Enter a British school and Japanese is likely to have been left outside the classroom. According to statistics from the United Kingdom's National Centre for Languages (CILT), last year 978 students took Japanese at GCSE level, the public exams taken at 16 after which students can leave school or continue studying. By contrast, there were 318,963 entrants for the French GCSE in 2004.
The distance between the U.K. and Japan is irrelevant to the 440 students currently studying Japanese at Hendon Secondary School in north London, where the language has been taught since 1996. Students come from at least 16 distinct ethnic backgrounds and around 60 percent speak a non-English language at home. In such fertile cosmopolitan soil, Japanese has flourished.
Hendon's Year 7 pupils (aged 11 and 12) first encounter Japanese during a three-month introductory program. Modules cover basics to generate an awareness about the relationships between language, culture and daily life. These students then decide which languages to study for the next two years. At the end of Year 9 (ages 13-14), pupils decide which languages to study for another two years in preparation for the GCSE. This year, out of 110 Year 9 pupils studying Japanese since Year 7, 60 opted to continue toward GCSE.