Robyn Spence-Brown, Matthew Absalom, Anne de Kretser, Kathe Kirby, Carolyn
Stevens, Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson, Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku, Kent Anderson

Plenary Panel Discussion
Japanese Language Education: Creating the Future
Edited by Robyn Spence-Brown

Panel members
Dr Robyn Spence-Brown, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics,
Monash University (Panel Chair)
Mr Matthew Absalom, President, Australian Federation of Modern Language Teachers
Associations (AFMLTA); School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne
Ms Anne de Kretser, Director, Melbourne Centre for Japanese Language Education(MCJLE), Monash University
Ms Kathe Kirby, Executive Director, Asia Education Foundation (AEF)
Professor Carolyn Stevens, President (2011-2013), Japanese Studies Association ofAustralia (JSAA); Professor of Japanese Studies, Monash University
Professor Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson, Australian representative on J-GAP programand Japanese Global Network; Professor of Japanese Studies, School of Humanities andLanguages, UNSW, Australia
Professor Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku, President, American Association of Teachers of Japanese;
Professor of Development Studies, University of California, San Diego
Professor Kent Anderson, Pro-Vice Chancellor (International), University of Adelaide

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Robyn Spence-Brown
The panel has been asked to address the following questions:• What are the strengths of Japanese Language Education (JLE) in Australia andthe challenges facing it?
• How can we build on strengths and address challenges to ensure it remains
strong and relevant?
• How can we promote the relevance of JLE and build demand in schools,
universities and the community more broadly?
• How can we work together across states, levels of education, and internationallyto build for the future?
I’ve asked each of the speakers to speak for six minutes or so about one or two aspects ofthese questions that they think are important, from different perspectives. Then, whenthey’ve all had their say, we’re going to open it up for the panel to pick up on points thathave been raised, and get into more of a discussion. I’d like to ask Kathe Kirby, Executive
Director of the Asia Education Foundation (AEF), to start.

Kathe Kirby
I want to focus my five minutes worth of comments today on the issue of building demand
for Japanese language learning in Australian schools. I’ve chosen that topic because I
wanted to draw on a report that the Asia Education Foundation published in June this year
(2012) called “What Works: Building Demand for Asia Literacy”, so my early comments
are going to be focused on a combination of what works at building demand for languages
education in general, for Asian languages and then finishing with Japanese.
I think all of us here are well-versed in the fact that building demand for languages is
as critical an area for investment as providing the supply of teachers and high quality
programs. We know that. We’ve known that for a long time, but I don’t think thatwe’ve developed much of an evidence base to actually tell us what works at building
demand. When we started this research project, we asked these sorts of questions:“What influences a primary school principal to support the choice of one language overanother or any language?”, “What influences a school community to support the choiceof one language over another?”, “What arguments work best with a largely monolingual
Australian community?”. Well, things like the White Paper on Australia in the Asian52

Robyn Spence-Brown, Matthew Absalom, Anne de Kretser, Kathe Kirby, Carolyn
Stevens, Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson, Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku, Kent Anderson

Century make a difference to the community’s views about the importance of learning
languages. “What influences a Year 7 student to choose Japanese over, say, Chinese or
French?”, “What strategies influence a year nine student to continue their Japanese
language?”, “What arguments and incentives are successful for Year 10 and 11 students
to continue on with their studies into Year 12 and then on to university?”.
The point that I want to make here is that we know that building demand for languages
learning, for Asian languages, for Japanese language, is a complex task that does nothave one single answer. The arguments that we might put to children in primary school,
in Year 7, in Year 9, in Year 10 or 11, are quite different arguments and I don’t think we’ve
recognised that nearly enough. And in fact, we might’ve done an analysis of many of thestrategies around the country that were funded through the National Asian Languages
and Studies in Schools program on building demand; many of them have had a fairly
narrow focus and they’ve often had a focus on just the vocational reasons for learninga language. And I don’t know how many times people have suggested to me, “Well, if
they just waived HECS, then students will do a language at Year 12.” We don’t have any
evidence to support that.
What’s really my point today is the need to know more about this area and to gather
evidence. There are lots of things we do know, and we’ve known them for some time:
we know that a powerful driver of demand in students to continue with their language
studies is having a sense of purpose. We know that that purpose is really supported
when the whole school is commissioned, when there are studies of countries wherethat language is spoken embedded across the curriculum, when the school community
values and celebrates the languages taught in the school. We know, and our reportabsolutely validates this, that personal encounter is one of the strongest drivers ofdemand for school principals and teachers and members of the community, perhaps
in hosting visitors from a language target country. We know that parents play a criticalrole in supporting school language choice and in fact, that’s one of the things that ourreport has emphasised.
We collected 26 case studies of what’s working around the country to build demand.
We didn’t want to accept the case studies unless they had a report, an evaluation or data
to prove that their strategy was being effective, and one of the key overview messages
that comes through is the importance of having parents on side. But think about this:how many strategies at a system level have there been to educate parents about Japanese
language or the value of languages learning in general? What role does policy play inspeaking to parents? What role does leadership from politicians and from education
leaders have? And of course we know that a powerful driver of demand is high quality
teaching, at all levels of school, of course, but vital to keep students engaged in the
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primary years, in transition to Year 7 and again in early secondary school, where ourdata shows that the influence of friends, the power of the teacher and the timetable
most drive the demand to continue on with language study. But we also know that nomatter how high quality the teaching is, that we’re often coming up against structural
impediments that have been put in place to hold us back, to create barriers; we knowwhat those structural impediments are. One of them, of course, is pathways between
primary and secondary school, the opportunity for students to have continuous
language learning. One of them is Year 12 assessment procedures, and another one isthe vital need for increased time on task.
We’ve actually known about these impediments for a long time. All of these factors, fromhigh-quality teaching to personal encounter and purpose, the removal of structural
impediments right down to political and community support, drive demand for Asian
languages and Japanese language in Australian schools, singly and together. I don’t
think we’ve recognised the depth of what’s required. Joe Lo Bianco often talks about the
67 plus reports that have been undertaken into languages education in the last 30 or 40
years in this country, so nothing that I’ve said to you today will shock you, but little has
been done at the systemic level to address these issues.
I really picked up, as all of you would, the important objective in the White Paper
announcement, that all Australian children will have access to continuous language
learning from primary school through to secondary, thereby setting in place theimportance of doing something about language pathways.
The fact that little has been done and languages have remained largely optional inAustralian school education has made languages absolutely vulnerable to the issue of
demand. Maths teachers don’t talk about driving demand; English teachers don’t talkabout the need to drive demand. It’s largely a conversation in languages education andperhaps in the arts and some other areas. Perhaps the White Paper’s objective that every
child will have continuous access to learning a language will go towards rectifying that.
My second last point is that too little research has been done in this area to know what
is working. Our report includes a literature review; we sent the researchers back fourtimes, we said there must be things there, there must be more literature that’s been doneon this issue of what arguments work with kids at primary, higher, lower secondary,upper school, the community, parents, principals, what strategies are working to build
those continuous pathways.

