Anna Matsushita

1978 – The Japanese Boarding School by the Sea "A Japanese school." I'd never heard the term before. It was only when Father was told he was being transferred to England for three years that it entered my life. In 1977, I was in my first year of high school, attending one of the city's top academic schools. If I worked hard enough, I believed I could sit the entrance exams for the university I wanted. Then came the news of Father’s transfer. The following year, in early summer 1978, my parents took me to England with my younger brother, who had only just started junior high school. Father had only one plan. He was determined to put both of us into British schools. I wanted nothing of the sort. I wanted to go to a Japanese high school in the UK. Even so, as soon as we arrived in England, Father dragged my brother and me from one school interview to another. Everywhere we went, the answer was the same. “You're already seventeen, and you don't speak English. I...

  I was an American.   I was seven years old when we went back to Chicago. I had been born in Japan, but America was home. I thought of myself as an American.   My parents were Japanese, but they'd both spent time in America back in the 1950s. In our family, it was just understood that someday we'd go back to America.   Dad was Japanese, but in his heart—and in the way he spoke—he was an American.   Even when we were still living in Japan, I spoke English with Dad. Inside our house, we spoke nothing but English. Whenever I said something to him, he'd stop me.   "Ken, that's not how an American says it." I'd try again. "Still not good enough." Sometimes I felt like crying.   I'd say it exactly the way Dad had said it. I'd roll my tongue. I'd try to get the sound just right. And then Dad's face would break into a huge grin. "Now that's American. Don't you forget it." ...

    It was 1978. On the very evening my first year of primary school came to an end, our family boarded a flight to Hong Kong, where Father was waiting for us. Before we left, Mum reminded my little sister and me of the same thing over and over. "You'll love Hong Kong, you know. The food is absolutely wonderful, and there's so much British culture there as well. At your new school, you'll simply use the English we've always spoken at home. I think you're going to enjoy it tremendously." She had spent much of her childhood and school years in Britain, after her diplomat father was posted there.  Father had grown up largely in Hong Kong, where he attended a British school.   We were going to Hong Kong.  I wasn't entirely sure what that really meant. The only thing I understood was that the English we'd always spoken at home would now become the language I used at school as well. When our plane landed in Hong Kong, the air was thick wi...

  Please listen to this as an old woman’s rambling reminiscence. It happened more than thirty years ago.   For someone like me, who had spent the years from the end of junior high school through high school in Britain, the Japanese university entrance examination system was an entirely unfamiliar world. What worried me most was hearing that the English used in entrance examinations was largely based on American English.   Let me start with the examination itself.   By the time I sat for the entrance examination at my second-choice university, I had already received a rejection from another university. I therefore attended a short summer course offered by a cram school, where I was taught things such as how to write academic essays in Japanese. There, I was told that, although it varied from university to university, American-style English was often used in entrance examinations.   Then came the day of my second university entrance examination. ...