Language Policy in Japan: The Challenge of Change

Language Policy in Japan The Challenge of Change

Over the last thirty years, two social developments have occurred that have led to a need for change in language policy in Japan. One is the increase in the number of migrants needing opportunities to learn Japanese as a second language, the other is the influence of electronic technologies on the way Japanese is written. This book looks at the impact of these developments on linguistic behaviour and language management and policy, and at the role of language ideology in the way they have been addressed. Immigrationinduced demographic changes confront long-cherished notions of national monolingualism, and technological advances in electronic text production have led to textual practices with ramifications for script use and for literacy in general. The book will be welcomed by researchers and professionals in language policy and management, and by those working in Japanese Studies. nanette gottlieb is Professor of Japanese Studies in the Japan Program of the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. She has published widely in international journals in the areas of language modernisation, script reform, script policy and the impact of word processing technology in Japan. Her recent publications include Language and Society in Japan (Cambridge, 2005) and Linguistic Stereotyping and Minority Groups in Japan (2006).

Language Policy in Japan The Challenge of Change Nanette Gottlieb The University of Queensland

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107007161 c Nanette Gottlieb 2012  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Gottlieb, Nanette, 1948– Language policy in Japan : the challenge of change / Nanette Gottlieb. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-00716-1 (hardback) 1. Second language acquisition – Japan. 2. Linguistics – Study and teaching – Japan. 3. Language and culture – Japan. 4. Citizenship – Japan. 5. Japan – Languages. 6. Language policy – Japan. 7. Japanese language – Political aspects. I. Title. P57.J3L37 2012 2011033047 306.44 952 – dc23 ISBN 978-1-107-00716-1 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

I dedicate this book to the memory of my dear friend, Kobayashi Y¯oko. ddd ddddddddd

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments 1 Language ideology, planning and policy

page ix xiv 1

2 The language needs of immigrants

33

3 Foreign languages other than English in education and the community

64

4 Technology and language policy change

98

5 National language policy and an internationalising community

123

Conclusion

161

Notes to the text References Index

167 180 205

vii

Preface

This book examines two language issues in Japan today which have arisen from significant developments in the social environment over the last three decades and have pointed to a need for a change in language policy. One is the increase in the number of migrants needing opportunities to learn Japanese as a second language (JSL), the other is the influence of electronic technologies on the way Japanese is written. Immigration-induced demographic changes confront longcherished notions of national monolingualism, and technological advances in electronic text production have led to textual practices with ramifications for script use and for literacy in general. My central concern is to show whether and how language policy authorities in Japan are moving to accommodate these social and cultural changes. Both the integration of immigrants and new practices affecting literacy are important to the social fabric; it is essential, therefore, that expectations about language in these areas are clear and that policy addresses the realities of the present rather than harking back to an earlier social context. In one of these two areas, a national policy already exists; in the other, it does not. In one of these areas, the national policy has been revised to acknowledge change; in the other, no national-level policy has yet been developed. In the area of kanji policy, deeply rooted in Japanese language ideology and important to ethnic mainstream Japanese citizens as it is, the widespread uptake of electronic text production has been viewed as necessitating a revision of the List of Characters for General Use, which has just been expanded to acknowledge that larger numbers of kanji are now routinely used than was the case when writing by hand alone. In the second, more contentious area, that of providing JSL instruction for migrants to Japan at a national rather than local level, no policy currently exists, in large part because such a move goes against deep-seated national language ideologies of monoethnicity and monolingualism. It is only very recently that the national government – in contrast to local governments, which have been active in this area for years – has begun to make sporadic provision for language training in certain clearly defined areas relating to employment. ix

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The main thrust of this book is therefore on the challenge Japan faces in opening up thinking at national government level to encompass the implications for social cohesion of the growing numbers of residents in local communities who need to learn Japanese. Over the past three decades this has developed far beyond the presence of long-established Chinese and Korean ethnic groups, as a result of globalisation-induced labour and other migration from many parts of the world, in particular from other parts of Asia and from South America. The announcement by the government on 30 November 2010 of the Revised List of Characters for General Use shows that national-level language policy can be changed when a need is seen to exist, as I will show in Chapter 4. While local governments and community groups have known for many years that immigrants need opportunities to develop Japanese-language skills which will smooth their lives and enable them to contribute fully to their new communities, however, the national government has only recently begun to acknowledge this and has put together ad hoc policies to meet those needs in certain areas but not across the board. Japan’s intake of foreign labour is small in comparison with other countries but has increased rapidly since the 1980s. The growing proportion of non-Japanese people in the population – many of whom now stay on as permanent residents – means that Japan has in fact become a country of immigration, although this is not acknowledged in national political discourse, with foreign workers being admitted under a range of disparate schemes rather than under a coordinated immigration policy. No political will to address the issue of immigration policy is currently in evidence, despite often vocal privatesector and civil-society advocacy on this account. While the closed-country ‘sakoku’ policy ended long ago, its intellectual and ideological baggage has lingered to a considerable extent in national discourse until quite recently, when the national government began to show signs of responding to evidence of linguistic needs that have been accepted and pragmatically managed at local government level for many years. The language ideologies which govern Japan’s existing language policies (or lack of policy) – the assumptions about language that shape the ways in which language is managed within a society – have come increasingly under challenge as the social fabric of Japan changes in ways not foreseen by earlier generations. An important aim of this book is to explicate the relationship between these two aspects of language in society – immigration and electronic technologies – and existing national language ideologies. Language ideologies shape many aspects of a society’s workings and have a considerable influence on all of its members in one form or another. Education policy for the national language, for example, and other language-in-education policies such as whether and to what extent community or international languages are taught in schools are all important indicators of language ideologies within a given society. It is already clear that in Japan, which has a clearly defined set of existing language

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policies and strongly entrenched ideologies of language, the areas of social change I have singled out have significant implications for the future trajectory of language policy, with the challenge now being to move the first of them from local to national government level in terms of policy development and implementation. There are of course many important language policy issues other than the two I deal with in this book, prominent among them the move to teach English in elementary schools from 2011. While the promotion of English as an International Language in the education system is a major focus of language policy in Japan today, it is not my focus in this book. I mention the emphasis on English only tangentially insofar as it is necessary to establish the parameters for a comparison with the teaching of other languages. That is not in any way to deny its enormous importance in Japan’s array of language policies. What I am interested in, however, is the manner in which provision has been made for the linguistic needs of foreign residents in schools and communities, the push for JSL education to become a national-level undertaking outside schools, the provision for teaching and using other languages which may now properly be considered community languages and policies relating to the provision of multilingual information to non-Japanese residents. I use the example of the kanji policy revision to illustrate that where ideology and changing social environment intersect in a positive manner considered important on a national level, policy change occurs; where the change runs counter to existing language beliefs and practices, it does not, or at least, it takes much longer and is much harder to effect. A society which has resolutely considered itself monolingual for purposes of nation-building rhetoric now has to come to terms with the reality of its own growing multilingualism, with all the signs being that migration-induced multilingualism is here to stay. Increased ethnic diversity has created demand for JSL classes for foreign children in Japanese schools and JSL classes through other means for their parents. In a growing number of areas, street signage now reflects a range of languages used in local communities. It is important to understand how the challenge to notions of national linguistic homogeneity posed by the presence of migrant communities in Japan create new expectations of the state, which itself must develop to meet those expectations through providing host-language learning opportunities for those who need them and through reassessing the teaching through the education system of what have become community languages. To date the provision of language-learning opportunities has been undertaken by local governments and civil society volunteers in the communities in which immigrants settle, but there is now a growing advocacy within the civil sector for the development of relevant language policies at national level. In the long term, this means a reconceptualising both of the place of language in national identity and of the linguistic dimensions of Japanese

xii

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citizenship. It means a rethink of the role of language in nation-building, not this time within the earlier context of building a modern Japan under the one people-one language banner beloved of nation-states but rather within that of providing the linguistic foundations needed for a socially cohesive Japan in a future in which immigration is forecast to increase. The book begins with a chapter on language ideologies and how they play out in Japan today, examining the relationship between language ideologies, language planning and language policy before introducing the two developments which are investigated at length in the rest of the book. Chapter 2 then explores the language needs of immigrants who are struggling to achieve mastery of Japanese and the manner in which those needs are (or are not) being met, focusing in particular on the language needs of school students, adults in general, non-Japanese spouses, foreign nurses and care workers and foreigners caught up in the legal system. In Chapter 3, the discussion moves from the individual needs of immigrants to two other policy-related aspects of language provision in the community relevant to immigration, namely the teaching of community and foreign languages other than English and the provision of multilingual material to immigrants to help them settle into life in Japan. While the latter is well advanced and variously applied, the former remains underdeveloped in the school system, raising the question of whether it would not be to Japan’s benefit to devote greater resources to widening the profile of foreign languages offered to students rather than depending so heavily on English alone. Chapter 4 then highlights the lack of national-level policy action in response to immigrants’ language needs, which are not supported by national language ideology, by discussing the very recent overhaul of a national kanji policy which is strongly supported by such ideology, throwing into relief the central role of language ideology in achieving national action. Kanji are the venerated icons of Japan’s writing system and literacy is judged not just on the ability to read and write but on the ability to read and write characters: reinforcing their position is very much in line with the language ideology discussed in Chapter 1. This chapter discusses prevailing perceptions of declining kanji ability and the perceived role of electronic technologies as a factor in falling standards before going on to examine the recent revision of the kanji policy in response to the influence of such technologies. In the fifth and final chapter, I examine the policy response to date to immigration-related language issues, focusing on language policies instituted at local government level, the evidence so far for the dawning realisation of the importance of language training for immigrants on the part of the national government and the push from elements of civil society for a national law guaranteeing opportunities for such training to immigrants wishing to avail themselves of them. It seems clear that a discursive shift is under way in

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relation to the old ideology that the Japanese language is the exclusive property of the Japanese people, but until the revision (or rather, development) of immigration policy and its attendant responsibilities is undertaken at national level, it is likely to be a very long time before discourse translates into action. The book closes with a conclusion reflecting upon the importance to future social cohesion of not allowing a linguistic underclass of migrants to develop. It is imperative that language policy evolves to reflect contemporary social realities and does not remain fossilised, reflecting circumstances now past. The revision of the kanji policy has shown that government can be responsive (even if slowly) to incontrovertible evidence of change in language practices. It now remains to address the realities of emergent multilingualism in Japan’s communities. Editorial note: Japanese names are given in Japanese order (surname first). Where no page number has been given in a reference, this usually indicates that the document has been read online, unless I am referring to the overall thrust of the source text rather than to a specific piece of information.

Acknowledgments

I am very much indebted to the Australian Research Council for a five-year Australian Professorial Fellowship which has allowed me to work uninterrupted on the research for this book. Along the way I have received valuable input and feedback from a long list of colleagues and friends in Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States which has helped clarify my thinking on aspects of the project and on the writing of the final manuscript and which I gratefully acknowledge. Thanks are also due to the staff of the Tokyo Metropolitan Library and the library of the International House of Japan for their courteous and willing help with sources and, in the case of IH in the latter stages of the project, for providing a congenial environment in which to reflect and write. Most of the research that has gone into this book has been undertaken specifically for that purpose, but a couple of small sections do draw on my 2008 polity study of Japan, ‘Japan: Language Policy and Planning in Transition’, Current Issues in Language Planning 9 (1): 1–68 and are used here with kind permission of the editor. This material has been revised and updated. As always, Hans, Susan and Greg have provided the ongoing understanding, encouragement and support that I have been privileged to receive from them throughout my academic career. They are particularly magnificent as deadlines approach. And finally, essential daily caffeine and warming chat has been provided by the friendly staff of the Espresso Hut, whose contribution to the progress of this book has been greater than they know.

xiv

1

Language ideology, planning and policy

This book examines two important issues in language policy in Japan today: first, and most prominently, increasing migration-induced multilingualism which has ramifications both for providing Japanese-language learning opportunities for migrants and for the use and teaching of languages other than Japanese and English; and second, the influence of electronic technologies such as computers and cell phones on the way in which Japanese is written. These two developments, of course, have occurred in many other countries beside Japan. What makes the Japanese case particularly interesting is that Japan does not yet consider itself to be a country of immigration and hence has only recently shown signs of an awareness of the importance of providing both language teaching and multilingual services for non-Japanese workers, so that what policy development does exist in this area is ad hoc and fragmented rather than centrally planned and coordinated at national level. It also has in place a set of longstanding policies pertaining to the officially sanctioned use of the writing system, policies which were arrived at after a great deal of division and debate, that shape the way in which Japanese and non-Japanese children alike learn to read and write in Japanese schools. In both these cases, official and individual views are strongly informed by language ideologies of various kinds. Any study of a society’s language policy must take into account the ideological context within which language functions because language ideologies always mediate and sometimes directly shape the formulation of such policy. To speak of language policy in Japan in isolation from national ideas about language would be to see only a part of the whole picture. Language ideology plays an important role in discussions of issues pertinent to this study, such as the provision of multilingual services for migrants, the current ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ (multicultural coexistence) policy discourse influencing local communities, the teaching of foreign languages other than English and the prominence of nonstandard orthographic conventions online. The most strongly entrenched and overarching ideology is a lingering belief that Japan is monolingual. In this chapter, I will introduce and discuss several definitions of language ideology put forward by scholars in the field, most of which posit links to 1

2

Language ideology, planning and policy

wider social ideologies. Put simply, language ideology can be described as the defining beliefs about language cherished by a society, or by a particular dominant section of a society, as an encapsulation of all that makes the language in question special and legitimates its use as the dominant language of that society. It refers to what members of a speech community take for granted about the language they use, often without reflecting on the culturally and historically specific genesis of such beliefs and with a strong element of justification for the linguistic status quo when the national language is the focus. Dominant ideas about language thus take on the status of everyday ‘common sense’. The nature of language ideology Language ideologies are commonly linked to political and/or economic themes of power relations. Irvine (1989), for example, arguing the impossibility of understanding the full range of roles played by language in a political economy without coming to grips with cultural systems of ideas, defines linguistic ideology as ‘the cultural (or subcultural) system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests’ (255). Linguistic ideology, she stresses, is a mediating factor, not necessarily a causative factor, between linguistic phenomena and social relationships, sometimes merely rationalising sociolinguistic differences rather than shaping them, but its influence cannot be ignored. Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) and Woolard (1998) also emphasise this point: language ideology is ‘a mediating link between social structures and forms of talk’ (1994: 55), because such ideologies are never about language alone but always extend to wider questions of identity (both group and personal), aesthetics, morality and epistemology, which means that they often underpin fundamental social institutions such as schooling and law, gender relations and child socialisation. In Japan as elsewhere, beliefs about language are foundational to such domains in both the public and private sectors, and they legitimate existing practices. The question of legitimation in language ideology is particularly important, because legitimating the use of a particular language as dominant also functions to legitimate its speakers as dominant. In Japan, the suppression of the Ainu and Okinawan languages in the service of nineteenth-century nation-building illustrates an ideology of linguistic uniformity used to legitimate the banning of minority languages in favour of the language of the dominant majority as a marker of citizenship and identity, a situation which prevailed until the late 1990s. The 1997 Ainu Cultural Promotion Act, which supports the teaching of the Ainu language and other aspects of Ainu culture, ‘can be seen as a cautious step away from official ideologies of Japanese ethnic and cultural homogeneity’ (Morris-Suzuki 2002: 171).

The nature of language ideology

3

As the Ainu example indicates, language ideologies change over time in response to internal and external factors. ‘Like the social makeup of dominant groups themselves, their ideologies are rarely monolithic, nor always stable’ (Gal 1998: 320). Lo Bianco and Slaughter (2009) characterise the continuum of Australia’s shifting language ideology and policy orientations as starting from a comfortably British base and moving through assertively Australian, ambitiously multicultural and energetically Asia-oriented phases to their most recent fundamentally economic incarnation. In the case of Japan, the ideology of monolingualism on which policies were largely based throughout all but the very last years of the twentieth century came to prominence at the beginning of the modern period1 when it was deemed necessary to prove that the Japanese state consisted of one people with one language in order to stave off territorial encroachments by other powers. This ideology has largely endured, and has been prominently on display in two periods of external promotion of the language, one in Japan’s colonies of Taiwan (1895–1945) and Korea (1910–45) and in other occupied territories during the Second World War, and the other in the promotion of Japanese language and culture overseas which began in the 1970s with the establishment of the Japan Foundation for that purpose. Today, however, it is under siege as local and – increasingly – national government policies seek to respond to the undeniable presence of migrants in Japanese communities once considered monoethnic. A speech community, either at the national or subnational level, incorporates many different ways of thinking about language, some of them made explicit, others unstated but nonetheless compelling. The dominant ones function to shape the manner in which language is handled, or managed, within that community. ‘Put simply’, Spolsky (2004: 14) tells us, ‘language ideology is language policy with the manager left out, what people think should be done. Language practices, on the other hand, are what people actually do.’ To Shohamy (2006: xv), language practices are ‘de facto’ language policies. Whether and how language policies affect language practices will depend to a large extent on the degree to which dominant ideologies are made explicit through political means such as the implementation of a particular view through the education system. If children in classrooms across the nation are taught to write in a manner laid down by a particular official script policy, as is the case in Japan, then that particular policy – derived from a consensus on what constitutes appropriate handling of the orthography within that society – can be seen to have a significant influence on this aspect of language practice. This is true not only in the overt domain of language policy but also in the covert, i.e., in the domain of the unstated but nevertheless completely understood expectations which frame the use of language in particular situations and are accepted as the prescriptive norm. When a child is continually guided by its parents as to what constitutes appropriate (or inappropriate) use of language in certain

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Language ideology, planning and policy

contexts, then practice here is informed by policy too, this time covert. Thinking in terms of linguistic ideology permits the integration of these macropolitical and microinteractional levels which might otherwise be considered separate and where ‘the difference is only one of scale in that both reflect and are shaped by the implicit unspoken assumptions encompassed by prevailing linguistic ideologies’ (Gal 1998: 318). Language ideology functions as a powerful mediator of discourse practices. In Japan today, conventions of what language use is appropriate in what situation may seem to be based upon a general consensus as to what makes ‘good’ Japanese. Nevertheless, the rules of ‘good’ Japanese are taught through the classrooms of the nation by teachers working to syllabi based on language policy documents: the script policies and the curriculum guidelines for the teaching of the national language. When parents teach their children how to speak ‘good’ Japanese, they too are passing on what they have been taught, mediated through the same filter of schooling. Ball (2004) provides two examples of ideology operating in Japanese relating to the use of honorifics and of dialect. In a study of dialectal codeswitching involving the Kansai dialect, he analyses its relationship to the ‘uchi’ (ingroup) and ‘soto’ (out-group) dichotomy often used in studies of Japan and notes that metapragmatic rules of use shape how dialect is used and evaluated in conversation. Speakers organize these normative rules according to linguistic ideologies about the roles and functions of language, self and society. These ideologies are reflexive folk distillations of linguistic, interactional and social information into concepts that fit within wider cultural systems of meaning, and must themselves be investigated critically. (357)

The decision to codeswitch between dialect and standard Japanese, he posits, revolves around the basic linguistic ideology that dialect may be used between in-group members but standard language is for out-group members. ‘Uchi’ and ‘soto’ he describes as ‘linguistic ideological primes’ in Japanese culture which function to construct an appearance of a basic underlying unity in that culture. ‘The circulation of linguistic ideological concepts such as this is often mediated by institutional structures at the national or state level. Academia, medicine, the media and politics are all potential domains of ideological reproduction’ (375). Similarly with honorifics: Politeness judgments are the product of a metapragmatic process of evaluation of the efficacy of particular forms in particular situations, calibrated against cultural categorical notions of social hierarchy. Thus, the link from the interaction order to the social order is achieved through linguistic ideological formulations of the use of language and social roles, appropriateness and power. (373)

The nature of language ideology

5

The association between ideologies and specific policies is not always straightforward, given that hidden agendas may lurk behind stated policy rationales; also, different language policies may share a common underlying ideology (Ricento 2000: 2–3). At other times, ideology is easily spotted: a simplistic equation of usage with dogma, for example, enables us to recognise a particular politically oriented language ideology through the use of specific vocabulary or phraseology allocated to particular functions. Of the language used by members of the North Korea-aligned Korean community in Japan for organisational functions in their umbrella organisation Chongryun, for example, Ryang (1997: 109) writes that ‘the reproduction of certain forms of words supports the socially significant group that has used them in the past. In other words, the corpus of organisational orthodoxy is supported by individual utterances that effectively legitimate the organisation and secure the social relationships internal to it.’ Here the ideology informing the language use serves to legitimate more than the organisation and its structures: it legitimates the ways of thinking behind them, imparting the sense that such utterances are no more than ‘common sense’ and represent the ways things should naturally be. ‘Successful ideologies are often thought to render their beliefs natural and self-evident – to identify them with the “common sense” of a society so that nobody could imagine how they might ever be different’ (Eagleton 1991: 58). In just such a manner has the ideology of monolingualism in Japan functioned both overtly and covertly, shoring up the myth of monoethnicity and ignoring the realities of large ethnic communities.2 The national language is assumed in an ‘it goes without saying’ way to be a powerful marker of Japanese citizenship. But national languages, like nations themselves, are as much ideological constructs as given realities (see, e.g., Lee 1996) and when language is pressed into the service of the state the idealised dicta that result serve the ends of that state. To go back to the Ainu example: when it was decreed in 1899 that all Ainu people were Japanese citizens and would henceforth speak only Japanese,3 that decree was largely tangential to the lived realities of individual people but rather functioned to underpin the image of Japan as a nation-state whose borders encompassed the Ainu homeland of Hokkaido. In this context, language as much as geography was made to serve as an indicator of citizenship and as a result the Ainu language came perilously close to extinction before enjoying its current revival of status. Linguistic nationalism assumes the existence of a homogeneous speech community, whose language expresses the spirit of that community (see Heinrich 2007: 126 for discussion). Even in variationist studies of the ethnography of speaking, Gal (1998: 320) reports, the speech community has been defined as ‘the locus of shared evaluations and attitudes towards varieties’, a view which ‘explicitly excluded variation from the realm of . . . ideology’. In

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Language ideology, planning and policy

reality, the speech community in Japan, like any other speech community, is far from homogeneous; rather, it encompasses first-language speakers of indigenous, community and foreign languages as well as first-language speakers of Japanese, with each of these groups displaying its own internal variations and crossovers. For the many second-language speakers of Japanese in Japan, the Japanese language is simply a means to an end rather than an expression of a unifying national spirit. A term used by Coulmas and other sociolinguists with regard to Japan in recent English-language scholarship is ‘language regime’, which has important commonalities – though not total equivalence – with language ideology. Coulmas (2005: 7) defines a language regime as ‘a set of constraints on individual language choices’; those constraints go beyond overt policies to include covert ‘common sense’ expectations as well: Just as we speak of political and social regimes, we can also speak of language regimes. That is, linguistic behaviour is in general controlled by a regime consisting of both explicit elements which have the capacity to be legally binding and implicit, customary elements, just as are all political processes and social relations. (Coulmas 2003: 246)

In other words, unstated expectations about how a particular country’s language should be used, developed over time by a speech community, are just as influential in governing language use within that country’s language regime as any official statutes or policies that may exist, and can carry weight equal to or even greater than such policies in determining aspects of language use. Here ideology is subsumed as one (important) element within the overall language regime. We turn now from the nature of language ideology in general to a more detailed examination of how this plays out in Japan. Language ideology in Japan It is important in discussing language ideology in Japan (or indeed, anywhere else) not to assume that a particular ideology is a uniform cultural given. Rather, as Woolard and Schieffelin (1994: 71) remind us in another context, ‘where casual generalization contrasts English and French linguistic attitudes as if they were uniform cultural attributes inhering at the state and individual level, historical studies show that such apparently characteristic national stances emerge conjuncturally from struggles among competing ideological positions’. There are certain clearly identifiable linguistic ideologies at work in Japan today that fit with this caveat in that they are contested positions not universally approved: in 2006, to give one high-profile example, the proposal to introduce English as a formal part of the curriculum in public elementary schools was not endorsed by then Education Minister Ibuki Bunmei, who shared the conservative view that

Language ideology in Japan

7

elementary schools should concentrate on improving students’ literacy in their own language before introducing a foreign language. Nevertheless, ideologies are significant shapers of and contributors to language planning and language policy. As in so many countries, the overarching general ideology informing language management decisions in Japan has been the desire for social cohesion, which over time has been turned to a variety of political purposes such as nation-building, the bolstering of national confidence in times of stress or war, recovery from war or recession, the harnessing of the education system to meet national goals, and most recently the restating of national identity in the face of the effects of globalisation. The belief that only one language is spoken in Japan, namely the national language, and a nationalist ideology of language, where the language is identified with the people and vice versa, have dominated the modern period. This ideological assumption of monolingualism flows from the overarching assumption that Japan is monoethnic, but this is far from the truth. Ironically, Befu (2009a: 24) points out that at the peak of Japan’s imperial expansion prior to 1945, ‘the “Japan” of that time was probably the most multi-ethnic and multicultural in Japanese history as it included numerous ethnic and racial groups’ in the colonies of Taiwan and Korea, the Kuriles and Micronesia, and yet Japanese political and intellectual discourse continued to stress the homogeneity of Japan’s people and culture, considering the Japanese residing in the home islands to embody the essence of Japan rather than the wider-flung citizenry of the colonial territories who did not speak Japanese or embody other Japanese cultural traits. ‘The essentialised Japan’, Befu comments, ‘is a standardised Japan with uniform characteristics disallowing internal variation. This Japan is largely the making of the national government since the Meiji Period, bent on creating a unified, uniform, and homogeneous nation. This essentialised Japan is an imagined community far from the reality the country presents’ (27). As we have seen, the ideology of national monolingualism has played a significant role as a foundational factor in nation-building, with the languages of minorities at Japan’s southern and northern peripheries (the Okinawans in the south and the Ainu in the north) being suppressed in the late nineteenth century in order to facilitate the myth that all Japanese citizens spoke Japanese as their first (and only) language. Such an assimilationist goal was crucial to defending Japan’s borders against possible encroachment by other powers, so that language and statist ideology came together in a confluence of interests that saw the use of other languages repressed. The ideology of monolingualism, in other words, was explicitly employed to suppress difference and to subordinate minorities by assimilating them linguistically into the category of Japanese citizens. The Japanese language became dominant not through historical accident of place alone but through the deliberate subjugation of other

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Language ideology, planning and policy

languages; although those languages posed no real threat to the predominance of Japanese, so intimate did the ideological link between Japanese language and Japanese citizenship become that it was considered necessary to impose linguistic assimilation on those at the peripheries rather than allow continuing difference. Later, in Japan’s colonies of Taiwan and Korea, a similar ideology prevailed: all subjects of the Emperor were expected to learn to speak the Japanese language. Nothing in the Constitution of Japan today specifies Japanese as the official language of Japan, i.e., Japanese is not an official language in the sense that it is defined as such in the highest legal document of the land, unlike, say, German in Austria, where Article 8 of the Constitution specifies that German is the official language of the Republic without prejudice to the rights provided by federal law for linguistic minorities. Japanese is the de facto rather than the de jure dominant or national language because the majority of citizens speak it as their first language and because it is seen as a defining element in Japanese identity. As such, its legal status, while not enshrined in the Constitution, is unchallenged as the medium for legal documents of all kinds. The authority of the standard language based on the Tokyo dialect is reinforced by the status of Tokyo as the capital, through the education system and by a massive national print and visual media, so that regional dialect use is reserved in the main for private use or for comic purposes in films and television. The only official language legislation in Japan today is the previously mentioned law relating to promotion of the Ainu language, the 1997 Ainu Cultural Promotion Act. To take Japanese citizenship, a certain level of language ability is required, roughly equivalent in terms of writing ability to third grade of elementary school, but this is not to my knowledge specified in any law. Policies relating to language do exist, of course, as do other language control mechanisms: parents instruct their children in what is and is not appropriate language use in particular situations; schools do the same with their students; editors keep a wary eye out for the use of inappropriate language in manuscripts or on television. The view that an idealised ‘Japanese’ is the dominant language of Japan overlooks the fact that the language is not monolithic and unchanging but, like any other language, displays a huge amount of internal variation in terms of pronunciation, dialectal differences and grammatical and lexical usage. Likewise, individuals are not constrained by the circumstances of their birth, occupation or education to use the particular kind of language usually associated with those variables on a continuing basis but rather make use of a wider linguistic repertoire, slipping in and out of other varieties as the circumstances of their daily lives require. Inoue (2006), for example, found that the accepted cultural construct of how women should speak bears little relation to how most women in Japan – particularly those outside Tokyo – actually do speak. Further,

Language ideology in Japan

9

as her fieldwork revealed, women use the delimited parameters of ‘women’s language’ actively and often subversively in a variety of performative ways when it suits them to do so. Likewise, the studies presented in Okamoto and Shibamoto Smith (2004) recognise the shifting patterns of use that characterise the standard everyday fluidity of gender roles and individual linguistic practices, investigating the practices of real speakers within the context of and in relation to overarching linguistic ideologies, i.e., showing what kind of language they actually do use rather than what they may be assumed by the ideological models to use. This leads automatically to the question, then, of how the kind of Japanese which is dominant today became recognised as dominant. Lee (1996) and Yasuda (2000) explicate the roles of linguistic nationalism, language standardisation and linguistic imperialism as factors, with major actors including politicians, bureaucrats, educators and the military driven by a range of motives to ensure that language outcomes served their interests. Decisions about language standardisation, of course, involve a complex web of language, politics and power (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994: 64). There was nothing uncontrived about the manner in which Japan’s language situation was presented in the modern period; rather, it was a carefully orchestrated outcome intended to delineate the contours of the nation, and yet the opposite view remains deeply entrenched, namely that an almost mystic connection binds together Japanese people, language and culture and that this is the natural order of things rather than the outcome of human effort. This view resurfaced volubly after the year 2000 with the debate over the possible adoption of English as a second official language, when opponents of the suggestion fell back on arguments of the same kind as those advanced a century earlier by Meiji Period linguist and educator Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937). Ueda’s most widely cited nationalistic lecture is the 1894 ‘Our Nation and Its Language’, in which he referred to the Japanese language as the spiritual blood binding the nation together and as the identifying mark of the state. Reaffirming this tradition of linguistic nationalism, Nakamura (2002: 113), for example, wrote that ‘Japanese are Japanese because they speak Japanese. The Japanese language expresses both Japan’s culture and the essential nature of the Japanese people.’ Politicians espousing this ideology have often taken steps to ensure that what they see as the ‘real’ Japanese is protected. A tradition of political interference in attempts to introduce language reforms was begun as far back as 1907 and ¯ continued until the 1980s (Okubo 1978: 21). I offer three examples of this here. First, in 1907, an attempt by the Education Ministry’s textbook committee to change the kana used in textbooks from the historical usage then the norm to a more standardised, phonetic usage was derailed when two conservative language protection groups, opposed to this erosion of orthographic tradition and motivated by the belief that the fortunes of the language were closely linked

10

Language ideology, planning and policy

to those of the nation, brought the question before the House of Peers, which requested the Education Minister to revert to historical kana usage. Later, during the years leading up to the Second World War and during the war itself, an especially strong form of this ideology known as ‘kotodama’ espoused by the ultranationalist government prevented any attempts to rationalise the Japanese writing system. ‘Kotodama’ translates loosely as ‘the spirit of the Japanese language’ and the term was used to imply an indissoluble connection between the unique Japanese language and the essence of the Japanese spirit. Kanji in particular, borrowed originally from China, true, but sanctified by many centuries of use in Japan, were seen as sacrosanct, as was historical rather than phonetic kana spelling. With so much tradition attaching to the existing writing system, any attempt to modernise it was viewed with extreme disfavour and attempts at reform were seen as an attack on the national identity of Japan’s citizens. The school system and the press frequently reinforced the link between language and heritage, stressing that using the Japanese language stamped a Japanese person as being an important cog in the ‘kokutai’ (national polity) system. This term was used to refer to a pattern of national unity centred on the Emperor (Mitchell 1976: 20); being part of it meant that the individual Japanese person, speaking the Japanese language, was part of a mystical whole set apart from other peoples and linked back through the ages to the wellsprings of national tradition. And as my final example: following the postwar script reforms which among other things limited the number of characters for everyday official use to 1,850 and were feared by some to be the thin end of the wedge, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politicians played a role in ensuring that kanji were not phased out as a national script by raising questions in the Diet about the validity of the committee process by which the 1946 T¯oy¯o Kanji (Characters for Interim Use) list had been drawn up by the Kokugo Shingikai (National Language Council, 1934–2001), then Japan’s language policy body. Members of the Council who had been opposed to the reforms enlisted the aid of like-minded LDP members to raise questions about them in the Diet and to argue against the idea of state interference with language and script. This resulted in 1966 in the setting up of an LDP committee on language matters, which two years later issued a report which proved instrumental in bringing about the partial reversal of some of the reforms (see Gottlieb 1995, Chapter 5). Belief in the indivisibility of language, culture and nation and in the monoethnicity of Japan remains strong in political circles today: in October 2005, for example, politician Aso Tar¯o, who was then Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications and later became Prime Minister (2008–9), described Japan in a speech he gave at the opening of the Kyushu National Museum as the only country in the world having ‘one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture and one race’ (The Japan Times 2005). In 2007, then Education

Language ideology in Japan

11

Minister Ibuki reinforced the message of monoethnicity when he referred to Japan as ‘an extremely homogeneous nation’, thereby attracting criticism from the United Nations’ special rapporteur on racism (Johnston 2007). From this central belief in monolingualism radiate others which contribute to and are expressions of language ideology. Written language is widely regarded as superior to spoken, for example, largely owing to the continuing emphasis on the nexus between the writing system and tradition, even though that writing system has now been modernised. As Woolard and Schieffelin (1994: 65) remind us, ‘in countries where identity and nationhood are under negotiation, every aspect of language, including its phonological description and forms of graphic representation can be contested . . . thus, orthographic systems cannot be conceptualised simply as reducing speech to writing, but rather they are symbols that carry historical, cultural, and political meanings’. This has been demonstrated over and over again in the case of Japan, where it is widely believed that kanji and the Japanese language are inseparable. Otake (2007), for example, comments that ‘Japan started importing kanji (Chinese characters) as early as before the Asuka Period (592–710), and now uses them in modified forms as the integral core of the Japanese language’ (emphasis mine). Comments like this are far from rare and may be found in many a discussion of the Japanese language by its own speakers. Kanji literacy, although often problematic in the schools, is highly prized, as former Prime Minister Aso found to his cost when he was widely lampooned for his kanji reading mistakes both in the press and in the Diet.4 Given the nature of the three-script Japanese writing system, literacy might be assumed to take several forms – a person who can write in hiragana but not in kanji could write just as much Japanese as someone using kanji, albeit using a phonetic syllabary – but in fact this is not the case because of the primacy of kanji in the script system: literacy is assumed to include proficiency in using characters. Language policy documents help with the designation of literacy here, not in terms of explicit definitions – official definitions of literacy in Japan are surprisingly hard to come by – but rather in terms of practices within the education system. Ministry of Education curriculum guidelines relating to orthography, laid down after the postwar script reforms and redrawn after the 1981 revision of the kanji list, specify that in addition to the hiragana and katakana scripts children will learn the 1,006 Education Kanji (Ky¯oiku Kanji, the list of those most frequently used which account for 90 per cent of the characters used in newspapers) by the end of elementary school and the 1,945 characters on the J¯oy¯o Kanji Hy¯o (List of Characters for General Use) by the end of the nine years of compulsory education. The latest 2010 expansion of the kanji list discussed in Chapter 4 will again change the parameters of literacy expected of the average Japanese person as the curriculum guidelines are rewritten to accommodate the added characters.

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Language ideology, planning and policy

It is useful here to consider a comment by Woolard and Schieffelin (1994: 66) which refers to the relationship between language ideology and literacy: The definition of what is and what is not literacy is always a profoundly political matter. Historical studies of the emergence of schooled literacy and school English show the association between symbolically valued literate traditions and mechanisms of social control . . . Analyses of classroom interaction further demonstrate how implicit expectations about written language shape discriminatory judgments about spoken language and student performance.

They are speaking of English, but the same holds true of Japanese, and this is highly relevant to the second thrust of this book, the challenge posed to implicit expectations of correct script use by the truncated and often creatively contorted orthography of e-mail and other online messages. Given the strong hold of kanji, both implicit and explicit, on the national psyche when it comes to written language, it is not surprising that ‘implicit expectations’ about correct writing shape value judgments about a wider range of issues than ‘incorrect’ kanji usage alone. One final point before we leave the matter of language ideology: contradictory as it may at first seem, the belief in monolingualism also shapes the policies relating to the promotion of the teaching of English, the foreign language promoted by Japan in the nation’s public schools almost – but not quite – to the exclusion of all others. The language ideology underlying language planning and policy formulation in this area is explicitly one of linguistic internationalisation, closely linked with the wider general agendas of internationalisation (kokusaika) and its twin, globalisation. English in Japan is taught specifically and pragmatically as English as an International Language rather than as a foreign or second language which might also offer some benefits domestically. The orientation is external, as spelled out in the report of the Prime Minister’s Commission (2000) which suggested a sharper focus on the teaching of English and floated (to general concern) the suggestion that English might one day become a second official language of Japan: Achieving world-class excellence demands that, in addition to mastering information technology, all Japanese acquire a working knowledge of English – not as simply a foreign language but as the international lingua franca. English in this sense is a prerequisite for obtaining global information, expressing intentions, and sharing values. Of course the Japanese language, our mother tongue, is the basis for perpetuating Japan’s culture and traditions, and study of foreign languages other than English should be actively encouraged. Nevertheless, knowledge of English as the international lingua franca equips one with a key skill for knowing and accessing the world. (my italics)

In the Japanese view, the study of English is a survival skill, a competence to be acquired to assist in communication outside Japan rather than to play any substantial role within it (Torikai 2005: 254), a strategy used to enhance

Ideology and language attitudes

13

internationalisation by allowing Japan to communicate with its international (= English-speaking) economic partners while retaining its own distinct identity. This is a limited ideology of internationalisation, an internationalisation on Japan’s own terms, i.e., it encourages Japanese people to communicate with outsiders in the outsiders’ language without themselves experiencing any intrusion into the comfortably monolingual Japanese-language environment surrounding them, thereby subtly reinforcing a sense of cultural nationalism. The discourse of internationalisation balances this tension between the promotion of English and nationalism while at the same time neglecting domestic diversity in favour of the monolingual, monocultural mainstream ideology (Kubota 2002). Ideology and language attitudes To what extent do language attitudes in Japan exemplify aspects of language ideology? Insofar as such attitudes can be encapsulated through examination of such sources as the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ annual language surveys,5 the major themes may be summed up as follows: r pride in the kanji and in the cultural history and tradition they embody. In the 1998 survey, for instance, in answer to a question about respondents’ perceptions of kanji, almost 73 per cent answered that they believed them to be indispensable for writing Japanese; r a belief in the importance and the value of the Japanese language. In the 2001 survey, in response to a question on this matter, almost 70 per cent of respondents indicated that they valued their language. Reasons (in descending order of frequency) included that the Japanese language ‘is what makes me a Japanese person’; that the Japanese language ‘is Japan’s very culture itself and supports all the rest of the culture’; and, more pragmatically, that ‘Japanese is the only language I can speak.’ Respondents overwhelmingly endorsed the idea that there was such a thing as ‘beautiful Japanese’ (utsukushii nihongo), primarily identified as language that embodied consideration for others. Seven years later, the 2008 survey found an increase (to 76.7 per cent) in respondents indicating they valued their language, with a noticeable increase among younger people. The idea of ‘utsukushii nihongo’ was again strongly endorsed in the same terms; r a lingering belief that the language is uniquely difficult and not accessible to ‘foreigners’, despite evidence to the contrary in the form of large numbers of non-Japanese studying and becoming proficient in the language throughout the world.6 In the 1995 survey, for example, little more than a third of respondents saw value in teaching foreigners to speak Japanese, and the survey’s compilers mused that this was perhaps because of the mistaken assumption that Japanese is difficult for foreigners;

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Language ideology, planning and policy

r a continuing belief that the language is in disarray (midareta), with particular blame for this laid at the door of younger people. Almost 90 per cent of respondents to a question in the survey carried out in the year 2000, for example, reported that they felt the language used by people they encountered in their daily lives or saw on television left something to be desired. The most common reasons given were that people spoke roughly, did not greet others properly, used words that hurt others, used bad language or made mistakes in ‘keigo’ (honorific language). These slips were seen as being most pronounced on the part of middle- and high-school students. As to whether their own language use showed signs of disorder, 75 per cent of respondents admitted that it did; the percentage of such respondents decreased in number according to age group, but even those over sixty returned almost a two-thirds ‘yes’ response. In the 2002 survey, just over 80 per cent reported feeling that the language was ‘midareta’, a percentage repeated in the 2007 survey. A continuing concern, as shown by responses in these and other surveys (e.g., 2004, 2005, 2007), is the perceived misuse of ‘keigo’ and the implications of that for ‘the way the language should be’; r allied to this, concerns about the way certain things are written in nonstandard ways or using non-standard grammatical forms. Attitudes vary as to whether particular non-standard usages constitute evidence of poor Japanese or are simply due to language change. When respondents in the 2001 survey, for instance, were asked their reactions to the not strictly correct use of ‘hana ni mizu o ageru’ rather than ‘hana ni mizu o yaru’ (meaning ‘to water the flowers’), just over half replied that it did not bother them, around 16 per cent considered it an example of ‘kotoba no midare’ (language disorder), approximately the same number thought it was an example of language change rather than of ‘kotoba no midare’ and around 15 per cent accepted it as correct usage. From this, it would seem that although the sense that the language is disordered is still present, attitudes are more flexible than might have been expected, an outcome that the ‘midare’ proponents would no doubt regard as part of the problem; r occasional concern about the continuing influx of ‘gairaigo’ (loanwords from languages other than Chinese), but generally a pragmatic acceptance that most of them are here to stay. Almost 60 per cent of respondents to this question on the 1995 survey said that they did not mind the increase. The following year, however, nearly 90 per cent reported feeling annoyed to varying degrees when they did not understand the meanings of ‘gairaigo’ used in the media. By 1999, those in the over-fifty age brackets were expressing concern because of difficulty in understanding ‘gairaigo’ mixed in with Japanese and because of the possible negative effects on Japan’s language and culture. In 2007, 86 per cent of respondents reported noticing that many words were written in katakana; of these, only 15 per cent thought that was

Ideology and language attitudes

15

a good thing, mainly because they felt loanwords enriched the language. The rest were almost evenly split between those who thought it undesirable (mostly because the loanwords were hard to understand) and those with no strong feeling either way. Many of the beliefs summarised here relate directly to aspects of language ideology discussed in the first part of this chapter: a deeply entrenched belief that kanji are essential to written Japanese and embody Japanese culture; belief in the existence of an idealised Japanese, deviations from which are cause for concern; the ongoing conflation of the Japanese language and Japanese citizenship (something which will inevitably be challenged in the future as increasing numbers of non-Japanese seek citizenship) and, by extension, of national language with national identity; and a continuing underlying belief that Japanese is too difficult a language for non-Japanese to truly master. In relation to the last of these, however, and perhaps not as contradictorily as it might at first seem, to a 1995 survey question about the kind of Japanese they expected non-Japanese people to use nearly 59 per cent responded that as long as the intended meaning got through, mistakes did not concern them and another 24 per cent were ready to accept any kind of Japanese at all from a foreigner. By the time of the survey in question, the number of migrant workers in Japan had greatly increased, so that the question of attitudes to the kind of Japanese used by non-native speakers had become a domestic issue rather than purely external as before, with non-Japanese residents more likely to be encountered in local communities than had previously been the case. Inoue (2008: 484) attributes the fact that post-Second World War surveys of language attitudes consistently report a belief that the language is degenerating to the existence of increasing numbers of older people since Japanese society entered its present period of ‘k¯oreika’ (becoming an ageing society) after 1970.7 Older people often view negatively the differences between their own language and that of younger people. In particular, ‘changes in usage of honorifics in Japanese upset older people, because they are addressed with honorific expressions less frequently’ (487). Surveys and letters to the editor complain from time to time about misuse of honorifics, and bookstores do a thriving trade in ‘keigo’ manuals (see Wetzel 2004). Japan is not alone in this concern with what are perceived as deteriorating language standards, of course: language change often attracts such charges, particularly from older people who often blame poor teaching in schools for what they perceive as a drop in standards (Crystal 1997: 4–5). One area in which the annual language attitude surveys do not bear out the ideas of linguistic purism we might expect given the depth of attachment to the national language relates to the area of loanwords from western languages. As the surveys above show, considerable numbers of respondents react to

16

Language ideology, planning and policy

this phenomenon with equanimity. This is not universally the case, however: complaints about bureaucratic language, in particular the overuse within it of foreign loanwords, led in 2002 to a decision by then Prime Minister Koizumi to request the Education Minister to investigate. A committee was set up to study the matter under the auspices of the Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenky¯ujo (National Institute for Japanese Language) and over the next four years issued four reports recommending the replacement of certain loanwords with Japanese equivalents (for full details, see Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenky¯ujo 2006). Ideology and language planning and policy Language planning, as defined by Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 3), is a body of ideas, laws and regulations (language policy), change rules, beliefs and practices intended to achieve a planned change (or to stop change from happening) in the language use in one or more communities. To put it differently, language planning involves deliberate, although not always overt, future oriented change in systems of language code and/or speaking in a societal context.

While government-instigated initiatives are the most immediately visible, language planning is carried out at sub-national and non-government levels as well with the purpose of in some way modifying linguistic behaviour. Language planning and policy formulation in any country usually proceed on the basis of the dominant ideologies at work in that country. Sometimes such ideologies exist primarily amongst the decision-makers and are imposed on the populace; at other times – as in the case of Japan – they are also present in the populace at large to begin with. Planning and policy are closely linked, the latter being (usually) the outcome of the former and both being informed by ideology. Spolsky (2004: 5) outlines a tripartite structure for the language policy of a speech community: ‘its language practices – the habitual pattern of selecting among the varieties that make up its linguistic repertoire; its language beliefs or ideology – the beliefs about language and language use; and any specific efforts to modify or influence that practice by any kind of language intervention, planning or management’. Practice, ideology and planning: these three work together. They are not, however, all of a piece. As Sonntag (2000: 134), discussing the politics of English in North India, points out, ‘While ideology informs policy, it does not determine it. Policies are contingent, adapted to changing material conditions. Ideologies . . . are more persistent.’ In the case of Japan, while the postwar script policies were determined as a result of specific material conditions, they were strongly informed by the ideas about language I have discussed above. Because Japan is what Fishman (1968) has categorised as an old developing nation, Cluster B in his schematic, one which has for a long time embodied

Ideology and language planning and policy

17

the attributes of both nation and sociocultural identity, it brought to its modern period a longstanding and well-defined literary tradition and a comparatively high rate of literacy (to varying degrees) among the population. Today’s language ideologies are not recently derived but are rooted in this historically evolved strength of attachment to the national language as a marker of both individual and national identity. They have been further reinforced over many years by a highly influential ethnocentric and essentialist literary genre known as ‘nihonjinron’ (theories of what it means to be Japanese), which underpinned much of the government, academic and cultural writing on Japanese society during the postwar period. ‘Nihonjinron’ heavily stressed the equivalence of Japanese language with Japanese identity, at the same time portraying the Japanese language as somehow different from all other languages (i.e., going far beyond the obvious surface differences) and insisting on Japan’s linguistic homogeneity. The influence of this genre was at its height in the 1980s and 1990s. Although other views of Japan have arisen to challenge its philosophy, such ideas are not easily displaced. Echoes (not very distant ones) can be seen in today’s language policies, such as in the belief that English for Japanese people is for externally oriented use and that literacy must take a certain carefully prescribed form. Language planning results in what Coulmas (2005: 3) refers to as ‘administered language’: language that is learned deliberately through instruction . . . the result of purposeful intervention in the course of language development by way of responding to changing communication requirements. The, as it were, visible hand of language administration takes the form of schooling, literacy education, terminology creation, and other measures of corpus planning.

