THE LEARNER DEVELOPMENT JOURNAL
学習者ディベロップメント研究部会誌

ISSN: 2433-5401
https://ldjournal.ld-sig.org

The Learner Development Journal Issue 5: Engaging with the Multilingual Turnfor Learner Development: Practices, Issues, Discourses, and Theorisations
Author: Akiko Nakayama
Title: Reconciling with English: An Autobiography to Ruminate Over the Different
Meanings That English Has for Us
Date of publication online: 2021
Author contact: <akknkym@gmail.com>

Published by the Japan Association for Language Teaching
Learner Development Special Interest Group, Tokyo
http://ld-sig.org/
Copyright 2021 each respective author

The APA citation reference for this paper is:
Nakayama, A. (2021). Reconciling with English: An autobiography to ruminate overthe different meanings that English has for us. In A. Barfield, O. Cusen, Y. Imamura, &R. Kelly (Eds.), The Learner Development Journal Issue 5: Engaging with the Multilingual Turnfor Learner Development: Practices, Issues, Discourses, and Theorisations (pp. 25-39). Tokyo:
The Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) Learner Development Special
Interest Group.

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NARRATIVE ACCOUNT

Reconciling with English: An Autobiography to
Ruminate Over the Different Meanings That
English Has for Us
Akiko Nakayama, Hiroshima University <akknkym@gmail.com>
In this narrative account, I will present the stories of how two women, Jina and I, relate with language learning. Jina is a Korean
woman studying at a Japanese university. In the Japanese context, most of the students from East Asia are fluent in either
Japanese or English, but she could communicate in both fluently. Moreover, she had invested heavily in English voluntarily.
Why did she invest in English in a non-English speaking country? This is the start of this research. The second story is my own
story, which emerged as I tried to understand Jina’s story reflectively. Although we grew up in different places and times, I wasable to reflect on the common life goals of both of us as women, the freedoms we have gained through language learning/use, and what learning English means to us. By moving back and forth between Jina’s and my stories, and re-telling andreliving my story, it became clear that language learning is tied to the feminine realm, especially for me. I will discuss how weboth had a common goal of living independently in this modern society, and that in order to achieve this goal, we formed twosides of the same coin, me refusing to learn English and Jina actively accepting it.
このナラティブ・アカウントでは，ジナと私という2人の女性が言語学習とどのように関わってきたかを紹介する。ジナは日本の大学で学ぶ韓国人女性である。日本のコンテクストでは，東アジア出身の学生のほとんどが日本語と英語のいずれかに流暢であるが，彼女には両方の言語で流暢にコミュニケーションをとる能力があった。彼女は日本語が流暢であるにもかかわらず英語に大きな投資をしていた。なぜ英語 ではない
日本に て英語なのか。これがこの研究の始まりである。二つ目のストーリーは，ジナのストーリーをリフレクシブに理解しようとする中で生まれた私のストーリーである。私は，生まれたところも育った時代もジナとは異なっていたが，二人のストーリーの間を行き し，自分のストーリーを語り直すことによって，私たちに共通する女性としての人生の目標，言語学習及び使用によって得た自由，さらに私たちにとって英語学習はどのような意味を持つのかを考察した。それにより，言語学習は，とりわけ私にとって女性の領域に結びついていることが明らかになった。また，私たちは二人ともこの近代社会の中で自立して生きるという共通の目標を持っており，この課題を達成するために，言語，特に英語学習に して私は拒否を，ジナはそれを積極的に受け入れるというコインの裏と表のような態度を持っていたことが明らかになった。
본고에서는 두 여성이 언어학습과 어떻게 관련되어 있는지에 대한 스토리를 소개한다. 첫 번째 여성은 일본 대학에서 유학 중인 한국인 진아다. 진아는 일본어가 유창함에도 불구하고 영어에 많은 투자를 했다. 그녀는 왜 일본까지 와서 영어를 중시하는가, 라는 의문이 이 연구를 시작하게 했다. 두 번째 여성은 진아의 스토리를 자기성찰적으로 이해하려는 중에 발견한 나 자신이다. 나는 진아과 다른 나라, 다른 시대를 살아왔지만, 우리 각각의 스토리를 오가며내 자신의 스토리를 다시 말하고 기억을 돌이켜봄으로써 우리에게 공통되는 인생의 목표, 언어학습과 사용을 통해 획득한 자유, 나아가 우리에게 영어 학습은 어떤 의미를 갖는지에 대해 고찰했다. 그 결과, 언어학습이 나에게는 여성의 영역에 매여 있었음을 알 수 있었다. 또한 우리는 현대 사회에서 자립하여 살아간다는 공통의 목표를 가지고 있으며, 이 과제를 달성하기 위하여 언어학습에 대해 나는 거부의 태도를 취한 반면, 진아는 적극적으로 수용하는 태도를 취하여 동전의 양면과 같은 태도였음을 알 수 있었다.

