San Francisco Examiner
By William Wetherall
28 December 2025
Fifty years have passed since the San Francisco Examiner published my Other Voices op-ed, Bilingual education -- a way to Identity, in its Wednesday, 11 June 1975 edition (pages 1 and 35).
While a student at Berkeley at three different periods from 1962 to 1975, I contributed a number of "Letters to the Icebox" column in The Daily Californian, the campus tabloid. I also submitted occasional letters-to-the-editor columns of San Francisco papers.
In the spring of 1975, as busy as I was -- taking my oral exams, applying for research grants, preparing to move to Japan and begin my field work on suicide, and managing the apartment building where I lived north of campus -- I somehow found time to read the San Francisco Examiner, and carry on a rather heated exchange in its Editor's Mail Box column with Guy Wright (1923-2006), one of the paper's most popular columnists, who opposed bilingual education, such as for the Indochinese refugees then streaming to America, many as "boat people" rescued on the open seas by passing cargo ships.
While I didn't consider myself a radical, my sympathies with disadvantaged people were definitely liberal. And when reading today my 1975 Examiner op-ed, advocating bilingual education as a human right, I'm keenly aware that I talked the talk, if I didn't exactly walk the walk, of 1970s radicalism.
I spoke of "3rd world peoples" and "heritage" much like the "woke" generation of recent years. My editorial perch was a high "royal we" -- though of course I had absolutely no authority to speak on behalf of anyone other than myself.
My op-ed was purely polemic. My advocacy of bilingual education was fashionable and even ideological, not reasoned or realistic -- a priori rather than empirical.
Not once did I examine actual conditions in the real world. I failed to examine even my personal experiences, such as they were at time -- limited but, in hindsight, more in tune with Wright's arguments than mine.
Bilingual circles
Today my support of bilingual education in any country is predicated on the need to first and foremost share the languages in which a country conducts its domestic affairs. In most countries of the world this means a single language -- hence English in the United States and Japanese in Japan.
There being hundreds, even thousands of languages in the world, there have to be people who are able to speak more than one language, whether because they were born into a family or community in which two or more languages were spoken, or later in life acquired the ability to speak other languages through study, travel, or migration.
Throughout history, in all parts of the world, bilingual people have played roles in commerce and peace making between villages and countries that don't share a common language. In almost all communities of any size, there are people who for whatever reason are able to speak a language or two other than the language which has most currency in the community.
International diplomatic, academic, athletic, and other fetes need highly skilled conference and simultaneous interpreters. AI-assisted interpretation is beginning to relieve shortages of trained human interpreters, but the fact remains that human migration and mixture naturally produce bilingual people without the need for bilingual education.
Professional interpreters may need specialized training and supervised internships to hone and discipline their skills as say court interpreters, or interpreters for heads of state in which mastery of protocol is also required. But this would be true for all fields of human endeavor. Specialization at advanced levels come after general education and experience.
Tourists of course may need a certain amount of support in the form of multilingual brochures and maps. Most large cities and not a few smaller municipalities in Japan provide information in English, Chinese, and Korean, in addition to Japanese. But anyone who comes to Japan other than as a tourist, who is permitted to stay, with an obligation to register as a denizen of the municipality in which they wish to reside, has no right to expect to be accommodated in a language other than Japanese.
That some municipalities today go out of their way to provide information in at least English, for the benefit of non-Japanese reading residents, is partly because they want to appear to be friendly rather than hostile toward foreigners. Local governments have also learned that explaining garbage collection rules in foreign languages is the quicker and more painless way to realize compliance among those who can't read Japanese.
Yet anyone who comes to Japan to live, without having learned basic Japanese, about a hundred hiragana and katakana, and a few hundred Sino-Japanese graphs, will quickly find that foreign-language support, such as it is, is extremely limited. And unless they embrace a willingness to linguistically assimilate, their lives in Japan will be bound by the limitations of their alien tongue.