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Stevens, Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson, Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku, Kent Anderson

So my final point is this (and I think that this creates a real challenge for Japanese
language education going forward): we also need to focus, as well as those macro issues,
which I’ve just briefly gone through, all of us here, need to challenge on what are thestrategies that will build demand for Japanese language education, specifically?
The really wonderful report on Japanese language education in Australian schools
undertaken by Robyn Spence-Brown and Anne de Kretser (drawn on) in the Four
languages, four stories report, emphasised that a one-size-fits-all approach to Asian
languages in Australian schools doesn’t work. We have to know, what are the argumentsthat are going to specifically speak to that primary school principal, that are going to
specifically speak to parents and to children at those different levels of schooling, toencourage them to continue on with their Japanese language education?
And we have a challenge here; and that challenge (apart from some of the things I’ve
mentioned) is the growing profile of China in Australia, and that’s one of the languages
that is on the tip of everyone’s tongues: “We must be learning more Mandarin”. And yet,Japanese has the most long-term and largest footprint in our schools and we need tobuild on the strength of that. So that’s really the challenge that I’m going to leave herewith you today: Is the argument for learning Japanese being lost in the community
and what are we going to need to do to specifically address some of the issues that are
just briefly outlined and identified today in regard to Japanese language learning in our
schools? Thank you.

Robyn Spence-Brown
Chihiro Thomson, from UNSW, will focus on a tertiary perspective on some of these issues.

Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson
Kathe talked about building demand in the school sector. I’d like to make somecomments on building demand in the tertiary sector.
I think in the tertiary sector, student enrolment is still very strong in Japanese; however,there is a demand which is not yet harvested due to mostly structural issues. Some
university students are not taking up Japanese, or for that matter, any languages, or
continuing with Japanese not because they don’t want to, but because they cannot orthey don’t think they can or because they don’t know how.

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Professor Lo Bianco talked about this morning what he called the “waverer”, who isneither committed nor totally uninterested, and I think this is where we can build
demand. When a high school leaver comes to the university, say this person is interested
in doing an Engineering degree, he would go to an Engineering Faculty student centre.
But the Engineering Faculty student centre will not tell him how to do a language within
the university structure. We need to have better communication between us; people
from Arts faculties or other faculties who are offering Japanese and places like theEngineering Faculty student centre, as well as high school teachers or career advisers
who’d advise this person where to go, how to find Japanese courses.
Non-Arts degrees, such as Engineering, Architecture, Medicine, etc., make it very
difficult to continue with Japanese or take up Japanese as a major. I’ve done a very small
survey at the UNSW, that’s my university, and I’ve found that there is no single programin the University of New South Wales that does not allow a language to be taken. It
might just be a single subject, but most likely, you are allowed to take up to six subjects
in Japanese or another language. That means you can do a three-year long, continuous
study of language, if you have the will to find it, and I think it’s probably similar in otheruniversities: if you are committed, you can find a way to do a language.
And also, when you come to a university as a first-year student, you don’t know the
way around, and the time goes very quickly and you’ll be a second-year, third-year or
fourth-year student and you think, “Oh, maybe I can take Japanese as an elective,” andthey do. Many of the first-year students in my course are Engineering students who arein their third or fourth year. They like the Japanese course very much but next year, they
are graduating; it’s too late.
So those are the structural issues within the university, and we need everybody’s help to
inform our students or other administrators, to make it more visible in the university
system for high school leavers or new students of Japanese to find a way to do Japanese,even if they are not majoring in Japanese.
Another point I want to make is that there is not enough incentive to start or continue
with Japanese in the university system. Victoria is blessed with a bonus point system(for university entrance), however in New South Wales, in my university, only those
who are going into the Arts degree would receive bonus points for doing a language.
I think we should inform university decision-makers of information, such as that US
universities require a foreign language for admission. For example at Harvard, they
recommend four years of language study before being admitted; Stanford, three or more
years; UCLA, two years required and three years recommended. This is for admission,and many top US universities require foreign language courses to be taken during their56