Keywords
English hegemony, autobiography, gender, identity, researcher reflexivity, language learning purposes
英語のヘゲモニー，オートバイオグラフィ，ジェンダー，アイデンティテイ，研究者のリフレクシビティ，言語学習の目的영어 헤게모니, 자전적 글쓰기, 성차, 아이덴티티, 연구자의 자기성찰, 언어 학습의 목표

Prologue
The hegemony of English is having a significant impact on our lives in the East Asian context(Park, 2009; Seargeant, 2009). Japanese universities have created many English-mediatedprograms to attract international students (Ninomiya et al., 2009) and pressured researchers
to present their research in English regardless of their field of study. I have been involved
with international students in Japan for more than 20 years as a Japanese language teacher,and during that time I have sensed the influence of English on the students I have met. In

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Reconciling with English: An Autobiography to Ruminate Over the Different Meanings That English Has for Us

the past, there were two different kinds of international student groups, one using English
and the other using Japanese (Simic et al., 2006). It was rare to meet a student from East
Asia who was fluent in both English and Japanese. However, in the past ten years or so, I
have occasionally met international students from East Asia who can speak both Japaneseand English fluently even at a university located in a small town. Jina (a pseudonym) is oneof these examples. She was an international student from South Korea, studying at Dream
Field University (also a pseudonym, and hereafter DFU) in West Japan, who majored in social
science as an undergraduate. Although she was fluent in Japanese, she preferred to speak in
English and actively interacted with English-speaking international students. Jina went to
a Baltic country for an English-medium program as an exchange student for one year. Why
was English so important even when she was in Japan, a non-English-speaking country? Had
the advantages of learning Japanese already disappeared? Jina made me realize the hegemonyof English and made me reconsider what the purpose of learning a foreign language is when
it loses economic merits. In this autobiographical narrative, I would like to look back on thelanguage learning processes of two East Asian women, Jina and me, using our life stories, andreflect on what language learning has meant to us as learners.
This narrative account also has another purpose, which is my private goal (Maxwell,2013). I want to construct my new English writing self (Canagarajah, 2002) by reconcilingmyself with the period in my life when I did not like studying English. While studying for
my doctoral dissertation, I was amazed by the volume and the width of the field related
to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) written in English. I wished I could join this groupsometime in the future. It was my “imagined community” (Kanno & Norton, 2003). But once
I started writing in English, I stopped writing and asked myself, “Why do I want to write inEnglish?” I felt I had to understand why I had so little interest in studying English. There
were several previous studies that depicted Japanese women who invested in the language
for the purpose of escaping their lives in Japan (McMahill,1997; Yoshimoto, 2008). For somegirls, English could be a tool for emancipation from conservative, patriarchal Japanese society;however, it did not seem like I fit in those cases. But that does not mean I was satisfied withthe current gender inequality situation in Japan. It is as if I had gone through the struggle
to construct a different identity and self to find my own voice, as many language learners
have done (Canagarajah, 2002; Morita, 2004; Taniguchi, 2013). When I initially started
writing about Jina, I had not recognized my ambivalent feelings toward English entangledwith my gendered life story, as well as my mother’s and my grandmother’s. Understanding
my feelings toward English shed light on my life story from a different angle, and thereforechanged the view I had about Jina and other women.
To achieve these multiple goals, I will share my semi-autobiography that has emerged
from reflexively inquiring into Jina’s language learning experiences. Why did she invest
in English so much? What did her experiences using Japanese mean to her? Why did I not
like studying English? I have moved back and forth between Jina’s stories and mine, andthrough comparison and contrast, I was able to retell and relive (Clandinin & Connelly,2000) my stories which I wrote in Japanese in the past (Nakayama, 2016b). Jina and I wereboth not only multilingual in Korean, English, and Japanese, but also sailing in this modern
competitive world as women heading towards the accomplishment of our missions of
independence. I could find a new meaning in our different attitudes to language learning byconnecting them with our mission. In addition, both of us experienced the construction of our
new L2 selves, which entailed freedom from our native cultures, albeit in different languages
and different environments. However, both of us felt uncomfortable using L2, Japanese for
Jina, and English for me. It was suggested that the feelings and emotions of L2 experiences
are good or bad, generated from the transaction with the society and the learner (Block, 2007;

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Duff, 2019). This transaction is unique to each learner because it is related to their personal
history.
This narrative account proceeds in the following order. I start with my story. As I
mentioned above, in order to write this semi-autobiography in English, I need to look backat my own history. I first share how I recognized the value of English, but ultimately kept itaway from me because it was a role assigned to women (Kobayashi, 2015). I continue with
Jina’s story. Following the memory of my encounter with Jina, I retell her experience of “total
freedom” with English as a lingua franca (ELF), which happened in a rural Turkish town
where she visited as a volunteer teacher. This prompted me to recall my experience of using
ELF in Korea and learning/using Korean. For me, speaking Korean in an L2 environment
helped me to feel free from my native Japanese culture to some extent, but this was not thecase for Jina when she spoke Japanese in her first study abroad experience at a large private
university in Tokyo. In the final part of this narrative account, I will explore the meaningof learning English for Jina. Jina was trying to put on English armor in order to survive inthis society. Isn’t that the flip side to why I kept away from learning English in high school?
Understanding the common mission that Jina and I shared helped me to change my view ofwomen who invest in language learning, which had been difficult for me to understand forso long. Through this series of small stories, I want the reader to understand the insight oflearning/using English and other languages in the East Asian context. I hope I can convey ourtruth of being multilingual women.

