Ybl16 Language Policy in Japan The Challenge of Change PDF

Language Policy in Japan
The Challenge of Change
Over the last thirty years, two social developments have occurred that have
led to a need for change in language policy in Japan. One is the increase in
the number of migrants needing opportunities to learn Japanese as a second
language, the other is the influence of electronic technologies on the way
Japanese is written. This book looks at the impact of these developments on
linguistic behaviour and language management and policy, and at the role
of language ideology in the way they have been addressed. Immigration-
induced demographic changes confront long-cherished notions of national
monolingualism, and technological advances in electronic text production
have led to textual practices with ramifications for script use and for literacy
in general. The book will be welcomed by researchers and professionals in
language policy and management, and by those working in Japanese Studies.
nanette gottlieb is Professor of Japanese Studies in the Japan Program of

the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University
of Queensland. She has published widely in international journals in the areas
of language modernisation, script reform, script policy and the impact of word
processing technology in Japan. Her recent publications include Language and
Society in Japan (Cambridge, 2005) and Linguistic Stereotyping and Minority
Groups in Japan (2006).
Language Policy in Japan
The Challenge of Change
Nanette Gottlieb
The University of Queensland
cambridge university press
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Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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c Nanette Gottlieb 2012
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2012
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Gottlieb, Nanette, 1948–
Language policy in Japan : the challenge of change / Nanette Gottlieb.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-00716-1 (hardback)
1. Second language acquisition – Japan. 2. Linguistics – Study and teaching – Japan.
3. Language and culture – Japan. 4. Citizenship – Japan. 5. Japan – Languages.
6. Language policy – Japan. 7. Japanese language – Political aspects. I. Title.
P57.J3L37 2012
306.44 952 – dc23 2011033047
ISBN 978-1-107-00716-1 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
I dedicate this book to the memory of my dear friend,
Kobayashi Yōko.
ddd ddddddddd
Contents
Preface page ix
Acknowledgments xiv
1 Language ideology, planning and policy 1

2 The language needs of immigrants 33
3 Foreign languages other than English in education and
the community 64
4 Technology and language policy change 98
5 National language policy and an internationalising
community 123
Conclusion 161
Notes to the text 167

References 180
Index 205
vii
Preface
This book examines two language issues in Japan today which have arisen from
significant developments in the social environment over the last three decades
and have pointed to a need for a change in language policy. One is the increase
in the number of migrants needing opportunities to learn Japanese as a second
language (JSL), the other is the influence of electronic technologies on the way
Japanese is written. Immigration-induced demographic changes confront long-
cherished notions of national monolingualism, and technological advances in
electronic text production have led to textual practices with ramifications for
script use and for literacy in general. My central concern is to show whether
and how language policy authorities in Japan are moving to accommodate
these social and cultural changes. Both the integration of immigrants and new
practices affecting literacy are important to the social fabric; it is essential,
therefore, that expectations about language in these areas are clear and that
policy addresses the realities of the present rather than harking back to an
earlier social context.
In one of these two areas, a national policy already exists; in the other, it does
not. In one of these areas, the national policy has been revised to acknowledge
change; in the other, no national-level policy has yet been developed. In the area
of kanji policy, deeply rooted in Japanese language ideology and important to
ethnic mainstream Japanese citizens as it is, the widespread uptake of electronic
text production has been viewed as necessitating a revision of the List of
Characters for General Use, which has just been expanded to acknowledge that
larger numbers of kanji are now routinely used than was the case when writing
by hand alone. In the second, more contentious area, that of providing JSL
instruction for migrants to Japan at a national rather than local level, no policy
currently exists, in large part because such a move goes against deep-seated
national language ideologies of monoethnicity and monolingualism. It is only
very recently that the national government – in contrast to local governments,
which have been active in this area for years – has begun to make sporadic
provision for language training in certain clearly defined areas relating to
employment.
ix
x Preface
The main thrust of this book is therefore on the challenge Japan faces in
opening up thinking at national government level to encompass the implications
for social cohesion of the growing numbers of residents in local communities
who need to learn Japanese. Over the past three decades this has developed far
beyond the presence of long-established Chinese and Korean ethnic groups, as
a result of globalisation-induced labour and other migration from many parts
of the world, in particular from other parts of Asia and from South America.
The announcement by the government on 30 November 2010 of the Revised
List of Characters for General Use shows that national-level language policy
can be changed when a need is seen to exist, as I will show in Chapter 4. While
local governments and community groups have known for many years that
immigrants need opportunities to develop Japanese-language skills which will
smooth their lives and enable them to contribute fully to their new communities,
however, the national government has only recently begun to acknowledge this
and has put together ad hoc policies to meet those needs in certain areas but
not across the board. Japan’s intake of foreign labour is small in comparison
with other countries but has increased rapidly since the 1980s. The growing
proportion of non-Japanese people in the population – many of whom now stay
on as permanent residents – means that Japan has in fact become a country of
immigration, although this is not acknowledged in national political discourse,
with foreign workers being admitted under a range of disparate schemes rather
than under a coordinated immigration policy. No political will to address the
issue of immigration policy is currently in evidence, despite often vocal private-
sector and civil-society advocacy on this account. While the closed-country
‘sakoku’ policy ended long ago, its intellectual and ideological baggage has
lingered to a considerable extent in national discourse until quite recently,
when the national government began to show signs of responding to evidence
of linguistic needs that have been accepted and pragmatically managed at local
government level for many years.
The language ideologies which govern Japan’s existing language policies (or
lack of policy) – the assumptions about language that shape the ways in which
language is managed within a society – have come increasingly under challenge
as the social fabric of Japan changes in ways not foreseen by earlier generations.
An important aim of this book is to explicate the relationship between these
two aspects of language in society – immigration and electronic technologies –
and existing national language ideologies. Language ideologies shape many
aspects of a society’s workings and have a considerable influence on all of its
members in one form or another. Education policy for the national language,
for example, and other language-in-education policies such as whether and to
what extent community or international languages are taught in schools are
all important indicators of language ideologies within a given society. It is
already clear that in Japan, which has a clearly defined set of existing language
Preface xi
policies and strongly entrenched ideologies of language, the areas of social

change I have singled out have significant implications for the future trajectory
of language policy, with the challenge now being to move the first of them
from local to national government level in terms of policy development and
implementation.
There are of course many important language policy issues other than the
two I deal with in this book, prominent among them the move to teach English
in elementary schools from 2011. While the promotion of English as an Inter-
national Language in the education system is a major focus of language policy
in Japan today, it is not my focus in this book. I mention the emphasis on
English only tangentially insofar as it is necessary to establish the parameters
for a comparison with the teaching of other languages. That is not in any way
to deny its enormous importance in Japan’s array of language policies. What
I am interested in, however, is the manner in which provision has been made
for the linguistic needs of foreign residents in schools and communities, the
push for JSL education to become a national-level undertaking outside schools,
the provision for teaching and using other languages which may now properly
be considered community languages and policies relating to the provision of
multilingual information to non-Japanese residents. I use the example of the
kanji policy revision to illustrate that where ideology and changing social
environment intersect in a positive manner considered important on a national
level, policy change occurs; where the change runs counter to existing language
beliefs and practices, it does not, or at least, it takes much longer and is much
harder to effect.
A society which has resolutely considered itself monolingual for purposes
of nation-building rhetoric now has to come to terms with the reality of its own
growing multilingualism, with all the signs being that migration-induced mul-
tilingualism is here to stay. Increased ethnic diversity has created demand for
JSL classes for foreign children in Japanese schools and JSL classes through
other means for their parents. In a growing number of areas, street signage now
reflects a range of languages used in local communities. It is important to under-
stand how the challenge to notions of national linguistic homogeneity posed by
the presence of migrant communities in Japan create new expectations of the
state, which itself must develop to meet those expectations through providing
host-language learning opportunities for those who need them and through
reassessing the teaching through the education system of what have become
community languages. To date the provision of language-learning opportuni-
ties has been undertaken by local governments and civil society volunteers in
the communities in which immigrants settle, but there is now a growing advo-
cacy within the civil sector for the development of relevant language policies at
national level. In the long term, this means a reconceptualising both of the place
of language in national identity and of the linguistic dimensions of Japanese
xii Preface
citizenship. It means a rethink of the role of language in nation-building, not

this time within the earlier context of building a modern Japan under the one
people-one language banner beloved of nation-states but rather within that of
providing the linguistic foundations needed for a socially cohesive Japan in a
future in which immigration is forecast to increase.
The book begins with a chapter on language ideologies and how they play
out in Japan today, examining the relationship between language ideologies,
language planning and language policy before introducing the two develop-
ments which are investigated at length in the rest of the book. Chapter 2 then
explores the language needs of immigrants who are struggling to achieve mas-
tery of Japanese and the manner in which those needs are (or are not) being
met, focusing in particular on the language needs of school students, adults in
general, non-Japanese spouses, foreign nurses and care workers and foreigners
caught up in the legal system. In Chapter 3, the discussion moves from the
individual needs of immigrants to two other policy-related aspects of language
provision in the community relevant to immigration, namely the teaching of
community and foreign languages other than English and the provision of mul-
tilingual material to immigrants to help them settle into life in Japan. While
the latter is well advanced and variously applied, the former remains under-
developed in the school system, raising the question of whether it would not
be to Japan’s benefit to devote greater resources to widening the profile of for-
eign languages offered to students rather than depending so heavily on English
alone.
Chapter 4 then highlights the lack of national-level policy action in response
to immigrants’ language needs, which are not supported by national language
ideology, by discussing the very recent overhaul of a national kanji policy
which is strongly supported by such ideology, throwing into relief the central
role of language ideology in achieving national action. Kanji are the venerated
icons of Japan’s writing system and literacy is judged not just on the ability
to read and write but on the ability to read and write characters: reinforcing
their position is very much in line with the language ideology discussed in
Chapter 1. This chapter discusses prevailing perceptions of declining kanji
ability and the perceived role of electronic technologies as a factor in falling
standards before going on to examine the recent revision of the kanji policy in
response to the influence of such technologies.
In the fifth and final chapter, I examine the policy response to date to
immigration-related language issues, focusing on language policies instituted
at local government level, the evidence so far for the dawning realisation of
the importance of language training for immigrants on the part of the national
government and the push from elements of civil society for a national law
guaranteeing opportunities for such training to immigrants wishing to avail
themselves of them. It seems clear that a discursive shift is under way in
Preface xiii
relation to the old ideology that the Japanese language is the exclusive property
of the Japanese people, but until the revision (or rather, development) of immi-
gration policy and its attendant responsibilities is undertaken at national level,
it is likely to be a very long time before discourse translates into action. The
book closes with a conclusion reflecting upon the importance to future social
cohesion of not allowing a linguistic underclass of migrants to develop. It is
imperative that language policy evolves to reflect contemporary social realities
and does not remain fossilised, reflecting circumstances now past. The revision
of the kanji policy has shown that government can be responsive (even if slowly)
to incontrovertible evidence of change in language practices. It now remains to
address the realities of emergent multilingualism in Japan’s communities.
Editorial note: Japanese names are given in Japanese order (surname first).
Where no page number has been given in a reference, this usually indicates that
the document has been read online, unless I am referring to the overall thrust
of the source text rather than to a specific piece of information.
Acknowledgments
I am very much indebted to the Australian Research Council for a five-year

Australian Professorial Fellowship which has allowed me to work uninterrupted
on the research for this book. Along the way I have received valuable input
and feedback from a long list of colleagues and friends in Australia, Japan,
the United Kingdom and the United States which has helped clarify my think-
ing on aspects of the project and on the writing of the final manuscript and
which I gratefully acknowledge. Thanks are also due to the staff of the Tokyo
Metropolitan Library and the library of the International House of Japan for
their courteous and willing help with sources and, in the case of IH in the latter
stages of the project, for providing a congenial environment in which to reflect
and write.
Most of the research that has gone into this book has been undertaken
specifically for that purpose, but a couple of small sections do draw on my 2008
polity study of Japan, ‘Japan: Language Policy and Planning in Transition’,
Current Issues in Language Planning 9 (1): 1–68 and are used here with kind
permission of the editor. This material has been revised and updated.
As always, Hans, Susan and Greg have provided the ongoing understanding,
encouragement and support that I have been privileged to receive from them
throughout my academic career. They are particularly magnificent as deadlines
approach.
And finally, essential daily caffeine and warming chat has been provided by
the friendly staff of the Espresso Hut, whose contribution to the progress of
this book has been greater than they know.
xiv
1 Language ideology, planning and policy
This book examines two important issues in language policy in Japan today:
first, and most prominently, increasing migration-induced multilingualism
which has ramifications both for providing Japanese-language learning oppor-
tunities for migrants and for the use and teaching of languages other than
Japanese and English; and second, the influence of electronic technologies
such as computers and cell phones on the way in which Japanese is written.
These two developments, of course, have occurred in many other countries
beside Japan. What makes the Japanese case particularly interesting is that
Japan does not yet consider itself to be a country of immigration and hence
has only recently shown signs of an awareness of the importance of providing
both language teaching and multilingual services for non-Japanese workers, so
that what policy development does exist in this area is ad hoc and fragmented
rather than centrally planned and coordinated at national level. It also has in
place a set of longstanding policies pertaining to the officially sanctioned use of
the writing system, policies which were arrived at after a great deal of division
and debate, that shape the way in which Japanese and non-Japanese children
alike learn to read and write in Japanese schools. In both these cases, official
and individual views are strongly informed by language ideologies of various
kinds.
Any study of a society’s language policy must take into account the ideo-
logical context within which language functions because language ideologies
always mediate and sometimes directly shape the formulation of such policy.
To speak of language policy in Japan in isolation from national ideas about
language would be to see only a part of the whole picture. Language ideology
plays an important role in discussions of issues pertinent to this study, such as
the provision of multilingual services for migrants, the current ‘tabunka kyōsei’
(multicultural coexistence) policy discourse influencing local communities, the
teaching of foreign languages other than English and the prominence of non-
standard orthographic conventions online. The most strongly entrenched and
overarching ideology is a lingering belief that Japan is monolingual.
In this chapter, I will introduce and discuss several definitions of language
ideology put forward by scholars in the field, most of which posit links to
1
wider social ideologies. Put simply, language ideology can be described as

the defining beliefs about language cherished by a society, or by a particular
dominant section of a society, as an encapsulation of all that makes the lan-
guage in question special and legitimates its use as the dominant language of
that society. It refers to what members of a speech community take for granted
about the language they use, often without reflecting on the culturally and
historically specific genesis of such beliefs and with a strong element of justi-
fication for the linguistic status quo when the national language is the focus.
Dominant ideas about language thus take on the status of everyday ‘common
sense’.
The nature of language ideology

Language ideologies are commonly linked to political and/or economic themes
of power relations. Irvine (1989), for example, arguing the impossibility of
understanding the full range of roles played by language in a political economy
without coming to grips with cultural systems of ideas, defines linguistic ide-
ology as ‘the cultural (or subcultural) system of ideas about social and linguis-
tic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests’
(255). Linguistic ideology, she stresses, is a mediating factor, not necessar-
ily a causative factor, between linguistic phenomena and social relationships,
sometimes merely rationalising sociolinguistic differences rather than shaping
them, but its influence cannot be ignored. Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) and
Woolard (1998) also emphasise this point: language ideology is ‘a mediating
link between social structures and forms of talk’ (1994: 55), because such ide-
ologies are never about language alone but always extend to wider questions
of identity (both group and personal), aesthetics, morality and epistemology,
which means that they often underpin fundamental social institutions such as
schooling and law, gender relations and child socialisation. In Japan as else-
where, beliefs about language are foundational to such domains in both the
public and private sectors, and they legitimate existing practices.
The question of legitimation in language ideology is particularly important,
because legitimating the use of a particular language as dominant also functions
to legitimate its speakers as dominant. In Japan, the suppression of the Ainu
and Okinawan languages in the service of nineteenth-century nation-building
illustrates an ideology of linguistic uniformity used to legitimate the banning
of minority languages in favour of the language of the dominant majority as
a marker of citizenship and identity, a situation which prevailed until the late
1990s. The 1997 Ainu Cultural Promotion Act, which supports the teaching of
the Ainu language and other aspects of Ainu culture, ‘can be seen as a cautious
step away from official ideologies of Japanese ethnic and cultural homogeneity’
(Morris-Suzuki 2002: 171).
The nature of language ideology 3
As the Ainu example indicates, language ideologies change over time in

response to internal and external factors. ‘Like the social makeup of dominant
groups themselves, their ideologies are rarely monolithic, nor always stable’
(Gal 1998: 320). Lo Bianco and Slaughter (2009) characterise the continuum
of Australia’s shifting language ideology and policy orientations as starting
from a comfortably British base and moving through assertively Australian,
ambitiously multicultural and energetically Asia-oriented phases to their most
recent fundamentally economic incarnation. In the case of Japan, the ideology
of monolingualism on which policies were largely based throughout all but the
very last years of the twentieth century came to prominence at the beginning of
the modern period1 when it was deemed necessary to prove that the Japanese
state consisted of one people with one language in order to stave off territorial
encroachments by other powers. This ideology has largely endured, and has
been prominently on display in two periods of external promotion of the lan-
guage, one in Japan’s colonies of Taiwan (1895–1945) and Korea (1910–45)
and in other occupied territories during the Second World War, and the other in
the promotion of Japanese language and culture overseas which began in the
1970s with the establishment of the Japan Foundation for that purpose. Today,
however, it is under siege as local and – increasingly – national government
policies seek to respond to the undeniable presence of migrants in Japanese
communities once considered monoethnic.
A speech community, either at the national or subnational level, incorpo-
rates many different ways of thinking about language, some of them made
explicit, others unstated but nonetheless compelling. The dominant ones func-
tion to shape the manner in which language is handled, or managed, within
that community. ‘Put simply’, Spolsky (2004: 14) tells us, ‘language ideol-
ogy is language policy with the manager left out, what people think should
be done. Language practices, on the other hand, are what people actually do.’
To Shohamy (2006: xv), language practices are ‘de facto’ language policies.
Whether and how language policies affect language practices will depend to
a large extent on the degree to which dominant ideologies are made explicit
through political means such as the implementation of a particular view through
the education system. If children in classrooms across the nation are taught to
write in a manner laid down by a particular official script policy, as is the
case in Japan, then that particular policy – derived from a consensus on what
constitutes appropriate handling of the orthography within that society – can be
seen to have a significant influence on this aspect of language practice. This is
true not only in the overt domain of language policy but also in the covert, i.e.,
in the domain of the unstated but nevertheless completely understood expecta-
tions which frame the use of language in particular situations and are accepted
as the prescriptive norm. When a child is continually guided by its parents
as to what constitutes appropriate (or inappropriate) use of language in certain
contexts, then practice here is informed by policy too, this time covert. Thinking
in terms of linguistic ideology permits the integration of these macropolitical
and microinteractional levels which might otherwise be considered separate
and where ‘the difference is only one of scale in that both reflect and are shaped
by the implicit unspoken assumptions encompassed by prevailing linguistic
ideologies’ (Gal 1998: 318).
Language ideology functions as a powerful mediator of discourse practices.
In Japan today, conventions of what language use is appropriate in what situa-
tion may seem to be based upon a general consensus as to what makes ‘good’
Japanese. Nevertheless, the rules of ‘good’ Japanese are taught through the
classrooms of the nation by teachers working to syllabi based on language
policy documents: the script policies and the curriculum guidelines for the
teaching of the national language. When parents teach their children how to
speak ‘good’ Japanese, they too are passing on what they have been taught,
mediated through the same filter of schooling.
Ball (2004) provides two examples of ideology operating in Japanese relating
to the use of honorifics and of dialect. In a study of dialectal codeswitching
involving the Kansai dialect, he analyses its relationship to the ‘uchi’ (in-
group) and ‘soto’ (out-group) dichotomy often used in studies of Japan and
notes that metapragmatic rules of use shape how dialect is used and evaluated
in conversation.
Speakers organize these normative rules according to linguistic ideologies about the
roles and functions of language, self and society. These ideologies are reflexive folk
distillations of linguistic, interactional and social information into concepts that fit within
wider cultural systems of meaning, and must themselves be investigated critically. (357)
The decision to codeswitch between dialect and standard Japanese, he posits,

revolves around the basic linguistic ideology that dialect may be used between
in-group members but standard language is for out-group members. ‘Uchi’ and
‘soto’ he describes as ‘linguistic ideological primes’ in Japanese culture which
function to construct an appearance of a basic underlying unity in that culture.
‘The circulation of linguistic ideological concepts such as this is often mediated
by institutional structures at the national or state level. Academia, medicine,
the media and politics are all potential domains of ideological reproduction’
(375).
Similarly with honorifics:
Politeness judgments are the product of a metapragmatic process of evaluation of the
efficacy of particular forms in particular situations, calibrated against cultural categorical
notions of social hierarchy. Thus, the link from the interaction order to the social order
is achieved through linguistic ideological formulations of the use of language and social
roles, appropriateness and power. (373)
The nature of language ideology 5
The association between ideologies and specific policies is not always

straightforward, given that hidden agendas may lurk behind stated policy ratio-
nales; also, different language policies may share a common underlying ideol-
ogy (Ricento 2000: 2–3). At other times, ideology is easily spotted: a simplistic
equation of usage with dogma, for example, enables us to recognise a particular
politically oriented language ideology through the use of specific vocabulary
or phraseology allocated to particular functions. Of the language used by mem-
bers of the North Korea-aligned Korean community in Japan for organisational
functions in their umbrella organisation Chongryun, for example, Ryang (1997:
109) writes that ‘the reproduction of certain forms of words supports the socially
significant group that has used them in the past. In other words, the corpus of
organisational orthodoxy is supported by individual utterances that effectively
legitimate the organisation and secure the social relationships internal to it.’
Here the ideology informing the language use serves to legitimate more than the
organisation and its structures: it legitimates the ways of thinking behind them,
imparting the sense that such utterances are no more than ‘common sense’ and
represent the ways things should naturally be.
‘Successful ideologies are often thought to render their beliefs natural and
self-evident – to identify them with the “common sense” of a society so that
nobody could imagine how they might ever be different’ (Eagleton 1991: 58). In
just such a manner has the ideology of monolingualism in Japan functioned both
overtly and covertly, shoring up the myth of monoethnicity and ignoring the
realities of large ethnic communities.2 The national language is assumed in an ‘it
goes without saying’ way to be a powerful marker of Japanese citizenship. But
national languages, like nations themselves, are as much ideological constructs
as given realities (see, e.g., Lee 1996) and when language is pressed into the
service of the state the idealised dicta that result serve the ends of that state.
To go back to the Ainu example: when it was decreed in 1899 that all Ainu
people were Japanese citizens and would henceforth speak only Japanese,3
that decree was largely tangential to the lived realities of individual people
but rather functioned to underpin the image of Japan as a nation-state whose
borders encompassed the Ainu homeland of Hokkaido. In this context, language
as much as geography was made to serve as an indicator of citizenship and as
a result the Ainu language came perilously close to extinction before enjoying
its current revival of status.
Linguistic nationalism assumes the existence of a homogeneous speech com-
munity, whose language expresses the spirit of that community (see Hein-
rich 2007: 126 for discussion). Even in variationist studies of the ethnogra-
phy of speaking, Gal (1998: 320) reports, the speech community has been
defined as ‘the locus of shared evaluations and attitudes towards varieties’, a
view which ‘explicitly excluded variation from the realm of . . . ideology’. In
reality, the speech community in Japan, like any other speech community, is far
from homogeneous; rather, it encompasses first-language speakers of indige-
nous, community and foreign languages as well as first-language speakers of
Japanese, with each of these groups displaying its own internal variations and
crossovers. For the many second-language speakers of Japanese in Japan, the
Japanese language is simply a means to an end rather than an expression of a
unifying national spirit.
A term used by Coulmas and other sociolinguists with regard to Japan in
recent English-language scholarship is ‘language regime’, which has important
commonalities – though not total equivalence – with language ideology. Coul-
mas (2005: 7) defines a language regime as ‘a set of constraints on individual
language choices’; those constraints go beyond overt policies to include covert
‘common sense’ expectations as well:
Just as we speak of political and social regimes, we can also speak of language regimes.
That is, linguistic behaviour is in general controlled by a regime consisting of both
explicit elements which have the capacity to be legally binding and implicit, customary
elements, just as are all political processes and social relations. (Coulmas 2003: 246)
In other words, unstated expectations about how a particular country’s lan-

guage should be used, developed over time by a speech community, are just as
influential in governing language use within that country’s language regime as
any official statutes or policies that may exist, and can carry weight equal to or
even greater than such policies in determining aspects of language use. Here
ideology is subsumed as one (important) element within the overall language
regime.
We turn now from the nature of language ideology in general to a more
detailed examination of how this plays out in Japan.
Language ideology in Japan

It is important in discussing language ideology in Japan (or indeed, anywhere
else) not to assume that a particular ideology is a uniform cultural given. Rather,
as Woolard and Schieffelin (1994: 71) remind us in another context, ‘where
casual generalization contrasts English and French linguistic attitudes as if they
were uniform cultural attributes inhering at the state and individual level, his-
torical studies show that such apparently characteristic national stances emerge
conjuncturally from struggles among competing ideological positions’. There
are certain clearly identifiable linguistic ideologies at work in Japan today that
fit with this caveat in that they are contested positions not universally approved:
in 2006, to give one high-profile example, the proposal to introduce English as a
formal part of the curriculum in public elementary schools was not endorsed by
then Education Minister Ibuki Bunmei, who shared the conservative view that
Language ideology in Japan 7
elementary schools should concentrate on improving students’ literacy in their

own language before introducing a foreign language. Nevertheless, ideologies
are significant shapers of and contributors to language planning and language
policy. As in so many countries, the overarching general ideology informing
language management decisions in Japan has been the desire for social cohe-
sion, which over time has been turned to a variety of political purposes such
as nation-building, the bolstering of national confidence in times of stress or
war, recovery from war or recession, the harnessing of the education system to
meet national goals, and most recently the restating of national identity in the
face of the effects of globalisation.
The belief that only one language is spoken in Japan, namely the national
language, and a nationalist ideology of language, where the language is iden-
tified with the people and vice versa, have dominated the modern period. This
ideological assumption of monolingualism flows from the overarching assump-
tion that Japan is monoethnic, but this is far from the truth. Ironically, Befu
(2009a: 24) points out that at the peak of Japan’s imperial expansion prior to
1945, ‘the “Japan” of that time was probably the most multi-ethnic and multi-
cultural in Japanese history as it included numerous ethnic and racial groups’
in the colonies of Taiwan and Korea, the Kuriles and Micronesia, and yet
Japanese political and intellectual discourse continued to stress the homogene-
ity of Japan’s people and culture, considering the Japanese residing in the home
islands to embody the essence of Japan rather than the wider-flung citizenry of
the colonial territories who did not speak Japanese or embody other Japanese
cultural traits. ‘The essentialised Japan’, Befu comments, ‘is a standardised
Japan with uniform characteristics disallowing internal variation. This Japan
is largely the making of the national government since the Meiji Period, bent
on creating a unified, uniform, and homogeneous nation. This essentialised
Japan is an imagined community far from the reality the country presents’
(27).
As we have seen, the ideology of national monolingualism has played a
significant role as a foundational factor in nation-building, with the languages
of minorities at Japan’s southern and northern peripheries (the Okinawans in
the south and the Ainu in the north) being suppressed in the late nineteenth
century in order to facilitate the myth that all Japanese citizens spoke Japanese
as their first (and only) language. Such an assimilationist goal was crucial to
defending Japan’s borders against possible encroachment by other powers, so
that language and statist ideology came together in a confluence of interests
that saw the use of other languages repressed. The ideology of monolingual-
ism, in other words, was explicitly employed to suppress difference and to
subordinate minorities by assimilating them linguistically into the category of
Japanese citizens. The Japanese language became dominant not through his-
torical accident of place alone but through the deliberate subjugation of other
languages; although those languages posed no real threat to the predominance

of Japanese, so intimate did the ideological link between Japanese language
and Japanese citizenship become that it was considered necessary to impose
linguistic assimilation on those at the peripheries rather than allow continuing
difference. Later, in Japan’s colonies of Taiwan and Korea, a similar ideol-
ogy prevailed: all subjects of the Emperor were expected to learn to speak the
Japanese language.
Nothing in the Constitution of Japan today specifies Japanese as the official
language of Japan, i.e., Japanese is not an official language in the sense that
it is defined as such in the highest legal document of the land, unlike, say,
German in Austria, where Article 8 of the Constitution specifies that German
is the official language of the Republic without prejudice to the rights provided
by federal law for linguistic minorities. Japanese is the de facto rather than the
de jure dominant or national language because the majority of citizens speak it
as their first language and because it is seen as a defining element in Japanese
identity. As such, its legal status, while not enshrined in the Constitution, is
unchallenged as the medium for legal documents of all kinds. The authority of
the standard language based on the Tokyo dialect is reinforced by the status of
Tokyo as the capital, through the education system and by a massive national
print and visual media, so that regional dialect use is reserved in the main for
private use or for comic purposes in films and television. The only official
language legislation in Japan today is the previously mentioned law relating
to promotion of the Ainu language, the 1997 Ainu Cultural Promotion Act.
To take Japanese citizenship, a certain level of language ability is required,
roughly equivalent in terms of writing ability to third grade of elementary
school, but this is not to my knowledge specified in any law. Policies relating
to language do exist, of course, as do other language control mechanisms:
parents instruct their children in what is and is not appropriate language use
in particular situations; schools do the same with their students; editors keep
a wary eye out for the use of inappropriate language in manuscripts or on
television.
The view that an idealised ‘Japanese’ is the dominant language of Japan
overlooks the fact that the language is not monolithic and unchanging but, like
any other language, displays a huge amount of internal variation in terms of pro-
nunciation, dialectal differences and grammatical and lexical usage. Likewise,
individuals are not constrained by the circumstances of their birth, occupation
or education to use the particular kind of language usually associated with
those variables on a continuing basis but rather make use of a wider linguistic
repertoire, slipping in and out of other varieties as the circumstances of their
daily lives require. Inoue (2006), for example, found that the accepted cul-
tural construct of how women should speak bears little relation to how most
women in Japan – particularly those outside Tokyo – actually do speak. Further,
as her fieldwork revealed, women use the delimited parameters of ‘women’s

language’ actively and often subversively in a variety of performative ways
when it suits them to do so. Likewise, the studies presented in Okamoto and
Shibamoto Smith (2004) recognise the shifting patterns of use that characterise
the standard everyday fluidity of gender roles and individual linguistic practices,
investigating the practices of real speakers within the context of and in relation
to overarching linguistic ideologies, i.e., showing what kind of language they
actually do use rather than what they may be assumed by the ideological models
to use.
This leads automatically to the question, then, of how the kind of Japanese
which is dominant today became recognised as dominant. Lee (1996) and
Yasuda (2000) explicate the roles of linguistic nationalism, language stan-
dardisation and linguistic imperialism as factors, with major actors including
politicians, bureaucrats, educators and the military driven by a range of motives
to ensure that language outcomes served their interests. Decisions about lan-
guage standardisation, of course, involve a complex web of language, politics
and power (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994: 64). There was nothing uncontrived
about the manner in which Japan’s language situation was presented in the
modern period; rather, it was a carefully orchestrated outcome intended to
delineate the contours of the nation, and yet the opposite view remains deeply
entrenched, namely that an almost mystic connection binds together Japanese
people, language and culture and that this is the natural order of things rather
than the outcome of human effort. This view resurfaced volubly after the year
2000 with the debate over the possible adoption of English as a second official
language, when opponents of the suggestion fell back on arguments of the same
kind as those advanced a century earlier by Meiji Period linguist and educator
Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937). Ueda’s most widely cited nationalistic lecture is
the 1894 ‘Our Nation and Its Language’, in which he referred to the Japanese
language as the spiritual blood binding the nation together and as the iden-
tifying mark of the state. Reaffirming this tradition of linguistic nationalism,
Nakamura (2002: 113), for example, wrote that ‘Japanese are Japanese because
they speak Japanese. The Japanese language expresses both Japan’s culture and
the essential nature of the Japanese people.’
Politicians espousing this ideology have often taken steps to ensure that what
they see as the ‘real’ Japanese is protected. A tradition of political interference
in attempts to introduce language reforms was begun as far back as 1907 and
continued until the 1980s (Ōkubo 1978: 21). I offer three examples of this here.
First, in 1907, an attempt by the Education Ministry’s textbook committee to
change the kana used in textbooks from the historical usage then the norm
to a more standardised, phonetic usage was derailed when two conservative
language protection groups, opposed to this erosion of orthographic tradition
and motivated by the belief that the fortunes of the language were closely linked
to those of the nation, brought the question before the House of Peers, which
requested the Education Minister to revert to historical kana usage.
Later, during the years leading up to the Second World War and during the war
itself, an especially strong form of this ideology known as ‘kotodama’ espoused
by the ultranationalist government prevented any attempts to rationalise the
Japanese writing system. ‘Kotodama’ translates loosely as ‘the spirit of the
Japanese language’ and the term was used to imply an indissoluble connection
between the unique Japanese language and the essence of the Japanese spirit.
Kanji in particular, borrowed originally from China, true, but sanctified by
many centuries of use in Japan, were seen as sacrosanct, as was historical
rather than phonetic kana spelling. With so much tradition attaching to the
existing writing system, any attempt to modernise it was viewed with extreme
disfavour and attempts at reform were seen as an attack on the national identity
of Japan’s citizens. The school system and the press frequently reinforced the
link between language and heritage, stressing that using the Japanese language
stamped a Japanese person as being an important cog in the ‘kokutai’ (national
polity) system. This term was used to refer to a pattern of national unity centred
on the Emperor (Mitchell 1976: 20); being part of it meant that the individual
Japanese person, speaking the Japanese language, was part of a mystical whole
set apart from other peoples and linked back through the ages to the wellsprings
of national tradition.
And as my final example: following the postwar script reforms which among
other things limited the number of characters for everyday official use to 1,850
and were feared by some to be the thin end of the wedge, Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP) politicians played a role in ensuring that kanji were not phased
out as a national script by raising questions in the Diet about the validity of the
committee process by which the 1946 Tōyō Kanji (Characters for Interim Use)
list had been drawn up by the Kokugo Shingikai (National Language Council,
1934–2001), then Japan’s language policy body. Members of the Council who
had been opposed to the reforms enlisted the aid of like-minded LDP members
to raise questions about them in the Diet and to argue against the idea of state
interference with language and script. This resulted in 1966 in the setting up of
an LDP committee on language matters, which two years later issued a report
which proved instrumental in bringing about the partial reversal of some of the
reforms (see Gottlieb 1995, Chapter 5).
Belief in the indivisibility of language, culture and nation and in the monoeth-
nicity of Japan remains strong in political circles today: in October 2005, for
example, politician Aso Tarō, who was then Minister for Internal Affairs and
Communications and later became Prime Minister (2008–9), described Japan
in a speech he gave at the opening of the Kyushu National Museum as the
only country in the world having ‘one nation, one civilization, one language,
one culture and one race’ (The Japan Times 2005). In 2007, then Education
Minister Ibuki reinforced the message of monoethnicity when he referred to

Japan as ‘an extremely homogeneous nation’, thereby attracting criticism from
the United Nations’ special rapporteur on racism (Johnston 2007).
From this central belief in monolingualism radiate others which contribute to
and are expressions of language ideology. Written language is widely regarded
as superior to spoken, for example, largely owing to the continuing emphasis
on the nexus between the writing system and tradition, even though that writ-
ing system has now been modernised. As Woolard and Schieffelin (1994: 65)
remind us, ‘in countries where identity and nationhood are under negotiation,
every aspect of language, including its phonological description and forms of
graphic representation can be contested . . . thus, orthographic systems cannot
be conceptualised simply as reducing speech to writing, but rather they are
symbols that carry historical, cultural, and political meanings’. This has been
demonstrated over and over again in the case of Japan, where it is widely
believed that kanji and the Japanese language are inseparable. Otake (2007),
for example, comments that ‘Japan started importing kanji (Chinese characters)
as early as before the Asuka Period (592–710), and now uses them in modi-
fied forms as the integral core of the Japanese language’ (emphasis mine).
Comments like this are far from rare and may be found in many a discussion
of the Japanese language by its own speakers. Kanji literacy, although often
problematic in the schools, is highly prized, as former Prime Minister Aso
found to his cost when he was widely lampooned for his kanji reading mistakes
both in the press and in the Diet.4
Given the nature of the three-script Japanese writing system, literacy might
be assumed to take several forms – a person who can write in hiragana but not
in kanji could write just as much Japanese as someone using kanji, albeit using
a phonetic syllabary – but in fact this is not the case because of the primacy of
kanji in the script system: literacy is assumed to include proficiency in using
characters. Language policy documents help with the designation of literacy
here, not in terms of explicit definitions – official definitions of literacy in
Japan are surprisingly hard to come by – but rather in terms of practices within
the education system. Ministry of Education curriculum guidelines relating to
orthography, laid down after the postwar script reforms and redrawn after the
1981 revision of the kanji list, specify that in addition to the hiragana and
katakana scripts children will learn the 1,006 Education Kanji (Kyōiku Kanji,
the list of those most frequently used which account for 90 per cent of the
characters used in newspapers) by the end of elementary school and the 1,945
characters on the Jōyō Kanji Hyō (List of Characters for General Use) by
the end of the nine years of compulsory education. The latest 2010 expansion
of the kanji list discussed in Chapter 4 will again change the parameters of
literacy expected of the average Japanese person as the curriculum guidelines
are rewritten to accommodate the added characters.
It is useful here to consider a comment by Woolard and Schieffelin (1994:

66) which refers to the relationship between language ideology and literacy:
The definition of what is and what is not literacy is always a profoundly political matter.
Historical studies of the emergence of schooled literacy and school English show the
association between symbolically valued literate traditions and mechanisms of social
control . . . Analyses of classroom interaction further demonstrate how implicit expec-
tations about written language shape discriminatory judgments about spoken language
and student performance.
They are speaking of English, but the same holds true of Japanese, and this
is highly relevant to the second thrust of this book, the challenge posed to
implicit expectations of correct script use by the truncated and often creatively
contorted orthography of e-mail and other online messages. Given the strong
hold of kanji, both implicit and explicit, on the national psyche when it comes
to written language, it is not surprising that ‘implicit expectations’ about correct
writing shape value judgments about a wider range of issues than ‘incorrect’
kanji usage alone.
One final point before we leave the matter of language ideology: contradic-
tory as it may at first seem, the belief in monolingualism also shapes the policies
relating to the promotion of the teaching of English, the foreign language pro-
moted by Japan in the nation’s public schools almost – but not quite – to the
exclusion of all others. The language ideology underlying language planning
and policy formulation in this area is explicitly one of linguistic internation-
alisation, closely linked with the wider general agendas of internationalisation
(kokusaika) and its twin, globalisation. English in Japan is taught specifically
and pragmatically as English as an International Language rather than as a
foreign or second language which might also offer some benefits domestically.
The orientation is external, as spelled out in the report of the Prime Minis-
ter’s Commission (2000) which suggested a sharper focus on the teaching of
English and floated (to general concern) the suggestion that English might one
day become a second official language of Japan:
Achieving world-class excellence demands that, in addition to mastering information
technology, all Japanese acquire a working knowledge of English – not as simply a
foreign language but as the international lingua franca. English in this sense is a
prerequisite for obtaining global information, expressing intentions, and sharing values.
Of course the Japanese language, our mother tongue, is the basis for perpetuating
Japan’s culture and traditions, and study of foreign languages other than English should
be actively encouraged. Nevertheless, knowledge of English as the international lingua
franca equips one with a key skill for knowing and accessing the world. (my italics)
In the Japanese view, the study of English is a survival skill, a competence

to be acquired to assist in communication outside Japan rather than to play
any substantial role within it (Torikai 2005: 254), a strategy used to enhance
Ideology and language attitudes 13
internationalisation by allowing Japan to communicate with its international

(= English-speaking) economic partners while retaining its own distinct iden-
tity. This is a limited ideology of internationalisation, an internationalisation
on Japan’s own terms, i.e., it encourages Japanese people to communicate
with outsiders in the outsiders’ language without themselves experiencing any
intrusion into the comfortably monolingual Japanese-language environment
surrounding them, thereby subtly reinforcing a sense of cultural nationalism.
The discourse of internationalisation balances this tension between the promo-
tion of English and nationalism while at the same time neglecting domestic
diversity in favour of the monolingual, monocultural mainstream ideology
(Kubota 2002).
Ideology and language attitudes

To what extent do language attitudes in Japan exemplify aspects of language
ideology? Insofar as such attitudes can be encapsulated through examination
of such sources as the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ annual language surveys,5
the major themes may be summed up as follows:
r pride in the kanji and in the cultural history and tradition they embody. In
the 1998 survey, for instance, in answer to a question about respondents’
perceptions of kanji, almost 73 per cent answered that they believed them to
be indispensable for writing Japanese;
r a belief in the importance and the value of the Japanese language. In the
2001 survey, in response to a question on this matter, almost 70 per cent of
respondents indicated that they valued their language. Reasons (in descend-
ing order of frequency) included that the Japanese language ‘is what makes
me a Japanese person’; that the Japanese language ‘is Japan’s very cul-
ture itself and supports all the rest of the culture’; and, more pragmatically,
that ‘Japanese is the only language I can speak.’ Respondents overwhelm-
ingly endorsed the idea that there was such a thing as ‘beautiful Japanese’
(utsukushii nihongo), primarily identified as language that embodied consid-
eration for others. Seven years later, the 2008 survey found an increase (to
76.7 per cent) in respondents indicating they valued their language, with a
noticeable increase among younger people. The idea of ‘utsukushii nihongo’
was again strongly endorsed in the same terms;
r a lingering belief that the language is uniquely difficult and not accessible to
‘foreigners’, despite evidence to the contrary in the form of large numbers of
non-Japanese studying and becoming proficient in the language throughout
the world.6 In the 1995 survey, for example, little more than a third of
respondents saw value in teaching foreigners to speak Japanese, and the
survey’s compilers mused that this was perhaps because of the mistaken
assumption that Japanese is difficult for foreigners;
r a continuing belief that the language is in disarray (midareta), with particular
blame for this laid at the door of younger people. Almost 90 per cent of
respondents to a question in the survey carried out in the year 2000, for
example, reported that they felt the language used by people they encountered
in their daily lives or saw on television left something to be desired. The most
common reasons given were that people spoke roughly, did not greet others
properly, used words that hurt others, used bad language or made mistakes in
‘keigo’ (honorific language). These slips were seen as being most pronounced
on the part of middle- and high-school students. As to whether their own
language use showed signs of disorder, 75 per cent of respondents admitted
that it did; the percentage of such respondents decreased in number according
to age group, but even those over sixty returned almost a two-thirds ‘yes’
response. In the 2002 survey, just over 80 per cent reported feeling that
the language was ‘midareta’, a percentage repeated in the 2007 survey. A
continuing concern, as shown by responses in these and other surveys (e.g.,
2004, 2005, 2007), is the perceived misuse of ‘keigo’ and the implications
of that for ‘the way the language should be’;
r allied to this, concerns about the way certain things are written in non-
standard ways or using non-standard grammatical forms. Attitudes vary as to
whether particular non-standard usages constitute evidence of poor Japanese
or are simply due to language change. When respondents in the 2001 survey,
for instance, were asked their reactions to the not strictly correct use of ‘hana
ni mizu o ageru’ rather than ‘hana ni mizu o yaru’ (meaning ‘to water the
flowers’), just over half replied that it did not bother them, around 16 per
cent considered it an example of ‘kotoba no midare’ (language disorder),
approximately the same number thought it was an example of language
change rather than of ‘kotoba no midare’ and around 15 per cent accepted
it as correct usage. From this, it would seem that although the sense that
the language is disordered is still present, attitudes are more flexible than
might have been expected, an outcome that the ‘midare’ proponents would
no doubt regard as part of the problem;
r occasional concern about the continuing influx of ‘gairaigo’ (loanwords
from languages other than Chinese), but generally a pragmatic acceptance
that most of them are here to stay. Almost 60 per cent of respondents to
this question on the 1995 survey said that they did not mind the increase.
The following year, however, nearly 90 per cent reported feeling annoyed to
varying degrees when they did not understand the meanings of ‘gairaigo’ used
in the media. By 1999, those in the over-fifty age brackets were expressing
concern because of difficulty in understanding ‘gairaigo’ mixed in with
Japanese and because of the possible negative effects on Japan’s language
and culture. In 2007, 86 per cent of respondents reported noticing that many
words were written in katakana; of these, only 15 per cent thought that was
Ideology and language attitudes 15
a good thing, mainly because they felt loanwords enriched the language.
The rest were almost evenly split between those who thought it undesirable
(mostly because the loanwords were hard to understand) and those with no
strong feeling either way.
Many of the beliefs summarised here relate directly to aspects of language
ideology discussed in the first part of this chapter: a deeply entrenched belief
that kanji are essential to written Japanese and embody Japanese culture; belief
in the existence of an idealised Japanese, deviations from which are cause
for concern; the ongoing conflation of the Japanese language and Japanese
citizenship (something which will inevitably be challenged in the future as
increasing numbers of non-Japanese seek citizenship) and, by extension, of
national language with national identity; and a continuing underlying belief
that Japanese is too difficult a language for non-Japanese to truly master. In
relation to the last of these, however, and perhaps not as contradictorily as
it might at first seem, to a 1995 survey question about the kind of Japanese
they expected non-Japanese people to use nearly 59 per cent responded that
as long as the intended meaning got through, mistakes did not concern them
and another 24 per cent were ready to accept any kind of Japanese at all from
a foreigner. By the time of the survey in question, the number of migrant
workers in Japan had greatly increased, so that the question of attitudes to
the kind of Japanese used by non-native speakers had become a domestic
issue rather than purely external as before, with non-Japanese residents more
likely to be encountered in local communities than had previously been the
case.
Inoue (2008: 484) attributes the fact that post-Second World War surveys of
language attitudes consistently report a belief that the language is degenerating
to the existence of increasing numbers of older people since Japanese society
entered its present period of ‘kōreika’ (becoming an ageing society) after 1970.7
Older people often view negatively the differences between their own language
and that of younger people. In particular, ‘changes in usage of honorifics
in Japanese upset older people, because they are addressed with honorific
expressions less frequently’ (487). Surveys and letters to the editor complain
from time to time about misuse of honorifics, and bookstores do a thriving trade
in ‘keigo’ manuals (see Wetzel 2004). Japan is not alone in this concern with
what are perceived as deteriorating language standards, of course: language
change often attracts such charges, particularly from older people who often
blame poor teaching in schools for what they perceive as a drop in standards
(Crystal 1997: 4–5).
One area in which the annual language attitude surveys do not bear out the
ideas of linguistic purism we might expect given the depth of attachment to
the national language relates to the area of loanwords from western languages.
As the surveys above show, considerable numbers of respondents react to
this phenomenon with equanimity. This is not universally the case, however:
complaints about bureaucratic language, in particular the overuse within it of
foreign loanwords, led in 2002 to a decision by then Prime Minister Koizumi to
request the Education Minister to investigate. A committee was set up to study
the matter under the auspices of the Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyūjo (National
Institute for Japanese Language) and over the next four years issued four
reports recommending the replacement of certain loanwords with Japanese
equivalents (for full details, see Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyūjo 2006).
Ideology and language planning and policy