This conflates both language planning and language policy: while it is language planning that sets up the outcomes, it is usually policy that delivers them. The easiest way to identify language policy, at least in its overt manifestations, is to look for the existence of official policy documents,8 and these Japan has in abundance: those relating to the national language as used within Japan were arrived at through the work of the National Language Council (NLC) and those relating to the promotion of the Ainu and English languages were developed under the auspices of various ministries (see Gottlieb 2008). Overt language policy in Japan, that which has been explicit and planned and widely discussed as such, has always been ideologically marked. A good example of this is the process by which the current national script policies and the standard language policy were developed. The script policies were an attempt to retain the best of the past while at the same time rationalising the orthography to meet the demands of a modernised Japan; they were motivated by at times conflicting ideologies of democratisation and modernisation

18

Language ideology, planning and policy

combined with a desire to protect a longstanding cultural tradition. The choice of a standard language arose out of the desire to shape the national language into an instrument for communication and control as a plank in constructing Japan’s modern identity and in particular its linguistic identity. More recently, the 2003 policy on the increased promotion of English9 took as its point of departure a belief in the national need to learn English as a language of international communication which would allow the views of Japanese people to be heard outside Japan to a greater extent in a knowledge-based environment where information and communication were paramount. At the same time, the policy also sought improvement in Japanese people’s ability to use their own language as well, thus combining ideologies of both internationalism and nationalism in the one policy. Overt policies do not always impinge on the consciousness of the public. When it comes to public recognition of the current official policy on character use, the Agency of Cultural Affairs’ 2006 annual survey on language attitudes turned up a surprising result: only just over half of respondents indicated that they knew of the existence of the List of Characters for General Use which has anchored Japan’s official script policies since 1981. Given that this list forms the basis for teaching of characters in schools, this illustrates the marginal extent to which the general population can be aware of the existence of formal language policy documents even when they are daily exposed to their effects. Quizzed further on this topic, only about 40 per cent of respondents who had indicated awareness of the policy, most of them older people, replied that they paid any overt attention to it in their ordinary daily writing practices, ignoring the fact that it has shaped their education. Such a finding puts paid to the occasionally voiced complaint that language policy constrains language use among those to whom it is applied. This was in fact an argument used during the 1960s battles over script policy, when opponents of policies restricting the numbers of characters in use framed such policies as an attack on the freedom of speech guaranteed by the 1946 Constitution. In practice, however, in Japan, language policies relating to script are binding only on the government itself in its publications and in the education system; the List of Characters for General Use states that it is intended as a ‘guide’ and not a ‘limit’, and the closest most people get to the policy itself is the fact that it directs what characters are taught in schools. Overt policies are at work in the private sector as well as in government, but here the ideology is that of profit optimisation through internationalisation when business is the instigator. Business in general often plays an important role in formulating language policy of various kinds (Kaplan and Baldauf 1997: 12). Multinational corporations have adopted language policies for their employees based on overt, pragmatic assessments of the value of bilingualism in Japanese and English to the organisation, providing employees with in-house

Ideology and language planning and policy

19

English-language lessons and, increasingly, requiring advanced proficiency for particular levels of appointment. Companies and local governments are now using performance on English tests such as the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) as a criterion for both employment and promotion (Torikai 2005: 253). Employees at IBM Japan seeking promotion to section chief require a minimum score of 600 points (usable business English) on the TOEIC test; Assistant General Manager positions require a score of at least 730 (able to communicate in any situation) (Gottlieb 2008: 55). Internet shopping company Rakuten announced in 2010 that from 2012 it will adopt English as its official in-house language, while electronics giant Sharp did the same for one of its research and development groups from April 2011. Major media organisations also have language policies restricting the use of words likely to cause offence to particular groups of people because of something deemed discriminatory in their nature which has in the past led to embarrassing public retaliation by protesters (see Gottlieb 2006). Ideology also informs covert language policies, those which are not explicit and have no policy documentation but may be widely entrenched in the public mind: Schiffman (1996: 13) categorises these as ‘implicit, informal, unstated, de facto, grass-roots, latent’, what actually happens on the ground as opposed to the ‘explicit, formalized, de jure, codified, manifest’ overt policies. An example is the somewhat stereotypical portrait of assumptions and expectations about women’s language found in the work of Ide Sachiko and challenged by other scholars such as End¯o (1997, 2006), Inoue (2006) and Okamoto and Shibamoto Smith (2004). Other examples of covert understandings include the old and persistent belief that the Japanese language is too difficult for foreigners to understand, which has a direct bearing on the national government’s lack of particular interest to date in providing state-sponsored Japanese-language classes for foreign workers and residents (coupled, of course, with the cost of such an undertaking). The equally widespread conviction that Japanese people are somehow congenitally bad at learning foreign languages lurks in the background of both the current very strong push for improved English teaching and the general lack of interest in teaching other foreign languages in the school system. Pennycook’s words, taken from a general discussion, are helpful in summing up the major themes of language ideology, language policy and language planning as they exist and intersect in Japan today: First, language policies need to be understood in their complexity: language policies both in the past and the present are interlinked with many other social, cultural, economic and political concerns. Second, they need to be understood contextually: unless we look at how language policies relate to the particular configurations of each context, we will not be able to understand why they have been constructed in particular ways and what the possible implications may be. Third, we need to understand the complicity and

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Language ideology, planning and policy

complementarity of language policies, by which I mean the ways in which apparently competing or oppositional policies may nevertheless on another level be complementary with each other and complicit with the larger forms of cultural and political control. And finally, the effects of language policy in the past have a powerful continuity with the present in terms of the ways in which they construct particular views of language. (2000: 50)

As the preceding discussion has shown, Japan’s current language policies10 are indeed linked with a wide range of non-linguistic issues. The script policies flowed from specific educational concerns as well as those of wider national literacy and were supported in their development by the print mass media in the private sector, to whom limits on the numbers of characters being taught in schools meant efficiencies of operation (in the pre-computer days) and increased readership (see Gottlieb 1995). The policy on the promotion of Ainu culture and language came as a result of political pressures from activists newly empowered by international support, while the post-1987 increased promotion of English stemmed both from concern over Japan’s poor performance in the international TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) rankings and the desire to have Japanese voices more widely heard on the international stage. Corporate policies on English-language proficiency are linked to profits; media policies on discriminatory language have resulted from the activism of marginalised groups. In every case, context has shaped content, and it is easy to find examples of complicity and complementarity, particularly in the earlier discussed argument that Japan’s policies promoting the teaching of English as an International Language are as much about cultural nationalism as they are about internationalisation. There is certainly no lack of continuity between the overarching cultural construction of language, in this case written language, shown in earlier twentieth-century kanji policies and 2010’s latest version of those lists. Katsuragi (2005) argues, rightly in my view, that Japan would best be served in the future by an overarching policy framework within which its separate language policies could nest. Given that the policies are informed by the prevailing language ideologies, the next step would be to construct an inclusive hierarchy which would account for all aspects of the national government’s language policy activities, including those relating to the national language, Ainu, English and the teaching of other foreign languages. The policy framework Katsuragi envisages rests on a form of cultural nationalism which he sees as valuing social order and integration above freedom of choice and diversity. In language policy terms, this requires a balancing act: members of minority groups are expected to master the national language, while at the same time respect is accorded to local languages and dialects. This pluralistic view of the nation’s languages departs from the eradication of minority cultures and identities which has characterised the nation-building nationalism described earlier in this chapter and

Immigration

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assists minority groups to maintain their own languages while at the same time learning the national language. While recognising that this will take some time to achieve in Japan, Katsuragi suggests a way to proceed: For now, what we need to do is what we have been doing with regard to environmental issues, that is, cultivate a national consciousness of language ethics, and formulate a policy framework for language. It will thus become possible to deal with language problems not in an emotional or ideological way, but in pragmatic terms paying due attention to financial sustainability. The goal will be to move away from an ideological national language policy to a well-balanced language policy framework. (2005: 53)

Ideology’s grasp, as Katsuragi implies, has to date prevented the development of his envisioned well-balanced language policy framework. One of the areas in which this is most clearly the case relates to the ideology of national monolingualism in schools which has resulted in the piecemeal, improvised, reactive rather than proactive provision of Japanese as a Second Language (JSL) classes for non-Japanese children in public schools and in the wider community for their parents. Society is changing, however, and Coulmas and Heinrich (2005) list elements of language ideology which are now being called into question: Among the many aspects of Japan’s language regime, which was functionally well-suited for modern industrial society and a catching-up economy, but which is loosing [sic] its relevance in the emerging postmodern knowledge society, are the presumed identity of state, people and language; the exclusive status and the comprehensive functional range of the national language; the linguistic standard of right and false keyed to an ideal written norm; and the assumption of discrete language systems. (1)

The current language regime, as I will show in this book, is beginning to change. Monolingualism in a globalising world is becoming increasingly irrelevant. It is no longer the case that Japan can take for granted either the presumed oneness of state, people and language or the exclusive status of the national language. Nor can the signs that linguistic behaviour does not conform to an ideal written norm, particularly in the area of electronic technologies, be ignored. I argue in this book that language ideology as expressed in official language policy (or lack of it) faces challenges in Japan from recent social developments, specifically increased immigration with its consequences for local communities and the development of electronic communication technologies which have spawned inventive new uses of the orthography. We move now to the first and most prominent of these, immigration. Immigration Japan today exemplifies Appadurai’s nation-state grappling with the realities of retaining control over its population in the face of multiple subnational and transnational movements and organisations (1996: 189):

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Language ideology, planning and policy

The isomorphism of people, territory, and legitimate sovereignty that constitutes the normative charter of the modern nation-state is itself under threat from the forms of circulation of people characteristic of the contemporary world. It is now widely conceded that human motion is definitive of social life more often than it is exceptional in our contemporary world. Work, both of the most sophisticated intellectual sort and of the most humble proletarian sort, drives people to migrate, often more than once in their lifetimes. (191)

Immigration, though still small in comparison with other countries, has increased significantly since the 1980s (see Chapter 2). Two waves of economic immigrants have contributed to this: those designated ‘newcomers’ who came during the bubble economy of the 1980s to do the unskilled jobs spurned by Japanese11 and those who arrived after the 1990 revision of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act which allowed unskilled workers descended from earlier Japanese migrants to South American countries (nikkeijin) to enter Japan to work (Nagy 2008: 36–7). At the end of 2008, the population included over 2 million registered foreigners, who include large numbers of Korean and Chinese ‘oldcomers’ and account as yet for only 1.75 per cent of the total population (Ministry of Justice 2009b).12 However, Japan’s birth rate, for many years a source of concern, dropped in 2004 to a record low. This and the consequent demand for labour met by ‘newcomer’ immigrants have led to a dramatic reshaping of many nation-states into formal or de facto multicultural and multilingual societies (Guiraudon and Joppke 2001), with Japan now among them. If immigration numbers continue to rise, as Japan’s Third Basic Plan for Immigration Control (2005) indicates will happen, the demographic mix will change markedly over time: a United Nations population projection scenario posits that Japan would need 17 million net immigrants up to the year 2050 to keep the population at its 2005 level; by 2050, these immigrants and their descendants would comprise nearly a fifth of the total population (United Nations Population Division 2001). Such scenarios are of course mere projections, open to modification by any number of emerging factors, not least Japan’s reluctance to loosen up its immigration policy. Nevertheless, signs of non-transient population growth have already emerged. Many of the ‘nikkei’ workers from Brazil and Peru who entered Japan in the 1990s intending to stay only a couple of years were unable to support themselves when they returned to their home countries because of adverse economic conditions there and so returned to Japan on a permanent basis; Immigration Bureau figures show that the number of ‘general permanent residents’ from Peru and Brazil (and other countries) increased sharply and steadily between 2000 and 2004 (Tezuka 2005: 51–2), and jumped markedly in 2006 and 2007 (Ministry of Justice 2009b). In 2008, Shoji observed that ‘Japanese people now have virtually everyday contact with foreigners and foreign languages, a situation that could not even have been imagined in the 1970s . . . Increasingly contacts with foreigners and

Immigration

23

their languages are, step by step, diminishing peoples’ mental barriers, which are heavily loaded by language consciousness’ (Shoji 2008: 109, 110). Sugimoto (2009: 1) confirms this: ‘at the beginning of the 21st century, the nation has observed a dramatic shift in its characterisation from a unique and homogeneous society to one of domestic diversity, class differentiation and other multidimensional forms’. Several factors have combined to foster the idea that Japan is now a multiethnic society, giving rise to what he calls the ‘ethnic turn’ in the way Japanese culture is defined. This current preoccupation with diversity is reflected in the academic literature. In addition to work on longstanding ethnic communities such as the Ainu, Koreans and other groups, a significant amount of research by both Japanese and non-Japanese scholars interrogating the circumstances and ramifications of the post-1980 growth in migration in Japan has appeared over the last fifteen or more years,13 with some researchers concentrating on particular communities.14 This demographic shift, however, has not been without its problems in terms of integration: In summary, starting with the economic boom of the 1980s, Japan started to become a multicultural and multilingual society, in spite of the fact that the Japanese government never envisaged such a transformation. There are numerous problems ensuing from governmental attitudes to migration to Japan. The ‘hidden internationalization’ of Japanese society that is taking place results in a lack of support and specific policies towards foreign workers. Such a lack is detrimental to the aim of integrating them into Japanese society. (Shikama 2008: 58)

Regardless of the increasing presence of foreign residents, at national government level Japan does not yet see itself as a country of immigration. Although the many popular and academic books published on the subject use the term ‘imin’ (immigrant) liberally in their titles and discussions, government documents and surveys show a continuing preference for the word ‘gaikokujin’ (foreigner) instead (Shikama 2008: 52, Befu 2009b). Tegtmeyer Pak (2000: 56) comments that the term ‘ij¯u r¯od¯osha’ (migrant worker) used in the names of several nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) supporting such workers represents ‘radical’ language, ‘because the Japanese-language terms for migrant and immigration are typically not used’, an omission she attributes to the fact that the national government’s choice of rhetoric ‘signals a commitment to a homogeneous Japanese nation in which immigration and the presence of migrants are inconceivable’, while the NGOs’ strategic use of the term highlights their belief that Japan has already become a country of immigration and attempts to reframe the terms of debate in this particular political issue. A notable exception to the prevailing trend has been the National Museum of Ethnology’s 2004 exhibition on multiethnic Japan, which in its English documentation made free use of the word ‘immigrants’;15 this, however, was largely the exception that proves the rule. Despite the significant contributions made by migrant labour

24

Language ideology, planning and policy

to the economy, Japan has been said to lack belief in the benefits offered by immigration (Sassen 1998: 55), and government rhetoric tends to bear this out. Outside national government circles, the private sector – which, like local government, is more closely involved with foreign residents’ day-to-day lives than the national government – has recently begun to recognise and advocate for the language training needs of foreign workers. ‘Immigration’, Coulmas (2007: 120) writes, ‘is one of the variables that must be reckoned with as Japan grapples with population decline and a changing international environment’, and over the last few years it has begun to be promoted within the twin contexts of declining birth rate and economic globalisation in statements by leading groups such as the Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Japan Business Federation. Increasingly, immigration is being framed as serving not only the needs of the immigrants themselves but those of Japan as a whole, in terms of its potential to reinvigorate and enhance the fabric of Japanese society. Language needs, an important contributing factor to this goal, have recently begun to figure in certain private sector documents. When considering language policy, we must bear in mind that ‘explicitly designated language policies are not the same as policies that concern languages . . . almost all policies can have some bearing on languages’ (Moore 2000: 26). Because language weaves through and supports a society’s workings in intimate and essential ways, employment policies, economic policies, social policies, cultural policies and many others hinge on language-related issues, even when ideas about language are coded as hidden assumptions rather than explicitly mentioned. In such cases, mention of language is often more likely to be explicit in the initial discussion documents aimed at achieving specific and (in some cases) measurable outcomes. A good example of this is the 2004 document Gaikokujin Ukeire Mondai ni kansuru Teigen (Recommendations for Accepting Non-Japanese Workers) put out by the Japan Business Federation, which recommended in several of its proposals that Japanese-language education be more widely provided for non-Japanese workers and students and stressed the importance of Japanese-language education in arriving at a comprehensive overall policy for the acceptance of such workers. A recommendation of this kind from so influential a body indicates the private sector’s substantial recognition of the role of immigrant workers in Japan’s economic and social fabric. The vocabulary of diversity The discourse of multiculturalism in Japan is largely subsumed under two main terms. The first, ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ (variously translated as inward, internal, local-level or domestic internationalisation), was coined by Hatsuse Ry¯uhei in the mid-1980s to refer to ‘the subtle global influences which were altering everyday life, values, and the nature of Japanese “civil society”’, among them

The vocabulary of diversity

25

the presence of migrants, and has since been taken up by the media and the government (Morris-Suzuki 1998: 194). It differentiates the term ‘kokusaika’ (internationalisation) from its other meaning, that of outward-oriented cultural and other exchange (known also as ‘sotonaru kokusaika’). Kanagawa Prefecture, for instance, inaugurated a programme by this name in the early 1990s to deal with the increase in the number of its foreign residents (Han 2004: 45). A series of policies adopted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government during the second half of the 1990s which aimed at developing an open society where foreign and Japanese residents coexisted smoothly also underlined the fact that ‘kokusaika’, one of the buzzwords of the late 1980s, no longer referred to externally oriented international activities alone but now included those which targeted people of other nationalities living in Japan itself (Backhaus 2004: 39). Domestic internationalisation of this kind is defined as ‘policies planned and instituted by local governments that are promoting a more inclusive society’ (Nagy 2008: 43, n23). The last two and a half decades, then, have seen a shift from outward-looking internationalisation to ‘uchinaru kokusaika’. Menju (2003) shows how this happened at the local level: following a 1989 directive from the Ministry of Home Affairs16 aimed at promoting regional international exchange, many prefectures and cities set up local international associations to host cultural exchange events and affiliate with sister cities. The financial downturn of the mid-1990s forced local governments to cut budget allocations for such purposes, resulting in a reformulation of international activities. Whereas in the past their international associations had often hosted visitors and study visits from other countries, the focus now turned inward as increasing numbers of foreign residents in local communities brought internationalisation closer to home, with concomitant needs and challenges. The international has now become internal to the local area in many parts of Japan. Local rather than national government is thought to be the appropriate arena for this kind of internationalisation, since local governments ‘are closer to grass-roots democracy and thus able to avoid the negative associations of the nation-state’ (Tegtmeyer Pak 2003: 250). The term ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ is therefore largely used to refer to local internationalisation programmes which provide support to foreign residents in the area and which invite such residents to showcase their cultures. The use of the phrase in Asahi Shimbun articles grew steadily from 1986 to 1999. The second term, ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ (multicultural coexistence), first appeared in Kawasaki City in the early 1990s and began to spread after the 1995 HanshinAwaji earthquake in Kobe. The earthquake has been seen as pivotal in altering the relationship between ethnic Japanese and foreign residents in the city as activists and volunteers tried to work out how best to help non-Japanese survivors in the aftermath of the quake; the term first began to appear in the titles of Kobe Shimbun articles after 1995 (Takezawa 2008: 32–3, 39). Searching

26

Language ideology, planning and policy

the database of the Asahi Shimbun, a major national newspaper, I found that while the term appeared in headlines only sixty-eight times between 1996 and mid-2009 on a slowly increasing cline, it appeared in the body of a much larger number of articles (804) over the same period, with the addition of another three articles relating to Kawasaki City before the earthquake, in 1993 and 1994, thus confirming that the year of the earthquake was indeed the starting point for public discussion of multicultural coexistence across Japan. The related term ‘ky¯osei shakai’ (society of coexistence) is referred to by Willis and Murphy-Shigematsu (2008: 310) as a ‘bellwether phrase’, i.e., a usage which indicates things to come, in this case an acceptance of coexistence on a continuing basis which many scholars regard as an essential prerequisite for the long-term future of Japan. ‘Surviving in the twenty-first century . . . ’, Befu (2008: xxv) argues, ‘demands invention of a new modus vivendi, often called ky¯osei, through a radical modification of the habitus of homogeneity’. ‘Ky¯osei shakai’ is not as specific as the more narrowly focused ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ and covers a greater variety of types of coexistence and inclusion: of the articles with this term in their headlines in the Asahi Shimbun in 1999, for example, two referred to gender, two to disability, one to pets and one to intergenerational coexistence; only one article spread a very wide net and included foreign residents within the groups it named. Outside the media, ‘tabunka ky¯osei’, with its emphasis on inclusion and diversity, has become a significant keyword widely used by scholars, the media and increasingly by government, even at the national level, replacing the previously ubiquitous ‘ibunka’ (literally, ‘different cultures’).17 The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIAC), for example, established a study group on the promotion of ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ in 2005 with the intention of fostering policies for multicultural coexistence in local districts, following this a year later with a Chiiki ni okeru Tabunka Ky¯osei Suishin Puran (Plan for Promoting Multicultural Coexistence in Local Communities) on which local governments have drawn to create their own policies. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)18 has funded grant applications aimed at improving aspects of ‘tabunka ky¯osei’.19 Other ministries using the phrase include the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the Ministry of Justice and the Cabinet Secretariat (in particular in a major 2006 report, Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin (Foreigners as Residents), produced jointly by officials from a range of ministries). A search of the Japanese government’s E-Gov portal using the keyword ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ in October 2010 brought up 4,136 hits linking to documents from a wide range of ministries, local government, university and other webpages, while a search of the minutes of the Diet the same month found thirty-seven instances of the use of the term in both Houses, beginning with one instance each in 2004 and 2005 and rising gradually over the following years to nine in 2008 and thirteen

The vocabulary of diversity

27

by mid-2009, the latter largely due to the minutes of a committee set up by the House of Councillors in 2007 to investigate the declining birth rate, ageing population and ‘ky¯osei’ society.20 Instances also abound at the local-government level both in documents and in the names of sections, organisations and networks, with a Google search on the term ‘tabunka ky¯osei sentaa’ (multicultural coexistence centre), also in October 2010, bringing up well over 15,000 hits. This term is thus now widely embedded in both official and private discourse. MIAC defines ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ as a state wherein ‘people of different nationalities and ethnicities live together as members of their local society, recognising each others’ cultural differences and striving to build relationships of equality’ (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2006b). Toyama Prefecture adopts MIAC’s definition in its own documents,21 as does Ibaraki, but the Shizuoka Prefectural Government’s Council for the Promotion of Multicultural Coexistence, established in 2006, in implementing the recommendations of the MIAC report referred to above, defined it more pragmatically in its documentation as ‘Japanese and foreign residents living together respecting and understanding each other and overcoming the barriers of language and culture’ (Shizuoka Prefecture Office of Multicultural Affairs 2007). Other prefectures have adopted their own definitions arising from this common base.22 Although ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ is regularly translated as ‘multiculturalism’, some scholars and commentators regard it as differing from the conception of multiculturalism in other countries. Iguchi Yasushi, an expert member of the Cabinet Office’s Council on Regulatory Reform and advisor to the Council of Cities with High Concentrations of Foreign Residents (CCHCFR),23 for example, sees no direct link between Japan’s ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ and multiculturalism in Canada or Australia (Iguchi 2008), regarding it instead as a typically Japanese grassroots idea fostered by local experience after the 1995 earthquake and more recently by the activities of the CCHCFR. Chapman (2006: 100), on the other hand, identifies similarities between Japan’s recent multiculturalist discourse and that of other countries, notably Australia, arguing that the failure of the discourse of assimilation as a means of social control has necessitated a new discourse to take its place: ‘The discourse of tabunka ky¯osei in Japan has much in common with the ways in which other nation-states attempt to manage diversity by the strategic inclusion of difference . . . A tabunka ky¯osei Japan may be preoccupied with homogeneity and the containment of identity to prevent the feared destruction of social cohesion.’ In this view, the communities to be included in harmonious coexistence are stereotyped just as much as is the mainstream host society, and the tensions arising from difference are smoothed over. To digress for a moment: Chapman further argues that the discourse on ‘ky¯osei’, with its emphasis on harmonious coexistence between disparate groups, has nevertheless been carried on within the framework of a belief

28

Language ideology, planning and policy

in an ethnically homogeneous national identity. In similar vein, Yamanaka (2008: 26) views the emphasis in recent government and other reports on the importance of Japanese-language education for foreign workers as a marker of unreconstructed national ideologies of homogeneity, underlining as it does the importance of cultural assimilation. A 2006 Ministry of Justice proposal24 discussing the line to be adopted when admitting foreign workers in the future suggested that ‘nikkeijin’, many of whom do not speak Japanese, should be required to reach a certain level of proficiency in Japanese and to have certain special skills in employment if they wish to stay in the country long-term. For Yamanaka: The ‘carrot and stick’ approach to induce Nikkeijin to assimilate appears here to exemplify a strictly nationalist model intended to maintain the narrow nation-state ideology that embraces ethnic homogeneity . . . Such discourses appear to be geared toward achieving the major goal of the nation-state, that is, to homogenize people of diverse backgrounds and integrate them into a single unified nation by eliminating cultural differences among foreigners and between foreigners and Japanese.

This is not, however, a view supported by Tegtmeyer Pak (2003: 250), who notes that she chose to use the term ‘incorporation programs’ to refer to the international migration-related activities of the local governments with whom she undertook her fieldwork because ‘incorporation is distinct from assimilation: local governments are not engaged in a process of Japanization’. Tightening up on the skill-base requirement and requiring such workers to achieve a certain level of proficiency in Japanese hardly equates to eliminating cultural differences between foreigners and Japanese. Rather, it recognises the likelihood that ‘nikkeijin’ workers are likely to remain a regular part of the landscape and seeks to regulate the conditions under which they stay longterm. Cultural differences are not easily eliminated, even by wartime fiat, as experience showed in Japan’s colonies and occupied territories when the prevailing policy was to turn occupants of those areas into subjects of the Emperor. It is overstating the case to claim that requiring a particular category of foreign workers to acquire certain skills, linguistic and otherwise, amounts to an attempt to recast those workers as Japanese, regardless of their shared heritage. Unless ‘nikkeijin’ eventually take out citizenship, they will never be Japanese but will always be South Americans living in Japan, increasingly with permanent residence.25 To dismiss the suggestion of language requirements as narrow nationalism is too temptingly easy. Rather, it should be seen as the positive step forward that it is, attempting to bring some rigour to an aspect of immigration policy seen to have failed in its original intent.26 Regardless of what one’s view of the motivation behind such proposals may be, it is difficult to argue against the substance of such advocacy: proficiency in the language of their employers and the host community in which they live can only be a

Writing practices

29

good thing for foreign workers, and facilitates not only smoother employment relations and practices but also more harmonious experience of the living environment they have chosen to enter. While it may still be largely true that foreigners in Japan ‘by providing an oppositional contrast . . . help construct and perpetuate an imagined Japanese self-identity’ (Creighton 1997: 212) and therefore represent universal Otherness, it is harder to Other a foreign neighbour if that neighbour speaks to you and shares information about him/herself in your own language. Old (and tired) arguments about rigid Othering dichotomies tend not to hold up in any but the abstract sense: they seem not to recognise the porosity and inherent instability of such barriers in the context of actual interpersonal contact. Coming back to the vocabulary of diversity, it is clear that the discursive acknowledgment of multiculturalism in the policy arena has been under way for some time. But is ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ really only what Morris-Suzuki (2002: 171) describes as ‘cosmetic multiculturalism’, i.e., ‘a vision of national identity in which diversity is celebrated, but only under certain tightly circumscribed conditions’ that do not require deep structural changes in the way people live but pertain only to the superficial recognition of cultural difference? Or does it signal a more profound willingness to engage with diversity at the everyday level of street, workplace and school life and to seek ways of overcoming those problems that might lead to friction? Analysis of local practice by government and volunteers would suggest the latter. In the following chapter I will explore how this translates into practice. Japan is no longer (and really never was) the homogeneous, static society of the national imaginary. Rather, Appadurai’s warp and woof scenario (1990: 7) constitutes the everyday reality for most local communities, wherein the warp of stability is comprehensively entwined with the woof of human motion, i.e., both domestic and international migrants. Befu (2008: xxiv) maintains that this reality does not stop legal and bureaucratic actors in the Japanese naturalisation process from acting according to what he calls, with a nod to Bourdieu, ‘the habitus of homogeneity’, i.e., ‘a set disposition to act and react toward foreigners on the assumption that Japan is supposed to be a homogeneous nation’.27 Nevertheless, such actors are whistling in the wind. The change is already here, as is recognised in local communities across Japan as well as increasingly at national level.28 Writing practices The second test for language policy, while not as pressing as that of emergent multilingualism, comes in the form of new writing practices mediated by technology. The ease with which any number of characters can be called up from a computer’s memory and the propensity to use kana rather than characters in text

30

Language ideology, planning and policy

messaging or emailing by cell phone, for example, mean that challenges to the hegemony of the existing policy on characters, predicated upon handwriting, have now emerged. The concept of writing has changed since the advent of electronic character processing in the 1980s to include technology-mediated forms of text production (see Gottlieb 2000). Whereas postwar script policy recommended as the basis for literacy a list of 1,850 (later revised to 1,945) characters for general use because writing by hand imposed burdens on the memory given the size of the character set, today that is no longer as important: software memories contain many thousands of characters, available to users at the touch of a button. The List of Characters for General Use no longer necessarily represents practice for the large numbers of people who produce text on computers or who use cell phone messaging and e-mails and/or the Internet to communicate. Different surveys have shown a marked increase in the proportion of characters in computer-produced rather than handwritten texts, the reappearance of characters left off the official list because they were considered too difficult to write by hand, a marked lessening of the ability to write characters by hand and a widespread tendency to abbreviate characters in online chat and text messaging, including the highly specialised and ludic ‘gyarumoji’ (gal script) which manipulates characters in ways that may defy interpretation by the uninitiated. The National Language Council, before its demise in 2001, was cautious in responding to these developments. Policy deliberations during the 1990s concentrated on rationalising the shapes of those characters used in computers which were not on the list and did not address the broader issue of whether the number of characters on the list should be expanded with the majority to be taught for recognition only, as has been occasionally suggested. The 2005 report of the NLC’s successor, the Kokugo Bunkakai (Subdivision on National Language of the Committee for Cultural Affairs), however, acknowledged the realities of the situation and announced that it would embark on a thorough reappraisal of existing policy on characters, which has since resulted in the decision to increase the size of the character list from 30 November 2010, specifically in response to the influence of information technology on writing. This is a timely move, given that the proportion of Japan’s population who grew up in the period when handwriting was the norm is rapidly ageing; even someone born at the beginning of the word processing boom in 1980 would be thirty now, with subsequent generations never having known a time when electronic character input and output were not possible. Script policy ties in with the wider concept of the nature of literacy in Japan today. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Japan has no official definition of literacy; achievement levels in reading are partly judged by the degree of script acquisition (Tamaoka 1996). The usual assertion is that Japan has a

Conclusion

31

99.9 per cent literacy rate, a claim which could only approach reality if based on the fallback phonetic kana syllabary rather than on functional literacy in characters and which ignores those parts of the population whose existence makes it clear that the real figure is quite different, such as people with learning difficulties and non-Japanese residents. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, surveys and research studies have repeatedly shown that university students have not reached the levels of literacy expected at the end of high school, i.e., they cannot reproduce or even recognise all the Characters for General Use. The literacy debate also subsumes the link between literacy and citizenship for migrants: given that access to written language – and thus to information – is a key factor in a citizen’s full participation in society, the nature of the Japanese writing system and the time it takes migrants to master it may play a role in determining categories of citizenship (Galan 2005). In June 2005, the government enacted a Law to Promote the Culture of the Written Word meant to ‘improve the language capacities of Japanese people’ by promoting written culture through assistance to libraries, publishers and schools. Written culture in the twenty-first century, however, includes a technology-mediated aspect: high rates of accessing the Internet by cell phone and text messaging make Japan distinctive in the transnational arena (Ito, Okabe and Matsuda 2005). Cheap messaging available through I-mode29 means that e-mail rather than talk is the major use for those phones in Japan, which leads the world in the use of the mobile Internet. This is contributing to a type of language use not envisaged by those who drew up the current script policies. Not only is the language used in messaging more often free of the formality of other written text, as in other countries, in Japan it has the added dimension of variations in script use: greater use of the kana script, for example, where characters would normally be used. It is clear that policy has not constrained usage in contemporary writing practices, and the recent expansion of the List of Characters for General Use reflects a pragmatic response on the part of the national government while maintaining the centrality of characters to the writing system and in language ideology. Conclusion Language policies are products of their times, based on particular decisions that dovetail with assumptions as to what a desired outcome will be. They should not be allowed to become fixed in amber but need to be revised to reflect contemporary realities. Policy may not always change in response to circumstances if ideology is strong enough to prevent clear-eyed recognition of those circumstances, but the nexus between society and policy is strong. As Ager (2003: 13) reminds us in the context of a discussion of Britain and language, discussion of issues such as identity and nationalism

32

Language ideology, planning and policy

often takes us apparently far from language behaviour; it is our contention that without an appropriate understanding of the nature of the society which uses the language, any attempt to understand language behaviour, and particularly language planning and policy, must be incomplete. One cannot remove the ‘socio’ from ‘sociolinguistics’, and nor can one remove the ‘planning’ from ‘language planning’. Even less can one begin to understand language policy without realising that it is indeed a policy, and like any other policy, is closely connected with social conditions, with social structures and processes, with the environmental background to decisions, and particularly with politics, political parties, their aims and ideologies.

The remainder of this book will deal with important social and linguistic issues having a bearing on language policy in Japan today. The following chapter investigates the language needs of particular groups of migrant workers. No matter what the national context may be, successful multicultural coexistence depends in large part on the ability to communicate in a common language. For harmonious relationships to exist between members of two fundamentally different groups living in the same area, smooth communication is vital. In the case of Japan, the presence of multilingual communities, many of whose members are now in Japan for the long rather than the short haul, clearly constitutes a challenge to longstanding notions of national homogeneity. It is simply no longer possible to dismiss as a passing phase the contribution of nonJapanese residents to the nation’s economy and cultural fabric. What, then, are the language expectations involved, from both sides? And to what extent is something being done about those expectations through language policies and practices in government offices and schools (in the case of the state) and in the private sector and the community at large?

2

The language needs of immigrants

The ideology of monolingualism can prove enduringly resistant to change, regardless of what new practices might be introduced. Australia adopted official national policies on multiculturalism in the 1970s, and yet in a study of that country’s language potential, Clyne (2005) stresses the disparity between what he calls Australia’s ‘monolingual mindset’ at policy and institutional level and the on-the-ground multilingual reality of Australia’s communities. The same is true of Japan, which is at a much earlier stage in the process: leaving aside the notable exception of the promotion of English, other policies and practices remain largely predicated on the ideological assumption that Japan is a monolingual nation, although there are signs that this is beginning to change. The following discussion will examine the linguistic needs of immigrants and their relationship to existing ideologies and policies. When prominent Japanese journalist and political commentator Funabashi Y¯oichi wrote in a 2001 essay entitled ‘Japan’s Moment of Truth’ that ‘new lines of debate are forming around the politics of Japanese identity’, he summarised astutely the issues surrounding Japan’s current demographics. ‘This debate’, he continued, ‘takes the form of a clash between two visions of Japan’s future: a more open, multilingual and multiracial Japan versus a homogenous, monolingual and mono-ethnic one.’ As we saw in Chapter 1, immigration, for so long a reluctant response to the demands of an ageing population and a low birth rate, is now a fact of life in Japan and is increasingly being recognised as such in both official and private sector discourse across the country. A report on Japan’s future goals published in the year 2000 spoke encouragingly of immigration’s potential to contribute to Japan’s wellbeing and even suggested that Japan begin work on an ‘imin seisaku’ (migration policy) (Nij¯uisseiki Nihon no K¯os¯o Kondankai 2000). The use of the word ‘imin’ (migrant) here, Morris-Suzuki (2002: 169) points out, is significant because the more commonly used terminology of ‘shutsuny¯ukoku kanri seisaku’ (policy controlling entry and exit from Japan) refers more to border control than to any real acknowledgment of the existence and needs of migrants as people. For English speakers, migration within the English-speaking world does not present the problem of having to learn another language. In Australia, for 33

34

The language needs of immigrants

example, many immigrants come from other countries such as the United Kingdom and New Zealand where English is spoken and have chosen to migrate to a country where language will not present a problem for them. In the case of Japan, however, the fact that Japanese is not an international language like English and is little spoken outside Japan itself means that the majority of newcomers do not have the advantage of already being able to speak the language, making the provision of JSL classes a key social issue as immigration continues to grow. This reality, while clearly understood at local level as evidenced by the manifold programmes instituted to deal with it, is not yet seen by policy-makers at the national level as sufficiently serious to warrant the provision of a national scheme for teaching Japanese to immigrants. The linguistic consequences of immigration for foreign residents can be farreaching in terms of both employment and personal life, whether individual or family. Those consequences also have ramifications for the host society, in terms of delivery of services and social cohesion. As Maher and Nakayama (2003: 136) comment, ‘the old framework of discourse and common knowledge about what constitutes “a Japanese community” has radically shifted’. This chapter will explore the language needs of immigrants who are struggling to achieve mastery of Japanese and the manner in which those needs are (or are not) being met. We begin with a look at who the foreign residents are. Japan’s registered foreign population, as we saw in Chapter 1, has been steadily increasing for nearly three decades as a result of globalisation-induced population flows. The number of such residents more than doubled between the beginning of labour migration in 1984 and 2004, the number of foreigners entering Japan for employment purposes continuing to grow despite the fact that in the early 1990s Japan entered what turned out to be a prolonged period of economic stagnation (Coulmas 2007: 116, 117). On the receiving side, many small to midsize businesses in Japan have come to depend on foreign labour for their activities. On the supply side, many countries in the Asia-Pacific region from which substantial numbers of migrants originate have come to depend on contributions from their expatriate populations to shore up their economies, and the salary differentials between Japan and such countries make Japan an attractive destination (Douglass and Roberts 2003a). Of the over 2 million registered foreign residents in Japan at the end of 2008, the largest numbers were from China, Korea, Brazil, the Philippines and Peru, with a total of 190 countries represented. The decade from 1997 to 2007 saw large increases in the numbers from Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and India. Almost one-fifth of foreign residents live in Tokyo, with concentrations also in Aichi Prefecture, Osaka and Kanagawa Prefecture (Ministry of Justice 2008b). Added to the numbers of registered foreign residents are over 100,000 known visa overstayers (fuh¯o zanry¯usha), most of them from Korea, China and the Philippines, in

The language needs of immigrants

35

addition to an unknown number of unregistered others who may have entered the country illegally. These figures for registered foreign residents do not account for newcomer migrants alone but also include longstanding ‘oldcomer’ ethnic communities such as the Korean and Chinese communities, many of whom are third- or fourth-generation long-term residents. As ethnic Koreans (zainichi kankokujin) hold special permanent resident status,1 they are routinely included in the ‘foreign resident’ figures.2 Of the registered foreign residents accounted for in the Ministry of Justice figures, around 40 per cent are permanent residents, roughly evenly divided between the ‘special permanent resident’ (tokubetsu eij¯usha) category and the ‘general permanent resident’ (ippan eij¯usha) category. The ministry figures give no information on ethnicity within these visa categories, but Chen (2008: 44) indicates that one third of the general permanent residents are Chinese while the special permanent residents are mainly Korean. Most foreign residents in Japan are there to work; the number of foreign spouses, many of whom are in the workforce too, is also increasing. As well, a large number of students study at Japan’s universities and colleges. The majority of international students come from Asia, overwhelmingly from China. Of the almost 124,000 foreign students in Japanese tertiary education institutions in 2008, the top five countries of origin in descending order were China (c. 60 per cent), Republic of Korea (c. 15 per cent), Taiwan (c. 4 per cent), Vietnam (c. 3 per cent) and Malaysia (c. 2 per cent) (JASSO 2009). Many seek leave to work while studying in Japan and are sometimes exploited by unscrupulous employers. Particularly notable is the already mentioned large group of migrants of Japanese descent (nikkeijin) from Brazil and to a lesser extent Peru and other South American countries who flocked to Japan in search of work following the 1990 revision of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act which eased entry requirements for this group in order to meet the labour force requirements of Japanese industry, effectively permitting a select category of migrants to work as unskilled workers in a country where the entry of unskilled migrant labour is in theory not permitted. The argument that ‘nikkeijin’ would integrate into Japanese society more easily because they were of Japanese descent proved hollow, as ‘the experience of migration revealed . . . that the nikkeijin rarely understood Japanese and that they did not differ substantially from other foreigners residing in Japan . . . Because of nikkeijin migration, Japaneselanguage classes, multilingual information and support systems for foreign residents had to be established around the mid-1980s’ (Shikama 2008: 53). Ironically, then, it was to meet the linguistic needs of those assumed not to need language instruction that language services first had to be established, thus turning the preconceived ideology equating language with ethnicity on its head.3

36

The language needs of immigrants

Chiiki Nihongo Ky¯oiku (regional Japanese-language education, hereafter CNK) has thus been carried on since the 1980s so that immigrants in local communities can learn Japanese as a second language (JSL). Hsu (2009), in an article focusing on non-commercial JSL volunteer groups, argues that unlike the JSL education offered in schools and universities, CNK is not solely about language acquisition but also functions as a site of intercultural interaction, of internationalisation on the ground where Japanese citizens interact with foreign residents to help them learn the language, so that it can be characterised as a social movement with the potential to change society. Earlier and more traditionally taught forms of JSL/JFL education carried on in Japan have by and large been externally oriented, i.e., for people from outside Japan, mainly international students and business people, or have been carried on in other countries as part of a move to spread knowledge of the Japanese language. CNK is different in that it is domestically oriented: it is meant not for short-term visitors or for students but for those now living inside Japanese communities who do not know the official language of their new host country. It is, in short, a key component of ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ of local origin and implementation. While the arrival of ‘nikkei’ residents may have provided the impetus for CNK, the linguistic consequences of migration of course have since spread far beyond this particular group to manifest themselves in a number of differing areas of need. In this chapter I have chosen to concentrate on the language needs of school students, adults in general, non-Japanese spouses, foreign nurses and care workers and foreigners caught up in the legal system, because these exemplify some of the issues currently being worked out. There are, of course, many other areas where language needs cause concern, and my omission of them in this discussion in no way downgrades their importance. Immigrant students in Japanese schools Although Oga and Abe (2009: 90) contend that Japan has only a short history of JSL education, in fact the history of JSL teaching stretches back to the teaching of Japanese in the colonies of Taiwan and Korea, in Okinawa and Hokkaido, and later in the occupied territories during the Second World War (see Gottlieb 1995). In schools within Japan itself, however, little attention was paid to this until the early 1990s influx of ‘nikkei’ workers4 led to a concomitant sharp rise in the number of non-Japanese children attending Japanese schools.5 As accompanying children or children born in Japan to these and other migrants began to appear in schools, MEXT instituted the practice of issuing annual reports on the number of children needing Japanese-language instruction from 1991 onwards and since that time has had to develop measures to deal with such students. The number of children reported in the annual surveys has been steadily increasing each year. In reality, the numbers had been growing since

Immigrant students in Japanese schools

37

the early 1980s, making it fortunate that the surge following the revision of the immigration law prompted action to recognise this on the part of the ministry. Non-Japanese children, if they are not Japanese citizens, are under no legal obligation to attend Japanese schools, but many municipalities do provide multilingual information on their websites making it clear that this option is available and advising parents of the procedures to be followed if they wish to do so. Kawasaki City, for example, sends out a letter to registered foreign residents (in Chinese, English, Korean, Portuguese or Spanish) advising that their child has now reached the appropriate age for school attendance and enclosing a school application form. Assistance with filling out the form is available (Kawasaki Board of Education 2010). Refugees or others who have had their education disrupted in some way or who want to enter school in a grade lower than their year level, normally because of insufficient proficiency in Japanese, are advised to consult the district board of education or the head of their local school (H¯oritsu Fujo Ky¯okai 2004: 151).6 To give some figures for the sake of perspective: MEXT statistics for the number of students in Japanese public schools ‘needing instruction in JSL’7 as of September 2008 show a total of 28,575 students enrolled in 6,212 schools, an increase of 12.5 per cent over the previous year in terms of student numbers and 5.7 per cent in school numbers. Of these, the majority (19,504) are in elementary schools, with smaller cohorts in middle schools (7,576) and high schools (1,365); each category showed an increase. Small numbers of students are also enrolled in secondary schools (six-year high schools) and special education schools (MEXT 2009b). Kanno (2008: 13) observes that these figures do not represent the full picture regarding students in need of JSL assistance: students not in public schools are not included, nor are students who have already been put into ordinary classes but have not achieved the degree of academic language proficiency required for their level. Shoji (2008: 106) also queries the reliability of the figures, noting that the percentage of children with Korean as their first language does not correspond to the proportion of Korean speakers in Japan, since many young newcomer Koreans do not yet have children. Interestingly, 4,895 students deemed to need help with language hold Japanese citizenship, an almost 12 per cent increase on the previous year, indicating the reality that citizenship in Japan is becoming porous and is no longer as firmly tied to the Japanese language as language ideology would have it. This neatly illustrates Befu’s point that who the Japanese are varies ‘in accordance with innumerable and variegated experiences in changing historical circumstances’ (2009a: 21); the foundational concept of what a Japanese citizen is, is itself beginning to change. The MEXT survey showed that in 2008 approximately 87 per cent of primaryschool students, 81 per cent of middle-school students and 77 per cent of

38

The language needs of immigrants

high-school students deemed in need of JSL education actually received it (an average of 85 per cent across all school levels). These students speak a wide variety of first languages. Portuguese (c. 40 per cent), Chinese (c. 20 per cent) and Spanish (c. 12.7 per cent) accounted between them for over 70 per cent; next most common, with much smaller percentages, were Tagalog, Korean, Vietnamese and English. The most common first language at elementary-school level is Portuguese, at just over 45 per cent, followed by Chinese at 14 per cent; at middle school, the representation of Portuguese is roughly equal to that of Chinese; but at high school, Chinese and Portuguese have almost reversed their elementary-school proportions, with Chinese at nearly 47 per cent while Portuguese drops to under 12 per cent. Spanish and Tagalog remain fairly consistent across all three levels, as does Korean (which increases slightly for high school). Other languages return much smaller figures. The majority of students are thinly spread throughout the system: almost half the schools had only one JSL student, almost 80 per cent had less than five. At the other end of the scale, over 20 per cent of schools had more than thirty students, depending on their location, i.e., whether they were found in areas where foreign workers are concentrated (a small number of primary and middle schools reported over fifty such students). In keeping with the overall general increase in foreign students, school locations showed a wider geographical spread than the previous year. Tokyo and Osaka both had high numbers of JSL students; Aichi Prefecture topped the list at 5,844 students, followed by Kanagawa, Chiba, Saitama and Mie Prefectures, i.e., the students are concentrated in the broad swathe between Tokyo and Osaka where their parents are employed in industry. By far the most common first language found in Aichi, Shizuoka, Gifu and Mie Prefectures is Portuguese; in Osaka and Tokyo, it is Chinese. Tokyo, along with Kanagawa and Aichi Prefectures, has the biggest concentration of speakers of what are categorised as ‘other languages’. The involvement of MEXT in supporting JSL activities in schools tends to focus on infrastructure and administrative issues, although the ministry did complete a JSL curriculum in 2007 (Kawakami 2008). The document reporting the student figures above also gives a breakdown of the policies in place at both prefectural and municipal level to assist with these students. Both levels engage in all ten listed activities to some extent, but there are some areas where levelspecific differences are clear. For elementary and middle schools, the municipal figures show that the top three support activities (in terms of numbers of schools) are the provision of advisors who can speak the students’ first language, the setting up of school entry and education advisory services and issuing guides to entering school.8 At prefectural level, the most common activity is the training of classroom teachers to deal with non-Japanese-speaking children in their classrooms. For high schools, at municipal level it is setting up school entry

Immigrant students in Japanese schools

39

and education advisory services; at prefectural level, it is despatching advisors who can speak the students’ first language, closely followed by school entry and education advisory services. The needs, then, are spread across all levels of the school system to varying degrees and apply to a linguistically and ethnically diverse body of students. The nature of the JSL education provided in public schools, however, is patchy at best. Without a recognised tradition of multilingualism and without the teaching resources needed in terms of staff and materials, Japan has had to find its own way here, and while some progress has been made, much remains to be done. There are no specialist Japanese-language teachers in schools, no teachertraining courses for JSL teachers at universities, no government-endorsed scales for measuring the Japanese-language proficiency of JSL students and no overarching language educational policy which takes into account the needs of both JSL and native Japanese students (Kawakami 2008; Kanno 2008: 15). It is up to each local Board of Education to decide what to offer its non-Japanese students in the way of support, and those schools which do make substantial provision for such students often have to rely on a considerable degree of community support. The situation is exacerbated by the complexity of the Japanese writing system. The difficulties of foreign children in school learning are not helped by their difficulties in learning to read and understand written Japanese: while the language of everyday life is acquired relatively quickly over a year or two, the knowledge of academic language of the kind needed to read textbooks and listen to classroom talks requires much longer, in the order of five to ten years (Okazaki 2004), so that extra work needs to be put into ensuring that they acquire these skills. The involvement of MEXT to date is not always seen as favourably as the ministry might wish. Kawakami (2008) acknowledges that MEXT has begun to institute some JSL-related policies in response to two strong submissions from MIAC seven years apart, the most recent in 2003, requesting that more positive steps be taken to help non-Japanese-speaking students attend Japanese schools. Such policies, however, are limited to providing financial assistance for JSL curriculum developments and running seminars to educate teachers working with JSL students in their classrooms. Although the national government considers these policies to be sufficient, Kawakami argues, they fall far short of what is needed, which is nothing less than a national policy on the education of children whose first language is not Japanese. As long as the government’s policies focus on the control of foreign residents as alien visitors in Japan rather than as local residents with contributions to make, this will not change. Even the much vaunted post-2006 ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ initiatives do not represent a giant leap forward into the future, in his view, but are merely the first step on the way to building a Japan for the twenty-first century. Tempting though it may be to salute ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ activities as

40

The language needs of immigrants

signalling an end to the ideology of homogeneity, Kawakami’s more realistic approach is hard to refute, and in an appearance before an Upper House committee of the Diet in 2008 he argued the case for fostering the training of specialist JSL teachers in Japan in the same way as ESL teachers are trained in Australia. Clearly, location (and therefore demand) makes a difference in the provision of JSL services. Oga and Abe (2009), reporting on their survey of in-service teachers in Sapporo, Hokkaido, found that while MEXT’s 2008–9 academicyear policies on support for foreign students are implemented in regions such as Aichi, Shizuoka and Kanagawa Prefectures and Tokyo where many immigrant families live, there is no sense of urgency in other parts of Japan with fewer such families about the educational needs of JSL students, and many schools and teachers do not have the training or resources to put into operation an effective JSL programme. As yet, for example, no specific teaching qualification is required for JSL in Japan, and the many academic institutions offering JSL teaching courses are aimed at teaching adult learners,9 resulting in a disconnect between teacher training in general and JSL teacher training. None of the teachers they interviewed had any specialist knowledge of JSL education, even those designated as ‘Japanese-language instructors’. The JSL classes themselves were taught by local volunteers, who concentrated on basic conversation and teaching the writing system. The ‘Japanese-language instructor’ teachers, on the other hand, worked in tandem with mainstream teachers in classrooms where they concentrated on helping JSL students achieve smooth relationships with the others in those classes rather than understanding better the work being covered. In areas with larger numbers of foreign residents, the situation is different. Some schools have produced their own multilingual teaching materials to help immigrant children. To give one example, the board of education in Ota City in Gunma Prefecture, where live many Brazilian immigrants working in the automobile industry, published for the Portuguese-speaking students in primary schools there10 supplementary readers in Portuguese which translate material from the third- to sixth-grade social studies texts containing Japanese terms students find hard to understand (The Daily Yomiuri 2006). This city is often mentioned in the literature for its excellent track record in meeting the needs of its non-Japanese students: in 1991, it instituted JSL classes in elementary schools, employing assistants who could speak the students’ first language, and three years later it applied for and was granted the status of ‘special district for the education of foreign children and students for permanent residence’ as part of a structural reform which enabled the city to employ certified teachers from Brazil to join the teaching team looking after such children. This special status, which is believed to have led to an increase in the number of non-Japanese children going on to local high schools where previously their Japanese-language

Night schools

41

abilities were insufficient to allow this, became available to schools across the country in 2006 (The Japan Forum 2006).11 Other sources of JSL teaching material are also available. The Center for Multilingual Multicultural Education and Research (CEMMER) at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS), for instance, which was established in 2006 with the aim of contributing in a meaningful way through teaching, research and social engagement to the resolution of problems encountered in Japan’s increasingly multilingual and multicultural society, provides free downloadable teaching materials on its website in Portuguese and Tagalog. Their reason for doing so is elaborated on the website: If students can not understand Japanese, then they would not be able to understand what is taught in class, either. Such students have a high tendency of refusing to go to school or even to be enrolled in school, and for this reason, they often can not enter senior high school. As a result, many of them end up committing crimes after failing to find a decent job. At the Center, we are working on the elaboration of educational materials to assist such children in learning. (CEMMER 2009)

Materials currently available include units on the first three years of kanji (a total of 200) and on simple mathematical operations such as multiplication and division. The website text acknowledges that creative volunteer JSL teachers devise many of their own teaching materials but laments that these are rarely made available to other people; the CEMMER teaching materials are therefore meant to be shared by anyone able to download them for use in teaching non-Japanese children. Night schools A second, often overlooked area of public education where JSL learners of disparate ages, ethnicities, backgrounds and social statuses come together in a classroom setting is the evening middle school or ‘night school’. These schools were initiated in 1947 to cater for people who in one way or another fell between the cracks of Japan’s mainstream education system, to enable them to finish their period of compulsory education and perhaps proceed to further education. Over the intervening years they have evolved to cater for a diverse clientele.12 Japanese students may be there because they have a history of attendance problems with regular schools, because they have dropped out of other schools at some stage and wish to resume their education and/or because they have problems with literacy. Non-Japanese students are often there to learn the language: a study by Harada (2003), for instance, found that in 2002 almost 70 per cent of the students in such schools were non-Japanese who were there specifically for that purpose. At the 2009 graduation of one such school in Edogawa Ward, Tokyo, twenty-six of the twenty-nine graduates were

