Children of Foreign Nationalities: Japanese-Language Education Needs to Be Enhanced Urgently

Editorial

13:59 JST, August 28, 2024

A certain level of Japanese language proficiency is essential for children of foreign nationalities to fit into Japanese society. A support system to dispel the language barrier must be quickly developed.

Last fiscal year, a record 58,000 children of foreign nationality needed Japanese-language lessons in addition to regular classes at such schools as public elementary, junior high and high schools. The number of children of Japanese nationality who also needed Japanese lessons due to reasons such as having lived abroad for a long time exceeded 11,000.

The number of foreign residents, including children, totals about 3.41 million. The number of nationalities has diversified, and their places of residence have spread to various parts of the country. The government is promoting the acceptance of foreign human resources to compensate for the labor shortage. The number of children of foreign nationals living in Japan will likely continue to increase.

Japan has become a society that has to be inclusive and accept foreigners. For children who come to Japan with their parents, once they graduate from high school, they can obtain residency status with no restrictions on employment. It is important to provide such children with opportunities to acquire the necessary Japanese-language skills so that they can live in Japan for a long time.

To this end, there are many issues to overcome. Of the children of foreign nationality who need Japanese-language instruction, 90.4% are actually receiving such lessons in school. The figure dropped by 0.6 percentage points from two years before, but this is because the system to provide Japanese lessons cannot keep up with the increase in the number of children.

There also are said to be about 8,600 children of foreign nationals who are not attending schools.

The percentage of foreign children in need of Japanese lessons who advance to high school or university is low, and the high school dropout rate is high. A lack of sufficient Japanese-language skills may be a contributing factor in such situations.

Many local governments are struggling to cope with the fact that children of foreign nationals are more multinational.

The town of Oizumi, Gunma Prefecture, which has seen an increase in the number of Japanese-Brazilians since the 1990s, has established a guidance program and has assigned Portuguese-language support staff to elementary and junior high schools. In recent years, however, the number of people from Nepal and Vietnam has increased, making it necessary to deal with various languages.

The government should strengthen its support through such means as securing human resources by encouraging university students who wish to become teachers to earn credits for Japanese-language instruction.

There may be people in regional communities who worked overseas for a long time and are proficient in certain languages. With the help of such people and private international exchange groups, Japanese-language education must be improved.

There must be regions where it is difficult to provide instruction in minority languages due to a lack of human resources. In such cases, it will be important to create a system whereby people who are proficient in minority languages can teach children across the country via online courses.

As long as the central government is promoting the acceptance of more foreigners as a national policy, it should not leave Japanese-language education to local governments and schools. The government should make efforts to provide financial support and share good practices from advanced regions.

(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, Aug. 28, 2024)