Cross-cultural communication （46）　

46）The language of daily life for Japanese-Canadian second-generation residents
I watched the film “Asahi of Vancouver”, which was released in January 2015. This film depicts the exploits of the Asahi baseball team, an amateur baseball team made up of second-generation Japanese-Canadian residents of Vancouver, before the Second World War. It was a very moving story, and I was satisfied with it, but there was one thing that felt strange to me. That was the fact that the second-generation Japanese-Canadians were speaking in completely fluent Japanese. In reality, the second generation of Japanese-Canadians and Americans mainly used English as their everyday language, and only used Japanese when speaking with their first-generation parents, who were not very good at English. I myself am interested in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a unit of Japanese Americans who fought in World War II, and I have read many books and seen many films about them, but the language of the Nisei in these stories is almost always perfect English. When I was a resident doctor in New York for three years, I had the opportunity to speak with some Nisei Americans and Canadians, but they all spoke perfect native English, with only a few words of Japanese.

Language is closely linked to the culture of a country. So, when depicting the lives of Japanese-Canadian second-generation immigrants, I think there is a significant difference in the content depending on whether they are speaking Japanese or English. In the film, there is a scene like this. When the second-generation immigrants get into trouble with white people, they immediately say, “I'm sorry.”. A Canadian who understood the Japanese-Canadian situation saw this and said, “Why do Japanese-Canadians not argue back and just apologize straight away? That's why they are made fun of.” However, the actual Japanese-Canadian Nisei of that time had received their education in Canadian schools in English, and they must have been more strongly influenced by Canadian culture than Japanese culture. Therefore, I don't think they were apologizing for everything like the Issei, first generation Japanese of that time.

Chinese people immigrated to North America earlier than the Japanese. Even the second generation and beyond of Chinese people speak English very well, but at home they usually speak Chinese. It seems that they do this almost compulsorily in order to maintain Chinese culture. When I was a resident in New York 30 years ago, all of the Chinese residents of my generation (the fifth and sixth generations at the time) said the same thing. During the period when the first generation of Japanese-Americans were transitioning to the second generation, the Japan-US war took place, and it seems that there was an atmosphere of trying to at least make the language completely North Americanized from the second generation onwards. In Hawaii, at the time, English that was grammatically childish was used by non-whites, including Japanese-Americans, and it was called 'pidgin English', but it is said that the written English of the second generation of Japanese-Americans was almost perfect because they had received good English education.

So, due to this somewhat sad historical background, the Japanese-American Nisei could only use English. Therefore, when making a film about the Japanese-American Nisei in the future, I think it would be more realistic if the actors playing the Nisei roles spoke their lines in English with Japanese subtitles, even if their pronunciation was a little bad.

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