Returning Student

Last Friday I was introduced to a new student at the junior high school. He’s 15, Japanese by birth, but has spent the last 10 years living in New York. He’s back for in Japan while the American schools are on summer vacation.

I’ve had a few encounters before with students who had lived abroad. More here than in Ajimu. In Ajimu people don't seem to travel as much. But my last year in Ajimu there was a 4th grade girl whose family had just returned from Taiwan. She was decently conversant in English, so I used to have small conversations with her in the hall or during lunchtime.

Here in Gifu at the elementary school last year I had two students whose families had spent a year in Indonesia. Again, they were decently conversant in English; we could talk a bit.

(Of course neither Taiwan nor Indonesia are English-speaking countries, but whenever a Japanese person leaves Japan their English seems to improve. The failure of the Japanese English Education system, or why no one seems to be able to learn English inside Japan, is another topic for another post.)

And then this year I was coaching speech class. There was a student with particularly good English ability. I had long suspected she was getting outside tutoring, but after she delivered her first speech, I realized the pronunciation was too perfect. “You’ve been to America before, haven’t you?” I said. Turns out she had lived in Rhode Island for a year back when she was in 3rd grade.

It’s usually a lot of fun interacting with these returning students because of the increased English ability. Usually most of them are eager to show off their English skills, and I’m eager to give them the opportunity, so as to impress upon their classmates that, yes, English can be learned.

The danger is of course that the English class can become their personal showcase. For instance, in Ajimu the girl who had lived in Taiwan started to get very upset whenever she would lose in English class. This was true even when we were playing running games or drawing games or games where the English component was secondary to the activity.

The girls who had been to Indonesia were a lot of fun. They translated everything their classmates were saying.
One of my strategies when I go to an elementary school is to pretend to suddenly lose the ability to understand Japanese whenever the conversation turns to bathroom humor. So these girls would jump right in whenever there was a communication problem. “It means ‘pooh’,” they would say. “He’s asking if you like pooh.”
“Oh,” I would say as if suddenly understanding it for the first time. “Tell him no.”

But in the case of this new student, he’s been living in America for most of his life. He’s arguably more American than Japanese.

It’s nice having someone who can speak English at the school. It gives him a chance to show off his English, and it gives me a chance to show off mine. (I’m always forced to talk in such slow simple English, the students are always amazed when they see that English is a language you can actually converse in like a normal person).

For instance recently we were doing a unit in English class on the atomic bombings. (It is a bit heavy stuff for students who mostly can’t even introduce themselves in English, but it is part of the textbook’s efforts to integrate peace education). So I’ve got a picture of an atomic bomb and a hydrogen bomb, and I’m doing my best to explain the difference in simple English, like, “This is an A-bomb. Do you know what A-Bomb means? It’s atomic bomb. This is the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is an H-Bomb. Do you know what H-Bomb means? Hydrogen Bomb. It is more powerful than the atomic bomb. Both the atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb are nuclear weapons.”

So I’m saying this as slow as I can, and using as simple English as I can, and of course the students still aren’t understanding it. And then the returning student raises his hand and says in fluent English, “Wait, which is the bomb that kills all the people but leaves the buildings standing. Is that the hydrogen bomb?”

“Ah, no, you’re thinking of the neutron bomb, the ultimate capitalist weapon,” I replied in my regular tone. There are murmurs of amazement from the other students, and even the English teacher doesn’t understand what we are saying, so she just says to me, “more slowly please.” So, I make an effort to explain the neutron bomb in simple English. “If neutron bomb, we are dead, but school is okay.”

The homeroom teachers are having a bit of a hard time deciding what to do with this kid, especially during English class. It is so pointless to have him sit through all the drills with the rest of the students. During pronunciation practice he’ll say, “Wait, did you want me to say the words as well,” and I’ll be like, “I don’t care. Either way.”

“Returning Students” as they are called in Japan, I’m sure represent a bit of a headache anywhere. They don’t know anyone, they haven’t been studying the same things as the rest of the class, and they often don’t know the social norms of their own country.

But in Japan, because of both the insular nature of the culture and because of the many layers of unspoken rules, represents a particular problem.

In fact the Japanese schooling, especially at the lower grades, is not so much education as cultural indoctrination. The emphasis is not on the subjects being studied, but on learning correct behavior. A returning student can easily be confused by the many layers of code, which seem to govern the classmates’ behavior.

Some years ago there was an incident when a Japanese teacher was teaching a room full of returning students. “It sure is cold in this room,” she said. She was shocked to discover that none of the students realized this was a request to shut the windows, and remained sitting in their seats. I’m told this was widely reported in the Japanese media as an example of the problem of educating returning students.

This past year, a Japanese comedian assaulted a female admirer because he thought she wasn’t speaking to him with enough respect. The Japanese media theorized that this might have been because the woman lived abroad during her childhood, and didn’t know the proper way of speaking.

That being said, my first impression upon meeting this returning student is how well adjusted he seems to be. I guess my impression of students caught between two cultures is that they tend to grow up socially awkward in both, but he seems amazingly mature and adult like for his age. And he seems to be fitting in with the other kids very well also.

“What do you think of the classes?” I asked him. “The teaching style is a lot different from America, isn’t it?”

He agreed, but then instead of highlighting things like the rote memorization or the passive role of the students, he mentioned, “The biggest difference is the way they teach World War II. In the U.S. schools they teach you how evil the axis powers are. In Japan they teach the war as if it was a great tragedy, with no one really in the right or wrong.”