Why Move?

I have a house in Japan.  I have a company, too.  I have friends and family.  Those things are still there, but someone else is living in my house, and Simon is running the company for me.  The friends and family are still friends and family, but I can't see them on the weekend like I used to.  And there are things I've lost.  I lost the job as a TV reporter.  I lost (well, gave away or sold) 80% of my possessions.  You know, I even lost my wedding band in the chaos surrounding our move.  So you kind of have to ask, "so why did you move?"  That is, of course, a multi-faceted answer, but the main reason -- the catalyst for our decision -- is the children.

The boys grew up entirely in a Japanese society.  We didn't have the money to send them to the international school, so we sent them to the local public schools -- Japanese public schools.  We figured that I could speak English with them at home and that would be enough exposure to the language to become bilingual.  Think again.  As I got busier and busier, I spent less and less time at home.  My schedule was at it's worst just about the time they needed me most for learning English.  For several years when they were pre-school to early elementary, I was working 13 hours a day, 6 days a week.  So Japanese was easier for them, naturally, as the greater part of their lives was spent communicating in Japanese.  Even though I spoke to them in English, they responded to me in Japanese because they knew I understood.  I even tried to hide that from them for a while.  One day, I pretended to hit myself on the head as I was getting into the car, and used that to pretend that I had lost the ability to understand Japanese.  For almost a year, we did wonderfully well at not using Japanese when I was in the home, and the boys made incredible progress.  But it would have been impossible to hide it from them forever.  I was on TV speaking Japanese every weekday, I was well-known in the community and often approached by people on the street.  I was receiving business phone calls at home.  And I didn't want the boys to think I had been lying to them if they found out that I really could speak Japanese.  So I staged a fall down the stairs that brought back my memory.  We promised to continue using only English at home, but that really only lasted for a few more months.

So for the next few years, we tried various ways to make them bilingual -- all with only moderate success.  Finally, we put our oldest through cram school and exam hell to get him into a new school where the classes are taught primarily in English.  The school itself was good and he was enjoying himself in this new environment, but we were coming to the realization that we were faced with a very expensive future if we hoped to school all three children this way.  And that brought us to the idea of making a move -- a very big move.

Sometime in late 2007, We realized that the only way to make the kids purely bilingual was to live in America.  As my wife is Japanese, her job would be to stay at home and home-school the kids in Japanese.  Since I would be out of the house most of the day working, I would not be able to give them much English input, but, of course, their world outside the house would be entirely English.  In fact, we decided that Japanese would be our language of choice at home so that we could increase their exposure, and so that I would be able to maintain my Japanese ability as well.

Well, that was the decision, and the theory.  How well it works is one thing I plan to record in this blog.