Negotiating Bilingual and Bicultural Identities: Japanese Returnees Betwixt Two Worlds

Yasuko Kanno

Negotiating Bilingual and Bicultural Identities Japanese Returnees Betwixt Two Worlds

NEGOTIATING BILINGUAL AND BICULTURAL IDENTITIES Japanese Returnees Betwixt Two Worlds

NEGOTIATING BILINGUAL AND BICULTURAL IDENTITIES Japanese Returnees Betwixt Two Worlds

Yasuko Kanno University of Washington

2003

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS Mahwah, New Jersey London

Contents

Preface

vii

Overview ix Acknowledgments xi

1

From My Story to the Stories of Other Bilinguals

1

“Alan Hall” 1 Exploring Identity 3 Framing Identity 8 Narrative Inquiry 8 Communities of Practice 11 In Search of Identity Narratives: The Process 14 A Brief Background on Kikokushijo 17 Approaching Four Students 19 Collaboration 21 Analysis 22

2

Sawako’s Story

27

3

Kenji’s Story

47

4

Kikuko’s Story

65

5

Rui’s Story

82 v

vi

6

CONTENTS

The Development of Bilingual and Bicultural Identities

107

Sojourn 107 “Canadians look down on us”: The English Barrier 107 “I survived thanks to Saturdays”: Hoshuko and Japanese Identity 111 “I need to ensure that I have an option of leading a secure life”: Parental Influence 113 Reentry 115 “She finds joy in not looking like a kikokushijo”: Readjustment Strategies 115 “There’s something lacking in me” and “You feel recognized”: Loss and Gain 117 Reconciliation 119 “I eat hamburgers but I like Japanese food too”: Coming to Terms With Hybrid Identities 119

7

Theoretical Implications

123

Sociocultural Context for Change 123 Immigrant and Sojourner Identities 125 Coherence, Multiplicity, and Narrative Links: The Question of Identity 130

8

Conclusions

134

Educational Implications 136 Are ESL Students’ Needs for Social Participation Adequately Addressed? 136 Under What Conditions Is Language Minority Students’ L1 Maintenance Successful? 138 How Can We Ensure the Educational Reintegration of Returnee Students? 139 Do We Have Enough Faith in Who Our Students Are Capable of Becoming? 141 To What Extent Are We Listening to Our Students’ Voices? 142 Postscript 144

References

147

Appendix: Cited Quotes in Original Japanese

155

Author Index

181

Subject Index

185

Preface

This book examines the development of bilingual and bicultural identities. Specifically, I am interested in how young bilingual learners’ sense of who they are and their relationship to their two languages and two (or more) cultures change as they move from adolescence to young adulthood. Using narrative inquiry and communities of practice as my theoretical framework, I reconstruct and analyze the identity narratives of four teenage Japanese students who spent several years in North America and then returned to Japan. Called kikokushijo (returnees), these students are the sons and daughters of Japanese businessmen who were transferred abroad. Spending their adolescent years in North America (mainly Canada) and returning to Japan as they moved into young adulthood, the students gradually became more sophisticated in negotiating their bilingual and bicultural identities with their surroundings. As adolescents, they initially tended to lean toward one language and culture over the other, as if believing that if one is Canadian, one cannot be Japanese, and vice versa. But through a period of difficult readjustment back home, as young adults the students gradually awakened to the possibility that one can be bilingual and bicultural. They came to appreciate their hybrid identities, learning to belong to Japanese culture without having to sacrifice their differences. This study documents that process of growth. Three characteristics of this book distinguish it from other studies of bilingual and bicultural identities. First of all, this is a longitudinal study. Few studies have followed the same bilingual students over a long period of time because of the time and energy it requires to maintain contact with a highly mobile population (Rogers & Ward, 1993). Most studies report only vii

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the group characteristics of a particular bilingual sample taken at a certain point in time. But a collection of snapshots of different bilingual subjects does not tell us much about the cumulative effects of cross-cultural experience on the same individual. As I discuss in chapter 1, a few researchers are beginning to introduce a longitudinal perspective into the research on ESL learners’ identities. But even in such cases, they tend to focus on the beginning stage of learning English. In this study, by contrast, my focus is more on how learners mature as bilingual and bicultural individuals and on where they decide to position themselves between two languages and cultures. Second, this study documents student perspectives. Lack of student voice is noticeable in educational research in general. Students being the least powerful stakeholders in the educational hierarchy, it is easy to ignore their perspectives. Erickson and Shultz (1991) pointed out, “The commonsense view of educational practice, of what is most important to pay attention to in and about schools, has left little room indeed for the points of view of the very persons who are the first-level consumers of educational services” (p. 481). Bilingual students are doubly liable to be silenced because of the marginalized positions they often occupy in the mainstream educational scene. But when we listen to student voices, it becomes apparent that they see their educational experiences quite differently from what we adults imagine them to be. Moreover, they are capable of articulating their own perspectives in a way that can enrich educational discourse. We adults have much to learn from them. Third, the bilingual students in this study eventually went back to their country of origin. Studies of bilingual individuals’ identities focus overwhelmingly on immigrants, who move to a new country and stay there for good. It is, of course, important to document their experiences; after all, a large proportion of people around the world who deal with multiple languages and cultures on a daily basis are immigrants and their descendants. At the same time, immigrant experience is not the only bilingual and bicultural experience there is. In an increasingly global world, it is no longer uncommon for people to live in several different countries or move between two countries repeatedly during their lifetime. This study provides a unique opportunity to examine the impact of sociocultural environment on bilingual youths’ identities: Halfway through their cross-cultural experience, the students in this study move from their host country, Canada, back to their native country, Japan. While they are in North America, these students are language/ethnic minority students. When they return to Japan, however, their position is reversed. They again become members of the dominant group, with the highly valued ability to speak English. It is of deep theoretical, as well as educational, interest to find out how such a dramatic change in social status, not once but twice, affects bilingual students’ identities and relationship with their two languages and cultures.

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OVERVIEW The book is divided roughly into three parts. Chapter 1 develops the framework for this study. I start with my own story of learning English and my own personal motivation for this study: I found that my gradual identity transition from a timid ESL (English as Second Language) student into a competent bilingual and bicultural adult was not well reflected in the literature. After a review of recent studies on bilingual and bicultural identities in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and bilingualism, I then go on to explain the narrative-inquiry and communities-of-practice perspectives, which are at the heart of how this study conceptualizes and understands human identity. The rest of the chapter describes the process of this inquiry: how I met my participants, how I worked with them, and the process I undertook to reconstruct and analyze their narratives. Chapters 2 through 5 are the stories of the four students. Chapter 2 tells Sawako’s story. Between ages 7 and 17, she moved several times between North America and Japan. The daughter of a very successful businessman, Sawako imposed on herself a fixed notion of “success”: She had to enter a prestigious university, land on a job at a large, respectable company, and marry a man whose future held as much promise as did her father’s career. She was drawn to society’s dominant group, attracted by its power and selfassurance. But her own background with multiple uprootings and startovers made her identification with society’s dominant monolinguals and monoculturals difficult. In high school she felt excluded by Canadians and attributed her isolation to her less than native-like English. However, when she returned to Japan and entered university, she discovered that she had become estranged from Japanese language and culture. Getting into a prestigious university as planned and still finding herself unhappy, Sawako started to wonder whether it was wise to apply her father’s definition of success to herself. Chapter 3 is Kenji’s story. Kenji left Japan at age 12. He went straight to Toronto and lived there until the end of high school. Sociable, kind, and a gifted athlete, Kenji was popular and well accepted among his Canadian peers. He found that Canadian education, with its emphasis on positive reinforcement and individual strengths, suited him and gave him the selfconfidence he had lacked. The degree to which he achieved integration into Canada in spite of his relatively late arrival is remarkable. What fascinates me about Kenji’s story, however, is his determination to reestablish his relationship with Japan and the self-discipline he manifested in the process— despite his carefree demeanor. Kenji was intensely proud of his Japanese identity, and reasoned that in order to make a career in Japan and to, as he put it, “go out into the world with the backup of Japan,” he first needed to get back into the most basic mode of life in Japan: teamwork. He joined a

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varsity golf club, subjecting himself to its regimental training and hierarchical relationships. His mind told him it was a good practice; his heart asked him what on earth he was doing. Kikuko, whose story I tell in chapter 4, moved to North America at age 13. She spent the first 4 years in Atlanta, and then another 2 years in Toronto. She did not want to leave Japan, and her initial experience with Americans did not make her impression of the United States particularly positive. Instead of striving for acceptance by English speakers, she poured her energy into “chasing after Japan.” Japanese peers, Japanese books and music, and videos of Japanese TV programs became her world. When she finally returned to Japan, she set out to assimilate back into Japanese culture, appealing to her new peers how she was “just like them.” Her impeccable Japanese and her up-to-date knowledge of Japanese popular culture enabled her to create a convincing identity as a “returnee who was not at all like the standard returnee.” She did not stand out among monolingual and monocultural peers. However, after she had enjoyed a taste of Japanese life and proved to herself and others her ability to blend in, Kikuko became increasingly aware that her 6 years of life in North America had, after all, left a strong imprint on her values and way of thinking. Part of her posed a question: Yes, she was able to blend in seamlessly, but was it so important? Finally, chapter 5 is Rui’s story. He left Japan for the first time at age 3, and until he entered university at age 18, he spent more time abroad than in Japan. Rui was extremely fortunate, learning English in a supportive school environment and having parents who made sure that he continued to develop his Japanese at home, which resulted in high-level bilingual proficiency. But because of his early departure from Japan, he was deeply insecure about his Japanese identity. Being Japanese was not something he could take for granted; rather, it was something he had to prove both to himself and to other Japanese around him. He was extremely protective of his Japanese and made an extra effort to socialize with Japanese peers. When he returned to Japan, however, he felt like a total stranger and discovered that he liked neither blending in nor being expected to blend in. He realized that it was not so much his being Japanese that was critical to his sense of identity but being different. All of a sudden what he had left behind in Canada began to look devastatingly wonderful. What do you do when what you have been longing for practically all your life turns out to be nothing but a sand castle? Chapters 6 through 8 provide an analysis of the four narratives. These narratives, documenting, as they do, the cross-cultural experiences of Japanese returnees, share certain common elements. The chapters identify these common themes and relate them to broader issues of bilingual and bicultural identities. In chapter 6 I divide the narratives into three phases—

PREFACE

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sojourn to North America, reentry into Japan, and eventual reconciliation— and discuss salient themes in each phase. Through an analysis of how my participants dealt with these issues in each phase, I argue that as they grew older, they became better at striking a balance between two languages and cultures, and that this change was accompanied by their increasingly sophisticated skill at participating in multiple communities. In chapter 7 I discuss the theoretical implications of the findings of this study. I make three main claims. First, I suggest that while bilingual youths can learn to appreciate their hybrid identities, it may not be possible without society’s recognition of their knowledge. Second, there are some concrete differences between immigrants’ identities and those of temporary sojourners, which suggests that we cannot make an automatic generalization from immigrants’ experiences to those of all bilingual learners. Third, I suggest that, while I endorse the notion of multiple identities, the key to understanding how these seemingly disparate identities affect one’s SLA lies in analyzing the narrative links between them. Finally, in chapter 8, I summarize the main findings of this study and suggest some educational implications.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the four students, Sawako, Kikuko, Kenji, and Rui, who participated in this study. If I were to do this study all over again, there are many things that I would do differently, but I would not trade them for anything. It was a privilege to work with them and to see them blossom into wonderful young adults. While I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation, on which this book is based, I was fortunate enough to have Jim Cummins as my supervisor. Every time I talked to him, the world seemed like a kinder place, my own work sounded more interesting and promising, and I was ready to pick up my pen again. It is thanks to his persistent questioning—“What’s happened to your book project?”—every time we met after I completed my dissertation that I managed to complete this book. Thanks also go to Patrick Allen, who related to the students’ narrative on a personal level and who has since become a dear friend; Alister Cumming, who agreed to be on my dissertation committee at the last minute; and Lily Wong Fillmore, who with her 10-page handwritten comments on my dissertation taught me the professional commitment of a senior scholar. A few years ago at a conference, I heard a well-known scholar say that he goes through many ups and downs in his work. He said, “One day I look at my writing and say ‘This is great!’, the next day ‘This is crap!’, and the next day ‘This is good stuff!’ again.” Working on this book I have gone though

