thoughts on teaching

The putative focus of my classes here is communication and culture, but my colleagues have made it clear that the most important thing is to interact with students in English. People here are always endearingly grateful whenever anything comes out of my mouth resembling their native language, even though the average snack bar hostess knows far more English than I know Japanese. Yet I’m almost discouraged from trying to meet the students halfway. There has been a stronger push than ever for English education here, with a prevailing sense that Japan will not take its rightful political and economic place in the world until its population becomes fluent in English, which is so radically different from Japanese in its vocabulary and grammar.

It’s a little too heavenly to be told you’re doing your job by speaking your own language. The intersection of language and power permeates my interactions in a way that’s hard to ignore. “You’re lucky,” says one colleague, “You can go anywhere in the world and people understand you.” The Japanese professors who visit SVSU are expected to speak English (or whatever it is we speak in Michigan), whereas I can go happily along in my own language and it’s the students’ job to adapt. For the majority of our time in the classroom to be spent vaguely understanding each other is expected here; at home, it’s a cause for complaint. Listening to the students here fumble along in broken English, I’m filled with admiration for their halting attempts to reconcile themselves to the closest thing to an international language – and embarrassment at some of my own students’ abuse of it as their first language.

I’m told that the students here find me gratifyingly easy to understand. My naturally slow speech, which tries my own students’ patience, works to my advantage here. The students are still pretty quiet but we’re starting to develop a rapport. I find their questions often focus less on particular words or verbal constructions than on everyday idioms, especially those conveying emotion or relation. Why would someone say “Don’t mention it” after being thanked? Why do Americans say “You shouldn’t have” after receiving gifts? (Do Americans not like gifts? Are they ungrateful?) People are especially preoccupied with the small pleasantries that grease the wheels of interaction. Japanese is full of these: not just the endlessly repeated “sumimasen,” “onegai shimasu,” “arigato,” etc., but the polite prefixes and suffixes so often used to dress up verbs and subjects. My favorite Japanese stock phrases: “gochiso sama” (“thanks for the wonderful meal”), “otsukare sama” (at the end of the workday, “thanks for your hard work”), and “yoroshiku onegai shimasu” (upon meeting someone, “please be kind to me”).

One of the DVDs I brought from home is Ozu’s late-1950s gem Ohayô (Good Morning), in which two young brothers stage a sort of civil action against their parents by refusing to talk for days on end. Their immediate gripe is the parents’ refusal to buy them a TV set, their larger gripe that so much of what passes for talk between adults seems pointless. Soon enough the children’s small gesture turns the social world of the neighborhood upside down: a woman down the street takes their silence personally, she strikes back with malicious gossip about the kids’ mother, and a neighborhood feud nearly ensues. The message is clear enough: even as we seek new information (via television, a new medium in a newly prosperous Japan at the time of Ozu’s film), we often neglect the functional importance of communication in just keeping the peace. In the end the kids call off their protest and get their TV, and mostly use it to partake in that most redundant and reassuring pastime, watching baseball.