to a U.S.-based distance
learning course and then went on to finish a Master’s program in Conflict Resolution in
an English-medium university based in Europe.
Today, he is living in the United States and works at a job where he uses his
Japanese as well as his Chinese language skills. In fact, his wife is Chinese and their
children (a boy age 9, and girl 6) use English, Chinese and Japanese in that order of
fluency. They seem to enjoy games and situations that require them to switch between
languages.
When our daughter reached junior high school age, some friends in Kyushu had
started a small international school (English-based, but also with Japanese components).
She made her own inquiries and convinced us to send her there. After completing her
high school in a bilingual environment, she chose to go to university in the United States.
Her path led her to marry into a Mexican-American family. They have three sons, ages 8,
6 and 3. They lived in Japan for a time as a family when the boys were quite small and
may choose to do so again. Although my daughter’s husband does not speak much
Spanish, the language and culture is alive and well in their extended family. Our daughter
has studied basic Spanish and continues her own Japanese studies at an advanced level
while she encourages the boys (as well as her husband) to learn the basics in the hope that
they will be able to appreciate the Japanese culture as a part of their family heritage. The
three boys are primarily English speakers at present, with occasional bits of Spanish and
Japanese thrown in.


 15

 Our children each took different and unique educational paths. We never really paid
attention to those who feared that they would not be able to “pass entrance exams” or get
into “high-standard colleges.” We knew, from our own experiences, that colleges and
universities are opening and expanding their paths to entrance. There is more than one
path to education. Our children were aware that the more skill and proficiency they
gained, the more opportunities and paths would be open to them, to take a useful place
bridging the East-West gaps in a “globalizing” world. From their essentially
“monolingual roots” (and parents who tagged along and may have attained by now a
stage of “one-and-a-half-lingualism”) our bilingual children are producing a generation
for whom a multi-cultural/multi-lingual mindset is natural.

Acquiring English as a Japanese Living in America

Luke Ishihara

“Do you think in English or Japanese?”

“Do you consider yourself American or Japanese?”
Questions like these are often posed to bilingual or multilingual individuals. For me,
it took a while to think about and formulate answers for such questions, but I think I have
come to my conclusions. However, a short explanation can’t really describe how one
develops into a person who has to think about such questions. Therefore, in this
monograph I would like to share my life story and the decisions that have made me into
the person I am today.

Family Background

The lives of all people are shaped by the life patterns of the parents that bring them
into the world. I was born in Minokamo-shi, a city in Gifu Prefecture. My Japanese
parents met each other while studying at a Bible college in Tokyo after both had become
Christians. Their set of values and beliefs as Christians influenced many of their own life
decisions and subsequently had deep impacts on mine.
My father felt a calling in his heart to become more proficient in theology after his
time at Bible College. After discussion with my mother, he decided to move our family
to the United States and enroll in a seminary there. That was in 1980. I was three years
old, and my sister was two. The four of us were a typical monolingual Japanese family
except for the fact that my father was atypically gregarious, outgoing, and adventurous—
perfect traits for living in the United States. After our move, we first lived in Oklahoma
City for six months before settling in St. Louis, Missouri for the next four years. It was
during the first year of living in the U.S. that my parents would watch my sister and me

 16

interact with each other or with other children and excitedly whisper, “Look! They’re
talking in English.” From then on, my Japanese language abilities quickly decreased, and
I became more of a monolingual English speaker than a bilingual.

Memories of Growing Up Bilingually and Biculturally

My father worked on his English by taking ESL courses for six months and was later
accepted to a seminary. I suspect that international student requirements at his seminary
were not very stringent at the time, as his grammar and pronunciation were still not very
good. He did, however, tell me he had gotten a TOEFL score of over 500 at the time. I
often watched him pore over his textbooks and type on his electronic typewriter. He
would talk to me in Japanese, and I would answer in only English.
My mother didn’t really speak English at all, and even now, after twenty-seven years
in the United States, my mother’s English level is not much more than what it was when
we first moved to the U.S. Without much ability in English, my mother tried to instill
Japanese language in my life by reading me Japanese books and teaching me hiragana. I
cannot recall her ever speaking to me in English, although my father spoke to me in
English when he wanted to get his point across, and still does so to this day.
My father would find it necessary to get his point across especially when my sister
or I disobeyed him. When we misbehaved, my father’s first flash of anger would come in
Japanese: “Nani shiteiru—omaera!” Then, as if it was because of a bad memory that we
did not obey him, he would say in his accented English, “Again and again I told you, no
[insert type of misbehavior here].” This was obviously not very effective to kids with
short memory spans.
Up until I was 8 years old, I didn’t have a lot of exposure to Japanese outside of my
parents, and so I probably didn’t really think it was important to differentiate between the
two languages in my mind. I think I could tell the difference because no one seemed to
understand my parents and me when we talked in Japanese. Although I understood my
parents’ Japanese, it wasn’t until we moved to California that my bilingualism really took
root.
My father had graduated from the seminary in Missouri, so he decided to take our
family back to the motherland for a vacation and to let my grandparents see my sister and
me. As she and I had gotten accustomed to speaking only in English with the people in
St. Louis and even with our Japanese parents, it was quite a peculiar thing when we first
arrived back in my mother’s hometown of Yokohama. Our grandparents would speak to
us in Japanese, and we would answer back in English, but they would not understand
what we said. My two cousins also spoke to us in Japanese, and although we understood
most of what they said, they had no idea what we were saying. My sister got so
frustrated with this lack of communication that at one point, she screamed at them in
English, “Don’t you understand what I’m saying!!!” That brought a great laugh to my
father.


 17

 After a week in Yokohama, my father took us to his hometown in Gifu Prefecture.
Here, he placed my sister and me in a Japanese elementary school for the next few weeks
to make friends with other students. By this time, our Japanese language ability was
picking up steam, and we were able to communicate with others in Japanese—an ability
we had long forgotten during the 4 years of English-only environment in Missouri. We
made friends quickly as we played with the other students, and they marveled at our
differences. A local newspaper even picked up the story of children born of a local man
who had moved his family to the U.S. We were semi-celebrities.
Like everyone else, I got a uniform, randoseru standard school backpack and the
requisite textbooks, and I tried to do the homework, but it was still mostly beyond me,
except for math. We weren’t really expected to do much in school, but in my classes, I
tried to do what I could. If I didn’t do it, it was no big deal, and if I did it, people took me
seriously and our teacher called on me when I raised my hand. After the six weeks or so
that I spent there, I had to leave, and my classmates gave me nice little presents and notes
to keep in touch. Our family packed up our things to start a new chapter of our lives in
San Jose, California.
By this time, my Japanese speaking ability was back on track. My father had been
commissioned to start a Japanese church in San Jose, and so there continued to be more
opportunities for me to speak and listen to Japanese. Among the new parishioners was
the Yamashita family, a family that had two sons about my age named Andy and Eddie.
Andy and Eddie were born in the U.S., so they were truly Japanese-American. They
spoke English just like all of the other American kids at school. However, their mother
was keen on making sure they kept their Japanese language ability alive. To facilitate
this endeavor, their mother gave them all kinds of Japanese books, movies, and toys to
play with. It was here that Andy gave me my first comic book, Doraemon Volume 1. Up
until this point, my father had often taken us to the local library, and I had had plenty of
opportunity to read in English, but reading in Japanese was new to me. Nonetheless, I
was able to read the hiragana, and was aided by furigana whenever I encountered a kanji
character. I enjoyed the fact that I was able to understand and enjoy the book, and it
opened the door for further reading in Japanese.
The next summer, my father sent my sister and me back to Japan again. This was
the first time for us to travel to Japan alone—a 9-year-old and a 7-year-old on a trans-
Pacific flight. Over the course of my life as a dependant, my father sent me back to
various locations in Japan over 10 times. He said he wanted his parents—my
grandparents—to get a chance to know their grandchildren, but more importantly, he
wanted us to come in contact with different cultures, especially Japan’s.
This is further evidenced by the fact that during our four years in St. Louis,
Missouri, my father took our family on road trips all over the United States, Canada, and
Mexico. Because of those trips, I was able to see, taste, and touch the cultures of 46 of
the 50 states as well as those of our northern and southern neighboring countries. Even
though he didn’t earn very much as a minister, he invested his money in an education that
allowed us to learn through experience with our whole selves.


 18

My Three-Pronged Japanese Language Education in the U.S.A.

One thing that sped my Japanese language education was a Japanese supermarket
called “Yaohan” (now renamed “Mitsuwa”) that opened up in our city. Adjacent to the
supermarket was a Kinokuniya bookstore (now “Asahiya”). There my mother purchased
the monthly comic magazine Korokoro Komikkusu for me. I happily devoured its pages
every month and was able to keep up with all of the pre-pubescent trends in Japan. As I
grew older, I continued to read Korokoro, but I also started to read Jump Comics. I was
privileged to be able to read Jump during its “Golden Years” (my name for the era) when
it contained very popular comics series such as Dragon Ball, Slam Dunk, Rokudenashi
Blues, Yuyu Hakusho, and a few others. I actually learned most of my honorifics in
Japanese (keigo) from reading Rokudenashi Blues, a series set in a high school! Because
there is a hierarchal system even amongst high school ruffians in Japan, the series
contained many dialogues between the older and younger members (sempai and kohai) of
the gangs in which the junior members would address their sempai adding –san to their
names and ssu to the end of sentences.
At the same time, my father started bringing in Japanese high school students who
were boarding at a local private school to his church. The teens were a few years older
than me, and they taught me all kinds of new words and expressions while also passing
on information about J-pop—Japanese popular music. As I grew older, I would listen to
these new songs that students would bring and try to decipher the meanings of the
expressions used in their lyrics. Most of the lyricists used higher-level Japanese that
could only be really understood with a proper Japanese education because they used more
mature language. I felt slightly frustrated, but more than that, I was motivated by not
being able to understand all of the material I had.
With the new stimuli of Japanese comic books and J-pop music, I began searching
for materials to facilitate my new longing to study the Japanese writing system in more
depth. Again, I went back to the rows and stacks of books at the Kinokuniya book store,
and this time I found what I was looking for: 5-Minute Drill books which were designed
to help Japanese elementary school students with their kanji memorization and usage.
They were a Godsend because each lesson was only 5 minutes long. I didn’t need to do
too much to get in the necessary practice I needed to understand the kanji in the drill
books. I blazed through these workbooks, but they did not help me understand the lyrics
of Japanese pop songs. Therefore, I began to simply ask the owners of the CDs what the
song words meant. They happily obliged, and so I learned, among other things, that
setsunai means “bittersweet feelings”, boseki means “grave stone,” and hokori means
“pride.”
My father had also purchased a “Nintendo Family Computer” or “Famicom” (called
the Nintendo Entertainment System in America) for me during my first summer back in
Japan—an act he probably regretted later. Thousands of hours were spent in front of the
television with a Nintendo controller in my hands as I played all kinds of action video
games (to my father’s ire). However, as I entered my junior high school years, I picked
up the game “Dragon Quest III”, which had been left to us by a homestay student who
had finished the game. Unlike other actions games that revolved mostly around finger
dexterity, “Dragon Quest III” was a role-playing game (RPG)—a game that involved

 19

“talking” to people to get information and using that information to solve puzzles. It also
involved commands such as “fight,” “magic,” “run away,” and “protect.” As this was still
the age of 8-bit gaming without real voice-over like we have in today’s video game
consoles, I had to read all of the “conversations” as well as all of the commands in
Japanese. Fortunately for me, this first RPG was scripted completely in hiragana, which
made reading everything much easier. It wasn’t until my mother had unwittingly
repeated my father’s mistake by buying me a “Supa Famicom” (Super Nintendo in the
U.S.) and I was playing “Dragon Quest V” (after finishing Dragon Quest IV on the
“Famicom”) that I had to use kanji characters to play. I had also played and finished
“Final Fantasy VI,” another popular RPG, as well. With the continued stream of video
games purchased for my Japanese consoles, leading gradually to higher-level Japanese
language medium games, my Japanese continued to improve.

More Language Practice and Education

As time passed, I continued to read comic books, listen to J-pop, play video games,
and visit Japan during my summers, but I was getting a little too old to spend my summer
in Japan playing while all of my peers were busy studying for college entrance exams and
other such things, so I started working at part-time jobs. It was at my part-time job at
Sakai Moving Center that I really had to put all of the keigo honorifics I had studied into
practice.
Soon, I enrolled in a college far from home in Oklahoma, but I still visited Japan
regularly. After I graduated from university, I decided to spend a whole year studying
Japanese in Japan. Up until that point, I had never stayed in Japan longer than three
months; I was eager to see if I could raise my language ability to that of an ordinary
Japanese person. During my year of study of Japanese at Nagoya’s Nanzan University, I
became enamored with every element of studying. I admit the studies were easy for me
(being a native speaker of the language), and being confident, I tried to make as many
friends and learn as many names of people as I could. To further my Japanese culture
studies, I joined the university’s karate club team. Through the club, I learned about
ultra-conservative Japanese power distance and further use of honorific language. This
eventually would prepare me for work in Japanese environments.

Bilingualism’s Effects on My Life

I got my first job, albeit a short-term contract, about a month after my return from
Nagoya to San Jose, California. The job entailed translating and interpreting for New
United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated (NUMMI). A joint venture between Toyota
and GM, the company was preparing to launch two new car models that year. As the
project was enormous by Toyota’s standards, they needed more translators/interpreters to
help the Japanese engineers and technicians explain things to the American staff, and
that’s where I came in.


 20

 My job was to translate documents Americans had made into Japanese and to
interpret at large and small meetings. With the aid of my dictionary, I was able to make
light work of the translation, but found it boring. I hated sitting behind a computer all
day. When the Japanese engineers and technicians needed an interpreter, they called one
of us out to the floor with them. Armed with the experience of watching my father
interpret for countless American preachers and gifted with his same love of the spotlight,
I effectively and efficiently interpreted countless exchanges between the Japanese
engineers and their counterparts. I quickly absorbed the technical nomenclature
necessary for my job, and I became more and more effective in larger meetings because
of my ability to speak up and to speak clearly. Eventually, I became the go-to interpreter
for large meetings of 100 or more people.

At such meetings, an American man would speak into his microphone and I would
speak into my microphone, but his voice was carried over large speakers while mine was
carried into the headsets and ears of the 10 Japanese engineers. He would not stop for me
to interpret for him because he was on a schedule, so I literally had to interpret
simultaneously. I became a language conduit, with his words going through my ears, and
my brain instantly reacting and spitting out Japanese words into the microphone.
Honorifics were of no concern here because it was the accuracy and the speed of the
transmission of information that mattered. Time and again I was called upon, and though
I liked the thrill of being in front of people, I knew the words that came from my mouth
would never be my thoughts; they would always be the speaker’s. They were not words
that really inspired me either, so I gradually grew bored with the work and promptly left
when I could opt out of my contract, even though the job paid handsomely.

I also had other motivations to leave. Teaching English to Japanese speakers at a

university had been one of my goals since college. I had helped a high school student in
Japan with his English homework, and when he finally understood the answer, he had
what teachers might call a “light bulb” moment, and the expression on this face was
priceless to me. Getting back to this goal was a priority to me, and since I had already
been accepted to a graduate school in Chicago, I was eager to make new friends near the
school.

Interpreting, however, was a skill that I took with me. I had never had formal
training in it before that contract, but now I could call myself a professional interpreter.
When I moved out to Chicago for graduate school, I found a Japanese church in the area
to interpret in, and currently in Osaka, I interpret regularly for my church. I occasionally
interpret at my job in Kwansei Gakuin University in Hyogo Prefecture. As the only full
bilingual among the contractual staff and the only trained interpreter, I try to make myself
useful by being the bridge between our staff and Japanese people who are completely
monolingual.

The Beginning of Multilingualism

Growing up, I didn’t have many friends who were bilinguals, although there were
many bilingual people around me in my father’s church. When I moved to Chicago,
however, I made my own friends, most of whom were bilingual in Japanese and English.


 21

I was also able to make a Taiwanese-American friend named Dave. Dave helped change
my life from that of a bilingual to a budding multilingual. I had previously been
interested in learning Chinese, as it was one of the most widely spoken languages in the
world. However, I didn’t want to start studying it until I had improved my Japanese.
After I passed level 1 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Exam, I felt I had reached
my goal and had nothing else to prove. Around that time, Dave gave me the inspiration to
start studying Chinese.

Dave actually was himself a budding multilingual, as he spoke Chinese at home with
his parents but also was studying Japanese at the same time. His father spoke Chinese
and English, but was also fluent in Japanese because he had studied in Japan. Meeting
his father and talking to him in Japanese, I was convinced I could also become trilingual.
I audited a Chinese language course at a local university two times a week and worked
hard on my homework. By that time, Dave was one of my housemates, and I had another
Taiwanese housemate named Willy. Willy checked my homework and helped me with
my phrases. Although they helped me when they could, there were obvious limitations to
such study. As I pondered studying abroad over the summer, Dave convinced me to
study in Taiwan instead of China.