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similar ups and downs, and it is the interest that many friends and colleagues have shown in my work that has kept me going. Xin Li read the first draft of almost all the chapters I wrote for my dissertation. I felt very safe entrusting my fragile ego and rough drafts with her. Kelleen Toohey was the first person to cite my work in a professional journal; I am still enough of a novice to remember how exciting that was. Aneta Pavlenko’s productivity and professional commitment never cease to amaze me, and when I write, I always strive to write something that will get her to say, “I liked it!” Christine Pearson Casanave, a mentor, a colleague, and a friend, read many of the drafts of this book, striking a wonderful balance between constructive criticism and support; I cannot think of a better writing partner. Leo van Lier told me that you can potentially keep on revising a book manuscript forever and that you just have to let go of it one day. I am grateful for that lesson. Professor Donald F. Hones, of the University of WisconsinOshkosh, provided an insightful and encouraging review of the manuscript. Naomi Silverman of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates was always wise and gentle in guiding this first-time book author. I am also indebted to Bonny Norton, Diane Dagenais, Adrian Blackledge, Ryuko Kubota, David Shea, David Qian, Marilyn Dickson, and Wendy Wang for their friendship and stimulating conversations. I would like to thank the Matsushita International Foundation for their generous research grant during the data collection of this project. My husband-cum-reluctant editor, Toby Walker, read and edited every single page of this book, and patiently—or not so patiently—tolerated my

endless English questions (“Do you need a or the or no article here?”). Honto ni gokuro samadeshita! For the last 10 years, it has been fascinating to watch his transformation from a monolingual English speaker to a competent Japanese–English bilingual. While we lived in Japan, he used to tell me that I was his link to English and Canada; now that we are in the United States, I look at him and think of Japan—another example that our identities are indeed multiple and changing in an uncanny sort of way. —Yasuko Kanno

C H A P T E R

1 From My Story to the Stories of Other Bilinguals N

“ALAN HALL” This story goes back to when I was 16. I had just made my first trip abroad, from my native country, Japan, to Wales, having been awarded a scholarship to study at an international school for 2 years. I had applied for the scholarship mainly to keep company with a friend who wanted to apply, but when some miracle sent the scholarship my way, I jumped at the opportunity out of a teenager’s curiosity and recklessness. By then I had had 4 years of English, but as a product of the grammar-translation method, I had never used English to communicate with anyone. One late afternoon, not long after I arrived in my new school, I found myself in a group of students engrossed in conversation, a conversation in which I was not participating because of my limited English. At one point, though, I caught the words “Alan Hall.” In my school, which was located in a 15th-century castle, there were many halls with different names. Eager to join the conversation and happy to have picked up words among what were mostly nonsensical noises, I quickly seized the opportunity and spoke up: “Where is Alan Hall?” I thought to myself that I had said something vaguely relevant and I felt good about having uttered a perfectly respectable English sentence. But everyone burst into laughter. What was so funny? I felt my cheeks going red, knowing that I had just made a fool of myself without knowing how. Then someone said to me, “Alan Hall isn’t a hall. He is a biology teacher.” Now, almost 20 years later, the name of Mr. Alan Hall, who was not even my teacher, is etched in my memory while the names of more important 1

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teachers are long forgotten. My story of English began like this—for me, the learning of English was one humiliating experience after another, interspersed with an occasional sense of accomplishment and satisfaction of making real progress. Yet, as I write this book now, the fact that I am writing it in English makes me realize how far I have traveled. English is now definitely my language—in a different way, yes, but no less than Japanese is my language. In my professional life, English is the principal language in which I communicate with my colleagues and my students, express my ideas, and create my own identity. I am often told how well I speak and write in English. But the fact that I still receive compliments about my English—I never get similar compliments about my Japanese—reminds me that I still come across as something of a nonnative speaker. To borrow the words of Xiaoming Li (1999), a fellow nonnative English educator, people expect my English “to be a little ‘off’ ” (p. 50). Nonetheless, without English I would not be who I am: a bilingual and bicultural person at home in both English and Japanese. When I reflect on how my identity as an English speaker/writer has changed over the years and keeps on evolving, I am struck by the paucity of research on the long-term development of second language (L2) learners and their transformation into competent bilinguals. Many studies of ESL education document the process of students learning English, but they rarely follow these students longitudinally to learn how they become bilingual and bicultural (or multilingual and multicultural) and what they do with their bilingualism and biculturalism. I see this as a serious gap in knowledge that needs to be filled because I know firsthand that many ESL students, however timid and silent they may appear to be when they start learning English, go on to own English as one of their languages. Through their second language, they also learn to claim their existence and negotiate their identity in their adopted culture. In other words, ESL students do not forever remain ESL students but—when their education works—turn into bilingual and bicultural (or multilingual and multicultural) adults. It is important to document that process. The purpose of this book, then, is to examine the longitudinal development of bilingual and bicultural identities: how young ESL learners first encounter another language and culture, and go on to mature into bilingual and bicultural young adults. I analyze the experiences of four Japanese “returnee” (kikokushijo) students who lived in English-speaking countries during their adolescence and returned to Japan to attend university. Through an analysis of their identity narratives, I argue that it is possible for bilingual individuals to strike a balance between two languages and cultures. As adolescents, the four participants in this study tended to be polarized toward one language and culture over the other, as if believing that fundamentally a person can keep only a single linguistic and cultural allegiance.

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3

However, through a period of difficult readjustment in Japan, they gradually came to appreciate their hybrid identities. In negotiating identities and reestablishing themselves in their home country, they had to think hard about what was important to them and who they wanted to associate with, and this reflection led them to the realization that they are, after all, bilingual and bicultural. In the remainder of this chapter I develop a theoretical and methodological framework for this study. First, I discuss recent studies of identity in the fields of second language acquisition (SLA) and bilingualism that have informed this study. I then describe two perspectives that I use to conceptualize identity: narrative inquiry and communities of practice. Finally, I describe the process of working together with four Japanese returnee students whose experiences constitute the core of this study. EXPLORING IDENTITY In this study I use the term identity to refer to our sense of who we are and our relationship to the world. Many aspects of our “selves” contribute to our understanding of who we are: race, gender, class, occupation, sexual orientation, age, among others. Which part becomes a salient feature of our identity depends on the context (McNamara, 1997). In this study, I am concerned with parts of our identities that are related to language and culture. Thus, by bilingual and bicultural identity I mean where bilingual individuals position themselves between two languages and two (or more) cultures, and how they incorporate these languages and cultures into their sense of who they are. In addition, because I believe that identity is multiple and changing, I use the plural form of the term, bilingual and bicultural identities, to reflect my belief. In this section, I discuss recent studies of identity in the fields of SLA and bilingualism that have informed this study. The last several years have seen a surge of interest in issues of identity in the field of SLA and bilingualism, and with it a shift toward viewing language learners as complex and multidimensional beings. Norton (2000; Norton Peirce, 1995), in her influential work on the language-learning experiences of immigrant women in Canada, questioned the traditional view of social identity as the fixed property of the individual. Drawing on poststructuralist theories especially Weedon (1987), Norton Peirce (1995) conceptualized the individual as “diverse, contradictory, and dynamic; multiple rather than unitary, decentered rather than centered” (p. 15). For Norton, social identity is not something that belongs to the individual but emerges out of the learner’s interaction with the learning context. She proposed the notion of investment to replace the traditional concept of motivation in order to better capture the complex negotiation between the language learner and the learning context:

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[In the traditional view] motivation is a property of the language learner—a fixed personality trait. The notion of investment, on the other hand, attempts to capture the relationship of the language learner to the changing social world. It conceives of the language learner as having a complex social identity and multiple desires. (Norton Peirce, 1995, pp. 17–18)

Rather than having a fixed amount of motivation to learn a particular language regardless of the situation, the learner assesses opportunities to practice the language in a given context and the potential symbolic (e.g., recognition, friendship, voice) and material (e.g., jobs, money) returns for his or her investment of time and effort. Norton’s work was with adult L2 learners, but McKay and Wong (1996) used Norton’s notion of investment to analyze the English learning of adolescent Chinese immigrant students in California, who are closer in age to my participants. They illustrated various discourses (i.e., colonial/racial, model-minority, Chinese cultural nationalist, school, and gender) in which the students were simultaneously involved within the school context. Some of these discourses helped students construct a social identity that was conducive to acquiring English; other discourses removed them from resources they needed in order to learn the language. Their work demonstrated that, even within the school setting, which is only one part of the immigrant students’ lives, they possessed multiple identities. The authors found that, for school-age language learners, maximizing returns on their investment was not always their primary concern, as it was for Norton’s adult learners. In fact, in order to preserve positive self-images, the students sometimes stopped their investment in English. McKay and Wong observed that “since the identity made possible by proficiency in their target language is not the only one available, other identities may already provide sufficient satisfaction to the learner at a given stage” (p. 604). Other researchers focused on examining hybrid identities that bilingual speakers express. In 1985, Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) argued that “the equation ‘a race = a culture = a language’ ” (p. 234) is simply not accurate. More recent studies effectively demonstrated their point. Rampton (1995) provided a detailed ethnographic analysis of language crossing by working-class youths in England, the appropriation of languages that are not normally associated with one’s own ethnicity: In his study, Punjabi was used by both African-Caribbean and white, English-speaking adolescents, for instance. Pavlenko’s (2001) analysis of the published autobiographies of L2 users showed the bilingual (or multilingual) writers struggling to claim identities that do not fit with the dominant ideologies of monolingualism and monoculturalism in the United States. She argued that by writing about their experiences of learning and using multiple languages, these authors are staking out a claim that “being a contemporary American is about multi-

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plicity and invention as much as it is about ‘fitting in’ in some preconceived identity options” (p. 340). These authors’ efforts to win recognition for their hybrid identities and their voices in their L2 (English) echo in the writings of nonnative English educators who work in a field that has traditionally privileged native proficiency in English (Braine, 1999). Kramsch and Lam (1999), in an article entitled The Importance of Being Non-Native, claimed and that nonnative speakers, because of their detachment from taken-for-granted assumptions of native speakers, can “stretch the limits of the sayable” (p. 61) in English and achieve the kind of creativity that is impossible for native speakers. As Kramsch and Lam’s (1999) emphasis on the importance of being nonnative demonstrates, underlying the enactment and experiences of multiple, hybrid identities are issues of power and language ideology. Society grants differential power and values to various languages: As Bourdieu (1977) pointed out, “Linguists are right in saying that all languages are linguistically equal; they are wrong in thinking they are socially equal” (p. 652). The market value of a particular language—or bilingual proficiency— depends on the language ideologies of the society. In a country such as the United States, where English monolingualism is strongly associated with nationalism (as evidenced by the passing of Proposition 227, which banned bilingual education in California), individual language minority families, even if they want to maintain their ethnic language and pass it on to their children, may not receive much material reward for their investment. Worse, their efforts may be circumscribed by negative images abundantly projected by the dominant group of the society toward immigrants and minorities. For example, an immigrant couple of Mexican origin in Schecter and Bayley’s (1997) study, who wanted their children to learn Spanish, were disturbed by what they called “un español muy pobre [an impoverished Spanish]” in the United States (p. 519): Spanish spoken on the local television and radio programs were full of errors; working-class Mexican values and images associated with the Spanish language in the United States were foreign to this couple, who originally came from well-educated, professional families. In contrast, in societies where bilingualism or multilingualism is valued such as Canada and Europe, individual efforts to develop multilingual proficiency are more likely to be facilitated, with more resources (e.g., immersion programs) and rewards (e.g., jobs that require bilingual proficiency) being available. However, even in such countries not all languages are treated equally (Dagenais, in press; Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996). The idea that identity is not fixed gives rise to the possibility that it can change over time. Another direction that recent explorations of identity have started to take, thus, is the examination of long-term changes in bilingual students’ identities. Research on the long-term changes has so far taken on two forms: the examination of bilingual learners’ retrospective ac-

