Mar 31, 2010 - (Friedrich Holderlin, Mnemosyne, Altere Fassung). Now we are living in an age in which most of us think without doubt that learning foreign.
Title
Author(s)
The Politics of Learning Foreign Languages : Learning language in an im aginary reality in Japan Sugiyama, Masao
Editor(s) Citation Issue Date URL
大阪府立大学紀要（人文・社会科学）. 2010, 58, p.39-50 2010-03-31 http://hdl.handle.net/10466/11864
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http://repository.osakafu-u.ac.jp/dspace/
The Politics of Learning Foreign Languages - Learning language in an imaginary reality in Japan Sugiyama Masao
1. Language and beiongingness When someone's or something's presence is natural, not annoying, it is said in Japanese that its existence "is like air." The circumstances in which we are living are usually recognized as being this way. We find our surroundings as natural as if they were natural phenomena. Augustin Berque says: 'Nature' is understood here as that which, in the world, has no sense/meaning either through or for humanity, yet is in and around it. People only know it through metaphors, those of culture, which govern both their perception of nature and their conception of the natural as well as their action on the world (which is mostly natural).} Like this, language is also perceived as being natural by its native users. It appears as a neutral and transparent tool to express feelings or thoughts and is often supposed to be an essential part of our spiritual activity. Our self-consciousness is reflected through our language and nourished through our immediate circumstance. Also, using the same language is thought to give the members of a community a certain resemblance in way of thinking through the use of a common vocabulary or phraseology. People within a same group often share similar information and historical memories. Therefore, people who do not speak the language native to a certain locale are not considered to be authentic members of the community. Language is regarded as a vital prerequisite for social belongingness. We are not always conscious of its kind of naturalness in our surroundings, but we are subconsciously monitoring what is normal and what is not for us. Once we encounter occurrences which seem to deviate from our image of the national, then we become aware of a sense of discomfort. We try to push it out or isolate it to get a clear boundary between ourselves and others. However, the boundary is imaginary and almost impossible to objectify. The imaging of this I Berque, Augustin: Nature, Artifice and Japanese Culture, trans. by Ros Schwartz, Pilkington Press, 1997 (first published 1993), P.1 0 1.
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kind of communal identity occurs arbitrarily and accidentally. It reflects rather the image of otherness which we have obtained from our socialization and which can hardly have an universal self-derived substance after all. On the other hand, we are lured by the idea of the national, to which we are supposed to belong, consciously or unconsciously. Sometimes we might feel a sense of togetherness, for example in the event of a sports international match or of a nationwide disaster, where we often feel we can see clear evidence of common ground. However, the more we know each element of the mutuality like culture and history concretely, the more the idea shows up unverifiable, because each of us has actually our own individual culture and interpret our official history differently, even though we speak the same language, which actually does not always give us the same pattern of thinking, because language also enables us to think differently. Nevertheless, language is supposed to be the vital differential feature of a community against the outside world. We feel comfortable and confident when we speak our own language with a fellow national who speaks the same language. In addition, our cultural and historical inheritance is usually woven into our common language. The consciousness of having the same language and cultural background seems to conjure up a spiritual common place for easier and less obstructive communication in our conversation.