42

The language needs of immigrants

foreign residents, who expressed their gratitude for the opportunity the school had given them to learn to speak Japanese and thereby improve their social networks. Given the increasing number of such residents, there has for some time been a two-track curriculum available at the school, one for native speakers of Japanese and one for JSL students (Shinmura 2009). The website of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Board of Education13 offers information about evening middle schools, namely that there are eight such schools in Tokyo (five of them offering a JSL stream), that they are for people who were not able to complete their period of compulsory education at other schools, and that enrolment is open to anyone who meets three simple criteria: they are age fifteen or older, have not graduated from primary school or middle school and live or work in Tokyo. The language of the webpage is uncomplicated, and hiragana versions of each heading and each sentence are appended for those who might have difficulty with kanji. An English version is also given. The Osaka Prefectural Board of Education provides similar information in a little more detail, with the exception of the English translation, though it is not until users click one level down to the enrolment guide14 that they reach the simpler Japanese, providing a user-friendly interface for prospective students who may lack kanji skills either because they are Japanese students whose education has been interrupted or non-Japanese who have not yet learned to read standard Japanese. Municipal boards of education provide statistics on evening middle-school enrolments: in Tokyo in 2009, for example, there were eight such schools with an enrolment of 324 students (Tokyo Metropolitan Government Board of Education 2009). Current statistics for national enrolment numbers proved remarkably hard to find through any official source of such statistics; this may be because ‘night junior high schools are not officially recognized by the national authorities, because the education laws define junior high school as a day-time institution’ (Maehira 1994: 336). Nonetheless, in 2002, Harada reported (perhaps by aggregating municipal totals) that across Japan there were 3,031 such students from a total of thirty-four countries, the top three groups being Chinese, ethnic Koreans and Japanese. In Tokyo, students came from a wide range of countries and 40 per cent were under the age of thirty; in Osaka, on the other hand, students were more likely to be ethnic Korean and older. Among the people seeking to learn Japanese by this means in Harada’s study were some repatriated from China who had missed out on formal education as children and young migrants whose education had become a casualty of repeatedly moving between their own country and Japan. For financial, agerelated and ability-related reasons, the night school was their only avenue for learning Japanese, and for some their main aim in being there was not to complete the normal middle-school curriculum offered by the schools but to learn sufficient Japanese to enable them to join the workforce. Some schools

Language education for adults

43

surveyed offered special JSL streams. At the school in her Tokyo-based study, Harada identified the differences in curriculum between three different groups. In addition to other subjects, the older learners group studied Japanese for ten forty-minute periods a week and English for only one; the younger learners group did five periods of Japanese and three of English; and the ‘Nihongo A’ JSL group took fifteen periods of Japanese and none of English. Japanese classes were traditional teacher-centred classes with little interaction; there was also little interaction between Japanese and non-Japanese students outside the classroom. All teachers were of course qualified, but JSL is not yet a curriculum subject in the teacher training courses. Although the teachers Harada observed worked hard to teach themselves how to teach JSL, the need for both specialist JSL teachers and a clear JSL curriculum in schools where over 70 per cent of the student body is not Japanese is undeniable. The schools discussed above are part of Japan’s formal nine years of compulsory education. In addition, evening courses which are not part of the compulsory education system are also offered at high schools. Non-Japanese students new to Japan who wish to attend public high schools have a difficult time passing the entrance examinations because of limited language skills and often opt to apply for the less well patronised evening high-school courses: in Tokyo, around 30 per cent of such students attend evening courses (The Daily Yomiuri 2007). Not all night school experiences are characterised by the lack of communication among ethnic groups reported by Harada. In 2006, for example, at a ceremony to mark ten years of evening classes in JSL at a high school in Ichioka, Osaka which had been started in 1996 with the express aim of helping foreign residents working during the day to learn Japanese at night, past students spoke with pleasure of the positive interaction of cultures they had experienced in classes taught by volunteers. In 2005, 135 volunteers had turned out to teach Japanese to 179 people from 29 different countries (Yomiuri Shimbun 2006a). Language education for adults Outside the schools, students’ parents face their own problems with language. Many ‘nikkei’ workers, for example, on arrival settle into communities of other ‘nikkei’ where they speak their own language, patronising ‘nikkei’-run businesses for many of their daily needs and often not developing their Japanese to the level needed for their employment as they are comfortably insulated linguistically from the communities around them. A 2003 survey of personnel managers at contract companies (the major employers of ‘nikkei’ workers) found that although such companies prefer the ‘nikkei’ workers on their books to be able to speak Japanese, less than 10 per cent of new arrivals were able to do so. One company surveyed reported that it would hire those unable to speak

44

The language needs of immigrants

Japanese if interpreters and compatriot workers were able to provide communication assistance; an important reason why ‘nikkei’ workers are concentrated into indirect employment (for contract companies) is precisely the availability of such interpreters in those companies (Watanabe 2005: 83, 97). This is the reality for many ‘nikkei’ workers in Japan, flying in the face of the expectation that workers of Japanese descent would integrate more easily into Japanese society because they were already likely to be familiar with the language when they arrived. Many second and third generation ‘nikkei’ had not kept up their heritage language and arrived in Japan no better off linguistically than someone from, say, China. In fact, a Chinese worker would have the advantage of familiarity with characters sufficient to allow for a reasonable guess at the meaning of a document despite the differences in the two languages; a South American has no such advantage. For those adults who do wish to learn Japanese, the local community is the usual source of classes, given that there is no national JSL-for-migrants scheme. Often this is done through a local government’s international association (either municipal or prefectural). In K¯ochi Prefecture in Shikoku, for example, the K¯ochi International Association (KIA), in addition to providing a wide spectrum of advice to foreign residents on living in Japan both face to face and through its multilingual website,15 runs Japanese-language and culture classes. This prefecture’s 2008 list of internationally oriented departmental measures includes a section on creating an environment conducive to living in harmony with foreign residents. It lists funding for the KIA to run classes to teach foreign residents basic everyday spoken Japanese and reading and writing, and to train volunteer teachers to run such classes. In addition, funding was allocated to the Culture and Environment Division to provide booklets on living information in English and Japanese in which kanji were glossed with hiragana. The Health and Welfare division of the prefectural government was funded to run ‘nihongo ky¯oshitsu’ (Japanese-language classes) for returnees from China and their families,16 to support them in learning Japanese in order to live independent lives. These classes were to teach Japanese to people whose main language was Chinese, and were taught at Ushioe Minami school (K¯ochi Prefectural Government 2008), a school which also provides Chinese-language instruction for its students from Year Three onward (Yomiuri Shimbun 2006b). According to MEXT statistics for 2008, almost two-thirds of children needing JSL instruction in K¯ochi Prefecture’s schools speak Chinese, reflecting the high population density of Chinese residents in the prefecture whose needs these measures are intended to address. We have seen that attempts to provide bilingual JSL material for children are in train in various quarters (CEMMER, Ota City), but the matter of appropriate textbooks for adult learners of Japanese remains a pressing concern. While most existing textbooks are oriented to the concerns of older bubble-era western

Language education for adults

45

university class and business concerns, Jones (2006: 1206) notes, ‘the new Japanese language learner . . . is likely to be a non-English speaking immigrant from Brazil, or a technical student from Vietnam, or an aged-care worker from the Philippines. Textbooks that are directed towards these students need to be produced in order to help them not only advance their language skills, but also adapt to living in Japan by teaching them how to perform functional tasks such as renting an apartment, applying for a job, or going to a doctor.’ Textbooks published by the Association for Overseas Technical Scholarship (AOTS) are available in eleven languages, and the Association for Japanese Language Teaching (AJALT)’s textbook of practical Japanese for technical trainees also has Chinese, English, Indonesian and Vietnamese supplements available for use with the main text. Just as pressing for adults as the need to learn to speak Japanese in order to deal with the ins and outs of working life in Japan is the need to learn to read it in order to understand and interact with the environment around them. For the foreign workers who originally planned to live in Japan only for a short time but ended up choosing to stay on there, unfamiliarity with the Japanese writing system has caused significant difficulties in their daily lives; even such commonly reported daily issues as the failure of foreign residents to comply with the accepted Japanese system of garbage disposal come down to inability to read the disposal instructions written in Japanese (Maher and Nakayama 2003: 136). Motivations for wanting to learn to read and write Japanese are varied. In late 2002, a survey of around 700 ‘nikkei’ residents over the age of fifteen in Toyota City found that 61 per cent and 73 per cent respectively could neither read the kanji for nor understand the meaning of the words ‘no parking’ and ‘danger’ used on everyday signs; the fact that so many who worked in factories were unable to understand the ‘danger’ sign was of particular concern (Yomiuri Shimbun 2002). Following the recent round of job losses arising from the financial downturn, incidents were reported of retrenched ‘nikkei’ workers visiting their local Gaikokujin S¯odankai because they were unable to understand the contents of the letter informing them of their retrenchment (Nihongo Ky¯oiku Gakkai 2009: 57). Volunteers at Musubi no Kai, a Christian group supporting foreign workers in Adachi-ku in Tokyo,17 began Japanese classes for adult Filipinos in 2004 specifically to prevent foreign workers from being exploited because of their inability to read and write Japanese: they had come to realise the often pivotal role played by literacy in labour disputes, with some unscrupulous managers presenting workers with Japanese documents they were unable to read and telling them to sign them only for the workers to discover later that they had signed their own dismissal papers (Musubi no Kai volunteer staff 2005). For parents (usually mothers) of children approaching school age, a primary goal in learning to read is to be able to understand the written information sent home from the school relating to their child and to

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The language needs of immigrants

school life in general. For others, it may be to enable them to read Japanese text messages on their cell phones. Local governments often offer financial support for reading and writing classes. The City of Kyoto’s Board of Education, for example, in August 2009 offered grants of up to 100,000 yen to people or groups wishing to apply to run classes that would teach elementary-school level reading and writing skills to people who could already carry on daily conversations in Japanese.18 Not all envisaged attendees were necessarily foreigners, rather the reverse: the example application form given on the website listed them as elderly people in local communities who wanted to learn to read and write hiragana and kanji to elementary-school levels by attending one class a week. Similarly, the ¯ Miyage Yomikaki Ky¯oshitsu Ozora, a member group of the Hyogo Nihongo Volunteers’ Network set up in 1997 following the Hanshin earthquake, runs a reading and writing class for native or non-native residents who want to learn these skills; some members attend these classes in the evenings after graduating from middle or high school.19 Ota Ward in Tokyo offered a free eighteen-week course in reading and writing for people of any nationality over sixteen years of age, with childminding for toddlers provided for a small fee, from September 2009 to March 2010, open to people who had not mastered the writing system at school and anyone else who wanted to learn to read and write. Both Japanese and non-Japanese were welcome to attend, but in the latter case, the non-Japanese students were required to be already able to speak Japanese.20 Many of the people undertaking such courses are themselves Japanese with life experiences which have left them without the training in reading and writing normally imparted by the education system. Some may be Japanese teenagers returning from parental postings abroad (known as ‘kikoku shijo’) who need help with writing; others, older people such as returnees from China or elderly ethnic Koreans,21 may not have completed school in Japan at all, or in some cases completed school in neither country and never learned to read and write at all. A basic assumption on the Japanese side in relation to China returnees was that they would be literate in Chinese and therefore able to read kanji; this turned out in practice not to be the case, as many were either completely or almost illiterate, having received very little education in China (Ward 2006: 147). The role of volunteers Very little of the local community teaching of Japanese could proceed without the contribution of volunteers, and it is here that the contribution of civil society22 to local integration is most evident. ‘Civic, localist thinking permeates students, housewives, senior citizens and some sections of the casual workforce – groups that are distant from the power centres of the state and are

The role of volunteers

47

not directly connected with the capitalist order of production and distribution’ (Sugimoto 2009: 19). All over Japan the need for language lessons is being met by volunteer associations, many associated either with churches (as in the case of Musubi no Kai) or with the international offices of particular local governments. The city of Kawachinagano in Osaka, for example, through its International Friendship Association (KIFA),23 offers foreign residents volunteer-led classes three times a week in Japanese conversation, reading and writing at elementary, intermediate and advanced levels. Not all such groups are affiliated with local government or with churches: in Kasugai City in Aichi, for example, volunteers from a private group called Crosscul formed in 1993 and with about forty members teach Japanese on a one-to-one basis, help the municipal government with translation of its PR materials into Chinese, English and Portuguese and interact with international students at nearby universities. Such voluntarism in the JSL area, while seen as normal today, is a comparatively recent phenomenon, as Hsu (2009) points out. The first short course for volunteer Japanese teachers was held in Kanazawa City in 1981, run by a citizens’ group aiming to teach Japanese to international tourists. After 1979, returnees from China, refugees from Vietnam and later, the foreign workers attracted by the bubble economy of the 1980s were supplemented by South American ‘nikkei’ in the 1990s. Newcomers were different from oldcomers in that they experienced language difficulties and required local-level JSL teaching. From the 1970s, Hsu asserts, the definition of a foreigner changed from being based on racial or citizenship grounds to being someone whose first language was not Japanese. Training programmes for JSL volunteer teachers were established all over Japan in the late 1980s, and enthusiasm for becoming such a volunteer accelerated after this time. During the 1990s the National Institute for Japanese Language also ran a symposium on JSL in local areas and implemented eight model projects, and regional networks of volunteer groups appeared nationwide. Local authorities today advertise frequently for volunteers and provide training.24 In 2009, volunteers accounted for 54 per cent of JSL teachers (Agency for Cultural Affairs 2010b). Nakano (2005) found that volunteers in Japan are preponderantly middleaged housewives and men retired from the workforce. ‘The word borantia . . . has come to mean activities that are progressive, advanced, and dedicated to the improvement of society’ (3) rather than merely unpaid and public-spirited, and volunteer registries and coordinators in local government offices make it easy to find an outlet for volunteering. Noting the lack of media coverage of community volunteering as opposed to the more glamorous forms of volunteering involving the environment, disaster relief or youth volunteering, Nakano suggests that this may reflect a more generalised social tendency to overlook middle-aged women and men no longer in the workforce, whereas in fact their personal decisions and everyday activities, though small in scale, have the potential

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The language needs of immigrants

to create a groundswell of change in Japanese society. Japanese volunteers are of course for the most part deeply invested in mainstream values, but she regards their work as ‘not the triumph of one set of values over another or the reproduction of an unchanging social order, but social changes in the making’ (166). It is precisely this bottom-up activity and provision of language training with volunteer participation, reflecting acknowledgment of language needs in local communities, that may in time effect a change in national policy as well, although the danger is always present that national government may leave wellfunctioning local systems of this kind to carry the burden rather than picking up the responsibility itself. Volunteers can be seen as individual citizens acting as agents of historical change (see Sasaki-Uemura 2001: 33). Le Blanc’s 1999 book on the political world of the Japanese housewife, aptly titled Bicycle Citizens, found that housewives in her study who were volunteers (not in JSL) ‘saw themselves as actors, striving to care for the world close to home that politics forgot’ (89). At the same time as they meet their own personal needs for meaningful engagement with the community around them, volunteers contribute to the public good in the private sphere by helping non-Japanese residents in their community through a variety of activities, many of them now having to do with language at the micro interface. The Spring 2006 newsletter of Kashiwa City’s international relations office,25 for example, publicised the volunteer work of the Kashiwa JSL Learning Club in helping non-Japanese children with their schoolwork on a one-to-one basis; for students who could not understand what their teachers were saying, the Club offered foreign-student volunteers to provide first-language help, while for those who could already speak some Japanese but otherwise needed help with schoolwork, Japanese volunteers were available (City of Kashiwa International Relations Office 2006). The Tokyo Nihongo Volunteer Network (TNVN) is another active group, targeting English speakers within the community. Set up in late 1993 as a network of volunteer groups teaching Japanese as a foreign/second language, the group aims to provide opportunities for useful activities and information exchange: ‘Through teaching JSL in their own neighbourhoods, TNVN members support, as neighbours, foreign residents who are experiencing difficulties because of languages’ (Tokyo Nihongo Volunteer Network 2009, my translation). The key words here are ‘as neighbours’: elsewhere on the website we find the declaration that ‘Japanese volunteer language groups are not only about language teaching, but about building international grass roots networks’, stressing the communitarian aspect of such activities. The TNVN website, available in both Japanese and English, provides a searchable database of ‘nihongo ky¯oshitsu’ provided by member groups in Tokyo, a newsletter (in Japanese) and a Bulletin Board System (BBS) where, among other things, notices of training activities, JSL-related information and calls for volunteer JSL teachers are posted from

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time to time. Other areas of Japan, particularly those with higher concentrations of foreign residents, are likewise well served by volunteer groups. In Ibaraki Prefecture, for example, the Ibaraki International Association’s website makes it easy for those interested to find opportunities either to learn or to teach Japanese at over sixty JSL venues which can be searched using a multilingual database available in nine languages with links to each venue. Similar online databases (though not always multilingual) can be found on local government websites across Japan, making the Internet a powerful element in the provision of information about the availability of JSL classes. Civil society activities of this kind are carried on in ‘a socio-political space which is not taken over by the formal political or economic institutions, such as government bureaucracy or corporations’ and which involves the active participation of members of society, in particular those involved in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and non-profit organisations (NPOs) (Befu 2009b: 30). Civil society is shaped by the interaction between state and society, which means that in the case of JSL education, it is the failure of the national government to provide for the language needs of foreign residents once it has admitted them which has stirred civil society in the form of volunteers to rise to the challenge of meeting those needs at the local level, in tandem with local governments. While the dominance of the public sector in governance in Japan for many decades, in particular the dominance of local governments in providing public services, may once have fostered an over-reliance on government for solutions to problems, today NPOs and NGOs are playing a much more significant role in local governance in response to changed social circumstances, particularly in providing services for foreign residents. A 1999 survey conducted by the Prime Minister’s Office showed that many respondents no longer viewed their job as the most important thing in their life, a view perhaps accounting for the increase in the number of volunteers interested in solving local problems (Tamura 2003). While agency in this sort of situation may stem from a variety of impulses, there is no doubt that volunteers are one of the main facilitators of JSL education in their own localities. In some cases, volunteer NPO activity has grown to mesh with local government initiatives in what Shipper (2008: 11) characterises as a model of associative activism: ‘(1) like-minded activists form a range of NGOs to address specific problems and (2) local governments increasingly cooperate with activists and their organisations, forming novel and flexible institutions’, and it is to be hoped that synergies of this kind increase. Non-Japanese spouses of Japanese citizens While it has been remarked that women tend to disappear in discussions about migration (Bottomley 1984: 98), studies of gender and migration to Japan have in fact multiplied over the last twenty years (e.g., Douglass and Roberts 2003a,

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The language needs of immigrants

Piper 2003, Suzuki 2000, Truong 1996). Where they do tend to disappear, however, is in discussions about language. In Japan, one group with pressing JSL needs is the increasing number of foreign spouses of Japanese citizens, such as the Filipina women who entered Japan in the 1990s as wives for farmers in rural areas who could not otherwise find someone to marry (Suzuki 2000). At the end of 2008, almost a quarter of a million people held visas as the spouse of a Japanese national, just over 11 per cent of the total number of visa holders (Ministry of Justice 2009a). The great majority are women, from a large number of countries but predominantly China, the Philippines, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam within Asia, the United Kingdom, Russia, Romania and France in Europe, Brazil, the United States, Peru and Canada in the Americas, and Australia. Within the countries just mentioned, the largest groups of spouse-visa holders come from Brazil followed by China and the Philippines with Korea in fourth place. Having settled in Japan for family reasons, these spouses are likely in time to become permanent residents or Japanese citizens, and their children will also be Japanese citizens. It is therefore in Japan’s interests to ensure that they are able to integrate into the fabric of society, and this is an important linguistic element of ‘tabunka ky¯osei’. Women who have migrated for family reasons experience disruption and dislocation on an all-encompassing scale: Gender roles are affected in relocation by disruption of status and power hierarchies, geographical dispersal of kin and friendship networks, new residence patterns, loss of economic resources, differential access to new resources, shifts in work patterns, exposure to strangers with different lifestyles, and different expectations. (Indra 1999: 25)

Some non-Japanese wives may have had prior experience in Japan before marriage; others do not, and encounter not only the pressures of settling into a new marriage but also those of settling into a new living environment, in many cases without sufficient proficiency in Japanese to smooth the way. Where they work outside the home, they often do so in jobs where no knowledge of Japanese is required, e.g., in businesses run by Portuguese speakers where staff can get by in that language for work purposes. Where they are at home full-time, they are often isolated from the community around them by their lack of Japanese-language proficiency. The 2007 House of Councillors’ committee investigating the declining birth rate, ageing population and ‘ky¯osei’ society heard submissions that foreign wives experience difficulty in communicating with both husbands and children and sometimes fall out with in-laws because of their limited Japanese proficiency. That same lack of language proficiency was also reported as preventing foreign wives from taking concrete action to escape from situations of very serious abuse (House of Councillors 2008: 33). Villages such as Mogami in Yamagata Prefecture, home to a large population of

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foreign spouses, have set up a suite of support services for these residents which includes Japanese-language education opportunities, something which Kwak (2009) suggests helps to compensate for the national government’s neglect of such issues. Busy wives and mothers often find that work and family responsibilities leave them little time to attend JSL classes, so that they either do not attain any noticeable degree of Japanese-language proficiency at all or manage to arrive at only a rudimentary proficiency through a degree of natural acquisition when exposed to Japanese speakers. Neither of these outcomes equips them to read the notes that come home from school (if their children attend Japanese schools) or to deal with other communications from the local authorities. The Nihongo Ky¯oiku Gakkai’s26 2008 survey of spouses in Yamagata Prefecture, home to many wives from China, Korea and the Philippines, therefore underscored the necessity for providing such residents with access to Japanese-language classes soon after their arrival in Japan. Survey respondents, all of whom had come to Japan within the previous ten years for an arranged marriage, fell into two groups: those who had studied Japanese at a ‘nihongo ky¯oshitsu’ within six months of arrival and had persevered, and those who had not. Key factors in the linguistic success of the former group, some of whom had reached the standard of Level One of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test,27 were the support of their families for their endeavours to learn Japanese (by, for example, childminding, driving them to classes, advising on assignments) and the fact that they had been given information on where and when Japanese classes were available at ‘nihongo ky¯oshitsu’ in their neighbourhoods, either by husbands, compatriots or staff at the foreign registration section of city hall. The second group listed lack of family support and lack of information about classes among the reasons they had not begun language study soon after arrival. These two elements would seem to be key. While the first is not something that can readily be addressed by local government, the second is. Respondents from both groups reported feelings of isolation and inadequacy stemming from their inability to communicate well with other family members during their first year or two in Japan, the stress of the situation often resulting in tears, frustration and misunderstandings. Those who had learned Japanese reported little trouble in the workplace, whereas those without Japanese spoke of bullying and other difficulties because their ignorance of the language needed to perform their work well sometimes caused problems for their co-workers. Three of this group, who had either never attended JSL classes or attended for a short time only, were also hardly able to read or write Japanese, two of them to the extent of not being able to write their own names and addresses for the purposes of the survey, although another was able to read school notices and write messages in the home–school liaison notebook like members of the other group. Of those who had gone to classes, one respondent reported literacy

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activities of the order of exchanging cell phone e-mails with Japanese people, reading the manuals for household appliances, studying Japanese history by reading manga and looking for part-time job opportunities and classes of various kinds on the Internet and in magazines. Another was able, with the help of her Japanese husband, to assist compatriots with reading court-related documents and work-related contracts. The report concluded that the provision of JSL classes to non-Japanese spouses soon after their arrival in Japan was essential to enable them to communicate smoothly with their new families. The best way to ensure that they received information about such classes available in their area was to provide it at the time of registration (gaikokujin t¯oroku), which had not been the case for all but one of the survey respondents. The local foreign registration section has an important role to play here in giving the information to the spouses themselves and not to other parties who may either not pass it on or mislay it. At the same time, government offices can act to bolster family support for wives learning Japanese by providing their families with information about the process and the facilities involved. Since the economic and social status of spouses of Japanese nationals is relatively secure, if they become proficient in Japanese, they can become an important bilingual resource in their communities. It is therefore very important in terms of fostering future social capital that they be assured of classroom-based JSL learning opportunities soon after they arrive in Japan. The report’s authors’ firmly expressed view is that responsibility for ensuring that all foreign residents, not just those who actually come to ‘nihongo ky¯oshitsu’, are given the chance to learn Japanese rests with the government (Nihongo Ky¯oiku Gakkai 2009). As always, it falls to local volunteers to address on-the-ground problems. Finding a class which allows prospective students to bring their children can be a problem: fewer than half of the volunteer-run Japanese classes advertised in Shinjuku in Tokyo in 2010 offer childminding services, although Shinjuku’s Multicultural Plaza itself offers a family Japanese-language course on Saturdays at which children are welcome (Shinjuku Multicultural Plaza 2010). Other areas, realising the problem, have also followed suit: in the city of Kitakyushu, for example, volunteers began classes for foreign wives to which they could bring their babies, learn to write Japanese and also chat about childrearing. Attendees had previously had difficulty finding a place to learn Japanese because of their small children (Nishi Nihon Shimbun 2008). Foreign nurses and care workers In 2007–8, the Japanese Language Education Guarantee Act Study Group, a group of researchers from universities and language-related organisations predominantly in the Osaka area, received a government grant for exploratory

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research on the language education and public law aspects of creating a draft law to guarantee Japanese-language education to newcomers,28 and succeeded in gaining further funding in the basic research category for 2009.29 The rationale for their research was the situation discussed above: although the number of foreign residents in Japan has greatly increased, the provision of Japaneselanguage education, whether for children or adults, is not systematised and is left for the most part to the good offices of local governments and altruistic volunteers. A group of researchers and practitioners in the fields of JSL, social education and public law had therefore banded together to attempt to draft a law that would guarantee Japanese-language education to all newcomers. A draft form of this law has been developed for discussion, as will be further discussed in Chapter 5. A prime example of the kind of piecemeal approach these researchers are aiming to prevent can be found in the field of health care, where the number one reason given for opposing the introduction of foreign care workers by respondents to a Cabinet Office survey in 2000, outstripping concerns about professional skills, was that such workers might lack sufficient Japanese-language proficiency (Shikama 2008: 56). Trained nurses and care workers from Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines recently brought into Japan to work under various bilateral government agreements30 in order to address shortfalls in this category of staff due to the ageing population are given six months of basic training in Japanese language31 and are then sent to work in hospitals, nursing homes and old people’s homes across the country as trainees, where they are expected to deal on the job with medical terminology the average Japanese layman would seldom use. In order to remain in Japan, they must pass national licensing examinations within three years of beginning work (four years in the case of nursing care assistants); these are the regular examinations that Japanese nurses and caregivers must pass to be licensed in the field which are designed for native speakers and have very low pass rates.32 The language barrier, in particular the requirement to read advanced Japanese, may prevent foreign nurses and care workers not from kanji-background countries like China from reaching the standard required to pass within the three or four years; the first to attempt the nursing examination did not pass.33 As Shikama (2008: 62) comments, ‘such a requirement represents a considerable barrier to integration rather than a tool towards integration’. Although the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare was lobbied to attach furigana (hiragana glosses indicating pronunciation) to kanji in questions written in Japanese, it declined to give special consideration to non-Japanese candidates (Kaneko 2009). Given that all foreign trainees are already qualified nurses or care workers in their home countries, mastering kanji rather than professional knowledge thus remains their biggest challenge in – or barrier to – successfully completing the test. A simple expedient such as adding furigana glosses would benefit Japanese native speakers as well as

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foreign candidates, but the ideology of kanji literacy without such crutches in formal settings such as examinations remains deeply entrenched. The first six months of compulsory language training in Japan is delivered by a provider/providers chosen by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (JICWELS 2009) at no cost to the trainees. The courses to date have been provided by the Association for Overseas Technical Scholarship (AOTS) and the Japan Foundation.34 Funding for the trainees’ living and tuition expenses is provided partly by the Japanese government and partly by the institutions with which trainees have arranged their employment contracts. When the first group of Indonesian trainees arrived in Japan in August 2008, the six months of language training was provided by the Japan Foundation’s Kansai Language Institute for 56 of them and by AOTS for another 149.35 The Japan Foundation course focused on fulfilling the following instructions from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: a) the curriculum overall should provide students with basic linguistic and sociocultural ability such as to enable them to live, work and continue to study in local areas and facilities; the language component should allow students to acquire a level of Japanese which would enable them to work using the language; and the sociocultural component should provide them with the understanding of Japanese society and of the daily life and work-related practices they would need both as residents and as candidates for work as certified caregivers. To this end, the language curriculum progressed over the six months from general to specialised workplace Japanese, seeking to strike a balance between the two needs (Noborizato et al. 2009). In 2009, a programme for nurses and caregivers from the Philippines was run between 11 May and 28 October at two AOTS training centres in Tokyo and Osaka. Of the 816 hours of programme contact, 675 were devoted to Japanese-language study, consisting of Basic Japanese, Intermediate Japanese and Technical Japanese, with the explicit target being ‘to acquire basic Japanese proficiency for living in Japan and minimum level of the language ability required for working and communicating with patients and staff at medical institutions’. Japanese-language lessons employed the direct method, i.e., they were conducted solely in Japanese, while English interpreters were used for lectures and visits. Language classes were supplemented with a further 141 hours of social and cultural adaptation curriculum, involving lectures and workshops on living and working in Japan, visits and meetings. Here the stated aim was ‘to understand Japanese society, learn Japanese lifestyle and acquire the ability to adapt to the working environment in Japan as a member of Japanese society and a nurse working at a medical institution in Japan’ (Philippines Overseas Employment Administration 2009). While the national government thus allows the entry of these medical workers and contributes funding for their initial language and cultural training, it takes no responsibility for their linguistic needs once they have completed the

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initial six-month course, which means in effect that they have no reasonable prospect of passing the national examination without significant further study. Planning and implementing their ongoing language training in preparation for the national examinations is left to the employing organisations. Each hospital and nursing care facility which accepts Indonesian workers must provide them with language lessons; it must submit a training plan to JICWELS and report periodically on progress (Noborizato et al. 2009, n7). Although in some cases volunteer organisations have stepped in to help, in others hiring language teachers and providing other support has proved a costly undertaking for the receiving organisation, estimated to require around 600,000 yen per person per year on top of salaries and other training costs (Uemura 2008). In Tokyo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is providing funds to subsidise the cost of language teachers at nine such facilities. The examinations employees will eventually be required to take, however, entail a considerable knowledge of kanji, and of technical kanji in particular, which as we have seen presents a real problem for caregivers from non-character-using countries. One newspaper, for example, reported that despite the good oral communication skills of Indonesian care workers in a Yokohama nursing home, their insufficient knowledge of kanji means that they have difficulty writing daily reports and reports on the condition of the patients for other workers: they can type hiragana into the computer, but do not know which of the various kanji options provided for that text is correct (The Daily Yomiuri 2008). This is not an isolated instance: similar newspaper reports abound (e.g., Yomiuri Shimbun 2008), attesting to how difficult it is for people from non-kanji backgrounds to master the Japanese writing system without sufficient time and opportunity to study it. The widely reported view is that this will make it all but impossible to pass the national qualifying examinations. But failure to pass these examinations on account of kanji proficiency, with consequent automatic repatriation, would represent the loss of not only a significant amount of expenditure on language training but also the loss of a valuable human resource for Japanese hospitals and nursing homes. In 2009, no foreign nurse passed the national nursing examination; in 2010, three (two from Indonesia and one from the Philippines) became the first to do so. In an encouraging sign of possible change in this area, in January 2010 Foreign Minister Okada Katsuda promised to ‘consider addressing’ the language barrier, and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare is currently considering using simpler terms in the examination (The Japan Times 2010). In response to a journalist’s question at a press conference on 26 March 2010, Minister Okada affirmed his belief that the need to master so many kanji for the examination was a hindrance to the success of this bilateral operation and that the government could do more for candidates who study seriously but still cannot pass on that account (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2010). It remains to be seen whether these activities bear fruit in actual practice, but the public

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acknowledgment of the problem at ministerial level represents at least a step forward. There is no JSL syllabus oriented specifically to the needs of these health care workers once the initial training is finished. While existing staff may give them Japanese lessons, or volunteers may come in to teach them medical terminology, it is all done on an ad hoc basis. Some hospitals, for example, attach furigana glosses to kanji to help their trainees understand (Kaneko 2009). One valuable resource that is indeed specifically targeted to the profession, however, is the Care-Navi website36 set up by the Japan Foundation’s Kansai Japanese Language Institute. Available on the website in Japanese-English or JapaneseIndonesian versions, or as a book in Japanese-English, this searchable database provides practical, relevant examples of over 8,000 vocabulary items likely to be needed in daily working life, such as when bathing, feeding or otherwise treating patients or writing reports on their condition. It also furnishes users with model sentences using the words and with a list of 200 kanji likely to be useful at work, and is designed to be used by both foreign care workers themselves and by Japanese language-teachers and local volunteers helping them learn the language. Support organisations from the wider community have also begun to appear: one newspaper reported that in Tokyo a group called Garuda Supporters and including people with medical training was formed in June 2009, while in Kobe in August that year students majoring in Indonesian at Konan Women’s University formed an NGO to support the trainees. A further network of supporters in Osaka was planned for November 2009. All of these groups offer support with language studies (The Daily Yomiuri Online 2009). Clearly, the government input into language training, while valuable in providing a kick-start for life and work in Japan through the initial six months of language instruction, is insufficient to meet the actual needs of foreign health care workers if they are to achieve the qualifications which will allow them to work in the capacities Japan needs in the care sector. It would seem useful to rethink here the ideology of stand-alone kanji in national tests in the light of changing national needs. It is true of any job, of course, that employees need to know the specialised terms pertaining to what they are employed to do in order to be able to carry out their duties effectively. The issue here is whether they have time to learn them properly and to improve their wider language skills while dealing with other onthe-job activities. Once employed, foreign residents have little leisure to attend formal Japanese classes except for those run by volunteers, where dropout rates tend to be high. While some enterprises like the nursing facilities mentioned above do have in-house JSL training programmes for employees which go some way towards addressing these needs, it is the lack of any systematic programme for offering JSL education to all newcomers that exercises both the drafters of the proposed law mentioned above and the Nihongo Ky¯oiku Gakkai.

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Language and the legal system Another area taking on increased significance as the foreign population grows and underlining the increasingly multilingual nature of Japan and the consequent need for language services is the justice system. While there is no overarching policy document addressing the rights of non-Japanese caught up in the various levels of the legal system, laws intended to protect the rights of defendants do exist. Article 175 of Japan’s Code of Criminal Procedure, for example, requires courts to ensure that trials involving a foreign defendant provide an interpreter proficient in the languages to be used. Prior to trial, foreign defendants are shown multilingual videos and are given multilingual documents explaining Japanese court procedures (Ministry of Justice 2010). Many of the legal troubles encountered by foreign residents concern immigration issues. In 2005, for instance, almost 60 per cent of foreign defendants were before district and summary courts on Immigration Control Law violations (Ministry of Justice 2006c). While regional immigration bureaus provide weekday counselling on a broad range of issues, since September 2008 this has been supplemented by two seven-day toll-free nationwide telephone counselling services, one run by the Tokyo Regional Information Bureau for issues specifically related to illegal residency and the other by the Tokyo Immigration Information Centre for foreign nationals with questions on a range of immigration control procedures. Both these services are advertised in seven versions other than Japanese (English, Spanish, Chinese, Chinese (simplified characters), Korean, Thai and Indonesian) on the Ministry of Justice website, and the second also advises that counselling in languages other than Japanese is available depending on the availability of counsellors able to speak other languages (Ministry of Justice 2008c and 2008d). The number of foreigners in trouble with the law fluctuates from year to year: in 2007, it was 13,339, 3.6 per cent of the total number of arrests for general criminal offences for that year (Ministry of Justice 2008a: 14). National Police Agency statistics give the breakdown by nationality for that year in descending order of frequency as Chinese (not including Taiwanese and Hong Kong), Brazilian, Turkish, Korean, Colombian, Philippine, Vietnamese, Peruvian, Thai and Sri Lankan (National Police Agency 2008), indicating the languages most frequently involved, but linguistically this is only a part of the total picture. Other Supreme Court data show that in 2008 the breakdown of languages used in court, again in descending order of frequency, was Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese, English, Farsi, Sinhalese and ‘other languages’. The last of these encompassed a wide range of languages, many of them with few speakers in Japan. It is worth listing them here in order to show the difficulty that can be involved in finding an

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interpreter: Amharic, Arabic, Indonesian, Urdu, Estonian, Dutch, Cambodian, Swahili, Tajik, Tamil, Dari, German, Turkish, Nepalese, Pashto, Punjabi, Hindi, French, Hebrew, Bengali, Polish, Malayalam, Malay, Burmese, Mongolian, Laotian, Romanian and Russian. This gives a total of thirty-eight languages for which interpreters were required, many of them Asian languages not studied widely in Japan, which limits the pool of available people. The same document shows the number of cases requiring court interpreting in 2008 as 4,511, approximately one in seventeen of all defendants that year. Whereas in 1989 foreign defendants came from thirty-five countries, by 2008 that number had increased to seventy (Ministry of Justice 2010). This is as good an indicator as any other of the increasing internationalisation of Japanese society over that period. Tsuda (1997) asserts that language as a component of human rights is clearly problematic in the case of Japan. Although Article 236 of Japan’s Standards for Criminal Investigation recommends that a translation should be attached to an arrest warrant, in practice the warrants are written only in Japanese, so that foreign residents may not be fully aware of the reasons for the arrest. The Japan Legal Aid Association advises foreign residents that should they find themselves in this situation, it is important at this stage to notify the arresting officer and request an interpreter from the outset (H¯oritsu Fujo Ky¯okai 2004: 377–8). Such an interpreter is paid for by the state during the interrogation (Osaka Bengoshi Kai 1992: 55). Before a defendant reaches the courts, he/she must undergo a police investigation, with interpreting services just as important at this level, as has been clear for many years now. The 1992 Police White Paper, for example, contains a case study of policing in Ashikaga City in Tochigi Prefecture, with the influx of foreign residents (at that time estimated to be about 5 per cent of the city’s population) meriting a special section. In a discussion of the effects this had had on local policing, the most prominent mentioned was the difficulty of procuring interpreters, which required a much greater expenditure of police time than when dealing with Japanese residents. Given the particular concentration of Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking residents in the area, interpreting in those languages was in demand. In one instance, a Spanish-speaking interpreter had to be sent from an employment agency in Ota, which has a high concentration of Spanish speakers, to help in an investigation; in another, a Farsi-speaking interpreter had to be requested through the police headquarters of another prefecture. Each of these instances required considerable time and effort to arrange (National Police Agency 1992). In response to the increase in the foreign population and the increased need for multilingual assistance in policing, the Ibaraki Prefectural Police in 1994 established a centre for that purpose which by 1997 had four full-time interpreters, with more expected to follow.37 Ten police officers were designated as interpreters in ten languages, and 150 civilians were signed up as part-time

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interpreters (The Daily Yomiuri 1997b). In 2006, prior to this unit being moved into the criminal investigation section of Ibaraki Police, a revised directive covering administrative aspects of its operations was issued, which specified among other things the procedures to be followed when an interpreter is requested and the qualifications for being both a designated and a civilian interpreter. Designated interpreters under this directive are police officers who have attained qualifications such as passing the national interpreter guide examination, an approved certified examination in a foreign language by a public institution or the National Police Agency (NPA) foreign-language skills test. Alternatively, they may have completed language training conducted by the NPA’s Research and Training Centre for International Criminal Investigation38 or a language course run by the Ibaraki Prefectural Police themselves. A comparable level of interpreting ability gained through self-study or having lived overseas is also acceptable. The criteria for civilian interpreters are less stringent, requiring only that they be non-police officers with an ‘ability to interpret in a foreign language’ who are deemed acceptable to act as police interpreters by the relevant authorities (Ibaraki Prefectural Police Headquarters 2006). In June 2004, about 60 per cent of the interpreters working for police were civilians, not all of whom acted according to expectations. Whereas larger police offices may have officers with NPA-sponsored language training, small police stations have to rely on civilian interpreters (The Daily Yomiuri 2004), and finding such an interpreter can take time. A survey conducted for the 2002 Police Yearbook, for example, found that of the reasons reported by the almost 96 per cent of respondents who found it more difficult to deal with investigations involving foreigners than with those involving Japanese, overwhelmingly (90.6 per cent) – and unsurprisingly – it was the language barrier and the need for interpreting which topped the list (National Police Agency 2002). Once someone is arrested, further interpreting is then required for the provision of legal advice before trial. Bar associations around Japan maintain registers of interpreters to provide assistance to foreign clients who have been arrested and provide occasional training sessions. One centre set up by three bar associations in Tokyo, for example, chooses as needed from a list of about 500 interpreters in order to make legal advice available to foreigners held in custody. Under Article 39 of the Criminal Prosecution Code, lawyers may speak with suspects in custody without police present, and in this instance the interpreter is considered an extension of the lawyer (The Daily Yomiuri 2001). When a case reaches the courts, the presence or absence of an interpreter is not at issue, given the legal requirement that one be present. Rather, as at the other levels, it is the quality of the interpretation provided that can be

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crucial for foreign defendants, since such interpreters are often not professionals experienced in legal interpreting. Registration for court interpreters in Japan is granted on the basis of performing well in oral interviews; there is as yet no certification system involving rigorous prior training in legal interpreting. Such training as exists is acquired ‘on the job’, i.e., through experience in courts. Occasional day seminars involving simulated interpreting situations and advice from experienced court interpreters are run by the Supreme Court for registered interpreters. Such interpreters must be fluent enough in both Japanese and the target language to enable them to understand Japanese trial procedures and explain them to the defendant in his/her own language and to interpret the defendant’s statement into Japanese. They must also acquire a good understanding of the procedures and vocabulary they will encounter in court. Would-be candidates are requested to contact their nearest district court; after they have sat in on some trials, they then submit the required documentation and attend an interview. Those judged likely on the basis of the interview to make competent interpreters are then given some introductory training in the procedures of the criminal justice system, legal terminology and general information necessary to enable them to carry out their tasks. They are also introduced to the multilingual court interpreters’ manuals and videos of court procedures. Their names are then added to the registers of legal interpreters held at high courts across Japan, to be called upon as occasion arises. As of 1 April 2009, the register contained 4,066 names and covered 58 languages; interpreters’ occupations ranged from university professors to company employees with experience from overseas postings to housewives. On occasion, when an interpreter cannot be sourced from the list, embassies, universities and other international cultural organisations may be approached for help in locating one (Ministry of Justice 2010). Unsurprisingly given the wide range of languages involved, and with no recognition of court interpreting as a profession regulated by certification, the skills base varies widely, from experienced conference interpreters to native speakers of a language to people who are registered ‘merely because of the rarity of their language’ (Kamiya 2009, Nae 2007). The responsibilities of court interpreters are substantial in achieving a fair outcome for the defendant and this is reflected in law: Article 171 of the Penal Code provides for sanctions against interpreters who, having sworn an oath, knowingly provide false interpretation or translation. On a less formal level, anecdotal evidence of poor interpreting can raise questions about the fairness of the trials received by foreign defendants (see, for example, The Daily Yomiuri 1997a). Nevertheless, the Supreme Court has so far argued that the measures it has in place to support interpreters are sufficient.39 Experienced court interpreters disagree: in 2005, at the urging of veteran interpreter Professor Mamoru Tsuda, Osaka University of Foreign

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Studies began offering a master’s course aimed at training interpreters and translators for legal and medical work in addition to other areas of community need. Of particular importance in the context of judicial interpreting is the change in Japan to a lay jury system which occurred in late May 2009. Under the new system, in trials involving particularly serious crimes such as murder, a panel of six citizens (‘lay judges’) now sits with three judges to consider the evidence and decide the outcome. In the interests of public understanding, the process involves a heavier reliance on oral proceedings than the earlier focus on written documentation. For interpreters, this means that less time is available to prepare the material under discussion than was previously the case. Ad hoc discussion cannot be prepared in advance, raising fears that defendants not proficient in Japanese may suffer as a result of interpreters inexperienced in such a setting, and mock trials using interpreters were held to address this. The Supreme Court reported that in 2008, interpreters took part in 138 of the 2,208 trials that would have been tried by lay juries if the forthcoming system change were already in place (Tanaka Miya 2009), indicating the degree to which interpreters are involved in the new system. By contrast with countries such as the United States, where interpreters must provide proof of certification prior to registration with the courts, in Japan court-provided interpreter training does not begin until after candidates have been accepted and registered (Nae 2007: 8). Experienced court interpreters and interpreter educators have intensified calls for a system of certification based on a set training period that will redress this situation in order to ensure that clients receive the best possible interpreting service. Veteran Japanese-English interpreter and academic Hiromi Nagao, for example, has been particularly vocal in this regard. She and others organised the Japan Judicial Interpreters Association (JJIA) in Osaka in 1992 which holds biannual training seminars and publishes its own journal. As a result of representations by a Senator on behalf of court interpreters, the Ministry of Justice set aside a budget allocation in 2000 to study the judicial interpretation system and directed that training seminars for beginners and for experienced interpreters be run twice each year by each district court, i.e., today’s training system (Nagao 2001). Nagao and others are now pushing for professionalisation of legal interpreting involving a full registration system similar to that used in other countries,40 advocating the formation of a training body separate from the Supreme Court (Kamiya 2009). A defined code of ethics is also seen as important. Meanwhile, to assist in informal training of interpreters, the JJIA along with a Kobe association of medical interpreters called Medint have since 2006 offered training seminars for members of an association of academics, interpreters and experts, the Japan Association of Public Service Interpreting and Translation, formed in Nishinomiya in 2005 (Yomiuri Shimbun 2005b).

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Conclusion In this chapter, I have examined some of the language needs of foreign residents in Japan, leaving aside the question of first-language maintenance and concentrating instead on the need for and the existing provision of opportunities to learn Japanese. Such residents are now an integral part of the fabric of many Japanese communities. They are there as the result of both internal and external factors and cannot simply be dismissed as part of a ‘border problem’: This complexity of factors, which also includes issues of basic human rights, is creating pressures of such magnitude that to continue the official policy of allowing foreign worker ‘entrants’ but not ‘immigrants’ will only lead to a heightening dissonance between the realities of increasing foreign settlement in Japan and the myths of Japan as a closed, single-race society. (Douglass and Roberts 2003b: 8)

Whatever happens on the policy front, whether Japan decides in time to badge itself in its official rhetoric and policy as a country of immigration or not, the reality is that foreign residents are here to stay. The mythical past of the ‘tan’itsu minzoku’ (monoracial) ideology and all the years of glossing over and attempting to constrain its true diversity need to come to an end with a recognition at the highest levels of the internationalising society within. ‘It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself’ (Eagleton 1991: xiii). While language planning which takes into account the needs of migrant children in Japanese schools and of their parents outside them makes perfect sense to those children and their families, it must also make sense to the Japanese mainstream. Whether this can be brought about with any degree of conviction at national rather than simply local level within the foreseeable future will of course depend to a significant extent on the discourse promoted by the national government. While we saw in Chapter 1 that the policy response of ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ began at the national level, that happened in response to on-the-ground realities in the local communities and was reactive rather than proactive. Immigration itself remains a politically sensitive topic: the thrust of the 2009–10 Hatoyama government’s response to the realities of the ageing population and low birth rate to date was to encourage births by the giving of cash incentives rather than to consider increasing the immigration intake. Challenges to language policy in Japan today, however, encompass other issues than the provision of JSL education for migrants alone. Conspicuously absent is anything more than a token attempt to teach the community languages spoken by migrants and of regional and international significance to Japan: English is everything. Although Japan is becoming multiethnic and multilingual

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to a small but increasing degree, that diversity is not reflected in the foreign languages offered in its education system (Kubota 2002: 15). The next chapter will examine two aspects of language in Japan which have a bearing on language policy: the current state of teaching of foreign languages other than English and the provision of multilingual information by government.

