THE NUMBER OF FILIPINAS married to Japanese
now top 100,000, consisting of more than half of the Filipinos
residing legally in Japan.
Since they are residents by virtue of marriage,
they live in Japan more or less permanently. With 7000 new
marriages added to the number every year, this segment of
the Japanese society will continue to generate particular
needs of its own.
The education of Japanese-Filipino children
is one of the needs that requires urgent attention. In recent
months, newspapers reported a Japanese-Filipino child who
broke his leg after jumping out of his school’s toilet
window. The child was frightened that his teacher would punish
him again for not bringing the assigned study materials. This
incident only conceals the more intense drama played out in
every Japanese-Filipino family everyday.
I recently had the opportunity to exchange
ideas on this issue with Mr. Yukio Okada, an official of the
Japanese Board of Education in Narita City, Chiba Pref., during
a sports event hosted by a Filipino Christian church in which
we were both invited guests.
“At kindergarten, the mother prepares
everything that the child needs. But when the child starts
elementary school, he is expected to be able to prepare the
study materials himself, with guidance and help from the mother,”
Mr. Okada explained.
The problem, however, is that most of the
reminders are in Japanese. The average Japanese public elementary
school does not have the personnel resources to prepare these
materials in English.
The result is not only poor performance at
school, or unfortunate incidents such as the one reported
above, but also a dysfunctional family in which the child
loses respect for his mother.
Mr. Okada describes incidents of children
belittling their mothers for not being able to read and write
Japanese. The greater the difficulties the child experiences
at school, the more he vents his anger and puts the blame
on his mother.
In a typical Japanese home, the Japanese father
is not expected to be of any help with school assignments.
It is the mother’s role to provide guidance to the child
in school work. Obviously, this arrangement cannot work for
Japanese-Filipino marriages. In most cases, however, the inability
to address the problem of the child’s education at home
is only an offshoot of the fundamental communication problem
between the mother and the father. It all boils down to the
lack of common language and sense of urgency to remedy this
problem.
Mr. Okada suggests that mothers should study
the Japanese language seriously before the child reaches school
age. Mr. Okada himself is a Japanese Language teacher, who
is proud to have helped foreign students pass the first level
of Japanese Language Proficiency Test and proceed to Japanese
universities. He teaches Japanese with a sense of mission,
expressing hope that eliminating the language gap between
Filipinos and Japanese will make for happier families.
As the child grows up, the outside environment,
including school and peer groups, exerts an increasing influence
on him. A Filipina who is unable to communicate with the child
forfeits her right as a mother to impart her own values to
him. Because the child grows up not recognizing the mother’s
authority, he is vulnerable to being misguided as he seeks
outside sources of direction.
I do not know of a Japanese-Filipino child
who has progressed beyond high school. A systematic study
will very likely reveal a low educational attainment on the
average. As a result, the employment opportunities available
to them are also limited to blue-collar and even the unstable
3K (kiken, kitsui, kitanai) jobs that
are usually taken up by their full-blooded Filipino counterparts.
Unless Filipina mothers take an active role
in the child’s education, their offspring will end up
forming a subculture of poverty in this society. Having married
a Japanese to better her lot, the Filipina mother will have
come full circle when her children end up with the fate she
had escaped.
The decision to marry with a Japanese means
making a lifetime commitment--whatever it takes-- to the welfare
of the family, most importantly of the children.*