Robyn Spence-Brown, Matthew Absalom, Anne de Kretser, Kathe Kirby, Carolyn
Stevens, Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson, Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku, Kent Anderson

degrees. For example, Columbia requires at least intermediate level proficiency; Yale,at least three courses; Duke, at least three courses. We need collaborative effort among
faculties within a university, we need collaborative effort between the university sector
and high school sector, and we need collaborative effort among universities so that wecan build more demand within the university.

Robyn Spence-Brown
And now Anne de Kretser, Director of the Melbourne Centre for Japanese Language
Education (MCJLE), will share some ideas.

Anne de Kretser
My work involves predominantly primary and secondary schools so I’m going to talkabout those sectors. I’m going to talk about two things today and the first is to makethe point that we are doing well and Japanese is doing considerably well. We are doinga very good job.
When Robyn and I interviewed a lot of people for the report that we wrote, one message
that came through was, “Why are we worried about Japanese? Japanese is fine.” Even
though, after the boom in the ‘80s and ‘90s we had the bust, we have survived andJapanese is still very strong in Australia. So when we interviewed people, that’s why
they were wondering why we were concerned about Japanese. However, even though
we’ve remained fairly strong, we have to keep evolving. And Japanese teachers havebeen expert in doing that. We’ve adapted, we have changed. We can’t, perhaps, rely as
much on the rhetoric that was used about students needing to learn Japanese because it
would help them get a job. So we have adapted.
Tohsaku-sensei talked about culture and how important that was, and that’s one of
the things that Japanese teachers have been—very expertly, I think—able to help theirstudents with: learning language and culture together. That’s been one of our strengths.
Having pop culture now—and I notice that even on Sunday mornings when Rage used
to be on—now it’s Asian pop instead. Pop culture, the digital age, that exchange that wehave, are all very important to us.
But importantly, I think Japanese teachers have embraced and used the personal touch
to their advantage. Sister school exchanges, language assistants coming into the school:that personal exchange cannot be underestimated, and those personal exchanges makethe language real for the students and I think that has been an ongoing strength of ours.
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However, we do have challenges as well, and as the public discussion around Chinese(Mandarin) has increased, the discussion about Japanese may have become less visible.
That’s an ongoing challenge for us, as Kathe said, and it’s something that we, as teachers,
need to be very, very aware of, but also very proactive, in making sure that our voice isheard. Today is a great example that we have a lot of voices and that we need to use them.
There was an interesting study done through the University of South Australia a few
years ago, interviewing students who were learning a language. And when they asked thestudents, “Why should you learn a language?” the students said, “I’m a global citizen. It’llhelp me get a job and I think it will be good for my future.” When they asked them, “Whyare you studying a language?” they said, “I enjoy it. I’m good at it, and I like my teacher.”
Sometimes the messages that we convey are not always the ones that resonate with thestudents. And I think Kathe is exactly right. Some of the messages that are going out
may not really be that important to a Grade 4 student or even a Year 7 student. So wehave to be very careful, but also very strategic, about those messages that we give.
Through my work at the Melbourne Centre for Japanese Language Education, I often
got calls in the past from teachers asking me to ring their principal and convince themthat the Japanese program is worthwhile. In the last two years, I’ve had numerous callsfrom principals asking me to come and speak to the staff to help them understand how
important the Japanese program is. That’s been a really big turnaround, and I think thatthat’s a great turnaround.
I mentioned this morning that we have a principal at this conference; we also haveclassroom teachers, classroom teachers who are trying to use Japanese in their class. So
they’re supporting Japanese in their school. So Japanese isn’t a specialist subject, it has
become a mainstream subject, and the students see their Japanese teacher using Japaneseoutside of the classroom, conversing with other teachers. They see those other teachers
using Japanese where they can in their class. It doesn’t have to be a huge amount, it’s thatthe students see that it’s a more mainstream thing than a specialist thing and therefore
that message that Japanese is too hard or it’s too difficult, or the poor children can’t cope,that sort of action actually helps to make sure that that message is not being sent.
The other thing that I really would like you to think about is that in secondary schools,
the message that often is given to students is: “If you don’t go all the way, don’t go at all.”
They’re only talking about the end product: Year 12. “How many students do we havegoing through Year 12?” I know it’s a numbers game in your schools but when we only
talk to students about success of language learning in terms of finishing Year 12, then I
think we are losing students who might stay with us longer.
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Stevens, Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson, Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku, Kent Anderson

