Learning to read and write in Japanese(kokugo and nihongo): a barrier to

multilingualism?

CHRISTIAN GALAN

Abstract

Japan is undergoing an acute demographic crisis, which in coming years

will bring an increasingly large number of ‘‘newcomers’’ to this country.

The presence in Japan of this new kind of economic immigrants will raise

the issue of their integration to greater prominence and will, therefore,

lead to a redefinition of citizenship and Japaneseness. This article examines

these various topics through various questions relating to the Japanese

school system and the Japanese written language. Are Japanese schools

ready to welcome a large number of students with limited or no Japanese

language ability? What is the main di‰culty of written Japanese? How

was the current method of teaching reading and writing set up in Japan? Is

this method suitable for non-Japanese children? Could learning to read and

write in Japanese be a barrier to multilingualism?

1. Introduction

The subject of discussion here will not be the general standing of multilin-

gualism that characterizes Japan today — this situation has been dis-cussed by people who master the subject far better than I do. Instead, the

focus will be more specific and closer to my own work: access to written

language for the various groups within the population of the country of

Japan — including both the natives and the immigrants or language mi-

nority (LM) people. In addressing this subject, linguistic aspects will be

taken into account, as well as educational or social aspects, for in reading

between the lines as we examine the issue of access to writing, and thus to

information, we encounter the issue of citizenship, and the broader issueregarding the status of the populations studied. In particular, we shall see

how using access to writing as a criterion, in my opinion, breaks down the

current and future populations living in Japan in a new way.

0165–2516/05/0175/0176–0249 Int’l. J. Soc. Lang. 175/176 (2005), pp. 249–269

6 Walter de Gruyter

Let us consider the changes Japan is undergoing at the linguistic level,

with the dual influence of population decrease and globalization. If these

changes mean that the Japanese population increasingly ‘‘lets in’’ other

languages, and furthermore, if the languages spoken in Tokyo today are

more and more numerous, what is the actual linguistic status of foreign

speakers? Do they share proficiency in the Japanese language with their

Japanese hosts? And if so, does this proficiency also include the writtenlanguage? What does this proficiency equate in an academic scope? Are

these ‘‘newcomers’’ able to acquire this proficiency only once they are in

Japan, or before they arrive in the country? And what about their chil-

dren, if they also live in Japan? These are the types of questions used

as a starting point. And as a backdrop to these questions, we must ask

whether the Japanese school system is capable of carrying out this (new)

role of making non-Japanese speaking populations proficient in the spo-

ken and written Japanese language.If we look at the general position of ‘‘foreigners’’ living in Japan, we

can, for our purposes here, very loosely break them down into ten broad

categories:

1. Adults who can speak but cannot read Japanese because they

studied the language before coming to Japan, or because they were

born abroad into families of Japanese origin, and acquired fair con-

trol of the Japanese language from family members (short, mediumor long term stays);

2. Adults who can speak and read Japanese because they studied the

language before coming to Japan, or because they were born abroad

into families of Japanese origin, and acquired fair control of the

Japanese language from family members (short, medium or long

term stays);

3. Educated adults who are not able to speak and/or read Japanese,

but for whom their reasons for being in Japan or their social classdo not require them to be proficient in Japanese (generally short or

medium term stays);

4. Adults with little education who cannot speak and/or read Japanese

who immigrated to Japan for economic reasons (medium term or

long stays?);

5. Adults that may belong to categories (1), (2), (3) or (4) who are

married to a Japanese spouse (medium term or long stays?);

6. The children of parents who belong to categories (1), (2), (3), (4)or (5) who are educated in Japan in ‘‘international schools’’, outside

the Japanese school system (with the goal of a planned return to the

country of origin);

250 C. Galan

7. The children of parents who belong to categories (1), (2), (3)

or (4) educated in Japan in Japanese schools from early child-

hood;

8. The children of parents in category (5) educated in Japan in Japa-

nese schools from early childhood;

9. The children of parents who belong to categories (1), (2), (3) or

(4) who entered the Japanese school system partway through theireducation;

10. The children of parents in category (5) who entered the Japanese

school system partway through their education.

We could make this breakdown more specific by creating subcategories

to account for the characteristics of the writing system in the native lan-

guage, and thus distinguishing, for example, the subjects from popula-

tions that use Chinese characters from those from populations that usealphabetic or syllabic writing. The ages of the subjects and their educa-

tional experiences prior to arriving in Japan could also be grounds for dif-

ferent subcategories within categories (9) and (10). But for our discussion

here, the breakdown will be limited to the 10 categories listed above, and

focus mainly on the subjects in categories (7), (9) and (10) who will cer-

tainly continue to grow in number and thus constitute one of Japan’s

greatest challenges in the area of bilingualism — which we will discuss

further on.I have structured my approach, based on situations that are familiar

to other industrialized nations, and France in particular, around the

notion of ‘‘barriers’’: barriers which, in the case of subjects from immi-

grant or foreign populations, stand in the way of acquiring proficiency

in the language of the host country, and barriers that the authorities

responsible for the educational policies in this host country must them-

selves overcome in order for the education of these populations to be

successful.