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counts and the longitudinal observation of bilingual learners. Adopting the former approach, Kondo-Brown (2000) asked bilingual heritage students of Japanese in Hawaii to reflect on their experiences of Japanese language maintenance and their cultural orientations. She found that while they were growing up, they sided with the dominant culture and resisted Japanese language and culture; however, now that they were university students, they were more willing to embrace both cultures and languages. KondoBrown (2000) observed, “These students’ acculturation strategies are not static; they seem to have changed from assimilative to additive modes over the years” (p. 15). Tse (1999) also identified a similar pattern of identity transition in published autobiographies of 39 Asian-Americans. She proposed four stages of development (p. 122). In stage 1, ethnic unawareness, which takes place usually prior to attending school, ethnic minority children have not had enough exposure to other races to be aware of their own ethnicity. Childhood and adolescence are characterized by stage 2, ethnic ambivalence/evasion, during which ethnic minority youngsters try to assimilate into the dominant group. By the time they enter adolescence or early adulthood, many of them reach stage 3, ethnic emergence. They realize that becoming a member of the dominant group is not entirely possible and start to look for alternative ways of self-definition. Finally, in stage 4, they identify with their own ethnic group (e.g., Asian-Americans), ethnic identity, and come to terms with their hybrid heritage. Kondo-Brown (2000) and Tse (1999) relied on the actors’ retrospective accounts of their experiences to reveal long-term changes in their identities. However, some authors spend a long term (more than a year) working with the same bilingual learners. Toohey (1996, 1998, 2000b) observed a group of language minority children from kindergarten to Grade 2. Through sociocultural theories of learning, especially Lave and Wenger’s (1991) communities-of-practice perspective, Toohey examined how practices in the classroom work to differentiate and rank students. We tend to believe the identities that students assume in the classroom are due to their own abilities and personality. Toohey argued that it is the community practices that shape the students’ identities as members of that community: The specific practices of their classrooms “produced” the focal children as specific kinds of students, with the identity “ESL learners” as a more or less important marker. They held the positions, not the internal essence, of being “ESL” and “quiet” or “clever” or “not so clever” and so on; these identities made sense only within the context of these particular practices. (Toohey, 2000b, p. 125)

Norton (2000; Norton Peirce, 1995) argued that social identities are born out of the interaction between the learner and the learning context; Toohey seemed to be going a step further by claiming that sometimes—perhaps

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more so in the case of young children—the learning context produces certain identities for the learners that they have little power to resist. Harklau (1994) and Miller (2000) worked longitudinally with ESL students closer in age to the students in this book. Harklau spent 3 1 2 years following four Chinese immigrant students in California as they moved from ESL to mainstream classes. Miller tracked Chinese high school students in Australia for 18 months, from their on-arrival intensive ESL program to their eventual integration into the mainstream classroom. Both studies found that, generally, ESL students remained isolated from English-speaking students, even after they had been mainstreamed. Harklau (1994) wrote, “Perhaps the single most salient aspect of observations of ESL students in mainstream classes was their reticence and lack of interaction with native-speaking peers” (pp. 262–263). Similarly, Miller (2000) found that the ESL students who moved to a regular high school after receiving intensive ESL instruction elsewhere had less opportunity to use English in the high school. Although they were physically surrounded by native English speakers, the ESL and the native-speaking groups had so little to do with each other that the physical proximity to English speakers did not lead to increased opportunities to use English for the ESL learners. Longitudinal studies such as Toohey (1996, 1998, 2000b), Harklau (1994) and Miller (2000) are extremely valuable as they can capture gradual changes in bilingual learners’ identities that escape the notice of short-term studies. Since these researchers observe these changes as they happen, they can record the complexity and contradictions involved in identity changes that are often smoothed over in retrospective accounts. Also, a longitudinal approach often involves following the same students from one sociocultural context to another—such as from one classroom to another, or from high school to college—resulting in a heightened awareness of the ways in which different settings shape learner identities. However, the longitudinal studies I reviewed here focus primarily on the process of learning English. Their scope does not extend to ESL learners’ eventual development as bilingual and bicultural individuals or their dealings with their bilingual and bicultural identities. This study, then, aims to fill that gap in knowledge by focusing specifically on how adolescent ESL learners gradually evolve into bilingual and bicultural young adults and decide where to position themselves between multiple languages and cultures. In so doing, I take the “multicompetence” (Cook, 1992, 1999) view of bilingualism and biculturalism: that is, to think of a bilingual person’s linguistic and cultural repertoire as a whole, rather than separating out each language and culture as if “the bilingual is (or should be) two monolinguals in one person” (Grosjean, 1992, p. 52). I believe that it is extremely important to examine the development of bilingual competence from a bilingual rather than monolingual perspective:

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Strong monolingual biases have influenced bilingual [and ESL] research, and the yardstick against which any bilingual has been measured has inevitably been the ideal—monolingual—speaker-hearer. . . . It is worth asking how the research on bilingualism would have evolved and what state it would be in today, had the scholars in the field all been bi- or multilingual (in fact and in spirit) and has the research been conducted in societies where bi- or multilingualism was the norm and not the exception. (Grosjean, 1992, p. 52)

The emphasis in my study, then, is on “life with two languages” (Grosjean, 1982), rather than solely on the acquisition of English; on “life betwixt two worlds,” rather than on assimilation/integration into North American culture.

FRAMING IDENTITY In addition to the recent studies of identity in the field of SLA and bilingualism that I have just reviewed, my understanding of identity is also informed by two perspectives stemming from the fields of education and anthropology that have much to say about issues of identity: narrative inquiry and communities of practice. In this section I explain these two perspectives in relation to how they frame this study. Narrative Inquiry Connelly and Clandinin (1988, 1990; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), whose writing and teaching first introduced me to narrative inquiry, wrote, “Formalists begin inquiry in theory, whereas narrative inquirers tend to begin with experience as expressed in lived and told stories” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 40). For me, this central focus on stories of experience distinguishes narrative inquiry from other types of qualitative investigation. Qualitative researchers in general are interested in understanding human experience from the actors’ own point of view. However, those of us in the narrative inquiry tradition (see Bell, 1997; Conle, 1992, 1995; Dalley, 1989; X. Li, 2002, for other examples of narrative inquiry on issues of SLA) pay particular attention to the role of narrative in the meaning-making process of human experience. Compared with other qualitative approaches (e.g., ethnography), the focus is on individuals and how they live their lives. We are interested in what connections individuals make between separate events, how one experience leads to another (Dewey, 1938/1963), and what identities they express in the telling of their stories. Story telling is used not only in our communication with our participants but also in our communication with the general public in the form of research reports, because we believe that narrative is a powerful medium through which other people’s experiences can be understood and shared. That is why a large portion of this book is

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devoted to the four students’ narratives; it is an invitation to the readers to see the students, not as research subjects, not even a type of students, but as “distinctive individual[s], in a unique situation, dealing with issues in a personal manner” (Polkinghorne, 1995, p. 18). A fundamental philosophical assumption behind narrative inquiry is that human beings experience their lives and identities in narrative form. Separate events and actions become meaningful only in the context of a plot of which they are a part (J. Bruner, 1987, 1990; MacIntyre, 1981; Polkinghorne, 1988): It is because we all live our narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others. Stories are lived before they are told—except in the case of fiction. (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 197)

Narrative thinkers are divided in their opinions about whether narrative structure is inherent in everyday experience itself or is a form that is imposed on everyday experience when humans try to make sense of it. Mink (1970), argued, in direct opposition to MacIntyre (1981), that “stories are not lived, but told. Life has no beginnings, middles, or ends” (p. 557). I agree that there is a qualitative difference between a life lived and a life told (E. M. Bruner, as cited in Hatch & Wisniewski, 1995, p. 129): More coherence and connection are worked into the life told than the life lived. Yet, the position that narrative understanding is an inherent part of what we call everyday experience makes intuitive sense to me. I do not wait until I tell my stories to connect events into a plot; rather, it seems to me that I engage in the connection making while I go through an experience. In this study I take the position, together with Connelly and Clandinin (1990) and MacIntylre (1981) that experience and narrative are inextricably intertwined.1 Narrative is indispensable not only for individual experiences, but also for our understanding of our own identities and those of others. The commonsense view of identity usually refers to labels, categories, and attributes, such as “ESL,” “female,” “Japanese,” “artist,” “tall,” “quiet,” and so on. These are, of course, important parts of our identities. However, as Polkinghorne (1988) reminded us, such labels and categories do not adequately answer the question of identity: “Who am I?” In everyday conversation, the answer takes a narrative form: e.g., “I was born in Tokyo. When I was three I went to Perth, Australia. My dad was transferred there . . .” Arendt (1981) made the same point by noting the distinction between who and what a person is. What someone is, she maintained, is answered in 1 For a good discussion of this debate, see Kerby (1991, pp. 39–48) and Widdershoven (1993, pp. 3–6).

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terms of attributes and categories. Who someone is, one the other hand, “we can only know by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero— his biography” (Arendt, 1981, p. 186). Implicit in Arendt’s (1981) argument is the idea that narrative is not limited to answering the question “Who am I?” but is equally essential for responding to “Who are you?” That is, in order to get to know another person, we implicitly seek his or her life story. Our knowledge of a person is hardly limited to an amalgam of attributes, such as race, gender, age, and class, although that is the way social science has traditionally approached the issues of identity. For instance, I may be classified as “female,” “Japanese,” “30-something,” “middle-class.” Knowing these attributes of mine may tell you something about me, but you can hardly claim that you know me. There is nothing in this set of attributes that distinguishes my individuality from other middle-class Japanese women in their mid-30s. To get to know someone beyond a superficial level inevitably draws us into story telling and story listening: “We come to know each other by telling, untelling, believing, and disbelieving stories about each other’s pasts, futures, and identities” (Hardy, 1968, p. 6). Two aspects of narrative as a vehicle of identity are particularly noteworthy in the context of this study. What attracts me about a narrative view of identity above all is that it allows us to think of identity as a movement: “Viewing the self as a narrative or story, rather than as a substance, brings to light the temporal and developmental dimension of human existence” (Polkinghorne, 1991, p. 135). The plot of one’s life story is in constant revision as new and unexpected events take place that throw our understanding of past events in a new light (Linde, 1993). Linde (1993, pp. 31–36) provided concrete examples of how people reconstruct and reinterpret their past to reconcile with their present perspective, deleting some stories that do not fit current claims and giving more emphasis on the aspects of the past that are consistent with the present. For example, one man quits his job in a research laboratory because, he says, it involves exposing mice to strong radiation and dissecting them in order to support an already wellestablished theory. Several years later, however, he returns to scientific work, and this time he does not mention his mice-killing experience at the previous job at all, despite Linde’s repeated effort to draw him out. Instead, he cites boredom as the principal reason for having left his job in the research laboratory. Linde argued that the “mouse murder” story disappeared from this man’s narrative because it constituted too violent a contradiction to be reconciled with his decision to return to science. In narrative inquiry, such revisions and contradictions are not aberrant factors to be resolved, but are viewed as narrative adjustments that reflect the teller’s changing perspective. Thus, in the following chapters, we see some in-

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stances of the bilingual students’ contradicting their earlier remarks and revising their interpretation in the light of more recent developments. Another important aspect of narrative is that it conveys the actor’s own voice. First-person narratives presenting learners’ perspectives—their side of the story—had until very recently not been considered worthy of serious attention in SLA research (Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000). In a field that still largely favors a “scientific” mode of inquiry, first-person narratives are automatically suspect as anecdotal, soft, and “just story telling.” Recently, however, in conjunction with growing interests in issues of identity, several studies, such as those I reviewed earlier, have emerged that take L2 learners’ own accounts of their language-learning experiences seriously and have arrived at important insights about the relations between language and identity (Kanno, 2000a; Kondo-Brown, 2000; Norton Peirce, 1995; Pavlenko, 2001; Tse, 2000). Conle (1995), noting that people’s experiences and the ways they make sense of them have not been a subject of inquiry for traditional research, wrote that “those of us who work in narrative use it because we feel the need for inquiry into those very areas” (p. 9). I do not believe that the co-emergence of interests in identity and a growing recognition of first-person narratives as legitimate “data” in the field of SLA is a mere coincidence. Tapping into issues of identity—how one views oneself and relates to the world around one—requires an inquiry into people’s experiences and meaning making, and an inquiry into those areas calls for the use of narrative. Communities of Practice Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985), in their book Acts of Identity, pointed to two meanings of identity: (a) to single out a particular person, and (b) to see a person as part of a group, a cause, or a tradition. Group membership is an indispensable part of what shapes our identities, just as much as our desire to be unique, irreplaceable individuals. Memberships in concrete, tangible groups such as company, school, and local community are probably among the clearest examples of the close relationship between group membership and identity. But no less relevant is the notion of group membership to our linguistic and cultural identities: where we positions ourselves among multiple cultures and languages (Gardner & Lambert, 1972; Giles & Byrne, 1982; Kanno, 2000a; Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985; Tabouret-Keller, 1997). It is important to note, once again, that this is not a fixed position. One of my participants felt very protective about his Japanese identity in Canada, but as soon as he returned to Japan, he discovered that he did not identify with the Japanese at all. Cultural and linguistic self-positioning depends on the particular sociocultural context. An additional complicating factor is that all

