“Oreo“, “acting white”. If you live in America you probably know the context in which these two would be used. Black people who decide to act differently than is dictated by the black American culture are called these words. It can be such things as musical preferences, clothing choices, doing well in school, or speech. John Ogbu went to Shaker Heights to search for the answer to a puzzling question – why are black students not doing as well as other students, even in this good school district? If you want to know more about the story, follow the link up top and read it because I’m not going to go into anything else in the story. But while I was reading the article, I realized that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and black American culture share some similarities with Osaka-ben.

So what defines and sets apart AAVE from the common American dialect of English? If you have any experience (or read wikipedia) you can recognize them as a difference in pronunciation and differing grammar for tenses. What this means for anyone doesn’t speak AAVE is that they most likely won’t grasp all of what is said. Now if you have someone from Osaka speak naturally to someone from Neo Tokyo 3 you’re going to end up with a similar result. While not the most difficult dialect (only taking pronunciation into account, it’s Okinawa-ben), when combined with the sheer number of differing words and phrases it’s very easy for a Tokyoite to be extremely confused by seemingly simple statements spoken by anyone from the Osaka area. If you want some examples read the Wikipedia page or the very thorough MIT site. Unfortunately, for those who can’t speak Japanese won’t really be able to understand how different they really are, which is the exact same position a regular Japanese person is in regarding the difference between standard American English and AAVE.

Really, what be up with that shit.

Now where American blacks and Osakans differ is when they use their own dialect or the common dialect so that they can be understood by all (共通語, kyoutsugo). People who live in Osaka and can speak Osaka-ben know that even though they can understand other citizens of their fair city that they must speak the common dialect in certain situations so that they can get their point across. In other words, I doubt you’d find a person who’d be willing to pass over a good job just because they refuse to use anything besides their native dialect. What you will find is a lot of people who will begrudgingly use the common Japanese dialect at work and then complain about it after they finish working.

Unfortunately it seems that black American culture has decided not to take this route. While residents of Osaka will give up their dialect during working hours, a black person using standard American English is looked at in a negative light if they would do so. The damage this causes is not properly known, but it is hard to see how this is a good thing. It looks like people who cannot leave their dialect at home, be it Americans, Japanese or any other country, will keep fucking that chicken, economically speaking.

What’s interesting is when you go take the test in Japan. The test is almost always at a university of some kind and since there will be people coming from all around to take the test there is definitely not enough room to fit everyone in one classroom, especially since they put a one seat gap between all students. This leads to you only being surrounded by a small cross-section of other applicants which you can only check against the body at large during intermissions. As you progress from level 4, you might notice the makeup (no, not this either) of the group changes slightly; there’s a significant lack of caucasians that take levels 1 and 2.

This isn’t to say that there were a lot of non-asians taking the test in Japan to begin with, there aren’t. The number taking the test at lower levels, like all the other groups, seems to mirror the population of the group in Japan (i.e. the percentages of applicants and the percentages of that group living in the country is roughly the same). However, the number of applicants from English speaking countries who take the test at each level seems to fall precipitously as you move towards the higher levels. Now there aren’t any published statistics on the number of applicants and test takers for each mother tongue (nor any other metric besides passing/failing and where they took the test), but since you must write all the important information needed to create the charts I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out that the organization has made, but does not share, graphs based on this information.

I was going to do all kinds of crazy new stuff to you but I can only do it if you pass 2級! Otherwise, no more WoW buffs.

Because of the lack of useful information, what I am about to say is, unfortunately, little more than conjecture and anecdotes. From my experience, people whose original language is English (or who can use English reasonably well even though it’s not their original language) that are living in Japan have an advantage that Indians, Koreans, and Chinese people don’t; many people here have learned some English and will try to use it. This does lead to a lower number of people who feel they need to know the language, even if they plan on staying here for a while. Related to this is that, most of the time, when they get a boyfriend/girlfriend that person seems to speak pretty good English; even if the native English speaker is trying to learn Japanese they now have a disincentive to learn. A third reason is that there is a large industry that uses only English and requires little to no Japanese, English teaching.

What ends up happening is that, even if they would decide to learn/study Japanese they have trouble since it’s easier to use English at their workplace and, possibly, with their significant other. After so much time passes they just decide to give up studying; by this point they know enough to be useful without knowing enough to engage in everything that a normal Japanese person would be able to do. Asians can’t usually work as English teachers so they are left to work at a place where Japanese is predominantly spoken. This lack of choice makes sure that they continue to study Japanese much longer than, what seems to be, the average native English speaker.

By the way, when I get my results (sometime around February) I’ll make sure to tell you what I got.