The Educational Issues of Multicultural Families in Japan: Analyzing the Narratives of Japanese Husbands of Chinese or Korean wives In Kawamura C. (2014) Educational Challenges in a Multicultural Society: Diversity and the Right to Learn: Akashi Shoten: Tokyo
This chapter investigates the educational strategies of Japanese men who married Chinese or Korean women through five in-depth interviews. Major questions asked include language education and school choice. In addition to reflecting the social climate following political tension in 2012, how they present or intend to present the complicated relationship between the father’s and mother’s country. The interviews were analyzed focusing on the fathers who lived in Japan. The analysis revealed they would like to bring up their children as bilingual, while most were brought up monolingually Japanese. Reasons given were a lack of linguistic ability in the mother’s language, as well as the influence of Japanese being the language of the local society, including schooling. School choices were referred to not as the focal point of identity negotiation but as the representation of conflicting discourse of public schooling versus private schooling in Japanese society. Fathers were skeptical about the competitive nature of education in China or Korea and were satisfied with sending their children to local public schools. They are also anxious about their children being bullied at school, but no actual case was mentioned.
