This is a summary of the speech in the talk session called "Why I Study Mark Twain," to be held at Hyatt Regency Long Beach, on 25 May 2000. Three American scholars spoke along with Ryota.

Twain in a Foreign Language:
A View from a Japanese

Ryota Iijima, Fukushima University, Japan

I am a Japanese born under Japanese parents living in Japan. It means I grew up in a uniformed society speaking one common language, Japanese. And I used to think we had only one language. Although we have Ainu and Okinawa languages they are never taught at public schools. I didn't even know their existence. In the elementary school I went to, there were no students or teachers who spoke another language. I did have a classmate born in Hawaii, but he never spoke English to us. In the junior high, there was a Korean who spoke Japanese, and in the private high school, there was a Sino-Taiwanese who spoke only Japanese. None of my personal friends spoke English.

What is strange in Japan, however, is that every student in secondary and higher education has to study English. It is the most important school subject along with mathematics. It was more important than our mother tongue.

Just like any Japanese student during 1970's and 80's, I had to learn English with 39 classmates in one classroom under one teacher with no assistants. The teacher was, as always, a Japanese who mainly spoke Japanese in the classroom. We studied the foreign language translating all the words in the textbook. Because the syntax of Japanese is very different from English, we often read the words in a sentence backwards. I don't do that now, but many Japanese still do.

In senior high, I had to study the strictest version of English grammar, in the classroom where no one spoke English. Most of the Japanese in high school are forced to do that even today. I found myself very bad at the subject.

The Japanese who don't teach English usually say they would like to learn how to talk in English, and many try to learn it, but few manage to acquire it. It is never easy. There are Japanese children who have grown up abroad and who can speak perfect English, but most of them, after coming back to Japan, forget how to speak it.

After finishing high school, I struggled for two years to find out the best way for me to learn English. It was the most important subject in the entrance examination of any Japanese university or college. And I somehow managed to enter a big private university in Tokyo. Strangely I chose the department of literature, majoring English.

It would be too long here to explain why I majored my worst subject. To make it very short, it will be something like this: I loved music, including American popular music, and I liked books, mostly Japanese but including translations of Tom Sawyer and some short stories of Mark Twain.

Many of my classmates in the university liked to study so-called "English conversation." I didn't join them because they used textbooks which looked like exercise books and they never talked about books. Many of my friends also liked to read Japanese translations of English literature, British and

American. I didn't join them because I felt that reading translated versions would not make my English better.

In the first term of the university, beginning in April, we translated stories written by Henry James and William Faulkner in the classroom. Outside of the classroom I read Richard Bach, Erich Segal, J. R. R. Tolkien and Sherwood Anderson. I found an interesting lecture on the history of American literature and its cultural background, taught by a Japanese professor who mainly studied naturalist writers. After summer vacation he gave us an assignment: to write a paper on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

All of my classmates read the Japanese translations, but I read the original version without the Raftsmen's Passage. It was a great shock to me. Even after the "Notice" about the dialects, it was surprising to read Huck's narrative written in "bad" English. Even the Duke, who is good at imitating British accent, makes a grammatical mistake. And it was a book recommended by a university professor! I liked their journey down the River, and I loved Huck's decision to go to the bad place, but I didn't like the final chapters.

After that I gradually found out through many books that many people actually spoke like Huck. I didn't choose Mark Twain for my senior and graduate studies, because I didn't like the ending of the novel. But as long as language was concerned, it was a revelation.

During the graduate years I mainly studied Theodore Dreiser, another American writer who wrote "bad" English. But privately I read the original version of Tom Sawyer and was surprised to find out that it was written in the heavy Victorian style.

After getting a job at a national university, I read a book by David R. Sewell, called Mark Twain's Languages: Discourse, Dialogue, and Linguistic Variety. I learned how Samuel Clemens learned to write and speak "good" English but chose to let Huck write in his own way. He knew the importance of the standard language and the strength of the nonstandard language. Twain's struggle with and mastery of "good" English and his love of "bad" English gives a ray of hope to anyone teaching or learning English in Japan.