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Teaching English in Japan

Even before I set foot in Japan, being a white, university-educated male from England gave me access to jobs at commercial language schools and teaching programs like the JET Program. The first school I taught at, a commercial language school (Eikaiwa in Japanese), advertised itself as a British English school. The company’s adverts featured pictures of young, white, smartly dressed teachers reflecting the trends identified by Piller and Takahashi. I later taught at a private high school where being a British passport holder was one of the requirements for employment. In this school, the foreign teachers were collectively addressed as “natives” by the Japanese teachers, and we had an ambivalent position in the school despite prominently featuring on the school’s website and at open days.

While being white, British, and male gave me privileged mobility to gain stable employment in Japan, both my employers offered little or no encouragement for Japanese learning. This meant that after 6 years of teaching in Japan, I developed a bittersweet relationship with Japanese, characterised by periods of both engagement and non-engagement with learning Japanese.

After returning to the UK to study for a master’s, reading Piller and Takahashi’s work connected many of the dots I had felt while in Japan. Throughout my time in Japan, I met teachers with varying Japanese proficiency levels. There were constant discussions about the need to speak Japanese and even some tension between teachers about their Japanese levels, but there was little institutional support for Japanese learning. Reading about the ideologies identified by Piller and Takahashi on learners led me to wonder how these forces influenced teachers in Japan when they were learning Japanese, so I made this goal of my Ph.D. research.

My research

Poster for an English language school in Japan (Image credit: Shinshin50)

I researched how two groups, newly arrived and long-term teachers learned Japanese. For the newly arrived teachers, 9 took part in a 6-month diary study in which they wrote weekly diaries about their Japanese language learning and participated in monthly interviews. For the long-term teachers, I interviewed 13 teachers who had made lives in Japan about their Japanese language learning histories.

The newly arrived teachers had to self-direct their learning while trying to find their position in the classroom, the school, and Japan. The newly arrived teachers found it challenging to develop consistent learning routines. While they had access to countless online self-study learning resources and approaches, they struggled to consistently use these resources and find appropriate face-to-face Japanese classes. One teacher felt she had to choose between her own mental well-being and Japanese learning, while other newly arrived teachers found managing Japanese learning alongside working and living in Japan caused them stress and mental health issues.

The long-term teachers also experienced trouble regulating Japanese language learning on a long-term basis. Some teachers were able to build long-term learning approaches that combined Japanese study with involvement with local communities, while others experienced more fluctuating Japanese learning, interspersing periods of engaged learning with periods of disengagement. Finding opportunities to use Japanese was a struggle for both groups of teachers as building connections with Japanese people depended on introductions from employers, connections teachers had before they arrived in Japan, or the areas they were placed in.

The deep impact of the desire for English in Japan on the lives of these foreign teachers could be seen in the lives of long-term foreign teachers in Japan. Often these teachers used English in romantic relationships, with one male teacher describing how marrying an English-speaking foreigner was seen as a way out of Japanese society by Japanese women. Due to the enduring desire for English in Japan, many long-term teachers with children in my study used English with their children to transfer their linguistic capital of being a native English speaker to their children. As they became long-term residents of Japan, the value of studying for academic and teaching qualifications that would help advance in their English teaching careers often trumped the symbolic capital Japanese learning gave them.

The key for both groups of teachers to sustaining Japanese learning and use was facilitative communities and individuals to use Japanese with. These individuals and communities often modified their Japanese and encouraged English teachers to learn and use Japanese. They were found within local areas, workplaces, and community groups. They invested in these teachers as Japanese speakers despite ideologies that saw foreign English teachers as short-term visitors to Japan and foreigners as deficient Japanese speakers. The depth and sustainability of each teacher’s Japanese engagement was strongly impacted by whether a learner had access to individuals and groups willing to invest in them as Japanese speakers.

The Future

Given the recent increases in migration to Japan, the importance of providing opportunities for migrants to learn Japanese will only increase in the coming years. Despite this, 70% of Japanese learning programs in Japan outside of the higher education sector are taught by community volunteers, many of whom do not have formal teaching qualifications. One recent study of Japanese foreign language programs in Tokyo found that in one large central ward of Tokyo, the lack of community-based classes meant that: “In 2020, Shibuya reported 10,597 foreign residents; if all of these residents want to complete the ward-sponsored courses, it would take more than 100 years”. Due to the “desire” of Japanese people to learn English, foreign English teachers will no doubt continue to live and work in Japan. Some teachers like me and the participants in my research in Japan will build lives in Japan. It remains to be seen whether there are the learning resources to meet the needs of migrants in Japan.

Being “the desired”

While being “the desired” in Japan gives English teachers “privileged mobility” to access jobs in Japan, the Japanese learning of the teachers in my study was dependent on each teacher’s own agency, their access to facilitative individuals and communities in Japan, and their ability to deal with the stress of learning Japanese while living and working in Japan. Being the “desired” for their English within Japan influenced the teachers in three significant ways: it mediated their access to communities of practice in which to use Japanese, it dictated the support English teachers had for their Japanese learning, and how English teachers and broader Japanese society valued Japanese learning.

One unintended consequence of my research was that it forced me to examine my relationship with Japanese learning and using Japanese. Examining how these teachers learned and used Japanese made me re-evaluate and change my approach to learning Japanese. These changes have allowed me to engage more with learning and using Japanese.

While I outlined some of the broader conclusions of my PhD here, because of the large amount of data I collected, there are even more insights to come from my research in the future.

