Children’s Creativity and Multicultural Family: Analysis of Narratives of Cross-married Japanese Fathers in Japan, China, and South Korea
This is the result of pilot interviews from a three-year project (2013-2016) that aims to explore challenges and characteristics of child rearing strategy of international couples in Japan, China, and South Korea through intensive interview. As the number of intermarriage couples between these three countries increases, so do embattled multicultural families in East Asian region. On the other hand, since 1970s, the accumulation of research into the bilingual and bicultural children has revealed their high potential of creativity in western context (Bain 1975, Kessler & Quinn, 1987，Leikin 2012). However, there has not been sufficient investigation into the related issues within the East Asian context. This presentation is a first step to fill this gap in the field by analyzing interviews of cross-married Japanese fathers whose wives are either Chinese or Korean. Although the entire project focuses on six types of intermarriage couples (Japanese-Korean and Japanese-Chinese couples in Japan, Korean-Japanese and Korean-Chinese couples in South Korea, and Chinese-Japanese and Chinese-Korean couples in China), this presentation deals with only narratives of 6 Japanese fathers in Japan, China, and Korea to identify general issues and to gain perspectives that could penetrate the entire research project. This research is unique in respect of covering these multi-combination and multi-sited fathers within a single study. The main questions asked include, but not limited to, how they teach language(s), what influences their choice of school, how they handle challenges between the countries, and their view on creativity development of their children.