In Taiwan, I was pleasantly surprised by how kind Taiwanese people were to me. It
may have been due to the fact that I was both Japanese and American in a way;
Taiwanese people generally seem to have a respect for both nationalities. This aided my
Chinese study because whenever I wanted to practice my Chinese, people seemed affable
and gracious. I committed to being a good language student by conversing in Chinese
often without being afraid of making mistakes, always doing my homework, and not
spending time with people who often spoke my native languages. I only had three
months to study, and it would barely be enough to gain conversational proficiency.

I did have certain advantages as a bilingual over other students in terms of Chinese
language study. Chinese grammar seemed to me like a simpler, more intuitive form of
English grammar, with its SVO form. I could understand many of the Chinese characters
because they were so similar in meaning or sound to the Japanese kanji I had studied in
the past. Facilitated by these advantages, I was relentless in my practice of Chinese and
carefully chose to spend time with other students who were of the same mindset. My
friends included three other Japanese students, a Korean student, and an American
student—all of whom would not talk to me in English or Japanese—using only Chinese.
My Chinese language ability was fueled by their friendship. I am indebted to their
patience and kindness, as I left Taiwan that year with more than a conversational grasp of
Chinese, but also a lot of great friends and memories.

My Family Today

Even while I was studying in Taiwan, I was in negotiations to get a job in Hyogo
Prefecture, Japan as an English instructor at Kwansei Gakuin University. This had been
my goal, and I was excited to see its realization. I knew that I would start a new chapter
in my life, and with it I would find new friends and gain new memories. The contract


 22

was for four years, and I was sure that I would be able to get the experience I needed to
further my career.
However, even after I had started my new life in Japan, my heart and mind could not
let go of one of my friends in Taiwan—the Korean student. Her name was Kayun. As I
began my job, I e-mailed her in Chinese and English, and she wrote back in English
because she figured I could better understand her feelings in written English. I asked her
where she had studied English, and she replied that she had to learn English in Taiwan
whether she wanted to or not because all of the other foreign students studying Chinese
had no other medium of conversation until their Chinese ability reached a certain level.
And since she wanted to make friends, she was forced to use the English she had not so
seriously studied during high school and college. By that time, her English ability was
more than enough for us to communicate.
After months of e-mails, conversations using video Skype, and visits to Japan, we
decided to get married. There were many factors that led to the belief that she was the
one for me, but one factor was definitely her talent for languages and interaction. I was
able to envision myself taking Kayun to other countries like China, Korea, Taiwan, or the
United States if my career called for such moves. I was also able to envision her being a
mother who demonstrated and instilled the importance of language and communication in
our children. Our wedding symbolized that, as it was done in three languages—English,
Japanese, and Korean—and we now speak English and Chinese at home. Since then,
Kayun has proved as able a language learner as one could hope for and has quickly
gained conversational Japanese ability. Whenever we talk to my mother or new friends
who are not keen on speaking English, Kayun accommodates them with her new,
budding ability in Japanese. She is on the road to becoming quadra-lingual.

Final Thoughts
In response to the questions I raised earlier, I would say I think in English when I
spend long periods of time with English speakers or using English. When I spend my
time exclusively with Japanese speakers for considerable amounts of time, I begin to do
all of my thinking in Japanese and react in that language. It is a phenomenon I can’t
really articulate or understand. I also consider myself 80% American and 20% Japanese
in terms of thinking because of the long period of my life spent in the United States.
Other bilinguals will probably come to different percentages or views on their identity.
In closing, I’d like to mention that Don Snow stated in his book Teaching English as
Christian Mission that learning the language of a culture is one of the best ways to
promote peace and understanding. The learner is humbled, as every person in that culture
is a potential teacher. I hope to keep my mind open and ready to learn as I come across
more cultures and become a better global citizen. Hopefully, my future children will also
enjoy and appreciate the vast number of cultures in the world, and learn to celebrate those
cultures by speaking their languages.


 23

 Section 3: Children of one Japanese and one non-Japanese parent

Two Languages, Two Children—Two Stories

Ms. A

I am an American and my husband is Japanese. I am fluent in Japanese and don't feel

any handicap in expressing myself in that language, so my husband and I have always
spoken Japanese together no matter where we’ve lived.
Our two children were born in New York City during an expat posting there. We
knew that we would not stay in the U.S. forever, and I continued to speak to my husband
in Japanese. However, when my son was born, it just felt natural to speak to him in
English. I therefore spoke English to the children when my husband wasn't there, but
switched to Japanese when he was.
My son, the older of our two children, went to daycare in New York while I worked
full time, and his main language was English. He had a passive knowledge of Japanese
from speaking with his father. We returned to Japan when he was four and he started
Japanese yochien as a nenchu-san (middle class student) right away, yet to this day, he
has an American accent (although he never “fixed” his childhood “th” sound and still
says “sinks” instead of “thinks”).
I have always spoken English to my daughter, too, but she was just 18 months old
when we returned to Japan and never had a chance to develop her English skills in an
English-speaking environment. Thus, she sounds Japanese when she speaks, making
Japanese second language learner errors.
It was a constant battle to try to maintain the children’s English while they attended
Japanese schools (and they knew that Mom spoke Japanese!). We couldn't afford to send
both children to international schools and decided that it was better for them to have a
strong grounding in written Japanese anyway—feeling that the English would come later,
as it eventually did. We also decided that it was more important for them to be able to
travel to visit family in the U.S.—something that we would not have been able to afford
if we were paying international school tuition.
To support their English, I organized English playgroups until they were both in
elementary school. Then I organized English tutoring on Friday evenings, usually
together with friends from the playgroup: an hour of study, then play (usually in
Japanese) and dinner with friends. There were various levels of resistance to English at
different ages, and I tried hard to remember that it was more important to have a good
relationship than it was to be bilingual, but I never switched to Japanese myself. By the
time the kids entered junior high, they seemed to realize that it was an advantage to be


 24

bilingual in Japanese and English and they had loving relationships with their U.S.
relatives to support the effort.
When my son was just about to start college and my daughter was about to enter high
school, we were transferred to Singapore. My son had already chosen to go to college in
Japan because he wanted to play basketball. He had looked at schools in the U.S., but
figured that he wasn't tall enough to play basketball there but would be all right in Japan,
so that was his motivation. We therefore left him in Tokyo when we moved to Singapore.
My daughter decided to move to Singapore with us and started at the Singapore
American School. She was in the ESL program for the first year and was mainstreamed
the next so that she could graduate within 3 years. She worked really hard, especially in
science—her chosen field. The language for her science classes was so specialized that I
couldn't even help her with her textbooks, so she had to do it all on her own. After high
school, she went to the U.S. for college and graduated in 2006. Her English vocabulary
now surpasses my son's by miles, but he still sounds more natural.
My son is pursuing a career in music and writes lyrics in Japanese, with some
English thrown in. He also works part time in a media job that he got because of his
bilingual abilities. He is now almost 28 and not following a “salaryman” path. We are
waiting for his big break!
My daughter is applying for medical school in the U.S., but her MCAT (medical
school entrance exam) scores were pulled down by her verbal score. We are not sure if
she will be accepted; if not, she will probably pursue a doctorate in Japan. She wants to
do research. She still struggles with English—composition especially—and her thought
process is definitely Japanese.
For both of our children, Japanese is their dominant language but their English is also
strong (well, maybe not spelling....). Nowadays I have relaxed my guard and when we
talk, even I switch back and forth between our languages with them.
I don't know what is in store for either of them in terms of relationships and/or
marriage ... it will be interesting to see!

One Experience of Bilingual Child-Rearing in the Contemporary World

Charles Fox

I am a white American male who came to Japan in 1973 on a contract to teach

English for two years. I knew no Japanese and had, as well, no capability in any other
foreign language, had never studied the Japanese language or culture, and thought at the
time that I would return to the U.S. at the end of my contract either to look for work in
publishing or to go on to graduate school in English literature, which had been my

 25

undergraduate major. In those two years, however, I began teaching myself Japanese, and
the longer I stayed in the country and interacted with various Japanese people, the more
focused I became on the language, so that by the end of my contract, I was determined
somehow, some way, to make my way forward economically doing something that made
use of the Japanese language skills that I was trying hard to acquire.
During that first two-year stint, I met my future wife, though we were slow to make
the turn toward marriage and starting a family. We did marry, though, in 1981, and in
1982, our twin sons were born. Though the marriage was planned, children a little less
than a year later were not. After all, I was a graduate student in Japanese Literature at an
American graduate school having to work desperately to maintain a high grade point so
as to receive continued funding. But plans often wilt and disappear before the power of
biology.
This is all by way of saying that my wife and I did not have a detailed plan for how
we would raise our sons; everything really seemed a day-to-day decision by necessity.
Our primary consideration, though, was that they always know and feel that they had two
countries, two families, and two languages, and that they feel comfortable in either of
those contexts. My wife’s English, though all learned in school in Japan, was quite
functional, but neither of us was a native speaker of the other’s language and, perhaps
more important, neither set of grandparents to these twin boys could speak to each other
except through us. It seemed vitally important that we make sure that our sons were never
cut off from any of these very important people in their lives. We decided in the
beginning, therefore, that my wife would use only Japanese to the kids while I would use
English.
Though we had made the decision to raise the kids bilingually, we could not really
plan for school, if only because there was no telling where we would be at that point. I
had a dissertation to plan, research, and write, and then there was the academic job
application process to go through after that. When the twins were three, we returned to
Japan for what we thought would be two years of research for my dissertation. I had
fellowships and therefore did not have to work on anything other than my dissertation-
related activities, and that gave me adequate time both to go about my research and also
to spend a lot of time with the kids. One of the most important things that I did in order to
make sure that their English did not fade away in these early years, when they were
separated from an English-speaking community, was to read to them constantly, which
they seemed to enjoy. Early on, it was an important playtime activity, and as the boys got
older, it became a bedtime ritual that both they and I looked forward to. Though I of
course started with easy stories like Goodnight, Moon and various kinds of picture books,
we moved steadily into more difficult text-dependent stories, things like Maurice
Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and after that into juvenile novels and beyond. The
bedtime reading continued all the way through their elementary school years, and
eventually we read wonderful and wonderfully complex things like the Madeline
L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time series and even the entire Lord of the Rings.
We stayed on in Japan beyond the fellowships both because it was good for my
research (to say nothing of my Japanese) and also because it was easier to make a decent
living here, through part-time university teaching and private teaching and translating.
My wife’s hands were full with the kids, and she had no career that she particularly


 26

wanted to pursue, so it really came down to where would be best for my work. I had
subjected all of us to some pretty severe poverty while in grad school in the States, so it
seemed best from every perspective for us to stay put in Japan, where we could at least be
comfortable. That decision also meant, however, that the onus was on me to make sure
that the kids kept advancing in English.
The TV and the VCR quickly became important tools in our quest to keep the kids
current in English. That my parents sent us VHS tapes of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers’s
Neighborhood helped greatly. The kids loved these shows, and we put no limits on their
TV time, but what was important was that we tried as much as possible to watch these
programs together with the kids. As a result, from early on TV watching became a highly
pleasurable family activity and was never a way of giving ourselves a break from them.
As the kids got older, and as video rental shops became more common and reasonably
priced, we began watching a tremendous number of films both old and new, and the ones
that they particularly enjoyed we tried to get copies of so that they could watch them
repeatedly, which they seemed to want to do. I feel that this activity was vitally important
for their English language ability, and because we did these things together as much as
possible, it never became an activity that shut anyone out; rather, these films as well as
the books that I read to them from were constantly providing subjects for family
conversation.
As it happened, the university in Japan with which I was affiliated for my
dissertation research made me an offer of a full-time, tenured position. Though we were
not sure that we would stay long-term, we were happy that we could at least start the kids
in a Japanese elementary school. Though I had done no concentrated research on the
topic, I had read somewhere that acquiring the basic knowledge needed to function at a
minimal level in society took six years in the U.S. but nine years in Japan. Now, I have
no idea whether that is really true or not, but it struck me as probably fairly accurate, if
for no other reason than because of the necessity of learning so many kanji (Chinese
characters) in order to be functional in Japanese. We believed that it would probably be
easier for us to teach the kids English at home than Japanese, and both my wife and I
generally liked the Japanese approach to elementary school, which was relaxed in terms
of passing and failing, and devoted a fair amount of time to music education especially,
something that eventually became quite important to our kids. We were somewhat
worried about possible bullying of the kids—a problem that was beginning to get a lot of
attention at the time (the late 80s)—but we thought that they would probably be all right.
Looking back now, neither my wife nor I regret our decision to stay here.
Circumstances, however, took the decision of schooling temporarily out of our hands. We
had thought that after the kids graduated from elementary school we would probably
enroll them in an international school because neither of us liked the emphasis in junior
and senior high on multiple-choice entrance exams for the next level of Japanese
education. My wife’s view was that of an insider; she was a graduate of the system and
had taught both junior high and high school prior to our marriage. My own view was
based on my own educational philosophy, which put much more emphasis on individual
thought and expression. The concentration on multiple-choice tests necessarily meant, it
seemed to me, that neither an individual thought process nor the individual expression
that resulted from that process—whether written or oral—would ever, indeed could ever,
be the focus of the educational experience. That seemed to us to be too great a loss and

 27

not worth the Japanese language linguistic advantage to be gained from matriculating in
the Japanese public educational system.
In preparation for the switch into English that entry into an international school
would entail, I had begun teaching the twins English at home starting in the second grade
of elementary school. I did not start earlier because I thought the transition to school was
probably difficult enough and that they did not need added pressure on top of that. Once
they reached the second grade, though, I thought they could manage it, so I began a
reading program at home with very easy books of various kinds after I had taught them
the basics of the alphabet. On trips back to the States I made it a point to go to
educational stores and pick up materials of various kinds to use in addition to the many
books I had read to the kids when they were younger and with which they were already
quite familiar. I set them daily reading goals and eventually added short writing
assignments as well.
As anyone who has attempted home schooling knows, it is very hard to teach one’s
own children. I was firm with the kids, but I had no interest in making them hate me or
English. I counted myself lucky that in front of their friends they had never pretended that
they could not understand what I said to them, but I also never insisted that they speak
only English to me, either. My reasoning was that I did not want them to become overly
self-conscious about language, and because I spoke Japanese around them, they were
well aware that I could understand most anything they might say to me in what was then
their stronger language. Therefore, for a number of years, our conversations were a back-
and-forth volley of English (from me) and Japanese (from them), with absolutely no
pauses and no awkward silences. When they had to speak English because the person
they were speaking to could not understand Japanese, they would manage it somehow,
but what came out of their mouths, though native, was very unnatural.
They needed more input than I alone could give them, and they needed as well the
kinds of expectations placed on them that only someone outside of the family could
provide; therefore, we arranged for them to participate in a private class held by a
qualified American grade school teacher who was taking time off from teaching in a local
international school in order to start a family herself. She had a class for seven native
English-speaking kids: our two boys and five others, all of whom came from the same
sort of linguistic circumstances. In addition, we had an American student studying in
Japan at an American junior-year-abroad program in Kyoto for which I taught part-time
come to the house once a week to coach the kids in drawing but to do it entirely in
English—in other words, to make using English seem like play rather than work.
The other major initiative that we undertook to keep the kids’ English alive was to
travel back to the States every summer for an extended period, regardless of the cost. Of
course we visited family, but we tended to choose our long-term hunkering-down spot
according to whether the situation guaranteed that there would be a number of kids their
own age around to play with. For example, since the kids had begun playing ice hockey
in the third grade, we arranged to put them in an ice hockey day camp in Champaign,
Illinois, on the campus of the University of Illinois one summer. I had a very good, very
old friend on the faculty there who invited us to stay with him for the entire summer if we
wanted, and we took him up on it. In the neighborhood, there were many kids the same


 28

age, and our friend’s faculty colleagues also had a number of kids who quickly became
our kids’ friends. That was a great stimulus to the twins in their language development.
We thought, therefore, that we were headed eventually toward the international
schools in Japan, but my Japanese university changed those plans by choosing me to go
and teach as a visiting professor in a joint program they have with the University of
British Columbia in Vancouver. One month into the sixth grade, the kids were withdrawn
from their Japanese school and taken off to Canada. They were deathly afraid of the idea
of school in English, simply because they had never done it. Our conversation about it
went something like this:

Me (in English): Come on, what’s the big deal?