2. Particularity of the written Japanese language and teaching strategy

The first barrier to the construction of true bilingualism including collec-

tive and individual proficiency in the written Japanese language is cer-

tainly the written language itself or, in other words, the fact that the par-ticularity of this written language imposes certain constraints when it

comes to learning it — particularly the fact that it is learned over a period

of many years. These constraints led Japanese educators to set up a

Learning to read and write in Japanese 251

‘‘method’’ for teaching how to read and write which is in itself extremely

restrictive and very precisely scheduled over time.1

Today, it has been fairly well established that assertions that there are

no problems with teaching reading in Japanese schools, or evaluations of

the literacy rate of the Japanese population at near 100%, are as much

founded on ‘‘myth’’ as the supposed linguistic (or ‘‘racial’’) unity of Japan

(see Noguchi 2000). In Japan, like anywhere else, there are problems withteaching reading in the schools, and there are various levels of literacy

within Japanese society. In any case, for our discussion here today, let us

assume — as an exception — that the assertions mentioned above are

representative of the reality in Japan. Let us assume, in particular, that

the twelve years of schooling that most Japanese children receive through

high school, or even the nine mere years of schooling that are mandatory

(shogakko þ chugakko) indeed allow all Japanese to attain an adult level

of reading and writing. But here we have to stress the following point: ittakes at least nine, or really twelve years to attain this level, and this is for

children born of Japanese parents and raised in Japan.

The strategy for teaching the kanji used in elementary schools since the

end of the nineteenth century (Galan 2001) can be summed up in three

words ‘‘memorization’’, ‘‘accumulation’’ and ‘‘substitution’’; memoriza-

tion and accumulation of a thousand kanji (reading and writing) stretched

out over the six elementary school years, and the progressive substitution

of kanji that have been studied in place of kana, in the sentences the chil-dren write or encounter. In fact, it is the simplicity of the phonic–graphic

relationship in the hiragana, which have to be studied first, making it pos-

sible to space out the introduction of the kanji over time without consti-

tuting an obstacle to the activity of reading, that allow the inherent di‰-

culty in the kanji to be overcome. The teaching instructions established at

the national level by the Minister of Education define the number and list

of kanji to be studied in all Japanese schools for all grades. This progres-

sion throughout the years of elementary school can be briefly presented asin Figure 1.

Depending on the school year, a given phrase (0) will appear, in a text-

book or in the student’s exercises, transcribed as in Figure 2.

A particularity of this method, due to the span of time it requires and/

or that is imposed by the specificity of the kanji, is that it prohibits any-

one from entering at any level except level zero (i.e., the first year of ele-

mentary school, in theory). This is true, unless one manages to somehow

catch up to the others, but this is only possible for individuals with excep-tionally prodigious memories. For the rest, the time factor and the limits

of the human memory will constitute major barriers on the path to mas-

tering written Japanese.

252 C. Galan

3. Organizational choices and conceptions of the child

Another set of obstacles or barriers seems to come from choices made in

Japan with regard to the structure, and equally the organization, of the

Japanese education system, as well from certain educational practices,

and from the dominant conception of the child in Japanese society.

Figure 1. Progression of written signs taught in Japanese elementary schools (Galan 2001:

22)

Figure 2. Transcription of a given phrase in Japanese elementary schools

Learning to read and write in Japanese 253

3.1. Pre-elementary education

The Japanese educational system does not really include the pre-

elementary level. The directives from the Minister of Education, monbu-

kagakusho, set the start of learning hiragana, and thus reading, at the

start of elementary school, shogakko, and the directives concerning pre-

elementary schools specify that only work that stimulates the mind andmotivates the child may be undertaken in these schools.

Thus, ‘‘o‰cially’’, children do not learn the hiragana before they start

elementary school, where the teaching of the signs begins during the first

quarter of the first year. But this is only the ‘‘o‰cial’’ version: the reality

is quite di¤erent. Indeed, although first grade teachers proceed as if none

of the children knew any hiragana on the first day of school, in reality,

over 90% of the children already know them by heart, and the other 10%

have some knowledge of them (Muraishi 1972; Shiomi 1986). So wheredo small Japanese children learn the hiragana? Even if some pre-schools,

mostly private ones, proceed to teach the hiragana to four and five-year-

olds, the vast majority of the public schools maintain the principle not to

teach them. In reality, children are taught the hiragana by their parents,

particularly by their mothers. Even parents who think it is better not to

end up teaching the hiragana for fear of otherwise hindering their child’s

academic career. Many of these parents only see learning the hiragana as

a basic step in development and think the sooner acquired, the better. Theparticularity of the hiragana, i.e., one sign equals one sound, does indeed

make this a fairly easy task. Parents are thus under the impression that

‘‘all’’ they have to do is get their child to memorize the fifty signs that

make up the hiragana, which can indeed be accomplished very quickly.

Consequently, as Tobin et al. note in their book Preschool in Three Cul-

tures (1989), there therefore exists in Japan, a fairly paradoxical situation

‘‘in which Japanese preschool teachers do not need to teach reading since

the majority of children in their charge learn to read at home’’ (Tobinet al. 1989: 58). Tobin et al. (1989: 191) also note that ‘‘[t]he Japanese

are spending little time reading, writing, and counting in their preschools.

