Resilience and Rebuilding in the Aftermath of Crisis:
Examining Japanese-East Asian Mixed Marriages, Education, Life Trajectories in the Face of a Pandemic
13th Biennial Conference of the Comparative Education Society of Asia
- Date: November 24 to 26th 2023
- Venue: Hiroshima
- https://www.cesa2023.jp/
WATANABE, Yukinori
Sagami Women’s University
Summary
This paper presentation concerns the way the Covid19 pandemic affected families of Japanese-East Asian cross-border marriages with regard to family decisions concerning the education of their children, given the challenges and dilemmas presented by the circumstances. With reference to qualitative data gathered from a project concerning the educational as well as life trajectories of Japanese-Filipino as well as Japanese-Singaporean families, the presenters of this paper aim to identify as well as examine the social, cultural, as well as ideological factors which affected (and continue to affect) the way decisions are made within these families concerning the way the children are schooled. While the project itself was a study of the sociocultural and identity-related aspects of Japanese-East Asian cross-border marriages, the course and duration of the project extended over the period when particularly difficult family decisions had to be made, not just imbricating issues pertaining to education, but those relating to cross-border movement - including the possibility of long-term migration or resettlement in a new or unfamiliar environment. In this presentation, issues concerning different conceptualizations of cultural, geographical, political, or otherwise discursive spaces are highlighted to illustrate the kinds of dilemmas mixed families face when it comes to weighing the advantages and disadvantages of educating their children in the different state systems from where their parents originate or identify with. Specific attention will be accorded to families which had to negotiate the challenges of relocating themselves across borders over the three-year course of the pandemic vis-a-vis matters relating to the children’s schooling and identity-related negotiations, as well as the ways in which the educational beliefs of the parents are constructed and contested. In the course of such deliberations, it will be seen that the children’s language affiliation(s) are invariably emotive matters that received serious consideration.
Keywords: pandemic, social crisis, migration, educational trajectories, language affiliation, cultural negotiation