3

Foreign languages other than English in education and the community

We move now from the individual needs of immigrants to the overall position of foreign languages other than English in the language policy landscape. While the role of English will be mentioned where relevant, the main focus of this chapter will be on two other aspects of language provision in the community, namely the teaching and learning of foreign languages other than English in Japanese schools and universities and the provision of multilingual information for foreign residents. Both of these relate to language policy in obvious ways. The aggressive promotion of English downgrades the importance of teaching in schools both those languages which in Japan may properly be considered community languages and other culturally and strategically important foreign languages, and the provision of multilingual information to non-Japanese residents in local communities is in the best interests of both government, community and individual alike. Policy exists to support and to facilitate: in the first part of the chapter, we shall see that the support for English has not been paralleled by support for the teaching of other languages, while in the second, it will become clear that the integration of newcomer residents into local communities has been facilitated by policy decisions taken to provide necessary information in a range of relevant languages. The attention of policy-makers has focused on English to the detriment of the teaching of other languages, which are referred to in passing only at the end of educational policy documents which are titled ‘Gaikokugo’ (foreign languages) but which deal almost exclusively with English. The word ‘gaikokugo’ is thus used in a very narrow sense, denoting in practice only one language. Other foreign languages are referred to as ‘eigo igai no gaikokugo’ (foreign languages other than English), underscoring the priorities of a foreign-language programme in which English is taken as the sine qua non.1 The working dichotomy is plain to see, as summed up by Fujita-Round and Maher (2008: 93): ‘In the imagined community in which language policy emerges in Japan, two geographical beacons are visible: Japanese (Nihongo) is the (sole) national language (kokugo) and English is pre-eminently the vehicle of internationalization. A straightforward ideological system underpins this stance which, mutatis mutandis, informs large tracts of policy-making at various educational levels.’ 64

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The major policy document setting out expectations of the foreign-language curriculum is the Course of Study (Foreign Languages) which focuses almost entirely on the teaching and learning of English with the merest nod to other languages.2 Japan’s government has poured massive amounts of money into English teaching, most notably with the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme since 1987 and the Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Abilities since 2003; the next step will be the introduction of English into the elementary school curriculum in 2011. The expressed purpose of teaching English is to enable Japanese people to communicate in international settings, Japanese not being a major international language. Academic writers such as Tsuda Yukio rail against the hegemony of English in terms of cultural imperialism, but Japanese policy-makers and educators show no signs of turning away from that hegemony; rather, they have embraced English as a means to Japan’s own ends. This can have a downside in terms of motivation: Sakuragi (2008: 88) suggests that the nature of foreign-language learning in Japan where students have no choice as to whether they study English or not from middle school (and soon elementary school) through to university means that ‘many Japanese may feel that the importance of language study in one’s education is not a matter of personal judgment but is imposed by the society’. Allowed to choose, students may well have decided to study one of the languages they hear spoken around them today instead. In 1996, the Ch¯uo¯ Ky¯oiku Shingikai (Central Education Council) in its first report on Desirable Outcomes for Japanese Education in the Twenty-first Century noted that given the likelihood of continuing globalisation Japanese students would need to know more than just English and should therefore be allowed to experience a range of foreign languages in middle and secondary schools.3 And yet today, the minutes of meeting after meeting of the Gaikokugo Senmon Bukai (Foreign Languages Subcommittee) of the Central Education Committee4 conclude with a statement that ‘the curriculum guidelines say that languages other than English should conform to the objectives and content of teaching English, and we really need to talk about this’, with no further action reported. All the other documented discussion is about English, and nothing appears to be taking place to address the issue of other languages. The same attitude can be seen in the 2002 report of the Central Education Committee, entitled Atarashii Jidai ni okeru Ky¯oy¯o Ky¯oiku no Arikata ni tsuite (T¯oshin) (A Report on Desirable Outcomes for General Education in a New Age), which stressed the importance of education with a global outlook in a world where globalisation was proceeding apace, making it all the more important to understand other people and cultures and the religions underpinning them. It was no longer enough just to understand Japan’s own traditions and culture, the report said; an attitude of respect for those of other countries and peoples must also be inculcated, along with the ability to arrive at an accurate mutual

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understanding of the peoples of the world through foreign languages (MEXT 2002a). Such a description would seem to indicate that more foreign languages than English alone are meant, given that not all the peoples of the world speak English. Later in the same document, however, speaking of high-school students, the text stresses the importance of planning for excellent teaching of foreign languages such that when a student graduates from high school, he or she will be able to carry on an everyday conversation with a non-Japanese person. No specific mention of English is made, but the fact that the curriculum guidelines for foreign-language study focus as usual on English and that the Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Abilities was released the following year indicates that English is the primary focus, particularly as the wording about proficiency on high-school graduation is so similar to that of the Action Plan. A further document put out by the same committee several months later, an interim report on the revision of the Basic Law on Education and plans to revitalise education appropriate to a new age (MEXT 2002b), had only the following to say about ‘foreign languages’ in a list of examples of concrete policy objectives: r To aim for excellent foreign language education, such as English-language education which aims at producing high-school graduates who are able to carry on everyday conversations in English and university graduates who can use English in their work. To aim for English abilities of a world average level based on objective indicators such as the TOEFL test. To introduce a foreignlanguage listening test into the national university entrance examinations from 2006. Since the only foreign language which currently has a listening test of those available for the national university entrance examinations is English, it is clear that ‘gaikokugo’ here is yet again used to refer to English alone. What, then, of other languages in the education system? Foreign and community languages In the overall approach to teaching languages other than English in Japan, language policy does not support and facilitate (except in strictly delimited circumstances, as we shall see) but rather excludes by faint inclusion, rather in the manner of damning with faint praise. The aims of the policy for the promotion of English are at least explicit, as is the ideology of internationalisation behind them. In the area of teaching other languages, however, aims appear to be lacking, though ideology is not: that the aims are not there speaks to the strength of the ideology that Japan needs only Japanese and English to be self-sufficient. Very little attention is paid to the teaching of other foreign languages. Although the new middle school Foreign Language syllabus released by MEXT in 2008

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sets out as its aims a deepened understanding of languages and cultures and a willingness to communicate actively through the study of foreign languages (MEXT 2008a), it then goes on to outline in detail the requirements for teaching English with the same blanket one-liner at the end about other languages being taught in conformity to the same aims and content, even though the political policy-speak about the aims of promoting English is quite different. We cannot say categorically that the teaching of other foreign languages has been omitted from the Course of Study guidelines, but it is certainly not accorded the individualised attention it deserves, subsumed as a line or two under a one-size-fits-all model with no acknowledgment of important pedagogical issues which may differ from language to language. Classroom support measures are likewise English-oriented. In 2009–10, 99 per cent of Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) on the governmentsponsored JET Programme came from countries where English is either the primary language or an official language (Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme 2009b). The 2009–10 JET information pamphlet5 specifies as ‘designated languages’ English, French, German, Chinese, Korean and for other nonEnglish countries, the principal language spoken in that country. At the time of its inception in 1987, the programme aimed to draw ALTs from countries where English was the primary language; German and French were included in the targeted languages from 1989, Chinese and Korean from 1998, and most recently Russian from 2005 (Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme 2009a). The programme was initially set up specifically to improve the English-speaking ability of Japanese students, with French and German added later following requests from the ambassadors of those countries. Prime Minister Nakasone had earlier asked Ishihara Nobuo, who had been closely involved with the setting up of the programme, whether he could tell then French President Mitterand at a summit in Paris that the French language would be added to the JET programme, which led to the French ambassador’s representations. Junior and senior high schools teaching French and German as second foreign languages were subsequently located, and ALTs from those countries were assigned to help out in classrooms there (Ishihara and Kayama 2007). When Prime Minister Takeshita, who followed Nakasone, announced in a 1988 speech given in Europe that French and German were to be included in the programme from the following year, it was as part of a strategy by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to move beyond the dependence on the relationship with the USA and strengthen ties with the European market, with the JET Programme being seen as one means of achieving this (McConnell 2000: 73–4). The strategy was not well aligned with on-the-ground realities, however: finding schools which taught these languages proved very difficult, and McConnell observes that most of the very small number6 of French and German participants invited in 1989 ended by teaching English in addition to some classes in their own

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language. This led future applicants from those countries to shift from the ALT arm of the programme to the Coordinator for International Relations (CIR) arm, where they could work in local governments which had French or German sister cities. The arrival of Chinese and Korean ALTs in 1998, where previously applicants from those countries had worked only as CIRs, reflected the growth of those languages as foreign language electives after 1997, when – as we shall see – Chinese became the most popular non-English foreign language studied in high schools (McConnell 2000: 256).7 It was also ‘a manifestation of larger regional dynamics’, with Japan turning back towards Asia in terms of economic linkages (233) and with the rise of China endowing a knowledge of its language with added importance not just in Japan but elsewhere as well. ‘In many Asian countries, in Europe and the USA, Mandarin has emerged as the new must-have language’ (Graddol 2006: 63) because of China’s rapidly growing economic importance, and its study is being promoted in typical soft-power fashion by a worldwide network of Confucius Institutes. In Japan, Chinese is a community language as well as a foreign language of regional, cultural and historical importance. The term ‘community languages’ indicates recognition that such languages are used by citizens within a polity; it has in large part replaced ‘foreign languages’ in Australia since the mid-1970s, where it refers to languages other than English used in the general community to acknowledge that these languages form a continuing part of the Australian social fabric. They are not ‘foreign languages’, since they are commonly used by many Australians (Clyne 2005: 5). In Japan’s case, languages other than Japanese are used within large ethnic communities encompassing in some cases both oldcomers and newcomers (for Chinese and Korean)8 and in others mainly newcomers (Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog and others) in the same way as is true of community languages in Australia. The difference between the two countries’ approaches to support for community languages is, of course, that Australia uses English as its de facto national language and therefore has no need to prioritise community languages against a perceived imperative to teach this major international language, whereas in Japan a three-tiered structure exists: the national language, English as an international language, and other ‘foreign’ languages, which sees those other foreign languages sidelined in the school system. This has not stopped other Asian countries in the same situation from teaching such languages: South Korea, for instance, has thirtyone speciality foreign-language high schools where students study either one or two other languages in addition to Korean and English as part of an intensive curriculum. Similar schools also operate in China: at Jinan Foreign Language School,9 for example, English, Japanese and Russian are taught. The 2009 Japan Foundation survey of overseas learners of Japanese as a foreign language showed Korea and China as having the largest contingents with around 960,000 and 830,000 students respectively (Japan Foundation 2010). Clearly, other

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countries in the region do not limit their offerings to the study of the national language and English but provide substantial avenues for the study of other languages as well. As with the study of English, the emphasis in Japanese government documents dealing with the learning of other languages is externally focused, with no recognition of the community status of some. A planning document relating to English in elementary schools, produced in 2006 by the Foreign Languages Subcommittee of the Central Education Committee, for example, states unequivocally with regard to other languages such as the Chinese now being taught in some high schools that ‘we also need to examine how best to teach foreign languages from the point of view of stimulating communication with the countries of Asia, in order to train Japanese people who live in international society’ (MEXT 2006b). Chinese is spoken by large numbers of people in Japan, but policy documents such as this make no acknowledgment of that fact, seeing the need to teach Chinese only in terms of external engagement with China and other Asian countries where that language is spoken. Other examples of this position are not hard to find. In an article in Kiky¯usen, a monthly newsletter for teachers sent from Japan to work in Japanese schools in other countries by the Elementary and Secondary Education Bureau of MEXT’s International Education Division, division chief Tezuka Yoshimasa wrote of how important it was to focus Japan’s foreign-language education on English as the official language of both the twenty-one-member APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) and the ten-member ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations). Even the formerly French-controlled areas of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, where French was widely spoken, use English as members of ASEAN, he argued, and if an East Asian grouping were to emerge with Japan and China among its members there was a strong probability that English would be its official language. With English so entrenched as the global standard for international communication, it was only realistic for Japan to focus its efforts in that area. Other foreign languages he saw as being important to bilateral relationships, with no need to rank them in any particular hierarchy. Even though the need for the study of Chinese and Korean was bound to increase to enhance Japan–China or Japan–Korea bilateral relationships, in multilateral forums English would remain the most important (Tezuka 2007: 2). The focus of these remarks is again squarely on external international relations, with no recognition of Chinese and Korean as community languages within Japan itself. To argue that recognition of the place of community languages in the education system as community languages is important is not, of course, to deny the externally oriented significance of those languages, in particular those of the East Asian region. The normalisation of diplomatic relations with South Korea in 1965 and China in 1972 led to an increase in the 1980s in regional

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linkages on the side of Japan facing the continent, with prefectures along the Japan Sea coast such as Tottori, Niigata and Toyama competing to establish economically motivated sister affiliations with China, Korea and Russia (Menju 2003: 93). Available sources of public opinion indicate support for the study of regional languages. When a 2001 Cabinet Office survey on future internationalisation in universities asked what criteria should be used to decide which foreign languages university students should learn, the most frequent response was (unsurprisingly) languages that are widely used in the world; next came languages that an educated person might reasonably be expected to know, languages used in countries expected to have an important relationship with Japan in the future and languages used in areas which have a close economic relationship with Japan. Asked to comment specifically on which foreign languages university students should learn, over 92 per cent of respondents chose English, almost 60 per cent chose Chinese and around 15 per cent each indicated French and Korean (Naikakufu Daijin Kanb¯o Seifu K¯oh¯oshitsu 2001). These percentages, Sensui (2009: 48) suggests, indicate that a desirable outcome would be seen as English +1. Japan is lagging behind the rest of the world in language choices, he argues, and should start teaching Korean and Chinese at middle-school level as compulsory second languages. This view is supported by Nakajima Mineo, a noted China specialist who in the year 2000 chaired a MEXT committee on improving English-language teaching methods and later became a member of the government’s Education Rebuilding Council. Reporting on a discussion of language policy within MEXT, Nakajima made a plea for the study of other languages beside English, pointing out that Ural-Altaic languages such as Korean, Mongolian and Turkish should be relatively easy for Japanese people to learn; Chinese, too, would not be difficult and would facilitate access to many parts of Asia. Everyone, he concluded, should study not just English but another Asian language as well (Nakajima 2003: 50). Members of the general public occasionally write to the newspapers advocating wider study of Asian languages, an example being a letter in November 2008 from a doctor who saw many Asian patients in an area near a university with large numbers of exchange students from China and Korea. He advocated the study of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and other languages as second foreign language options at university as a means to understanding the lives of such people, positing as the ideal the presence of Japanese people here and there in the community who had at some stage of their lives studied such languages, regardless of their degree of proficiency. Perfect mastery was not required; the mere presence of people who could understand even to a small degree their native language would give great comfort to foreign residents (Yoshimura 2008). This letter from a doctor with first-hand experience of non-Japanesespeaking patients is by no means an isolated instance of such views, illustrating

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the readiness of people in local communities to engage with speakers of other languages who live there as well. Nor is the business world ignorant of the benefits of other foreign-language study, although its major focus is on English. When Norihiro Nosse published an essay reflecting on his thirty-year executive career at Matsushita Electric in 1996, for instance, he included in a list entitled ‘Much Asked-for Talents and Capabilities in the Future: New Businessman of the 21st Century’ the following: ‘Proficiency in at least three languages (two foreign languages). To be able to handle the English language is no longer considered a talent. Fairly good command of another foreign language will add an extra advantage to 21st century businessmen whether it be Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese), or Indonesian’ (Nosse 1996: 181). Japan has chosen to focus on English as its first foreign language for obvious reasons. The result, however, has been that the concept of multilingualism promoted through the school system has been a blinkered multilingualism, emphasising only one alternative worldview through language rather than offering a range of choices (see, e.g., Kubota 2002 and Tanaka 2002). During the 1980s, when ‘kokusaika’ (internationalisation) became the buzzword of the day, the study of foreign languages was seen as a key indicator of internationalisation by the Nakasone government’s Rinji Ky¯oiku Shingikai (Ad Hoc Council on Education, set up in 1984), and the Committee’s publications made motherhood statements about the importance of including foreign languages other than English, including Asian languages (Hood 2001: 53; Koike 1992: 230–1). Nevertheless, twenty years later, the Foreign Language curriculum guidelines continue to focus almost exclusively on English. Has the overriding emphasis on English been worth the consequent marginalisation of other foreign languages in the school system at pre-tertiary levels and increasingly at tertiary level? The sought-after improvement in the ability to speak better English has not been spectacular despite the large amounts of money invested to this end through the JET Programme and more recently the Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Abilities policy. An alternative approach could be to divert some of that money into the wider teaching of Asian languages, particularly given the increasing community interest in studying Chinese and Korean at school. As Kaiser observes, speakers of a language such as Japanese which is spoken mainly within Japan itself must rely on foreign languages for international communication; they will not be able to communicate with the world unless they are bilingual or multilingual, since speakers of other languages cannot be relied on to learn Japanese. Japanese people should therefore be studying not just English alone but English in combination with the languages of neighbouring countries such as China, Korea and Indonesia. For local communication, either Japanese or the language of neighbouring-country interlocutors

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could be used, with English doing duty for international commerce and Internet communication (Ono et al. 2000: 6). Research studies of different polities have shown language planning and policy to be based on ‘distinctive ideological assumptions about the role of language in civic and human life . . . and distinctive stances toward the state regulation of language’ (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994: 63). Such assumptions shape the way in which language issues are perceived and planned within a society: Ruiz (1984), for example, identifies three orientations in language planning, namely language as a resource, a problem or a right. Japan today remains fixed in the ‘language as problem’ orientation and does not yet see the linguistic abilities of its non-Japanese citizens as a resource. As I will show, despite some encouraging signs of growth over the last decade in Chinese and Korean, the local community languages remain under-represented in the formal education system. Kakazu (2007) has said that while during the Meiji Period (1868–1912) foreign languages such as English, German, French and Russian were rigorously studied in order to absorb knowledge of the West as rapidly as possible, postwar language education in schools for foreign languages dominated by English has been done under the rubric not of language policy but rather of curriculum guidelines. I would argue, however, that these curriculum guidelines are in fact language policy in action, translated into classroom practice. The lack of any real attention to foreign languages other than English in the Foreign Language curriculum guidelines highlights the lacuna in national language policy on this subject, a gap which needs to be filled to take account not only of the importance to Japan’s external relations of teaching the languages of regional neighbours but the internal importance of teaching its community languages. Although people usually think of foreign languages as something they would use overseas, Sensui (2009: 50) observes, in fact they are surrounded by opportunities to use other languages within Japan itself. Spanish and Portuguese in particular are widely spoken in his own local community of Hiratsuka City in Kanagawa Prefecture. English is actually the language least likely to be associated with ethnic minorities and immigrants in Japan, whereas both Chinese and Korean are strongly associated with ethnic minority status (oldcomers) and immigration (newcomers) and Spanish is increasingly visible because of ‘nikkei’ workers (Sakuragi 2008). Sakuragi’s study of student attitudes towards the English, Chinese, Korean and Spanish languages at two universities found the preferred languages to be English, Chinese, Spanish and Korean, in that order. Significant correlations were found between attitudes to Chinese, Korean and Spanish and social distance (defined as a degree of individual willingness to accept people with various ethnic backgrounds into one’s personal relationships), prompting Sakuragi to suggest the potential benefit to be gained from expanding the number of languages taught in schools in terms of social cohesion.

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Another survey of attitudes towards foreign-language learning in Japan was conducted by Shibata and Okado (2001), who in 1998 targeted four groups engaged in activities relating to the economy and in international exchange, in both high schools where English is the only foreign language taught and high schools teaching other foreign languages as well. Unsurprisingly, the first of these viewed language proficiency as strategically very important to Japan’s economic development, ranking it second (from a predetermined list of choices) after ‘a global outlook’ in response to a question on what sort of talents should be cultivated for the Japan of the future. The results were almost the same for the schools which taught foreign languages other than English, which ranked a global outlook, ability to deal with other cultures and foreign-language proficiency as their top three choices. Schools teaching only English ranked language proficiency in fourth place, as did organisations involved in international exchange which gave precedence to intercultural communication skills. Nevertheless, the fact that language proficiency appeared in one of the top four slots for each group indicates a degree of consensus on the need for people with good language skills in Japan in relation to global outlook. When asked what sort of human talent should be fostered for the areas in which respondents themselves lived, however, those on the Japan Sea coast, not surprisingly given that it faces China and Korea, showed an awareness of different needs. Whereas respondents from inland areas and areas on the Pacific coast accorded top rankings to global outlook, language proficiency and intercultural understanding or negotiating ability (with language proficiency coming first in the Pacific coast areas), those from the west coast saw greater value in local knowledge, followed by language proficiency and general knowledge. Clearly, this indicates recognition of the importance of knowing the languages of neighbouring countries when dealing with those countries: as the authors of this study point out, a person with good general knowledge, a local outlook and language skills can be expected to make a solid contribution to developing economic and other relationships across the Sea of Japan. The top ranking given to language skills in the Pacific Coast areas, where most of the large cities are concentrated, may reflect the fact that migrants from various countries cluster in those cities, along with the greater exposure of the east coast to international visitors and events. The overall survey results show that foreign-language education is considered by respondents to be an important element in the development of Japan’s future human capital. The English language figured prominently in responses relating to ‘high communication ability’, a factor deemed desirable across all four sectors. In terms of foreign languages other than English, however, language awareness and education were most noticeable at local levels, with Chinese, Korean and Russian being listed as important languages to learn on the Japan Sea side. Respondents

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from inland areas listed Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese; those from the Pacific Coast side, Chinese, Korean, Spanish and to a lesser extent French and German. Shibata and Okado stress the importance of understanding what they refer to as ‘the glocal language situation’: it is simply not enough to rely on English, given that regional languages are becoming increasingly important with the continuing progress of glocalisation. As these surveys indicate, the value of studying community and regional languages is well understood by respondents. Reflecting this, some adults have begun to study Asian languages through a range of available options as a result of grassroots internationalisation in local communities (Tanaka 2002). Clammer’s chapter in a recent wide-ranging demographic study of Japan identified language study as ‘a major activity amongst the retired, whether in a formal school setting or at home or with friends, Chinese being a very popular option, and currently Korean to some extent, although the elderly except those with memories of colonial life in Korea, are less effected [sic] by the “Korean boom” currently sweeping Japan and visible in popular culture, movies, music and foods in particular’ (Clammer 2008: 604). Local government international organisations often offer inexpensive courses in foreign languages to Japanese residents: in Tokyo, Mitaka City’s International Society for Hospitality (MISHOP), for example, offers Japanese residents introductory courses in foreign languages ‘to promote better understanding of different cultures and smooth communication between internationals and Japanese residents’. The largest group of registered foreign residents in this community is Chinese, followed by Koreans. Therefore, the multilingual webpage invites, ‘Why don’t you study Chinese or Korean to try communicating with your foreign neighbors around you!’10 Introductory- and intermediate-level classes in Chinese and Korean, as well as more advanced activities using English, are offered at the centre; each course meets weekly for ten weeks and costs residents 10,000 yen plus textbook costs. In Osaka, the city of Kawachinagano, through its International Friendship Association (KIFA), offers classes in Chinese, English conversation, English (intermediate), Korean, Spanish (intermediate) and French (introductory) through its Language Club at the very affordable price of 500 yen per class.11 The private language business sector is also a source of classes in other languages for interested members of the community. In addition to English, which accounts for the bulk of the market, private language schools offer courses in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Latin and Spanish; several of the larger schools, such as Daigakusyorin International Language Academy (DILA),12 offer a much wider range of languages taught to both private and business-sector learners. In 2002, DILA released survey material identifying language study trends since 1990. Whereas previous surveys had shown that English, French and German (in that order) were the most popular foreign

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languages towards the end of the bubble-economy period in the late 1980s, the economic rise of Asia since then had led to increased interest in the study of Asian languages, Chinese and Thai in particular followed by Indonesian, which had now surpassed European languages. The demand from companies for Chinese-speaking employees had also been increasing rapidly (Fukuoka International Association 2002). This slackened somewhat in subsequent years thanks to the gloomy financial situation: the Yano Research Institute’s survey of the language business market13 in fiscal 2008 reported that language-related business sales had declined for the fourth year in a row. Correspondence lessons and teacher-led classes in Chinese, Korean, French and German (in descending order of size of market) had each recorded a drop against the previous year. Possible factors in the overall decline were given as depressed consumer spending following the late-2008 recession and the reduction in provision of language training by corporate clients to their employees for the same reason. One sector expected to show increased growth in 2009 was the language examination market, thanks to the continuing demand for foreign-language skills in business activities as Japanese companies increased their trade with overseas enterprises (Yano Research Institute Ltd 2009). And finally, language classes are also offered to the public through Nippon H¯os¯o Ky¯okai (Japan Broadcasting Corporation, known as NHK), the country’s public broadcaster, which offers weekly language-learning programmes in English, Chinese, French, Italian, Korean, German, Spanish, Russian and Arabic. Korean lessons, for example, have been made available in this manner since 1984; in the first decade of the present century, the number of listeners greatly increased because of the 2002 World Cup and popular Korean soap operas on TV. In 2005 the number of lecture texts published for the TV Korean classes reached 220,000, with the actual number of listeners said to be three or four times that number. Whereas in 1994 only 80,000 lecture texts had been sold, far fewer than for other languages, by 2004 Korean had become the top seller (Nishie 2009). Interest in learning languages other than English in community or private sector classes, then, is certainly not lacking in the populace at large. Encouraging though this may be, however, it does not address the real heart of the matter, which is the need for a policy on teaching such languages in schools and universities on a much wider basis than is currently the case. While there has certainly been an increase in the number of schools teaching Chinese and Korean over the last decade, statistics taken at face value can sometimes be misleading. An article in the Asahi Shimbun in early 2000 reported that the number of schools teaching foreign languages other than English in 1998 had increased by more than 17 per cent over the previous two years, many offering a second foreign language in parallel with English. Of the new schools, 343 were public and 208 were private. Most offered Chinese (almost 70 per cent); Korean

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(c. 24 per cent), French (c. 22 per cent) and German (c. 20 per cent) were also available. These second-foreign-language classes, however, were concentrated in schools where students either did not go on to further education or moved on ‘escalator-style’14 to a university affiliated with the school (Asahi Shimbun 2000), i.e., their students did not have to face the rigours of the university entrance examination system, allowing greater latitude in including so-called ‘non-essential’ subjects such as a second foreign language in the curriculum. Far from indicating a more rigorous uptake of the study of second foreign languages, these figures in fact represent a view of such languages as an easy option in the curriculum of not overly academic schools. This is very different from the Meiji Period situation, when school students studied English, French and German for six to eight hours a week. While the stated aim then was to acquire the four skills, in reality classes became good practice for translation, then so important in Japan’s learning interface with the West, and this became the focus of foreign-language education, especially English (Koike 1992: 219– 20).15 The importance of foreign languages – with the exception of English – in the scheme of things has been downgraded since then, particularly in the case of the once-so-important European languages: ‘In contrast to the English boom . . . the status of other modern European languages in Japan is in decline. One reason for this is the raised interest in other Asian languages, but the biggest reason is the de-emphasis on learning a second foreign language at third level’ (Hashimoto 2004: 1). What, then, is the current situation with regard to teaching foreign languages other than English in the education system? Such languages are taught mainly at Japanese universities rather than in schools, where the decision on whether to offer a second foreign language is decided by the individual school. In the absence of any overarching national language policy encompassing community languages and/or strategically important languages, such a situation is inevitable. The following section will investigate language offerings in the secondary sector, beginning with detailed statistics on what is currently taught. The secondary sector As of June 2009, sixteen foreign languages other than English were being offered in just over 2,000 Japanese high schools, over two-thirds of them public schools, the rest private, slightly fewer than at the same time two years earlier. Of the major languages, the most widely taught was Chinese (831 schools; 19,751 learners), followed in descending order16 by Korean (420; 8,448), French (373; 8,954) and Spanish (143; 2,763).17 Both Chinese and Korean had expanded over the preceding six years, Chinese from 154 schools and Korean from 42 in 1993; other languages had not. In middle schools, Chinese was taught at the largest

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number of schools (19 schools; 490 learners), followed by French (16 schools; 1,938 learners), Korean (14; 452), Spanish (6; 184) and German (2; 12), making French the most widely studied language in terms of student numbers, if not of schools. At this level, the European languages were taught at private schools only, unlike Chinese and Korean which are also offered in public schools (Monbukagakush¯o Shot¯o Ch¯ut¯o Ky¯oiku-kyoku Kokusai Ky¯oiku-ka 2010).18 When we consider that in 2010 Japan had 10,814 middle schools (9,982 of them public) and 5,116 high schools (3,780 public) (MEXT 2010b), most of which teach English as their foreign language, we can see how low this profile is. Unlike the statistics on foreign-language teaching at universities presented in the following section, information on the number of schools offering English is not included in the high-school figures because English is positioned as the first foreign language in the school sector and is taught almost universally; MEXT’s statistical table listing these languages is headed ‘foreign languages other than English’. In recent years, then, the teaching of Chinese and Korean has shown signs of growth in the wake of several administrative and bureaucratic developments. The final report of the Ad-Hoc Council on Educational Reform19 released in 1987 recommended that the range of elective subjects in the high school curriculum be expanded. To that end, the then Ministry of Education embarked in 1991 on a programme of designating certain schools for two-year periods as ‘k¯ot¯o gakk¯o gaikokugo tay¯oka kenky¯u ky¯oryoku k¯o’ (schools for collaborative research on the diversification of foreign-language education in high schools) for purposes of developmental research (Monbush¯o 1996). The purpose was specified as being to adapt effectively to internationalisation. In 1993, two reports on foreign languages other than English were issued by the Schools for Collaborative Research on the Diversification of Foreign Language Education, the first of which suggested that the languages of neighbouring Asian countries be introduced into the curriculum of middle and high schools (The Japan Forum 1998). The number of such schools peaked at seventeen in 1993, after which it declined steadily to only one by 1999; there seems to have been no systematic planning for a longer-term outlook (Tanaka 2002: 105; see also Goto et al. 2010). Then, in the year 2000, a report commissioned by then Prime Minister Obuchi on Japan’s goals for the new century also recommended that the teaching of Chinese and Korean be dramatically expanded as a strategy for improving neighbourly relations with those two countries (Prime Minister’s Commission 2000). These various pieces of rhetoric translated into action in 2002, not in terms of any large- or medium-scale rollout but rather in the form of resuscitation of the small-scale strategy of focus schools used in the 1990s. MEXT set aside funding that year for a plan20 to teach foreign languages other than English in high schools, giving the following rationale: although language teaching in

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Japanese schools is overwhelmingly focused on English, we also need to build proficiency in other languages because in future Japan will also have dealings with countries other than those where English is the primary language. To promote this diversification of foreign-language education, therefore, the ministry planned to designate certain areas teaching foreign languages other than English as ‘suishin chiiki’ (special promotion areas, i.e., promotion of a government policy) and would set up a liaison council for them encompassing representatives from schools, ALTs, administration, PTAs, people of learning and experience, exchange students and volunteer groups. The high schools teaching or planning to teach nominated languages within these areas would be designated ‘suishink¯o’ (lit.: schools promoting a policy). In conjunction with relevant local organisations, practical survey research would be carried out on effective curriculum topics and on how to use local resources in communities in classrooms. The schools would also send and receive students to and from the target-language countries. Schools in three prefectures (six in Kanagawa, six in Hy¯ogo and five in Wakayama) were designated as Chineseteaching schools, and twenty-one schools in Osaka as Korean-teaching schools, each for a two-year period, with a budget of 10,652,000 yen allocated for the project.21 By 2006, the scheme had expanded to encompass Russian. The White Paper of that year reported that in 2006–7 the prefecture of Hokkaido was designated to teach Russian; Kanagawa, Osaka and Wakayama to teach Chinese; and Osaka and Kagoshima to teach Korean (MEXT 2006a). The Hokkaido Government Board of Education’s website reports on the development of Russian-language teaching materials and provides downloads of the texts, teacher’s guides and self-study notes for thirty lessons at elementary level (developed in 2006) and for intermediate level (developed in 2007), along with teaching materials for intercultural understanding called in Japanese ‘My neighbours, Russia’, which provide cultural information about life in Russia. The webpage reports on the activities of the Hokkaido Liaison Council for the Promotion of Russian Language Education (Hokkaid¯o Government Board of Education 2008). An informational presentation given soon after the halfway mark of the project noted that the teaching materials produced in 2006 were the first Russianlanguage teaching materials meant for high-school students to be produced in Japan and were being used in six high schools by 150 students. The presentation also predicted that the project would systematise an educational environment for Russian language, increase the number of schools teaching Russian and advance cultural exchange with Russia through student visits (Hokkaid¯o Government Board of Education 2007). At Nemuro High School, one of the project’s nine designated schools, ninety students were studying two units of Russian in the first year of the project. Nemuro Nishi High School, also designated, had forty-two students, second-years taking three units and third-years two; this

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school also had Hokkaido’s only Russian ALT (Hokkaid¯o Government Board of Education 2006). A 2008 evaluation of this programme (MEXT 2008b) reported on the outcomes over what had become an extension of the original two-year trial period. That year there were three designated schools for Chinese, two for Korean, two for Russian and one each for French and Spanish, indicating an overall expansion of the programme in terms of both schools and languages. The six years since the programme’s inception had seen a cumulative total of eleven designated schools: five for Chinese, two for Korean, two for Russian and one each for Spanish and French. In the year prior to the inception of this policy there had been 1,046 schools teaching foreign languages other than English throughout Japan; by 2007, that number had expanded by almost 100 per cent to over 2,000. The number of Japanese students visiting the target-language countries and students from those countries visiting Japanese schools had also increased, as planned. Based on these indicators, the report concluded that the policy had greatly advanced the diversification of foreign-language teaching in schools. It was decided on the basis of these encouraging results to disseminate as widely as possible the results of the research carried on during the project as well as to encourage local areas to act on their own initiative in this regard. A total of 8 million yen had been spent on the designated schools, and 10 million on student exchange schemes; further funding, however, would not be requested in the 2009 budget. What had taken place, then, was a pilot project which had achieved encouraging results but which was not to be extended by the national government to a wider catchment area; rather, the research conducted by the designated schools was to form the basis for action for those local areas interested enough to put their own time and money into teaching the languages further. The reported increase in the number of schools, while encouraging, is no more than a drop in the bucket when compared to the total number of Japanese schools. Within the overall context of the education system, the growth is small: it lacks the backing of policy planning and any explicit vision for its wider spread. Without systematic government support, other languages cannot expect to flourish within the system, unlike the situation in the European Union (Tanaka 2002: 105–6). Korean was first taught at high schools in 1973, when it was offered at a school in Hyogo Prefecture; by 1988 there were 14 schools, rising to 219 in 2003 (Nishie 2009) and, as we have seen, to 420 in 2009. A survey of Korean in high schools conducted in early 2007 by the National Center for University Entrance Examinations received responses from 189 of the 290 high schools then teaching Korean across Japan, most of them public schools. Korean was offered across a variety of curriculum concentration areas, with the majority in any one area being in the general education curriculum but a large number also coming under the ‘other’ category, which encompassed

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twenty-eight different areas including integrated programmes, international studies, international communication and economics. The number of schools offering Korean began to increase after 1991, with a particularly sharp rise after 2003,22 leading to the addition of Korean as a subject in the national university entrance examinations. Data on student numbers was supplied by 172 schools, accounting for a total of 5,567 students, ranging in cohort size from 427 at one school to only one at another. At more than 75 per cent of schools surveyed, students had undertaken only four units or less of Korean by the time they graduated, less than the number of units taken by students of English in a single year. Sixty-five schools were teaching Korean as their only other foreign language besides English.23 Most schools reported fostering conversational ability rather than grammar or reading/writing, and the majority taught fewer than 500 words of vocabulary. When schools were asked to list problematic issues pertaining to students, ‘lack of interest’, ‘differences in ability’ and ‘lack of progress’ featured prominently, along with the lack of sufficient contact hours and appropriate teaching materials (National Center for University Entrance Examinations 2008). The National Center for University Entrance Examinations’ annual reports on the foreign-language tests in the entrance examinations provides some insight into the situation of foreign languages other than English in secondary schools. To start with the big picture: of the written foreign-language tests in 2009, 99.84 per cent of applicants sat the English test. The other languages for which testing is available are German, French, Chinese (since 1997) and Korean (since 2002). The breakdown of applicants sitting these tests was as follows: Chinese 0.08 per cent (409 applicants), French and Korean both 0.03 per cent (149 and 136 respectively) and German 0.02 per cent (106) (National Center for University Entrance Examinations 2009b). Excavating a little more information about Chinese and Korean, the most widely studied foreign languages other than English: individual reports on the outcomes for each of the languages provide context about the nature of their teaching and student body. The 2009 report for Chinese notes that more students had taken Chinese that year than any other language except English, albeit slightly fewer than the previous year. The fact that the average mark was lower than that of the previous year it attributes to two factors, the first that over 10 per cent of students received less than half marks on the test, something not seen in previous years, and the second that the correct answer rate for nine questions in particular was particularly low. The first of these the report explains by the continuing increase in the numbers of Japanese (i.e., not Chinese or Chinese-background) students sitting the test now that over 500 high schools nationwide teach Chinese. A second contributing factor is that the language used in framing the questions required a higher level of ability in Japanese than previously, so that Chinese students sitting the test

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were disadvantaged (National Center for University Entrance Examinations 2009a). It seems ironic that Japanese-language ability should prevent Chinese students from doing well in a Chinese-language examination, and indeed the report’s authors question whether there has been too much of a shift towards testing whether the examinee has good Japanese-language ability by this means. The report on Korean comments that almost all the students studying Korean at high schools were taking only two to four units, which allowed them to achieve only a fairly basic knowledge of reading and writing Hangul script, simple greetings, a vocabulary of between 500 and 1,000 words (depending on the school) and very basic grammar. Over the eight years the Korean test had been offered, the number of applicants had steadily increased from 99 to 136 but the number of units they had studied had not, so that what had actually been seen was an increase in the number of elementary-level students. This, however, did not appear to be recognised by the test setters, who expected the level to be the same as that of students who had studied English for a much greater number of hours. Most of those who actually sit the test have not studied Korean at Japanese high schools but are either people born and raised in Korea who only recently came to Japan or students who studied at Korean schools in Japan, and the writer of the report asks just what it is that the Center for Entrance Examinations expects in running this test, given that there is a clear disconnect between the test content and the learning situation in schools and that it is unlikely that there will be any dramatic increase in the number of students taking twelve units and over of Korean at schools. He suggests that the nature of the test be rethought, not only for Korean but for other foreign languages other than English, so that it better reflects present educational content (National Center for University Entrance Examinations 2009c). Foreign languages other than English have not always had such a low profile in the education system as they do today. During the Meiji Period, when Japan was attempting to take its place among the modern nations, English, French and German were included in the secondary school and university curricula for the very practical purpose of facilitating the gaining of knowledge from western countries: in other words, the fact that they were taught was driven by external forces. English was promoted as the major foreign language, then as now, with French or German as electives. In the period leading up to and during the Second World War, however, English was viewed with increasing disfavour as the language of the enemy; Chinese24 and later (during the war in the Pacific) Malay were added to the middle school curriculum (Tanaka Shinya 2009). Following the war, however, most schools concentrated on teaching English as their only foreign language, with other languages in the main being taught at university level (Tanaka 2002).

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The tertiary sector Since high schools concentrate almost exclusively on teaching English, it is only after they reach university that most students have the opportunity to study other foreign languages. A few universities specialise in foreign languages, such as Tokyo Gaikokugo Daigaku (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) which teaches around fifty languages, half of them Asian. In 2010 Japan had 778 universities, over three-quarters of them private universities (MEXT 2010a). A study of undergraduate language course offerings at 747 universities in late 2009 to early 2010 found that the most widely taught were English (at 715 universities), Chinese (610), French (531), German (528) and Korean (429). Other languages offered were Spanish, Russian, Italian, Latin and Arabic in descending order of frequency. English as usual dominates, with many of the other languages being offered as second-foreign-language electives. The strength of French and German reflects Japan’s history of engagement with these countries and their languages during its modernisation period. The popularity of Korean, as we have seen, can be attributed to the popularity of Korean TV soaps, films and music, as well as to sporting contacts between Japan and Korea in soccer, baseball and figure skating; in addition, cooperation between the two countries is increasing at both government and private sector levels (Nishie 2009; Oguri 2007). Internationalisation is more visibly present in the tertiary sector than the secondary. A 2009 OECD report on tertiary education in Japan remarked on the fact that while the international dimension ‘is not central in the Japanese culture’, awareness of the international dimensions of the knowledge economy and recent educational reforms have led to a greater effort towards internationalisation in Japanese universities. This has manifested itself in attempts to increase the number of overseas students studying in Japan, and in a growth in the number of universities offering foreign-language instruction: ‘in 2003 nearly half of all universities . . . were offering lessons in foreign languages, while at some universities all courses were in English’ (Newby et al. 2009: 82). Most universities, however, the report concluded, lacked a clearly articulated internationalisation strategy, so that such moves as had been made in that direction were mainly the result of bottom-up processes rather than any overarching policy directive from MEXT. Despite the OECD’s encouraging assessment, while it is certainly true that most foreign languages other than English are studied in universities rather than schools, even that has dropped from what it used to be before the 1990s because of the emphasis on English. Supporting evidence of the strength of the Englishfirst mentality, if any were needed, comes from comments reported in the Asahi Shimbun in May 2008.25 In an article on the decline in teaching of second foreign languages at several universities, a spokesman for Shinsh¯u University,

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a national university where six of the eight faculties had removed elementary foreign-language courses from the required units in their core curriculum, commented that ‘realistically speaking, it’s too hard to acquire a second foreign language as a skill – in the academic world as well as in business, English should take priority’ (Asahi Shimbun 2008). After the Second World War, foreign languages other than English (mainly French and German) were taught in universities under the designation of second foreign languages until a reduction of units available for general education courses in the early 1980s resulted in such languages being removed from the compulsory part of the curriculum at many universities and offerings often being reduced to one extra language only. Subsequently, following the partial revision of the University Establishment Standards in 1991,26 curriculum construction was freed up and it fell to each university to decide whether to offer foreign languages or not. At many universities, foreign languages then became electives, with a consequent drop in enrolments, and yet during this period new courses in Chinese, Spanish and Korean were established here and there, providing a wider choice of languages to study. After the year 2000, however, a renewed emphasis on English as the language of international communication led even those universities which still had a compulsory second foreign language to restrict themselves to English, in particular for science students where English is the lingua franca of the profession.27 Most students who enrol in other language courses at university, therefore, can receive only an introductory-level taste of the language because of the decrease in the number of units available. In other words, the postwar situation where all university students had to take two foreign languages is a thing of the past; today it is up to each university to decide what to offer, which of course brings internal factors into play, and the number of units available for study of a second foreign language has been greatly reduced (Tanaka 2002; see also Sensui 2009). To Ostheider (2009), globalisation has resulted in the choice of languages taught being made solely on the basis of the doctrine of profit. This, he argues, can clearly be seen in Japan, where ‘foreign language’ is synonymous with English and where ‘intercultural communication’ is often interpreted to mean English conversation with people from economically powerful countries. Moreover, although communication with the people from Asia and South America who make up the bulk of foreign residents in Japan is mostly in Japanese, many Japanese still perceive communication with foreigners in Japan as taking place in English. This situation is not improved by the fact that the ALTs working in Japanese schools on the JET Programme are overwhelmingly from English-speaking countries and often have limited Japanese-language proficiency, which sets up in students’ minds the stereotype of foreigners as English-speaking persons who cannot speak much Japanese. When Ostheider asked over 300 of his (university-level) students which countries accounted for

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the largest number of foreigners living in Japan, more than 70 per cent listed Americans in their top three choices, whereas the Ministry of Justice statistics for 2007 showed that Americans accounted for only 2.4 per cent, with much larger populations of Chinese, Koreans, Brazilians, Filipinos and others. Given this equating of ‘foreign language’ with English, Ostheider continues, learning a foreign language is seen as difficult because of the degree of difference involved. Were a language with points of similarity to Japanese, such as Korean, introduced to students before they were expected to learn English, the result would be a greatly reduced idea of the difficulty involved in language learning which would then flow on to affect later study of other languages and help to dispel the stereotype of their own language as particularly difficult which has been engendered by using English as a point of comparison. Real internationalisation, he contends, starts first from within the country; the teaching of Asian languages in Japanese schools should therefore not be oriented solely to countries outside Japan from motives of economic profit as is currently the case but rather should take into account that these languages, along with Spanish and Portuguese, also play a significant domestic role in the internationalisation of Japanese society today. In other words, he argues for recognition of the concept of community languages. The community languages angle has not been a factor in the increase in study of Chinese and Korean since the 1990s; rather, as we have seen, this has mainly been in response to external factors. Their present situation is in sharp contrast to what it was immediately after the Second World War, when they were seen as the languages of Japan’s former colonies28 and enrolments were small compared to French and German (Nishie 2009).29 Oguri (2007: 52) observes that many ethnic Korean teachers in western Japan today teach Korean as the language of a neighbouring country (both South and North Korea), but argues that this position, while plausible, is insufficiently persuasive to justify teaching it; rather, it should be taught because it is a language which is grammatically similar to Japanese and thus easy to learn, from a country with which Japan has had a close historical and cultural relationship. The popularity of Chinese-language study in Japan tends to be dependent on the current state of relations between the two states, with anti-Japanese demonstrations in China affecting enrolments (Ramzy 2006).30 Kaku (2007) attributes the increase in the numbers of students studying Chinese since the 1990s to the twenty-firstcentury expansion of China’s economy and its trade ties with Japan. Student motivations thus vary according to language and perspective, but generally derive from external rather than domestic considerations. What is missing is any acknowledgment of Japan’s own ethnic Korean and Chinese communities, where both languages could be used with ease inside Japan itself. The external orientation remains consistent in the statement that before Chinese and Korean could be seen as significant for university foreign-language education, both

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countries had to achieve political and economic stability to make studying them worthwhile. The way forward? Several benefits could accrue to Japan in adopting a policy of increased policy attention to teaching foreign languages other than English, particularly in terms of adding a local dimension to its current thinking on foreign-language teaching. Such a change would openly recognise its already existing linguistic diversity, strengthen the concept of community languages and further encourage internal cultural internationalisation. Teachers could be trained who could support the education of migrant children by offering supplemental mothertongue instruction while the students are still in the lengthy process of mastering written Japanese, so that such students do not lose out on content. Such a policy could also provide both symbolic and practical evidence of goodwill to regional neighbours where residual wartime memories create ongoing tensions today, a source of friction most recently acknowledged in Prime Minister Kan’s August 2010 apology for the suffering experienced by Korea during Japan’s colonial rule. The history of government-sponsored foreign-language study in Japan has always reflected the international environment of the time. There is no good reason why today should be an exception: the languages of Korea and China deserve to be taught in the education system in international terms both for economic reasons and for their proximity to Japan. It is surely time, however, to move past the focus on international factors alone and to think more closely about the internal environment with regard to language teaching. Korean and Chinese are the languages of countries with much older historical and cultural ties with Japan than the western languages, and are associated with large ethnic communities within Japan itself.31 It is no longer a case of a self-contained Japan reaching out to an external locus: as we saw in the previous chapter, the international community has come to Japan, no longer just for special events like Expos and the Olympics or on tourist visas but to work, study, live and play, so that ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ is now a fact of life. Japan, in other words, has community languages, and in the case of the Chinese and Korean communities has had them for a very long time. Kat¯o (2009: 164) suggests that Japan’s language policy is already being influenced by the increase in immigration to Japan from Asian countries, and that the language policy focus has switched from the international scene (English) to the domestic. While I do not agree that this process is yet as advanced as Kat¯o seems to believe, this is certainly the direction in which it should optimally be headed. A shift in language policy in this area can be seen as a tool for realising political and social objectives in reshaping imaginings of community, nation and language.

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A decision to invest in expanded teaching of regional languages and other foreign languages besides English can play a very constructive role in shaping student (and by extension, community) perceptions of internal internationalisation, and there is an incontrovertible need for both understanding and linguistic proficiency across a variety of fields. Harada (2003: 105), for example, in her study of evening middle schools where 70 per cent of the student body are non-Japanese, noted that teachers who could speak Chinese or a foreign language other than English were extremely rare in this environment and yet were badly needed in such schools to help students learning Japanese with advice on life and curriculum and with home–school communication. The ability to communicate with a student in his or her own first language can help to prevent a build-up of misery and misunderstanding caused by language barriers the student does not yet have the ability to surmount. It is to be hoped that in time Japan will move towards a level of greater cultural sophistication in terms of its engagement with community and foreign languages at both policy and delivery level. Multilingual information for foreign residents Turning now from foreign languages other than English in education to the provision of multilingual language services in the community: the last decade has seen a great increase in the use of community languages in public services, both in print and online, most noticeably at the municipal level. Some areas have also taken steps to include foreign languages in public signs. In this section of the chapter, I will examine how and what sort of information in languages other than Japanese has been provided in order to integrate newcomer residents into local communities. While hard copy information is available from local ward offices and other government outlets, today the Internet is also widely used as a means of delivering multilingual information. One of the most immediately apparent ways in which foreign languages are used in public areas is their incorporation into public signs, street signs and advertising hoardings, i.e., what has become known as linguistic landscaping. Linguistic landscaping is the name given to a field of study pertaining to the language used on signs in public spaces and several country-specific studies have been published (e.g., Landry and Bourhis 1997). For Coulmas (2009: 13), linguistic landscaping is ‘the study of writing on display in the public sphere’, where the public sphere is specifically taken to mean the urbanised society’s cityscape, particularly in a multilingual setting. Backhaus (2007: 10), in his study of linguistic landscapes in Japan, defines linguistic landscaping as ‘the planning and implementation of actions pertaining to language on signs’ and linguistic landscapes as ‘the result of these actions’. The languages used on public signs, he asserts, can offer important clues to language policies,

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language attitudes and power relations between different linguistic groups, to which we can add changing demographic features of the area concerned that point to larger social and economic shifts in society. Where commercial signs are involved, of course, the use of a foreign language may well denote the presence of a local community of speakers of that language32 but – depending on the language and the nature of the business concerned – it may equally well be an attempt by the business owner to add an eye-catching element of difference or glamour to signs. English and French are particular favourites for this purpose in Japan, where they are used to create a desired commercial image. The languages used on official signs in Japan, those relating to municipal operations, are not decided by an official language policy at national level but rather by local authorities. This, of course, is just as much language policy as any higher-level document. Shohamy (2006: xvi) refers to the treatment of language in the public space as a policy device used to perpetuate language practices that creates ‘real’ (i.e., de facto, as opposed to de jure) policies: ‘these devices, which on the surface may not be viewed as policy devices, are strongly affecting the actual policies, given their direct effects on language practice’. In the case of Tokyo, an actual written policy does exist: the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, as a result of discussions at a 2002 meeting of its Chiiki Kokusaika Suishin Kent¯o Iinkai (Committee to Examine and Promote Local Internationalisation) and associated consultations, issued a guide to writing signs that would make Tokyo easier for its many foreign residents and visitors, particularly those on foot, to get around. The five general principles the guide espoused for the language used in signs were that it should be simple, clear, consistent, uniform and systematic. Places to be targeted included the airports, stations, guide map signboards, subway and bus stops, major intersections and facilities and tourist attractions. Since to use several languages on the signs would defeat the purpose of making them easily readable, a linguistic hierarchy was adopted. As a basic principle all such signs were to use romanisation or English along with Japanese (Hepburn-system romanisation for Japanese proper nouns and English for common nouns); in view of Tokyo’s large population of foreign residents and its many international tourists, Japanese, romanisation/English, simplified-character Chinese and Korean were to be prioritised; and furigana could be added to kanji to assist foreign residents with reading them (Tokyo Metropolitan Government 2003). Anyone entering Japan through Narita Airport will easily find the fourlanguage signs in evidence, and they also feature prominently throughout Tokyo. In the Tokyo Metropolitan Library, a major research library visited by Japanese and foreign readers alike, for example, signs are posted in Japanese, English, Korean and Chinese, and the computer catalogue can be searched using a Japanese, English, Chinese or Korean interface. The library’s website

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provides information in all four languages, the bulk of it of course in Japanese, but sufficient in English, Chinese and Korean to outline its services. Clearly, implementation of the metropolitan government’s policy has proceeded successfully since 2003. Backhaus examined his database of 2,444 Tokyo signs in the light of the above document and suggested that if a language other than the prioritised four appears on a sign in central Tokyo, that sign will not be an official one; however, since government-related signs in his collection accounted for only about 30 per cent of the total, he concluded, it was clear that ‘the multilingual landscape in Tokyo is shaped more by the citizens than by the authorities’ (2007: 81). Nevertheless, the extent of government implementation of such signs signals willingness to acknowledge the linguistic needs of Tokyo as a multilingual population centre and is an excellent example of a language policy developed to meet changing linguistic needs on a demographic basis, a practice which has been ongoing in Tokyo since the early 1990s in reaction to the growth in foreign resident numbers. With regard to the use of English on signs, Backhaus observes, ‘the mere existence of a sizeable number of multilingual signs with simple English text given with a corresponding Japanese version implies that a minimal degree of proficiency in English has become a basic requirement in order to understand a Japanese sign these days’, suggesting that the completely monolingual Japanese reader is now the exception rather than the rule (2007: 143), despite the lingering ideology to the contrary. The major source of multilingual information, both written and spoken, has of course been local government offices, where it is in the interests of the local community to assist foreign residents to settle in without problems. Tegtmeyer Pak (2000: 63) sums this up thus: Local governments have focused on overcoming language barriers. Maps, information about the city and its government offices, community newsletters, and guides to daily life in Japan are increasingly available in an ever wider range of foreign languages. Japanese language classes are taught free or at minimal expense in public community centers. Consultation services in foreign languages are available in person and over the telephone, with migrants seeking assistance most frequently for problems involving their employers, health care, family law issues, residency status, and immigration procedures.