References

Hatasa, Y. and Watanabe, T. (2017). Japanese as a Second Language Assessment in Japan: Current Issues and Future Directions. Language Assessment Quarterly, 14(3), pp.192-212. https://doi.org/10.1080/15434303.2017.1351565
Lee, S. J., & Niiya, M. (2021). Migrant oriented Japanese language programs in Tokyo: A qualitative study about language policy and language learners. Migration and Language Education, 2(1), 17–33. https://doi.org/10.29140/mle.v2n1.489
Minns, O. T. (2021). The teacher as a learner: English teachers learning Japanese in Japan [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Anglia Ruskin University. Available at: https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/id/eprint/707748
Piller, I., & Takahashi, K., 2006. A passion for English: Desire and the language market. In A. Pavlenko (ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, pp. 59 – 83.
Takahashi, K., 2013. Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

The South China-Laos-Thailand region with the new railway line (Source: South China Morning Post)

Language learning through watching films and playing videogames is a new trend. This kind of informal language learning differs significantly from language learning in the classroom or in immersion contexts.

Language learning through media brings new languages to the fore that have not been widely learned in the past, and it is particularly marginalized speakers of peripheral languages for whom media provide new language learning opportunities.

Here, I will illustrate mediated language learning with the example of the Thai language learning by two groups of people marginalized in China: international students from Laos and ethnic minority youths with a Zhuang background. Both Lao and Zhuang are minor peripheral languages in the global linguistic order. And both are closely related to the Thai language.

My account here draws on the work of my students Tingjiang Ge (葛婷江), Yifan Man (满怡帆), and Xinyao Li (李欣瑶).

Students from Laos learning Chinese through Thai

Some of Van’s favorite Thai-medium Chinese dramas on her mobile

Laos is a land-locked country surrounded by China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. The recently opened railway from its capital, Vientiane, to Kunming in China will transform it from land-locked to land-linked, as part of China’s ambitious 5,500-km trans-Asia railway. This material link between Laos and China is further reinforced by an increasing number of scholarships awarded to students from Laos to study in China.

However, despite needing to achieve Chinese language proficiency at HSK-4 level for admission, many students from Laos still lack the Chinese proficiency needed to thrive in their subject learning.

To overcome these difficulties, many of them turn to Thai for their Chinese language learning. Sounds counterintuitive? Well, it is not.

To begin with, Thai is an easy language for Lao students because the two languages are mutually intelligible, there are only slight differences in the scripts of the two languages, and Thai media play a prominent role in Laos.

Second, there are many Chinese language learning resources for Thai speakers but few for Lao speakers.

Combine these two facts and it is obvious how Thai can facilitate Chinese language learning for students from Laos. Thai allows them to use translation apps to check the meaning of Chinese vocabulary, to use textbooks aimed at Thai learners of Chinese, and – the most popular option – to watch Chinese dramas with Thai subtitles.

Becoming a producer of Chinese-themed Thai language content

The story of Van is particularly impressive. Like many of her Lao peers, Van gave up her university study in Laos and came to China to seek a more profitable future. The aspiration of most international students from Laos is to return to Laos after their studies in China, and to find a steady job in a Chinese company there.

One of the main characters in Van’s Chinese-themed Thai-language novel

Van’s aspiration is different: she wants to become an entrepreneurial writer producing Chinese-themed novels for the Thai market.

Since she was very young, Van has loved reading Thai novels and watching Thai dramas. This also exposed her to many novels and dramas translated from Chinese into Thai, long before she even started to learn Chinese.

As her knowledge of Chinese language and culture has blossomed, she has started to write her own fiction. Van’s writing has strong elements of Chinese fantasy and romance but is written in Thai. The reason she has chosen Thai instead of Lao as the medium of her writing lies in the larger size of the Thai-language market and the greater technological sophistication of the Thai-medium online space.

Through her years of exposure to different transnational social media, Van today markets her writing on all major Thai-medium reading apps and has already gained a loyal following of over 2,000 Thai readers.

Chinese students learning Thai through Zhuang

Thai media content is not only attractive to youths from Laos but also those from China. It is particularly the Boys’ Love genre that is hugely popular. While negative attitudes towards same-sex relationships and queer identities persist in China, the opposite is true in Thailand. The Boys’ Love genre centers on romantic relationships between male characters. Thai media thus introduce Chinese youths to a broader range of gender and sexual identities and help to promote gender and sexual diversity. A good example for the popularity of the genre comes from the Boys’ Love actor Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana, also known as Saint, who has over 1.1 million Chinese followers on Weibo,

A scene from “I told sunset about you” – its potential as a language learning resource is obvious

Ban, a Zhuang minority student from Funing, a border town in Yunnan between China and Vietnam, is one of those Chinese fans of Thai dramas. When she started to watch Thai dramas as a teenager out of curiosity for the “exotic” culture of Thailand, she was surprised to discover that the Thai language is quite similar to Zhuang.

This similarity – coupled with the informal exposure through her prolific drama watching – led her to quickly develop proficiency in Thai.

Her proficiency in Thai proved a huge asset when Ban graduated from university and could not find a job suited to her degree in business administration. It was her Thai that helped her secure a position and she now works as a business translator for an international company in Guangzhou.

Transnational Thai media

The popularity of Thai dramas in China has not been lost on Thai producers. Boys’ Love dramas increasingly include Chinese content to reach further into the huge and profitable Chinese market.

A student from the China-Laos Friendship Nongping Primary School on the Lane Xang EMU train of the China-Laos Railway (Source: Xinhuanet)

The drama “I Told Sunset about You” is a case in point. The plot centers on the romance between two boys preparing for university admission by taking Chinese language classes. The story is driven by their joint language learning focusing on key words all involving the Chinese word 心 (xin; “heart”).

This plot is not particularly far-fetched as the Chinese language has indeed become a commodity in Thailand that may help individuals to gain upward mobility in study and at work. Aspects of Thai culture and Chinese language meld to produce a new form of consumer product that may generate profit.

