Abstract
Japan consists of four main islands (Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu and Hokkaido and the Ryukyu Islands—including Okinawa—also known as the Nansei-Shoto group, and possibly the disputed Kuril group and a number of smaller islands), lying along the northeast coast of Asia, covering some 145, 882 square miles (377, 835 sq. km.). If the Japanese islands were stretched out along the United States East Coast, they would reach from Maine to Florida (roughly 1, 300 miles). Japan has a population of some 126, 549, 976 people. (See Appendix A, Figure 5.)
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Notes
Kokugo was tied to parallel notions of moral education and to the notion of kokutai [national essence]. Kokugo also gave rise to a notion that the language had a kind of volksgeist [kotodama]. All of this played well in the rising tide of nationalism.
The Japanese educational system employed dialect tags, emulating the practice in such places as Wales where a ‘Welsh Not’ stigma was employed.
Ainu is essentially a dead language; there are virtually no native speakers left, and the few remaining are very elderly. The best that can be hoped for in this context is an historical preservation, or possibly a small population of second-language speakers of Ainu in a context in which the language has an extremely limited number of registers.
Japan has been a significant borrower of foreign terms. McCreary (1990) estimates that 95 per cent of recent loanwords in Japanese are taken from English; these words occur in a wide variety of registers. One must not overlook sports register, since baseball has become rooted in Japan and since American football is slowly moving into Japan.
For example, French is often used in advertising. Near Kaplan’s former residence in Urayasu City, there was in 1998–99 a so-called ‘French’ restaurant whose menu contained some French translations of the various dishes; in a shopping area near Shin Urayasu Station, there was also a restaurant featuring a Korean menu, and another featuring an English menu.
Indeed, the National Language Research Institute reports to the Ministry of Education. It does not create language policy; rather, it publishes reports from which the Ministry of Education undertakes to develop policy.
In any number of instances, people have explained some particular practice with the words “This is Japan!” or “We have always done it this way, “ the latter often implying a practice dating from the time of the Meiji restoration.
Curriculum is time-bound; there are only so many classroom hours in a day, so many days in a school week, so many weeks in an academic year. To increase the time allocation for any given subject, time must be deleted from some other subject. Similarly, there is a finite amount of money in the annual school budget; to allocate greater resources to some particular area implies deleting that amount from one or more other areas.
Another curious phenomenon lies in the fact that Korean, Mandarin, and other Asian languages are not included among the languages permitted in the school curriculum. Only in very recent years has there been action to recognise the Ainu people; Ainu culture can now be taught, but only to Ainu people. The Ainu language is also not included in the school curriculum.
U.S. = 43 (66%); Canada = 8 (12%) ; New Zealand = 4 (6%); Australia = 4 (6%); Ireland = 2 (3%); Korea = 1 (1.5%); United Kingdom = 1 (1.5%); India = 1 (1.5%); Ghana = 1 (1.5%) = TOTAL 65 (100%).
Under the headline ‘A Bold Approach to Bilingualism, ‘ Kodera (1999) reports on an immersion English program at Katoh Gakuin in Shizuoka Prefecture. This program, the only such program in Japan, uses English as a medium of instruction in primary school.
Kaplan is aware of some classes at tertiary level having as many as 100 students.
One would assume, since the average class size is large and since the class hour is no more than 50 minutes-and sometimes less-that the average student receives something like one minute of individual instruction per 50-minute class hour.
In Kaplan’s experience, to a significant extent, instruction is delivered in teacher-centred classrooms; a circumstance in which teachers do on the order of 85 per cent of the talking, and students speak only relatively rarely and then largely in some sort of oral drill, either memorised or repetitive of structures introduced by the teacher during the lesson. There is little question that rote learning plays a large part in education in Japan.
TOEFL, produced and administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), Princeton, NJ. An article by Shoichi Kobayashi, entitled ‘English can save Japan, ‘ which appeared in the Japan Times, 3 August 1999, p. 16, gives an even more depressing figure—”...the TOEFL... tests administered by the U.N. showed the average score of Japanese students ranked 181st among 189 member countries of the United Nations....”
This number is very conservative; it represents only the student population in lower secondary school. A more realistic count would probably include at least 6, 782, 000 students as well as an uncounted number of students studying in ‘juku’—private ‘cram’ schools.
Prime Minister Obuchi, in 1999, authorised the preparation of a report on Japan’s Goals for the 21st century. That report considered the matter of English in Japan and went so far as to recommend that English be made the second official language of Japan. Unfortunately, with the death of Obuchi and the elections that took place in 2000, nothing came of the report. The official English version of the report of the Commission on Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century can be found at [http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/21century/report/pdfs].
Monbusho—The Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture—employs 140, 000 people; the ministry absolutely controls all educational matters, even faculty salaries—it must approve even minor variations in salary at all educational institutions (even private schools). There are under its control 99 national universities, 50 other public institutions, and 400 private institutions, of which a significant number are junior colleges, many being private colleges for women. Roughly 80 per cent of the MOE’s budget goes to higher education.
It has been reported (Kubota 1998; Yvette Slaughter, personal communication) that debating, based on logical argumentation, has become popular in some Japanese language school classrooms, and that there has been a movement in junior high schools to get students to give opinions and debate ideas, albeit that this occurs in a stilted manner. It is unclear whether the evidence for these school practices is anecdotal or is becoming more widespread, but there is no evidence to indicate that these practices have spread to the tertiary level.
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Kaplan, R.B., Baldauf, R.B. (2003). Language Planning in Japan. In: Language and Language-in-Education Planning in the Pacific Basin. Language Policy, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0145-7_2
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