[ . . . ] In a society worried about kyoiku mamas driving their children to

succeed academically, preschools are seen as havens from academic pres-

sure and competition.

This situation has a double consequence for foreign children for whom

Japanese is not the mother tongue of at least one of their parents:

1. Supposing that their parents are able to provide them with pre-

elementary schooling — bearing in mind that preschool is not obliga-

tory and must be paid for — this would, in most cases, allow these

254 C. Galan

children to evolve socially, to blossom and to develop their mastery

of spoken Japanese, but would not provide them with su‰cient build-

ing blocks in written Japanese. As it is currently organized, the edu-

cational institution would not allow them to make up here for the

handicap that comes from growing up in a home in which written

Japanese is not used, or possibly not even known;

2. At the start of elementary school, these children may possess the lin-guistic level specified in the o‰cial directives, but in reality, they will

be ‘‘behind’’ Japanese children in terms of written language skills:

while the Japanese children are merely reviewing things they have al-

ready learned and are familiar with, the foreign children will be learn-

ing something entirely new.

3.2. School as a place to verify how children read

So not only will these foreign children begin elementary school with dif-

ferent levels in the knowledge and use of written language than the vast

majority of Japanese children, moreover, elementary school will not al-

low them to make up this deficit (unless additional classes are set up espe-

cially to help them).

Indeed, as established in a previous study (Galan 2001: 25–31), the ko-

kugo lessons given in the first quarter of the first grade are more like over-view or review sessions than true presentations of new material (which is

understandable considering that, as we have just seen, nearly all Japanese

children already know the hiragana). If Japanese children really were start-

ing out with no prior knowledge of the hiragana, could they be mastered in

as short a time, i.e., under three months with eight 45-minute sessions a

week, or less? If you ask the teachers, who claim as it is that they do not

have enough time to su‰ciently cover this ‘‘review’’, the answer is no.

Along the same lines, and this point is central to our discussion here, thebulk of the work involved in learning the kanji (and thus learning to read)

is relegated from fourth grade on, or even thrid grade in some schools, to

work the children do on their own (Galan 2001: 31–37). The kanji, which

up to that point were studied one by one during language classes, now be-

come something the children study almost entirely ‘‘outside school’’. Al-

though one hour a week is still devoted to the kanji, from this point on,

school is really only the place where the results of the learning process are

verified. The mechanism for learning the kanji that is set up in first gradeand reiterated under the teacher’s supervision over the next two years until

it becomes automatic (or a routine) as soon as a new character appears,

now works on its own, allowing the teachers of the upper grades to turn

Learning to read and write in Japanese 255

over this teaching to the children’s individual work, confident that it will be

done correctly (The parents, and especially the juku2 play an extremely im-

portant role at this stage in the learning process [see Galan 1995b]).

But how e¤ective is this method, or will this method will be, for foreign

children whose parents, once again, are not proficient in written Japanese,

or cannot necessarily a¤ord to send their children to a ‘‘second school’’,

the first being the public school, and the second the juku?

3.3. The dual outcome of reading lessons

It seems clear that another barrier also comes from the fact that, gener-

ally speaking, elementary school in Japan is as much or more so a place

of socialization for the children — and where they learn ‘‘Japaneseness’’

— as the place where they acquire academic knowledge. This is true interms of how the school and its disciplines function in general, and is es-

pecially true of how reading is taught.

As just one example, of the ten criteria set by the o‰cial elementary

school directives published in 1989 (Monbusho 1989: 23) and according

to which texts given to the children had to be chosen, seven reveal con-

cerns that have little to do with reading and reflect instead the ministry’s

aim of reinforcing moral education. The reform of 1989 was meant to re-

align an educational system that had been criticized in particular for put-ting content ahead of the needs of individuals. But not only did it fail

to change the practical teaching conditions, a point I will not be able to

elaborate on here (Galan 2001: 274–276), but it focused even more heav-

ily on the moral nature of the texts given to the children. More than ever,

the directives of 1989 adopted the position described by Makita and Sa-

kamoto in their 1973 work on what the o‰cial standpoint had been since

1958: ‘‘The main purpose of Japanese reading education is not only to

make children literate but also to enforce the understanding of the moralsof stories and to promote sound personality development.’’ (Makita and

Sakamoto 1973: 450)

The input from the specialists, who had been engaged at a higher level

in the 1989 reform, was almost entirely left out of the final text for the

simple reason that the changes unanimously seen as necessary threatened

the sacrosanct principle of the uniformity of education. It is di‰cult in-

deed, beyond the scope of pure intentions, to ask teachers to shift their

focus to individuals when by their very nature the o‰cial directives denyany movement in this direction. Outside the Japanese debate on the issue

of school, it is not certain that these measures, and in turn the method ap-

plied in schools, help foreign children learn to read: do not directives that

256 C. Galan

favor the Japanese culture and values that are specific to ‘‘Japaneseness’’

handicap those who do not share these values simply because their par-

ents, raised in other cultures, are not familiar with them and therefore

could not pass them on to their children?