Strengthening transnational relationships

The opening of the Laos-China segment of the trans-Asian railroad constitutes a major milestone for transnational connections between China, Laos, Thailand, and, eventually, beyond. These connections are mostly seen in economic and geopolitical terms. The links that individuals build through linguistic and cultural consumption are too often overlooked.

The concept of language learning for academic or employment advance is no longer sufficient to understand young language learners’ learning experiences. The language desire that is evident in the research presented here deserves further attention to capture how young and marginalized people without much linguistic capital in valuable languages like English and Chinese might be included in the regional integration between China and ASEAN.

Author’s note: ‘Malay Sketches’ charts the poet’s gain/loss of language following the British colonisation of Singapore. Mirrored in three columns, the first poem’s silence presents her ignorance of the Jawi script; the second mourns the gradual loss of her Malay mother tongue, while the third celebrates childhood scenes in Lakemba, Sydney. Words that are obscured she has no current knowledge of.

Kimie Takahashi (2013) Language learning, gender and desire: Japanese women on the move. Multilingual Matters.

It’s Valentine’s Day today. Valentine’s Day is a truly global event inextricably linking the emotional life of individuals with the capitalist world order. Young women around the world dream of romantic love and many men do their best to meet those dreams, showing how much they care by buying flowers, chocolates, lingerie, jewellery or any of the other consumer goods that have come to symbolize romantic love. Those that do not engage in the consumption bonanza also find their lives touched by Valentine’s Day: for instance, an estimated 198 million red roses are grown specifically for Valentine’s Day and that’s a huge amount of one particular crop to get ready, to harvest and to bring to market for one single day: the socio-economic structure of whole counties in Kenya, Colombia or Ecuador has been changed to make way for this floral industry.

Given the deep connections between individual emotions and the socio-economic order, it is not surprising that English, too, has found its way into this mix. A timely new book, Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move* by Kimie Takahashi, explains exactly those connections.

Following a group of young adult Japanese women studying overseas in Sydney, the book shows how, during their teenage years, the romantic desires of these young women had been shaped by Hollywood movies and other popular media. Teenage crushes on media stars are nothing unusual and each generation seems to have their own idols. However, for the Japanese women in the study the pop stars they had teenage crushes on (men like Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt) had a salient characteristic: they were white native speakers of English.

As a result, they ended up making a deep emotional connection between romantic attractiveness, Whiteness and English. While they outgrew their teenage crushes, their desire for white English-speaking men lingered on.

As the study shows, this was not only an idiosyncratic romantic desire that the five women who were the study’s main participants happened to develop. Rather, the association between learning English, going abroad and falling in love is actively fostered in many discourses promoting English language learning, from women’s magazines to language school advertising. Indeed, teaching ‘the language of love’ – Relationship English or Renai English – has become a form of English for Specific Purposes that is addressed in specific language learning materials and courses.

In sum, a range of powerful media discourses worked to inculcate particular emotional sensibilities in these women, which included a conflation of going abroad, learning English, and romantic desires.

Once in Sydney, of course, a different reality quickly hit: establishing contacts and relationships with locals (and particularly the kinds of locals they desired) was far from easy; becoming fluent in English was not as easy as they had imagined it would be once they were in Australia; and few of the men they met conformed to the chivalrous image of Westerners they had formed in their minds.

Each of the participants has her own life story and had to face her own trials and tribulations in Sydney. However, their emotional experiences are deeply shaped by the role of English as both an object of desire and a consumer commodity.

If you are looking for some academic reading this Valentine’s Day, Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move is the one. Don Kulick’s endorsement of the book sums up the reading experience you can expect:

Romance blossoms, hearts break, and lives change as Japanese women go troppo in the Antipodes and tell the author all about their dreams, adventures and experiences of learning English as a second language. This delightful book is the definitive answer to the question, ‘Is the concept of “desire” useful to students of language?’. The ethnography is wacky, the analysis is insightful and the writing is engaging and crisp. An absolute must-read for everyone interested in language and desire, language and learning, and language and globalization.

Enjoy! And Happy Valentine’s Day!

*In the interest of full disclosure: I was the supervisor of the PhD research the book is based on.

Takahashi, Kimie (2013). Language learning, gender and desire: Japanese women on the move Multilingual Matters

Gay men, English and desire in Bangkok

I have recently begun working on my MA thesis on sexuality and second language learning at the Graduate School of English, Assumption University of Thailand, under the supervision of Kimie Takahashi. She has encouraged me to share my experience in developing this project here on Language on the Move. Funny enough, my research topic is often seen as ‘outside the box’ here, but it came quite naturally, so to speak, and here is why.

In 2010, I arrived in Bangkok as an international student from Taiwan, and since then I’ve been introduced to many fashionable gay hubs, such as the glamorous Telephone Bar or The Balcony on Silom Soi 4 or the always-packed DJ Station on Soi 2.  The city has always been well-known  internationally for its gay-friendliness and sexual diversity (Jackson, 2011), and indeed these places are packed with international couples, especially Asian and Western.

What struck me most about Bangkok’s international gay scene here is that these Asian gay men from non-English-speaking backgrounds, do not only speak good English but also seem very confident and skilful in socialising with Westerners: they so elegantly flirt, joke around and engage in intellectual conversations on the economy, education, globalisation and whatnot, all in English. They definitely don’t fit the image of Asians as deficient or shy speakers of English that is still paramount in the literature that I have been reading since I began my master’s degree in ELT. I’m pretty sure that they’d roll their eyes or be offended if I told them how Asians are talked about as such by researchers.

When I initially started developing an MA thesis project last year, I didn’t know that what I had observed in my daily life could be a research topic. Having read A Passion for English by Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi (2006), I learned that research on the intersection of sexuality and desire in second language learning is actually cutting-edge I then decided to propose a project that would look into the language learning trajectory of gay Asian men in Bangkok, to explore if they were like the Japanese women in their study who developed akogare (desire) for the English language alongside their fantasy for Western masculinity.