One of them (in Japanese): We can’t speak English.
Me (in English): What do you mean? You understand everything that
I’m saying right now, don’t you?
One of them (in Japanese): Yeah, but you’re Dad.
Me (in English): Give me a break! I’m just like the teachers you’ll
have over there.
The scene was comic, but their fear was quite real.
Vancouver is an interesting place for more reasons than one. In the 90s, it was the
preferred destination for many wealthy Hong Kong Chinese looking to leave the city
before it reverted to China from Britain. As a result of that and other factors, the
elementary school age population of Vancouver at that time was more than 50% non-
native English speakers, and the ESL/EFL operation in the city was huge. We worried
that our kids would be placed in this operation rather than in among the Vancouver native
speakers, but the results of the battery of entrance exams that the twins were put through
placed them at above grade level in both English and mathematics. If truth be told, that
result says much more about the Vancouver school system than it does about my kids’
preparedness, but what it also suggests is that the kids had a soft landing in the English-
speaking world. They loved their two years there, especially since they were ice hockey
players before they went and now suddenly found themselves in the middle of Ice
Hockey Central.
Our decision about schooling upon the twins’ return to Japan was based on our desire
that they go to university in the U.S. and not in Japan. Again, my wife and I were agreed
on this, but for different reasons. She had graduated from university in Japan and came
away thinking little of the education she had received. There had been little depth, she
thought, and much going through the motions only. She was never inspired and looked
upon it as an extension of a much disliked high school experience. I myself had taught
long enough in Japanese universities to see that little in the way of independent thought
or expression was either taught or encouraged, and neither faculty nor students had much
desire to change that situation. University seemed a four-year playground before the real
world of some sort of company job reined the young people in. In the States, on the other

 29

hand, it was the intensity of the education that I had received at university, and the real
sense of individual challenge that it had extended me, that had made me want to go to
graduate school and aim for university teaching in the first place; therefore, I hoped to
have my kids experience something of the same. As a result of these two thought
processes, both of us felt that since the kids had already made a more or less successful
transition to school in English, they should stay in English for the next stage as well. For
this reason, we made application to Osaka International School prior to returning to Japan
in the fall of 1995, when they were about to enter the eighth grade.
The twins spent the next two years at OIS, and they looked on it then and still see it
now as a very happy time. In those difficult early teen years, they found it comforting and
comfortable to be among a group of kids who were from similar linguistic and economic
circumstances as they themselves. There was only one class per grade, so they got to
know their classmates very well and received much individual attention.
The only drawback, and it was a big one, is that they fell steadily behind their age
peers in Japan in terms of Japanese reading and writing ability. Here I think that my wife
and I should have pushed harder, but teens are teens and have minds of their own. Again,
as when they were in elementary school, our main concern was that they not reject either
of their languages for any reason. We knew that because they had received a basic
elementary education in Japan, they could, if sufficiently motivated, make up for what
they had missed later on independently if necessary. After all, I myself was a self-taught
speaker and reader of Japanese, and I had had friends in graduate school who been
through a similar experience to that of my twins; therefore, I was confident that with their
background they would be all right.
The next step in my sons’ education was decided by their determination to play ice
hockey competitively in their high school years. They were convinced that they had to be
in North America to do that and therefore lobbied to be allowed to return for that purpose.
I did not want to let go of them that early in life and knew also that it would cost a small
fortune that we did not have. Therefore, because they were determined and it had been
completely their own choice, we agreed, but made our agreement subject to the
conditions that they be accepted by a good school and that we receive sufficient financial
aid as well. Since they had no relatives who lived where hockey was played seriously, the
boys would necessarily have to attend a prep school in order to do what they wanted to
do, and that is the type of school to which they applied. They were lucky and were
accepted with generous funding at Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire, so at the beginning
of the tenth grade, off they went. As a family, we were also lucky in that I was able to get
a year’s sabbatical that year and arranged for a visiting scholar’s slot at Harvard, just an
hour or so south of Exeter.
Exeter was, by far, the biggest challenge of my sons’ educational path. This was not
only because the school was a high-powered, pressure-filled place that thought of itself as
a feeder school for Harvard and Yale: it was also because the kids felt as if they had been
dropped into an environment they had never realized existed. The daily pressure on them
to prepare for the next day’s classes, the lack of freedom that characterized living in a
residential high school, and the demand there to speak, speak, speak in class and compete
with others for this “air” time were things they had never experienced before. If anything,
the experience confirmed in their own minds that they were Japanese, not American.


 30

Eventually this changed, but their transition to Western education this time around was
much rougher than it had been in Canada. It was a transition that for the first time brought
about a split between the twins as well.
To make a long and painful story short, one of my boys decided in the middle of his
second (junior) year at Exeter that he hated it and wanted only to return to his
international school and the close friends that he had left behind. The other son was not
particularly happy at the prep school, but he wanted to continue to play hockey there. For
the family, it was a traumatic time. There were serious financial repercussions—tuition
was paid up for that year and we had not purchased any tuition insurance, so transferring
back to Japan meant a third separate and very expensive tuition to be paid. Therefore, we
pleaded with our son to wait till the end of the academic year to make the move. The
longer he stayed, however, the more serious his psychological situation became. In the
end, he came back to Japan, and we shelled out the money for his re-entry into OIS—out
of savings that we had thought were going to be a down-payment on a place of our own.
I go into this detail because I want to emphasize how important the element of
mutual trust is in these sorts of decisions, as well as how much it is a negotiation between
you and your child. We were distraught both about the financial implications of what our
son was doing and the fact that he was dropping out of prep school in the middle of his
junior year of high school. This latter fact would as good as doom his college applications
the following fall, we knew, and this, too, led to anguished tears on all sides. Our son,
though, proved to be right: he needed to be out of that prep school environment. He
simply could not succeed there and would not stay. As a student at Exeter, he was
proving to be a C student, uninspired, and feeling always as if he were drowning. He
promised that if allowed to return to Osaka International, he would do much better
because he would be happy and among people that he knew and liked.
The change for our son who returned was great indeed and just as he promised it
would be. He became a motivated student who did all his work seriously and turned it in
on time. He bubbled with ideas, made excellent grades, and became a class leader—
everything that he had not been at Exeter—and the classes that he had most hated in
America became his favorites in Japan, especially English.
Not to put too rosy a light on it, though: our prediction that his college applications
would be adversely affected indeed came true. He was rejected at every school to which
he applied that following fall. We had been somewhat prepared for this eventuality in our
own minds, though, and we had actively encouraged both boys to consider taking a year
off between high school and university both to raise SAT scores to a higher level and to
gain more confidence in themselves and their English ability before heading back into the
pressures of university classrooms. The experience of learning two languages
simultaneously simply puts too much pressure on a child, we thought and counseled the
kids, and though their long-term prospects always seemed good, we thought that getting
up to university level in either or both of their languages would simply take longer than it
would a monolingual child. Hence, the idea for the year off.
Both boys ended up taking the year off, which proved good all around. Though the
one who had stayed at Exeter through to graduation had been accepted at a number of
good universities, he had failed to get into any of his first-choice schools, and the year off
enabled him to give it all a second try. The one who had failed to get in anywhere knew

 31

the reason for it and did not let it get him down that much. In the second round of
applications, his senior year back in Osaka stood him in very good stead, and he
eventually had his pick of schools. That was also the case with my other son as well; the
second time around, he had a tough choice among a number of “first choices.” They
decided on the basis of having split up in high school that they did not want to go to
different universities, so they both chose the same place, Williams College, a fine liberal
arts college in the American northeast. What was really amazing about that choice is that
given the one boy’s experience at Exeter, one would think that a place like Williams
would be the last place that he would choose to go to, but this time he was ready.
Both boys have graduated from Williams now and are working in New York City.
They want to be filmmakers—we’ve raised them to be very practical, as you can see—
and they have taken jobs as production assistants in the Big Apple as a way of getting
their feet in the door. Neither is yet married, so we have not had to deal with the problem
of language for the third generation, our grandchildren.
Both of our boys miss Japan a lot and in fact, even in high school, argued strongly
against my taking an American academic job and our moving back to the States. In their
words, they wanted a home in Japan that they could always come back to, and they seem
still to feel that way. Will their future wives agree with that sentiment? If they turn out to
be American, I suspect not, but who knows? I know that an openness to life in Japan is an
important issue for the kids as they seek out mates, and were those mates native Japanese,
the issue would be the same in reverse. They have a large number of friends in the
American northeast especially, but both kids have said that they don’t think that they can
stick it out much longer there. English is now the stronger language for both boys; there
is no denying that. Yet Japanese remains an important part of their lives and something
that they never want to give up.
In conclusion, I would say that the most important thing that we did, in addition to
deciding early that it was essential for the kids to always know and be able to
communicate with their relatives on both sides of the Pacific, was to be flexible enough
not to put too much pressure on them to learn either of the languages they have inherited.
Also, that we slogged through it all together cannot be emphasized enough. Every single
step was one we all felt that we were taking together. Now we are an ocean and most of
another continent apart almost all of the time, but the wonders of modern technology
(Skype and the Internet mostly) enable us to talk almost daily, and that, too, has been a
blessing for our family communication and for their maintaining an intimate relation to
Japan and their Japanese-speaking selves.


 32

 A Bilingual Parent’s Mixed Success in Bringing Up Bilingual
Children
Margaret Maeda

My Own Bilingual Upbringing

I was brought up bilingually in French and English by a British father and a French
mother. Although I was born and raised in England, both my parents spoke only French
to me until I started nursery school at the age of three. Thus, the first language I spoke
was French, and I learnt to speak English at nursery school.
I came home from nursery school speaking English, and as a result, my younger
brother’s first language was English. My French pronunciation was always a little better
than his, and I never made mistakes with the gender of articles, whereas my brother
constantly made mistakes with them. My mother believed the difference was due to
French being my first language chronologically, and his second. Even so, from the time I
was twelve or thirteen, French people started to notice that I had a slight English accent.
My family spent six weeks every summer with my grandparents in France, as my
father was a schoolteacher who had long summer vacations. In addition, my grandparents
spent two weeks a year in England with us. During our summers in France and my
French grandparents’ visits to England—a total of two months of every year throughout
my childhood—my parents insisted that I speak only French. My only escape from
French during these periods came when I could get outside the house and speak English
with my brother.
In addition to these experiences speaking French, I also read novels in French
throughout my childhood, but I wrote very little in French until I learnt French at school
in England. There, I studied French language and literature to Advanced Level G.C.E.
(General Certificate of Education).
My parents, particularly my father, strongly believed that children from a bicultural
family should be brought up bilingually, and I considered myself to have been brought up
as a successful bilingual. Therefore, when I married a Japanese, I believed that not
bringing up my children bilingually was unthinkable, and I was shocked when I heard
English-speaking mothers speaking to their children in Japanese.

My Son’s Story

My son was born in England and started to speak English around the age of one. Soon
after that, we noticed that he understood a little of the conversation between my husband
and Japanese friends. My husband went to work in Brazil, and I went with my son to live
with my mother and French stepfather (in England) while we waited to join him in Brazil.


 33

Three months later, we noticed that my son understood a little French: My mother
remarked in French that it was raining and he looked out of the window.
When my son was 16 months old, we joined my husband in Brazil. By that time, my
son was speaking complete sentences of three or four words in English. With the move,
he lost an extended family, a house and garden; moreover, my husband was often away
on business trips. My son therefore had only me for company in an apartment. He seemed
to suffer from depression and stopped speaking completely for two months. When he
started speaking again, his sentences consisted of one syllable composed of a single
consonant and vowel, and often he substituted one consonant for another. For example,
for “rabbit”, he said, “ma”. After a year in Brazil, he had only learnt one word from
Brazilians—“ciao”—and he had made little progress in English.
Then when my son was two and a half, we moved to Japan. At that point, most of his
conversation consisted of two sentences: “Look this same” and “Kore nani?” The first
sentence was a result of my trying to teach him, “Look—this is the same” in an attempt to
get him to classify things. He repeated these two expressions about thirty times each per
minute. (I counted). In addition, he had a few other short English expressions.
Just before my son turned three, my daughter was born. Although we were settled in
Japan, my son’s linguistic ability continued to show little progress. Before starting
Japanese kindergarten at the age of nearly five, he had little English and little Japanese. In
the playground, he was aware that he was behind the other children in language and
spoke gibberish in imitation of their fluent speech. One child asked me what he was
talking about, and I answered, “He’s speaking English,” to cover for him. Since he had
very little of any language by the time he started kindergarten, I was starting to worry that
he might have a developmental problem, but various incidents had made me believe that
he probably did not.
Once he began attending kindergarten, his Japanese improved. Until that time, I had
only spoken English to my two children. Yet every day when we went to the
kindergarten, as soon as we got near it, he told me to speak Japanese because he did not
want to seem different from the other children. By that time, I was happy that he was
speaking any language at all, so I did switch to Japanese when he made such requests. At
home, however, I tried to continue speaking to him in English, but he stopped speaking
English at home, too.
Around that time, my daughter had her eighteen-month health and development
check-up, and to prepare for it, I needed to count the number of words she spoke.
According to the local Health Center, a child of that age is supposed to have a vocabulary
of at least fifty words. I found that my daughter had well over a hundred words each in
English and Japanese and that the level of her English and Japanese was about the same.
Yet this was when her brother began to come home from kindergarten speaking Japanese.
Soon, my daughter’s English also almost completely disappeared. I found myself
speaking more Japanese at home even though I tried to stop myself.
By the end of kindergarten, my son had mostly caught up in Japanese with his
classmates, although he was still a little behind. In elementary school, because of his
slowness with language, he was considered to be intellectually slow and had a “helper”
assigned to him, although I was not aware of this at the time—he only told me about this

 34

when he was in his twenties. In elementary and junior high school, one teacher noticed
that he had ability in mathematics. Apart from that, all his grades in elementary and
junior high school were poor.
When he was about to graduate from junior high school, we were advised to put him
into a low-ranking public high school. My husband and I felt that his grades were based
more on his eccentric and rebellious character than on his intellectual abilities. We put
him into a private high school which had a policy of disregarding junior high school
character reports and which concentrated mainly on test scores, especially mathematics.
The high school recommended a good university, but he was put off by the English part
of the entrance examination, which looked difficult for an applicant who had never lived
in an English-speaking country. It tested natural, spoken-style English. He took a more
typical entrance examination for another good university because he felt he could pass by
memorizing a lot of grammar and vocabulary. He passed that and went to a university in
Kansai to study mathematics.
He now has a good vocabulary and speaks grammatically accurate English, but he
speaks slowly. He reads extensively in English. Like my daughter, his listening
comprehension is good. In university he became motivated to improve his spoken English
and used rock music for practice. As a result, he now has a mixed British, American and
Japanese accent.

My Daughter’s Story

Much as in my brother’s case, our home in Japan was far more local-language
dominated for the second child than it had been for the first. My daughter’s listening
comprehension in English remained good, and her pronunciation was a mixture of British
and Japanese. Apart from this, her English did not seem to be much better than that of her
classmates when she was in junior high school. In high school, her best subject was
mathematics, but she was discouraged from pursuing studies in this area because she was
not as good in the sciences and college entrance examinations in Japan normally focus on
either the humanities or math and science.
Thus, she ended up studying English at university—not because she wanted to, but
because she had an advantage in listening comprehension and because she had been
strongly discouraged from majoring in mathematics. Although she was not enthusiastic
about studying English, by the time she graduated, she was happy to find that her English
reading, writing and vocabulary had improved.
She now works at Haneda Airport. When she started, her shyness made her panic
when she was asked questions in English by passengers. To help her overcome her lack
of confidence, I started spending more time speaking in English with her. Recently, my
brother spoke to her in English for twenty minutes on the phone and was surprised at her
fluency. She was surprised at it herself. In fact, it was the first time her uncle had ever
had a conversation with her because when she had visited England at the age of sixteen,
she had too little English to hold a conversation.


 35

Conclusions

My special interest in TESOL is pronunciation, especially intonation, so I have tried

at times to use my children as Japanese learner subjects. Interestingly, I have found that
there were too many native-like features in their English rhythm and intonation for me to
treat them as Japanese learners. This suggests that their English is much closer to a native
speaker than the average Japanese. Nevertheless, they have never thought of themselves
as bilinguals.
Thus, I found bringing up children bilingually to be more problematic than I
expected. In my son’s case, his reaction to changes of country made his language learning
difficult, although some children take just as many changes in their stride. Because of the
distance and expense, they have spent very little time in England compared with the time
I spent in France as a child. However, if they are motivated to do so, I believe they can be
good second language speakers of English.

Listening to the “Experts” When Considering Adding a Second

Language
Dennis K. McLean

Our family consists of myself, an English-speaking Canadian, my wife Kumiko, a

Japanese born and raised who also speaks English, and Maya, our Canadian-born
daughter, who lived the first 23 months of her life in Canada before coming to Japan with
her parents. Maya then spent the next 13 years in Japan with 12 of those years being in
the Japanese school system, from kindergarten to the end junior high school. Her high
school years were spent in Canada at Maxwell International Baha’i School. From
Maxwell she went to a Canadian college to improve her English language skills enough
to attend university. At this point, she is completing an MA-level degree at a university in
Canada.
Returning to the beginning of our family’s story: I was finishing my university
degree in Canada while Kumiko was attending ESL classes at the same university when
Maya was born. Because Kumiko and I had started our relationship in English, and all of
our friends—both Canadians and immigrants to Canada—communicated in English, the
language in our home was English. Kumiko usually spoke to Maya in Japanese at home
when there were no guests present. We thought it would be nice if our daughter could be
bilingual, and we believed it would come naturally to her with the language outside being
one language and one parent speaking the other language at home.


