Upbringing and Mother Tongue
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One afternoon, my son got back home and talked about a word: upbringing. I had never really understood its meaning or known its meaning in Japanese. My first language is Japanese. My son and I communicate in Japanese. But I didn’t know why he brought up the word that day. It might have been related to an assignment he had just finished a few days ago. In it, he shot a video and recited his book review. That thought popped up in my mind while he explained the word lengthily. I didn’t care much about the word’s definition or his struggle.
Japanese is our first language. I have always believed it is. The language is my mother tongue; it had been such to my parents and grandparents and more. So, it should have been so for my son. He sometimes tells his stories with words used awkwardly, though.
A week later, I quarreled with my son over the use of a Japanese word: みんな. The word is more or less the equivalent of an English word: everyone. What do we do when we can’t find the best word for our idea? Concession. That was his claim when he was accused of being eased by perceiving himself as a member of everyone. I sensed he found assurance in it. My reasoning: although the rest of his math class saw it as natural or irresistible that the only smartest guy in the class could comprehend a concept, it didn’t mean he could think that he was exempted from striving to comprehend it by thinking he belonged to everyone. He claimed that he just didn’t know other words than everyone and didn’t consider using more accurate vocabulary such as the rest of the class or other than him.
He added that his Japanese had not improved since 2019, the year we left Japan, so I sounded ridiculous when I pointed out his misusage of a word. That was a blow. The existence of English had grown without my knowledge.
Days passed, and this assignment came up. It asked me what was a significant experience I had with the use of language. Among the potential topics I listed was the moment my son struggled to explain the word upbringing in Japanese. It had not become a complete experience from which I could draw a lesson or anything meaningful, but it started to do so from that moment.
I searched for the word’s definition in Japanese and English. Collins Cobuild explains, “Your upbringing is the way that your parents or carers treat you and the things that they teach you when you are growing up.”
Suddenly, my mind got flooded with countless memories of how my wife and I talked about Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, and English. All of those, each or both of us speak, listen, read, and write. And the talks sometimes centered back to our son: which one should be the strongest, which language skills must be mastered, how to encourage him to use one actively and discourage him from one.
Such language talks are distilled into long-lasting practices. This was a conjuncture of my son’s life.
When he was a third grader, on the way home, he said as if he was begging, “I don’t want to speak Vietnamese. I don’t like Mum to come to school because my friends make fun of me when I speak Vietnamese with Mum. Mum’s Japanese is weird, too.” I responded, “Your friends will be sorry. Vietnam’s economy is growing. Many people will wanna do business with them. They will like you if you speak Vietnamese. What’s more important, you’re Vietnamese too. Using the language, you can keep your secrets only to you and your mum.”
The temporal aspect of the word’s definition also made me recall how I had aligned situations for my Vietnamese acquisition. It was a course of training made natural by an unnatural intention.
If one side of a couple is from a developing country, it’s natural that they speak the language used in the developed country. But that was not my choice. Japanese is a complex language to master if you didn’t finish elementary school in Japan. It has two sets of phonogramic characters and over two thousand ideogramic characters originated in China. It requires very dedicated training to be literate. Also, Vietnam had started to become a growing economic power in Southeast Asia, with its population officially close to 100 million and unofficially more than that. Other than that, I wanted my son to see me speak the language because, unless I did so, he would be discouraged from saying it. After all, conversing in Vietnamese had always been unnatural in Japan.
Now, I’m struggling to express my thoughts in English. I need to contrive a situation and have it work in the long-term and avoid a natural implication led by the conditions that exist as they do.
Any career has its engine generating its power, and I’m directing myself in two directions that straddle two areas that require two different ways of using my brain: developing a software-based product and organizing teams of people. The former needs logic and mathematics; the latter requires languages and a little bit of politics. I need the former in the first place, and that’s the reason I’m learning computer networking, cybersecurity, and programming intensively while, sometimes, I must neglect my linguistic development.
I also want to discuss many in-depth topics with my son using my mother tongue. So, I need to plan to develop his Japanese fluency and be persistent.
The moment I saw my son struggling to explain a word reminded me of an old realization that expressing yourself in a language is a skill you obtain through opportunities repeatedly and continuously given to you – by yourself or someone who has that intention. Now, I have to tackle my lifelong homework.
Copyright © 2025 Takeo Shimazu