3.4. Conception of the child

The last point we see as problematic is related to the conception of the

child that prevails in Japanese society. So it is that Japanese mothers are

not worried about whether their child will succeed in ‘‘learning to read’’,

as we saw earlier, because no one in Japan would ever consider that

it might be ‘‘di‰cult’’ enough that someone of normal intelligence might

not succeed. What worries mothers before their child starts elementary

school is not that he will not manage learn to read, but rather that hewill be ‘‘behind’’ the others. The certainty that their children will have

no problem learning to read comes from three major underlying princi-

ples of the Japanese philosophy on education: (1) that all children have

equal or equivalent intellectual potential; (2) that all children have the

ability to apply themselves and assimilate the material in the programs:

(3) that the habits, such as application and attention, on which any aca-

demic success is founded, can be learned.

The fact that everyone, parents and teachers alike, accepts these princi-ples means that the di¤erences that appear between children are a result

of the quantity of work and e¤ort they put in, and of their perseverance,

and not merely a result of their individual potential. These three princi-

ples also, in fact, fail to take into account any reference to the social or

economic class a child lives in, as if both these factors were of no conse-

quence and had no influence on the child’s performance.

This concept of children’s abilities boils down to a ‘‘denial’’ of academic

failure. So it is that passing to the next grade is automatic in Japan (exceptin rare cases of long-term absence due to illness). This is certainly due to the

fact that holding a child back a year is seen as extremely damaging, since it

excludes the child from the group he belongs to (the psychological conse-

quences would be worse than the increasing academic gap between him

and the others), but also because, according to the fore-mentioned princi-

ples, any lost ground or di‰culties can be compensated for with extra work

and e¤ort. Therefore, there is no sense in making a child who is behind

waste a year: he can catch up thanks to special tutoring, or more likelyby spending more time studying, usually organized outside class times.

Learning to read is no exception to the rule. Based on the presuppo-

sition that all children can succeed, and moreover, that they all start

Learning to read and write in Japanese 257

out with the same abilities to do so, regardless of their background, the

method used in schools takes little note of each child’s particularities and

mainly focuses on the acquisition of the reading mechanisms. Once again,

we have hit on an important point in the issue of foreign children in the

Japanese school system, for this makes an obstacle of the di¤erence that

characterizes these children by definition.

3.5. An academic method of teaching not adapted to di¤erence

Basically, the various concrete points discussed so far reveal that the way

the Japanese school system works today, in terms of both how it is orga-

nized and the pedagogy it applies, is not prepared to (successfully) accom-

modate foreign children. The Japanese school system is currently set up

to ‘‘teach reading’’ to Japanese children who are born of Japanese parentsand raised in Japan, who speak Japanese from birth and live in an envi-

ronment in which the only language spoken, heard and written is Japa-

nese. Moreover, the vast majority of Japanese teachers have never been

faced with teaching students other than these, or they have only had an

occasional student of di¤erent origins, and they have not been trained to

address the di¤erent needs in such cases.

In a sense, this is not surprising considering that since the 1950s, the

Japanese school system has been purposely conceived to provide all chil-dren throughout Japan with an education that is identical in all respects

(e.g., rhythm, progression, materials used): organized around negating the

di¤erences that may exist between children, the school system has cer-

tainly not been set up to accept and e¤ectively educate children who are

by definition ‘‘very di¤erent’’, except perhaps at the level of certain well-

intentioned teachers. And so far, we haven’t even mentioned the case of

children who arrive in Japan already well into their school years.

Under these circumstances, how can Japanese schools address theneeds of foreign children in a system that otherwise, as we have seen, re-

fuses the very notion of academic failure? In the present state of a¤airs,

this seems to be a nearly impossible feat, unless, as discussed in section

3, there is a way out of this problem of school.

4. Demography, immigration, and schools

The Japanese statistics bureau’s projections, based on current birth

rate figures, estimate the population of Japan in one century (2100) at

just over half (e67,000,000) the population of today (e127,000,000).

258 C. Galan

Whatever general solution the Japanese authorities decide on to resolve

the impending shortage of workers (projections show 1 retired person for

every 1.5 workers in 2050) (Somusho 2000), it is hard to see how they could

avoid resorting to foreign immigration on some scale. This is a topic of

great debate in Japan, and should the country ever implement an active

immigration policy, it would certainly be highly controlled and regulated.

For a long time, it could be said of foreigners living in Japan that ifthey did not have sound speaking, reading and writing skills in Japanese,

at least they had the will to learn. Of course, there were some who spent

years in Japan without ever being able to read Japanese, or more rarely,

without being able to speak the language. But these cases were in the mi-

nority. Mixed couples formed and settled permanently in Japan, but rela-

tively few non-mixed couples settled in Japan for long periods. Generally

speaking, there were until now few foreigners in Japan, and consequently

very few foreign children in Japanese schools. Thus, over ten years agowhen I first took an interest in how reading was taught in Japan, I wrote

that elementary school teachers in Japan taught in a context that was to-

tally foreign to that of teachers in Europe, and certainly to teachers in

France: i.e., at whatever level they might teach, Japanese teachers were

sure of having students who were all fluent in Japanese (I prefer to phrase

it this way rather than to use the term ‘‘linguistic homogeneity’’ so as to

avoid pigeonholing the ‘‘foreign’’ children from the di¤erent communities

already settled in Japan for several generations); in addition, the large ma-jority of these children’s parents also spoke and understood the language,

having been for the most part educated in the Japanese school system.

