Learning Japanese

By Gerald K. LeTendre

Over the past 10 years, I have conducted extensive fieldwork in four U.S. and Japanese middle schools of roughly the same size, with about 800 to 900 students each.

Although the complexities of racial, ethnic, and linguistic differences were most prominent in the United States, in both countries teachers found themselves working with students whose social backgrounds and expectations for the life course were often different from their own.

Both Japanese schools—Aratamachi and Furukawa—are three-story, ferroconcrete buildings located in Kotani, a city of about 75,000 inhabitants. Most of the teachers live outside the schools' immediate neighborhoods and most commute in their automobiles. In an attempt to promote contact between teachers and neighborhoods, each teacher is also assigned an area (a few cho , or "blocks") for which he or she is responsible. The extent of these responsibilities is not onerous; teachers are merely required to be familiar with their area's shops, dangerous...