Language planning, as defined by Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 3), is
a body of ideas, laws and regulations (language policy), change rules, beliefs and
practices intended to achieve a planned change (or to stop change from happening) in
the language use in one or more communities. To put it differently, language planning
involves deliberate, although not always overt, future oriented change in systems of
language code and/or speaking in a societal context.
While government-instigated initiatives are the most immediately visible, lan-

guage planning is carried out at sub-national and non-government levels as well
with the purpose of in some way modifying linguistic behaviour.
Language planning and policy formulation in any country usually proceed
on the basis of the dominant ideologies at work in that country. Sometimes
such ideologies exist primarily amongst the decision-makers and are imposed
on the populace; at other times – as in the case of Japan – they are also
present in the populace at large to begin with. Planning and policy are closely
linked, the latter being (usually) the outcome of the former and both being
informed by ideology. Spolsky (2004: 5) outlines a tripartite structure for
the language policy of a speech community: ‘its language practices – the
habitual pattern of selecting among the varieties that make up its linguistic
repertoire; its language beliefs or ideology – the beliefs about language and
language use; and any specific efforts to modify or influence that practice by
any kind of language intervention, planning or management’. Practice, ide-
ology and planning: these three work together. They are not, however, all
of a piece. As Sonntag (2000: 134), discussing the politics of English in
North India, points out, ‘While ideology informs policy, it does not deter-
mine it. Policies are contingent, adapted to changing material conditions.
Ideologies . . . are more persistent.’ In the case of Japan, while the postwar
script policies were determined as a result of specific material conditions, they
were strongly informed by the ideas about language I have discussed above.
Because Japan is what Fishman (1968) has categorised as an old developing
nation, Cluster B in his schematic, one which has for a long time embodied
Ideology and language planning and policy 17
the attributes of both nation and sociocultural identity, it brought to its modern
period a longstanding and well-defined literary tradition and a comparatively
high rate of literacy (to varying degrees) among the population. Today’s lan-
guage ideologies are not recently derived but are rooted in this historically
evolved strength of attachment to the national language as a marker of both
individual and national identity. They have been further reinforced over many
years by a highly influential ethnocentric and essentialist literary genre known
as ‘nihonjinron’ (theories of what it means to be Japanese), which underpinned
much of the government, academic and cultural writing on Japanese society
during the postwar period. ‘Nihonjinron’ heavily stressed the equivalence of
Japanese language with Japanese identity, at the same time portraying the
Japanese language as somehow different from all other languages (i.e., going
far beyond the obvious surface differences) and insisting on Japan’s linguistic
homogeneity. The influence of this genre was at its height in the 1980s and
1990s. Although other views of Japan have arisen to challenge its philosophy,
such ideas are not easily displaced. Echoes (not very distant ones) can be seen
in today’s language policies, such as in the belief that English for Japanese peo-
ple is for externally oriented use and that literacy must take a certain carefully
prescribed form.
Language planning results in what Coulmas (2005: 3) refers to as ‘adminis-
tered language’:
language that is learned deliberately through instruction . . . the result of purposeful

intervention in the course of language development by way of responding to changing
communication requirements. The, as it were, visible hand of language administration
takes the form of schooling, literacy education, terminology creation, and other measures
of corpus planning.
This conflates both language planning and language policy: while it is language
planning that sets up the outcomes, it is usually policy that delivers them. The
easiest way to identify language policy, at least in its overt manifestations, is
to look for the existence of official policy documents,8 and these Japan has in
abundance: those relating to the national language as used within Japan were
arrived at through the work of the National Language Council (NLC) and those
relating to the promotion of the Ainu and English languages were developed
under the auspices of various ministries (see Gottlieb 2008).
Overt language policy in Japan, that which has been explicit and planned
and widely discussed as such, has always been ideologically marked. A good
example of this is the process by which the current national script policies
and the standard language policy were developed. The script policies were
an attempt to retain the best of the past while at the same time rationalising
the orthography to meet the demands of a modernised Japan; they were moti-
vated by at times conflicting ideologies of democratisation and modernisation
combined with a desire to protect a longstanding cultural tradition. The choice

of a standard language arose out of the desire to shape the national language
into an instrument for communication and control as a plank in constructing
Japan’s modern identity and in particular its linguistic identity. More recently,
the 2003 policy on the increased promotion of English9 took as its point of
departure a belief in the national need to learn English as a language of inter-
national communication which would allow the views of Japanese people to
be heard outside Japan to a greater extent in a knowledge-based environment
where information and communication were paramount. At the same time,
the policy also sought improvement in Japanese people’s ability to use their
own language as well, thus combining ideologies of both internationalism and
nationalism in the one policy.
Overt policies do not always impinge on the consciousness of the public.
When it comes to public recognition of the current official policy on character
use, the Agency of Cultural Affairs’ 2006 annual survey on language attitudes
turned up a surprising result: only just over half of respondents indicated that
they knew of the existence of the List of Characters for General Use which has
anchored Japan’s official script policies since 1981. Given that this list forms
the basis for teaching of characters in schools, this illustrates the marginal
extent to which the general population can be aware of the existence of formal
language policy documents even when they are daily exposed to their effects.
Quizzed further on this topic, only about 40 per cent of respondents who had
indicated awareness of the policy, most of them older people, replied that they
paid any overt attention to it in their ordinary daily writing practices, ignoring
the fact that it has shaped their education.
Such a finding puts paid to the occasionally voiced complaint that language
policy constrains language use among those to whom it is applied. This was
in fact an argument used during the 1960s battles over script policy, when
opponents of policies restricting the numbers of characters in use framed such
policies as an attack on the freedom of speech guaranteed by the 1946 Consti-
tution. In practice, however, in Japan, language policies relating to script are
binding only on the government itself in its publications and in the education
system; the List of Characters for General Use states that it is intended as a
‘guide’ and not a ‘limit’, and the closest most people get to the policy itself is
the fact that it directs what characters are taught in schools.
Overt policies are at work in the private sector as well as in government,
but here the ideology is that of profit optimisation through internationalisation
when business is the instigator. Business in general often plays an important
role in formulating language policy of various kinds (Kaplan and Baldauf
1997: 12). Multinational corporations have adopted language policies for their
employees based on overt, pragmatic assessments of the value of bilingualism
in Japanese and English to the organisation, providing employees with in-house
Ideology and language planning and policy 19
English-language lessons and, increasingly, requiring advanced proficiency for

particular levels of appointment. Companies and local governments are now
using performance on English tests such as the Test of English for International
Communication (TOEIC) as a criterion for both employment and promotion
(Torikai 2005: 253). Employees at IBM Japan seeking promotion to section
chief require a minimum score of 600 points (usable business English) on the
TOEIC test; Assistant General Manager positions require a score of at least 730
(able to communicate in any situation) (Gottlieb 2008: 55). Internet shopping
company Rakuten announced in 2010 that from 2012 it will adopt English as
its official in-house language, while electronics giant Sharp did the same for
one of its research and development groups from April 2011. Major media
organisations also have language policies restricting the use of words likely
to cause offence to particular groups of people because of something deemed
discriminatory in their nature which has in the past led to embarrassing public
retaliation by protesters (see Gottlieb 2006).
Ideology also informs covert language policies, those which are not explicit
and have no policy documentation but may be widely entrenched in the public
mind: Schiffman (1996: 13) categorises these as ‘implicit, informal, unstated,
de facto, grass-roots, latent’, what actually happens on the ground as opposed
to the ‘explicit, formalized, de jure, codified, manifest’ overt policies. An
example is the somewhat stereotypical portrait of assumptions and expectations
about women’s language found in the work of Ide Sachiko and challenged by
other scholars such as Endō (1997, 2006), Inoue (2006) and Okamoto and
Shibamoto Smith (2004). Other examples of covert understandings include the
old and persistent belief that the Japanese language is too difficult for foreigners
to understand, which has a direct bearing on the national government’s lack
of particular interest to date in providing state-sponsored Japanese-language
classes for foreign workers and residents (coupled, of course, with the cost
of such an undertaking). The equally widespread conviction that Japanese
people are somehow congenitally bad at learning foreign languages lurks in the
background of both the current very strong push for improved English teaching
and the general lack of interest in teaching other foreign languages in the school
system.
Pennycook’s words, taken from a general discussion, are helpful in sum-
ming up the major themes of language ideology, language policy and language
planning as they exist and intersect in Japan today:
First, language policies need to be understood in their complexity: language policies both
in the past and the present are interlinked with many other social, cultural, economic
and political concerns. Second, they need to be understood contextually: unless we look
at how language policies relate to the particular configurations of each context, we
will not be able to understand why they have been constructed in particular ways and
what the possible implications may be. Third, we need to understand the complicity and
complementarity of language policies, by which I mean the ways in which apparently

competing or oppositional policies may nevertheless on another level be complementary
with each other and complicit with the larger forms of cultural and political control.
And finally, the effects of language policy in the past have a powerful continuity with
the present in terms of the ways in which they construct particular views of language.
(2000: 50)
As the preceding discussion has shown, Japan’s current language policies10 are
indeed linked with a wide range of non-linguistic issues. The script policies
flowed from specific educational concerns as well as those of wider national
literacy and were supported in their development by the print mass media in
the private sector, to whom limits on the numbers of characters being taught in
schools meant efficiencies of operation (in the pre-computer days) and increased
readership (see Gottlieb 1995). The policy on the promotion of Ainu culture and
language came as a result of political pressures from activists newly empowered
by international support, while the post-1987 increased promotion of English
stemmed both from concern over Japan’s poor performance in the international
TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) rankings and the desire to
have Japanese voices more widely heard on the international stage. Corporate
policies on English-language proficiency are linked to profits; media policies
on discriminatory language have resulted from the activism of marginalised
groups. In every case, context has shaped content, and it is easy to find exam-
ples of complicity and complementarity, particularly in the earlier discussed
argument that Japan’s policies promoting the teaching of English as an Inter-
national Language are as much about cultural nationalism as they are about
internationalisation. There is certainly no lack of continuity between the over-
arching cultural construction of language, in this case written language, shown
in earlier twentieth-century kanji policies and 2010’s latest version of those
lists.
Katsuragi (2005) argues, rightly in my view, that Japan would best be served
in the future by an overarching policy framework within which its separate lan-
guage policies could nest. Given that the policies are informed by the prevailing
language ideologies, the next step would be to construct an inclusive hierarchy
which would account for all aspects of the national government’s language pol-
icy activities, including those relating to the national language, Ainu, English
and the teaching of other foreign languages. The policy framework Katsuragi
envisages rests on a form of cultural nationalism which he sees as valuing social
order and integration above freedom of choice and diversity. In language policy
terms, this requires a balancing act: members of minority groups are expected
to master the national language, while at the same time respect is accorded to
local languages and dialects. This pluralistic view of the nation’s languages
departs from the eradication of minority cultures and identities which has char-
acterised the nation-building nationalism described earlier in this chapter and
Immigration 21
assists minority groups to maintain their own languages while at the same time
learning the national language. While recognising that this will take some time
to achieve in Japan, Katsuragi suggests a way to proceed:
For now, what we need to do is what we have been doing with regard to environmental
issues, that is, cultivate a national consciousness of language ethics, and formulate a
policy framework for language. It will thus become possible to deal with language
problems not in an emotional or ideological way, but in pragmatic terms paying due
attention to financial sustainability. The goal will be to move away from an ideological
national language policy to a well-balanced language policy framework. (2005: 53)
Ideology’s grasp, as Katsuragi implies, has to date prevented the development

of his envisioned well-balanced language policy framework. One of the areas
in which this is most clearly the case relates to the ideology of national mono-
lingualism in schools which has resulted in the piecemeal, improvised, reactive
rather than proactive provision of Japanese as a Second Language (JSL) classes
for non-Japanese children in public schools and in the wider community for
their parents. Society is changing, however, and Coulmas and Heinrich (2005)
list elements of language ideology which are now being called into question:
Among the many aspects of Japan’s language regime, which was functionally well-suited
for modern industrial society and a catching-up economy, but which is loosing [sic] its
relevance in the emerging postmodern knowledge society, are the presumed identity of
state, people and language; the exclusive status and the comprehensive functional range
of the national language; the linguistic standard of right and false keyed to an ideal
written norm; and the assumption of discrete language systems. (1)
The current language regime, as I will show in this book, is beginning to change.
Monolingualism in a globalising world is becoming increasingly irrelevant. It
is no longer the case that Japan can take for granted either the presumed oneness
of state, people and language or the exclusive status of the national language.
Nor can the signs that linguistic behaviour does not conform to an ideal written
norm, particularly in the area of electronic technologies, be ignored. I argue in
this book that language ideology as expressed in official language policy (or lack
of it) faces challenges in Japan from recent social developments, specifically
increased immigration with its consequences for local communities and the
development of electronic communication technologies which have spawned
inventive new uses of the orthography. We move now to the first and most
prominent of these, immigration.
Immigration
Japan today exemplifies Appadurai’s nation-state grappling with the realities
of retaining control over its population in the face of multiple subnational and
transnational movements and organisations (1996: 189):
The isomorphism of people, territory, and legitimate sovereignty that constitutes the
normative charter of the modern nation-state is itself under threat from the forms of
circulation of people characteristic of the contemporary world. It is now widely conceded
that human motion is definitive of social life more often than it is exceptional in our
contemporary world. Work, both of the most sophisticated intellectual sort and of the
most humble proletarian sort, drives people to migrate, often more than once in their
lifetimes. (191)
Immigration, though still small in comparison with other countries, has

increased significantly since the 1980s (see Chapter 2). Two waves of eco-
nomic immigrants have contributed to this: those designated ‘newcomers’ who
came during the bubble economy of the 1980s to do the unskilled jobs spurned
by Japanese11 and those who arrived after the 1990 revision of the Immigra-
tion Control and Refugee Recognition Act which allowed unskilled workers
descended from earlier Japanese migrants to South American countries (nikkei-
jin) to enter Japan to work (Nagy 2008: 36–7). At the end of 2008, the population
included over 2 million registered foreigners, who include large numbers of
Korean and Chinese ‘oldcomers’ and account as yet for only 1.75 per cent of
the total population (Ministry of Justice 2009b).12 However, Japan’s birth rate,
for many years a source of concern, dropped in 2004 to a record low. This and
the consequent demand for labour met by ‘newcomer’ immigrants have led to
a dramatic reshaping of many nation-states into formal or de facto multicul-
tural and multilingual societies (Guiraudon and Joppke 2001), with Japan now
among them. If immigration numbers continue to rise, as Japan’s Third Basic
Plan for Immigration Control (2005) indicates will happen, the demographic
mix will change markedly over time: a United Nations population projection
scenario posits that Japan would need 17 million net immigrants up to the
year 2050 to keep the population at its 2005 level; by 2050, these immigrants
and their descendants would comprise nearly a fifth of the total population
(United Nations Population Division 2001). Such scenarios are of course mere
projections, open to modification by any number of emerging factors, not least
Japan’s reluctance to loosen up its immigration policy. Nevertheless, signs of
non-transient population growth have already emerged. Many of the ‘nikkei’
workers from Brazil and Peru who entered Japan in the 1990s intending to stay
only a couple of years were unable to support themselves when they returned
to their home countries because of adverse economic conditions there and so
returned to Japan on a permanent basis; Immigration Bureau figures show that
the number of ‘general permanent residents’ from Peru and Brazil (and other
countries) increased sharply and steadily between 2000 and 2004 (Tezuka 2005:
51–2), and jumped markedly in 2006 and 2007 (Ministry of Justice 2009b).
In 2008, Shoji observed that ‘Japanese people now have virtually everyday
contact with foreigners and foreign languages, a situation that could not even
have been imagined in the 1970s . . . Increasingly contacts with foreigners and
Immigration 23
their languages are, step by step, diminishing peoples’ mental barriers, which
are heavily loaded by language consciousness’ (Shoji 2008: 109, 110). Sugi-
moto (2009: 1) confirms this: ‘at the beginning of the 21st century, the nation
has observed a dramatic shift in its characterisation from a unique and homo-
geneous society to one of domestic diversity, class differentiation and other
multidimensional forms’. Several factors have combined to foster the idea that
Japan is now a multiethnic society, giving rise to what he calls the ‘ethnic turn’
in the way Japanese culture is defined. This current preoccupation with diver-
sity is reflected in the academic literature. In addition to work on longstanding
ethnic communities such as the Ainu, Koreans and other groups, a significant
amount of research by both Japanese and non-Japanese scholars interrogating
the circumstances and ramifications of the post-1980 growth in migration in
Japan has appeared over the last fifteen or more years,13 with some researchers
concentrating on particular communities.14 This demographic shift, however,
has not been without its problems in terms of integration:
In summary, starting with the economic boom of the 1980s, Japan started to become
a multicultural and multilingual society, in spite of the fact that the Japanese govern-
ment never envisaged such a transformation. There are numerous problems ensuing
from governmental attitudes to migration to Japan. The ‘hidden internationalization’ of
Japanese society that is taking place results in a lack of support and specific policies
towards foreign workers. Such a lack is detrimental to the aim of integrating them into
Japanese society. (Shikama 2008: 58)
Regardless of the increasing presence of foreign residents, at national govern-

ment level Japan does not yet see itself as a country of immigration. Although
the many popular and academic books published on the subject use the term
‘imin’ (immigrant) liberally in their titles and discussions, government doc-
uments and surveys show a continuing preference for the word ‘gaikokujin’
(foreigner) instead (Shikama 2008: 52, Befu 2009b). Tegtmeyer Pak (2000: 56)
comments that the term ‘ijū rōdōsha’ (migrant worker) used in the names of
several nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) supporting such workers repre-
sents ‘radical’ language, ‘because the Japanese-language terms for migrant and
immigration are typically not used’, an omission she attributes to the fact that
the national government’s choice of rhetoric ‘signals a commitment to a homo-
geneous Japanese nation in which immigration and the presence of migrants
are inconceivable’, while the NGOs’ strategic use of the term highlights their
belief that Japan has already become a country of immigration and attempts to
reframe the terms of debate in this particular political issue. A notable excep-
tion to the prevailing trend has been the National Museum of Ethnology’s 2004
exhibition on multiethnic Japan, which in its English documentation made free
use of the word ‘immigrants’;15 this, however, was largely the exception that
proves the rule. Despite the significant contributions made by migrant labour
to the economy, Japan has been said to lack belief in the benefits offered by
immigration (Sassen 1998: 55), and government rhetoric tends to bear this out.
Outside national government circles, the private sector – which, like local
government, is more closely involved with foreign residents’ day-to-day lives
than the national government – has recently begun to recognise and advocate
for the language training needs of foreign workers. ‘Immigration’, Coulmas
(2007: 120) writes, ‘is one of the variables that must be reckoned with as Japan
grapples with population decline and a changing international environment’,
and over the last few years it has begun to be promoted within the twin contexts
of declining birth rate and economic globalisation in statements by leading
groups such as the Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Japan Business
Federation. Increasingly, immigration is being framed as serving not only the
needs of the immigrants themselves but those of Japan as a whole, in terms of its
potential to reinvigorate and enhance the fabric of Japanese society. Language
needs, an important contributing factor to this goal, have recently begun to
figure in certain private sector documents. When considering language policy,
we must bear in mind that ‘explicitly designated language policies are not the
same as policies that concern languages . . . almost all policies can have some
bearing on languages’ (Moore 2000: 26). Because language weaves through
and supports a society’s workings in intimate and essential ways, employment
policies, economic policies, social policies, cultural policies and many others
hinge on language-related issues, even when ideas about language are coded as
hidden assumptions rather than explicitly mentioned. In such cases, mention of
language is often more likely to be explicit in the initial discussion documents
aimed at achieving specific and (in some cases) measurable outcomes. A good
example of this is the 2004 document Gaikokujin Ukeire Mondai ni kansuru
Teigen (Recommendations for Accepting Non-Japanese Workers) put out by
the Japan Business Federation, which recommended in several of its proposals
that Japanese-language education be more widely provided for non-Japanese
workers and students and stressed the importance of Japanese-language edu-
cation in arriving at a comprehensive overall policy for the acceptance of such
workers. A recommendation of this kind from so influential a body indicates
the private sector’s substantial recognition of the role of immigrant workers in
Japan’s economic and social fabric.
The vocabulary of diversity

The discourse of multiculturalism in Japan is largely subsumed under two main
terms. The first, ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ (variously translated as inward, internal,
local-level or domestic internationalisation), was coined by Hatsuse Ryūhei
in the mid-1980s to refer to ‘the subtle global influences which were altering
everyday life, values, and the nature of Japanese “civil society”’, among them
The vocabulary of diversity 25
the presence of migrants, and has since been taken up by the media and the
government (Morris-Suzuki 1998: 194). It differentiates the term ‘kokusaika’
(internationalisation) from its other meaning, that of outward-oriented cultural
and other exchange (known also as ‘sotonaru kokusaika’). Kanagawa Prefec-
ture, for instance, inaugurated a programme by this name in the early 1990s to
deal with the increase in the number of its foreign residents (Han 2004: 45). A
series of policies adopted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government during the
second half of the 1990s which aimed at developing an open society where
foreign and Japanese residents coexisted smoothly also underlined the fact that
‘kokusaika’, one of the buzzwords of the late 1980s, no longer referred to
externally oriented international activities alone but now included those which
targeted people of other nationalities living in Japan itself (Backhaus 2004: 39).
Domestic internationalisation of this kind is defined as ‘policies planned and
instituted by local governments that are promoting a more inclusive society’
(Nagy 2008: 43, n23).
The last two and a half decades, then, have seen a shift from outward-looking
internationalisation to ‘uchinaru kokusaika’. Menju (2003) shows how this hap-
pened at the local level: following a 1989 directive from the Ministry of Home
Affairs16 aimed at promoting regional international exchange, many prefectures
and cities set up local international associations to host cultural exchange events
and affiliate with sister cities. The financial downturn of the mid-1990s forced
local governments to cut budget allocations for such purposes, resulting in a
reformulation of international activities. Whereas in the past their international
associations had often hosted visitors and study visits from other countries, the
focus now turned inward as increasing numbers of foreign residents in local
communities brought internationalisation closer to home, with concomitant
needs and challenges. The international has now become internal to the local
area in many parts of Japan. Local rather than national government is thought
to be the appropriate arena for this kind of internationalisation, since local
governments ‘are closer to grass-roots democracy and thus able to avoid the
negative associations of the nation-state’ (Tegtmeyer Pak 2003: 250). The term
‘uchinaru kokusaika’ is therefore largely used to refer to local internationali-
sation programmes which provide support to foreign residents in the area and
which invite such residents to showcase their cultures. The use of the phrase in
Asahi Shimbun articles grew steadily from 1986 to 1999.
The second term, ‘tabunka kyōsei’ (multicultural coexistence), first appeared
in Kawasaki City in the early 1990s and began to spread after the 1995 Hanshin-
Awaji earthquake in Kobe. The earthquake has been seen as pivotal in altering
the relationship between ethnic Japanese and foreign residents in the city as
activists and volunteers tried to work out how best to help non-Japanese sur-
vivors in the aftermath of the quake; the term first began to appear in the titles
of Kobe Shimbun articles after 1995 (Takezawa 2008: 32–3, 39). Searching
the database of the Asahi Shimbun, a major national newspaper, I found that
while the term appeared in headlines only sixty-eight times between 1996 and
mid-2009 on a slowly increasing cline, it appeared in the body of a much larger
number of articles (804) over the same period, with the addition of another
three articles relating to Kawasaki City before the earthquake, in 1993 and
1994, thus confirming that the year of the earthquake was indeed the starting
point for public discussion of multicultural coexistence across Japan.
The related term ‘kyōsei shakai’ (society of coexistence) is referred to by
Willis and Murphy-Shigematsu (2008: 310) as a ‘bellwether phrase’, i.e., a
usage which indicates things to come, in this case an acceptance of coexistence
on a continuing basis which many scholars regard as an essential prerequisite
for the long-term future of Japan. ‘Surviving in the twenty-first century . . . ’,
Befu (2008: xxv) argues, ‘demands invention of a new modus vivendi, often
called kyōsei, through a radical modification of the habitus of homogeneity’.
‘Kyōsei shakai’ is not as specific as the more narrowly focused ‘tabunka kyōsei’
and covers a greater variety of types of coexistence and inclusion: of the articles
with this term in their headlines in the Asahi Shimbun in 1999, for example, two
referred to gender, two to disability, one to pets and one to intergenerational
coexistence; only one article spread a very wide net and included foreign
residents within the groups it named.
Outside the media, ‘tabunka kyōsei’, with its emphasis on inclusion and
diversity, has become a significant keyword widely used by scholars, the media
and increasingly by government, even at the national level, replacing the pre-
viously ubiquitous ‘ibunka’ (literally, ‘different cultures’).17 The Ministry of
Internal Affairs and Communications (MIAC), for example, established a study
group on the promotion of ‘tabunka kyōsei’ in 2005 with the intention of foster-
ing policies for multicultural coexistence in local districts, following this a year
later with a Chiiki ni okeru Tabunka Kyōsei Suishin Puran (Plan for Promoting
Multicultural Coexistence in Local Communities) on which local governments
have drawn to create their own policies. The Ministry of Education, Culture,
Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)18 has funded grant applications aimed
at improving aspects of ‘tabunka kyōsei’.19 Other ministries using the phrase
include the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the Ministry of Economy,
Trade and Industry, the Ministry of Justice and the Cabinet Secretariat (in par-
ticular in a major 2006 report, Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin (Foreigners as
Residents), produced jointly by officials from a range of ministries). A search
of the Japanese government’s E-Gov portal using the keyword ‘tabunka kyōsei’
in October 2010 brought up 4,136 hits linking to documents from a wide range
of ministries, local government, university and other webpages, while a search
of the minutes of the Diet the same month found thirty-seven instances of the
use of the term in both Houses, beginning with one instance each in 2004 and
2005 and rising gradually over the following years to nine in 2008 and thirteen
The vocabulary of diversity 27
by mid-2009, the latter largely due to the minutes of a committee set up by the
House of Councillors in 2007 to investigate the declining birth rate, ageing pop-
ulation and ‘kyōsei’ society.20 Instances also abound at the local-government
level both in documents and in the names of sections, organisations and net-
works, with a Google search on the term ‘tabunka kyōsei sentaa’ (multicultural
coexistence centre), also in October 2010, bringing up well over 15,000 hits.
This term is thus now widely embedded in both official and private discourse.
MIAC defines ‘tabunka kyōsei’ as a state wherein ‘people of different nation-
alities and ethnicities live together as members of their local society, recognising
each others’ cultural differences and striving to build relationships of equality’
(Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2006b). Toyama Prefecture
adopts MIAC’s definition in its own documents,21 as does Ibaraki, but the
Shizuoka Prefectural Government’s Council for the Promotion of Multicul-
tural Coexistence, established in 2006, in implementing the recommendations
of the MIAC report referred to above, defined it more pragmatically in its doc-
umentation as ‘Japanese and foreign residents living together respecting and
understanding each other and overcoming the barriers of language and culture’
(Shizuoka Prefecture Office of Multicultural Affairs 2007). Other prefectures
have adopted their own definitions arising from this common base.22
Although ‘tabunka kyōsei’ is regularly translated as ‘multiculturalism’, some
scholars and commentators regard it as differing from the conception of multi-
culturalism in other countries. Iguchi Yasushi, an expert member of the Cabinet
Office’s Council on Regulatory Reform and advisor to the Council of Cities
with High Concentrations of Foreign Residents (CCHCFR),23 for example,
sees no direct link between Japan’s ‘tabunka kyōsei’ and multiculturalism in
Canada or Australia (Iguchi 2008), regarding it instead as a typically Japanese
grassroots idea fostered by local experience after the 1995 earthquake and
more recently by the activities of the CCHCFR. Chapman (2006: 100), on
the other hand, identifies similarities between Japan’s recent multiculturalist
discourse and that of other countries, notably Australia, arguing that the failure
of the discourse of assimilation as a means of social control has necessitated
a new discourse to take its place: ‘The discourse of tabunka kyōsei in Japan
has much in common with the ways in which other nation-states attempt to
manage diversity by the strategic inclusion of difference . . . A tabunka kyōsei
Japan may be preoccupied with homogeneity and the containment of identity to
prevent the feared destruction of social cohesion.’ In this view, the communities
to be included in harmonious coexistence are stereotyped just as much as is the
mainstream host society, and the tensions arising from difference are smoothed
over.
To digress for a moment: Chapman further argues that the discourse on
‘kyōsei’, with its emphasis on harmonious coexistence between disparate
groups, has nevertheless been carried on within the framework of a belief
in an ethnically homogeneous national identity. In similar vein, Yamanaka

(2008: 26) views the emphasis in recent government and other reports on the
importance of Japanese-language education for foreign workers as a marker
of unreconstructed national ideologies of homogeneity, underlining as it does
the importance of cultural assimilation. A 2006 Ministry of Justice proposal24
discussing the line to be adopted when admitting foreign workers in the future
suggested that ‘nikkeijin’, many of whom do not speak Japanese, should be
required to reach a certain level of proficiency in Japanese and to have certain
special skills in employment if they wish to stay in the country long-term. For
Yamanaka:
The ‘carrot and stick’ approach to induce Nikkeijin to assimilate appears here to exem-
plify a strictly nationalist model intended to maintain the narrow nation-state ideol-
ogy that embraces ethnic homogeneity . . . Such discourses appear to be geared toward
achieving the major goal of the nation-state, that is, to homogenize people of diverse
backgrounds and integrate them into a single unified nation by eliminating cultural
differences among foreigners and between foreigners and Japanese.
This is not, however, a view supported by Tegtmeyer Pak (2003: 250), who
notes that she chose to use the term ‘incorporation programs’ to refer to the
international migration-related activities of the local governments with whom
she undertook her fieldwork because ‘incorporation is distinct from assimila-
tion: local governments are not engaged in a process of Japanization’.
Tightening up on the skill-base requirement and requiring such workers to
achieve a certain level of proficiency in Japanese hardly equates to eliminating
cultural differences between foreigners and Japanese. Rather, it recognises the
likelihood that ‘nikkeijin’ workers are likely to remain a regular part of the
landscape and seeks to regulate the conditions under which they stay long-
term. Cultural differences are not easily eliminated, even by wartime fiat,
as experience showed in Japan’s colonies and occupied territories when the
prevailing policy was to turn occupants of those areas into subjects of the
Emperor. It is overstating the case to claim that requiring a particular category
of foreign workers to acquire certain skills, linguistic and otherwise, amounts
to an attempt to recast those workers as Japanese, regardless of their shared
heritage. Unless ‘nikkeijin’ eventually take out citizenship, they will never be
Japanese but will always be South Americans living in Japan, increasingly with
permanent residence.25 To dismiss the suggestion of language requirements as
narrow nationalism is too temptingly easy. Rather, it should be seen as the
positive step forward that it is, attempting to bring some rigour to an aspect
of immigration policy seen to have failed in its original intent.26 Regardless of
what one’s view of the motivation behind such proposals may be, it is difficult
to argue against the substance of such advocacy: proficiency in the language
of their employers and the host community in which they live can only be a
Writing practices 29
good thing for foreign workers, and facilitates not only smoother employment
relations and practices but also more harmonious experience of the living
environment they have chosen to enter. While it may still be largely true that
foreigners in Japan ‘by providing an oppositional contrast . . . help construct
and perpetuate an imagined Japanese self-identity’ (Creighton 1997: 212) and
therefore represent universal Otherness, it is harder to Other a foreign neighbour
if that neighbour speaks to you and shares information about him/herself in your
own language. Old (and tired) arguments about rigid Othering dichotomies
tend not to hold up in any but the abstract sense: they seem not to recognise
the porosity and inherent instability of such barriers in the context of actual
interpersonal contact.
Coming back to the vocabulary of diversity, it is clear that the discursive
acknowledgment of multiculturalism in the policy arena has been under way
for some time. But is ‘tabunka kyōsei’ really only what Morris-Suzuki (2002:
171) describes as ‘cosmetic multiculturalism’, i.e., ‘a vision of national identity
in which diversity is celebrated, but only under certain tightly circumscribed
conditions’ that do not require deep structural changes in the way people live
but pertain only to the superficial recognition of cultural difference? Or does
it signal a more profound willingness to engage with diversity at the everyday
level of street, workplace and school life and to seek ways of overcoming those
problems that might lead to friction? Analysis of local practice by government
and volunteers would suggest the latter. In the following chapter I will explore
how this translates into practice.
Japan is no longer (and really never was) the homogeneous, static society
of the national imaginary. Rather, Appadurai’s warp and woof scenario (1990:
7) constitutes the everyday reality for most local communities, wherein the
warp of stability is comprehensively entwined with the woof of human motion,
i.e., both domestic and international migrants. Befu (2008: xxiv) maintains
that this reality does not stop legal and bureaucratic actors in the Japanese
naturalisation process from acting according to what he calls, with a nod
to Bourdieu, ‘the habitus of homogeneity’, i.e., ‘a set disposition to act and
react toward foreigners on the assumption that Japan is supposed to be a
homogeneous nation’.27 Nevertheless, such actors are whistling in the wind.
The change is already here, as is recognised in local communities across Japan
as well as increasingly at national level.28
Writing practices
The second test for language policy, while not as pressing as that of emergent
multilingualism, comes in the form of new writing practices mediated by tech-
nology. The ease with which any number of characters can be called up from a
computer’s memory and the propensity to use kana rather than characters in text
messaging or emailing by cell phone, for example, mean that challenges to the
hegemony of the existing policy on characters, predicated upon handwriting,
have now emerged.
The concept of writing has changed since the advent of electronic character
processing in the 1980s to include technology-mediated forms of text produc-
tion (see Gottlieb 2000). Whereas postwar script policy recommended as the
basis for literacy a list of 1,850 (later revised to 1,945) characters for general
use because writing by hand imposed burdens on the memory given the size
of the character set, today that is no longer as important: software memories
contain many thousands of characters, available to users at the touch of a but-
ton. The List of Characters for General Use no longer necessarily represents
practice for the large numbers of people who produce text on computers or
who use cell phone messaging and e-mails and/or the Internet to communicate.
Different surveys have shown a marked increase in the proportion of char-
acters in computer-produced rather than handwritten texts, the reappearance
of characters left off the official list because they were considered too diffi-
cult to write by hand, a marked lessening of the ability to write characters
by hand and a widespread tendency to abbreviate characters in online chat
and text messaging, including the highly specialised and ludic ‘gyarumoji’ (gal
script) which manipulates characters in ways that may defy interpretation by the
uninitiated.
The National Language Council, before its demise in 2001, was cautious
in responding to these developments. Policy deliberations during the 1990s
concentrated on rationalising the shapes of those characters used in computers
which were not on the list and did not address the broader issue of whether
the number of characters on the list should be expanded with the majority to
be taught for recognition only, as has been occasionally suggested. The 2005
report of the NLC’s successor, the Kokugo Bunkakai (Subdivision on National
Language of the Committee for Cultural Affairs), however, acknowledged the
realities of the situation and announced that it would embark on a thorough
reappraisal of existing policy on characters, which has since resulted in the
decision to increase the size of the character list from 30 November 2010,
specifically in response to the influence of information technology on writing.
This is a timely move, given that the proportion of Japan’s population who
grew up in the period when handwriting was the norm is rapidly ageing; even
someone born at the beginning of the word processing boom in 1980 would
be thirty now, with subsequent generations never having known a time when
electronic character input and output were not possible.
Script policy ties in with the wider concept of the nature of literacy in Japan
today. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Japan has no official definition
of literacy; achievement levels in reading are partly judged by the degree of
script acquisition (Tamaoka 1996). The usual assertion is that Japan has a
Conclusion 31
99.9 per cent literacy rate, a claim which could only approach reality if based
on the fallback phonetic kana syllabary rather than on functional literacy in
characters and which ignores those parts of the population whose existence
makes it clear that the real figure is quite different, such as people with learning
difficulties and non-Japanese residents. As will be discussed in Chapter 4,
surveys and research studies have repeatedly shown that university students
have not reached the levels of literacy expected at the end of high school, i.e.,
they cannot reproduce or even recognise all the Characters for General Use.
The literacy debate also subsumes the link between literacy and citizenship for
migrants: given that access to written language – and thus to information – is a
key factor in a citizen’s full participation in society, the nature of the Japanese
writing system and the time it takes migrants to master it may play a role in
determining categories of citizenship (Galan 2005).
In June 2005, the government enacted a Law to Promote the Culture of
the Written Word meant to ‘improve the language capacities of Japanese peo-
ple’ by promoting written culture through assistance to libraries, publishers
and schools. Written culture in the twenty-first century, however, includes a
technology-mediated aspect: high rates of accessing the Internet by cell phone
and text messaging make Japan distinctive in the transnational arena (Ito, Okabe
and Matsuda 2005). Cheap messaging available through I-mode29 means that
e-mail rather than talk is the major use for those phones in Japan, which leads
the world in the use of the mobile Internet. This is contributing to a type of
language use not envisaged by those who drew up the current script policies.
Not only is the language used in messaging more often free of the formality
of other written text, as in other countries, in Japan it has the added dimension
of variations in script use: greater use of the kana script, for example, where
characters would normally be used. It is clear that policy has not constrained
usage in contemporary writing practices, and the recent expansion of the List
of Characters for General Use reflects a pragmatic response on the part of
the national government while maintaining the centrality of characters to the
writing system and in language ideology.
Conclusion
Language policies are products of their times, based on particular decisions
that dovetail with assumptions as to what a desired outcome will be. They
should not be allowed to become fixed in amber but need to be revised to
reflect contemporary realities. Policy may not always change in response to
circumstances if ideology is strong enough to prevent clear-eyed recognition
of those circumstances, but the nexus between society and policy is strong.
As Ager (2003: 13) reminds us in the context of a discussion of Britain and
language, discussion of issues such as identity and nationalism
often takes us apparently far from language behaviour; it is our contention that without
an appropriate understanding of the nature of the society which uses the language,
any attempt to understand language behaviour, and particularly language planning and
policy, must be incomplete. One cannot remove the ‘socio’ from ‘sociolinguistics’, and
nor can one remove the ‘planning’ from ‘language planning’. Even less can one begin to
understand language policy without realising that it is indeed a policy, and like any other
policy, is closely connected with social conditions, with social structures and processes,
with the environmental background to decisions, and particularly with politics, political
parties, their aims and ideologies.
The remainder of this book will deal with important social and linguistic issues
having a bearing on language policy in Japan today. The following chapter
investigates the language needs of particular groups of migrant workers. No
matter what the national context may be, successful multicultural coexistence
depends in large part on the ability to communicate in a common language.
For harmonious relationships to exist between members of two fundamentally
different groups living in the same area, smooth communication is vital. In
the case of Japan, the presence of multilingual communities, many of whose
members are now in Japan for the long rather than the short haul, clearly
constitutes a challenge to longstanding notions of national homogeneity. It is
simply no longer possible to dismiss as a passing phase the contribution of non-
Japanese residents to the nation’s economy and cultural fabric. What, then, are
the language expectations involved, from both sides? And to what extent is
something being done about those expectations through language policies and
practices in government offices and schools (in the case of the state) and in the
private sector and the community at large?
2 The language needs of immigrants
The ideology of monolingualism can prove enduringly resistant to change,

regardless of what new practices might be introduced. Australia adopted official
national policies on multiculturalism in the 1970s, and yet in a study of that
country’s language potential, Clyne (2005) stresses the disparity between what
he calls Australia’s ‘monolingual mindset’ at policy and institutional level
and the on-the-ground multilingual reality of Australia’s communities. The
same is true of Japan, which is at a much earlier stage in the process: leaving
aside the notable exception of the promotion of English, other policies and
practices remain largely predicated on the ideological assumption that Japan is
a monolingual nation, although there are signs that this is beginning to change.
The following discussion will examine the linguistic needs of immigrants and
their relationship to existing ideologies and policies.
When prominent Japanese journalist and political commentator Funabashi
Yōichi wrote in a 2001 essay entitled ‘Japan’s Moment of Truth’ that ‘new lines
of debate are forming around the politics of Japanese identity’, he summarised
astutely the issues surrounding Japan’s current demographics. ‘This debate’, he
continued, ‘takes the form of a clash between two visions of Japan’s future: a
more open, multilingual and multiracial Japan versus a homogenous, monolin-
gual and mono-ethnic one.’ As we saw in Chapter 1, immigration, for so long a
reluctant response to the demands of an ageing population and a low birth rate,
is now a fact of life in Japan and is increasingly being recognised as such in
both official and private sector discourse across the country. A report on Japan’s
future goals published in the year 2000 spoke encouragingly of immigration’s
potential to contribute to Japan’s wellbeing and even suggested that Japan
begin work on an ‘imin seisaku’ (migration policy) (Nijūisseiki Nihon no Kōsō
Kondankai 2000). The use of the word ‘imin’ (migrant) here, Morris-Suzuki
(2002: 169) points out, is significant because the more commonly used ter-
minology of ‘shutsunyūkoku kanri seisaku’ (policy controlling entry and exit
from Japan) refers more to border control than to any real acknowledgment of
the existence and needs of migrants as people.
For English speakers, migration within the English-speaking world does
not present the problem of having to learn another language. In Australia, for
33
example, many immigrants come from other countries such as the United King-
dom and New Zealand where English is spoken and have chosen to migrate
to a country where language will not present a problem for them. In the case
of Japan, however, the fact that Japanese is not an international language like
English and is little spoken outside Japan itself means that the majority of new-
comers do not have the advantage of already being able to speak the language,
making the provision of JSL classes a key social issue as immigration continues
to grow. This reality, while clearly understood at local level as evidenced by the
manifold programmes instituted to deal with it, is not yet seen by policy-makers
at the national level as sufficiently serious to warrant the provision of a national
scheme for teaching Japanese to immigrants.
The linguistic consequences of immigration for foreign residents can be far-
reaching in terms of both employment and personal life, whether individual
or family. Those consequences also have ramifications for the host society, in
terms of delivery of services and social cohesion. As Maher and Nakayama
(2003: 136) comment, ‘the old framework of discourse and common knowledge
about what constitutes “a Japanese community” has radically shifted’. This
chapter will explore the language needs of immigrants who are struggling
to achieve mastery of Japanese and the manner in which those needs are
(or are not) being met. We begin with a look at who the foreign residents
are.
Japan’s registered foreign population, as we saw in Chapter 1, has been
steadily increasing for nearly three decades as a result of globalisation-induced
population flows. The number of such residents more than doubled between
the beginning of labour migration in 1984 and 2004, the number of foreigners
entering Japan for employment purposes continuing to grow despite the fact
that in the early 1990s Japan entered what turned out to be a prolonged period
of economic stagnation (Coulmas 2007: 116, 117). On the receiving side, many
small to midsize businesses in Japan have come to depend on foreign labour for
their activities. On the supply side, many countries in the Asia-Pacific region
from which substantial numbers of migrants originate have come to depend
on contributions from their expatriate populations to shore up their economies,
and the salary differentials between Japan and such countries make Japan an
attractive destination (Douglass and Roberts 2003a). Of the over 2 million
registered foreign residents in Japan at the end of 2008, the largest numbers
were from China, Korea, Brazil, the Philippines and Peru, with a total of 190
countries represented. The decade from 1997 to 2007 saw large increases in
the numbers from Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and India. Almost one-fifth of
foreign residents live in Tokyo, with concentrations also in Aichi Prefecture,
Osaka and Kanagawa Prefecture (Ministry of Justice 2008b). Added to the
numbers of registered foreign residents are over 100,000 known visa overstayers
(fuhō zanryūsha), most of them from Korea, China and the Philippines, in
The language needs of immigrants 35
addition to an unknown number of unregistered others who may have entered

the country illegally.
These figures for registered foreign residents do not account for newcomer
migrants alone but also include longstanding ‘oldcomer’ ethnic communities
such as the Korean and Chinese communities, many of whom are third- or
fourth-generation long-term residents. As ethnic Koreans (zainichi kankoku-
jin) hold special permanent resident status,1 they are routinely included in the
‘foreign resident’ figures.2 Of the registered foreign residents accounted for
in the Ministry of Justice figures, around 40 per cent are permanent residents,
roughly evenly divided between the ‘special permanent resident’ (tokubetsu
eijūsha) category and the ‘general permanent resident’ (ippan eijūsha) cate-
gory. The ministry figures give no information on ethnicity within these visa
categories, but Chen (2008: 44) indicates that one third of the general permanent
residents are Chinese while the special permanent residents are mainly Korean.
Most foreign residents in Japan are there to work; the number of foreign
spouses, many of whom are in the workforce too, is also increasing. As well, a
large number of students study at Japan’s universities and colleges. The major-
ity of international students come from Asia, overwhelmingly from China.
Of the almost 124,000 foreign students in Japanese tertiary education institu-
tions in 2008, the top five countries of origin in descending order were China
(c. 60 per cent), Republic of Korea (c. 15 per cent), Taiwan (c. 4 per cent),
Vietnam (c. 3 per cent) and Malaysia (c. 2 per cent) (JASSO 2009). Many
seek leave to work while studying in Japan and are sometimes exploited by
unscrupulous employers.
Particularly notable is the already mentioned large group of migrants of
Japanese descent (nikkeijin) from Brazil and to a lesser extent Peru and other
South American countries who flocked to Japan in search of work following the
1990 revision of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act which
eased entry requirements for this group in order to meet the labour force require-
ments of Japanese industry, effectively permitting a select category of migrants
to work as unskilled workers in a country where the entry of unskilled migrant
labour is in theory not permitted. The argument that ‘nikkeijin’ would inte-
grate into Japanese society more easily because they were of Japanese descent
proved hollow, as ‘the experience of migration revealed . . . that the nikkei-
jin rarely understood Japanese and that they did not differ substantially from
other foreigners residing in Japan . . . Because of nikkeijin migration, Japanese-
language classes, multilingual information and support systems for foreign
residents had to be established around the mid-1980s’ (Shikama 2008: 53).
Ironically, then, it was to meet the linguistic needs of those assumed not to
need language instruction that language services first had to be established,
thus turning the preconceived ideology equating language with ethnicity on its
head.3
Chiiki Nihongo Kyōiku (regional Japanese-language education, hereafter

CNK) has thus been carried on since the 1980s so that immigrants in local
communities can learn Japanese as a second language (JSL). Hsu (2009), in an
article focusing on non-commercial JSL volunteer groups, argues that unlike
the JSL education offered in schools and universities, CNK is not solely about
language acquisition but also functions as a site of intercultural interaction,
of internationalisation on the ground where Japanese citizens interact with
foreign residents to help them learn the language, so that it can be characterised
as a social movement with the potential to change society. Earlier and more
traditionally taught forms of JSL/JFL education carried on in Japan have by
and large been externally oriented, i.e., for people from outside Japan, mainly
international students and business people, or have been carried on in other
countries as part of a move to spread knowledge of the Japanese language.
CNK is different in that it is domestically oriented: it is meant not for short-term
visitors or for students but for those now living inside Japanese communities
who do not know the official language of their new host country. It is, in short,
a key component of ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ of local origin and implementation.
While the arrival of ‘nikkei’ residents may have provided the impetus for
CNK, the linguistic consequences of migration of course have since spread far
beyond this particular group to manifest themselves in a number of differing
areas of need. In this chapter I have chosen to concentrate on the language needs
of school students, adults in general, non-Japanese spouses, foreign nurses
and care workers and foreigners caught up in the legal system, because these
exemplify some of the issues currently being worked out. There are, of course,
many other areas where language needs cause concern, and my omission of
them in this discussion in no way downgrades their importance.
Immigrant students in Japanese schools

Although Oga and Abe (2009: 90) contend that Japan has only a short history of
JSL education, in fact the history of JSL teaching stretches back to the teaching
of Japanese in the colonies of Taiwan and Korea, in Okinawa and Hokkaido,
and later in the occupied territories during the Second World War (see Gottlieb
1995). In schools within Japan itself, however, little attention was paid to this
until the early 1990s influx of ‘nikkei’ workers4 led to a concomitant sharp
rise in the number of non-Japanese children attending Japanese schools.5 As
accompanying children or children born in Japan to these and other migrants
began to appear in schools, MEXT instituted the practice of issuing annual
reports on the number of children needing Japanese-language instruction from
1991 onwards and since that time has had to develop measures to deal with
such students. The number of children reported in the annual surveys has been
steadily increasing each year. In reality, the numbers had been growing since
Immigrant students in Japanese schools 37
the early 1980s, making it fortunate that the surge following the revision of the
immigration law prompted action to recognise this on the part of the ministry.
Non-Japanese children, if they are not Japanese citizens, are under no legal
obligation to attend Japanese schools, but many municipalities do provide
multilingual information on their websites making it clear that this option is
available and advising parents of the procedures to be followed if they wish
to do so. Kawasaki City, for example, sends out a letter to registered foreign
residents (in Chinese, English, Korean, Portuguese or Spanish) advising that
their child has now reached the appropriate age for school attendance and
enclosing a school application form. Assistance with filling out the form is
available (Kawasaki Board of Education 2010). Refugees or others who have
had their education disrupted in some way or who want to enter school in a
grade lower than their year level, normally because of insufficient proficiency
in Japanese, are advised to consult the district board of education or the head
of their local school (Hōritsu Fujo Kyōkai 2004: 151).6
To give some figures for the sake of perspective: MEXT statistics for the
number of students in Japanese public schools ‘needing instruction in JSL’7 as
of September 2008 show a total of 28,575 students enrolled in 6,212 schools,
an increase of 12.5 per cent over the previous year in terms of student numbers
and 5.7 per cent in school numbers. Of these, the majority (19,504) are in
elementary schools, with smaller cohorts in middle schools (7,576) and high
schools (1,365); each category showed an increase. Small numbers of students
are also enrolled in secondary schools (six-year high schools) and special
education schools (MEXT 2009b). Kanno (2008: 13) observes that these figures
do not represent the full picture regarding students in need of JSL assistance:
students not in public schools are not included, nor are students who have
already been put into ordinary classes but have not achieved the degree of
academic language proficiency required for their level. Shoji (2008: 106) also
queries the reliability of the figures, noting that the percentage of children
with Korean as their first language does not correspond to the proportion of
Korean speakers in Japan, since many young newcomer Koreans do not yet
have children.
Interestingly, 4,895 students deemed to need help with language hold
Japanese citizenship, an almost 12 per cent increase on the previous year,
indicating the reality that citizenship in Japan is becoming porous and is no
longer as firmly tied to the Japanese language as language ideology would
have it. This neatly illustrates Befu’s point that who the Japanese are varies ‘in
accordance with innumerable and variegated experiences in changing histori-
cal circumstances’ (2009a: 21); the foundational concept of what a Japanese
citizen is, is itself beginning to change.
The MEXT survey showed that in 2008 approximately 87 per cent of primary-
school students, 81 per cent of middle-school students and 77 per cent of
high-school students deemed in need of JSL education actually received it (an

average of 85 per cent across all school levels). These students speak a wide
variety of first languages. Portuguese (c. 40 per cent), Chinese (c. 20 per cent)
and Spanish (c. 12.7 per cent) accounted between them for over 70 per cent;
next most common, with much smaller percentages, were Tagalog, Korean,
Vietnamese and English. The most common first language at elementary-school
level is Portuguese, at just over 45 per cent, followed by Chinese at 14 per cent;
at middle school, the representation of Portuguese is roughly equal to that
of Chinese; but at high school, Chinese and Portuguese have almost reversed
their elementary-school proportions, with Chinese at nearly 47 per cent while
Portuguese drops to under 12 per cent. Spanish and Tagalog remain fairly
consistent across all three levels, as does Korean (which increases slightly for
high school). Other languages return much smaller figures.
The majority of students are thinly spread throughout the system: almost
half the schools had only one JSL student, almost 80 per cent had less than
five. At the other end of the scale, over 20 per cent of schools had more
than thirty students, depending on their location, i.e., whether they were found
in areas where foreign workers are concentrated (a small number of primary
and middle schools reported over fifty such students). In keeping with the
overall general increase in foreign students, school locations showed a wider
geographical spread than the previous year. Tokyo and Osaka both had high
numbers of JSL students; Aichi Prefecture topped the list at 5,844 students,
followed by Kanagawa, Chiba, Saitama and Mie Prefectures, i.e., the students
are concentrated in the broad swathe between Tokyo and Osaka where their
parents are employed in industry. By far the most common first language
found in Aichi, Shizuoka, Gifu and Mie Prefectures is Portuguese; in Osaka
and Tokyo, it is Chinese. Tokyo, along with Kanagawa and Aichi Prefectures,
has the biggest concentration of speakers of what are categorised as ‘other
languages’.
The involvement of MEXT in supporting JSL activities in schools tends
to focus on infrastructure and administrative issues, although the ministry did
complete a JSL curriculum in 2007 (Kawakami 2008). The document reporting
the student figures above also gives a breakdown of the policies in place at both
prefectural and municipal level to assist with these students. Both levels engage
in all ten listed activities to some extent, but there are some areas where level-
specific differences are clear. For elementary and middle schools, the municipal
figures show that the top three support activities (in terms of numbers of schools)
are the provision of advisors who can speak the students’ first language, the
setting up of school entry and education advisory services and issuing guides to
entering school.8 At prefectural level, the most common activity is the training
of classroom teachers to deal with non-Japanese-speaking children in their
classrooms. For high schools, at municipal level it is setting up school entry
Immigrant students in Japanese schools 39
and education advisory services; at prefectural level, it is despatching advisors

who can speak the students’ first language, closely followed by school entry
and education advisory services.
The needs, then, are spread across all levels of the school system to varying
degrees and apply to a linguistically and ethnically diverse body of students.
The nature of the JSL education provided in public schools, however, is patchy
at best. Without a recognised tradition of multilingualism and without the teach-
ing resources needed in terms of staff and materials, Japan has had to find its
own way here, and while some progress has been made, much remains to be
done. There are no specialist Japanese-language teachers in schools, no teacher-
training courses for JSL teachers at universities, no government-endorsed scales
for measuring the Japanese-language proficiency of JSL students and no over-
arching language educational policy which takes into account the needs of both
JSL and native Japanese students (Kawakami 2008; Kanno 2008: 15). It is up to
each local Board of Education to decide what to offer its non-Japanese students
in the way of support, and those schools which do make substantial provision
for such students often have to rely on a considerable degree of community
support. The situation is exacerbated by the complexity of the Japanese writing
system. The difficulties of foreign children in school learning are not helped
by their difficulties in learning to read and understand written Japanese: while
the language of everyday life is acquired relatively quickly over a year or two,
the knowledge of academic language of the kind needed to read textbooks and
listen to classroom talks requires much longer, in the order of five to ten years
(Okazaki 2004), so that extra work needs to be put into ensuring that they
acquire these skills.
The involvement of MEXT to date is not always seen as favourably as the
ministry might wish. Kawakami (2008) acknowledges that MEXT has begun
to institute some JSL-related policies in response to two strong submissions
from MIAC seven years apart, the most recent in 2003, requesting that more
positive steps be taken to help non-Japanese-speaking students attend Japanese
schools. Such policies, however, are limited to providing financial assistance
for JSL curriculum developments and running seminars to educate teachers
working with JSL students in their classrooms. Although the national gov-
ernment considers these policies to be sufficient, Kawakami argues, they fall
far short of what is needed, which is nothing less than a national policy on
the education of children whose first language is not Japanese. As long as the
government’s policies focus on the control of foreign residents as alien vis-
itors in Japan rather than as local residents with contributions to make, this
will not change. Even the much vaunted post-2006 ‘tabunka kyōsei’ initia-
tives do not represent a giant leap forward into the future, in his view, but
are merely the first step on the way to building a Japan for the twenty-first
century. Tempting though it may be to salute ‘tabunka kyōsei’ activities as
signalling an end to the ideology of homogeneity, Kawakami’s more realis-

tic approach is hard to refute, and in an appearance before an Upper House
committee of the Diet in 2008 he argued the case for fostering the training of
specialist JSL teachers in Japan in the same way as ESL teachers are trained in
Australia.
Clearly, location (and therefore demand) makes a difference in the provision
of JSL services. Oga and Abe (2009), reporting on their survey of in-service
teachers in Sapporo, Hokkaido, found that while MEXT’s 2008–9 academic-
year policies on support for foreign students are implemented in regions such
as Aichi, Shizuoka and Kanagawa Prefectures and Tokyo where many immi-
grant families live, there is no sense of urgency in other parts of Japan with
fewer such families about the educational needs of JSL students, and many
schools and teachers do not have the training or resources to put into oper-
ation an effective JSL programme. As yet, for example, no specific teaching
qualification is required for JSL in Japan, and the many academic institutions
offering JSL teaching courses are aimed at teaching adult learners,9 resulting
in a disconnect between teacher training in general and JSL teacher training.
None of the teachers they interviewed had any specialist knowledge of JSL
education, even those designated as ‘Japanese-language instructors’. The JSL
classes themselves were taught by local volunteers, who concentrated on basic
conversation and teaching the writing system. The ‘Japanese-language instruc-
tor’ teachers, on the other hand, worked in tandem with mainstream teachers in
classrooms where they concentrated on helping JSL students achieve smooth
relationships with the others in those classes rather than understanding better
the work being covered.
In areas with larger numbers of foreign residents, the situation is different.
Some schools have produced their own multilingual teaching materials to help
immigrant children. To give one example, the board of education in Ota City
in Gunma Prefecture, where live many Brazilian immigrants working in the
automobile industry, published for the Portuguese-speaking students in primary
schools there10 supplementary readers in Portuguese which translate material
from the third- to sixth-grade social studies texts containing Japanese terms
students find hard to understand (The Daily Yomiuri 2006). This city is often
mentioned in the literature for its excellent track record in meeting the needs
of its non-Japanese students: in 1991, it instituted JSL classes in elementary
schools, employing assistants who could speak the students’ first language, and
three years later it applied for and was granted the status of ‘special district for
the education of foreign children and students for permanent residence’ as part
of a structural reform which enabled the city to employ certified teachers from
Brazil to join the teaching team looking after such children. This special status,
which is believed to have led to an increase in the number of non-Japanese chil-
dren going on to local high schools where previously their Japanese-language
Night schools 41
abilities were insufficient to allow this, became available to schools across the
country in 2006 (The Japan Forum 2006).11
Other sources of JSL teaching material are also available. The Center for
Multilingual Multicultural Education and Research (CEMMER) at Tokyo Uni-
versity of Foreign Studies (TUFS), for instance, which was established in 2006
with the aim of contributing in a meaningful way through teaching, research
and social engagement to the resolution of problems encountered in Japan’s
increasingly multilingual and multicultural society, provides free downloadable
teaching materials on its website in Portuguese and Tagalog. Their reason for
doing so is elaborated on the website:
If students can not understand Japanese, then they would not be able to understand what
is taught in class, either. Such students have a high tendency of refusing to go to school
or even to be enrolled in school, and for this reason, they often can not enter senior
high school. As a result, many of them end up committing crimes after failing to find a
decent job. At the Center, we are working on the elaboration of educational materials to
assist such children in learning. (CEMMER 2009)
Materials currently available include units on the first three years of kanji (a
total of 200) and on simple mathematical operations such as multiplication and
division. The website text acknowledges that creative volunteer JSL teachers
devise many of their own teaching materials but laments that these are rarely
made available to other people; the CEMMER teaching materials are therefore
meant to be shared by anyone able to download them for use in teaching
non-Japanese children.
Night schools
A second, often overlooked area of public education where JSL learners of
disparate ages, ethnicities, backgrounds and social statuses come together in a
classroom setting is the evening middle school or ‘night school’. These schools
were initiated in 1947 to cater for people who in one way or another fell
between the cracks of Japan’s mainstream education system, to enable them
to finish their period of compulsory education and perhaps proceed to further
education. Over the intervening years they have evolved to cater for a diverse
clientele.12 Japanese students may be there because they have a history of
attendance problems with regular schools, because they have dropped out of
other schools at some stage and wish to resume their education and/or because
they have problems with literacy. Non-Japanese students are often there to
learn the language: a study by Harada (2003), for instance, found that in 2002
almost 70 per cent of the students in such schools were non-Japanese who
were there specifically for that purpose. At the 2009 graduation of one such
school in Edogawa Ward, Tokyo, twenty-six of the twenty-nine graduates were
foreign residents, who expressed their gratitude for the opportunity the school
had given them to learn to speak Japanese and thereby improve their social
networks. Given the increasing number of such residents, there has for some
time been a two-track curriculum available at the school, one for native speakers
of Japanese and one for JSL students (Shinmura 2009).
The website of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Board of Education13
offers information about evening middle schools, namely that there are eight
such schools in Tokyo (five of them offering a JSL stream), that they are for
people who were not able to complete their period of compulsory education at
other schools, and that enrolment is open to anyone who meets three simple
criteria: they are age fifteen or older, have not graduated from primary school
or middle school and live or work in Tokyo. The language of the webpage
is uncomplicated, and hiragana versions of each heading and each sentence
are appended for those who might have difficulty with kanji. An English ver-
sion is also given. The Osaka Prefectural Board of Education provides similar
information in a little more detail, with the exception of the English transla-
tion, though it is not until users click one level down to the enrolment guide14
that they reach the simpler Japanese, providing a user-friendly interface for
prospective students who may lack kanji skills either because they are Japanese
students whose education has been interrupted or non-Japanese who have not
yet learned to read standard Japanese.
Municipal boards of education provide statistics on evening middle-school
enrolments: in Tokyo in 2009, for example, there were eight such schools
with an enrolment of 324 students (Tokyo Metropolitan Government Board
of Education 2009). Current statistics for national enrolment numbers proved
remarkably hard to find through any official source of such statistics; this
may be because ‘night junior high schools are not officially recognized by
the national authorities, because the education laws define junior high school
as a day-time institution’ (Maehira 1994: 336). Nonetheless, in 2002, Harada
reported (perhaps by aggregating municipal totals) that across Japan there were
3,031 such students from a total of thirty-four countries, the top three groups
being Chinese, ethnic Koreans and Japanese. In Tokyo, students came from a
wide range of countries and 40 per cent were under the age of thirty; in Osaka,
on the other hand, students were more likely to be ethnic Korean and older.
Among the people seeking to learn Japanese by this means in Harada’s study
were some repatriated from China who had missed out on formal education
as children and young migrants whose education had become a casualty of
repeatedly moving between their own country and Japan. For financial, age-
related and ability-related reasons, the night school was their only avenue for
learning Japanese, and for some their main aim in being there was not to
complete the normal middle-school curriculum offered by the schools but to
learn sufficient Japanese to enable them to join the workforce. Some schools
Language education for adults 43
surveyed offered special JSL streams. At the school in her Tokyo-based study,
Harada identified the differences in curriculum between three different groups.
In addition to other subjects, the older learners group studied Japanese for ten
forty-minute periods a week and English for only one; the younger learners
group did five periods of Japanese and three of English; and the ‘Nihongo
A’ JSL group took fifteen periods of Japanese and none of English. Japanese
classes were traditional teacher-centred classes with little interaction; there was
also little interaction between Japanese and non-Japanese students outside the
classroom. All teachers were of course qualified, but JSL is not yet a curriculum
subject in the teacher training courses. Although the teachers Harada observed
worked hard to teach themselves how to teach JSL, the need for both specialist
JSL teachers and a clear JSL curriculum in schools where over 70 per cent of
the student body is not Japanese is undeniable.
The schools discussed above are part of Japan’s formal nine years of compul-
sory education. In addition, evening courses which are not part of the compul-
sory education system are also offered at high schools. Non-Japanese students
new to Japan who wish to attend public high schools have a difficult time
passing the entrance examinations because of limited language skills and often
opt to apply for the less well patronised evening high-school courses: in Tokyo,
around 30 per cent of such students attend evening courses (The Daily Yomiuri
2007). Not all night school experiences are characterised by the lack of com-
munication among ethnic groups reported by Harada. In 2006, for example,
at a ceremony to mark ten years of evening classes in JSL at a high school
in Ichioka, Osaka which had been started in 1996 with the express aim of
helping foreign residents working during the day to learn Japanese at night,
past students spoke with pleasure of the positive interaction of cultures they
had experienced in classes taught by volunteers. In 2005, 135 volunteers had
turned out to teach Japanese to 179 people from 29 different countries (Yomiuri
Shimbun 2006a).
Language education for adults

