Yamagata: Country kids need language support

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the Japan Times,
THE ZEIT GIST

Country kids need language support

Growing educational diversity not limited to urban areas
By CHRIS BURGESS

Ji Young was 13 when she moved from Seoul to a small village in Yamagata
in 1999. Her mother had arrived from Korea a few months earlier to marry a
Japanese man. Entering the local high school, she struggled at first with
the language, cultural differences, and relations with friends, though
quickly picked up spoken Japanese. Ji Young's mother's case was a fairly
common example of a non-Japanese woman marrying a Japanese man who brings
(or is later joined by -- "yobiyose") a child or children ("tsureko") from
a first marriage. And Yamagata Prefecture is a fairly typical destination
for such children.

This region of around 1.25 million people located in Tohoku, was the first
place in Japan to officially "bring in" brides from abroad, in 1985,
triggering a nation-wide international marriage boom. Today, one in 17
(6.1 percent) of all marriages in the prefecture are international
marriages, compared with around one in 20 nationally. And while most of
the children of international marriages are born and brought up in Japan,
usually hold Japanese citizenship and speak fluent Japanese, stepchildren
like Ji Young are typical of what researchers currently refer to as
"newcomer" children -- those children who were born and brought up outside
of Japan. Haruo Ota, perhaps the leading researcher in this area, argues
that the growing presence of these children in Japanese society presents
one of the most significant historical challenges to the Japanese public
school system.

At the moment, however, neither local nor national governments are
adequately addressing the challenge of newcomer children outside urban
areas, despite the fact that it is the more commonly observed situation
throughout Japan. According to government figures for 2004, the number of
registered foreign children of compulsory school age was 120,417, with the
number actually enrolled in Japanese public schools standing at 70,345.
While the discrepancy can be partly explained by enrollment in private,
ethnic, and international schools, there are also estimated to be a large
number of non-attendees, particularly among children of "nikkeijin."

Of the 70,345 attendees, 19,678 were classified as "requiring Japanese
language instruction," with 84 percent actually receiving some kind of
support. Broken down by region, Aichi Prefecture had the highest number
(3,057) of students classified as needing language support, while Yamagata
ranked in the lower half, with only 73 students. These figures form the
background for a glut of recent research on newcomer children in Japanese
public schools. The vast majority of this work has focused on what have
been called "diversity points," urban areas with large visible
concentrations of non-Japanese, including not only Aichi Prefecture but
also places such as Kanagawa Prefecture (Kawasaki City), Shizuoka
Prefecture (Hamamatsu City), Gunma Prefecture (Ota City), as well as Tokyo
and Osaka. However, most children who require Japanese instruction are not
concentrated in one area but spread across Japan, with over 80 percent of
schools and more than half of villages, towns, and cities having four or
fewer such students.

In other words, statistically, regions such as Yamagata do, in some ways,
better reflect the situation and experiences of the majority of
non-Japanese children in Japanese public schools compared with the
diversity points. However, despite the fact that the children in these
nonmetropolitan regions represent some of the most needy cases, they tend
to be ignored by researchers and their schools ineligible for government
support. A further problem is the category "foreign students who need
Japanese instruction" itself. First, there is no clear official definition
of the term, judgment usually being left to individual schools. Second,
once students are adjudged to have reached a certain level of Japanese --
usually proficiency in daily conversation and basic reading -- they
"disappear" from the statistics, typically after a year or so of
schooling.

Third, children who are born and brought up in Japan and/or who possess
dual nationality are not included in the category. Thus, although the
figure of 73 children "who need Japanese instruction" gives the impression
of a very low level of cultural diversity, this is in reality only the tip
of the multicultural iceberg. The 20 percent of schools which have more
than four students deemed to require language help have generally enjoyed
significant support from the Ministry of Education (MEXT). Since 1992,
additional teachers have been dispatched to individual schools
specifically to teach Japanese as a second language (JSL) and provide
guidance on school culture. In 2004, for example, 985 such teachers were
dispatched, though not all of these were Japanese teaching specialists.
Unfortunately, the 80 percent of public schools in Japan with four or
fewer such students generally fail to qualify for these kinds of national
assistance. As a result, support tends to come not from inside but from
outside the school. Sometimes, volunteer organizations are the only source
of support for many newcomer children in Japan.

In this respect, the support offered by grassroots organizations all over
Japan fills a crucial gap. According to a Cabinet Office survey, as of
November 2004 there were more than 19,000 officially licensed NPOs
nation-wide, a six-fold increase over four years. And although there is no
precise data on how many of these specifically support newcomer children,
3.3 percent of civic organizations, including NPOs, gave education as
their main activity, with a further 17.4 percent involved in a secondary
role. In Yamagata, the necessity of providing newcomer children with
appropriate Japanese language support was first discussed in a December
2001 symposium sponsored by IVY, a local NGO. Since then, progress in the
form of practical policy response has been mixed. The prefectural
government's recent 10-year plan barely mentioned the issue. On the
municipal level, Yamagata City has seen the most promising initiatives.

In May 2004, Yamagata City International Friendship Association (YIFA) --
an independent organization largely funded by the city government -- made
use of a one-off national government regional development grant to
establish a "Resident Foreigner School Support Program." Aimed at children
between five and 20 and utilizing both bilingual staff and student
volunteers, the program offers both intensive five-day-a-week classes for
new arrivals and supplementary classes at weekends for those already
attending school. Unfortunately, the outlook for such organizations is
uncertain. The YIFA program barely survived into its second year following
the end of the initial government grant and only last minute funds from
the city government saved the program, albeit one that had to be
drastically cut back.

"Basically, with the lack of resources we are unable to provide proper
support," one veteran says. "Moreover, with administrative restrictions
being so stifling, I wonder just for who and why we're doing this." As
numbers of NPOs and other civic organizations continue to increase
nationally in order to satisfy the needs of growing local educational
diversity, funding is likely to become even tighter and red tape more
cumbersome. Ji Young, the 13-year-old Korean girl who followed her mother
to Yamagata, was lucky to have a supportive family, friends, teachers, and
neighbors in her struggle to adapt to Japanese public school life. But
thousands of students in hundreds of schools across Japan continue to
struggle with little or no support at all.

Dr. Chris Burgess lectures in Japanese Studies at Tsuda College Send
comments to: community at japantimes.co.jp
The Japan Times: March 14, 2006

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