RMIT did a pilot program called VET in Schools, and they actually offer the students a
certificate, a vocational Certificate II in Languages, in Japanese. And they offered it toschools where they were losing students after the post-compulsory years, or in schools
where students generally did not show a great interest in learning Japanese. Having thestudents being able to actually accomplish a certificate at a midway point, after Year9, and in some cases Year 10; actually being able to say, “I studied Japanese ’til Year 10
and I have a qualification. I have a certificate that says I achieved this much,” was a very
powerful thing in those pilot schools. The numbers of students retained increased andinterestingly, some of the students who decided they weren’t going to continue, aftergetting that qualification, decided, “You know what? I am going to continue.” I thinkthat we need to start looking at acknowledging students’ language level at other points,
not just at the end of the game.
With my work, I’ve travelled to particularly South Australia and Tasmania and worked
within Australia, and I see—and Robyn and I saw this through our report as well—teachers involved in the Japanese Language Teachers’ Associations (JLTA) working so
hard to provide professional development for their teacher body. They work very hardto keep their teachers networked and connected. They’re all doing amazing work, but
we don’t share that work. There are innovative programs, there are fantastic processes,
there are incredible teachers doing amazing things, and in their network or in theirstate, they are able to support one another. But we are not sharing that in a bigger way.
And one of the things that MCJLE, and I hope The Japan Foundation, are going towork on is actually bringing those JLTAs together to ensure that there’s a stronger bodyand that we work more closely together, sharing that information and making sure that
information and knowledge is shared amongst us. We are living in the digital age andthat sort of thing is much, much more easily done these days. So that’s where we’reheading, I hope, in the future. Thank you.

Robyn Spence-Brown
Now I’d like to invite Carolyn Stevens, President of the Japanese Studies Association ofAustralia (JSAA), to speak.

Carolyn Stevens
As the current president of the JSAA, sadly, one of the tasks I’m called upon to perform
is writing letters of support to the university, usually senior managers, on behalf ofJapanese language programs that are under threat of downsizing or even closure. This
trend is despite the clearly recognised need for, and promises of support for, Asian59

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literacy in Australia, as per the White Paper released last Sunday. Thankfully, at least to
the Federal Government, Asian engagement seems to be important.
So then, why this constant sense of threat? Why is it that we feel the need to quote,“Tame the tiger,” as Joe (Lo Bianco) noted this morning? In his keynote, he described anuneasy relationship between knowledge, which is what we do, and power, which is what
they do, as outlined in policy. This uncertain and uneasy relationship is at the heart ofthis sense of insecurity. And I think I speak for many here when I say that oftentimes it
seems as if teachers, whatever the level of schooling, end up creating knowledge in spiteof the support, or lack thereof, of policy or (those in) power. Policy takes a fairly narrowfocus on the vocational aspect of studying language, at any level, but I’m particularly
talking about university.
This is problematic because it separates language from the rest of the academic
curriculum as somehow different or special; an extra add-on. And unfortunately, thisoften results in a subordinate status. This is the tension quoted from Joe’s book from2009: “[a] tension between the view that we have language provision serving economicand employment ends versus serving the ends of social justice, educational access andpersonal satisfaction”. The problem is, if we barter with the “tigers” using the currency
they value, we too end up focusing on the economic and employment ends of ourdiscipline and make ourselves even more vulnerable to the ebb and flow of supply
and demand. Despite the government calls for continuous support, if there is fallingdemand, there is little realisation of policy support from our heads of schools, deans
and vice chancellors.
With the rise of China, students as well as administrators, turn their interests to Chinese.
Others have their eyes on South America and are supporting Spanish. We are told thatthe economic rise of China and India has encouraged university students to study theselanguages, and therefore, we learn that Japan has to contract if China is to grow. This neoliberalist view of Asian literacy hurts not only just the area specialists who are not includedin the flavour of the month menu, but it also endangers those who are chosen, for when
supply and demand principles drive education, everyone runs the risk of vulnerability.
I would like to see teachers of Japanese at both the secondary and the tertiary levels
promote the study of Japanese in non-instrumentalist ways as well. As Kathe pointed
out, let’s project ourselves as the teachers do in Maths and in English. Project that image,and the reception will follow.

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Stevens, Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson, Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku, Kent Anderson

But this situation is not limited just to Australia. The Modern Language Association,
which is the peak academic body for the teaching of foreign languages at universities in
the United States, wrote in 2007:
In the context of globalisation and the post-9/11 environment, the usefulnessof studying languages other than English is no longer contested. The goals
and the means of language study, however, continue to be hotly debated. On
the one end, it is considered to be principally instrumental, a skill to use incommunicating thought and information. At the opposite end, language isunderstood as an essential element of a human being’s thought processes,
perceptions and self-expressions. (MLA 2007)

