Virginia Tanuki *
Monday, December 14th, 2009
My grandson attends a public school in Fairfax County, Virginia, USA, and is enrolled in a Japanese language partial-immersion program. There it is possible for children to enter an immersion program from the first grade in Spanish, French, German, or Japanese. The school system believes in the great benefits of language immersion not only for language learning, but for its positive effects giving students greater flexibility in thinking, greater sensitivity to language, and improved listening skills. My grandson generally spends half the day with one teacher learning Language Arts and Social Studies in English, and the other half with a fluent Japanese-speaking teacher, learning Math and Science in Japanese. He does not really “study” Japanese; grammar is not explicitly taught, for example. On the other hand, how to communicate what he is thinking, feeling and observing in Japanese is a part of every day’s curriculum. He has been in the program since early September – about 3 months’ time. When I visited my daughter’s family last week I was surprised to find my grandson had learned an amazing amount in that very short time. In a telephone call to his grandfather here in Japan he sang a number of traditional Japanese children’s songs and his grandfather was surprised both by his proficiency and that he learned this all at a public school! The only unusual thing was that the words to “Genkotsu yama no tanuki-san” had been changed to protect American sensibilities. That is, the tanuki drinks “mi-ru-ku” and not an “oppai!” My grandson pronounced the word milk in perfect “Japanese.”
*This post was originally a newspaper article written for a Japanese audience. “Genkotsu yama no tanuki-san” is an old children’s song about a tanuki (badger) who is alternately held by his mother, carried on her back, is put to sleep and offered milk from her oppai (literally “breasts”) which in the Americanized version was changed to simply milk with a three-syllable Japanese-like pronunciation to make the same syllable count as tanuki.