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I FIRST met Seiichi Makino on a bus taking us to a reception at the Japanese Consulate in Washington, DC. The ride was brief, but I clearly remember Makino sensei entertaining me with a lively account of the literary texts he enjoyed assigning for reading and discussion in the Japanese language program he directed at Princeton. I was impressed with his physical and mental energy, with the range of his interests, and with his expectation that his students would be as engaged as he in reading challenging Japanese texts and debating their meanings.
As I came to know Makino sensei better, I learned that his irrepressible energy was directed toward many goals. I learned, for example, that he swims for an hour every morning—well before daybreak, I believe—anywhere he can find a pool, whether at home or out of town. I learned that his several academic degrees reflected the breadth of a lively intelligence: a BA and an MA in English literature from Waseda University, a second BA and MA in linguistics from the University of Tokyo, and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Illinois, Urbana. I learned that he had been and continues to be extraordinarily active (and inordinately modest) in his contributions to the field of Japanese language teaching in the United States and worldwide. In fact, the record of his professional service and accomplishments parallels in many ways the growth and successes of the field of Japanese studies over the past decades.
The teaching of Japanese as a foreign language in the United States is a relatively recent phenomenon. A 1934 survey of United States education about Japan (Takagi) found that there were only eight American universities offering Japanese language instruction. This instruction was, the report stated,
uniformly the work of native instructors and, almost without exception, the responsibility of one man per institution. There were no proper teaching materials. Training was available only to advanced graduate students and only after they had persuasively demonstrated their need for it.1
There were at that time only thirteen Americans judged able to use Japanese language in their research.
After World War II, Americans who had been trained in Japanese for the war effort (many of them at the Navy Language School in Boulder, Colorado, where I now teach) returned to American universities, continued their studies, and began to make university programs on Japan more widely available. By the mid-1960s, when Makino sensei first began teaching in the United States, there were about 500 Japan area specialists in United States universities, 135 colleges and universities offering some sort of instruction about Japan, and roughly 4,000 university students of the Japanese language.
Just fifteen years later, in the early 1980s, there were over 11,000 students of Japanese at the university level and, in addition, more than 6,000 in precollegiate—mostly secondary—programs. By 1990, these numbers had increased to over 45,000 at the university level and over 23,000 in precollegiate programs. The most recent surveys indicate that university enrollment is holding fairly steady, while the number of precollegiate students of Japanese hovers at perhaps 70,000, including more than 27,000 at the elementary school level.
Clearly the national defense and security concerns of the post-World War II era, followed by the dramatic and attention-grabbing recovery of the Japanese economy in the succeeding decades, had a great deal to do with this increase in interest in Japan and in the concomitant increase in numbers of programs and students at all levels. But it was the way many teachers of Japanese responded to the challenges brought about by this explosive increase that has made Japanese the relatively stable, mature field it is today. Seiichi Makino’s work is exemplary in this regard.
Probably most teachers of Japanese in the United States have had to devote considerable time and energy to programmatic development, to lobbying for support from administrators and the public, to increasing student numbers, to building library collections, to doing outreach to local communities, to writing grant applications, to improving Japanese language pedagogy, to creating the necessary materials and texts to meet the needs of increasingly diverse students of Japanese, to developing appropriate assessment instruments, and to preparing Japanese teachers to work with students of different ages and different backgrounds in different types of school settings. Makino sensei is one of the visionaries of the field who recognized these needs very early and devoted himself to addressing them. His activities and his support and encouragement for others have contributed enormously to the dramatic changes in Japanese language education that have taken place during the past half century.
