Japanese Americans and Cultural Continuity

Maintaining Language through Heritage

Toyotomi Morimoto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135578978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Although the United States is a nation of immigrants, few Americans are familiar with the ethnic community mother-tongue schools that nurtured and maintained the immigrants' language and culture. This book records the history of the schools of Americans of Japanese ancestry, focusing on the efforts of the Japanese community in California to maintain their linguistic and cultural heritage. The main focus of the book is on the period from the early 20th century to World War II, but it also surveys conditions during the war and in the postwar era up to the present. The coverage examines the difficulties experienced by the ancestors of the model minority, from the San Francisco Japanese school-children segregation incident in the early part of this century to private school control laws in the 1920s. The book also surveys the lives of Japanese Americans as college students in Japan in the 1930s, as well as looks at Japanese communities in Hawaii and Brazil.

Chapter One

Cherishing Our Heritage

Language and Heritage Maintenance Efforts in America

Now the whole earth had one language and few words. … [And men said,] “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do. … Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, they may not understand one another’s speech.”

—Genesis 11: 1–7

The United States is known as an immigrant country with a continuous influx of different nationalities. And yet, it has been taken for granted that the country has been bound by a single language since its inception. This was not the case in colonial days, however. The Continental Congress printed the Articles of Confederation in German during the War of Independence. The laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania were published not only in English but also in German from 1805 to 1850. In Louisiana, state laws were written in French and English from 1804 to 1867.¹ While there is no doubt as to the importance the English language has played in the United States, I will in this chapter show that other languages were a major element of the lives of many immigrants.

Among immigrant families who spoke languages other than English, the linguistic and cultural gap between the first and the second-generations widened much faster than either expected. It eventually became insurmountable. As the gap between the two generations widened, parents began feeling that someone ought to slow down this process. Parents who were busy working in canning factories in Washington or in the fields in California had no time for teaching their children their own language and cultural heritage. They could hardly ask public schools to fill in the gap. Their English was not good enough to convey their message to the schools even if they had tried.

For many immigrant communities, the easiest and perhaps the most conventional way to solve this problem of children’s education was to create their own community mother-tongue schools. Although ethnic community mother-tongue schools are by no means a major part of the American education scene today, in the past private ethnic schools played a much more significant role. Different immigrant groups established their own full-day schools to accommodate the educational needs of their second-generation children. The American public school system became a bona fide part of the educational system of the country only in the early twentieth century.

Thus immigrant groups, like the Japanese whose second generation reached school age in this period, did not have to establish their own private all-day schools; the children attended public schools. Unsure about permanent residency in the United States, Issei (the first-generation Japanese immigrants) created Japanese-language schools to provide supplementary education for their children. As the number of Nisei (the second-generation Japanese Americans, born in the United States) increased, so did the language schools. Despite the often-claimed inefficiency of language instruction in the schools and the pressure of the Americanization movement, Japanese-language schools continued to grow in the 1920s and 1930s.

The increase in the Nisei population is one factor for explaining why Japanese-language schools mushroomed in a short period of time. However, it was not the only cause. In several other ethnic communities, the number of supplementary schools did not expand as rapidly as in the Japanese community. Some possible explanations may be found in what Joshua A. Fishman calls “rewards.” There are social rewards (enforcing and recognizing membership in the family, community, society, and people); fiscal rewards (jobs, promotions, raises, and bonuses); political rewards (election, appointment, and public acclaim); and religious rewards. Fishman acknowledges that although schools are, to a large extent, controlled by the social, economic, and political milieu, they are also effective in teaching values to different individual students. He believes that ethnic schools contribute to language maintenance because they offer the symbolic reward of literacy, raise issues of moral imperatives by replacing the role of churches, and become the training institutions where minority ethnic community leaders are raised. Although the aim of this book is not to test Fishman’s assumptions, you will find these varieties of symbolic reward crucial in the efforts of the Japanese in America to retain a language and heritage of their own.²

Whenever two or more linguistic groups are in contact, the phenomenon of a language shift occurs and the challenge of maintaining a former language sets in. While the former occurs rather naturally in many social contexts, the latter requires somewhat artificial efforts. John Edwards believes that language shift is the rule, not the exception, and that language maintenance is affected more by economic factors than cultural factors. He argues against those who place language at the center of ethnic identity by stating: “Indeed, while we lament the decline of some contemporary minority language we often forget that if we took a long enough perspective we would see that virtually all groups have language shift somewhere in their past. Does this mean that everyone’s identity is reduced?”³ He is convinced that people make choices in order to create “the least possible disruption to [their] existing life style.”⁴ This pragmatic flexibility, he holds, is the key to group continuity.