Today, however, it is this issue that is facing change. The immigration

of non-Japanese speakers, in large part from culturally unsinicized coun-

tries and mainly for economic reasons, is surpassing the forms of immi-

gration known to Japan thus far (Somusho 2001, 2003a, 2003b). A recent

report from the OECD published this January (2004) discusses the world-

wide phenomenon of the ‘‘new immigrant workers’’, or in other words,workers whose motivation is to find a job that will bring them to the

world’s most prosperous countries. The aging of the population and a

shortage of workforce are the two main reasons for which the host coun-

tries encourage this movement. Japan definitely fits this profile3, except

that it has not yet decided to open its borders and is wondering how

to go about doing so (see OECD report [2004]). The ‘‘new immigrant

workers’’ include qualified workers as well as less trained or untrained mi-

grants. Their move to the host country may be permanent or temporary,depending on the policies in force, but the latter case most often involves

temporary immigrants seeking long-term status. As these immigrants will

come to Japan solely for economic reasons, their investment in studying

Learning to read and write in Japanese 259

the Japanese language — if they find time for this outside work — will be

minimal and most likely not allow them to attain an adult level of profi-

ciency in the written language.

Furthermore, unless you wager on the Japanese authorities’ chances of

making sure these immigrants stay single, or that if they do get married, it

is to Japanese spouses, or that if they do marry other immigrants, they

wait to have children until they are back in their own country, or that, ifthey were already married in their country, they will not try to bring over

their family, Japanese schools in the years to come will be confronted

with a large-scale influx of schoolchildren who have neither the same lin-

guistic abilities nor the same cultural background as Japanese children.

What can Japanese schools do for these children? How will the school

system accommodate these children raised in Japan, but in families with-

out access to the country’s written (or even spoken) language? Of course,

on the surface, this issue seems no di¤erent from the question of edu-cating immigrant children in all the industrialized countries that have

chosen to open their doors to immigration. However, the particularity of

the writing system and the methods of teaching reading, as well as the

various characteristics of the Japanese school system presented in sections

2 and 3 appear to make the task of Japanese o‰cials considerably more

complicated than the already complex task of their Western counterparts.

In September 2002, the Japanese Ministry of Education published a

study related to the linguistic situation of foreign students attending Jap-anese schools: Nihongo shido ga hitsuyo na gaikokujin jido seito no ukeire

jokyo ni kansuru chosa (heisei 14 nendo) [Study on the situation regarding

the reception of foreign students needing Japanese language instruction

(2002)] (Monbukagakusho 2003). This study is the eighth of its kind con-

ducted in Japan since 1990. Its major findings are the following:

1. In 2002, the number of foreign students ‘‘needing Japanese language

instruction’’ in Japanese elementary, middle and high schools was18,734 (i.e., 0.12% of the total 15,442,659 children attending Japa-

nese schools): 12,046 elementary school students and 5,507 middle

school students (together representing 94.3%), 1,131 high school stu-

dents (6.0%) and 50 children attending special needs schools for the

handicapped (0.3%);

2. These students were distributed among 5,130 di¤erent public schools

(in a total of 39,600 schools): 3,097 elementary schools, 1,694 middle

schools, 300 high schools, 39 special needs schools;3. They were distributed among the schools in the following manner:

2,401 had only one foreign student, 947 had 2 students, 436 had 3

students, 269 had 4 students, and 1,077 had five students or more;

260 C. Galan

4. The local governments that counted less than 5 foreign students

numbered 569 (55.5% of the sample group: 1026), 145 (14.1%)

had between 5 and 10 foreign students, 231 (22.5%) counted between

10 and 50, 52 (5.1%) counted between 50 and 100, and 29 (2.8%)

counted over 200;

5. Only 84.6% of these children received special instruction in Japanese;

6. The period of time these children spent in the Japanese schoolsvaried: 3,606 (19.2%) attended the schools for under 6 months, 2,737

(14.6%) attended for 6 to 12 months, 4,208 (22.5%) attended for one

to two years, 2,754 (14.7%) attended for two to three years, 2,927

(15.6%) attended for three to five years, 2,214 (11.8%) attended for

five to ten years, and 288 (1.5%) attended for over ten years;

7. These children’s mother tongue was: Portuguese for 6,770 (36.1%) of

them, Chinese for 5,178 (27.6%) of them, Spanish for 2,560 (13.7%)

of them, and another mother tongue for 4,226 of them (Tagalog[7.1%], Korean [4.1%], Vietnamese [3.3%], English [2.5%], etc.

[5.5%]).

What do these figures tell us? First of all, it is important to note that

the number of foreign students ‘‘needing Japanese language instruction’’

continues to rise every year: the figure stood at 5,463 in 1991, at 11,553

in 1995 (Vaipae 2000: 185) and at 18,734 in 2002. On the other hand,

when compared to the total number of students enrolled in Japaneseschools, this last figure represents 0.12% in 2002, thus suggesting that the

issue of foreign children in Japanese schools remains peripheral: very few

schools, very few teachers, very few local governments are concerned.

Moreover, these children attend the schools for a very short time: 56.3%

of them are enrolled for under two years.