Having decided to model my project on Ingrid’s and Kimie’s work, I looked for similar ELT studies with a focus on Asian gay men’s desire for English and the West. My pursuit was rather fruitless. Brian King (2008) explains that although the fields of ELT in general and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in particular have investigated learner motivation and learner identities since the 1980s, the literature has suffered from heteronormativity. Indeed, doing my literature review has made me wonder what kind of world previous research has been occupying for the last so many decades – certainly not the one occupied by millions of fellow gay and lesbian friends of mine living side by side with fellow heterosexual folks.

As such the fields of ELT and SLA have failed to address why gay learners aspire to learn English or how such aspirations manifest in their linguistic practices and learning or if being gay really matters at all. Similarly, the fields of Sexuality Studies or Sociology seem to have paid little attention to the language learning trajectories of gay Asian men who desire Western men. My study is thus designed t to fill this gap in the literature on Asian gay men’s desire for English and Western men, and how their desires may impact their opportunities to learn and use English in Bangkok.

As part of the requirements for my degree, I defended my proposal, a critical ethnography of Asian gay men’s desire and second language learning in Bangkok, to the proposal committee in April, 2012. One of the comments by an examiner was “This is an interesting project. It’s like thinking outside the box”. I was flattered, of course, as every new research has to be original and innovative. But, at the same time, the metaphor of the ‘box’ seems to index the very problem I’m going to challenge head-on, i.e., heteronormativity. For me, a gay man belonging to the thriving gay community in Bangkok and beyond, what I’m going to look into is pretty much inside the box.

References
Jackson, P. A. (2011). Queer Bangkok : Twenty-first-century markets, media, and rights. Aberdeen, Hong Kong; Chiang Mai, Thailand: Hong Kong Univ. Press; Silkworm Books.

King, B. (2008). “Being Gay Guy, That is the Advantage”: Queer Korean Language Learning and Identity Construction Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 7 (3-4), 230-252 DOI: 10.1080/15348450802237855

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2006). A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market In A. Pavlenko (Ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation: Multilingual Matters, pp. 59–83.

Because I know all of this, I was not surprised to learn (in Clayton 2008) that the good people of Cambodia, too, want to learn English; nor was I surprised that the good people of the West are doing their best to help them to exert that choice. In the mid-1990s, for instance, one British and two Australian aid agencies alone devoted around USD12 million to provide English language teaching aid for Cambodia so as to enable Cambodians to exert the choice for English.

But then I saw another figure and was surprised: during the same period the funds devoted by ALL external aid agencies to support basic literacy in Cambodia were USD5 million. Seeing that two thirds of the adult Cambodian population are functionally illiterate, USD12mio for English teaching from only three agencies against USD5mio for literacy from all external agencies is an interesting difference in spending priorities. It is this conundrum that is at the heart of Stephen Clayton’s exploration of the meaning of “choice” when it comes to language policy and, specifically, English language spread in Cambodia.

Clayton’s central argument is that “choice” is not free and that the demand for English in Cambodia has been constructed by international aid agencies, including those operating in refugee camps and the United Nations Transitional Authority. All these set up English as a way to lead Cambodia out of international isolation (an isolation which was, incidentally, forced upon Cambodia by the UN in its 1979 decision not to recognize the Heng Samrin government), as a way to access international aid, and thus the means for reconstruction and development. The need for English in Cambodia has thus been largely constructed by external agencies and is based on an external orientation to development.

Does it matter how a particular choice was structured and created in evaluating the choice? It could be argued that, no matter how, why and by who the demand for English was created, now it’s there and Cambodians need English to be able to access aid, to participate in the emerging tourist economy, to develop and to become integrated into the global economy. If all Cambodians today had an equal chance to become fluent in English and to access all those supposed or real benefits, one would have to agree. However, the external orientation (to aid, tourism, the global) inscribed into English benefits only a tiny Cambodian elite. Those with proficiency in English can access external aid agencies and the model of externally driven “development” becomes entrenched.

At the same time, the external development model has been failing the majority of Cambodians, the rural and urban poor. Additionally, for all the rhetoric of choice, English is out of their reach. For instance, in the export trade, on an average garment worker’s wage of USD45 per month, even English lessons at 2cents per hour as provided by some aid agencies are unaffordable. Not to mention that these workers probably have little time and energy left for English study. The vast majority of Cambodians are mired in poverty to such a degree that learning English is not a feasible choice for them – an impossible dream maybe. What is more, the development model of “free” global markets into which English is inscribed has actually removed another choice from the reach of most of these people: the choice to become literate in their own language.

Choice is a marker of privilege. For all the neoliberal cult of personal responsibility, choice is only for those who are beyond the constraints of economic necessity. As Clayton shows, the choice of English in Cambodia was structured on the basis of external and internal socio-economic inequalities in the first place and the privileging of English within the free market model further widened those inequalities as an effect of the restructuring of local labour markets.

If “everyone” wants to learn English, it is not because English is so wonderful but because too many of us have no other choice.

Clayton, S. (2008). The problem of ‘choice’ and the construction of the demand for English in Cambodia Language Policy, 7 (2), 143-164 DOI: 10.1007/s10993-008-9084-9

Having lived and taught English in Japan for more than fifteen years, until last night I’d thought I’d seen it all. That was until I stumbled across the もし彼氏が外国人だったら英会話 (What if my Boyfriend was a Foreigner English Conversation [my translation]) iPhone application.

This application, as you might have guessed, is a novel new twist on foreign language ‘edutainment’. Consumers begin a virtual relationship with one of three characters, and as their romantic love story unfolds, English conversational ability is apparently enhanced! Wow!

