East Coast Kahuna

Learning Japanese

Looking back, I missed a big opportunity to learn to speak Japanese.

I am of the Sansei generation (3rd generation from immigration). My grandparents - the Issei - did not speak English. My parents - the Nisei - were bilingual, but not by choice. They often had to serve as the Japanese-English interpreters for their parents in Hawaii. At that time, there were many foreign nationals who came to Hawaii to work on the plantations - Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Filipino - along with the Japanese and Okinawans (Note that the Okinawans are distinguished from the Japanese). "Pidgin English" - the Hawaiian dialect of English - developed because of this melting pot of many nationalities. My grandparents may have picked up some English words here and there - but they didn't learn English enough to speak to their grandchildren (they had their children to interpret for them). My grandparents lived separately from us so I didn't pick up Japanese in this manner either. Before I was born, my family lived in a larger household which included my paternal grandmother. My older sister remembers being able to talk to Grandma a little in Japanese. But then my family moved out to be on our own a few years after I was born.

I had a close friend who was "hapa-haole" - or half-white in Hawaiian. His mother was of Japanese ancestry, his father of German ancestry. He used to attend "Japanese School" after school - this was extra Japanese language classes taught by the local Buddhist church (the Hongwanji). We used to tease him because it was like an extra chore for him to go - I considered myself lucky that I didn't go.

I've only recently reflected on why he studied Japanese and I didn't. My parents had to go through WWII - where not having the children learn Japanese was part of being loyal to the United States. It's unfortunate that the loyalty of Japanese-American citizens was put through so much scrutiny. Many of the Japanese language written materials were discarded or destroyed (didn't want them to be found if their houses were searched). My mother also considering herself Christian did not want the extra affiliation with the Buddhist temple. In this generation, the mother usually controlled raising the children while the father was out earning money for the family. So it was my mother's decision.

My friend's mother, was a librarian in the local schools and was very conscious of the educational value of having her son learn Japanese. Because she was married to a caucasian, my guess is that she did not feel that she had to prove loyalty to the United States (although hapa-haole families had other problems associated with them being of mixed-marriage).

I went to the best private school in Honolulu (Iolani, not Punahou!) and I ended up taking Russian as a foreign language - typical Asian-American ambition. I took up what was considered to be the hardest language (we had 7 to choose from in those days: Latin, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Japanese and Chinese). And because of the space race and my slant toward technology I chose between Russian and German (Japan was not yet considered a technological powerhouse). Also, I felt that I was already behind in Japanese because many of my classmates already had some early instruction in it - so it would have been harder for me to compete. With Russian, at least the whole class pretty much started from the very beginning.

While living on the East Coast, I've lost count of how many times I've been asked if I know Japanese, especially in the context of reading Japanese technical papers or patents. I can understand how someone who doesn't know English must feel, but only to a small scale.
Now I want to learn Japanese (and Okinawan) in order to go to back Japan (I was there for 2 weeks in 1970 with my high school band for Expo '70). I am hoping to be able to research my ancestors a little deeper and meet some relations. For somebody at my age it would be a big challenge.

posted by tjh14850 @ 7:38 AM