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of us belong to multiple communities. We cannot simply devote all our attention to one community we belong to; rather we need to coordinate various memberships we hold (Wenger, 1998). Even if we are focusing on one particular community membership, the quality and the extent of our participation in that community is likely to affect our memberships elsewhere. Multimembership is a fact of life. For the question of bilingual and bicultural identities, then, “It is not where people belong that is important, but how people belong—the various ways people are attached and attach themselves affectively into the world” (Grossberg, 1997, as cited in Kramsch & Lam, 1999, p. 70, original emphasis). For the investigation of how bilingual individuals negotiate their multiple community memberships, I find Lave and Wenger’s (1991; Wenger, 1998) communities-of-practice perspective useful. Lave and Wenger are interested in the relationship between learning, identity, and community participation. When newcomers join a community of people with shared practices—“ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations” (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992, p. 464)—they need to learn to participate in those practices. Lave and Wenger maintained that what we usually call learning is part of learning to take part in shared practices of a community. We learn not for the abstract goal of attaining knowledge, but in order to participate in communities where we wish to become a member. Because for Lave and Wenger, learning is intertwined with community participation and belonging, it has direct implications for identity: “Because learning transforms who we are and what we can do, it is an experience of identity. It is not just an accumulation of skills and information, but a process of becoming—to become a certain person or, conversely, to avoid becoming a certain person” (Wenger, 1998, p. 215). Lave and Wenger’s communities-of-practice perspective has far-reaching implications for the concept of learning. However, for the purpose of this study, I want to discuss two aspects of their framework: the role of the community and negotiability of participation. First of all, newcomers cannot be expected to participate in the community practices to the same extent as old-timers from the beginning. They start out by taking on easier tasks or less responsibility and then gradually increase their involvement. This attenuated form of participation, which Lave and Wenger (1991) called legitimate peripheral participation, facilitates learning because it involves actual engagement with community practices without the responsibility and workload of a full member. For the legitimate peripheral participation to take place, however, at least two conditions must be met: The newcomers must be willing to engage in the practices, and the community must have an effective mechanism to initiate the new members into its customs, repertoire, and practices. In the ideal world both conditions are present, but in reality many communities neglect to initiate the newcom-

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ers to their practices or, worse, actively exclude them from participation. Lave and Wenger (1991) provided an example of the apprenticeship of meat cutters (pp. 76–79). Apprentices need to become familiar with the equipment to cut and saw meat. However, because the supermarket cannot afford to lose money by assigning the apprentices to work on the machines with which they have little familiarity, they are relegated to an easier job at which they can contribute maximally to the profit-making, say, working the automatic wrapping machine. As a result, the apprentices rarely have an opportunity to watch skilled journeymen process meat, still less to use the equipment themselves. They are prevented from becoming competent members of the community. In SLA, the conversation that one of Norton Peirce’s (1995) immigrant participants, Eva, had with her coworker, Gail, is a good reminder that the old-timers, rather than facilitating a newcomer’s entry into the community, may instead choose to humiliate the latter by highlighting her “ignorance.” Pointing to a customer’s T-shirt with an image of Bart Simpson, Gail exposed Eva’s ignorance of North American popular culture and made Eva “feel so bad” (Norton Peirce, 1995, p. 10). In order to become a full member of a community, newcomers need “access to a wide range of ongoing activity, old-timers, and other members of the community, and to information, resources, and opportunities for participation” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 101). But research in SLA suggests that access to interactions with native speakers cannot be assumed to be readily available to L2 learners (Harklau, 1994; Miller, 2000; Norton Peirce, 1993). In such situations, newcomers are kept at the margins and eventually become old-timers without developing their expertise to engage more fully. In this regard, Toohey (2000a) recently made an interesting distinction between “full participation” and “competent participation.” She argued that over time anyone achieves their full level of participation in a community, but whether they manage to acquire an identity of competence is a different matter. “Community practices are sometimes so arranged that identities of competence are not always available to all members. One can, then, be constructed as a full but incompetent participant” (p. 2). Not everyone becomes powerful and influential in a community of practice; some members are ostracized and silenced. Despite the myriad constraints and power relations in which they are placed, however, individuals do not simply accept undesirable identities that are handed down to them, but rather “behave as agents who resist, negotiate, change, and transform themselves and others” (Blackledge & Pavlenko, in press, p. 10). The influence of the community–individual interaction is not unidirectional: Not only do the extent and quality of our community participation affect our sense of who we are, but also, as Wenger (1998) reminded us, we have the ability to shape the nature of the communities to which we belong. In exploring bilingual and bicultural identities,

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then, we cannot overlook the importance of individual bilinguals’ agency to make choices about how to belong and to resist negative identities and negotiate more positive ones. Dagenais’s (in press) study of immigrant parents who choose to enroll their children in French immersion programs is a good example of such agency. Although the development of trilingualism (English, French, and their home language) may not yield more economic return in the mainstream Canadian context than English–French bilingualism, these parents are envisioning their children’s future affiliation with their heritage language communities that transcends Canadian borders. In their own way, these parents are challenging a dominant language ideology in Canada, which places English and French before all the other ethnic languages. In doing so, they are claiming more expansive, global identities for their children. If enough immigrant parents enroll their children in French immersion programs in this manner, they might eventually change the objectives and approaches in such programs (Dagenais, in press). In summary, in this study I take the position that bilingual and bicultural identities are multiple, hybrid, and changing. Although I expect bilingual individuals to be subject to ideologies and power relations that constrain the range of identities available to them, I believe that within these constraints, and sometimes against these constraints, the individuals exercise agency to choose where and how they position themselves among multiple cultures and languages. What I am looking for, then, are Japanese returnee students’ “identity narratives” (Green, 2001, p. 8; Pavlenko, in press, p. 2) that reflect the ways in which they negotiate their identities with various communities and reconcile their multiple connections with languages and cultures. In the next section, I describe the process in which I, together with four participants, reconstructed their identity narratives and analyzed the changing approaches to their languages and cultures that are reflected in these narratives.

IN SEARCH OF IDENTITY NARRATIVES: THE PROCESS In 1991, while I was working on my PhD program in Toronto, Canada, I started teaching at a Saturday Japanese school in the city. Called hoshuko (supplementary school) in Japanese, this is a school that Japanese expatriate students attend on Saturdays in order to maintain their academic Japanese proficiency and keep up with the Japanese school curriculum. I remember being excited about the idea of teaching the students who shared a similar experience with me—of living abroad during adolescence and returning to Japan as young adults. Even the rumors that this school was “difficult” fueled my competitive energy: Surely I could meet the challenge be-

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cause I knew what these kids were going through! Now 10 years later, I need a sense of humor in order to look back on the naiveté, idealism, and arrogance of a young, inexperienced teacher without being embarrassed. But it was also true that I genuinely wanted to be of help to Japanese students in Canada who, I imagined, were struggling with their rapidly changing sense of who they were and their relationship with the world, being caught in the triangle of language, culture, and identity. I was assigned to teach Grade 12 Japanese Language Arts. Initially, the students struck me as more “Japanese” than I had imagined. My impression of their being “Japanese” was most likely caused by the gap between what I had expected to see and what I actually saw. Having gone through a considerable degree of assimilation during the 2 years I spent in Britain, I expected expatriate students who had been living in Canada for several years to look more like Canadian teenagers. But many of my students looked like teenagers one would run into on the streets of Tokyo. There was an unspoken rule of using only Japanese on the school premises, but teachers did not have to enforce it vigorously as most students preferred to speak Japanese anyway. Every week I saw Japanese magazines and comics circulating around. I often wished that my students listened to my class with half as much concentration as that paid to their comics. I once gave them an editorial in the The Globe and Mail (a Canadian national newspaper) and asked them to translate it into Japanese as an assignment. About half of the class did not complete the assignment because they could not understand the original English article. As I became used to the school, however, I became more attuned to differences among the students. Some looked forward to coming to hoshuko every Saturday, because it was one place where they did not have to speak English. There they were able to socialize with their peers, take courses, talk about what was happening in Japan, browse library books—all in their first language (L1). For those students who felt isolated in their local Canadian schools, in particular, hoshuko was an important sanctuary where once a week they were exempt from having to assume an awkward identity in their second language. For other students, especially for those who were Canadian-born or had lived in Canada from a very young age, attending hoshuko was a chore, something they did because their parents told them to. They formed their own small peer groups and generally stayed away from those whose lives and interests were much more heavily invested in Japan. Not surprisingly, an extraordinary range of Japanese literacy levels existed among my students: Some were reading and writing at or beyond their grade level; others were struggling at the Grade 2 or 3 levels—all of them in the same Grade 12 class. To this day, this has been the most challenging class I have ever taught, and I had the honor of being an utterly unprepared teacher trying to meet the challenge.

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Because every Saturday was a battle, I still remember many of the students vividly. There was a son of a diplomat, who, because he had moved around the world so much with his father, never developed enough competence either in Japanese or in any other language to say what he wanted. His mother apparently was the only person who could communicate with him. From time to time I wondered what it must be like to be him, a self trapped inside with no doors. Or does a self even exist without sufficient language? There was a Canadian-born Nisei girl who had a magic hand with origami, was active in a Japanese-Canadian association, and was generally very enthusiastic about learning her heritage culture. At the same time, she was much more comfortable speaking English than Japanese. We spent many early mornings in the library chatting in English. She was the only student who referred to my husband by his first name. There was a an older kid who specialized in brokering the exchange of second-hand stereos among his peers in high school. He was already a few years behind in schooling but did not seem worried. His attendance in my class was sporadic, and when he was there, he acted the part of a quintessentially unmotivated student. When I hired him as an assistant to help repaint my apartment, however, I was surprised by the meticulousness and devotion with which he approached the job. He carefully put tapes around the edges so that the paint would not spill over and chastened me to brush more carefully. There was a professional pool player who, with his tall figure and sweet face, was very popular among girls. He had arrived in Canada only after high school and was struggling with English, a disadvantage he compensated for with his good looks and cool attitude. He told me that he would rather go to a school with no ESL classes, because “If ESL is big, then you get labelled as an ESL student, and that’s a stigma. But if there is no ESL, I can say, ‘I don’t speak English. So what? That’s my personality.’ ” Then there were three girls who, when combined together, were a walking encyclopedia of Japanese popular culture. This was a pre-Internet age, but these girls’ use of resources were remarkable: With the degree of passion that still astonishes me, they sought videos of Japanese TV programs, newspapers, CDs, comics, and information through word of mouth. They knew exactly who was in which drama, which actor was dating which actress, who had just changed hairstyles. As I got to know them, I became curious to find out why my students were so different in their bilingual and bicultural identities. Plainly, my assumption that all Japanese students who live abroad during teenage years go through a similar kind of assimilation process was wrong. All of my students at hoshuko came to Toronto because of their fathers’ overseas assignments, they all attended local Canadian schools during weekdays and ho-

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shuko on Saturdays, and most of them planned to return to Japan once they finished high school. But within this common framework were many ways of being. Geertz (1973) wrote, “One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one” (p. 45). How did each of these students come to live one kind of life and not others in Canada? Furthermore, given such a diversity of experiences and identities during their sojourn, how would they fare with the life back in Japan they were soon to encounter? Like a person who started to read a novel half-heartedly but once into it found herself engrossed, knowing tiny fragments of my students’ lives made me want to know what would happen next. That is how this study started. A Brief Background on Kikokushijo Japanese students like those I taught at Toronto hoshuko, who leave Japan at an young age and return to Japan after a prolonged sojourn abroad are called kikokushijo in Japan. Kikoku means to “return to one’s home country” and shijo “sons and daughters.”2 They go abroad because of their parents’ (usually their fathers’) job transfer and return to Japan either when the parents are called back home or when they come to a logical dividing point in their schooling (e.g., at the end of middle or high school). There were 50,792 Japanese expatriate children living around the world as of 2001 (Monbukagakusho, 2001), most of whom will eventually return to Japan. Although little known outside of Japan, the readjustment problems of kikokushijo and discussions about their reintegration into the Japanese education system and society at large have a long history in Japan. A correspondingly large body of literature exists on kikokushijo (e.g., Horoiwa, 1987; Kaigaishijo Kyokushi Hensan Iinkai, 1991; Kobayashi, 1980; Sato, 1997; Shibuya, 2000; in Japanese; Goodman, 1990; Kanno, 2000a, 2000b; White, 1988; Yashiro, 1995; in English). Over the past four decades, Japan has gone through a tremendous social transformation both domestically and internationally, and society’s evaluation of kikokushijo has changed accordingly. During the 1960s and 1970s, kikokushijo were considered a societal and educational liability. They were deemed deficient in Japanese language proficiency—and deficiency in Japa2 Historically, shi in kikokushijo meant “sons,” so shijo was meant to refer to both “sons and daughters.” However, shi can also mean “child,” which is the more dominant meaning in contemporary Japanese. Some researchers argue that shijo connotes only girls, and therefore use kikokusei (returnee students) instead. In this study, I opt for the term kikokushijo, because to me shijo refers to both males and females, and more importantly because that is how my participants identified themselves.

