Bilingual Schooling Options for Michael and Mei

With Michael turning 6 in June this year and only one more year of preschool to go, the time has come to make a decision about elementary school enrollment and settle on a broad vision of how we want to school our kids.

The default choice for primary school is our local public Japanese school, Nishi-Mitaka Gakuen, which is a model program of sorts and seems to have a good reputation in the area. Unless we come up with a better option, Michael will enroll there in April 2010. Basically, I feel very comfortable with allowing Michael to enter Japanese elementary school. He already is forming an identity as a local Japanese kid, many of his friends will be going there, and Japanese primary school education has many strengths in helping students form good learning habits and basic literacy. It will be a good educational experience for him. Megumi and I both went through Japanese public elementary schools and we have good impressions of it.

The biggest drawback of going to a Japanese school, of course, is that his identity as an English speaker will weaken, so we need a plan for English. Even now, after two years in yochien, he is starting to refuse to reply in English when I try to talk to him. He can converse in English at an OK level for a 5 year old, but English communication is getting more and more frustrating for him as his Japanese communication ability develops at a much faster rate from interaction with local kids, media input, and talking with his Mom. I've taught him to read almost at the first grade level already and he can write his alphabets too, but since I'm basically the only English speaker he talks with, I'm feeling the limits of what I can do through communication and schooling at home.

So...what are we going to do about his English academic ability? First of all, I think our main goal is to make sure Michael has enough academic ability in English to go where he wants for college. However we get there, through Japanese schools or international schools or schools in the U.S., we just need to be able to keep his options open. How can we do that? Here are some methods we'll eventually need to choose from:

Option 1. International schools
Use international schools in Japan at some point, switching over from Japanese public schools sooner or later. ASIJ is close to ICU but would be close to impossible financially, especially for two kids (2.5 mil per kid). I went to CAJ and enjoyed my years there; it is more reasonable but still expensive at 1.5mil per kid. Enrolling in international schools for many years is tough financially, but the more we delay, the more difficult it will be to keep the kids' English levels high enough to get in. Here's a long list of international schools in Japan. Should we start from 1st grade somewhere? If not, at what point should we switch over? Can we maintain English levels until 5th or 6th grade and switch over, for example?

Option 2. Japanese public or private schools,
(with just enough English study on the side)
If our goal is to help our kids get into English language universities abroad, one way is to graduate from Japanese high school and apply as an international student using TOEFL scores etc. Basically, academic ability will be developed in Japanese, going through the Japanese system of taking examinations to get into decent schools, hopefully with good English programs suited to the level our kids will have. Some place like Kato Gakuen in Numazu?