Some Japanese are insufferable ethnobigots

Here's another long, meandering post sparked by a short conversation. There's no adoption content at all.

As background, I've mentioned this before, but I don't speak Japanese. I took a private lesson during a stay in Japan when I was a teenager, but didn't get too far past that. I just didn't have the motivation. I felt bad for being monolingual. I had a fleeting affair with the German language but it beat me into submission before I could get past the neuter gender. Then Spanish warmly welcomed me. After I started seriously studying Spanish, I gave up the guilt.

Linguists note that the Chinese are supercharged language keepers compared to the Japanese. The Chinese diaspora has touched almost every continent. Somehow they manage, very frequently, to keep their language to the second and even third generation. I have many examples to contrast with the Chinese. Living in Florida, I knew tons of kids whose parents came from Cuba or other Spanish-speaking countries, and all of them complained about speaking miserable Spanish. Mexican-Americans in border states hang on to fluency longer, but not by much. I have a good friend who's Palestinian-American, and he too spoke what he called "kitchen Arabic". He now speaks standard Arabic fluently, but it cost him many years of really hard work.

Japan had a diaspora concentrated in the 19th to early 20th century in which immigrants ended up in places like Brazil, Hawaii and Peru. The second generation everywhere had low rates of language retention. What this all means is that by not speaking Japanese, I'm actually being more authentically Japanese-American!

I work with a Japanese-American woman. I'll call her K. Both her parents emigrated from Japan and run a restaurant together here in Atlanta. A time came up when I needed some Japanese translation. Rude people occasionally tsk-tsk me for not speaking "my own" language, so I'm so sensitive I would never ask another Japanese-American if they spoke Japanese. Instead, I asked K, "So you don't speak Japanese, do you?" She said, "No, I don't. I just understand a few words and sentences." We commiserated a little bit about those supercharged Chinese, and that was all.

Just tonight I had another conversation with K. She's now working part-time because she's starting a college degree. As an elective, she's taking Japanese. But she's just been dropped from the class. The teacher told her that as a "heritage speaker" she doesn’t belong there.

Now, this might make sense if there was a class for Japanese heritage speakers. Maybe it exists in Hawaii, but sure as hell not in Atlanta! As an occasional language teacher, I understand the need for these classes. For Spanish it's especially crucial. An English speaker foreign to Spanish comprehends the big cognate words before they understand the small, everyday ones; for a heritage speaker, the small ones are often already packed in the mental toolcase, but the confidence to put the big cognates together is lacking. There's a serious lack of Spanish classes for heritage speakers. Reversing the stand of those Monolingualism or Death! English-only activists, I'm much more concerned about the state of Spanish-language education in our country. Anyway, given how lacking these heritage classes are in Spanish, of course there's none for Japanese here.

K was given another choice, which was to take the next level up in Japanese. She was completely unprepared for that level, and her writing skills in particular would be far behind. She couldn't do it; she would have been lost. She told me indignantly that there were several people in the class who had lived in Japan, which she has never done, and that they obviouslyspoke Japanese better than she did. They weren't Japanese-American, and they were allowed to stay.

I had the sneaking suspicion of racism. Then I had an even sneakier suspicion.

"Is the teacher Japanese?"

"Yes! I think she's prejudiced against Japanese-Americans!"

We commiserated. I believed her, and said she should think about writing a letter of protest, but how likely is it that someone at the university would believe her and act on it?

Some people reading this may have trouble understanding why a teacher would do something like that. I can’t call it racism so I'll use the word "ethnobigotry" instead. The idea is that Japaneseness is next to godliness. You have to be ever vigilant to maintain your Japaneseness and that of your children. If you "fall" from a state of being Japanese, you might turn into a pitiable thing lower than if you were never Japanese to begin with. Obviously not all Japanese think this way, but it's not an uncommon idea.

Any person of immigrant heritage will have some degree of conflict when interacting with related people whose families didn't leave. I think it's unrealistic for anyone, be they Irish-American or Cuban-American or whatever, to return to their ancestral country and expect to be welcomed with open arms as if they'd never left. But we're not talking about K demanding to be treated like a Japanese person. She just wanted a chance to learn Japanese like any other regular student of any other race or cultural background, and the teacher is screwing her over.

I found an interesting essay on a related subject. It covers prejudice not against Japanese-Americans but against Japanese-Brazilians. It's called "Media Images, Immigrant Reality: Ethnic Prejudice and Tradition in Japanese Media Representations of Japanese-Brazilian Return Migrants" by Takeyuki “Gaku” Tsuda and is available here in PDF or here in Googlefied HTML.

Among the many expressions of disparagement directed toward the first generation nikkeijin (the original Japanese emigrants), the following statement by an older Tokyo resident was quite representative:

The Japanese do not perceive the nikkeijin well. They are seen as people who were from Japanese rural villages and were poor. They were the type of low level people who couldn't survive in Japan, so they had to discard Japan and go abroad. They are seen as nihonjin shikkaku (not worthy of being Japanese)--people who didn't have much ability.

A middle-aged housewife in Oizumi-town in Gunma-prefecture was even more explicit:

The nikkeijin are low level people. They were Japanese social dropouts who were poor and uneducated. These were people who had nothing in Japan, so said to themselves, 'regardless of how horrible things are overseas, they can't be worse than my life in Japan.' Therefore, they abandoned their own country and fled abroad.

Now, K's parents aren't from this original wave of emigration, and my father isn't really an emigrant at all. Nevertheless, I feel a kinship with these nikkeijin. They were a bunch of losers, rebels, dreamers, rejects, weirdos... people who weren't afraid to leave it all behind. They stopped worrying so much about the purity of their blood and language, and got to work and started creating their own hybrid cultures.