Outside the schools, students’ parents face their own problems with language.
Many ‘nikkei’ workers, for example, on arrival settle into communities of other
‘nikkei’ where they speak their own language, patronising ‘nikkei’-run busi-
nesses for many of their daily needs and often not developing their Japanese
to the level needed for their employment as they are comfortably insulated
linguistically from the communities around them. A 2003 survey of personnel
managers at contract companies (the major employers of ‘nikkei’ workers)
found that although such companies prefer the ‘nikkei’ workers on their books
to be able to speak Japanese, less than 10 per cent of new arrivals were able to
do so. One company surveyed reported that it would hire those unable to speak
Japanese if interpreters and compatriot workers were able to provide commu-

nication assistance; an important reason why ‘nikkei’ workers are concentrated
into indirect employment (for contract companies) is precisely the availability
of such interpreters in those companies (Watanabe 2005: 83, 97). This is the
reality for many ‘nikkei’ workers in Japan, flying in the face of the expectation
that workers of Japanese descent would integrate more easily into Japanese
society because they were already likely to be familiar with the language when
they arrived. Many second and third generation ‘nikkei’ had not kept up their
heritage language and arrived in Japan no better off linguistically than someone
from, say, China. In fact, a Chinese worker would have the advantage of famil-
iarity with characters sufficient to allow for a reasonable guess at the meaning
of a document despite the differences in the two languages; a South American
has no such advantage.
For those adults who do wish to learn Japanese, the local community is
the usual source of classes, given that there is no national JSL-for-migrants
scheme. Often this is done through a local government’s international asso-
ciation (either municipal or prefectural). In Kōchi Prefecture in Shikoku, for
example, the Kōchi International Association (KIA), in addition to providing
a wide spectrum of advice to foreign residents on living in Japan both face to
face and through its multilingual website,15 runs Japanese-language and cul-
ture classes. This prefecture’s 2008 list of internationally oriented departmental
measures includes a section on creating an environment conducive to living in
harmony with foreign residents. It lists funding for the KIA to run classes to
teach foreign residents basic everyday spoken Japanese and reading and writ-
ing, and to train volunteer teachers to run such classes. In addition, funding
was allocated to the Culture and Environment Division to provide booklets on
living information in English and Japanese in which kanji were glossed with
hiragana. The Health and Welfare division of the prefectural government was
funded to run ‘nihongo kyōshitsu’ (Japanese-language classes) for returnees
from China and their families,16 to support them in learning Japanese in order
to live independent lives. These classes were to teach Japanese to people whose
main language was Chinese, and were taught at Ushioe Minami school (Kōchi
Prefectural Government 2008), a school which also provides Chinese-language
instruction for its students from Year Three onward (Yomiuri Shimbun 2006b).
According to MEXT statistics for 2008, almost two-thirds of children needing
JSL instruction in Kōchi Prefecture’s schools speak Chinese, reflecting the high
population density of Chinese residents in the prefecture whose needs these
measures are intended to address.
We have seen that attempts to provide bilingual JSL material for children are
in train in various quarters (CEMMER, Ota City), but the matter of appropriate
textbooks for adult learners of Japanese remains a pressing concern. While most
existing textbooks are oriented to the concerns of older bubble-era western
Language education for adults 45
university class and business concerns, Jones (2006: 1206) notes, ‘the new
Japanese language learner . . . is likely to be a non-English speaking immigrant
from Brazil, or a technical student from Vietnam, or an aged-care worker from
the Philippines. Textbooks that are directed towards these students need to be
produced in order to help them not only advance their language skills, but also
adapt to living in Japan by teaching them how to perform functional tasks such
as renting an apartment, applying for a job, or going to a doctor.’ Textbooks
published by the Association for Overseas Technical Scholarship (AOTS) are
available in eleven languages, and the Association for Japanese Language
Teaching (AJALT)’s textbook of practical Japanese for technical trainees also
has Chinese, English, Indonesian and Vietnamese supplements available for
use with the main text.
Just as pressing for adults as the need to learn to speak Japanese in order to
deal with the ins and outs of working life in Japan is the need to learn to read
it in order to understand and interact with the environment around them. For
the foreign workers who originally planned to live in Japan only for a short
time but ended up choosing to stay on there, unfamiliarity with the Japanese
writing system has caused significant difficulties in their daily lives; even such
commonly reported daily issues as the failure of foreign residents to comply
with the accepted Japanese system of garbage disposal come down to inability
to read the disposal instructions written in Japanese (Maher and Nakayama
2003: 136). Motivations for wanting to learn to read and write Japanese are
varied. In late 2002, a survey of around 700 ‘nikkei’ residents over the age of
fifteen in Toyota City found that 61 per cent and 73 per cent respectively could
neither read the kanji for nor understand the meaning of the words ‘no parking’
and ‘danger’ used on everyday signs; the fact that so many who worked in
factories were unable to understand the ‘danger’ sign was of particular concern
(Yomiuri Shimbun 2002). Following the recent round of job losses arising
from the financial downturn, incidents were reported of retrenched ‘nikkei’
workers visiting their local Gaikokujin Sōdankai because they were unable
to understand the contents of the letter informing them of their retrenchment
(Nihongo Kyōiku Gakkai 2009: 57). Volunteers at Musubi no Kai, a Christian
group supporting foreign workers in Adachi-ku in Tokyo,17 began Japanese
classes for adult Filipinos in 2004 specifically to prevent foreign workers from
being exploited because of their inability to read and write Japanese: they had
come to realise the often pivotal role played by literacy in labour disputes, with
some unscrupulous managers presenting workers with Japanese documents
they were unable to read and telling them to sign them only for the workers to
discover later that they had signed their own dismissal papers (Musubi no Kai
volunteer staff 2005). For parents (usually mothers) of children approaching
school age, a primary goal in learning to read is to be able to understand the
written information sent home from the school relating to their child and to
school life in general. For others, it may be to enable them to read Japanese
text messages on their cell phones.
Local governments often offer financial support for reading and writing
classes. The City of Kyoto’s Board of Education, for example, in August 2009
offered grants of up to 100,000 yen to people or groups wishing to apply
to run classes that would teach elementary-school level reading and writing
skills to people who could already carry on daily conversations in Japanese.18
Not all envisaged attendees were necessarily foreigners, rather the reverse: the
example application form given on the website listed them as elderly people
in local communities who wanted to learn to read and write hiragana and
kanji to elementary-school levels by attending one class a week. Similarly, the
Miyage Yomikaki Kyōshitsu Ōzora, a member group of the Hyogo Nihongo
Volunteers’ Network set up in 1997 following the Hanshin earthquake, runs
a reading and writing class for native or non-native residents who want to
learn these skills; some members attend these classes in the evenings after
graduating from middle or high school.19 Ota Ward in Tokyo offered a free
eighteen-week course in reading and writing for people of any nationality over
sixteen years of age, with childminding for toddlers provided for a small fee,
from September 2009 to March 2010, open to people who had not mastered the
writing system at school and anyone else who wanted to learn to read and write.
Both Japanese and non-Japanese were welcome to attend, but in the latter case,
the non-Japanese students were required to be already able to speak Japanese.20
Many of the people undertaking such courses are themselves Japanese with life
experiences which have left them without the training in reading and writing
normally imparted by the education system. Some may be Japanese teenagers
returning from parental postings abroad (known as ‘kikoku shijo’) who need
help with writing; others, older people such as returnees from China or elderly
ethnic Koreans,21 may not have completed school in Japan at all, or in some
cases completed school in neither country and never learned to read and write
at all. A basic assumption on the Japanese side in relation to China returnees
was that they would be literate in Chinese and therefore able to read kanji; this
turned out in practice not to be the case, as many were either completely or
almost illiterate, having received very little education in China (Ward 2006:
147).
The role of volunteers

Very little of the local community teaching of Japanese could proceed with-
out the contribution of volunteers, and it is here that the contribution of civil
society22 to local integration is most evident. ‘Civic, localist thinking per-
meates students, housewives, senior citizens and some sections of the casual
workforce – groups that are distant from the power centres of the state and are
The role of volunteers 47
not directly connected with the capitalist order of production and distribution’
(Sugimoto 2009: 19). All over Japan the need for language lessons is being met
by volunteer associations, many associated either with churches (as in the case
of Musubi no Kai) or with the international offices of particular local govern-
ments. The city of Kawachinagano in Osaka, for example, through its Interna-
tional Friendship Association (KIFA),23 offers foreign residents volunteer-led
classes three times a week in Japanese conversation, reading and writing at
elementary, intermediate and advanced levels. Not all such groups are affiliated
with local government or with churches: in Kasugai City in Aichi, for exam-
ple, volunteers from a private group called Crosscul formed in 1993 and with
about forty members teach Japanese on a one-to-one basis, help the munici-
pal government with translation of its PR materials into Chinese, English and
Portuguese and interact with international students at nearby universities.
Such voluntarism in the JSL area, while seen as normal today, is a compar-
atively recent phenomenon, as Hsu (2009) points out. The first short course
for volunteer Japanese teachers was held in Kanazawa City in 1981, run by a
citizens’ group aiming to teach Japanese to international tourists. After 1979,
returnees from China, refugees from Vietnam and later, the foreign workers
attracted by the bubble economy of the 1980s were supplemented by South
American ‘nikkei’ in the 1990s. Newcomers were different from oldcomers in
that they experienced language difficulties and required local-level JSL teach-
ing. From the 1970s, Hsu asserts, the definition of a foreigner changed from
being based on racial or citizenship grounds to being someone whose first
language was not Japanese. Training programmes for JSL volunteer teachers
were established all over Japan in the late 1980s, and enthusiasm for becom-
ing such a volunteer accelerated after this time. During the 1990s the National
Institute for Japanese Language also ran a symposium on JSL in local areas and
implemented eight model projects, and regional networks of volunteer groups
appeared nationwide. Local authorities today advertise frequently for volun-
teers and provide training.24 In 2009, volunteers accounted for 54 per cent of
JSL teachers (Agency for Cultural Affairs 2010b).
Nakano (2005) found that volunteers in Japan are preponderantly middle-
aged housewives and men retired from the workforce. ‘The word borantia . . .
has come to mean activities that are progressive, advanced, and dedicated to the
improvement of society’ (3) rather than merely unpaid and public-spirited, and
volunteer registries and coordinators in local government offices make it easy to
find an outlet for volunteering. Noting the lack of media coverage of community
volunteering as opposed to the more glamorous forms of volunteering involving
the environment, disaster relief or youth volunteering, Nakano suggests that
this may reflect a more generalised social tendency to overlook middle-aged
women and men no longer in the workforce, whereas in fact their personal
decisions and everyday activities, though small in scale, have the potential
to create a groundswell of change in Japanese society. Japanese volunteers

are of course for the most part deeply invested in mainstream values, but she
regards their work as ‘not the triumph of one set of values over another or the
reproduction of an unchanging social order, but social changes in the making’
(166). It is precisely this bottom-up activity and provision of language training
with volunteer participation, reflecting acknowledgment of language needs in
local communities, that may in time effect a change in national policy as well,
although the danger is always present that national government may leave well-
functioning local systems of this kind to carry the burden rather than picking
up the responsibility itself.
Volunteers can be seen as individual citizens acting as agents of historical
change (see Sasaki-Uemura 2001: 33). Le Blanc’s 1999 book on the politi-
cal world of the Japanese housewife, aptly titled Bicycle Citizens, found that
housewives in her study who were volunteers (not in JSL) ‘saw themselves
as actors, striving to care for the world close to home that politics forgot’
(89). At the same time as they meet their own personal needs for meaningful
engagement with the community around them, volunteers contribute to the
public good in the private sphere by helping non-Japanese residents in their
community through a variety of activities, many of them now having to do
with language at the micro interface. The Spring 2006 newsletter of Kashiwa
City’s international relations office,25 for example, publicised the volunteer
work of the Kashiwa JSL Learning Club in helping non-Japanese children with
their schoolwork on a one-to-one basis; for students who could not understand
what their teachers were saying, the Club offered foreign-student volunteers
to provide first-language help, while for those who could already speak some
Japanese but otherwise needed help with schoolwork, Japanese volunteers were
available (City of Kashiwa International Relations Office 2006).
The Tokyo Nihongo Volunteer Network (TNVN) is another active group, tar-
geting English speakers within the community. Set up in late 1993 as a network
of volunteer groups teaching Japanese as a foreign/second language, the group
aims to provide opportunities for useful activities and information exchange:
‘Through teaching JSL in their own neighbourhoods, TNVN members support,
as neighbours, foreign residents who are experiencing difficulties because of
languages’ (Tokyo Nihongo Volunteer Network 2009, my translation). The key
words here are ‘as neighbours’: elsewhere on the website we find the decla-
ration that ‘Japanese volunteer language groups are not only about language
teaching, but about building international grass roots networks’, stressing the
communitarian aspect of such activities. The TNVN website, available in both
Japanese and English, provides a searchable database of ‘nihongo kyōshitsu’
provided by member groups in Tokyo, a newsletter (in Japanese) and a Bulletin
Board System (BBS) where, among other things, notices of training activities,
JSL-related information and calls for volunteer JSL teachers are posted from
Non-Japanese spouses of Japanese citizens 49
time to time. Other areas of Japan, particularly those with higher concentrations
of foreign residents, are likewise well served by volunteer groups. In Ibaraki
Prefecture, for example, the Ibaraki International Association’s website makes
it easy for those interested to find opportunities either to learn or to teach
Japanese at over sixty JSL venues which can be searched using a multilingual
database available in nine languages with links to each venue. Similar online
databases (though not always multilingual) can be found on local government
websites across Japan, making the Internet a powerful element in the provision
of information about the availability of JSL classes.
Civil society activities of this kind are carried on in ‘a socio-political space
which is not taken over by the formal political or economic institutions, such as
government bureaucracy or corporations’ and which involves the active partici-
pation of members of society, in particular those involved in non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) and non-profit organisations (NPOs) (Befu 2009b: 30).
Civil society is shaped by the interaction between state and society, which means
that in the case of JSL education, it is the failure of the national government to
provide for the language needs of foreign residents once it has admitted them
which has stirred civil society in the form of volunteers to rise to the challenge
of meeting those needs at the local level, in tandem with local governments.
While the dominance of the public sector in governance in Japan for many
decades, in particular the dominance of local governments in providing public
services, may once have fostered an over-reliance on government for solutions
to problems, today NPOs and NGOs are playing a much more significant role
in local governance in response to changed social circumstances, particularly
in providing services for foreign residents. A 1999 survey conducted by the
Prime Minister’s Office showed that many respondents no longer viewed their
job as the most important thing in their life, a view perhaps accounting for
the increase in the number of volunteers interested in solving local problems
(Tamura 2003). While agency in this sort of situation may stem from a variety
of impulses, there is no doubt that volunteers are one of the main facilitators
of JSL education in their own localities. In some cases, volunteer NPO activity
has grown to mesh with local government initiatives in what Shipper (2008:
11) characterises as a model of associative activism: ‘(1) like-minded activists
form a range of NGOs to address specific problems and (2) local governments
increasingly cooperate with activists and their organisations, forming novel and
flexible institutions’, and it is to be hoped that synergies of this kind increase.
Non-Japanese spouses of Japanese citizens

While it has been remarked that women tend to disappear in discussions about
migration (Bottomley 1984: 98), studies of gender and migration to Japan have
in fact multiplied over the last twenty years (e.g., Douglass and Roberts 2003a,
Piper 2003, Suzuki 2000, Truong 1996). Where they do tend to disappear,
however, is in discussions about language. In Japan, one group with pressing
JSL needs is the increasing number of foreign spouses of Japanese citizens,
such as the Filipina women who entered Japan in the 1990s as wives for
farmers in rural areas who could not otherwise find someone to marry (Suzuki
2000). At the end of 2008, almost a quarter of a million people held visas as
the spouse of a Japanese national, just over 11 per cent of the total number
of visa holders (Ministry of Justice 2009a). The great majority are women,
from a large number of countries but predominantly China, the Philippines,
Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam within Asia, the United Kingdom,
Russia, Romania and France in Europe, Brazil, the United States, Peru and
Canada in the Americas, and Australia. Within the countries just mentioned,
the largest groups of spouse-visa holders come from Brazil followed by China
and the Philippines with Korea in fourth place. Having settled in Japan for
family reasons, these spouses are likely in time to become permanent residents
or Japanese citizens, and their children will also be Japanese citizens. It is
therefore in Japan’s interests to ensure that they are able to integrate into the
fabric of society, and this is an important linguistic element of ‘tabunka kyōsei’.
Women who have migrated for family reasons experience disruption and
dislocation on an all-encompassing scale:
Gender roles are affected in relocation by disruption of status and power hierar-
chies, geographical dispersal of kin and friendship networks, new residence patterns,
loss of economic resources, differential access to new resources, shifts in work pat-
terns, exposure to strangers with different lifestyles, and different expectations. (Indra
1999: 25)
Some non-Japanese wives may have had prior experience in Japan before
marriage; others do not, and encounter not only the pressures of settling into a
new marriage but also those of settling into a new living environment, in many
cases without sufficient proficiency in Japanese to smooth the way. Where
they work outside the home, they often do so in jobs where no knowledge
of Japanese is required, e.g., in businesses run by Portuguese speakers where
staff can get by in that language for work purposes. Where they are at home
full-time, they are often isolated from the community around them by their lack
of Japanese-language proficiency. The 2007 House of Councillors’ committee
investigating the declining birth rate, ageing population and ‘kyōsei’ society
heard submissions that foreign wives experience difficulty in communicating
with both husbands and children and sometimes fall out with in-laws because
of their limited Japanese proficiency. That same lack of language proficiency
was also reported as preventing foreign wives from taking concrete action to
escape from situations of very serious abuse (House of Councillors 2008: 33).
Villages such as Mogami in Yamagata Prefecture, home to a large population of
Non-Japanese spouses of Japanese citizens 51
foreign spouses, have set up a suite of support services for these residents which
includes Japanese-language education opportunities, something which Kwak
(2009) suggests helps to compensate for the national government’s neglect of
such issues.
Busy wives and mothers often find that work and family responsibilities
leave them little time to attend JSL classes, so that they either do not attain any
noticeable degree of Japanese-language proficiency at all or manage to arrive
at only a rudimentary proficiency through a degree of natural acquisition when
exposed to Japanese speakers. Neither of these outcomes equips them to read
the notes that come home from school (if their children attend Japanese schools)
or to deal with other communications from the local authorities. The Nihongo
Kyōiku Gakkai’s26 2008 survey of spouses in Yamagata Prefecture, home to
many wives from China, Korea and the Philippines, therefore underscored the
necessity for providing such residents with access to Japanese-language classes
soon after their arrival in Japan. Survey respondents, all of whom had come
to Japan within the previous ten years for an arranged marriage, fell into two
groups: those who had studied Japanese at a ‘nihongo kyōshitsu’ within six
months of arrival and had persevered, and those who had not. Key factors in
the linguistic success of the former group, some of whom had reached the
standard of Level One of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test,27 were the
support of their families for their endeavours to learn Japanese (by, for example,
childminding, driving them to classes, advising on assignments) and the fact
that they had been given information on where and when Japanese classes were
available at ‘nihongo kyōshitsu’ in their neighbourhoods, either by husbands,
compatriots or staff at the foreign registration section of city hall. The second
group listed lack of family support and lack of information about classes among
the reasons they had not begun language study soon after arrival. These two
elements would seem to be key. While the first is not something that can readily
be addressed by local government, the second is.
Respondents from both groups reported feelings of isolation and inadequacy
stemming from their inability to communicate well with other family members
during their first year or two in Japan, the stress of the situation often resulting
in tears, frustration and misunderstandings. Those who had learned Japanese
reported little trouble in the workplace, whereas those without Japanese spoke
of bullying and other difficulties because their ignorance of the language needed
to perform their work well sometimes caused problems for their co-workers.
Three of this group, who had either never attended JSL classes or attended
for a short time only, were also hardly able to read or write Japanese, two of
them to the extent of not being able to write their own names and addresses for
the purposes of the survey, although another was able to read school notices
and write messages in the home–school liaison notebook like members of the
other group. Of those who had gone to classes, one respondent reported literacy
activities of the order of exchanging cell phone e-mails with Japanese people,
reading the manuals for household appliances, studying Japanese history by
reading manga and looking for part-time job opportunities and classes of various
kinds on the Internet and in magazines. Another was able, with the help of her
Japanese husband, to assist compatriots with reading court-related documents
and work-related contracts.
The report concluded that the provision of JSL classes to non-Japanese
spouses soon after their arrival in Japan was essential to enable them to com-
municate smoothly with their new families. The best way to ensure that they
received information about such classes available in their area was to provide
it at the time of registration (gaikokujin tōroku), which had not been the case
for all but one of the survey respondents. The local foreign registration section
has an important role to play here in giving the information to the spouses
themselves and not to other parties who may either not pass it on or mislay
it. At the same time, government offices can act to bolster family support for
wives learning Japanese by providing their families with information about
the process and the facilities involved. Since the economic and social status of
spouses of Japanese nationals is relatively secure, if they become proficient in
Japanese, they can become an important bilingual resource in their communi-
ties. It is therefore very important in terms of fostering future social capital that
they be assured of classroom-based JSL learning opportunities soon after they
arrive in Japan. The report’s authors’ firmly expressed view is that responsi-
bility for ensuring that all foreign residents, not just those who actually come
to ‘nihongo kyōshitsu’, are given the chance to learn Japanese rests with the
government (Nihongo Kyōiku Gakkai 2009).
As always, it falls to local volunteers to address on-the-ground problems.
Finding a class which allows prospective students to bring their children can
be a problem: fewer than half of the volunteer-run Japanese classes advertised
in Shinjuku in Tokyo in 2010 offer childminding services, although Shinjuku’s
Multicultural Plaza itself offers a family Japanese-language course on Sat-
urdays at which children are welcome (Shinjuku Multicultural Plaza 2010).
Other areas, realising the problem, have also followed suit: in the city of
Kitakyushu, for example, volunteers began classes for foreign wives to which
they could bring their babies, learn to write Japanese and also chat about
childrearing. Attendees had previously had difficulty finding a place to learn
Japanese because of their small children (Nishi Nihon Shimbun 2008).
Foreign nurses and care workers

In 2007–8, the Japanese Language Education Guarantee Act Study Group,
a group of researchers from universities and language-related organisations
predominantly in the Osaka area, received a government grant for exploratory
Foreign nurses and care workers 53
research on the language education and public law aspects of creating a draft law
to guarantee Japanese-language education to newcomers,28 and succeeded in
gaining further funding in the basic research category for 2009.29 The rationale
for their research was the situation discussed above: although the number of
foreign residents in Japan has greatly increased, the provision of Japanese-
language education, whether for children or adults, is not systematised and is
left for the most part to the good offices of local governments and altruistic
volunteers. A group of researchers and practitioners in the fields of JSL, social
education and public law had therefore banded together to attempt to draft a
law that would guarantee Japanese-language education to all newcomers. A
draft form of this law has been developed for discussion, as will be further
discussed in Chapter 5.
A prime example of the kind of piecemeal approach these researchers are
aiming to prevent can be found in the field of health care, where the number one
reason given for opposing the introduction of foreign care workers by respon-
dents to a Cabinet Office survey in 2000, outstripping concerns about profes-
sional skills, was that such workers might lack sufficient Japanese-language
proficiency (Shikama 2008: 56). Trained nurses and care workers from Indone-
sia, Thailand and the Philippines recently brought into Japan to work under
various bilateral government agreements30 in order to address shortfalls in this
category of staff due to the ageing population are given six months of basic
training in Japanese language31 and are then sent to work in hospitals, nursing
homes and old people’s homes across the country as trainees, where they are
expected to deal on the job with medical terminology the average Japanese
layman would seldom use. In order to remain in Japan, they must pass national
licensing examinations within three years of beginning work (four years in the
case of nursing care assistants); these are the regular examinations that Japanese
nurses and caregivers must pass to be licensed in the field which are designed for
native speakers and have very low pass rates.32 The language barrier, in particu-
lar the requirement to read advanced Japanese, may prevent foreign nurses and
care workers not from kanji-background countries like China from reaching the
standard required to pass within the three or four years; the first to attempt the
nursing examination did not pass.33 As Shikama (2008: 62) comments, ‘such
a requirement represents a considerable barrier to integration rather than a tool
towards integration’. Although the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare
was lobbied to attach furigana (hiragana glosses indicating pronunciation) to
kanji in questions written in Japanese, it declined to give special consideration
to non-Japanese candidates (Kaneko 2009). Given that all foreign trainees are
already qualified nurses or care workers in their home countries, mastering
kanji rather than professional knowledge thus remains their biggest challenge
in – or barrier to – successfully completing the test. A simple expedient such
as adding furigana glosses would benefit Japanese native speakers as well as
foreign candidates, but the ideology of kanji literacy without such crutches in
formal settings such as examinations remains deeply entrenched.
The first six months of compulsory language training in Japan is delivered by
a provider/providers chosen by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
(JICWELS 2009) at no cost to the trainees. The courses to date have been
provided by the Association for Overseas Technical Scholarship (AOTS) and
the Japan Foundation.34 Funding for the trainees’ living and tuition expenses
is provided partly by the Japanese government and partly by the institutions
with which trainees have arranged their employment contracts. When the first
group of Indonesian trainees arrived in Japan in August 2008, the six months
of language training was provided by the Japan Foundation’s Kansai Language
Institute for 56 of them and by AOTS for another 149.35 The Japan Foundation
course focused on fulfilling the following instructions from the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs: a) the curriculum overall should provide students with basic
linguistic and sociocultural ability such as to enable them to live, work and
continue to study in local areas and facilities; the language component should
allow students to acquire a level of Japanese which would enable them to work
using the language; and the sociocultural component should provide them with
the understanding of Japanese society and of the daily life and work-related
practices they would need both as residents and as candidates for work as
certified caregivers. To this end, the language curriculum progressed over the
six months from general to specialised workplace Japanese, seeking to strike a
balance between the two needs (Noborizato et al. 2009).
In 2009, a programme for nurses and caregivers from the Philippines was
run between 11 May and 28 October at two AOTS training centres in Tokyo
and Osaka. Of the 816 hours of programme contact, 675 were devoted to
Japanese-language study, consisting of Basic Japanese, Intermediate Japanese
and Technical Japanese, with the explicit target being ‘to acquire basic Japanese
proficiency for living in Japan and minimum level of the language ability
required for working and communicating with patients and staff at medical
institutions’. Japanese-language lessons employed the direct method, i.e., they
were conducted solely in Japanese, while English interpreters were used for lec-
tures and visits. Language classes were supplemented with a further 141 hours
of social and cultural adaptation curriculum, involving lectures and workshops
on living and working in Japan, visits and meetings. Here the stated aim was
‘to understand Japanese society, learn Japanese lifestyle and acquire the ability
to adapt to the working environment in Japan as a member of Japanese society
and a nurse working at a medical institution in Japan’ (Philippines Overseas
Employment Administration 2009).
While the national government thus allows the entry of these medical work-
ers and contributes funding for their initial language and cultural training, it
takes no responsibility for their linguistic needs once they have completed the
Foreign nurses and care workers 55
initial six-month course, which means in effect that they have no reasonable
prospect of passing the national examination without significant further study.
Planning and implementing their ongoing language training in preparation for
the national examinations is left to the employing organisations. Each hospi-
tal and nursing care facility which accepts Indonesian workers must provide
them with language lessons; it must submit a training plan to JICWELS and
report periodically on progress (Noborizato et al. 2009, n7). Although in some
cases volunteer organisations have stepped in to help, in others hiring language
teachers and providing other support has proved a costly undertaking for the
receiving organisation, estimated to require around 600,000 yen per person
per year on top of salaries and other training costs (Uemura 2008). In Tokyo,
the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is providing funds to subsidise the cost
of language teachers at nine such facilities. The examinations employees will
eventually be required to take, however, entail a considerable knowledge of
kanji, and of technical kanji in particular, which as we have seen presents a real
problem for caregivers from non-character-using countries. One newspaper, for
example, reported that despite the good oral communication skills of Indone-
sian care workers in a Yokohama nursing home, their insufficient knowledge
of kanji means that they have difficulty writing daily reports and reports on
the condition of the patients for other workers: they can type hiragana into the
computer, but do not know which of the various kanji options provided for
that text is correct (The Daily Yomiuri 2008). This is not an isolated instance:
similar newspaper reports abound (e.g., Yomiuri Shimbun 2008), attesting to
how difficult it is for people from non-kanji backgrounds to master the Japanese
writing system without sufficient time and opportunity to study it. The widely
reported view is that this will make it all but impossible to pass the national
qualifying examinations. But failure to pass these examinations on account of
kanji proficiency, with consequent automatic repatriation, would represent the
loss of not only a significant amount of expenditure on language training but
also the loss of a valuable human resource for Japanese hospitals and nursing
homes. In 2009, no foreign nurse passed the national nursing examination; in
2010, three (two from Indonesia and one from the Philippines) became the first
to do so. In an encouraging sign of possible change in this area, in January
2010 Foreign Minister Okada Katsuda promised to ‘consider addressing’ the
language barrier, and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare is currently
considering using simpler terms in the examination (The Japan Times 2010).
In response to a journalist’s question at a press conference on 26 March 2010,
Minister Okada affirmed his belief that the need to master so many kanji for
the examination was a hindrance to the success of this bilateral operation and
that the government could do more for candidates who study seriously but still
cannot pass on that account (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2010). It remains to
be seen whether these activities bear fruit in actual practice, but the public
acknowledgment of the problem at ministerial level represents at least a step

forward.
There is no JSL syllabus oriented specifically to the needs of these health
care workers once the initial training is finished. While existing staff may
give them Japanese lessons, or volunteers may come in to teach them medical
terminology, it is all done on an ad hoc basis. Some hospitals, for example, attach
furigana glosses to kanji to help their trainees understand (Kaneko 2009). One
valuable resource that is indeed specifically targeted to the profession, however,
is the Care-Navi website36 set up by the Japan Foundation’s Kansai Japanese
Language Institute. Available on the website in Japanese-English or Japanese-
Indonesian versions, or as a book in Japanese-English, this searchable database
provides practical, relevant examples of over 8,000 vocabulary items likely to
be needed in daily working life, such as when bathing, feeding or otherwise
treating patients or writing reports on their condition. It also furnishes users
with model sentences using the words and with a list of 200 kanji likely to
be useful at work, and is designed to be used by both foreign care workers
themselves and by Japanese language-teachers and local volunteers helping
them learn the language.
Support organisations from the wider community have also begun to appear:
one newspaper reported that in Tokyo a group called Garuda Supporters and
including people with medical training was formed in June 2009, while in Kobe
in August that year students majoring in Indonesian at Konan Women’s Univer-
sity formed an NGO to support the trainees. A further network of supporters in
Osaka was planned for November 2009. All of these groups offer support with
language studies (The Daily Yomiuri Online 2009). Clearly, the government
input into language training, while valuable in providing a kick-start for life
and work in Japan through the initial six months of language instruction, is
insufficient to meet the actual needs of foreign health care workers if they are
to achieve the qualifications which will allow them to work in the capacities
Japan needs in the care sector. It would seem useful to rethink here the ideology
of stand-alone kanji in national tests in the light of changing national needs.
It is true of any job, of course, that employees need to know the specialised
terms pertaining to what they are employed to do in order to be able to carry out
their duties effectively. The issue here is whether they have time to learn them
properly and to improve their wider language skills while dealing with other on-
the-job activities. Once employed, foreign residents have little leisure to attend
formal Japanese classes except for those run by volunteers, where dropout rates
tend to be high. While some enterprises like the nursing facilities mentioned
above do have in-house JSL training programmes for employees which go some
way towards addressing these needs, it is the lack of any systematic programme
for offering JSL education to all newcomers that exercises both the drafters of
the proposed law mentioned above and the Nihongo Kyōiku Gakkai.
Language and the legal system 57
Language and the legal system

Another area taking on increased significance as the foreign population grows
and underlining the increasingly multilingual nature of Japan and the con-
sequent need for language services is the justice system. While there is no
overarching policy document addressing the rights of non-Japanese caught up
in the various levels of the legal system, laws intended to protect the rights
of defendants do exist. Article 175 of Japan’s Code of Criminal Procedure,
for example, requires courts to ensure that trials involving a foreign defen-
dant provide an interpreter proficient in the languages to be used. Prior to
trial, foreign defendants are shown multilingual videos and are given multi-
lingual documents explaining Japanese court procedures (Ministry of Justice
2010).
Many of the legal troubles encountered by foreign residents concern immi-
gration issues. In 2005, for instance, almost 60 per cent of foreign defendants
were before district and summary courts on Immigration Control Law viola-
tions (Ministry of Justice 2006c). While regional immigration bureaus provide
weekday counselling on a broad range of issues, since September 2008 this
has been supplemented by two seven-day toll-free nationwide telephone coun-
selling services, one run by the Tokyo Regional Information Bureau for issues
specifically related to illegal residency and the other by the Tokyo Immigra-
tion Information Centre for foreign nationals with questions on a range of
immigration control procedures. Both these services are advertised in seven
versions other than Japanese (English, Spanish, Chinese, Chinese (simplified
characters), Korean, Thai and Indonesian) on the Ministry of Justice website,
and the second also advises that counselling in languages other than Japanese
is available depending on the availability of counsellors able to speak other
languages (Ministry of Justice 2008c and 2008d).
The number of foreigners in trouble with the law fluctuates from year to
year: in 2007, it was 13,339, 3.6 per cent of the total number of arrests for gen-
eral criminal offences for that year (Ministry of Justice 2008a: 14). National
Police Agency statistics give the breakdown by nationality for that year in
descending order of frequency as Chinese (not including Taiwanese and Hong
Kong), Brazilian, Turkish, Korean, Colombian, Philippine, Vietnamese, Peru-
vian, Thai and Sri Lankan (National Police Agency 2008), indicating the lan-
guages most frequently involved, but linguistically this is only a part of the
total picture. Other Supreme Court data show that in 2008 the breakdown of
languages used in court, again in descending order of frequency, was Chi-
nese, Korean, Tagalog, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese, English, Farsi,
Sinhalese and ‘other languages’. The last of these encompassed a wide range
of languages, many of them with few speakers in Japan. It is worth listing
them here in order to show the difficulty that can be involved in finding an
interpreter: Amharic, Arabic, Indonesian, Urdu, Estonian, Dutch, Cambodian,

Swahili, Tajik, Tamil, Dari, German, Turkish, Nepalese, Pashto, Punjabi, Hindi,
French, Hebrew, Bengali, Polish, Malayalam, Malay, Burmese, Mongolian,
Laotian, Romanian and Russian. This gives a total of thirty-eight languages for
which interpreters were required, many of them Asian languages not studied
widely in Japan, which limits the pool of available people. The same docu-
ment shows the number of cases requiring court interpreting in 2008 as 4,511,
approximately one in seventeen of all defendants that year. Whereas in 1989
foreign defendants came from thirty-five countries, by 2008 that number had
increased to seventy (Ministry of Justice 2010). This is as good an indicator
as any other of the increasing internationalisation of Japanese society over that
period.
Tsuda (1997) asserts that language as a component of human rights is clearly
problematic in the case of Japan. Although Article 236 of Japan’s Standards
for Criminal Investigation recommends that a translation should be attached to
an arrest warrant, in practice the warrants are written only in Japanese, so that
foreign residents may not be fully aware of the reasons for the arrest. The Japan
Legal Aid Association advises foreign residents that should they find them-
selves in this situation, it is important at this stage to notify the arresting officer
and request an interpreter from the outset (Hōritsu Fujo Kyōkai 2004: 377–8).
Such an interpreter is paid for by the state during the interrogation (Osaka
Bengoshi Kai 1992: 55). Before a defendant reaches the courts, he/she must
undergo a police investigation, with interpreting services just as important at
this level, as has been clear for many years now. The 1992 Police White Paper,
for example, contains a case study of policing in Ashikaga City in Tochigi Pre-
fecture, with the influx of foreign residents (at that time estimated to be about
5 per cent of the city’s population) meriting a special section. In a discussion of
the effects this had had on local policing, the most prominent mentioned was the
difficulty of procuring interpreters, which required a much greater expenditure
of police time than when dealing with Japanese residents. Given the particular
concentration of Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking residents in the area, inter-
preting in those languages was in demand. In one instance, a Spanish-speaking
interpreter had to be sent from an employment agency in Ota, which has a high
concentration of Spanish speakers, to help in an investigation; in another, a
Farsi-speaking interpreter had to be requested through the police headquarters
of another prefecture. Each of these instances required considerable time and
effort to arrange (National Police Agency 1992).
In response to the increase in the foreign population and the increased need
for multilingual assistance in policing, the Ibaraki Prefectural Police in 1994
established a centre for that purpose which by 1997 had four full-time inter-
preters, with more expected to follow.37 Ten police officers were designated
as interpreters in ten languages, and 150 civilians were signed up as part-time
interpreters (The Daily Yomiuri 1997b). In 2006, prior to this unit being moved
into the criminal investigation section of Ibaraki Police, a revised directive
covering administrative aspects of its operations was issued, which speci-
fied among other things the procedures to be followed when an interpreter
is requested and the qualifications for being both a designated and a civilian
interpreter.
Designated interpreters under this directive are police officers who have
attained qualifications such as passing the national interpreter guide exami-
nation, an approved certified examination in a foreign language by a public
institution or the National Police Agency (NPA) foreign-language skills test.
Alternatively, they may have completed language training conducted by the
NPA’s Research and Training Centre for International Criminal Investigation38
or a language course run by the Ibaraki Prefectural Police themselves. A
comparable level of interpreting ability gained through self-study or having
lived overseas is also acceptable. The criteria for civilian interpreters are less
stringent, requiring only that they be non-police officers with an ‘ability to
interpret in a foreign language’ who are deemed acceptable to act as police
interpreters by the relevant authorities (Ibaraki Prefectural Police Headquarters
2006). In June 2004, about 60 per cent of the interpreters working for police
were civilians, not all of whom acted according to expectations. Whereas
larger police offices may have officers with NPA-sponsored language training,
small police stations have to rely on civilian interpreters (The Daily Yomiuri
2004), and finding such an interpreter can take time. A survey conducted for
the 2002 Police Yearbook, for example, found that of the reasons reported
by the almost 96 per cent of respondents who found it more difficult to deal
with investigations involving foreigners than with those involving Japanese,
overwhelmingly (90.6 per cent) – and unsurprisingly – it was the language
barrier and the need for interpreting which topped the list (National Police
Agency 2002).
Once someone is arrested, further interpreting is then required for the pro-
vision of legal advice before trial. Bar associations around Japan maintain
registers of interpreters to provide assistance to foreign clients who have been
arrested and provide occasional training sessions. One centre set up by three
bar associations in Tokyo, for example, chooses as needed from a list of about
500 interpreters in order to make legal advice available to foreigners held in
custody. Under Article 39 of the Criminal Prosecution Code, lawyers may
speak with suspects in custody without police present, and in this instance
the interpreter is considered an extension of the lawyer (The Daily Yomiuri
2001).
When a case reaches the courts, the presence or absence of an interpreter
is not at issue, given the legal requirement that one be present. Rather, as
at the other levels, it is the quality of the interpretation provided that can be
crucial for foreign defendants, since such interpreters are often not professionals
experienced in legal interpreting. Registration for court interpreters in Japan is
granted on the basis of performing well in oral interviews; there is as yet no
certification system involving rigorous prior training in legal interpreting. Such
training as exists is acquired ‘on the job’, i.e., through experience in courts.
Occasional day seminars involving simulated interpreting situations and advice
from experienced court interpreters are run by the Supreme Court for registered
interpreters.
Such interpreters must be fluent enough in both Japanese and the target
language to enable them to understand Japanese trial procedures and explain
them to the defendant in his/her own language and to interpret the defendant’s
statement into Japanese. They must also acquire a good understanding of the
procedures and vocabulary they will encounter in court. Would-be candidates
are requested to contact their nearest district court; after they have sat in on some
trials, they then submit the required documentation and attend an interview.
Those judged likely on the basis of the interview to make competent interpreters
are then given some introductory training in the procedures of the criminal
justice system, legal terminology and general information necessary to enable
them to carry out their tasks. They are also introduced to the multilingual
court interpreters’ manuals and videos of court procedures. Their names are
then added to the registers of legal interpreters held at high courts across
Japan, to be called upon as occasion arises. As of 1 April 2009, the register
contained 4,066 names and covered 58 languages; interpreters’ occupations
ranged from university professors to company employees with experience from
overseas postings to housewives. On occasion, when an interpreter cannot be
sourced from the list, embassies, universities and other international cultural
organisations may be approached for help in locating one (Ministry of Justice
2010).
Unsurprisingly given the wide range of languages involved, and with no
recognition of court interpreting as a profession regulated by certification, the
skills base varies widely, from experienced conference interpreters to native
speakers of a language to people who are registered ‘merely because of the
rarity of their language’ (Kamiya 2009, Nae 2007). The responsibilities of court
interpreters are substantial in achieving a fair outcome for the defendant and this
is reflected in law: Article 171 of the Penal Code provides for sanctions against
interpreters who, having sworn an oath, knowingly provide false interpretation
or translation. On a less formal level, anecdotal evidence of poor interpreting
can raise questions about the fairness of the trials received by foreign defendants
(see, for example, The Daily Yomiuri 1997a). Nevertheless, the Supreme Court
has so far argued that the measures it has in place to support interpreters are
sufficient.39 Experienced court interpreters disagree: in 2005, at the urging
of veteran interpreter Professor Mamoru Tsuda, Osaka University of Foreign
Studies began offering a master’s course aimed at training interpreters and

translators for legal and medical work in addition to other areas of community
need.
Of particular importance in the context of judicial interpreting is the change
in Japan to a lay jury system which occurred in late May 2009. Under the new
system, in trials involving particularly serious crimes such as murder, a panel
of six citizens (‘lay judges’) now sits with three judges to consider the evidence
and decide the outcome. In the interests of public understanding, the process
involves a heavier reliance on oral proceedings than the earlier focus on written
documentation. For interpreters, this means that less time is available to prepare
the material under discussion than was previously the case. Ad hoc discussion
cannot be prepared in advance, raising fears that defendants not proficient in
Japanese may suffer as a result of interpreters inexperienced in such a setting,
and mock trials using interpreters were held to address this. The Supreme Court
reported that in 2008, interpreters took part in 138 of the 2,208 trials that would
have been tried by lay juries if the forthcoming system change were already
in place (Tanaka Miya 2009), indicating the degree to which interpreters are
involved in the new system.
By contrast with countries such as the United States, where interpreters must
provide proof of certification prior to registration with the courts, in Japan
court-provided interpreter training does not begin until after candidates have
been accepted and registered (Nae 2007: 8). Experienced court interpreters and
interpreter educators have intensified calls for a system of certification based
on a set training period that will redress this situation in order to ensure that
clients receive the best possible interpreting service. Veteran Japanese-English
interpreter and academic Hiromi Nagao, for example, has been particularly
vocal in this regard. She and others organised the Japan Judicial Interpreters
Association (JJIA) in Osaka in 1992 which holds biannual training seminars
and publishes its own journal. As a result of representations by a Senator on
behalf of court interpreters, the Ministry of Justice set aside a budget allocation
in 2000 to study the judicial interpretation system and directed that training
seminars for beginners and for experienced interpreters be run twice each year
by each district court, i.e., today’s training system (Nagao 2001). Nagao and
others are now pushing for professionalisation of legal interpreting involving
a full registration system similar to that used in other countries,40 advocating
the formation of a training body separate from the Supreme Court (Kamiya
2009). A defined code of ethics is also seen as important. Meanwhile, to assist
in informal training of interpreters, the JJIA along with a Kobe association
of medical interpreters called Medint have since 2006 offered training semi-
nars for members of an association of academics, interpreters and experts, the
Japan Association of Public Service Interpreting and Translation, formed in
Nishinomiya in 2005 (Yomiuri Shimbun 2005b).
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have examined some of the language needs of foreign residents
in Japan, leaving aside the question of first-language maintenance and concen-
trating instead on the need for and the existing provision of opportunities to
learn Japanese. Such residents are now an integral part of the fabric of many
Japanese communities. They are there as the result of both internal and external
factors and cannot simply be dismissed as part of a ‘border problem’:
This complexity of factors, which also includes issues of basic human rights, is creating
pressures of such magnitude that to continue the official policy of allowing foreign
worker ‘entrants’ but not ‘immigrants’ will only lead to a heightening dissonance
between the realities of increasing foreign settlement in Japan and the myths of Japan
as a closed, single-race society. (Douglass and Roberts 2003b: 8)
Whatever happens on the policy front, whether Japan decides in time to

badge itself in its official rhetoric and policy as a country of immigration
or not, the reality is that foreign residents are here to stay. The mythical past
of the ‘tan’itsu minzoku’ (monoracial) ideology and all the years of gloss-
ing over and attempting to constrain its true diversity need to come to an
end with a recognition at the highest levels of the internationalising society
within.
‘It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interven-
tions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself’ (Eagleton
1991: xiii). While language planning which takes into account the needs of
migrant children in Japanese schools and of their parents outside them makes
perfect sense to those children and their families, it must also make sense to
the Japanese mainstream. Whether this can be brought about with any degree
of conviction at national rather than simply local level within the foresee-
able future will of course depend to a significant extent on the discourse
promoted by the national government. While we saw in Chapter 1 that the
policy response of ‘tabunka kyōsei’ began at the national level, that happened
in response to on-the-ground realities in the local communities and was reactive
rather than proactive. Immigration itself remains a politically sensitive topic:
the thrust of the 2009–10 Hatoyama government’s response to the realities of
the ageing population and low birth rate to date was to encourage births by the
giving of cash incentives rather than to consider increasing the immigration
intake.
Challenges to language policy in Japan today, however, encompass other
issues than the provision of JSL education for migrants alone. Conspicuously
absent is anything more than a token attempt to teach the community languages
spoken by migrants and of regional and international significance to Japan:
English is everything. Although Japan is becoming multiethnic and multilingual
Conclusion 63
to a small but increasing degree, that diversity is not reflected in the foreign
languages offered in its education system (Kubota 2002: 15). The next chapter
will examine two aspects of language in Japan which have a bearing on language
policy: the current state of teaching of foreign languages other than English
and the provision of multilingual information by government.
3 Foreign languages other than English in
education and the community
We move now from the individual needs of immigrants to the overall position of
foreign languages other than English in the language policy landscape. While
the role of English will be mentioned where relevant, the main focus of this
chapter will be on two other aspects of language provision in the community,
namely the teaching and learning of foreign languages other than English in
Japanese schools and universities and the provision of multilingual information
for foreign residents. Both of these relate to language policy in obvious ways.
The aggressive promotion of English downgrades the importance of teaching
in schools both those languages which in Japan may properly be considered
community languages and other culturally and strategically important foreign
languages, and the provision of multilingual information to non-Japanese res-
idents in local communities is in the best interests of both government, com-
munity and individual alike. Policy exists to support and to facilitate: in the
first part of the chapter, we shall see that the support for English has not been
paralleled by support for the teaching of other languages, while in the second,
it will become clear that the integration of newcomer residents into local com-
munities has been facilitated by policy decisions taken to provide necessary
information in a range of relevant languages.
The attention of policy-makers has focused on English to the detriment of
the teaching of other languages, which are referred to in passing only at the
end of educational policy documents which are titled ‘Gaikokugo’ (foreign lan-
guages) but which deal almost exclusively with English. The word ‘gaikokugo’
is thus used in a very narrow sense, denoting in practice only one language.
Other foreign languages are referred to as ‘eigo igai no gaikokugo’ (foreign lan-
guages other than English), underscoring the priorities of a foreign-language
programme in which English is taken as the sine qua non.1 The working
dichotomy is plain to see, as summed up by Fujita-Round and Maher (2008:
93): ‘In the imagined community in which language policy emerges in Japan,
two geographical beacons are visible: Japanese (Nihongo) is the (sole) national
language (kokugo) and English is pre-eminently the vehicle of internationaliza-
tion. A straightforward ideological system underpins this stance which, mutatis
mutandis, informs large tracts of policy-making at various educational levels.’
64
Foreign languages other than English 65
The major policy document setting out expectations of the foreign-language

curriculum is the Course of Study (Foreign Languages) which focuses almost
entirely on the teaching and learning of English with the merest nod to other
languages.2 Japan’s government has poured massive amounts of money into
English teaching, most notably with the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET)
Programme since 1987 and the Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English
Abilities since 2003; the next step will be the introduction of English into
the elementary school curriculum in 2011. The expressed purpose of teaching
English is to enable Japanese people to communicate in international settings,
Japanese not being a major international language. Academic writers such
as Tsuda Yukio rail against the hegemony of English in terms of cultural
imperialism, but Japanese policy-makers and educators show no signs of turning
away from that hegemony; rather, they have embraced English as a means to
Japan’s own ends. This can have a downside in terms of motivation: Sakuragi
(2008: 88) suggests that the nature of foreign-language learning in Japan where
students have no choice as to whether they study English or not from middle
school (and soon elementary school) through to university means that ‘many
Japanese may feel that the importance of language study in one’s education is
not a matter of personal judgment but is imposed by the society’. Allowed to
choose, students may well have decided to study one of the languages they hear
spoken around them today instead.
In 1996, the Chūō Kyōiku Shingikai (Central Education Council) in its
first report on Desirable Outcomes for Japanese Education in the Twenty-first
Century noted that given the likelihood of continuing globalisation Japanese
students would need to know more than just English and should therefore be
allowed to experience a range of foreign languages in middle and secondary
schools.3 And yet today, the minutes of meeting after meeting of the Gaikokugo
Senmon Bukai (Foreign Languages Subcommittee) of the Central Education
Committee4 conclude with a statement that ‘the curriculum guidelines say that
languages other than English should conform to the objectives and content of
teaching English, and we really need to talk about this’, with no further action
reported. All the other documented discussion is about English, and nothing
appears to be taking place to address the issue of other languages. The same
attitude can be seen in the 2002 report of the Central Education Committee,
entitled Atarashii Jidai ni okeru Kyōyō Kyōiku no Arikata ni tsuite (Tōshin) (A
Report on Desirable Outcomes for General Education in a New Age), which
stressed the importance of education with a global outlook in a world where
globalisation was proceeding apace, making it all the more important to under-
stand other people and cultures and the religions underpinning them. It was
no longer enough just to understand Japan’s own traditions and culture, the
report said; an attitude of respect for those of other countries and peoples
must also be inculcated, along with the ability to arrive at an accurate mutual
66 Foreign languages other than English
understanding of the peoples of the world through foreign languages (MEXT

2002a). Such a description would seem to indicate that more foreign languages
than English alone are meant, given that not all the peoples of the world speak
English. Later in the same document, however, speaking of high-school stu-
dents, the text stresses the importance of planning for excellent teaching of
foreign languages such that when a student graduates from high school, he
or she will be able to carry on an everyday conversation with a non-Japanese
person. No specific mention of English is made, but the fact that the cur-
riculum guidelines for foreign-language study focus as usual on English and
that the Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Abilities was released
the following year indicates that English is the primary focus, particularly as
the wording about proficiency on high-school graduation is so similar to that
of the Action Plan.
A further document put out by the same committee several months later,
an interim report on the revision of the Basic Law on Education and plans
to revitalise education appropriate to a new age (MEXT 2002b), had only the
following to say about ‘foreign languages’ in a list of examples of concrete
policy objectives:
r To aim for excellent foreign language education, such as English-language
education which aims at producing high-school graduates who are able to
carry on everyday conversations in English and university graduates who can
use English in their work. To aim for English abilities of a world average level
based on objective indicators such as the TOEFL test. To introduce a foreign-
language listening test into the national university entrance examinations
from 2006.
Since the only foreign language which currently has a listening test of those
available for the national university entrance examinations is English, it is clear
that ‘gaikokugo’ here is yet again used to refer to English alone. What, then,
of other languages in the education system?
Foreign and community languages