My Story: Two Faces That English Has
First Encounters with English
It was the time when my family and I were living in a small danchi, the unattractive public
housing provided by the Japanese government. A number of same-size buildings were standing
in a row on the top of the hill, and in the summer, pink flowers of bamboo peach would bloom
for a long time. We moved to this danchi in Osaka from Yokohama, near Tokyo, because myfather quit his job and started his own business. Due to this, my mother quit her desirable
highly skilled government work to save their marriage. Despite this, she was enthusiastic about
her new missions: the education of her three daughters and the management of the household.
We, the three sisters, or at least me, were happy, even though we did not have much money.
I am the eldest and was about to start elementary school at the time. I was pleased that ourmother was at home now and I could spend time with my father when he came back early. I
will never forget the taste of the sweet coffee milk he bought for us on the way back from thepublic bath. We were poor but enjoyed a stable nuclear family life in the danchi.
One day, my mother bought a luxurious English self-study set for us. It included about
ten thick books written in English with a few pictures, finger puppets or plastic toy vehicles,
cassette tapes, and a set of picture story cards. The cards depicted a story with images, andthe cassette tapes read out the plot in English and Japanese. It was designed for children toplay and learn native English by themselves. At least it was supposed to be. My sister and I
started with the picture story cards. We flipped through them, listening to the audiotapes.
They told the story of a boy who visited a magic kingdom suffering from the pollution causedby the king of darkness. In the magic kingdom, everybody spoke English. A black parrot—
bilingual in English and Japanese—served as a translator and helped the boy. We imitatedand laughed at the native English pronunciation because it was so different from the way
we spoke Japanese. The parrot prompted the boy to say, “I beg your pardon?” to the English
speaking trees, and ants were marching, saying “left, right, left, right.” “What are you doing?
何をしているのだ！[Nani o shite iru noda],” the king of darkness roared in English and Japanese.
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We were very young, and we indulged ourselves in this interesting story. Even though
we did not have opportunities to use those English phrases in everyday life, we could still
memorize them easily. My mother looked happy and satisfied with her purchase as she
watched us giggling while listening and repeating the phrases. “The pronunciation of ‘a’in ‘black’ is between Japanese ‘あ’ [a] and ‘え’ [e].” Sometimes my father showed off his
knowledge on what we were studying. My mother said, “My daughters’ pronunciation ismuch better than mine. I cannot pronounce it. It is absolutely necessary for them to startlearning a language when they are young.” However, the story cards were the only part ofthe set we used. We were supposed to use the books and other finger puppets to learn familynames and other basic words, but it was no fun at all with only English. My mother wasbusy taking care of my youngest sister and it was too time-consuming for her to read the
instructions and teach us how to play. Later in our lives, she financially invested a lot in our
education, and the English study set turned out to be a waste of money. The nice storage caseit came in occupied a large space in our small apartment.
It was unclear why my mother invested in such an expensive English-studying set for us.
No foreigners lived in our area and otherwise she was very careful about our family’s everyday
expenses. She sewed almost all of our clothes and we did not go away on any overnight trips.
In my memory, my mother and father sometimes were talking about an Englishman. My
mother’s voice sounded pleasant when she was talking about him, and I could guess the timewith the foreigner was not bad for her. Later, when I was in middle school, I had a chance
to ask my mother who this Englishman was. According to her, he was my father’s private
English teacher. These days, when I recall this vague memory of mine, I see her telling methat my father’s company hired this teacher for him. My father once had been a brilliant
and promising businessman in an excellent company. Sometimes my father had invited theteacher to dinner with my mother. About my father, I asked my mother, “Why would he takeEnglish lessons? Wasn’t it expensive?” My mother replied, “Your father was called a future
CEO in the company. Speaking good English would be a necessary skill for him as the CEO,I guess.” I was amazed by my father’s unknown past and connected the word “promising”
with English. After this conversation, I took the English studying set out from the closet andtried to listen to the tapes again that did not have any Japanese translation, but it was too
hard for me.

Mission to Be Independent“Look at the new news anchor in the show! She looks so intelligent, and it seems that she
is fluent in English,” my grandmother said excitedly at the dinner table one day. All of myfamily, except my father, sat around the low table at the center of the cluttered but cozytatami living room and had dinner prepared by my mother. My father usually came back lateand had dinner alone. When I was nine, we moved to Nara, where my mother had grown up
and started living with my grandmother. The house was attached to my grandmother’s shop,
which she had started from scratch and made into the biggest one in the small town. She
was like a mother goddess. After she lost her husband at the age of 33, she quit her teaching
job and started her own shop. She worked day and night, bought a house, and sent all of her
kids to university. My mother was the oldest among her siblings, so she had a strong bondwith my grandmother. For a while her assistants lived with her but after all got married,
my grandmother was alone in the house. Somehow, my family ended up moving in andliving with her. My poor father agreed to live there but had to spend more than two hours
commuting every day, and so spent less time with us.

