The book, “Language Communities in Japan”(edited by John C. Maher, published in 2022 by Oxford University Press) introduces the existence of diverse language communities in Japan. There are 23 chapters categorized into three sections: Section 1 National Languages, Section 2 Community Languages, and Section 3 Languages of Culture, Politics, and Modernization.

When you look at the index at the end, there is a keyword: international marriage. In this book, in sections 2 and 3, some authors mentioned international marriage/intermarriage in the language community when relevant to their chapter. In the chapters of the community languages, Chinese, Urdu/Pakistan, Nepali, Filipino, and Russian.

Although this book focuses more on language diversity and language speakers’ demography within Japan, there are some common issues with our project to understand how the language communities recognize intermarriage and their children.

The children of intermarriage couples are included in the Nepali speakers and community together with Nepali nationals and Japanese who previously lived in Nepal and studied (Shrestha, Chapter 12, p.134), some Pakistani-Japanese households attend Japanese or international school and go on to high education in Japan, but some “seek university study abroad, which complements their education in Japan in terms of language and the social world they live in”, to countries like Malaysia, Thailand, and Pakistan, where provide “affordable English-medium education with an acceptance of Islamic values” (Yamashita, Chapter 11, p.128). Although “the Russian speech community comprises a population of bilingual children, raised in the international household”, where a substantial number of Russian female citizens have children with dual citizenship. But there are problems with Russian language maintenance and loss (Podalko, Chapter 21, p.216).

In our Kaken project, perhaps we can explore more on these issues in depth through interviews with intermarriage couples living abroad and their data.