In light of the [Australia in the Asian Century report, which] I would consider fairly
instrumentalist, we also have to argue a further case, that of the intellectual valueof studying Japanese and how the study of Japanese enhances and deepens ourunderstandings of ourselves and others in exactly the same way that the study ofHistory or Philosophy does. We want to take advantage of the current political andeconomic climate that prioritises Asian literacy for economic growth and employment
opportunities, but we must not rest on the White Paper’s instrumentalist support.
Regardless of the cheerleading in Canberra, those of us in any form of education,
whether it’s tertiary, primary or secondary, are vulnerable to administrators who follow
numbers. We must present our discipline as an intellectually vital area, and the activitiesof the MCJLE and also my organisation, the JSAA, are crucial in supporting this.
My organisation sponsors activities such as a biannual conference. We have a newly
formalised annual symposium grant program and we also publish an ERA A-ranked
journal Japanese studies published by Routledge in the UK. These are all ways the JSAA
supports teachers of Japanese at all levels in ways that are recognised by the workplace
managers who are following numbers, but are also intellectually viable. While many ofyou here are already members, I call on the others to join, and those who are alreadymembers to engage with the association’s activities more regularly. I think the JSAA canassist with this project, moving away from instrumentalism and towards intellectual
vitality through its activities. One of my main goals is to show the monolingual leaders at
the top that the study of Japanese is not merely a trend to rise or to fall, but an academic
area with intellectual as well as strategic benefits.

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Robyn Spence-Brown
Now I’d like to hand over to Matthew Absalom, president of the Australian Federationof Modern Language Teachers Associations (AFMLTA).

Matthew Absalom
It’s fantastic to see you all here today and congratulations on a very interesting program.
I want to talk a little bit about some of my own work. I’m a linguist and a language
teacher. I teach Italian, but I’m here in my role as the president of the AFMLTA. I did
a little study on motivation a couple of years ago, looking at why first-year university
students have continued or dropped the language during their second years. I pulled
out the students that kept going with Japanese to the end of Year 12, and the statisticthat stood out was the importance of teachers, and this point’s already been made. It
looks like only a subtle difference, but statistically, actually that’s significant. Everythingelse, you can see the factors there (referring to Powerpoint slide): travel, culture, future
employment, teachers and entertainment. And then you see things such as strategic
Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) scores. I also want to note that, by the endof school, parents have moved out of the equation, actually. If we look at motivational
studies in junior secondary, parents are a big thing. By the end of school, it’s not theparents anymore. If anything, it might be students’ peers. But by the end of school,
students have become people. They’re a little bit more independent, they make theirown decisions. So that’s something to think about.
Here’s a quote: “Japanese was a much more interesting experience than French atsenior level and the teacher seemed much more interested and knowledgeable.” And
this comment’s been made before. Actually in Australia, we’ve got an expert body ofJapanese language teachers and that’s a strength that really needs to be maximised.
I just want to talk about Japanese more widely. Japanese is a little bit of an anomaly inAustralia. If you think about the language, and if you think about the other languages
that we teach here, the perceptions are different. If we pick out other languages, people
will say “French is music” or “Indonesian’s easy”. Italian: “all the Latin lovers”. What dopeople say about Japanese? It doesn’t have—there isn’t a “hanger” like that. There isn’t
a, “I’m doing Japanese because...” Okay, people say “anime” and all of that, but I’m notconvinced that’s the thing. But just think about that a little bit.

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Stevens, Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson, Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku, Kent Anderson

It’s not a community language because there haven’t been waves of immigration. So
Japanese doesn’t have the community language status that other languages have. It’s notnecessarily a language for business anymore. Everyone’s talking about Chinese now.
It’s not spoken widely. It’s not a mass language. It’s not like Spanish, Arabic. It’s not alanguage of colonialism. And people say it’s not easy. The thing about “easy” though,look, seriously, nothing’s easy, actually. I mean, anything that’s valuable isn’t easy. And
as languages educators, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of saying, “It’s hard,” because
everything’s hard. It’s hard to write a critical essay. It’s hard to learn a musical instrument.
It’s hard to drive a car. It’s hard to get the pasta just right.
I think the other important thing I’d like to talk about is branding. This is my point.
Rethink the message. What’s the message? Think about the message. Japanese clearly hasa special place in the heart and minds of countless Australians, otherwise it wouldn’t havethe strength that it’s got in education. That’s something really, really important for you
to bear in mind. People have fond memories of learning Japanese. They don’t have thehorror of, “My Latin teacher was this,” or, “French was hideous, Madame was—” youknow, whatever. We don’t have those stories around Japanese, which is something to reallybuild on. There are clear special relationships between Australia and Japan. When I wasdoing a bit of research, you know, apparently the best buckwheat soba noodles are from
Tasmania? You know that old adage about getting to people through their stomach.
I think a good way to think about Japanese is as a gateway language. We have to be a little
bit more collaborative in languages and a little bit less competitive and combative. It’snice if people can use Japanese to move on to Korean or whatever it is. And we should
actually be happy with that and not going, “Oh, no. Keep doing Japanese.” Intellectualand chic and an achievement. They’re three things that I want you to think about around
Japanese. Intellectual, as my colleague just said. Japan is, from a design point of view,
from a fashion point of view, to look at—aesthetically very pleasing. Something to bearin mind. We’re talking about adolescents. They like the way things look. They like fads.
I think it’s good to think about what’s easy as well. I’m a phonologist. Japanese isphonologically a very accessible language. Same vowel system as Spanish, Indonesian.
Not difficult syllabic structure. From a pronunciation, from a phonological production
point of view, it’s actually quite accessible.
And the people side of it, we’ve heard about it today. We’ve got connections. Increasingly,
I’m talking about language learning as about people. If we make it all about books andwhatever, that’ll appeal to that nerd that likes books, but the 99% of the rest of yourstudents are interested, actually, in interacting with people. Working together; lastpoint. As I’ve said already, within languages, we’re our own worst enemies. We look at
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each other and go, “Oh, no. They’ve got a few of my students. They should have kept
doing Italian. Why did they move to Japanese?” We’ve got to move on from this, we’ve
got to move away from it. We’ve got to think as a field. We’ve got to think as “languages”.
We’ve got to think of each other, not being divided and conquered. We have to learn
from each other.
The AFMLTA National Conference 2013 will be a fabulous opportunity to learn fromone another. The AFMLTA, what do we do? We do some national projects—we’relooking at building capacity. One of our recent ones has been mentoring leadership. You
can find this on our website. We’re putting up examples of practice at the moment. We
need better research, we’ve heard that already. We need to know what works. (You cansee we’re all on the same page up here.) We need to know why people choose Japanese.
Why? Because it’s unclear to me why students choose Japanese. We need to know why.
We need better collaboration. AFMLTA, MLTAs, JSAA, we’ve got representatives ofuniversities here. Schools; get some research happening in your schools. Do it yourself.
It’s easy to do research in your schools. If you want some suggestions, contact any of us.
We’ll help you out. I’ll come to your school and help you, wherever it is. But get someresearch going. Work out for yourselves what’s going on.
And don’t let this moment slip away. We’ve got our moment now. Everyone’s always
seeing those moments, this is a good moment. And think about quality. What do wewant for our students? What do the students want? Have you asked them? And that’s
where I’m going to finish.