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After we moved to my grandmother’s house, my life changed a lot. My mother, who madedecisions about our education, sent us to many different after-school activities including
piano lessons, calligraphy, painting, a ski camp in winter, and a swimming course insummer. In addition, she started monitoring our school grades. My grandmother believed
it was important to get an education and a strong will was necessary to survive in society,especially for girls. She kept repeating a family motto from my great-grandfather: “Girls
need to get a skill to live by themselves.” When he was working in a factory, he saw young
female workers being forced to work under bad conditions and decided to educate hisdaughters. He did not want his daughters to end up like those factory girls. He pushed his
daughters, including my grandmother, to get a skill—and she eventually became a teacher.
My great-grandfather’s motto became part of my grandmother’s history, and she passed
it on to us. In addition to all this, there was competition among families who lived nearby
over whose children were academically successful. Back then, even though my mother wasbusy campaigning for the local government to provide better educational facilities, she wasstill a full-time homemaker. She found the time to monitor our studies. I constantly felt thepressure from her for good grades, something I had never felt in the small danchi in Osaka.
My grandmother held power in our family in many ways, one of which was by controllingthe only television set in the house. She liked NHK—Nippon Housou Kyoukai [Japan
Broadcasting Corporation]—and did not let us watch any other channel at dinner time. Herfavorite television personalities included women anchors on the 7 o’clock NHK news show.
Most of them were young, charming, graduates of famous universities in Japan, and they
were fluent in English. I remember they were called kikoku-shijo [returnees], who had grown
up abroad because of their parents’ jobs. I looked at their long black hair (mine was very
short) and admired them, but there was no way I could be like them.

Ambivalent Feeling Toward English
English came to mean something different to me; it was not only a symbol of success, butalso an emblem of being female. Even if the young female anchor on the NHK news show
was talented, she always sat next to an older, unappealing man, nodding her head benignly
without expressing herself. I wanted to have “my” things to say, not to read something otherpeople wrote. I was a girl who had a desire to rise in the world as much as my competitivefriends in middle school. My mother, who still had a hard time giving up her attachment to
her previous job, used to tell me “Girls must be three times as excellent and useful as boys topass the job exam, at least it used to be like that.” I felt anger and fear facing that reality, andshe encouraged me to fight against the obstacles which stood in my way just because I am awoman.
I studied very hard to enter the best high school in our area. After that I could relax
somewhat, freeing myself from the pressure to enter a good high school. I remember two
English teachers. The elder one had such a strong Japanese accent in English, it sounded
like a cat meowing. The younger one, who had studied in the U.S. for a year, taught us sometips on pronunciation and how to improve our listening. But overall I was not so interested
in English. At that time, I devoted a good deal of my energy to high school athletic club
activities. Often when I was in English class, I fell asleep. I also hated learning new words
and grammar that required repetition and took time. I thought everything worth reading wastranslated into Japanese, and I would be fluent if I had a chance to stay in an “English nativespeaker” country for a year or so. “Why is it necessary to study English?” I was naïve anddid not know the reality of language learning.1 At the same time, like others from our young
1.

Research about studying abroad indicates it has positive outcomes for language learning, but the individual
differences are big (Kinginger, 2015). You can find a couple of unhappy cases in Block (2007).

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generation (Kobayashi, 2002; Takahashi, 2013; Yoshimoto, 2008), I longed for the world
outside Japan. So, blind to my own English ability, I even begged my father to pay for me to
study in the United States for a year.
This was all happening in the 1980s, a time when the world was amazed at Japan’ economic
success and called it No. 1. This discourse affected me. I was very proud of Japanese culture
and loved the old artifacts of Nara, which was the first capital of the country. On the contrary,
I resented the dominant position of European culture. I perceived the people who worshiped
the products, fashion, and customs from Europe and America as frivolous and sometimes
even despised them, including one of my girl classmates. Today, I still wonder where thismalicious feeling came from, however I remember the classmate used to tell me she wanted
to go to Tokyo to major in European languages in university, because those languages were
just cool. I thought she was the type of person who volunteered to be a manager for thehigh school baseball team. They were never out front putting themselves on the line asplayers. Instead, they worked hard in the background for the male players. It seemed like myclassmate friend did not mind being positioned in that—female—realm. I wanted to live formyself in society, not for someone else. For me, English was not a vehicle that would take mein that direction.
For me, English was associated with social success and decent jobs. That is why myfather took private lessons and the TV anchors were fluent in English. But at the same time,speaking English or any foreign language well was also considered something that women
were good at and in the domain of women (Schmenk, 2004). On the one hand, I wanted to geta respected job and interact with people from all over the world, but on the other hand, I had
an aversion to being labeled as a woman.