An American friend who has been in Japan as long as I have, once asked me why I don't select English at ATMs or ticket machines. I tell her if had chosen to live my daily life in English, I'd never have learned to do everything in Japanese. She knew I wasn't saying this as a personal dig, but was simply being honest about the consequences of not striving for a minimum functional level of reading if not also writing ability. She speaks Japanese but struggles to read anything written only in Japanese. Thus she heavily depends on friends who can read Japanese, whether natively or as a second language, who are willing to treat her as what I would call a "professional alien".
Rights versus choices
But back to the United States, where written English does not impose the sort of barrier that written Japanese or Chinese, or even Korean, poses for people familiar only with alphabetic scripts. People traveling in the United States as tourists generally come with some understanding of English, even if limited to what they learned in an English language class in an otherwise monolingual school. Very few countries are motivated to provide public school educations in multiple languages.
I'm not saying that there is no room for opportunities to learn history or arithmetic in two languages at lower levels of schooling. An English-speaking American who plans to work in Germany as a chemist needs to study Chemistry in German, even if ones German colleagues can speak English. But that would be a personal choice. It would not be cause to offer a bilingual English-German course in chemistry at any level.
Did children of Cambodian refugees in San Francisco in the 1970s need to be educated in both English and Cambodian? Did they have a right to a bilingual education?
My answer today would be that public schools in the United States have no obligation to provide educations in languages other than English. If a child of Cambodian-speaking parents speaks Cambodian at home, that is a family matter. If Cambodian-speakers settle in the same neighborhood, and choose to speak Cambodian with each other, in the shops and restaurants they may operate in the neighborhood, and at meetings they convene for the purpose of conducting communal affairs -- that, too, would be a private matter.
But step outside ones linguistic comfort zone in say Vietnam, into the United States or Japan, and one is obliged to learn English or Japanese. It's that simple and sensible.
What about adult refugees, who may arrive in the United States or Japan with no English or Japanese ability whatever? If admitted as refugees, and permitted to settle, they need to quickly learn at least enough English or Japanese to survive and minimally participate in American or Japanese life.
They need to be able understand the local language of daily transactions when shopping or using public transportation. They need to be able to convey basic medical needs at clinics and hospitals. They need to be able read and understand traffic and road signs to qualify for a driver's license.
Minimum fluency won't come over night, but survival in the new language needs to be the primary goal. Initial support in a native tongue is analogous to training wheels on bicycles. One can chose whether to use the wheels and for how long. Some people, though, have found it more effective to dispense with training wheels, and focus on building balancing skills while facing and overcoming the fear of losing balance.
Naturalization
In the 1980s, the semanticist, columnist, and politician S.I. Hayakawa (1906-1992), a Canadian who turned American, started a movement to make English the official language of the United States. Guy Wright became a staunch supporter, and also endorsed Hayakawa's opposition to bilingual ballots, which had become popular in California and several other states.
The question came down to whether an alien who can't understand basic English, sufficient to participate in American politics, should be admitted to U.S. citizenship. And whether ballots should be available in languages other than English.
My answer today would be no. My own personal experience -- not an ideology of linguistic inclusiveness -- convinces me that a certain amount of linguistic assimilation is the price all people who cross language borders have to pay for a place in their adopted home. They may regard their mother tongue as their most spiritual language, as I do, but that is private matter. What matters in the public square is whether they are ready, able, and willing to meet the public language at least half way.
As for citizenship -- aliens who naturalize in Japan are not required to show that they know anything about Japan's history, its constitution, and its system of government. Nor is a language test.
Aliens seeking to become Japanese have to submit all documents in Japanese. Documents originating in other languages have to be translated into Japanese. While forms may now be completed on a computer, applicants must submit the statement of why they want to become a national of Japan in Japanese in their own hand, and conduct interviews with Legal Affairs Bureau officials in Japanese.
Last revised 29 December 2025