Old School, New Focus

When 83-year-old Barry Tamura attended the San Fernando Valley Japanese Language Institute in the 1920s, Japanese American farmers and flower growers were scattered across the northeast Valley.

Most of his 79 classmates in 1924--the year the school was founded--were nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans, who spoke Japanese at home and attended the school mainly to master kanji--the complex writing system of their forebears.

Today, as the language institute in Pacoima celebrates its 75th anniversary, the student body could not be more different.

Most students are of mixed-race heritage with only one Japanese-American parent. Few speak Japanese at home. Classroom lessons are less rigid, more Americanized. And slowly, non-Japanese Americans are enrolling, such as Jeremy Lopez, 11, whose mother is Salvadoran.

Fewer Families Speak Japanese

The institute is thriving--it had 85 students this year--but gradually the emphasis has shifted to culture over language and conversational Japanese over written.

“In the last 10 years, the mix of students from Japanese-speaking families versus non-Japanese-speaking families has changed dramatically,” said Ken Mui, past president of the school’s parent-teacher association. “The issei hear Japanese at home, the nisei hear some Japanese at home, the sanseis--fewer of them learn Japanese and fewer of them speak it.”

The debate over how best to teach those who do not speak Japanese became so highly charged in recent years that one teacher, Paul Jokonouchi, quit and started his own school--Wakaba Japanese Language School--in the same compound, using a more Western foreign-language approach.

Harold Muraoka, 68, whose children attended the institute, moved to Burbank in 1947 after his family was released from an internment camp. He predicts the school and its community center--which celebrates its 50th anniversary in July--may have to diversify into a Pan-Asian institution to survive.

Even with the demographic changes, the original school retains a distinct Japanese flavor. The compound contains the community center, a Buddhist temple, a dojo and several baseball fields.

The teachers and Principal Hisashi Iwami are native Japanese speakers. By and large, only Japanese is spoken. The faculty lounge has the overcrowded, cluttered feel of a teachers’ room in Japan.

Postwar Attitudes Started Shift

Because of the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II, many nisei reacted by denying their heritage, experts say. They did not teach their children Japanese or send them to Saturday school.

“The first time I saw my grandmother after the war, she said, ‘You learned to speak Japanese!’ ” Muraoka recalls, “and I said, ‘You’re in America. You should be learning English.’ I started forgetting it then. That’s just something that happened because of the war.”

After their release from camps, Japanese Americans were not permitted to return en masse to the West Coast cities and towns that had been their homes. One of two federal housing projects in the country for Japanese Americans was in Burbank, Muraoka said. About 200 families moved there, and his was one of them.

Later, those families moved to lower-income areas in Pacoima and parts of North Hollywood, he said.

Today, most of the school’s students come from the Valley, but some drive from as far away as Palmdale and Lancaster.

The school is one of about 30 in Southern California, said Charles Igawa of the California Assn. of Japanese Language Schools. But the number is shrinking. About 10 have closed in the last 25 years as Japanese Americans become more assimilated and less interested in retaining their Japanese cultural identity, he said.

On a recent Saturday morning at the institute, kindergarten children folded brightly colored paper into origami sumo wrestlers as their teacher chattered to them in Japanese.

Multilevel Classes Present Challenge

In the first- and second-grade classes, children composed short speeches in hiragana, a Japanese phonetic writing system. When the bell rang for recess, they rose and bowed to their teacher Japanese-style before dashing off to play.

The challenges of teaching so many levels of Japanese are apparent. In the first-grade class, children range in age from 7 to 12. Those with Japanese mothers speak with almost flawless pronunciation, using difficult grammatical structures.

For others, the language is more difficult, the speaking more stilted. The gap widens over the years.

“There are more students in kindergarten and first grade than seventh or eighth,” said parent Miki Lorentz, whose daughter is in the fifth grade at the institute. “Kids don’t stay in school because of the difficulty.”

Those are the ones the nearby Wakaba School is poised to capture. Classes are conducted in English, and Japanese is taught as a foreign language. Five years after it was founded, the school has 60 students who come from as far away as Simi Valley, said Principal Jokonouchi.

Iwami, principal of the original school, said his institute has been forced to tone down its traditional, rigid teaching style.

“The school has had to change its teaching methodology,” he said. “The reason other schools’ enrollment has dropped is they haven’t changed their methodology.”

For adult student Edward Wright, a computer programmer in his 50s from Studio City with a yen to learn Japanese, the school offers the closest thing in the area to total immersion.

Tradition Gaining Favor Among Youth

Standing in the parking lot during recess, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, Wright, who is in the fourth-grade class, said he finds the traditional teaching style appealing.

“It was hard to be in third grade again,” he said, smiling wryly. “But being in an environment where a lot of Japanese is spoken is helpful. Some kids hear Japanese at home, and they are quite good at conversation and grammar.”

Even students who resist getting up on Saturday mornings for school while their friends play sports or sleep in, appreciate what they have learned.

“My friends think it’s kind of cool,” said Matthew Minae, 10. “Just the other day, my friends wanted me to teach them the alphabet.”

The 75th anniversary celebration begins today at 11 a.m. at the school, 15339 Saticoy St., with Taiko drumming, a Shinto purification ceremony, speeches, dancing and a slide show.