In the overall approach to teaching languages other than English in Japan,
language policy does not support and facilitate (except in strictly delimited cir-
cumstances, as we shall see) but rather excludes by faint inclusion, rather in the
manner of damning with faint praise. The aims of the policy for the promotion
of English are at least explicit, as is the ideology of internationalisation behind
them. In the area of teaching other languages, however, aims appear to be lack-
ing, though ideology is not: that the aims are not there speaks to the strength of
the ideology that Japan needs only Japanese and English to be self-sufficient.
Very little attention is paid to the teaching of other foreign languages. Although
the new middle school Foreign Language syllabus released by MEXT in 2008
Foreign and community languages 67
sets out as its aims a deepened understanding of languages and cultures and
a willingness to communicate actively through the study of foreign languages
(MEXT 2008a), it then goes on to outline in detail the requirements for teaching
English with the same blanket one-liner at the end about other languages being
taught in conformity to the same aims and content, even though the political
policy-speak about the aims of promoting English is quite different. We cannot
say categorically that the teaching of other foreign languages has been omitted
from the Course of Study guidelines, but it is certainly not accorded the individ-
ualised attention it deserves, subsumed as a line or two under a one-size-fits-all
model with no acknowledgment of important pedagogical issues which may
differ from language to language.
Classroom support measures are likewise English-oriented. In 2009–10,
99 per cent of Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) on the government-
sponsored JET Programme came from countries where English is either the
primary language or an official language (Japan Exchange and Teaching Pro-
gramme 2009b). The 2009–10 JET information pamphlet5 specifies as ‘desig-
nated languages’ English, French, German, Chinese, Korean and for other non-
English countries, the principal language spoken in that country. At the time of
its inception in 1987, the programme aimed to draw ALTs from countries where
English was the primary language; German and French were included in the tar-
geted languages from 1989, Chinese and Korean from 1998, and most recently
Russian from 2005 (Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme 2009a). The
programme was initially set up specifically to improve the English-speaking
ability of Japanese students, with French and German added later following
requests from the ambassadors of those countries. Prime Minister Nakasone
had earlier asked Ishihara Nobuo, who had been closely involved with the
setting up of the programme, whether he could tell then French President Mit-
terand at a summit in Paris that the French language would be added to the JET
programme, which led to the French ambassador’s representations. Junior and
senior high schools teaching French and German as second foreign languages
were subsequently located, and ALTs from those countries were assigned to
help out in classrooms there (Ishihara and Kayama 2007).
When Prime Minister Takeshita, who followed Nakasone, announced in a
1988 speech given in Europe that French and German were to be included in the
programme from the following year, it was as part of a strategy by the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs to move beyond the dependence on the relationship with the
USA and strengthen ties with the European market, with the JET Programme
being seen as one means of achieving this (McConnell 2000: 73–4). The strategy
was not well aligned with on-the-ground realities, however: finding schools
which taught these languages proved very difficult, and McConnell observes
that most of the very small number6 of French and German participants invited
in 1989 ended by teaching English in addition to some classes in their own
language. This led future applicants from those countries to shift from the ALT
arm of the programme to the Coordinator for International Relations (CIR)
arm, where they could work in local governments which had French or German
sister cities. The arrival of Chinese and Korean ALTs in 1998, where previously
applicants from those countries had worked only as CIRs, reflected the growth
of those languages as foreign language electives after 1997, when – as we shall
see – Chinese became the most popular non-English foreign language studied
in high schools (McConnell 2000: 256).7 It was also ‘a manifestation of larger
regional dynamics’, with Japan turning back towards Asia in terms of economic
linkages (233) and with the rise of China endowing a knowledge of its language
with added importance not just in Japan but elsewhere as well. ‘In many Asian
countries, in Europe and the USA, Mandarin has emerged as the new must-have
language’ (Graddol 2006: 63) because of China’s rapidly growing economic
importance, and its study is being promoted in typical soft-power fashion by a
worldwide network of Confucius Institutes.
In Japan, Chinese is a community language as well as a foreign language of
regional, cultural and historical importance. The term ‘community languages’
indicates recognition that such languages are used by citizens within a polity; it
has in large part replaced ‘foreign languages’ in Australia since the mid-1970s,
where it refers to languages other than English used in the general community
to acknowledge that these languages form a continuing part of the Australian
social fabric. They are not ‘foreign languages’, since they are commonly used
by many Australians (Clyne 2005: 5). In Japan’s case, languages other than
Japanese are used within large ethnic communities encompassing in some cases
both oldcomers and newcomers (for Chinese and Korean)8 and in others mainly
newcomers (Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog and others) in the same
way as is true of community languages in Australia. The difference between the
two countries’ approaches to support for community languages is, of course,
that Australia uses English as its de facto national language and therefore has no
need to prioritise community languages against a perceived imperative to teach
this major international language, whereas in Japan a three-tiered structure
exists: the national language, English as an international language, and other
‘foreign’ languages, which sees those other foreign languages sidelined in
the school system. This has not stopped other Asian countries in the same
situation from teaching such languages: South Korea, for instance, has thirty-
one speciality foreign-language high schools where students study either one
or two other languages in addition to Korean and English as part of an intensive
curriculum. Similar schools also operate in China: at Jinan Foreign Language
School,9 for example, English, Japanese and Russian are taught. The 2009
Japan Foundation survey of overseas learners of Japanese as a foreign language
showed Korea and China as having the largest contingents with around 960,000
and 830,000 students respectively (Japan Foundation 2010). Clearly, other
countries in the region do not limit their offerings to the study of the national
language and English but provide substantial avenues for the study of other
languages as well.
As with the study of English, the emphasis in Japanese government doc-
uments dealing with the learning of other languages is externally focused,
with no recognition of the community status of some. A planning document
relating to English in elementary schools, produced in 2006 by the Foreign
Languages Subcommittee of the Central Education Committee, for example,
states unequivocally with regard to other languages such as the Chinese now
being taught in some high schools that ‘we also need to examine how best
to teach foreign languages from the point of view of stimulating communi-
cation with the countries of Asia, in order to train Japanese people who live
in international society’ (MEXT 2006b). Chinese is spoken by large numbers
of people in Japan, but policy documents such as this make no acknowledg-
ment of that fact, seeing the need to teach Chinese only in terms of external
engagement with China and other Asian countries where that language is
spoken.
Other examples of this position are not hard to find. In an article in Kikyūsen,
a monthly newsletter for teachers sent from Japan to work in Japanese schools in
other countries by the Elementary and Secondary Education Bureau of MEXT’s
International Education Division, division chief Tezuka Yoshimasa wrote of
how important it was to focus Japan’s foreign-language education on English
as the official language of both the twenty-one-member APEC (Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation) and the ten-member ASEAN (Association of South
East Asian Nations). Even the formerly French-controlled areas of Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia, where French was widely spoken, use English as members
of ASEAN, he argued, and if an East Asian grouping were to emerge with Japan
and China among its members there was a strong probability that English would
be its official language. With English so entrenched as the global standard for
international communication, it was only realistic for Japan to focus its efforts
in that area. Other foreign languages he saw as being important to bilateral
relationships, with no need to rank them in any particular hierarchy. Even
though the need for the study of Chinese and Korean was bound to increase
to enhance Japan–China or Japan–Korea bilateral relationships, in multilateral
forums English would remain the most important (Tezuka 2007: 2). The focus
of these remarks is again squarely on external international relations, with
no recognition of Chinese and Korean as community languages within Japan
itself. To argue that recognition of the place of community languages in the
education system as community languages is important is not, of course, to
deny the externally oriented significance of those languages, in particular those
of the East Asian region. The normalisation of diplomatic relations with South
Korea in 1965 and China in 1972 led to an increase in the 1980s in regional
linkages on the side of Japan facing the continent, with prefectures along the
Japan Sea coast such as Tottori, Niigata and Toyama competing to establish
economically motivated sister affiliations with China, Korea and Russia (Menju
2003: 93).
Available sources of public opinion indicate support for the study of regional
languages. When a 2001 Cabinet Office survey on future internationalisation
in universities asked what criteria should be used to decide which foreign lan-
guages university students should learn, the most frequent response was (unsur-
prisingly) languages that are widely used in the world; next came languages
that an educated person might reasonably be expected to know, languages used
in countries expected to have an important relationship with Japan in the future
and languages used in areas which have a close economic relationship with
Japan. Asked to comment specifically on which foreign languages university
students should learn, over 92 per cent of respondents chose English, almost
60 per cent chose Chinese and around 15 per cent each indicated French and
Korean (Naikakufu Daijin Kanbō Seifu Kōhōshitsu 2001). These percentages,
Sensui (2009: 48) suggests, indicate that a desirable outcome would be seen as
English +1. Japan is lagging behind the rest of the world in language choices,
he argues, and should start teaching Korean and Chinese at middle-school level
as compulsory second languages. This view is supported by Nakajima Mineo,
a noted China specialist who in the year 2000 chaired a MEXT committee on
improving English-language teaching methods and later became a member of
the government’s Education Rebuilding Council. Reporting on a discussion of
language policy within MEXT, Nakajima made a plea for the study of other lan-
guages beside English, pointing out that Ural-Altaic languages such as Korean,
Mongolian and Turkish should be relatively easy for Japanese people to learn;
Chinese, too, would not be difficult and would facilitate access to many parts of
Asia. Everyone, he concluded, should study not just English but another Asian
language as well (Nakajima 2003: 50).
Members of the general public occasionally write to the newspapers advo-
cating wider study of Asian languages, an example being a letter in November
2008 from a doctor who saw many Asian patients in an area near a university
with large numbers of exchange students from China and Korea. He advocated
the study of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and other languages as second for-
eign language options at university as a means to understanding the lives of
such people, positing as the ideal the presence of Japanese people here and there
in the community who had at some stage of their lives studied such languages,
regardless of their degree of proficiency. Perfect mastery was not required;
the mere presence of people who could understand even to a small degree
their native language would give great comfort to foreign residents (Yoshimura
2008). This letter from a doctor with first-hand experience of non-Japanese-
speaking patients is by no means an isolated instance of such views, illustrating
the readiness of people in local communities to engage with speakers of other

languages who live there as well.
Nor is the business world ignorant of the benefits of other foreign-language
study, although its major focus is on English. When Norihiro Nosse published
an essay reflecting on his thirty-year executive career at Matsushita Electric
in 1996, for instance, he included in a list entitled ‘Much Asked-for Talents
and Capabilities in the Future: New Businessman of the 21st Century’ the
following: ‘Proficiency in at least three languages (two foreign languages).
To be able to handle the English language is no longer considered a talent.
Fairly good command of another foreign language will add an extra advantage
to 21st century businessmen whether it be Spanish, French, German, Ital-
ian, Russian, Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese), or Indonesian’ (Nosse
1996: 181).
Japan has chosen to focus on English as its first foreign language for obvious
reasons. The result, however, has been that the concept of multilingualism pro-
moted through the school system has been a blinkered multilingualism, empha-
sising only one alternative worldview through language rather than offering a
range of choices (see, e.g., Kubota 2002 and Tanaka 2002). During the 1980s,
when ‘kokusaika’ (internationalisation) became the buzzword of the day, the
study of foreign languages was seen as a key indicator of internationalisation
by the Nakasone government’s Rinji Kyōiku Shingikai (Ad Hoc Council on
Education, set up in 1984), and the Committee’s publications made mother-
hood statements about the importance of including foreign languages other
than English, including Asian languages (Hood 2001: 53; Koike 1992: 230–1).
Nevertheless, twenty years later, the Foreign Language curriculum guidelines
continue to focus almost exclusively on English. Has the overriding emphasis on
English been worth the consequent marginalisation of other foreign languages
in the school system at pre-tertiary levels and increasingly at tertiary level? The
sought-after improvement in the ability to speak better English has not been
spectacular despite the large amounts of money invested to this end through
the JET Programme and more recently the Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese
with English Abilities policy. An alternative approach could be to divert some
of that money into the wider teaching of Asian languages, particularly given
the increasing community interest in studying Chinese and Korean at school.
As Kaiser observes, speakers of a language such as Japanese which is spoken
mainly within Japan itself must rely on foreign languages for international
communication; they will not be able to communicate with the world unless
they are bilingual or multilingual, since speakers of other languages cannot
be relied on to learn Japanese. Japanese people should therefore be study-
ing not just English alone but English in combination with the languages of
neighbouring countries such as China, Korea and Indonesia. For local commu-
nication, either Japanese or the language of neighbouring-country interlocutors
could be used, with English doing duty for international commerce and Internet
communication (Ono et al. 2000: 6).
Research studies of different polities have shown language planning and
policy to be based on ‘distinctive ideological assumptions about the role of
language in civic and human life . . . and distinctive stances toward the state
regulation of language’ (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994: 63). Such assumptions
shape the way in which language issues are perceived and planned within a
society: Ruiz (1984), for example, identifies three orientations in language plan-
ning, namely language as a resource, a problem or a right. Japan today remains
fixed in the ‘language as problem’ orientation and does not yet see the linguistic
abilities of its non-Japanese citizens as a resource. As I will show, despite some
encouraging signs of growth over the last decade in Chinese and Korean, the
local community languages remain under-represented in the formal education
system. Kakazu (2007) has said that while during the Meiji Period (1868–1912)
foreign languages such as English, German, French and Russian were rigor-
ously studied in order to absorb knowledge of the West as rapidly as possible,
postwar language education in schools for foreign languages dominated by
English has been done under the rubric not of language policy but rather of cur-
riculum guidelines. I would argue, however, that these curriculum guidelines
are in fact language policy in action, translated into classroom practice. The
lack of any real attention to foreign languages other than English in the Foreign
Language curriculum guidelines highlights the lacuna in national language pol-
icy on this subject, a gap which needs to be filled to take account not only of the
importance to Japan’s external relations of teaching the languages of regional
neighbours but the internal importance of teaching its community languages.
Although people usually think of foreign languages as something they would
use overseas, Sensui (2009: 50) observes, in fact they are surrounded by oppor-
tunities to use other languages within Japan itself. Spanish and Portuguese in
particular are widely spoken in his own local community of Hiratsuka City in
Kanagawa Prefecture. English is actually the language least likely to be asso-
ciated with ethnic minorities and immigrants in Japan, whereas both Chinese
and Korean are strongly associated with ethnic minority status (oldcomers)
and immigration (newcomers) and Spanish is increasingly visible because of
‘nikkei’ workers (Sakuragi 2008). Sakuragi’s study of student attitudes towards
the English, Chinese, Korean and Spanish languages at two universities found
the preferred languages to be English, Chinese, Spanish and Korean, in that
order. Significant correlations were found between attitudes to Chinese, Korean
and Spanish and social distance (defined as a degree of individual willingness
to accept people with various ethnic backgrounds into one’s personal rela-
tionships), prompting Sakuragi to suggest the potential benefit to be gained
from expanding the number of languages taught in schools in terms of social
cohesion.
Another survey of attitudes towards foreign-language learning in Japan was

conducted by Shibata and Okado (2001), who in 1998 targeted four groups
engaged in activities relating to the economy and in international exchange,
in both high schools where English is the only foreign language taught and
high schools teaching other foreign languages as well. Unsurprisingly, the
first of these viewed language proficiency as strategically very important to
Japan’s economic development, ranking it second (from a predetermined list
of choices) after ‘a global outlook’ in response to a question on what sort
of talents should be cultivated for the Japan of the future. The results were
almost the same for the schools which taught foreign languages other than
English, which ranked a global outlook, ability to deal with other cultures
and foreign-language proficiency as their top three choices. Schools teaching
only English ranked language proficiency in fourth place, as did organisations
involved in international exchange which gave precedence to intercultural com-
munication skills. Nevertheless, the fact that language proficiency appeared in
one of the top four slots for each group indicates a degree of consensus on
the need for people with good language skills in Japan in relation to global
outlook.
When asked what sort of human talent should be fostered for the areas in
which respondents themselves lived, however, those on the Japan Sea coast,
not surprisingly given that it faces China and Korea, showed an awareness
of different needs. Whereas respondents from inland areas and areas on the
Pacific coast accorded top rankings to global outlook, language proficiency
and intercultural understanding or negotiating ability (with language profi-
ciency coming first in the Pacific coast areas), those from the west coast saw
greater value in local knowledge, followed by language proficiency and general
knowledge. Clearly, this indicates recognition of the importance of knowing
the languages of neighbouring countries when dealing with those countries: as
the authors of this study point out, a person with good general knowledge, a
local outlook and language skills can be expected to make a solid contribution
to developing economic and other relationships across the Sea of Japan. The
top ranking given to language skills in the Pacific Coast areas, where most of
the large cities are concentrated, may reflect the fact that migrants from various
countries cluster in those cities, along with the greater exposure of the east
coast to international visitors and events. The overall survey results show that
foreign-language education is considered by respondents to be an important
element in the development of Japan’s future human capital.
The English language figured prominently in responses relating to ‘high com-
munication ability’, a factor deemed desirable across all four sectors. In terms
of foreign languages other than English, however, language awareness and edu-
cation were most noticeable at local levels, with Chinese, Korean and Russian
being listed as important languages to learn on the Japan Sea side. Respondents
from inland areas listed Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese; those from
the Pacific Coast side, Chinese, Korean, Spanish and to a lesser extent French
and German. Shibata and Okado stress the importance of understanding what
they refer to as ‘the glocal language situation’: it is simply not enough to rely
on English, given that regional languages are becoming increasingly important
with the continuing progress of glocalisation.
As these surveys indicate, the value of studying community and regional
languages is well understood by respondents. Reflecting this, some adults have
begun to study Asian languages through a range of available options as a
result of grassroots internationalisation in local communities (Tanaka 2002).
Clammer’s chapter in a recent wide-ranging demographic study of Japan iden-
tified language study as ‘a major activity amongst the retired, whether in a
formal school setting or at home or with friends, Chinese being a very popular
option, and currently Korean to some extent, although the elderly except those
with memories of colonial life in Korea, are less effected [sic] by the “Korean
boom” currently sweeping Japan and visible in popular culture, movies, music
and foods in particular’ (Clammer 2008: 604). Local government interna-
tional organisations often offer inexpensive courses in foreign languages to
Japanese residents: in Tokyo, Mitaka City’s International Society for Hospital-
ity (MISHOP), for example, offers Japanese residents introductory courses in
foreign languages ‘to promote better understanding of different cultures and
smooth communication between internationals and Japanese residents’. The
largest group of registered foreign residents in this community is Chinese, fol-
lowed by Koreans. Therefore, the multilingual webpage invites, ‘Why don’t
you study Chinese or Korean to try communicating with your foreign neigh-
bors around you!’10 Introductory- and intermediate-level classes in Chinese and
Korean, as well as more advanced activities using English, are offered at the
centre; each course meets weekly for ten weeks and costs residents 10,000 yen
plus textbook costs. In Osaka, the city of Kawachinagano, through its Interna-
tional Friendship Association (KIFA), offers classes in Chinese, English con-
versation, English (intermediate), Korean, Spanish (intermediate) and French
(introductory) through its Language Club at the very affordable price of
500 yen per class.11
The private language business sector is also a source of classes in other lan-
guages for interested members of the community. In addition to English, which
accounts for the bulk of the market, private language schools offer courses
in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Latin and Spanish; several of
the larger schools, such as Daigakusyorin International Language Academy
(DILA),12 offer a much wider range of languages taught to both private and
business-sector learners. In 2002, DILA released survey material identifying
language study trends since 1990. Whereas previous surveys had shown that
English, French and German (in that order) were the most popular foreign
languages towards the end of the bubble-economy period in the late 1980s,
the economic rise of Asia since then had led to increased interest in the study
of Asian languages, Chinese and Thai in particular followed by Indonesian,
which had now surpassed European languages. The demand from companies
for Chinese-speaking employees had also been increasing rapidly (Fukuoka
International Association 2002). This slackened somewhat in subsequent years
thanks to the gloomy financial situation: the Yano Research Institute’s survey
of the language business market13 in fiscal 2008 reported that language-related
business sales had declined for the fourth year in a row. Correspondence lessons
and teacher-led classes in Chinese, Korean, French and German (in descend-
ing order of size of market) had each recorded a drop against the previous
year. Possible factors in the overall decline were given as depressed consumer
spending following the late-2008 recession and the reduction in provision of
language training by corporate clients to their employees for the same reason.
One sector expected to show increased growth in 2009 was the language exam-
ination market, thanks to the continuing demand for foreign-language skills in
business activities as Japanese companies increased their trade with overseas
enterprises (Yano Research Institute Ltd 2009).
And finally, language classes are also offered to the public through Nippon
Hōsō Kyōkai (Japan Broadcasting Corporation, known as NHK), the coun-
try’s public broadcaster, which offers weekly language-learning programmes
in English, Chinese, French, Italian, Korean, German, Spanish, Russian and
Arabic. Korean lessons, for example, have been made available in this manner
since 1984; in the first decade of the present century, the number of listeners
greatly increased because of the 2002 World Cup and popular Korean soap
operas on TV. In 2005 the number of lecture texts published for the TV Korean
classes reached 220,000, with the actual number of listeners said to be three or
four times that number. Whereas in 1994 only 80,000 lecture texts had been
sold, far fewer than for other languages, by 2004 Korean had become the top
seller (Nishie 2009).
Interest in learning languages other than English in community or private
sector classes, then, is certainly not lacking in the populace at large. Encour-
aging though this may be, however, it does not address the real heart of the
matter, which is the need for a policy on teaching such languages in schools
and universities on a much wider basis than is currently the case. While there
has certainly been an increase in the number of schools teaching Chinese and
Korean over the last decade, statistics taken at face value can sometimes be
misleading. An article in the Asahi Shimbun in early 2000 reported that the
number of schools teaching foreign languages other than English in 1998 had
increased by more than 17 per cent over the previous two years, many offering a
second foreign language in parallel with English. Of the new schools, 343 were
public and 208 were private. Most offered Chinese (almost 70 per cent); Korean
(c. 24 per cent), French (c. 22 per cent) and German (c. 20 per cent) were also
available. These second-foreign-language classes, however, were concentrated
in schools where students either did not go on to further education or moved
on ‘escalator-style’14 to a university affiliated with the school (Asahi Shimbun
2000), i.e., their students did not have to face the rigours of the university
entrance examination system, allowing greater latitude in including so-called
‘non-essential’ subjects such as a second foreign language in the curriculum.
Far from indicating a more rigorous uptake of the study of second foreign
languages, these figures in fact represent a view of such languages as an easy
option in the curriculum of not overly academic schools. This is very different
from the Meiji Period situation, when school students studied English, French
and German for six to eight hours a week. While the stated aim then was to
acquire the four skills, in reality classes became good practice for translation,
then so important in Japan’s learning interface with the West, and this became
the focus of foreign-language education, especially English (Koike 1992: 219–
20).15 The importance of foreign languages – with the exception of English –
in the scheme of things has been downgraded since then, particularly in the
case of the once-so-important European languages: ‘In contrast to the English
boom . . . the status of other modern European languages in Japan is in decline.
One reason for this is the raised interest in other Asian languages, but the
biggest reason is the de-emphasis on learning a second foreign language at
third level’ (Hashimoto 2004: 1).
What, then, is the current situation with regard to teaching foreign lan-
guages other than English in the education system? Such languages are taught
mainly at Japanese universities rather than in schools, where the decision on
whether to offer a second foreign language is decided by the individual school.
In the absence of any overarching national language policy encompassing
community languages and/or strategically important languages, such a situa-
tion is inevitable. The following section will investigate language offerings in
the secondary sector, beginning with detailed statistics on what is currently
taught.
The secondary sector

As of June 2009, sixteen foreign languages other than English were being
offered in just over 2,000 Japanese high schools, over two-thirds of them public
schools, the rest private, slightly fewer than at the same time two years earlier. Of
the major languages, the most widely taught was Chinese (831 schools; 19,751
learners), followed in descending order16 by Korean (420; 8,448), French (373;
8,954) and Spanish (143; 2,763).17 Both Chinese and Korean had expanded over
the preceding six years, Chinese from 154 schools and Korean from 42 in 1993;
other languages had not. In middle schools, Chinese was taught at the largest
The secondary sector 77
number of schools (19 schools; 490 learners), followed by French (16 schools;
1,938 learners), Korean (14; 452), Spanish (6; 184) and German (2; 12), making
French the most widely studied language in terms of student numbers, if not of
schools. At this level, the European languages were taught at private schools
only, unlike Chinese and Korean which are also offered in public schools
(Monbukagakushō Shotō Chūtō Kyōiku-kyoku Kokusai Kyōiku-ka 2010).18
When we consider that in 2010 Japan had 10,814 middle schools (9,982 of
them public) and 5,116 high schools (3,780 public) (MEXT 2010b), most of
which teach English as their foreign language, we can see how low this profile
is. Unlike the statistics on foreign-language teaching at universities presented
in the following section, information on the number of schools offering English
is not included in the high-school figures because English is positioned as the
first foreign language in the school sector and is taught almost universally;
MEXT’s statistical table listing these languages is headed ‘foreign languages
other than English’.
In recent years, then, the teaching of Chinese and Korean has shown signs of
growth in the wake of several administrative and bureaucratic developments.
The final report of the Ad-Hoc Council on Educational Reform19 released
in 1987 recommended that the range of elective subjects in the high school
curriculum be expanded. To that end, the then Ministry of Education embarked
in 1991 on a programme of designating certain schools for two-year periods as
‘kōtō gakkō gaikokugo tayōka kenkyū kyōryoku kō’ (schools for collaborative
research on the diversification of foreign-language education in high schools)
for purposes of developmental research (Monbushō 1996). The purpose was
specified as being to adapt effectively to internationalisation. In 1993, two
reports on foreign languages other than English were issued by the Schools for
Collaborative Research on the Diversification of Foreign Language Education,
the first of which suggested that the languages of neighbouring Asian countries
be introduced into the curriculum of middle and high schools (The Japan
Forum 1998). The number of such schools peaked at seventeen in 1993, after
which it declined steadily to only one by 1999; there seems to have been no
systematic planning for a longer-term outlook (Tanaka 2002: 105; see also
Goto et al. 2010). Then, in the year 2000, a report commissioned by then Prime
Minister Obuchi on Japan’s goals for the new century also recommended that
the teaching of Chinese and Korean be dramatically expanded as a strategy for
improving neighbourly relations with those two countries (Prime Minister’s
Commission 2000).
These various pieces of rhetoric translated into action in 2002, not in terms
of any large- or medium-scale rollout but rather in the form of resuscitation of
the small-scale strategy of focus schools used in the 1990s. MEXT set aside
funding that year for a plan20 to teach foreign languages other than English
in high schools, giving the following rationale: although language teaching in
Japanese schools is overwhelmingly focused on English, we also need to build

proficiency in other languages because in future Japan will also have deal-
ings with countries other than those where English is the primary language.
To promote this diversification of foreign-language education, therefore, the
ministry planned to designate certain areas teaching foreign languages other
than English as ‘suishin chiiki’ (special promotion areas, i.e., promotion of a
government policy) and would set up a liaison council for them encompassing
representatives from schools, ALTs, administration, PTAs, people of learning
and experience, exchange students and volunteer groups. The high schools
teaching or planning to teach nominated languages within these areas would
be designated ‘suishinkō’ (lit.: schools promoting a policy). In conjunction
with relevant local organisations, practical survey research would be carried
out on effective curriculum topics and on how to use local resources in com-
munities in classrooms. The schools would also send and receive students to
and from the target-language countries. Schools in three prefectures (six in
Kanagawa, six in Hyōgo and five in Wakayama) were designated as Chinese-
teaching schools, and twenty-one schools in Osaka as Korean-teaching schools,
each for a two-year period, with a budget of 10,652,000 yen allocated for the
project.21
By 2006, the scheme had expanded to encompass Russian. The White Paper
of that year reported that in 2006–7 the prefecture of Hokkaido was designated
to teach Russian; Kanagawa, Osaka and Wakayama to teach Chinese; and Osaka
and Kagoshima to teach Korean (MEXT 2006a). The Hokkaido Government
Board of Education’s website reports on the development of Russian-language
teaching materials and provides downloads of the texts, teacher’s guides and
self-study notes for thirty lessons at elementary level (developed in 2006) and
for intermediate level (developed in 2007), along with teaching materials for
intercultural understanding called in Japanese ‘My neighbours, Russia’, which
provide cultural information about life in Russia. The webpage reports on
the activities of the Hokkaido Liaison Council for the Promotion of Russian
Language Education (Hokkaidō Government Board of Education 2008). An
informational presentation given soon after the halfway mark of the project
noted that the teaching materials produced in 2006 were the first Russian-
language teaching materials meant for high-school students to be produced in
Japan and were being used in six high schools by 150 students. The presentation
also predicted that the project would systematise an educational environment for
Russian language, increase the number of schools teaching Russian and advance
cultural exchange with Russia through student visits (Hokkaidō Government
Board of Education 2007). At Nemuro High School, one of the project’s nine
designated schools, ninety students were studying two units of Russian in
the first year of the project. Nemuro Nishi High School, also designated, had
forty-two students, second-years taking three units and third-years two; this
school also had Hokkaido’s only Russian ALT (Hokkaidō Government Board
of Education 2006).
A 2008 evaluation of this programme (MEXT 2008b) reported on the out-
comes over what had become an extension of the original two-year trial period.
That year there were three designated schools for Chinese, two for Korean,
two for Russian and one each for French and Spanish, indicating an overall
expansion of the programme in terms of both schools and languages. The six
years since the programme’s inception had seen a cumulative total of eleven
designated schools: five for Chinese, two for Korean, two for Russian and one
each for Spanish and French. In the year prior to the inception of this policy
there had been 1,046 schools teaching foreign languages other than English
throughout Japan; by 2007, that number had expanded by almost 100 per cent
to over 2,000. The number of Japanese students visiting the target-language
countries and students from those countries visiting Japanese schools had also
increased, as planned. Based on these indicators, the report concluded that the
policy had greatly advanced the diversification of foreign-language teaching in
schools. It was decided on the basis of these encouraging results to dissem-
inate as widely as possible the results of the research carried on during the
project as well as to encourage local areas to act on their own initiative in this
regard. A total of 8 million yen had been spent on the designated schools, and
10 million on student exchange schemes; further funding, however, would not
be requested in the 2009 budget. What had taken place, then, was a pilot project
which had achieved encouraging results but which was not to be extended by
the national government to a wider catchment area; rather, the research con-
ducted by the designated schools was to form the basis for action for those
local areas interested enough to put their own time and money into teaching
the languages further. The reported increase in the number of schools, while
encouraging, is no more than a drop in the bucket when compared to the total
number of Japanese schools. Within the overall context of the education system,
the growth is small: it lacks the backing of policy planning and any explicit
vision for its wider spread. Without systematic government support, other lan-
guages cannot expect to flourish within the system, unlike the situation in the
European Union (Tanaka 2002: 105–6).
Korean was first taught at high schools in 1973, when it was offered at
a school in Hyogo Prefecture; by 1988 there were 14 schools, rising to 219
in 2003 (Nishie 2009) and, as we have seen, to 420 in 2009. A survey of
Korean in high schools conducted in early 2007 by the National Center for
University Entrance Examinations received responses from 189 of the 290
high schools then teaching Korean across Japan, most of them public schools.
Korean was offered across a variety of curriculum concentration areas, with
the majority in any one area being in the general education curriculum but
a large number also coming under the ‘other’ category, which encompassed
twenty-eight different areas including integrated programmes, international

studies, international communication and economics. The number of schools
offering Korean began to increase after 1991, with a particularly sharp rise
after 2003,22 leading to the addition of Korean as a subject in the national
university entrance examinations. Data on student numbers was supplied by
172 schools, accounting for a total of 5,567 students, ranging in cohort size
from 427 at one school to only one at another. At more than 75 per cent of
schools surveyed, students had undertaken only four units or less of Korean
by the time they graduated, less than the number of units taken by students
of English in a single year. Sixty-five schools were teaching Korean as their
only other foreign language besides English.23 Most schools reported fostering
conversational ability rather than grammar or reading/writing, and the majority
taught fewer than 500 words of vocabulary. When schools were asked to list
problematic issues pertaining to students, ‘lack of interest’, ‘differences in
ability’ and ‘lack of progress’ featured prominently, along with the lack of
sufficient contact hours and appropriate teaching materials (National Center
for University Entrance Examinations 2008).
The National Center for University Entrance Examinations’ annual reports on
the foreign-language tests in the entrance examinations provides some insight
into the situation of foreign languages other than English in secondary schools.
To start with the big picture: of the written foreign-language tests in 2009, 99.84
per cent of applicants sat the English test. The other languages for which testing
is available are German, French, Chinese (since 1997) and Korean (since 2002).
The breakdown of applicants sitting these tests was as follows: Chinese 0.08
per cent (409 applicants), French and Korean both 0.03 per cent (149 and 136
respectively) and German 0.02 per cent (106) (National Center for University
Entrance Examinations 2009b).
Excavating a little more information about Chinese and Korean, the most
widely studied foreign languages other than English: individual reports on the
outcomes for each of the languages provide context about the nature of their
teaching and student body. The 2009 report for Chinese notes that more stu-
dents had taken Chinese that year than any other language except English,
albeit slightly fewer than the previous year. The fact that the average mark
was lower than that of the previous year it attributes to two factors, the first
that over 10 per cent of students received less than half marks on the test,
something not seen in previous years, and the second that the correct answer
rate for nine questions in particular was particularly low. The first of these the
report explains by the continuing increase in the numbers of Japanese (i.e.,
not Chinese or Chinese-background) students sitting the test now that over
500 high schools nationwide teach Chinese. A second contributing factor is
that the language used in framing the questions required a higher level of
ability in Japanese than previously, so that Chinese students sitting the test
were disadvantaged (National Center for University Entrance Examinations

2009a). It seems ironic that Japanese-language ability should prevent Chinese
students from doing well in a Chinese-language examination, and indeed the
report’s authors question whether there has been too much of a shift towards
testing whether the examinee has good Japanese-language ability by this
means.
The report on Korean comments that almost all the students studying Korean
at high schools were taking only two to four units, which allowed them to
achieve only a fairly basic knowledge of reading and writing Hangul script,
simple greetings, a vocabulary of between 500 and 1,000 words (depending on
the school) and very basic grammar. Over the eight years the Korean test had
been offered, the number of applicants had steadily increased from 99 to 136
but the number of units they had studied had not, so that what had actually
been seen was an increase in the number of elementary-level students. This,
however, did not appear to be recognised by the test setters, who expected
the level to be the same as that of students who had studied English for a
much greater number of hours. Most of those who actually sit the test have
not studied Korean at Japanese high schools but are either people born and
raised in Korea who only recently came to Japan or students who studied at
Korean schools in Japan, and the writer of the report asks just what it is that
the Center for Entrance Examinations expects in running this test, given that
there is a clear disconnect between the test content and the learning situation
in schools and that it is unlikely that there will be any dramatic increase in
the number of students taking twelve units and over of Korean at schools. He
suggests that the nature of the test be rethought, not only for Korean but for
other foreign languages other than English, so that it better reflects present
educational content (National Center for University Entrance Examinations
2009c).
Foreign languages other than English have not always had such a low profile
in the education system as they do today. During the Meiji Period, when Japan
was attempting to take its place among the modern nations, English, French
and German were included in the secondary school and university curricula
for the very practical purpose of facilitating the gaining of knowledge from
western countries: in other words, the fact that they were taught was driven
by external forces. English was promoted as the major foreign language, then
as now, with French or German as electives. In the period leading up to and
during the Second World War, however, English was viewed with increasing
disfavour as the language of the enemy; Chinese24 and later (during the war in
the Pacific) Malay were added to the middle school curriculum (Tanaka Shinya
2009). Following the war, however, most schools concentrated on teaching
English as their only foreign language, with other languages in the main being
taught at university level (Tanaka 2002).
The tertiary sector

Since high schools concentrate almost exclusively on teaching English, it is only
after they reach university that most students have the opportunity to study other
foreign languages. A few universities specialise in foreign languages, such
as Tokyo Gaikokugo Daigaku (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) which
teaches around fifty languages, half of them Asian. In 2010 Japan had 778
universities, over three-quarters of them private universities (MEXT 2010a).
A study of undergraduate language course offerings at 747 universities in
late 2009 to early 2010 found that the most widely taught were English (at
715 universities), Chinese (610), French (531), German (528) and Korean
(429). Other languages offered were Spanish, Russian, Italian, Latin and Arabic
in descending order of frequency. English as usual dominates, with many
of the other languages being offered as second-foreign-language electives.
The strength of French and German reflects Japan’s history of engagement
with these countries and their languages during its modernisation period. The
popularity of Korean, as we have seen, can be attributed to the popularity of
Korean TV soaps, films and music, as well as to sporting contacts between
Japan and Korea in soccer, baseball and figure skating; in addition, cooperation
between the two countries is increasing at both government and private sector
levels (Nishie 2009; Oguri 2007).
Internationalisation is more visibly present in the tertiary sector than the
secondary. A 2009 OECD report on tertiary education in Japan remarked on
the fact that while the international dimension ‘is not central in the Japanese
culture’, awareness of the international dimensions of the knowledge economy
and recent educational reforms have led to a greater effort towards interna-
tionalisation in Japanese universities. This has manifested itself in attempts to
increase the number of overseas students studying in Japan, and in a growth
in the number of universities offering foreign-language instruction: ‘in 2003
nearly half of all universities . . . were offering lessons in foreign languages,
while at some universities all courses were in English’ (Newby et al. 2009: 82).
Most universities, however, the report concluded, lacked a clearly articulated
internationalisation strategy, so that such moves as had been made in that direc-
tion were mainly the result of bottom-up processes rather than any overarching
policy directive from MEXT.
Despite the OECD’s encouraging assessment, while it is certainly true that
most foreign languages other than English are studied in universities rather than
schools, even that has dropped from what it used to be before the 1990s because
of the emphasis on English. Supporting evidence of the strength of the English-
first mentality, if any were needed, comes from comments reported in the Asahi
Shimbun in May 2008.25 In an article on the decline in teaching of second
foreign languages at several universities, a spokesman for Shinshū University,
The tertiary sector 83
a national university where six of the eight faculties had removed elementary
foreign-language courses from the required units in their core curriculum,
commented that ‘realistically speaking, it’s too hard to acquire a second foreign
language as a skill – in the academic world as well as in business, English should
take priority’ (Asahi Shimbun 2008).
After the Second World War, foreign languages other than English (mainly
French and German) were taught in universities under the designation of sec-
ond foreign languages until a reduction of units available for general education
courses in the early 1980s resulted in such languages being removed from the
compulsory part of the curriculum at many universities and offerings often
being reduced to one extra language only. Subsequently, following the par-
tial revision of the University Establishment Standards in 1991,26 curriculum
construction was freed up and it fell to each university to decide whether to
offer foreign languages or not. At many universities, foreign languages then
became electives, with a consequent drop in enrolments, and yet during this
period new courses in Chinese, Spanish and Korean were established here and
there, providing a wider choice of languages to study. After the year 2000,
however, a renewed emphasis on English as the language of international com-
munication led even those universities which still had a compulsory second
foreign language to restrict themselves to English, in particular for science
students where English is the lingua franca of the profession.27 Most students
who enrol in other language courses at university, therefore, can receive only an
introductory-level taste of the language because of the decrease in the number
of units available. In other words, the postwar situation where all university
students had to take two foreign languages is a thing of the past; today it is
up to each university to decide what to offer, which of course brings internal
factors into play, and the number of units available for study of a second foreign
language has been greatly reduced (Tanaka 2002; see also Sensui 2009).
To Ostheider (2009), globalisation has resulted in the choice of languages
taught being made solely on the basis of the doctrine of profit. This, he argues,
can clearly be seen in Japan, where ‘foreign language’ is synonymous with
English and where ‘intercultural communication’ is often interpreted to mean
English conversation with people from economically powerful countries. More-
over, although communication with the people from Asia and South America
who make up the bulk of foreign residents in Japan is mostly in Japanese,
many Japanese still perceive communication with foreigners in Japan as taking
place in English. This situation is not improved by the fact that the ALTs
working in Japanese schools on the JET Programme are overwhelmingly
from English-speaking countries and often have limited Japanese-language
proficiency, which sets up in students’ minds the stereotype of foreigners as
English-speaking persons who cannot speak much Japanese. When Ostheider
asked over 300 of his (university-level) students which countries accounted for
the largest number of foreigners living in Japan, more than 70 per cent listed
Americans in their top three choices, whereas the Ministry of Justice statistics
for 2007 showed that Americans accounted for only 2.4 per cent, with much
larger populations of Chinese, Koreans, Brazilians, Filipinos and others.
Given this equating of ‘foreign language’ with English, Ostheider continues,
learning a foreign language is seen as difficult because of the degree of differ-
ence involved. Were a language with points of similarity to Japanese, such as
Korean, introduced to students before they were expected to learn English, the
result would be a greatly reduced idea of the difficulty involved in language
learning which would then flow on to affect later study of other languages
and help to dispel the stereotype of their own language as particularly diffi-
cult which has been engendered by using English as a point of comparison.
Real internationalisation, he contends, starts first from within the country; the
teaching of Asian languages in Japanese schools should therefore not be ori-
ented solely to countries outside Japan from motives of economic profit as
is currently the case but rather should take into account that these languages,
along with Spanish and Portuguese, also play a significant domestic role in the
internationalisation of Japanese society today. In other words, he argues for
recognition of the concept of community languages.
The community languages angle has not been a factor in the increase in
study of Chinese and Korean since the 1990s; rather, as we have seen, this
has mainly been in response to external factors. Their present situation is in
sharp contrast to what it was immediately after the Second World War, when
they were seen as the languages of Japan’s former colonies28 and enrolments
were small compared to French and German (Nishie 2009).29 Oguri (2007: 52)
observes that many ethnic Korean teachers in western Japan today teach Korean
as the language of a neighbouring country (both South and North Korea),
but argues that this position, while plausible, is insufficiently persuasive to
justify teaching it; rather, it should be taught because it is a language which is
grammatically similar to Japanese and thus easy to learn, from a country with
which Japan has had a close historical and cultural relationship. The popularity
of Chinese-language study in Japan tends to be dependent on the current state
of relations between the two states, with anti-Japanese demonstrations in China
affecting enrolments (Ramzy 2006).30 Kaku (2007) attributes the increase in
the numbers of students studying Chinese since the 1990s to the twenty-first-
century expansion of China’s economy and its trade ties with Japan. Student
motivations thus vary according to language and perspective, but generally
derive from external rather than domestic considerations. What is missing is
any acknowledgment of Japan’s own ethnic Korean and Chinese communities,
where both languages could be used with ease inside Japan itself. The external
orientation remains consistent in the statement that before Chinese and Korean
could be seen as significant for university foreign-language education, both
The way forward? 85
countries had to achieve political and economic stability to make studying

them worthwhile.
The way forward?

Several benefits could accrue to Japan in adopting a policy of increased pol-
icy attention to teaching foreign languages other than English, particularly in
terms of adding a local dimension to its current thinking on foreign-language
teaching. Such a change would openly recognise its already existing linguistic
diversity, strengthen the concept of community languages and further encour-
age internal cultural internationalisation. Teachers could be trained who could
support the education of migrant children by offering supplemental mother-
tongue instruction while the students are still in the lengthy process of master-
ing written Japanese, so that such students do not lose out on content. Such a
policy could also provide both symbolic and practical evidence of goodwill to
regional neighbours where residual wartime memories create ongoing tensions
today, a source of friction most recently acknowledged in Prime Minister Kan’s
August 2010 apology for the suffering experienced by Korea during Japan’s
colonial rule.
The history of government-sponsored foreign-language study in Japan has
always reflected the international environment of the time. There is no good
reason why today should be an exception: the languages of Korea and China
deserve to be taught in the education system in international terms both for
economic reasons and for their proximity to Japan. It is surely time, however,
to move past the focus on international factors alone and to think more closely
about the internal environment with regard to language teaching. Korean and
Chinese are the languages of countries with much older historical and cultural
ties with Japan than the western languages, and are associated with large ethnic
communities within Japan itself.31 It is no longer a case of a self-contained
Japan reaching out to an external locus: as we saw in the previous chapter, the
international community has come to Japan, no longer just for special events
like Expos and the Olympics or on tourist visas but to work, study, live and play,
so that ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ is now a fact of life. Japan, in other words, has
community languages, and in the case of the Chinese and Korean communities
has had them for a very long time. Katō (2009: 164) suggests that Japan’s
language policy is already being influenced by the increase in immigration to
Japan from Asian countries, and that the language policy focus has switched
from the international scene (English) to the domestic. While I do not agree
that this process is yet as advanced as Katō seems to believe, this is certainly
the direction in which it should optimally be headed. A shift in language policy
in this area can be seen as a tool for realising political and social objectives in
reshaping imaginings of community, nation and language.
A decision to invest in expanded teaching of regional languages and other

foreign languages besides English can play a very constructive role in shaping
student (and by extension, community) perceptions of internal internationalisa-
tion, and there is an incontrovertible need for both understanding and linguistic
proficiency across a variety of fields. Harada (2003: 105), for example, in her
study of evening middle schools where 70 per cent of the student body are
non-Japanese, noted that teachers who could speak Chinese or a foreign lan-
guage other than English were extremely rare in this environment and yet were
badly needed in such schools to help students learning Japanese with advice
on life and curriculum and with home–school communication. The ability to
communicate with a student in his or her own first language can help to prevent
a build-up of misery and misunderstanding caused by language barriers the
student does not yet have the ability to surmount. It is to be hoped that in time
Japan will move towards a level of greater cultural sophistication in terms of its
engagement with community and foreign languages at both policy and delivery
level.
Multilingual information for foreign residents

Turning now from foreign languages other than English in education to the
provision of multilingual language services in the community: the last decade
has seen a great increase in the use of community languages in public services,
both in print and online, most noticeably at the municipal level. Some areas
have also taken steps to include foreign languages in public signs. In this section
of the chapter, I will examine how and what sort of information in languages
other than Japanese has been provided in order to integrate newcomer residents
into local communities. While hard copy information is available from local
ward offices and other government outlets, today the Internet is also widely
used as a means of delivering multilingual information.
One of the most immediately apparent ways in which foreign languages are
used in public areas is their incorporation into public signs, street signs and
advertising hoardings, i.e., what has become known as linguistic landscaping.
Linguistic landscaping is the name given to a field of study pertaining to the
language used on signs in public spaces and several country-specific studies
have been published (e.g., Landry and Bourhis 1997). For Coulmas (2009:
13), linguistic landscaping is ‘the study of writing on display in the public
sphere’, where the public sphere is specifically taken to mean the urbanised
society’s cityscape, particularly in a multilingual setting. Backhaus (2007: 10),
in his study of linguistic landscapes in Japan, defines linguistic landscaping as
‘the planning and implementation of actions pertaining to language on signs’
and linguistic landscapes as ‘the result of these actions’. The languages used
on public signs, he asserts, can offer important clues to language policies,
Multilingual information for foreign residents 87
language attitudes and power relations between different linguistic groups, to

which we can add changing demographic features of the area concerned that
point to larger social and economic shifts in society. Where commercial signs
are involved, of course, the use of a foreign language may well denote the
presence of a local community of speakers of that language32 but – depending
on the language and the nature of the business concerned – it may equally
well be an attempt by the business owner to add an eye-catching element of
difference or glamour to signs. English and French are particular favourites
for this purpose in Japan, where they are used to create a desired commercial
image.
The languages used on official signs in Japan, those relating to municipal
operations, are not decided by an official language policy at national level but
rather by local authorities. This, of course, is just as much language policy as any
higher-level document. Shohamy (2006: xvi) refers to the treatment of language
in the public space as a policy device used to perpetuate language practices
that creates ‘real’ (i.e., de facto, as opposed to de jure) policies: ‘these devices,
which on the surface may not be viewed as policy devices, are strongly affecting
the actual policies, given their direct effects on language practice’. In the case of
Tokyo, an actual written policy does exist: the Tokyo Metropolitan Government,
as a result of discussions at a 2002 meeting of its Chiiki Kokusaika Suishin
Kentō Iinkai (Committee to Examine and Promote Local Internationalisation)
and associated consultations, issued a guide to writing signs that would make
Tokyo easier for its many foreign residents and visitors, particularly those on
foot, to get around. The five general principles the guide espoused for the
language used in signs were that it should be simple, clear, consistent, uniform
and systematic. Places to be targeted included the airports, stations, guide
map signboards, subway and bus stops, major intersections and facilities and
tourist attractions. Since to use several languages on the signs would defeat the
purpose of making them easily readable, a linguistic hierarchy was adopted.
As a basic principle all such signs were to use romanisation or English along
with Japanese (Hepburn-system romanisation for Japanese proper nouns and
English for common nouns); in view of Tokyo’s large population of foreign
residents and its many international tourists, Japanese, romanisation/English,
simplified-character Chinese and Korean were to be prioritised; and furigana
could be added to kanji to assist foreign residents with reading them (Tokyo
Metropolitan Government 2003).
Anyone entering Japan through Narita Airport will easily find the four-
language signs in evidence, and they also feature prominently throughout
Tokyo. In the Tokyo Metropolitan Library, a major research library visited by
Japanese and foreign readers alike, for example, signs are posted in Japanese,
English, Korean and Chinese, and the computer catalogue can be searched
using a Japanese, English, Chinese or Korean interface. The library’s website
provides information in all four languages, the bulk of it of course in Japanese,

but sufficient in English, Chinese and Korean to outline its services. Clearly,
implementation of the metropolitan government’s policy has proceeded suc-
cessfully since 2003. Backhaus examined his database of 2,444 Tokyo signs in
the light of the above document and suggested that if a language other than the
prioritised four appears on a sign in central Tokyo, that sign will not be an offi-
cial one; however, since government-related signs in his collection accounted
for only about 30 per cent of the total, he concluded, it was clear that ‘the
multilingual landscape in Tokyo is shaped more by the citizens than by the
authorities’ (2007: 81).
Nevertheless, the extent of government implementation of such signs signals
willingness to acknowledge the linguistic needs of Tokyo as a multilingual
population centre and is an excellent example of a language policy developed
to meet changing linguistic needs on a demographic basis, a practice which
has been ongoing in Tokyo since the early 1990s in reaction to the growth in
foreign resident numbers. With regard to the use of English on signs, Backhaus
observes, ‘the mere existence of a sizeable number of multilingual signs with
simple English text given with a corresponding Japanese version implies that
a minimal degree of proficiency in English has become a basic requirement in
order to understand a Japanese sign these days’, suggesting that the completely
monolingual Japanese reader is now the exception rather than the rule (2007:
143), despite the lingering ideology to the contrary.
The major source of multilingual information, both written and spoken, has
of course been local government offices, where it is in the interests of the local
community to assist foreign residents to settle in without problems. Tegtmeyer
Pak (2000: 63) sums this up thus:
Local governments have focused on overcoming language barriers. Maps, information

about the city and its government offices, community newsletters, and guides to daily
life in Japan are increasingly available in an ever wider range of foreign languages.
Japanese language classes are taught free or at minimal expense in public community
centers. Consultation services in foreign languages are available in person and over the
telephone, with migrants seeking assistance most frequently for problems involving their
employers, health care, family law issues, residency status, and immigration procedures.
Alongside the local governments work NGOs of various kinds, also involved
in support for foreign residents, many of them working with undocumented
migrants (visa overstayers) whose needs local government cannot officially
recognise (see Shipper 2008). Other volunteers are not affiliated with either
local governments or with NGOs but offer language-related services (mostly
teaching Japanese) in small neighbourhood groups. Two recent books, Kawa-
hara (2004) and Kawahara and Noyama (2007), document and discuss in detail
the wide range of language services (tagengo saabisu) made available to foreign
residents by local governments, with language services defined as including the

provision of multilingual signs in public areas of cities, the production of infor-
mation pamphlets in foreign languages, the provision of Japanese-language
education and support for first-language maintenance education (Kawahara
and Noyama 2007: 3).
For foreign residents to be treated on an equal footing with Japanese res-
idents, Hirano (1996: 65–6) points out, they first have to know the rules
and expectations of the host community; it is therefore essential to provide
them with this information in languages they can understand, since if it is
provided in Japanese alone those who do not speak Japanese will be left in
the dark, and that is the conceptual underpinning of ‘tagengo saabisu’. Such
moves, he notes, were initially predicated on a 1988 document issued by the
Sōmushō (then the Ministry of Home Affairs, now MIAC), Kokusai Kōryū
no Machizukuri no Tame no Shishin (Guidelines for Creating Communities
Favourable to International Interaction) and taken up by local governments.33
Multilingual services were thus spoken of as a government concern from the
late 1980s, a move underpinned by requests from newcomer foreign residents
themselves and by observations from local international associations. As a
result, many public offices had opened multilingual inquiry counters by late
1992; while some offered only English, others offered a range of languages
depending on the makeup of the local population. Multilingual written material
followed.
As the number of foreign workers in local communities continued to grow
during the 1990s, multilingual information began to become available from
non-government sources as well. In 1992, for example, the Osaka Bar Associ-
ation published a human rights handbook for foreigners in Japan in seventeen
languages other than Japanese34 which reflected the countries of origin of
the many foreign workers then in Japan working in the 3-K jobs and in the
entertainment industry. Many such workers, the preface asserted, either had
no proper visa or had overstayed their visas, and the book was thus intended
to acquaint them with their rights. It provided information about immigration
control and status of residence, labour, work-related accidents, employment,
security, health, marriage and birth and criminal cases, along with a directory of
groups supporting foreigners in Japan (Osaka Bengoshi Kai 1992). The Asso-
ciation of Medical Doctors of Asia (AMDA), which provides both telephone
services explaining Japan’s medical system in eight languages and introductions
to doctors who can speak the patient’s language, in 2001 received around forty
calls per day from foreigner residents seeking these services (Shipper 2002:
38). Several years later, in an example of increased municipal government and
private sector cooperation, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government made a con-
tract with this group to provide medical consultation to foreigners in English,
Chinese, Korean, Thai and Spanish (Shipper 2008: 144).
A good example of a regional government response to the more recent