 36

 However, in conversation with Kumiko’s ESL teachers, we were advised to make
sure our daughter was fluent in one language first and let her learn the second language as
a subject of study. Their reasoning was the result of experience teaching ESL and
preparing international students for university. They said they had met too many students
in their ESL classes who were supposedly bilingual but were well grounded in neither
language.
By the time of my graduation I thought that I would like to become a Baha’i pioneer
to Japan, and Kumiko agreed to return to her home country. After moving to Japan, for
the first 2½ years we lived in the same house with Kumiko’s parents, who spoke
absolutely no English. Therefore, it turned out the daily language of communication was
principally Japanese. While we lived on separate floors of the house, we generally ate
together with the grandparents. The grandparents were happy to have their granddaughter
living in the same house, so she was always coming and going between floors. At that
time my Japanese skills were severely limited, so I used English when talking to Kumiko
and Maya. Maya therefore did hear English regularly but Japanese was predominant.
At the time of our arrival in Japan, Maya was beginning to use some English. After
we’d been here for about three months, she stopped speaking altogether for about one
month. When she started speaking again, it was only in Japanese. However, I continued
to speak to her in English all the time. While Maya always responded in Japanese, her
responses were such that we realized her listening comprehension of English continued to
be very good.
Although Kumiko and I believed Maya could be bilingual, the idea of making sure
Maya had one language first, suggested by the ESL teachers, was more or less forced
upon us, because her early education was focused exclusively in Japanese. Thus, when
she moved to Canada to attend Maxwell for high school, she had to begin in the ESL
class.
Maya is now living in Canada, attending university, while Kumiko and I are still
living in Japan. We speak with Maya regularly by phone, and she usually visits at least
once a year. Kumiko always uses Japanese when speaking with Maya, and I always use
English with her.
Maya’s recreational reading is in both Japanese and English, but her academic
reading level is basically English. For her academic work she does occasionally translate
Japanese material into English. When she does translate Japanese into English for her
academic work she occasionally experiences some difficulty with the specialized
vocabulary used at this level because her Japanese learning effectively came to an end at
the time she left Japan to go to high school in Canada.
As we look back now, our expectations of her becoming bilingual naturally – with
one language at home and the other outside – were unfulfilled. However, we realize there
were things we could have put more effort into to help Maya become more bilingual as
she was growing up. Because we were living in Japan, we could have read to her more in
English, sung to her more in English, played more videos in English, made her respond in
English, had her spend more time with English only.


 37

 We also now understand more fully the value of the advice from the ESL teachers.
Maya became fluent in Japanese first and has since become fluent in English as a result
of her university study. She has a good grounding in both languages now.

Comment added by Maya

“It also involves social pressure as well. When I was growing up, I stopped speaking
English because I hated to be different from Japanese. I wanted to become Japanese, and
in order to be recognized as one, I had to speak Japanese, and not English. Japan was a
hard place to raise a bilingual kid 20 years ago or so, I think.”

A Long and Winding Road — With a Happy Ending

Mary Goebel Noguchi

Introduction

At JALT ‘94, I attended a presentation by Eileen Christianson in which she reported

the results of her study of 17 adults who had been brought up bilingually (reported in
Ryan, 2000). Having conducted extensive structured interviews with each of her
participants, Christianson was able to describe their varied backgrounds and
circumstances, the factors that promoted their acquisition of two languages, the problems
they encountered along the way, and their feelings about being bilingual.
Two things struck me about her presentation. First, each of Christianson’s
participants had a different story: Every family is unique and has to make choices based
on its own circumstances and the personality of each child. Second, although 14 of the
17 participants had described how difficult it was to grow up with two languages, all
“said that they would recommend parents who have a chance to bring up their children
bilingually to do so” (Ryan, 2000, p. 6). I suspect that both of these findings will be
confirmed by the stories in this year’s monograph.
I offer my own family’s story, then, not as a “roadmap”, but rather as one more tale of
a unique set of circumstances in which readers may be able to discern some universal
truths. Among them, I hope, will be the following: Becoming bilingual is not
“automatic” or even easy, but it is worth it.


 38

Background

I am an American who first came to Japan as an American Field Service exchange

student during the summer vacation between my junior and senior years in high school.
In the three months I attended high school in Fukuoka, I learned hiragana, katakana and a
dozen or so kanji and decided that I would like to learn to read Japanese when I went to
college.
Following up on that impulse, I ended up getting a double major in Japanese studies
and English literature at the University of Wisconsin, then went on to earn a Master’s
Degree in Japanese studies before returning to Japan in 1974. At that time, I could
already read and write Japanese reasonably well, but my conversation skills were
extremely limited. I therefore enrolled in the intensive Japanese program of what was
then known as the “Stanford Center” in Tokyo.

While there, I became a Baha’i and decided to use my language skills to help out the
small Baha’i community in Japan. I have therefore lived in this country ever since,
except for a 2-year stint in London while my husband got a Master’s Degree there.
After finishing up the 9-month language program in Tokyo, I moved to the Kansai
area, where I studied at Kansai University as an auditing student for a year and a half.
Later, I got a job as a copywriter/translator at an advertising company in Osaka. Thus, I
had already been living in Japan for quite some time and had developed my Japanese
abilities to a fairly high level before I met and married a Japanese scholar of Shakespeare.

Decisions on Family Language Use

My husband Tada’aki and I did a lot of talking about education and language policies
for our children before they were even born. Tada’aki was keen on giving our children a
head start on learning English, since it had been a real struggle for him to master the
language. I, on the other hand, had concerns about asking them to deal with two
languages. I had met a number of graduates of international schools who could not read
Japanese well—if at all—but whose written English indicated a lack of command in their
school language as well. I felt that to be able to think at an advanced level, a person
needed to have a strong command of at least one language. Moreover, I was
uncomfortable with the perspective many of these international school graduates had on
Japan: it was highly critical and definitely viewed Japan from the outside. Having spent
my entire childhood and youth in the same small community in the American Midwest, I
was grateful for the sense of belonging I had developed and wanted my children to have
the same feeling of being rooted in a community. Thus, at first, my husband and I were
not able to agree on whether or not to raise our children bilingually.
Tada’aki had always promised his parents that he would live with them after he got
married, and when we got engaged, I agreed to help him fulfill this promise. Shortly after
we got married we moved to England for two years so that Tada’aki could pursue his

 39

studies there, but after we returned, the family built a large house in a rural community
situated between Kyoto and Nara. We all moved in together just before our first child,
our daughter Amy, was born. Our son Dan was born three years later.
Given the fact that international schools were extremely expensive and there wasn’t
one near our new home anyway, Tada’aki readily gave up his dream of sending our
children to an international school. However, he still felt that we should teach them
English as well as Japanese.
Shortly after Amy was born, I attended the annual JALT Conference with a friend
who had a baby girl the same age as Amy. My friend suggested that we go to hear the
Bilingualism Colloquium. That was the start of my association with the group that
eventually developed into the Bilingualism SIG, and it totally changed my attitude toward
raising children bilingually. I began reading more about bilingualism and trying to figure
out how I could effectively teach my children English without undermining their
Japanese ability. Soon, I was writing book reviews and articles about bilingualism and
sharing what I knew with Tada’aki so that he could support this newfound goal.
Since we were living with Tada’aki’s parents and ate dinner with them every night, it
seemed impossible to follow the guidelines presented in the books I was reading. All of
the research stressed “consistency” and recommended the one parent – one language
approach for families like ours. Yet when Amy was first born, I found myself talking to
her in Japanese when other people were around. Even after she began speaking English, I
also taught her Japanese equivalents in an attempt to make sure that she would be able to
communicate easily with her grandparents and the people in our neighborhood.
After a number of years spent worrying about the fact that I was not following “the
rules” for raising children bilingually, I finally let practicality win out over theory. I
devised a number of techniques that allowed me to use Japanese with my children when I
felt it was necessary, but also ensured that they were getting as much English input as
possible. I have written about these techniques in an article called “The Bilingual Parent
as Model for the Bilingual Child” (Noguchi, 1996a).

English Literacy

Meanwhile, my research convinced me that I needed to start teaching my children to

read English as soon as possible. To get ideas on how to go about this, I read extensively
about teaching English literacy skills and conducted a survey of English-speaking parents
in Japan who had taught their children to read English. The results were published in a
series in Bilingual Japan between 1994 and 1996 and then compiled as the SIG’s fourth
monograph (Noguchi, 1996b). Based on what I learned through this research, I
enthusiastically began to teach Amy the basics of English literacy while she was still in
kindergarten. Fortunately, she was very happy to learn. Once she got into grade school,
however, she had homework to do and also wanted to play with her friends more, so our
English lessons became more of a chore.


 40

 The good friend who had originally introduced me to the Bilingualism group in JALT
was having the same problem with her daughter, who is the same age as Amy, so we
decided to start up a small Saturday School at her home when the girls were still in first
grade. Although my friend’s home was a 45-minute drive away, we managed to meet
three Saturdays a month and have the girls do another couple of hours of homework each
week, following the English language curriculum of a major American textbook
publisher. (More information about this Saturday School is included in Noguchi, 1996b.)
Based on my experience with Amy, I decided to start teaching Dan to read English at
an even earlier age using the Doman method, which I had learned about in the course of
doing research for the Bilingual Japan series. At first, Dan was very excited about these
lessons and the special attention they brought, but later, he got confused and frustrated, so
we eventually gave up on that.
Since the friend who hosted the Saturday School had a son Dan’s age, I took Dan
along to play while Amy had her lessons. When the boys entered kindergarten, we
started a class for the boys, bringing in another American friend in the area who had a son
born in the same year as ours. Thus, the school grew to serve the families of four
American mothers married to Japanese men, and we had six students—three girls and
three boys. The mothers became very close friends, and we were able to continue the
lessons until the kids’ second year of junior high school.

Maximizing English Input

In addition to the Saturday School lessons, I tried to give my children as much

English input as possible. Although the family spoke Japanese when we were at the
dinner table with my in-laws, we usually spoke English in the nuclear family. I also
bought a large number of American videos, which greatly improved the kids’ listening
comprehension skills and accustomed them to hearing a wide variety of accents. We also
made visits to the States every year or two. There, the kids made friends with my
parents’ neighbors and their American relatives.
One of the biggest impacts on their knowledge of English, however, came from our
reading together. We did this almost every night before the kids went to bed. After Amy
outgrew picture books, we moved on to longer stories, and Dan always listened along
with her. When he would ask questions about the meaning of words, I stopped to explain
them in easier English. I would also stop occasionally to make sure the kids understood
what was happening in the story—always explaining in easy English.
I really enjoyed reading out loud and created different voices for each character. We
read through The Tales of Narnia twice, all of the Anne of Green Gables books, Tom
Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and more, but what really kept us going was the Harry
Potter series. All three of us liked them so much that we read books 1 to 3 twice before
book 4 came out. By then, Amy was already in junior high school and quite capable of
reading the books on her own, but we continued to read them as a family, with me doing
most of the work, but the kids taking turns reading when I was tired and wanted them to


 41

go to bed. Just before each new book came out, the kids would sit down and re-read the
previous book, and then we would read the new one together when it arrived. By the
time the last book in the series came out, both kids were in college, but on the release
day, Amy was home and the two of us opened it up and took turns reading it out loud to
each other. Amy later finished it herself and then passed it on to Dan, who came home
just to pick it up.
For both kids, this love of Harry Potter gradually transformed into a love of reading in
general, and today, they both read for pleasure in both of their languages. When the
movie The Da Vinci Code was released, Dan went out and bought a copy of the book in
English and quickly read it through, discussing the plot with me as he went along. Amy
also often borrows English books from the library near her apartment and frequently
recommends those she likes to me.

Bumps Along the Way

Despite these little triumphs, however, the road to bilingualism was never smooth. In
between trips to the States, the amount of English the kids used usually declined, and
there were periods when they would talk to me in Japanese even though they understood
my English. I described one such period in Dan’s life in an article I wrote for Bilingual
Japan (Noguchi, 2000).
In addition, the kids—especially Dan—did not like being seen as different from the
other kids at school and did not want to speak English for that reason. This eventually
became a non-issue when they entered junior high school and realized how far ahead of
the other kids they were in terms of English studies. However, while they were in
elementary school, it was a source of some tension.
Both kids also resented the “extra” homework involved in Saturday School lessons.
Fortunately, the mothers figured out a way to solve this problem: peer pressure. All I
needed to do was say something like, “I’m sure Joe will have his homework done. Do
you want to face him without yours done, too?” The thought of being behind their
friends was usually enough of a push to get both kids through their week’s homework,
although sometimes they did it all on Friday night.
Given all these hurdles, motivation to keep up their acquisition of English was a key
issue. I therefore tried to get the kids to see the benefits of being able to speak English:
the fun they had in the States, the pleasure of watching Disney movies in the original
language, the joys of reading together. I also made sure that they were able to regularly
meet other kids like themselves at the Saturday School and in the Baha’i community of
Japan. Moreover, I stressed the Baha’i principle of the beauty of diversity when they
were worried about being different from their peers. Nonetheless, there were a lot of
tough times.

 42

 Higher Education

By the time the kids had applied to high school, however, the rewards of all this hard
work were starting to show. Both children were accepted to a top-level magnet school
for our prefecture, at least partly because they had passed advanced English proficiency
tests (Eiken Jun-ikkyu for Amy and Nikyu for Dan) before they applied.
When it came time to choose a college, Amy debated a lot about whether to go to the
States or stay in Japan. We finally discovered what seemed like the perfect compromise:
the Dual Undergraduate Degree Program at Ritsumeikan University (where I was
teaching at the time). This program was particularly attractive because it would allow
Amy to go to college in both Japan and the States and get an undergraduate degree from a
university in both countries. This, in turn, would give her a choice of which country she
wanted to live in afterward. In addition, both Ritsumeikan and American University, the
partner school in this program, offered substantial scholarships, so it would cost only a
little more to go through this program than it would to attend Ritsumeikan (a private
university) for four years. Considering how expensive American colleges are for
international students, this seemed like an incredible bargain.
However, Amy’s decision to apply for this program was made rather late—at the end
of the spring term of her third year in high school—and she had not really been studying
all that hard for college entrance exams. Thanks to her knowledge of English, however,
she was able to apply for advanced admission under the “self recommendation” (jiko
suisen) system. She had to submit a TOEFL score along with her application, and she
only had enough time to practice for a couple of hours to get herself used to the test
format and to typing in answers on a computer. Yet despite this lack of preparation, she
got a score indicating near native-speaker competency—enough to be accepted to
Ritsumeikan and the DUDP Program.
After one semester at Ritsumeikan, Amy went with the rest of her cohort of twenty-
some students to American University in Washington, D.C., where she took ordinary
course work along with American students. The program was tough, especially writing
the term papers for her classes. Still, Amy loved the academic rigor of the courses in her
major—psychology—and was pleased to find that most people assumed she was
American. In fact, in one class, she was asked to write up the report for a group
presentation because, she was told, her English spelling and grammar were the best in her
group (the rest of whom were Americans). Amy laughed when she told me that, knowing
that I was fully aware of how little confidence she had in her English writing skills,
especially her spelling.
Two years and ninety credits later, Amy returned to Ritsumeikan, where she finished
up her course work, earning B.A. degrees from both Ritsumeikan and American
University. She graduated this spring (2008), and has gone on to graduate school at
Ritsumeikan. Although almost all of her coursework is in Japanese now, a lot of the
research she is studying was originally written in English, and she always reads the
original. This spring, she took an intensive course on drama therapy taught by a visiting
American professor and was pleased to be able to communicate directly with the


 43

instructor rather than having to listen to the interpreter. She is hoping to qualify as a
counselor when she graduates.
My son Dan has taken an entirely different path, although his English skills have
helped him, too. He has always loved music and singing and is hoping to become a
popular singer. Like Amy, he applied and was accepted for early admission to the
college of his choice. He is currently studying popular music and not only sings in both
of his languages but also writes lyrics in both. He also continues to do at least some
pleasure reading in English.

The Family Picture Today

Both Amy and Dan have their own apartments now, but we are in regular contact.
Both speak to me in English as a matter of course. We also do a lot of text-messaging,
and that is also in English, although both kids do a lot of very creative spelling. When
they come home, we enjoy watching movies together—mostly Hollywood fare, but
occasionally Japanese films.
Neither has anyone they are serious about yet, so marriage is probably a ways in the
future. However, not long ago, Amy said to me that if she does have children, she wants
me to teach them English, too.
I asked Amy and Dan to look over this article, and then asked what they thought
about having been raised bilingually. Both of them stressed that it had not been easy.
But both said they were really happy to know both languages now.