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nese language was considered synonymous with deficiency in being Japanese. They were also considered behind in other subject matters. It was not unusual for them to be placed one or two grades lower than their age mates upon reentering Japanese schools or to be turned down by high schools (Kaigaishijo Kyoiku Hensan Iinkai, 1991). They were regarded as misfits who did not know how to conform to the Japanese norms of behavior, disrupted harmony in the classroom, and generally got on the nerves of teachers and classmates. Many incidents of bullying were reported (Domoto, 1987; Enloe & Lewin, 1987; Osawa, 1986; Willis, 1984). In addition to the maladjustment, another problem kikokushijo faced was a disadvantage in taking entrance exams, which tested one’s mastery of the Japanese school curriculum (Kitsuse, Murase, & Yamamura, 1984). In a country where the competition for top schools is fierce and its results have major implications for one’s future career, this was a serious concern.3 In the 1960s and 1970s, kikokushijo’s parents were mostly elite businessmen and diplomats with sufficient political clout to push the government. At their loud protest, in the mid-1970s the Japanese government started to provide financial and administrative support to full-time Japanese schools (nihonjingakko) and supplementary Saturday schools (hoshuko), which had been founded by groups of expatriate parents around the world. Within Japan, several universities began, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, to reserve a certain number of places each year for kikokushijo candidates as a rescue measure (Kaigaishijo Kyoikushi Hensan Iinkai, 1991; Kitsuse et al., 1984). Up to this point, kikokushijo had been regarded as a “problem,” a walking contradiction who looked Japanese but did not behave Japanese. It was generally acknowledged that the difficulties they encountered were not their fault and that they were victims of Japan’s economic ambitions. But they were a “problem” nonetheless. The last 15 years or so, however, have seen a dramatic change in public opinions about kikokushijo. As Japan started to focus on “internationalization,” kikokushijo, with their intercultural expertise, came to be viewed less as a problem and more as a valuable societal resource. In particular, the English proficiency that many of them possess is highly valuable, in the light of the fact that the regular school system has consistently failed to produce proficient English speakers. As the social value attached to kikokushijo increased, so did the number of universities that wanted to accept them. The quota system for kikokushijo, which originally started in a handful of universities to “save” returnees who had nowhere else to go, has now spread to over 300 universities (Kaigaishijo Kyoiku Shinko Zaidan, 2000). This system has becomes so widespread that some criticize it as a preferential treatment for an emerg3 This is rapidly changing now, because of a sharp decline in the college-age student population. Some junior colleges and university departments are having to close because of insufficient enrollment.

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ing international elite class (Goodman, 1990; “Kikoku nyushi,” 1995). Indeed, supply now exceeds demand: Every year for the last several years, more than 50 universities have received no applications even though they have a special quota for kikokushijo (Kaigaishijo Kyoiku Shinko Zaidan, 2000). Approaching Four Students When I decided to start this project, I knew immediately which of the 30 students that I taught in my first year at hoshuko to approach and why—although of course, whether or not they would agree to participate was an entirely different question. In choosing Sawako, Kikuko, Kenji, and Rui,4 it is true that many of the standard criteria to diversify the sample went into consideration: both male and female students, both sociable and quiet persons, and those who left Japan very young and those who left relatively late. I also remember mentally placing the four students on the Canadian culture–Japanese culture continuum: “How Japanese or Canadian are they?” In my mind, I positioned Kikuko at the Japanese end of the spectrum, Rui at the other end, and Sawako and Kenji in between. While this way of categorizing bilingual and bicultural individuals now strikes me as oversimplistic, I was concerned with including a wide range of cultural identities in my study, and thinking of the four students this way gave me some confidence in my selection (see Fig. 1.1 for a summary of their places of residence). On these criteria alone, however, I could have chosen another set of students. In the end it was something unique in each individual that attracted me. Rui’s long overseas career piqued my interest; I wondered what it must be like to leave one’s native land so young and spend the majority of one’s life in another country. In a similar way, I wanted to know Sawako’s view on frequent trans-Pacific relocation, never staying in one place for more than 3 years at a time, switching languages so often. I envied the apparent ease and optimism with which Kenji seemed to cross cultural borders, in contrast to the ulcer-inducing stress I was feeling in negotiating cultural differences. And Kikuko’s ability and unabated energy to simulate a Japanese lifestyle on the other side of the globe fascinated me. When I was her age, I was too much focused on assimilation to realize that such an option existed. I contacted them one by one after they left hoshuko: Sawako left half-way through the year to return to Japan and the other three graduated in 1992. 4 The participants’ names as well as the names of their affiliations are real. Sawako, Kikuko, and Kenji appeared in another article under the pseudonyms Ritsuko, Saori, and Kenta, respectively (Kanno & Applebaum, 1995). Pseudonyms were used while this project was still ongoing. However, at the end of the project, I asked the students whether they wanted to keep the pseudonyms or preferred to use their real names. They all chose to be referred to by their real names, saying that their names are an important part of their identities. The names of their family members and friends that appear in this study are not real.

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FIG. 1.1. Summary of the four participants’ backgrounds.

In meeting with them, I spent about an hour to an hour and a half explaining the project by going over the two-page research proposal in Japanese I had prepared for them. I emphasized that this was a long-term project—although even I did not anticipate that it would turn out to be a 10-year project!—and that it was going to tap deeply into their private lives. All of them agreed readily. Sawako said enthusiastically, “Let’s make a book!” Given the emerging nature of qualitative research, it was impossible to spell out exactly what was going to happen every step of the way. Also, I am not sure to what extent the still inexperienced 18-year olds understood the implications of participating in a study such as this. However, I believe that I did all I could to explain the project in a language they could understand and to give them enough time and space to decide.

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Collaboration As is often the case with a long-term qualitative study, it is hard for me to say exactly how long this project lasted. I still keep in touch with the four participants, who have by now become my friends. It was only the other day that I asked them to reflect on their cross-cultural experience from the vantage point of an adult—they are now in their late 20s. I discuss some of these recent developments in the final chapter. Formally, I worked with them from March 1992 to December 1995, spending approximately 3 years with each of them: a few months while they were still in Canada, 2 years after their reentry into Japan, and another several months for analysis and feedback. The longitudinal perspective allowed me to document changes in their identities as they moved from one sociocultural context to another. Before they left Canada, I interviewed them two to three times, each lasting 1 1 2 to 2 hours. I asked about their backgrounds, what their life in North America was like, and how they felt about returning to Japan. After their return, I flew over to Japan—I was living in Canada at that time—to meet with them approximately every 6 months for 2 years, keeping track of their readjustment. All the interviews were recorded. I transcribed all the interview tapes and sent a copy of the transcripts to each participant as they were produced. Once I started interviewing the students, I witnessed their taking to story-telling very fast. Mishler (1986) observed that interview respondents tend to fall naturally into the storytelling mode when answering the interviewer’s questions. What prevents them from doing so is the interviewer’s reluctance to let them go off on a tangent and assume control over the content and structure of their discourse. In that respect, the problem is “not the voices that speak but with the ears that do not hear” (Casey, 1995/1996, p. 223). Initially, they were confused by the lack of directions coming from me, and wondered aloud why on earth anyone would be interested in the details of their personal lives for the purpose of academic research. But once the message had sunk in, after repeated assurance that I really wanted to know what they had learned from their experiences as bilinguals, they did not have to be instructed to deliver it in a story form. They fell naturally into it. Each time we talked, their stories moved on, picking up the plots where we had left the last time and incorporating new experiences. Or they might revise the plots according to a new turn of events. Each time, what they wanted to talk about varied slightly, reflecting the changes in what was occupying their minds at the time. Grasped together, however, these stories were all expressions of who they were, where they had come from, and where they wished to go. The interviews were supplemented by letter/journal exchange, telephone calls, and e-mail. In addition, because the four students—former

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classmates—wanted to keep in touch with one another, we circulated a group journal among the five of us by mail. We wrote about what was happening in our lives and discussed issues that were relevant to all of us. The speed of the circulation of the group journal was too slow—sometimes it took 6 months to make a round, and one journal notebook was lost in the mail—to offer the participants the real sense of a support network that I had hoped it would create.5 But it provided me with an important insight into what kinds of issues mattered to my participants, since which topics to discuss and whether to respond to someone else’s entry were entirely up to the students. Finally, toward the end of data collection, I asked each participant to introduce me to the person he or she felt closest to and I interviewed that person. Who that was depended on each participant. With Kikuko, I interviewed her mother; with Sawako, her boyfriend; the two men each introduced me to a few of their closest kikokushijo friends. The purpose of these “confidant interviews,” as I called them, was to get a third person’s perspective on each student. Given the trust I had established with each participant over the years, it was rare for me to get entirely new information from their confidants. Nonetheless, how they interpreted events and actions I had already known sometimes offered quite different perspectives from either mine or the students’, and their perspectives added depth to my understanding of the participants’ multifaceted identities. Analysis Analysis of the data started immediately after the first interview. From the second interview on, data collection and data analysis proceeded in parallel, the two processes increasingly intertwined over time. Each time we met, we went over the previous materials (i.e., interviews, letters, journals) and discussed possible interpretations. I would offer my take on an action or a turn of events and they would confirm, modify, or reject my interpretations, often introducing new stories to illustrate their point. When data collection was completed with each participant, I read his or her data file several times. I then went through all the materials, sorting them according to the themes that emerged in our dialogues. The thematic sorting I carried out was similar to the one described in Lincoln and Guba (1985). I physically cut and pasted a copy of the data file, so that, for example, I would have all the comments Kenji had ever made about ESL on one large sheet of paper, and all his comments on parents on another sheet, and so on. Some themes were common across the participants; others were par5 If I were to do this now, I would definitely use the Internet, but at the time of this study, the technology was still not widely available.

5

FROM MY STORY TO THE STORIES OF OTHER BILINGUALS

23

ticular to each person. For instance, Sawako had planned to become a concert pianist, so her interviews included frequent mention of piano lessons. The theme of piano, then, was important in her story but did not appear in other students’. Thirty to 40 themes were generally sufficient to categorize all the data for each person (Table 1.1). Initially, I was afraid that themes might expand unmanageably, but I discovered that over time one person tends to speak about the same topics repeatedly. That is the nature of our identities: Some things matter to each of us more than others (Taylor, 1989). In addition to identifying prominent themes each individual’s stories, I also sought common patterns in their identity development. It was interesting to observe that all four students broke up their stories into their overseas experience and their return to Japan. Linde (1993) pointed out that we tend to organize our life stories in terms of major events in our lives such as university graduation, first job, marriage, the birth of a child, etc. For the students in this study, going abroad and returning home were two such milestones in their lives. Similarly, there seemed to be a turning point at around 1 1 2 to 2 years after their return. The students spent the first year or so back in Japan readjusting to Japanese society and reestablishing their lives there; it was such a major task that their lives revolved around it. However, after the initial readjustment period, they started to sound more at peace, more in control of their lives. Rather than solely focusing on adjusting themselves to their surroundings, they began to make some choices regarding when to go along, when to say no, and when to insist on their own ways. Accordingly, I divided their narratives into three phases—sojourn, reentry, and reconciliation—and analyzed changes from one phase to another. After I wrote a chapter on each participant, I sent a copy of the draft to them for verification and feedback. Their ways of giving feedback varied widely: They ranged from Sawako’s 14-page, hand-written letter to Kenji’s response posted on his homepage. In addition to providing global comments, they took to writing metacomments on the margins of the text: their present selves commenting on their past selves. I then corrected a few factual errors and incorporated many of their interpretations into the main text and the footnotes. Since this study is about bilingual students, the choice of language of our communication deserves some comment. All our communication except email took place in Japanese, with occasional borrowing of English expressions. The choice of the language had partly to do with the circumstances in which we first met and partly to do with their bilingual proficiency. We had met in the context of a Japanese school as teacher and students of the Japanese language. Even as we later shifted our relationship into that of researcher and participants, we continued to communicate in the language in which our relationship had started in the first place. Also, the students (ex-