Jina’s Story
The First Time I Met Her
Another way the hegemony of English has impacted me has been the declining Japaneselearning and teaching in South Korea as a result of it. I taught Japanese there in the 1990s justbefore the peak of Japanese language education in South Korea (The Japan Foundation, 2020).
At that time both university students and working adults, regardless of their specialties, werelearning Japanese to get a job or a promotion. Since being able to speak Japanese was also
a promise of employment, I did not question why so many Koreans studied the language,
and why I taught it in this former colony of Japan. When I started researching language
issues in Korea in the 2010s, I was stunned by the decline of Japanese language educationin the country. Many students and teachers told me that Japanese language skills were nolonger enough to get a job, so students were eager to study English, even if they had majoredin Japanese (Nakayama, 2016a). If language learning does not promise future wealth or
economic benefits as linguistic instrumentalism does (Kubota, 2011) then, what is its purpose?
When I was facing the social economic realities surrounding Japanese teaching, I met Jina.
The first time I met Jina was at an orientation for international students. I remember she
was wearing somewhat showy clothes, and her Japanese was fluent. She asked staff members
some questions after the session. It was unusual to see that kind of active—even slightly
aggressive—city girl in DFU. She was enthusiastic and looked thrilled to start her new life in
DFU. Soon after the orientation, Jina joined an international students’ club that I sometimes
helped. She was older than her Japanese peers and took great initiative in the club activities.
She was a kind of scary, older sister. She was also involved in other activities, including

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working as an interpreter/translator for the local government. It seemed she was always busy
trying to achieve something—like a tuna fish that would die if it stopped swimming.
I knew that Jina spoke excellent English. First, she did not take Japanese classes forinternational students. Instead, she took English classes with other Japanese students. She
also emceed in English at the parties for international students. She seemed confident in
her English. She told me she wanted to work in international business using her English
and Japanese skills. So, I was not surprised when I learnt that she was going to study at auniversity in a Baltic country that provided courses in English for a year. It was easy to guessthat she longed for the “big world” away from this small town where our university was.

Complete Freedom Provided by English as a Lingua Franca
When Jina returned from studying abroad, we met by chance in front of the main gate.
“What? Are you home already? How was your study abroad experience?” I asked her. She
looked good and seemed not to have changed much, but I noticed she was wearing sneakers,
whereas earlier she always wore high heels. At that time, I was interviewing international
students for my research. I asked Jina for an interview about her experiences while she wasabroad for a year, and she immediately accepted. But I had to wait several months to haveinterview sessions with her. Before the first interview, I explained to her the purpose of theresearch, the procedure of the data collection, and ethical matters. I managed to have threeinterview sessions, in October, February, and March of Jina’s senior year. I chose my office
for interviews so we could talk in a quiet atmosphere while having tea and snacks together.
We spoke in Japanese most of the time, except some Korean words here and there. Afterthe interviews, we went out for a late lunch or a walk around the campus. I jotted down
the conversations and how she looked in my field notebook. The recorded interviews weretranscribed, sorted by event, and rearranged to create Jina’s story. I later sent Jina’s story to
her after she graduated and returned to Korea, and asked her to check the contents. The storyof Jina used in this narrative account is constructed from those original interviews.
In the interviews, I asked her about her experiences using Japanese and English when she
was studying abroad. Her best experience using English, she told me, happened during her
summer vacation. It was a long one, so she looked for a part-time job abroad and ended up
working as a volunteer, teaching English in a village in rural Turkey. She said she experienced“complete freedom” there. Her students welcomed her, and even invited her for dinner. Jina
felt their “love” in communication without words. Her peer volunteer teachers in the village
came from all over the world, including Taiwan, Spain, France, Serbia, and Francophone
Canada. They were from many age groups and had different occupations in their homecountries; some had just graduated from high school, and others were teachers in theircountries. She recounted her experiences to me.
Jina: Everyone was equal, and you could feel perfect equality. Everyone spoke a little
bit of English, which was the common language. That was the environment where webecame friends, so I did not have to be somebody different from my own self. It was
not necessary to pretend that I was somebody who could do something or that I wasa tough person. It was not necessary to feel pressure to achieve something. (I couldfeel) complete freedom. It did not really matter if you had money or not and it was
not necessary to pretend you had money or a good character. In such an environment,
personalities were different from person to person. Especially in Japan, there is sucha thing as a good personality. I think it is the same in Korea. A particular type ofcharacter is considered good.
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Reconciling with English: An Autobiography to Ruminate Over the Different Meanings That English Has for Us