Secondly, one needs to ask what these figures really represent. In the

documents we consulted, the category of children ‘‘needing Japanese lan-

guage instruction’’ is never clearly defined, nor are the criteria dictatingthis categorization defined. The Japanese Ministry of Justice statistics (Ho-

musho 2002) relating to the immigrant populations living in Japan count

114,199 foreign children between the ages of 0 and 9, and 139,146 foreign

children between the ages of 10 and 19, i.e., 253,345 foreign children in all.

Even considering that this total includes children under school age (0 to 5

years old), the di¤erence between this number and the 18,734 school chil-

dren ‘‘needing Japanese language instruction’’ is hard to explain. More-

over, it is especially di‰cult, if one looks only at these figures, to distin-guish foreign children born in Japan — possibly to foreign parents who

were also born in Japan — from foreign children born outside Japan

and therefore, whose linguistic needs are, by circumstance, necessarily

Learning to read and write in Japanese 261

di¤erent. In any case, as Vaipae (2000: 185) writes, and I certainly agree:

‘‘[ . . . ] the number of children needing Japanese language instruction re-

ported by the Ministry of Education is thought to represent only a portion

of the actual number of language minority students in Japanese schools.’’

As this figure is based on the teachers’ counts (necessarily subjective), it

is indeed lacking in precision: ‘‘Since the term ‘children who need Japa-

nese language instruction’ is not strictly defined, [ . . . ] students who havedaily conversation skills in spoken Japanese are not generally considered

to ‘need Japanese language instruction’ ’’ (Vaipae 2000: 185). Vaipae

(2000: 189) also notes that ‘‘[ . . . ] teachers often failed to accurately esti-

mate their student’s social language skills.’’

The second impression one has is, therefore, that the question of for-

eign children in Japanese schools has not been clearly identified, nor ac-

curately measured by the Japanese authorities.

Furthermore, the figures relating to how long foreign children spend inschools in Japan clearly impose the question of what linguistic level they

acquire with regard to the ‘‘time factor’’: in 2002, 43.6% of the children

attended a Japanese school for more than two years, but only 1.5% (288)

received more than ten years of schooling. Theoretically, only this 1.5%

of foreign students was truly able to acquire proper proficiency in the

written language.

The study provides no information as to their capabilities, nor does it

mention the age of entry into the Japanese school system (another key cri-terion for determining the acquisition of proficiency in written Japanese).

The experience of other industrialized countries in fact demonstrates that

not only does it take the children of immigrants a long time to catch up

linguistically when they arrive in their host country, but moreover, that

the older they are when they come, the harder it is for them, so that some-

times it is even impossible to catch up (regarding this issue, see Vaipae

[2000: 190–191]). But none of these points are addressed in the Ministry

of Education’s 2002 study.The study does, however, clearly show that among all the local govern-

ments in Japan, only 12 prefectures (out of 47) and 87 municipalities with

foreign students in their schools (out of a total of 1,026) had recruited li-

censed teachers specialized in teaching Japanese, that only 13 prefectures

and 49 municipalities organized training sessions for the teachers, that

only 5 prefectures and 35 municipalities provided special educational ma-

terials for foreign students, and that only 1 prefecture and 37 municipal-

ities had updated the resources meant to help teachers confronted withthe presence of such children in their class.

The Japanese Ministry of Education a‰rms that while foreign children

are exempt from the obligatory schooling requirement, they do have the

262 C. Galan

right, if there parents so choose, to attend a Japanese public elementary

or middle school — and that they must receive the same treatment as Jap-

anese children, particularly in that there is no charge for schooling and

textbooks. However, in reality, as the results of the study demonstrate be-

yond any doubt, the Japanese school system is not prepared to accommo-

date these children.

Vaipae’s assertion (2000: 199) that ‘‘[ . . . ] initiatives by the Ministryof Education relating to LM children are strictly voluntary’’ holds true

today, and simple searches on the Internet reveal that most of the initia-

tives in this area seem to come from outside the public school system: as-

sociations, NGOs, municipalities, etc. Initiatives undertaken by local gov-

ernments seem to be e¤orts to ‘‘externalize’’ the problem, i.e., to ‘‘take it

away’’ from school (see: Maher [2003: 173]; and sites such as http://

www.ztv.ne.jp/junko-f/work.html [for children originally from Brazil]).

As Vaipae (2000: 228) states:

Japanese language instruction is provided in only about 20% of the schools

that host LM students nationwide, and then it is limited to short-term pull-out

programmes that focus on communication skills and are taught by untrained,

occasionally unwilling teachers with little or no outside support. Innovation

and student-centred programmes evolve only when individual teachers take the

initiative.

All the ‘‘foreign’’ children that come to Japan today or in the future

will not be the same age, nor will they have the same educational back-

ground, if any. Yet the arrival age is a critical point in terms of academic

success: the age of 15/16 is seen as an important stage in other industrial-

ized countries (see: Marechal 2002). But how will it be considered in

Japan? For all the linguistic and pedagogical reasons we have discussed

here, this critical age beyond which any e¤orts are doomed to fail could

very likely fall to an even younger age. Furthermore, the structures thatare generally set up in Western countries (see Ministere de l’Education

Nationale [2001]) aim to — ideally — place children temporarily in spe-

cial classes (or in special sessions o¤ered concurrently with their enroll-

ment in ‘‘normal’’ classes) in order to allow the children to successfully

integrate a regular class or course of studies as quickly as possible. Once

more we have to ask: how could a system like this be implemented in the

Japanese system considering all the obstacles we have identified here.