 There are three virtual foreign boyfriends from which to choose from: First, there’s William, aged 20. He’s blonde haired and blue eyed, and sports a decisively British cricket vest. Or perhaps Daniel is more your speed? He’s 35, and a dead-ringer for Johnny Depp. Finally, there’s Keith. I’m not too sure what to make of Keith. At 25, he seems too young to carry off a yellow bowtie and pink sports coat. But then again, how would I know? Oh, and yes, of course William, Daniel, and Keith are all ‘white’.

If you get sick of the guy you first choose, no problem. He can be changed! (According to the blurb, ストーリーは選んだ相手により変化する。) Through daily telephone ‘conversations’ – which are actually just recordings of your ‘boyfriend’ talking – your listening ability is reportedly enhanced, and through a Quiz Mode, phrases from the ‘conversations’ can be practiced (毎日の電話会話でリスニング力を強化し、「クイズモード」で会話に出てきたフレーズ練習を行っていく。). Such cutting edge teaching indeed!

It’s no wonder there are so many glowing testimonials from satisfied consumers. According to one review, リスニングが楽しい♡, 単語じゃなくてフレーズとして覚えられるので使えそう！解説も丁寧で分かりやすい☆ (The listening is enjoyable. I can remember phrases and not just words, so it’s useful! The instructions are also really easy to understand.)

 So what are we to make of all this? There now exists, of course, an exciting body of literature articulating the way language learning and romantic desires are intertwined (see for example, Takahashi, 2010). The ‘language desires’ of the subjects in such studies are, of course, predicated on an idealized fantasy of what ‘foreign’ partners are supposed to be like, but they essentially are concerned with relationships between real people. In contrast, the iPhone app described here represents, as my friend and colleague from Senshu University, Peter Longcope, cleverly put it, an intriguing case of “Tamagotchi meets Rosetta Stone”. We are living in interesting times indeed!

Silly though it may seem, I never anticipated the day when the intertwinement of language learning, gender, race, and romance in the virtual world would emerge as a subject deserving of scholarly attention. Of course, the emergence of new forms of foreign language ‘edutainment’ such as the “What if my boyfriend was a Foreigner” iPhone app are significant because they are obviously perpetuating discourses about native speakers, nationalities, gender, and language learning that need to be challenged.

Takahashi, Kimie (2010). Multilingual couple talk: Romance,identity, and the political economy of language D. Nunan & J. Choi (Eds.), Language and culture: Reflective narratives and the emergence of identity. New York: Routledge, 199-207

As I learnt more about the English fever gripping some Asian countries, my collaborators and I came to interpret the disappointment of overseas students as the result of overblown dreams and unrealistic expectations (Piller & Takahashi 2006; Piller, Takahashi & Watanabe 2010). If you are learning English and coming to Australia expecting to experience a magic life transformation, to discover your “real” cool Western self or to find a White native-speaker Prince Charming to live with happily ever after, there is obviously a good chance that you’ll experience disappointment.

Describing it this way makes the people who experience disappointment with the outcome of investing into English language learning and overseas study sound foolish. However, none of the people who confided their disappointment ever struck me as foolish. Having recently read a fascinating account of how education has transformed life in rural India by Karuna Morarji, I think there might be an explanation for the disappointment I have just described that I and my collaborators have so far overlooked: it could be that disappointment with English language learning and overseas study is entirely reasonable because language learning does not only open doors but also closes doors.

You are probably surprised to read that learning could close doors because the fact that education and learning are always good is such a basic article of our modern faith. However, as Morarji demonstrates with references to primary and secondary education in villages in the Aglar River Valley in Uttarakhand in northern India, where mass formal education only dates from the 1990s, education is a double-edged sword: formal education makes everyone dream of achieving a service sector job. Few actually achieve that dream because competition for service sector jobs is fierce and rural children even with a formal education cannot really compete with their urban peers who enjoy much better opportunities in the competition for waged office work.

However, while education does not really enable these children to join India’s urban middle class, it has the additional pernicious effect of also closing off opportunities to live on the land. School takes children away from being apprenticed into subsistence agriculture or artisan work such as carpentry. Having learnt how to read and write instead, they do not know how to do agricultural or other rural labor and, more crucially, they do no longer WANT to engage in manual, non-waged labor. Many of the villagers interviewed by Morarji argued that while education was good if you got a job, an uneducated person was better off than an educated person without a job. Education is thus not only part of the solution to the problem of rural decline in India but it is also, perversely, part of the problem.

It seems to me that this conundrum is also worth exploring with relation to the global spread of English: we’ve all been conditioned to believe that English proficiency holds many promises, creates opportunities and opens doors – and that is undoubtedly true in some cases. However, we’ve also been conditioned to not even entertain the possibility that learning English might also close doors and make learners who don’t achieve the dream unfit for local lives. Neither here nor there, the door English may have opened may only be towards a marginal position:

Experiences of alienation and disappointment around education illustrate how the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of a market economy have meant that “becoming a part of the world has frequently entailed becoming marginal to the world” […] (Morarji 2010, p. 58)

Karuna Morarji (2010). Where does the rural educated person fit? Development and social reproduction in contemporary India Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (ed. Philip McMichael). Routledge, 50-63

Lotus Pond (part of Shinobazu Pond) in Ueno Park

“There are so many stupid Japanese women around, huh? Many Westerners are coming to our country and the stupid women love stupid white men.”

My husband and I were stunned by this comment thrown at us by a stranger in Ueno Park during our Language-on-the Move tour to Japan. The insult came from a middle-aged Japanese man who was standing near Shinobazu Pond holding a can of beer in his hand with a flat expression on his face.

“Excuse me? What did you say?!” My husband, a white Western man walking with his Japanese wife, was not going to let the insult pass and was getting ready for a fight.