Akiko: Good character?
Jina: Yes, the expression “She’s a good girl” is an especially good example. It decides,
to some extent, a particular personality is a good one. But um… how can I explain thatwhen you use English, the bias or omoikomi / 思い込み [belief] got weaker. Especiallywhen non-native English speakers from different countries got together, there was noright answer for the character. … So, I did not need to be good. I could be the way I was.
That experience was precious to me because I could feel freedom, not worrying about
anything. I could not be freer ever at that time. (From the first interview)
When I heard Jina’s story, the first thought that struck me was the different positions
English and Japanese had in the world. The Japan Foundation announced there were morethan three million Japanese language learners outside Japan in 2018 (The Japan Foundation,2020). However, I cannot imagine a volunteer Japanese language class run in a Turkish village
by non-native Japanese-speaking teachers from all over the world. For Jina, English was
literally a tool to communicate with people from across the globe. By using it, she felt she
could escape cultural norms that had bound her. Why could only English, not Japanese, orKorean, provide her with the opportunity to escape the cultural norms and make her feel free?
As Kubota (2011) points out, speaking good English does not guarantee being an excellent
international businessperson. However, the assumption has increased the number ofserious English learners, and the more people learn it, the more firmly English becomesthe international language. This phenomenon covers many places in the world, and it gave
Jina a chance to escape the cultural norms of the person she thought she had to be in South
Korea and Japan—her Japanese and Korean selves. She came to realize how much Japaneseor Korean selves were not her own. I was amazed that, in this story, how people from allover the world—the volunteers—claimed ownership of English (Norton, 1997) by teachingit as a foreign language. Based on the terms she was using, “not necessary to pretend that I
was somebody,” Jina could be a resident in the land of nowhere, and its official language wasEnglish.
The second thought I had was a feeling of envy. I had married an American I met in Korea
when I was teaching Japanese there. Why could I not have such a feeling in English? WhenI visited my in-laws in the US, even though they all welcomed me, I sometimes felt odd
because most of the time I was the only one who was not white and not a native speaker ofEnglish. When I was holding my first baby in their home, visitors occasionally thought I wasa babysitter. Once, at a restaurant where we all went for a meal, one of the waitresses looked
at me briefly as if she had found someone who did not fit there. I felt marginalized in the US
outside of the family.
Is this the only reason I do not like speaking English? Have I ever used English as a lingua
franca?

My Story in Korea
Being an Ornament
After I got my master’s degree in history, I ended up going to Korea to teach Japanese. I went
there because I failed to get into the Ph.D. program I wanted to join, and this happened justas I got my master’s. Since I had not prepared what to do beyond studying at education,teaching Japanese was the only chance I had to get a job immediately after graduation. I felt
relieved to get such a position at a university, so I did not complain that the university was in
the countryside, and I would be the only Japanese in the entire town.

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In my first year in Korea, there was a sort of unofficial exclusive foreigner club. Most of thetime, the host was an old English teacher, and the other members were a Russian couple, aSpanish couple, a French teacher, a Chinese teacher, and me. We seven were the only nonKorean workers at the university. I joined the party when I was invited even though I quietly
sat there without any clue about what they were saying. Also, Korean women who were thewives of wealthy families sometimes joined us. As far as I remember, they were students ofthe English teacher, and they would occasionally invite all of us to a picnic or for a meal in
an expensive restaurant. “Why do they want to invite foreigners?” I felt like I had become an
ornament (Levy, 2011) for rich Korean ladies, because I could not see the reason they wanted
to invite us, especially me. It seemed like being friends with us had symbolic value. At the
party without them, we talked about how strange Korean customs were. At the time, it was
not long after Korea’s democratization, and it was quite different from the Korea of today. To
me, the relationship between the foreign teachers and the rich Korean ladies was strange. I
felt uncomfortable to be around it, even though my loneliness in Korea was alleviated to someextent by the parties.
Rethinking the reason I was uneasy at the club, I felt it was more than because my English
was not so good or that I was unfamiliar with European customs. Japan had occupied Korea
until the end of World War II. Most of the Japanese who settled in Korea in the colonial period
did not learn any Korean and despised their traditions. The first thing I decided to do in Korea
was learn Korean because I did not want to be the same kind of person as the Japanese before
the war. When I was speaking English in the club and being positioned as an ornament for
Korean ladies, I felt like I was a new version of a pre-war colonial settler. That was not theposition I wanted to take. After the English teacher retired, the foreigners’ club did not meetup so often and the university stopped treating us as precious guests anymore. Instead, theuniversity authorities started hiring more English teachers and treating foreign language
teachers like teaching labor.

The Freedom Provided by Korean
I could not feel free like Jina when I was using English in Korea, although I felt I was able tojump away from Japanese norms when I was using Korean in Korea.
My diligent work studying Korean was rewarded. I enjoyed speaking Korean with mystudents. First, we were almost the same age, and some of the boys were even older than me
because they had to do military service. They treated me half as a teacher and half as a friend,and supported and protected me in many ways, as I did not understand Korean customs.
Second, I found that they were good at making jokes. We laughed together, went out for
drinks and karaoke parties, and talked in coffee shops after class. I was so happy that I was
accepted by my students and other Korean people that I met. Then, I found I was to somedegree different from what I was in Japan. I was less timid about joking around in Korean
than I was in Japanese. I even used my female position to make jokes. Also, I was fearless
when it came to asking questions of anyone—which was very different from how I acted inJapan. To some extent, I was not the same “me” in Korea as in Japan. In other words, I wasable to create a new self outside of my Japanese one.
I have often wondered why I could be like that. One possible reason is that my attributes
and affiliations as a native Japanese speaker and a young female university professor interms of cultural resources (Bourdieu, 1993; Norton, 2013) had different values in Korean andJapanese society. If I made a mistake due to my ignorance of Korean language or culture,
nobody would scold me. Every time I spoke Korean, they praised me as if I was totally fluent.
I had access to the things that Koreans sought. Among the Korean housewives I met at the
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Reconciling with English: An Autobiography to Ruminate Over the Different Meanings That English Has for Us

