34, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 18-20 To the Editor Search

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IT IS a pleasure to have the opportunity to acknowledge our debts and express our gratitude to those to whom we owe so much in our careers. I haven’t had the benefit of working as closely with Professor Makino as Yukiko Hatasa has, or for as long a period of time as Laurel Rodd has, but I would like to mention one encounter with him.

In November 1989, Professor Makino came to the University of Minnesota, with David Hiple, to conduct an OPI workshop. Yuki Johnson, a graduate student at the time, was one of the organizers, and she had mustered nearly everyone within driving distance of the university for the workshop. I had finished my PhD at the university in 1985, and after starting two high school Japanese programs in the area was teaching at Macalester College in Saint Paul. The OPI workshop was a revelation to me, for several reasons.

First, it presented an organized, carefully calibrated way of looking at our goals as teachers of language. Although the OPI needed to be adjusted for Japanese specifically, especially in those first years of its existence, the discussions of what should be at the core of instruction were hugely important to those of us who were beginning our careers in Japanese language pedagogy. Even though the OPI focused on oral proficiency exclusively, it was a good place to begin to talk about what we meant by “proficiency” in all the modes. It clarified for me my sense of my task and gave me tools for measuring the progress of my students and concomitantly the effectiveness of my teaching.

Second, the workshop intrigued me enormously because it was one of my first experiences of seeing Japanese treated as a language among languages. That is, there was an assumption that Japanese was not so different that it could not be learned, or so totally other that one could not assume that it worked in much the same way as European languages did. I was astounded by the clear assumption that while it had its own particular features, Japanese was part of the family of languages and had much in common with them. Having grown up in Japan, I had long been used to the idea perpetuated by many Japanese, even Japanese language teachers, that foreigners could probably not ever achieve real proficiency in Japanese. The reason was that it was “unique,” too “different.” This uniqueness was a point of pride among some. The same attitude prevailed in the United States in the 1980s. There were those even in academia who spoke of Japanese as a truly foreign language and explained why it could not be treated as other languages were. Thus the workshop was thrilling for me in a very personal as well as professional way.

A third memory I have of that workshop encapsulates Professor Makino’s good humor. Just before a coffee break during one training session, one of our hosts got up and meant to invite us to come for coffee, but she began to get tangled up in honorific language. Professor Makino saved the day by saying,. In English, “Please be drunk by the coffee.” We all enjoyed a good laugh.

Professor Makino provided critical leadership in the boom years of the 1980s, when anyone who was Japanese or who had lived in Japan or even claimed to be fluent in Japanese was pressed into service without regard for credentials to teach in proliferating programs in colleges, universities, and secondary schools. His firm, reasoned leadership of the Japanese OPI workshops defined the standards for Japanese instruction and provided direction and ways of evaluating teaching and learning. He gave us basic tools for teaching in his two volumes, A Basic Dictionary of Japanese Grammar and An Intermediate Dictionary of Japanese Grammar. With the recent publication of his textbook series Nakama, we have the luxury of a choice of textbooks based on a communicative model of pedagogy. These are enormous achievements that continue to strengthen the teaching of Japanese all over the country.

Yet I’m certain that Professor Makino would be the first to say that much remains to be done, and I have been asked to speak here about the issues that we face now in Japanese language pedagogy. These are ongoing issues, and I expect that Professor Makino will continue to provide leadership as we engage them over the next few years. I’d like to center my comments around four words: who, what, how, and why.

One of the great challenges for all of us over forty engaged in teaching today is that we are teaching a generation of students who learn in ways quite different from our own. I grew up without TV or computers, so the whole world of this “digital” generation is unlike anything I experienced as a child. The students who sit in our classrooms today are confirmed visual learners, comfortable with multitasking, and intrigued by learning through manipulation. They want to be able to do something, not learn about something. They want to be able to interact. The world of multimedia and virtual reality does not seem foreign, difficult, or artificial. These are natural modes for them. The students don’t have the habit of memorization—a terrible weakness if one wants to be proficient in reading a language like Japanese. They like their autonomy; they want to be in control of the learning process. Others may identify with this feeling of mine: I have been teaching for more than twenty-five years, and just as I have reached the point where I feel I’m good at what I do, I discover that I need to learn how to teach all over again for today’s student. Our clients have changed in fundamental ways. That means that how we conceive of our task must change, too.

