Lost in Translation

UCLA’s reputation in Japan began to outgrow the Westwood
campus decades ago. The acronym can now be found emblazoned across
sweatshirts, résumés and political propaganda in a place
where only a fraction of those sporting the name have any
affiliation with the school. But brand loyalty aside, UCLA is still
recognized as a prestigious university, as one Japanese newspaper
regularly refers to it, and it remains an extremely popular
destination for Japanese students with the grades to attend ““
and the acuity to know to which university they are actually
applying. In translation, UCLA shares all but three Japanese
characters with California State University, Los Angeles.
Downtown’s University of Southern California is also only a
few characters off. Compounding that with a general unfamiliarity
with California’s three-tiered higher education system,
confusion about which university is the authentic UCLA occurs more
often than many realize.

UCLA versus USC versus … CSULA?
“I’d say the confusion happens a fair amount about
international inquirers ““ it’s a reasonable mistake to
make,” says Harold Martin, Cal State Los Angeles’
international students counselor. “The distinction
isn’t clear in a lot of international students’
minds.” One of Martin’s students didn’t realize
the difference until his last quarter, though most figure it out
before they arrive on campus. That’s in part because when
many international students are applying to college abroad, they
realize UCLA does not offer some degrees that they want to pursue,
like finance, Martin said. Even English-speaking UCLA parents get
confused. “Sometimes parents will wander on campus trying to
find their children and we’ll point out that they’re in
the wrong end of Los Angeles,” Martin said. But students from
Japan face a unique complication: deciphering the correct English
name from nearly identical strings of characters. “The
biggest problem is that when you translate UCLA, the difference in
the name is very small between UCLA and CSULA,” said Haruhisa
Yamamoto, a first-year electrical engineering graduate student who
immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1992. In looking for
jobs in Japan, he says, the translation difficulty is acute.
“I have to somehow translate the word UCLA in Japan, and I
don’t want to translate it the wrong way to end up at CSULA.
I want to make sure they know.” Yet even employers are often
ignorant of the difference. At a job fair she attended for Japanese
firms, Mako Fukumoto said she saw someone claim he had attended UC
San Bernardino. “Some people want to take advantage because
Japanese people don’t know,” said Fukumoto, a
fourth-year world arts and cultures student who came to study at
UCLA straight from Japan. “They think: “˜Oh, a
university in America, it must be good’ ““ but they
don’t know the difference between UC and CSU,” said
Yamamoto. Often, people will claim they went to UCLA when they
actually attended its extension campus, which does not screen its
students against UCLA admissions standards. A counselor at USC said
she had never heard of any confusion from students abroad, though
students say the distinction between UCLA and USC is easier to
understand. A counselor at UCLA said he had never heard of it
either.

“It sounds … like UCLA” The City
University of Los Angeles is a lesser-known cousin of the Los
Angeles-based schools that share similar names. CULA is a private,
distance-learning school that is accredited by an agency based in
South Carolina, according to its Web site, and now operates as a
nonprofit corporation. On its Web site, CULA dedicates a paragraph
to distinguishing the two schools, identifying UCLA as “the
famous public university with the football and basketball
teams.” When asked if there is confusion between CULA and
UCLA, Admissions Director Andy Lee said “no.”
“But when I was at UCLA there was confusion between UCLA and
the University of Southern California,” he said. “If
you want some confusion, there’s the confusion for
you.” If anything, students aren’t confused because
they have never heard of the school. But at least one private Web
site in Singapore warns its readers against confusing the two, and
Martin suggests it could be a problem. “It sounds, to an
unsuspecting ESL student, like UCLA,” Martin said. CULA
targets international students and has addresses in six foreign
countries. Lee says his school has been partnered with a university
in Tokyo for seven to eight years, but that he didn’t know
what the university was. The accreditation agency ““ the
Association of Accredited Private Schools ““ could not be
located.

“It’s used almost as a
fashion” UCLA fever hit Japan in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, though the university was well known for its academic
reputation much earlier. The Rose Bowl was first broadcast in Japan
in the late 1970s, and by the early 1980s, the Associated Students
of UCLA had signed an agreement to market UCLA apparel in that
country ““ its first international contract. Japan Airlines
billed UCLA as a major stop on its travel tours to Southern
California around the same time, according to John Sandbrook, then
an assistant chancellor to Charles Young. “We were always
told that UCLA was the second most popular destination spot of
Japanese tourists during the 1980s, second to Disneyland,”
Sandbrook recalls. As an academic institution comparable to Harvard
and Yale on the West Coast, UCLA morphed into a status symbol.
ASUCLA now collects 25 percent of its international sales from
Japan, and Ackerman Union remains a popular destination for
Japanese bus tours. Jun Takahashi studied at UCLA under a Fulbright
Scholarship in the 1960s, and now works in the film industry in
Tokyo. During an interview in Westwood while on a trip from Japan,
Takahashi pointed to a student wearing a UCLA sweatshirt. In
California, wearing “UCLA” means the student has some
affiliation with the school. In Japan, he says, it’s
different. Sometimes, when he sees someone wearing the logo, he
says he asks, “Hey, what year?” “No, I
didn’t go, this is just a shirt,” he will hear in
response. “It’s used almost as a fashion. Using it as a
fashion is kind of innocent, but to use it in a political campaign
is a crime.”

Writing UCLA on a fake résumé The
reference to politics is deliberate. Since January 2004, Japan has
seen one member of its House of Representatives expelled for
allegedly manufacturing his academic credentials, and dozens of
others are now “reconsidering” their résumés.
Studying abroad is used as a catch phrase when campaigning for
public office, Takahashi says, and UCLA in particular is used as a
status symbol. “This must be part of the Japanese psychology
or mentality ““ they want to show off they’re better by
saying they have a Gucci bag, or studied abroad,” he said.
Democratic Party of Japan campaign pamphlets circulated before last
November’s election stated Junichiro Koga had studied at UCLA
and earned a bachelor’s degree from Pepperdine University.
Amid heavy speculation that his claims were false, Koga flew to
California on Jan. 21 to clear up the confusion. He arrived at UCLA
only to have the university tell him it had no records of his
attendance with the registrar or UCLA Extension. A day later, after
Koga met with Pepperdine administrators in Malibu, the school
announced he had attended but not graduated. By the end of the
week, the Democratic Party of Japan said Koga had called to say the
reference to studying at UCLA was a typing error and instead meant
Cal State L.A., according to the Japan Times. That university later
said he never attended. The episode became a joke to many Japanese:
A mother of one Japanese exchange student e-mailed her son to ask
if he was really studying at UCLA after all. But the media’s
scrutiny has forced other politicians to reevaluate the truth in
their claims about studying abroad. A similar scandal erupted in
1996 when a woman running for a seat in the Diet, the Japanese
legislature, claimed she had studied at Columbia University even
though she hadn’t. “I’d bet a lot of people are
rewriting their résumés now,” said Tom Plate, a
UCLA communication studies professor and syndicated columnist who
writes weekly on East Asia. Takahashi said it’s relatively
easy to get away with. “In Japan, if you go to Waseda (a top
Japanese university), it’s very easy to track down. But
outside, very few people can protest,” said Jun. They have no
idea if it’s a bad school, he says, and it doesn’t
matter. “It’s UCLA.”