2. Discomfort of speaking foreign languages Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren. (Friedrich Holderlin, Mnemosyne, Altere Fassung)
Now we are living in an age in which most of us think without doubt that learning foreign languages is desirable and should be promoted by all means. It is supposed that we should learn foreign languages in order to communicate with the people from other cultures and widen our understanding of other people, which serves to contribute to the avoidance of serious conflicts between different nations. Actually the command of a foreign language might open up new possibility for one's future. Is it true, however, that learning foreign languages always promotes the improvement of mutual understanding between foreign nations? Even people with the same tongue have constantly trouble in understanding each other and come into collision. The main problem in learning a foreign language is the difficulty of mastering it. It tends to continually give rise to a
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feeling of ambiguity for poor speakers, which causes them to misread the situation. The utterance of one's partner might be interpreted incorrectly or in a wrong context. All those common phenomena can make mutual understanding more complicated and unstable. Even in the case of a fluent speaker, he or she would have a problem of another dimension: Those people who sometimes feel disconnected from our own belongingness and left behind between two foreign worlds, between our own and the other, depending on the involvement and density in their living circumstances. If it happens in a multi-lingual society, then the problem would be reduced. To people living in multi-lingual societies the mastering of several languages is often regarded. as natural. However, learning and speaking a foreign languages in monolingual societies has a different problematic. To learn a foreign language is, psychologically speaking, a potentially dangerous undertaking, because it causes people to question their basic perceptions and assumptions, destabilizes their identity. Learning another lenguages forces them to relativize their previous way of thinking and behavior or values. It interferes with our sense of identity by making a "foreigner" of us for better or worse.
3. English as a lingua franca "English plays a most primary role as a lingua franca which bridges people with different mother tongues and it is vital for our children to develop communication ability in English as a lingua franca in order to survive the twenty-first century.,,2 The establishment of English as the most important second language has been hardly questioned in Japan since the end of the Pacific War in 1945, which seems to be also a general phenomenon in the world. However, people in Japan have been thinking at length why this political and educational belief never comes to fruition despite the passionate devotion of the authorities concerned and expectations of dedicated teachers and learners. Tirelessly and eagerly, they are trying to improve technical methods and to invest in human resources and funds. Currently English classes are about to be introduced into public elementary schools from 2011 despite the fact that only three percent of elementary school teachers are qualified to teach
2 '''Eigo ga tsukaeru nihonjin'no ikusei no tameno kodokeikaku no sakutei nitsuite" 2002, The ministry of Education, Culture, Science &Technology. (http://www.e-jes.orgl03033102.pdf). The ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan announced an agenda for action for fostering Japanese who can speak English.
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English. 3 The feeling of urgency shared by governmental officials and academics, caused by fear of losing out in international competition in process of globalization, forces the pace of changing the system rather blindly. The versatility of English on the international level is widely recognized between business and academic people and there is little doubt about it. However, we should think about the fact that the majority of Japanese learners are living in a monolingual situation in which they hardly need to speak a foreign language, even though they think English can be a magical way to experience another world. Language schools have been booming and also many people are learning English on TV or radio. Yet how many people would be put into the circumstances in their future life, in which they are forced to speak English continuously? Looking at the simple fact that the major non-Japanese inhabitants in Japan are Chinese and Koreans, practically speaking, people in Japan have very little chance to speak English. Why do people want to regard English language as an idolatrous object? I will argue below about the constellation of foreign languages and social necessity in Japan to ask how this incongruity emerges and on which worldview is it based.
4. Politics and Foreign Languages Until the end of the Tokugawa period Chinese was a requisite subject for people over a certain level of social class who had to read and write. It was not a spoken, but written language among intellectuals, and needed for official documents, which premised mastery of the essential Chinese classics. People learned old Chinese, because the whole intellectual discourse was built on it. With the exception of professional interpreters and translators hired by the government and a few Intellectuals like Ogyu Sorai, few intellectuals tried to learn spoken Chinese. Chinese, especially old one, was lingua franca for intellectuals in many Asian countries including Japan. After the surrender of China after the First Opium or Anglo-Chinese War in 1842, the recognition of the dominance of European countries over Asian was the very trigger for Japan to change their previous worldview. Since then, the world order has been reorganized from the China-centered one to European-centered very quickly. Ironically, globalization and progress in transportation among countries wiped away the idealized images among Japanese Intellectuals about China and Chinese. With growing numbers of human exchange after the first treaty
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"Shougakkou no eigo ha hitsuyouka?", Sankei shinbun, 2009.5.24.
