Nihongo, daijoubu desuka??

BokuNoNeko Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Actually, I kind of had the same experience as Futzl. I came from an eastern European country and lived in Germany and had to go to regular German schools. The first year was brutal (as well as making friends) but after that it got much easier. Today I barely speak German lol, but I can understand it. Japanese and English have replaced my German in a way. But the thing is, unfortunate as it is, we as people will never be accepted in the countries we live in unless they are our own. As much as I love Japan and America, these are really not the places where I or my family is from. It is sad that this happened to the girl and she SHOULD be allowed in the school because kids do really learn quickly. Only problem is the writing system is very complex, but even just spending 30 minutes to an hour a day learning kanji can help a great deal with that.
Although this kind of racism doesn’t happen often in America, having also spent part of my childhood in America I can say that not all Americans are exactly accepting of foreigners either. Heck, a few weeks back my cousin was in a store with her son. The mother spoke with a foreign accent but all in English to the son and a woman nearby sighed and made a comment about not liking ‘foreigner children.’ So you see we have all kinds of racists everywhere.
The girl should be allowed into the school, but it is hard to change the attitude of many Japanese. You can live in Japan for decades and people will still ask you “Nihongo, daijoubu desuka??” Like Debito even gets! And this gets very tiresome but if you have the attitude that this is how things are in Japan, it might make things easier. Many Japanese people believe that their language is really tough for foreigners and we shouldn’t always take these kinds of things as insults. Could it just be that because they are a 島国 that they have a different mentality than most people in the world? Sorry for the rambling, but I hope I got something across. Instead of fighting against their attitudes head on, it might be better to just adopt a different attitude and try more subtle ways to make changes in their thinking as far as these kinds of things. And Japanese schools, when it comes even to Japanese kids can be quite brutal such as to kids with physical disabilities,etc. A Japanese girl even told me she was told in Japan she cannot be a flight attendant because she’s too short! I guess sometimes in Japan there’s cases where there’s equal-opportunity discrimination, heh.

debito.org/?p=4020#comment-180944


　最初の方は公平な記述だとおもうが、在日外国人に日本語大丈夫ですか？と聞いてしまう日本人をもって、島国根性と結びつけるのはいかがなものか？
　テレビなどに日本語が堪能な外国人や片親が外国人のタレントなどよくみかけるようになったが、しかし、日本語がしゃべれる外国人はむしろ例外というのはあまりかわらない。
　そもそも、そこで、英語でコソコソとやっていること自体、日本語大丈夫ですか？と聞きたくなる要因である。

　在日外国人のみなさまもどうか積極的に日本語で日本人との対話を試みていただきたいものだ。