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The English Language Amendment: One Nation Indivisible?
| Article
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11197 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1986 |
5,917 Words |
| Author
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S.I. Hayakawa
S.I. Hayakawa, the former U.S. Senator from California is
currently Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for East
Asian and Pacific Affairs. This paper is reprinted by
permission of The Washington Institute for Values in Public
Policy. |
May I start by telling you a little about myself, since many have wondered how it is that a movement aimed at making English the official language of the United States is being headed by a man with a Japanese name?
My father, Ichiro Hayakawa, was born in 1884 in Yamanashi Prefecture in Japan. Like many thousands of young people born in the wake of the Meiji Restoration, which ended almost two hundred and fifty years of the rigid isolationism of the Tokugawa Shogunate, he wanted to be part of the great movement toward the westernization of Japan. Having prepared himself by studying English earnestly in high school, he took off for San Francisco at the age of 18 to work, like many Japanese youths of that time, as a houseboy while continuing his studies.
The high point of his career in this period was when he joined the navy to become a mess attendant on a training ship, the USS Pensacola, which was moored at Goat Island, now known as Yerba Beuna Island. Father has told me that on his days off he would go to San Francisco to call on the office of the Japanese language newspaper, Shin Sekai (New World), to offer for publication his translation into Japanese of English and American poetry--Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Longfellow. Many of his translations were published.
For years, Father remained proud of his Japanese translation of an English version of Heine's Die Lorelei. The files of Shin Sekai were destroyed, however, in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, leaving me unable to prove that my father was a poet.
Decades later, I
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