24 TABLE 1.1 List of Themes for Each Participant Sawako Exam preparation Multiculturalism Selecting university Life in the U.S. ESL and peers ESL as a system Assimilated Japanese Kikokushijo identity Inferiority complex Pseudonym Piano Hakujin Chutohanpa (or language and identity) Sandy I don’t get along with peers in university Japanese collectivism An unpopular kikokushijo Classes in university Boyfriend Adjustment pattern

Rui

Kikuko

Australia-Japan Japan-Canada To stay in Canada or to go back to Japan Predeparture anxieties Parents “Typical” Japanese Racism among Japanese I’m different from the average Japanese People in hoshuko Baseball team Shakespeare Kokusaijin Kikokushijo images Intellectual stimulation Lack of confidence in being Japanese English/Japanese Canada Sister Violin Architecture

ESL Regular English My English is no good Foreigners/Asians/ Japanese My boyfriend must be Japanese Mother’s influence Mother’s child-rearing Magazines/videos Longing for Japan I like Japanese Selecting university Plans for university I haven’t done things the average Japanese do I may know more than the average Japanese Basically a loner Standard Japanese Junior high school “Brainy” Kikuko Atlanta

Kenji Brother Parents Childhood Elite consciousness Junior high school Japan-Canada English ESL Life in Canada I’m the peace keeper of the family Reasons for returning to Japan Wakon-yosai Kikokushijo identity Attitudes to Canada Integrative motivation Sports Dreams for future Japanese/Japan Racial discrimination Musings before departure Friends in Canada Changes during sojourn

Friends in Toronto Relationship with parents I should have stayed in Toronto one more year English after return Need to keep high marks while abroad Home Friends I really want First friends after return Changes in clothing Discontentment about university Dreams for future This is my problem

Tsukuba University Exam preparation Japanese universities Future plans On returning to Japan Impressions of Japan Anxieties My time Glad to see foreigners Disappointment in university Kikokushijo identity Church English education English as identity symbol Home Life in university Link with outside world Was it a wrong choice? Average students in Tsukuba September starters Reflections on this project New hopes for university Kikokushijo programs ESL Kaede Kobo I’m slacking off I’ve changed

Friends in Atlanta Atlanta-Toronto Hoshuko (Atlanta) Haigers Courses (Toronto) Changes during sojourn Exam preparation Adjustment in university Attitudinal change toward English Kikokushijo images On being Japanese No attachment to place Gaps between ‘can-do’s & ‘can’t-do’s Future direction Kaeru My personality Adjustment in Japan Kwansei Gakuin Differences between Rui/Sawako and me Part-time job Friends in university Club Classes in university Don’t have much money Daily schedule Love experience

Kokusaijin Exam preparation Shonan Fujisawa Campus Golf Club September starters Culture shock SFC is high-tech Courses Job hunting Daily schedule Collective behavior Average students Citizenship I’m not competitive Support toward kikokushijo

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cept Rui) were more proficient in Japanese than in English, which, given that I, too, am a native speaker of Japanese, made it more natural for us to converse in Japanese. In the case of Rui, although his English was as good as and possibly better than his Japanese, he resolutely refused to speak English with native speakers of Japanese around him for reasons of identity (see chapter 5). For these reasons, although some colleagues suggested that I change languages occasionally to determine whether the students would respond differently, we found such an arbitrary shift of language impossible. To do so would have affected our identities and changed the nature of our relationship. All the quotes of the students that appear in this book are, unless otherwise noted, my translations, which have been checked by the participants. For readers interested in what the students actually sounded like, the original Japanese quotations can be found in the appendix.

C H A P T E R

2 Sawako’s Story N

I remember some ethnographer saying that sometimes an informant simply “turns up” on your doorstep at the right time. Sawako was such a participant for me. I did not get to know her very well when she was my student at hoshuko. She left after one term, going back to Japan permanently in the summer. What little I learned about her during those 3 months intrigued me. She was not a particularly studious student, always more interested in socializing with her classmates. But the essays she wrote in my class, which all but ignored conventional differences between the spoken and the written forms in Japanese and sounded exactly like she spoke, were always full of raw feelings, expressing anxieties about herself, her relationship with her parents, and her future. It is not rare for a teacher to receive confiding essays from teenage students, but hers were unique. She always sounded very dramatic, as if the whole world were coming down on her. At the same time, she had a power of observation and a knack of telling good stories, so that I could understand why life seemed so tempestuous to this 17-year-old girl. Later, as my plans for this project matured, it occurred to me to contact her and invite her to participate in the study. But I did not have her address in Japan; besides, I thought she must have forgotten about me altogether. She was out of my reach. Then one Saturday afternoon the following February, she casually walked into my class as if she had never left. I said, “Hey! What are you doing in here?!” She giggled and told me that she had been accepted by a university in Japan and that as it was not going to start until April, she came back to visit her parents, who were still in Toronto. At that time, participant selection was very much on my mind. Although I had already decided to 27

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ask Rui, Kikuko, and Kenji, I had little clue about a fourth one. The fact that Sawako, whom I had always liked but had never had enough time to get to know properly, appeared in front of me then and there seemed like a sign from above, and my inner voice was shouting, “I’ve got to have this girl!” It was like a teenager falling in love. I started to talk about my research and asked timidly, “Would you be at all interested in joining the project?” The following comes from my journal that day: She immediately said, “Sure!” I almost had to dissuade her from taking it so lightly. I explained that it would be quite demanding on her part, that it was not just a one-shot interview but something that was going to take two years. My threat did not deter her. She was very enthusiastic. She said, “Let’s make a book!” even before I finished my explanation. By then I knew that I had found someone I could work with (Field notes, February, 29, 1992).

Thus started my relationship with Sawako, the first participant in this study. ———————— Sawako left Japan when she was seven, when her father, who worked for a large Japanese corporation, was transferred to its Los Angeles branch. Sawako had a good start in Los Angeles because her Grade 3 teacher was a sympathetic Japanese-American. Mrs. Sato took it upon herself to teach English to this newcomer while making sure that she would not be isolated in a predominantly white classroom. Because the teacher was nice to her, so were other children: “All my classmates were really kind to me, these hakujin (white) kids. When I couldn’t take notes, they would say, ‘Sawako, are you OK?’ and lend me their notes.” By the end of 2 years, Sawako’s American life was in full bloom. An athletic girl, she participated in various sports events in school and won many medals. By then she was no longer Sawako but Sandy. Her English became increasingly fluent, her Japanese increasingly shaky. English began to replace Japanese in her conversation with her younger brother, Shota. “Had I stayed there,” she mused, “I would have become like a Japanese-American.” She probably would not have minded had she become a JapaneseAmerican. When she talked about her Los Angeles days, she did so with a hint of nostalgia. But her parents had a different agenda in mind: They needed to make sure that their children kept sufficient ties with the Japanese language and culture so that they would be able to go back to Japan when the time came. It was all very well for Sawako and Shota to learn an American way of life, but they were temporary sojourners destined to return to their home country one day. A rapid deterioration of their Japanese, especially the younger Shota’s, concerned the parents and eventually led

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them to intervene. When the family moved to Chicago after 3 years, the parents sent both children to a nihonjingakko (full-time Japanese school). Nihonjingakko are full-time Japanese schools set up in countries outside of Japan for the education of expatriate students. They follow the same curricula as those in Japan. Theoretically, a fifth-grader who has moved from a school in Tokyo to a nihonjingakko in New York can continue with his or her studies using the same textbooks with little need for adjustment. Most nihonjingakko place a strong emphasis on keeping their students academically current, so that when they return to Japan they will be able to compete with other students on an equal footing (Kaigaishijo Kyoikushi Hensan Iinkai, 1991). Because of this specialized focus, as a rule only those who plan to return to Japan one day attend nihonjingakko (Goodman, 1990; Okada, 1993). Okada (1993) observed that the children who attend nihonjingakko have very little contact with host nationals. They usually travel a long distance by school bus and do not get home until late in the afternoon. Many of them have after school commitments such as cram schools, piano lessons (with a Japanese instructor), kendo, or shodo (Chinese calligraphy) that leave them little time to go out and play with other children in the neighborhood. Horigome (1989, as cited in Kaigaishijo Kyoikushi Hensan Iinkai, 1991, p. 129) observed that for those expatriate children who transfer from a local school to a nihonjingakko, their conversational skills in the host language tend to decline the longer they spend in nihonjingakko. Sawako remembered being much more fluent in English and having more contact with Americans than most students in the Chicago nihonjingakko. She was taking intensive piano lessons to become a concert pianist at that time, as I describe shortly, and these lessons, together with some contact with neighbors, TV, and magazines, kept her from being totally isolated from the local community. Nonetheless, attending the nihonjingakko significantly reduced her use of English. She no longer had to use English to communicate with friends. She said that while her Japanese improved dramatically during the 2 years in Chicago, her English came to a standstill, never developing any further than the level it had reached in Los Angeles. Sawako returned to Japan when she was 12. ———————— I have never had an opportunity to hear her play, but Sawako is apparently an accomplished pianist. Her father, a successful and busy corporate executive, was a devout fan of Western classical music and an amateur violinist. He dreamed of having at least one of his two children become a professional musician. His son, Shota, would have none of his father’s music fantasies and traded the assigned cello for a basketball at the earliest opportunity possible. But Sawako showed interest and early signs of promise—her teachers assured them that she was talented. She started her lessons when

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she was three; she continued to feed her father’s dream for the next 12 years. Her music training remained undisturbed even as the family moved from Kyoto to Los Angeles to Chicago and back to Kyoto. No matter where they were, her parents found top-notch instructors. After she returned to Japan at age 12, with private lessons with a famous music professor and history and theory classes, piano became a full-time commitment. Everything else had to be pushed aside for the sake of her training: School work was barely kept up; outings with friends were grudgingly given up, as were sports, which might hurt her fingers. By then her father had started to talk about sending her to Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku, the most prestigious art and music institute in Japan. She spent an average of 3 to 4 hours in front of the piano every day (“One hour for each piece”), 5 hours before a contest. Sawako hated long practice and lessons (“The day before I went to my teacher’s house, I would get a stomachache”), but if her mind wandered elsewhere her father was there to bring it back to the piano: “He goes, ‘OK, Let’s hear it. From this bar!’ (laugh) I say, ‘Wait, Dad. I can practice by myself. Go away.’ But he said, ‘No, when I was listening to you in the corridor, you played this part a little too fast,’ or ‘Here you need to play it more softly.’ I’m not good with details and my playing is—how shall I put it?—dynamic. So I don’t care if it’s piano or forte, I just want to finish. When I am not concentrating like that, he catches it. ‘Your heart wasn’t in it now, was it?’ (laugh).” Contests were even worse. Sawako started to compete when she was eight. But the more she competed with other aspiring pianists, the less confident she became. Far more talented people were out there trying to outshine one another. She just was not in their league. But the weight of her parents’ expectations was enormous: “My parents expected too much of me. [At a contest site] I would see somebody who could play better than me and think to myself, ‘No way I can beat her!’ But my parents were like, ‘Good luck with you, Sawako-chan. You’ll do just fine! We believe in you!’ (laugh).” “I don’t think I disliked it,” said Sawako of playing the piano. “Actually, I sort of liked it.” But “sort of liking it” was not an enough drive for a young woman to devote herself to such a competitive and all-consuming career, especially when she was not even sure of her talents. She was also going through her rebellious stage in her life. The question, “This is my life. Why should my parents dictate it?” loomed large in her mind. Thus, one day she declared to her parents, “I am going to quit the piano and if you don’t let me, I’m leaving home.” She was 14 with only one more year to go before she was scheduled to take the entrance exam of a highly competitive music high school in Kyoto. Sawako remembered seeing her father looking very sad, which surprised her: She was expecting a temper tantrum. It in fact

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31

made her feel guiltier, but stubborn girl that she was, there was no taking back her words. At one level, her act was a volcanic eruption of a teenager’s long-standing resentment toward her powerful father. But at another level, I also recognize an act of self-protection based on cautious and sober thinking. If she passed the entrance exam of this music school, she would be one step closer to Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku. She grew up hearing her parents preach the importance of entering a prestigious university for a woman, for otherwise “she will not be able to land a job with a good company or marry into a good family.” But her talent did not convince her that she would be able to get into the high school. “What if I failed this piano school? I wasn’t studying at all; which high school would I get into? I didn’t want to go to a belowaverage school—never.” Quitting the piano left her with only a year to change her career plan and get ready for the entrance exams of regular academic high schools. After some research, she and her parents discovered that she was in fact eligible for the kikokushijo entrance exam of a reputable private school in the vicinity. Many high schools allow kikokushijo to take a separate entrance exam from regular students up to 3 years after reentry. But then she faced a difficult choice: The school offered two types of exams to kikokushijo: one an essay written in English, the other an exam of five core subjects (Japanese, English, mathematics, social studies, and science) in Japanese. Sawako was initially more inclined to write the Japanese exam, but when she tried the past exam questions she found them too difficult. Just one month before the actual exam, she decided to switch to the English exam, only to discover how much English she had forgotten over the years. The result was a disaster: “When I finished writing the exam, I knew I had failed.” When she related her experience of the entrance exam, the word she used to describe herself was chutohampa, or its shortened form hampa. Chutohampa is a difficult phrase to translate into English. It means, roughly, half-baked or half-way. It describes the state of being caught between two things and being unable to be one or the other properly or fully. The word has a negative connotation. “Whichever way I turned [i.e., the English and Japanese exams], they were equally difficult. The biggest shock of my Grade 9 year was, Why can’t I do either?” said Sawako. “You want to be one way or the other. If both your English and Japanese are chutohampa, you get into trouble at the kikokushijo entrance exam. It’s usually either Japanese essay writing or an English test. If you go abroad in Grade 10 for the first time in your life, you are a typical Japanese and your Japanese is perfect, but your English is a bit [weak]. So you can focus on the [Japanese] essay writing. On the other hand, if you’ve been here [Canada] for a long time, your Japanese is weak but your can speak English. Chutohampa people can’t do either. You want to be one way or the other, living abroad for an extremely long time, or an extremely short time. You want to be one way or the other.”