“Not worth it!” I grabbed his arm and quickly dragged him away assuming that the stranger was a drunk or mentally ill. Ueno Park is notorious for the large number of homeless people living there and we had already seen so many of them along the way from the park’s entrance. Homelessness is one of the hidden dark sides of Japan’s declining prosperity as Shiho Fukada so poignantly demonstrates in her photography.

Although I hadn’t wanted a confrontation, the comment upset me. I have explored issues of misogyny and of animosity towards interracial relationships in Japan in my research but this was the first time I personally experienced this kind of harassment in a public space.  I was also intrigued by the fact that the man had insulted us in fluent English. I couldn’t get the incident out of my mind: Where did he learn English so well? Does he stand there all day insulting interracial couples walking by? What else does he do? Why is he doing this? How often have such comments resulted in a fight?

After we had looked at the pond and decided not to take the famous swan-shaped boat, we had to take the same way back passing the man again. I felt weary and he, too, noticed us. He was staring at us but said nothing this time. My curiosity got the better of me:

Kimie: “Excuse me, but may I ask where you learned English so well?”
Stranger: “I didn’t learn English. It’s God’s gift.”

Soon we were having a friendly conversation because it turned out that he didn’t mind Australians as much as Americans! He told us how Asian women were stupid going after White men, and how interracial marriage, which he called stupidity, weakens the nation. In his view, Japan should never have opened its doors to the West in the 19^th century. Ever since then, the country had been infected with evil Western influences. In particular he was aggravated by the fact that Japanese women are so into White men. “They say ‘I love you, I love you’ and the women love it. It’s stupid. If love is there, you don’t have to say it.” I asked him if he had a partner. With the same contempt, he said “How can I find a partner when women here watch stupid American romantic movies and expect me to say I love you?”

He also told us that he was a freelance writer and that we were standing right in his publishing office. “I write many things including haiku”, and he took out several hand-made copies of a small booklet. “If you’d like to take one, I’d appreciate a small contribution.” We paid and left. By way of farewell he said “I hope you will enjoy my work.”

When we sat down in a café later, I looked at his collection of twelve haikus. They were beautifully hand-written in English and in a fude brush pen with titles such as ‘Bird’, ‘Northerly wind’ or ‘Journey’.  “How interesting”, I thought to myself in that café in the Ueno Park.

Hideo Asano on the right and Kimie with his haiku collection, September 29, 2010

At that point I did not yet know that we had actually met Hideo Asano, a well-known Tokyo artist, writer and blogger! Attacking Japanese-Western couples seems to be some sort of street performance he engages in as this, rather disrespectful, YouTube video shows.  However, the haikus, poems and short stories on his website are beautiful.

Hideo Asano is a bilingual, English-as-a-second-language writer who could be an inspiration to many learners of English. On his website he writes:

I hope especially my work could encourage students who study English as a second language that anyone could reach to a higher level, striving with persistence, to reach to the point of realizing that the more you know the more you don’t know. English belongs to everyone who cares, a baseball player’s son can’t automatically be a good baseball player.

This must be one of the strongest encouragements to find your own voice in a second language I have seen in a long time! That Asano is left to peddle his art as a homeless person on the streets of Tokyo and to draw attention to himself by insulting others, in a country that is obsessed with English language learning and idolizes native-speaking teachers is a sad and deeply disturbing testament to the power of the intersection of linguistic and racial ideologies.

Based on case studies from Japan and South Korea, this review paper explores the hidden costs of English language learning (ELL). In a context where English has become a commodity and ELL a form of consumption, we focus on the personal and social costs of (a) studying abroad as a much-touted path to “native-like” proficiency and (b) sexualization of language teaching materials in order to reach new niche markets. The hidden costs of ELL are embedded in language ideologies which set English up as a magical means of self-transformation and, at the same time, an unattainable goal for most Japanese and Koreans. We end with the call to expose debilitating language ideologies in order to shed light on the hidden costs of ELL.

We are particularly excited that this journal article is our first piece of peer-reviewed research writing that started life on this blog, with a post about the mental health effects of the English fever in South Korea and a post about pornographic language teaching materials in Japan.

The full text of the article is also available from our Resources section under Language & Consumerism.

Ingrid Piller, Kimie Takahashi, & Yukinori Watanabe (2010). The Dark Side of TESOL: The Hidden Costs of the Consumption of English Cross-Cultural Studies, 20, 183-201

I was reminded of this young woman when I read a paper about Korean early study abroad students and their families in the current issue of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. The author, Juyoung Song, writes about a “Korean education exodus” with more and more children leaving South Korea temporarily for chogi yuhak (“early study abroad”) in the USA and other English-speaking countries. In 2006, 29,511 Korean elementary to high school students pursued education visas, with around half of these of elementary school age. Furthermore, these numbers do not include children who accompany their parents, i.e. where the reason for the visa is some parental activity. Overall, more than 40,000 Korean children seem to be living abroad in order to pursue an early English education and to acquire that “perfect accent.” The typical pattern is apparently for these children to be accompanied by their mothers while the fathers stay behind to support their children’s foreign education. So widespread is the pattern that there is a special term for this type of family formation: kiregi kajok or “geese family” – like geese, they fly every now and then to see each other.

When I was a child my father, who worked as a construction worker, was often away from home for extended periods and I remember well how much I missed him. Consequently, I’ve always considered the early separation of children from their parents a particularly poignant aspect of labor migration. It had never occurred to me that economically secure parents would choose separation because they thought it was in the best interest of their children. Isn’t it amazing that the allure of English is such that people are willing to trade close family bonds for high levels of proficiency? Not only family bonds as a matter of fact, one of the mothers in the study is quoted as being upset about the fact that her young daughter’s best friend during her study abroad year in the USA was another Korean girl and that they spoke Korean with each other. This mother felt cheated of her investment into her daughter’s English proficiency.

