Languages and Citizenship in Education: Migrant Languages in Government Schools

Abstract

For the past few decades, immigration has been one of the most controversial political issues in Japan. The official position of the Japanese government so far has been restrictive towards immigration, but the government has also managed to create indirect mechanisms that allow certain categories of foreign workers to enter Japan through the back door ( Kajita 1998 ). One of the most significant of these backdoor mechanisms is a special visa category (called teijūsha) created in 1990, which enables foreigners of Japanese descent to live and work legally in Japan regardless of occupation. While often justified as providing an opportunity for Japanese co-ethnics around the world to visit the land of their ancestors and keep up their ties with Japan, this visa has in fact provided labor-deficient manufacturers in Japan with the means to recruit hundreds of thousands of Japanese-descended unskilled foreign workers, most of them from Brazil. 1 These Japanese Brazilians have received a substantial amount of public attention, and their situation in Japan has had a considerable influence on the debates concerning the effects that a more permissive immigration policy might have on Japanese society. The problems related to Japanese Brazilians extrapolate from labor issues to much broader questions concerning cultural difference and their inclusion in Japanese social and political life. In this chapter, I refer to the social position associated with these more encompassing issues as cultural citizenship , a concept I will explain in greater detail later.

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