Edwards maintains that within a language there should be a distinction between what he calls communicative and symbolic functions, the former being “language in its ordinarily understood sense as a tool of communication,” and the latter, “language as an emblem of groupness, as a symbol, a rallying-point.”⁵ These two aspects of language, he states, can be separated. A linguistic minority group can retain the symbolic aspect of its language while losing the communicative aspect. For him the Irish, whose language is spoken by only a few, continue to demonstrate an attachment to symbolic aspects of their language and thus exemplify language as a symbolic rallying point.

Before discussing the language and culture maintenance efforts among the Japanese community, I will delineate the path that different groups of immigrants in the United States followed in their efforts to maintain their linguistic, cultural, and religious heritage. In discussing these issues, I will limit my focus to the immigrants’ private educational institutions.

Public Schooling and Cultural Preservation

There seemed to be a strong conviction among the American people, both old stock and newly arrived, that public schooling was essential to achieving their individual goals. Especially for poor immigrants, the education of their children was seen as essential for moving up the social ladder in a hopefully meritocratic society. In the long run, poor immigrants expected that public schooling could create a society with full equality of opportunity for all.

Public schools were also agencies of cultural transmission. They transmitted mainly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant values to immigrant children. At least, in the eyes of some immigrant parents whose cultural background was different from that of the mainstream Americans, the schools seemed to be teaching the Anglo heritage to their children.

Anglo-Saxon values aside, through public school education, immigrant children in the United States have been taught how important it is to be able to speak English and how loyal they need to be toward the Stars and Stripes. American public schools, though their academic efficacy has been questioned time and again, manifested great efficiency in making children proud of being Americans. Under one flag, one is expected to speak the common language and fight for the common cause. However, for some immigrant parents, this was not what they wanted to see happening. From the early days of its history, the United States was characterized by an uninterrupted flow of immigrants who did not speak English.

Those early immigrants who were seriously thinking of returning to their homeland some day felt that the continuity of cultural and linguistic heritage was too precious to discard in one generation. They tried their best to retain their traditions. In particular, German immigrants, whose continuous influx between 1830 and 1890 amounted to a total of 4.5 million immigrants, were well known for their zeal in trying to maintaining their linguistic heritage. They even established their own public schools to achieve that goal. Though few immigrant parents protested against their children’s acquiring English, many at least hoped that their children would become interested in learning their ancestral language and culture, too.

Let us now turn our attention to the history of the schooling in the United States that was not conducted in the public schools.

Sunday Schools

Although Sunday schools were established primarily for denominational education, they share certain commonalities with ethnic community mother-tongue schools. First appearing in the 1790s, Sunday schools in the United States were designed to provide rudimentary instruction to children of the lower working class. The founders of the schools seemed to be more concerned about literacy training for these children than indoctrinating them. However, by the 1830s, these first American Sunday schools disappeared, and there arose a new type of school taught by volunteers who were mostly evangelical Protestants. In this second phase of development, Sunday schools proliferated remarkably along with the growth of the free public schools. By 1830, as Boyran puts it, “the Sunday school was well on its way to becoming a permanent fixture in American life.”⁶ In fact, the complementary relationship between these two different types of school continued during the 1830s and 1840s.⁷

One noteworthy phenomenon with regard to Sunday schools in early nineteenth-century America was that the most enthusiastic clients of the schools were found among African American adults and children. In New York, for example, African Americans constituted 25 percent of the pupils in the schools registered in the Sunday-School Union Society by 1817.⁸ However, with the spread of public schools during the 1820 and 1830s, which resulted in a decrease in the significance of Sunday schools as providers of basic literacy, African American children found less significance in attending these schools. Furthermore, they were hard hit by racial prejudice, particularly after Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia in 1831. Exactly how many African American–run schools were founded is not known, but they replaced the Sunday schools as providers of literary training. However, such schools were controversial, especially in the South. The white majority could not help worrying about the slave’s acquiring literacy, which might lead to other riots. According to a survey done in 1832 by the American Sunday School Union, more than half of its 8,268 affiliated schools were in six states: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. On the other hand, only 499 schools were found in the Deep South slave states. This discrepancy among different regions lasted throughout the antebellum years.⁹

