Japanese language education in the United States
Over the course of the next century, it would slowly expand to include non-Japanese as well as native speakers (mainly children of Japanese expatriates being educated in international schools).
[6] The schools were financed by both the Japanese immigrant community and the sugar planters they worked for, as they provided much needed childcare for the plantation laborers during their long workday.
[5] The schools' perceived connection to Japan and support for labor movements, including the 1909 and 1920 strikes against the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association, exposed fault lines of religion and class within the Japanese American community, and fed growing anti-Japanese sentiment from the larger public.
[6][10] In the meantime, California politicians enacted the Parker Bill in August 1921, establishing extensive prerequisites for teacher certification and giving complete control over hiring, operations and curricula in the schools to the Superintendent of Public Education.
88 of Hawaii's 146 Japanese schools eventually joined the suit, and Farrington v. Tokushige worked through several appeals before landing in the Supreme Court, where in 1927 the Justices found the regulations unconstitutional.
[10] Interest from foreign language learners was limited prior to World War II, and instruction for non-heritage speakers was established more slowly.
[6] Due to this shortage, the military's need for personnel competent in Japanese even before the US entry into World War II drove the MIS to establish its own specialized school aimed at training specialists to serve as interpreters, interrogators, and translators, the Military Intelligence Service Language School; initially based at the Presidio of San Francisco, it was later moved to Minnesota, first Camp Savage, and then later Fort Snelling.
Not only did it serve mainly for intelligence activities during the war, but also its graduates, such as Edward Seidensticker,[18] Donald Keene, Otis Cary and others, often called the "Boulder Boys", made important contributions to introducing the Japanese culture in the post-WWII world.
[19] The first program aimed at training secondary school Japanese language teachers was established at the University of Hawaii under the provisions of the National Defense Act of 1958; it initially admitted 20 students.
[22] However, unlike Chinese, which continued to grow in the early 2000s, the popularity of Japanese declined sharply, with thousands of students dropping the language.
[24] Japanese-language education aimed at native speakers began later, as the rise of the economy of Japan resulted in increasing numbers of companies sending employees and their families to the United States for short-term assignments.
[31] She also coauthored the widely used Mastering Japanese textbook, along with the Foreign Service Language Institute, and Hamako Ito Chaplin.
[34] Colleagues in the field of Japanese pedagogy, such as Professor Mari Noda, say that Dr. Jorden was unusual in her time in that she insisted on the use of audio recordings to supplement the text-based grammar and vocabulary in her work.
After Dr. Jorden’s time, the trend of Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) has been to focus on reading, writing, and grammar chapters arranged by themes based on pragmatic, real-life situations.
[36] Junko Mori, Kimberly Jones, and Tsuyoshi Ono believe that use of cultural and discourse knowledge may be lacking in classrooms, making it so that students aren’t totally prepared for real-life interactions with native Japanese speakers.
A survey of dialogues in modern textbooks found that they are, on average, short and decontextualized, involve only two speakers, are contextless, arranged in neat question-answer pairs that are complete sentences, and are without many conversational linguistic devices.