Korean music class I took, Japanese products, including rice cookers or tea pots, were very
popular. Maybe because I was right in front of them, Japanese products became a topic
of conversation. I was treated differently in Korea than in Japan, and in response I acted
differently.
My generally happy experience in Korea influenced my teaching after I returned to Japan. I
have always wished for my students to be happy when they speak Japanese, especially outside
the classroom. But when I reconsidered my story and Jina’s, another purpose of foreign
language learning emerged; to give learners a chance to break free from the norms of theirnative language and culture. Jina felt free while using English as a lingua franca, whereas
I felt free when I was surrounded by native speakers of Korean. We can see it is not theprerogative of English alone to give learners such a chance. By learning a foreign language,
learners can create a new self that is different from their native-language self (Pavlenko,
2004). What makes us free is not which language we learn, but with whom, when, and inwhat kind of community we use it. That relates to identity and personal history and how
learners perceive themselves.
However, Jina’s experience with using Japanese in Japan was quite different from myexperience of using Korean in Korea. Actually, Jina had a hard time when she came to Japanfor the first time as a student at a big private university in Tokyo. This experience could
explain why Jina could be free in English but not in Japanese.

Jina’s Story in Japan
Jina in Tokyo
In our interviews, Jina shared a lot of her background with me. Before she joined DFU, she
attended a university in Tokyo for a year where she struggled to gain full acceptance from her
peers.
Jina: That university is quite big, and international students are not rare. (…) Unlessthey become almost Japanese, I mean, unless they make contact in the Japanese student
style, the students do not take their international counterparts seriously. Japanese
students do not want to change their style much for international students. They do
not have any sense of consideration for international students. So, to make Japanese
friends, I have to be like them. (From the first interview)
What Jina felt at her university in Tokyo was the pressure to speak and act like a Japanese
student. Jina felt that she would not be able to make friends with Japanese people if she did
not remove all traces of her being an international student. As a Japanese language teacher, I
was shocked that she felt constrained to “act and behave like a Japanese person,” especiallywhen compared to the “complete freedom” she felt when she was in Turkey and whencompared to the jolly self that I had constructed in Korea. It is difficult to find out the realreason why Jina felt the barriers of Japanese youth culture in Tokyo. Is it because the youth inTokyo are not interested in getting to know people from different cultures and backgrounds?
Or is it because people in Tokyo are too busy? In contrast, I did not have to be 100% boundby Korean norms. Sometimes I wanted to be like the Koreans around me, but I never felt theneed to erase my Japanese identity, and that was just not possible anyway.
In Tokyo, Jina was trying to find the way to make her life fruitful, so she joined a student
association to promote the connection between students in different departments. Fortunately,
she met a Japanese student who had lived in Brazil for a couple of years. He took her todifferent places for the association’s work. His communication style was not “typical Japanese”
and was relatively easy for Jina. Other members of the association did not treat Jina coldly

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or rudely but they did not know how to interact with her. She felt that they treated her as
a “Gaijin” (foreigner) and kept their distance. Even now, she feels “inhibited” when using
Japanese.
Jina: So when you speak Japanese to a Japanese person, you need to be nicer, moreconsiderate, use polite language, and when you are talking with your teachers, youneed to use honorifics to be respectful. Maybe my Japanese ability is not quite goodenough yet, and I do not have the skills to be able to control everything, or maybe
that’s the problem. When I am speaking Korean, I have to use honorifics, but I guess I
can handle it to the best of my ability. I do not have to worry about using language. I
can trust myself that I am polite enough to the teacher, but not in Japanese. (From thesecond interview)
Jina does not have complete confidence in her ability in English and Japanese. It is difficultfor her to change the way she speaks depending on the context of the situation. However,she believes “basically, it’s not necessary to worry about it,” in English but it is necessary inJapanese. Jina assumed the reason she feels a strong constraint in Japanese is partly because ofher personality. “I’m pretty good at following some kind of rules to some extent,” she told me.

Jina’s English Learning History
Unfortunately, the Great East Japan earthquake occurred around the time Jina finished her
freshman year in Tokyo, and she was forced to immediately return to Korea. It took two years
for her to come back to Japan as a DFU student due to the economic difficulties her family
faced. I asked her what she did during the two years. Jina told me that for 10 days of a month,
she worked to make some money, but for the rest, she was studying English near her home inthe library. She also joined the English-studying club, which was run by a church. Why wasshe studying English? Wasn’t she planning to return to Japan? Didn’t she have a hard timecommunicating with her peers at the university in Tokyo? She explained to me without any
hesitation:
Akiko: Why did you study English? What did you want to do after improving yourEnglish?
Jina: It is not to say what I wanted to do, but it is an essential skill.
Akiko: Essential? What does that mean?
Jina: Like getting a job after school, I think…I felt at that moment that English wasan essential skill to be a part of society—shakai hito ni naru / 社会人になる[shakai hito ninaru]. (From the first interview)
Jina told me her story and her relationship with English. It had played a big role in her
younger days and was also related to Korean “English studying fever” (Park, 2009). When
she was young, her parents, especially her mother, gave her many home study programs. She
studied Chinese characters, math, and English. I was surprised when she said in the interview
that she used to be obedient to her parents. Because of her efforts when she was young, she
did not have any problems getting good grades especially in English and Japanese in middle
school. At the same time, she wanted to leave her parents, partly because their quarrels weresevere.