Robyn Spence-Brown
Now, it’s over to Professor Kent Anderson, who has just arrived from the airport.

Kent Anderson
どうも、
こんにちは。本当に遅れまして申し訳ありません。
アデレード大学のケント・アンダーソ
ンと申します。今日、
日本語で発表するか英語で発表するか、本当に迷っていたんですけれども、
ジョー・ロビアンコ先生と話していたとき、「ケントでは絶対に5分以内で報告はできない！」と言われたので、早口で話すために英語で発表させていただきます。

So I started in Japanese to tie in two things, to make two points. One, is I’m one ofthose evil administrators that you’ve heard about. Some of us evil administrators
speak Japanese, speak foreign languages, and believe deeply and passionately about the64

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Stevens, Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson, Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku, Kent Anderson

importance of language. You have allies that you don’t know about who are there, whowill come. And we’ve seen that again and again. So it’s not as bleak as we sometimes
think it is and that is my punch line for today. I only have five minutes, but my message
is a very simple one: “the power of the positive”—the power of the positive message.
The second reason that I started off in Japanese is I love to tell stories, so let me start
off with a story of mine. I took French in Years 6, 7 and 8 because I was a student in the
United States and in order to go to university, you had to do a language. And I failed.
Having failed at French before I got to the point where you can get into university, I
took German for Years 9, 10 and 11, and I failed. I got into university somehow andthere decided, “Well, shoot. I’d better do something,” and so I started to study Japanese.
And well, my Japanese is not perfect; but I can get by enough to do things. The point ofthat story is that on the back of those failures of French and German is the success ofanother language. So what I’m trying to suggest is we change the language, for example,
on retention, not to talk about how we fail our students if they don’t stay with us, but
how we actually leave them prepared to succeed in not only learning another language
but in hundreds and thousands of other ways. Connecting with people. And that is oneof the things that I think the White Paper talks about very well.
Okay, so my message is again simple: the power of the positive. There are two aspects
to that. The first is the negative is lazy, intellectually lazy, and I think a scapegoat for too
much. It is hard to change. It is easy to retain the status quo. Therefore, given the two
options, we will do nothing. Negative is easy for evil administrators to ride. The positive
is something that they want to do, but given no option, like the vacuum, they will go
into the negative space.
The second is, the positive is powerful. If you don’t try something, of course you won’t
achieve anything. So first is the willingness to try, and being positive. And I want torepeat what others have already said, there should be no excuses for something being
hard. Everything in life that is worthwhile is hard. Don’t use “hard” as a negative. Hardis a positive that builds resilience, that builds humanity, and that builds powerfulrelationships. And those are the challenges. I was rewriting a speech of the Vice
Chancellor’s today. I took out “problems” and I put in “challenges”. Those are thechallenges that present us. And then, whether you believe the research or not, there is
this concept of the power of positive thinking and positive psychology.
Okay, if you have come with me this far and you believe in this power of the positive, I
think there are two aspects, or two ways I want to think about it. One is around learning.
The message that this is the hardest language; the message that most people never get tofluency; the message that we have dropouts; the message that our retention rates are not
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NSJLE Proceedings 2012as high as we want, are negative messages which make the cause harder. Turning that
into the positive, which is how we prepare people for those future successes, I think iseasier to get people on board with.
The second one is about the politics, or the public policy as Joe (Lo Bianco) would
talk about. Let me focus on three things here. The first is, why Japan? So much of ourtime now is talking about the negative of Japan. The lost decades. Why Japan? I wantto get beyond that. Japan (I like this idea of rebranding) is sexy. Japan has the strongest
teaching infrastructure of any language. You guys are the best. This is the model for the
rest of the world. So get out of the conversation, of the rhetoric, of deficit, and move to
how strong we are. The same with the White Paper. No one actually debates what theWhite Paper is arguing, which is, the gravity has shifted and we need to prepare. All of
the debate, all of the negativity is over: do we put in ten thousand dollars or ten billion
dollars? I mean, that’s a pretty positive conversation to be having. Let’s turn it into thepositive. And finally, the challenges in schools. I’ve been there, I’ve been to your schools,
my son’s in your schools, I’ve taught in the schools; I know it is challenging. I know
doing that day in and day out, you can get frustrated and you can fall into the rhetoricof the negative, but it’s actually the positive that will bring us along. It’s the positivethat the evil principals, it’s the positive that the evil deans, it’s the positive that the evilcheque writers, the politicians and the bureaucrats, want. Optimism sells. And we havesomething that this country needs and you are the best in the world at delivering it.
Thank you very much.