http://sankei.jp.msn.comllife/educationl090524/edc0905241800000-n 1.htm
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between both countries 1871 enthusiasm for China as the land of Confucius or ''the Sage" turned out disillusioned at the sight of political confusion caused by European colonial power. Journalism began to promulgate bruited negative images of China. Oka Senjin reported about the scourge of opium and the outdated Confucian morality in China.4 That tendency as a whole lead to the First Sino-Japanese War on the grounds that China refused to adjust to European civilization, because the Japanese government thought that China should be Japan's alliance partner against European power and that China's backwardness, however, would put Japan in jeopardy of colonialization. Tokutomi Soha termed Japan "a guide of civilization and spreader of humanism,,5 and legitimated the putting Japanese military pressure on China. The traditional knowledge from China and the language fitted for nothing, not only that, it would raise the risk of backwardness. European languages like English, German or French became essential tools to understand and absorb the modem knowledge and technology from the west and it was accelerated especially after the foundation of a new university, Tokyo University, established in 1877 as the central resource of modernization in Japan. Inspired by the triumph of Prussia over France in 1871, the Japanese government delegated reorganization of the Japanese army from the French style to German to a German major Meckel 1878. Also from the aspect of its conservative and autocratic tendency, German thought, as well as German language was gaining an advantage in the Japanese higher education until the end of the Second World War. The introduction of English into the middle high school system was announced by the imperial proclamation about school system (gakka rei) 1881. English was taught six hours a week, the same as "kanbun" or japanized Chinese. Learning a modem European language was an absolute requirement to get a higher education as well as to reach a high position in the society.6 Acquiring foreign language divided social stratum decisively. Since 1945, the world order changed and the United States became the leader of the west. The American civilization was regarded as the world standard for the rest of the world within the capitalist camp. It was the beginning of a new globalization, which reorganized the other part of the world according to a system of certain American values. This process also stimulated the feeling of nationalism in many colonized countries by destabilizing and threatening their national identity. But America became a symbol of the future goal for the capitalist countries, as well as the English language, which was beginning to spread all over the world.
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Namiki Yorihisa: Nihonjin no ajianinshiki, Yamakawa-shuppan, 2008, p21-22. Idem, P.29. Imura, "Nihon No Eigo Kyoiku 200 nen", Taishl1kan , 2003, P 265.
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5. Immaterialized power of foreign languages The first NHK English program in Japan, which started In 1946 and was moderated by Hayakawa Tadaichi, "was regularly listened to in an estimated 5.7 million households" until the end of the program in 1951. 7 It was the beginning of the forming of a positive image of English, blended with the feeling of liberation from the depressing and miserable atmosphere of the previous war. From that point English got free of the status of the language of the elite, becoming profane and democratized. There is no doubt that the process of Japan's liberalization from the trauma of repressive and suffocating experiences during the war has become the ultimate inception for the association of English as a symbol of a future life for Japanese. The most popular English textbook for middle high school in the post war period, "Jack and Betty", was most. widely distributed as an authorized text and made up 80% of the share 1950 in Japan 8 and its sales run up 40 million copies in 20 years9. The text is settled on the subject matter of the life of middle class American students and presents various events takes place in a daily life in a neighboring town of Chicago, which made Japanese students direct their dreams to the rich and free country America. lO Based on the sales of twenty-six different NHK radio and TV texts in eight different languages in 2006, it is estimated that approximately 4,600,000 people were learning foreign languages on radio and TV and 3,150,00 of those wer~ English learners.ll English changed roles, from that of a political instrument of absorbing western knowledge at state level to one for everybody, to that of an important tool for mass education, cut off from a real multi-lingual world: In parallel with increasing number of college students, English was established as an indispensable subject within the secondary school curriculum, especially as a college entrance examination subject. It became predominantly a scale of learning achievement at school. English became of less practical use. The introduction of English into compulsory education was often subjected to harsh criticism. Kato Shuichi said in 1955 that learning English does more harm than good, because the great majority of junior high school students had no chance to use English in business and even if they had such a chance, their level is totally inadequate. 12