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Reconciling with English: An Autobiography to Ruminate Over the Different Meanings That English Has for Us

Jina: My parents fought a lot, and the house was not at peace until junior high school...
and I hated them anyway. In junior high school, I hated my parents and wanted toleave home, and that’s all I could think about. (From the first interview)
When Jina heard that an elite foreign language high school had a boarding facility and she
had a chance to live there, she instantly decided to take the entrance exam and applied for the
test. She passed and moved out of her parents’ home.
Akiko:Did you go to a foreign language high school because they had a dormitory?
Then, it was not like you were interested in a foreign country or anything until then.
Jina: Not at all.
Akiko: You didn’t particularly like to study English?
Jina: No, I didn’t. (From the first interview)
Life in the foreign language high school, however, was rather tough for Jina. The students
were very good in English. For example, some of them had grown up in the US and lived there
for many years. Even though Jina kept studying from six in the morning to midnight, she still
could not catch up with the returnees. Her pride in her English ability fell apart, so she ended
up making no effort to study it. Even without studying, Jina’s score in English on national
exams far surpassed that of the average Korean high school students.
After listening to her high school story, I realized that her investment in English was
related to the self she lost in her high school. She needed to study English to regain
confidence and control over her life. In this sense, Jina may have felt the same mission of
independence as I did when I was young. In her journey to be a grown up with no one toprotect her, perhaps Jina thought that English would give her a way to survive and have her
abilities recognized by society. In this way, English was a protective shield for her in society.

Jina After Studying Abroad
It was June in her senior year when she visited my office. She suddenly started confessingthat she did not know what she wanted to do after graduation. I was a bit confused because
she had been talking about getting involved with international business. I asked her about
that. She told me that she did not think about what she really wanted to do because sheused to worry about what other people thought of her. Trying to be involved in international
business was what other people thought cool. I do not remember how this conversation
ended. The next time she visited my office, she asked me to help her prepare for the entrance
exam for graduate school to be a Japanese-Korean translator. Until I finished writing her
story in this narrative account, I did not realize that her experience in Turkey might have hadsome impact on the change in her plans for the future. The experience of total freedom might
give her the chance to reflect on her life.
At her graduation ceremony, her mother and grandmother from Korea participated. Jina’s
father could not come because he had some duty on his business. Jina showed me her picturewith a cute red han-bok [Korean traditional cloth], which was a gift from her grandmother.
She was smiling in the picture with her mother and grandmother.
Last time I met her, she told me she is teaching English and Japanese as a part time teacher
in Seoul, at the same time, she is working as an actress. I cannot tell you what place English,

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Japanese, possibly other languages will take in her life from now on. The journey of her life
continues.

Epilogue
My attempt to retell my story in order to understand Jina’s story has had a number ofoutcomes which related to me as a woman and as a teacher. The first was that I was able toconnect my language learning history, especially English, with my mission to be independent.
This is a mission that has carried me from my childhood to now. My reluctance to study
English was strongly linked not only to my ability, but also to gendered linguistic ideologies.
After retelling our stories, I can realize now the mission is possibly shared by not only Jina
and me, but also other women, like the wealthy Korean women who were hovering aroundus or my high school friend who loved to learn Western languages. Thus, language learning,
even the rejection of it, is strongly connected to the question of how women live their lives.
Secondly, I was able to reconsider the purposes that people have in learning languages. The
personal language use experiences that Jina had with English as a lingua franca and that I
had with Korean encouraged us to construct our new selves. Just as I became more outgoingin Korea and Jina changed from high heels to sneakers, language learning could free learners
from the constraints of cultural norms to some extent. I have not yet come to a conclusion
on how to teach language as a language teacher, because learning a language always involves
learning grammatical pragmatic rules made by someone else (Bakhtin, 1981; Barfield,
personal communication, April 21, 2021). However, I have been able to reaffirm the value of
language learning through this narrative account, and that will guide me in my classes.

Acknowledgments
My thanks first goes to Jina. I also would like to thank Andy and Lorraine, and all the editorsof LDJ5, as well as the Peer Reviewers for their patience and support for my struggle to create
my “English writing self” (Canagarajah, 2002).

Author Bio
Akiko Nakayama Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Teaching Japanese as a Second
Language program at Hiroshima University, Japan. She is currently interested in learners’
stories, L2 learner identities, and teacher development.
中山亜紀子（博士）。広島大学人間社会科学研究科日本語教育学プログラム准教授。学習者の物語，学習者のア
イデンティティ，教師教育などに関心がある。

Review ProcessThis paper was blind peer-reviewed by members of The Learner Development Journal Review
Network and Journal Steering Group. (Contributors have the option of open or blind review.)

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