Robyn Spence-Brown
I’ve asked Professor Tohsaku to go last so that he can, with his critical eye, from an
outsider’s perspective, comment on some things he’s observed since he’s been here.

Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku
Because I went through a very bad education system, I didn’t develop well my criticalthinking skills, and so I cannot be critical in that way, but I’d like to talk about the buildingof Japanese language education in Australia from a slightly different point of view.
As Chihiro-sensei said when she introduced me (for the keynote address), I am the firstpresident of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese. This association started
on January 1st this year. Before then, we had two organisations. One is ATJ, mainly
consisting of university faculty members who are teaching Japanese language, Japanese
literature. And another one is NCJLT, mostly comprising K through 12 teachers.
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Stevens, Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson, Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku, Kent Anderson

Before these two organisations merged, they hardly had a conversation between these
two entities. Probably, the conversation started five or six years ago when we started
developing national standards. That was the first time when I think university faculty
members and K–12 teachers got to work together and discussed the streamlined programof Japanese language, and that was a really good opportunity for both the K through12 teachers and university faculty members. And also we developed an advanced
program, AP Japanese Language and Culture program, whereby high school students
can take this university Japanese language course while in high school, and if they pass
the exam, they can get college credit before coming into a college. In order to develop
the AP program and exam, especially, high school teachers and university teachers
come together to develop the program and test. During the course of this process, wehave a conversation and we get to know each other. Before the introduction of the AP
program, university faculty members didn’t care about K through 12 programs. And K
through 12 teachers were afraid of talking to us. But communication is really great. And
I think it’s important for K through 12 teachers and university faculty members to havea conversation, to sit together and to understand each other. This is really important forbuilding a future of Japanese language education, I think in Australia too. And one good
way to have this kind of conversation is to develop a well-articulated program. By nothaving a well-articulated program from kindergarten through to university, we waste a
lot of money and time. And also, we cannot create highly proficient Japanese language
speakers.
I often hear in the United States, “How many years do you have to study Japanese if you
want to become proficient?” It’s true, Japanese language is really difficult, but sometimes(it’s not) because (it is) too hard, it’s because we don’t have well-articulated Japanese
language programs from kindergarten through university, that students won’t become
more proficient in Japanese. So I think teachers from every entity, every sector, should
get together and think about developing a well-articulated program from K throughuniversity. And also, we should not forget after university. I think we should think about
Japanese language education from cradle to grave. Even after university, when education
is over, people should use Japanese.
So developing life-long Japanese language speakers and users is really important. I was
reading a newspaper article, actually Nihon keizai shinbun, the other day, and in that
article, I don’t mean to put down cab drivers, but a cab driver who had worked for areally famous, big corporation in Japan, he actually was in Southeast Asia, and when hereturned to Japan from Southeast Asia, he was fired and he lost his job and he became acab driver. And when someone interviewed this cab driver and asked “Why do you think
you were fired?” he replied “Because I didn’t have any professional skills.” I talked about
twenty-first-century skills this morning, and in this article, this person who interviewed
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this cab driver said, “In the twenty-first-century, having professional skills, perfectprofessional skills, is really important to survive.” So if you study Japanese, you should
strive to become a really proficient speaker. There is a business book talking about Ten
thousand hours; in order to become professionally skilful, you have to do something,
one thing, for ten thousand hours. Ten thousand hours is just a figurative thing, but if
you want to become more proficient in Japanese, you have to, although it’s hard, you
should work really hard. And you should work from kindergarten through university
and even after university is over, I think you should keep studying Japanese, and weshould emphasise that. And, again, it’s up to you to create joy in learning Japanese.
And I know my time is up soon, but in order to build up the future Japanese educationin Australia, you should constantly do leadership training. Leaders do not stay young
forever. We need the next generation of leaders. The same is true in the United States.
When I was approached by The Japan Foundation five years ago and asked “What is thepriority for Japanese language education here?” I said, “Development of young leaders.”
We won’t stay young forever, and we need, constantly need, the next generation ofleaders, and I think the same is true with Australia.
And also lastly, I talked about advocacy and as you see from my talk, advocacy needs
special skills. So in order to advocate for Japanese language education in Australia, I
strongly suggest you have a workshop to train people for advocacy skills. Thank you.

