Do you know the word “dekasegi”? I guess you know this word. If someone goes to “dekasegi”,which means that go to another country to find better job in order to make living. The dekasegi people from Brazil are quite famous in japan and there are a lot of people from Brazil as migrant workers. They normally take their children with them and stay in Japan like 3 or 7 years.

The problem here is that the children who were took by their parents. They usually come to Japan when they are 5 or 8 years old, so they speak some their main language, Portuguese for example. During their stay in Japan, they will be able to speak Japanese so they seem like bilingual. However, in fact, they are really afraid to go back to their country and their school life. It is because that they can speak little Portuguese and little Japanese. They can speak neither language sufficiently. This is called double limited problem. The teacher works in the elementary school in Shiga said that this kind of student study hard and tried to speak Japanese with limited vocabulary. However, they actually did not improve their Japanese. He thinks that the reason why they cannot improve their language level is that the student will be able to improve another language when they acquire their mother tongue. Since they have no foundation or standard, they are more difficult to get another language than others.

The economic level is decreasing in the world and we Japan no longer need the worker like dekasegi people. Therefore, they are now forced to go back their home country with having the anxiety like I mentioned. I think this is going to be more serious problem in the near future.

by Shoya Tai