Alongside the local governments work NGOs of various kinds, also involved in support for foreign residents, many of them working with undocumented migrants (visa overstayers) whose needs local government cannot officially recognise (see Shipper 2008). Other volunteers are not affiliated with either local governments or with NGOs but offer language-related services (mostly teaching Japanese) in small neighbourhood groups. Two recent books, Kawahara (2004) and Kawahara and Noyama (2007), document and discuss in detail the wide range of language services (tagengo saabisu) made available to foreign

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residents by local governments, with language services defined as including the provision of multilingual signs in public areas of cities, the production of information pamphlets in foreign languages, the provision of Japanese-language education and support for first-language maintenance education (Kawahara and Noyama 2007: 3). For foreign residents to be treated on an equal footing with Japanese residents, Hirano (1996: 65–6) points out, they first have to know the rules and expectations of the host community; it is therefore essential to provide them with this information in languages they can understand, since if it is provided in Japanese alone those who do not speak Japanese will be left in the dark, and that is the conceptual underpinning of ‘tagengo saabisu’. Such moves, he notes, were initially predicated on a 1988 document issued by the S¯omush¯o (then the Ministry of Home Affairs, now MIAC), Kokusai K¯ory¯u no Machizukuri no Tame no Shishin (Guidelines for Creating Communities Favourable to International Interaction) and taken up by local governments.33 Multilingual services were thus spoken of as a government concern from the late 1980s, a move underpinned by requests from newcomer foreign residents themselves and by observations from local international associations. As a result, many public offices had opened multilingual inquiry counters by late 1992; while some offered only English, others offered a range of languages depending on the makeup of the local population. Multilingual written material followed. As the number of foreign workers in local communities continued to grow during the 1990s, multilingual information began to become available from non-government sources as well. In 1992, for example, the Osaka Bar Association published a human rights handbook for foreigners in Japan in seventeen languages other than Japanese34 which reflected the countries of origin of the many foreign workers then in Japan working in the 3-K jobs and in the entertainment industry. Many such workers, the preface asserted, either had no proper visa or had overstayed their visas, and the book was thus intended to acquaint them with their rights. It provided information about immigration control and status of residence, labour, work-related accidents, employment, security, health, marriage and birth and criminal cases, along with a directory of groups supporting foreigners in Japan (Osaka Bengoshi Kai 1992). The Association of Medical Doctors of Asia (AMDA), which provides both telephone services explaining Japan’s medical system in eight languages and introductions to doctors who can speak the patient’s language, in 2001 received around forty calls per day from foreigner residents seeking these services (Shipper 2002: 38). Several years later, in an example of increased municipal government and private sector cooperation, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government made a contract with this group to provide medical consultation to foreigners in English, Chinese, Korean, Thai and Spanish (Shipper 2008: 144).

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A good example of a regional government response to the more recent ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ discourse of the national government is Miyagi Prefecture, home in 2010 to 16,000 foreign residents, which has recently ramped up its multicultural coexistence activities in a policy-driven manner. In 2007 Miyagi was the first prefecture in Japan to enact a law to promote the formation of a ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ society, followed in 2009 by the release of the Miyagi Prefectural Plan for Promotion of a Tabunka Ky¯osei Society setting out the planned trajectory and policy initiatives through which this goal would be achieved. The definition of ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ adopted was the same as that in the 2006 MIAC document. One arm of the policy was to ensure that foreign residents were provided with relevant printed material and inquiry counters using multiple languages other than Japanese to improve their quality of life. Given that one of the Plan’s four steps is to break down language barriers, provision of multilingual information and interpreting services so that foreign residents can understand issues of public importance is seen as crucial, particularly in times of emergency; to that end, the Plan explicitly promotes the dissemination of such services, with one of its steps in this direction being to provide material both in other languages and in Yasashii Nihongo (Easy Japanese) (Miyagi-ken Kokusai Keizai K¯ory¯u Ka 2007). At the national level, by the time of the 2005 national population census, foreign residents with questions about the process were able to access a multilingual national hotline which provided services in English (five days a week), Chinese (three days) and Korean (two days); the census forms themselves were provided in a dozen languages other than Japanese. The census website was also multilingual, with information in Japanese, Chinese, English, Korean and Portuguese (Coulmas 2007: 115), as is the website for the 2010 census,35 reflecting the importance of those five languages within the community. Interestingly enough, while these languages are those most widely spoken in Japan and this must have been recognised by those who planned the provision of multilingual information, the census itself contains no question as to the first language of the informant. Presumably the decision is taken on the basis of the demographic statistics on registered foreign residents, which is as good a rough guide as any, but the census itself is not being used as any kind of planning tool in this regard. This is a missed opportunity: a firsthand knowledge of the first languages of the foreign population based on information given by members of that population themselves would provide much more fine-grained information about community languages and could be used to guide the provision of services accordingly in a more accurately targeted way. The online dimension of information provision is also important. At national government level, ministry websites provide information in Japanese and English, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also having links to pages in other languages from its top page under the ‘other languages’ rubric. Although

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the top page of the main Ministry of Justice website offers only Japanese and English, information in other languages is available through links: information on new immigration procedures instituted in 2007, for example, is available in six languages, namely Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.36 A national portal site for policies for foreign residents was set up in 2009 in response to employment difficulties arising from the global financial crisis; as this site was targeted mainly at ‘nikkei’ workers, the languages it uses are Japanese, English, Portuguese and Spanish.37 At prefectural and municipal government levels, the spread of languages tends to be greater, depending on the demographics of the area served by the authority in question.38 The website of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government offers information in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean, while that of Nagoya, Japan’s third largest city, supports pages in eight languages (Chinese, English, Filipino, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish). Kanagawa Prefecture’s website is particularly notable for its range of languages, offering on its ‘international’ page information in Cambodian, Chinese, English, Korean, Lao, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese.39 So is that of Miyazaki Prefecture, which offers a different range of languages, in this case Chinese (traditional characters), Chinese (simplified characters), English, French, Korean and Spanish. For Aichi Prefecture,40 the mix is slightly different: Chinese (traditional characters), Chinese (simplified characters), English, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Ibaraki Prefecture41 offers Chinese, English, Korean, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai. Not all pages in other languages carry the same amount of information as the Japanese pages, of course: the cost of translating the entire Japanese website would be prohibitive, and thus non-Japanese pages tend to carry summaries or restricted amounts of material, their main aim being to provide speakers of other languages with the information they need to enable them to come to grips with the basics of living in local communities. Foreign residents, however, may need additional information to that provided to Japanese residents, i.e., not just when and how to put out the garbage but also information on alien registration or on cultural events and expectations of behaviour that are taken for granted by Japanese and oldcomer residents (Carroll 2010: 389). Providing information in foreign languages on local government websites is therefore not simply a matter of translating or condensing the Japanese version but involves writing original material as well, either directly in the target language or in Japanese with a subsequent translation. The latter is more likely where information is translated into more than one foreign language. Multilingual websites, as well as providing screen-based content, also put people in touch with speakers of other languages with whom they can consult in person. The Multicultural Society Promotion Council jointly run by Gunma, Shizuoka, Gifu, Aichi and Mie Prefectures and the City of Nagoya, areas that

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are home to many foreign workers, provides an online service whereby people seeking multilingual consultation services operated by local governments within those areas (and also in Nagano Prefecture) can search by language, area and type of information required. Someone seeking consultation services in Bengali about general information in Gunma, for instance, can search using those keywords and discover that they can access such services in Gunma’s Shibukawa City on Thursdays for two hours from 1 p.m., with a link provided with relevant contact details, or those wanting to know where they can talk about immigration and visa issues in Portuguese in Nagoya City can find that information as well. The search facilities cover over sixteen languages, nine areas and fourteen categories of information. The website itself is posted in Japanese, English and Portuguese. This provides a significant service for migrants seeking a place to go where their lack of proficiency in Japanese will not be a barrier to comprehension of important issues relating to their lives in Japan. In July 2009, software internationalisation company Kokusaika JP published a report on the multilingual capabilities of all sixty-two local government websites under the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Of these, thirty-seven were multilingual and twenty-five were not. The most commonly used language other than Japanese was English, which appeared on all the multilingual websites; then came Chinese (simplified characters), followed closely by Korean. No local government sites used languages other than these three, with the exception of certain sites providing tourist information. English, Chinese and Korean were used together on twenty-seven websites, English and Chinese on two, and English-only on eight. While all twenty-three ward websites provided information in English, more than half of local government sites in the western area of Tokyo around Tama and most of those in the Izu and Ogasawara Islands used only Japanese. On five of the thirty-seven multilingual sites, the foreign-language pages had been machine-translated from Japanese, resulting in a low-quality output; on the other thirty-two, they had been separately created (Kokusaika JP 2009). The fact that the only time foreign languages other than the three above were used was on tourist-oriented information pages indicates that the main purpose of using these languages on local government sites is to provide information to foreign residents living in the area rather than to provide for tourists’ needs. One problem identified by the Kokusaika JP report was that some of the Japaneseonly websites served areas with up to 4,000 registered foreign residents, i.e., in identified high-need municipalities, certain of the areas where English was the only foreign language used housed several thousand Chinese and Korean residents as well as speakers of other languages such as Portuguese and Spanish. Among the Chinese residents were those from Taiwan who could not read the simplified characters used on the websites. Clearly, the report concluded,

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although much progress had been made, there remained significant room for improvement. A particularly important area is that of disseminating crucial information in other languages to non-Japanese residents in the wake of a disaster such as an earthquake, typhoon, terrorist attack or major gas leak. Following the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995, many such residents who were not proficient in Japanese experienced great difficulty in obtaining information on the likelihood of aftershocks and on where to assemble and to get food and water. Because of the time needed for translation, the first multilingual information sheets to be issued by local authorities appeared a week after the earthquake, while others took as long as a month. A later earthquake in Niigata in 2004 produced similar results: follow-up questionnaires with foreign residents revealed that well over half of the Brazilian residents were at a loss as to what to do. Multilingual information made available through local government offices tends to focus on disaster preparedness, providing preliminary information about what to do; the real need, however, is for information to be made available immediately after disaster strikes (Sato et al. 2009), as seen in March 2011. One response to this, involving Japanese rather than other languages, has been the development of Yasashii Nihongo, a simplified version of Japanese which uses a restricted range of vocabulary and grammatical structures. It was developed after the 1995 earthquake and is specifically intended to assist foreign residents whose command of the language is limited. Based on the premise that in times of disaster providing information in a form of Japanese foreigners can understand is more realistic than providing multilingual information given the timelag required for translation (estimated at seventy-two hours), Yasashii Nihongo is meant for those who have achieved proficiency equating to Level Three of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, i.e., everyday Japanese. It is intended to be used in community media such as announcements on radio and posters, and represents a useful step in closing the information gap for those with some proficiency in Japanese. Unlike an earlier scheme, Kan’yaku Nihongo (Simplified Japanese) proposed by Nomoto Kikuo in the 1980s which was premised on making Japanese easier for foreign business people to speak and was to be spoken only by non-Japanese, on which account it came in for widespread criticism,42 Yasashii Nihongo is meant to be used by Japanese native speakers to foreign residents and may even be easier for native speakers themselves to understand (Carroll 2008: 28). The pragmatic focus on alleviating the impact of disaster makes Yasashii Nihongo a useful tool in times of stress. Yasashii Nihongo was developed in the late 1990s by a group of linguists led by Sato Kazuyuki at Hirosaki University in Aomori Prefecture who were supported by a government research grant for the purpose. An explanation of the system is available on the project’s website43 in Japanese, Chinese,

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English and Korean, with an online manual and other guidelines also available on the Japanese pages. It requires a knowledge of around 2,000 basic words, along with the kind of grammatical constructions used for shopping, using public transport and other simple daily activities. In written materials, kanji are supplemented with furigana giving the pronunciations. One basic principle is that words likely to be frequently used in the media, e.g., ‘shelter’, ‘tsunami’ and ‘aftershock’, are kept as they are heard in announcements but are supplemented by an explanation: to ‘yoshin’ (aftershock), for example, is appended ‘ato kara kuru jishin’ (an earthquake which comes after [the first one]). Although the project has not been without its critics (e.g., Shibata 1999, Miyazaki 2007), the use of Yasashii Nihongo continues to spread, albeit slowly. The project website carries a list of public responses including government uptake, such as an earthquake information page on the website of the Niigata Prefectural Government.44 Yasashii Nihongo has also been taken up by a number of local government websites not just for disaster-related information but for information on local life as well. The website of Asao Ward in Kawasaki City, for example, has a Yasashii Nihongo version of the ward’s information on daily living pages (which includes disaster information) as well as an English version,45 while the official Saitama Prefecture website carries a Gaikokujin ni Yasashii Nihongo Hy¯ogen no Tebiki (Guide to Easy Japanese Expressions for Foreigners) based in part on the Hirosaki group’s work.46 The Osaka Prefectural Government website also carries Yasashii Nihongo materials,47 and Yasashii Nihongo documents explaining swine flu were published on the websites of the Yokohama Association for International Communications and Exchanges and the Nagata Volunteer Center in Kobe in 2009.48 Mori (2005: 4) reports that the newsletter of an NPO in Kobe is made available in a Yasashii Nihongo version as well as other languages.49 Yasashii Nihongo was suggested as part of the solution to providing webbased administrative information to foreign residents of Chiba City in a 2007 study by Park; such residents had more than tripled in number between 1990 and 2005, a trend which was expected to continue over time. The city’s concern was to ensure that non-Japanese residents had the information they needed to enable them both to access services available to them as residents and to fulfil their obligations as residents by participating fully in the community. Long-term residents (i.e., those staying more than two or three years) needed information on schools, child-related services and legal services, the same sort of information needed by Japanese residents. Park and two colleagues at Tokyo University of Information Sciences in conjunction with the city administration therefore carried out a survey of foreign residents in Chiba

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in 200550 in order to ascertain what categories of information they saw as necessary, the survey itself being made available in Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, Tagalog and Thai. Personal information collected during this process showed that almost three-quarters of respondents were able to read hiragana and katakana very well, but only just over half were able to handle conversation in Japanese. Given that translating information into other languages is time-consuming and expensive, Park’s study recommended that the city work on making the Japanese-language information presented in the Chiba City News easier for foreign residents to access. The survey had shown that fewer than 10 per cent of respondents accessed information from its webpages, the main reason being their inability to read text containing kanji and complex vocabulary. The following proposals were therefore made: for those who could read kana already, furigana should be added to characters; for those (Chinese and Korean residents) who understand kanji, simple kanji could be retained. For those able to converse in Japanese, a more conversational style of Japanese could be used on the written page; and for those able to understand speech but not writing, read-aloud software could be employed. Suggestions for simplified Japanese included the use of spaces between words, the parallel use of katakana and English versions of a loanword and the use of elementary-school-level kanji and vocabulary (equivalent to the Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level Three), with furigana added to kanji: in other words, the Hirosaki University team’s Yasashii Nihongo. For long-term residents able to read some Japanese, Park recommended that Yasashii Nihongo be employed on the city’s administrative webpages; for short-term residents with little Japanese, however, providing multilingual information remained the only solution (Park 2007). The city has not to date adopted these recommendations. Its website51 offers pages in Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese. Not all the information is available in all languages: the English website carries much more than the other foreign-language pages. The emergency guide is available only in Japanese and English, underscoring the importance of English as an international language for speakers of other languages in Japan when accessing information. Conclusion This chapter has discussed two matters relating to foreign languages in Japan, namely the teaching of foreign languages other than English and the use of languages in the community to provide multilingual information to foreign residents. It is clear that the overwhelming promotion of English has had a detrimental effect on the teaching of other foreign languages in the national

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education system in the absence of any wide-ranging and systematic policy plan to broaden the offerings. At local government level, however, pragmatic recognition of the need to provide effective material on settling in to Japanese communities in a variety of other languages has resulted in very good progress in this area over the last two decades. Within the school system, some progress has been made in the teaching of the major regional languages Chinese and Korean, but the focus has been for the most part on external relationships and the scope of the expansion has been limited to trial periods with designated schools. What is lacking is an overarching languages-in-education policy that gives due recognition both to the teaching (or indeed, even the existence) of community languages and to the importance of wider teaching of strategically important languages other than English, in addition to the cognitive and personal benefits to be derived from the study of other languages and other ways of seeing the world. This may derive in part from the old ideology that Japanese people cannot speak foreign languages successfully, but most of it derives from the monocular English-only view of foreign-language education imposed by the national government in its push to equip the populace with the skills to have their voices heard, and thus to represent Japan, to the rest of the (English-speaking) world. In its restricted provision of foreign-language education in schools, Japan is out of step with practices in other developed countries, both in the West and in the Asian region, and language policy-makers at the highest levels need to take this into account. ‘A large number of democratic countries that were the prototypes of the “one nation, one language” policy are adopting more plurilingual and inclusive policies that involve a number of languages’ (Shohamy 2006: 47) as nationstates experience more internal diversity and transnational linkages. Japan too – while a very long way from having the need in absolute demographic terms to adopt policies that support official recognition of minority languages – would do well to increase the scope of its languages-in-education policy to align itself more closely with both internal and external realities, thereby legitimising the position of languages in relation to both. Kaplan and Baldauf (2005: 1014, 1017), who list foreign/second language learning (what foreign languages are taught and why) as one of the four cultivation planning goals which relate to policy goals influencing the success of policy development driven by languagein-education considerations, observe that the curriculum policy system in Japan is heavily top-down, with the community having little input into policy. It may now be time for policy-makers to ascertain what the views of the community are on teaching community and regional languages. Policy-making in the area of what languages are taught through the education system is an example of status planning, i.e., of making decisions related to choices about the appropriate use of language/s. What will be discussed in

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the following chapter, namely the 2010 revision of the major script policy document in response to the influence of electronic technologies on writing, is an example of corpus planning, i.e., decisions on how elements of a particular language, in this case kanji in the Japanese writing system, are optimally to be used.

4

Technology and language policy change

It is no accident that the most clearly marked policy development in recent years, apart from the announcement of the Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Abilities, relates to kanji. For one thing, the kanji policy is relatively easy to change, because it already exists as a policy document; while arguments surrounding the recent increase in content were many and varied, they centred on which characters should be added or deleted rather than on whether the policy itself should be changed to accommodate an increase. For another, kanji are the venerated icons of Japan’s writing system: reinforcing their position is in line with the language ideology surrounding characters discussed in Chapter 1. We have seen that despite the availability of an alternative means of writing in the form of the kana, literacy in Japan is judged by the ability to use kanji correctly; use of kana where kanji would be the norm is not encouraged, despite its frequent occurrence. This means that ‘kanji heavily contribute to the lengthening of acquisition of literacy, which is often a lifelong process’ (Akamatsu 2006: 486). It takes until the end of the nine years of compulsory education to teach the full List of Characters for General Use. Over the two decades between 1975 and 1995, the teaching of writing was the most researched and discussed aspect of national language education in Japan (Namba 1995: 64), a situation which has continued since then. ‘Under the conditions of a writing system that makes use of Chinese characters’, Coulmas (1994: 312) comments, ‘literacy is a graded notion. This is true, of course, also of alphabetic literacy, but with Chinese characters this gradation is more obviously encoded in the writing system.’ Everyone who has completed compulsory education is expected to know and to use a certain level of kanji, whether or not this is actually the case in practice. Little wonder, then, that discussion of literacy standards, by which is frequently meant kanji proficiency standards, features so frequently in both the academic and popular literature. In this chapter, I will discuss prevailing perceptions of declining kanji ability and the perceived role of electronic technologies as a factor in falling standards before going on to examine the recent revision of the kanji policy in response to the influence of such technologies. 98

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Perceptions of declining kanji ability A historical decline in the overall use of kanji has been observed for many years now: Morioka (1969), for example, in a study of the number of kanji used in newspapers between 1879 and 1968, reported a drop of almost 30 per cent over that period, with kana replacing kanji mostly in the representation of Japanese words (wago) rather than Sino-Japanese words (kango).This, of course, is likely to be due in large part to the postwar script reforms which newspapers, although not bound to adhere to the character list as government departments were, chose in the main to follow in the interests of efficiency and of circulation figures (see Gottlieb 1995). It is a separate issue from that of today’s commonly expressed belief that kanji use is declining, which is based not on script policy interventions but rather on the belief that general levels of kanji proficiency are not what they used to be or might be expected to be. Such ideas are not found only within Japan itself. A common perception outside the country, as expressed by American journalist James Brooke in The New York Times, is that the Japanese love of manga comics (which account for 60 per cent of printed publications in Japan) is rooted in low literacy rates, where ‘low literacy’ refers not to the usual definitions of functional literacy1 but rather to a desire to avoid reading books written in kanji because reading and writing skills are declining (Brooke 2002). Two years later, an article in Britain’s Guardian newspaper also reported on declining kanji proficiency, but whereas the New York Times article relied on anecdotal evidence,2 the Guardian article discussed the results of a survey of 13,000 first-year students at private universities conducted by Japan’s National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME), which found that almost one-fifth of respondents had only the reading ability expected of thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds, i.e., junior secondary-school level. The Guardian writer commented that the findings confirmed a trend reported by educators over at least the previous decade and, like The New York Times, reported on the attribution of this by the public (though not by the NIME report) to the influence of comics. The survey also found that only 6 per cent of students at national universities, where the entrance tests tend to be tougher, showed lower than expected reading ability (Johnston 2004). Inside Japan, given that achievement levels in reading are partly judged by the degree of script acquisition (Tamaoka 1996: 12), journalists and online commentators often express concern about declining kanji proficiency. During Aso Tar¯o’s brief time as Prime Minister (September 2008–September 2009), he was several times mocked in the press for his frequent mistakes in pronouncing kanji correctly, with Parry (2009: 60) reporting anecdotal evidence from parents that the name Tar¯o had become ‘a schoolboys’ taunt for a playground dunce’. Almost half the respondents to a Mainichi Shimbun survey on the Prime Minister’s approval rating thought that his kanji mistakes cast doubts on his

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qualifications to serve as leader (Mainichi Shimbun 2009). Part of the credit for a recent bestselling book on kanji, Yomes¯o de Yomenai Machigaiyasui Kanji (Easily Mistaken Kanji You Think You Can Read But You Can’t) by Deguchi Munekazu, was given to the Prime Minister’s kanji troubles; customers requesting ‘Prime Minister Aso’s book’ turned out to be looking for Machigaiyasui Kanji, and booksellers reported that books on correct pronunciation of kanji began to sell well shortly after reports of Aso’s troubles began to appear in the press (Yasumoto 2009). Given the strength of the ideology pertaining to characters as discussed in Chapter 1, this is not surprising. In a highly competitive society with a constant emphasis on the superiority of kanji, admitting to shortcomings in this area is not something to be welcomed and proficiency in characters is important for success (Crump 1988: 400–1). This is probably due to the fact that literacy in Japan requires intensive schooling to sustain it. To show so publicly a deficiency in this area, then, is evidence not just of a human failing that could perhaps be portrayed by a sympathetic rather than antagonistic media as lovable but of a deficiency of schooling. Galan (2005: 265) picks up on this underlying theme in the context of a discussion of illiteracy: ‘the official discourse on illiteracy hides another discourse that can be summed up as follows: all “true” Japanese, all “normal” Japanese, know how to read’. In the face of such an ideology, the derision heaped upon Prime Minister Aso takes on a layer of meaning additional to that of mere journalistic hyperbole. Perceptions of declining literacy levels have quite often surfaced as a concern in the annual Agency for Cultural Affairs language attitudes surveys, particularly with regard to characters. In the 2001 survey, for example, when asked their opinion on the current state of Japanese people’s proficiency in their own language, almost 90 per cent of respondents indicated that they believed the ability to write was declining, while almost 70 per cent thought the same of reading skills. Questioned about the effect of electronic media on their writing habits, over 40 per cent, notably those in their thirties, answered that their ability to write kanji accurately had declined as a result of using such media. Almost a third of respondents, particularly those in their forties, found writing kanji by hand a bore. In the following year’s survey, when asked to nominate those areas of their own proficiency in Japanese where they lacked complete confidence, almost a third specified their knowledge of script, i.e., kanji and kana usage, an even higher percentage than the fifth who worried about ‘keigo’. Interestingly, however, in the next question relating to which areas of language knowledge and ability they felt were important for life in the future, knowledge of kanji and kana usage ranked lowest, particularly among the younger age groups, perhaps reflecting the influence of electronic technologies which make it easier to use characters even without necessarily knowing how to write them properly by hand. A year later, almost 80 per cent expressed a belief that the spread of information technology was influencing language use to varying

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degrees, the number one manifestation being that people were forgetting how to write kanji by hand. Lack of confidence in the ability to use kanji surfaced again as an issue in the 2004 survey, and when asked a similar question about the influence of information technology the following year, just over half the respondents who used computers confirmed the trend. Non-government surveys report similar results, but with an added focus on actual test results rather than perceptions. In 2005, a kanji proficiency survey conducted by the Nihon Kanji N¯oryoku Kentei Ky¯okai (Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation) found that fewer than 40 per cent of answers recorded by university students were correct; this was a lower percentage of correct answers than that returned by middle-school students, although of course the questions on both tests were not the same (Asahi Shimbun 2005a). A separate Internet survey of 400 children aged ten to fifteen and 400 adults aged thirty-five to forty conducted by the same body the following year reported that 85 per cent of adult respondents felt that their kanji proficiency had dropped over the past few years, most noticeably when they were writing letters and other documents by hand. Of this group, over 87 per cent attributed this to frequent computer use, 44 per cent to frequent use of cell phone e-mail and only 42 per cent to age-related memory decline.3 Over 75 per cent reported having experienced embarrassment in the workplace because of this (Kanken DS 2006). Two years later, almost 9,000 elementary school students were tested to determine whether those in each year level could actually write the kanji they had learned the year before, and were given a questionnaire on attitudes and habits related to reading, kanji and the Japanese language in general. Although almost two-thirds of students indicated on the questionnaire that they enjoyed the study of their own language, the percentage of correct answers on the kanji test was low, overall only 57.9 per cent with little variation across year levels, thus confirming an earlier survey of teacher perceptions in 2001 in which almost two-thirds of respondents indicated a belief that students’ proficiency in their own language had declined in the areas of vocabulary, writing, writing kanji and reading (Benesse Ky¯oiku Kenky¯u Kaihatsu Sentaa 2007). Clearly there is a considerable gap between the academic rhetoric expressed in MEXT’s official curriculum guidelines, which specify that students in a particular year will be able to read and write the kanji covered in previous years and use them in writing, and the actual outcomes in terms of students’ proficiency with kanji. This concern over declining academic standards (gakuryoku teika), in particular in reading and writing, is not a recent phenomenon but has been a feature of national discourse about education in Japan since the 1980s; even before that, opponents of the postwar script reforms were outspoken about their concerns that education would be ‘dumbed down’ by the changes to kanji and kana use (see Gottlieb 1995 for details). Unease intensified after 1999 in response

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to the national curriculum reform known as ‘yutori aru ky¯oiku’ (pressure-free education, as opposed to the earlier cramming approach) which was implemented in 2002, four years after it was announced by MEXT. This involved a move to a five-day school week (dispensing with Saturday-morning classes) and a move to a more child-centred inquiry-based approach, in line with the OECD’s recommendation of process-based education over content-focused (Takayama 2008). The reduction in class hours available per subject as a result of this curricular reform is widely regarded as a key factor in declining literacy standards, a view reinforced by concern over the performance of fifteen-yearold Japanese students on the reading literacy indicator in the 2003 PISA4 results when Japan ranked fourteenth on this indicator, dropping from eighth place in the 2000 test. After only a couple of years, the ‘yutori’ approach began to be reversed in favour of greater ‘back to basics’ rigour, with Education Minister Nakayama Nariaki saying in early 2005 that the ‘periods of integrated learning’ which the ‘yutori’ approach had introduced ought to be used instead for teaching the national language (kokugo) (Asahi Shimbun 2005c). The 2005 issue of the National Institute for Japanese Language’s Nihongo Bukkuretto5 remarked on the prevalence of both newspaper and general-interest magazine articles expressing concern about the state of national language education that year. The announcement of the PISA test results and the Minister’s subsequent and controversial backpedalling on ‘yutori’ education in January sparked a flurry of discussion. Contributing to the debate was the publication of a nationwide survey around that time by the S¯og¯o Shot¯o Ky¯oiku Kenky¯ujo (Research Institute of Elementary Education) on the reading and writing abilities of 15,000 elementary- and middle-school students which found that many students, even if they could read kanji correctly, were unable to write them accurately. This was offset somewhat by another much larger survey of 450,000 late-elementary and middle-school students’ academic abilities published a few months later which reported ‘good results’. Nevertheless, concern about literacy levels persisted, again fuelled by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation’s survey referred to above. Accepting the fact of a decline in both kanji literacy and reading abilities on the basis of the evidence provided by the various surveys, MEXT later that year put together a programme to raise reading and writing standards which was to be implemented not just in national language classes alone but throughout the school curriculum. The Institute’s bibliography listed details for forty-one newspaper articles on these topics over the year, together with another fifteen on the associated topic of an ‘education renaissance’, evidence of the lively public concern surrounding the issue; eighteen articles in the general-interest magazines, most of which were published as part of special issues or round-table discussions on the topic, also took a line critical of ‘yutori’ education as responsible for the drop in standards (Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenky¯ujo 2007). Even the television networks took up the theme in

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2005, with four of the major networks broadcasting variety programmes aimed at improving ‘kokugo’ from autumn that year; the lacklustre performance of some contestants in identifying common kanji led one journalist to conclude that what she termed ‘kokugo panic’ may be well founded (Noguchi 2005). One factor often proposed as contributing to declining literacy skills in recent years, along with ‘yutori’ education, is the popularity of cell phone emailing. From time to time, articles in the mainstream press have suggested this connection: an article in the Yomiuri Shimbun on 7 December 2004, for example, reporting on the reading literacy results in the PISA test, cited a university lecturer who suggested that the prevalence of the very short sentences used in cell phone e-mails meant that students were no longer adept at reading longer texts (Yomiuri Shimbun 2004), while another in April 2009 attributed the low results achieved by many students on an entrance test of kanji and ‘keigo’ instituted by Tokushima University from 2008 for its new students to the fact that the rapid spread of computers and cell phones had led to a diminution of opportunities for students to write by hand (Yomiuri Shimbun 2009). In a 2007 survey of perceptions of kanji ability, when respondents were asked whether they had confidence in their own kanji proficiency, just over half answered that they did not, and of that group, almost three-quarters attributed this to the fact that they often wrote using cell phones or computers (Goo Research 2007). Certainly the perception of the influence of cell phone usage is strong, and I will come back to this later in the chapter. At language policy level, the Kokugo Bunkakai defended the importance of retaining the ability to write well by hand in its 2005 report. In addition to announcing that the committee would shortly begin a reassessment of the existing policy on characters in the light of the influence of technology, the report also stressed anew the value of cultivating the art of handwriting. Addressing the evidence of declining handwriting skills uncovered by recent surveys, it emphasised both the role played by handwriting in learning and using the characters properly in the first place and the central place of kanji in Japan’s linguistic culture. With regard to the matter of writing by hand: we should take the fundamental line that writing by hand must not be lost from Japan’s culture. While the use of computers and other devices is widespread, the value of writing by hand is now being re-discovered. But we must also address the need we already feel to apologise if something is handwritten. (Kokugo Bunkakai 2005)

The Asahi Shimbun noted this with approval: the basis of all learning in Japanese, its editorial stressed, was reading and writing, and these skills must be constantly reinforced at elementary-school level; regardless of the fact that Japanese children have a harder task than their overseas counterparts in learning to write because of the orthography, teachers must continue to inculcate good

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writing skills (Asahi Shimbun 2005b). That a major newspaper – motivated by yet another survey revealing insufficient kanji proficiency among elementaryschool students – would editorialise in support of a ‘back to basics’ approach on the beneficial role of rote repetition in learning kanji indicates the depths of disquiet aroused by the prospect of continuing under par literacy skills, not only in relation to using kanji but also in the wider general area of writing. Universities have taken direct action to improve the writing skills of their incoming students. Since the 1990s, Miyake (2002) reports, many have established introductory-level courses on how to write good Japanese which teach students the practical skills of writing in different genres such as reports and essays and of speaking well;6 some focus on writing rather than speaking, others vice versa. Some courses have a narrow academic skills focus, others concentrate on the wider public arena. In order to ascertain in what areas students’ literacy skills were lacking, Miyake analysed the results of a writing task given to her students in the first week of her course. In one student’s written comments on the task, she found expressions such as ‘ka naa’ that were inappropriate for academic writing, along with other words and expressions more appropriate to spoken language; there were also kanji mistakes such as dd (kanten) instead of dd (kanten) where the wrong homophonous character has been used for the first character, and dd (d¯oshi) instead of dd (d¯oshi), where the same is true of the second. Similar problems were found to a greater or lesser extent in the work of other students. In addition to these purely linguistic deficiencies, she found evidence of sloppy thinking in constructing sentences, affecting clarity, and of cognitive inability to differentiate between binary concepts such as spoken and written language owing to insufficient prior training in logical writing and lack of ability to read analytically due to insufficient experience in reading. This led Miyake to urge that the previous emphasis on remedying only linguistic problems be expanded to include training in both logical thinking and overcoming cognitive deficiencies. This discussion has shown that fears about declining standards of literacy have been present in the community at large and among educators for some considerable time. In addition to the debate over ‘yutori aru ky¯oiku’, a major element contributing to such fears has of course been the spread of electronic means of text production, something which in Japan has coincided with the burgeoning effects of globalisation. Maher and Nakayama (2003: 127) point out that ‘globalization is not merely the imposition of transnational capitalist structures upon local economies but is also a social relation. Thus, language – a sensitive constant of social organization and human relations – has likewise found itself the axis of dramatic change in Japan.’ Within the purview of this dramatic change, they include the impact of new technologies on the writing system along with the challenge of emergent multilingualism discussed in the earlier part of this book. The high priority accorded to written expression that

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has characterised language education in Japan both in the mother tongue and in the teaching of English they attribute to the fact that the writing system itself takes so much time to master: given that exegesis of written Chinese texts has been central to education for more than a millennium, ‘difficulty in mastering the writing system of the modern language likewise maintains ideological devotion to written language education’ (129). The written language thus remains paramount in the teaching of Japanese to its native speakers, which goes a long way toward explaining the persistent unease about the fall in standards of kanji proficiency. What is happening now, however, is that beliefs about language (i.e., language ideologies) that were once central to the national imaginary and formed the basis for existing language policy, ‘the way things are (and should be) done’, are in the process of being reevaluated. Since 1980 a quiet revolution in writing practices has come to pose a challenge to the relevance of the current script policies, based as they are on an assumption that writing means writing by hand. The sustained engagement with technology which has underpinned this change has led to departures from accepted ways of writing in personal communications in cyberspace which have been the subject of much academic research and public comment. It is debatable whether such practices are likely to spill over into offline use. Nevertheless, the influence of technology does mean that contemporary writing practices in terms of orthography use have implications for script policy, as the government has recently acknowledged in its revision of the kanji policy. Declining kanji proficiency attributed to electronic technologies A popular belief is that today’s declining ability to read and write kanji can be attributed to the fact that time once spent reading or writing has been eroded by other media such as television and newer electronic technologies. In other words, people depend less today on text and more on images. Phrases such as ‘moji banare’ (loss of interest in writing) and ‘katsuji banare’ (loss of interest in the printed word) are often found in this context. Is it actually, true, however, that the dependence on written text has lessened? Akiyama (2003) set out to test this by a quantitative study of the usage of text information carried by the whole range of communication media, using the annual Information Flow Census. While it is true that dependence on text in hard-copy published sources such as books, magazines and newspapers has been declining, he found, the increase in use of text online compensates for this, so that far from dependence on written text being in decline, there has simply been a swing towards using ‘post-typographic’ digital and network technologies to deliver text information. Based on Akiyama’s empirical evidence, then, we may safely conclude that it is the shift away from reliance on more traditional means of reading and writing that is causing conservative concern in society, with varying degrees of

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disinterest or disdain reserved for online writing as an element in an individual’s range of literacies, probably because of the transgressive writing practices observed in younger people’s e-mails and bulletin boards. Such practices are only one small part of the equation, however; the majority of informationbased websites (with the exception, again, of those targeting teenagers) follow a standard formal approach to writing as seen on the websites of government organs, educational or medical institutions and businesses, although of course the on-screen text is often combined with graphic devices intended to catch the eye. The language and orthography found in the articles of the major newspapers online show no differences from the print form attributable to the means by which they are disseminated. The real root of the perception of declining literacy skills, therefore, lies not in any actual reduced social exposure to text but rather in unease over the long-term effects of text production by electronic means, at the same time as the convenience of this is universally acknowledged. In a country where handwriting was the norm even in most business documents long past the time offices in other countries were using typewriters on a large scale, the ideological attachment to writing by hand has deep roots. The emphasis on writing by hand, however, with the consequent burden it imposed on the memory, has been seen as the reason for failure to live up to the ideal expectations of literacy, namely, the ability to write all 1,945 of the kanji for general use by the end of the period of compulsory education. Such failure is quite widespread, as shown, for example, by a 1988 National Language Research Institute report on a survey of children in Tokyo, Akita Prefecture and Nara Prefecture which found that at both elementary and high-school levels students were not able to write kanji as well as they could read them (National Language Research Institute 1988: 389–91). Overall, Taylor and Taylor (1995: 353) conclude, ‘the mastery of Kanji by Japanese students and adults is far from perfect, despite the effort and time expended on it’. It might have seemed, then, that the advent of word-processing technology and computers which removed this burden of memory by providing in internal dictionaries many more characters than the average user could ever want would be welcomed, but this was not always the case. The central importance of writing in language ideology ensured that electronic means of text production were viewed through a lens of suspicion and disapproval in many quarters while being well received in others, notably the printing industry because of the freedom from the exigencies of using printing type thus enabled. It was the social and cultural impact of the technology, however, that occasioned most alarm: people worried about whether users would forget how to write by hand if the technology spread, or whether the old belief in the supremacy of handwriting as an indicator of character would be overthrown by the safe anonymity of printed text (see Gottlieb 2000).

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The influence of electronic technology on the way Japanese is written began in the 1980s and early 1990s, when sales of personal word processors, followed later by computers with word processing software, burgeoned after the invention of a means of electronic text production capable of handling the Japanese writing system. This was followed from the mid- to late 1990s by the uptake of the Internet which saw the use of written Japanese extended to the screen, in emails, chatrooms, bulletin boards, websites and other cyberfora. In due course, this extended further to encompass today’s proliferation of blogs, cell phone e-mails and social networking sites such as Mixi and Twitter. Throughout this process of technological innovation and evolution, concerns about language – and specifically about written Japanese – remained constant. When the craze for personal-use word processors took off in the 1980s, with users enthralled by internal dictionaries holding large numbers of characters, it was not long before unorthodox writing practices began to attract comment. By ‘unorthodox’ here, I mean practices not in line with the script policies which govern teaching in schools and with accepted general practice. Documents began to look much denser or ‘blacker’ in aspect, containing many more kanji than usual given the ease of retrieving them from the dictionary, and certain multi-stroke characters such as the second character in the word dd (kirei, beautiful) which had been left out of the official kanji list because of their complexity began to reappear. As ‘density of Chinese characters in Japanese texts is an indication of the texts’ style and weightiness’ (Coulmas 1994: 312), when word processor users began to use too many characters in trivial documents, the effect was ridiculous as well as being hard to read because of the ‘blackness’ thus imparted to texts. Unwary users in a hurry were also apt to choose the wrong character from the list of choices thrown up (see Gottlieb 2000 for details). Naturally, these changes attracted criticism, on the surface centred on perceived infractions of the textual status quo but in reality stemming from a deep unease about the influence of this technology on the social function of writing which had for so long been done – in line with social expectations – as a personal, handcrafted activity.7 Concerns about kanji were the most numerous, ranging from overuse to inappropriate use to the fear – to a large extent justified, as time has shown – that regular use of a keyboard would mean forgetting how to write characters by hand. The former – overuse and inappropriate use, for example of characters such as ‘kirei’ above – settled down after the first flush of enthusiasm, when it became clear that there was no point to producing showy text if recipients found it difficult to read or laughed at it. With time and with improvements in input technology, users settled into using the technology to communicate effectively rather than to experiment, at least in matters of ordinary text.8 Kanji proficiency, however, has indeed declined, as both anecdotal evidence and surveys have shown (see, for instance, the Agency for Cultural Affairs surveys

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and the surveys reported in Atsuji (1991) and Ogino (1994)), although opinions differ as to whether this is attributable to use of computers or to declining kanji proficiency in general. Nor has the ancillary effect on writing good Japanese in general gone unnoticed: Mino (2005) has lamented the fact that the earlier emphasis on teaching the techniques of good writing in Japanese Expression classes at universities was replaced by the mid-1980s in many institutions by a focus on learning how to use to best effect the functions offered by word processing now that assignments did not have to be written by hand, thus losing sight of the original objective of such classes. Given that the most striking problem she encountered was student inability to read or write kanji properly without the aid of a machine, classes once devoted to refining already good writing skills are now needed to teach students how to write accurate and comprehensible Japanese, a problem she attributes to the prevalence of cell phone e-mailing with its truncated forms. After computer screens began to show not only on-machine documents but also Internet pages, a new set of orthographic possibilities and practices emerged. Japanese rapidly established a substantial online presence, though mainly within the Japanese homeland itself. By 1998 it had become the second most widely used language (after English) on the Internet, a position it held until passed by Chinese in 2001; as of 31 December 2009 it was in fourth place, behind English, Chinese and Spanish (Internet World Stats 2010). In 2007 it was the top language of the blogosphere (Sifry 2007). On Twitter, in 2010 it sits in second place after English (Semiocast 2010). Much of this prominence is facilitated by Japan’s high rate of use of the mobile Internet, i.e., using cell phones to send e-mails and access Internet sites.9 What all this means is that despite its relatively restricted geographical origin, the Japanese language is used across the full range of online activities, many of them informal and more conversational than literary, with resulting online linguistic and orthographic changes mirroring that. ‘Internet users’, comments Randall (2002: 2), ‘are speaking with their fingers’, and many empirical studies of online language use have verified this in the Japanese case (e.g., Mino 2005, Nishimura 2003, Sanuki 2006, Satake 2005). As in other languages, attempts to replicate the sounds of laughter and other emotions phonetically feature prominently (see Miyake 2004), along with irregular punctuation and spelling and use of emoticons, supplemented in the Japanese case by a non-standard use of orthography permitted by the flexibility of the multi-script Japanese writing system. In many cases, informal online language use shades over into language play, namely the ‘bending and breaking the rules of language’ (Crystal 1998: 1) to achieve a particular and unexpected effect (see Gottlieb 2010a for more on this in Japanese). Language play can have several functions. It can be a way of saving time in messages to friends, as documented by Sasahara (2002)

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who found that young women in his survey often used kanji-only in their cell phone messages for brevity’s sake. It can be a way of expressing personality: Kataoka (1997) found that ‘the writers in my data often depart sharply from convention, and intentionally cross genre boundaries to exploit particular images for better self-representation’ (107). Unconventional practices are defined in this particular study as use of invented punctuation marks, pictorial signs and ‘intentionally transformed letters to cater to the writer’s need of self-representation’ (109). Tanaka’s survey of frequent keitai (cell phone) mail users also found that over 60 per cent reported being aware of using what they called ‘keitai mail language’, women much more than men (Tanaka 2005). In more extreme cases, this can function as a restricted in-group code meant to exclude those not in the know: Nishimura’s 2004 study of postings on unmoderated community forum website 2Channeru, for example, found examples of phonetic kanji punning and substitution of similarly shaped symbols with this intent. To be at all meaningful, such practices require a consensus of sorts among users. Su (2003), discussing playful language usage on college-affiliated bulletin board systems (BBS) in Taiwan, commented on the socialisation processes involved in such in-group uses of language: ‘through a shared history of engagement, BBS users negotiate the meanings of their experiences, and develop routines and styles of communication. Language practices on the BBSs become highly stylized, such that a new user must undergo socialization to learn to be a fully competent participant in the community. On these BBSs the exploration and use of various forms of language play are highly encouraged.’ An often discussed example of in-group language in Japan is ‘gyarumoji’, the writing conventions used by a particular subculture of rebellious young women known as ‘kogaru’. This is a mix of Japanese scripts (with kanji sometimes divided into component parts and reassembled in a predetermined codified manner), Roman letters, Greek letters and typographic, mathematical or other symbols: an example is d £ d instead of dddd (good morning), where d,d and are half-size forms of standard hiragana and katakana respectively (this word is normally written in hiragana only) and £ substitutes for hiragana d (Miyake 2004: 162, see also Tanabe 2005 for further details and examples). Standard Japanese can be translated into ‘gyarumoji’ for transmission to a friend’s cell phone by websites dedicated to that purpose, taking the hard work out of the process.10 Unsurprisingly, the major objective of such transgressive orthographic practices is to indicate that the users are non-conformist rebels who flout the rules of written Japanese taught in schools, at least amongst themselves. Milroy and Milroy’s observation that ‘the level of integration of any given group into the wider society is likely to be inversely related to the extent to which it maintains a distinctive vernacular’ (1992: 4) is amply borne out in the case of ‘kogaru’.

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‘Gyarumoji’ users are using their own form of what Halliday (1976) has termed ‘anti-language’, and which Hodge and Kress (1993: 77) further explain along the following lines: anti-languages are parasitic, taking their basic systems of rules from the norm language; they are defensive, languages of evasion; they are oppositional, attacking the classification system of the norm language; and they cannot be explained without reference to the place of the anti-society using them in the larger social structure. Halliday’s examples of anti-society encompassed an element of criminality, but Churcher (2009) also considers the language used by young people in text messaging in English to be an example of an anti-language: ‘To outsiders, the language is little more than a series of random letters, numbers and punctuation marks; yet to insiders, the language represents a carefully designed vernacular designed to challenge society and familial hegemony.’ The existence of an anti-language, she contends, not only validates the alternate sphere from which it springs but also maintains its reality and sense of autonomy, with those engaged in cyberspeak taking a stand against accepted language conventions that could slow down online ‘speak’. Such is certainly the intent of the ‘gyarumoji’, although it might be argued that the complexity of some of the devices employed does little to facilitate the speed of cyberspeak but rather requires more time to decode than would regular language, which of course is part of its charm: a trade-off between speed and presenting oneself as interesting, mysterious, definitely out of the ordinary. And, naturally, this also functions to prevent outsiders from understanding the message. Online language play as evidence of declining standards? Unorthodox writing practices, whether they are the more extreme ‘gyarumoji’ or what have become the ordinary online conventions, are to a large extent taken for granted by young people. For many older people, however, they tie into the vein of concern about ‘midare’ discussed in Chapter 1, namely the perception that language standards are falling from some idealised norm, particularly in the case of ‘wakamono kotoba’ (language used by young people). To return to the Agency for Cultural Affairs language attitudes surveys, for example, around 8 per cent of respondents in the 2008 version indicated that they used anonymous bulletin boards (such as 2Channeru). This group were then asked if they had any problems with the language used there. In a ‘tick all that apply’ response, around a quarter indicated that they did not, but over half found much of the language to be aggressive and strong; many commented on the profusion of ‘wakamono kotoba’, slang and buzzwords as well as the many misspellings, omitted characters and mistakes in usage. Almost 20 per cent found the language hard to understand, often because it was fragmented like conversation (something that almost three-quarters reported was also the

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case in their own cell phone e-mails). As with an earlier 2003 survey, the top manifestation mentioned of the influence of information systems on language was that respondents had lost their kanji writing skills. It cannot be automatically assumed, however, that because such practices are rife online they also spill over into users’ other writing genres. With perhaps a few isolated exceptions,11 users are perfectly well able to differentiate by situation and appropriateness the kind of written Japanese they use. The type of idiosyncratic text that appears in messages to friends does not normally appear in school or university assignments or other domains where more conventional writing is expected. Kataoka’s study of ninety-two letters and notes written by women aged between fifteen and thirty-three, for example, found that juvenile writers make perfectly separated use of these styles according to formal and informal settings, and their own covertly prestigious, resistant forms and styles are kept concealed within their personal domains . . . Many of the writers, contradictory as it may seem, are also generally conformist in the public domain, as most readily abandon their practices once they graduate from school or reach adulthood. (1997: 130)

Miyake (2007) also argues that the kind of language found in cell phone e-mails constitutes nothing more than a temporary escape from the pressure to conform to social expectations experienced outside the privacy of cyberspace. That being the case, it is not transgressive online writing practices that have concerned the language policy-makers but rather the widely recognised drop in kanji writing skills put down to the influence of keyboard technology, as acknowledged by the Kokugo Bunkakai’s remarks on the importance of handwriting. Its response in language policy terms has been to increase the number of characters on the List of Characters for General Use by 191, from 1,945 to 2,136 in recognition of the influence of information technology. It has taken the committee (and its predecessor, the National Language Council) a long time to reach this decision: although it had become clear by the early 1990s both that the widespread use of word processing technology was having an effect on the way people wrote and that the technology was here to stay, the immediate focus of policy investigations during that decade was not on rethinking the kanji list but rather on standardising electronic fonts for characters not on the list. Are unorthodox writing practices likely to be of any lasting concern in terms of language policy? School textbooks and government documents adhere faithfully to the official script policies, which indeed are only binding on government agencies but are disseminated to the general public through the education system. Whether people choose to stick to them or not in their everyday writing (as opposed to school assignments), however, is a matter of individual choice, and we can safely assume that they write as they please regardless of whether a policy stipulates the use of, say, a particular form of okurigana or a particular character, in both handwriting and online. Electronic processing of text

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since the 1980s has undoubtedly influenced the way in which Japanese is written: a large number of studies attest to changes in orthographic practices by ‘kiib¯odo ningen’ (keyboard persons, people who hardly ever write by hand),12 usually involving a departure from the accepted conventions embodied in the script policies (see Gottlieb 2000 for details). This is particularly true of text in cyberspace. As Ricento (2000: 7) reminds us, ‘ideologies inform and shape political decisions, but formal planned language policies do not always – or even often – achieve their objectives, be they liberatory or oppressive . . . It is simply difficult to legislate language behaviour, whether for good or evil purposes.’ The nature of the texts currently found online is a good illustration of this in action in Japan’s case, as were earlier instances of nonconformist teenage handwriting such as the ‘marumoji’13 craze of the 1970s which was banned in some schools (see Kinsella 1995). The ‘rules’ can be more honoured in the breach than in the observance in the private domain, as any scrutiny of personal letters to friends will show. Just as members of a language community adjust their spoken language according to their interlocutors, so also they use a continuum of writing practices adjusted according to genre, and this in no way indicates an overall decline in literacy skills. People engaging in the kind of language manipulation found in text-speak do so from an already existing basis of familiarity with the underlying rules of good writing (Crystal 2008, Kataoka 1997, Tagliamonte and Denis 2008). Declining proficiency in reading and writing kanji, on the other hand, given the nature of the expectations of full literacy in Japanese, is certainly a concern, but perhaps this has more of a symbolic basis than a practical one. Inability to read the kanji properly, as we have seen in the case of former Prime Minister Aso, is considered inappropriate for an educated person. According to the author of the kanji bestseller mentioned above, ‘if you misread kanji, people will begin to doubt your entire intellectual level, including your knowledge of history, culture and all sorts of other things. Knowledge of kanji could form the fundamental basis of who you are’ (Yasumoto 2009). While declining writing abilities are usually attributed to the use of technology, much of the belief in declining reading abilities is based on a lingering belief that the book is the only worthwhile form of reading. Literacy and reading rates remain generally high, but Japan appears to be experiencing a decline in the more traditional forms of reading as other activities encroach upon available time, as shown by numerous surveys of reading habits and a noticeable drop in book sales in recent years. The 2002 Agency for Cultural Affairs survey, for example, included a question on reading habits over a month which found that 37.6 per cent of respondents had not read a book at all during that period, while just over half the respondents to a 2007 survey by the Yomiuri Shimbun had not read a book during the previous month (Yoshida 2008), with lack of time given as the major reason. Lack of time is not the only factor: rather, people are choosing to

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spend part of their time using the Internet and other media instead of reading books.14 As we saw earlier in this chapter, however, these activities involve text as well. Over recent years steps have been taken to address this concern about declining reading skills. In late 2001, the Diet passed eleven laws aiming to promote reading by children, designating 23 April each year as Children’s Reading Day, and an action plan aiming to develop the habit of reading in elementary students was put into place the following year. MEXT maintains a website devoted to the promotion of children’s reading activities where the laws may be found,15 although at the time of writing it does not appear to have been updated since April 2008. In a reaction against ‘yutori’ education, some schools have returned to the practice of ‘ondoku’, an older teaching method where students take turns reading aloud to their classmates, thus ensuring correction of any pronunciation mistakes (Gordenker 2004). In 2003, the Kokugo Bunkakai’s reading activities subcommittee issued a document detailing its discussions, in which the connection between reading, correct use of language and the development of other important language skills was heavily emphasised. Reading skills had become all the more important in the information age to enable people to think for themselves rather than becoming passive consumers of fragmentary information, it said, and Agency for Cultural Affairs surveys reflect public awareness of this. At the same time, however, the surveys found respondents ranging from children to adults who never read books, a finding backed up by the Mainichi Shimbun’s annual survey of reading habits which showed an alarming growth in the percentage of students from elementary through to secondary levels who had not read even one book in the previous month. The document stressed the importance of early childhood activities meant to inculcate a love of reading and produce engaged, autonomous readers, a mindset which would later greatly influence children in adulthood, and set out a range of policy strategies to be followed by national and local governments in support of achieving this overall aim (Kokugo Bunkakai 2003). The emphasis throughout the document is heavily on books as the preferred vehicle for reading; reading and writing to newspapers, although supported by some members, is dismissed in the conclusion as insufficient to foster language ability because newspaper text is pitched at the level of the readership (presumably rather than extending it). There are of course many other avenues for reading than books. The type of reading being thus promoted is often not the kind of reading actually being done by most young people, bringing us back to the charge of lowered literacy levels stemming from manga reading discussed at the beginning of this chapter. ‘School literacy as prescribed by the curriculum is represented by classroom textbooks and library books . . . On the other hand, personal literacy is determined by the readers themselves’ (Allen and Ingulsrud 2005: 265), and in many cases may not reflect the values of educators. In order to investigate

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the personal literacies of teenage students, Allen and Ingulsrud conducted two surveys, one of junior high-school students and the other of college students, and found that 99 per cent of respondents in both surveys had read manga and a majority reported continuing to do so. The study found that the existence of a community of readers played an important role in a student’s introduction to and continued reading of manga, and that the majority of students surveyed did not report having any reading difficulties despite the multimodal format in which orthographic conventions may not always be observed.16 This prompted the observation that the ‘reading crisis’ might be approached from a different angle were educators to take into account how much time their students spend as engaged readers of manga and the nature of the self-taught literacy practices involved. Far from dumbing down students’ reading abilities, then, manga reading may be seen as actually extending the range of literacies open to them and their ability to negotiate a complex web of meaning presented at several levels, in line with the New Media Consortium’s definition of twenty-first-century literacy as ‘the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual and digital literacy overlap’ (New Media Consortium 2005: 2). It is a different but nonetheless important aspect of literacy that cannot easily be ignored or necessarily blamed for the decline in other indicators of literacy. Coming back to my main point: those who see online language practices as evidence of declining literacy standards among young people fail to understand that literacy is not fixed in amber across time and culture and that in contemporary literacy research literacy is not measured against an unchanging yardstick but rather is viewed as a set of practices and values which must be understood within the context of the contemporary cultural milieu, historical period and material conditions (Selfe and Hawisher 2006: 274). That is not to suggest that unorthodox online language practices must be accepted as a new manifestation of literacy which supplants the old; to the contrary, researchers such as Crystal (2008) and Tagliamonte and Denis (2008) have found that online texting and e-mail practices are embedded in and arise from a confident mastery of the accepted literary conventions and amount to expertly playful departures from such norms rather than any attempt to replace them. Users are clearly exercising their sociolinguistic competence, their sense of what kinds of writing are appropriate in what context. It is clear, then, that a general amorphous public concern over ‘declining standards of literacy’ caused by digital technologies relates more to perceived outcomes than to actual practice. In large part this is due to a fear that incorrect use of, say, orthography amounts to a decline in the overall social order, a fear that frequently recurs not just in Japan but in many other countries with well-established traditions of literacy as well (see, e.g., Graff 1994), particularly given the strong correlation usually made between literacy and a strong economy, political stability and even personal integrity: ‘What it is to be a person, to be moral and to be human in specific cultural

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contexts is frequently signified by the kind of literacy practices in which a person is engaged’ (Street 1994: 97). To scholars for whom the social context of literacy is key (see Street 1993), a view of this kind stems from an ideological will to maintain the status quo of those in power. As we have seen in Chapter 1, language ideologies are commonly linked to themes of power relations and beliefs about language legitimate existing practices, in this case to do with what constitutes ‘good’ written Japanese and what does not, and the role of kanji is central to this theme, thus guaranteeing that deliberate manipulation of characters in non-orthodox ways is bound to cause concern, whether or not there is any basis in reality for such perceptions of widespread declining literacy standards. The available evidence, then, suggests that users of unorthodox language and script online compartmentalise these activities, limiting them to the private arena, and that public perceptions of ‘midare’ in the language relate much more to the spoken language – particularly misuse of honorifics and young people’s language in general – than to non-standard script use. Recent language policy activities relating to the way Japanese is written have therefore been restricted to the kanji list. Regardless of whether people write by hand or use a keyboard, the role of kanji remains unchanged, fundamental to conceptions of written Japanese and freighted with a historical burden of language ideology. Despite arguments in favour of replacing characters with either kana or the Roman alphabet over the years since the Meiji Period, the centrality of kanji to the writing system has never been in doubt, and in the postwar script reforms the decision to rationalise the number of characters was always certain to win out over the push for romanisation (see Gottlieb 2010b). The policy focus on kanji does not mean that mention of writing good Japanese is absent from policy documents other than the curriculum guidelines, of course: the National Language Council’s 1995 report, Atarashii Jidai ni o¯ jita Kokugo Shisaku ni tsuite (On Language Policy for a New Age), for example, stressed the responsibility of government in planning for and disseminating a ‘beautiful and rich language’, and the Kokugoka (the Language Section within the Agency for Cultural Affairs) produced a video called ‘Aiming for a beautiful and rich language’. Later, as one arm of the 2002 strategic plan promoting English, the government announced that 200 schools at all three levels of education nationally would be designated flagship Japanese-language education providers, with a special emphasis on fostering advanced reading and writing skills, knowledge of the classics and oral communication skills, on the basis that a good command of students’ first language is a prerequisite for successful acquisition of a foreign language. More recently, MEXT’s list of Designated and Pilot Schools for projects other than English-language education in 2010 lists several tasked with curricula and teaching methods that will foster skills based on the ability to read and understand (MEXT 2010c).