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Rejected by the school of her first choice, she had to settle for a second choice. But just when she thought her chance of getting into a top university was gone—for going to a “second-rate” high school almost always meant going to a “second-rate” college in Japan—the news of another overseas assignment for her father arrived. It occurred to her that she would probably stand a better chance of getting into a good university if she accompanied her parents and came back 2 years later to take the kikokushijo entrance exam rather than staying in her current school. There is a widespread perception among high school students and their parents that the kikokushijo versions of the entrance exams of competitive universities are generally easier than the regular kind. Sawako left Japan again at age 15 after finishing one term of high school. ———————— Sawako came to Toronto in the summer of 1989 with a definite agenda in mind: to finish the rest of high school in 2 years, so that she would not lag behind her peers in Japan. A majority of kikokushijo returning from North America enter university a year later than domestic students, at age 19. Because of the difference in the academic year between North America and Japan (school starts in April and ends in March in Japan), by the time they finish high school in North America in June and come back to Japan, university has already started and they have to wait until the following April. But Sawako was reluctant to be a year behind. Even on the other side of the globe, her sense of competition with others back in Japan was alive. Years of training to outshine others die hard. To be a year behind her age mates was to lose in the competition, and that she could not allow herself. She did enjoy life in Toronto. When you are 15, it is hard not to be wholly occupied by the here and now. My image of Sawako from hoshuko is her always chatting with her friends—before, during, and after class. She had a troop of friends, both male and female, and I remember seeing them getting into cars and heading off somewhere in search of fun after school on Saturday afternoon. When Sawako was no longer my student and therefore had no more worry about getting a lecture from me, she revealed to me what she and her peers were up to those days: “The day before we go out, I get about five phone calls from various people, which is real fun. It’s usually ‘Who’s gonna drive?’ and ‘Where shall we go?’ type of thing. Usually Jun, Kazu, and Masa [all male students] decide where we are going without consulting us girls. We tend to go out after hoshuko, because it is the easiest time for all of us to get together. But we girls don’t know where we are going and are usually dragged to billiards because Jun is crazy about it. Girls just watch bored stiff while guys play pool. Then we go straight to Masa’s house afterwards and play ping-pong and mah-jongg till late at night (laugh). It’s like that

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when we go out after hoshuko. On weekdays after school, sometimes somebody would say, ‘Let’s go out,’ and then a bunch of us Japanese get together and go bowling.” Sometimes her attention drifted so much to play that her mother had to bring her back to her original plan of returning one year earlier than her peers: “ ‘Everyone else is going back next year, but you are going this year,’ [my mother] would tell me. ‘You went to the school office [to notify them] yourself. So discipline yourself and get back to your studies.’ ” Understandable as her mother’s concern was, it was Sawako’s relationship with her Japanese peers at hoshuko that gave her a sense of belonging. Church (1982) noted the importance of compatriot groups for individual sojourners. Such groups, he noted: allow the sojourner to reestablish primary group relations and maintain familiar, traditional values, and belief systems while minimizing psychological and behavioral adjustments. A protective function is served whereby psychological security, self-esteem, and a sense of belonging are provided, and anxiety, feelings of powerlessness, and social stresses are reduced. Such enclaves also serve as reference groups with whom the new environment can be discussed, compared and interpreted. (pp. 552–553)

For Sawako, her Japanese peers constituted an important community, bonded by shared identities. They knew that the experiences they were going through were unique, something that could not be totally shared with either Canadian students or Japanese students in Japan. They and they alone knew what it meant to be living in Canada at this point in their lives. In the circle of their friendship, Sawako felt at home. ———————— Being a teacher at hoshuko, I had a good grasp of the students’ academic performance in Japanese and their social life there. What I could not see was their life in Canadian schools. Conversations with my students sometimes gave me a glimpse of this aspect of their lives, but the scattered bits of information left me with more questions than answers. Since Sawako was my first participant, I began with her to explore this vast territory still largely unknown to me. I was curious: What was she like in the Canadian context? Given her popularity at hoshuko, I assumed that she was also a popular figure in her Canadian school. And indeed why shouldn’t she be popular there? She was friendly and gregarious; she had had a previous experience with North American schools; she was dressed like any Canadian teenagers. I had the image of Sawako surrounded by friends everywhere she went. Sawako told me that she, too, expected to make many Canadian friends and to blend seamlessly into the local Canadian school when she first ar-

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rived. The image of Los Angeles days was still vivid on her mind and led her to believe that her new life in Toronto would be much the same. She readopted her English name Sandy to use in her new school. That was a start. She would pick up her “Japanese-American” story once again, or would it be a “Japanese-Canadian” story this time? At any rate, she thought, she would be cracking jokes with her Canadian peers in no time at all. But first, something had to be done with her rusty English. Upon consultation with the head of ESL in her new school, she decided to try its ESL program until she regained her facility with the language. That was, she said, a big mistake: “I thought I’d try ESL only for a short time, because I had forgotten English during the 3 years I was in Japan. But once I was in it, it was too late. The Japanese are really cliquey there and I couldn’t get out; I got trapped.” Her new school had a number of ESL students, many of whom were Asian, and an extensive ESL system to accommodate them. Not only was ESL English available in Grades 10, 11, and 12 but so were a host of other ESL subject area courses such as history, geography, and Spanish. Mathematics and sciences were not offered as ESL courses because “Asians are better at them,” said Sawako. In theory, ESL students were supposed to be able to move readily from the ESL program to the regular program and vice versa, depending on their needs and English development. The ESL curriculum guidelines published by the Ontario Ministry of Education (1998) stated that “It is essential that initial placement of all students be tentative, with change readily available” (p. 13, emphasis added). That, however, was not what Sawako found. It appeared to her that the whole school community was divided in two, with English-speaking students taking regular (i.e., non-ESL) courses and ESL students taking ESL courses. “Only a short time” was extended to a full year and dragged into the second year. By then she had lost her motivation to move on to the regular program. Some subjects were offered only as regular courses, but whenever available, Sawako opted for ESL courses. Sawako had her own agenda in staying in the ESL program: She felt compelled to earn as high marks as possible for her future university entry. Marks from host schools weigh significantly in kikokushijo’s admission to Japanese universities. “Japanese parents tell their children, ‘You don’t have to take difficult courses; just make sure you keep your grade average high,’ ” said Sawako. “So the children go for the courses they think they can score good marks for. For instance, if I took Regular English, I would get something like 60. In that case I might as well take ESL English and get 80 something. I wanted to venture into Regular English and experience the real English class. But I was too afraid to do it. I wish I had.” Socially, it was much easier to become acquainted with Japanese than any other students. Adults played a large part in setting a climate for this. ESL teachers, Sawako said, usually introduced Japanese newcomers to

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some of the old Japanese students in an effort to facilitate their induction into the new school. At home, parents encouraged children to meet the similar-age children of their Japanese business associates by taking them out for a dinner together or arranging their meetings. Once you get to know a Japanese student that way, Sawako said, then she will introduce you to her Japanese friends, who in turn will introduce you to their Japanese friends and so on. The result is that you become more and more involved in the Japanese community with less and less contact with people from any other ethnic groups. But it was above all the chasm between ESL and regular students that kept her in the ESL program. Because she was eager to join the school’s “mainstream” community, she was highly sensitive to the way the regular students behaved toward the ESL students: the absence of applause when ESL students did a presentation; the annoyed look on a Canadian student’s face when Sawako, not understanding the teacher’s question, asked her to share her notes; a clear demarcation of territories in the cafeteria according to ethnicity (“Chinese table, Japanese table”). These signs were small and insignificant in themselves, but when combined, they sent a powerful message to Sawako that “English-speaking people think they are the best.” The message was not only received but internalized, for Sawako found it impossible to deal with English-speaking students on equal ground: “[In a class where both English-speaking and ESL students are present] you understand the content of the class, but when you have to find a partner and do some group work together, you can’t get into a group actively. You are too embarrassed to find a partner. You feel like you are going to be a burden on your partner, so you don’t ask them; you wait for them to ask you.” The following story represents, in an extreme form, the kind of chasm and hostility between the English-speaking students and the ESL students that Sawako experienced: “Some time in my first year I had a quarrel with my science teacher and ended up doing an experiment by myself during the lunch hour. I was in the lab and a Canadian student came and knocked on the door. I didn’t let her in because the teacher allowed me to use the room on the condition that I didn’t let anyone else in. So I told her she couldn’t get in. . . . But she sneaked in from the backdoor, which wasn’t locked. And then she shouted at me, ‘What are you thinking? Are you deaf or ESL!?’ . . . It made me feel like being an ESL student was some kind of a handicap. It really shocked me. . . . But then I later told one of my Chinese friends about it, and his response was, ‘Oh just ignore them. You know, we hate Canadians; Canadians hate us, too.’ ” (Kanno & Applebaum, 1995, p. 43). As her Chinese friend’s words indicate, some of the ESL students were content to remain with their ESL peers. In fact, a majority of them were, Sawako said; she was the exception. Although she had no complaints about individual students she made friends with in the ESL classes—apart from

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the Japanese, she became close to some of the Chinese students there—she nonetheless regarded them as second-rate citizens who had no place, no say in their adopted society. Associating with them, she believed, would only reinforce her own marginality. She said, “As long as I hang out with ESL students, I feel like I don’t get to know life here, like I am not interacting with people who belong here. . . . My English doesn’t improve either. I feel like I’m not recognized as a Canadian, I mean, as one of them. It feels chutohampa . . . I feel like Canadians consider me a hampa human being just because I’m an ESL student.” Curriculum guidelines and technical reports like to discuss ESL programs and ESL students stripped of social contexts where questions such as “Who owns the language?” and “Why are some students considered more centrally situated than others?” come in (see Ontario Ministry of Education, 1988; Toronto Board of Education, 1988, for examples of value-free, context-free discussions of ESL programs). ESL students who are in the real school setting, however, cannot avoid such questions, and each of them works out his or her own answers to them. From Sawako’s point of view, whether or not one arrived in a new school already equipped with full English proficiency determined one’s place in the community: If you did, you were bound for the center; if you didn’t, you were forever on the margins. Clearly, English was the key: “I don’t know anybody who is Canadianized without speaking the language,” she said. Furthermore, a closer look at her narrative reveals that race, so inextricably intertwined with language as to be almost indistinguishable, also played a subtle but important role in her world. She consistently referred to the students in the regular program as hakujin, or whites. That is, anyone who spoke native or native-like English was a hakujin to her, whether they be English Canadians, Black, Chinese, or even Japanese. At the core of this group were Anglo-Saxon Canadians, who owned the language and culture of Canadian society. All the rest were allowed in by virtue of their cultural and linguistic proximity to them. There was little in her experience to illuminate the image of Canada, the cultural mosaic.1 As a Japanese who wanted to, but could not, cross the fence over to the hakujin side, Sawako was particularly bitter about Japanese immigrants in her school who were fluent in English and therefore could side with hakujin. “In my Canadian school there is a Japanese girl who came here when she was in Grade 2. She is fluent in Japanese but she refuses to speak with other Japanese in school. She is always hanging out with hakujin . . . and you

