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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, October 21, 2002

Changing times erode Island tradition

Students in the Japanese Language school at the Mo'ili'ili Community Center play tamaide, a Japanese game in which teams race to pick up colored balls. The exercise was part of Undokai, or track and field day, an autumn tradition in schools throughout Japan.

Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

Paper balls painted red and white — aka and shiro in Japanese — littered the lawn at Mo'ili'ili Community Center. Children rocketed around the yard, picking balls of their team's color and chasing the classroom aide who carried a basket to drop the balls into.

Centennial celebration

The Mo'ili'ili Japanese Language School celebrates its centennial next month, and has invited students and alumni to an open house, 5:30 p.m. Dec. 6 at the Mo'ili'ili Community Center, 2535 S. King St.

The school is seeking memorabilia to display at the homecoming. For information: 955-1555.

Mo'ili'ili Japanese Language School was engaged in Undokai, track and field day, an autumnal observance throughout schoolyards in Japan. Learning about culture has always been as much a part of the curriculum as memorizing kanji characters and pronouncing them correctly.

The school marks its centennial in December, surviving an era that has seen school after school close in the withering of a historic Hawai'i institution.

Students today are of multiple ethnicities — owing, perhaps, to the broader interest in Japanese language since the 1980s. Sheila Tokuuke, a transplanted Texan married to a man of Japanese ancestry, was delighted last summer to hear her son Ryan, 7, demonstrate his language skills for Japanese tourists on a plane.

"They thought he was really good — and he was," she said. "I thought he was really great ... the more language you know, the better."

The schools originally were set up by immigrants from Japan to pass on language and culture to their children, many of whom were becoming more conversant in pidgin, the lingua franca of the plantation-era melting pot.

So says Eileen Tamura, a University of Hawai'i professor who has studied the history of the language schools. Tamura said Japanese language schools have served as a safe place for working parents to send children after school since the plantation era, but the tradition has yielded to competition from other on-campus programs and competition for family time and attention.

As a result, even with teachers using more participatory and kid-friendly methods than their counterparts 100 years ago, the number of students enrolled in the schools has shrunk drastically.

At their peak, in the 1930s, Japanese language schools enrolled 41,000 students in after-school classes offered at temples and neighborhoods sites throughout the Islands.

Today, there are 1,100 students studying at 15 schools statewide, paying tuition of $400 to $700 a year or more, said the Rev. Shugen Komagata, principal of Wakei Gakuen at the Soto Mission of Hawai'i in Nu'uanu and Ka'ala Nippongo Gakuen in Wahiawa.

Komagata relies on the personal charm of veteran teachers such as Yoshiko Inatsuka, a sensei at Wakei Gakuen for 30 years, to keep children coming back.

"Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo!" the sensei teased kindergarteners at Wakei Gakuen. Inatsuka waved flash cards painted with hiragana, characters from the phonetic writing system, and sang out, "Nandesuka, nandesuka?" ("What is it, what is it?") The first child to name the character won the card and earned points.

Yoshiko Inatsuka, a teacher at Wakei Gakuen, a Japanese language school at the Soto Mission of Hawaii in Nu'uanu, leads a lesson in the phonetic alphabet using flash cards with hiragana characters.

Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser

She engaged them in simple dialogue.

"Anata wa okaasan desuka (Are you a mother)?" she asked one girl, who promptly answered in the negative: "Iie!"

Several seats were empty because of students on inter-session break from their regular schools. But Komagata acknowledged that the school's enrollment of 100 was down 20 from just two years ago.

A key problem for many of the schools, he said, is transportation. There are no longer many schools within walking distance of neighborhood schools, so working parents usually need help shuttling children between campuses.

In August, the Nu'uanu school got notice from its bus company that ridership had fallen to the point that it could no longer provide bus service for less than $5 per day, Komagata said. Now students who want to attend must find their own way to school.

Komagata, who also is president of Hawai'i Kyoiku-kai, the association of Japanese language schools, has been championing their preservation. Wakei Gakuen was founded by his grandmother in 1932, and he's struggling to find a way to keep it alive.

"The Japanese language school is going through a declining process," he said. "For young parents, it's hard to see the importance of Japanese language or how useful it could be in their child's future."

Interest in Japanese language has blossomed since the 1980s, but many parents and students find it more convenient to enroll in classes at their own high school or college than at independent schools, Tamura said. An associate professor of education at UH, she is author of "Americanization, Acculturation and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawai'i."

The book focuses on the children of the first Japanese immigrants, who were strongly encouraged to keep in touch with the language and culture of their ancestral home.

"They taught shushin (moral values)," said UH assistant professor of ethnic studies Jonathan Okamura. "Determination, perseverance, all those traditional values ... the sacrifices parents had made and the sense of shame: Don't bring shame to the family."

In the 1920s, the Hawai'i political establishment tried to regulate the language schools, Tamura said. Such efforts — struck down as unconstitutional in 1927 — included special fees charged to the schools, with criminal penalties for failing to pay.

The schools were closed down during World War II, and signs of decline were evident when they reopened.

"I think that, first of all, Japan was the loser in that war, the aggressor," said Larry Okinaga, a board member at Mo'ili'ili who attended from 1948 to 1957. "There was some concern about being identified with Japan on the part of some students and parents.

"And as time went on, there were a lot more activities for students. They'd rather be out playing sports than going to language school."

Brenda Nakamura takes some pleasure in recalling that, as future director of the Mo'ili'ili school, she once balked — inwardly — at going to classes herself. She never made an issue of it, though.

"It was just one of those things: You do it or you get it!" Nakamura said with a laugh.

Learning was based on rote memorization: Sensei writes, you copy — an approach that she and most administrators have abandoned in favor of games and lighthearted drills for younger students and more conversational exercises for older ones.

Former Gov. George Ariyoshi attended Nippongo Gakuen, Fort Gakuen and Hawaii Chugakko Japanese language schools and remembers the experience in vivid detail, from the black jackets he wore to the grueling study of kanji.

"We had tests all the time," he said, "and every Saturday for two hours I got private calligraphy lessons. I can still feel the stroking, the memory of how to do it."

Okinaga remembers the old ways a little less fondly. But he treasures what he learned, which is hard to find in the language classes that are replacing them, tucked away on larger campuses.

Nuances of body language and interpersonal relations are subtleties that have been of immeasurable value in his work as a banking lawyer often representing Japanese companies.

"I was very tempted to leave school, but my parents would not allow me," Okinaga admitted. "In retrospect, I'm glad my parents forced me."

Another alumnus, KIKU-TV president Joanne Ninomiya, remembered kids acting up in class, to the dismay of the invariably strict, non-English-speaking sensei. But this was the 1950s, and the memories now carry the glow of nostalgia.

"It had this warm feeling of home," Ninomiya said. "And it was still the age of innocence ... when the kids got scolded, at least they listened."

But nostalgia will never restore the former glory of a historical institution, treasured as it is, Ninomiya said.

"If the theme is that this cultural icon is passing, I think it is," she said. "Maybe there will be vestiges in the next 20 years. But it's a different time now."

Reach Vicki Viotti at vviotti@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8053.