Robyn Spence-Brown
Now, I’d like to throw the floor open to the panel, to throw in those important comments
you’ve missed or pick up on things that other people have said. Who would like to kick off?

Matthew Absalom
I absolutely agree that we shouldn’t be justifying ourselves. I want to remind you thatin every declaration for educational goals for young people—the three declarations:
Darwin, Melbourne, Adelaide—languages has always been one of the key learning
areas. We actually have to stop justifying ourselves.
But the point I want to make is actually about finding out why the students are doing
it. Sometimes the curriculum documents tell us that the kids are doing it because theywant to talk the language or, you know, they want to go buy one of your nice Japanesepancakes or something and they want to talk to the lady while they’re doing it. Somekids don’t want to, some kids want to read, some kids want to do something else. My
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Stevens, Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson, Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku, Kent Anderson

point is to find out why they’re doing it so we can respond as educators, so we can go,“Oh, I’ve got a group of nerdy big heads here who want to read. Let’s do some readingeven though the curriculum doesn’t tell us to”, or “I’ve got the opposite, some illiteratefools who don’t want to read.” Let’s emphasise another aspect of the language. That’s mypoint about why they’re doing it. I just want us to be able to be responsive and actually
feel okay about going, “Hang on a minute, okay, I’ve got this curriculum thing here, but
the kids want this (other thing). I know I can do it. I know their Japanese will improvethrough these activities. Let’s give it a whirl.”

Kent Anderson
I hadn’t thought about Matthew’s suggestion of brand until he made it. I think it’s an
excellent one. Let me encourage one thing which is, we don’t have to wait for Japanto figure out what Japan’s brand is, and fall on the back of that. This is Japanese forAustralia, and that can be different, and indeed we might even lead Japan in this.
The second point is, tagging on to the end of this conversation we were just having rightnow, when you go into a branding exercise, you are not just saying, “What do the clientswant?” you are also saying, “Who do I want to be?” So, I’m not in favour of just 100%
giving up who we are to wherever the students might be at this time. I want to take a
bit of responsibility for who we are as well. But I think the brand is a wonderful idea for
JSAA or for one of those others. Also, I might plug Languages and Cultures Network forAustralian Universities (LCNAU) Languages Communities; for the university teachers
here, please join in this advocacy.

Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson
Taking on the branding idea, I think if we let the students do the choosing it’ll work. And
just to look back at my last semester, our students did some presentations on their own
chosen topics and one was “maid cafes” and a second was, “Why is it that Japanese idols
don’t sell in Australia?” And those topics came along with “Why is the Japanese suicide
rate so high?”. So, you know, let the students choose what they want to learn and it will
work. And also our Australian students have different types of consuming life. They use
Hello Kitty stationery goods and they aspire to buy Shiseido Cosmetics, even though they
are so expensive and they can’t afford it, and they eat sushi every day. We don’t have to sell
Japan too much, they already own their own Japan. Let the students do their own talking,I think it will be alright. And after listening to Tohsaku-sensei’s talk this afternoon, andI’ve known Tohsaku-sensei for many years, I have taken his advice and I want to do some
self-promotion, and I’d like to encourage you to do more self-promotion.
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This year at UNSW we have focussed on advocacy. One of the advocacy strategies
was, we applied for the Office of Learning and Teaching citation for an outstanding
contribution to student learning, and we were awarded that, along with $10,000 dollars.
You know, being humble is Japanese, I know self-promotion is not very Japanese-y, but
we need to do it and I’m sure there are many more deserving teams and individuals here
who’d deserve this award much more than us, but we did it and that’s why we got it. We
need to do it and I encourage all of you to apply for awards.

Kathe Kirby
I wanted to pick up on something that Anne de Kretser has said and link her to the
obvious enthusiasm for the number of associations that have been talked about during
the panel discussion. Anne made a point about sharing good practice, and if there’s
one thing that the AEF learned through the report we did into what’s working to build
demand, it’s that if we do share practice, we’re sharing good practice and that it’s reallypowerful. One of the profiles we did was a program happening in New South Wales
independent schools where they actually were teaching parents at primary schools thelanguage that the primary school was teaching, so parents were able to come in for half
an hour a couple of times a week and had a go at learning Japanese or Chinese. This hada really powerful effect on the parents. And the parents all of a sudden say, “Oh now we
get it! Oh this is fun! We’re going to really support this.” I’m using that as an example,
when you share that practice, when you say, “Here are some schools in New South
Wales doing this, why couldn’t schools everywhere be doing this?” So it’s a way to bring
the parent community in. And I think that with the rich and live associations that you’ve
got, one of the real challenges is utilising the technologies that there are today. How areyou going to really build on sharing good practice and sharing what’s working? Because
everybody in this room has strategies that they know work really well. So I just urge you
to think about that.

Robyn Spence-Brown
Thank you very much to all the panellists, for giving us such rich ideas in a very shortperiod of time: Very important ideas about how to connect and how to advocate forJapanese—and a lot of challenges. That’s why we invited them, because just as Jo Lo
Bianco said about our expectations for students, we have very high expectations for
the Japanese community. We feel very privileged to have had you here. Thank you forstarting many conversations for us.

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