Realities, Rewards, and Risks of Heritage-Language Education: Perspectives from Japanese Immigrant Parents in a Midwestern Community

Abstract

This ethnographic case study describes how three Japanese immigrant parents in a midsize urban community in the Midwest viewed heritage-language education in relation to their children's socioemotional development as bicultural Americans. The literature review offers a comparative and historical analysis of Japanese schools in the diaspora to reveal trends in terms of how Japanese culture, identity, and language have been articulated and represented in these dynamic community-run spaces across multiple generations and sociopolitical contexts. Methods included analysis of site documents, interviews with the parents, and on-site participant observations. The findings reveal how the participants have strategically used the ethnic community's structure to encourage their children to maintain strong attachments to their ethnic identities through language and literacy education. The findings also highlight the challenges of rearing bicultural and bilingual children in ethnocentric spaces, particularly given the increasing demands placed on second-generation Japanese American children as they enter adolescence where they are expected to excel at their regular schools to prepare for their postsecondary years. The final section offers new directions for future studies.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.