References
Noguchi, M.L.G. (1996a). The bilingual parent as model for the bilingual child. In
Seisaku Kagaku, Special Issue Commemorating the Retirement of Professor Tsuji
Yoshio (pp. 245 – 261). Kyoto, Japan: Ritsumeikan University, College of Policy
Science, Seisaku Kagakkai. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 415
671).
Noguchi, M.L.G. (1996b). Monographs on bilingualism no. 4: Adding biliteracy to
bilingualism: Teaching your child to read English in Japan. Osaka, Japan:
Bilingualism Special Interest Group of the Japan Association for Language Teaching.
Noguchi, M.L.G. (2000). Conversations with a passive bilingual (or: I talk in English, he
answers in Japanese). In S.M. Ryan (Ed.) Monographs on bilingualism no. 8: The
best of Bilingual Japan (pp. 14 – 16). Osaka, Japan: Bilingualism Special Interest
Group of the Japan Association for Language Teaching.


 44

Noguchi, M.L.G. (2001). Bilinguality and bicultural children in Japan: A pilot survey of
factors linked to active English-Japanese bilingualism. In M. G. Noguchi & S. Fotos
(Eds.), Studies in Japanese bilingualism (pp. 234 – 271). Clevedon, UK:
Multilingual Matters.
Noguchi, M.L.G. (2003). Bilinguals and semantic boundaries. Bilingual Japan, Vol. 12,
No. 2, March/April, 2003, 5 - 7.
Ryan, S. M. (2000). A study of adult proficient bilinguals, by Eileen Christianson,
conference review. In S.M. Ryan (Ed.) Monographs on bilingualism no. 8: The best
of Bilingual Japan (pp. 6 – 7). Osaka, Japan: Bilingualism Special Interest Group of
the Japan Association for Language Teaching.

Growing Up in an International Family in Japan:

Assumptions, Expectations, and Everyday Realities

Craig Smith

“Many of my Japanese friends from my school days and colleagues at work in Tokyo
ask about and make comments on my Mom and Dad’s Japanese-Canadian marriage. It’s
so annoying!” complains Tami, our 24 year-old salary-earning daughter. She explains,
“Lots of my friends are at an age when questions about marrying are on their minds. They
all assume that an international marriage must be hard—harder than normal partnerships,
and perhaps, even destined to fail.”
The annoying bit for Tami is not the spotlight of attention—unwelcome as it was in
her childhood—that her life situation receives from the people around her, but the
perceived disconnect between human relationships in an inter-national marriage and
those in an intra-national marriage. “How weird it is that in one breath friends are going
on about their parents’ miseries based on communication problems and in the next breath
feeling curious about how impossible it must be to live happily with someone from
another culture. I had a ring-side seat to lots of fights but I never felt we needed to ask the
UN to send us the guys in Blue Helmets. They fought as a couple, not as an international
couple. Growing up my house didn’t prepare me for a career as a mediator in
international disputes. Darn!”
Tami feels that we are just a regular family. Phew! To my wife and I, obsessed as we
were throughout Tami’s childhood about the potential difficulties that would spring from
our international marriage, Tami’s adult view of us is a relief.
Tami’s education outside of home was the same as the other kids in the
neighborhood. Except for one year of high school in Boston, Tami attended Japanese

 45

public schools from pre-school to the end of junior high and then she went to a Japanese
private senior high school and university.
Tami wonders why people aren’t more empathetic about the challenges and
tribulations faced by the offspring of romances without borders liaisons. The children’s
bilingual language skills are always of great interest. There is a “half”—apparently
monolingual—who often appears on TV these days. Poor fellow is publicly mocked by
some fellow stars as a failure for not being able to speak English! It’s more than a wee
bit strange that he gets precious little praise for the Japanese communication skills that
landed him a paying job on TV. Guess he’s just a pretty face, eh?
“Do our parents realize how relentless the pressure is on all of us to be bilingual? The
constant whispered comparisons when international parents gather are way too stressful.
Anyway, it’s like comparing apples and oranges. We are all different but are we allowed
to be different? Placing the same high language expectations on everyone is not fair. As
kids, we are not in training for the Language Olympics! Most kids don’t care who gets
the medals for languages. Many of us internationals are just trying to fit in with the daily
reality of the kids around us. In order to be on an equal playing field with monolingual
kids, it seems we have to be good at both our languages. In fact, just good is not good
enough—perfect is the expected standard.”
It makes my wife and I break into a nervous sweat when we hear Tami talking like
this. We are waiting for the lessons to be brought home to us. Did we push her too hard to
be bilingual? We talked about it endlessly. Before Tami was born we starting setting
family language policies:

1. Yoko and I each spoke our native language to Tami. When the three of us were
chatting we usually used English or we went back and forth between the two
languages.
2. We focused our attention on raising a biliterate daughter by making reading in her
two languages a natural and central part of our family communication.
3. We separated the two language/cultural components of our outside lives.

At home in Japan, we tried our best to fit in with local community. On frequent trips
to Canada, Tami was a Canadian girl. Is this what we sometimes describe as the life of a
double child? Yoko and I rejected the term double as vehemently as we did the
pejorative half. We used the separation policy to respect the normalcy of Tami’s life as
one individual human being. This was accomplished in much the same way I separate my
working life from my family life while at the same time, I struggle to integrate the two
parts of my life to the extent necessary to have a single self-identity and not to survive by
wearing a false moustache and disguise to work.
Writing articles for Bilingual Japan was a great help in clarifying our thinking about
our parenting. If we wrote about something useful or wise we were doing, it helped us
muster the strength to actually do it and then, keep on doing it.

 46

 A fourth part of our family policy was spending most summers while Tami was
growing up in a community with lots of international marriages. This helped relieve some
of the stress that comes from being different from most of the people around
internationals in their daily lives. Tami remembers, “It was so nice to be with other kids
like me. No one stared at me there. I wasn’t really noticed. I didn’t draw attention just
because of the way I look. And, honestly I didn’t have the feeling that we were being
compared that much by the parents in that community as I was growing up, but their
expectations started to become obvious to me when my friends reached university age
and then later, when we got our first jobs. Maybe, the parents were comparing each
other’s marriages—who made it, who didn’t.”
Indeed, this sort of parental rivalry occurs outside of the world of international
marriages, but Tami’s perspective on us as a group of parents is the everyday reality of
children of international marriages in Japan. We are the only world they know. The
hothouse environment of international families in Japan can become more intense,
ironically, when we gather in support groups to fight the isolation of being different if we
fall into reactive consolation chat instead of building good community energy to be
proactive parents.
The diversity of international families has grown as the numbers of us explode. For
example, there may be many differences between the experiences of Portuguese-
Japanese, Chinese-Japanese, Tagalog-Japanese and English-Japanese families. We have
to be careful not to over-generalize or stereotype our kids’ situations.
It’s a sobering thought that as the diversity grows, after all our talk about raising
children to be bilingual, we remain with more questions than answers. This may be a
blessing if a common characteristic of the two-language family is not to take the
education of their children for granted. Constantly monitoring and reflecting upon our
children’s lives leads us to accept a partnership responsibility in the various growing up
events of our kids’ lives. In contrast, my parents were part of the “go-out-and-play
generation.”
In retrospect, the most difficult bit for Tami to deal with was the unwanted attention
her appearance and her international-ness attracted throughout her years as the only child
like her at the Japanese schools she attended. “I envied my friends at international
schools. They fit in physically, and they seemed to be having a lot more fun!”
The saying, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” is true in Tami’s case
because when we were trying our best to persuade her to go to a university in Canada, she
sat Yoko and I down for a serious talk and started off by telling us, “I like Canada. I like
Canada very much, but I love Japan.” She had made up her own mind to go to university
in Japan. In spite of the rough patches, her experiences of being different in Japanese
schools did not turn her off the culture.
At university she wasn’t unusual anymore. There was lots of diversity in her fellow
students’ backgrounds, skills, and experiences. She felt that she was naturally accepted
for who she was.
At work it’s much the same: “I really feel that I was hired for who I am—the whole
me. I don’t feel any discrimination whatsoever. It’s a great company. I haven’t even used


 47

English much yet on the job. I work for a trading company and so it’s assumed everyone
can get by in English or in some other second language. It’s truly international. And, hey,
in my accounting job, I can go for hours not speaking to anyone in any language. It’s just
me and my numbers and my computer. But I hope this is one of these skill-building
experiences that people move on from. I thought I was growing up by developing people
skills and the ability to get along with and understand different sorts of people. Here I am
doing accounting. Go figure!”
What about those annoying questions about international marriages Tami constantly
fields? “Maybe it’s not so bad,” Tami says. “You know, people think I know something
they don’t. Sometimes I think that might actually be true. When I made my own decisions
about university and work, some people from both sides of my life gave me their views
that I was heading in the wrong direction. But I realized that some of them were trapped
in their thinking by untested stereotypes. I was looking at the world in different ways and
I knew what was right for me.”
Tami seems to have survived her parents. She’s bilingual and biliterate. Most
importantly, she’s off our pay roll. Phew!
Tami is so independent that Yoko and I have had to reinvent our lifestyle and our
relationship. Sometimes we don’t eat dinner, we go on dates—with each other—and we
talk about things other than Tami—you know, like politics.
Hey, have you ever thought about how Barrack Obama shares some aspects of his
childhood experiences with Tami and with all our internationals? And, do you think some
day the United States will be ready for a Canadian woman president? Hmm… maybe not
just yet, eh!

Once Upon a Time

Amanda & Kye Taura

Amanda: Well, my son’s done it—reached that magical age of 20 when he has become
an adult in Japan, and is way past the age of majority (18) designated by his “other”
country, Australia, as well. He can do it all on his own. No more grammar drills,
handwriting practice exercises, or bribes for him to study English. Sadly, no more
bedtime stories, either, but we are into newspaper articles now, where we can banter back
and forth about what is going on in the world or share fictional tales that we have read.
Yes—we are entering adult territory now. I can only “recommend” books for him to
read now that he is making his own choices from among the world’s literary treasures,
from Norwegian Wood by Murakami Haruki to Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon; but
I also enjoy being regaled with stories about the ten stimulating classics that he is reading
simultaneously at the moment, while studying Japanese literature at university. I can give

 48

opinions and get intelligent commentary back, including quotes and authors’ names—all
remembered with a lot more depth and focus now than I can recall from books read in the
long distant past. And what’s more, he can do it – or rather speak, read and write it
extensively – in two languages. What a thrill to see that he can live on his own, and
maintain and challenge himself in two languages now.
So, how does he feel looking back on the trials, tribulations and victories over the
years, and what does he perceive in the future for himself? Looking back over the years
and our family dynamics, Kye describes first, our family background, the language
patterns and his schooling, which included a combination of Japanese school,
international school, school abroad and home schooling, meaning he had the best of all
worlds. “Carpe diem” or “seizing the day”, in a variety of different ways was our policy.
Japanese school was from age 6 months in local Kyoto daycare to the end of the
neighborhood elementary school 6th grade, apart from one year and 3 months when he
was in Grade 3-4 back in Sydney, Australia. There, he attended Australian public school,
and this was a major boost for his English language at the time. After coming back to
Japan, he continued for another year with distance schooling from Australia while
attending Japanese elementary school again, so in this way, we combined home schooling
with local schooling (a challenge and a half!). Then, for grades 7-12, Kye was lucky to go
to the private school SIS (Senri International School) in Osaka, with its unique program
of Japanese education with the arts subjects (art, music, P.E. and English) taught in
English only. In year 9, he again spent 10 months back in Australia in a high school, then
returned to Senri for years 10-12. Now he is in the 3rd year at a Tokyo university and is
majoring in Japanese literature.

Kye: I've lived in Japan for the most part, except for going to Australia, where my
grandparents live, almost every year for about a month, and then for two longer periods
of a year—first, when I was in the third grade, and again in my last year of junior high.
But even though I have spent most of my life in Japan, I talk in English with my mother
(Japanese with my father), and she used to read me books every night, which had a large
influence on my bilingual ability. The longer terms I spent in Australia, especially in the
third grade, also boosted my English reading and speaking skills a lot. Also, during that
year back in Australia when I was nine and my sister was five, I used to speak English
with her, whereas now, we speak mainly Japanese. In addition, the curriculum for English
at junior and senior high school in Japan at Senri International School in Osaka had a
level which equaled that of any other in the U.S. or Australia, so my experiences here, I
think, succeeded in nurturing in me a deeper cultural understanding of people with
different English backgrounds. At the same time, I could maintain and excel in English,
improving my skills throughout my six years of high school.
On the other hand, reading, writing, listening and speaking in Japanese have never
seemed to be much of problem for me, since I have been living in Japan for most of my
life, and I hope that my study of Japanese literature at university will leave me with yet a
higher level of sophistication not just concerning the usage of the language but with an
understanding of Japanese culture.


 49

Amanda: Well—I really like the fact that Kye remembers me reading to him every
night, as children often forget their parents reading them stories. From what I hear when
talking to my monolingual friends back in Australia, parents usually read to their children
in the early years of primary or elementary school, but as soon as the children can read on
their own, their parents supply them with books and opportunities to visit the library but
don’t read aloud to them anymore. This is a pity, since when reading together, the level of
books chosen can be a lot higher, as the parent is always there to read out new words,
expressions and concepts and explain them. Not only was it enjoyable for Kye to read
with me, but for me, it was one of the most wonderful ways to bond with my children as
well, and we read together until he was about 13 or so and had entered junior high school
at Senri International School.
Now, let’s move on to some of Kye’s memories about growing up bilingually and
with two cultures, and how this helped him come to terms with his identity.

Kye: I fondly look back at all the books my mother read me, which is one of the oldest
bilingual memories that I have. Being able to read, write, listen and speak in two
languages has always been an advantage, because so many more horizons seem to arise.
There are a variety of different possibilities which lie in the usage of each language and
the countries it can be used in, and knowing two languages also allows me to think about
the same thing in two different narratives or from two slightly different viewpoints.
Saying the same thing in each language embodies a different impression. Therefore, for
me to think or say the same thing in either language seems to make me feel like a slightly
different person.
I think it is hard for me to concurrently maintain two identities or let them coexist
while living in Japan. This can be explained, I think, by the strong emotional
discrimination towards “others” in this country, or should I say, the strong emotional tie
that Japanese people feel towards one another that doesn’t let other people easily come
“inside” their circle. In elementary school, I would get the occasional “you're a ha-fu”
kind of comment, or a remark or look that would cast me aside as though I was not
normal. This eventually evolved into "ha-fu people are kakko-ii or kawa-ii”, which still
represents the same type of discrimination against those who are different. Even now, at
university, it seems hard for people to understand why, how or what right I have to be
majoring in Japanese literature because I am not Japanese according to their standards.
No one thinks of me as being Japanese when we first meet, because of my exotic (?)
looks.
Referring back to what I previously said, this makes it hard for me to let my two
identities coexist, since I think that an identity is constructed from how other people see
you and not what you construct on your own, so this means that to some extent, if I want
to be Japanese, I cannot be a “foreigner” in Japanese eyes. However, I don't look purely
Japanese in the first place, so I seem to just end up going around in circles all of the time
with the idea of having a Japanese identity. Concerning my Australian side, I have never
really thought about it, so basically my “Australian identity” is untouched; it is there
because of my blood, and from what my parents keep telling me, so naturally, it is not as
engraved into my character or as ambivalently profound as my Japanese side.


 50

Amanda: Identity is always a difficult issue with our children. We just wanted our
children to be happy and confident and accepted for who they were. We thought that
growing up in the one place in Kyoto during their formative years would give them roots,
local friends, local customs and festivals so that they would feel a part of this area. Senri
International School allowed them to be accepted and admired for their bicultural and
bilingual heritage and gave them self-confidence because there was such a mixture of
nationalities, as well as many Japanese students who had studied outside Japan. Students
there could be different and be comfortable with that. However, since Kye left Kyoto to
go to Tokyo for tertiary studies, he has been continually questioned about who he is and
what his cultural background is. The world has become a bigger place, and there are more
people who want to know about him.
Kye is now studying for his undergraduate degree and does not yet have a career,
except translating part time, and marriage is still ahead of him.

Kye: I have yet to make a choice or think about marriage, career, possibly living in
another country, or choosing a nationality, so I am not sure about answers to those
questions, but what I can gather from my experiences at this point (I say “gather” because
those experiences or choices weren't made in a very conscious way at the time) is that,
with relationships, I tend to like people who can understand how I feel about having this
sort of background, and career-wise, I definitely have to say that I am propelled towards a
job that would put me in a good position to effectively use both my languages and
cultures.