‘tabunka kyōsei’ discourse of the national government is Miyagi Prefecture,
home in 2010 to 16,000 foreign residents, which has recently ramped up its
multicultural coexistence activities in a policy-driven manner. In 2007 Miyagi
was the first prefecture in Japan to enact a law to promote the formation of a
‘tabunka kyōsei’ society, followed in 2009 by the release of the Miyagi Prefec-
tural Plan for Promotion of a Tabunka Kyōsei Society setting out the planned
trajectory and policy initiatives through which this goal would be achieved.
The definition of ‘tabunka kyōsei’ adopted was the same as that in the 2006
MIAC document. One arm of the policy was to ensure that foreign residents
were provided with relevant printed material and inquiry counters using mul-
tiple languages other than Japanese to improve their quality of life. Given that
one of the Plan’s four steps is to break down language barriers, provision of
multilingual information and interpreting services so that foreign residents can
understand issues of public importance is seen as crucial, particularly in times
of emergency; to that end, the Plan explicitly promotes the dissemination of
such services, with one of its steps in this direction being to provide material
both in other languages and in Yasashii Nihongo (Easy Japanese) (Miyagi-ken
Kokusai Keizai Kōryū Ka 2007).
At the national level, by the time of the 2005 national population census,
foreign residents with questions about the process were able to access a multi-
lingual national hotline which provided services in English (five days a week),
Chinese (three days) and Korean (two days); the census forms themselves
were provided in a dozen languages other than Japanese. The census website
was also multilingual, with information in Japanese, Chinese, English, Korean
and Portuguese (Coulmas 2007: 115), as is the website for the 2010 census,35
reflecting the importance of those five languages within the community. Inter-
estingly enough, while these languages are those most widely spoken in Japan
and this must have been recognised by those who planned the provision of
multilingual information, the census itself contains no question as to the first
language of the informant. Presumably the decision is taken on the basis of the
demographic statistics on registered foreign residents, which is as good a rough
guide as any, but the census itself is not being used as any kind of planning tool
in this regard. This is a missed opportunity: a firsthand knowledge of the first
languages of the foreign population based on information given by members
of that population themselves would provide much more fine-grained informa-
tion about community languages and could be used to guide the provision of
services accordingly in a more accurately targeted way.
The online dimension of information provision is also important. At national
government level, ministry websites provide information in Japanese and
English, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also having links to pages in
other languages from its top page under the ‘other languages’ rubric. Although
the top page of the main Ministry of Justice website offers only Japanese and
English, information in other languages is available through links: informa-
tion on new immigration procedures instituted in 2007, for example, is avail-
able in six languages, namely Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Korean and
Portuguese.36 A national portal site for policies for foreign residents was set up
in 2009 in response to employment difficulties arising from the global financial
crisis; as this site was targeted mainly at ‘nikkei’ workers, the languages it uses
are Japanese, English, Portuguese and Spanish.37
At prefectural and municipal government levels, the spread of languages
tends to be greater, depending on the demographics of the area served by
the authority in question.38 The website of the Tokyo Metropolitan Govern-
ment offers information in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean, while
that of Nagoya, Japan’s third largest city, supports pages in eight languages
(Chinese, English, Filipino, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Span-
ish). Kanagawa Prefecture’s website is particularly notable for its range of
languages, offering on its ‘international’ page information in Cambodian,
Chinese, English, Korean, Lao, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai and
Vietnamese.39 So is that of Miyazaki Prefecture, which offers a different range
of languages, in this case Chinese (traditional characters), Chinese (simpli-
fied characters), English, French, Korean and Spanish. For Aichi Prefecture,40
the mix is slightly different: Chinese (traditional characters), Chinese (simpli-
fied characters), English, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Ibaraki Prefecture41
offers Chinese, English, Korean, Portuguese, Tagalog and Thai. Not all pages in
other languages carry the same amount of information as the Japanese pages, of
course: the cost of translating the entire Japanese website would be prohibitive,
and thus non-Japanese pages tend to carry summaries or restricted amounts
of material, their main aim being to provide speakers of other languages with
the information they need to enable them to come to grips with the basics of
living in local communities. Foreign residents, however, may need additional
information to that provided to Japanese residents, i.e., not just when and how
to put out the garbage but also information on alien registration or on cultural
events and expectations of behaviour that are taken for granted by Japanese
and oldcomer residents (Carroll 2010: 389). Providing information in foreign
languages on local government websites is therefore not simply a matter of
translating or condensing the Japanese version but involves writing original
material as well, either directly in the target language or in Japanese with a
subsequent translation. The latter is more likely where information is translated
into more than one foreign language.
Multilingual websites, as well as providing screen-based content, also put
people in touch with speakers of other languages with whom they can consult
in person. The Multicultural Society Promotion Council jointly run by Gunma,
Shizuoka, Gifu, Aichi and Mie Prefectures and the City of Nagoya, areas that
are home to many foreign workers, provides an online service whereby peo-
ple seeking multilingual consultation services operated by local governments
within those areas (and also in Nagano Prefecture) can search by language,
area and type of information required. Someone seeking consultation services
in Bengali about general information in Gunma, for instance, can search using
those keywords and discover that they can access such services in Gunma’s
Shibukawa City on Thursdays for two hours from 1 p.m., with a link pro-
vided with relevant contact details, or those wanting to know where they can
talk about immigration and visa issues in Portuguese in Nagoya City can find
that information as well. The search facilities cover over sixteen languages,
nine areas and fourteen categories of information. The website itself is posted
in Japanese, English and Portuguese. This provides a significant service for
migrants seeking a place to go where their lack of proficiency in Japanese will
not be a barrier to comprehension of important issues relating to their lives in
Japan.
In July 2009, software internationalisation company Kokusaika JP published
a report on the multilingual capabilities of all sixty-two local government web-
sites under the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Of these, thirty-seven were
multilingual and twenty-five were not. The most commonly used language
other than Japanese was English, which appeared on all the multilingual web-
sites; then came Chinese (simplified characters), followed closely by Korean.
No local government sites used languages other than these three, with the
exception of certain sites providing tourist information. English, Chinese and
Korean were used together on twenty-seven websites, English and Chinese on
two, and English-only on eight. While all twenty-three ward websites provided
information in English, more than half of local government sites in the west-
ern area of Tokyo around Tama and most of those in the Izu and Ogasawara
Islands used only Japanese. On five of the thirty-seven multilingual sites, the
foreign-language pages had been machine-translated from Japanese, resulting
in a low-quality output; on the other thirty-two, they had been separately created
(Kokusaika JP 2009).
The fact that the only time foreign languages other than the three above were
used was on tourist-oriented information pages indicates that the main purpose
of using these languages on local government sites is to provide information to
foreign residents living in the area rather than to provide for tourists’ needs. One
problem identified by the Kokusaika JP report was that some of the Japanese-
only websites served areas with up to 4,000 registered foreign residents, i.e.,
in identified high-need municipalities, certain of the areas where English was
the only foreign language used housed several thousand Chinese and Korean
residents as well as speakers of other languages such as Portuguese and Spanish.
Among the Chinese residents were those from Taiwan who could not read
the simplified characters used on the websites. Clearly, the report concluded,
although much progress had been made, there remained significant room for
improvement.
A particularly important area is that of disseminating crucial information in
other languages to non-Japanese residents in the wake of a disaster such as an
earthquake, typhoon, terrorist attack or major gas leak. Following the Great
Hanshin Earthquake in 1995, many such residents who were not proficient in
Japanese experienced great difficulty in obtaining information on the likelihood
of aftershocks and on where to assemble and to get food and water. Because of
the time needed for translation, the first multilingual information sheets to be
issued by local authorities appeared a week after the earthquake, while others
took as long as a month. A later earthquake in Niigata in 2004 produced similar
results: follow-up questionnaires with foreign residents revealed that well over
half of the Brazilian residents were at a loss as to what to do. Multilingual
information made available through local government offices tends to focus on
disaster preparedness, providing preliminary information about what to do; the
real need, however, is for information to be made available immediately after
disaster strikes (Sato et al. 2009), as seen in March 2011.
One response to this, involving Japanese rather than other languages, has
been the development of Yasashii Nihongo, a simplified version of Japanese
which uses a restricted range of vocabulary and grammatical structures. It was
developed after the 1995 earthquake and is specifically intended to assist for-
eign residents whose command of the language is limited. Based on the premise
that in times of disaster providing information in a form of Japanese foreigners
can understand is more realistic than providing multilingual information given
the timelag required for translation (estimated at seventy-two hours), Yasashii
Nihongo is meant for those who have achieved proficiency equating to Level
Three of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, i.e., everyday Japanese. It
is intended to be used in community media such as announcements on radio
and posters, and represents a useful step in closing the information gap for
those with some proficiency in Japanese. Unlike an earlier scheme, Kan’yaku
Nihongo (Simplified Japanese) proposed by Nomoto Kikuo in the 1980s which
was premised on making Japanese easier for foreign business people to speak
and was to be spoken only by non-Japanese, on which account it came in
for widespread criticism,42 Yasashii Nihongo is meant to be used by Japanese
native speakers to foreign residents and may even be easier for native speakers
themselves to understand (Carroll 2008: 28). The pragmatic focus on allevi-
ating the impact of disaster makes Yasashii Nihongo a useful tool in times of
stress.
Yasashii Nihongo was developed in the late 1990s by a group of linguists
led by Sato Kazuyuki at Hirosaki University in Aomori Prefecture who were
supported by a government research grant for the purpose. An explanation
of the system is available on the project’s website43 in Japanese, Chinese,
English and Korean, with an online manual and other guidelines also avail-
able on the Japanese pages. It requires a knowledge of around 2,000 basic
words, along with the kind of grammatical constructions used for shopping,
using public transport and other simple daily activities. In written materials,
kanji are supplemented with furigana giving the pronunciations. One basic
principle is that words likely to be frequently used in the media, e.g., ‘shelter’,
‘tsunami’ and ‘aftershock’, are kept as they are heard in announcements but
are supplemented by an explanation: to ‘yoshin’ (aftershock), for example, is
appended ‘ato kara kuru jishin’ (an earthquake which comes after [the first
one]).
Although the project has not been without its critics (e.g., Shibata 1999,
Miyazaki 2007), the use of Yasashii Nihongo continues to spread, albeit
slowly. The project website carries a list of public responses including gov-
ernment uptake, such as an earthquake information page on the website of
the Niigata Prefectural Government.44 Yasashii Nihongo has also been taken
up by a number of local government websites not just for disaster-related
information but for information on local life as well. The website of Asao
Ward in Kawasaki City, for example, has a Yasashii Nihongo version of
the ward’s information on daily living pages (which includes disaster infor-
mation) as well as an English version,45 while the official Saitama Prefec-
ture website carries a Gaikokujin ni Yasashii Nihongo Hyōgen no Tebiki
(Guide to Easy Japanese Expressions for Foreigners) based in part on the
Hirosaki group’s work.46 The Osaka Prefectural Government website also car-
ries Yasashii Nihongo materials,47 and Yasashii Nihongo documents explain-
ing swine flu were published on the websites of the Yokohama Association
for International Communications and Exchanges and the Nagata Volunteer
Center in Kobe in 2009.48 Mori (2005: 4) reports that the newsletter of an
NPO in Kobe is made available in a Yasashii Nihongo version as well as other
languages.49
Yasashii Nihongo was suggested as part of the solution to providing web-
based administrative information to foreign residents of Chiba City in a 2007
study by Park; such residents had more than tripled in number between 1990 and
2005, a trend which was expected to continue over time. The city’s concern
was to ensure that non-Japanese residents had the information they needed
to enable them both to access services available to them as residents and
to fulfil their obligations as residents by participating fully in the commu-
nity. Long-term residents (i.e., those staying more than two or three years)
needed information on schools, child-related services and legal services, the
same sort of information needed by Japanese residents. Park and two col-
leagues at Tokyo University of Information Sciences in conjunction with the
city administration therefore carried out a survey of foreign residents in Chiba
Conclusion 95
in 200550 in order to ascertain what categories of information they saw as

necessary, the survey itself being made available in Japanese, English, Chinese,
Korean, Tagalog and Thai. Personal information collected during this process
showed that almost three-quarters of respondents were able to read hiragana and
katakana very well, but only just over half were able to handle conversation in
Japanese.
Given that translating information into other languages is time-consuming
and expensive, Park’s study recommended that the city work on making the
Japanese-language information presented in the Chiba City News easier for
foreign residents to access. The survey had shown that fewer than 10 per
cent of respondents accessed information from its webpages, the main reason
being their inability to read text containing kanji and complex vocabulary.
The following proposals were therefore made: for those who could read kana
already, furigana should be added to characters; for those (Chinese and Korean
residents) who understand kanji, simple kanji could be retained. For those able
to converse in Japanese, a more conversational style of Japanese could be used
on the written page; and for those able to understand speech but not writing,
read-aloud software could be employed. Suggestions for simplified Japanese
included the use of spaces between words, the parallel use of katakana and
English versions of a loanword and the use of elementary-school-level kanji and
vocabulary (equivalent to the Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level Three),
with furigana added to kanji: in other words, the Hirosaki University team’s
Yasashii Nihongo. For long-term residents able to read some Japanese, Park
recommended that Yasashii Nihongo be employed on the city’s administrative
webpages; for short-term residents with little Japanese, however, providing
multilingual information remained the only solution (Park 2007). The city
has not to date adopted these recommendations. Its website51 offers pages
in Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese. Not all the
information is available in all languages: the English website carries much
more than the other foreign-language pages. The emergency guide is available
only in Japanese and English, underscoring the importance of English as an
international language for speakers of other languages in Japan when accessing
information.
Conclusion
This chapter has discussed two matters relating to foreign languages in Japan,
namely the teaching of foreign languages other than English and the use of
languages in the community to provide multilingual information to foreign
residents. It is clear that the overwhelming promotion of English has had a
detrimental effect on the teaching of other foreign languages in the national
education system in the absence of any wide-ranging and systematic policy

plan to broaden the offerings. At local government level, however, pragmatic
recognition of the need to provide effective material on settling in to Japanese
communities in a variety of other languages has resulted in very good progress
in this area over the last two decades.
Within the school system, some progress has been made in the teaching
of the major regional languages Chinese and Korean, but the focus has been
for the most part on external relationships and the scope of the expansion has
been limited to trial periods with designated schools. What is lacking is an
overarching languages-in-education policy that gives due recognition both to
the teaching (or indeed, even the existence) of community languages and to the
importance of wider teaching of strategically important languages other than
English, in addition to the cognitive and personal benefits to be derived from
the study of other languages and other ways of seeing the world. This may
derive in part from the old ideology that Japanese people cannot speak foreign
languages successfully, but most of it derives from the monocular English-only
view of foreign-language education imposed by the national government in its
push to equip the populace with the skills to have their voices heard, and thus
to represent Japan, to the rest of the (English-speaking) world. In its restricted
provision of foreign-language education in schools, Japan is out of step with
practices in other developed countries, both in the West and in the Asian region,
and language policy-makers at the highest levels need to take this into account.
‘A large number of democratic countries that were the prototypes of the “one
nation, one language” policy are adopting more plurilingual and inclusive
policies that involve a number of languages’ (Shohamy 2006: 47) as nation-
states experience more internal diversity and transnational linkages. Japan too –
while a very long way from having the need in absolute demographic terms to
adopt policies that support official recognition of minority languages – would
do well to increase the scope of its languages-in-education policy to align itself
more closely with both internal and external realities, thereby legitimising the
position of languages in relation to both. Kaplan and Baldauf (2005: 1014,
1017), who list foreign/second language learning (what foreign languages are
taught and why) as one of the four cultivation planning goals which relate to
policy goals influencing the success of policy development driven by language-
in-education considerations, observe that the curriculum policy system in Japan
is heavily top-down, with the community having little input into policy. It may
now be time for policy-makers to ascertain what the views of the community
are on teaching community and regional languages.
Policy-making in the area of what languages are taught through the education
system is an example of status planning, i.e., of making decisions related to
choices about the appropriate use of language/s. What will be discussed in
Conclusion 97
the following chapter, namely the 2010 revision of the major script policy
document in response to the influence of electronic technologies on writing, is
an example of corpus planning, i.e., decisions on how elements of a particular
language, in this case kanji in the Japanese writing system, are optimally to be
used.
4 Technology and language policy change
It is no accident that the most clearly marked policy development in recent

years, apart from the announcement of the Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese
with English Abilities, relates to kanji. For one thing, the kanji policy is rel-
atively easy to change, because it already exists as a policy document; while
arguments surrounding the recent increase in content were many and varied,
they centred on which characters should be added or deleted rather than on
whether the policy itself should be changed to accommodate an increase. For
another, kanji are the venerated icons of Japan’s writing system: reinforcing
their position is in line with the language ideology surrounding characters dis-
cussed in Chapter 1. We have seen that despite the availability of an alternative
means of writing in the form of the kana, literacy in Japan is judged by the
ability to use kanji correctly; use of kana where kanji would be the norm is
not encouraged, despite its frequent occurrence. This means that ‘kanji heavily
contribute to the lengthening of acquisition of literacy, which is often a life-
long process’ (Akamatsu 2006: 486). It takes until the end of the nine years
of compulsory education to teach the full List of Characters for General Use.
Over the two decades between 1975 and 1995, the teaching of writing was
the most researched and discussed aspect of national language education in
Japan (Namba 1995: 64), a situation which has continued since then. ‘Under
the conditions of a writing system that makes use of Chinese characters’,
Coulmas (1994: 312) comments, ‘literacy is a graded notion. This is true, of
course, also of alphabetic literacy, but with Chinese characters this gradation
is more obviously encoded in the writing system.’ Everyone who has com-
pleted compulsory education is expected to know and to use a certain level
of kanji, whether or not this is actually the case in practice. Little wonder,
then, that discussion of literacy standards, by which is frequently meant kanji
proficiency standards, features so frequently in both the academic and popular
literature.
In this chapter, I will discuss prevailing perceptions of declining kanji ability
and the perceived role of electronic technologies as a factor in falling standards
before going on to examine the recent revision of the kanji policy in response
to the influence of such technologies.
98
Perceptions of declining kanji ability 99
Perceptions of declining kanji ability

A historical decline in the overall use of kanji has been observed for many
years now: Morioka (1969), for example, in a study of the number of kanji
used in newspapers between 1879 and 1968, reported a drop of almost 30 per
cent over that period, with kana replacing kanji mostly in the representation
of Japanese words (wago) rather than Sino-Japanese words (kango).This, of
course, is likely to be due in large part to the postwar script reforms which
newspapers, although not bound to adhere to the character list as government
departments were, chose in the main to follow in the interests of efficiency and
of circulation figures (see Gottlieb 1995). It is a separate issue from that of
today’s commonly expressed belief that kanji use is declining, which is based
not on script policy interventions but rather on the belief that general levels of
kanji proficiency are not what they used to be or might be expected to be.
Such ideas are not found only within Japan itself. A common perception
outside the country, as expressed by American journalist James Brooke in The
New York Times, is that the Japanese love of manga comics (which account
for 60 per cent of printed publications in Japan) is rooted in low literacy rates,
where ‘low literacy’ refers not to the usual definitions of functional literacy1
but rather to a desire to avoid reading books written in kanji because reading
and writing skills are declining (Brooke 2002). Two years later, an article in
Britain’s Guardian newspaper also reported on declining kanji proficiency, but
whereas the New York Times article relied on anecdotal evidence,2 the Guardian
article discussed the results of a survey of 13,000 first-year students at private
universities conducted by Japan’s National Institute of Multimedia Education
(NIME), which found that almost one-fifth of respondents had only the reading
ability expected of thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds, i.e., junior secondary-school
level. The Guardian writer commented that the findings confirmed a trend
reported by educators over at least the previous decade and, like The New York
Times, reported on the attribution of this by the public (though not by the NIME
report) to the influence of comics. The survey also found that only 6 per cent
of students at national universities, where the entrance tests tend to be tougher,
showed lower than expected reading ability (Johnston 2004).
Inside Japan, given that achievement levels in reading are partly judged by
the degree of script acquisition (Tamaoka 1996: 12), journalists and online
commentators often express concern about declining kanji proficiency. During
Aso Tarō’s brief time as Prime Minister (September 2008–September 2009),
he was several times mocked in the press for his frequent mistakes in pronoun-
cing kanji correctly, with Parry (2009: 60) reporting anecdotal evidence from
parents that the name Tarō had become ‘a schoolboys’ taunt for a playground
dunce’. Almost half the respondents to a Mainichi Shimbun survey on the Prime
Minister’s approval rating thought that his kanji mistakes cast doubts on his
qualifications to serve as leader (Mainichi Shimbun 2009). Part of the credit for
a recent bestselling book on kanji, Yomesō de Yomenai Machigaiyasui Kanji
(Easily Mistaken Kanji You Think You Can Read But You Can’t) by Deguchi
Munekazu, was given to the Prime Minister’s kanji troubles; customers request-
ing ‘Prime Minister Aso’s book’ turned out to be looking for Machigaiyasui
Kanji, and booksellers reported that books on correct pronunciation of kanji
began to sell well shortly after reports of Aso’s troubles began to appear in
the press (Yasumoto 2009). Given the strength of the ideology pertaining to
characters as discussed in Chapter 1, this is not surprising. In a highly compet-
itive society with a constant emphasis on the superiority of kanji, admitting to
shortcomings in this area is not something to be welcomed and proficiency in
characters is important for success (Crump 1988: 400–1). This is probably due
to the fact that literacy in Japan requires intensive schooling to sustain it. To
show so publicly a deficiency in this area, then, is evidence not just of a human
failing that could perhaps be portrayed by a sympathetic rather than antagonis-
tic media as lovable but of a deficiency of schooling. Galan (2005: 265) picks
up on this underlying theme in the context of a discussion of illiteracy: ‘the
official discourse on illiteracy hides another discourse that can be summed up
as follows: all “true” Japanese, all “normal” Japanese, know how to read’. In
the face of such an ideology, the derision heaped upon Prime Minister Aso
takes on a layer of meaning additional to that of mere journalistic hyperbole.
Perceptions of declining literacy levels have quite often surfaced as a concern
in the annual Agency for Cultural Affairs language attitudes surveys, particu-
larly with regard to characters. In the 2001 survey, for example, when asked
their opinion on the current state of Japanese people’s proficiency in their own
language, almost 90 per cent of respondents indicated that they believed the
ability to write was declining, while almost 70 per cent thought the same of
reading skills. Questioned about the effect of electronic media on their writing
habits, over 40 per cent, notably those in their thirties, answered that their
ability to write kanji accurately had declined as a result of using such media.
Almost a third of respondents, particularly those in their forties, found writing
kanji by hand a bore. In the following year’s survey, when asked to nominate
those areas of their own proficiency in Japanese where they lacked complete
confidence, almost a third specified their knowledge of script, i.e., kanji and
kana usage, an even higher percentage than the fifth who worried about ‘keigo’.
Interestingly, however, in the next question relating to which areas of language
knowledge and ability they felt were important for life in the future, knowl-
edge of kanji and kana usage ranked lowest, particularly among the younger
age groups, perhaps reflecting the influence of electronic technologies which
make it easier to use characters even without necessarily knowing how to write
them properly by hand. A year later, almost 80 per cent expressed a belief that
the spread of information technology was influencing language use to varying
degrees, the number one manifestation being that people were forgetting how
to write kanji by hand. Lack of confidence in the ability to use kanji surfaced
again as an issue in the 2004 survey, and when asked a similar question about
the influence of information technology the following year, just over half the
respondents who used computers confirmed the trend.
Non-government surveys report similar results, but with an added focus on
actual test results rather than perceptions. In 2005, a kanji proficiency survey
conducted by the Nihon Kanji Nōryoku Kentei Kyōkai (Japan Kanji Aptitude
Testing Foundation) found that fewer than 40 per cent of answers recorded by
university students were correct; this was a lower percentage of correct answers
than that returned by middle-school students, although of course the questions
on both tests were not the same (Asahi Shimbun 2005a). A separate Internet
survey of 400 children aged ten to fifteen and 400 adults aged thirty-five to
forty conducted by the same body the following year reported that 85 per cent
of adult respondents felt that their kanji proficiency had dropped over the past
few years, most noticeably when they were writing letters and other documents
by hand. Of this group, over 87 per cent attributed this to frequent computer
use, 44 per cent to frequent use of cell phone e-mail and only 42 per cent to
age-related memory decline.3 Over 75 per cent reported having experienced
embarrassment in the workplace because of this (Kanken DS 2006).
Two years later, almost 9,000 elementary school students were tested to
determine whether those in each year level could actually write the kanji they
had learned the year before, and were given a questionnaire on attitudes and
habits related to reading, kanji and the Japanese language in general. Although
almost two-thirds of students indicated on the questionnaire that they enjoyed
the study of their own language, the percentage of correct answers on the
kanji test was low, overall only 57.9 per cent with little variation across year
levels, thus confirming an earlier survey of teacher perceptions in 2001 in which
almost two-thirds of respondents indicated a belief that students’ proficiency
in their own language had declined in the areas of vocabulary, writing, writing
kanji and reading (Benesse Kyōiku Kenkyū Kaihatsu Sentaa 2007). Clearly
there is a considerable gap between the academic rhetoric expressed in MEXT’s
official curriculum guidelines, which specify that students in a particular year
will be able to read and write the kanji covered in previous years and use
them in writing, and the actual outcomes in terms of students’ proficiency with
kanji.
This concern over declining academic standards (gakuryoku teika), in partic-
ular in reading and writing, is not a recent phenomenon but has been a feature
of national discourse about education in Japan since the 1980s; even before
that, opponents of the postwar script reforms were outspoken about their con-
cerns that education would be ‘dumbed down’ by the changes to kanji and kana
use (see Gottlieb 1995 for details). Unease intensified after 1999 in response
to the national curriculum reform known as ‘yutori aru kyōiku’ (pressure-free

education, as opposed to the earlier cramming approach) which was imple-
mented in 2002, four years after it was announced by MEXT. This involved
a move to a five-day school week (dispensing with Saturday-morning classes)
and a move to a more child-centred inquiry-based approach, in line with the
OECD’s recommendation of process-based education over content-focused
(Takayama 2008). The reduction in class hours available per subject as a result
of this curricular reform is widely regarded as a key factor in declining literacy
standards, a view reinforced by concern over the performance of fifteen-year-
old Japanese students on the reading literacy indicator in the 2003 PISA4 results
when Japan ranked fourteenth on this indicator, dropping from eighth place in
the 2000 test. After only a couple of years, the ‘yutori’ approach began to be
reversed in favour of greater ‘back to basics’ rigour, with Education Minister
Nakayama Nariaki saying in early 2005 that the ‘periods of integrated learn-
ing’ which the ‘yutori’ approach had introduced ought to be used instead for
teaching the national language (kokugo) (Asahi Shimbun 2005c).
The 2005 issue of the National Institute for Japanese Language’s Nihongo
Bukkuretto5 remarked on the prevalence of both newspaper and general-interest
magazine articles expressing concern about the state of national language edu-
cation that year. The announcement of the PISA test results and the Minister’s
subsequent and controversial backpedalling on ‘yutori’ education in January
sparked a flurry of discussion. Contributing to the debate was the publication
of a nationwide survey around that time by the Sōgō Shotō Kyōiku Kenkyūjo
(Research Institute of Elementary Education) on the reading and writing abili-
ties of 15,000 elementary- and middle-school students which found that many
students, even if they could read kanji correctly, were unable to write them accu-
rately. This was offset somewhat by another much larger survey of 450,000
late-elementary and middle-school students’ academic abilities published a
few months later which reported ‘good results’. Nevertheless, concern about
literacy levels persisted, again fuelled by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing
Foundation’s survey referred to above. Accepting the fact of a decline in both
kanji literacy and reading abilities on the basis of the evidence provided by
the various surveys, MEXT later that year put together a programme to raise
reading and writing standards which was to be implemented not just in national
language classes alone but throughout the school curriculum. The Institute’s
bibliography listed details for forty-one newspaper articles on these topics over
the year, together with another fifteen on the associated topic of an ‘education
renaissance’, evidence of the lively public concern surrounding the issue; eigh-
teen articles in the general-interest magazines, most of which were published
as part of special issues or round-table discussions on the topic, also took a line
critical of ‘yutori’ education as responsible for the drop in standards (Kokuritsu
Kokugo Kenkyūjo 2007). Even the television networks took up the theme in
2005, with four of the major networks broadcasting variety programmes aimed
at improving ‘kokugo’ from autumn that year; the lacklustre performance of
some contestants in identifying common kanji led one journalist to conclude
that what she termed ‘kokugo panic’ may be well founded (Noguchi 2005).
One factor often proposed as contributing to declining literacy skills in
recent years, along with ‘yutori’ education, is the popularity of cell phone e-
mailing. From time to time, articles in the mainstream press have suggested
this connection: an article in the Yomiuri Shimbun on 7 December 2004, for
example, reporting on the reading literacy results in the PISA test, cited a
university lecturer who suggested that the prevalence of the very short sentences
used in cell phone e-mails meant that students were no longer adept at reading
longer texts (Yomiuri Shimbun 2004), while another in April 2009 attributed the
low results achieved by many students on an entrance test of kanji and ‘keigo’
instituted by Tokushima University from 2008 for its new students to the fact
that the rapid spread of computers and cell phones had led to a diminution of
opportunities for students to write by hand (Yomiuri Shimbun 2009). In a 2007
survey of perceptions of kanji ability, when respondents were asked whether
they had confidence in their own kanji proficiency, just over half answered that
they did not, and of that group, almost three-quarters attributed this to the fact
that they often wrote using cell phones or computers (Goo Research 2007).
Certainly the perception of the influence of cell phone usage is strong, and I
will come back to this later in the chapter.
At language policy level, the Kokugo Bunkakai defended the importance
of retaining the ability to write well by hand in its 2005 report. In addition to
announcing that the committee would shortly begin a reassessment of the exist-
ing policy on characters in the light of the influence of technology, the report
also stressed anew the value of cultivating the art of handwriting. Address-
ing the evidence of declining handwriting skills uncovered by recent surveys,
it emphasised both the role played by handwriting in learning and using the
characters properly in the first place and the central place of kanji in Japan’s
linguistic culture.
With regard to the matter of writing by hand: we should take the fundamental line that
writing by hand must not be lost from Japan’s culture. While the use of computers and
other devices is widespread, the value of writing by hand is now being re-discovered. But
we must also address the need we already feel to apologise if something is handwritten.
(Kokugo Bunkakai 2005)
The Asahi Shimbun noted this with approval: the basis of all learning in
Japanese, its editorial stressed, was reading and writing, and these skills must
be constantly reinforced at elementary-school level; regardless of the fact that
Japanese children have a harder task than their overseas counterparts in learning
to write because of the orthography, teachers must continue to inculcate good
writing skills (Asahi Shimbun 2005b). That a major newspaper – motivated by

yet another survey revealing insufficient kanji proficiency among elementary-
school students – would editorialise in support of a ‘back to basics’ approach
on the beneficial role of rote repetition in learning kanji indicates the depths
of disquiet aroused by the prospect of continuing under par literacy skills, not
only in relation to using kanji but also in the wider general area of writing.
Universities have taken direct action to improve the writing skills of their
incoming students. Since the 1990s, Miyake (2002) reports, many have estab-
lished introductory-level courses on how to write good Japanese which teach
students the practical skills of writing in different genres such as reports and
essays and of speaking well;6 some focus on writing rather than speaking, others
vice versa. Some courses have a narrow academic skills focus, others concen-
trate on the wider public arena. In order to ascertain in what areas students’
literacy skills were lacking, Miyake analysed the results of a writing task given
to her students in the first week of her course. In one student’s written comments
on the task, she found expressions such as ‘ka naa’ that were inappropriate for
academic writing, along with other words and expressions more appropriate to
spoken language; there were also kanji mistakes such as dd (kanten) instead
of dd (kanten) where the wrong homophonous character has been used for
the first character, and dd (dōshi) instead of dd (dōshi), where the same is
true of the second. Similar problems were found to a greater or lesser extent
in the work of other students. In addition to these purely linguistic deficien-
cies, she found evidence of sloppy thinking in constructing sentences, affecting
clarity, and of cognitive inability to differentiate between binary concepts such
as spoken and written language owing to insufficient prior training in logical
writing and lack of ability to read analytically due to insufficient experience in
reading. This led Miyake to urge that the previous emphasis on remedying only
linguistic problems be expanded to include training in both logical thinking
and overcoming cognitive deficiencies.
This discussion has shown that fears about declining standards of literacy
have been present in the community at large and among educators for some
considerable time. In addition to the debate over ‘yutori aru kyōiku’, a major
element contributing to such fears has of course been the spread of electronic
means of text production, something which in Japan has coincided with the
burgeoning effects of globalisation. Maher and Nakayama (2003: 127) point
out that ‘globalization is not merely the imposition of transnational capitalist
structures upon local economies but is also a social relation. Thus, language –
a sensitive constant of social organization and human relations – has likewise
found itself the axis of dramatic change in Japan.’ Within the purview of this
dramatic change, they include the impact of new technologies on the writing
system along with the challenge of emergent multilingualism discussed in the
earlier part of this book. The high priority accorded to written expression that
Kanji proficiency and electronic technologies 105
has characterised language education in Japan both in the mother tongue and
in the teaching of English they attribute to the fact that the writing system
itself takes so much time to master: given that exegesis of written Chinese
texts has been central to education for more than a millennium, ‘difficulty
in mastering the writing system of the modern language likewise maintains
ideological devotion to written language education’ (129). The written language
thus remains paramount in the teaching of Japanese to its native speakers,
which goes a long way toward explaining the persistent unease about the
fall in standards of kanji proficiency. What is happening now, however, is
that beliefs about language (i.e., language ideologies) that were once central
to the national imaginary and formed the basis for existing language policy,
‘the way things are (and should be) done’, are in the process of being re-
evaluated. Since 1980 a quiet revolution in writing practices has come to pose
a challenge to the relevance of the current script policies, based as they are on
an assumption that writing means writing by hand. The sustained engagement
with technology which has underpinned this change has led to departures from
accepted ways of writing in personal communications in cyberspace which have
been the subject of much academic research and public comment. It is debatable
whether such practices are likely to spill over into offline use. Nevertheless,
the influence of technology does mean that contemporary writing practices in
terms of orthography use have implications for script policy, as the government
has recently acknowledged in its revision of the kanji policy.
Declining kanji proficiency attributed to electronic technologies

A popular belief is that today’s declining ability to read and write kanji can be
attributed to the fact that time once spent reading or writing has been eroded
by other media such as television and newer electronic technologies. In other
words, people depend less today on text and more on images. Phrases such as
‘moji banare’ (loss of interest in writing) and ‘katsuji banare’ (loss of interest
in the printed word) are often found in this context. Is it actually, true, however,
that the dependence on written text has lessened? Akiyama (2003) set out to
test this by a quantitative study of the usage of text information carried by
the whole range of communication media, using the annual Information Flow
Census. While it is true that dependence on text in hard-copy published sources
such as books, magazines and newspapers has been declining, he found, the
increase in use of text online compensates for this, so that far from dependence
on written text being in decline, there has simply been a swing towards using
‘post-typographic’ digital and network technologies to deliver text information.
Based on Akiyama’s empirical evidence, then, we may safely conclude that it
is the shift away from reliance on more traditional means of reading and
writing that is causing conservative concern in society, with varying degrees of
disinterest or disdain reserved for online writing as an element in an individual’s

range of literacies, probably because of the transgressive writing practices
observed in younger people’s e-mails and bulletin boards. Such practices are
only one small part of the equation, however; the majority of information-
based websites (with the exception, again, of those targeting teenagers) follow
a standard formal approach to writing as seen on the websites of government
organs, educational or medical institutions and businesses, although of course
the on-screen text is often combined with graphic devices intended to catch
the eye. The language and orthography found in the articles of the major
newspapers online show no differences from the print form attributable to the
means by which they are disseminated.
The real root of the perception of declining literacy skills, therefore, lies
not in any actual reduced social exposure to text but rather in unease over
the long-term effects of text production by electronic means, at the same time
as the convenience of this is universally acknowledged. In a country where
handwriting was the norm even in most business documents long past the time
offices in other countries were using typewriters on a large scale, the ideological
attachment to writing by hand has deep roots. The emphasis on writing by hand,
however, with the consequent burden it imposed on the memory, has been seen
as the reason for failure to live up to the ideal expectations of literacy, namely,
the ability to write all 1,945 of the kanji for general use by the end of the
period of compulsory education. Such failure is quite widespread, as shown,
for example, by a 1988 National Language Research Institute report on a survey
of children in Tokyo, Akita Prefecture and Nara Prefecture which found that
at both elementary and high-school levels students were not able to write kanji
as well as they could read them (National Language Research Institute 1988:
389–91). Overall, Taylor and Taylor (1995: 353) conclude, ‘the mastery of
Kanji by Japanese students and adults is far from perfect, despite the effort and
time expended on it’.
It might have seemed, then, that the advent of word-processing technology
and computers which removed this burden of memory by providing in internal
dictionaries many more characters than the average user could ever want would
be welcomed, but this was not always the case. The central importance of
writing in language ideology ensured that electronic means of text production
were viewed through a lens of suspicion and disapproval in many quarters
while being well received in others, notably the printing industry because of
the freedom from the exigencies of using printing type thus enabled. It was
the social and cultural impact of the technology, however, that occasioned
most alarm: people worried about whether users would forget how to write
by hand if the technology spread, or whether the old belief in the supremacy
of handwriting as an indicator of character would be overthrown by the safe
anonymity of printed text (see Gottlieb 2000).
The influence of electronic technology on the way Japanese is written began

in the 1980s and early 1990s, when sales of personal word processors, followed
later by computers with word processing software, burgeoned after the invention
of a means of electronic text production capable of handling the Japanese
writing system. This was followed from the mid- to late 1990s by the uptake of
the Internet which saw the use of written Japanese extended to the screen, in e-
mails, chatrooms, bulletin boards, websites and other cyberfora. In due course,
this extended further to encompass today’s proliferation of blogs, cell phone
e-mails and social networking sites such as Mixi and Twitter. Throughout this
process of technological innovation and evolution, concerns about language –
and specifically about written Japanese – remained constant.
When the craze for personal-use word processors took off in the 1980s, with
users enthralled by internal dictionaries holding large numbers of characters, it
was not long before unorthodox writing practices began to attract comment. By
‘unorthodox’ here, I mean practices not in line with the script policies which
govern teaching in schools and with accepted general practice. Documents
began to look much denser or ‘blacker’ in aspect, containing many more kanji
than usual given the ease of retrieving them from the dictionary, and certain
multi-stroke characters such as the second character in the word dd (kirei,
beautiful) which had been left out of the official kanji list because of their
complexity began to reappear. As ‘density of Chinese characters in Japanese
texts is an indication of the texts’ style and weightiness’ (Coulmas 1994:
312), when word processor users began to use too many characters in trivial
documents, the effect was ridiculous as well as being hard to read because of
the ‘blackness’ thus imparted to texts. Unwary users in a hurry were also apt
to choose the wrong character from the list of choices thrown up (see Gottlieb
2000 for details). Naturally, these changes attracted criticism, on the surface
centred on perceived infractions of the textual status quo but in reality stemming
from a deep unease about the influence of this technology on the social function
of writing which had for so long been done – in line with social expectations –
as a personal, handcrafted activity.7
Concerns about kanji were the most numerous, ranging from overuse to
inappropriate use to the fear – to a large extent justified, as time has shown –
that regular use of a keyboard would mean forgetting how to write characters
by hand. The former – overuse and inappropriate use, for example of characters
such as ‘kirei’ above – settled down after the first flush of enthusiasm, when
it became clear that there was no point to producing showy text if recipients
found it difficult to read or laughed at it. With time and with improvements
in input technology, users settled into using the technology to communicate
effectively rather than to experiment, at least in matters of ordinary text.8 Kanji
proficiency, however, has indeed declined, as both anecdotal evidence and
surveys have shown (see, for instance, the Agency for Cultural Affairs surveys
and the surveys reported in Atsuji (1991) and Ogino (1994)), although opinions
differ as to whether this is attributable to use of computers or to declining kanji
proficiency in general. Nor has the ancillary effect on writing good Japanese
in general gone unnoticed: Mino (2005) has lamented the fact that the earlier
emphasis on teaching the techniques of good writing in Japanese Expression
classes at universities was replaced by the mid-1980s in many institutions by
a focus on learning how to use to best effect the functions offered by word
processing now that assignments did not have to be written by hand, thus
losing sight of the original objective of such classes. Given that the most
striking problem she encountered was student inability to read or write kanji
properly without the aid of a machine, classes once devoted to refining already
good writing skills are now needed to teach students how to write accurate and
comprehensible Japanese, a problem she attributes to the prevalence of cell
phone e-mailing with its truncated forms.
After computer screens began to show not only on-machine documents
but also Internet pages, a new set of orthographic possibilities and practices
emerged. Japanese rapidly established a substantial online presence, though
mainly within the Japanese homeland itself. By 1998 it had become the second
most widely used language (after English) on the Internet, a position it held
until passed by Chinese in 2001; as of 31 December 2009 it was in fourth place,
behind English, Chinese and Spanish (Internet World Stats 2010). In 2007 it
was the top language of the blogosphere (Sifry 2007). On Twitter, in 2010 it
sits in second place after English (Semiocast 2010). Much of this prominence
is facilitated by Japan’s high rate of use of the mobile Internet, i.e., using
cell phones to send e-mails and access Internet sites.9 What all this means is
that despite its relatively restricted geographical origin, the Japanese language
is used across the full range of online activities, many of them informal and
more conversational than literary, with resulting online linguistic and ortho-
graphic changes mirroring that. ‘Internet users’, comments Randall (2002: 2),
‘are speaking with their fingers’, and many empirical studies of online lan-
guage use have verified this in the Japanese case (e.g., Mino 2005, Nishimura
2003, Sanuki 2006, Satake 2005). As in other languages, attempts to replicate
the sounds of laughter and other emotions phonetically feature prominently
(see Miyake 2004), along with irregular punctuation and spelling and use
of emoticons, supplemented in the Japanese case by a non-standard use of
orthography permitted by the flexibility of the multi-script Japanese writing
system.
In many cases, informal online language use shades over into language play,
namely the ‘bending and breaking the rules of language’ (Crystal 1998: 1)
to achieve a particular and unexpected effect (see Gottlieb 2010a for more
on this in Japanese). Language play can have several functions. It can be a
way of saving time in messages to friends, as documented by Sasahara (2002)
who found that young women in his survey often used kanji-only in their cell
phone messages for brevity’s sake. It can be a way of expressing personal-
ity: Kataoka (1997) found that ‘the writers in my data often depart sharply
from convention, and intentionally cross genre boundaries to exploit particu-
lar images for better self-representation’ (107). Unconventional practices are
defined in this particular study as use of invented punctuation marks, picto-
rial signs and ‘intentionally transformed letters to cater to the writer’s need
of self-representation’ (109). Tanaka’s survey of frequent keitai (cell phone)
mail users also found that over 60 per cent reported being aware of using
what they called ‘keitai mail language’, women much more than men (Tanaka
2005). In more extreme cases, this can function as a restricted in-group code
meant to exclude those not in the know: Nishimura’s 2004 study of postings on
unmoderated community forum website 2Channeru, for example, found exam-
ples of phonetic kanji punning and substitution of similarly shaped symbols
with this intent. To be at all meaningful, such practices require a consen-
sus of sorts among users. Su (2003), discussing playful language usage on
college-affiliated bulletin board systems (BBS) in Taiwan, commented on the
socialisation processes involved in such in-group uses of language: ‘through a
shared history of engagement, BBS users negotiate the meanings of their expe-
riences, and develop routines and styles of communication. Language practices
on the BBSs become highly stylized, such that a new user must undergo social-
ization to learn to be a fully competent participant in the community. On these
BBSs the exploration and use of various forms of language play are highly
encouraged.’
An often discussed example of in-group language in Japan is ‘gyarumoji’, the
writing conventions used by a particular subculture of rebellious young women
known as ‘kogaru’. This is a mix of Japanese scripts (with kanji sometimes
divided into component parts and reassembled in a predetermined codified
manner), Roman letters, Greek letters and typographic, mathematical or other
symbols: an example is d £ d instead of dddd (good morning), where
d,d and are half-size forms of standard hiragana and katakana respectively
(this word is normally written in hiragana only) and £ substitutes for hiragana
d (Miyake 2004: 162, see also Tanabe 2005 for further details and examples).
Standard Japanese can be translated into ‘gyarumoji’ for transmission to a
friend’s cell phone by websites dedicated to that purpose, taking the hard work
out of the process.10 Unsurprisingly, the major objective of such transgressive
orthographic practices is to indicate that the users are non-conformist rebels
who flout the rules of written Japanese taught in schools, at least amongst
themselves. Milroy and Milroy’s observation that ‘the level of integration of
any given group into the wider society is likely to be inversely related to the
extent to which it maintains a distinctive vernacular’ (1992: 4) is amply borne
out in the case of ‘kogaru’.
‘Gyarumoji’ users are using their own form of what Halliday (1976) has
termed ‘anti-language’, and which Hodge and Kress (1993: 77) further explain
along the following lines: anti-languages are parasitic, taking their basic sys-
tems of rules from the norm language; they are defensive, languages of evasion;
they are oppositional, attacking the classification system of the norm language;
and they cannot be explained without reference to the place of the anti-society
using them in the larger social structure. Halliday’s examples of anti-society
encompassed an element of criminality, but Churcher (2009) also considers the
language used by young people in text messaging in English to be an example
of an anti-language: ‘To outsiders, the language is little more than a series of
random letters, numbers and punctuation marks; yet to insiders, the language
represents a carefully designed vernacular designed to challenge society and
familial hegemony.’ The existence of an anti-language, she contends, not only
validates the alternate sphere from which it springs but also maintains its real-
ity and sense of autonomy, with those engaged in cyberspeak taking a stand
against accepted language conventions that could slow down online ‘speak’.
Such is certainly the intent of the ‘gyarumoji’, although it might be argued
that the complexity of some of the devices employed does little to facilitate
the speed of cyberspeak but rather requires more time to decode than would
regular language, which of course is part of its charm: a trade-off between speed
and presenting oneself as interesting, mysterious, definitely out of the ordinary.
And, naturally, this also functions to prevent outsiders from understanding the
message.
Online language play as evidence of declining standards?