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While this designation of certain schools to work on literacy-related issues is certainly an example of language management in practice, the fact that the only document overtly marked as policy in recent years has been the 2010 increase in the number of characters on the List of Characters for General Use indicates that the orthographic practices found online are not viewed with anything more than the equivalent of a fatalistic shrug, a metaphorical rolling of the eyes when discussing young people’s language. Apart from the usual injunctions to write good Japanese and the campaign to encourage students to read more books, it is the place of kanji in everyday life both online and off that has been regulated and reinforced. Making mistakes in writing characters by hand cannot be equated with a poor standard of literacy in its most basic sense, given that the phonetic scripts provide an alternative means of writing, but since in the Japanese context full literacy involves the ability to use characters properly, it does present an important symbolic problem. As we saw in Chapter 1, kanji are considered to be central to written Japanese, not an optional add-on, and this explains the policy focus on the kanji list. Kanji-related policy action In January 2005, an article in the Yomiuri Shimbun reported that the Kokugo Bunkakai had just released a draft proposal that kanji policy,17 including the List of Characters for General Use, be partially revised, given that the number of kanji people were seeing had greatly increased because of the widespread and rapid dissemination of information technology such as computers. The proposal was to be submitted at the following month’s general meeting of the Bunka Shingikai, the overarching committee to which the Kokugo Bunkakai reports (Yomiuri Shimbun 2005a).18 That this article appeared on the front page of the Yomiuri (as did articles dealing with the kanji list in other major newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun) indicated the topic’s importance in the general scheme of news reporting. Somewhat revealingly, though, given the findings reported in Chapter 1 of the degree of ignorance about the existence of the List of Characters for General Use, the article carried a short explanation at the end of what the list is, when it was drawn up and why, and how it differed from its 1946 predecessor, the List of Kanji for Interim Use. The Kokugo Bunkakai’s own 2005 report explained that its overarching task had been to identify and clarify problematic issues surrounding the national language in all areas of contemporary society and to decide how best to deal with them on a language policy basis. As the kanji arm of its deliberations, the committee had chosen to focus on kanji policy in the information age as requested by the Minister for Education in March 2005, the primary consideration being whether the current List of Characters for General Use – formulated in 1981 as ‘a guide to the use of kanji in writing modern Japanese in everyday

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life’ (Kokugo Shingikai 1981) with no concept of the rapid spread of information technology which was just around the corner – could really still be said to be functioning as a proper ‘guide’ today when that technology had made such inroads and people were increasingly exposed to characters not on the official list. Many electronic devices were soon to have in their memory 10,000 kanji (Japan Industrial Standards Levels One to Four); newspapers showed signs of using increased numbers of kanji not on the general list; Agency for Cultural Affairs’ surveys reported the influence of such devices on the language practices of users; and the List of Kanji for Use in Personal Names (Jinmeiy¯o Kanji) had recently been expanded. The time had therefore come, the committee felt, to revisit the character list. The investigation would be based on reliable empirical surveys of kanji frequency and of reading and writing abilities as well as recent Agency for Cultural Affairs’ surveys of attitudes towards kanji (Kokugo Bunkakai 2005). The kanji subcommittee’s membership represented a variety of views. Concern over the extent of students’ kanji proficiency was expressed by Professor Iwabuchi Tadasu of Waseda University at the very first meeting when he proffered the observation that while students – who now in the main used electronic dictionaries – could certainly enter kanji they were used to seeing, when they encountered more abstruse compounds such as dd (sogo, inconsistency) they were more likely to read the attached furigana than to look properly at the kanji themselves. While they knew the word, they could neither write it nor select it from the choices offered by an electronic dictionary. In Iwabuchi’s view, clarification of the extent of the lack of ability to write kanji should be undertaken as part of the committee’s review of the kanji list. Another member, Kanetake Nobuya of the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association, agreed that many people could not write the kanji on the List of Characters for General Use but questioned whether surveys of writing ability were really of any use: given the contemporary prevalence of word processing, was it not enough just to be able to read the characters? (Kokugo Bunkakai Kanji Subcommittee 2005). By the time the final Revised List of Characters for General Use report was made public in 2010, the kanji subcommittee and its various sub-groups had met a total of ninety-four times since September 2005 (Bunka Shingikai 2010: 1). A list of what was discussed at each meeting may be found at the end of the 2010 report. Three years into the process, the subcommittee had released an interim progress report, in which the two main points relevant to deciding whether or not to expand the list were given as pertaining to change in the language itself and to change in the environment relating to language, specifically the spread of information systems. The nature of the revised kanji list, then tentatively titled the Shin J¯oy¯o Kanji Hy¯o (New List of Characters for General Use), would be the same as that of the existing list: namely, it

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would provide a guide for effective kanji use (excluding proper nouns, except for the names of Japan’s administrative regions) in non-specialist areas of writing for those who had completed compulsory education and then spent some further time in schools or in society at large. While the list’s guidelines did not extend to specialist fields such as sciences and the arts, or to the writing practices of individuals, it was nevertheless hoped that they would be followed in writing those specialised words which had a close connection to everyday life. The basic thrust of the committee’s ongoing work was to select through machine-based kanji frequency surveys those characters most commonly used by the general public (presented in Appendix 1 of the report), initially identifying a set of 3,000–3,500 characters and then narrowing it down, with due regard to those characters which were important for a knowledge of kanji structure during the acquisition process or which while not frequently used were nevertheless important for the transmission of Japanese culture (detailed notes on the selection procedure are contained in Appendix 2 of the report). Due consideration would be given to those kanji needed for the names of administrative regions which were not in the current list, e.g., the ‘saka’ of Osaka or the ‘oka’ found in many place names such as Shizuoka. Various issues needing further consideration had been identified during the selection process. One was whether, if the total number of characters were considered too great, a list of Supplementary Characters for General Use (Jun J¯oy¯o Kanji) consisting of those characters considered useful when writing by electronic means might be separated out from among them, and what the relationship between that list and the main List of Characters for General Use might be. The main list would contain the most frequently used characters and would form the basis for education. Both lists should in principle satisfy the criteria of containing kanji which could be read, understood and written, but in the third criterion of writing there would be a difference between them in that only those on the main list would be intended to be written by hand without the aid of information technology. Alternatively, a Special Kanji (Tokubetsu Kanji) list of those low-frequency characters nevertheless considered necessary for daily life could be drawn up. A third option might be to add to the main list a new appendix of idiomatic phrases containing high-frequency off-list kanji,19 such as the ‘ai’ and ‘satsu’ only ever used in the word ‘aisatsu’ (greetings) or the ‘tan’ of ‘gantan’ (New Year’s Day), such characters to be recognised as having equal status to the Characters for General Use but with their use restricted to the specified phrases. Other issues still to be considered related to ‘on’ and ‘kun’ readings, character shapes and the matter of what the name of the new list should be given that frequency of occurrence was not the sole criterion for inclusion as discussed above (Kokugo Bunkakai 2009). When the final form of the new list appeared in June 2010 as a report from the Bunka Shingikai to the Minister for Education, following the usual period

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of public consultation on a draft version released for comment in November 2009 and subsequent fine-tuning, its name was not the initially proposed Shin J¯oy¯o Kanji Hy¯o (New List of Characters for General Use) but rather Kaitei J¯oy¯o Kanji Hy¯o (Revised List of Characters for General Use). To the 1,945 characters of the existing list have been added a further 196 characters, with five deleted, bringing the new total to 2,136, certainly an increase but still only a fraction of the number of characters available in computer and cell phone dictionaries. Because the availability of electronic writing technologies enables users to produce characters having a large number of strokes at the touch of a button, kanji such as the twenty-nine-stroke ‘utsu’ meaning ‘melancholy’ which was not on the previous list, meaning that the word ‘y¯uutsu’ (depression) was written half in kanji and half in hiragana as ddd rather than as dd, have now been added. The new list was formally announced and brought into operation by the government on 30 November 2010. The document included a justification of the need for the kanji list as a national language policy: a list of this kind to function as a guide has real significance today when so many more kanji are encountered through information technology. Given that kanji are an indispensable tool for communication, the role of the kanji list as policy is to facilitate the nation’s linguistic life by making the transmission of the written language simpler and more efficient and to assist with the goal of mastering the kanji themselves. In today’s information technology environment, the consequences of not having such a list as a guideline are not hard to imagine, the document argued. Here we see once again enshrined the central role of kanji within Japan’s writing system, but with a major difference in ideological emphasis from that found in early twentieth-century discussions of their role: where once such instrumentalism was seen as an attack on cultural heritage (see Gottlieb 1995), in the discourse of today’s policy documents and following sixty years of experience which has shown that the rationalisation of the writing system by the postwar script reforms has not had the dire consequences predicted by opponents, it is not only welcomed but actively sought. A further argument for such a policy advanced in the document was the need to support ‘writing behaviour’, as it was the way people wrote rather than the way they read that had been most affected by the widespread use of information technology. The basic aim of the expanded list remained the same as the old one, namely to function as a guide to non-specialist character use in everyday life. The report stated that the list was not in any sense meant to impose a limit on the number of characters people could use: rather, it was intended to be used in conjunction with characters not on the list, to which might be added some aid to reading them such as added furigana glosses. Nor did it propose that all characters be handwritten, something not realistic in view of the widespread daily use of keyboards. The guiding principle of the revision was to overcome

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the discrepancy that had developed between the List of Characters for General Use and the reality of kanji use in contemporary Japan. Characters had therefore been chosen on the basis of frequency of use using surveys carried out by the committee, narrowing down from a list of 3,500 candidates (including the 1,945 already on the List of Characters for General Use) using the guidelines previously discussed in the 2008 interim report. The kanji survey data examined came from 860 books (including textbooks), two months’ editions of both the Asahi Shimbun and the Yomiuri Shimbun and a large number of websites. Of these last, postings to electronic bulletin boards were excepted, presumably because the kind of unorthodox kanji use found there (as described earlier in this chapter) rendered that data unusable for the purposes of the review. Each candidate kanji was subjected to careful scrutiny as to its suitability for inclusion in the revised list. As a result of these deliberations, an initial 220 characters (subsequently reduced to 188) had been identified as candidates for addition to the existing list and 5 characters already on the list as candidates for exclusion. Following rigorous scrutiny of the 188, a further 4 were added and 1 was dropped, bringing the total to be added to the new list to 191. Then followed a month of consultation on a draft proposal to this effect during which opinions were sought from the general public and from government departments; on the basis of feedback received, further fine-tuning by the committee resulted in a changed total of 196 characters (9 added and 4 dropped). After a second period of public consultation, it was decided to proceed on the proposed basis of the new 196. Just to be certain, a survey of public opinion on the acceptability of the characters to be added and dropped was carried out in early 2010, which confirmed support for the changes.20 In the interests of making the new list as simple and straightforward as possible, the committee’s earlier idea of adding appendices of ‘supplementary’ and ‘special’ kanji, after vigorous in-house debate, was dropped (‘aisatsu’ and the ‘tan’ of ‘gantan’, discussed above, were included among the 196 new characters added). Other changes made included additions (28) and deletions (3) of ‘on-kun’ readings and clarifications of the use of different kanji having the same ‘kun’ reading. Significantly, the 2010 report left open the possibility of future changes to the list, something which the 1981 list had not done. In today’s era of rapid change, it declared, language policy should be periodically reviewed, in particular in those areas closely connected to the changing writing environment such as the kanji list. It was therefore important, in the committee’s view, to implement regular and planned surveys of kanji use; language policy should be reviewed on the basis of these surveys, as prefigured in the 2008 interim report, to take into account both changes in language and changes in the language environment, with ‘changes in the language environment’ here specifically construed to indicate the use of information technology (Bunka Shingikai 2010).

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This adjustment to kanji policy was concluded much more easily than was the previous expansion of the list. The revision of the 1946 List of Characters for Interim Use which resulted in the 1981 List of Characters for General Use was such a sensitive issue in terms of its position within the twentieth-century ideological debate over the place of characters in the Japanese writing system that it took not the proposed six years but eight years in total to arrive at the final list, with not one but two drafts offered for public consultation during that time (see Gottlieb 1995). That the present revision, once committed to, took only five years (and was, of course, facilitated by the use of information technology in a way not available to the earlier committee) is in no way an indication that the position of kanji is taken any less seriously now than it was thirty years ago, when we consider that those five years of deliberations resulted in the expansion of the List of Characters for General Use by only 191 characters. The fact that the list had been revised once already provided a precedent, of course, and there was not the acrimonious political debate that had surrounded the earlier revision. Instead, there was a compelling environmental factor in the widespread use of information technology which rendered people well disposed to the idea of change. The fact that the revision occurred so long after the evidence was in that electronic text production was causing significant changes in the way people wrote, however, speaks to the cautious attitude towards tinkering with the kanji list which has been the hallmark of language policy deliberations in this area. And indeed, it is not something that can be taken lightly, given the flow-on effects for education it will have. What is of particular significance about the revised list is not the nature of the kanji included (or of those five excluded) but rather the accompanying report’s belated acknowledgment of the influence of information technology on reading and writing and its recognition that not all characters need to be written by hand while at the same time it reaffirms the importance of writing by hand within Japan’s written culture. That the actual decision to revisit the list took so long coming after the need became apparent can thus be put down to caution about making changes to a policy which had been so hard won in the first place. The announcement in 1981 of the List of Characters for General Use, predicated still on handwriting, coincided with the beginnings of the word processing boom; a few years after this, once the new technology had begun to spread widely, academics such as Kabashima Tadao (1988, 1989) began to discuss the possibility of a future change in script policy given that people no longer needed to write so many characters by hand. The National Language Council began to acknowledge this in its reports early in the 1990s, only a decade after the list had been promulgated: its 1992 report, for example, recognising that writing kanji had become much simpler and that it was important to be able to read them correctly in order to produce error-free text in word processing, ventured the opinion that it might in time become necessary to move away from the emphasis on teaching

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all characters for both recognition and reproduction by hand in the direction of increasing the former and reducing the latter (Kokugo Shingikai 1992: 13). Not unnaturally, however, given that more time was needed to ensure that the technology was really here to stay, the Council proved reluctant to proceed in that direction until almost another two decades had elapsed, choosing instead to focus its activities on the issue of standardisation of the shapes of the many characters found in the dictionaries of word processing packages that were not in the official J¯oy¯o Kanji list (see Kokugo Shingikai 2000 for its report on this). Today, however, the number of people born after the introduction of electronic text production, who have always had available that alternative to handwriting, amounts to approximately a third of the population; the technology is well and truly here to stay and is incorporated into a multiplicity of commonly used devices. Given this, and in the face of numerous sets of evidence of declining ability to write by hand as described earlier in this chapter, the time for a rethink had clearly arrived. Such a policy intervention, of course, could only be done at national level, given that it affected the country as a whole. In this particular area of language policy, then, policy change to fit a social environment which all agree has been irrevocably changed by a new set of writing practices mediated by information technology has been achieved not easily but without the stop-start fragmented approach of policy relating to emergent multilingualism, where no such consensus exists. The revision of the kanji list does not challenge the centrality of the national language or the needs of its users; what it means for learners of Japanese as a second language is probably little different from the burden they already faced in the form of the previous list. What will be discussed in the next chapter, however, deals with a much thornier issue and one much less easily resolved, namely the need for a policy acknowledgment of the JSL needs of Japan’s newcomer residents. Providing multilingual information in languages used in the community, welcome though that undoubtedly is, does not address the grassroots issue of providing non-Japanese residents with opportunities to learn the language of their host country and is an issue which needs to be addressed at national rather than local level.

5

National language policy and an internationalising community

In the best of all possible worlds, the formulation and implementation of language policy would respond quickly to change in on-the-ground circumstances once sufficient time had elapsed to establish the permanence of that change. In modern bureaucracies, however, this is only infrequently the case. If we consider language policy in its formalised, overt incarnation, i.e., as ‘the formulation and proclamation of an explicit plan or policy, usually but not necessarily written in a formal document, about language use’ (Spolsky, 2004: 11), then examination of past policy formulation in Japan – relating, for example, to standardisation, script reform and the revival of the Ainu language – makes it clear that the process is usually slow and often tortuous. The presence of deep-rooted language ideologies means that change is something to be carefully scrutinised for agendas both overt and hidden that have the potential to upset the status quo. On a practical level, the implementation phases of new policies must be carefully planned and costed. Change at the national level of language policy often involves many years of discussion and consultation on issues that affect the nation as a whole. We have seen in earlier chapters of this book that growing multilingualism in local communities, the negative effect of the overwhelming national promotion of the study of English on the teaching of other languages and the changes to ways of writing Japanese enabled by electronic text production all raise questions about the way language is currently managed in Japan, i.e., about language policies. The preceding chapter discussed the only one of these to have been addressed at national level so far. In this chapter, I will examine to what extent the will to move in the direction of change can be discerned at national level in response to the other issues. As will become clear, a discursive shift is under way in relation to the old ideology that the Japanese language is the exclusive property of the Japanese people. The most pressing policy issue is without doubt the need to provide nationally sponsored opportunities for JSL education for foreign residents, given that the presence of such residents has become a permanent feature of Japanese society. With many foreign workers choosing to stay on in Japan rather than returning 123

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to their countries of origin, it makes sense in the interests of present and future social harmony to ensure that they are linguistically proficient in the language of the host society in order to enable them to act independently within it. Because this is occurring within the framework of a still strong national ideology of monolingualism, however, and because the national government is by and large removed from day to day dealings with foreign residents, the response at national level has been slow and fragmented by comparison with the greater responsiveness of local governments, which enjoy more freedom to take action as area-specific challenges arise. To date, then, we have seen a more proactive stance in bottom-up than top-down language policy initiatives in this area, with local governments and NPOs which provide assistance to foreign residents in their communities displaying a much greater recognition of the actual ecology of language in Japan than has the national government.1 It is at the national level, however, that a policy stance on provision of avenues for JSL education is needed in both symbolic and practical terms. In symbolic terms, recognition of the need to provide language-learning opportunities for non-Japanese residents would confront the old ideology of monolingualism by formally acknowledging that local communities are now very likely to be multilingual, particularly in certain areas of the country. In practical terms, financial aid from the national government to provide that education in local areas would relieve the current pressure on local government budgets and enable a smoother and – ideally – more professionalised service delivery. Spolsky, speaking of language managers (people or groups seeking to intervene to manipulate a language situation), lists by way of example the following: a legislative assembly writing a nation’s constitution or a national legislature making a law on the choice of official language; a state/provincial/ cantonal/other local government body determining what languages should be used on public signs; law courts; administrators; institutions and businesses; and even family members. Language policy ‘may refer to all the language practices, beliefs and management decisions of a community or polity’ (2004: 8, 9). In this chapter we shall see that the players active in those aspects of Japan’s language policy discussed in this book do indeed include national, prefectural and municipal governments along with civil society groups such as NGOs and NPOs and other groups of motivated individuals, all working to bring about change in particular areas of language practice identified as of concern. While the national government’s most recent foray into language-policy change has been a top-down adjustment of the kanji policy, one of the major loci of language ideology identified in Chapter 1, in terms of response to multilingualism the advocacy for change and the practical display of good practice have come from local government and civil society groups.

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Local government Immigration-related issues are currently dealt with at two levels. The national government implements the Immigration Control Act through the Immigration Bureau, while local governments have been responsible for implementing the Alien Registration Act, involving the issue of alien registration cards through local city offices to all residents staying in Japan for more than ninety days. In other words, until recently, once the national government issued a visa for a medium- to long-term stay in Japan, it handed over responsibility for that visa holder to local government. This changed following an amendment to the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act in July 2009, which abolished both the former Alien Registration Act and alien registration card and replaced them with a residence card and a change in responsibility for collecting information on foreign residents: after July 2010, this shifted from local to national government, thus enabling the Ministry of Justice to consolidate information on where foreign residents are living. This, in theory, enables the collection of a database on which to base decisions about other changes relating to foreign residents. Regardless of this change in immigration control procedures, however, under the terms of the Local Government Law the provision of services to all residents, Japanese or not, remains the responsibility of local governments; they are therefore the ones who deal firsthand with the integration of foreign residents into the communities where they live. In the absence of clear policies at national level for dealing with immigrants, local governments have developed their own ways of doing so, using their international associations to deliver advice, information and language training in association with volunteer citizens’ groups created to meet this need to varying degrees across the regions. They had already been doing this for many years when the Omnibus Law of Decentralisation came into force in April 2000: this law clearly defined the autonomy of local governments from the national government, making the former responsible for all aspects of local and regional public policy independent of the national ministries, and further opened the way to promoting the formulation of local policies by civil society actors such as NPOs and think tanks (Nakamura 2003: 111). Decentralisation therefore provided the underpinning for local government initiatives at the same time as it formally removed the responsibility of the national government in those areas. Nagy argues that local governments react to the national government’s lack of involvement with foreign residents through ‘uchinaru kokusaika’, using concepts of citizenry based on the Local Government Law. Local governments across Japan, he notes, have had perforce to create integrative policies for their foreign residents because of the Local Government Law, the Alien

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Registration Act and the lack of a national policy on integration. In other words, they have had no choice but to pick up the administrative and practical consequences of globalisation manifesting themselves in Japan’s local communities. For the most part this task has been undertaken competently, creatively and even enthusiastically, depending on where in Japan the particular government instrumentality is located and what the makeup of its foreign population is: where such residents are few in number, few inclusive activities are found, in contrast to other areas where whole suites of programmes have been developed to meet the needs of large numbers of foreign residents. Newcomer migrants, as the immediate beneficiaries of inclusive policies, have provided the spur for such developments; as lack of proficiency in Japanese is a major issue for this group, policies targeting them have focused on multilingual advisory windows and legal counselling, the provision of multilingual information in the form of handbooks and webpages as discussed in Chapter 3, and other such services intended to overcome the language barrier (Nagy 2008: 43–6). Many also offer JSL classes. All of these activities represent on-the-ground, targeted and pragmatic language policy in action. As Tegtmeyer Pak (2001) has pointed out, attempts of this kind to assist foreign residents in overcoming language difficulties, mundane though they may seem, are nevertheless at odds with the national immigration policy which remains based on the principle that Japan is not a country of immigration; in fact, they expose the inaccuracy of that premise by highlighting the increased numbers of foreign residents needing such services. Tegtmeyer Pak’s criteria for judging the state of development of a municipal incorporation programme (her term for foreign-resident-oriented activities) are twofold: first, the number of different programmes developed and how relevant and accessible they are for foreign residents, and then to what extent efforts are made to coordinate programmes which go beyond the narrow jurisdictional boundaries of a particular government department to liaise with other sectors and with the wider community. The most important actors in this process are local bureaucrats. In contrast to Nagy’s view of local activity as a reaction to national government inertia, Tegtmeyer Pak argues that the relationship between incorporation programmes and ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ has developed not as a result of demand from the electorate or from citizens’ movements so much as from an opening provided by another policy area: in this case, a nationally sponsored ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ project which furnished local bureaucrats with the opportunity to work out their own preferred solutions to issues arising from the flood of international migrants in the 1980s. Taking the cities of Kawasaki and Hamamatsu as examples, she identifies five steps in this process: first, pressure from local business communities spurred cities to pursue cultural exchanges such as sister-city relationships; at the same time, these two cities began to formulate initial policies for their foreign residents; the national government then began

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several ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ projects controlled by what was then the Ministry for Home Affairs (now MIAC) which had as their focus the establishment of international relationships by local governments for the benefit of Japanese citizens; both cities in time established incorporation programmes within their new International Offices, thus replacing the previous externally oriented conceptualisation of ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ with one which viewed it as including the interface with non-Japanese residents living locally; and finally, by the mid-1990s this redefinition of ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ was spread horizontally through networks fostered by the national-level interest in local internationalisation. Local conditions and histories with foreign residents thus played a key role in shaping the responses of differing municipalities. Local language policies in action An excellent example of local government policy-making is the Council of Cities with High Concentrations of Foreign Residents (Gaikokujin Sh¯uj¯u Toshi Kaigi),2 formed in 2001 by thirteen member cities home to large numbers of foreign residents, in particular to Brazilians who arrived after 1990. By July 2009, the number of member cities had grown to twenty-eight. This council (hereafter CCHCFR) meets regularly to discuss issues affecting foreign residents such as health care and social security: one focus of particular concern is the education of the many foreign children who do not attend school regularly and thus do not acquire an education in either Japanese or their first language. Late in 2001 the council issued what is known as the Hamamatsu Declaration, calling on the government to develop its own policies given the long-term residence plans of many of the local foreign residents. Of the proposals, those relating to education included enhanced JSL courses in schools and measures to encourage non-Japanese children to go to school (Yamawaki 2002). In member city Oizumi, for example, one in every seven residents is nonJapanese, the largest proportion of any city in the country, and 90 per cent are South American. Itoi (2006) outlines some of the policies put in place in this city once it became apparent that the revision of the Immigration Control Law, combined with the presence of many factories in the area’s industrial park which attracted foreign workers, had resulted in an increased foreign population. Local government staff from a range of areas where new residents needed services met to discuss the situation and identified communication as the biggest problem. To address this, the local government office developed a multi-pronged language policy. A South American person was hired to translate local government documents, listen to residents’ problems and mediate when necessary; a second bilingual staff member was employed at the counter of the Alien Registration Office, where new residents had to come to register. Bilingual handbooks of local information in Portuguese were issued, the first

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of their kind in Japan, and many local signs also appeared in Portuguese as well as Japanese. Municipal newsletters in Portuguese have been published regularly since 1992, and tripartite meetings between local government staff, Japanese residents and Brazilian residents are encouraged. JSL classes were begun in three schools with many South American students in late 1990, and the Oizumi Public Library also established an international corner with Portuguese books and audiovisual materials intended to help children with first-language maintenance. A second snapshot of local language policy comes from the city of Konan in Shiga Prefecture, also a member of the CCHCFR, which was discussed by politician Yamashita Yoshiki at a meeting of the House of Councillors General Affairs Committee in mid-2009. Konan’s foreign resident population had increased to about 6 per cent since the 1990s, Yamashita reported; the city’s mayor had spoken to him of the services it fell to the city to provide as a result. These included eight interpreters at municipal offices: given the financial difficulties of 2009, demand for this service was strong, with around 1,000 requests per month. In addition, publishing public relations information and daily life guides not only in Japanese but also in Portuguese and Spanish meant employing translators every month. All this, the city provided from its own resources. Particularly important were the measures taken for the education of foreign children: since the 1990s, some schools had found themselves with five or six such students per class; because they could not understand what the teacher was saying, some had reportedly begun to leave the classroom to amuse themselves in the playground, thereby prompting comment from Japanese students who wanted to do the same, so that classes were disrupted. Seeing this as underscoring the importance of teaching foreign children Japanese, the city thereupon established at its own expense JSL classrooms called Sakura Classrooms to provide initial instruction in Japanese. Once the students were deemed able to understand sufficient Japanese, they entered the school’s regular classes, with interpreters also provided on occasion (House of Councillors 2009). None of this, of course, was cheap: financial outlays in areas with large foreign populations can account for a significant chunk of the responsible authority’s budget, and Konan’s budget papers for 2009 show an allocation of ¥7,846,000 for running the Sakura JSL classrooms in its schools.3 Practical decisions about education are thus currently very much the concern of local communities, and language policy relating to the provision of JSL in schools is developed at the local level in response to community needs. To give a final example, this time from within Tokyo itself, local councillor Shinmura Ikuko from Edogawa Ward in May 2008 reported the presence of 392 foreign students in primary schools in the ward and 166 in middle schools. Two primary schools and one middle school were offering JSL classes. However, because commuting to the middle school from the northern part of the ward took time,

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the ward council had been requested to extend this to a second middle school in the north and had agreed to do this in 2010 (Shinmura 2009). This is a local responsibility because the ward’s Board of Education is responsible for public elementary and middle schools; high schools, on the other hand, are operated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Board of Education. It is at the more junior school levels that the demand for JSL classes is greatest, as MEXT’s annual figures on children needing JSL instruction in the public school system attest. Examples abound in the recent literature of local initiatives similar to those just described (see, e.g., Kawahara 2004 and Kawahara and Noyama 2007). The prime movers in such local policy-making have been identified as local politicians, municipal governments, local business communities and voluntary organisations (Tsu 2008: 138). For some time now, the influence of nongovernment groups such as NPOs and others has been making itself strongly felt in the provision of language and other services to foreign residents (both documented and undocumented, the latter an area into which government cannot be seen to go). At the local level, observes Befu (2009b: 30), ‘a sizable number of Japanese . . . not only oppose the notion that Japan belongs only to the ethnic Japanese but actively subscribe to the idea of a multiethnic Japan by supporting foreigners in Japan within the space of Japanese “civil society”’, defined by him as ‘a socio-political space which is not taken over by the formal political or economic institutions, such as government bureaucracy or corporations’. Self-motivated citizen groups originally began such work without recourse to government, finding their own ways to offer help. More recently, however, local governments have increasingly come to realise the benefits of working with such groups in terms of economies of service delivery and breadth of outreach (Menju 2003, Shipper 2008), thus involving community members more closely in the practical activities which work towards the integration of foreign residents into their local areas. As Baldauf (1994) observes, language is a universally acquired medium of which everyone feels a sense of ownership, meaning that most people feel free to involve themselves at will in micro-level language planning activities of this sort. Language policy operates within a speech community of any size, from national and international domains down to local and personal groupings (Spolsky 2004: 40); language-planning activities within such speech communities may be formal or informal, and are not often related to objectives and processes at the national level (Liddicoat 2008: 9), supposing such to exist. Citizens in Japan’s local communities, such as the volunteer groups discussed in Chapter 2, are informally involved in language policy as free agents motivated by the idea of making their communities more harmonious environments for foreign residents by teaching their language to newcomers in the expectation that the subsequent reduction in communication difficulties will lead to smoother

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interactions between the two elements. This kind of micro-level language planning is not a trickle-down effect from the national level; rather, it is a grassroots, bottom-up evolution of language policy to meet local needs which may in time influence a national response at both the discursive and practical levels of language policy, leading to the kind of overarching policy framework within which disparate elements nest, as envisaged by Katsuragi (2005). Before this latter can happen, however, an ideological reimagining of the relationship between the Japanese state, its citizens and the national language must first take place. Meanwhile, at the level of quotidian practice, local-level planning and activity continue apace, and a great deal of comment in both the press and the academic literature has now been published on the civil society input to this process (see, e.g., Nishiguchi 2008, Nomoto 2004 and Okazaki 2008). A key development in the implementation at local levels of the 2006 MIAC ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ policy which will be discussed later in the chapter has been cooperation between local governments and local citizens’ groups, with the latter teaching in government-supported JSL classrooms, volunteering as interpreters and translators and acting as all-round resource persons for foreign residents (Nagy 2008: 47). In the following section I will describe what policy initiatives have been made to date on the part of the national government with regard to the language needs of the foreign community and will consider the interfaces between national and local government in this area. National government responses to language needs: key documents Such language-related initiatives or even acknowledgments of language issues on the part of the national government as exist are usually embedded within documents dealing with other issues, a reminder that ‘ideologies of language are linked to other ideologies that can influence and constrain the development of language policies’ (Ricento 2000: 4). Spolsky concurs: ‘language policy functions in a complex ecological relationship among a wide range of linguistic and non-linguistic elements, variables and factors’ (2004: 41). The non-linguistic elements he identifies include political, demographic, social, religious, cultural, psychological and bureaucratic factors; one can only arrive at a useful account of language policy by taking into account contextual variables such as these. The most immediately apparent contextual variables in the case of Japan relate to business and to the desire for social harmony. The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a number of initiatives by ministries, local governments and industry bodies on issues to do with foreign residents in their roles either as labour-force members or as residents in local communities. Ozaki (2009) lists some as follows:

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r Council of Cities with High Concentrations of Foreign Residents (2001–) r Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), Gaikokujin Ukeire Mondai ni kansuru Teigen (Recommendations on Accepting Non-Japanese Workers) (April 2004) r Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Tabunka Ky¯osei no Suishin ni kansuru Kenky¯ukai H¯okoku: Chiiki ni okeru Tabunka Ky¯osei no Suishin ni mukete (Report of the Committee Studying the Promotion of Multicultural Coexistence: Towards the Promotion of Multicultural Coexistence in Local Communities) (March 2006) r ‘Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin’ ni kansuru S¯og¯oteki Tai¯osaku (Comprehensive Plan for dealing with ‘Foreigners as Residents’) (December 2006) r Ajia Jinzai Shikin K¯os¯o (Career Development Programme for Foreign Students in Japan),4 2007–11 r Ry¯ugakusei 30 Mannin Keikaku (Plan to Accept 300,000 International Students), 2008–20 r Jimint¯o Gaikokujinzai K¯ory¯u Suishin Giin Renmei (Liberal Democratic Party Parliamentary Group for the Promotion of the Exchange of Foreign Personnel, a body of eighty formed in 2005), Nihonkei Imin Seisaku no Teigen (Proposal for an Immigration Policy Suited to Japan) (June 2008) r Acceptance of applicants as nurses and care workers under an EPA (August 2008–) r Nippon Keidanren, Jink¯o Gensh¯o ni Tai¯o shita Keizai Shakai no Arikata (An Economy and Society that Responds to the Challenges of a Declining Population) (October 2008) r Liberal Democratic Party Education Division, launch of a JSL subcommittee, November 2008 r JSL to support the employment of ‘nikkeijin’, 2009– r Revision of the Immigration Law (8 July 2009) Each of these has involved some recognition of the importance of language training in accepting foreign residents. Some of the language-related activities of the CCHCFR, for instance, were discussed earlier in this chapter. Both submissions from the Nippon Keidanren emphasise the importance of JSL education. In 2004, the Recommendations on Accepting Non-Japanese Workers made this explicit: ‘It is essential that uniform and coordinated measures taken by national and local governments be promoted in order to develop a well-rounded acceptance policy that addresses Japanese-language education, employment assistance, eradication of discrimination, and the needs of the children of non-Japanese workers and students arriving in Japan.’5 Four years later, the second document An Economy and Society That Responds to the Challenges of a Declining Population listed under the heading of ‘Policies for Maintaining the Vitality of the Economy and Society in the Long Term’ a statement that in order to encourage foreign workers to stay in Japan social integration policies

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required active responses by local communities, government and companies in several areas, including strengthened Japanese-language education.6 The opportunity to become proficient in the language of the host country is thus seen by this influential business group as a responsibility to be shouldered by government at both national and local levels and by the business community itself. The agreements described in Chapter 2 under which nurses and care workers from Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines enter Japan to work likewise place emphasis on language proficiency in the workplace. One further important document with significant provisions relating to language – not a policy, but a discussion document – is Kongo no Gaikokujin no Ukeire ni kansuru Kihonteki na Kangaekata (Basic Stance on Admitting Foreigners in the Future) released by a Ministry of Justice panel in September 2006.7 This report stressed the importance of a revamp of the current immigration policy to the future economic health of Japan given the declining birth rate and ageing population and recommended that the number of migrant workers allowed into Japan should be allowed to increase to 3 per cent of the total population: still small compared to other countries, but an increase on the 1.57 per cent of 2005 (Ministry of Justice 2006a). The report also recommended an overhaul of the trainee system under which large numbers of people entering Japan on a trainee visa, ostensibly to be trained in some particular aspect of technology transfer to be used when they return to their own (usually) developing country, have been used as a source of often very poorly paid unskilled labour in direct contravention of Japan’s stated policy of accepting only skilled migrants. In addition to proposing a new category to cater for such workers, the report specified that continuation of their employment would be contingent upon their acquiring a specified level of technical skill and Japanese-language ability within a set period after starting work. Once achieved, this would permit them to bring their families, who must likewise have some proficiency in Japanese, to join them. A second category of migrants mentioned by name is the ‘nikkei’ community of workers from Brazil, Peru and Argentina, who the report recommends should be subject to the same requirements regarding language skills as those in the revamped trainee category, not only for new migrants but also for those already working in Japan. Experience has shown that despite their heritage many ‘nikkei’ workers living in Japan do not speak Japanese, and never have. This recommendation appears to be an attempt to remedy this and possibly points to a future Ministry of Justice rethink of the descent-based policy which allowed this category of migrant into the country under conditions not available to others (Roberts 2008: 775). Of particular interest to the present study is the emphasis on language, showcasing as it does government recognition of the importance of language to integration. Foreign workers would be able to renew their visas for further employment if they were able to demonstrate that they had

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acquired proficiency in Japanese during their stay, and it was further proposed that the same period of compulsory education undertaken by Japanese children be made mandatory also for the children of foreign workers, something which is not at present the case. Parents who did not cooperate in this would have their stays limited. In a press conference at the time of this report’s release, the then Vice Minister of Justice K¯ono Tar¯o who had overseen the project acknowledged that lack of proficiency in Japanese was becoming a major problem for foreign workers and admitted that ‘the government must take responsibility for building a system to teach Japanese to them’ (Hongo 2006). As of the time of writing in late 2010, no change has yet occurred as a result of these recommendations, and a search of the records of Diet committee meetings has turned up no discussion of the report, apart from a reference to the setting up of the committee in 2006. Nevertheless, the report indicates an apparent willingness within the Ministry of Justice to move forward on the language issue. We have seen that because Japan made no provision for language proficiency before allowing ‘nikkei’ workers into the country, the simple fact of their Japanese descent being sufficient to allow them entry, many ‘nikkeijin’ with little or no Japanese-language ability only manage linguistically by living among compatriots who speak their own language. This is also true of their children, who – if they attend Japanese schools – struggle to make progress. Such a situation reflects the fact that Japan, only now beginning to acknowledge that foreign workers have become a permanent part of the landscape, has not yet done the language policy work necessary to deal with multilingualism in its communities by providing adequate opportunities to study the host country’s language as a nationally sponsored and well integrated enterprise. Policies or discussion documents which mention language training have been oriented to the labour market and to the smooth running of local communities on an ad hoc basis and lack a general overview of national needs in this area. Nevertheless, instrumental recognition of language needs is an encouraging start and signs of the national government’s growing awareness of the need for action in this area have been evident for some years. Although nationallevel immigration policies have been criticised as remaining distant from the on-the-ground specifics of life in Japan for foreign residents, Japan’s current Basic Plan for Immigration Control, drawn up in 2005, does in fact mention the importance of Japanese language skills for foreign nationals planning to stay long term in Japan: From the point of view of developing an environment where foreign nationals can live comfortably, it is indispensable to link together measures in various areas including labor, education and welfare to appropriately address living condition problems seen in regions where many foreign nationals reside. Therefore, relevant national measures should be considered in coordination with local government measures. Since it is important

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for foreign nationals to have Japanese language skills when engaging in various activities in Japan, cooperation with government agencies in charge of Japanese language education and promotion measures for foreign nationals in Japan and foreign countries will be reinforced, and the immigration control administration will also play a major role including consideration of how to accept foreign nationals.8 (my bolding)

Note here the bolded section referring to government cooperation with agencies in charge of Japanese-language education. The following section will examine how this has been occurring in recent years. Shikama has argued that several actors contribute to the discourse on migration and integration in Japan: First, the introduction of foreign workers is promoted by Japanese economic organizations. But the Japanese government also identifies migration and the establishment of an integration policy, in particular with regard to Japanese language education, as important issues . . . Both government and economic organizations suggest language education merely as a means of ensuring short-range interests such as economic efficiency and the ability to accommodate to Japanese companies. In other words, they lack concern about integrating non-Japanese into Japanese society. (2008: 52)

It is difficult to see how this argument can be sustained, however, given that in 2006 two important documents appeared which did indeed make explicit a concern for integrating foreign residents into the communities in which they live. These were first MIAC’s Chiiki ni okeru Tabunka Ky¯osei Suishin Puran ni tsuite (On the Plan for Promoting Multicultural Coexistence in Local Communities) in March that year and the ‘Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin’ ni kansuru S¯og¯oteki Tai¯osaku (Comprehensive Plan for dealing with ‘Foreigners as Residents’) put out by the Liaison Committee of Ministries and Government Offices Involved with Foreign Worker Issues which followed in December. MIAC’s Plan for Promoting Multicultural Coexistence in Local Communities and its flow-on effects for local government MIAC’s Plan for Promoting Multicultural Coexistence in Local Communities (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2006a) pointed out that ‘tabunka ky¯osei’, rather than being solely a matter for communities where large numbers of ‘nikkeijin’ live and work, now concerns the whole country, given that work, study and international marriage have taken foreign residents all over Japan. Experience had shown that where local governments had been proactive in dealing with foreign residents, such as Kanagawa Prefecture where multilingual staff had been appointed to help the children of foreign residents adapt to school, there were very few problems. The report addressed the concern that the entry of such children into Japanese schools would result in reduced resources for Japanese children, thereby contributing to a decline in their levels

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of achievement, by pointing out that ‘these concerns can be met by increasing the number of teachers deployed and otherwise building a sufficient system based on the understanding that policies targeting foreigners are developed with a view to Japanese society as a whole, foreigners included’ (17). Having Japanese and non-Japanese children studying together in public schools would open the way for mutual communication; successful schemes in Aichi Prefecture and elsewhere which had helped foreign residents integrate into the community and foreign children adapt to Japanese schools should be expanded into national-level mechanisms. Of particular relevance here are the language-related policies subsumed under the heading ‘Support for communication’, which each locality was requested to implement: r provision of information related to administration and living conditions in multilingual format, to be made available not only from government offices but also from community facilities and Japanese-language classrooms; r training of volunteer interpreters and provision of multilingual information in cooperation with NPOs which support foreigners and with foreign residents’ self-help groups; r provision of an orientation session on local living requirements and administrative matters at the earliest possible opportunity after foreign residents move into the area, to be followed by provision of opportunities for such residents to continue to study Japanese language and culture; r in-school support for such matters as the provision of extra teaching staff and extra-curricular supplementation of school activities with first-language learning support and learning support in cooperation with volunteer groups, in order to increase the effectiveness of learning in Japanese. As requested, local governments across Japan have been developing their own ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ plans in response to this document. The website of the Ibaraki Prefectural Government’s International Affairs Division, for instance, in a message addressed to ‘all residents of the prefecture’ in 2006, explained clearly in both Japanese and English why multicultural coexistence is important (framing it in terms of the foreign resident population of the prefecture) and how it differs from international exchange (foreign residents are residents, not visitors) and from ‘foreigner support’ (foreign residents are not just recipients of support but make important contributions to their communities). The benefits of ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ were expressed in terms of economic stimulation, social harmony, improved cross-cultural understanding and improvement of the prefecture’s image as a good place for non-Japanese to live. Here the emphasis is strongly on the benefits to Japanese residents, a swing away from earlier rhetoric about foreign residents needing support towards a more mature conceptualisation of bilateral support. Multicultural harmony, the webpage continues, is being promoted through the cooperation of the following

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elements: the nation (which agrees to accept foreigners in the first place), the prefecture (which responds to large-scale issues), municipalities (which provide direct and practical lifestyle-related support to local foreign residents), international associations (which implement model projects) and NGOs/NPOs (which work together with local governments and international associations to support foreign residents). Ibaraki Prefecture itself was running the Ibaraki Foreign Resident Roundtable, a multicultural regional development project, a multicultural harmony symposium (a forum for the bilateral exchange of ideas) and a foreign labour workshop (Ibaraki Prefectural Government International Affairs Division 2006). Elsewhere, in Kyoto, the Kyoto City International Foundation published a major report in 2007 on the city’s language-support needs based on surveys conducted over the preceding two years on the requirements of administration, schools, foreign residents (newcomers) and special permanent residents (oldcomers) (Ky¯oto-shi Kokusai K¯ory¯u Ky¯okai 2007). Within the Tokyo area, Nagy (2009) examines in detail the responses of two municipalities, namely Shinjuku and Adachi Wards, both of which have developed multicultural coexistence plans and have large and diverse populations of non-Japanese residents. Shinjuku’s plan has focused on the provision of multilingual information at a wide range of locations and of language-learning opportunities, on activities which lead to increased understanding on the part of Japanese residents of their new neighbours and on the encouragement of linguistic and cultural pluralism; all these activities ‘demonstrate Shinjuku’s commitment to ensuring that the minority resident community do not become a burden to the municipal government and the Japanese residents of Shinjuku-ku’ (169). An amount of well over 4 million yen is set aside for rudimentary JSL education conducted by locally inducted volunteer teachers, again on the premise that language proficiency will foster independence and minimise disruption to the host community. Clearly, then, the request to local governments to develop their own ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ plans which include language-related initiatives has borne fruit, and it is on this basis that most local language policy relating to foreign residents has been developed since 2006. More recently, however, moves have been made to involve the national government more closely in such activities, mostly through budget allocations. In 2008, an interim report from a committee established the previous year in the House of Councillors to investigate the declining birth rate, ageing population and ‘ky¯osei’ society made several recommendations to government and industry on the same issue of coexistence with foreigners. The report recognised that ‘given that 40,000 foreigners per annum are being granted permanent residence, Japan would seem to be in the process of becoming a nation of immigrants’ (House of Councillors 2008: 24) and proposed that ‘recognizing that foreigners are no longer temporary visitors but rather our neighbours and part of Japanese society, the time has come to redesign

