LOVE is complex. It is the perfect and absolute sum of all things lacking—passion, fear, desire, doubt. For Mamiko Morita, it was a mother’s love for her three children that finally pushed her to do something that other people in her home country would probably frown at.
Morita wrote and published a book. It challenged what most people in Japan consider as a subject of zero-compromise. According to Morita, Japanese learned and communicated in Japanese. It is an admirable cultural trait. But for Morita, it was only a matter of time that Japan shut itself trapped inside a shrinking economic bubble as its people can hardly connect with the world beyond the Pacific.
“It is hard to talk about this subject in Japan,” said Morita. “But now, a lot of good companies that used to be based in Japan are building businesses outside of Japan.” Morita continued about how establishments that teach English offering affordable rates are hard to find in Japan, and English, as part of the curriculum for selected schools, is taught only in Japanese.
Will Your Children and Grandchildren Be Able To Find Jobs Without Having English Skills? is Morita’s entry into the industry of publication; part-storytelling, part-plea.
“If Japanese were bilingual, they could live and work anywhere they want,” she said. “I have a serious wish for Japanese to have much better English communication skills in the future. Otherwise, it will be impossible to survive in this global world.”
Morita and her family moved to Cebu, Philippines in May 2014. The move was the culmination of Morita’s worries about her children’s future, and what sparked it was an ad on the internet about learning English in Cebu and some reading some positive feedback about it.
Now based in Cebu, Morita is promoting the hardbound book in Japanese sold through Amazon. An English version is now available for free download at www.englishjkids.net/english. “I worry about my children if they didn’t know how to speak in English. But I’m not concerned about losing our identity as Japanese, as we spend our summer vacations in Japan.”
“I think it is time that Japanese start to study every subject in English, like here in the Philippines.”