“Gross.” “I’m Seriously Done.” Why Japanese Children Are Losing the Words to Express Themselves
The less developed a child’s <language skills>, which are built on vocabulary, the more likely they are to struggle with a wide range of problems, including bullying, school refusal, and violence on school grounds.
If they cannot put their feelings into words, their emotions may build up until they explode under stress, or they may tend to give up on things, thinking, “Nobody understands me” or “There’s nothing I can do.” As a result, they become unable to resolve the problems right in front of them and move forward.
Children today tend to express almost everything using extreme words such as “yabai” (“crazy,” “awful,” or “insane”), “uzai” (“annoying”), “kimoi” (“gross”), and “egui” (“extreme” or “brutal”). But when trouble occurs, repeatedly saying “Yabai, yabai” (“This is bad, this is bad”) doesn’t change anything. They cannot think of solutions, communicate their feelings to others, or reach a mutual understanding with other people.
My book, “Children Who Cannot “Communicate Through Words” (Nihon Jitsugyo Publishing), released this July, was already reprinted in a large additional run before its official release and has continued to go through additional printings since then.
Repeatedly saying “Yabai”
A veteran elementary school teacher featured in the book says:
“The deterioration of children’s language is directly linked to disorder in their daily lives. Children being unable to understand one another, being unable to express their own feelings, being unable to consider other people’s feelings, and being unable to cooperate with everyone else—all of these things stem from the deterioration of language.
“However, these days, it’s not just parents. Nursery-school teachers, instructors at extracurricular activities, and even celebrities and YouTubers repeatedly use ‘yabai’ and lack vocabulary as well. When that happens, no matter how much we teach children more precise words at school and tell them, ‘Let’s think properly using words’ and ‘Let’s communicate properly through words,’ it simply doesn’t resonate with them at all.”
When you think about it, problems occurring in the adult world—such as difficulties communicating with others, hate, conspiracy theories, and online abuse—stem from people who cannot use language accurately thinking about and expressing things in crude, imprecise terms.
Perhaps the reason this book has become a hit is that the inability to communicate through words is a problem affecting Japanese society as a whole, including adults.
Why do children try to express things using only such extreme words?
The book analyzes the factors behind this in detail, but one of the problems during early childhood is the declining number of opportunities for adults and children to engage in conversations with each other.
Children acquire new vocabulary in their everyday lives by having parents and other adults put their feelings into words for them and describe what is happening around them. They also learn words that are not commonly used in everyday conversation through activities such as having picture books read to them.
However, statistics clearly show that the amount of time parents and children spend talking to each other has steadily declined. The following is a comment from a nursery-school teacher featured in the book.
“Smartphones are probably the reason parent-child conversations have decreased. These days, it’s not unusual for a three-year-old to have four or five hours of screen time a day. Parents spend even more time on them. As a result, they’re glued to their smartphones not only while taking their children to and from nursery school, but also during meals and throughout the rest of the day.
“Also, even if children are taught words at nursery school, those words don’t become their own unless they use them during private time with their family and friends. They don’t become part of who they are. Today’s children may have more opportunities to be taught words as part of their education, but because they don’t use them while playing, they can’t truly make those words their own and use them effectively. That’s why it’s no longer unusual to see two-year-olds who can only say things like ‘yabai’ and ‘uzai.’”
The book explains in detail how to help children develop their language skills while still allowing them to use smartphones and play games. But if parents don’t know how to do this, smartphones and games can end up taking away children’s ability to use language. Even as these children move on to elementary and junior high school, their environment does not change very much.
Even when children study hard and learn a large number of words, shared experiences such as playing sports with other children and participating in events are declining year by year. As a result, classrooms tend to be filled with nothing but crude, simplistic language.
“It’s seriously over” during a cooking class
There is an interesting episode introduced in the book. It goes like this:
During a home economics cooking class, the students were making tomato sauce, and one boy ended up cooking the tomato stems—the green parts—along with the tomatoes. The other children immediately shouted things like, “Gross,” “This guy is crazy,” and “It’s seriously over.” As a result, the boy was hurt and became unable to go to school.
Think about it.
There is nothing disgusting, crazy, or over about cooking a tomato stem, is there? When something unexpected happens, these children are simply reacting reflexively by blurting out such harsh words.
But what about the person on the receiving end? If someone tells you that you’re disgusting, crazy, and finished simply because you cooked a tomato stem, it is only natural that you would feel dejected and become afraid of being around your friends.
Here is what an elementary school teacher featured in the book says:
“The crudeness of language is also noticeable online. On social media, conversations consist almost entirely of individual words, and harsh language is constantly being thrown around. Many children become completely exhausted by it.
“Children these days often use the word pressure. They say things like, ‘The pressure in the classroom is intense’ or ‘The pressure in the group LINE chat is crazy.’ Because harsh language is constantly flying around them in everyday life, students have to remain constantly on guard and tense in order to protect themselves emotionally. It’s exhausting them.”
Neither parents nor teachers are very good at noticing this reality. That is because they themselves use the same kind of crude language, so they fail to consider how deeply it can hurt children.
Unfortunately, it is also said that these circumstances are linked, to no small degree, to economic disparities among families.
Adults with higher incomes tend to have the ability to use language to work their way through problems, and they are more likely to help their children acquire a rich vocabulary. They also give their children a wide range of experiences, allowing them to turn the words they have learned into something they can genuinely use. As a result, children from higher-income households tend to have greater opportunities to develop strong language skills.
However, “Children Who Cannot Communicate Through Words” contains numerous tips for overcoming this gap with just a few creative approaches. What we need to learn is the methodology for developing <language skills>.
In the second part, I will introduce specific techniques for helping children build their vocabulary.
Reporting and Text： Kota Ishii (Nonfiction Writer) PHOTO： Afro