The role that Sunday schools played in literacy training decreased as years passed, but the function of the schools as nuclei for church members in urban areas was significant. In rural areas, too, the Sunday school as an educational institution was a gathering place for children and adults alike. The schools also gave moral lessons to those who attended by teaching “punctuality, obedience, self-discipline, and order, all values consistent with requirements of an industrial age.”¹⁰

Catholic Schools

While Protestants of European origin created Sunday schools to serve their religious as well as educational purposes, European immigrants from Catholic backgrounds created privately funded all-day schools. The early Catholic school was often a bilingual school which taught the immigrant children their own respective mother-tongue as well as English. Proponents of Catholic schools believed that they “afford[ed] a much easier pathway for the foreigner to enter the American life than is the case in the public school.”¹¹ After a generation or two, foreign language as a medium of instruction at most of these schools was replaced by English. Immigrant parents themselves wanted their children to learn English as soon as possible for future social and economic advancement.

The history of private Catholic schools is, however, filled with conflict with public school systems. In California, section No. 1664 of the state school law in 1864 required that “all schools must be taught in the English language.” And as early as 1861, virtually every school seeking public funds was required to use English as the medium of instruction.¹² In the late nineteenth century, three states in New England enacted laws mandating the use of English in all schools. The requirement of English use in schools spread to other states. In 1890, states that required the use of English in private schools included New York, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Kansas, North and South Dakota, and Massachusetts.¹³ By 1909 the following states required the ability to read and write English before a child was allowed to engage in employment: Arkansas, California, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, and Vermont.¹⁴ The attack against non-English usage came not only from outside but also from inside the Catholic church. Some English-speaking clergy tried to restrict non-English instruction in Catholic schools.¹⁵

Foreign language instruction in public schools was not, however, totally prohibited in California. In 1865, San Francisco City Superintendent of Public Instruction John Pelton authorized so-called Cosmopolitan Schools in which German and French were taught along with English. Composed of 30 percent German, 20 percent French, and the rest American students in 1867, the multilingual/multiethnic schools received enthusiastic support from the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1867. The 1870 Franco-Prussian War, however, gave supporters second thoughts about the merit of the schools. Consequently, the schools had to convert what had been devoted to foreign language instruction to English. The declining popularity of the Cosmopolitan Schools created a situation where French and German immigrants established their own private, community mother-tongue schools. Deutsche Schulbund and the Alliance Française conducted classes weekday afternoons in public schools. Similar arrangements were made for Italian immigrant children. The Italian Free School Society of San Francisco provided immigrant children with weekday afternoon classes at a public school building in North Beach.¹⁶

The Jewish All-Day Schools

The growth of Jewish all-day schools in the early and mid-nineteenth century partly stemmed from the immigrants’ dissatisfaction with the public schools, as was the case with Catholics. They did not want their children to be educated in schools of Christian influence, and they also worried about the possibility of unqualified teachers in the public schools. However, a shortage of qualified teachers also plagued Jewish schools. Ironically, as the system of management of the public schools improved, the popularity of the Jewish schools dramatically diminished. High tuition also prevented the growth of enrollment in Jewish schools.

The founders of Jewish schools had to face opposition from within. Some Jewish leaders questioned the feasibility of creating such schools on the ground that the schools would further social separatism. From the very beginning some rabbis expressed dissatisfaction with the creation of such schools. Some felt the school “converts the Jew into a self-created alien.” Others went so far as to say “that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Cherishing Our Heritage
• Chapter Two Early Settlers
• Chapter Three Against the Wind
• Chapter Four Portent of War
• Chapter Five The Bridge of Understanding over the Pacific
• Chapter Six Possibilities and Limitations
• Chapter Seven Language and Heritage Maintenance Efforts During and After World War II
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index