Dower, "Embracing Defeat - Japan in the Aftermath of World War n ", Penguin, 1999, pI73-4. Imura, p.163. 9 http://www.kairyudo.co.jp/contents/07_company/index.htm. 10 Imura, p.166. 11 8 foreign languages are English, Chinese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian. http://www.md-navi.jp/index. php?m=v_ media&a=listing_small&cc= 157&pp=O&ta=&pr=&te=none&tg=O&aa%5B %5D=%E5%85%A8%E5%9B%BD&wd=nhk 12 Imura, p282. 7
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As mentioned above, because of these policies Japanese society IS almost entirely monolingual. Language acquisition requires hand-on practice, which is difficult to come by. Without a pressing demand or any certain prospect in the near future we will not to push ourselves to learn a foreign language. There is, however, another motivation to learn foreign languages enthusiastically: we can create a virtual foreign world in daily life without changing life on a large scale. Such an alternative world is made possible in the classroom. Japanese learners' favorite way to learn foreign languages is going to a language school. According to statistics of the MITI announced in 2009, the number of foreign language learners at commercial language schools peaked in 2006 with 9,562.000, although in 2008 it took a radical downturn to 4,514,000 due to shrinkage of the market. 13 In the year 2005, 91.1% of 1144 language schools gave English courses. In any case, the great majority of language learners are taking English courses. This tendency, which emerged seemingly from innocent curiosity, actually consists of a multifactorial problematic. Here two characteristics which should be mentioned: First, learning languages became autotelic. Instead of surviving in a foreign circumstance, talking a foreign language with foreign teachers in the classroom itself was now regarded as the ultimate goal of experiencing otherness for many learners in Japan. Speaking a foreign language is no more a survival tool in reality, but often rather a hobby for complacency. In this case passive learning gains ground and learning language tends to just repeat grammatical and syntactical exercises. A basic mechanism of communication between self and others, relativising and destabilizing the identity of one's own self, hardly takes place. By this means people can be home and dry from endangering their own identity. Second, meta-linguistic factors, including the political aspects of a language, remain unrealized in such a dialogue. Dialogues of any kind, especially between different nationalities, could generate lots of tension due to racial, gender issues or stereotyped cultural conflicts between dialogists. If there would be no possibility, for real dialogue to be carried out, then language learning would be nothing but a monologue or like talking to a wall. Then memorizing words and phrases would be an essential part of the learning process. In this closed and autotelic process, learners would be divested of the sensibility to perceive the real problematique in the dialogue.
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http://www.meti.go.jp/statistics/tyo/tokusabido/result-2.html
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6. Ideology and "English Conversation" Already in 1976, Douglas Lummis analyzed in his essay, "English Conversation As Ideology," those ideological and racial problems in classroom English in Japan. As mentioned above, the business of foreign language schools extended the market colossally, especially from around 1980. The industry had started already in the 1970s. For most Japanese, this kind of school was almost the only place to meet foreigners from the west. Lummis described the feeling of shrinking back when the students of the ESS (English Speaking Society) gathered around him overly subserviently like "puppies". He was also surprised when told that their life purpose was achieving a mastery of English and the place they wanted to go was Los Angeles or their favorite novelist and poet were Hawthorne and Longfellow. Lummis realized, however, that the red-carpet treatment by the students did not come from a feeling of intimate connectedness to guests from abroad, but he was treated just as a sample of western people or, to put it simply, whites. 14 In fact, other English speaking members from Southeast Asian countries were treated as if they were invisible. Also language schools used to hire young white persons to rope people in. Aspiration after the western world results in racial adoration of western people. On the other hand, any middleclass white persons from the United States or European can enjoy the sudden elevation of the social rank and being treated like class elite in Japan, which they never had before in their home country, due to their national origin. 15 This dependency, on the one hand, on the imaginary adoration of learners and, on the other hand, imaginary superiority of teaching persons, which is derived from the conviction that they came from "the real world", creates the space of English conversation. 