Happiness for the mothers interviewed by Song was tied to a good return on their investment as measured by their children’s English proficiency, and particularly their accent. One mother had this to say:

English is the place where you can see a close correlation between the money you spend and the improvement of children’s learning. The more you spend, the more efficient the learning. Yes, especially when the children are young, the amount of money spent in their English education is visible, which makes me happy. (p. 30)

Sounds like a special brand of shopaholic to me – learning English as a particular form of consumption addiction! Seeing that in 2002 the South Korean English language teaching industry, excluding chogi yuhak, was worth around 3 billion USD according to an LA Times report and assuming that that figure has undoubtedly grown since then (according to Song, chogi yuhak figures grew seven times between 2000 and 2006), the comparison with a drug market feels not entirely inappropriate. The craze for English is such that there is even a market for plastic surgery, lingual frenectomy, to supposedly improve English pronunciation.

A language learning market that looks pretty saturated can only continue to grow if addiction is built into the system. How do you become addicted to language learning? Make the goal seem magical and, at the same time, impossible to reach! That is where the other language ideology identified by Song comes in: linguistic self-depreciation. Apparently, for all their investments into English language teaching and learning, South Koreans feel that their English is terrible and that English language teaching in the country is hopeless. One mother spoke of herself as a “frog in the well” because of her poor English; another one said her husband had only “two words of English” – the man with the “two words of English” worked as a researcher at a US university, mind you.

Being in thrall to an English language teaching industry that is so rampant that it makes people value proficiency in English more than family relationships and that is geared to instilling a perpetual sense of inferiority is surely a recipe for great profits on the one hand and significant mental health risks on the other. Sadly, the recipe is not restricted to South Korea but – with variations – seems to be working well in many places around the world.

Song, J. (2010). Language ideology and identity in transnational space: globalization, migration, and bilingualism among Korean families in the USA International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13 (1), 23-42 DOI: 10.1080/13670050902748778

Moetan’s storyline involves a smart high school girl, Inku, who has a crush on her classmate, Nao, an underachiever. To help him improve his marks in English, she magically turns herself into a witch, Pastel Inku. Yeah, right! Moetan has many illustrations of Pastel Inku and her magical friends. Some of these illustrations are extremely disturbing in their explicit pornographic content. Although Inku and Pastel Inku are supposed to be senior high school students, they look to be somewhere between 8 to 12 years old. In many of the illustrations, Inku and Pastel Inku are sexualized:

• their under pants are shown (11 illustrations)
• they are almost naked (2 illustrations)
• they are shown with no under pants (1 illustration)
• they are in pajamas but their underwear shows (1 illustration)
• they pose in sexually seductive positions (11 illustrations)

I cannot reproduce any of these images in this blog because they are in violation of child pornography laws in many countries, including Australia where I’m based. In fact, viewers from outside Japan are blocked from viewing certain images on the Moetan website. In contrast to most other countries, child pornography laws in Japan apply only to photographic or live-action video content of real children, not to manga, anime and video games (see this Age report for more details). This makes Japan and Russia the only G8 countries where “it is legal to own pornographic images of children, provided people do not intend to sell or distribute them.”

Moetan is obviously designed to appeal to Japan’s ‘otaku’ demographic, i.e. Japanese men who have a fetish for young girls or anime/manga characters that depict them. I’m aware that there are many different kinds of otakus, but the one Moetan is geared towards is those obsessed with the imaginary ‘sister culture’ in which young girls are a symbol of innocent sexuality and look up to men as dependable older brothers. None of the illustrations resemble Playboy-type adult pornography – the otaku’s fascination with young sister-like girls’ sexuality seems closely linked with their inability to relate to adult women and the promotion of incestual desires.

Moetan has been incredibly successful. To date, more than 200,000 copies of Moetan have been sold, making it one of the best-selling English phrasebooks in 2003-2004. Following this phenomenal success in the highly competitive English textbook market, there have been further Moetan products, including more phrase books, DVDs, CDs, figure models, Moetan DS (produced by Nintendo – if you choose to click on this link, please note that you may find the images on the site offensive) – all of which are even more sexualized and pornographic than the original Moetan. The website proudly claims that 200,000 Moetan products such as above have been sold.

It is not only the images of Moetan that are disturbing. The English phrases that are taught are equally sexualized as the following examples show:

• Accept: “Even if you are a man who is only interested in two-dimensional beautiful girls, you will accept the real girl when she declares herself” (p. 22).
• Broadcast: “They broadcast the scene of glance at the panties of the national icon” (p. 32).
• Appropriate: Taking my futon away by my sister or childhood friend is the appropriate way to wake me up (p. 165)
• Beat: I’ll never stop beating you until you cry (p. 168)
• Female: I cannot get interested in a female in the real world anyway (p. 179)
• Confuse: The boy was confused when a girl fell down from the sky (p. 185)
• Tiny: You can feel at ease. Some men prefer the tiny breasts (p. 197).
• Bet: When I fell in love with her, I thought that the girl was my stepsister. I bet if I had known she was my real sister I would not have fallen in love with her (p. 198).
• Wish: I wish I could be a brother to all the sisters all over the world (p. 201).

Similar to other foreign language learning materials we have analyzed, the language learning value of Moetan is close to zero. The Moetan phrases are created by two academics in foreign language education, Professor Watanabe of Saitama University and Suzuki of Seibu Bunri University. Watanabe and Suzuki are fellow experts in foreign language education but I find their judgment in participating in the production of this type of English learning materials appalling.

