Anyone who reads my posts knows I'm a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, but once in a while my opinions stray from the liberal mainstream. One such case is the "national language" debate. This article from Reuters captures the essence of the debate:http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyid=2006-06-09T133215Z_01_N08392339_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-ENGLISH.xml&src=rssThe gentleman, 66 year-old Joey Vento, who put up the sign reading "This is America -- when ordering speak English" in his cheese steak restaurant in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (very close to my home town) is the grandson of Italian immigrants. He says "They should be glad that I put the sign up. I'm trying to help them to speak English." He further says, "Without the English language, they are going to have a lot of problems in this country."In response, Roberto Santiago, executive director of Philadelphia's Council of Spanish Speaking Organizations, said "I think what's coming out of his mouth is racist [....] He is saying, 'I don't like these brown faces in my community and I will do everything I can to get them out of there.'"As an "immigrant" of sorts (I was born and raised in the U.S., but have lived most of my adult life in Japan), I agree with Mr. Vento, and I find Mr. Santiago's response to be offensive, disturbing, and disappointingly shallow.I recently spent three weeks in the beautiful city of Halle, in East Germany, and for the first time in twenty years had the humbling experience of not being able to communicate in everyday situations. But I have learned the language of the country I live in--Japan--and I have met many non-Japanese (usually from Anglophone nations) who, although they have also lived in Japan for many years, have never bothered to learn the language, and assume that they should be able to get by with English. I have always found this attitude to be arrogant and naive. Most Japanese living in Japan, though they spend six years learning to read and write English, never have an opportunity to learn to comprehend spoken English or speak it. This is only natural. English and German have much in common, but I had trouble communicating with East Germans. Obviously, it is going to be much more difficult for Japanese to master a language as different from their own as English.I chose to live in Japan, so I made the effort to learn Japanese. True, I had the luxury of a college education, where I was first introduced to Japanese. But I learned most of my Japanese by talking with Japanese, watching Japanese television, and reading manga, newspapers and magazines. Economic class is not an excuse. I have met many people in my life who learned to communicate in a second language without benefit of formal langauge training. They did so by simply interacting with natives, making and correcting mistakes, and just trying to understand and make themselves understood. Their grammar may be terrible, and their vocabularly may be skewed, but they learned to communicate by just going out there and trying. Anyone with an I.Q. above 70 should be able to do this. This is not about racism. It's not about nationalism. It's about common sense, and respect for other cultures. I live in Japan because I want to. I have plenty of complaints about the government, and certain tendencies in the society, but I respect the culture and the people, so I have made an effort to understand them. The first step was learning Japanese. It was hard. It was frustrating. But I did it. And frankly, I have little respect for people who live in Japan for years without trying to learn Japanese. It would be racist of me to hold immigrants living in America to a different standard. Are they more stupid than I? No. All they have to do is get out there and try to communicate with the natives. In many parts of America, if you are a Spanish, Korean, Cantonese or Mandarin speaker, it is possible to get by without learning English. Does that mean I have to respect your "right" to not learn English? Sorry, but the answer is no. I struggled to learn the language of the country I chose to live in. Today, I can understand 99.9% of the spoken Japanese I encounter, I can say anything I want to in Japanese, I can read Japanese, and I even sometimes get paid to write in Japanese. I may be a heterosexual male of Western European descent, but where I live I'm a minority, and face discrimination on a daily basis. I've learned to live with it. (Hell, I can always go back to the U.S. where I'll be in the dominant class.) For me, it's a matter of pride. I'll eat anything that's offered to me. I'll take on anyone who wants to make fun of the "foreigner." If you have pride, prove it by holding on to your own culture while mastering the language and culture of the country you choose to live in. I don't care if it's the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands, or Kenya.What do you think?
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Matt Thorn
Department of Comics Production
Kyoto Seika University
