Korean course at high school on island nurtures self-reliance
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Loading... - Mawar Anam
- 21 Jul 2022
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Shortly after the start of the new academic year, a class of high school freshmen was listening to Kim Kyoung-ah on the podium, who is in her seventh year of teaching Korean.
“You breathe differently to pronounce strong and weak sounds in Korean,” Kim said.
The students appeared tense at the seriousness of the Korean class they were taking on April 21.
Girls accounted for the overwhelming majority of the students. Seen applied to their pen cases and pencil boards were photos and sticky labels with images of their favorite K-pop stars.
But what was surprising is that the students were not in South Korea but at Prefectural Tsushima High School here on a remote island in Nagasaki Prefecture.
The current academic and fiscal year marks the 20th for a special curriculum at the school, which offers intensive lessons in Korean, something uncommon for a public high school in Japan.
Many of the students in the course are here on a prefectural program for “studying on a remote island,” having left their households at age 15.
More than a few of these students will go on to study at universities in South Korea.
Interviews with alumni of the course who studied on Tsushima island and in South Korea showed they have stayed in touch with South Korea in some way or other, although they have not been spared from the rough waves of the bilateral relations.
They were found, before everything else, to be characteristically teeming with a spirit of self-reliance.
Leach Lilly Midorikawa, a freshman, said she came from Karatsu, Saga Prefecture, to study Korean here because she has become a fan of Twice, a multinational all-girl pop group based in South Korea.
Midorikawa, whose father is from Australia, said she hopes to study at a South Korean university so she can learn to speak three languages, including English.
The studying on a remote island program was created by the Nagasaki prefectural board of education in fiscal 2003 for having high schools on the prefecture’s remote islands host students from outside the islands.
An international cultural exchange course, for teaching Korean and South Korea’s culture to students on the program, was set up at Tsushima High School on this “border island,” which lies only 50 kilometers from Busan.
The course was promoted in fiscal 2019 to the international cultural exchange department, where two teachers from South Korea give lessons to students so they become proficient enough in the language in three years to study at a South Korean university.
Admitted into the course by spring 2021 were 363 students from Kyushu, Kanto, Kinki and other regions. More than 70 of the alumni have gone on to study at universities in South Korea.
FOOTPRINTS ACROSS BORDERS
Kanako Mitani, 34, a native of the prefectural capital of Nagasaki, was among the first batch of students at the Korean course. She went on to attend Dong-A University in Busan and also went to study in Canada while she was enrolled there.
Mitani served stints at a Tokyo branch of a South Korean trading house and an information technology giant. She now works for a business in Kita-Kyushu, her husband’s hometown, where she uses both English and Korean to communicate with her business connections.
The international cultural exchange course was set up at Tsushima High School during the halcyon days around the time when Japan and South Korea co-hosted soccer's FIFA World Cup in 2002.
The bilateral relations, however, have since taken a gradual turn for the worse and into a tit-for-tat of anti-Japanism in South Korea and Korea-phobia in Japan. Read More…