Amanda: Kye is now away from home, living on his own for university, and while we
maintain telephone and e-mail contact, it is no longer on a daily basis. He reads books in
English and tries to keep his vocabulary up to par by using vocabulary exercise books of
a high level to stop attrition, but certainly isn’t receiving the same input of spoken
English which he would if he were still living at home in Kyoto. He isn’t worried,
though, as he knows that literacy and reading is a major key to keeping up his English
level. I am only grateful that in our family, my choice to speak in English to our children
and my husband’s use of mainly Japanese (these were random choices at the beginning
and not supported by us reading up on the research) turned out to be the best way for our
children. I can now talk with Kye about difficult topics in English and relay my feelings
and opinions easily to him, and visa versa. I didn’t need to become another person by
speaking Japanese to my son. I could retain my own identity and converse in the most
natural way to my own child in my own language.

Kye: Actually, I'm not really afraid of losing either of my languages, as I try to maintain
them both, which means I won’t ever lose my connection with my parents anyway–be it
over the phone, through e-mail, i-chat, Skype or visiting home.


 51

Amanda: Grandchildren? Not for a while yet, I hope!! But when it happens, I really
hope that Kye will remember that reading is an enjoyable way to make a connection on a
daily basis, in any language, with his own children.

Kye: Again, I'm not anywhere near to making such choices in reality, so my answer will
not be able to avoid the realm of fiction, but yes, I would definitely like to raise my
children bilingually, in the same languages that I know.

Amanda: And that is the end of the story—or perhaps just the beginning—for Kye.

Section 4: Studies of multilingual young people

Identities of Young Multicultural Adults

Erina Ogawa

Introduction
Individuals who identify (wholly or partly) with more than one culture are called
multicultural. Yet cultural identity is changeable and complex, and is dependent on the
circumstances of the individual. It is an oversimplification to say that if children have
parents from two different cultural backgrounds, they will incorporate both cultures
equally into their own identity. In an earlier study (Ogawa, 2008), I found that the way
cultural identities of multicultural children developed was dependent on the individual
circumstances of each family, as well as on each child. Whilst this previous research
investigated parental influence over the cultural identity development of multicultural
children, the present study examines the cultural identities largely already developed in
young multicultural adults.

Methodology

This study explores the cultural identities of seven students from a university in
Saitama, Japan, who have multicultural backgrounds. The respondents’ names have been
changed to protect their identities. Since my Masters of Management is in the area of
cultural communication, and I am not an expert in linguistics, this study focuses on the


 52

cultural aspects of the participants’ identities rather than on their language use. Therefore,
in choosing respondents for this study, I selected young adults who expressed
identification with more than one culture, rather than those who were able to speak more
than one language.
Three of the respondents are students I have taught personally and had previously
revealed their multicultural identities to me, so I approached them personally for the
interview session. I found the other four students by asking staff and students to refer
likely participants to me. All seven students were interested in the topic, willingly
participated in the study, and signed a consent form.
Information was gathered during interviews which were based on the questions
posed in the Call for Contributions for this monograph. (See Appendix on p. 78.) In
addition, the respondents were asked to classify their cultural identity using the pie chart
shown below, which was developed in my previous study. They were asked to classify
their identity as 1) based on a single culture, 2) a combination of their cultural
backgrounds, or 3) a global identity.

!"#$"%&#'()*+$,-,.&$,/+

0,+1#*
!/23,+*)
4#/3&#

Adapted from Ogawa (2008)

Each of the participants shared openly, although there were some signs of shyness
regarding the life partner question. Especially considering their ages, I considered it very
brave of them to share such intimate thoughts. In general, those who seemed to have
confidence in their cultural identities appeared to speak more freely than those who
seemed to be still in the process of coming to an understanding of these issues.
I made it clear that this research was unrelated to class work, was entirely voluntary,
and that normal class rules of only English speaking did not apply. Some of the

 53

participants expressed concern about not being able to express themselves properly in
English. Some needed assurance that their teacher—who in the classroom is strict about
only speaking in English to them and expects only English in reply—would actually
allow the interview to take place in Japanese! The fact that most of the interview session
was conducted in Japanese allowed the respondents to relax, and their relationship with
me changed from that of teacher-student to that of interviewer-interviewee. Five of the
interviews were conducted in Japanese, while two participants (Antonio and Tom) chose
to use English.
I personally translated the Japanese interviews into English. Although this does not
rule out misunderstandings or mistranslations on my part, a third party armed with only
the taped conversations would not have had the benefits of non-verbal communication,
which accounts for a large part of face-to-face communication. Since this report deals
with the participants’ feelings, at times the original Japanese words have been included to
provide a closer understanding of the feelings being conveyed.
The interview session took place in the university's Writing Center room in July
2008. Most respondents stayed to listen to what the other respondents had to say, but
they were generally not present for the entire session, as it was a day of normal classes
and the students needed to get something for lunch or attend class for part of the session.
When I thanked them for their participation at a later date, all expressed enjoyment of the
experience.
After the interviews, I compiled the information I had gleaned from each participant
into a short description of the person’s background and identity. These “stories” are
presented below.

The Participants’ Stories

Dinnah
Dinnah, a fourth-year student, is a 21 year-old Japanese national with a Pakistani
father and a Japanese mother. Although her father can speak five languages (Urdu,
Arabic, Persian, English, Japanese and Punjabi), Dinnah says that she herself is only
fluent in Japanese, with the same level of English as most Japanese students her age, and
a beginning level of Arabic (she can do greetings but not everyday conversation). When
asked if she is Japanese, Dinnah replied that she did not know. She does not think that
nationality is important and often tells people that she does not have a national identity:
“nanijin demo nai yo!”
Dinnah attended normal Japanese schools and until her second year at high school,
she had a complex about her appearance. Although I personally feel that she is beautiful,
she wanted to look like everyone else and not be called a foreigner (gaikokujin). Adults
would tell her that she was cute (“Kawaii ne!”) or that they were jealous of her looks
(“Urayamashii!”), but her peers treated her quite differently. They told her that she was
different and that made her sad (“Kanashii”) and she suffered because of it (“Tsurai omoi
wo shita”).


 54

 Dinnah also did not like to belong to just one class group of friends as most Japanese
girls do: she wanted to be friends with everyone. She is glad that she insisted on her right
to be able to make friends with everyone because now she can understand a lot of
different people’s ways of thinking.
From her second year in high school, Dinnah began to feel glad to have been born of
mixed race and cultures—a so-called “haafu”. She now feels that to be different from
everyone else is to be her own unique individual. She used to hate being asked if she was
a “haafu” but now she just smiles and says “I am a human. I am me!”
In the future, Dinnah wants to be an international volunteer in Africa or some needy
place and, although she would lean toward marrying a foreigner, all she requires of a
future partner is that he be able to accept her dream and that his personality matches hers.
She wants her future children to learn many things, as she intends to do herself, and to be
able to speak Japanese, English and Arabic.

Antonio
Antonio, a third-year student, is a 20 year-old Nikkei Brazilian national with
permanent residency status in Japan. He lived in Brazil and spoke only Portuguese until
he was twelve years old. Antonio’s language use is ___domain-based: he speaks Japanese at
school and Portuguese at home.
Until Antonio’s family moved to Japan when he was twelve, the only exposure
Antonio had had to Japanese language and culture was through his Japanese
grandparents, but this was limited to eating some sushi and other Japanese foods and
learning some hiragana. Due to his Japanese heritage, he was called a “Jap” and other
derogatory terms in Brazil.
Then when he came to Japan, he was told that he did not look Japanese, so he
became confused as to who he was. He said that it was very hard at the beginning
because he could not speak Japanese and found it hard to make friends.
The turning point for Antonio was his first year in high school, when he could finally
understand what the teacher was saying and this made him feel that he fit in. The
development of Antonio’s linguistic ability was crucial for him to fit into Japanese
society and to adopt a Japanese identity. The reason Antonio gives for choosing his
Japanese identity over his Brazilian one is that he has been in Japan for a long time. He
now feels more comfortable in Japanese culture than in Brazilian culture.
Antonio believes that being bilingual and bicultural will affect his career and life
partner choices but he is not sure how. He would like to have a Japanese partner, as he
identifies with Japanese, but would prefer to work in a Brazilian or other international
company, as that is where his linguistic and cultural strengths will be of the most benefit.


 55

Satomi
Satomi, a first-year student, is an 18 year-old Chinese national with permanent
residency status in Japan. Her father is half Chinese and half Japanese and was raised in
Japan, while her mother is Chinese and was raised in China. Satomi was also raised in
China until she was four years old. Although she cannot remember anything of this
period in her life now, she has been told that she did everything in Chinese at that time.
After the family came to Japan, Satomi’s parents continued to speak to each other in
Chinese but Satomi began speaking to them in Japanese and continued to do so for the
rest of her childhood. As she didn’t use her Chinese while she was growing up, she
cannot speak the language now. Sometimes her parents speak to her in Chinese and
sometimes in Japanese. She can understand a limited amount of Chinese (that which has
been spoken in her household) but cannot hold a conversation in the language.
Until very recently, Satomi did not tell her friends that she was Chinese, but since
coming to the university, she has found the confidence to do so, as she feels that the
students in her department are open minded. Most of the friends she grew up with do not
know of her Chinese identity, as she always looked and acted like a Japanese child. Now
that she is comfortable telling people about her background, she feels relieved (“Sore wa
raku desu ne!”), as it was very awkward (“kimazui”) for her to keep it a secret for so
long.
Satomi appears to be still negotiating her cultural identity. When I asked what she is
now, she replied that she is Chinese, then said maybe Japanese, then that it is hard to say
(“bimyou”). After we discussed the fact that she feels Chinese in Japan and Japanese in
China, she concluded that actually, she does feel like a normal Japanese young adult
(“futsu”). It will be interesting to see if her identity is clearer after she visits China this
summer for her brother's wedding.
When asked about what languages she would like her future children to learn, Satomi
first said that she wants them to learn English because she thinks it is more useful than
Chinese. However, she said she also wants them to learn Chinese, but says that she will
have to learn it herself first!

Toshio
Toshio, a first-year student, is a 19 year-old with a South Korean mother and
Japanese father. He was born and raised in Japan but spent three years, from the ages of
nine to twelve, in South Korea due to his father’s job. While in Korea, Toshio did not use
Japanese at all and picked up the Korean language easily, even though he had not spoken
the language before the move. He can now speak Korean well, except for technical
language, although he is not very competent at writing it.

Although Japanese is the main language spoken in his home, Toshio’s mother, who
was raised in Korea and came to Japan in her twenties, does speak to him in Korean.
Toshio believes that she has a strong Korean identity, since she often speaks Korean with
her Korean friends and was, in fact, visiting Korea at the time of the interview.


 56

 Apart from his last three years of elementary school, which he spent in Korea,
Toshio has had a normal Japanese education. However, his high school had an
international focus, drawing many students from different cultures. There, when he told
his classmates that he was half Korean, he would get comments such as “Great! Really?”
(“Sugoi! Maji de?”). Likewise, he feels accepted at the university. Thus, Toshio feels
that he has been sheltered from racial prejudice so far and worries about how he will deal
with it once he goes out into society after graduation.
Toshio wishes that he had lived in the United States and learned English while he
was young, so he wants to provide that opportunity for his future children. He wants
them to speak English and Japanese but does not feel that Korean is very useful, as it is
not spoken in many places.

Enrique

Enrique, a first-year student, is a twenty-one year-old Nikkei Peruvian with Japanese

permanent residency status. Until he came to Japan with his family at age five, he lived
in Peru.
He went to a Japanese kindergarten and elementary school, but could not understand
the language and got behind in both his studies and his relationships. He says that his life
was a mess. He hated school and so did not go to class until his third year there. Instead,
Enrique and another Latin American boy would hide computer games in their school bags
and play them at school until a teacher caught them. After he entered junior high school,
Enrique attended classes but did not study. He says that some days he just went to eat
lunch. As he did not earn enough credits in junior high to enter high school, he ended up
going to night school before entering university.
One problem seems to have been his language development. Enrique claims that he
had not become competent in either Spanish or Japanese. His parents both worked long
hours, so Enrique did not see them much, and his Spanish language development suffered
as a result. At one point, he says he was no longer able to speak in Spanish. His
Japanese at the time was also weak. Over the years, his Japanese has improved, but he
still feels it needs a lot of work.
The turning point for Enrique came in his fourth year of elementary school, when his
family went back to Peru for a year. There, he picked up Spanish as he played with other
children. He listened to music and wanted to dance, remembering his cultural roots. He
also learned pick-up lines to chat up girls. Enrique believes that through these
interactions with his peers, his Spanish linguistic ability improved dramatically and so did
his sense of identity as a Peruvian. He got used to living in Peru and found it hard to
come back to Japan at the end of the year. Enrique says that he never doubted his
Peruvian identity but struggled a lot to survive in Japan. Now, he sees himself as a
bilingual Peruvian who is used to living in Japan.
Being bilingual has a huge influence on Enrique’s life decisions. He sees it as an
advantage (“toku”) to be bilingual, because if you only have Japanese, you have to stay in
Japan, but if you have Spanish, English, or another language, you can study and work in a


 57

lot of different places. In the future, Enrique wants to travel and live in many different
cultures—possibly starting with Europe—to find the one most suited to him. He wants to
marry whoever he falls in love with and bring his children up to be bilingual. Since he
struggled so hard to become bilingual himself, Enrique wants to pass that on to his
children and make it easier for them.
I would like to conclude Enrique’s story with a message he asked me to share with
our readers. Enrique says that a lot of children get bullied. He asks people to please not
bully others and especially stop bullying Nikkeijin (foreigners with Japanese ancestry).

Tom
Tom, a first-year student, is a twenty-one year-old half Filipino-American/half black
American. Growing up in America, he naturally experienced a lot of different cultures
within his home and family and absorbed all of them without thinking about it. He can
speak English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, a bit of Dutch, and a dialect of the
Philippines.
Tom’s father is a Filipino-American, and his mother is an African American. His
racial and cultural roots are complicated, but he normally says that he is half black and
half Filipino, as he assumes that most people include European and other elements into a
black American identity. Actually, his great-grandmother looked very Caucasian but
considered herself to be African. Tom described his own appearance by naming
celebrities he is often likened to: People often say he looks like Tiger Woods, and this
resemblance was also obvious to this researcher. Other celebrities he is said to look like
are Denzel Washington, the brother from the Softbank commercial, and Jero, the
Japanese-African American enka singer from Chicago.
Tom says that his father is racially 100% Filipino and culturally 100% American.
Tom’s mother is an African American, and he believes her cultural identity is that of an
African American. He thinks that he also has that as part of his identity, but finds it
difficult that an African American identity seems to be what he calls a “package deal”.
He elaborated by saying that if you say that you are an African American, people then
assume that “you like this, this, and this, and you think this way”, but these assumptions
are not always true for him.
Tom’s parents divorced when he was young, and they each remarried soon after that.
He was raised by an El Salvadorian nanny and had a mother-child type bond with her, so
he spoke Spanish from an early age. His stepmother is Cuban (raised in Cuba), and he
often visits that side of his family, so he still has Spanish-speaking cultural influences in
his life. In addition, his stepfather was from Holland, so he visited Holland a lot and
explored the Dutch culture. Tom says that as a child he was accepted into all of the
cultures he was exposed to.
When asked if he has an American cultural identity, Tom replied that he does not.
Although he grew up in America, with normal American schooling, he traveled a lot and
experienced many different cultures with family members. He also went to immersion


 58

language and culture programs in China and Japan, so he does not have a strong
American identity.
Despite these many cultural influences, Tom says he has no internal conflicts over
his cultural identity—just external ones. He was not raised with a concept of race, and it
was only when he went to college that he became aware of prejudice. At that time, he
thought, “So, that’s what this is”. People could tell that he was black and something else,
and as he answered their questions about his background, he was able to answer the
question of who he was for himself. Tom says that he has never struggled with his
cultural identity himself and claims, “I am completely comfortable with myself”.
However, he has had problems with people telling him that he does not look Filipino or
that he is only black. At one stage, he tried to play down his black side because he did
not want to be stereotyped, but now he feels comfortable saying he is black.
English and Spanish are the languages that were spoken in his home when he was a
child. He has learnt Japanese and Chinese from study in these countries, and he has
learnt some Dutch and a dialect of the Philippines from extended family members. Tom
views languages as tools for aiding cross-cultural communication and plans to become an
international lawyer based in Japan in the future.
He believes that multilingualism will affect his life choices. He wants to find a
marriage partner who speaks English, as he values directness and has found English to be
the most direct language of the many languages he has studied. He feels capable of doing
business in any language that he can speak.
As far as his future children are concerned, he would like them to be raised with just
two cultures rather than with many cultures, as he was. This is because he thinks it will be
easier for them. Although he hesitates to say it, he also states that he wants his children
to be raised to speak English. He also wants them to be able to speak other languages and
to be able to relate to people from different cultures, but he feels that English is a
necessity.
When asked if there was anything he wished to add, Tom said that he feels for people
with mixed cultural identities when people say that they do not look like who they are.
When people tell him that he is not Filipino because he looks black, he thinks, “Wow!
You just, like, killed off my Filipino side—like, I’m sorry you don’t think that, but that’s
not going to change my biological make-up”.