16 Pretending to be a harmless act of learning or teaching language, the English-language classroom is actually an arena of racial politics in many ways. What matters is that the world of "English Conversation" needs a highly unbalanced and asymmetric relationship between learners and teachers. Moreover, it has little to do with the knowledge or ability of the teacher, but with the background or origin of the person. Even the personality of the teacher is not needed for English conversation. Lummis reports about a chat with Japanese who addressed him with stereotyped phrases and questions in English, while he was standing in a dramatically beautiful scene in Kanazawa. He felt that the man did not accost him as an individual with own personality, but as a westerner. Here we can see the vicious circle between naive worshipping of the west and self-contempt on the side of Japanese, which is bonded by racial bias. This process creates and spreads on the other hand an unfounded and 14 Lummis, Douglas: "ideorogI tositeno eikaiwa" (English Conversation as Ideology), trans. by Saito, Yasuko, Shobunsha, 1986, P21. 15 Id., p.29. 16 Id, P.XX
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imaginary superiority of "westerners". However the unpleasant feeling is at the same time suppressed and people try to push the image of the superior westerner out of their intimate connectedness. As a result, a stereotyped caricature of the strange westerner is made of them. From this kind of ideological structure, language suffers often from a fatal dysfunction as a tool to express our feelings and thought, because such a "conversation" can hardly hit on the point. This kind of learning gives rise to mistrust and suspicion towards the interlocutor, much less mutual understanding or inspiration. The vital problem is that it is not a problem how to teach, but one of the world view of learners, which is based in the reciprocal political and cultural imaginary dependency between learners and teachers. After all, English learning is comprised of an imaginary world of the foreignness with superior values and their amenable admirer. Learning a foreign language encompasses inevitably embrace of its worldview, of which the language is compounded. And this learning mechanism keeps reproducing stereotyped images and a wall of unbridgeable differences between races, cultures and nationalities.
7. Worldview of language policy in Japan The public monolingual language education offered by the Japanese school system could cause rather more communicative problems or disturb understanding others than work things out: It hides diversity of the real world and delivers us an one-dimensional view of the world as if our world would consist of just two areas, the Japanese and English-speaking domains. It is the situation, in which we are put, in other words, we are surrounded by "the false realities of a politicized society" (Karel van Wolferen). It is said everywhere that we are living in a globalizing world and we are exposed to international competition, so that we have to learn English. We are actually so eager to learn a language which is not much tangent to our reality and try to fit our self to the non-existent goal, while we are facing more real home needs and really necessary languages. The design of the foreign language education made by the Japanese government is apparently built on a very simple image of the world: there are still now only Japan and the west. The languages of those areas are worth learning as a national project, while learning other languages is left to people's own choice, the implication being that they are not really necessary to learn. Globalization means a simple one-way approach to the other or AmericaniEurope. On the other hand, our real life is becoming increasingly diversified and needs multilateral measures like never before.
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For reference, let us take a look at the language policy of European Union. The EU is trying to advance the integration between different member countries with different languages at a multidimensional level. Responding to this new language environment, the Council of Europe developed in "The Common European Framework," a new language policy. The basic concept of this language policy is based on the reality of a multilingual society with a multiethnic population, not on the hypothetical inference that the Japanese government wants to believe in. The first priority is set on daily communication with people who speak other languages within or outside own country, "basing language teaching and learning on the needs, motivations, characteristics and resources of learners". 17 Also there is the principle that a better knowledge of other languages "will be possible to facilitate communication and interaction among Europeans of different mother tongues in order to promote European mobility, mutual understanding and co-operation, and overcome prejudice and discrimination." 18 If so, neglecting neighbors' languages could leave the present situation of conflicts and prejudice between Japan and other Asian countries untouched. Actually promoting a single language in public means ignorance and exclusion of the others. It would reflect the consciousness of the world order which is still believed generally among Japanese English learners despite of changing circumstances.