What are we going to teach? It has clearly been established that culture cannot be divorced from language, if it ever was. No one would disagree that there is an interdependence between the two that makes it unwise to try to separate them. Yet we keep having to make the point on our campuses that language is not a skill like tennis or piano that can be taught in isolation from the culture in which it developed. In fact, skills without any sensitivity for cultural context can cause as many problems as connections.

For those of us who are text-bound or text-enraptured, it is difficult to make the kinds of transitions required these days, and I think it may be especially difficult for us in Japanese language pedagogy. Years ago, students came to us with an interest in Japanese poetry or fiction or aesthetics or Zen or martial arts. Then students came who saw Japanese giving them a special edge in their business careers. Now we are getting more and more students who grew up with Japanese video games and are captivated by anime (Japanese animated films) or even manga (graphic novels). It’s all low culture, you might say. It seems our task now is to use their interest in pop culture as a bridge to other, “higher” aspects of Japanese culture that we want them to enjoy and know. Maybe we can take them from their passion for video games and anime to a consideration of their roots in traditional culture; maybe we’ll be seduced into finding valuable knowledge in their world of pop culture. Who knows? But we cannot reject those things that bring them to us and to a study of Japanese. We need to face the question, Why don’t we make much more use of anime and manga and Japanese pop music, even rap, in our classes?

Not only have the who and what changed in fundamental ways, so has the how. It is both alarming and exciting to contemplate. We Japanese teachers used to work in an environment that was more limited and controlled. We had a textbook, audiotapes, maybe a video or two, and the boxes of realia we accumulated. We felt lucky to have that much. We kept adding to and adapting these tools, but our environment was comfortingly finite and complete. It has changed completely. We no longer are the arbiters of access to the culture and language we teach. Students can go to Web sites for news, images, and information that were hard to come by just a few years ago, especially in the less commonly taught languages. Our students can now talk with Japanese students and others in chat rooms. They can exchange information on favorite anime or even post their own fansubs on the Internet. They ask us for translations of lines by singers or characters in videos we teachers have never heard of.

We also struggle to keep up with the pressure to use the Web to provide out-of-class, interactive exercises for students. We need to learn how to use SmartCarts, make CDs loaded with images and materials tailored to our classes, and do office hours over the Internet. Our students, in contrast, have no trouble at all using Power Point to make class presentations or creating and editing digital movies for their oral presentations. All this technology displaces textbooks and even instructors, forces us to reorient ourselves, and suggests that new modes of learning and teaching will emerge soon, or are emerging right now, as we attempt to engage them.

The word why draws our attention to the larger setting in which we do our work. In the field of languages we must all constantly tend our relation to the core curriculum at our institutions and take every opportunity to insinuate ourselves into that core. We must constantly be ready to explain how we fit into the liberal arts or undergraduate curriculum and articulate our particular contribution to it. We must also take the lead on our campuses in the emerging discussion of internationalization and intercultural studies. We have a chance to help define the content of these efforts, to place ourselves at the forefront of important new initiatives, and to acknowledge and build on what we share.

In this, teachers of Japanese have common cause with all the languages on our campuses. It is essential that we continue to reach out in the way that Professor Makino has modeled for us. From the first, he was an advocate for the participation of Japanese language teachers in the national professional organizations, especially ACTFL. He rejected the temptation to stay within comfortable but narrow Japanese or Asian professional organizations. In insisting that Japanese teachers join the general professional discussions among languages, he has done us all a tremendous service.

Since we continue to need the leadership of people like Professor Makino, he cannot retire quite yet! But we in Japanese language pedagogy are in good shape to meet these and other challenges we may not even recognize yet, because of his hard work in laying a solid foundation for the continuing development of our field. Professor Makino chose to be an encourager when he could have been a severe critic. He chose to use his sense of humor and his enormous energy to help us grow as a profession. When I think of his achievements and contributions, I’m tempted to think of words like “tiger,” “whirlwind,” or “giant,” such has been the force of his intellect, his wisdom, and his capacity for leadership. In Japanese there is a word onshi, which literally means the “teacher” or “craftsman” to whom one is indebted, the person who has taught you all the essentials about your craft or art. For many of us in Japanese language and literature, Professor Makino has been this kind of onshi.

© 2003 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.

ADFL Bulletin 34, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 18-20

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