JapanFile has been updated! If you are not automatically redirected, click here to visit the new site.

Three years ago, I had an illuminating experience during an English class. It was an English Reading class for 12th graders. I happened to name a girl and made her read aloud a certain passage from the textbook. She, like ordinary Japanese girls, read the passage in a very low voice, using the typical pronunciation which ordinary Japanese cannot help but use--so-called Katakana-English. But I noticed, by and by, that though she meticulously simulated Katakana-English, there was a subtle, yet fluent, native pronunciation here and there in her reading, which was unable to be hidden. When she finished reading, I asked her if she went to an English conversation school such as ECC. She flatly answered no and sat down. She seemed somewhat tense and I refrained from inquiring further, but as her attitude puzzled me, I asked her homeroom teacher about her circumstances. He answered that she had lived in London until finishing elementary school and then had come home to start junior high school. It must have been hard for her to adjust here, he added, and so I got the answer.

Now, what do you think lies behind this bizarre and seemingly paranoid attitude of hers? Why did she have to keep it a secret that she had lived in a foreign country? Was there any necessity for her to pronounce English deliberately mimicking the pronunciation of the Japanese? It is one of the most important keys that can help unlock the chain of questions which leads to the real causes of this 'Japan Crisis'.

In recent years, the mass media has been filled with lurid news of junior high school youngsters' suicides allegedly caused by harassment in schools (ijime). I know there are similar harassment cases in America, Britain and other Western countries of course, but their similarity seems superficial to my eyes. I believe student apathy in classes and harassment in schools stem from the same root.