Masa Part I

Brazilian kids face double language woes
BY HIROYUKI KOBAYASHI AND RIE YAMADA THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

After seven years of struggling to learn Japanese in Shiga Prefecture, 10-year-old Victor, a third-generation Japanese-Brazilian, expressed his anxieties about a different language before returning to his homeland.

"What I worry about the most is writing (Portuguese)," Victor, standing beside piles of suitcases at Kansai Airport in Osaka Prefecture, said in rudimentary Japanese. "I'm also worried about being unable to go on to the next grade unless I pass tests."

He was surrounded by fellow Japanese-Brazilians from across Japan who lost their jobs amid the economic slump and were catching a cheap flight to Brazil via Dubai.
Victor is one of many "double limited" foreign children raised in Japan with a weak command of both Japanese and their native languages.

The boy came to Japan at age 3 with his mother, who worked at an auto parts factory in Shiga Prefecture. But because of the late working hours of both his mother and aunt who lived with them, Victor had little time to learn Portuguese from them.
His former elementary school teacher in Shiga said Victor's mother was concerned about the boy's inability to speak Portuguese well.

"In order to master another language, you need to be able to express abstract concepts of a certain level in your own language first," the teacher said. "Without that foundation in your mother tongue, you cannot develop abilities to think. You end up with half-baked proficiency in both languages."

According to an education ministry survey on 90 Brazilian schools in Japan, 722 students returned to Brazil over a two-month period from December 2008, and 160 students transferred to Japanese public schools.

Moreover, 598 children stopped going to school altogether.
In the city of Hamamatsu, which has the largest Brazilian population at 15,000 in Japan, Santos, an 18-year-old fourth-generation Japanese-Brazilian, inspects vehicle doors at an auto parts factory by day and studies Japanese and other subjects by night. It's part of a "re-education" program sponsored by the city for Brazilians over the regular school age. Santos came to Japan with his parents when he was 1 year old, and ran into language problems immediately after entering a public elementary school.
Although he attended a Brazilian junior high school, he also had a hard time following classes in Portuguese.

"Speaking is OK. What's difficult is writing kanji," said Santos, who is now studying fourth-grade Japanese.

The government has started taking action to help more of these children transfer smoothly to public schools. Under a program that started last fall, the government pays up to 20 million yen ($221,000) to 39 nonprofit organizations and Brazilian schools to teach the Japanese language and customs to these children.