Culture exchange: Japanese students, host familes learn from each other

I've watched shy Japanese teens wander around in a foreign land, only that foreign land was my house.

Since 2003, my mother has hosted 20 home-stay students through the Intensive English Program at Southeast Missouri State University. I've lived with five of them.

Foreign students come to America for the Intensive English Program at Southeast and colleges around the country. The program places them with a host family to immerse them in the new language and culture. Only after I studied abroad in Denmark could I empathize with the challenges these Japanese students faced.

Takuya Motohashi lived with a different family in Cape Girardeau when he first entered college. He is now 20 years old and has been living in Cape Girardeau for the past two years studying English in hope of finding a good job using it back in Japan. Now he lives with two Japanese roommates. They all live under one main rule: Only English can be spoken in the apartment. It took him a year in Cape Girardeau to learn English, but he credits the friendship he made with one student for his leap from depressed struggler to confident speaker.

At the age of 18, Motohashi didn't want to become a part of Japan's "conforming" culture and thought he needed other cultural experiences, he said. He thought living in America could give him that experience and provide him with the opportunity to learn English in an English-speaking environment.

He had studied English since he was 12 years old but knew that his school curriculum wasn't incorporating enough speech practice. When he came to America, speaking English was an enormous problem.

"All I could say to people, was, 'Hi, how are you doing?' This lack of communication stressed me out," Motohashi said.

Motohashi separated himself from other Japanese students because he only wanted to speak English. Among themselves, they mostly spoke Japanese. He said he didn't want to be like the Japanese students who go back to Japan with a document saying they studied English, though they can't really speak it.

"My education was paid by my parents, and they received a report of my grades every month," Motohashi said. "I wanted to give something back."

The pain of a new language and the separation from other Japanese students caused Motohashi to become a loner, he said.

"I couldn't make any friends," Motohashi said. "I lived with only with my host mom and her dog."

He thinks his host mom was great but it didn't prevent him from becoming depressed and begin to think of ways he could go back to Japan early, he said.

His English finally came around a year into his studies when he befriended another exchange student trying to learn the language. Together, the two could speak English.

"We just talked as friends do," Motohashi said.

Aside from the language, the cultural challenges that affect Japanese students can easily be overlooked. Maybe it is a stereotype, but I think most Americans, including myself, perceive Japanese culture as respectful toward its elders. Noriko Inoguchi, who lived with my mom and me for eight weeks in the summer of 2004, helped prove that theory.

The three of us would talk, for what seemed to be hours, at the kitchen table after dinner. Speaking, Inoguchi said, was her favorite part about learning English. But, as much fun as she had talking, referring to my mother by her first name, "Brenda," was strange and rude, she said. In Japan, the elderly are always addressed by younger people by their last name followed by the phonetic sound, "son."

In America we often address adults with a prefix "Mr." or "Ms.", but many of my friends refer to my mom by her first name.

"When I introduced her to my parents, I introduced her as "Brendason," Inoguchi said, adopting the sign of respect to her first name, which is common with home-stay students. "My mom would've been so mad, had I called her just by her first name."

Another sign of respect I learned from Inoguchi went beyond our elders and toward the thought of ownership. When she arrived she was afraid to open the refrigerator. In Japan it was considered rude.

"It's not your stuff, so you don't touch it," she said.

In America, we often tell guests to "make yourself at home," which means opening and closing the fridge at leisure.

When her parents came to visit, Inoguchi — always being a helpful-hand around the house — opened the fridge to help my mom prepare dinner.

"My mom said, 'What are you doing?' Inoguchi said. "I told her that here, in America, we're considered part of the family."

The cultural experience was something Inoguchi didn't expect when she came to America.

Japanese program supervisors "only told us we would have to speak English," Inoguchi said.

adohogne@semissourian.com

335-6611