Japanese Export Education To Keep Culture Alive For Their Children

ATLANTA - The children's voices rang out confident and clear as they stood to recite Scriptures for a Christmas-program rehearsal one recent morning.

Images of a star and a blond holy family flashed on a wall as the students at one of Atlanta's newest private schools sang carols and retold the Christmas story.

No surprises - except that everything but one verse of ``Silent Night'' was in Japanese.

The children attend Seigakuin Atlanta International School, one of the few full-time Japanese schools in the United States. It opened in September to join a growing community of Japanese schools in the hometown of ``Gone With The Wind.''

Atlanta also has two schools that meet only on Saturdays to teach mathematics and the Japanese language - two subjects stressed in Japan. There are similar, although much smaller, weekend schools in scores of cities, including Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Jacksonville, all in Florida.

The parents of most students work for Japanese companies. Many eventually will return to Japan and want the transfer to be as easy as possible for their children. Others plan to stay in the United States permanently but want their children to learn their native language and customs.

The schools, like many of the transplanted students, are neither completely Japanese nor American.

``It's hard to raise children and let them have an identity. They want to be Japanese or American,'' said Hiroe Takahara, mother of two children, one at Seigakuin, one at a public school. ``Education-wise, I don't know what is best. I've been struggling for a long time.''

Seigakuin is housed in a refurbished neighborhood elementary school on a suburban street lined with magnolia trees and brick houses.

But inside everything except English-language class is taught in Japanese. Textbooks are shipped from Tokyo, and the curriculum is set by the Japanese Ministry of Education. Children bow to their teachers at the beginning of class, clean their classrooms each day and exchange street shoes for tennis shoes, as they would in Tokyo.

Yet there are distinctively American touches. The children study American history and start learning English in kindergarten - seven years earlier than in Japan. They talk and giggle more in class than pupils would dare back home. And they celebrate Thanksgiving, Halloween and Valentine's Day.

A goal of the exported education is to help Japanese children keep up their native language and customs and become international citizens, officials with all the schools say.

``They are little ambassadors. They can't change their brown eyes and black hair and Oriental origin,'' Seigakuin's assistant headmaster, Etsuko Kobayashi, said of her students.

Several mothers said they welcomed the full-time Japanese school because they and their children sometimes had trouble understanding what was expected in American schools - and making their needs understood.

``While we were still in Japan, we planned to send our children to American school,'' Hitimi Yamada said through a translator. ``We thought our older daughter might blossom and learn to express herself better in an American environment.

``In reality she can't, because of the language. For the mother, too, communication plays a big role as far as school is concerned.''