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NOVEMBER, 2017: BREEZE ISSUE #121
A FREE MONTHLY E-NEWSLETTER FOR FRIENDS OF JAPAN & TEACHERS OF
JAPANESE2017 SHORT-TERM TEACHER TRAINING PROGRAMPARTICIPANT
BY COLLEEN LAIRD
Western Washington University
Bellingham, WA
Nihongojin is a neologism that refers to a group of people notcategorized by race, ethnicity, or national citizenship, but rather as
their ability to speak, read, write, and understand Japanese:“Japanese language people.” It is an exciting term that breaks down barriers of nation states toforefront inclusivity. The term implicitly acknowledges a complexly diverse global languagecommunity. Whether one lives in Poland, Uzbekistan, Russia, Argentina, Singapore, or theUnited States, regardless of embodied heritage, the Nihongojin identity asserts that theJapanese language community is much larger than an island or archipelago; it is the languageof a global community that transcends both the body and political borders. Nihongojin are apeople and a body of difference.
I encountered this word for the first time this summer at a workshop held at the JapanFoundation’s Japanese Language Institute in Urawa, Saitama. Thanks to the generous supportof the Foundation, I participated in the Summer Short-Term Language Teacher Training Programfrom late June to late August. The program is designed for non-native speaking teachers ofJapanese with three explicit goals in mind: 1) to engage in intensive language brush up; 2) toimprove established language pedagogy practices; and 3) to experience first-hand culturalactivities that can be brought back to classrooms overseas. These are the stated goals of theprogram, but there is a fourth benefit that is of equal, of not greater, importance. As one of only
four native English speakers, I spent each day, all day, in Japanese, working with, building
friendships, and learning discursively from 45 other participants from 21 countries—all nonnative teachers of Japanese and all nihongojin . I experienced the vitality and transformative
potential of this term first hand; it’s not often that Japanese is the defacto lingua franca , but
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eight weeks of my summer I shared living, eating, and working space with strangers cum
friends from the mountain reaches of Nepal to the beaches of Jamaica, and we did it all inJapanese.

Along with my fellow nihongojin , we soon came to appreciate the pedagogical and practicalimportance of namaky ō zai (“raw” aka “primary source” materials), another term many of us
encountered for the first time at the Institute. Over the course of the program, several
workshops and activities encouraged us to seek out namaky ō zai for use in developing practicalclassroom exercises in an attempt to expand effective pedagogical practices beyond the lesseffective and outdated techniques of textbook ondoku (reading aloud) and rote repetition thatare at odds with contemporary communicative practices. Within my own cohort, determined bylanguage aptitude established via placement test, I grew quite close to other PhDs andcollege-level teachers from Hungary, Poland, and Taiwan. Together, we ventured beyond theInstitute and into the streets of local Saitama and further afield to Tokyo in search ofnamaky ō zai to bring back home, the shipping of which was also generously paid for by theFoundation. My Taiwanese and Polish colleagues, specially trained and experienced in kanjiacquisition, brought back invaluable examples of kanban (sign or notification) culture which weused collectively to re-theorize effective and meaningful techniques of kanji instruction andacquisition. My Hungarian colleague and I tackled the genre of annaisho (travel guides) inorder to design a two-week classroom unit dedicated to planning travel itineraries using
primary source materials to be implemented into advanced high school or intermediate college
curriculums. We also canvassed the deliciously rich world of Japanese cuisine, harvesting
actual menus and food packages to bring back to classrooms to use in real-world restaurantand shopping exercises.
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As we incorporated into our syllabi these raw examples of language use experienced in Japan,
as actualized nihongojin we soon began to understand that namaky ō zai are not limited tolanguage artifacts arising from and out of Japan itself, be it on the streets or on the Internet.
Rather, as a global community of nihongojin , we are also creators of language production andnamaky ō zai every day, and potentially in every classroom experience. Our own language andcommunication is namaky ō zai .The materials we and our students create, especially those wecultivate communally across borders through online and in-person exchanges (blogs, texts,comment boards, study abroad programs, language circles, creative self-expression projects,etc.), are equally valid and viable examples of living language, the shared communicative
expressions of nihongojin . As such, the participants of the program found exciting potential in
not just collected examples of language experience in Japan, but also in shared expression
outside of Japan, both physically on our respective campuses around the world as well as
virtually on the ultimately unbounded Internet. As nihongojin , we explored the radical space ofour own classrooms and international communities as the potential future of cross-cultural
Japanese language communication. Most importantly, in these increasingly contentious times,
as members of an incredibly rich and diverse international community, we learned that we canfind common ground and space for new growth through our shared Japanese language as
members of a global nihongojin identity.

Breeze #122

Breeze #1212017 J-LEAP Report: Asako Sakamoto2017 J-LEAP Report: Yui Kimura

Japanese Language Update #48

2017 Teacher Training Program Participant: Colleen Laird

Breeze #120

Breeze #119

Breeze #118

Breeze #117

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Breeze #115

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