Noriko Calderon begins second year of junior high

@hoihoi: The language is called Tagalog, and don’t assume to know the domestic situations of private families – I know of a few cases, including my own, where you’re just flat out wrong.

“I know some cases where Koreans and Chinese only speak Japanse,”
I know/knew people like that too – but in every case they were either born and raised in Japan and were effectively unable to communicate fluently in Korean or Chinese, or were married to a Japanese who did not speak their language and made a decision to stick to Japanese in the home – but in the latter case stick them with another native Korean or Chinese and they would often switch to their mutual mother tongue even if both spoke Japanese.

The Calderons fit neither of these categories. They (the parents) are both native Filipinos, who came to Japan as adults and learned the language after arriving. Based on the times I saw them on TV, they did learn to speak Japanese well. However I still have a very, very hard time believing that they did not regularly talk to each other in Tagalog or their native dialect (Visayan, Ilocano, whatever) in the home.

Especially in a fight. I know in my home I always lose fights to my wife because I am forced to fight in Japanese.

Or, as an older relative of an Italian-American friend put it “We have to argue in Italian – it doesn’t feel like an argument if we don’t”.