Nobuyuki
Nobuyuki, a second-year student, is a half-Japanese/half-Taiwanese resident of Japan
who has Taiwanese nationality. His father is from Taiwan and came to Japan when he
was a university student. His mother is a Japanese who can speak Chinese. Although he
often heard his parents speaking in Chinese while he was growing up, Nobuyuki was
born and raised mainly in Japan and in Japanese culture.
At the end of his junior high school years, Nobuyuki’s family moved to Singapore
when his father took up a job in mainland China, where he has remained ever since.
Because his father was no longer living with the family, Nobuyuki’s exposure to Chinese

 59

decreased. During the year that he lived in Singapore, Nobuyuki attended an
international school where classes were taught in English. Yet even though he no longer
heard Chinese at home and was being schooled in English, Nobuyuki found himself to be
more interested in Chinese than English because he had found a Chinese girlfriend. After
a year in Singapore, his family moved to Canada for five years, and Nobuyuki enrolled in
an ordinary Canadian school despite his limited English proficiency at the time.
While he was in Canada, Nobuyuki could not make Canadian friends. This was
partly due to the language barrier, but also due to a lack of interest on Nobuyuki’s part
because of the cultural barrier. For example, he was not interested in ice hockey—the
sport most of the Canadians around him loved passionately. Thus, Nobuyuki had
Japanese friends and attended night classes in order to pass the tests at school. Somehow,
he managed to graduate from Canadian high school, but he said that studying
Shakespeare was really difficult!
However, it was returning to Japan to enter university that posed the greatest
difficulty for Nobuyuki. He had assumed that he would be able to enter a Japanese
university easily as a foreign student, since he had a Taiwanese passport and had
graduated from a Canadian high school. However, he learned that he was not eligible to
sit the examination for foreigners because he had lived in Japan for more than three years.
He therefore tried to sit the returnee examination, but was again told he was not qualified,
this time because he did not have Japanese nationality or permanent residency status.
Therefore, he was only eligible to take general entrance examinations. This was difficult
because in Canada he had been studying Shakespeare, not the classical Japanese tested on
general entrance exams. It appeared that he might not be able to get into any Japanese
university, but he finally found one that allowed students to enter on the basis of a single
English examination and was able to pass that.
At university, Nobuyuki is taking Chinese language classes. Although his early
exposure to Chinese at home and in Singapore made it possible for him to speak the
language without problems, it was not until he reached university that he at last learned to
read and write it.
Interestingly, for both Nobuyuki and his younger brother, Japanese is their dominant
language and their English proficiency is limited, while for their younger sister, English
is her dominant language and her Japanese proficiency is limited. Nobuyuki says that
this is because his sister, who is now ten years old, was mainly brought up in Canada.
In addition to this difference in their dominant languages, there is also a difference in
the siblings’ cultural identities. Nobuyuki believes that his sister has a Canadian identity
because her friends are Canadian. Conversely, considering the fact that his friends (even
the ones in Canada) are Japanese, Nobuyuki feels that he is culturally Japanese. He
believes that friends have a lot to do with shaping a person’s cultural identity. When he
goes to China or Canada, he looks for Japanese friends. Nobuyuki speaks Japanese with
his family and a mixture of Japanese and English with his sister. He does not feel it at all
strange that his sister has a different dominant language and cultural identity from him.
Although Nobuyuki is clear about his Japanese identity, he has found that Japanese
society does not accept this because his family name is not Japanese and he does not hold
Japanese nationality. Thus, when asked by Japanese people about his cultural identity,

 60

Nobuyuki replies that he is Taiwanese, even though he has only visited Taiwan a couple
of times and does not feel like he belongs there. Although he is Japanese at heart, he
answers that he is Taiwanese because that is what Japanese people expect him to say. He
calmly explained that this is because of his family name and because nationality is
important to Japanese people (“Nihonjin wa kokuseki ni kodawaru”). This researcher
thinks that, despite his declaration “I am Taiwanese”, Nobuyuki’s reasons for answering
in that way are very Japanese and just serve to prove his Japanese identity.
Nonetheless, Nobuyuki has no anxieties about this apparent contradiction and has
accepted his position in Japanese society. He is determined, however, to obtain
permanent residency once he has been in Japan for the required number of years, and
eventually wants to become a Japanese national.
In the future, Nobuyuki wants to live in Japan, marry a Japanese woman and work
for a Japanese company. He wants to lead a normal Japanese life and to be considered an
ordinary Japanese person. As for his children, he does not mind what language they are
brought up to speak and does not feel it necessary for them to have a Japanese identity.
He is used to family members speaking different languages and having different cultural
identities and has no problem with that.

Discussion
The complexity of the identities of these multicultural individuals is fascinating!
You cannot say that if you live in a culture from a certain age, you will necessarily adopt
that identity. Antonio came to Japan at age twelve and did adopt a Japanese identity.
While he values his bilingualism and bicultural identity, he acknowledges the dominance
of his Japanese side, which he adopted after coming to Japan. On the other hand, Enrique
has acquired the Japanese language without adopting a Japanese cultural identity, even
though he arrived in Japan at the much younger age of only five. Perhaps this difference
is due to the fact that Enrique identified with Peruvian culture while he was in Peru,
whereas Antonio, as a Nikkeijin, still has the issue of looking Japanese in Brazil.
You also cannot say that bilingualism, biculturalism, biracialism, and nationality
issues are absolute and easily defined. Tom appears to be comfortable with his identity
and does not mind answering questions about who he is, even though his linguistic and
cultural heritage is complicated. Likewise, Dinnah has a strong sense of identity, even
though that identity is somewhat ambiguous. In Nobuyuki's case, his nationality and his
cultural identity do not match. Toshio and Enrique have separated language and culture,
claiming that their bilingualism does not determine their cultural identity. I believe that
Satomi is still coming to terms with her cultural identity and am interested to see how this
will develop in the near future.
A common theme that emerged from this study is the importance of peer acceptance.
Dinnah fought for acceptance by explaining and debating her situation regarding wanting
to be more of an individual than a member of a single group. Antonio learnt the Japanese
language and culture and now feels part of the Japanese culture himself. Satomi kept her
Chinese identity a secret in order to be accepted by her peers. Toshio has been sheltered
from prejudice and is nervous about having to confront this issue in the future. Enrique


 61

was not accepted by his peers in Japan, partly due to a lack of linguistic ability, but felt
accepted in Peru—hence his Peruvian identity. Tom avoided being labeled by his peers
and chooses his own labels. Nobuyuki could not relate to the language and culture of his
Canadian peers and instead made friends with other Japanese teenagers and retained his
Japanese identity. It appears that if you do not feel accepted by your peers in the culture
you are in, it is very difficult to adopt that culture’s identity. This should be noted by
those influential in the identity development of multicultural youth or youth exposed to a
new culture.
My previous research (Ogawa, 2008) revealed three categories (or types) of cultural
identity for multicultural people raised in Japan. I adapted these three categories to suit
the current study and asked the participants to choose which category they felt they most
belonged to. Antonio, Satomi, Toshio and Nobuyuki chose a single culture as their main
cultural identity. Tom chose a combination of two cultures as his main cultural identity.
Dinnah and Enrique chose a fluid or global identity for their cultural identity. These
results confirm my previous findings that the cultural identities of multicultural people
depend on their individual circumstances.
Each and every one of us human beings is a unique individual. This report presented
seven individuals who share something in common – cultural identities which cannot be
described simply. That does not make them better or worse than monocultural
individuals, but it certainly makes them interesting. This researcher wishes to thank these
seven wonderful individuals for sharing personal thoughts about themselves with us. I
hope that their sharing will aid in the understanding of people with multicultural
identities.

References
Ogawa, E. (2008). Identity Choices by Parents of Multicultural Children. Language and
Communication Department, Tokyo International University (Vol. 4, March 2008).

Raising Children to Become Bilingual and Biliterate

(Condensed from a paper submitted by the author to Temple University Japan in April, 2008)

Jimena "Emily" Homma

Introduction
Many scientists believe that learning begins at infancy—or even earlier. Our learning
foundations and the efforts we exert in building them determine the kind of life we will


 62

lead in the future. This fact motivates many parents and educators to strive to provide
richer experiences for the children they help raise.
As they do this, they are faced with many questions. How educated should an
individual be to be fully successful in today’s world? The demands keep growing as our
society invents new products and activities at a pace unimaginable some decades ago.
How many languages and dialects should one speak to be able to have a considerable
grasp of the tasks and events happening in the world today? The answers are so startling
that parents now design fascinating courses of study for their children. It is no surprise
that numerous learning institutions and crash courses emerge in our communities today,
all to meet the demands and hunger for learning of both children and adults. Regardless
of what educational theories they were exposed to in their earlier lives, parents today are
often determined to set their own goals for their children and have them follow a definite
track they themselves sculpture.
Not fully aware of the many arguments and contrasting studies on educational
theories, parents appear to indulge in their own dreams as they devise curriculums for
their children. Yet despite their lack of background in the fields of linguistics and
pedagogy, their techniques are innovative and inspiring. Since parents’ goals for their
children’s education differ greatly according to their culture, economic status, ___location,
profession and beliefs, the writer, as an educator and parent herself, thought it would be
interesting to investigate how various families mold and prepare their children for their
future and how they create pathways for their children to acquire the skills that might
adequately equip the future builders of the world.
Specifically, I decided to explore strategies parents use to help their children become
bilingual and biliterate. I felt that these findings would not only aid me in choosing
strategies favorable to my own child-raising and language teaching, but also help others
in molding children to be better equipped to face the challenges of today’s world.

Survey
To learn more about the strategies used by different families who had raised children
to be bilingual and biliterate, I conducted a survey of eight families who are currently
living in such different environments as Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom,
and were found to be employing effective strategies on their way towards their goal of
raising their children to be literate in two or more languages.
The families were asked to complete a questionnaire comprised of ten questions
pertaining to the languages being learned by their children, factors that affected their
decisions, principles and learning styles, as well as the strategies and methods being
observed in their children’s language acquisition. Table 1 briefly describes each family’s
make-up, their children’s ages, the main factors affecting their children’s learning, and
the strategies and methods the family used in trying to achieve their goals of bilingualism
and biliteracy.


 63

 Table 1: Family Characteristics and Strategies

MAIN FACTORS
CHILDREN STRATEGIES
FAMILY Affecting Language Learning
Sex / Age in Years Used to Achieve Biliteracy
of All Children

FAMILY A

Japanese father: * Regular conversation * Father speaks Japanese at

Child 1: M, 26
manager home
* Attitude, example set by
parents * Mother speaks English at
American mother: home
Child 2: M, 22 * Contact with friends
writer / nurse * American friends speak
* Travel, study abroad English with children
* Reading books seen as * Japanese friends speak
Location: Japan Child 3: M, 18 parents' work Japanese with children

FAMILY B

* Father speaks English to

French father: children
Child 1: F, 18
French teacher * Study abroad * Mother speaks Japanese
to children
* Language schools
* Children attended
Japanese mother: * Parents' goals for children
English medium school
housewife * Children's desire to learn
* Child 1 studied in France
* Books and TV shows for 2 years
* Child 2 planning to study
Location: Japan Child 2: F, 16 in France, too


 64

 FAMILY C

* Japanese father spoke

Japanese father: Japanese to children
Child 1: M, 18
construction worker * Filipino mother speaks
Tagalog to children
Filipino mother: * Family and friends
* Children studied and
Child 2; M, 16 * Living conditions
factory worker lived abroad for 2 years
* Opportunities abroad * Father 2 speaks Tagalog
at home
Japanese father died, * Activities at home: TV, PC
mother married a * Children go to Japanese
Child 3: M, 10 * Gathering: big family
Filipino construction preschool and elementary
gatherings, parties, social
worker school
gatherings
* Children have Filipino
friends and speak
Location: Japan Child 4: F, 4 Tagalog with them

FAMILY D

American father:
Child 1: M, 18 * Father speaks English at
* Inadequacy of international
accountant home
schools
* Mother speaks English at
American mother: * Parents' goals for children
home
Child 2: M, 16
registrar * Opportunities abroad
* International school
* Parents' employment
* Homestay abroad
overseas
Location: Saudi * Study at boarding school
Child 3: M, 13 * Regular conversations
Arabia in home country

FAMILY E

Syrian-British * Father speaks English at

Child 1: M, 19
father: businessman home

* Environment, family, friends * Mother speaks English at

Filipino-British home
mother: hotel * Supportive schools
manager * Father taught children
* Separation of parents Arabic while they were in
* Parents' profession, status, elementary school
work * Father taught children the
Location: United
Child 2, F, 18 Koran
Kingdom
* English-speaking friends


 65

 FAMILY F

* Constant home country

visits
Norwegian father: * International school
Child 1: M, 19 * When needed, parents
engineer * Norwegian language arranged to be reassigned
environment in the home in home country
* Father's employment * Parents constantly
overseas monitoring children's
* Regular home country visits language development
Norwegian mother:
Child 2: M, 17 * Father's posting back and * Effective use of materials
housewife
forth and language
environment
* Book, videos in both
languages * Maintenance of
Location: Saudi Norwegian-speaking
Child 3: M, 15
Arabia environment in the home

FAMILY G

Chinese father:
Child 1: M, 18 * International schools, * Both parents speak
petroleum engineer Chinese in the home
Chinese school

Chinese mother: * Chinese-speaking * Regular contact with

environment in the home relatives who converse in
petroleum engineer Chinese
* Parents' talk, conversations
Location: * Attendance at Chinese
Child 2: M, 12 * Relatives role, conversations schools
Saudi Arabia

FAMILY H

Japanese father:
Child 1: M, 25 * Father speaks Japanese
construction worker with their son
* Mother speaks Russian
* Family and friends with their son
Russian mother:
* Parents' regular * Relatives visit
gymnastics teacher conversations occasionally
* Songs, books, movies, toys * Mother's strong
determination to provide
minority language
Location: Japan exposure









 66

Strategies Employed
After gathering the above information on the basic family characteristics and the
factors and strategies that had the most impact on their efforts to instill biliteracy in their
children, I asked the participants what specific techniques they found to be effective in
achieving their objectives for their target languages. The following are a selection of the
answers I received.



Family A (Japanese Father and American Mother Living in Japan)
“I felt that if I spoke only English, the children would learn it, and they did. I
considered deliberately teaching reading and writing, but decided they would
eventually get that in school and I would not set lessons. (Obviously, this strategy
only works for English.) I read a lot to them when they were small. They heard a
lot of English from our foreign friends. We had English videos and bilingual TV.
We took them to the U.S. for a few weeks every summer when they were young
(through elementary school). I think one very significant factor for our three boys
is that their father is completely bilingual Japanese. So, they have always seen a
real Japanese man who is comfortable in both languages. We also have many
multilingual friends. They came to view using more than one language as
normal”.

Family D (American Couple Living in Saudi Arabia)

“Classroom learning is not adequate by itself. The student/child needs to practice
the language with others who are fluent in the language they are trying to
learn. At Saudi Aramco, all students used to take Arabic throughout their
elementary school education—grades K ~ 9, which is approximately ages 5 ~
14. However, even living in Saudi Arabia, many students did not really learn
Arabic, as they did not practice it. Within the Aramco community, there were not
many Arabic speakers, so they were not required to speak it. Outside of the
Aramco community, in the local economy, many merchants were from India,
Pakistan, and other countries, and they did not generally prefer to speak
Arabic. If a customer spoke English, even if they tried to speak Arabic, the
merchant would speak English. As with our oldest child, I think an immersion
program is excellent once you have a foundation of the language you are trying to
learn. By providing him with the homestay opportunity last summer, I think this
helped to stimulate him to continue with Japanese through college. I’ve offered
assistance for him in getting him an internship with Saudi Aramco in Tokyo in a
couple of years, so I hope that this will encourage him to continue with his
Japanese language studies.”


 67

 Family F (Norwegian Couple Living in Saudi Arabia)
“Children’s books and videos in both languages, and of course exposure to
people with other backgrounds. However, our main strategy has been a
Norwegian-speaking environment at home, combined with English-speaking
schools. We are of the opinion that a child of less than 7 years will not retain
many memories. Hence we have moved back and forth between a Norwegian and
an English-speaking school environment after our children passed 7.”
Family G (Chinese Couple Living in Saudi Arabia)
“Take them to the language environment and live there for a while. Send them to
Chinese schools whenever we can, plus, both of the parents’ native language is
Chinese.