Among the areas in which he has made contributions are publishing research in linguistics and in Japanese language pedagogy, producing textbooks and language reference materials, directing and teaching in summer language programs in the United States and abroad, and directing and teaching in summer workshops for teachers. In addition, he has engaged in important professional service, having been one of the original members of the ACTFL committee that developed Japanese proficiency guidelines, serving as a longtime OPI tester and tester trainer, and advocating tirelessly for the use of proficiency measures in Japanese language teaching. He has twice served on the Executive Board of the Association of Teachers of Japanese as well as on various ATJ committees. Perhaps most important, in all these activities he has always taken the widest possible view. He recognizes—and acts on—the belief that social and cultural knowledge and skill are essential for effective communication and interaction, and he embodies in his teaching the belief that Japanese cultural and literary studies not only enhance the educational depth and value of linguistic study but are actually inseparable from it. He was one of the first to recognize that the expansion of Japanese programs into precollegiate institutions necessitated development of appropriate training programs and support for secondary teachers and, in fact, for Japanese teachers at all levels. In designing such programs, he has taken it for granted that we must provide training to both native and nonnative teachers so as to provide all our students with the best instructors and instruction possible.
Japanese grew more rapidly than any other language in the United States in the postwar period, and Japanese instruction is now reaching a broader segment of American society than ever before. Still, the situation is not quite as rosy as that statement suggests: as we all know, only a small proportion of Americans study any foreign language. And less than 3% of students who study a foreign language study Japanese. Therefore publishers have not exactly been competing over the years to produce textbooks and learning materials for Japanese. With the increasing diversification of students, not only in terms of age and socioeconomic background but also in terms of motivation for study and professional goals, we have to train teachers, develop materials, and design appropriate curricula and methodologies for students of widely varying ages, backgrounds, and interests.
In addition to his numerous books and articles on Japanese linguistics, Makino sensei is the author of a long list of articles and books on Japanese language pedagogy, addressing such diverse topics as contrastive semantic analysis and the teaching of Japanese, the ACTFL proficiency guidelines and the teaching of Japanese in the United States, integrating language and culture through video, and the history of Japanese language education. He has also taken the lead in producing a widely adopted, highly regarded new Japanese textbook series, Nakama (Makino, Hatasa, and Hatasa), as well as numerous dictionaries of Japanese grammar and reference works on other aspects of the Japanese language for learners of Japanese at all levels.
Makino sensei has also been active in designing and implementing both professional development opportunities for teachers and special study opportunities for students of Japanese. From 1978 to 1988, he served as director of the Summer Japanese Language School at Middlebury College, having taught there the three previous summers. As director he conceived of the first summer workshop for Japanese high school teachers held in the United States, which was offered at the University of Illinois, Urbana. A second summer workshop was held at Middlebury and Georgia Southwestern State University two years later, and that grew into additional summer pedagogy workshops at Middlebury and at the Hokkaido International Foundation in Hakodate, Japan. In 1991, Makino sensei began directing the ongoing Institute in Japanese Language Pedagogy and the MA (obtainable through successive summers of study) in Japanese Pedagogy at Columbia University. The ATJ is proud to follow in his footsteps in collaborating with the Middlebury Japanese Language School to offer summer language immersion opportunities and courses on various aspects of Japanese pedagogy to teachers of Japanese. The ATJ has sent teachers on fellowship to Middlebury for several years and hopes to build on this experience to develop graduate-level courses for them in the future. Makino sensei clearly laid the groundwork for this collaboration of institutions and professional organizations.
During the same years he was directing the Middlebury program and engaged in the extraordinarily demanding type of teaching that takes place there in the summer, Makino sensei further demonstrated his impressive ability to design and administer successful programs. He established two well-regarded summer study-abroad opportunities in Japan, the Hokkaido International Foundation Program and the Princeton in Japan Program in Ishikawa. Both programs continue to this day and are popular with American university students seeking summer immersion in Japanese language and culture.