Unorthodox writing practices, whether they are the more extreme ‘gyarumoji’
or what have become the ordinary online conventions, are to a large extent taken
for granted by young people. For many older people, however, they tie into the
vein of concern about ‘midare’ discussed in Chapter 1, namely the perception
that language standards are falling from some idealised norm, particularly in
the case of ‘wakamono kotoba’ (language used by young people). To return
to the Agency for Cultural Affairs language attitudes surveys, for example,
around 8 per cent of respondents in the 2008 version indicated that they used
anonymous bulletin boards (such as 2Channeru). This group were then asked
if they had any problems with the language used there. In a ‘tick all that
apply’ response, around a quarter indicated that they did not, but over half
found much of the language to be aggressive and strong; many commented
on the profusion of ‘wakamono kotoba’, slang and buzzwords as well as the
many misspellings, omitted characters and mistakes in usage. Almost 20 per
cent found the language hard to understand, often because it was fragmented
like conversation (something that almost three-quarters reported was also the
Online language play means declining standards? 111
case in their own cell phone e-mails). As with an earlier 2003 survey, the top
manifestation mentioned of the influence of information systems on language
was that respondents had lost their kanji writing skills.
It cannot be automatically assumed, however, that because such practices are
rife online they also spill over into users’ other writing genres. With perhaps
a few isolated exceptions,11 users are perfectly well able to differentiate by
situation and appropriateness the kind of written Japanese they use. The type of
idiosyncratic text that appears in messages to friends does not normally appear
in school or university assignments or other domains where more conventional
writing is expected. Kataoka’s study of ninety-two letters and notes written by
women aged between fifteen and thirty-three, for example, found that
juvenile writers make perfectly separated use of these styles according to formal and
informal settings, and their own covertly prestigious, resistant forms and styles are kept
concealed within their personal domains . . . Many of the writers, contradictory as it may
seem, are also generally conformist in the public domain, as most readily abandon their
practices once they graduate from school or reach adulthood. (1997: 130)
Miyake (2007) also argues that the kind of language found in cell phone e-mails
constitutes nothing more than a temporary escape from the pressure to conform
to social expectations experienced outside the privacy of cyberspace.
That being the case, it is not transgressive online writing practices that have
concerned the language policy-makers but rather the widely recognised drop
in kanji writing skills put down to the influence of keyboard technology, as
acknowledged by the Kokugo Bunkakai’s remarks on the importance of hand-
writing. Its response in language policy terms has been to increase the number
of characters on the List of Characters for General Use by 191, from 1,945 to
2,136 in recognition of the influence of information technology. It has taken the
committee (and its predecessor, the National Language Council) a long time to
reach this decision: although it had become clear by the early 1990s both that
the widespread use of word processing technology was having an effect on the
way people wrote and that the technology was here to stay, the immediate focus
of policy investigations during that decade was not on rethinking the kanji list
but rather on standardising electronic fonts for characters not on the list.
Are unorthodox writing practices likely to be of any lasting concern in terms
of language policy? School textbooks and government documents adhere faith-
fully to the official script policies, which indeed are only binding on government
agencies but are disseminated to the general public through the education sys-
tem. Whether people choose to stick to them or not in their everyday writing
(as opposed to school assignments), however, is a matter of individual choice,
and we can safely assume that they write as they please regardless of whether
a policy stipulates the use of, say, a particular form of okurigana or a partic-
ular character, in both handwriting and online. Electronic processing of text
since the 1980s has undoubtedly influenced the way in which Japanese is writ-
ten: a large number of studies attest to changes in orthographic practices by
‘kiibōdo ningen’ (keyboard persons, people who hardly ever write by hand),12
usually involving a departure from the accepted conventions embodied in the
script policies (see Gottlieb 2000 for details). This is particularly true of text
in cyberspace. As Ricento (2000: 7) reminds us, ‘ideologies inform and shape
political decisions, but formal planned language policies do not always – or
even often – achieve their objectives, be they liberatory or oppressive . . . It
is simply difficult to legislate language behaviour, whether for good or evil
purposes.’ The nature of the texts currently found online is a good illustration
of this in action in Japan’s case, as were earlier instances of nonconformist
teenage handwriting such as the ‘marumoji’13 craze of the 1970s which was
banned in some schools (see Kinsella 1995). The ‘rules’ can be more honoured
in the breach than in the observance in the private domain, as any scrutiny of
personal letters to friends will show. Just as members of a language community
adjust their spoken language according to their interlocutors, so also they use
a continuum of writing practices adjusted according to genre, and this in no
way indicates an overall decline in literacy skills. People engaging in the kind
of language manipulation found in text-speak do so from an already existing
basis of familiarity with the underlying rules of good writing (Crystal 2008,
Kataoka 1997, Tagliamonte and Denis 2008).
Declining proficiency in reading and writing kanji, on the other hand, given
the nature of the expectations of full literacy in Japanese, is certainly a concern,
but perhaps this has more of a symbolic basis than a practical one. Inability to
read the kanji properly, as we have seen in the case of former Prime Minister
Aso, is considered inappropriate for an educated person. According to the
author of the kanji bestseller mentioned above, ‘if you misread kanji, people
will begin to doubt your entire intellectual level, including your knowledge of
history, culture and all sorts of other things. Knowledge of kanji could form the
fundamental basis of who you are’ (Yasumoto 2009). While declining writing
abilities are usually attributed to the use of technology, much of the belief in
declining reading abilities is based on a lingering belief that the book is the
only worthwhile form of reading. Literacy and reading rates remain generally
high, but Japan appears to be experiencing a decline in the more traditional
forms of reading as other activities encroach upon available time, as shown
by numerous surveys of reading habits and a noticeable drop in book sales
in recent years. The 2002 Agency for Cultural Affairs survey, for example,
included a question on reading habits over a month which found that 37.6 per
cent of respondents had not read a book at all during that period, while just over
half the respondents to a 2007 survey by the Yomiuri Shimbun had not read a
book during the previous month (Yoshida 2008), with lack of time given as the
major reason. Lack of time is not the only factor: rather, people are choosing to
spend part of their time using the Internet and other media instead of reading
books.14 As we saw earlier in this chapter, however, these activities involve text
as well.
Over recent years steps have been taken to address this concern about declin-
ing reading skills. In late 2001, the Diet passed eleven laws aiming to promote
reading by children, designating 23 April each year as Children’s Reading Day,
and an action plan aiming to develop the habit of reading in elementary students
was put into place the following year. MEXT maintains a website devoted to
the promotion of children’s reading activities where the laws may be found,15
although at the time of writing it does not appear to have been updated since
April 2008. In a reaction against ‘yutori’ education, some schools have returned
to the practice of ‘ondoku’, an older teaching method where students take turns
reading aloud to their classmates, thus ensuring correction of any pronunciation
mistakes (Gordenker 2004). In 2003, the Kokugo Bunkakai’s reading activities
subcommittee issued a document detailing its discussions, in which the con-
nection between reading, correct use of language and the development of other
important language skills was heavily emphasised. Reading skills had become
all the more important in the information age to enable people to think for
themselves rather than becoming passive consumers of fragmentary informa-
tion, it said, and Agency for Cultural Affairs surveys reflect public awareness
of this. At the same time, however, the surveys found respondents ranging from
children to adults who never read books, a finding backed up by the Mainichi
Shimbun’s annual survey of reading habits which showed an alarming growth
in the percentage of students from elementary through to secondary levels who
had not read even one book in the previous month. The document stressed
the importance of early childhood activities meant to inculcate a love of read-
ing and produce engaged, autonomous readers, a mindset which would later
greatly influence children in adulthood, and set out a range of policy strategies
to be followed by national and local governments in support of achieving this
overall aim (Kokugo Bunkakai 2003). The emphasis throughout the document
is heavily on books as the preferred vehicle for reading; reading and writing to
newspapers, although supported by some members, is dismissed in the conclu-
sion as insufficient to foster language ability because newspaper text is pitched
at the level of the readership (presumably rather than extending it).
There are of course many other avenues for reading than books. The type
of reading being thus promoted is often not the kind of reading actually being
done by most young people, bringing us back to the charge of lowered liter-
acy levels stemming from manga reading discussed at the beginning of this
chapter. ‘School literacy as prescribed by the curriculum is represented by
classroom textbooks and library books . . . On the other hand, personal literacy
is determined by the readers themselves’ (Allen and Ingulsrud 2005: 265), and
in many cases may not reflect the values of educators. In order to investigate
the personal literacies of teenage students, Allen and Ingulsrud conducted two
surveys, one of junior high-school students and the other of college students,
and found that 99 per cent of respondents in both surveys had read manga and
a majority reported continuing to do so. The study found that the existence of
a community of readers played an important role in a student’s introduction
to and continued reading of manga, and that the majority of students surveyed
did not report having any reading difficulties despite the multimodal format in
which orthographic conventions may not always be observed.16 This prompted
the observation that the ‘reading crisis’ might be approached from a different
angle were educators to take into account how much time their students spend
as engaged readers of manga and the nature of the self-taught literacy practices
involved. Far from dumbing down students’ reading abilities, then, manga read-
ing may be seen as actually extending the range of literacies open to them and
their ability to negotiate a complex web of meaning presented at several levels,
in line with the New Media Consortium’s definition of twenty-first-century
literacy as ‘the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual and digital literacy
overlap’ (New Media Consortium 2005: 2). It is a different but nonetheless
important aspect of literacy that cannot easily be ignored or necessarily blamed
for the decline in other indicators of literacy.
Coming back to my main point: those who see online language practices as
evidence of declining literacy standards among young people fail to understand
that literacy is not fixed in amber across time and culture and that in contempo-
rary literacy research literacy is not measured against an unchanging yardstick
but rather is viewed as a set of practices and values which must be understood
within the context of the contemporary cultural milieu, historical period and
material conditions (Selfe and Hawisher 2006: 274). That is not to suggest that
unorthodox online language practices must be accepted as a new manifestation
of literacy which supplants the old; to the contrary, researchers such as Crystal
(2008) and Tagliamonte and Denis (2008) have found that online texting and
e-mail practices are embedded in and arise from a confident mastery of the
accepted literary conventions and amount to expertly playful departures from
such norms rather than any attempt to replace them. Users are clearly exercis-
ing their sociolinguistic competence, their sense of what kinds of writing are
appropriate in what context. It is clear, then, that a general amorphous public
concern over ‘declining standards of literacy’ caused by digital technologies
relates more to perceived outcomes than to actual practice. In large part this is
due to a fear that incorrect use of, say, orthography amounts to a decline in the
overall social order, a fear that frequently recurs not just in Japan but in many
other countries with well-established traditions of literacy as well (see, e.g.,
Graff 1994), particularly given the strong correlation usually made between
literacy and a strong economy, political stability and even personal integrity:
‘What it is to be a person, to be moral and to be human in specific cultural
contexts is frequently signified by the kind of literacy practices in which a per-

son is engaged’ (Street 1994: 97). To scholars for whom the social context of
literacy is key (see Street 1993), a view of this kind stems from an ideological
will to maintain the status quo of those in power. As we have seen in Chapter
1, language ideologies are commonly linked to themes of power relations and
beliefs about language legitimate existing practices, in this case to do with what
constitutes ‘good’ written Japanese and what does not, and the role of kanji is
central to this theme, thus guaranteeing that deliberate manipulation of char-
acters in non-orthodox ways is bound to cause concern, whether or not there
is any basis in reality for such perceptions of widespread declining literacy
standards.
The available evidence, then, suggests that users of unorthodox language
and script online compartmentalise these activities, limiting them to the private
arena, and that public perceptions of ‘midare’ in the language relate much
more to the spoken language – particularly misuse of honorifics and young
people’s language in general – than to non-standard script use. Recent lan-
guage policy activities relating to the way Japanese is written have therefore
been restricted to the kanji list. Regardless of whether people write by hand
or use a keyboard, the role of kanji remains unchanged, fundamental to con-
ceptions of written Japanese and freighted with a historical burden of language
ideology. Despite arguments in favour of replacing characters with either kana
or the Roman alphabet over the years since the Meiji Period, the centrality
of kanji to the writing system has never been in doubt, and in the postwar
script reforms the decision to rationalise the number of characters was always
certain to win out over the push for romanisation (see Gottlieb 2010b). The
policy focus on kanji does not mean that mention of writing good Japanese is
absent from policy documents other than the curriculum guidelines, of course:
the National Language Council’s 1995 report, Atarashii Jidai ni ōjita Kokugo
Shisaku ni tsuite (On Language Policy for a New Age), for example, stressed
the responsibility of government in planning for and disseminating a ‘beauti-
ful and rich language’, and the Kokugoka (the Language Section within the
Agency for Cultural Affairs) produced a video called ‘Aiming for a beautiful
and rich language’. Later, as one arm of the 2002 strategic plan promoting
English, the government announced that 200 schools at all three levels of edu-
cation nationally would be designated flagship Japanese-language education
providers, with a special emphasis on fostering advanced reading and writing
skills, knowledge of the classics and oral communication skills, on the basis
that a good command of students’ first language is a prerequisite for successful
acquisition of a foreign language. More recently, MEXT’s list of Designated
and Pilot Schools for projects other than English-language education in 2010
lists several tasked with curricula and teaching methods that will foster skills
based on the ability to read and understand (MEXT 2010c).
While this designation of certain schools to work on literacy-related issues is

certainly an example of language management in practice, the fact that the only
document overtly marked as policy in recent years has been the 2010 increase
in the number of characters on the List of Characters for General Use indicates
that the orthographic practices found online are not viewed with anything more
than the equivalent of a fatalistic shrug, a metaphorical rolling of the eyes
when discussing young people’s language. Apart from the usual injunctions
to write good Japanese and the campaign to encourage students to read more
books, it is the place of kanji in everyday life both online and off that has
been regulated and reinforced. Making mistakes in writing characters by hand
cannot be equated with a poor standard of literacy in its most basic sense, given
that the phonetic scripts provide an alternative means of writing, but since in
the Japanese context full literacy involves the ability to use characters properly,
it does present an important symbolic problem. As we saw in Chapter 1, kanji
are considered to be central to written Japanese, not an optional add-on, and
this explains the policy focus on the kanji list.
Kanji-related policy action

In January 2005, an article in the Yomiuri Shimbun reported that the Kokugo
Bunkakai had just released a draft proposal that kanji policy,17 including the
List of Characters for General Use, be partially revised, given that the number
of kanji people were seeing had greatly increased because of the widespread
and rapid dissemination of information technology such as computers. The
proposal was to be submitted at the following month’s general meeting of the
Bunka Shingikai, the overarching committee to which the Kokugo Bunkakai
reports (Yomiuri Shimbun 2005a).18 That this article appeared on the front
page of the Yomiuri (as did articles dealing with the kanji list in other major
newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun) indicated the topic’s importance in the
general scheme of news reporting. Somewhat revealingly, though, given the
findings reported in Chapter 1 of the degree of ignorance about the existence of
the List of Characters for General Use, the article carried a short explanation at
the end of what the list is, when it was drawn up and why, and how it differed
from its 1946 predecessor, the List of Kanji for Interim Use.
The Kokugo Bunkakai’s own 2005 report explained that its overarching task
had been to identify and clarify problematic issues surrounding the national
language in all areas of contemporary society and to decide how best to deal
with them on a language policy basis. As the kanji arm of its deliberations,
the committee had chosen to focus on kanji policy in the information age as
requested by the Minister for Education in March 2005, the primary considera-
tion being whether the current List of Characters for General Use – formulated
in 1981 as ‘a guide to the use of kanji in writing modern Japanese in everyday
Kanji-related policy action 117
life’ (Kokugo Shingikai 1981) with no concept of the rapid spread of informa-
tion technology which was just around the corner – could really still be said to
be functioning as a proper ‘guide’ today when that technology had made such
inroads and people were increasingly exposed to characters not on the official
list. Many electronic devices were soon to have in their memory 10,000 kanji
(Japan Industrial Standards Levels One to Four); newspapers showed signs of
using increased numbers of kanji not on the general list; Agency for Cultural
Affairs’ surveys reported the influence of such devices on the language prac-
tices of users; and the List of Kanji for Use in Personal Names (Jinmeiyō Kanji)
had recently been expanded. The time had therefore come, the committee felt,
to revisit the character list. The investigation would be based on reliable empir-
ical surveys of kanji frequency and of reading and writing abilities as well as
recent Agency for Cultural Affairs’ surveys of attitudes towards kanji (Kokugo
Bunkakai 2005).
The kanji subcommittee’s membership represented a variety of views. Con-
cern over the extent of students’ kanji proficiency was expressed by Professor
Iwabuchi Tadasu of Waseda University at the very first meeting when he prof-
fered the observation that while students – who now in the main used electronic
dictionaries – could certainly enter kanji they were used to seeing, when they
encountered more abstruse compounds such as dd (sogo, inconsistency)
they were more likely to read the attached furigana than to look properly at
the kanji themselves. While they knew the word, they could neither write it
nor select it from the choices offered by an electronic dictionary. In Iwabuchi’s
view, clarification of the extent of the lack of ability to write kanji should be
undertaken as part of the committee’s review of the kanji list. Another member,
Kanetake Nobuya of the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association,
agreed that many people could not write the kanji on the List of Characters for
General Use but questioned whether surveys of writing ability were really of any
use: given the contemporary prevalence of word processing, was it not enough
just to be able to read the characters? (Kokugo Bunkakai Kanji Subcommittee
2005).
By the time the final Revised List of Characters for General Use report
was made public in 2010, the kanji subcommittee and its various sub-groups
had met a total of ninety-four times since September 2005 (Bunka Shingikai
2010: 1). A list of what was discussed at each meeting may be found at the
end of the 2010 report. Three years into the process, the subcommittee had
released an interim progress report, in which the two main points relevant to
deciding whether or not to expand the list were given as pertaining to change
in the language itself and to change in the environment relating to language,
specifically the spread of information systems. The nature of the revised kanji
list, then tentatively titled the Shin Jōyō Kanji Hyō (New List of Characters
for General Use), would be the same as that of the existing list: namely, it
would provide a guide for effective kanji use (excluding proper nouns, except
for the names of Japan’s administrative regions) in non-specialist areas of
writing for those who had completed compulsory education and then spent
some further time in schools or in society at large. While the list’s guidelines
did not extend to specialist fields such as sciences and the arts, or to the
writing practices of individuals, it was nevertheless hoped that they would
be followed in writing those specialised words which had a close connection
to everyday life. The basic thrust of the committee’s ongoing work was to
select through machine-based kanji frequency surveys those characters most
commonly used by the general public (presented in Appendix 1 of the report),
initially identifying a set of 3,000–3,500 characters and then narrowing it down,
with due regard to those characters which were important for a knowledge of
kanji structure during the acquisition process or which while not frequently
used were nevertheless important for the transmission of Japanese culture
(detailed notes on the selection procedure are contained in Appendix 2 of the
report). Due consideration would be given to those kanji needed for the names
of administrative regions which were not in the current list, e.g., the ‘saka’ of
Osaka or the ‘oka’ found in many place names such as Shizuoka.
Various issues needing further consideration had been identified during the
selection process. One was whether, if the total number of characters were
considered too great, a list of Supplementary Characters for General Use (Jun
Jōyō Kanji) consisting of those characters considered useful when writing
by electronic means might be separated out from among them, and what the
relationship between that list and the main List of Characters for General Use
might be. The main list would contain the most frequently used characters and
would form the basis for education. Both lists should in principle satisfy the
criteria of containing kanji which could be read, understood and written, but in
the third criterion of writing there would be a difference between them in that
only those on the main list would be intended to be written by hand without
the aid of information technology. Alternatively, a Special Kanji (Tokubetsu
Kanji) list of those low-frequency characters nevertheless considered necessary
for daily life could be drawn up. A third option might be to add to the main list
a new appendix of idiomatic phrases containing high-frequency off-list kanji,19
such as the ‘ai’ and ‘satsu’ only ever used in the word ‘aisatsu’ (greetings)
or the ‘tan’ of ‘gantan’ (New Year’s Day), such characters to be recognised
as having equal status to the Characters for General Use but with their use
restricted to the specified phrases. Other issues still to be considered related
to ‘on’ and ‘kun’ readings, character shapes and the matter of what the name
of the new list should be given that frequency of occurrence was not the sole
criterion for inclusion as discussed above (Kokugo Bunkakai 2009).
When the final form of the new list appeared in June 2010 as a report from
the Bunka Shingikai to the Minister for Education, following the usual period
of public consultation on a draft version released for comment in November

2009 and subsequent fine-tuning, its name was not the initially proposed Shin
Jōyō Kanji Hyō (New List of Characters for General Use) but rather Kaitei
Jōyō Kanji Hyō (Revised List of Characters for General Use). To the 1,945
characters of the existing list have been added a further 196 characters, with
five deleted, bringing the new total to 2,136, certainly an increase but still
only a fraction of the number of characters available in computer and cell
phone dictionaries. Because the availability of electronic writing technologies
enables users to produce characters having a large number of strokes at the touch
of a button, kanji such as the twenty-nine-stroke ‘utsu’ meaning ‘melancholy’
which was not on the previous list, meaning that the word ‘yūutsu’ (depression)
was written half in kanji and half in hiragana as ddd rather than as dd,
have now been added. The new list was formally announced and brought into
operation by the government on 30 November 2010.
The document included a justification of the need for the kanji list as a
national language policy: a list of this kind to function as a guide has real
significance today when so many more kanji are encountered through informa-
tion technology. Given that kanji are an indispensable tool for communication,
the role of the kanji list as policy is to facilitate the nation’s linguistic life
by making the transmission of the written language simpler and more effi-
cient and to assist with the goal of mastering the kanji themselves. In today’s
information technology environment, the consequences of not having such a
list as a guideline are not hard to imagine, the document argued. Here we see
once again enshrined the central role of kanji within Japan’s writing system,
but with a major difference in ideological emphasis from that found in early
twentieth-century discussions of their role: where once such instrumentalism
was seen as an attack on cultural heritage (see Gottlieb 1995), in the discourse
of today’s policy documents and following sixty years of experience which
has shown that the rationalisation of the writing system by the postwar script
reforms has not had the dire consequences predicted by opponents, it is not only
welcomed but actively sought. A further argument for such a policy advanced
in the document was the need to support ‘writing behaviour’, as it was the way
people wrote rather than the way they read that had been most affected by the
widespread use of information technology.
The basic aim of the expanded list remained the same as the old one, namely
to function as a guide to non-specialist character use in everyday life. The
report stated that the list was not in any sense meant to impose a limit on the
number of characters people could use: rather, it was intended to be used in
conjunction with characters not on the list, to which might be added some aid
to reading them such as added furigana glosses. Nor did it propose that all
characters be handwritten, something not realistic in view of the widespread
daily use of keyboards. The guiding principle of the revision was to overcome
the discrepancy that had developed between the List of Characters for General
Use and the reality of kanji use in contemporary Japan. Characters had therefore
been chosen on the basis of frequency of use using surveys carried out by the
committee, narrowing down from a list of 3,500 candidates (including the
1,945 already on the List of Characters for General Use) using the guidelines
previously discussed in the 2008 interim report. The kanji survey data examined
came from 860 books (including textbooks), two months’ editions of both the
Asahi Shimbun and the Yomiuri Shimbun and a large number of websites. Of
these last, postings to electronic bulletin boards were excepted, presumably
because the kind of unorthodox kanji use found there (as described earlier
in this chapter) rendered that data unusable for the purposes of the review.
Each candidate kanji was subjected to careful scrutiny as to its suitability for
inclusion in the revised list.
As a result of these deliberations, an initial 220 characters (subsequently
reduced to 188) had been identified as candidates for addition to the existing
list and 5 characters already on the list as candidates for exclusion. Following
rigorous scrutiny of the 188, a further 4 were added and 1 was dropped,
bringing the total to be added to the new list to 191. Then followed a month
of consultation on a draft proposal to this effect during which opinions were
sought from the general public and from government departments; on the
basis of feedback received, further fine-tuning by the committee resulted in a
changed total of 196 characters (9 added and 4 dropped). After a second period
of public consultation, it was decided to proceed on the proposed basis of the
new 196. Just to be certain, a survey of public opinion on the acceptability of
the characters to be added and dropped was carried out in early 2010, which
confirmed support for the changes.20 In the interests of making the new list as
simple and straightforward as possible, the committee’s earlier idea of adding
appendices of ‘supplementary’ and ‘special’ kanji, after vigorous in-house
debate, was dropped (‘aisatsu’ and the ‘tan’ of ‘gantan’, discussed above, were
included among the 196 new characters added). Other changes made included
additions (28) and deletions (3) of ‘on-kun’ readings and clarifications of the
use of different kanji having the same ‘kun’ reading.
Significantly, the 2010 report left open the possibility of future changes to the
list, something which the 1981 list had not done. In today’s era of rapid change,
it declared, language policy should be periodically reviewed, in particular in
those areas closely connected to the changing writing environment such as the
kanji list. It was therefore important, in the committee’s view, to implement
regular and planned surveys of kanji use; language policy should be reviewed on
the basis of these surveys, as prefigured in the 2008 interim report, to take into
account both changes in language and changes in the language environment,
with ‘changes in the language environment’ here specifically construed to
indicate the use of information technology (Bunka Shingikai 2010).
This adjustment to kanji policy was concluded much more easily than was
the previous expansion of the list. The revision of the 1946 List of Characters
for Interim Use which resulted in the 1981 List of Characters for General Use
was such a sensitive issue in terms of its position within the twentieth-century
ideological debate over the place of characters in the Japanese writing system
that it took not the proposed six years but eight years in total to arrive at the final
list, with not one but two drafts offered for public consultation during that time
(see Gottlieb 1995). That the present revision, once committed to, took only
five years (and was, of course, facilitated by the use of information technology
in a way not available to the earlier committee) is in no way an indication that
the position of kanji is taken any less seriously now than it was thirty years ago,
when we consider that those five years of deliberations resulted in the expansion
of the List of Characters for General Use by only 191 characters. The fact that
the list had been revised once already provided a precedent, of course, and
there was not the acrimonious political debate that had surrounded the earlier
revision. Instead, there was a compelling environmental factor in the widespread
use of information technology which rendered people well disposed to the idea
of change. The fact that the revision occurred so long after the evidence was
in that electronic text production was causing significant changes in the way
people wrote, however, speaks to the cautious attitude towards tinkering with
the kanji list which has been the hallmark of language policy deliberations
in this area. And indeed, it is not something that can be taken lightly, given
the flow-on effects for education it will have. What is of particular significance
about the revised list is not the nature of the kanji included (or of those five
excluded) but rather the accompanying report’s belated acknowledgment of the
influence of information technology on reading and writing and its recognition
that not all characters need to be written by hand while at the same time it
reaffirms the importance of writing by hand within Japan’s written culture.
That the actual decision to revisit the list took so long coming after the need
became apparent can thus be put down to caution about making changes to a
policy which had been so hard won in the first place. The announcement in
1981 of the List of Characters for General Use, predicated still on handwriting,
coincided with the beginnings of the word processing boom; a few years after
this, once the new technology had begun to spread widely, academics such
as Kabashima Tadao (1988, 1989) began to discuss the possibility of a future
change in script policy given that people no longer needed to write so many
characters by hand. The National Language Council began to acknowledge
this in its reports early in the 1990s, only a decade after the list had been
promulgated: its 1992 report, for example, recognising that writing kanji had
become much simpler and that it was important to be able to read them correctly
in order to produce error-free text in word processing, ventured the opinion that
it might in time become necessary to move away from the emphasis on teaching
all characters for both recognition and reproduction by hand in the direction of
increasing the former and reducing the latter (Kokugo Shingikai 1992: 13).
Not unnaturally, however, given that more time was needed to ensure that the
technology was really here to stay, the Council proved reluctant to proceed in
that direction until almost another two decades had elapsed, choosing instead
to focus its activities on the issue of standardisation of the shapes of the many
characters found in the dictionaries of word processing packages that were not
in the official Jōyō Kanji list (see Kokugo Shingikai 2000 for its report on this).
Today, however, the number of people born after the introduction of electronic
text production, who have always had available that alternative to handwriting,
amounts to approximately a third of the population; the technology is well and
truly here to stay and is incorporated into a multiplicity of commonly used
devices. Given this, and in the face of numerous sets of evidence of declining
ability to write by hand as described earlier in this chapter, the time for a rethink
had clearly arrived. Such a policy intervention, of course, could only be done
at national level, given that it affected the country as a whole.
In this particular area of language policy, then, policy change to fit a social
environment which all agree has been irrevocably changed by a new set of
writing practices mediated by information technology has been achieved not
easily but without the stop-start fragmented approach of policy relating to
emergent multilingualism, where no such consensus exists. The revision of
the kanji list does not challenge the centrality of the national language or
the needs of its users; what it means for learners of Japanese as a second
language is probably little different from the burden they already faced in
the form of the previous list. What will be discussed in the next chapter,
however, deals with a much thornier issue and one much less easily resolved,
namely the need for a policy acknowledgment of the JSL needs of Japan’s
newcomer residents. Providing multilingual information in languages used
in the community, welcome though that undoubtedly is, does not address the
grassroots issue of providing non-Japanese residents with opportunities to learn
the language of their host country and is an issue which needs to be addressed
at national rather than local level.
5 National language policy and an
internationalising community
In the best of all possible worlds, the formulation and implementation of lan-
guage policy would respond quickly to change in on-the-ground circumstances
once sufficient time had elapsed to establish the permanence of that change. In
modern bureaucracies, however, this is only infrequently the case. If we con-
sider language policy in its formalised, overt incarnation, i.e., as ‘the formula-
tion and proclamation of an explicit plan or policy, usually but not necessarily
written in a formal document, about language use’ (Spolsky, 2004: 11), then
examination of past policy formulation in Japan – relating, for example, to stan-
dardisation, script reform and the revival of the Ainu language – makes it clear
that the process is usually slow and often tortuous. The presence of deep-rooted
language ideologies means that change is something to be carefully scrutinised
for agendas both overt and hidden that have the potential to upset the status
quo. On a practical level, the implementation phases of new policies must be
carefully planned and costed. Change at the national level of language policy
often involves many years of discussion and consultation on issues that affect
the nation as a whole.
We have seen in earlier chapters of this book that growing multilingualism in
local communities, the negative effect of the overwhelming national promotion
of the study of English on the teaching of other languages and the changes
to ways of writing Japanese enabled by electronic text production all raise
questions about the way language is currently managed in Japan, i.e., about
language policies. The preceding chapter discussed the only one of these to
have been addressed at national level so far. In this chapter, I will examine to
what extent the will to move in the direction of change can be discerned at
national level in response to the other issues. As will become clear, a discursive
shift is under way in relation to the old ideology that the Japanese language is
the exclusive property of the Japanese people.
The most pressing policy issue is without doubt the need to provide nationally
sponsored opportunities for JSL education for foreign residents, given that the
presence of such residents has become a permanent feature of Japanese society.
With many foreign workers choosing to stay on in Japan rather than returning
123
124 National language policy and growing diversity
to their countries of origin, it makes sense in the interests of present and future
social harmony to ensure that they are linguistically proficient in the language of
the host society in order to enable them to act independently within it. Because
this is occurring within the framework of a still strong national ideology of
monolingualism, however, and because the national government is by and
large removed from day to day dealings with foreign residents, the response at
national level has been slow and fragmented by comparison with the greater
responsiveness of local governments, which enjoy more freedom to take action
as area-specific challenges arise. To date, then, we have seen a more proactive
stance in bottom-up than top-down language policy initiatives in this area, with
local governments and NPOs which provide assistance to foreign residents in
their communities displaying a much greater recognition of the actual ecology
of language in Japan than has the national government.1 It is at the national
level, however, that a policy stance on provision of avenues for JSL education is
needed in both symbolic and practical terms. In symbolic terms, recognition of
the need to provide language-learning opportunities for non-Japanese residents
would confront the old ideology of monolingualism by formally acknowledging
that local communities are now very likely to be multilingual, particularly in
certain areas of the country. In practical terms, financial aid from the national
government to provide that education in local areas would relieve the current
pressure on local government budgets and enable a smoother and – ideally –
more professionalised service delivery.
Spolsky, speaking of language managers (people or groups seeking to inter-
vene to manipulate a language situation), lists by way of example the fol-
lowing: a legislative assembly writing a nation’s constitution or a national
legislature making a law on the choice of official language; a state/provincial/
cantonal/other local government body determining what languages should be
used on public signs; law courts; administrators; institutions and businesses;
and even family members. Language policy ‘may refer to all the language
practices, beliefs and management decisions of a community or polity’ (2004:
8, 9). In this chapter we shall see that the players active in those aspects of
Japan’s language policy discussed in this book do indeed include national,
prefectural and municipal governments along with civil society groups such
as NGOs and NPOs and other groups of motivated individuals, all work-
ing to bring about change in particular areas of language practice identi-
fied as of concern. While the national government’s most recent foray into
language-policy change has been a top-down adjustment of the kanji policy,
one of the major loci of language ideology identified in Chapter 1, in terms
of response to multilingualism the advocacy for change and the practical dis-
play of good practice have come from local government and civil society
groups.
Local government 125
Local government
Immigration-related issues are currently dealt with at two levels. The national
government implements the Immigration Control Act through the Immigration
Bureau, while local governments have been responsible for implementing the
Alien Registration Act, involving the issue of alien registration cards through
local city offices to all residents staying in Japan for more than ninety days.
In other words, until recently, once the national government issued a visa for
a medium- to long-term stay in Japan, it handed over responsibility for that
visa holder to local government. This changed following an amendment to the
Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act in July 2009, which abol-
ished both the former Alien Registration Act and alien registration card and
replaced them with a residence card and a change in responsibility for collect-
ing information on foreign residents: after July 2010, this shifted from local
to national government, thus enabling the Ministry of Justice to consolidate
information on where foreign residents are living. This, in theory, enables the
collection of a database on which to base decisions about other changes relating
to foreign residents.
Regardless of this change in immigration control procedures, however, under
the terms of the Local Government Law the provision of services to all residents,
Japanese or not, remains the responsibility of local governments; they are
therefore the ones who deal firsthand with the integration of foreign residents
into the communities where they live. In the absence of clear policies at national
level for dealing with immigrants, local governments have developed their
own ways of doing so, using their international associations to deliver advice,
information and language training in association with volunteer citizens’ groups
created to meet this need to varying degrees across the regions. They had already
been doing this for many years when the Omnibus Law of Decentralisation
came into force in April 2000: this law clearly defined the autonomy of local
governments from the national government, making the former responsible
for all aspects of local and regional public policy independent of the national
ministries, and further opened the way to promoting the formulation of local
policies by civil society actors such as NPOs and think tanks (Nakamura
2003: 111). Decentralisation therefore provided the underpinning for local
government initiatives at the same time as it formally removed the responsibility
of the national government in those areas.
Nagy argues that local governments react to the national government’s lack
of involvement with foreign residents through ‘uchinaru kokusaika’, using
concepts of citizenry based on the Local Government Law. Local govern-
ments across Japan, he notes, have had perforce to create integrative policies
for their foreign residents because of the Local Government Law, the Alien
Registration Act and the lack of a national policy on integration. In other

words, they have had no choice but to pick up the administrative and practical
consequences of globalisation manifesting themselves in Japan’s local commu-
nities. For the most part this task has been undertaken competently, creatively
and even enthusiastically, depending on where in Japan the particular govern-
ment instrumentality is located and what the makeup of its foreign population
is: where such residents are few in number, few inclusive activities are found, in
contrast to other areas where whole suites of programmes have been developed
to meet the needs of large numbers of foreign residents. Newcomer migrants,
as the immediate beneficiaries of inclusive policies, have provided the spur
for such developments; as lack of proficiency in Japanese is a major issue for
this group, policies targeting them have focused on multilingual advisory win-
dows and legal counselling, the provision of multilingual information in the
form of handbooks and webpages as discussed in Chapter 3, and other such
services intended to overcome the language barrier (Nagy 2008: 43–6). Many
also offer JSL classes. All of these activities represent on-the-ground, targeted
and pragmatic language policy in action.
As Tegtmeyer Pak (2001) has pointed out, attempts of this kind to assist
foreign residents in overcoming language difficulties, mundane though they
may seem, are nevertheless at odds with the national immigration policy which
remains based on the principle that Japan is not a country of immigration; in
fact, they expose the inaccuracy of that premise by highlighting the increased
numbers of foreign residents needing such services. Tegtmeyer Pak’s criteria
for judging the state of development of a municipal incorporation programme
(her term for foreign-resident-oriented activities) are twofold: first, the number
of different programmes developed and how relevant and accessible they are
for foreign residents, and then to what extent efforts are made to coordinate
programmes which go beyond the narrow jurisdictional boundaries of a par-
ticular government department to liaise with other sectors and with the wider
community. The most important actors in this process are local bureaucrats.
In contrast to Nagy’s view of local activity as a reaction to national govern-
ment inertia, Tegtmeyer Pak argues that the relationship between incorporation
programmes and ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ has developed not as a result of demand
from the electorate or from citizens’ movements so much as from an opening
provided by another policy area: in this case, a nationally sponsored ‘uchi-
naru kokusaika’ project which furnished local bureaucrats with the opportunity
to work out their own preferred solutions to issues arising from the flood of
international migrants in the 1980s. Taking the cities of Kawasaki and Hama-
matsu as examples, she identifies five steps in this process: first, pressure from
local business communities spurred cities to pursue cultural exchanges such as
sister-city relationships; at the same time, these two cities began to formulate
initial policies for their foreign residents; the national government then began
Local language policies in action 127
several ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ projects controlled by what was then the Ministry
for Home Affairs (now MIAC) which had as their focus the establishment of
international relationships by local governments for the benefit of Japanese
citizens; both cities in time established incorporation programmes within their
new International Offices, thus replacing the previous externally oriented con-
ceptualisation of ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ with one which viewed it as including
the interface with non-Japanese residents living locally; and finally, by the
mid-1990s this redefinition of ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ was spread horizontally
through networks fostered by the national-level interest in local internationali-
sation. Local conditions and histories with foreign residents thus played a key
role in shaping the responses of differing municipalities.
Local language policies in action

An excellent example of local government policy-making is the Council of
Cities with High Concentrations of Foreign Residents (Gaikokujin Shūjū Toshi
Kaigi),2 formed in 2001 by thirteen member cities home to large numbers
of foreign residents, in particular to Brazilians who arrived after 1990. By
July 2009, the number of member cities had grown to twenty-eight. This
council (hereafter CCHCFR) meets regularly to discuss issues affecting foreign
residents such as health care and social security: one focus of particular concern
is the education of the many foreign children who do not attend school regularly
and thus do not acquire an education in either Japanese or their first language.
Late in 2001 the council issued what is known as the Hamamatsu Declaration,
calling on the government to develop its own policies given the long-term
residence plans of many of the local foreign residents. Of the proposals, those
relating to education included enhanced JSL courses in schools and measures
to encourage non-Japanese children to go to school (Yamawaki 2002).
In member city Oizumi, for example, one in every seven residents is non-
Japanese, the largest proportion of any city in the country, and 90 per cent
are South American. Itoi (2006) outlines some of the policies put in place in
this city once it became apparent that the revision of the Immigration Control
Law, combined with the presence of many factories in the area’s industrial
park which attracted foreign workers, had resulted in an increased foreign pop-
ulation. Local government staff from a range of areas where new residents
needed services met to discuss the situation and identified communication as
the biggest problem. To address this, the local government office developed a
multi-pronged language policy. A South American person was hired to trans-
late local government documents, listen to residents’ problems and mediate
when necessary; a second bilingual staff member was employed at the counter
of the Alien Registration Office, where new residents had to come to register.
Bilingual handbooks of local information in Portuguese were issued, the first
of their kind in Japan, and many local signs also appeared in Portuguese
as well as Japanese. Municipal newsletters in Portuguese have been pub-
lished regularly since 1992, and tripartite meetings between local government
staff, Japanese residents and Brazilian residents are encouraged. JSL classes
were begun in three schools with many South American students in late 1990,
and the Oizumi Public Library also established an international corner with
Portuguese books and audiovisual materials intended to help children with
first-language maintenance.
A second snapshot of local language policy comes from the city of Konan
in Shiga Prefecture, also a member of the CCHCFR, which was discussed
by politician Yamashita Yoshiki at a meeting of the House of Councillors
General Affairs Committee in mid-2009. Konan’s foreign resident population
had increased to about 6 per cent since the 1990s, Yamashita reported; the
city’s mayor had spoken to him of the services it fell to the city to provide
as a result. These included eight interpreters at municipal offices: given the
financial difficulties of 2009, demand for this service was strong, with around
1,000 requests per month. In addition, publishing public relations information
and daily life guides not only in Japanese but also in Portuguese and Spanish
meant employing translators every month. All this, the city provided from its
own resources. Particularly important were the measures taken for the education
of foreign children: since the 1990s, some schools had found themselves with
five or six such students per class; because they could not understand what the
teacher was saying, some had reportedly begun to leave the classroom to amuse
themselves in the playground, thereby prompting comment from Japanese
students who wanted to do the same, so that classes were disrupted. Seeing
this as underscoring the importance of teaching foreign children Japanese, the
city thereupon established at its own expense JSL classrooms called Sakura
Classrooms to provide initial instruction in Japanese. Once the students were
deemed able to understand sufficient Japanese, they entered the school’s regular
classes, with interpreters also provided on occasion (House of Councillors
2009). None of this, of course, was cheap: financial outlays in areas with
large foreign populations can account for a significant chunk of the responsible
authority’s budget, and Konan’s budget papers for 2009 show an allocation of
¥7,846,000 for running the Sakura JSL classrooms in its schools.3
Practical decisions about education are thus currently very much the concern
of local communities, and language policy relating to the provision of JSL in
schools is developed at the local level in response to community needs. To give
a final example, this time from within Tokyo itself, local councillor Shinmura
Ikuko from Edogawa Ward in May 2008 reported the presence of 392 foreign
students in primary schools in the ward and 166 in middle schools. Two primary
schools and one middle school were offering JSL classes. However, because
commuting to the middle school from the northern part of the ward took time,
Local language policies in action 129
the ward council had been requested to extend this to a second middle school
in the north and had agreed to do this in 2010 (Shinmura 2009). This is a local
responsibility because the ward’s Board of Education is responsible for public
elementary and middle schools; high schools, on the other hand, are operated
by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Board of Education. It is at the more
junior school levels that the demand for JSL classes is greatest, as MEXT’s
annual figures on children needing JSL instruction in the public school system
attest.
Examples abound in the recent literature of local initiatives similar to those
just described (see, e.g., Kawahara 2004 and Kawahara and Noyama 2007).
The prime movers in such local policy-making have been identified as local
politicians, municipal governments, local business communities and volun-
tary organisations (Tsu 2008: 138). For some time now, the influence of non-
government groups such as NPOs and others has been making itself strongly
felt in the provision of language and other services to foreign residents (both
documented and undocumented, the latter an area into which government can-
not be seen to go). At the local level, observes Befu (2009b: 30), ‘a sizable
number of Japanese . . . not only oppose the notion that Japan belongs only to
the ethnic Japanese but actively subscribe to the idea of a multiethnic Japan by
supporting foreigners in Japan within the space of Japanese “civil society”’,
defined by him as ‘a socio-political space which is not taken over by the formal
political or economic institutions, such as government bureaucracy or cor-
porations’. Self-motivated citizen groups originally began such work without
recourse to government, finding their own ways to offer help. More recently,
however, local governments have increasingly come to realise the benefits of
working with such groups in terms of economies of service delivery and breadth
of outreach (Menju 2003, Shipper 2008), thus involving community members
more closely in the practical activities which work towards the integration of
foreign residents into their local areas. As Baldauf (1994) observes, language is
a universally acquired medium of which everyone feels a sense of ownership,
meaning that most people feel free to involve themselves at will in micro-level
language planning activities of this sort.
Language policy operates within a speech community of any size, from
national and international domains down to local and personal groupings
(Spolsky 2004: 40); language-planning activities within such speech commu-
nities may be formal or informal, and are not often related to objectives and
processes at the national level (Liddicoat 2008: 9), supposing such to exist. Cit-
izens in Japan’s local communities, such as the volunteer groups discussed in
Chapter 2, are informally involved in language policy as free agents motivated
by the idea of making their communities more harmonious environments for for-
eign residents by teaching their language to newcomers in the expectation that
the subsequent reduction in communication difficulties will lead to smoother
interactions between the two elements. This kind of micro-level language plan-
ning is not a trickle-down effect from the national level; rather, it is a grassroots,
bottom-up evolution of language policy to meet local needs which may in time
influence a national response at both the discursive and practical levels of lan-
guage policy, leading to the kind of overarching policy framework within which
disparate elements nest, as envisaged by Katsuragi (2005). Before this latter
can happen, however, an ideological reimagining of the relationship between
the Japanese state, its citizens and the national language must first take place.
Meanwhile, at the level of quotidian practice, local-level planning and activ-
ity continue apace, and a great deal of comment in both the press and the
academic literature has now been published on the civil society input to this
process (see, e.g., Nishiguchi 2008, Nomoto 2004 and Okazaki 2008). A key
development in the implementation at local levels of the 2006 MIAC ‘tabunka
kyōsei’ policy which will be discussed later in the chapter has been coop-
eration between local governments and local citizens’ groups, with the latter
teaching in government-supported JSL classrooms, volunteering as interpreters
and translators and acting as all-round resource persons for foreign residents
(Nagy 2008: 47).
In the following section I will describe what policy initiatives have been made
to date on the part of the national government with regard to the language needs
of the foreign community and will consider the interfaces between national and
local government in this area.
National government responses to language needs:

key documents
Such language-related initiatives or even acknowledgments of language issues
on the part of the national government as exist are usually embedded within
documents dealing with other issues, a reminder that ‘ideologies of language are
linked to other ideologies that can influence and constrain the development of
language policies’ (Ricento 2000: 4). Spolsky concurs: ‘language policy func-
tions in a complex ecological relationship among a wide range of linguistic and
non-linguistic elements, variables and factors’ (2004: 41). The non-linguistic
elements he identifies include political, demographic, social, religious, cultural,
psychological and bureaucratic factors; one can only arrive at a useful account
of language policy by taking into account contextual variables such as these.
The most immediately apparent contextual variables in the case of Japan
relate to business and to the desire for social harmony. The first decade of
the twenty-first century has seen a number of initiatives by ministries, local
governments and industry bodies on issues to do with foreign residents in
their roles either as labour-force members or as residents in local communities.
Ozaki (2009) lists some as follows:
Key national government documents 131
r Council of Cities with High Concentrations of Foreign Residents (2001–)
r Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), Gaikokujin Ukeire Mondai
ni kansuru Teigen (Recommendations on Accepting Non-Japanese Workers)
(April 2004)
r Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Tabunka Kyōsei no
Suishin ni kansuru Kenkyūkai Hōkoku: Chiiki ni okeru Tabunka Kyōsei
no Suishin ni mukete (Report of the Committee Studying the Promotion of
Multicultural Coexistence: Towards the Promotion of Multicultural Coexis-
tence in Local Communities) (March 2006)
r ‘Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin’ ni kansuru Sōgōteki Taiōsaku (Compre-
hensive Plan for dealing with ‘Foreigners as Residents’) (December 2006)
r Ajia Jinzai Shikin Kōsō (Career Development Programme for Foreign
Students in Japan),4 2007–11
r Ryūgakusei 30 Mannin Keikaku (Plan to Accept 300,000 International
Students), 2008–20
r Jimintō Gaikokujinzai Kōryū Suishin Giin Renmei (Liberal Democratic
Party Parliamentary Group for the Promotion of the Exchange of Foreign
Personnel, a body of eighty formed in 2005), Nihonkei Imin Seisaku no
Teigen (Proposal for an Immigration Policy Suited to Japan) (June 2008)
r Acceptance of applicants as nurses and care workers under an EPA (August
2008–)
r Nippon Keidanren, Jinkō Genshō ni Taiō shita Keizai Shakai no Arikata
(An Economy and Society that Responds to the Challenges of a Declining
Population) (October 2008)
r Liberal Democratic Party Education Division, launch of a JSL subcommittee,
November 2008
r JSL to support the employment of ‘nikkeijin’, 2009–
r Revision of the Immigration Law (8 July 2009)
Each of these has involved some recognition of the importance of language
training in accepting foreign residents. Some of the language-related activi-
ties of the CCHCFR, for instance, were discussed earlier in this chapter. Both
submissions from the Nippon Keidanren emphasise the importance of JSL
education. In 2004, the Recommendations on Accepting Non-Japanese Work-
ers made this explicit: ‘It is essential that uniform and coordinated measures
taken by national and local governments be promoted in order to develop a
well-rounded acceptance policy that addresses Japanese-language education,
employment assistance, eradication of discrimination, and the needs of the chil-
dren of non-Japanese workers and students arriving in Japan.’5 Four years later,
the second document An Economy and Society That Responds to the Challenges
of a Declining Population listed under the heading of ‘Policies for Maintaining
the Vitality of the Economy and Society in the Long Term’ a statement that in
order to encourage foreign workers to stay in Japan social integration policies
required active responses by local communities, government and companies

in several areas, including strengthened Japanese-language education.6 The
opportunity to become proficient in the language of the host country is thus
seen by this influential business group as a responsibility to be shouldered by
government at both national and local levels and by the business community
itself. The agreements described in Chapter 2 under which nurses and care
workers from Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines enter Japan to work
likewise place emphasis on language proficiency in the workplace.
One further important document with significant provisions relating to lan-
guage – not a policy, but a discussion document – is Kongo no Gaikokujin
no Ukeire ni kansuru Kihonteki na Kangaekata (Basic Stance on Admitting
Foreigners in the Future) released by a Ministry of Justice panel in Septem-
ber 2006.7 This report stressed the importance of a revamp of the current
immigration policy to the future economic health of Japan given the declining
birth rate and ageing population and recommended that the number of migrant
workers allowed into Japan should be allowed to increase to 3 per cent of the
total population: still small compared to other countries, but an increase on the
1.57 per cent of 2005 (Ministry of Justice 2006a). The report also recommended
an overhaul of the trainee system under which large numbers of people entering
Japan on a trainee visa, ostensibly to be trained in some particular aspect of
technology transfer to be used when they return to their own (usually) devel-
oping country, have been used as a source of often very poorly paid unskilled
labour in direct contravention of Japan’s stated policy of accepting only skilled
migrants. In addition to proposing a new category to cater for such workers,
the report specified that continuation of their employment would be contingent
upon their acquiring a specified level of technical skill and Japanese-language
ability within a set period after starting work. Once achieved, this would per-
mit them to bring their families, who must likewise have some proficiency in
Japanese, to join them.
A second category of migrants mentioned by name is the ‘nikkei’ community
of workers from Brazil, Peru and Argentina, who the report recommends should
be subject to the same requirements regarding language skills as those in
the revamped trainee category, not only for new migrants but also for those
already working in Japan. Experience has shown that despite their heritage
many ‘nikkei’ workers living in Japan do not speak Japanese, and never have.
This recommendation appears to be an attempt to remedy this and possibly
points to a future Ministry of Justice rethink of the descent-based policy which
allowed this category of migrant into the country under conditions not available
to others (Roberts 2008: 775). Of particular interest to the present study is the
emphasis on language, showcasing as it does government recognition of the
importance of language to integration. Foreign workers would be able to renew
their visas for further employment if they were able to demonstrate that they had
Key national government documents 133
acquired proficiency in Japanese during their stay, and it was further proposed
that the same period of compulsory education undertaken by Japanese children
be made mandatory also for the children of foreign workers, something which
is not at present the case. Parents who did not cooperate in this would have
their stays limited.
In a press conference at the time of this report’s release, the then Vice Minister
of Justice Kōno Tarō who had overseen the project acknowledged that lack of
proficiency in Japanese was becoming a major problem for foreign workers and
admitted that ‘the government must take responsibility for building a system
to teach Japanese to them’ (Hongo 2006). As of the time of writing in late
2010, no change has yet occurred as a result of these recommendations, and a
search of the records of Diet committee meetings has turned up no discussion
of the report, apart from a reference to the setting up of the committee in 2006.
Nevertheless, the report indicates an apparent willingness within the Ministry
of Justice to move forward on the language issue.
We have seen that because Japan made no provision for language profi-
ciency before allowing ‘nikkei’ workers into the country, the simple fact of
their Japanese descent being sufficient to allow them entry, many ‘nikkeijin’
with little or no Japanese-language ability only manage linguistically by living
among compatriots who speak their own language. This is also true of their
children, who – if they attend Japanese schools – struggle to make progress.
Such a situation reflects the fact that Japan, only now beginning to acknowledge
that foreign workers have become a permanent part of the landscape, has not
yet done the language policy work necessary to deal with multilingualism in its
communities by providing adequate opportunities to study the host country’s
language as a nationally sponsored and well integrated enterprise. Policies or
discussion documents which mention language training have been oriented to
the labour market and to the smooth running of local communities on an ad
hoc basis and lack a general overview of national needs in this area.
Nevertheless, instrumental recognition of language needs is an encouraging
start and signs of the national government’s growing awareness of the need
for action in this area have been evident for some years. Although national-
level immigration policies have been criticised as remaining distant from the
on-the-ground specifics of life in Japan for foreign residents, Japan’s current
Basic Plan for Immigration Control, drawn up in 2005, does in fact mention the
importance of Japanese language skills for foreign nationals planning to stay
long term in Japan:
From the point of view of developing an environment where foreign nationals can live
comfortably, it is indispensable to link together measures in various areas including labor,
education and welfare to appropriately address living condition problems seen in regions
where many foreign nationals reside. Therefore, relevant national measures should be
considered in coordination with local government measures. Since it is important
for foreign nationals to have Japanese language skills when engaging in various
activities in Japan, cooperation with government agencies in charge of Japanese
language education and promotion measures for foreign nationals in Japan and
foreign countries will be reinforced, and the immigration control administration will
also play a major role including consideration of how to accept foreign nationals.8 (my
bolding)
Note here the bolded section referring to government cooperation with agencies
in charge of Japanese-language education. The following section will examine
how this has been occurring in recent years.
Shikama has argued that several actors contribute to the discourse on migra-
tion and integration in Japan:
First, the introduction of foreign workers is promoted by Japanese economic organiza-
tions. But the Japanese government also identifies migration and the establishment of an
integration policy, in particular with regard to Japanese language education, as impor-
tant issues . . . Both government and economic organizations suggest language education
merely as a means of ensuring short-range interests such as economic efficiency and
the ability to accommodate to Japanese companies. In other words, they lack concern
about integrating non-Japanese into Japanese society. (2008: 52)
It is difficult to see how this argument can be sustained, however, given that
in 2006 two important documents appeared which did indeed make explicit
a concern for integrating foreign residents into the communities in which
they live. These were first MIAC’s Chiiki ni okeru Tabunka Kyōsei Suishin
Puran ni tsuite (On the Plan for Promoting Multicultural Coexistence in Local
Communities) in March that year and the ‘Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin’ ni
kansuru Sōgōteki Taiōsaku (Comprehensive Plan for dealing with ‘Foreigners
as Residents’) put out by the Liaison Committee of Ministries and Government
Offices Involved with Foreign Worker Issues which followed in December.
MIAC’s Plan for Promoting Multicultural Coexistence in Local

Communities and its flow-on effects for local government
MIAC’s Plan for Promoting Multicultural Coexistence in Local Communi-
ties (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2006a) pointed out that
‘tabunka kyōsei’, rather than being solely a matter for communities where large
numbers of ‘nikkeijin’ live and work, now concerns the whole country, given
that work, study and international marriage have taken foreign residents all over
Japan. Experience had shown that where local governments had been proactive
in dealing with foreign residents, such as Kanagawa Prefecture where multi-
lingual staff had been appointed to help the children of foreign residents adapt
to school, there were very few problems. The report addressed the concern
that the entry of such children into Japanese schools would result in reduced
resources for Japanese children, thereby contributing to a decline in their levels
The Plan for Promoting Multicultural Coexistence 135
of achievement, by pointing out that ‘these concerns can be met by increasing

the number of teachers deployed and otherwise building a sufficient system
based on the understanding that policies targeting foreigners are developed
with a view to Japanese society as a whole, foreigners included’ (17). Hav-
ing Japanese and non-Japanese children studying together in public schools
would open the way for mutual communication; successful schemes in Aichi
Prefecture and elsewhere which had helped foreign residents integrate into the
community and foreign children adapt to Japanese schools should be expanded
into national-level mechanisms.
Of particular relevance here are the language-related policies subsumed
under the heading ‘Support for communication’, which each locality was
requested to implement:
r provision of information related to administration and living conditions in
multilingual format, to be made available not only from government offices
but also from community facilities and Japanese-language classrooms;
r training of volunteer interpreters and provision of multilingual information in
cooperation with NPOs which support foreigners and with foreign residents’
self-help groups;
r provision of an orientation session on local living requirements and admin-
istrative matters at the earliest possible opportunity after foreign residents
move into the area, to be followed by provision of opportunities for such
residents to continue to study Japanese language and culture;
r in-school support for such matters as the provision of extra teaching staff
and extra-curricular supplementation of school activities with first-language
learning support and learning support in cooperation with volunteer groups,
in order to increase the effectiveness of learning in Japanese.
As requested, local governments across Japan have been developing their
own ‘tabunka kyōsei’ plans in response to this document. The website of the
Ibaraki Prefectural Government’s International Affairs Division, for instance,
in a message addressed to ‘all residents of the prefecture’ in 2006, explained
clearly in both Japanese and English why multicultural coexistence is impor-
tant (framing it in terms of the foreign resident population of the prefecture)
and how it differs from international exchange (foreign residents are resi-
dents, not visitors) and from ‘foreigner support’ (foreign residents are not just
recipients of support but make important contributions to their communities).
The benefits of ‘tabunka kyōsei’ were expressed in terms of economic stimu-
lation, social harmony, improved cross-cultural understanding and improve-
ment of the prefecture’s image as a good place for non-Japanese to live.
Here the emphasis is strongly on the benefits to Japanese residents, a swing
away from earlier rhetoric about foreign residents needing support towards a
more mature conceptualisation of bilateral support. Multicultural harmony, the
webpage continues, is being promoted through the cooperation of the following
elements: the nation (which agrees to accept foreigners in the first place), the
prefecture (which responds to large-scale issues), municipalities (which pro-
vide direct and practical lifestyle-related support to local foreign residents),
international associations (which implement model projects) and NGOs/NPOs
(which work together with local governments and international associations
to support foreign residents). Ibaraki Prefecture itself was running the Ibaraki
Foreign Resident Roundtable, a multicultural regional development project, a
multicultural harmony symposium (a forum for the bilateral exchange of ideas)
and a foreign labour workshop (Ibaraki Prefectural Government International
Affairs Division 2006).
Elsewhere, in Kyoto, the Kyoto City International Foundation published a
major report in 2007 on the city’s language-support needs based on surveys
conducted over the preceding two years on the requirements of administra-
tion, schools, foreign residents (newcomers) and special permanent residents
(oldcomers) (Kyōto-shi Kokusai Kōryū Kyōkai 2007). Within the Tokyo area,
Nagy (2009) examines in detail the responses of two municipalities, namely
Shinjuku and Adachi Wards, both of which have developed multicultural coex-
istence plans and have large and diverse populations of non-Japanese residents.
Shinjuku’s plan has focused on the provision of multilingual information at a
wide range of locations and of language-learning opportunities, on activities
which lead to increased understanding on the part of Japanese residents of their
new neighbours and on the encouragement of linguistic and cultural pluralism;
all these activities ‘demonstrate Shinjuku’s commitment to ensuring that the
minority resident community do not become a burden to the municipal govern-
ment and the Japanese residents of Shinjuku-ku’ (169). An amount of well over
4 million yen is set aside for rudimentary JSL education conducted by locally
inducted volunteer teachers, again on the premise that language proficiency
will foster independence and minimise disruption to the host community.
Clearly, then, the request to local governments to develop their own ‘tabunka
kyōsei’ plans which include language-related initiatives has borne fruit, and it
is on this basis that most local language policy relating to foreign residents has
been developed since 2006. More recently, however, moves have been made to
involve the national government more closely in such activities, mostly through
budget allocations. In 2008, an interim report from a committee established the
previous year in the House of Councillors to investigate the declining birth
rate, ageing population and ‘kyōsei’ society made several recommendations
to government and industry on the same issue of coexistence with foreigners.
The report recognised that ‘given that 40,000 foreigners per annum are being
granted permanent residence, Japan would seem to be in the process of becom-
ing a nation of immigrants’ (House of Councillors 2008: 24) and proposed
that ‘recognizing that foreigners are no longer temporary visitors but rather
our neighbours and part of Japanese society, the time has come to redesign
The Plan for Promoting Multicultural Coexistence 137
our approach to foreigners in Japan’ (40–1). Several of the discussion points

recognised the need to move to supporting at national level activities currently
undertaken at local level, where, for instance, such local areas do not have suf-
ficient funds to support a smaller number of foreign residents (particularly the
education of foreign children in the Japanese language). The heavy financial
burden incurred by local communities in supporting ‘tabunka kyōsei’ was thus
acknowledged, with the setting up of a national fund suggested to support such
activities by international exchange associations and NPOs.
This report’s concluding proposals, addressed both to the Japanese govern-
ment and to Japanese companies, were grouped under four headings: policies on
coexistence with foreigners; coexisting with foreigners as workers; improving
the education system for foreign children; and improving the living environ-
ment for foreigners. Although language played little part in the second category
and was addressed only as a matter of interpreting for medical care in the fourth,
it was listed as a major element in the other two. The lead recommendation in
the first category noted the following:
Japan’s policies in regard to foreigners tend to have been developed after the fact, with
foreigners already entering Japan in response to a labor shortage. However, given the
current situation, whereby foreigners are demonstrating a marked tendency to take up
long-term residence rather than simply working here temporarily, we need to revisit
these policies in order to avoid future problems for Japan. In so doing, one critical issue
will be to design and operate systems for identifying the Japanese-language abilities of
foreigners when they enter Japan and for promoting Japanese-language education for
their children. (41)
Under the heading of education, the committee recommended:

