Early this month we learned to our painful dismay that the owners of the TV station KIKU plan to close down the Japanese and Filipino programming. At the end of June, we are told, KIKU will be replaced by more advertising programs, 24/7.
But more replacement of invaluable cultural assets, just to increase the wealth of commercial interests, is not something Hawaii needs.
KIKU’s programs serve not only the Japanese- and Filipino-speaking populations here — the former well-established in Hawaii for more than a century, the latter our fastest-growing demographic — but our whole state. They serve anyone who wants to understand our modernizing and fascinating world. Given the excellent subtitling, you need not be a member of those communities to be fascinated by (or addicted to?) their news, dramas and documentaries.
Although KIKU has been on the air for four decades, I came to it late, during the shutdown imposed by the pandemic. I have been astonished by how culturally revealing and emotionally engaging the sitcoms and dramas are, how informative “Soko Ga Japan” and the news shows are. I’ve been rearranging my work and exercise schedules around my favorite four or five shows. Even if you’re a news junkie, as I’ve become lately, supplementing our American stations and BBC is eye-opening.
I learned Japanese many years ago, in an intensive 12-month program called FALCon (Full-year Asian Language CONcentration), and I have tried to keep up ever since. As a former linguist, I’m stunned, watching KIKU, to realize just how complex language- learning is — much more complex than I thought when I studied it. It’s far from just a matter of grammar and vocabulary, learn it and practice. It’s how and when to use those standard greetings and apologies.
The everyday expressions that turn out to be so easy in Japanese, but that a native-speaker of English expects specialized terms for? They’re learned by practicing hearing and listening, attending to rhythms and intonations, why people slow down when they do. It’s understanding the meaning quickly enough to keep up with the conversation. Repeating sentences I’ve just heard, to myself, to get my tongue to move as fast as they do — or, at least, fast enough.
Classroom language/vocabulary is limited — my friends are tolerant, but it’s embarrassing to have to ask them about too many words. Detective, historical and medical dramas teach me their specialized vocabularies; “Soko Ga Japan” is great on the terminology of geography, arts, crafts, industries and food. The kanji/kana transcriptions for the news as it’s spoken help me read faster and recall pronunciations of characters I haven’t used in a while.
And living languages change. We learn new ways of expressing ourselves, and the new social situations requiring new expression: bullying, stepparenting, women in positions of authority, new kinds of entrepreneurship, divorce and kids being separated from beloved parents by divorce, the challenges of keeping up with new technologies. I’m catching up on slang and dialects (currently Hokkaido, from the superb drama, “Kita no Kuni Kara”). All students should be watching them!
Children of Filipino immigrants — I speak here as a former middle-school teacher of many — struggle, linguistically and emotionally, to maintain interest in Tagalog and Ilocano if they hear it only at home.
KIKU’s shows are invaluable to everyone who wants — or needs — to learn or support those languages, and their cultures as well. We in Hawaii must find a way to prevent this new commercial invasion from devastating our culturally and linguistically diverse community.
Mara Miller taught humanities and Japanese history at Hawaii Tokai International College, and language arts and social studies at St. Anthony’s School in Kalihi; she currently is a visiting scholar at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.
