Japan Connections over 55 Years in English

Crossing language barriers with Japan

Japan Connections over 55 Years in English

Quite a long time ago in 1964 our town sponsored a new foreign exchange student from Japan. Through the American Foreign Student (AFS) Exchange Program, Shizuho came to our small Midwest town with few English language skills. She stayed with a local family.

She was our age. That was our senior year. We were teenagers.

Our new AFS Exchange had begun!

She was one of the first foreigners in our town. Several of us invited her to meet others in our class one day. About the only recollection I have is saying to her, “When you don’t know what to call it, just say, ‘stuff.’”

We all laughed. We enjoyed her smile and her gentle personality.

Keeping in touch

Our small-town class size was a little over 100 students. Before each 5-year reunion we invited her to return. By then she was married. Her husband worked for Toyota.

They moved from Japan to London.

Ten years later, so did my cousin who was our age and in the same class. Reconnected!

Then 30 years later, we met in London and enjoyed staying at her house with her husband and their daughter.

Connections, memories, letters, beautiful handwritten notes kept us aware of each other’s lives. Shizuho had learned to speak and write well in English.

Update to 2022

We still correspond today with Shizuho.

Unrelated to Shizuho, but also from Japan, are new friends whose son married a Japanese woman when he was teaching English there.

My friends are grandparents my age.

Their son and his wife have children now.

For the first ten years they lived in the USA.

Then they moved to Japan for two years and back to the USA in 2021 for less than a year.

This year they moved to Japan again to be nearer to her aging parents.

Language proficiency

Changes! Changes! Adapting to cultures and languages, the youngest son is more proficient and adjusting in a Japanese school. He knows more Japanese. He is there now with his parents.

Age makes a difference.

But the oldest son, now 14, stayed with my friends (his grandparents) to finish out this year in school in April and May. He will be in an international, English-speaking school. He speaks little Japanese.

He made friends here. The transition is tough.

An adjustment to a new school, the language, and leaving grandpa and grandma is more difficult.

Japanese school and English intonation

What caught my attention was an article about Japanese and English. I am a former English teacher.

I read with interest the article, American Kids Deal With Japan’s Rigid English Education by Diane Neill Tincher published in Japonica about the teachers, the challenges, the misperceptions.

Knowing what to expect may help my friends, too.

Connections with Japan continue

So Shizuho did not teach us Japanese. She and her family moved back to Japan. Yet, through the years her presence connects us. We were the Baby Boomers after the war with Japan.

We’re still friends who encourage friends across the miles through the generations, still learning, still writing — in English.