SAN FRANCISCO, California

I'm part of a student team that is volunteering on behalf of Nihonmachi Little Friends, a non-profit, full service day-care and after school program located in Japantown in San Francisco, California. We have just completed a new version of the center's website, http://www.nlfchildcare.org.

The new NLF site features an extensive resources section, with links to other sites of interest to the Japanese-American community and to parents in general.

We would be of interest to parents relocating to San Francisco, California, who would like to obtain bilingual daycare for their children in Japanese and English.

Steve Aultman
SFSU Multimedia Studies Program/NLF Project
saultman@pacbell.net

Hi, here is a site that has a listing dated 1999 of partial and total immersion programs in the USA:

http://www.cal.org/ericcll/

When I did a search for Japanese language immersion about 13 listings came up but some seem to be duplicates (i.e. elementary and middle school for the same school system).

Here is an example of a listing for Charlotte, North Carolina:

http://www2.cal.org/immersion/FMPro?-db=immersion-programs.fp3&-format=detail.html&-lay=web-search&-sortfield=state&languages=Japanese&-max=10&-recid=32949&-find=

Other places on the list include:

Alaska, Anchorage
California, Culver City
California, Long Beach
Florida, Broward County
Illinois, InterCultura Montessori School
Michigan, Detroit
Ohio, Cincinnati
Oregon, Portland
Oregon, Eugene
Virginia, Fairfax County

My daughter and I are returning to the US (Austin, TX) after two years here. She attended a Japanese kindergarten in Kyoto and I am anxious for her to keep up her Japanese, since we will be coming back to Japan in 2-3 years. Does anyone have suggestions about how to keep up language ability at this age? The Saturday Japanese school is not an option in our case--there is no school in Austin.

I am pretty sure there is a Japanese community in Austin (I know for a fact that there is one in Houston). Even if the school is not official, I'm guessing that it still exists.

The best thing to do is try to get mixed in with the Japanese community somehow and ask around. If any major Japanese companies have offices in Austin, there is sure to be some sort of network. IF nothing else, at least some Japanese playmates the same age would be helpful.

Tenn. Mourns Loss of Japanese High School
By Bill Poovey, Associated Press Writer
August 23, 2003, 3:21 AM EDT

SWEETWATER, Tenn. -- Japan's first accredited high school in the United States is set to close in 2006 after almost two decades, but already this small East Tennessee town is lamenting the loss of students who have broadened cultural horizons and boosted the economy.

All of the Japanese students live in dorms on the hilly, 144-acre campus. The school also employs 57 people.

Katherine Kyker, the school's athletic director and one of four American instructors, said the school's governing board in Japan, where it is accredited, has voted to close the campus in 2006, probably because of declining enrollment. She said enrollment peaked at 198 students before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks but has dipped to about 100 students.

Kyker said news reports in Japan about terrorist threats and homeland security alerts in America have made parents "afraid to send their children here." She said the school needs to do more student recruiting.

Tennessee Meiji Gakuin opened 14 years ago as the first accredited Japanese school in the United States. A second accredited Japanese high school, Keio High School, is located in a New York City suburb.

The parent school is Meiji Gakuin University in Japan.

Kyker said the school was originally opened mainly for children of Japanese industry executives who moved to the United States, but those families have sent their children to public schools.

The campus includes a Japanese cultural center that attracts community groups and students from other schools, and provides free Japanese language instruction. The school also provides community access to its fitness center, indoor pool and gymnasium.

Annual tuition and fees total $30,000 for each student.

Helen Hagood, the school's general manager, said its property taxes total about $80,000 a year. She said the school's economic impact on the community is "about $3 or $4 million a year."

see full version of story at: http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-japanese-high-school,0,5039844.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines
Tennessee Meiji Gakuin
1314 Peachtree Street
Sweetwater, TN 37874, U.S.A.
Tel: 423-337-3390, Fax: 423-337-4639
Exit 62 on I-75, turn east.

For California:
http://advancedjp.homestead.com/

Scroll down to the part with Japanese for kids. There is a Japanese immersion program in a Culver City public school for example. And Venice Beach has a magnate high school for Asian (and other) languages including Japanese. There is also a list of schools appropriate for native Japanese speakers.

Dear Susan, this is probably not much help at this late date, but for others in Austin, here goes!

Austin does not seem to have a legacy Japanese community so maybe there are no schools in place there, but here are some possibilities for networking:
Japan America Society Austin http://www.main.org/jasa/
Austin Japan Association http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/aja/

University of Texas at Austin International Center
105 W. Dean Keeton (26th St.)
Campus Mail EA7000
Drawer A, Austin, Texas 78713-7206
Phone (512) 471-1211 Fax (512)475-6812
The university might have Japanese faculty on staff which may be struggling to raise their children (hopefully including some younger kids) with a dose of Japanese. Maybe you can find some good contacts here.

They have an International families welcome program (http://www.utexas.edu/international/utfamily/index.html), and here you should be able to find Japanese families.

There are 3 elementary schools doing Japanese immersion from grades 1-6 in Fairfax County, VA:
Great Falls Elementary School, Great Falls
Fox Mill Elementary School, Herndon
Floris Elementary School, Herndon

I guess they are all so close together because they all feed into the continuation program in only one intermediate school. Unfortunately that's a pricey area of Fairfax County, though maybe one could claim that all of Fairfax County is expensive these days.

Unfortunately, the immersion programs still are not necessarily suitable for a child that has been learning Japanese on a native level since early childhood. That child could be pretty bored in these immersion programs. So from that point of view, I've been trying to research the schools created within the Japanese communities for native speakers of Japanese. This presents a different set of problems.

I was wondering if anyone else has been trying to plan a return back to the USA including Japanese continuation for their kid(s)? I would really appreciate sharing of thoughts on this subject.