1. Given that all children have the right to receive an education, and that coming
to Japan for reasons such as accompanying a parent represents a change in
the education environment beyond the control of the child, due consideration
must be given to the education of foreign children in Japan. A key issue
in this regard is the acquisition of Japanese as a second language and as
an academic language, requiring the training and deployment of specialist
teachers familiar with language acquisition stages, etc. Assistance should
also be provided to elicit the participation and cooperation of guardians.
2. When foreign children are taught Japanese, they need to acquire not just
basic interpersonal communication skills, but also sufficient academic lan-
guage proficiency. Tools for accurately gauging levels of Japanese-language
acquisition therefore need to be developed and utilized, and a more detailed
grasp acquired of the actual situation in regard to those foreign students
lacking adequate academic language proficiency. (43)
The second point’s concern for standards in JSL education is heartening, evin-
cing as it does a move beyond the earlier extemporised approach to language
needs. The committee’s proposals further emphasised the need for more proac-
tive national intervention in education through budget allocations to support the
provision and training of JSL teachers, noting that despite the local measures
currently in place ‘adequate results have not been achieved due primarily to
financial constraints and a lack of specialist teachers and teaching assistants’
(43). Above all, ‘given the many complex and multi-faceted challenges that arise
in seeking to coexist with foreign residents, an organizational framework should
be established which adds to the existing liaison council of relevant ministries a
ministerial meeting among the same ministries, as well as an institution to take
on comprehensive responsibility for measures related to foreigners’ (41–2). A
coordinated approach of this kind would be greatly preferable to the current
scattered miscellany of policies and procedures and would in ideological terms
signal recognition at the national level that a significant number of foreign res-
idents have become part of the social fabric, contributing to Japan’s economy
and society and deserving of coordinated planning and provision of services to
enable them to fit smoothly within that society. As a first step towards smoother
implementation of ‘tabunka kyōsei’, it is to be commended.
Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin (Foreigners as residents)

The second significant recent document is ‘Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin’
ni kansuru Sōgōteki Taiōsaku (Comprehensive Plan for dealing with ‘Foreign-
ers as Residents’), on which to a large extent language-related activities in
ministries such as MEXT have been predicated since its release in 2006. This
major report was produced jointly by officials from a range of ministries which
stressed Japan’s responsibility to treat non-Japanese people working and liv-
ing there properly by providing an environment wherein they, as members of
society, could receive the same services as Japanese residents on an equitable
basis. To that end, a liaison committee of government agencies involved with
foreign-worker issues had engaged in a consultative process of work on the
issues involved in considering foreigners as ‘seikatsusha’ (residents) rather
than as transients, culminating in this report. The document stressed that fur-
ther consideration of policy relating to foreigners including ‘nikkeijin’ was
essential and that government agencies were expected to comply in the effec-
tive implementation of its findings. It laid out recommendations under four
major headings: creating local communities where foreign residents could live
without difficulty; enriching the education of foreign children; improving the
working environment and access to social insurance; and reconsidering the visa
management system.
Language issues featured prominently in the first and second of these,
with targeted funding to be provided under what was called the Gaikoku-
jin no Seikatsu Kankyō Tekiō Kasoku Puroguramu (Accelerated Programme
Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin 139
Applying to the Living Environment of Foreigners).9 Under the heading of

creating foreigner-friendly communities, the report noted that lack of language
proficiency and cultural awareness on the part of newcomers had led in the past
to friction, to problems in accessing public services since the provision of infor-
mation about administrative and living information was for the most part done
in Japanese and to the need for special support during any emergencies that
might arise. Remedial strategies suggested were similar to what many (but not
all) local governments had already been doing for some time, e.g., providing
interpreters (particularly in medical and education-related areas), opportuni-
ties to learn Japanese and multilingual information about services. An added
strategy was the promotion of ‘tabunka kyōsei’ in local communities by local
governments and NPOs, in line with MIAC’s document. Best-practice exam-
ples of work done by volunteer groups were to be circulated and policy was
to be planned. Research and development would also be promoted on practical
JSL education for foreigners, on the training of Japanese-language teachers
including retired teachers and foreigners already proficient in Japanese and on
establishing JSL classrooms for ‘nikkeijin’. In the area of provision of infor-
mation in different languages and in ‘Easy Japanese’, again, existing examples
of exemplary practice would be collected and disseminated widely.
Noting that local governments were expected to draw up their own multicul-
tural coexistence plans based on MIAC’s just issued Chiiki ni okeru Tabunka
Kyōsei Suishin Puran, the document commented that in the provision of ser-
vices to foreign residents (seikatsusha toshite no gaikokujin), the national gov-
ernment, local governments and NPOs each had important roles to play. The
national government’s responsibility was to ensure that foreign residents in
local communities were provided with information and material relating to
national policies and to take adequate measures to calculate the allocation of
tax to local governments given the financial burden imposed on them by the
rapid increase in the number of foreign residents in their local communities.
With regard to foreign children in Japanese schools, the report recognised
that it was essential to give them as good an education as possible to provide
them with a foundation for life in Japan, given that language difficulties had led
children to stop going to school or, if they stayed, to have difficulties in keeping
up with the curriculum. School attendance was therefore to be encouraged and
efforts to improve their educational experience through JSL classes and other
means were to be planned. To achieve these aims, a JSL curriculum was being
developed, with the primary level already written and the middle-school version
to be ready by the end of fiscal 2006. Teachers with little experience of teaching a
JSL curriculum would be provided with best-practice examples and workshops
paid for by the Gaikokujin no Seikatsu Kankyō Tekiō Kasoku Puroguramu,
and JSL short-course opportunities would also be provided to boost teacher
numbers. Outside Japan’s public school system, support for ethnic schools
would be provided in conjunction with the relevant foreign government. While

the document’s provisions for training JSL teachers are encouraging, it stops
short of acknowledging the need to establish JSL as a subject in teacher-training
programmes on a national basis.
With the publication of this report a new element entered the debate about
foreign residents in the form of the distinctively Japanese term ‘seikatsusha’,10
in addition to the terms ‘uchinaru kokusaika’ and ‘tabunka kyōsei’ which as
we saw in Chapter 1 have become important in establishing the discourse
of incipient multiculturalism in Japan. As we shall see, the ‘Foreigners as
Seikatsusha’ document has had flow-on effects in terms of the provision of
JSL education in local communities. ‘Seikatsusha’ are defined by Sugimoto as
‘the ordinary, nameless and common men and women who actively construct
their living conditions. Seikatsusha constitute the core of Japan’s civil society,
independent of powers of the state and the market’ (2009: 7). This term is
widely used across a variety of fields and is, Sugimoto asserts, more ‘reality-
focused’ than ‘shimin’ (citizens) and ‘kokumin’ (members of the nation). The
description of foreign residents as ‘seikatsusha’ in this official document can
thus be seen as an important discursive step forward in identifying migrants as
being on the same footing as Japanese. The annual funding allocation for this
programme continues today.
The role of MEXT in JSL education

MEXT currently plays two roles in assisting with the provision of JSL edu-
cation. In its own annual requests for budgetary appropriations it includes an
allocation for the education of the increasing number of non-Japanese children
with poor Japanese-language skills in the public school system, to be used for
deploying support staff able to speak foreign languages and developing stan-
dard guidelines for teaching such children effectively. The amount requested
in the 2010 papers was 300 million yen, no increase over the previous year
despite the rapidly rising student numbers in this category. By way of compari-
son, this is one-third of the amount requested under the heading of Enrichment
of Foreign Language Education, which in fact means preparing in various ways
for the introduction of English to the elementary school curriculum (MEXT
2009a), reflecting the disparity in the importance accorded to these two arms
of the current language policy landscape. Clearly, externally oriented priorities
take precedence over internal needs when the national emphasis on promoting
English as an international language is given greater financial support than the
teaching of JSL to newcomer children in Japan’s schools.
The ministry as a whole, then, takes budgetary responsibility for the needs
of non-Japanese children within the public school system. To that end, its
involvement to date has been multi-pronged: in addition to collecting and
The role of MEXT in JSL education 141
publishing statistics, it provides support for JSL teachers in the form of work-
shops; arranges the deployment of JSL teachers in schools, paid for by national
rather than local government; and issues a Guidebook for Starting School in
seven languages.11 The ministry’s CLARINET website lists details of these
and other activities.12 These developments followed pressure from MIAC in
both 1996 and 2003, requesting MEXT to take an active policy role in assist-
ing non-Japanese students in public schools (Kawakami 2008). The ministry
does promote a JSL curriculum spanning the period from the early stages of
Japanese-language instruction to the curricular study stage and sends bilin-
gual counsellors to schools, but as we saw in Chapter 2, these measures have
been criticised by Kawakami Ikuo, one of Japan’s foremost researchers in
this area, who told a House of Councillors’ committee that they are inade-
quate because ‘the Ministry has not provided clear standards on whether or
not Japanese-language instruction is necessary, with this judgment left up to
schools. Schools, however, tend to decide that instruction is no longer neces-
sary once a student can handle everyday conversation’ (House of Councillors
2008: 27).
In Kawakami’s view, proactive measures to train greater numbers of JSL
teachers are essential, as is the development of national language-education
policies that take account of foreign children. Acknowledging that MEXT has
developed the policies outlined above, he nevertheless takes issue with the fact
that the national government has not gone further and established a national
policy on JSL education for foreign residents because it believes these policies
to be sufficient; indeed, it considers foreign governments (in the case of ethnic
schools) and businesses which employ foreign workers to be responsible for
providing for the linguistic needs of non-Japanese children, given that such
children are free to enter the public school system if they wish. This view, he
argues, represents a continuation of the old postwar ideology that the national
government is responsible only for the control of foreigners coming into Japan
and does not view them as residents making a contribution to Japanese society
(Kawakami 2008).
MEXT’s second role, that of outsourcing activities promoting JSL in the
wider community, is overseen by the Agency for Cultural Affairs within the
ministry, which makes its own annual request for budgetary allocations and
which since 2007 has been working on oversight of JSL policies related to the
‘Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin’ paper with the expressed aims of helping
foreign residents to acquire sufficient proficiency in Japanese to prevent them
from remaining isolated within their local communities and of contributing to
the formation of a multicultural society. To this end the Agency calls each year
for applications to run JSL programmes within local areas, the target activi-
ties being the establishment and running of ‘nihongo kyōshitsu’, the training
of Japanese-language teachers and hands-on training for volunteers. Eligible
applicants are local governments, incorporated groups, and non-incorporated

groups meeting certain conditions. It is worth spending some time here on
examining the outcomes of these schemes. The list of successful applicants
for the scheme’s 2009 round of funding for JSL teaching activities reveals a
varied tapestry of interested groups from twenty-five prefectures across Japan
from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south, many prefectures being
home to several projects run by different groups. In Shizuoka Prefecture, home
to seven member cities of the CCHCFR, for example, fifteen projects were
funded, illustrating a wide variety of JSL-related teaching: one was to be run
by a university, several by groups teaching Japanese to Portuguese speakers,
another by a group teaching Japanese through Korean; other successful appli-
cants included the NPO Hamaoka Association of Japanese Teachers and several
international associations from different municipalities. Three groups specified
that they would be offering language training for foreign nurses and/or care
workers. Outside Shizuoka, funding to run Japanese-language classes went to
such diverse groups as the Japan Peru Society, the Fukuoka YWCA, again many
local government international associations, Refugee Assistance Headquarters,
the Association of Nikkei and Japanese Abroad, another NPO group and the
Nagahama UNESCO Association, to list but a few. Like the nurse/care worker
classes in Shizuoka and elsewhere, some projects are very specifically targeted:
an NPO in Gunma Prefecture aimed to provide language training for ‘nikkei’
Brazilian students either already in or wanting to enter Japanese high schools,
others targeted children or children and their parents, some were for Chinese
residents or Indochinese refugees, and a project in Gifu Prefecture aimed to
teach Japanese for the study of food safety through the livestock industry, agri-
culture and forestry in local areas (Agency for Cultural Affairs 2010c). All
across Japan, then, local groups are responding to perceived language needs,
with some attending to narrowly specified target groups and others having a
broader remit. Clearly the motivation and energy to provide such a wide and
varied spread of language training are abundantly available at local level in both
government and non-government sectors, and the national government funding
from MEXT has helped with the provision of such services by outsourcing
them in the absence of any national budget allocation for a centrally controlled
curriculum and delivery.
Under the funding category for training Japanese-language teachers, there
were forty-two successful projects from seventeen prefectures, again across a
range of interest groups and providers. Some were intended to teach volunteers
how to teach Japanese; some to train teachers of Japanese for children; more
than one targeted retired teachers to train as support teachers of JSL for foreign
children. In Saitama Prefecture, the Hanno international association would be
offering classes on JSL teaching for native speakers of foreign languages who
could also speak Japanese, as would the Hamamatsu International Association
Other government initiatives 143
in Shizuoka Prefecture. Others were to train teachers for Portuguese-speaking

children, and one, in Niigata, was to teach children Japanese using sign lan-
guage (Agency for Cultural Affairs 2010d). And finally, in the third category
for funding during 2010, that of the provision of training courses specifically
for volunteer JSL teachers, twenty projects in eighteen prefectures successfully
applied for funding, some focusing on volunteers to support children learning
the language or foreign residents in the work force, others on general conversa-
tion classes or on training regional coordinators for Japanese-language learning
support (Agency for Cultural Affairs 2010a).
Funding for this scheme tied to the Seikatsusha toshite no Gaikokujin project
first appeared in the Agency’s budget in 2007, when an allocation of 133 million
yen was set aside for that purpose. The budget papers noted that along with
the steady growth in the foreign population had come friction in local areas
caused in part by insufficient proficiency in Japanese on the part of the new
arrivals. A number of committees such as the Liaison Committee of Ministries
and Government Offices involved with Foreign Worker Issues set up by the
Cabinet Secretariat had identified in their deliberations the importance of JSL
education. The Agency had therefore decided, as part of a plan to provide
JSL education so that foreign residents could avoid the problems caused by
language difficulties and live harmoniously as members of Japanese society,
to focus in 2007 on three things: the establishment of ‘nihongo kyōshitsu’
and training, research development and the creation of a handbook (Agency
for Cultural Affairs 2007). What was actually funded in the 2007 round of
outsourcing applications were JSL classrooms using ‘nikkeijin’, JSL teacher
training for retired teachers and foreign residents with good Japanese, practical
classes for volunteers and research on practical JSL education. In the 2010
budget, the amount devoted to the project increased to 215 million yen, along
with smaller subventions for language teaching to refugees and for surveys
and research on JSL education, categories which were continued the following
year before being collapsed into the three funded in 2009 (Agency for Cultural
Affairs 2010e).
Other government initiatives

Two more recent national-level undertakings grew out of the global financial
crisis. On 28 April 2009, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare initiated a
targeted national intervention in the provision of Japanese-language education
for one subsection of foreign residents, the ‘nikkeijin’, with a programme
known as the Nikkeijin Shūrō Junbi Kenshū Jigyō (Employment Preparation
Training for Foreigners of Japanese Descent). The press release announcing this
project reported on the effect the financial crisis was having on the employment
circumstances of ‘nikkeijin’ in areas where many such workers lived. The fact
that their language skills and experience of Japanese employment practices

were limited, the ministry noted, meant that once out of the workforce they
would find it very difficult to find work again. In addition to stepping up the
deployment of mobile teams of interpreters and counsellors to Hello Work
offices13 in relevant localities, therefore, the ministry offered ‘nikkeijin’ job
applicants who wanted and badly needed stable employment the opportunity
to increase their ability to communicate in Japanese and to learn about Japan’s
Labour Law, employment practices and social security system. To that end, a
programme of lectures and practical classes lasting up to three months would be
outsourced to the Japan International Cooperation Center (JICE),14 to begin the
following month in the designated cities of Hamamatsu (Shizuoka Prefecture),
Toyota and Okazaki (Aichi Prefecture), Yamato (Kanagawa Prefecture) and
Minokamo and Kani (Gifu Prefecture), with plans to extend the programme
to other areas at a later date (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2009c).
Funding for this scheme had been included in an economic policy package to
address the financial crisis announced earlier that month (Ministry of Health,
Labour and Welfare 2009b).
This is an excellent example of language management in the form of a tar-
geted language policy tailored to the specific needs of a specified population
in defined areas and to the circumstances of a specific time. Although it may
not have eventuated without the precipitating factor of the financial crisis, it
nevertheless constitutes an official recognition of the language-related difficul-
ties faced by non-Japanese people already in the country. It is limited in its
scope, targeting only workers of Japanese descent rather than being open to all
foreign workers in similar situations, and the more cynical of Japan commen-
tators would no doubt view that as an expression of race-based exclusionism.
In my view, however, it is an encouraging sign of national intervention into the
provision of JSL opportunities for foreign residents in need (ironically, those
who were in the early 1990s presumed not to need such opportunities because
of their Japanese heritage) and could well prove to be the first step in the wider
provision of language classes by the national government. While the will (and
perhaps also the budget) may not yet be there to widen the net, providing
Japanese-language classes to those of Japanese heritage is a start. I suspect that
as workers of other heritages notice the provisions being made for ‘nikkeijin’
in this regard, bottom-up pressure will be brought to bear on the government
to widen the categories eligible for such support.
A second offshoot of the financial crisis was the setting up of a portal by the
national government. The crisis hit some of the ethnic schools hard, as parents
having trouble with employment could no longer afford to pay the fees. The
Brazilian Ambassador to Japan reported in January 2009 that many Brazilians
in this situation had chosen to return home rather than transfer their chil-
dren to Japanese schools, partly because of the lack of JSL support available
A national law on the provision of JSL needed? 145
(Matsutani 2009). That same month, the government announced immediate

support measures for foreign residents, and three months later, the Cabinet
Office opened a multilingual web portal (Japanese, English, Portuguese, Span-
ish) which enables such residents to access both general information about
living in Japan and information on specific topics, e.g., multilingual informa-
tion on swine flu. The portal15 also indicates a degree of willingness on the part
of the national government to become involved in the provision of language
classes in cooperation with local governments and associations. A link leads
to an April 2009 Cabinet Office committee document outlining further sup-
port measures intended to assist non-Japanese children who wish to make the
transition from ethnic schools to Japanese schools, particularly in those cities
with high concentrations of foreign residents. For this to progress smoothly,
of course, it is essential to build the children’s Japanese-language proficiency;
teaching assistance to Japanese classes conducted at the local level in order
to prepare such children for mainstream school would therefore be provided
by former JICA volunteers, among others, and public schools accepting such
children would also set up JSL classes to assist them.
The long-term importance of such moves lies in the groundwork they lay for
enabling language proficiency which could in time assist those migrants who
wish to become citizens. Citizenship is a key legal mechanism for facilitating
integration, and its nature is coming increasingly under scrutiny worldwide as
a result of global population flows. Japan’s current language requirements for
citizenship stipulate an ability to read and write Japanese equivalent to that
gained by the second or third year of elementary school, a level of literacy
clearly insufficient to allow full participation in public life. With more and
more migrants choosing to remain in Japan, ongoing discussion is needed on
what the expectations of a Japanese citizen in terms of mastery of the Japanese
language might be, what the impediments to achieving this are for new arrivals
and how they can be overcome. The new provision of increased support by
the national government for JSL learning in some areas is a start towards
addressing this situation as a national issue rather than as a local concern.
The next challenge will be to reconceptualise the nature of the link between
citizenship and language, which will entail a significant break with current
language ideology.
The push for a national law on the provision of JSL opportunities

It is clear from all the above that the importance of language proficiency for
foreign residents has not gone unnoticed by the national government, although
the response to date – while increasingly noticeable – has been contingent and
ad hoc, as exemplified by the language training provided for nurses and care-
givers discussed in Chapter 2, the ‘nikkei’-oriented programme just discussed
and local-area JSL initiatives. In the civil sector, public advocacy of a wider-
ranging, integrated approach in the form of a national law on the provision
of education in Japanese as a second language has been growing for some
time now. In 2001, the Nihongo Fuōramu Zenkoku Netto (National Network
of Forums on Japanese Language), formed in 1995 by people involved either
as volunteers or educators in offering life advice or Japanese-language support
to foreigners living in Japan, adopted what they call the Tokyo Declaration16
calling for government input into the provision of JSL instruction. This Decla-
ration, available on the group’s website in Japanese, romanised Japanese and
English,17 defines as ‘foreigners’ all those whose first language is not Japanese,
including those of Japanese nationality, a definition based on language alone
rather than citizenship and thus counter to the language ideology discussed
in Chapter 1. Most foreign residents, network members argued, cannot con-
veniently access classes in Japanese, non-Japanese children have trouble at
school and anti-foreigner prejudice is widespread. The Declaration, therefore,
referencing a number of international human rights agreements, stressed the
importance of creating in Japan a multicultural and multilingual society where
foreigners were not forced to assimilate into the host culture. Not only should
multilingual services be provided at all levels of government, the host society
itself needs to increase its multilingual capacities.
Of paramount importance to this group is that Japan should guarantee foreign
residents of any age or situation the opportunity to learn Japanese if they wish.
Members saw this as a matter for government, both national and local, arguing
that a nation should not accept foreign workers without first putting in place
a proper language policy. The network therefore called for the enactment of a
law to ensure that Japanese-language instruction would be available as a matter
of priority, stipulating that the level of language needed for an adult to live
a productive life was at least that attained by Japanese students at the end of
middle school, i.e., at the end of the period of compulsory education. They
further advocated an adequate policy on JSL in education for foreign children
in schools, many of whom cannot cope without adequate Japanese-language
skills; the opportunity to continue learning their first languages should also be
guaranteed. Network members hoped that such a law could be in place by 2010.
This has not happened, but the idea has not been left to languish. As men-
tioned in Chapter 2, the Japanese Language Education Guarantee Act Study
Group, a group of researchers from universities and language-related organi-
sations predominantly in the Osaka area, has been working since 2007 on a
draft law to guarantee Japanese-language education to foreign residents which
is quite similar in nature to the earlier one and for which the research has been
funded by MEXT grants. Their premise is that such a law is necessary because
despite the increase in the number of migrants nothing has been done to sys-
tematise Japanese-language instruction for either adults or children, leaving
progressive local governments and volunteers to provide what they can. The
proposed draft law is an attempt by researchers and practitioners in the areas
of JSL, social education and public law to remedy this situation and so prevent
foreign residents from being excluded on the grounds of insufficient linguistic
proficiency from access to the services, information and other aspects of life
they need.
The draft of the proposed Act, which is called the Nihongo Kyōiku Hoshō
Hōan (Japanese Language Education Guarantee Bill) and is written in Japanese
with furigana attached to enable comprehension by those readers who are the
object of its attention, sets out as its objective the promotion of multicultural
coexistence and the enrichment of Japanese-language education ‘by defin-
ing the fundamental principles and responsibilities of the national and local
governments pertaining to the public guarantee of education and determining
basic matters relating to the policy of Japanese-language education’. ‘Tabunka
kyōsei’ is defined as a situation wherein all members of Japanese society,
whether native-born Japanese or not, live on equal terms while acknowledg-
ing their differences, similar to the MIAC definition given in Chapter 1, and
‘Japanese-language education’ as teaching not only Japanese as a Second Lan-
guage but also teaching about Japanese society. The purpose of teaching the
Japanese language is specified as helping to bring about a state of multicultural
coexistence (Nihongo Kyōiku Hoshōhō Kenkyūkai 2009).
On policy matters, the draft proposes that the national government establish in
consultative fashion a basic policy on the provision of JSL instruction covering
measures to promote it and to educate the general populace on the situation
faced by those whose first language is not Japanese, to foster research on JSL
education and to specify how the policy will be implemented. The basic plan
proposed to this end moves the policy a step further down the hierarchy of
government levels: those prefectures deemed to be appropriate on the basis of
their demographic profile should establish a basic plan for their area based on
the policy outlined at national level which would be submitted to MEXT and
then publicly announced. JSL education opportunities would be guaranteed
in day-care centres, kindergartens and schools, but schools would not be the
only avenues: the national and local governments would also urge business
operators employing non-Japanese workers to guarantee opportunities for JSL
instruction at their own expense. It was hoped by the drafters of the proposed
Act that, following a maximum period of five years’ research, such legislation
would be in place within ten years.
The role of the national government is thus seen as to formulate the over-
arching policy and keep oversight of the outcomes, while that of local gov-
ernment is to oversee the practical implementation of the plan in accordance
with local conditions.18 Under the section of the Act which deals with respon-
sibilities, the national and local governments are charged with guaranteeing
opportunities to foreign residents to learn Japanese in their local communi-

ties. As we have seen, although the different levels of local government in
areas with many foreign residents have taken up that challenge with by and
large a fine degree of engagement to date, this is not because of any sense of
compulsion stemming from national government demands. The proposed Act
would change that by requiring all such local governments to offer classes,
with a much stronger emphasis on ‘tabunka kyōsei’. The Notes accompanying
the draft Act point out that while the term ‘tabunka kyōsei’ is often heard in
conjunction with both MEXT’s and local governments’ JSL activities, such
activities have been implemented on an ad hoc basis rather than arising from
any really substantial discussion of what the ideal of ‘tabunka kyōsei’ might
mean in practice. The proposed Act therefore clearly defines the relationship
between multicultural coexistence, the Constitution of Japan and various other
international human rights laws. In order to further clarify the issue of what
multicultural coexistence is, it also showcases the intent of its drafters to stop
what they refer to as a trend towards using JSL as a means of assimilating for-
eign residents into Japanese culture rather than recognising both Japanese and
non-Japanese residents as equal but different. The Notes also clearly specify
that the intent of Article 6, on responsibilities pertaining to JSL in the local com-
munity, is not to ensure that governments provide support to volunteer teachers
but rather to indicate the responsibility of governments in developing a sys-
tem which will provide stable employment for JSL instructors and education
coordinators.
A third group also keenly interested in promoting Japanese-language instruc-
tion both within and outside Japan and now also advocating laws to guarantee
an overarching policy approach to JSL/JFL education at national government
level is the Nihongo Kyōiku Gakkai (Society for Teaching Japanese as a For-
eign Language), which in 2009 formally constituted a seven-member working
group to work on preparing material for such laws. Shinya Makiko of Osaka
Sangyō Daigaku, representing the Japanese Language Education Guarantee
Act Study Group, is a member of the working party. Its website19 sets out the
rationale for their work thus: the number of foreign residents within Japan is
increasing, while outside Japan interest in Japanese culture and economy con-
tinues to grow. Those involved in JSL/JFL instruction both inside and outside
the country face many intractable problems, but the national government has as
yet shown no interest in or long-term vision for the issues, with the result that
such measures as do exist in different areas are sporadic and uncoordinated.
Rather than simply asking the government to address this matter, in their view,
those involved in teaching Japanese need to bring to light the problems experi-
enced at the coalface, formulate a vision for desirable outcomes, collect basic
data for a master plan for a policy on teaching Japanese to non-Japanese and put
together arguments which can be incorporated in laws which would become the
basis for that policy master plan. In short, it is up to the professionals to craft
the policy and present it for inspection and approval, not the government itself.
A progress report from the group issued in early 2010 advised that they were
engaged in distilling the essentials for a bill which would have the working
title of either the Nihongo Kyōiku Shinkō Hō (Laws for the Promotion of
Japanese Language Education) or Nihongo Kyōiku Kihon Hō (Basic Laws
for Japanese Language Education). Subjects under discussion included the
establishment of a National Research Institute for Teaching Japanese as a
Second Language along with regional Japanese-language education centres,
the deployment of regional JSL coordinators and a guarantee of the right to
Japanese-language education for foreign residents. The group’s plan is to pub-
lish material advocating the need for such a law, to hold symposia to raise public
awareness of their project and to actively lobby the Diet and relevant ministries
with regard to the proposed legislation. Laws are necessary, members stipulate,
because they make the government responsible for continuing to implement
a policy; while their group will not draw up the law itself, they will draw up
an outline of the points which should be incorporated into it (Nihongo Kyōiku
Shinkō Hō Hōseika Waakingu Guruupu 2010). This subsequently appeared in
a book published in October 2010. In the prefaratory statement to the list, the
group stressed that as a result of their deliberations they had decided that the
Nihongo Kyōiku Shinkō Hō would not be a single law, as it was not possible to
encompass all the various fields of JSL policy by this means; rather, along with
a basic law which would form the basis for a master plan for JSL policy, their
target was revision of a wide range of existing laws and government ordinances
in which it was possible to have a provision related to JSL education inserted
(Nihongo Kyōiku Seisaku Masutaapuran Kenkyūkai 2010).
The three groups discussed above have all approached the issue from the
perspective of those involved in Japanese-language education. While their
desired goals are the same, i.e., a law guaranteeing Japanese-language edu-
cation to foreign residents who want it, their approaches are different, with the
Nihongo Kyōiku Gakkai placing much greater emphasis on its own involve-
ment in doing the groundwork of research for their envisaged master plan for
JSL education. A fourth group approaching the issue from a different per-
spective is the CCHCFR, which since its formation in 2001 has lobbied the
government to improve conditions in various areas, including the provision
of JSL support, one of its objectives being to formulate proposals to national
government.20
The first document the CCHCFR submitted to the national government was
the previously mentioned Hamamatsu Sengen (Hamamatsu Declaration)21 aris-
ing from a members’ conference in that city in 2001, which stressed the impor-
tance of education in Japanese language and culture for the many non-Japanese
children in schools and proposed that money be set aside to fund a manual
setting out educational guidelines for use in public schools, along with an
increase in the number of teachers and interpreters deployed to help such
children. Measures to address the issue of school non-attendance by foreign
resident children were also canvassed (Gaikokujin Shūjū Toshi Kaigi 2001). A
few weeks later, the declaration was sent to five ministries and two agencies.22
The following year the CCHCFR held a conference in Tokyo attended by rep-
resentatives of those ministries and agencies where the issues addressed in
the Declaration were discussed; this allowed local government representatives
their first chance to meet with the national government officials responsible for
policy planning (Yamawaki 2002). Similarly, the 2003 conference in Toyota
City was followed later that year by a symposium attended by representatives
from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the Japan Federation of
Economic Organisations (Keidanren) and the Japan International Cooperation
Agency (JICA).
Subsequent declarations following joint meetings were released in 2004
(the Toyota Declaration), 2006 (the Yokkaichi Declaration) and 2008 (the
Minokamo Declaration), each bearing the name of the city which acted as
CCHCFR secretariat in that financial year and each stressing the CCHCFR’s
commitment to the goal of ‘tabunka kyōsei’. In each, the three central working
issues were the same: ‘relations between foreign residents as “seikatsusha”
and their local communities’, ‘cooperation with local governments and support
for foreign residents in businesses in local communities’ and ‘the education
of foreign children’. Each year has seen some form of contact with arms of
the national government; a 2005 meeting in Yokkaichi also included foreign
residents and NPO representatives, thereby widening the ambit of discussions
to include civil society input as well. The CCHCFR called on the national
government to create a coordinated policy to address the listed issues, includ-
ing a guarantee of support to enable foreign residents to become proficient in
Japanese so that they can achieve independence and participate fully in com-
munity building. The submissions clearly outline the steps members think the
national government ought to take.
Posted on the CCHCFR’s website are two 2009 documents, one listing the
requests it had made for regulatory reform and the other detailing the national
government’s responses. The requests range across a wide range of areas, from
visas to labour conditions and public health. The language-related ones of
most interest here are the requests for the establishment of a system to guar-
antee foreign residents the opportunity to acquire the knowledge of Japanese
language and Japanese life necessary for their lifestyles and employment; for
an expansion of JSL education in gaikokujin gakkō (ethnic schools), given
that many children attending such schools are likely to stay in Japan and to
work there; for a skills certification examination system pitched at the level
of the end of compulsory education for non-native speakers of Japanese in
schools;23 for an expansion of the number of evening schools to allow people

to study even though working; for the training of staff in JSL teaching and
multicultural coexistence education; and for a guarantee of Japanese-language
learning opportunities to foreign children. It is worth examining some of these
in detail here.
To unpack the first by way of illustration: the request concerning the desired
guarantee of JSL instruction to foreign residents was based upon the fact that
although discrete visa categories regulating the residence and employment of
non-Japanese people entering the country exist at the national level, there is
no provision of opportunities to allow them to attain sufficient proficiency in
the Japanese language to live and work in the local areas where they settle.
Given that the administrations of member cities had to deal on a daily basis
with the consequences of this, the CCHCFR requested the relevant ministries
and agencies to consider the development of several things: a guarantee of
language-learning opportunities tailored to meeting the needs of foreign res-
idents, creation of a system of certification of study results and standards for
language proficiency and development of methods for determining proficiency.
It was suggested that incentives in the form of favourable treatment for visa
extensions and renewals could be linked to levels of proficiency in Japanese.
The current lack of such opportunities meant that the language barrier prevented
foreign residents from becoming fully self-reliant members of their local com-
munities and was a root cause of friction in the community. Rather than relying
on the self-initiated activities of local governments and NPOs in this area, the
national government should accept responsibility for this and should construct
and disseminate a JSL education system, including the training and deploy-
ment of staff charged with implementing it at national and local government
levels and in businesses. While the recent revision of the Employment Mea-
sure Act touched on language issues in its Article 9, this had no practical
effect. The increase in demand for language training from foreign residents
following the downturn in the employment situation was a further indicator
of the need for national government intervention in this sphere. The request
from the CCHCFR indicated the relevant laws that would need changing to
accommodate this action; the ministries in charge were listed as the Ministry
of Justice (immigration policy and visa issues), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
(visas), MEXT (education) and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare
(employment).
The responses received from each ministry are discussed in the docu-
ment. The Ministry of Justice response affirmed the importance of raising the
Japanese-language proficiency of foreigners, and committed to continuing to
consider ways and means of maintaining an environment for studying Japanese.
In considering the matter of Japanese-language proficiency in relation to visa
extensions and changes in visa status, they agreed, it is first necessary to ensure
that the foreigner in question is guaranteed opportunities to learn Japanese and

to maintain an examination and qualifications system that measures objectively
his or her Japanese-language proficiency as a ‘seikatsusha’. As the CCHCFR
pointed out, however, although the urgency of these aims was acknowledged,
no timelines were set for achieving them, and its document questioned whether
the Ministry of Justice did in fact intend to throw its weight behind influencing
other relevant ministries to work on the matter; given that that ministry recog-
nised the need for a system of language proficiency certification examinations,
it ought to take a proactive role in setting one up.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ response noted that the Kokugo Bunkakai’s
Subcommittee on Teaching Japanese as a Second Language was carrying out a
professional investigation into both the level of Japanese that should be required
and the system of certifying that level; Foreign Affairs would therefore prefer
to proceed in tandem with other ministries on the basis of that report. This
elicited the same response from the CCHCFR, namely, that the ministry should
take a more proactive role in influencing other ministries, joining forces with
the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of
Health, Labour and Welfare to set a specific timetable for achieving the specific
outcomes involved.
MEXT itself might be thought to be the most closely concerned with this
matter, given the previously discussed Agency for Cultural Affairs’ oversight
of JSL activities intended for ‘foreigners as residents (seikatsusha) within
Japan’ since 2007. Since its Kokugo Bunkakai subcommittee on JSL educa-
tion, as noted in the MOFA response, has been considering objectives, standard
content and methods of proficiency evaluation and certification in JSL pro-
grammes, MEXT might well be seen as a policy locus. The response from
the ministry pointed this out, adding that during the 2009 financial year it
would build on the work of the JSL subcommittee by carrying out research
on evaluation of foreign residents’ proficiency levels. Using none of the ten-
tative syntax employed by other ministries as to their ‘wish’ to work towards
this aim, MEXT announced that through these measures it would arrive at
an excellent system for providing Japanese-language education for foreigners
under the aegis of the ‘seikatsusha’ project. However, the CCHCFR queried
whether MEXT’s project was sufficiently wide-reaching to guarantee JSL edu-
cation for all interested foreign residents, asking what percentage of those with
life- or employment-related language needs it would actually reach, and also
requested clarification of the extent to which the MEXT project had taken into
account relationships with projects already being run by local governments,
NPOs and universities. MEXT was asked to request an increased allocation
for the project in its 2010 budget request, but this did not happen. In the view
of the CCHCFR, the MEXT project was a model which local governments,
NPOs and universities working in local areas could use as a reference but
which did not go far enough in addressing the needs of foreign residents as a
whole.
Finally, in relation to this item, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare
was commended for its groundbreaking Employment Preparation Training
for Foreigners of Japanese Descent programme, the first time a programme
providing JSL opportunities to foreigners who had lost their jobs had been
sponsored at national level. The CCHCFR expressed the hope that this policy
would continue to be monitored in the light of circumstances in local areas and
adopted as a permanent labour policy.
The above somewhat lengthy but illuminating examination of responses
from the national government to one of the CCHCFR’s language-related items
confirms that although the need to upgrade the Japanese-language skills of
foreign residents and workers is recognised by various sections of the national
government, overall responses are in most cases limited in scope to mother-
hood statements indicating a wish to improve rather than to plans for concrete
action, with the exception of the MHLW ‘nikkeijin’-targeted plan and the more
diffuse MEXT activities. None go so far as to suggest that the government
take blanket responsibility for providing Japanese-language education to all
interested foreign residents. This step may still be some time away. It would
require, of course, a significant subvention in the national budget, but more
than that, an increased acknowledgment at national level that the nature of
Japanese society is changing which goes beyond lip service at discourse level
and enters into a pragmatic willingness to grapple with and provide for the
practical consequences of globalisation for local societies and for Japan as a
whole. Bringing about a language policy of this sort will require the interven-
tion of powerful political figures who are convinced of its appropriateness, but
there is currently no compelling evidence of such a group in Japan’s political
landscape at national level.
Taken together, the four groups discussed here provide excellent examples of
activities – some generated from within civil society, the CCHCFR from within
local government itself – that call on the national government for action on the
provision of JSL education. The nexus between civil society and government
across a wide range of areas has grown increasingly significant in recent years,
with that of the treatment of foreign residents being no exception, particularly in
the relationship between NGOs/NPOs and local government (Shipper’s (2008)
‘associative activism’ in action). Most such activity takes place in the informal
public sphere of civil society, its impact felt initially at the local level of
government. While the private groups described above are composed mainly
of researchers and practitioners rather than being NPOs/NGOs, their intent is
activist in nature and they thus fall within the parameters of the associative
activism model. The CCHCFR expressly references the contribution of NPOs
in its Minokamo Declaration, requesting that the national government work
with them as well as with local government and the business world in building
a society where foreign residents are provided with what they need to enable
them to contribute to the communities in which they live.
Some of the literature produced in pursuit of this goal of a national law is
particularly noteworthy because it rearticulates the definition of a foreigner in
terms of language rather than ethnicity or blood. Satō (2008), in a paper on
language rights in which he calls for such a law, defines a gaikokujin (foreigner)
as anyone whose first language is not Japanese. His paper works through various
relevant articles of Japan’s Constitution, noting that the Constitution contains
no reference to language, not even specifying Japanese as the official language
of the country, and argues that foreign residents should be guaranteed the
right to instruction in Japanese as a second or foreign language. Article 26,
for example, specifies the right of all citizens (kokumin) to an education. The
use of the word ‘kokumin’ (the people), Satō argues, cannot be interpreted to
mean that the guarantee of rights does not extend to foreign residents, who
are basically as entitled to the protection of their rights as anyone else. With
regard to education, since Article 26 does not specify only school education or
the period of compulsory education, it ought to be possible to include under
this rubric the idea of lifelong learning and of an official guarantee of language
education for foreigners.
In support of his case, Satō further canvasses a range of international human
rights conventions to which Japan is signatory. Analysing Article 13 of the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR),
which, recognising the right to education, specifies that education ‘shall enable
all persons to participate effectively in a free society’,24 he argues that this can
be interpreted as mandating the provision of an education system which will
provide the knowledge needed to live in that country, and that this provides
a basis for an official guarantee of language training which includes foreign
residents. The lack of trained specialist JSL teachers in public schools, however,
places a heavy burden on ordinary teachers and constitutes a barrier to achieving
this goal. Japan’s national education system’s one-language, one-culture stance
in fact runs counter to the provisions of the international conventions Japan has
ratified, specifically the ICESCR and the Convention on the Rights of the
Child. Musing on the categories of foreign residents who need JSL instruction,
he notes that the criterion of foreign citizenship is insufficient as an indicator
of language needs because it does not account for those ‘former foreigners’
who have taken Japanese citizenship but still lack proficiency. For the purposes
of his argument about the linguistic rights of foreigners in terms of receiving
education in Japanese as a second language, therefore, he defines a foreigner,
regardless of their current citizenship, as someone whose first language is not
Japanese. Very careful thought should be given to what kind of Japanese foreign
residents need to learn; they do not need the traditional Japanese-language
Teaching of community languages in schools 155
education offered to native speakers and intended to create good Japanese

citizens. The point here is that non-Japanese need to study the language for
communication rather than to affirm a sense of shared identity as Japanese as is
the case with Japanese native speakers. If many of those non-Japanese go on in
time to become Japanese citizens, however, that will again raise the question of
the nature of the connection between language and national identity, currently
such a deeply embedded part of the prevailing language ideology as discussed
in Chapter 1.
Teaching of community languages in schools

Turning now from the teaching of Japanese to immigrants to the teaching of
languages in Japan’s education system: we saw in Chapter 3 that most teaching
of foreign languages other than English is done at university level, with only
comparatively small numbers of students taking other languages in secondary
schools. After the 2005 White Paper on Education acknowledged the need to
teach languages other than English, in particular regional languages, the second
wave of targeted programmes described in Chapter 3 was expanded, assign-
ing responsibility for developing language curricula to designated schools in
particular prefectures. The number of students studying regional languages,
i.e., Korean and Chinese and to a lesser extent Russian, expanded slightly
as a result, but no further budget allocation for this purpose appears likely
to be made. As mentioned earlier, in the 2010 MEXT budget appropriation
requests the money requested for Enrichment of Foreign Language Education
is earmarked exclusively for the move of English into the elementary school
curriculum.
The concept of community languages has not yet entered into the language
policy process, where other languages are still consistently referred to as foreign
languages, underlining their status as something external to Japan despite the
presence of large communities of speakers of those languages who live and
work in Japanese communities. The term ‘community languages’ rather than
‘foreign languages’, as we saw in Chapter 3, has been used in Australia since
the mid-1970s and legitimises the continuing existence of those languages as
part of Australian society. This issue of legitimisation is important: as discussed
in Chapter 1, an important role of language ideology is to legitimise particular
beliefs about language. For as long as Japan continues to refer in its official
discourse and planning to Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and other
languages spoken within its borders as foreign languages, it will deny them
the status they deserve, namely that of languages spoken as legitimate parts
of the national linguistic landscape. This lack of recognition of on-the-ground
linguistic realities and language practices is why such languages are all but
ignored in the public school system in favour of English. The foreign languages
other than English which have until recently been the most common options
were European languages such as French and German, historically linked with
the adoption of aspects of European science and culture; the notion of teaching
languages which would enable mainstream Japanese to communicate with non-
Japanese living in their country is missing from educational policy (Hirano
1996: 71).
The Japanese–English binary continues to constrain foreign-language edu-
cation even though the policy documents relating to the promotion of English
make much of international issues as a driving force. The English version of the
March 2003 MEXT press release ‘Regarding the Establishment of an Action
Plan to Cultivate “Japanese with English Abilities”’ which accompanied the
release of the policy, for example, uses the phrases ‘international interdepen-
dency’, ‘international understanding and cooperation’, ‘living as a member of
the international society’, ‘participate in international activities’ and the state-
ment that ‘in addition, the situation demands the sharing of wisdom among
different peoples for the resolution of worldwide issues that face humanity
such as global environmental problems’ before going on to make it clear that
English is the only language that counts in these situations: ‘English abilities
are important in terms of linking our country with the rest of the world, obtain-
ing the world’s understanding and trust, enhancing our international presence
and further developing our nation.’ This is a blinkered internationalisation, one
which views the world through only two linguistic lenses rather than offer-
ing Japanese school students a wider range of language-learning experiences.
With its overly instrumental emphasis, it risks limiting students’ worldviews
and opportunities for cognitive development through lack of exposure to dif-
ferent languages and the different ways of thinking they both exemplify and
involve.
Extending language planning to further proactive fostering of the study of
regional languages could prove a useful strategy for Japan not only in its domes-
tic arrangements but also in its external foreign relations. Members of its large
communities of Chinese and Korean oldcomer residents may or may not still
speak their heritage language, depending on the individual case, but the many
foreign students and trainees studying or working in Japan, over 90 per cent
of whom are from China, South Korea and other areas of East and South East
Asia, certainly do (MEXT 2007), making these languages very much com-
munity languages. Were the national government to recognise this and further
expand teaching of these languages in its public schools, diluting its focus on
English as the only really important language, such evidence of goodwill and
acceptance might conceivably help to ease lingering tensions between Japan
and its Asian neighbours over wartime hostilities, as the 2000 report to the
Prime Minister mentioned above recognised. English is certainly used as a lin-
gua franca in communication throughout the region, but the affective benefits of
Teaching of community languages in schools 157
placing increased importance on communicating in the local languages rather

than relying on English could be considerable.
As we saw in Chapter 3, Katō (2009: 164) argues that the increase in the
number of migrants to Japan from the Asian region exerts a major influence on
the social context of language policy. The movement of these people, he asserts,
not only urges a rethink of the focus on English in the teaching of languages in
Japan but also more importantly suggests the need to reconceptualise language
policy in this area as a domestic issue. Katō is correct: it is no longer sufficient
to focus foreign-language teaching in Japan’s schools on the external use of
English when Japan’s communities are home to speakers of regional and other
non-English languages, with many more native speakers of Korean and Chinese
than of English. While the importance of English as an international language
is undeniable, as Japan’s leaders and policy documents concur, and while it
functions as a lingua franca not only in the wider international setting but
also within the Asian region, language policy ought to reflect current realities
and cast a wider net in order to avoid what Miura (2000: 9) refers to as
‘double monolingualism: within Japan, Japanese only; outside Japan, English
only’.
Despite the money earlier allocated to the designated-schools project and
despite the statement in the 2009 White Paper on Education that the programme
is continuing,25 this does not appear to be an ongoing project. It is difficult to
see what purpose temporary policies such as this have in the overall long-
term picture if programme funding is discontinued. As Lo Bianco comments
in the Australian context, ‘redressing systemic language deficiencies today
requires co-ordinated policy action, expert guidance and consultative processes
of debate and public engagement and . . . articulation between the latent and
largely untutored bilingualism of the . . . population and its more monolingual
public institutions’ (Lo Bianco and Slaughter 2009: 7). To my knowledge,
no widely consultative process about what languages should be available in
Japanese public schools has taken place. The implementation of decisions on
language teaching has been top-down, whereas what would benefit Japan is a
wide-ranging national discussion on what languages are taught and why. As
briefly discussed in Chapter 1, the belief that Japanese people are not good at
learning foreign languages may have something to do with the lack of interest
in expanding the foreign language offerings in schools, but the government,
through its massive injection of funds first into the JET Programme and more
recently into the Strategic Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Abilities
programme, has shown that it will act to support language learning where
it sees the need. The challenge ahead, then, is to convince it of the need to
further diversify the range of languages taught and to do this not merely from
externally oriented motives but from an acknowledgment that these languages
are spoken in Japanese communities every day. Progress happens in language
policy not by arguing old cases but by developing new ways to look at existing
situations (Lo Bianco 2009).
Conclusion
We have seen in this book that policy relating to the linguistic needs of migrants
is moving from the bottom to the top, while that relating to script use has devel-
oped from the top down (albeit with opportunities for widespread community
consultation built in). With regard to the former, the contribution of local gov-
ernment and NPOs to the encouraging signs of interest and involvement we
are now seeing from the national government should not be underestimated.
As shown by Reed (1986) and Furukawa (2003), local government policies
have influenced national policy in the areas of welfare, the environment and
more recently information disclosure. Given these precedents, together with
the examples given by Shipper (2008) of the increasing influence of migrant
rights activist groups in the civil society sector on the behaviour of govern-
ment organisations, it is reasonable to assume that the local government and
civil society calls on the national government to provide JSL education oppor-
tunities described in this chapter may in time bear similar fruit in bringing
about a programmatic dimension to this area. Language policy initiatives in
Japan since the postwar script reforms of the mid-twentieth century have on
the whole been reactive rather than proactive;26 this area looks likely to be no
different.
In the area of provision of multilingual information to migrants, as discussed
in Chapter 3, Japan is doing well, depending on which area of the country
we look at. Hirano (1996: 70–1) contrasts this manifestation of language pol-
icy with the nation-state version which has informed Japan’s language policy
to date, the biggest difference between the two being the difference in target
group. Multilingual services policies recognise linguistic diversity rather than
ignoring it in favour of assimilation as has been the case under the nation-state
model, with the target group being those for whom the language of the majority,
i.e., the national language, is not their first language. The nation-state model
has been propounded by the national government, with language positioned as
a manifestation of national identity, the target group as the Japanese people as a
whole, the majority language as the national language, the aim of corpus plan-
ning as modernisation, purification and standardisation and the policy domains
as administration and mass communication (i.e., the whole of society). The
language policy informing the provision of multilingual services, on the other
hand, is propounded by multiple actors including local government; language
is seen as a means of communicating information, the intended targets are the
populace including foreign residents, the focus is on the languages of linguistic
Conclusion 159
minorities, the aim of corpus planning is simplification and the policy domain
is administrative services for part of society. In other words, such policies
recognise the everyday linguistic diversity of Japanese communities. Some
progress has therefore been made in this area, magnified in recent years by the
ability to provide multilingual information through the Internet once govern-
ments established a presence online.
Increased national government intervention into the provision of JSL edu-
cation opportunities and the teaching of foreign languages other than English
in the school system is essential, however, if Japan is to develop its linguistic
potential to deal with the opportunities and responsibilities inherent in being a
recognisably multilingual society and to accomplish any real degree of interna-
tionalisation in society. At this stage, while the national government continues
to promote ‘internationalisation’, this does not rest upon an adequate con-
ceptual framework of multilingualism and multiculturalism (Fujita-Round and
Maher 2008: 402) and does not manifest in schools as supporting regional and
community or indigenous languages. And yet sufficient time has now elapsed
to provide compelling evidence of a globalisation-induced social shift that will
not now be reversed, regardless of how much nationalist politicians may push
the old monoethnic, monolingual line of argument and appeal to a language
ideology which is now increasingly out of step with the lived realities of both
citizens and non-citizen residents. Providing language classes for foreign resi-
dents is not a one-way street which benefits only the recipient of the teaching.
It is through becoming proficient in the language of the host community that
foreign residents are empowered to contribute to that community and thus the
provision of language classes is a vital link in enabling social cohesion. Argu-
ments which focus on the cost of such programmes overlook the fact that if
Japan were not to provide such classes it would risk squandering an impor-
tant national resource which will grow in importance as time passes and the
proportion of non-Japanese among the population increases. Buckling down
to providing this as a national responsibility can only result in benefits to both
host community and foreign residents which will with time improve the quality
of life for both.
It is time to bring together the disparate strands of language policy, aban-
doning both old ideas and the butterfly approach in favour of a coordinated
set of policies which take cognisance of the practical realities of everyday life
in Japan today. As Yamanaka (2008: 25) comments: ‘All of the demands for
change at the grassroots have pointed in one direction: the government must be
actively involved, and take leadership in, transforming this homogenous society
into a multicultural one. Civil society and local governments will not be able to
complete this task on their own. Social harmony can result only from compre-
hensive legal and administrative systems that promote respect among diverse
groups of people.’ Language policy has an important role to play in achiev-

ing such harmony, and it is imperative that policy-makers turn their attention
henceforth to devising appropriate policies to reflect the increasingly diverse
and internationalised society in which they live, in the interests of continuing
social harmony.
Conclusion
The broad social reach of language policy’s implementation makes it a key

