Essay A yen for Japanese By Linda Hoaglund	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
両親から受けた言語教育 日本映画の字幕翻訳の第一人者であるホーグランドさんが、英語と日本語を自由に使えるバイリンガルとなったのは、子供のころに両親から受けた厳しい言語教育のたまもの。 日本の学校で見聞きしたことを、夕食時に日本語を交えずに話をするなどという訓練もありました。

I owe my native fluency in Japanese to two radical decisions my parents made. After they chose to be missionaries and wound up in Japan, they vowed not to minister in the big cities where some of the comforts of American life, including English-language schools, were available. They hadn't traveled for weeks on a freighter from San Francisco for that. Instead, they requested a remote posting, which landed them in Hofu, Yamaguchi Prefecture, a provincial city of about 100,000 people.

Once there, they decided to educate their three daughters in Japanese schools, instead of packing us off to the international boarding school in Kobe. Making this choice, they overcame vociferous opposition from their friends back in the States, who warned we would either turn into little Buddhists or go completely "native" and flunk out of American life. In the 1960s, most Americans no doubt still imagined the Japanese to be as treacherous as the men who attacked Pearl Harbor and as crazy as the kamikaze who dive-bombed American ships.

In that context, my parents' commitment to our Japanese education was as progressive as the rules they set and enforced about our English education at home were rigid. Mom woke us up at 6 a.m. and as we waited under the covers for the portable kerosene stove to warm our room, she read to us from "Little Women" or "Old Yeller." Then as two of us started our daily English lessons from our boxed correspondence course, one of us would take her turn to go upstairs to study American history with Dad, who got to sleep in a little longer. But the correspondence course wasn't good enough for Mom. She demanded we also memorize and learn how to use 25 new words a day.

To reinforce our early-morning home schooling, at dinner my parents insisted we recount in English what had happened in school that day. The rule was no Japanese words. And it was no joke. There was a cute piggy bank into which we had to deposit one precious yen out of our allowances for every Japanese word that slipped out. There must have been many because I remember watching my father empty out the full piggy bank on several occasions.

As a child I found this rule incredibly unfair, just like having to attend school on Saturday mornings and having only the month of August to enjoy summer vacation, like every Japanese child, trials no American child had to endure. But I owe my instinctive facility in rendering Japanese into English to my parents' many rules, especially that infuriating one barring Japanese at dinner. Every day of my childhood I had no choice but to practice communicating what I had seen and felt in Japanese into articulate English, peppered with my newly acquired vocabulary.

Shukan ST: Oct. 12, 2007

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