Paper short abstract:

For deaf children, attending deaf school which uses Japanese Sign Language (JSL) is crucial for their social and cognitive development. This paper reports a legal case that is still ongoing in which a Deaf student sued the government and the reactions from the Deaf community in Japan about the case.

Paper long abstract:

Contrary to popular views, Japan is not a monolingual country and in fact, UNESCO lists eight indigenous languages within the boundary of Japan, including the Ainu and the languages of the Ryukyu Islands. Another linguistic minority in Japan is the Deaf community, the users of Japanese Sign Language (henceforth JSL), which is linguistically a distinct language from Japanese. It is not widely known that JSL is different from Signed Japanese, but the latter is a manual (and often insufficient) representation of the Japanese and does not possess the linguistic features of JSL, such as classifiers and referential shifts.

For deaf and hard-of-hearing (henceforth DHH) children, having access to JSL from birth is vital for their language acquisition, but unfortunately it is not the case for many of them, the results of which can lead to a phenomenon known as Language Deprivation. Many DHH children face the risk of language deprivation because their first language is different from that of their parents, which is a challenge rarely found in bilingual children in two spoken languages.

Furthermore, for a child to develop both socially and academically, school plays an important role and that also applies to DHH children, and thus one could claim that Deaf schools provide “linguistic home” environments for Deaf children. Unfortunately, however, only two deaf schools in Japan offer instruction through JSL as of March 2022. At one such school, Sapporo Schools for Deaf, one Deaf student sued the government and the board of education for not replacing the retiring teachers with high commands of JSL, which resulted in assigning non-signing teachers for his class, and therefore deprived of his rights to education. The deaf community in Japan reacted to this movement in various ways: there is an enthusiastic supports from signing Deaf people, while the Japanese Federation of the Deaf reacting in favour of the government. This paper analyses this seemingly ambiguous reactions of the Deaf community on this problem and how the policy makers and the government take advantages of such disagreements in silencing the minority voices altogether.