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our approach to foreigners in Japan’ (40–1). Several of the discussion points recognised the need to move to supporting at national level activities currently undertaken at local level, where, for instance, such local areas do not have sufficient funds to support a smaller number of foreign residents (particularly the education of foreign children in the Japanese language). The heavy financial burden incurred by local communities in supporting ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ was thus acknowledged, with the setting up of a national fund suggested to support such activities by international exchange associations and NPOs. This report’s concluding proposals, addressed both to the Japanese government and to Japanese companies, were grouped under four headings: policies on coexistence with foreigners; coexisting with foreigners as workers; improving the education system for foreign children; and improving the living environment for foreigners. Although language played little part in the second category and was addressed only as a matter of interpreting for medical care in the fourth, it was listed as a major element in the other two. The lead recommendation in the first category noted the following: Japan’s policies in regard to foreigners tend to have been developed after the fact, with foreigners already entering Japan in response to a labor shortage. However, given the current situation, whereby foreigners are demonstrating a marked tendency to take up long-term residence rather than simply working here temporarily, we need to revisit these policies in order to avoid future problems for Japan. In so doing, one critical issue will be to design and operate systems for identifying the Japanese-language abilities of foreigners when they enter Japan and for promoting Japanese-language education for their children. (41)

Under the heading of education, the committee recommended: 1. Given that all children have the right to receive an education, and that coming to Japan for reasons such as accompanying a parent represents a change in the education environment beyond the control of the child, due consideration must be given to the education of foreign children in Japan. A key issue in this regard is the acquisition of Japanese as a second language and as an academic language, requiring the training and deployment of specialist teachers familiar with language acquisition stages, etc. Assistance should also be provided to elicit the participation and cooperation of guardians. 2. When foreign children are taught Japanese, they need to acquire not just basic interpersonal communication skills, but also sufficient academic language proficiency. Tools for accurately gauging levels of Japanese-language acquisition therefore need to be developed and utilized, and a more detailed grasp acquired of the actual situation in regard to those foreign students lacking adequate academic language proficiency. (43) The second point’s concern for standards in JSL education is heartening, evincing as it does a move beyond the earlier extemporised approach to language

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needs. The committee’s proposals further emphasised the need for more proactive national intervention in education through budget allocations to support the provision and training of JSL teachers, noting that despite the local measures currently in place ‘adequate results have not been achieved due primarily to financial constraints and a lack of specialist teachers and teaching assistants’ (43). Above all, ‘given the many complex and multi-faceted challenges that arise in seeking to coexist with foreign residents, an organizational framework should be established which adds to the existing liaison council of relevant ministries a ministerial meeting among the same ministries, as well as an institution to take on comprehensive responsibility for measures related to foreigners’ (41–2). A coordinated approach of this kind would be greatly preferable to the current scattered miscellany of policies and procedures and would in ideological terms signal recognition at the national level that a significant number of foreign residents have become part of the social fabric, contributing to Japan’s economy and society and deserving of coordinated planning and provision of services to enable them to fit smoothly within that society. As a first step towards smoother implementation of ‘tabunka ky¯osei’, it is to be commended. Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin (Foreigners as residents) The second significant recent document is ‘Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin’ ni kansuru S¯og¯oteki Tai¯osaku (Comprehensive Plan for dealing with ‘Foreigners as Residents’), on which to a large extent language-related activities in ministries such as MEXT have been predicated since its release in 2006. This major report was produced jointly by officials from a range of ministries which stressed Japan’s responsibility to treat non-Japanese people working and living there properly by providing an environment wherein they, as members of society, could receive the same services as Japanese residents on an equitable basis. To that end, a liaison committee of government agencies involved with foreign-worker issues had engaged in a consultative process of work on the issues involved in considering foreigners as ‘seikatsusha’ (residents) rather than as transients, culminating in this report. The document stressed that further consideration of policy relating to foreigners including ‘nikkeijin’ was essential and that government agencies were expected to comply in the effective implementation of its findings. It laid out recommendations under four major headings: creating local communities where foreign residents could live without difficulty; enriching the education of foreign children; improving the working environment and access to social insurance; and reconsidering the visa management system. Language issues featured prominently in the first and second of these, with targeted funding to be provided under what was called the Gaikokujin no Seikatsu Kanky¯o Teki¯o Kasoku Puroguramu (Accelerated Programme

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Applying to the Living Environment of Foreigners).9 Under the heading of creating foreigner-friendly communities, the report noted that lack of language proficiency and cultural awareness on the part of newcomers had led in the past to friction, to problems in accessing public services since the provision of information about administrative and living information was for the most part done in Japanese and to the need for special support during any emergencies that might arise. Remedial strategies suggested were similar to what many (but not all) local governments had already been doing for some time, e.g., providing interpreters (particularly in medical and education-related areas), opportunities to learn Japanese and multilingual information about services. An added strategy was the promotion of ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ in local communities by local governments and NPOs, in line with MIAC’s document. Best-practice examples of work done by volunteer groups were to be circulated and policy was to be planned. Research and development would also be promoted on practical JSL education for foreigners, on the training of Japanese-language teachers including retired teachers and foreigners already proficient in Japanese and on establishing JSL classrooms for ‘nikkeijin’. In the area of provision of information in different languages and in ‘Easy Japanese’, again, existing examples of exemplary practice would be collected and disseminated widely. Noting that local governments were expected to draw up their own multicultural coexistence plans based on MIAC’s just issued Chiiki ni okeru Tabunka Ky¯osei Suishin Puran, the document commented that in the provision of services to foreign residents (seikatsusha toshite no gaikokujin), the national government, local governments and NPOs each had important roles to play. The national government’s responsibility was to ensure that foreign residents in local communities were provided with information and material relating to national policies and to take adequate measures to calculate the allocation of tax to local governments given the financial burden imposed on them by the rapid increase in the number of foreign residents in their local communities. With regard to foreign children in Japanese schools, the report recognised that it was essential to give them as good an education as possible to provide them with a foundation for life in Japan, given that language difficulties had led children to stop going to school or, if they stayed, to have difficulties in keeping up with the curriculum. School attendance was therefore to be encouraged and efforts to improve their educational experience through JSL classes and other means were to be planned. To achieve these aims, a JSL curriculum was being developed, with the primary level already written and the middle-school version to be ready by the end of fiscal 2006. Teachers with little experience of teaching a JSL curriculum would be provided with best-practice examples and workshops paid for by the Gaikokujin no Seikatsu Kanky¯o Teki¯o Kasoku Puroguramu, and JSL short-course opportunities would also be provided to boost teacher numbers. Outside Japan’s public school system, support for ethnic schools

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would be provided in conjunction with the relevant foreign government. While the document’s provisions for training JSL teachers are encouraging, it stops short of acknowledging the need to establish JSL as a subject in teacher-training programmes on a national basis. With the publication of this report a new element entered the debate about foreign residents in the form of the distinctively Japanese term ‘seikatsusha’,10 in addition to the terms ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ and ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ which as we saw in Chapter 1 have become important in establishing the discourse of incipient multiculturalism in Japan. As we shall see, the ‘Foreigners as Seikatsusha’ document has had flow-on effects in terms of the provision of JSL education in local communities. ‘Seikatsusha’ are defined by Sugimoto as ‘the ordinary, nameless and common men and women who actively construct their living conditions. Seikatsusha constitute the core of Japan’s civil society, independent of powers of the state and the market’ (2009: 7). This term is widely used across a variety of fields and is, Sugimoto asserts, more ‘realityfocused’ than ‘shimin’ (citizens) and ‘kokumin’ (members of the nation). The description of foreign residents as ‘seikatsusha’ in this official document can thus be seen as an important discursive step forward in identifying migrants as being on the same footing as Japanese. The annual funding allocation for this programme continues today. The role of MEXT in JSL education MEXT currently plays two roles in assisting with the provision of JSL education. In its own annual requests for budgetary appropriations it includes an allocation for the education of the increasing number of non-Japanese children with poor Japanese-language skills in the public school system, to be used for deploying support staff able to speak foreign languages and developing standard guidelines for teaching such children effectively. The amount requested in the 2010 papers was 300 million yen, no increase over the previous year despite the rapidly rising student numbers in this category. By way of comparison, this is one-third of the amount requested under the heading of Enrichment of Foreign Language Education, which in fact means preparing in various ways for the introduction of English to the elementary school curriculum (MEXT 2009a), reflecting the disparity in the importance accorded to these two arms of the current language policy landscape. Clearly, externally oriented priorities take precedence over internal needs when the national emphasis on promoting English as an international language is given greater financial support than the teaching of JSL to newcomer children in Japan’s schools. The ministry as a whole, then, takes budgetary responsibility for the needs of non-Japanese children within the public school system. To that end, its involvement to date has been multi-pronged: in addition to collecting and

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publishing statistics, it provides support for JSL teachers in the form of workshops; arranges the deployment of JSL teachers in schools, paid for by national rather than local government; and issues a Guidebook for Starting School in seven languages.11 The ministry’s CLARINET website lists details of these and other activities.12 These developments followed pressure from MIAC in both 1996 and 2003, requesting MEXT to take an active policy role in assisting non-Japanese students in public schools (Kawakami 2008). The ministry does promote a JSL curriculum spanning the period from the early stages of Japanese-language instruction to the curricular study stage and sends bilingual counsellors to schools, but as we saw in Chapter 2, these measures have been criticised by Kawakami Ikuo, one of Japan’s foremost researchers in this area, who told a House of Councillors’ committee that they are inadequate because ‘the Ministry has not provided clear standards on whether or not Japanese-language instruction is necessary, with this judgment left up to schools. Schools, however, tend to decide that instruction is no longer necessary once a student can handle everyday conversation’ (House of Councillors 2008: 27). In Kawakami’s view, proactive measures to train greater numbers of JSL teachers are essential, as is the development of national language-education policies that take account of foreign children. Acknowledging that MEXT has developed the policies outlined above, he nevertheless takes issue with the fact that the national government has not gone further and established a national policy on JSL education for foreign residents because it believes these policies to be sufficient; indeed, it considers foreign governments (in the case of ethnic schools) and businesses which employ foreign workers to be responsible for providing for the linguistic needs of non-Japanese children, given that such children are free to enter the public school system if they wish. This view, he argues, represents a continuation of the old postwar ideology that the national government is responsible only for the control of foreigners coming into Japan and does not view them as residents making a contribution to Japanese society (Kawakami 2008). MEXT’s second role, that of outsourcing activities promoting JSL in the wider community, is overseen by the Agency for Cultural Affairs within the ministry, which makes its own annual request for budgetary allocations and which since 2007 has been working on oversight of JSL policies related to the ‘Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin’ paper with the expressed aims of helping foreign residents to acquire sufficient proficiency in Japanese to prevent them from remaining isolated within their local communities and of contributing to the formation of a multicultural society. To this end the Agency calls each year for applications to run JSL programmes within local areas, the target activities being the establishment and running of ‘nihongo ky¯oshitsu’, the training of Japanese-language teachers and hands-on training for volunteers. Eligible

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applicants are local governments, incorporated groups, and non-incorporated groups meeting certain conditions. It is worth spending some time here on examining the outcomes of these schemes. The list of successful applicants for the scheme’s 2009 round of funding for JSL teaching activities reveals a varied tapestry of interested groups from twenty-five prefectures across Japan from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south, many prefectures being home to several projects run by different groups. In Shizuoka Prefecture, home to seven member cities of the CCHCFR, for example, fifteen projects were funded, illustrating a wide variety of JSL-related teaching: one was to be run by a university, several by groups teaching Japanese to Portuguese speakers, another by a group teaching Japanese through Korean; other successful applicants included the NPO Hamaoka Association of Japanese Teachers and several international associations from different municipalities. Three groups specified that they would be offering language training for foreign nurses and/or care workers. Outside Shizuoka, funding to run Japanese-language classes went to such diverse groups as the Japan Peru Society, the Fukuoka YWCA, again many local government international associations, Refugee Assistance Headquarters, the Association of Nikkei and Japanese Abroad, another NPO group and the Nagahama UNESCO Association, to list but a few. Like the nurse/care worker classes in Shizuoka and elsewhere, some projects are very specifically targeted: an NPO in Gunma Prefecture aimed to provide language training for ‘nikkei’ Brazilian students either already in or wanting to enter Japanese high schools, others targeted children or children and their parents, some were for Chinese residents or Indochinese refugees, and a project in Gifu Prefecture aimed to teach Japanese for the study of food safety through the livestock industry, agriculture and forestry in local areas (Agency for Cultural Affairs 2010c). All across Japan, then, local groups are responding to perceived language needs, with some attending to narrowly specified target groups and others having a broader remit. Clearly the motivation and energy to provide such a wide and varied spread of language training are abundantly available at local level in both government and non-government sectors, and the national government funding from MEXT has helped with the provision of such services by outsourcing them in the absence of any national budget allocation for a centrally controlled curriculum and delivery. Under the funding category for training Japanese-language teachers, there were forty-two successful projects from seventeen prefectures, again across a range of interest groups and providers. Some were intended to teach volunteers how to teach Japanese; some to train teachers of Japanese for children; more than one targeted retired teachers to train as support teachers of JSL for foreign children. In Saitama Prefecture, the Hanno international association would be offering classes on JSL teaching for native speakers of foreign languages who could also speak Japanese, as would the Hamamatsu International Association

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in Shizuoka Prefecture. Others were to train teachers for Portuguese-speaking children, and one, in Niigata, was to teach children Japanese using sign language (Agency for Cultural Affairs 2010d). And finally, in the third category for funding during 2010, that of the provision of training courses specifically for volunteer JSL teachers, twenty projects in eighteen prefectures successfully applied for funding, some focusing on volunteers to support children learning the language or foreign residents in the work force, others on general conversation classes or on training regional coordinators for Japanese-language learning support (Agency for Cultural Affairs 2010a). Funding for this scheme tied to the Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin project first appeared in the Agency’s budget in 2007, when an allocation of 133 million yen was set aside for that purpose. The budget papers noted that along with the steady growth in the foreign population had come friction in local areas caused in part by insufficient proficiency in Japanese on the part of the new arrivals. A number of committees such as the Liaison Committee of Ministries and Government Offices involved with Foreign Worker Issues set up by the Cabinet Secretariat had identified in their deliberations the importance of JSL education. The Agency had therefore decided, as part of a plan to provide JSL education so that foreign residents could avoid the problems caused by language difficulties and live harmoniously as members of Japanese society, to focus in 2007 on three things: the establishment of ‘nihongo ky¯oshitsu’ and training, research development and the creation of a handbook (Agency for Cultural Affairs 2007). What was actually funded in the 2007 round of outsourcing applications were JSL classrooms using ‘nikkeijin’, JSL teacher training for retired teachers and foreign residents with good Japanese, practical classes for volunteers and research on practical JSL education. In the 2010 budget, the amount devoted to the project increased to 215 million yen, along with smaller subventions for language teaching to refugees and for surveys and research on JSL education, categories which were continued the following year before being collapsed into the three funded in 2009 (Agency for Cultural Affairs 2010e). Other government initiatives Two more recent national-level undertakings grew out of the global financial crisis. On 28 April 2009, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare initiated a targeted national intervention in the provision of Japanese-language education for one subsection of foreign residents, the ‘nikkeijin’, with a programme known as the Nikkeijin Sh¯ur¯o Junbi Kensh¯u Jigy¯o (Employment Preparation Training for Foreigners of Japanese Descent). The press release announcing this project reported on the effect the financial crisis was having on the employment circumstances of ‘nikkeijin’ in areas where many such workers lived. The fact

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that their language skills and experience of Japanese employment practices were limited, the ministry noted, meant that once out of the workforce they would find it very difficult to find work again. In addition to stepping up the deployment of mobile teams of interpreters and counsellors to Hello Work offices13 in relevant localities, therefore, the ministry offered ‘nikkeijin’ job applicants who wanted and badly needed stable employment the opportunity to increase their ability to communicate in Japanese and to learn about Japan’s Labour Law, employment practices and social security system. To that end, a programme of lectures and practical classes lasting up to three months would be outsourced to the Japan International Cooperation Center (JICE),14 to begin the following month in the designated cities of Hamamatsu (Shizuoka Prefecture), Toyota and Okazaki (Aichi Prefecture), Yamato (Kanagawa Prefecture) and Minokamo and Kani (Gifu Prefecture), with plans to extend the programme to other areas at a later date (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2009c). Funding for this scheme had been included in an economic policy package to address the financial crisis announced earlier that month (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2009b). This is an excellent example of language management in the form of a targeted language policy tailored to the specific needs of a specified population in defined areas and to the circumstances of a specific time. Although it may not have eventuated without the precipitating factor of the financial crisis, it nevertheless constitutes an official recognition of the language-related difficulties faced by non-Japanese people already in the country. It is limited in its scope, targeting only workers of Japanese descent rather than being open to all foreign workers in similar situations, and the more cynical of Japan commentators would no doubt view that as an expression of race-based exclusionism. In my view, however, it is an encouraging sign of national intervention into the provision of JSL opportunities for foreign residents in need (ironically, those who were in the early 1990s presumed not to need such opportunities because of their Japanese heritage) and could well prove to be the first step in the wider provision of language classes by the national government. While the will (and perhaps also the budget) may not yet be there to widen the net, providing Japanese-language classes to those of Japanese heritage is a start. I suspect that as workers of other heritages notice the provisions being made for ‘nikkeijin’ in this regard, bottom-up pressure will be brought to bear on the government to widen the categories eligible for such support. A second offshoot of the financial crisis was the setting up of a portal by the national government. The crisis hit some of the ethnic schools hard, as parents having trouble with employment could no longer afford to pay the fees. The Brazilian Ambassador to Japan reported in January 2009 that many Brazilians in this situation had chosen to return home rather than transfer their children to Japanese schools, partly because of the lack of JSL support available

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(Matsutani 2009). That same month, the government announced immediate support measures for foreign residents, and three months later, the Cabinet Office opened a multilingual web portal (Japanese, English, Portuguese, Spanish) which enables such residents to access both general information about living in Japan and information on specific topics, e.g., multilingual information on swine flu. The portal15 also indicates a degree of willingness on the part of the national government to become involved in the provision of language classes in cooperation with local governments and associations. A link leads to an April 2009 Cabinet Office committee document outlining further support measures intended to assist non-Japanese children who wish to make the transition from ethnic schools to Japanese schools, particularly in those cities with high concentrations of foreign residents. For this to progress smoothly, of course, it is essential to build the children’s Japanese-language proficiency; teaching assistance to Japanese classes conducted at the local level in order to prepare such children for mainstream school would therefore be provided by former JICA volunteers, among others, and public schools accepting such children would also set up JSL classes to assist them. The long-term importance of such moves lies in the groundwork they lay for enabling language proficiency which could in time assist those migrants who wish to become citizens. Citizenship is a key legal mechanism for facilitating integration, and its nature is coming increasingly under scrutiny worldwide as a result of global population flows. Japan’s current language requirements for citizenship stipulate an ability to read and write Japanese equivalent to that gained by the second or third year of elementary school, a level of literacy clearly insufficient to allow full participation in public life. With more and more migrants choosing to remain in Japan, ongoing discussion is needed on what the expectations of a Japanese citizen in terms of mastery of the Japanese language might be, what the impediments to achieving this are for new arrivals and how they can be overcome. The new provision of increased support by the national government for JSL learning in some areas is a start towards addressing this situation as a national issue rather than as a local concern. The next challenge will be to reconceptualise the nature of the link between citizenship and language, which will entail a significant break with current language ideology. The push for a national law on the provision of JSL opportunities It is clear from all the above that the importance of language proficiency for foreign residents has not gone unnoticed by the national government, although the response to date – while increasingly noticeable – has been contingent and ad hoc, as exemplified by the language training provided for nurses and caregivers discussed in Chapter 2, the ‘nikkei’-oriented programme just discussed

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and local-area JSL initiatives. In the civil sector, public advocacy of a widerranging, integrated approach in the form of a national law on the provision of education in Japanese as a second language has been growing for some time now. In 2001, the Nihongo Fu¯oramu Zenkoku Netto (National Network of Forums on Japanese Language), formed in 1995 by people involved either as volunteers or educators in offering life advice or Japanese-language support to foreigners living in Japan, adopted what they call the Tokyo Declaration16 calling for government input into the provision of JSL instruction. This Declaration, available on the group’s website in Japanese, romanised Japanese and English,17 defines as ‘foreigners’ all those whose first language is not Japanese, including those of Japanese nationality, a definition based on language alone rather than citizenship and thus counter to the language ideology discussed in Chapter 1. Most foreign residents, network members argued, cannot conveniently access classes in Japanese, non-Japanese children have trouble at school and anti-foreigner prejudice is widespread. The Declaration, therefore, referencing a number of international human rights agreements, stressed the importance of creating in Japan a multicultural and multilingual society where foreigners were not forced to assimilate into the host culture. Not only should multilingual services be provided at all levels of government, the host society itself needs to increase its multilingual capacities. Of paramount importance to this group is that Japan should guarantee foreign residents of any age or situation the opportunity to learn Japanese if they wish. Members saw this as a matter for government, both national and local, arguing that a nation should not accept foreign workers without first putting in place a proper language policy. The network therefore called for the enactment of a law to ensure that Japanese-language instruction would be available as a matter of priority, stipulating that the level of language needed for an adult to live a productive life was at least that attained by Japanese students at the end of middle school, i.e., at the end of the period of compulsory education. They further advocated an adequate policy on JSL in education for foreign children in schools, many of whom cannot cope without adequate Japanese-language skills; the opportunity to continue learning their first languages should also be guaranteed. Network members hoped that such a law could be in place by 2010. This has not happened, but the idea has not been left to languish. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the Japanese Language Education Guarantee Act Study Group, a group of researchers from universities and language-related organisations predominantly in the Osaka area, has been working since 2007 on a draft law to guarantee Japanese-language education to foreign residents which is quite similar in nature to the earlier one and for which the research has been funded by MEXT grants. Their premise is that such a law is necessary because despite the increase in the number of migrants nothing has been done to systematise Japanese-language instruction for either adults or children, leaving

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progressive local governments and volunteers to provide what they can. The proposed draft law is an attempt by researchers and practitioners in the areas of JSL, social education and public law to remedy this situation and so prevent foreign residents from being excluded on the grounds of insufficient linguistic proficiency from access to the services, information and other aspects of life they need. The draft of the proposed Act, which is called the Nihongo Ky¯oiku Hosh¯o H¯oan (Japanese Language Education Guarantee Bill) and is written in Japanese with furigana attached to enable comprehension by those readers who are the object of its attention, sets out as its objective the promotion of multicultural coexistence and the enrichment of Japanese-language education ‘by defining the fundamental principles and responsibilities of the national and local governments pertaining to the public guarantee of education and determining basic matters relating to the policy of Japanese-language education’. ‘Tabunka ky¯osei’ is defined as a situation wherein all members of Japanese society, whether native-born Japanese or not, live on equal terms while acknowledging their differences, similar to the MIAC definition given in Chapter 1, and ‘Japanese-language education’ as teaching not only Japanese as a Second Language but also teaching about Japanese society. The purpose of teaching the Japanese language is specified as helping to bring about a state of multicultural coexistence (Nihongo Ky¯oiku Hosh¯oh¯o Kenky¯ukai 2009). On policy matters, the draft proposes that the national government establish in consultative fashion a basic policy on the provision of JSL instruction covering measures to promote it and to educate the general populace on the situation faced by those whose first language is not Japanese, to foster research on JSL education and to specify how the policy will be implemented. The basic plan proposed to this end moves the policy a step further down the hierarchy of government levels: those prefectures deemed to be appropriate on the basis of their demographic profile should establish a basic plan for their area based on the policy outlined at national level which would be submitted to MEXT and then publicly announced. JSL education opportunities would be guaranteed in day-care centres, kindergartens and schools, but schools would not be the only avenues: the national and local governments would also urge business operators employing non-Japanese workers to guarantee opportunities for JSL instruction at their own expense. It was hoped by the drafters of the proposed Act that, following a maximum period of five years’ research, such legislation would be in place within ten years. The role of the national government is thus seen as to formulate the overarching policy and keep oversight of the outcomes, while that of local government is to oversee the practical implementation of the plan in accordance with local conditions.18 Under the section of the Act which deals with responsibilities, the national and local governments are charged with guaranteeing

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opportunities to foreign residents to learn Japanese in their local communities. As we have seen, although the different levels of local government in areas with many foreign residents have taken up that challenge with by and large a fine degree of engagement to date, this is not because of any sense of compulsion stemming from national government demands. The proposed Act would change that by requiring all such local governments to offer classes, with a much stronger emphasis on ‘tabunka ky¯osei’. The Notes accompanying the draft Act point out that while the term ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ is often heard in conjunction with both MEXT’s and local governments’ JSL activities, such activities have been implemented on an ad hoc basis rather than arising from any really substantial discussion of what the ideal of ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ might mean in practice. The proposed Act therefore clearly defines the relationship between multicultural coexistence, the Constitution of Japan and various other international human rights laws. In order to further clarify the issue of what multicultural coexistence is, it also showcases the intent of its drafters to stop what they refer to as a trend towards using JSL as a means of assimilating foreign residents into Japanese culture rather than recognising both Japanese and non-Japanese residents as equal but different. The Notes also clearly specify that the intent of Article 6, on responsibilities pertaining to JSL in the local community, is not to ensure that governments provide support to volunteer teachers but rather to indicate the responsibility of governments in developing a system which will provide stable employment for JSL instructors and education coordinators. A third group also keenly interested in promoting Japanese-language instruction both within and outside Japan and now also advocating laws to guarantee an overarching policy approach to JSL/JFL education at national government level is the Nihongo Ky¯oiku Gakkai (Society for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language), which in 2009 formally constituted a seven-member working group to work on preparing material for such laws. Shinya Makiko of Osaka Sangy¯o Daigaku, representing the Japanese Language Education Guarantee Act Study Group, is a member of the working party. Its website19 sets out the rationale for their work thus: the number of foreign residents within Japan is increasing, while outside Japan interest in Japanese culture and economy continues to grow. Those involved in JSL/JFL instruction both inside and outside the country face many intractable problems, but the national government has as yet shown no interest in or long-term vision for the issues, with the result that such measures as do exist in different areas are sporadic and uncoordinated. Rather than simply asking the government to address this matter, in their view, those involved in teaching Japanese need to bring to light the problems experienced at the coalface, formulate a vision for desirable outcomes, collect basic data for a master plan for a policy on teaching Japanese to non-Japanese and put together arguments which can be incorporated in laws which would become the

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basis for that policy master plan. In short, it is up to the professionals to craft the policy and present it for inspection and approval, not the government itself. A progress report from the group issued in early 2010 advised that they were engaged in distilling the essentials for a bill which would have the working title of either the Nihongo Ky¯oiku Shink¯o H¯o (Laws for the Promotion of Japanese Language Education) or Nihongo Ky¯oiku Kihon H¯o (Basic Laws for Japanese Language Education). Subjects under discussion included the establishment of a National Research Institute for Teaching Japanese as a Second Language along with regional Japanese-language education centres, the deployment of regional JSL coordinators and a guarantee of the right to Japanese-language education for foreign residents. The group’s plan is to publish material advocating the need for such a law, to hold symposia to raise public awareness of their project and to actively lobby the Diet and relevant ministries with regard to the proposed legislation. Laws are necessary, members stipulate, because they make the government responsible for continuing to implement a policy; while their group will not draw up the law itself, they will draw up an outline of the points which should be incorporated into it (Nihongo Ky¯oiku Shink¯o H¯o H¯oseika Waakingu Guruupu 2010). This subsequently appeared in a book published in October 2010. In the prefaratory statement to the list, the group stressed that as a result of their deliberations they had decided that the Nihongo Ky¯oiku Shink¯o H¯o would not be a single law, as it was not possible to encompass all the various fields of JSL policy by this means; rather, along with a basic law which would form the basis for a master plan for JSL policy, their target was revision of a wide range of existing laws and government ordinances in which it was possible to have a provision related to JSL education inserted (Nihongo Ky¯oiku Seisaku Masutaapuran Kenky¯ukai 2010). The three groups discussed above have all approached the issue from the perspective of those involved in Japanese-language education. While their desired goals are the same, i.e., a law guaranteeing Japanese-language education to foreign residents who want it, their approaches are different, with the Nihongo Ky¯oiku Gakkai placing much greater emphasis on its own involvement in doing the groundwork of research for their envisaged master plan for JSL education. A fourth group approaching the issue from a different perspective is the CCHCFR, which since its formation in 2001 has lobbied the government to improve conditions in various areas, including the provision of JSL support, one of its objectives being to formulate proposals to national government.20 The first document the CCHCFR submitted to the national government was the previously mentioned Hamamatsu Sengen (Hamamatsu Declaration)21 arising from a members’ conference in that city in 2001, which stressed the importance of education in Japanese language and culture for the many non-Japanese children in schools and proposed that money be set aside to fund a manual

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setting out educational guidelines for use in public schools, along with an increase in the number of teachers and interpreters deployed to help such children. Measures to address the issue of school non-attendance by foreign resident children were also canvassed (Gaikokujin Sh¯uj¯u Toshi Kaigi 2001). A few weeks later, the declaration was sent to five ministries and two agencies.22 The following year the CCHCFR held a conference in Tokyo attended by representatives of those ministries and agencies where the issues addressed in the Declaration were discussed; this allowed local government representatives their first chance to meet with the national government officials responsible for policy planning (Yamawaki 2002). Similarly, the 2003 conference in Toyota City was followed later that year by a symposium attended by representatives from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the Japan Federation of Economic Organisations (Keidanren) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). Subsequent declarations following joint meetings were released in 2004 (the Toyota Declaration), 2006 (the Yokkaichi Declaration) and 2008 (the Minokamo Declaration), each bearing the name of the city which acted as CCHCFR secretariat in that financial year and each stressing the CCHCFR’s commitment to the goal of ‘tabunka ky¯osei’. In each, the three central working issues were the same: ‘relations between foreign residents as “seikatsusha” and their local communities’, ‘cooperation with local governments and support for foreign residents in businesses in local communities’ and ‘the education of foreign children’. Each year has seen some form of contact with arms of the national government; a 2005 meeting in Yokkaichi also included foreign residents and NPO representatives, thereby widening the ambit of discussions to include civil society input as well. The CCHCFR called on the national government to create a coordinated policy to address the listed issues, including a guarantee of support to enable foreign residents to become proficient in Japanese so that they can achieve independence and participate fully in community building. The submissions clearly outline the steps members think the national government ought to take. Posted on the CCHCFR’s website are two 2009 documents, one listing the requests it had made for regulatory reform and the other detailing the national government’s responses. The requests range across a wide range of areas, from visas to labour conditions and public health. The language-related ones of most interest here are the requests for the establishment of a system to guarantee foreign residents the opportunity to acquire the knowledge of Japanese language and Japanese life necessary for their lifestyles and employment; for an expansion of JSL education in gaikokujin gakk¯o (ethnic schools), given that many children attending such schools are likely to stay in Japan and to work there; for a skills certification examination system pitched at the level of the end of compulsory education for non-native speakers of Japanese in

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schools;23 for an expansion of the number of evening schools to allow people to study even though working; for the training of staff in JSL teaching and multicultural coexistence education; and for a guarantee of Japanese-language learning opportunities to foreign children. It is worth examining some of these in detail here. To unpack the first by way of illustration: the request concerning the desired guarantee of JSL instruction to foreign residents was based upon the fact that although discrete visa categories regulating the residence and employment of non-Japanese people entering the country exist at the national level, there is no provision of opportunities to allow them to attain sufficient proficiency in the Japanese language to live and work in the local areas where they settle. Given that the administrations of member cities had to deal on a daily basis with the consequences of this, the CCHCFR requested the relevant ministries and agencies to consider the development of several things: a guarantee of language-learning opportunities tailored to meeting the needs of foreign residents, creation of a system of certification of study results and standards for language proficiency and development of methods for determining proficiency. It was suggested that incentives in the form of favourable treatment for visa extensions and renewals could be linked to levels of proficiency in Japanese. The current lack of such opportunities meant that the language barrier prevented foreign residents from becoming fully self-reliant members of their local communities and was a root cause of friction in the community. Rather than relying on the self-initiated activities of local governments and NPOs in this area, the national government should accept responsibility for this and should construct and disseminate a JSL education system, including the training and deployment of staff charged with implementing it at national and local government levels and in businesses. While the recent revision of the Employment Measure Act touched on language issues in its Article 9, this had no practical effect. The increase in demand for language training from foreign residents following the downturn in the employment situation was a further indicator of the need for national government intervention in this sphere. The request from the CCHCFR indicated the relevant laws that would need changing to accommodate this action; the ministries in charge were listed as the Ministry of Justice (immigration policy and visa issues), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (visas), MEXT (education) and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (employment). The responses received from each ministry are discussed in the document. The Ministry of Justice response affirmed the importance of raising the Japanese-language proficiency of foreigners, and committed to continuing to consider ways and means of maintaining an environment for studying Japanese. In considering the matter of Japanese-language proficiency in relation to visa extensions and changes in visa status, they agreed, it is first necessary to ensure

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that the foreigner in question is guaranteed opportunities to learn Japanese and to maintain an examination and qualifications system that measures objectively his or her Japanese-language proficiency as a ‘seikatsusha’. As the CCHCFR pointed out, however, although the urgency of these aims was acknowledged, no timelines were set for achieving them, and its document questioned whether the Ministry of Justice did in fact intend to throw its weight behind influencing other relevant ministries to work on the matter; given that that ministry recognised the need for a system of language proficiency certification examinations, it ought to take a proactive role in setting one up. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ response noted that the Kokugo Bunkakai’s Subcommittee on Teaching Japanese as a Second Language was carrying out a professional investigation into both the level of Japanese that should be required and the system of certifying that level; Foreign Affairs would therefore prefer to proceed in tandem with other ministries on the basis of that report. This elicited the same response from the CCHCFR, namely, that the ministry should take a more proactive role in influencing other ministries, joining forces with the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare to set a specific timetable for achieving the specific outcomes involved. MEXT itself might be thought to be the most closely concerned with this matter, given the previously discussed Agency for Cultural Affairs’ oversight of JSL activities intended for ‘foreigners as residents (seikatsusha) within Japan’ since 2007. Since its Kokugo Bunkakai subcommittee on JSL education, as noted in the MOFA response, has been considering objectives, standard content and methods of proficiency evaluation and certification in JSL programmes, MEXT might well be seen as a policy locus. The response from the ministry pointed this out, adding that during the 2009 financial year it would build on the work of the JSL subcommittee by carrying out research on evaluation of foreign residents’ proficiency levels. Using none of the tentative syntax employed by other ministries as to their ‘wish’ to work towards this aim, MEXT announced that through these measures it would arrive at an excellent system for providing Japanese-language education for foreigners under the aegis of the ‘seikatsusha’ project. However, the CCHCFR queried whether MEXT’s project was sufficiently wide-reaching to guarantee JSL education for all interested foreign residents, asking what percentage of those with life- or employment-related language needs it would actually reach, and also requested clarification of the extent to which the MEXT project had taken into account relationships with projects already being run by local governments, NPOs and universities. MEXT was asked to request an increased allocation for the project in its 2010 budget request, but this did not happen. In the view of the CCHCFR, the MEXT project was a model which local governments, NPOs and universities working in local areas could use as a reference but

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which did not go far enough in addressing the needs of foreign residents as a whole. Finally, in relation to this item, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare was commended for its groundbreaking Employment Preparation Training for Foreigners of Japanese Descent programme, the first time a programme providing JSL opportunities to foreigners who had lost their jobs had been sponsored at national level. The CCHCFR expressed the hope that this policy would continue to be monitored in the light of circumstances in local areas and adopted as a permanent labour policy. The above somewhat lengthy but illuminating examination of responses from the national government to one of the CCHCFR’s language-related items confirms that although the need to upgrade the Japanese-language skills of foreign residents and workers is recognised by various sections of the national government, overall responses are in most cases limited in scope to motherhood statements indicating a wish to improve rather than to plans for concrete action, with the exception of the MHLW ‘nikkeijin’-targeted plan and the more diffuse MEXT activities. None go so far as to suggest that the government take blanket responsibility for providing Japanese-language education to all interested foreign residents. This step may still be some time away. It would require, of course, a significant subvention in the national budget, but more than that, an increased acknowledgment at national level that the nature of Japanese society is changing which goes beyond lip service at discourse level and enters into a pragmatic willingness to grapple with and provide for the practical consequences of globalisation for local societies and for Japan as a whole. Bringing about a language policy of this sort will require the intervention of powerful political figures who are convinced of its appropriateness, but there is currently no compelling evidence of such a group in Japan’s political landscape at national level. Taken together, the four groups discussed here provide excellent examples of activities – some generated from within civil society, the CCHCFR from within local government itself – that call on the national government for action on the provision of JSL education. The nexus between civil society and government across a wide range of areas has grown increasingly significant in recent years, with that of the treatment of foreign residents being no exception, particularly in the relationship between NGOs/NPOs and local government (Shipper’s (2008) ‘associative activism’ in action). Most such activity takes place in the informal public sphere of civil society, its impact felt initially at the local level of government. While the private groups described above are composed mainly of researchers and practitioners rather than being NPOs/NGOs, their intent is activist in nature and they thus fall within the parameters of the associative activism model. The CCHCFR expressly references the contribution of NPOs in its Minokamo Declaration, requesting that the national government work

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with them as well as with local government and the business world in building a society where foreign residents are provided with what they need to enable them to contribute to the communities in which they live. Some of the literature produced in pursuit of this goal of a national law is particularly noteworthy because it rearticulates the definition of a foreigner in terms of language rather than ethnicity or blood. Sat¯o (2008), in a paper on language rights in which he calls for such a law, defines a gaikokujin (foreigner) as anyone whose first language is not Japanese. His paper works through various relevant articles of Japan’s Constitution, noting that the Constitution contains no reference to language, not even specifying Japanese as the official language of the country, and argues that foreign residents should be guaranteed the right to instruction in Japanese as a second or foreign language. Article 26, for example, specifies the right of all citizens (kokumin) to an education. The use of the word ‘kokumin’ (the people), Sat¯o argues, cannot be interpreted to mean that the guarantee of rights does not extend to foreign residents, who are basically as entitled to the protection of their rights as anyone else. With regard to education, since Article 26 does not specify only school education or the period of compulsory education, it ought to be possible to include under this rubric the idea of lifelong learning and of an official guarantee of language education for foreigners. In support of his case, Sat¯o further canvasses a range of international human rights conventions to which Japan is signatory. Analysing Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which, recognising the right to education, specifies that education ‘shall enable all persons to participate effectively in a free society’,24 he argues that this can be interpreted as mandating the provision of an education system which will provide the knowledge needed to live in that country, and that this provides a basis for an official guarantee of language training which includes foreign residents. The lack of trained specialist JSL teachers in public schools, however, places a heavy burden on ordinary teachers and constitutes a barrier to achieving this goal. Japan’s national education system’s one-language, one-culture stance in fact runs counter to the provisions of the international conventions Japan has ratified, specifically the ICESCR and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Musing on the categories of foreign residents who need JSL instruction, he notes that the criterion of foreign citizenship is insufficient as an indicator of language needs because it does not account for those ‘former foreigners’ who have taken Japanese citizenship but still lack proficiency. For the purposes of his argument about the linguistic rights of foreigners in terms of receiving education in Japanese as a second language, therefore, he defines a foreigner, regardless of their current citizenship, as someone whose first language is not Japanese. Very careful thought should be given to what kind of Japanese foreign residents need to learn; they do not need the traditional Japanese-language

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education offered to native speakers and intended to create good Japanese citizens. The point here is that non-Japanese need to study the language for communication rather than to affirm a sense of shared identity as Japanese as is the case with Japanese native speakers. If many of those non-Japanese go on in time to become Japanese citizens, however, that will again raise the question of the nature of the connection between language and national identity, currently such a deeply embedded part of the prevailing language ideology as discussed in Chapter 1. Teaching of community languages in schools Turning now from the teaching of Japanese to immigrants to the teaching of languages in Japan’s education system: we saw in Chapter 3 that most teaching of foreign languages other than English is done at university level, with only comparatively small numbers of students taking other languages in secondary schools. After the 2005 White Paper on Education acknowledged the need to teach languages other than English, in particular regional languages, the second wave of targeted programmes described in Chapter 3 was expanded, assigning responsibility for developing language curricula to designated schools in particular prefectures. The number of students studying regional languages, i.e., Korean and Chinese and to a lesser extent Russian, expanded slightly as a result, but no further budget allocation for this purpose appears likely to be made. As mentioned earlier, in the 2010 MEXT budget appropriation requests the money requested for Enrichment of Foreign Language Education is earmarked exclusively for the move of English into the elementary school curriculum. The concept of community languages has not yet entered into the language policy process, where other languages are still consistently referred to as foreign languages, underlining their status as something external to Japan despite the presence of large communities of speakers of those languages who live and work in Japanese communities. The term ‘community languages’ rather than ‘foreign languages’, as we saw in Chapter 3, has been used in Australia since the mid-1970s and legitimises the continuing existence of those languages as part of Australian society. This issue of legitimisation is important: as discussed in Chapter 1, an important role of language ideology is to legitimise particular beliefs about language. For as long as Japan continues to refer in its official discourse and planning to Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and other languages spoken within its borders as foreign languages, it will deny them the status they deserve, namely that of languages spoken as legitimate parts of the national linguistic landscape. This lack of recognition of on-the-ground linguistic realities and language practices is why such languages are all but ignored in the public school system in favour of English. The foreign languages

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other than English which have until recently been the most common options were European languages such as French and German, historically linked with the adoption of aspects of European science and culture; the notion of teaching languages which would enable mainstream Japanese to communicate with nonJapanese living in their country is missing from educational policy (Hirano 1996: 71). The Japanese–English binary continues to constrain foreign-language education even though the policy documents relating to the promotion of English make much of international issues as a driving force. The English version of the March 2003 MEXT press release ‘Regarding the Establishment of an Action Plan to Cultivate “Japanese with English Abilities”’ which accompanied the release of the policy, for example, uses the phrases ‘international interdependency’, ‘international understanding and cooperation’, ‘living as a member of the international society’, ‘participate in international activities’ and the statement that ‘in addition, the situation demands the sharing of wisdom among different peoples for the resolution of worldwide issues that face humanity such as global environmental problems’ before going on to make it clear that English is the only language that counts in these situations: ‘English abilities are important in terms of linking our country with the rest of the world, obtaining the world’s understanding and trust, enhancing our international presence and further developing our nation.’ This is a blinkered internationalisation, one which views the world through only two linguistic lenses rather than offering Japanese school students a wider range of language-learning experiences. With its overly instrumental emphasis, it risks limiting students’ worldviews and opportunities for cognitive development through lack of exposure to different languages and the different ways of thinking they both exemplify and involve. Extending language planning to further proactive fostering of the study of regional languages could prove a useful strategy for Japan not only in its domestic arrangements but also in its external foreign relations. Members of its large communities of Chinese and Korean oldcomer residents may or may not still speak their heritage language, depending on the individual case, but the many foreign students and trainees studying or working in Japan, over 90 per cent of whom are from China, South Korea and other areas of East and South East Asia, certainly do (MEXT 2007), making these languages very much community languages. Were the national government to recognise this and further expand teaching of these languages in its public schools, diluting its focus on English as the only really important language, such evidence of goodwill and acceptance might conceivably help to ease lingering tensions between Japan and its Asian neighbours over wartime hostilities, as the 2000 report to the Prime Minister mentioned above recognised. English is certainly used as a lingua franca in communication throughout the region, but the affective benefits of

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placing increased importance on communicating in the local languages rather than relying on English could be considerable. As we saw in Chapter 3, Kat¯o (2009: 164) argues that the increase in the number of migrants to Japan from the Asian region exerts a major influence on the social context of language policy. The movement of these people, he asserts, not only urges a rethink of the focus on English in the teaching of languages in Japan but also more importantly suggests the need to reconceptualise language policy in this area as a domestic issue. Kat¯o is correct: it is no longer sufficient to focus foreign-language teaching in Japan’s schools on the external use of English when Japan’s communities are home to speakers of regional and other non-English languages, with many more native speakers of Korean and Chinese than of English. While the importance of English as an international language is undeniable, as Japan’s leaders and policy documents concur, and while it functions as a lingua franca not only in the wider international setting but also within the Asian region, language policy ought to reflect current realities and cast a wider net in order to avoid what Miura (2000: 9) refers to as ‘double monolingualism: within Japan, Japanese only; outside Japan, English only’. Despite the money earlier allocated to the designated-schools project and despite the statement in the 2009 White Paper on Education that the programme is continuing,25 this does not appear to be an ongoing project. It is difficult to see what purpose temporary policies such as this have in the overall longterm picture if programme funding is discontinued. As Lo Bianco comments in the Australian context, ‘redressing systemic language deficiencies today requires co-ordinated policy action, expert guidance and consultative processes of debate and public engagement and . . . articulation between the latent and largely untutored bilingualism of the . . . population and its more monolingual public institutions’ (Lo Bianco and Slaughter 2009: 7). To my knowledge, no widely consultative process about what languages should be available in Japanese public schools has taken place. The implementation of decisions on language teaching has been top-down, whereas what would benefit Japan is a wide-ranging national discussion on what languages are taught and why. As briefly discussed in Chapter 1, the belief that Japanese people are not good at learning foreign languages may have something to do with the lack of interest in expanding the foreign language offerings in schools, but the government, through its massive injection of funds first into the JET Programme and more recently into the Strategic Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Abilities programme, has shown that it will act to support language learning where it sees the need. The challenge ahead, then, is to convince it of the need to further diversify the range of languages taught and to do this not merely from externally oriented motives but from an acknowledgment that these languages are spoken in Japanese communities every day. Progress happens in language

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policy not by arguing old cases but by developing new ways to look at existing situations (Lo Bianco 2009). Conclusion We have seen in this book that policy relating to the linguistic needs of migrants is moving from the bottom to the top, while that relating to script use has developed from the top down (albeit with opportunities for widespread community consultation built in). With regard to the former, the contribution of local government and NPOs to the encouraging signs of interest and involvement we are now seeing from the national government should not be underestimated. As shown by Reed (1986) and Furukawa (2003), local government policies have influenced national policy in the areas of welfare, the environment and more recently information disclosure. Given these precedents, together with the examples given by Shipper (2008) of the increasing influence of migrant rights activist groups in the civil society sector on the behaviour of government organisations, it is reasonable to assume that the local government and civil society calls on the national government to provide JSL education opportunities described in this chapter may in time bear similar fruit in bringing about a programmatic dimension to this area. Language policy initiatives in Japan since the postwar script reforms of the mid-twentieth century have on the whole been reactive rather than proactive;26 this area looks likely to be no different. In the area of provision of multilingual information to migrants, as discussed in Chapter 3, Japan is doing well, depending on which area of the country we look at. Hirano (1996: 70–1) contrasts this manifestation of language policy with the nation-state version which has informed Japan’s language policy to date, the biggest difference between the two being the difference in target group. Multilingual services policies recognise linguistic diversity rather than ignoring it in favour of assimilation as has been the case under the nation-state model, with the target group being those for whom the language of the majority, i.e., the national language, is not their first language. The nation-state model has been propounded by the national government, with language positioned as a manifestation of national identity, the target group as the Japanese people as a whole, the majority language as the national language, the aim of corpus planning as modernisation, purification and standardisation and the policy domains as administration and mass communication (i.e., the whole of society). The language policy informing the provision of multilingual services, on the other hand, is propounded by multiple actors including local government; language is seen as a means of communicating information, the intended targets are the populace including foreign residents, the focus is on the languages of linguistic

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minorities, the aim of corpus planning is simplification and the policy domain is administrative services for part of society. In other words, such policies recognise the everyday linguistic diversity of Japanese communities. Some progress has therefore been made in this area, magnified in recent years by the ability to provide multilingual information through the Internet once governments established a presence online. Increased national government intervention into the provision of JSL education opportunities and the teaching of foreign languages other than English in the school system is essential, however, if Japan is to develop its linguistic potential to deal with the opportunities and responsibilities inherent in being a recognisably multilingual society and to accomplish any real degree of internationalisation in society. At this stage, while the national government continues to promote ‘internationalisation’, this does not rest upon an adequate conceptual framework of multilingualism and multiculturalism (Fujita-Round and Maher 2008: 402) and does not manifest in schools as supporting regional and community or indigenous languages. And yet sufficient time has now elapsed to provide compelling evidence of a globalisation-induced social shift that will not now be reversed, regardless of how much nationalist politicians may push the old monoethnic, monolingual line of argument and appeal to a language ideology which is now increasingly out of step with the lived realities of both citizens and non-citizen residents. Providing language classes for foreign residents is not a one-way street which benefits only the recipient of the teaching. It is through becoming proficient in the language of the host community that foreign residents are empowered to contribute to that community and thus the provision of language classes is a vital link in enabling social cohesion. Arguments which focus on the cost of such programmes overlook the fact that if Japan were not to provide such classes it would risk squandering an important national resource which will grow in importance as time passes and the proportion of non-Japanese among the population increases. Buckling down to providing this as a national responsibility can only result in benefits to both host community and foreign residents which will with time improve the quality of life for both. It is time to bring together the disparate strands of language policy, abandoning both old ideas and the butterfly approach in favour of a coordinated set of policies which take cognisance of the practical realities of everyday life in Japan today. As Yamanaka (2008: 25) comments: ‘All of the demands for change at the grassroots have pointed in one direction: the government must be actively involved, and take leadership in, transforming this homogenous society into a multicultural one. Civil society and local governments will not be able to complete this task on their own. Social harmony can result only from comprehensive legal and administrative systems that promote respect among diverse

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groups of people.’ Language policy has an important role to play in achieving such harmony, and it is imperative that policy-makers turn their attention henceforth to devising appropriate policies to reflect the increasingly diverse and internationalised society in which they live, in the interests of continuing social harmony.

