Why is it so hard for English teachers to learn Japanese?

A chapter by this site’s founders set me off on a path to doing a Ph.D. and made me re-evaluate my linguistic practises and my position as an English teacher in Japan. In the article, Piller and Takahashi examined how the English teaching industry in Japan used the image of an ideal white male as a marketing tool to attract female Japanese students. They describe how some Japanese women feel desire (“Akogore” in Japanese) for the Western world and how this leads them to study English. Reading this article and Takahashi’s subsequent book on the same area as a postgraduate student made me reflect on the impact these ideologies had on my own experiences in Japan. These reflections pushed me to investigate how being “the desired” influenced how English teachers like me learned Japanese while teaching English in Japan.

Handed my MA dissertation in four years ago on this day. This article by Piller and Takahashi, "A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market" from @Lg_on_the_Move, directly inspired my dissertation and my subsequent PhD research. https://t.co/4i3gjY3UqJ

— Dr Owen Minns (@OTMinns) September 24, 2019

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

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.