player in framing the manner in which language is handled in a particular soci-
ety. It acts as an important device for the legitimisation of particular uses of
language which coincide with social expectations, i.e., it encapsulates and artic-
ulates the national thinking on language (language ideology) and cannot stand
outside the culture and the times in which it is created. Therefore, it is imper-
ative that language policy evolves to reflect contemporary social realities and
does not remain fossilised, reflecting circumstances now past. Both increased
immigration and technology-related language change have made their presence
felt in Japan for thirty years now; they are in no sense temporary aberrations.
It is clear that they have important consequences for society at large and that
language policy must therefore be extended to address them. As we have seen,
at national level only one of these issues has resulted in action, namely the
revision of the kanji policy to reflect the influence of information technology
on reading and writing.
I would argue that the provision of JSL learning opportunities at national
level and the expansion of opportunities to learn languages other than English
are the most important language policy matters facing Japan today, far more
significant than the forthcoming establishment of English as a curriculum sub-
ject in elementary schools, because of their deep and enduring import for future
social cohesion. What has emerged in this book from the discussion of com-
munity language needs and practices and responses to them by government
and other groups is a picture of rich, diversely textured language management
activities (language policies) being adopted in a multiplicity of areas by bod-
ies ranging from groups of concerned individuals to the highest levels of the
national government, with many local government levels in between. What is
at issue now is the direction in which Japan will next move. At what stage
will the government decide that a critical mass of long-term foreign residents
sufficient to justify national intervention into language provision has been
reached?
Maher and Nakayama (2003) have pointed out that sociologists are increas-
ingly challenging basic social constructs such as ‘the Japanese’ on which
161
162 Conclusion
national decisions about language policy are based. It is clear that the
assumption that in Japanese schools all or nearly all students are Japanese
is no longer true. ‘Japanese second language education now faces the funda-
mental problem of developing children’s cultural literacy in Japanese and other
languages free from the ideological wrapping of what Japanese is supposed to
“symbolize” for the nation’ (133). This ideological carapace has been slow to
crack and remains firmly in place, but there has been a vigorous acknowledg-
ment at grassroots level that Japanese is now a second language for many resi-
dents of Japanese communities rather than their first. The recent national-level
documents discussed in Chapter 5 have also reflected a growing willingness
to address the importance of JSL language learning for immigrant adults and
children. We may assume, then, that change is on the way and that the question
is slowly – very slowly – becoming not if but when appropriate policy will be
developed by the national government, as advocated by the Japanese Language
Education Guarantee Act Study Group and the Society for Teaching Japanese
as a Foreign Language.
The dominant narrative in this process may be summed up as one of hov-
ering between loss and gain: loss of the comfort of homogeneity and assumed
shared heritage balanced against economic and cultural gain from the pres-
ence of foreign residents in local communities. The key change which flies
in the face of past and current ideology lies in recognising such communities
as multilingual: ‘The presence of non-Japanese children in Japanese schools
is now the critical issue of the next decade. Quite simply, the government
has no policy to deal with this new social phenomenon legitimately, because
it has no background framework of what constitutes a multilingual commu-
nity – that is, no concept of Japan as a multilingual community’ (Maher
and Nakayama 2003: 135). Ostheider (2009) concurs: the old ideology of
monoethnicity and monolingualism with its binary distinction between ‘Japan’
and ‘foreign countries’ no longer works. Residents of those ‘foreign coun-
tries’ have come to Japan, often not to stay for a while and move on but to
settle, and the social fabric of Japanese communities has been changed as a
result.
If we look at other changes in Japan’s language history, we can predict that
such a change will be gradual rather than sudden. The development of today’s
modern written Japanese, for example, took many decades from the time of
the first Meiji Period advocates of replacing classical writing traditions with
something based on contemporary speech, and the twentieth-century script
policies were also not achieved without decades of argument and struggle. In
both these examples, the single most important factor retarding change was
the strength of the existing language ideologies, the views of what writing
should be like and equally importantly what it should not be like. Even the
Conclusion 163
2010 revision of the kanji policy took thirty years after the appearance of the
first word processors to appear.
The key element in securing change will be the willingness to accommodate
‘others’. As Shohamy (2006: 46) observes:
The current nation-state, because of its being composed of different ideologies and rules
of representation (e.g., common history) and its connections to the global world, stands
in stark contrast to the traditional nation-state and can even be viewed as threatening it,
because of the many ‘others’ it introduces as social actors. As a result, authorities often
use propaganda and ideologies about language loyalty, patriotism, collective identity
and the need for ‘correct and pure language’ or ‘native language’ as strategies for
continuing their control and holding back the demands of these ‘others’.
I have shown that Japan too has made good use of these strategies of ideology
and exclusion or assimilation in regard to language throughout its modern
period. It will be difficult to change such longstanding attitudes to language
management, and yet it is imperative that they do change. All the indications
are that immigration will continue to grow through various channels, regardless
of whether or not the national discourse admits it openly. The experience of
Germany has shown that failure to respond to the needs of the identified ‘others’
will lead to a variety of social ills. Failure on Japan’s part to respond to the
linguistic needs of the ‘others’ who are now living locally is likely to result
in a linguistic underclass which carries attendant risks of social alienation
and upheaval: ‘The continued exclusion of foreign migrants from the level
of economic, social and political life enjoyed by Japanese citizens carries a
high risk. The resulting gulf, summed up as the difference between inclusion
and exclusion, will inevitably raise continuing issues of social justice and basic
human rights, and will create potential for social unrest’ (Douglass and Roberts
2003b: 29).
The first-ever OECD high-level policy forum on migration, held in Paris
in mid-2009, stressed that the successful integration of immigrants and their
children into host societies was essential if immigration was to be able to help
meet the long-term challenges for the labour forces of ageing host societies.
Unsurprisingly, lack of host language proficiency was identified as contributing
to the difficulties immigrants face in finding work. Integration issues were
seen as being important for the children of immigrants: ‘since most of the
children of immigrants have been raised and educated in the host countries,
achieving equal outcomes for this group can be considered a “benchmark”
for successful integration policy’ (OECD 2009). Such outcomes are unlikely
to be achieved in Japan, however, without national government input into
language policy in terms of providing JSL training for new migrants along
the lines of Australia’s Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP)1 and ESL
164 Conclusion
school programmes for children. As Coulmas (2007: 119) observes, ‘The cost
of language and assimilation programmes is high, but the social costs of not
providing such programmes are likely to be even higher.’
Yamawaki (2002) has commented that the most serious educational
problem found in the areas represented by the Council of Cities with High
Concentrations of Foreign Residents is the high percentage of non-Japanese
children not attending school: in one city, over 50 per cent of foreign school-
age children were not attending school at the time of his writing. This makes it
likely that such children will not acquire appropriate communication skills in
either their first language or Japanese, which is bound to lead to social problems
in the future if not addressed. In Oizumi in 2002, the municipal government
found that while about half of all minority students in the area attended local
elementary and middle schools, with others attending Brazilian ethnic schools,
5 per cent did not go to school at all, thus losing their opportunity to gain an
education. To help such students who have dropped out of school, the Oizumi
Public Library runs a ‘Multilingual Salon’ every Saturday to assist them in
studying Japanese (Itoi 2006).
For foreign workers and their children who do in fact return to their home
countries after two or three years, the lack of appropriate language proficiency
is less of a problem, or at least, it is a problem with an end in sight. For those
who find themselves deciding to stay in Japan, however, it produces adverse
outcomes for parents and in particular for children. The single most influential
factor in a child’s dropping out or not attending the local Japanese school is
the inability to speak Japanese well enough to cope with classes. Language
skills also feature prominently in the ability of their parents and other adults
to settle successfully into working and living in Japan. Lack of proficiency in
Japanese, and particularly in the ability to read Japanese, means a deficit in
the information needed to live successfully in the host country. Although this
has been addressed to some extent by the many multilingual guides to living in
local communities put out by local governments, as discussed in Chapter 3, this
is a stopgap measure which offers no real long-term solution for those migrants
intending to make Japan their permanent home; they need to be able to carry out
daily life and employment tasks independently, particularly where important
documentation is involved. Without sufficient proficiency in Japanese, children
have little hope of extending their educational levels to the point where they can
achieve satisfying and remunerative careers. In addition, children not attending
school miss out on the socialisation aspect of education which acculturates
them to the norms of their new environment. Some children who drop out
turn to petty crime to fill their days. Tezuka’s study of nearly thirty ‘nikkei’
Brazilian inmates at the Kurihama Juvenile Training School (a reform school)
in early 2005 found that all intended to stay in Japan, and that all reported that
‘the primary reason they became involved with crime in the first place was their
Conclusion 165
inability to communicate in Japanese. Both the juveniles themselves and the

workers at the reformatory agreed that if they had been able to use the Japanese
language and had been able to function normally in school and elsewhere,
they would not have become involved in criminal activity. At this school, the
important work of the reformatory employees concerning Brazilian-Japanese
youth was to teach them the Japanese language’ (Tezuka 2005: 59).
Any country introducing foreign labour across cultural and linguistic bor-
ders, Tezuka warns, needs to bear in mind the danger that insufficiently con-
sidered policies will lead to the emergence of a class of such children in that
society. Likewise Kawakami (2008) underlines the new paradigm brought to
Japanese schools and society in general by children crossing borders, whose
existence he sees as calling into question not only the dichotomy of nationals
and non-nationals but also notions of nationality linked to ethnicity because
of their difference and mixed backgrounds; they further disrupt fixed notions
of citizenship by their multiple border crossings accompanied in some cases
by changes of nationality. This is a timely reminder of the importance of the
language factor in Japan’s admission policies and of the inherent risks of ad hoc
policies which have not yet taken this sufficiently into account, perhaps because
in language ideology terms the language was for so long seen as something
that belonged exclusively to ethnic Japanese. Globalisation and other factors,
however, have now ensured that this is no longer the case; it has become instead
a language increasingly used (or needing to be used) within Japan as the second
language of residents of local communities, both children and adults.
As Nagy (2009: 3) has pointed out, the various admission schemes for foreign
labour which function instead of an official immigration policy in Japan ‘do
not anticipate and, therefore, do not include a road map towards citizenship’.
Current language requirements for citizenship are clearly not sufficient to allow
full participation in public life. The expectations of a Japanese citizen in terms
of mastery of the national language, what the impediments to achieving this
are for new arrivals and how they can be overcome all need to be the subject of
ongoing discussion as the population mix continues to change. The increased
support for JSL learning by the national government in certain areas is thus a
welcome recognition that this situation is a national issue rather than a purely
local concern. The challenge now is to advance to a situation where a national
approach to language education provision supports local initiatives in both
ideological and financial terms.
We have seen that the national government has in recent years taken policy
action on concerns affecting mainstream Japanese citizens, exemplified by
the recent revision of the kanji policy and the push to establish English as
a curriculum subject in elementary schools. It should be noted here that the
kanji policy is important not only to Japanese citizens but also to all the other
non-Japanese children whose literacy education will be based on the classroom
166 Conclusion
implementation of that policy, who need to be able to read and write properly,
who use mobile phones and want to be able to e-mail in Japanese. True kanji
literacy should no longer be considered out of their reach: as potential future
citizens, they need JSL education in schools which will enable them to deal
with the ordinary written curriculum studied by their Japanese classmates.
It is too late to argue that there is no need for such an approach, or for the kind
of overarching language policy framework suggested by Katsuragi (2005). It is
clear that Japan has changed markedly, Tegtmeyer Pak (2006: 89) comments;
both the refusal to countenance international migration and the reluctance of
public institutions to view cultural, ethnic and racial differences as potentially
positive factors in society now belong to the past. Sugimoto (2009: 1) con-
curs: ‘The view that Japan is a monocultural society with little internal cultural
divergence and stratification, which was once taken for granted, is now losing
monopoly over the way Japanese culture is portrayed. This transformation has
resulted not so much from intellectual criticisms levelled at the once domi-
nant model as from public perceptions of structural changes that have been in
progress since the late 20th century.’ It is the importance of the local, of citizen
observation of and response to the changes at the grassroots levels of local com-
munities, that has led to the development of local policies to address local needs.
The national government’s belated recognition of multicultural coexistence at
policy level and the subsequent appeal to regional governments to follow the
same policy were simply building on and giving national government impri-
matur to a network of already existing policies grounded in necessity. Amongst
all the many and various challenges facing Japan today, coming to grips with
its own internal multilingualism and meeting the needs of its non-Japanese
residents for JSL education by developing a national policy in this area has
ramifications for future social cohesion in both ideological and practical terms
that cannot be overlooked.
Notes to the text
1 L A N G UAG E I D E O L O G Y, P L A N N I N G A N D P O L I C Y
1 Japan’s modern period began in 1868 with the Meiji Restoration.
2 Probably one of the most often quoted examples of this is the Japanese government’s
1980 report to the United Nations Human Rights Committee: ‘The right of any
person to enjoy his own culture, to profess and practice his religion or to use his own
language is ensured under Japanese law. However, minorities of the kind mentioned
in the Covenant do not exist in Japan’ (UNHCR 1980).
3 Under the terms of the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of that year.
4 The Democratic Party of Japan’s Kitazawa Toshimi, for instance, listed the inability
to read kanji correctly among the Prime Minister’s shortcomings in the House of
Councillors on 14 July 2009.
5 See www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo nihongo/yoronchousa/ for annual surveys from 1995
to 2008, accessed 1 December 2010.
6 The Japan Foundation’s most recent survey in 2009 reported 3.65 million people
studying Japanese at institutions in 133 countries outside Japan (Japan Foundation
2010, provisional results on website).
7 In 2008, the population of elderly citizens (those over 65) accounted for 22.1 per
cent of the total population, a record high. This is predicted to increase to almost
40 per cent by 2050. Japan’s population is ageing at a much faster rate than other
advanced countries. While in Japan the over-65 population almost doubled in the
24 years between 1970 and 1994, the same increase (from 7 per cent to 14 per cent)
took 61 years in Italy, 85 years in Sweden and 115 years in France (Statistics Bureau
of Japan 2009).
8 This is not the only way, of course. As Ball (1994: 15) points out, policy of any
kind consists of both texts, i.e., particular policy documents setting out specifics,
and discourse, i.e., the ideas and the debate which inform the decision-making. In
the case of language policy, this discourse is what I have referred to in this book as
language ideology.
9 MEXT, ‘Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Abilities’, online at
www.mext.go.jp/english/topics/03072801.htm, accessed 8 November 2010.
10 An English-language account of the major policies relating to the national lan-
guage may be found at www.bunka.go.jp/english/pdf/h21 chapter 08.pdf, accessed
8 November 2010. For a discussion of these and other policies, see Gottlieb 2001
and 2005.
167
168 Notes to pages 22–7
11 The so-called 3-K jobs: ‘kiken’ (dangerous), ‘kitanai’ (dirty) and ‘kitsui’ (difficult).
12 The official figures on non-Japanese residents do not include undocumented immi-
grants or returnees from China, which means that the actual figures are higher than
this.
13 E.g., Brody (2002); Douglass and Roberts (2003a); Furukawa and Menju (2003);
Goodman et al. (2003); Graburn et al. (2008); Han (2004); Kashiwazaki (2000);
Kawahara (2004); Kawahara and Noyama (2007); Kawamura (2009); Kawamura
and Son (2007); Komai (2006, 2001, 1999, 1995); Lee et al. (2006); Lie (2001);
Sellek (2001); and Yamanaka (1997), to name just a few.
14 De Carvalho (2003), Ikegami (2001), Ishi (2003), Lesser (2003), Ōkubo (2005), Roth
(2002), Takezawa (2002) and Tsuda (2003), for example, deal with the Brazilian or
‘nikkei’ community in Japan; Chapman (2006), Kyo (2008 and 1997), Maher and
Kawanishi (1995), Ryang (2000 and 1997), Ryang and Lie (2009), Tai (2007 and
2004) with ethnic Korean communities; and Chen (2008), Liu-Farrer (2008), Maher
(1995) and Nagano (1994) with Chinese living in Japan.
15 See, for example, www.minpaku.ac.jp/special/200404/english.html, accessed 8
November 2010.
16 Today’s Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommuni-
cations.
17 See Burgess (2004) for an analysis of the use of this term.
18 Formerly the Ministry of Education, hereafter MEXT.
19 In 2007, for example, financial support was provided for a project at Hama-
matsu Gakuin University aimed at developing a programme to train teach-
ers of Japanese language for Hamamatsu City (where large numbers of South
American residents live) under this rubric (see www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/houdou/
19/07/07072304/002/042.htm, accessed 8 December 2010).
20 This committee was set up to undertake a long-term, comprehensive study on
Japan’s falling birth rate and aged society, and on building an integrated society.
Members chose as the central research theme ‘restoring and strengthening commu-
nities’. The committee released an interim report in 2008. For an English-language
version, see www.sangiin.go.jp/eng/report/2008shoushikyousei.pdf, accessed 8
November 2010. The Japanese version is at www.sangiin.go.jp/japanese/
chousakai/houkoku/hou10–12/shoushi2008.pdf, accessed 8 November 2010.
21 See www.pref.toyama.jp/cms cat/106030/kj00004902.html, accessed 8 December
2010.
22 Saitama Prefecture’s English-language material, for example, defines it slightly dif-
ferently as ‘a community where people of different nationalities and backgrounds
live on equal terms, and display their abilities fully, showing mutual understand-
ing of their cultural differences’ (www.pref.saitama.lg.jp/uploaded/attachment/
377644.pdf, accessed 8 November 2010, in Japanese dddddddddddd
ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd
d d d d d d d d d d at www.pref.saitama.lg.jp/s-gikai/gaiyou/h2012/
20126070.html, accessed 8 November 2010). Hyogo Prefecture’s long-term vision
for the twenty-first century, articulated in 2004, aspires to the creation of a ‘tabunka
kyōsei’ society where a diverse international exchange is carried on in local areas
and where everyone can easily live, taking as its base mutual understanding regard-
less of differences in culture, language and living habits: ddddddddd
Notes to pages 27–37 169
ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd
dddd dddddddddddddddddddddddddd (see
http:// web.pref.hyogo.lg.jp/contents/000060123.pdf under Program 15 on page 44,
where the steps to achieve this are also listed, accessed 8 November 2010).
23 See Chapter 5.
24 Kongo no Gaikokujin no Ukeire ni kansuru Kihonteki na Kangaekata (Basic
Stance on Admittance of Foreigners in the Future) (Ministry of Justice 2006b.
See www.nira.or.jp/past/newsj/kanren/180/182/pdf/03 jpn.pdf, accessed 10 Octo-
ber 2010).
25 In 2008 a further 16,824 Brazilians were granted permanent residence in Japan, the
largest national group for that year (Ministry of Justice 2009b).
26 It was assumed that ‘nikkeijin’, because of their family background, would speak
Japanese and thus integrate more easily, but most did not speak the language.
27 This habitus of homogeneity, Befu further contends (2009b: 27), is ‘elevated to
the level of ideology’, is used to justify discrimination against heterogeneity and is
automatically followed by the ‘habitus of exclusion’.
28 Okano (2009: 107), for example, asserts that in Japanese schools with new migrant
students, teachers no longer adhere to what has hitherto been the foundational
assumption of Japanese schooling, namely that all students are Japanese, that the
first language of all students is Japanese and that all students share acculturation to
a common Japanese lifestyle.
29 Internet-mode, a wireless service launched in Japan by DoCoMo in 1999 which
enables e-mails to be exchanged between mobile phones.
2 T H E L A N G UAG E N E E D S O F I M M I G R A N T S
1 I.e., they do not have Japanese citizenship but must apply to be naturalised
if they wish even if they were born and brought up in Japan. A total of
7,412 ethnic Koreans took Japanese citizenship in 2008 (Ministry of Justice,
www.moj.go.jp/MINJI/toukei t minji03.html, accessed 9 November 2010).
2 During most of the first half of the twentieth century, over 2 million immigrant
workers flowed into Japan from Korea (then a Japanese colony) and later from
annexed territory in China. Those who remained in Japan after the Second World
War lost their Japanese citizenship and today have ‘special permanent resident’ visa
status.
3 Nagy (2008: 36–7) too reports a rapid increase during the 1980s in the number
of NGOs working to assist foreign residents with, inter alia, Japanese-language
classes. A lack of language proficiency, particularly in reading and writing, he notes
(37–8), is likely to account for the reported income disparity between Japanese and
Brazilian-Japanese workers.
4 The number of migrants from Brazil and Peru swelled from 18,649 in 1989, the
year before the revision of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act,
to 145,614 in 1991, the year after (Kanno 2008: 12).
5 Before that, JSL candidates had mainly consisted of China returnees (see note 16)
and a small number of Vietnamese refugees and others.
6 As an alternative to Japanese schools, non-Japanese children are also educated
at international and ethnic schools either on a full-time or after-school basis (see
Kanno 2008 for an excellent in-depth study of some of these schools). Most children
of postwar immigrants attend Japanese schools, but newcomer children may attend
ethnic schools where their first language is maintained, the major advantage of
an ethnic school run by the community concerned being that it ‘can create an
environment where [its] language and culture are the central concern’ (Kanno
2003: 139) rather than peripheral. Brazilian schools take in many of the Brazilian
students who drop out of Japanese public schools because of bullying and insufficient
Japanese-language proficiency (Nakamura 2008).
7 Defined by MEXT as ‘students who cannot use Japanese adequately in everyday
conversation and students who, even if they can do this, lack the study vocabulary
appropriate to their grade level so that this hinders their participation in learning
activities’.
8 See, for example, www.mext.go.jp/a menu/shotou/clarinet/003/001/005.pdf
(accessed 9 November 2010) for an example of a bilingual Japanese and Chinese
guide issued by MEXT itself.
9 Students from such courses do sometimes teach school children on a voluntary
basis, however: in 2003, for example, foreign children attending public kinder-
gartens, elementary and middle schools in Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo began receiving
JSL instruction from MA students in Waseda University’s Graduate School of
Japanese Applied Linguistics after the university and the Shinjuku Board of Educa-
tion signed an agreement (The Daily Yomiuri 2003).
10 60 per cent of the non-Japanese students in Ota’s elementary and middle schools –
about 2 per cent of the total school population – are from Brazil (The Japan Forum
2006).
11 Ota is by no means exceptional in the number of foreign students in its schools.
One in every ten residents of Shinjuku Ward in Tokyo, for example, holds over-
seas citizenship, from over thirty countries; of the children enrolled at Okubo Ele-
mentary School within this ward, around 60 per cent come from twelve coun-
tries outside Japan, and the school has worked hard to provide a supportive
and encouraging environment within which these students can learn and pro-
vide their own input into multicultural learning within the student body (The
Japan Forum 2006). Statistics on the number of children studying Japanese
at all levels of schooling in the Tokyo Metropolitan area are available at
www.kyoiku.metro.tokyo.jp/toukei/21kouritsu/21mokuji.htm, accessed 9 Novem-
ber 2010.
12 Until 1974, many of the students were ethnic Koreans whose educational opportu-
nities had been stunted by the confusion following the end of the war; the signing
of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and the People’s Repub-
lic of China in 1978 led to an increase in the number of returnees from China
as students; and the 1990 revision of the Immigration Control Act increased the
number of students from Brazil, Peru and Argentina (Harada 2003). Classes were
also run for older ethnic Korean women wanting to learn how to write Japanese
because they had been shut out of the Japanese public education system after they
lost citizenship in 1952 (attendance at Japanese schools was not permitted until
1965 following the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of
Korea).
13 www.kyoiku.metro.tokyo.jp/pickup/p gakko/yakan/, accessed 9 November 2010.
14 www.pref.osaka.jp/shochugakko/yakanngakkyuu/nyuugakuannnai.html, accessed
9 November 2010.
15 www.kochi-kia.or.jp/, accessed 9 November 2010, has Japanese, English, Chinese
and Korean, with earthquake information in English, Chinese, Indonesian, Korean,
Tagalog and Vietnamese, languages which cover over 90 per cent of Kōchi’s current
international community.
16 These were war orphans, Japanese children abandoned in China during the Japanese
retreat at the end of the Second World War. Repatriation began in 1972 after the
normalisation of China-Japan relations, and picked up speed after a 1994 Diet
bill laid the responsibility for this on Japan’s own government. Although born
Japanese, most returnees did not speak Japanese when repatriated, and the families
who accompanied them spoke only Chinese (Kanno 2008: 12). Language education
targeted specifically for such returnees is available through a network of China
Returnee Support Centres and affiliated bodies. Over 20,000 people in this category
had returned to Japan by 2006; those who were publicly funded were eligible for four
months of free intensive JSL training at a support centre in Saitama, supplemented
later by a further eight months at designated language schools and, after two years’
residence in Japan, four more months (Ward 2006: 146).
17 Many foreign workers in Japan are Christians, in particular those from Brazil, Peru,
Korea and the Philippines (Shipper 2008: 92).
18 www.city.kyoto.lg.jp/kyoiku/page/0000066756.html, accessed 9 November 2010.
19 www.hyogo-ip.or.jp/hnvn/ja/group/mikage.html, accessed 9 November 2010.
20 www.city.ota.tokyo.jp/seikatsu/manabu/gakushuu/nihongoyomikakikyoushitsu/
index.html, accessed 9 November 2010.
21 The typical illiterate person among ethnic Koreans is female and over 60 years old
(Coulmas 1994: 314).
22 Defined by Pharr (2003: xiii) as ‘sustained, organized social activity that occurs in
groups that are formed outside the state, the market, and the family’.
23 www.kifa-web.jp/, accessed 9 November 2010.
24 Kawasaki-ku in Kawasaki City, for example, where about a third of the city’s 32,000
foreign residents live, in 2008 advertised for volunteers to teach Japanese, providing
twelve hours of training sessions and couching the appeal in terms of promoting
‘tabunka kyōsei’. See www.city.kawasaki.jp/press/info20081211 1/item3761.pdf,
accessed 9 November 2010.
25 Kashiwa City is a commuter city close to Tokyo which had a total of 6,040 foreign
residents out of a population of just under 400,000 in September 2009. The quarterly
newsletter published by its International Relations Office in English, Chinese and
Spanish lists JSL classes, multilingual counselling and information sessions of
various kinds for foreign residents.
26 Society for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language.
27 A standardised test of the Japanese-language proficiency of non-Japanese test takers,
administered worldwide twice annually in East Asia and annually elsewhere, and
used to certify levels for entrance to Japanese universities, employment requirements
and anywhere where an independent certification of proficiency is required. Level
One is the highest of five levels.
28 http://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/p/19652050, accessed 9 November 2010.
29 http://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/p/21320097/2009/1/ja, accessed 9 November 2010.
30 Under the Japan–Indonesia agreement, Japan agreed to accept 600 care workers and
400 nurses over a two-year period: the first tranche of 208 (fewer than the agreed
number) arrived in August 2008 and began work in February 2009 after finishing
their basic language training, with a further 800 due to arrive in November that
year. Under the FTA agreement with the Philippines, Japan has agreed to accept
1,000 Filipino medical workers over a two-year period, with the first contingent
arriving in May 2009. The Japan Times reported in April 2009 that the second round
of Indonesian workers might not reach the agreed numbers given that the number
of job offers from accepting facilities had dropped (owing in part to the burden of
providing Japanese-language education) and that Filipino workers were also due to
begin entering Japan in 2009 (The Japan Times 2009). See also Roberts 2008 for a
succinct summary.
31 Unless they can provide proof of sufficient proficiency to exempt them from this
requirement.
32 Only 52 per cent of those who sat the caregivers’ test in 2009 passed (Ministry of
Health, Labour and Welfare 2009a).
33 Aspiring nurses may sit the examination three times within the three years; caregivers
do not have that option, because before they can sit for the examination they are
required to have three years’ experience in Japan.
34 AOTS, established in 1959 with the support of what is now the Ministry of Economy,
Trade and Industry, receives more than 5,000 trainees in Japan each year and provides
Japanese-language training in addition to technical training. Established in 1972
to promote Japanese language and culture on the international scene, the Japan
Foundation in 2003 became an independent administrative institution under the
jurisdiction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
35 The remaining three, all care workers, had already been assessed while still in
Indonesia as having achieved a standard of Japanese equivalent to Level Two
of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test and were therefore excused from
the language training course, going straight to their receiving institutions after
receiving some introductory care work training from JICWELS (Noborizato et al.
2009).
36 http://nihongodecarenavi.jp/, accessed 3 December 2010.
37 Ibaraki Prefecture’s largest groups of foreign residents are from Brazil, China,
Korea, Peru, the Philippines and Thailand.
38 This centre focuses on Asian languages, particularly Mandarin Chinese and Korean
(National Police Agency 2002).
39 In addition to supplying interpreters with relevant trial documentation ahead of their
appearance in court to enable them to prepare, trial procedure manuals are published
in eighteen languages, occasional practice seminars have been organised since 2000
and proceedings where an interpreter is used are taped in case later confirmation
is needed, although this latter is done at the discretion of the presiding judge and
interpreters themselves are not allowed to access the tapes for purposes of evaluation
even after the case is settled (Tsuda 1997).
40 In Australia, for example, the Australian Federal Police source interpreters for
police interviews from those accredited at the appropriate level by the National
Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI), which sets the
national accreditation standards for interpreters and translators. In the USA, legal
interpreters are regulated by both a law and a code of ethics.
3 F O R E I G N L A N G UAG E S OT H E R T H A N E N G L I S H I N
E D U C AT I O N A N D T H E C O M M U N I T Y
1 Using ‘eigo igai no gaikokugo’ as a search term is the main way to find infor-
mation about such languages in Japanese schools and universities when search-
ing Japanese government websites. A search of Japan’s E-Gov Internet portal at
www.e-gov.go.jp/ on 18 August 2010, for example, yielded 808 hits, many of them
relating to curricular or other documents at Japan’s national universities, others to
MEXT documents.
2 This occurs at the end of the document in a one-line admonition to the effect that
the teaching of other languages should follow the objectives and contents of English
instruction as laid out in detail in the rest of the syllabus.
3 See www.mext.go.jp/b menu/shingi/12/chuuou/toushin/960701n.htm, accessed
10 November 2010.
4 Documents are available online at www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chukyo/chukyo3/
015/giji_list/index.htm, accessed 10 November 2010.
5 www.jetprogramme.org/documents/pubs/2009 Pamphlet e.pdf, accessed 11 Octo-
ber 2010.
6 Fewer than a dozen.
7 In the 2009–10 intake, however, participants from China and Korea were over-
whelmingly in the CIR category rather than in language classrooms as ALTs; the
same is true for all significant numbers of participants from non-English-speaking
countries with the exception of France, where ten are CIRs and eight are ALTs.
8 Much of Asia’s international migration takes place at the regional level,
bringing newcomers from China and Korea into Japanese communities
where substantial groups of oldcomers from those countries may already
exist.
9 www.chinatefl.com/shandong/teach/jnfls.htm, accessed 10 November 2010.
10 http://mishop.jp/en/act/group.php?id=g0019&cat=4, accessed 11 November
2010.
11 www.kifa-web.jp/lang.html, accessed 3 December 2010.
12 www.dila.co.jp/, accessed 10 November 2010. DILA, which has around 3,000 stu-
dents, teaches 55 languages, and around 80 per cent of its students are employees
of large companies and the financial sector.
13 Defined in their report as ‘comprised of total foreign language classes,
English teacher dispatching to kindergartens and nursing schools, correspon-
dence courses, e-learning services, software, language examinations, study abroad
agencies, translation/interpreting services, and foreign languages other than
English (schooling/correspondence courses), in which language examinations, study
abroad agencies and translation/interpreting services are classified as “peripheral
business”’.
14 I.e., without entrance examinations.
15 Foreign languages have historically functioned in Japan as conduits for the reception
of an advanced culture: Chinese in the seventh century; Portuguese for the Christian
culture in the sixteenth century; Dutch from the early seventeenth to midway through
the nineteenth century with European culture in the Edo Period; then after the Meiji
Restoration, English, German and French for western culture (Tanaka Shinya 2009).
16 In terms of schools, though not of learners.
17 Other languages taught, mostly to very small numbers of students, include German,
Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Malay, Tagalog and Arabic.
18 See Goto et al. 2010 for a report on Spanish in high schools. General remarks on
French and German in schools can be found in the evaluation reports on the results
for these subjects on the National Center for University Entrance Examinations
website.
19 A body established in 1984 in response to public concern over the capacity of the
education system to respond to social change.
20 The Kōtō Gakkō ni okeru Gaikokugo Kyōiku Tayōka Jigyō (Plan for Diversification
of Foreign Language Education in High Schools).
21 www.mext.go.jp/b menu/shingi/chousa/shotou/020/sesaku/image/020402b.pdf,
22 Perhaps as a result of the 2002 World Cup held jointly in Japan and South Korea.
23 Others taught (in decreasing order of enrolments) Chinese (2,970 students; 119
schools), French (968; 38), Spanish (652; 29), German (329; 17), Italian (93; 5),
Russian (57; 6), Portuguese (38; 3), Indonesian (32; 3), Latin (18; 1), Thai (11; 2),
Filipino (3; 2), Vietnamese (1; 1) and Arabic (1; 1).
24 Then called ‘shina-go’ rather than today’s ‘chūgokugo’.
25 Similarly, an article in the education section of the Asahi the following year reported
further on the trend to making second foreign language study non-compulsory
at many universities, to the extent that some students no longer understood the
abbreviation ‘nigai’ for ‘second foreign language’ (daini gaikokugo). The article
stressed that the significance of studying other languages lay in coming to know
other people thereby, and commented that even if people all over the world could
communicate in English, that did not diminish the importance of Japanese, Korean
and Chinese people’s learning each other’s languages (Ishikawa 2009).
26 This revision abolished the distinction between general and specialised education,
which had seen general education subjects taught only in the first two years before
proceeding to the final two years of specialised education.
27 A notable exception here is the Faculty of Science and Technology at one of
Japan’s top private universities, Keio University, which contains a Department
of Foreign Languages and General Education in addition to twelve other aca-
demic departments and three graduate schools. Undergraduate students in this
department must study required courses in English and one other foreign lan-
guage. The rationale given for studying languages other than English is that
‘[a]s part of their preparation for taking on leadership responsibilities in the
twenty-first century, students clearly need to acquire skills in more than one for-
eign language’. For the required courses, students must choose from Chinese,
French, German, Korean and Russian; electives are also available in Arabic,
Italian and Spanish. Here the educational goals are listed as ‘learning regional
languages’ and ‘improving overall linguistic capacity and sharpening thinking
skills’ (www.st.keio.ac.jp/english/departments/faculty/facu fore.html, accessed 11
November 2010).
28 Korea was a Japanese colony during the period 1910–45; Taiwan was a colony 1895–
1945. In the 1920s, Korean-language departments at some Japanese universities were
abolished on the grounds that Korean was not therefore a foreign language (Nishie
2009).
29 While German was the language of a losing party postwar, it was already established
as a foreign language subject because of its importance in medicine, law and science
and technology and thus the prewar flow was continued (Nishie 2009).
30 As is the case elsewhere: foreign language enrolments are often affected by external
events. Enrolments in Chinese-language courses in Australia, for example, declined
sharply for a year or two following the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests
in 1989 but later re-established themselves.
31 Although many members of oldcomer communities, born and bred in Japan, do not
speak their heritage language, others do, as do the many newcomers from Korea
and Chinese-speaking countries.
32 Backhaus (2007: 77) mentions a sign at a small international telephone company in
Ōzaki, Tokyo, where the slogan ‘Calling from Japan’ is given in Japanese, English,
Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, Farsi and Tagalog, indicating the likely
makeup of the local population.
33 At the time this document was issued ‘the preferred foreign language was assumed
to be English, and those who should be provided the information were tourists or
business people from abroad’ rather than non-Japanese residents in local communi-
ties (Sato et al. 2009: 52). That came later, in the 1990s, following the arrival of many
workers from non-English-speaking countries. The national population census form
in 1990 was for the first time made available in translation in multiple languages.
34 Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, Farsi, Filipino, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean,
Malaysian, Nepali, Portuguese, Sinhalese, Spanish, Thai, Urdu and Vietnamese.
35 The 2010 census forms themselves were available in twenty-seven languages.
36 www.moj.go.jp/ENGLISH/IB/ip.html, accessed 11 November 2010.
37 www8.cao.go.jp/teiju-portal/eng/index.html, accessed 10 November 2010.
38 See Carroll 2010 for an excellent discussion of multilingual information on prefec-
tural government websites.
39 www.pref.kanagawa.jp/osirase/kokusai/, accessed 11 November 2010.
40 www.pref.aichi.jp/, accessed 11 November 2010.
41 www.pref.ibaraki.jp/bukyoku/seikan/kokuko/kokuko.htm, accessed 11 November
2010.
42 See, for example, Nagata 1991.
43 http://human.cc.hirosaki-u.ac.jp/kokugo/EJ1a.htm, accessed 11 November 2010.
44 www.pref.niigata.lg.jp/HTML_Simple/japanesegen.pdf, accessed 11 November
2010.
45 www.city.kawasaki.jp/73/73soumu/foreigner/index.htm, accessed 11 November
2010.
46 www.pref.saitama.lg.jp/site/tabunkakyousei/yasasiinihongo.html, accessed 11
November 2010.
47 www.pref.osaka.jp/kokusai/kotobanokabe/index.html, accessed 11 November
2010.
48 www.yoke.or.jp/Infectious/nihongo.pdf and http://nagatavc.org/vc/images/
infruchirashi.pdf, accessed 11 November 2010.
49 The NPO is the Kobe Ajia Taun Suishin Kyōgikai, established a year after the 1995
earthquake to provide foreign residents with information not only on emergencies but
also on daily life. Mori’s article includes a useful comparison of Yasashii Nihongo
with the earlier Kan’yaku Nihongo.
50 Available online at www.city.chiba.jp/sogoseisaku/sogoseisaku/kikaku/download/

kyodokenkyu/gaikokugo.pdf, accessed 11 November 2010.
51 www.city.chiba.jp/, accessed 11 November 2010.
4 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D L A N G UAG E P O L I C Y C H A N G E
1 Functional literacy ‘defines literacy relative to the requirements of an individual
within a particular society; it is the degree of literacy required for effective function-
ing in a particular community’ (Stubbs 1980: 14). For Levine (1994: 121), the degree
of social survival afforded by functional literacy invariably includes employability.
Coulmas (1994: 313) observes that functional literacy in Japanese is difficult to
define because of the structural features of the writing system: although the List of
Characters for General Use provides a yardstick, there is wide variation in the range
of kanji actually acquired across the spectrum from erudition to basic literacy, and
at the lower end some may know only a few hundred kanji. It is possible, he asserts,
to get by with considerably less than the Jōyō Kanji without being categorised as
semi-literate.
2 See follow-up article ‘Japan’s love of comics due to “low literacy rate”’ (The Japan
Times 2002), where the author of the New York Times piece explained that ‘a lot
of older Japanese’ had told him that proficiency in reading and writing kanji was
declining.
3 Percentages do not total 100 per cent because this was a ‘tick all that apply’ question.
4 Programme for International Student Assessment.
5 An annual publication giving bibliographic references for books, general-interest
magazine and newspaper articles relating to language which have appeared in the
press during that year, along with commentary on the trends revealed.
6 Many books have also been published along similar lines. In Miyake’s paper, she
found online reference to over 50 through a Yahoo search in 2002; my own search
of Amazon.co.jp in early August 2010 retrieved 148.
7 Excluding to a certain extent the business world, where Japanese typewriters – bulky
and requiring specialist training to use – had preceded word processing. Even so,
many office documents were written by hand pre-word processor, and the fax was
developed to allow for this.
8 Although of course the font capabilities were widely used for more decorative
functions.
9 Japan is a world leader in the mobile Internet: the number of cell phone subscriptions
has surpassed those of landline subscriptions since around the year 2000, and by
the end of fiscal year 2009 was approximately 2.7 times that of fixed subscriptions
(Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2010). The major use of cell
phone networks is to send e-mails on the move rather than to make voice calls
(Okada 2005: 49), owing in part to a social prohibition on using cell phones for
voice calls in public transport and other public places.
10 See, e.g., http://mizz.lolipop.jp/galmoji/v2.cgi, accessed 15 November 2010.
11 Sasahara (2002), for example, reports cases where students have written down kanji
during lectures with a slightly different shape from the handwritten norm because
they have copied them from their cell phone dictionaries, and Mino’s 2005 study
of student writing identifies paragraphing and punctuation difficulties along with
inability to differentiate properly between spoken and written language that she
attributes to the popularity of cell phone e-mailing.
12 This term had begun to appear in Japan as early as 1984.
13 A ‘cute’ way of writing using horizontal rather than vertical writing and very
stylised, rounded characters randomly interspersed with English, katakana and cute
little pictures.
14 One particularly noticeable area where reading and technology intersect is the ‘keitai
shōsetsu’ (cell phone novel), where short daily excerpts of novels can be read on
cell phones in a few minutes. These novels, which have great appeal for younger
readers, are often published in book form later: five of the thirty bestsellers of 2007
were ‘keitai shōsetsu’ (Yoshida 2008).
15 www.mext.go.jp/a menu/sports/dokusyo/index.htm, accessed 15 November 2010.
16 Possibly because of the manga practice of adding furigana to kanji.
17 Kanji policies and their associated ministries include the List of Characters for
General Use (Agency for Cultural Affairs, MEXT), the List of Characters for Use
in Personal Names (Ministry of Justice) (expanded in 2004) and the JIS (Japan
Industrial Standard) Kanji (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry).
18 This proposal also, as mentioned earlier, reaffirmed the importance of writing by
hand, given the decreasing opportunities to do so and the importance of writing by
hand in learning kanji.
19 A similar appendix is attached to the 1981 List of Characters for General Use.
20 Among the new additions are eleven characters used in the names of major cities
such as Osaka and of prefectures such as Gifu and Kumamoto, along with characters
for common words such as ‘pillow’, ‘chopsticks’, ‘buttocks’ and ‘chin’.
5 NAT I O NA L L A N G UAG E P O L I C Y A N D A N
I N T E R NAT I O NA L I S I N G C O M M U N I T Y
1 In January 2007, for example, Miyagi Prefecture became the first prefecture in
Japan to draft bylaws (the drafts are written in Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean
and Portuguese) promoting multiculturalism in that prefecture; six months later, the
prefectural assembly voted to accept them.
2 www.shujutoshi.jp/, accessed 1 November 2010.
3 www.city.konan.shiga.jp/konan1/yosan/pdf/2009/21108.pdf, accessed 16 Novem-
ber 2010.
4 See www.ajinzai-sc.jp/index.html, accessed 16 November 2010.
5 www.keidanren.or.jp/english/policy/2004/029.html, accessed 16 November 2010.
6 www.keidanren.or.jp/english/policy/2008/073.html, accessed 16 November 2010.
7 See www.nira.or.jp/past/newsj/kanren/180/182/pdf/03 jpn.pdf, accessed 16
November 2010.
8 www.moj.go.jp/ENGLISH/information/bpic3rd-03.html#3–1–6, accessed 15
November 2010.
9 www.mext.go.jp/b menu/houdou/19/01/06122800/06122802/002.htm, accessed 16
November 2010.
10 This term is difficult to translate and has been variously rendered as ‘consumers’,
‘people leading an everyday life’ (‘seikatsu’ means ‘everyday life’) or ‘people
earning everyday livelihoods’. I have chosen to translate it here as ‘residents’,
meaning ordinary everyday residents in local communities.
11 See www.mext.go.jp/a menu/shotou/clarinet/003/001.htm#a09, accessed 16

November 2010. The languages are Chinese, English, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish,
Tagalog and Vietnamese.
12 Children Living Abroad and Returnees Internet, at www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/
shotou/clarinet/main7_a2.htm, accessed 16 November 2010. Although their pres-
ence is not reflected in the CLARINET title, the site also contains information on
foreign children in Japanese schools.
13 Hello Work is the name given to the government’s network of employment ser-
vices centres. A list of Hello Work offices throughout Japan which provide foreign
language assistance is available on the website of the Tokyo Employment Ser-
vice Center for Foreigners at www.tfemploy.go.jp/en/coun/cont 2.html, accessed
16 November 2010. The languages offered are almost without exception Chinese,
English, Portuguese and Spanish.
14 An organisation experienced in offering introductory courses on Japanese language
and culture to trainees coming to Japan from other countries. See JICE website at
http://jice.org/e/jigyou/nihongo.htm, accessed 16 November 2010, for details.
15 At www8.cao.go.jp/teiju-portal/eng/index.html, accessed 16 November 2010.
16 Full name: Tabunka Tagengo Shakai no Jitsugen to sono Tame no Kyōiku ni
taisuru Kōteki Hoshō o mezasu Tōkyō Sengen oyobi Kōdō Keikaku (Tokyo
Declaration aiming for the Public Endorsement of Education for the Purpose
of Realising a Multicultural and Multilingual Society) (translation, Catherine
Maxwell).
17 See homepage3.nifty.com/N-forum/aboutForum.html, accessed 16 November 2010.
18 This was also the case with the 1999 Law for the Promotion of the Ainu Culture, on
which this section (Articles Four and Five) of the Act is modelled.
19 www.houseika2012.net/wordpress/, accessed 16 November 2010.
20 See the statement on the Council’s website at www.shujutoshi.jp/gaiyou/index.htm,
21 Named after the city of Hamamatsu which acted as Council secretariat for that
two-year period.
22 MIAC, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, MEXT, Agency for Cultural
Affairs, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, and the Social Insurance Agency.
23 Children who for health or other unavoidable reasons cannot attend school during
the nine years of compulsory education can take an examination equivalent to the
end of middle school; if they pass, they are given a high school entry qualification.
The Council recommended that a special test of this kind tailored to assessing the
abilities of non-Japanese students having difficulty with the language be developed.
24 http://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%20993/volume-993-I-14531
-English.pdf, accessed 16 November 2010.
25 www.mext.go.jp/b menu/hakusho/html/hpaa200901/detail/1284405.htm, accessed
16 November 2010.
26 With the possible exception of the 2003 Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with
English Abilities, in the case of English, and even that is reactive in the sense that
it is a reaction to external developments of English as an International Language
on the international scene and the large-scale investment by other East Asian and
South East Asian governments in teaching English, as well as Japan’s poor showing
in the TOEFL scales.
Note to page 163 179
CONCLUSION
1 AMEP provides free English lessons for adult migrants who are new to Aus-
tralia, have been granted a permanent visa and have little or no English. See
www.immi.gov.au/living-in-australia/help-with-english/amep/learning-english/,
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Index
Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Easy Japanese (Yasashii Nihongo), 93, 139
Abilities, 65, 66, 71, 98 eigo igai no gaikokugo (foreign languages
Ad Hoc Council on Education (Rinji Kyōiku other than English), 64
Shingikai), 71 electronic text production
Ainu language, 2, 5, 123 and changes in writing practices, 107–8
Aso Tarō, 10, 99 and declining kanji proficiency, 105–10
Association for Japanese Language Teaching and revision of kanji policy, 122
(AJALT), 45 English language
Association for Overseas Technical and English-first mentality, 82
Scholarship (AOTS), 45, 54 and ‘gaikokugo’, 64, 66, 83
and ‘intercultural communication’, 83
Basic Stance on Admitting Foreigners in the and public signs, 88
Future (Kongo no Gaikokujin no in elementary schools 2011, 65
Ukeire ni kansuru Kihonteki na in schools, 77
Kangaekata), 132 teaching of, 12–13, 65, 156
cell phone e-mailing, 52, 103, 109 foreign and community languages, 66–76
Center for Multilingual Multicultural and language policy, 66–7, 85
Education and Research (CEMMER), benefits of teaching, 85–6
41 in secondary schools, 76–81
Central Education Council (Chūō Kyōiku in universities, 82–5
Shingikai), 65 foreign nurses and careworkers, 52–6
citizenship, 5, 8, 15, 28, 31, 37, 145, 165 and Japanese language, 52–4, 132
and language, 145, 154 and Japanese writing system, 55
civil society, 49, 125, 129, 130, 153 and JSL materials, 56
community languages, 84, 155 functional literacy
definition of, 68 definitions of, 176
importance of teaching, 72
in public services, 86 gyarumoji, 109
need for policy on, 75 and anti-language, 110
value of studying, 74
Comprehensive Plan for dealing with Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, 25, 93
‘Foreigners as Residents’ (Seikatsusha
toshite no Gaikokujin ni kansuru immigration, 21–4, 33
Sōgōteki Taiōsaku), 26, 138 and children in Japanese schools, 36–41,
Council of Cities with High Concentrations of 139
Foreign Residents (Gaikokujin Shūjū and language needs, 24, 28–9, 33–63
Toshi Kaigi), 27, 127, 131, 149, instrumental recognition of, 133
164 national government documents on,
Course of Study (Foreign Languages), 65 130–40
and local governments, 25
designated schools, 77, 78, 115, 157 and private sector, 24
205
206 Index
immigration (cont.) kokugo panic, 103

government view of, 1, 23, 126 kokusaika (internationalisation), 25, 71
linguistic consequences of, 36 kotodama (spirit of the language), 10
newcomers, 22, 35, 47, 68, 126
oldcomers, 22, 35, 47, 68, 156 language attitudes, 13–16
projections, 22 language classes
statistics, 34 and NHK, 75
terminology for, 23, 33 private sector, 74
Internet language ideology, 1, 2–6, 162
and Japanese language, 107, 108 and discourse practices, 4
and mutilingual information, 86 and language policy, 5, 7
interpreting and legitimation, 2, 115, 161
and lay jury system, 61 in Japan, 13, 123, 162
court, 59–61 and English, 66
legal, certification need for, 60 and foreign languages, 19, 96
police, 58–9 and politicians, 9
and writing, 105, 106
Japan Business Federation (Nippon historical basis for, 17
Keidanren), 131 language management, 7, 116, 124, 144, 161,
Japan Foundation, 3, 54, 56, 68 163
Japanese language language planning, 16, 62
and internal variation, 8 three orientations in, 72
as official language, 8 language planning and policy, 16–21
disarray in, 14, 110, 115 language play, 108
Japanese Language Education Guarantee Act language policy, 3, 17
Study Group, 52, 146 and curriculum guidelines, 72
JET Programme, 65, 67–8, 71, 83 and English, 18, 20
JSL classes and JSL education, 123
and MEXT, 38–40, 140–3 and kanji list, 119
and night schools, 41–3 and local government, 125–7
and schools, 37–8 and revision of kanji list, 111
local examples of, 40 and script policies, 17, 30
and teaching materials, 40–5 and social harmony, 160
for adults, 46 and standard language, 18
writing, 45–6 and writing practices, 111
MEXT reports on, 36 at national level, 123–4
need for, 34 foreign language education, 64, 155–8,
regional, 36 161
JSL education, 124, 161
kanji covert, 3, 6, 19
actual decline in use of, 99 local government
actual mastery of, 106 examples of, 127–30
and ideology, 98, 100, 115, 119 need for change, 31, 161
concerns about electronic use of, 107 overt, 17–19, 123
fears of declining use, 99–105 role of, 161
policy, 98 language practices, 3
in the information age, 116 language regime, 6
policy focus on, 115 changing, 21
pride in, 13 language services (tagengo saabisu), 88
surveys on use of, 100, 102 languages-in-education policy, 96
katsuji banare (loss of interest in the printed legal system and language, 57–61
word), 105 statistics, 57
Katsuragi, Takao, 20–1 linguistic landscaping, 86
kiibōdo ningen (keyboard persons), 112 and language policy, 87
Kokugo Bunkakai, 30, 103, 113, 116, 152 linguistic nationalism, 5, 9
Index 207
List of Characters for General Use, 18, 30, 98, Plan for Promoting Multicultural Coexistence
116 in Local Communities (Chiiki ni okeru
2010 revision of, 105, 111, 116–21 Tabunka Kyōsei Suishin Puran), 26,
aim of, 119 134
literacy, 11, 30–1, 98, 100, 112, 165
and class hours, 102 reading skills, 113
and electronic technologies, 100 Recommendations for Accepting
and manga, 113–14 Non-Japanese Workers (Gaikokujin
and online language practices, 114–15 Ukeire Mondai ni kansuru Teigen),
perceptions of decline in, 100 24
loanwords (gairaigo), 14, 15 regional languages, 155
local government support for teaching of, 70–1
and JSL classes, 43–6, 52 Revised List of Characters for General Use
cost of, 128 (Kaitei Jōyō Kanji Hyō), 119
language classes (non-Japanese), 74
seikatsusha, 150
marumoji, 112 definition of, 140
moji banare (loss of interest in writing), 105 Simplified Japanese (Kan’yaku Nihongo), 93
monolingualism, 3, 5, 7, 11, 12, 21, 33, 124, Society for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign
162 Language (Nihongo Kyōiku Gakkai),
multiculturalism 148
cosmetic, 29 speech community, 129
discourse of, 24 in Japan, 6
multilingual information, 158
and disasters, 93 tabunka kyōsei (multicultural coexistence), 1,
and local governments, 88 25–7, 29, 39, 90, 134
and the census, 90 and local governments, 135–6
online, 90–5, 145 and multiculturalism, 27
multilingual language services, 86–95 and non-Japanese spouses, 50
MIAC definition of, 27
National Center for University Entrance
Examinations uchinaru kokusaika (domestic
report on Chinese, 80 internationalisation), 24, 36, 85, 125,
report on Korean, 79 126
National Language Council, 30, 111, 115, 121 Ueda Kazutoshi, 9
national law on JSL education, 145–55 University Establishment Standards
National Network of Forums on Japanese 1991 revision of, 83
Language (Nihongo Fuōramu Zenkoku
Netto), 146 volunteers and JSL, 46–9, 55
night schools, enrolments in, 42
Nihongo Kyōiku Shinkō Hō (Laws for the wakamono kotoba, 110
Promotion of Japanese Language writing
Education), 149 by hand, 103, 106, 121
nihonjinron, 17 mistakes in, 116
nikkei (immigrants of Japanese descent), 22, concept of, 30
28, 35, 43, 132, 143 teaching of, 98
non-Japanese spouses, 49–52 writing skills
and JSL classes, 51 tertiary remedial classes in, 104
statistics, 50 writing system, 1, 10, 11, 39, 45
written language, 11, 20, 104
OECD, 82, 163 and new writing practices, 29–31
online writing practices written text, dependence on, 105
and offline writing, 111, 115
yutori aru kyōiku (pressure-free education),
permanent residents, 35 102, 104

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Language Policy in Japan

The Challenge of Change

nanette gottlieb is Professor of Japanese Studies in the Japan Program of

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2012

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

ISBN 978-1-107-00716-1 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

1 Language ideology, planning and policy 1

Notes to the text 167

policies and strongly entrenched ideologies of language, the areas of social

citizenship. It means a rethink of the role of language in nation-building, not

I am very much indebted to the Australian Research Council for a five-year

wider social ideologies. Put simply, language ideology can be described as

The nature of language ideology

As the Ainu example indicates, language ideologies change over time in

The decision to codeswitch between dialect and standard Japanese, he posits,

The association between ideologies and specific policies is not always

In other words, unstated expectations about how a particular country’s lan-

Language ideology in Japan

elementary schools should concentrate on improving students’ literacy in their

languages; although those languages posed no real threat to the predominance

as her fieldwork revealed, women use the delimited parameters of ‘women’s

Minister Ibuki reinforced the message of monoethnicity when he referred to

It is useful here to consider a comment by Woolard and Schieffelin (1994:

In the Japanese view, the study of English is a survival skill, a competence

internationalisation by allowing Japan to communicate with its international

Ideology and language attitudes

Ideology and language planning and policy

While government-instigated initiatives are the most immediately visible, lan-

language that is learned deliberately through instruction . . . the result of purposeful

combined with a desire to protect a longstanding cultural tradition. The choice

English-language lessons and, increasingly, requiring advanced proficiency for

complementarity of language policies, by which I mean the ways in which apparently

Ideology’s grasp, as Katsuragi implies, has to date prevented the development

Immigration, though still small in comparison with other countries, has

Regardless of the increasing presence of foreign residents, at national govern-

The vocabulary of diversity

in an ethnically homogeneous national identity. In similar vein, Yamanaka

The ideology of monolingualism can prove enduringly resistant to change,

addition to an unknown number of unregistered others who may have entered

Chiiki Nihongo Kyōiku (regional Japanese-language education, hereafter

Immigrant students in Japanese schools

high-school students deemed in need of JSL education actually received it (an

and education advisory services; at prefectural level, it is despatching advisors

signalling an end to the ideology of homogeneity, Kawakami’s more realis-

Language education for adults

Japanese if interpreters and compatriot workers were able to provide commu-

The role of volunteers

to create a groundswell of change in Japanese society. Japanese volunteers

Non-Japanese spouses of Japanese citizens

Foreign nurses and care workers

acknowledgment of the problem at ministerial level represents at least a step

Language and the legal system

interpreter: Amharic, Arabic, Indonesian, Urdu, Estonian, Dutch, Cambodian,

Studies began offering a master’s course aimed at training interpreters and

Whatever happens on the policy front, whether Japan decides in time to

The major policy document setting out expectations of the foreign-language

understanding of the peoples of the world through foreign languages (MEXT

Foreign and community languages

the readiness of people in local communities to engage with speakers of other

Another survey of attitudes towards foreign-language learning in Japan was