The techniques employed by these families were enlightening. The learning acquired
by attending language schools and international schools was further enhanced by the
parents’ constant use of their native language, thus providing balanced exposure to both
majority and minority languages. Sometimes, even if the parents didn’t really set clear
targets for their foreign parents’ tongues (as in the case of Family C), activities natural to
one parent’s culture, such as regular visits by relatives, socio-cultural parties, and a few
years of study in that parent’s home country assured a good balance between the
children’s L1 and L2. This was true for both Family C and Family G, which displayed
typical Asian practices, with extended family structures and strong family ties. Other
parents (Families A, B, D and F), on the other hand, in the absence of the regular
presence of relatives on both sides, strove to attain a similarly rich environment by
arranging for their children to attend international schools and/or live and interact with
international communities (Families D and F in Saudi Arabia).
One interesting practice was observed in London, England, where the primary school
attended by the children in Family E supported the PTA’s suggestion to support small
community language clubs where children from the different language groups were
taught the minority language by a native speaker parent. This program was seen as a very
effective means of encouraging children to learn their parents’ native language alongside
their peers, while also engaging in cultural activities from their parents’ native culture
and interacting with other children from a similar background. Unfortunately, this
community had no follow-up to this program for the children in the higher grades to
continue their L2 learning in high school or college. This eventually resulted in the
children losing interest in achieving proficiency in their L2 (Arabic).
Realizing the difficulties involved in scheduling and finding expert teachers of the
minority language in the upper grades, parents might consider reviving their children’s
L2 foundation later on, after the children have passed though the busy high school period.
This is what Family B did, making up for lost opportunities in educating their children in
French during their elementary school days by later sending them to France for total
immersion in the language and culture. Reactivation of the neglected language might not
be too difficult if one parent supplies L2 support from time to time in accordance with the
family’s long-term goals.


 68

Evaluating the Strategies
To try to determine which of the family strategies was effective, I asked the
participants to evaluate their children’s language proficiencies and explain the basis for
their evaluation. Their answers are shown in Table 2.



Table
2:

Evaluation
of
Children’s
Bilinguality




Do you think your child / children could be called bilingual at their current
proficiency? Why/ Why not?



Family A (Japanese Father and American Mother Living in Japan)



 Proficient? Why do you consider them to be or not to be proficient in two or

more languages? 

(Yes / No) 


Child 1
 Yes
 Writes and presents scientific research papers in English.

Understands American humor. Travels abroad using English
without difficulty.


Child 2
 Yes
 Took the GRE to apply to U.S. graduate schools and scored about
50th percentile (compared with native speakers). Travels abroad
using English without difficulty. Understands and enjoys films, etc.
in English.


Child 3
 Yes
 Admitted to International Communications department of Japanese

university with excellent marks in English, including full points for
listening comprehension. Understands and enjoys music and films
in English…. Has English girl friend….






Family B (French Father and Japanese Mother Living in Japan)


 Proficient? Why do you consider them to be or not to be proficient in

two or more languages? 

(Yes / No) 


Child 1
 Yes
 Graduated from Japanese university; Garnered good marks in

French.


Child 2
 Not yet, but Attends Japanese high school; Will study in France, too.

will be



 69

 Family C (Japanese and Filipino Fathers and Filipino Mother Living in Japan)


 Proficient? Why do you consider them to be or not to be proficient in

two or more languages? 

(Yes / No) 


Child 1
 Not yet
 Proficient in Japanese, and later Tagalog. Child’s interest to
learn is high. Child has been speaking Tagalog with parents
and friends.


Child 2
 Yes
 Proficient in both Japanese /Tagalog. Wants to study in

Philippines again.


Child 3, Child 4
 No
 Receptive Tagalog; future long vacations planned by parents
will help.


Family D (American Couple Living in Saudi Arabia)


 Proficient? Why do you consider them to be or not to be proficient in

two or more languages? 

(Yes / No) 


Child 1
 No
 Learning Japanese in school – I would not consider him

bilingual yet.


Child 2
 No
 Learning Spanish in school – nowhere near proficient.


Child 3
 No
 Learning Arabic in school – nowhere near proficient.


Family E (Syrian-British Father and Filipino-British Mother Living in the UK)


 Proficient? Why do you consider them to be or not to be proficient in

two or more languages? 

(Yes / No) 


Child 1
 No
 Very good foundation in Arabic, but now has discontinued
study.


Child 2
 No
 Very good foundation in both English and Arabic, but
discontinued study due to lack of time and support.


Both
children
 
 Father who used to provide opportunities for Arabic learning

now has moved to another country; separated from spouse and
children.



 70

Family F (Norwegian Couple Living in Saudi Arabia)


 Proficient? Why do you consider them to be or not to be proficient in

two or more languages? 

(Yes / No) 


Child 1
 Yes
 He is fully conversant in both English and Norwegian and

speaks with a natural accent and dialect in both.


Child 2
 Yes
 Ditto.


Child 3
 Yes
 Ditto.


Family G (Chinese Couple Living in Saudi Arabia)


 Proficient? Why do you consider them to be or not to be proficient in

two or more languages? 

(Yes / No) 


Child 1
 Yes
 He graduated from his high school’s Chinese classes with an
SAT-Chinese score of 760/800. 


Child 2
 Yes
 She is taking Chinese classes weekly and can speak and
understand Chinese well.


Family H (Japanese Father and Russian Mother Living in Japan)


 Proficient? Why do you consider them to be or not to be proficient in

two or more languages? 

(Yes / No) 


Child 1
 Not yet
 In his first years of learning; will be biliterate eventually;

Mom and Dad dream.


All of the parents who participated in this survey had very positive viewpoints
about their childrearing duties. They were proud to have achieved a certain degree of
success, and indicators of progress motivated the families to try more effective ways to
speed up L1 and L2 learning. Although some of these families faced a lot of challenges


 71

and difficulties, it was a pleasure to learn of their future prospects and plans to counter
the current unfavorable circumstances.
The appreciation expressed by the writer for the role the parents play in helping their
children achieve their goals seems to have generated more enthusiasm among the parents.
It should be noted therefore, that for parents to continue providing a supportive
environment for L1 and L2 acquisition, they need more support from society at large. It
is imperative that governments recognize the successes of these multicultural children
and understand the advantages of offering numerous experiences for these versatile
children. It is hoped that governments and communities will come to accept that
bilingualism and multilingualism could answer the many problems we face today.

Factors Having Positive and Negative Impact on Bilingual Childrearing

While families trying to raise their children bilingually have successes, they may also
have failures. My next questions therefore tried to find out what parents think of as
stumbling blocks to their objectives, as well as
those factors which had a positive impact
on the family's attempts to raise their children bilingually. The participants’ answers to
this question, presented below, again warn us of the many factors that could present
difficulties.

What do you think are the important variables that are impacting positively
or negatively on the family’s attempts to raise their children bilingually?

Family A (Japanese Father and American Mother Living in Japan)

“I think parents need to treat bilingualism very matter of factly, and just expect
it to happen. In our house it is assumed we speak more than one language. (My
husband also speaks good German, and I speak survival German.) Interaction
with lots of people outside the family from various cultures, all speaking
English together, has been very helpful. I also agree with the literature that says
it is easier if the mother speaks the “extra” language, the one not spoken in the
community, since she generally spends a lot more time with the children. And I
do believe that not sending our children to yochien until age 4 was good—I had
them more to myself longer. And for the same reason (one-on-one interaction
with me), it was probably helpful that our children are spaced so far apart. The
youngest was always home with me after the older ones were in some kind of
Japanese school.
“I suppose I should also say that our children had good experiences in
Japanese schools and were never made fun of or otherwise harassed for
speaking English. I only had one conflict, with a junior high English teacher
who took off points on tests if the child did not answer exactly what was taught
in class, even if his answer was also correct. “So, you punish excellence?” My


 72

 husband stood behind me and we got the child his two test points, just on
principle. That teacher was gone the next year. …”

Family D (American Couple Living in Saudi Arabia)

“The most important factor is that the student of a second language be in an
environment where they have to use the language, even rely on it. If you are not
challenged to use the language you learn in the classroom, it is difficult to
become proficient in the language. Like anything you learn, if you don’t use it,
you will lose it… Arabic speakers in Arab countries don’t encourage non-Arabs
to speak Arabic. It is my impression that:
* Some Arabs prefer to communicate in English because their English is
better than the other person’s Arabic, so it is easier to communicate.
* Some Arabs seem to prefer that they have a language that others don’t
understand so that they can communicate without being understood. I
know people who worked on learning Arabic for business purposes, and
once those in the room/meeting knew the non-Arab spoke Arabic, they
started speaking English.
In terms of speaking Arabic outside of Arab countries, there are negative
connotations associated with Arabs, so I think Arabic-speaking Arabs are
careful not to speak Arabic outside of the Middle East to avoid drawing
attention to, and possible bias against, them.

Family E (Syrian-British Father and Filipino-British Mother Living in the

UK)
“ Our children’s happiness is the first and foremost in our lives. If our children
do not feel comfortable speaking and learning a language, and spending so
much time at the expense of other more important school tasks, we let them
decide for their own career”.

Family F (Norwegian Couple Living in Saudi Arabia)

“Each parent needs to stick to their own native language at home from the
beginning, as young children quickly learn and distinguish between languages.
It is important for the child to be able to communicate effectively with the
extended families on both sides, so perseverance from both parents is necessary
(easily said by us, as we are both Norwegian). This may mean that each parent
also needs to learn the other's language. In our case we only needed to move to
an English school environment to give the children enough exposure.


 73

 Family G (Chinese Couple Living in Saudi Arabia)
“Positively, we traveled frequently to China and negatively, people tend to
communicate with the easiest language they feel they can use to get the message
across, that includes all of us: both parents and kids.

Family H (Japanese Father and Russian Mother Living in Japan)

“ I am afraid youchien would have greater influence on my child. This is giving
me a reason to work more in using materials straight from my home country.
It’s just me now talking to him in Russian. I think I have to double my time and
strategies.”

Impact of Parental Attitudes, Educational Background and Personal Circumstances

The next part of the questionnaire was designed to elicit the parents’ views on
bilingualism and determine the principles that affected their decisions on the kind of
education their children received.

As a parent/ parents, how do you view bilingualism? Is it your desire that

your child / children become bilingual? Why / Why not?

Family A (Japanese Father and American Mother Living in Japan)

“It was my specific goal before the first child was born to raise bilingual
children. My husband and I both view proficiency in extra languages as a
tremendous asset. Communication is power! And it is so very much easier to
learn a language as a young child.

“My husband and I discussed child development a lot even before we were
married. We both believed (and still believe) that anyone can become American
if he speaks English, but to be culturally Japanese he really needs to grow up
here. I know this is a hot topic among foreign mothers—do you WANT your
children to be culturally Japanese?—but I am fine with this, provided they
remain open to many other points of view. If they are equipped with English,
opportunities are limitless.”

Family B (French Father and Japanese Mother Living in Japan)

“Our goal for our children is multilingualism. Globally, English is a necessity.
There’re not enough resources in Japan that could offer a very rich French
experience, so sending them to my home country could be the best option. That
will be done when they finish high school at their own choice. Japanese and

 74

 English are the two important languages for people in Japan. They have to be
proficient in these two languages first, I think. The third language can wait, even
if it is my native language. “

Family C (Japanese and Filipino Fathers and Filipino Mother Living in

Japan)
“We rely much on what the Japanese education could provide our children, but
having relatives that speak other languages, it is so natural and easy for us to
give our children other cultural and language experiences. We are happy that
our children find bilingualism an asset and are not ashamed they have other
cultural backgrounds apart from Japanese.”

Family D (American Couple Living in Saudi Arabia)

“As we are both native English speakers, we generally don’t have a need to
learn another language. Therefore, as parents we did not establish any targets for
our children with regard to learning another language. If interested in learning
another language, we would certainly encourage this interest–as we’ve done
with our first child (learning Japanese as L2). We are preparing him for a
possible position in our Japan office. I think that with learning another
language, you often learn more about the culture of those who are native
speakers of the language. Understanding different cultures and perspectives is
important in today’s global society.”

Family E (Syrian-British Father and Filipino-British Mother Living in the

UK)
“As we have been living here in England more than half of our lives, we don’t
feel any need for our children to master another language. My husband used to
insist that the children acquire Arabic too, but the children’s identity and
perception of their own selves affect the way we choose their educational
experiences now. My son has been keeping so many questions about his own
cultural and religious background, and expresses confusion over his being
Muslim. Their father has stopped giving them Arabic studies. The children feel
that they are fully British, and think they’d live here in the future till the rest of
their lives. They are open to hearing and understanding my native language
Filipino though, but knowing English would be good enough to communicate
with my relatives in the Philippines. They view their father’s native language,
Arabic, as a cultural and religious thing, rather than educational.”


 75

 Family F (Norwegian Couple Living in Saudi Arabia)
“Yes, we have consciously chosen to expose our children to multilingual
environments in order for them to have more options in life. The world is a big
place, and command of several languages allows more freedom”.

Family G (Chinese Couple Living in Saudi Arabia)

“It is another way of brain development, in addition to having an added skill for
competition in the future job market”.

Family H (Japanese Father and Russian Mother Living in Japan)

“It is my culture, so it should be my son’s culture. He has to learn and speak the
languages I speak, especially my native language, Russian. I realized that
knowing many languages is an advantage. I myself can communicate with many
nationalities and may apply and win positions requiring knowledge of
languages. My son should be able to speak my husband’s and my own language,
primarily to communicate and understand us both, and then be able to live in a
country he wishes to be live in the future. He should be able to find happiness
with the languages he learns to speak”.

The reasons why the participants decided to educate their children to be bilingual and
biliterate included cultural, personal, educational and economic reasons, but in all cases,
the parents were striving to offer what they thought were the best opportunities to prepare
their children for the future. As the parents themselves had experienced or realized the
advantages of being multilingual, they were aware of the dangers, sacrifices and joys dual
education could bring.
In some cases, there were personal reasons why the children’s language studies were
discontinued. Trends and incidents influence the way people view certain languages and
judge the speakers of particular languages. The parents’ choices and their reasons given
above are eye openers: we see in them issues that require society’s impartial judgment
and understanding.
Even when they are just teenagers, children seem to have their own direction and
personal choices about the languages they learn and speak. But as parents, how strong are
we in leading our children in their choices? Whatever the language, it is important that
children are fully convinced and informed of the many advantages L1/L2 can have in
their lives.



Acknowledgement
The writer wishes to express her gratitude to the cooperation and help the eight families extended for the
completion of this narrative and investigative report. They shall be the strong force that would guide other
homemakers of the best choices for their children’s future… My sincerest gratitude. J B Homma

 76




Appendix

Call for Monograph Contributions: All grown up: The bilingual adult
The JALT Bilingualism SIG is calling for authors for this year’s monograph. The focus
will be on adults who have been raised bilingually in Japanese and one or more other
languages. We hope to have a broad range of perspectives, including young adults in
university or in the workforce, bilingually raised adults with children of their own, and
the parents of bilingual adults. Below is a list of suggestions and questions that you may
wish to address in your article, but they are just ideas gathered by people currently raising
their children bilingually who want a peek into the future. The suggestions are not meant
to be a prescriptive list by any means.

Questions for parents of children who have been raised bilingually

1. What is your background? Briefly describe your family, the languages you used while
your children were growing up and the languages you use now.

2. Did you have a specific plan for bilingualism from the beginning, for example,
minority language at home or one parent one language, or did you create your path as you
went along?

3. How do you relate to your adult children now? How have the language dynamics
changed? Are you and your children living in the same country now? If you are all in
Japan, for example, and your adult daughter has married a monolingual Japanese man,
how does your family’s minority language fit into your daughter’s life now? Conversely,
if your child married someone from your language background or a person from a totally
different culture altogether, how are you balancing all of the different languages and
cultures? Are you afraid of your child losing his or her minority language and then losing
part of your connection? If this is a concern, how are you dealing with the situation?

4. If your children have children, are they raising them in more than one language? What
is your role, if any, in raising your grandchildren in your language?

5. Many parents of young children worry about their children not being able to
communicate as an adult in either language. What advice would you give to them?


 77

Questions for people who have been raised bilingually

1. What is your background? Briefly describe your family, the languages you use or
used with different family members and your education (Japanese school,
international school, schooling abroad, homeschooling or a combination of these).

2. What are some of your memories of growing up bilingually and biculturally? Did you
ever struggle with your identity as a bilingual person? How have you eventually
come to identify yourself?

3. How has bilingualism affected your choices in career, dating, marriage, nationality,
and country of residence? How do you use your languages now as an adult?

4. How do you relate to your parents now? Are you afraid of losing the connection to
one or both of your parents if you do not use their language daily as you might have
when you were a child at home?

5. If you have children, are you raising them in more than one language? If you plan to
have children in the future, do you hope to raise your children bilingually? Will you
do it the same way you were raised or differently?


 78