It has only been since the late 1800s that Western culture has infiltrated Japan on a wider scale than the novelty ‘Dutch Learning’ books imported from the traders in Nagasaki. Japan is a mono-culture, an island that has been physically and culturally cut off from the whole world for centuries. I think this goes back to the culturally imbedded xenophobia that Japan as a whole (if rarely Japanese people in specific) is prone to. What I leave out of my explanation to my students is that the other people who only spell things the American way are those who are trying to imitate the Americans. Isn’t the point of having a native English speaker as a teacher to promote internationalization and an awareness of the diversity of cultures around the globe? Apparently not. Everywhere native English speakers are asked to avoid their own local slang words, their zokugo, in favour of the false and flat slang found in the text books. Australians are told to modify their spelling. Folks with New Zealand accents are asked to pronounce words “properly” in front of their classes. What really sticks in my craw is the Japanese education system’s insistence that the only correct way to do anything in the English language is the American way. Isn’t “thru” a more accurate phonetic representation than “through”? We all say “sent-er” not “sent-reh”, so why is it ‘centre’ and not ‘center’? Nothing against our American cousins I actually believe that many of the edits they have made to the English language make sense. “We don’t want endless phone calls telling us, ‘Oh, there’s a spelling mistake on page seven.’ We also do translations - we can’t have a magazine that looks like it’s spelled poorly.”Įven though it’s not. Why? “We are seen by people all over Fukuoka,” Nick Szasz, the publisher and conceiving force behind this magazine, said one night over drinks. Even our dear Fukuoka Now, despite its publisher being Canadian himself, chooses to utilize the American style of spelling over any other. Ribbing aside, it just doesn’t seem to make sense. We’ll be able to spot a non-American at a hundred paces!” I can well imagine a guy in a tavern in 1775 saying to his buddies: “We don’t want to be British, we’ll be Americans, thank you very much! To prove it, let’s have a revolution, gain our independence, and change our spelling and measuring systems into such a garble that no one but us will understand it. Perhaps American spelling, as well as the American rejection of the metric system employed by practically every other first-world nation on Earth, is a form of protest. Anyone ever tried to read the first printings of a Shakespeare Folio? Don’t. Or, perhaps, it is due to the atrocious attempts at spelling made by the first printers before spelling was standardized. At one time words may have actually been pronounced as they are now written. These ‘Queen’s English’ spellings, of course, have their roots in the historical evolution of the language. I go on to explain that most English-speaking countries around the world, save for the United States, use the British form of spelling, or a mixture of British and American. I tell them that it is a known fact that the only people in the world who spell everything the American way are the Americans. At least once a semester I must stop my class and explain to a room full of patiently waiting (or sleeping) ichi-nensei students that ‘no, in fact, I have not made a mistake.’ There are two commonly accepted ways of spelling words - the American way and, what I jokingly refer to as, the right way. Or a Kiwi, or an Aussie, or a Brit, or… in fact, pretty much anyone who is not American. There’s no ‘u’ in color.” It’s enough to make a Canuck want to bang her head against the whiteboard. Every non-American English teacher in Fukuoka has heard this dreaded phrase at least once: “Ano… sensei? You spelled that wrong.
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