8. Lingua Franca for what? According to statistics announced 2009 by the Statistical Department of Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, 26,336,000 people left and entered Japan in 2007: 17,300,000 are Japanese, 6,655,000 Asian (among them 2,800,000 Korean and 2,560,000 Chinese), 1,048,000 North American, 932,000 European, 263,000 from Oceania. There are 2,152,000 foreign residents registered in the country. The largest group is Asian (1,600,000), the second is South American (394,000), then North American (67,000), European (60,000), Oceanian (15,000), African (11,000). Among the approximately 850,000 foreign permanent residents (including the spouses of Japanese and permanent residents, also fixed domicile residents) are 560,000 Asians, 79,000 South Americans, 36,000 North Americans and 31,000 Europeans, 6,300 from Oceania, 4,600 Africans. Probably more than 900/0 of those long-term residents speak other languages than English as their mother tongue. So far, Japanese people have had more chances to deal with Korean and Chinese than other languages. Why has not learning Chinese and Korean been taken seriously and promoted in the school system by the government? 17 The Common European Framework in its political and educational context, 1.2 The aims and objectives of Council of Europe language policy. 18 Idem.
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9. Experiencing foreignness In the year 2007 there were 720,000 marriage registrations in Japan, in which 680,000 were couples in which both partners are Japanese, and 40,000 in which one partner is Japanese and the other is the holder of a foreign passport. The spouses of the 31,000 Japanese who were part of an international couple were Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Thai, Brazilian and Peruvian. Only 2,100 of these couples had an American or British spouse. 19 Thus, since language is important part of our identity and more and more people are establishing their life in multilingual circumstances, language policy should be designed to correspond with this reality. Not only English, but multilingual education should be promoted at the local community level. First, the use of foreign languages in daily life makes people in question and their surrounding experience what multilingual life is. Conflicts among people with different backgrounds and the experience of overcoming these by means of foreign languages should be vital to multicultural encounters. Furthermore, it could make it possible to embrace foreign people and their behavior at a deeper level. Not an unilateral, but a mutual linguistic approach, especially a back-to-reality one, would strengthen human bonds among people with diverse backgrounds, and promote inner understanding beyond borders, which would also activate human exchanges?O What does a sense of uneasiness and anxiety when speaking a foreign language with a native speaker in foreign circumstances mean? In a monolingual nation like Japan, foreign languages tend to be associated with foreigners and foreign countries, which evoke immediately fundamental differences of race and ways of thinking. However, originally foreign languages had nothing to do with foreign nations and countries, because the nation- state is a creation of the modem age, while a language is presumably generated and shared accidentally in a closed circle of people. The association of foreign languages with foreign nations is rather a product of socialization in our society. Incomprehension through foreign language causes the psychological experience of not understood, therefore the fear of the disappearance of the self in foreignness. Then people try to eliminate this bewildering feeling together with all foreignness and to draw a clear border between themselves and others in order to push the other out. But experiencing this kind of incomprehension is a first step to cross the border of psychological foreignness. This inner confrontation with foreignness would make it possible to understand a person who speaks foreign languages from within and also our self more clearly. Adherence to the nationality or
http://www.mhlw.gojp/toukei/saikin/hwZiinkou/suii07/index.html For example the "Korean boom," sparked by the popularity Korean television dramas in 2004, created a large enthusiastic fandom among Japanese women, among others, into existence. They not only watch videos of Korean filmss, but also make trips to Korea and learn Korean to understand videos in their original language. Some of those people get to doubt their previous recognition oft the world. 19
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external appearance of a person itself does not give us any insight into how to better understand others. The difficulties of learning foreign languages could be reduced in this way, even if only slightly.
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