Conclusion

The broad social reach of language policy’s implementation makes it a key player in framing the manner in which language is handled in a particular society. It acts as an important device for the legitimisation of particular uses of language which coincide with social expectations, i.e., it encapsulates and articulates the national thinking on language (language ideology) and cannot stand outside the culture and the times in which it is created. Therefore, it is imperative that language policy evolves to reflect contemporary social realities and does not remain fossilised, reflecting circumstances now past. Both increased immigration and technology-related language change have made their presence felt in Japan for thirty years now; they are in no sense temporary aberrations. It is clear that they have important consequences for society at large and that language policy must therefore be extended to address them. As we have seen, at national level only one of these issues has resulted in action, namely the revision of the kanji policy to reflect the influence of information technology on reading and writing. I would argue that the provision of JSL learning opportunities at national level and the expansion of opportunities to learn languages other than English are the most important language policy matters facing Japan today, far more significant than the forthcoming establishment of English as a curriculum subject in elementary schools, because of their deep and enduring import for future social cohesion. What has emerged in this book from the discussion of community language needs and practices and responses to them by government and other groups is a picture of rich, diversely textured language management activities (language policies) being adopted in a multiplicity of areas by bodies ranging from groups of concerned individuals to the highest levels of the national government, with many local government levels in between. What is at issue now is the direction in which Japan will next move. At what stage will the government decide that a critical mass of long-term foreign residents sufficient to justify national intervention into language provision has been reached? Maher and Nakayama (2003) have pointed out that sociologists are increasingly challenging basic social constructs such as ‘the Japanese’ on which 161

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national decisions about language policy are based. It is clear that the assumption that in Japanese schools all or nearly all students are Japanese is no longer true. ‘Japanese second language education now faces the fundamental problem of developing children’s cultural literacy in Japanese and other languages free from the ideological wrapping of what Japanese is supposed to “symbolize” for the nation’ (133). This ideological carapace has been slow to crack and remains firmly in place, but there has been a vigorous acknowledgment at grassroots level that Japanese is now a second language for many residents of Japanese communities rather than their first. The recent national-level documents discussed in Chapter 5 have also reflected a growing willingness to address the importance of JSL language learning for immigrant adults and children. We may assume, then, that change is on the way and that the question is slowly – very slowly – becoming not if but when appropriate policy will be developed by the national government, as advocated by the Japanese Language Education Guarantee Act Study Group and the Society for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language. The dominant narrative in this process may be summed up as one of hovering between loss and gain: loss of the comfort of homogeneity and assumed shared heritage balanced against economic and cultural gain from the presence of foreign residents in local communities. The key change which flies in the face of past and current ideology lies in recognising such communities as multilingual: ‘The presence of non-Japanese children in Japanese schools is now the critical issue of the next decade. Quite simply, the government has no policy to deal with this new social phenomenon legitimately, because it has no background framework of what constitutes a multilingual community – that is, no concept of Japan as a multilingual community’ (Maher and Nakayama 2003: 135). Ostheider (2009) concurs: the old ideology of monoethnicity and monolingualism with its binary distinction between ‘Japan’ and ‘foreign countries’ no longer works. Residents of those ‘foreign countries’ have come to Japan, often not to stay for a while and move on but to settle, and the social fabric of Japanese communities has been changed as a result. If we look at other changes in Japan’s language history, we can predict that such a change will be gradual rather than sudden. The development of today’s modern written Japanese, for example, took many decades from the time of the first Meiji Period advocates of replacing classical writing traditions with something based on contemporary speech, and the twentieth-century script policies were also not achieved without decades of argument and struggle. In both these examples, the single most important factor retarding change was the strength of the existing language ideologies, the views of what writing should be like and equally importantly what it should not be like. Even the

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2010 revision of the kanji policy took thirty years after the appearance of the first word processors to appear. The key element in securing change will be the willingness to accommodate ‘others’. As Shohamy (2006: 46) observes: The current nation-state, because of its being composed of different ideologies and rules of representation (e.g., common history) and its connections to the global world, stands in stark contrast to the traditional nation-state and can even be viewed as threatening it, because of the many ‘others’ it introduces as social actors. As a result, authorities often use propaganda and ideologies about language loyalty, patriotism, collective identity and the need for ‘correct and pure language’ or ‘native language’ as strategies for continuing their control and holding back the demands of these ‘others’.

I have shown that Japan too has made good use of these strategies of ideology and exclusion or assimilation in regard to language throughout its modern period. It will be difficult to change such longstanding attitudes to language management, and yet it is imperative that they do change. All the indications are that immigration will continue to grow through various channels, regardless of whether or not the national discourse admits it openly. The experience of Germany has shown that failure to respond to the needs of the identified ‘others’ will lead to a variety of social ills. Failure on Japan’s part to respond to the linguistic needs of the ‘others’ who are now living locally is likely to result in a linguistic underclass which carries attendant risks of social alienation and upheaval: ‘The continued exclusion of foreign migrants from the level of economic, social and political life enjoyed by Japanese citizens carries a high risk. The resulting gulf, summed up as the difference between inclusion and exclusion, will inevitably raise continuing issues of social justice and basic human rights, and will create potential for social unrest’ (Douglass and Roberts 2003b: 29). The first-ever OECD high-level policy forum on migration, held in Paris in mid-2009, stressed that the successful integration of immigrants and their children into host societies was essential if immigration was to be able to help meet the long-term challenges for the labour forces of ageing host societies. Unsurprisingly, lack of host language proficiency was identified as contributing to the difficulties immigrants face in finding work. Integration issues were seen as being important for the children of immigrants: ‘since most of the children of immigrants have been raised and educated in the host countries, achieving equal outcomes for this group can be considered a “benchmark” for successful integration policy’ (OECD 2009). Such outcomes are unlikely to be achieved in Japan, however, without national government input into language policy in terms of providing JSL training for new migrants along the lines of Australia’s Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP)1 and ESL

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school programmes for children. As Coulmas (2007: 119) observes, ‘The cost of language and assimilation programmes is high, but the social costs of not providing such programmes are likely to be even higher.’ Yamawaki (2002) has commented that the most serious educational problem found in the areas represented by the Council of Cities with High Concentrations of Foreign Residents is the high percentage of non-Japanese children not attending school: in one city, over 50 per cent of foreign schoolage children were not attending school at the time of his writing. This makes it likely that such children will not acquire appropriate communication skills in either their first language or Japanese, which is bound to lead to social problems in the future if not addressed. In Oizumi in 2002, the municipal government found that while about half of all minority students in the area attended local elementary and middle schools, with others attending Brazilian ethnic schools, 5 per cent did not go to school at all, thus losing their opportunity to gain an education. To help such students who have dropped out of school, the Oizumi Public Library runs a ‘Multilingual Salon’ every Saturday to assist them in studying Japanese (Itoi 2006). For foreign workers and their children who do in fact return to their home countries after two or three years, the lack of appropriate language proficiency is less of a problem, or at least, it is a problem with an end in sight. For those who find themselves deciding to stay in Japan, however, it produces adverse outcomes for parents and in particular for children. The single most influential factor in a child’s dropping out or not attending the local Japanese school is the inability to speak Japanese well enough to cope with classes. Language skills also feature prominently in the ability of their parents and other adults to settle successfully into working and living in Japan. Lack of proficiency in Japanese, and particularly in the ability to read Japanese, means a deficit in the information needed to live successfully in the host country. Although this has been addressed to some extent by the many multilingual guides to living in local communities put out by local governments, as discussed in Chapter 3, this is a stopgap measure which offers no real long-term solution for those migrants intending to make Japan their permanent home; they need to be able to carry out daily life and employment tasks independently, particularly where important documentation is involved. Without sufficient proficiency in Japanese, children have little hope of extending their educational levels to the point where they can achieve satisfying and remunerative careers. In addition, children not attending school miss out on the socialisation aspect of education which acculturates them to the norms of their new environment. Some children who drop out turn to petty crime to fill their days. Tezuka’s study of nearly thirty ‘nikkei’ Brazilian inmates at the Kurihama Juvenile Training School (a reform school) in early 2005 found that all intended to stay in Japan, and that all reported that ‘the primary reason they became involved with crime in the first place was their

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inability to communicate in Japanese. Both the juveniles themselves and the workers at the reformatory agreed that if they had been able to use the Japanese language and had been able to function normally in school and elsewhere, they would not have become involved in criminal activity. At this school, the important work of the reformatory employees concerning Brazilian-Japanese youth was to teach them the Japanese language’ (Tezuka 2005: 59). Any country introducing foreign labour across cultural and linguistic borders, Tezuka warns, needs to bear in mind the danger that insufficiently considered policies will lead to the emergence of a class of such children in that society. Likewise Kawakami (2008) underlines the new paradigm brought to Japanese schools and society in general by children crossing borders, whose existence he sees as calling into question not only the dichotomy of nationals and non-nationals but also notions of nationality linked to ethnicity because of their difference and mixed backgrounds; they further disrupt fixed notions of citizenship by their multiple border crossings accompanied in some cases by changes of nationality. This is a timely reminder of the importance of the language factor in Japan’s admission policies and of the inherent risks of ad hoc policies which have not yet taken this sufficiently into account, perhaps because in language ideology terms the language was for so long seen as something that belonged exclusively to ethnic Japanese. Globalisation and other factors, however, have now ensured that this is no longer the case; it has become instead a language increasingly used (or needing to be used) within Japan as the second language of residents of local communities, both children and adults. As Nagy (2009: 3) has pointed out, the various admission schemes for foreign labour which function instead of an official immigration policy in Japan ‘do not anticipate and, therefore, do not include a road map towards citizenship’. Current language requirements for citizenship are clearly not sufficient to allow full participation in public life. The expectations of a Japanese citizen in terms of mastery of the national language, what the impediments to achieving this are for new arrivals and how they can be overcome all need to be the subject of ongoing discussion as the population mix continues to change. The increased support for JSL learning by the national government in certain areas is thus a welcome recognition that this situation is a national issue rather than a purely local concern. The challenge now is to advance to a situation where a national approach to language education provision supports local initiatives in both ideological and financial terms. We have seen that the national government has in recent years taken policy action on concerns affecting mainstream Japanese citizens, exemplified by the recent revision of the kanji policy and the push to establish English as a curriculum subject in elementary schools. It should be noted here that the kanji policy is important not only to Japanese citizens but also to all the other non-Japanese children whose literacy education will be based on the classroom

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implementation of that policy, who need to be able to read and write properly, who use mobile phones and want to be able to e-mail in Japanese. True kanji literacy should no longer be considered out of their reach: as potential future citizens, they need JSL education in schools which will enable them to deal with the ordinary written curriculum studied by their Japanese classmates. It is too late to argue that there is no need for such an approach, or for the kind of overarching language policy framework suggested by Katsuragi (2005). It is clear that Japan has changed markedly, Tegtmeyer Pak (2006: 89) comments; both the refusal to countenance international migration and the reluctance of public institutions to view cultural, ethnic and racial differences as potentially positive factors in society now belong to the past. Sugimoto (2009: 1) concurs: ‘The view that Japan is a monocultural society with little internal cultural divergence and stratification, which was once taken for granted, is now losing monopoly over the way Japanese culture is portrayed. This transformation has resulted not so much from intellectual criticisms levelled at the once dominant model as from public perceptions of structural changes that have been in progress since the late 20th century.’ It is the importance of the local, of citizen observation of and response to the changes at the grassroots levels of local communities, that has led to the development of local policies to address local needs. The national government’s belated recognition of multicultural coexistence at policy level and the subsequent appeal to regional governments to follow the same policy were simply building on and giving national government imprimatur to a network of already existing policies grounded in necessity. Amongst all the many and various challenges facing Japan today, coming to grips with its own internal multilingualism and meeting the needs of its non-Japanese residents for JSL education by developing a national policy in this area has ramifications for future social cohesion in both ideological and practical terms that cannot be overlooked.

Notes to the text

1 L A N G UAG E I D E O L O G Y, P L A N N I N G A N D P O L I C Y 1 Japan’s modern period began in 1868 with the Meiji Restoration. 2 Probably one of the most often quoted examples of this is the Japanese government’s 1980 report to the United Nations Human Rights Committee: ‘The right of any person to enjoy his own culture, to profess and practice his religion or to use his own language is ensured under Japanese law. However, minorities of the kind mentioned in the Covenant do not exist in Japan’ (UNHCR 1980). 3 Under the terms of the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of that year. 4 The Democratic Party of Japan’s Kitazawa Toshimi, for instance, listed the inability to read kanji correctly among the Prime Minister’s shortcomings in the House of Councillors on 14 July 2009. 5 See www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo nihongo/yoronchousa/ for annual surveys from 1995 to 2008, accessed 1 December 2010. 6 The Japan Foundation’s most recent survey in 2009 reported 3.65 million people studying Japanese at institutions in 133 countries outside Japan (Japan Foundation 2010, provisional results on website). 7 In 2008, the population of elderly citizens (those over 65) accounted for 22.1 per cent of the total population, a record high. This is predicted to increase to almost 40 per cent by 2050. Japan’s population is ageing at a much faster rate than other advanced countries. While in Japan the over-65 population almost doubled in the 24 years between 1970 and 1994, the same increase (from 7 per cent to 14 per cent) took 61 years in Italy, 85 years in Sweden and 115 years in France (Statistics Bureau of Japan 2009). 8 This is not the only way, of course. As Ball (1994: 15) points out, policy of any kind consists of both texts, i.e., particular policy documents setting out specifics, and discourse, i.e., the ideas and the debate which inform the decision-making. In the case of language policy, this discourse is what I have referred to in this book as language ideology. 9 MEXT, ‘Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Abilities’, online at www.mext.go.jp/english/topics/03072801.htm, accessed 8 November 2010. 10 An English-language account of the major policies relating to the national language may be found at www.bunka.go.jp/english/pdf/h21 chapter 08.pdf, accessed 8 November 2010. For a discussion of these and other policies, see Gottlieb 2001 and 2005.

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Notes to pages 22–7

11 The so-called 3-K jobs: ‘kiken’ (dangerous), ‘kitanai’ (dirty) and ‘kitsui’ (difficult). 12 The official figures on non-Japanese residents do not include undocumented immigrants or returnees from China, which means that the actual figures are higher than this. 13 E.g., Brody (2002); Douglass and Roberts (2003a); Furukawa and Menju (2003); Goodman et al. (2003); Graburn et al. (2008); Han (2004); Kashiwazaki (2000); Kawahara (2004); Kawahara and Noyama (2007); Kawamura (2009); Kawamura and Son (2007); Komai (2006, 2001, 1999, 1995); Lee et al. (2006); Lie (2001); Sellek (2001); and Yamanaka (1997), to name just a few. ¯ 14 De Carvalho (2003), Ikegami (2001), Ishi (2003), Lesser (2003), Okubo (2005), Roth (2002), Takezawa (2002) and Tsuda (2003), for example, deal with the Brazilian or ‘nikkei’ community in Japan; Chapman (2006), Kyo (2008 and 1997), Maher and Kawanishi (1995), Ryang (2000 and 1997), Ryang and Lie (2009), Tai (2007 and 2004) with ethnic Korean communities; and Chen (2008), Liu-Farrer (2008), Maher (1995) and Nagano (1994) with Chinese living in Japan. 15 See, for example, www.minpaku.ac.jp/special/200404/english.html, accessed 8 November 2010. 16 Today’s Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications. 17 See Burgess (2004) for an analysis of the use of this term. 18 Formerly the Ministry of Education, hereafter MEXT. 19 In 2007, for example, financial support was provided for a project at Hamamatsu Gakuin University aimed at developing a programme to train teachers of Japanese language for Hamamatsu City (where large numbers of South American residents live) under this rubric (see www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/houdou/ 19/07/07072304/002/042.htm, accessed 8 December 2010). 20 This committee was set up to undertake a long-term, comprehensive study on Japan’s falling birth rate and aged society, and on building an integrated society. Members chose as the central research theme ‘restoring and strengthening communities’. The committee released an interim report in 2008. For an English-language version, see www.sangiin.go.jp/eng/report/2008shoushikyousei.pdf, accessed 8 November 2010. The Japanese version is at www.sangiin.go.jp/japanese/ chousakai/houkoku/hou10–12/shoushi2008.pdf, accessed 8 November 2010. 21 See www.pref.toyama.jp/cms cat/106030/kj00004902.html, accessed 8 December 2010. 22 Saitama Prefecture’s English-language material, for example, defines it slightly differently as ‘a community where people of different nationalities and backgrounds live on equal terms, and display their abilities fully, showing mutual understanding of their cultural differences’ (www.pref.saitama.lg.jp/uploaded/attachment/ 377644.pdf, accessed 8 November 2010, in Japanese dddddddddddd ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd d d d d d d d d d d at www.pref.saitama.lg.jp/s-gikai/gaiyou/h2012/ 20126070.html, accessed 8 November 2010). Hyogo Prefecture’s long-term vision for the twenty-first century, articulated in 2004, aspires to the creation of a ‘tabunka ky¯osei’ society where a diverse international exchange is carried on in local areas and where everyone can easily live, taking as its base mutual understanding regardless of differences in culture, language and living habits: ddddddddd

Notes to pages 27–37

23 24

25 26 27

28

29

169

ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd dddd dddddddddddddddddddddddddd (see http:// web.pref.hyogo.lg.jp/contents/000060123.pdf under Program 15 on page 44, where the steps to achieve this are also listed, accessed 8 November 2010). See Chapter 5. Kongo no Gaikokujin no Ukeire ni kansuru Kihonteki na Kangaekata (Basic Stance on Admittance of Foreigners in the Future) (Ministry of Justice 2006b. See www.nira.or.jp/past/newsj/kanren/180/182/pdf/03 jpn.pdf, accessed 10 October 2010). In 2008 a further 16,824 Brazilians were granted permanent residence in Japan, the largest national group for that year (Ministry of Justice 2009b). It was assumed that ‘nikkeijin’, because of their family background, would speak Japanese and thus integrate more easily, but most did not speak the language. This habitus of homogeneity, Befu further contends (2009b: 27), is ‘elevated to the level of ideology’, is used to justify discrimination against heterogeneity and is automatically followed by the ‘habitus of exclusion’. Okano (2009: 107), for example, asserts that in Japanese schools with new migrant students, teachers no longer adhere to what has hitherto been the foundational assumption of Japanese schooling, namely that all students are Japanese, that the first language of all students is Japanese and that all students share acculturation to a common Japanese lifestyle. Internet-mode, a wireless service launched in Japan by DoCoMo in 1999 which enables e-mails to be exchanged between mobile phones.

2 T H E L A N G UAG E N E E D S O F I M M I G R A N T S 1 I.e., they do not have Japanese citizenship but must apply to be naturalised if they wish even if they were born and brought up in Japan. A total of 7,412 ethnic Koreans took Japanese citizenship in 2008 (Ministry of Justice, www.moj.go.jp/MINJI/toukei t minji03.html, accessed 9 November 2010). 2 During most of the first half of the twentieth century, over 2 million immigrant workers flowed into Japan from Korea (then a Japanese colony) and later from annexed territory in China. Those who remained in Japan after the Second World War lost their Japanese citizenship and today have ‘special permanent resident’ visa status. 3 Nagy (2008: 36–7) too reports a rapid increase during the 1980s in the number of NGOs working to assist foreign residents with, inter alia, Japanese-language classes. A lack of language proficiency, particularly in reading and writing, he notes (37–8), is likely to account for the reported income disparity between Japanese and Brazilian-Japanese workers. 4 The number of migrants from Brazil and Peru swelled from 18,649 in 1989, the year before the revision of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, to 145,614 in 1991, the year after (Kanno 2008: 12). 5 Before that, JSL candidates had mainly consisted of China returnees (see note 16) and a small number of Vietnamese refugees and others. 6 As an alternative to Japanese schools, non-Japanese children are also educated at international and ethnic schools either on a full-time or after-school basis (see

170

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Notes to pages 37–42 Kanno 2008 for an excellent in-depth study of some of these schools). Most children of postwar immigrants attend Japanese schools, but newcomer children may attend ethnic schools where their first language is maintained, the major advantage of an ethnic school run by the community concerned being that it ‘can create an environment where [its] language and culture are the central concern’ (Kanno 2003: 139) rather than peripheral. Brazilian schools take in many of the Brazilian students who drop out of Japanese public schools because of bullying and insufficient Japanese-language proficiency (Nakamura 2008). Defined by MEXT as ‘students who cannot use Japanese adequately in everyday conversation and students who, even if they can do this, lack the study vocabulary appropriate to their grade level so that this hinders their participation in learning activities’. See, for example, www.mext.go.jp/a menu/shotou/clarinet/003/001/005.pdf (accessed 9 November 2010) for an example of a bilingual Japanese and Chinese guide issued by MEXT itself. Students from such courses do sometimes teach school children on a voluntary basis, however: in 2003, for example, foreign children attending public kindergartens, elementary and middle schools in Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo began receiving JSL instruction from MA students in Waseda University’s Graduate School of Japanese Applied Linguistics after the university and the Shinjuku Board of Education signed an agreement (The Daily Yomiuri 2003). 60 per cent of the non-Japanese students in Ota’s elementary and middle schools – about 2 per cent of the total school population – are from Brazil (The Japan Forum 2006). Ota is by no means exceptional in the number of foreign students in its schools. One in every ten residents of Shinjuku Ward in Tokyo, for example, holds overseas citizenship, from over thirty countries; of the children enrolled at Okubo Elementary School within this ward, around 60 per cent come from twelve countries outside Japan, and the school has worked hard to provide a supportive and encouraging environment within which these students can learn and provide their own input into multicultural learning within the student body (The Japan Forum 2006). Statistics on the number of children studying Japanese at all levels of schooling in the Tokyo Metropolitan area are available at www.kyoiku.metro.tokyo.jp/toukei/21kouritsu/21mokuji.htm, accessed 9 November 2010. Until 1974, many of the students were ethnic Koreans whose educational opportunities had been stunted by the confusion following the end of the war; the signing of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and the People’s Republic of China in 1978 led to an increase in the number of returnees from China as students; and the 1990 revision of the Immigration Control Act increased the number of students from Brazil, Peru and Argentina (Harada 2003). Classes were also run for older ethnic Korean women wanting to learn how to write Japanese because they had been shut out of the Japanese public education system after they lost citizenship in 1952 (attendance at Japanese schools was not permitted until 1965 following the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea). www.kyoiku.metro.tokyo.jp/pickup/p gakko/yakan/, accessed 9 November 2010.

Notes to pages 42–53

171

14 www.pref.osaka.jp/shochugakko/yakanngakkyuu/nyuugakuannnai.html, accessed 9 November 2010. 15 www.kochi-kia.or.jp/, accessed 9 November 2010, has Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean, with earthquake information in English, Chinese, Indonesian, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese, languages which cover over 90 per cent of K¯ochi’s current international community. 16 These were war orphans, Japanese children abandoned in China during the Japanese retreat at the end of the Second World War. Repatriation began in 1972 after the normalisation of China-Japan relations, and picked up speed after a 1994 Diet bill laid the responsibility for this on Japan’s own government. Although born Japanese, most returnees did not speak Japanese when repatriated, and the families who accompanied them spoke only Chinese (Kanno 2008: 12). Language education targeted specifically for such returnees is available through a network of China Returnee Support Centres and affiliated bodies. Over 20,000 people in this category had returned to Japan by 2006; those who were publicly funded were eligible for four months of free intensive JSL training at a support centre in Saitama, supplemented later by a further eight months at designated language schools and, after two years’ residence in Japan, four more months (Ward 2006: 146). 17 Many foreign workers in Japan are Christians, in particular those from Brazil, Peru, Korea and the Philippines (Shipper 2008: 92). 18 www.city.kyoto.lg.jp/kyoiku/page/0000066756.html, accessed 9 November 2010. 19 www.hyogo-ip.or.jp/hnvn/ja/group/mikage.html, accessed 9 November 2010. 20 www.city.ota.tokyo.jp/seikatsu/manabu/gakushuu/nihongoyomikakikyoushitsu/ index.html, accessed 9 November 2010. 21 The typical illiterate person among ethnic Koreans is female and over 60 years old (Coulmas 1994: 314). 22 Defined by Pharr (2003: xiii) as ‘sustained, organized social activity that occurs in groups that are formed outside the state, the market, and the family’. 23 www.kifa-web.jp/, accessed 9 November 2010. 24 Kawasaki-ku in Kawasaki City, for example, where about a third of the city’s 32,000 foreign residents live, in 2008 advertised for volunteers to teach Japanese, providing twelve hours of training sessions and couching the appeal in terms of promoting ‘tabunka ky¯osei’. See www.city.kawasaki.jp/press/info20081211 1/item3761.pdf, accessed 9 November 2010. 25 Kashiwa City is a commuter city close to Tokyo which had a total of 6,040 foreign residents out of a population of just under 400,000 in September 2009. The quarterly newsletter published by its International Relations Office in English, Chinese and Spanish lists JSL classes, multilingual counselling and information sessions of various kinds for foreign residents. 26 Society for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language. 27 A standardised test of the Japanese-language proficiency of non-Japanese test takers, administered worldwide twice annually in East Asia and annually elsewhere, and used to certify levels for entrance to Japanese universities, employment requirements and anywhere where an independent certification of proficiency is required. Level One is the highest of five levels. 28 http://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/p/19652050, accessed 9 November 2010. 29 http://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/p/21320097/2009/1/ja, accessed 9 November 2010.

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Notes to pages 53–61

30 Under the Japan–Indonesia agreement, Japan agreed to accept 600 care workers and 400 nurses over a two-year period: the first tranche of 208 (fewer than the agreed number) arrived in August 2008 and began work in February 2009 after finishing their basic language training, with a further 800 due to arrive in November that year. Under the FTA agreement with the Philippines, Japan has agreed to accept 1,000 Filipino medical workers over a two-year period, with the first contingent arriving in May 2009. The Japan Times reported in April 2009 that the second round of Indonesian workers might not reach the agreed numbers given that the number of job offers from accepting facilities had dropped (owing in part to the burden of providing Japanese-language education) and that Filipino workers were also due to begin entering Japan in 2009 (The Japan Times 2009). See also Roberts 2008 for a succinct summary. 31 Unless they can provide proof of sufficient proficiency to exempt them from this requirement. 32 Only 52 per cent of those who sat the caregivers’ test in 2009 passed (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2009a). 33 Aspiring nurses may sit the examination three times within the three years; caregivers do not have that option, because before they can sit for the examination they are required to have three years’ experience in Japan. 34 AOTS, established in 1959 with the support of what is now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, receives more than 5,000 trainees in Japan each year and provides Japanese-language training in addition to technical training. Established in 1972 to promote Japanese language and culture on the international scene, the Japan Foundation in 2003 became an independent administrative institution under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 35 The remaining three, all care workers, had already been assessed while still in Indonesia as having achieved a standard of Japanese equivalent to Level Two of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test and were therefore excused from the language training course, going straight to their receiving institutions after receiving some introductory care work training from JICWELS (Noborizato et al. 2009). 36 http://nihongodecarenavi.jp/, accessed 3 December 2010. 37 Ibaraki Prefecture’s largest groups of foreign residents are from Brazil, China, Korea, Peru, the Philippines and Thailand. 38 This centre focuses on Asian languages, particularly Mandarin Chinese and Korean (National Police Agency 2002). 39 In addition to supplying interpreters with relevant trial documentation ahead of their appearance in court to enable them to prepare, trial procedure manuals are published in eighteen languages, occasional practice seminars have been organised since 2000 and proceedings where an interpreter is used are taped in case later confirmation is needed, although this latter is done at the discretion of the presiding judge and interpreters themselves are not allowed to access the tapes for purposes of evaluation even after the case is settled (Tsuda 1997). 40 In Australia, for example, the Australian Federal Police source interpreters for police interviews from those accredited at the appropriate level by the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI), which sets the national accreditation standards for interpreters and translators. In the USA, legal interpreters are regulated by both a law and a code of ethics.

Notes to pages 64–76

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3 F O R E I G N L A N G UAG E S OT H E R T H A N E N G L I S H I N E D U C AT I O N A N D T H E C O M M U N I T Y 1 Using ‘eigo igai no gaikokugo’ as a search term is the main way to find information about such languages in Japanese schools and universities when searching Japanese government websites. A search of Japan’s E-Gov Internet portal at www.e-gov.go.jp/ on 18 August 2010, for example, yielded 808 hits, many of them relating to curricular or other documents at Japan’s national universities, others to MEXT documents. 2 This occurs at the end of the document in a one-line admonition to the effect that the teaching of other languages should follow the objectives and contents of English instruction as laid out in detail in the rest of the syllabus. 3 See www.mext.go.jp/b menu/shingi/12/chuuou/toushin/960701n.htm, accessed 10 November 2010. 4 Documents are available online at www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo3/ 015/giji_list/index.htm, accessed 10 November 2010. 5 www.jetprogramme.org/documents/pubs/2009 Pamphlet e.pdf, accessed 11 October 2010. 6 Fewer than a dozen. 7 In the 2009–10 intake, however, participants from China and Korea were overwhelmingly in the CIR category rather than in language classrooms as ALTs; the same is true for all significant numbers of participants from non-English-speaking countries with the exception of France, where ten are CIRs and eight are ALTs. 8 Much of Asia’s international migration takes place at the regional level, bringing newcomers from China and Korea into Japanese communities where substantial groups of oldcomers from those countries may already exist. 9 www.chinatefl.com/shandong/teach/jnfls.htm, accessed 10 November 2010. 10 http://mishop.jp/en/act/group.php?id=g0019&cat=4, accessed 11 November 2010. 11 www.kifa-web.jp/lang.html, accessed 3 December 2010. 12 www.dila.co.jp/, accessed 10 November 2010. DILA, which has around 3,000 students, teaches 55 languages, and around 80 per cent of its students are employees of large companies and the financial sector. 13 Defined in their report as ‘comprised of total foreign language classes, English teacher dispatching to kindergartens and nursing schools, correspondence courses, e-learning services, software, language examinations, study abroad agencies, translation/interpreting services, and foreign languages other than English (schooling/correspondence courses), in which language examinations, study abroad agencies and translation/interpreting services are classified as “peripheral business”’. 14 I.e., without entrance examinations. 15 Foreign languages have historically functioned in Japan as conduits for the reception of an advanced culture: Chinese in the seventh century; Portuguese for the Christian culture in the sixteenth century; Dutch from the early seventeenth to midway through the nineteenth century with European culture in the Edo Period; then after the Meiji Restoration, English, German and French for western culture (Tanaka Shinya 2009). 16 In terms of schools, though not of learners.

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Notes to pages 76–84

17 Other languages taught, mostly to very small numbers of students, include German, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Malay, Tagalog and Arabic. 18 See Goto et al. 2010 for a report on Spanish in high schools. General remarks on French and German in schools can be found in the evaluation reports on the results for these subjects on the National Center for University Entrance Examinations website. 19 A body established in 1984 in response to public concern over the capacity of the education system to respond to social change. 20 The K¯ot¯o Gakk¯o ni okeru Gaikokugo Ky¯oiku Tay¯oka Jigy¯o (Plan for Diversification of Foreign Language Education in High Schools). 21 www.mext.go.jp/b menu/shingi/chousa/shotou/020/sesaku/image/020402b.pdf, accessed 11 November 2010. 22 Perhaps as a result of the 2002 World Cup held jointly in Japan and South Korea. 23 Others taught (in decreasing order of enrolments) Chinese (2,970 students; 119 schools), French (968; 38), Spanish (652; 29), German (329; 17), Italian (93; 5), Russian (57; 6), Portuguese (38; 3), Indonesian (32; 3), Latin (18; 1), Thai (11; 2), Filipino (3; 2), Vietnamese (1; 1) and Arabic (1; 1). 24 Then called ‘shina-go’ rather than today’s ‘ch¯ugokugo’. 25 Similarly, an article in the education section of the Asahi the following year reported further on the trend to making second foreign language study non-compulsory at many universities, to the extent that some students no longer understood the abbreviation ‘nigai’ for ‘second foreign language’ (daini gaikokugo). The article stressed that the significance of studying other languages lay in coming to know other people thereby, and commented that even if people all over the world could communicate in English, that did not diminish the importance of Japanese, Korean and Chinese people’s learning each other’s languages (Ishikawa 2009). 26 This revision abolished the distinction between general and specialised education, which had seen general education subjects taught only in the first two years before proceeding to the final two years of specialised education. 27 A notable exception here is the Faculty of Science and Technology at one of Japan’s top private universities, Keio University, which contains a Department of Foreign Languages and General Education in addition to twelve other academic departments and three graduate schools. Undergraduate students in this department must study required courses in English and one other foreign language. The rationale given for studying languages other than English is that ‘[a]s part of their preparation for taking on leadership responsibilities in the twenty-first century, students clearly need to acquire skills in more than one foreign language’. For the required courses, students must choose from Chinese, French, German, Korean and Russian; electives are also available in Arabic, Italian and Spanish. Here the educational goals are listed as ‘learning regional languages’ and ‘improving overall linguistic capacity and sharpening thinking skills’ (www.st.keio.ac.jp/english/departments/faculty/facu fore.html, accessed 11 November 2010). 28 Korea was a Japanese colony during the period 1910–45; Taiwan was a colony 1895– 1945. In the 1920s, Korean-language departments at some Japanese universities were abolished on the grounds that Korean was not therefore a foreign language (Nishie 2009).

Notes to pages 84–94

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29 While German was the language of a losing party postwar, it was already established as a foreign language subject because of its importance in medicine, law and science and technology and thus the prewar flow was continued (Nishie 2009). 30 As is the case elsewhere: foreign language enrolments are often affected by external events. Enrolments in Chinese-language courses in Australia, for example, declined sharply for a year or two following the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 but later re-established themselves. 31 Although many members of oldcomer communities, born and bred in Japan, do not speak their heritage language, others do, as do the many newcomers from Korea and Chinese-speaking countries. 32 Backhaus (2007: 77) mentions a sign at a small international telephone company in ¯ Ozaki, Tokyo, where the slogan ‘Calling from Japan’ is given in Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, Farsi and Tagalog, indicating the likely makeup of the local population. 33 At the time this document was issued ‘the preferred foreign language was assumed to be English, and those who should be provided the information were tourists or business people from abroad’ rather than non-Japanese residents in local communities (Sato et al. 2009: 52). That came later, in the 1990s, following the arrival of many workers from non-English-speaking countries. The national population census form in 1990 was for the first time made available in translation in multiple languages. 34 Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, Farsi, Filipino, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Malaysian, Nepali, Portuguese, Sinhalese, Spanish, Thai, Urdu and Vietnamese. 35 The 2010 census forms themselves were available in twenty-seven languages. 36 www.moj.go.jp/ENGLISH/IB/ip.html, accessed 11 November 2010. 37 www8.cao.go.jp/teiju-portal/eng/index.html, accessed 10 November 2010. 38 See Carroll 2010 for an excellent discussion of multilingual information on prefectural government websites. 39 www.pref.kanagawa.jp/osirase/kokusai/, accessed 11 November 2010. 40 www.pref.aichi.jp/, accessed 11 November 2010. 41 www.pref.ibaraki.jp/bukyoku/seikan/kokuko/kokuko.htm, accessed 11 November 2010. 42 See, for example, Nagata 1991. 43 http://human.cc.hirosaki-u.ac.jp/kokugo/EJ1a.htm, accessed 11 November 2010. 44 www.pref.niigata.lg.jp/HTML_Simple/japanesegen.pdf, accessed 11 November 2010. 45 www.city.kawasaki.jp/73/73soumu/foreigner/index.htm, accessed 11 November 2010. 46 www.pref.saitama.lg.jp/site/tabunkakyousei/yasasiinihongo.html, accessed 11 November 2010. 47 www.pref.osaka.jp/kokusai/kotobanokabe/index.html, accessed 11 November 2010. 48 www.yoke.or.jp/Infectious/nihongo.pdf and http://nagatavc.org/vc/images/ infruchirashi.pdf, accessed 11 November 2010. 49 The NPO is the Kobe Ajia Taun Suishin Ky¯ogikai, established a year after the 1995 earthquake to provide foreign residents with information not only on emergencies but also on daily life. Mori’s article includes a useful comparison of Yasashii Nihongo with the earlier Kan’yaku Nihongo.

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Notes to pages 95–111

50 Available online at www.city.chiba.jp/sogoseisaku/sogoseisaku/kikaku/download/ kyodokenkyu/gaikokugo.pdf, accessed 11 November 2010. 51 www.city.chiba.jp/, accessed 11 November 2010.

4 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D L A N G UAG E P O L I C Y C H A N G E 1 Functional literacy ‘defines literacy relative to the requirements of an individual within a particular society; it is the degree of literacy required for effective functioning in a particular community’ (Stubbs 1980: 14). For Levine (1994: 121), the degree of social survival afforded by functional literacy invariably includes employability. Coulmas (1994: 313) observes that functional literacy in Japanese is difficult to define because of the structural features of the writing system: although the List of Characters for General Use provides a yardstick, there is wide variation in the range of kanji actually acquired across the spectrum from erudition to basic literacy, and at the lower end some may know only a few hundred kanji. It is possible, he asserts, to get by with considerably less than the J¯oy¯o Kanji without being categorised as semi-literate. 2 See follow-up article ‘Japan’s love of comics due to “low literacy rate”’ (The Japan Times 2002), where the author of the New York Times piece explained that ‘a lot of older Japanese’ had told him that proficiency in reading and writing kanji was declining. 3 Percentages do not total 100 per cent because this was a ‘tick all that apply’ question. 4 Programme for International Student Assessment. 5 An annual publication giving bibliographic references for books, general-interest magazine and newspaper articles relating to language which have appeared in the press during that year, along with commentary on the trends revealed. 6 Many books have also been published along similar lines. In Miyake’s paper, she found online reference to over 50 through a Yahoo search in 2002; my own search of Amazon.co.jp in early August 2010 retrieved 148. 7 Excluding to a certain extent the business world, where Japanese typewriters – bulky and requiring specialist training to use – had preceded word processing. Even so, many office documents were written by hand pre-word processor, and the fax was developed to allow for this. 8 Although of course the font capabilities were widely used for more decorative functions. 9 Japan is a world leader in the mobile Internet: the number of cell phone subscriptions has surpassed those of landline subscriptions since around the year 2000, and by the end of fiscal year 2009 was approximately 2.7 times that of fixed subscriptions (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2010). The major use of cell phone networks is to send e-mails on the move rather than to make voice calls (Okada 2005: 49), owing in part to a social prohibition on using cell phones for voice calls in public transport and other public places. 10 See, e.g., http://mizz.lolipop.jp/galmoji/v2.cgi, accessed 15 November 2010. 11 Sasahara (2002), for example, reports cases where students have written down kanji during lectures with a slightly different shape from the handwritten norm because they have copied them from their cell phone dictionaries, and Mino’s 2005 study of student writing identifies paragraphing and punctuation difficulties along with

Notes to pages 112–40

12 13

14

15 16 17

18

19 20

177

inability to differentiate properly between spoken and written language that she attributes to the popularity of cell phone e-mailing. This term had begun to appear in Japan as early as 1984. A ‘cute’ way of writing using horizontal rather than vertical writing and very stylised, rounded characters randomly interspersed with English, katakana and cute little pictures. One particularly noticeable area where reading and technology intersect is the ‘keitai sh¯osetsu’ (cell phone novel), where short daily excerpts of novels can be read on cell phones in a few minutes. These novels, which have great appeal for younger readers, are often published in book form later: five of the thirty bestsellers of 2007 were ‘keitai sh¯osetsu’ (Yoshida 2008). www.mext.go.jp/a menu/sports/dokusyo/index.htm, accessed 15 November 2010. Possibly because of the manga practice of adding furigana to kanji. Kanji policies and their associated ministries include the List of Characters for General Use (Agency for Cultural Affairs, MEXT), the List of Characters for Use in Personal Names (Ministry of Justice) (expanded in 2004) and the JIS (Japan Industrial Standard) Kanji (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry). This proposal also, as mentioned earlier, reaffirmed the importance of writing by hand, given the decreasing opportunities to do so and the importance of writing by hand in learning kanji. A similar appendix is attached to the 1981 List of Characters for General Use. Among the new additions are eleven characters used in the names of major cities such as Osaka and of prefectures such as Gifu and Kumamoto, along with characters for common words such as ‘pillow’, ‘chopsticks’, ‘buttocks’ and ‘chin’.

5 NAT I O NA L L A N G UAG E P O L I C Y A N D A N I N T E R NAT I O NA L I S I N G C O M M U N I T Y 1 In January 2007, for example, Miyagi Prefecture became the first prefecture in Japan to draft bylaws (the drafts are written in Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean and Portuguese) promoting multiculturalism in that prefecture; six months later, the prefectural assembly voted to accept them. 2 www.shujutoshi.jp/, accessed 1 November 2010. 3 www.city.konan.shiga.jp/konan1/yosan/pdf/2009/21108.pdf, accessed 16 November 2010. 4 See www.ajinzai-sc.jp/index.html, accessed 16 November 2010. 5 www.keidanren.or.jp/english/policy/2004/029.html, accessed 16 November 2010. 6 www.keidanren.or.jp/english/policy/2008/073.html, accessed 16 November 2010. 7 See www.nira.or.jp/past/newsj/kanren/180/182/pdf/03 jpn.pdf, accessed 16 November 2010. 8 www.moj.go.jp/ENGLISH/information/bpic3rd-03.html#3–1–6, accessed 15 November 2010. 9 www.mext.go.jp/b menu/houdou/19/01/06122800/06122802/002.htm, accessed 16 November 2010. 10 This term is difficult to translate and has been variously rendered as ‘consumers’, ‘people leading an everyday life’ (‘seikatsu’ means ‘everyday life’) or ‘people earning everyday livelihoods’. I have chosen to translate it here as ‘residents’, meaning ordinary everyday residents in local communities.

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Notes to pages 141–58

11 See www.mext.go.jp/a menu/shotou/clarinet/003/001.htm#a09, accessed 16 November 2010. The languages are Chinese, English, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese. 12 Children Living Abroad and Returnees Internet, at www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/ shotou/clarinet/main7_a2.htm, accessed 16 November 2010. Although their presence is not reflected in the CLARINET title, the site also contains information on foreign children in Japanese schools. 13 Hello Work is the name given to the government’s network of employment services centres. A list of Hello Work offices throughout Japan which provide foreign language assistance is available on the website of the Tokyo Employment Service Center for Foreigners at www.tfemploy.go.jp/en/coun/cont 2.html, accessed 16 November 2010. The languages offered are almost without exception Chinese, English, Portuguese and Spanish. 14 An organisation experienced in offering introductory courses on Japanese language and culture to trainees coming to Japan from other countries. See JICE website at http://jice.org/e/jigyou/nihongo.htm, accessed 16 November 2010, for details. 15 At www8.cao.go.jp/teiju-portal/eng/index.html, accessed 16 November 2010. 16 Full name: Tabunka Tagengo Shakai no Jitsugen to sono Tame no Ky¯oiku ni taisuru K¯oteki Hosh¯o o mezasu T¯oky¯o Sengen oyobi K¯od¯o Keikaku (Tokyo Declaration aiming for the Public Endorsement of Education for the Purpose of Realising a Multicultural and Multilingual Society) (translation, Catherine Maxwell). 17 See homepage3.nifty.com/N-forum/aboutForum.html, accessed 16 November 2010. 18 This was also the case with the 1999 Law for the Promotion of the Ainu Culture, on which this section (Articles Four and Five) of the Act is modelled. 19 www.houseika2012.net/wordpress/, accessed 16 November 2010. 20 See the statement on the Council’s website at www.shujutoshi.jp/gaiyou/index.htm, accessed 16 November 2010. 21 Named after the city of Hamamatsu which acted as Council secretariat for that two-year period. 22 MIAC, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, MEXT, Agency for Cultural Affairs, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, and the Social Insurance Agency. 23 Children who for health or other unavoidable reasons cannot attend school during the nine years of compulsory education can take an examination equivalent to the end of middle school; if they pass, they are given a high school entry qualification. The Council recommended that a special test of this kind tailored to assessing the abilities of non-Japanese students having difficulty with the language be developed. 24 http://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%20993/volume-993-I-14531 -English.pdf, accessed 16 November 2010. 25 www.mext.go.jp/b menu/hakusho/html/hpaa200901/detail/1284405.htm, accessed 16 November 2010. 26 With the possible exception of the 2003 Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Abilities, in the case of English, and even that is reactive in the sense that it is a reaction to external developments of English as an International Language on the international scene and the large-scale investment by other East Asian and South East Asian governments in teaching English, as well as Japan’s poor showing in the TOEFL scales.

Note to page 163

179

CONCLUSION 1 AMEP provides free English lessons for adult migrants who are new to Australia, have been granted a permanent visa and have little or no English. See www.immi.gov.au/living-in-australia/help-with-english/amep/learning-english/, accessed 16 November 2010.

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Index

Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Abilities, 65, 66, 71, 98 Ad Hoc Council on Education (Rinji Ky¯oiku Shingikai), 71 Ainu language, 2, 5, 123 Aso Tar¯o, 10, 99 Association for Japanese Language Teaching (AJALT), 45 Association for Overseas Technical Scholarship (AOTS), 45, 54 Basic Stance on Admitting Foreigners in the Future (Kongo no Gaikokujin no Ukeire ni kansuru Kihonteki na Kangaekata), 132 cell phone e-mailing, 52, 103, 109 Center for Multilingual Multicultural Education and Research (CEMMER), 41 Central Education Council (Ch¯uo¯ Ky¯oiku Shingikai), 65 citizenship, 5, 8, 15, 28, 31, 37, 145, 165 and language, 145, 154 civil society, 49, 125, 129, 130, 153 community languages, 84, 155 definition of, 68 importance of teaching, 72 in public services, 86 need for policy on, 75 value of studying, 74 Comprehensive Plan for dealing with ‘Foreigners as Residents’ (Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin ni kansuru S¯og¯oteki Tai¯osaku), 26, 138 Council of Cities with High Concentrations of Foreign Residents (Gaikokujin Sh¯uj¯u Toshi Kaigi), 27, 127, 131, 149, 164 Course of Study (Foreign Languages), 65 designated schools, 77, 78, 115, 157

Easy Japanese (Yasashii Nihongo), 93, 139 eigo igai no gaikokugo (foreign languages other than English), 64 electronic text production and changes in writing practices, 107–8 and declining kanji proficiency, 105–10 and revision of kanji policy, 122 English language and English-first mentality, 82 and ‘gaikokugo’, 64, 66, 83 and ‘intercultural communication’, 83 and public signs, 88 in elementary schools 2011, 65 in schools, 77 teaching of, 12–13, 65, 156 foreign and community languages, 66–76 and language policy, 66–7, 85 benefits of teaching, 85–6 in secondary schools, 76–81 in universities, 82–5 foreign nurses and careworkers, 52–6 and Japanese language, 52–4, 132 and Japanese writing system, 55 and JSL materials, 56 functional literacy definitions of, 176 gyarumoji, 109 and anti-language, 110 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, 25, 93 immigration, 21–4, 33 and children in Japanese schools, 36–41, 139 and language needs, 24, 28–9, 33–63 instrumental recognition of, 133 national government documents on, 130–40 and local governments, 25 and private sector, 24

205

206

Index

immigration (cont.) government view of, 1, 23, 126 linguistic consequences of, 36 newcomers, 22, 35, 47, 68, 126 oldcomers, 22, 35, 47, 68, 156 projections, 22 statistics, 34 terminology for, 23, 33 Internet and Japanese language, 107, 108 and mutilingual information, 86 interpreting and lay jury system, 61 court, 59–61 legal, certification need for, 60 police, 58–9 Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren), 131 Japan Foundation, 3, 54, 56, 68 Japanese language and internal variation, 8 as official language, 8 disarray in, 14, 110, 115 Japanese Language Education Guarantee Act Study Group, 52, 146 JET Programme, 65, 67–8, 71, 83 JSL classes and MEXT, 38–40, 140–3 and night schools, 41–3 and schools, 37–8 local examples of, 40 and teaching materials, 40–5 for adults, 46 writing, 45–6 MEXT reports on, 36 need for, 34 regional, 36 kanji actual decline in use of, 99 actual mastery of, 106 and ideology, 98, 100, 115, 119 concerns about electronic use of, 107 fears of declining use, 99–105 policy, 98 in the information age, 116 policy focus on, 115 pride in, 13 surveys on use of, 100, 102 katsuji banare (loss of interest in the printed word), 105 Katsuragi, Takao, 20–1 kiib¯odo ningen (keyboard persons), 112 Kokugo Bunkakai, 30, 103, 113, 116, 152

kokugo panic, 103 kokusaika (internationalisation), 25, 71 kotodama (spirit of the language), 10 language attitudes, 13–16 language classes and NHK, 75 private sector, 74 language ideology, 1, 2–6, 162 and discourse practices, 4 and language policy, 5, 7 and legitimation, 2, 115, 161 in Japan, 13, 123, 162 and English, 66 and foreign languages, 19, 96 and politicians, 9 and writing, 105, 106 historical basis for, 17 language management, 7, 116, 124, 144, 161, 163 language planning, 16, 62 three orientations in, 72 language planning and policy, 16–21 language play, 108 language policy, 3, 17 and curriculum guidelines, 72 and English, 18, 20 and JSL education, 123 and kanji list, 119 and local government, 125–7 and revision of kanji list, 111 and script policies, 17, 30 and social harmony, 160 and standard language, 18 and writing practices, 111 at national level, 123–4 foreign language education, 64, 155–8, 161 JSL education, 124, 161 covert, 3, 6, 19 local government examples of, 127–30 need for change, 31, 161 overt, 17–19, 123 role of, 161 language practices, 3 language regime, 6 changing, 21 language services (tagengo saabisu), 88 languages-in-education policy, 96 legal system and language, 57–61 statistics, 57 linguistic landscaping, 86 and language policy, 87 linguistic nationalism, 5, 9

Index List of Characters for General Use, 18, 30, 98, 116 2010 revision of, 105, 111, 116–21 aim of, 119 literacy, 11, 30–1, 98, 100, 112, 165 and class hours, 102 and electronic technologies, 100 and manga, 113–14 and online language practices, 114–15 perceptions of decline in, 100 loanwords (gairaigo), 14, 15 local government and JSL classes, 43–6, 52 cost of, 128 language classes (non-Japanese), 74 marumoji, 112 moji banare (loss of interest in writing), 105 monolingualism, 3, 5, 7, 11, 12, 21, 33, 124, 162 multiculturalism cosmetic, 29 discourse of, 24 multilingual information, 158 and disasters, 93 and local governments, 88 and the census, 90 online, 90–5, 145 multilingual language services, 86–95 National Center for University Entrance Examinations report on Chinese, 80 report on Korean, 79 National Language Council, 30, 111, 115, 121 national law on JSL education, 145–55 National Network of Forums on Japanese Language (Nihongo Fu¯oramu Zenkoku Netto), 146 night schools, enrolments in, 42 Nihongo Ky¯oiku Shink¯o H¯o (Laws for the Promotion of Japanese Language Education), 149 nihonjinron, 17 nikkei (immigrants of Japanese descent), 22, 28, 35, 43, 132, 143 non-Japanese spouses, 49–52 and JSL classes, 51 statistics, 50 OECD, 82, 163 online writing practices and offline writing, 111, 115 permanent residents, 35

207 Plan for Promoting Multicultural Coexistence in Local Communities (Chiiki ni okeru Tabunka Ky¯osei Suishin Puran), 26, 134 reading skills, 113 Recommendations for Accepting Non-Japanese Workers (Gaikokujin Ukeire Mondai ni kansuru Teigen), 24 regional languages, 155 support for teaching of, 70–1 Revised List of Characters for General Use (Kaitei J¯oy¯o Kanji Hy¯o), 119 seikatsusha, 150 definition of, 140 Simplified Japanese (Kan’yaku Nihongo), 93 Society for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language (Nihongo Ky¯oiku Gakkai), 148 speech community, 129 in Japan, 6 tabunka ky¯osei (multicultural coexistence), 1, 25–7, 29, 39, 90, 134 and local governments, 135–6 and multiculturalism, 27 and non-Japanese spouses, 50 MIAC definition of, 27 uchinaru kokusaika (domestic internationalisation), 24, 36, 85, 125, 126 Ueda Kazutoshi, 9 University Establishment Standards 1991 revision of, 83 volunteers and JSL, 46–9, 55 wakamono kotoba, 110 writing by hand, 103, 106, 121 mistakes in, 116 concept of, 30 teaching of, 98 writing skills tertiary remedial classes in, 104 writing system, 1, 10, 11, 39, 45 written language, 11, 20, 104 and new writing practices, 29–31 written text, dependence on, 105 yutori aru ky¯oiku (pressure-free education), 102, 104