Moreover, it is a system dominated by textbook-oriented teaching meth-ods, meaning that reading alone provides access to all other subjects.

For the Japanese authorities, the possibilities are in fact more limited

than in the West, and basically come down to the following choice: either

Learning to read and write in Japanese 263

reform the school system in order to facilitate the accommodation of for-

eign students, or educate foreign students outside the school system. Thus,

in the work of organizations or through the individual or group initiatives

discussed here, there is no question of the concern and determination

to counterbalance the shortcomings of the Japanese school system in

terms of accommodating foreign students. However, there is also evi-

dence of an emerging policy that could become widespread in the future:i.e., the policy of educating these children outside the Japanese school sys-

tem or of keeping them in the public school system, but marginalizing

them by having them follow special courses of study — which has the

same e¤ect.

5. Multilingualism and the notion of citizenship

It is clear that the increasingly visible presence of the ‘‘newcomers’’ who

are greater and greater in number will create questions both as to Japa-

nese identity (Who is Japanese?) and what it means to be a citizen in Ja-

pan (Who actively participates in the life of the society and is successful

there?). There is good reason to believe that one of the criteria dictating

the reassessment of this new citizenship will very likely be mastery of the

language.

The arrival of Asian immigrant nyukamazu [ . . . ], for whom the problem of co-

habitation or integration is very di¤erent from that of the o[rudo]-kamazu (old

comers), destabilizes the cultural-ethnic conceptions of Japanese identity, particu-

larly in the case of the nikkeijin, emerging as a new type of non-Japanese Japa-

nese. (Pelletier 2003: 200)

More and more, Westerners manage to speak Japanese quite properly, while the

nikkeijin speak it poorly, even though they ‘‘look Japanese’’. This situation strikes

the Japanese as ‘‘unnatural’’ [ . . . ]. The existence of foreigners that are actually

‘‘very Japanese’’ and of Japanese who are ‘‘ethnically Japanese’’ (the nikkeijin)

but not ‘‘real Japanese’’ linguistically and behaviorally speaking, disrupts the old

balance between ethnic identity and socio-cultural identity. Indeed, in Japanese

popular thinking, this balance was seen as the quintessence and unique quality of

‘‘Japaneseness’’. The belief that anyone who speaks Japanese and physically looks

Japanese must be Japanese is thus shattered by what is perceived as ‘‘dissonance

between defining lines’’ [ . . . ] (Pelletier, 2003: 170).

The point of view that links the question of Japanese identity to the

issue of proficiency in the Japanese language seems to be of particular in-

terest and relevance here. Yet, we can surely go further if we broaden our

264 C. Galan

scope beyond the mere ability to speak and understand Japanese, to also

take into account the ability to read and write the language. Indeed, as

Unger a‰rms (1987: 104; cited by Carroll 2001: 171): ‘‘The Japanese at-

tachment to kanji is intimately tied to the shared experience of mastering

a complex body of knowledge that defines group membership.’’

Is this to say that those considered to be Japanese are or will be those

(and only those) who can read and write Japanese? It is di‰cult to say thistoday, although the discourse on illiteracy maintained in Japan since the

1950s suggests this is true. Indeed, to accept and reproduce the assertion

that the illiteracy rate in Japan is as low as 0.1 or 0.3%, as Japanese

authorities and certain Western scholars often do without the least evi-

dence from any national study based on objective, scientific criteria, is to

accept and only consider the Japanese population once ‘‘relieved’’ (to

skirt around the word ‘‘purged’’) of the following: burakumin, first-

generation (and to a lesser degree) second-generation Koreans, the physi-cally and mentally disabled, part of the generation sacrificed to the war

and now between 60 and 75 years old, those who came back from China,

day workers who lack the basic decent living conditions needed to main-

tain proficiency in reading, political refugees and registered or illegal im-

migrant workers, students who dropped out, etc. For the o‰cial discourse

on illiteracy hides another discourse that can be summed up as follows:

all ‘‘true’’ Japanese, all ‘‘normal’’ Japanese, know how to read. The

counterpart to this manner of thinking determines that those who do notknow how to read are not and cannot become Japanese (see Galan 1995a,

forthcoming).

Along the same lines, we may also assert that access to the written lan-

guage determines or will determine the superior level of citizenship in Ja-

pan. There is indeed a fundamental link between the notion of citizenship

and proficiency in the language of the country in question. The feeling of

belonging to a society depends largely on one’s certainty of having access

to all the available information in the said country. Learning not only thelanguage, but also to read and write in the language is to embark on a

process that enables social integration into the host country, or at the

very least, to use a phrase from the report presented to Prime Minister

Obuchi Keizo in January 2000 ‘‘Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century’’, is

one of the essential conditions that allow ‘‘foreigners to live normally

and comfortably in [Japan]’’ (Shusho kantei 2000: 2 chap. 1).