When I showed my copy of Moetan to a Chinese colleague, she said, “This kind of English learning material won’t be allowed in China”. Unfortunately, she’s wrong there: Moetan has in fact already made it into the Chinese market, and there is a talk of a Taiwanese version on the horizon.

English language teaching without a conscience and without morals? An industry out of control? As far as Moetan is concerned, that is clearly so. For many decades, applied linguists have been working hard to problematise gender inequalities in foreign/second language education by analyzing textbooks. However, textbooks used outside formal school contexts, such as Moetan, have gone largely unchecked and unchallenged. As child pornography in educational disguise spreads into other Asian countries, it is high time the English language teaching industry adopt basic ethic standards.

Reference

Ingrid Piller & Kimie Takahashi (2010). At the intersection of gender, language and transnationalism. In Nikolas Coupland. Ed. Handbook of Language and Globalisation. Malden, MA: Blackwell. (Preprint)

Rarely do language students get an actual say in institutional offerings and a current polling initiative by the Student Council at Zayed University is therefore the more exciting. This internal poll has been running for a couple of days and I can’t take my eyes of it: for a sociolinguist this is like Melbourne Cup Day without the hats!

The way the survey was first published a few days ago, the choice was between Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish. “Chinese plus the usual choice of European languages” I thought and noticed particularly that none of these languages are widely spoken in the UAE while some of those spoken by large segments of the UAE population such as Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu or Tagalog are absent.

This is not particularly surprising as language learning is often about the desire to reinvent oneself and that desire is crucially influenced by media discourses and these discourses often set up Western identities as the pinnacle of desirability as Kimie Takahashi and I have shown in a study of the Occidental longings of young Japanese women and how they are exploited by the English language teaching industry (available from our Resources Section (click on “Language learning, gender & identity” > ”A passion for English”).

محمد إدريس, who blogs on “Language and Globalization,” has a similar, even if somewhat more sinister explanation for the reasons why learning Spanish has become so popular in Germany: he sees Germans’ desire to learn Spanish as mindless copying of US tastes and preferences, an acceptance of US hegemony. He argues that learning Spanish is undoubtedly in the interests of US-Americans and so that preference is mediated by Hollywood to the world, even if German foreign language learners would be better served with the languages of neighboring countries such as Czech, French or Polish. So, that’s similar to my own observation that there were no regional languages offered in the Zayed University Student Council Poll.

Well, it’s not all that simple, at least not here at ZU: after the original poll was published, the members of the Japanese and Korean clubs demanded the inclusion of these languages, and since then Korean had been gaining ground steadily on French, the initial leader, until it drew ahead yesterday.

So, does that invalidate the idea that the desire to learn another language is influenced by hegemonic discourses? It doesn’t – it just shows that the center of gravity is shifting. The West is no longer the only source of desirable identities, and particularly cool youth identities, on offer. South Korea has been an exporter of popular melodramas for about a decade and the popularity of Korean youth culture has become known as Korean Wave or even “Korean Fever” in China and Japan. Little surprise then that this also opens up a market for Korean language teaching!

I’ll keep watching that poll – for now, I’m betting on Korean.

Piller, Ingrid, & Takahashi, Kimie (2006). A passion for English: desire and the language market Aneta Pavlenko. Ed. Bilingual minds: Emotional experience, expression, and representation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 59-83

Now, apparently they are sending World champion ironman Shannon Eckstein to Tokyo, trying to woo young Japanese women to Australia. http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/ironman-to-woo-japanese-women-to-australia-20091104-hwac.html

Using western masculinity to entice Japanese female customers is a trick that many English language schools have relied on for many years, too. This is something Ingrid and I know very well through our research on Japanese women’s ‘akogare,’ or desire, for Western men and how it’s linked with English language teaching/learning.

In their teenage years, all our participants wanted to learn English, for example, to write a fan letter to Tom Cruise or understand what their favorite singers were singing about. Many of them wanted to find a western boyfriend, who, in their view, would be more romantic than Japanese men. Our participants considered finding an English-speaking partner as a killing-two-birds-with-one-stone-approach – enjoy much-admired Western-style romance AND have an in-house English teacher.

One of the interesting developments out of this akogare phenomenon is the Relationship English business. There are many textbooks, websites, and magazines that claim to teach Japanese women how to conduct romantic and sexual relationships with foreign men in English. One of the Relationship English textbooks we have analyzed is called “Roppongi English” and it’s probably one of the most bizarre ‘textbooks’ we’ve ever seen.

The problem with the discourse of Relationship English is that they often perpetuate existing negative stereotypes of culture, gender and sexuality in the context of cross-cultural romantic relationships. In the case of Roppongi English, for example, a traditional Japanese woman is described as socially and sexually demure and has a well-educated chivalrous White boyfriend who is caring and romantic. On the other hand, a Japanese woman who grew up bilingually in LA is portrayed as sexually loose and gets into a dysfunctional relationship with a divorced and aggressive Black American man. Here is a website which talks about Roppongi English and comments there from the general audience will give you some insights into the public discourse of cross-cultural romance in the Japanese context.

Roslyn Appleby of the University of Technology Sydney is looking at another aspect of cross-cultural romance and the ways it is exploited in global and local economies. She is exploring the concept of “Charisma Man” and shows how Western men who are considered ‘losers’ in their home countries can transform themselves into chic magnets as soon as they land in Japan where many women would put the men up on a pedestal just because they are White and English- speaking.

Now back to the tourism campaign. It may be a tough time ahead of Australian tourism officials. The young Japanese women I know have no headspace to think about holidays at the moment – they are either super-busy finding work or super-busy at work (because so many of their colleagues have been made redundant) or just busy holding on to their job.

I wish Tourism Australia and Shannon Eckstein success…. although even Hugh Jackman, ‘the sexiest man alive’, apparently didn’t quite pull it off…