Makino sensei was an early proponent of collaboration with other foreign language fields. As I mentioned, he represented the less commonly taught languages on the ACTFL committees that developed foreign language proficiency guidelines. He later became an OPI trainer and has given numerous training workshops in the United States and Japan. He is a valued member of the ATJ task force to develop a framework for postbasic Japanese, an ongoing professional project of the field during the 1990s. It is unlikely the Japanese professional organizations would today be members of the National Standards in Foreign Language Education Collaborative without his early work with the ACTFL proficiency committee. We are pleased that we now have a voice in the development of teacher standards for both entry-level teachers and professional teachers in all foreign languages (through INTASC and NBPTS) as members of the collaborative. Still only a few states certify teachers of Japanese, so state certification is an area in which professional organizations can offer assistance and shape standards appropriately. We are gratified to have worked with the collaborative to propose standards for foreign language teacher preparation to the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and hope we can continue this collaborative effort to set standards for and assess teacher preparation and teacher competencies.
Among the successes of the proficiency and standards movement is the fact that teachers of Japanese at all levels now have a common vocabulary and a basis for discussing programmatic articulation, setting goals, and assessing accomplishments. Makino sensei’s early efforts to establish proficiency measures and design professional development opportunities and pedagogy workshops for teachers were pioneering in this regard.
Challenges lie before us:
Let me describe a few of the current initiatives ATJ is undertaking to address these changes and challenges and mention some ways in which Makino sensei blazed trails and contributed (and continues to contribute) to these endeavors.
We are offering professional development grants to allow teachers to attend short-term professional conferences and workshops; we are also designing and offering such programs directly. Besides offering the summer program for teachers at Middlebury College, we have received funding from the Fulbright Group Projects Abroad program of the United States Department of Education for a six-week study-abroad opportunity for teachers of Japanese. This program combines language and culture study with intensive work on development and use of Japanese instructional technology at the National Institute for Multimedia Education in Makuhari, Japan.
Another area we’ve targeted is communication and sharing of information and materials. A little over a year ago, we teamed with the National Foreign Language Center to work on the Japanese portion—JapanNet—of the LangNet project, an online database of instructional materials. Japanese teachers are excited about the prospect that in the not-too-distant future we, and our students as well, may be able to log on and receive a set of learning materials specifically tailored to individual needs. Language resources included are not only textbooks and commercial tapes but also extracts from commercial materials, lessons developed by classroom teachers, Web sites and online tools, and professional development materials. An ATJ-appointed editorial board of experts in various aspects of Japanese education selects materials for JapanNet and recommends them to meet specific learning goals. Makino sensei was the first chair of the Japanese Editorial Board, and he continues to participate actively in this project.
We are also exploring the feasibility of offering online professional development modules for in-service teachers, so that they may select topics specific to their current needs and work online with both master K–12 teachers and professional experts in Japanese language instruction without leaving their homes, applying what they learn immediately in their classrooms. These modules—on such topics as assessment, pedagogical grammar, use of authentic materials, classroom management—will eventually be available for both university credit and personal development, and we expect Makino sensei’s expertise will be invaluable on this project as well.
I close with a waka from “Poems of Felicitation,” book 7 of the early-tenth-century
Japanese anthology the Kokinsh
. The poem is by my favorite Kokinsh poet, Sosei:
kasuga no ni
wakana tsumitsutsu
yorozu yo o
iwau kokoro wa
kami zo shiru ran
on Kasuga Plain
gathering young herbs of spring
to celebrate your
many years the awesome gods
surely know how we rejoice2
2The translation is adapted from Rodd and Henkenius 149.
Japanese Studies in the United States: The 1990s. Japanese Studies 26. Tokyo: Japan Foundation, 1996.
Makino, Seiichi, Yukiko Abe Hatasa, and Kazumi Hatasa. Nakama: Japanese Communication, Culture, Context. New York: Heath, 1998–99.
Rodd, Laurel Rasplica, and Mary Katherine Henkenius, trans. Kokinsh
. A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.
Takagi, Yasaka. Japanese Studies in the Universities and Colleges of the United States: Survey for 1934. Honolulu: Inst. of Pacific Relations, 1935.
© 2003 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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