The concept of global literacy presented in the same report (Shusho

kantei 2000: 2 chap. 1) refers to the Japanese population’s need to acquiretrue proficiency in English if it is to attain a new ‘‘global’’ citizenship

during the twenty-first century. Yet, between the lines, in the concept

of ‘‘access to information’’, we can also read a prerequisite of ‘‘local’’

Learning to read and write in Japanese 265

citizenship for the non-Japanese inhabitants of the country. For how will

these populations succeed in gaining free access to information and

knowledge? Will it be via the English language that will be the country’s

second national language? Or will it be via the Japanese language alone?

Unless we envision a future Japan that chooses to follow Canada’s exam-

ple, it is safe to assume that, as it is today, information will, most likely

and for a long time to come, be accessible via the Japanese languagealone.

But, as Vaipae (Vaipae 2000: 234) writes, if the current teaching of

Japanese to LM students ‘‘may contribute to increased levels of social

communication skills, [it] stops far short of providing the instruction nec-

essary to build academic language skills (CALP)’’ — and even further

short of preparing them to be active citizens when this requires minimal

access to the information available in the country’s written language.

So there may well be a new breakdown of populations distinguishingtwo categories of individuals — and thus two categories of citizenship:

those who have access to writing and those who do not. The factor of the

time one has spent in Japan combined with the factor of the time spent

studying the Japanese language will determine to which category an indi-

vidual belongs.

6. Conclusion

Linguistic pluralism, assimilation, integration through language, interna-

tionalization (adoption of English as a national language) . . . no matter

how the linguistic situation in Japan evolves in the future, or how the

country’s leaders try to make it evolve, theses leaders will not, in our

opinion, be able to avoid reassessing the issue of their writing system.

We fully agree with Unger’s statement that ‘‘Japanese society may have

turned its back on script reform for the time being, but the underlyingissues have not gone away.’’ (Unger 1996: 125; cited by Carroll 2001:

176).

Indeed, considering that it takes the Japanese nine (or twelve) years to

be fully at ease with the adult writing system, we can set down the princi-

ple that anyone who does not receive these nine (or twelve) years of edu-

cation in Japan — notably the foreigners and children of foreigners who

live in Japan — has no chance of becoming proficient in the written lan-

guage. It is true that the qualities of maturity (for older students andadults) and motivation can be factors and reduce the time needed to

learn, but due to the (current?) limits of the human memory, there cannot

be much of a shortcut.

266 C. Galan

If Japan decides to become an open, multilingual and/or multicultural

society, and/or if it undertakes a policy to integrate its immigrant

workers, the question of access to the written language for all those living

in Japan will immediately impose itself, with the issues of citizenship and

equality as an undercurrent. The Japanese school system will thus be con-

fronted with the formidable challenge of ensuring access to the written

language for a large number of people whose mother tongue and/or lan-guage spoken at home is not Japanese, something which this system is

clearly unprepared for today.

If, however, Japan chooses a policy of separate development, there

is no doubt that its current schools and writing system will be the pol-

icy’s best instruments, and the most e¤ective armor against any alter-

ation of ‘‘Japaneseness’’ such as it is perceived today. Yet the question

is whether or not this position will be viable in the long term, or be

reasonable.Indeed, although it is too early to tell whether, in the future, access to

writing will define Japanese identity, or be a major factor in defining it

(although this is already true in the current discourse on illiteracy), it

seems obvious that it will increasingly play a determining role in access

to citizenship for the inhabitants of Japan.

In more educational terms, instruction of the language to non-Japanese

learners clearly must also be given greater thought, including consider-

ation not only of people who are extremely determined to learn the Japa-nese language, but also those — adults or children — who have neither

the desire nor the motivation or time to learn it. Along the same lines, it

will be interesting to see whether, in the future, this debate will still be

limited to the scope of the NGO’s and local governments, and organiza-

tions such as the Japan Foundation, or if the school system — and its

teachers — will also get involved.

Ultimately, the question of the role and purpose of the Japanese school

system will impose itself, at which point this role and purpose will mostlikely be redefined, based, in particular, on the notion of ‘‘di¤erence’’ —

di¤erence that is accepted and perceived as a reality, and even a resource,

rather than just a synonym for exclusion. In this light, we can imagine

that giving proper thought to the issues concerning the education of for-

eign children could be to the benefit of all Japanese children — notably

by making parents and teachers aware of the fact that it is normal for

children to progress at di¤erent rates, that their needs and abilities vary

from one child to another, and that, particularly when it comes to read-ing, children do not all go about it in the same way.

Toulouse

Learning to read and write in Japanese 267

Notes

1. I will not elaborate here on the question of this method’s relevance and true or claimed

e¤ectiveness; this is an issue I have explored elsewhere: see Galan (2001), notably pages

11 to 40 and 280 to 308.

2. Jukus are ‘‘after-school schools’’ where children go mainly to work on what they are

studying at the public school or to get ahead in the program. These schools are private

and charge tuition, and the methods they use, although based largely on individual

work, are strictly traditional. They are ruled by the principle of ‘‘learning by heart’’, as

the ultimate goal is not to educate or train children, but to prepare them for exams. The

rate of attendance increases in proportion to the children’s level of studies.

3. ‘‘The phenomenon of job-based immigration is, according to the OECD, particularly

prevalent in Japan, in South Korea, and in the U.S.’’ (Le Monde, 24 January 2004).

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