(Paper) Intermarriage family and bilingual education in the context of Asian countries: case studies of Japanese language clubs for children by the Japanese parents in South Korea and Thailand

Based on the fieldwork in South Korea and Thailand, this paper compares two case studies of Japanese language clubs for children organized by their Japanese parents. In the intermarriage family, the parents encounter to choose the language use with their child/ren in the family and select their school according to parents’ language choice. In this paper, two case studies of alternative language child-rearing are described: the Japanese parents organized a Japanese language club on Saturday and involved themselves to nurture the Japanese language in South Korea and Thailand, where they lived with their spouses and child/ren. One of the outcomes from this paper is the social influence of the recognition of the Japanese language. In Bangkok, the Japanese language is valued as an asset for the child to find a better job; thus, parents recognized this value and had positive attitudes toward educating Japanese as a second language, whereas in the suburb of Seoul, English had evaluated more than the Japanese language. This paper is a part of the author’s research supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP16K04630, which aimed to extend our understanding of intermarriage families in Asia to reveal the new realities of language life in Asian countries.