Choei Middle School is in the middle of Higashi Osaka, which is full of small-scale factories and ranks high among Japanese municipalities in terms of the number of factories. More than a few Higashi Osaka factories own high-level technology important to Japanese industries. Being a traditional working-class community, the area has a folksy atmosphere, where people talk candidly.
I explained to Melissa that such an atmosphere is referred to as 'zakku-baran' in Japanese. Melissa is proficient in Japanese, but didn't know that word. She consulted a pocket-size electronic Japanese dictionary, admitting Japanese is difficult. It seemed to me that her remark represented foreigners' view of the Japanese language. In fact, one of my foreign friends once told me that he was surprised to find that there are as many as 18 pronunciations for one word.
But how did she attain proficiency in Japanese? The way she studied Japanese may give a hint for how Japanese should learn foreign languages.
In her judgment, English education in Japan lacks studies on phonics. She insists that phonics is very important in language education. In other words, languages must be learned phonetically. More specifically, teachers must teach beginners the relationship between letters, spellings and pronunciations, she said.
For example, she pointed out, in the case of the word 'cat,' when 'e' is added, it becomes a different word 'Cate,' a girl's name pronounced [keit]. But since Japanese transcribe English pronunciations with 'kana' letters, their English pronunciations are based on 'kana,' which is quite a problem. Japanese shyness is another problem in English education.

Melissa first learned the Japanese language from her classmate, whose mother is Japanese, when she was a fourth-grade student. She majored in Japanese at the University of California in Santa Cruz. There were initially 40 classmates, but the number dwindled to a mere three when she became a senior, because lessons were hard. She came to Japan when she was a junior and studied at International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo for one year.
Speaking Japanese with the Osaka accent was popular among foreign students at ICU, because it sounded fashionable, Melissa recalled. She passed the ALT examination and came to Osaka as she had hoped. Her three-year term at Choei Middle School will expire at the end of July.
She plans to study at a graduate school after returning to the U.S. She told me that she has a Japanese boy friend, who will be going to the U.S. in September to study.
For the rest of her stay in Japan, she hopes to learn more about Japan, such as calligraphy and kimono-making, and visit various places of interest. One of them is the Shiba Ryotaro Memorial Museum in Osaka, which displays various mementos of the late writer, whose works mostly dealt with Japanese history. (H)