1

After reading a draft of this chapter Sawako commented, “I did say hakujin a lot in this project, didn’t I. I think this term emerged out of my disappointment that I could not be anything but a minority and had no way of approaching the hakujin people who lived in a different world (because I was in ESL). So it is not exactly the same as ‘Canadians.’ ” (January 1995) 1

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know, she is Japanese, and yet when she passes by with other hakujin in the hallway, she looks at us, like, ‘What are you Japanese doing here all together?’ I feel like telling her, ‘You too are Japanese, remember!’ ” I imagine that Sawako was particularly hostile to this girl because she saw many of her “possible selves” (Markus & Nurius, 1986) in her: the Sawako who could have learned to speak fluent English; the Sawako who could have been socializing with her hakujin friends; the Sawako who could have been looking down on other “cliquey” Japanese with disdain. These “could have”s were not entirely impossible to imagine because in the United States, she had been on a path to assimilation herself. At that time her parents intervened and put her on a different path, but had she continued to walk on that path, chances were she would have become this immigrant girl. This girl bothered Sawako because she was living out the story that should have been Sawako’s.2 In the end, her sojourn in Toronto turned out to be very different from her earlier sojourn in Los Angeles. In a way this was hardly surprising, as her Toronto sojourn was considerably more complex, involving three distinct facets of life, each demanding her attention. Although she wanted to keep her allegiance to her Japanese peers, she also aspired to participate fully in Canadian society and gain what she thought was her due recognition in it. While juggling these two strands of life in Canada, she also had to plan ahead for her impending return to Japan. Although this triple life was common to all my participants during their sojourn, Sawako was particularly torn by the pull in three directions. Trying to live three lives all at once, she found herself being chutohampa instead, unable to commit herself to any one of them. In particular, the failure to enter the Canadian mainstream left her feeling inadequate. All the while, her mind kept going back to the good old life in Los Angeles, where she could be just one thing and concentrate on the “here and now.” ———————— When I first described this project to Sawako, drawing on my own experience of returning to Japan after a lengthy sojourn abroad, I told her that for me the most difficult thing about readjustment was making new friends, whereas I had no problem coping with academic work. Sawako remembered this, and just before leaving Canada, she said, “But for me, relationships will be no problem; academic work is what worries me.” Overall, however, she had a fairly optimistic outlook for her new life back in Japan. She 2 Sawako comments, “One comment of yours that really hit the mark was about this girl called Seiko. I hated her, and yet I wanted to be friends with her and was envious of her, to tell you the truth. I don’t think she even knew me. I did wonder, though, why she refused to speak to other Japanese. Really, in that sense I thought she was a bitch. But it is also true that I thought if I had lived in the States, I would have become like that.”

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commented that she was proud to be a kikokushijo and that sharing her kikokushijo stories would be a good way to make friends with people she would meet in university. The first task she had to face after returning to Japan was to find a university to spend the next 4 years in, a task that involved proving her academic competence, an area in which she was not confident. Seven days after landing in Japan, barely out of jet lag, she started to attend a cram school that specialized in kikokushijo entrance exams. Meanwhile, she had to decide which universities to apply to. She was not yet sure what she wanted to study. She had a vague interest in psychology and also liked writing fiction and poetry, but neither had yet led to a clear direction. One thing she knew was that she wanted to get into as good a university as possible using the kikokushijo entrance exam. After all, that was part of the original plan when she left for Canada. She also felt that she owed it to her parents to enter a good university: “I thought that if I failed the entrance exam, that would be so undutiful (oyafuko) of me to my parents. I had already quit the piano, and now if I failed university too, I’d practically shatter all their hopes.” Her choice of universities was thus dictated by three criteria: (a) their physical proximity to her grandmother’s house (the rest of her family were still in Canada and she moved in with her grandmother in Kyoto); (b) their academic ranking; and (c) the availability of the kikokushijo entrance exam. She chose four universities according to these criteria and then picked a major out of the limited selection each university offered to kikokushijo.3 The result was an eclectic collection of subject areas: international relations in Ritsumeikan University; English literature in Kwansei Gakuin and Kobe Jogakuin; and management in Kobe University. When, much to her own surprise, she passed the exams of all four universities she applied to, it did not take a long time for her to decide on Kobe University. The fact that it was the highest ranking university of the four she applied to was enough for her and the people around her to decide immediately that she would be attending Kobe from the following spring. “That was the only reason why [I chose Kobe University]. . . . If I said ‘I want to go to Kobe Jogakuin,’ for instance, they wouldn’t let me, would they? My father would say, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ and that would be the end of the discussion.” Besides, it was the university her father graduated from. What would be a better way of making up for her past disloyalty than gaining admission to his alma mater? Her parents were delighted: “I have a such a good daughter!” her usually calm father exclaimed, she later told me. In a society where the identity of young adults is closely tied with the name of the school they attend, Sawako’s entry into Kobe University was 3 Within a given university, only a selected number of departments and faculties have quotas for kikokushijo candidates.

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something many people would look at with much admiration and a touch of jealousy. She used the kikokushijo special quota system to her advantage and was admitted into a prestigious national university perhaps beyond her academic abilities, fully meeting her parents’ expectations. It is this kind of scenario that made Goodman (1990) argue that kikokushijo are being given preferential treatment and groomed as “Japan’s new international elite” (p. 229). Sawako herself thought that once she entered university everything would be fine. However, what happened to her after she entered university points to the problem of evaluating the adequacy of kikokushijo education, as Goodman did, solely on the basis of the number of schools that admit kikokushijo students. Somewhere in the process of a desperate search for a place to fit them into, the quality of education and experience after they are admitted to school is lost on parents, students, and researchers alike. There is no question that Sawako enjoyed the prestige of being a Kobe University student: The surprised look on people’s face when she told them the name of the university she attended and comments such as “So you go to Kobe U.? You must be really smart,” tickled her ego. But inside the university she felt increasingly out of place. For the first time since she returned to Japan, she met students who had gone through Japan’s examination war and had come out as winners. The depth and breath of their knowledge made her feel as if she had sneaked into a place she did not belong: “I have an inferiority complex toward those students who got into Kobe University through the serious entrance exam. But I’d rather die than let them know that. So when a friend annoys me by saying, ‘But you got in through the kikokushijo entrance exam. You had it easy, didn’t you,’ I make a point of saying, ‘Yeah, but being a kikokushijo isn’t that easy, and our exam was difficult, too, you know,’ emphasizing how hard it was. . . . But we kikokushijo all know in our heart of hearts that compared with the regular entrance exam, the kikokushijo version is bogus.” The difference between her as a kikokushijo and other students, she said, was that they had a solid foundation (dodai) for learning from years of austere training that she lacked: “In math, for example, we learn new things in university but everybody says it’s a continuation of what they did in high school. The same for geography; they tell me it is so similar to the high school stuff that a little bit of studying before the exam makes them remember everything. . . . Even the classes that have nothing to do with what you studied in high school, you need a foundation. I envy people for having that foundation.” Another difference concerned Japanese literacy. In a top-ranking university such as Kobe, in a nation with a highly centralized education system, the average literacy level of students is extremely high with relatively little variance. Sawako found that what seemed to her to be highly specialized

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words and expressions floated around both inside and outside of the class, shared and taken for granted among professors and students. For instance, if someone made a joke using one of the four-character Chinese proverbs they learned in high school, Sawako would be the only one who did not get it. In class, she might already know the concepts that were introduced, but she would have to rememorize all the labels in Japanese, plus how to write them in kanji (Chinese characters). To be fair to Kobe University, Sawako was by no means the most diligent student on campus. She skipped one too many classes and spent more time socializing than studying. Also, she tended to use her kikokushijo identity as an excuse for her academic problems: Many subjects were beyond her “because I am a kikokushijo”; she was not as good at memorizing things as other students “because I am a kikokushijo.” It is probably true, however, that she lacked sufficient academic language proficiency in Japanese to cope with the academic standards in Kobe University and would have benefited from extra support in this area. As I have mentioned, Sawako was not so worried about making new friends in university as she was about her scholastic performance. And indeed, the snippets of news I received from her after she entered university suggested the beginning of an excellent social life. She joined one of the university’s rock band clubs as a keyboard player, changing her repertoire from Chopin to Bon Jovi. She was delighted to find that many of the club members defied her preconception of Kobe U. students as “geeks who had done nothing but studying until they got into university.” They donned ripped jeans, spiked boots, black leather jackets, and had long blond hair— very heavy metal. “People who are smart and yet rebellious” was how she described them. They in turn seemed very positive about her kikokushijo background. They took to calling her “Kanada-jin (Canadian)” and sought her advice on the pronunciation of some of the English words that appeared in their repertoire. All this promising news made me think: Oh good, maybe by the end of it all she will come out of her readjustment saying, “Interpersonal problems? What interpersonal problems?” Differences began to surface in the summer, however. The leader of one of the bands in which she was a principal member told her that the kind of music they were playing did not need a keyboard player: an indirect way of telling her to leave. Numerous conflicts ensued, in which Sawako was accused of being too self-centered, too direct, too childish, and of being ignorant of the “Japanese common sense (nihon no joshiki).” Many things were apparently included in the “Japanese common sense,” although they were never clearly spelled out. She learned the hard way what counted as social faux pas. The club members, who initially appeared appreciative of her kikokushijo identity, rapidly grew intolerant of it. Any stories of her experience in

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Canada or mixing of English words in her Japanese irritated them. One day, she casually said to one of them who was just about to park his car, “Are you going to parallel-park (parallel-park suruno)?” using the English word parallel-park because she did not know the equivalent word in Japanese. This provoked the people who were in the car: “What are you using English for? Say it in Japanese. Show-off (kakko-tsukenna yo)!” The accusation “show-off” is an interesting one because it reveals their perception of her action. Many people show intolerance to a foreign or minority language being spoken in what they consider their territory. But Sawako’s use of English was doubly irritating to her peers because it was not just any foreign language but a foreign language that they wished they could speak. The knowledge of English is deemed valuable in Japan, which gives many kikokushijo an edge. For Sawako’s peers, to acknowledge her English proficiency was to acknowledge the existence of a place where she would hold power and control over them. It was a territory they would rather not enter. Had she spoken a less socially valued non-European language, say Vietnamese or Swahili, they might not have been so threatened. They might have derided her but not accused her of showing off. Another area of contention involved her refusal to use honorific expressions (keigo) with senior members of the club. In Japanese schools, seniority plays a large part in determining students’ behavior with one another. Junior students (kohai) are supposed to pay respect to senior students (senpai), employing honorific expressions, which are extensive in Japanese, and humble postures. The senpai–kohai ranking is relative: A second-year student in high school, for instance, would wave casually at her first-year kohai, who bows to her profusely, but when she meets her third-year senpai, it would be her turn to bow. Such a practice starts as early as in elementary school and is particularly stressed in activity clubs. In spite of ripped jeans and blond ponytails that suggested an antiestablishment spirit, Sawako’s club members were very conservative when it came to maintaining order in their community. They took the senpai–kohai relationship at face value. Sawako, with her North American upbringing, was less prepared to do so. “I didn’t use keigo when I was speaking to senpai. They are not that much older than me anyway and I didn’t want to use keigo in Japan, either. So I spoke to them casually. Then one day, one senpai, one of the nicer ones, said to me, ‘You know, some of your senpai are saying, “Who is that stuck-up first-year kid who doesn’t use keigo?” I think you better fix your attitude, for your own sake.’ So ever since then, I’ve been trying to use it a bit.” There was one club member, called Yuji, who was sympathetic to her way of thinking. But his behavior confused her as much as comforted her. In private he would eagerly listen to her side of the story and tell her, “You are not wrong”; in the presence of other club members, he would not stand

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by her. His rationale was that although he agreed with her point of view, he also wanted to get along with other club members; the act of taking her side would make him stand out, along with her, in the group. This kind of group orientation, which was typical of all the other club members, Sawako found hard to take. “If one person speaks ill of you, then the whole group will start looking at you negatively,” she said. “Getting along with others is important here; it’s a strange world, Japan.” Sawako’s sense of alienation was such that when I met her in December of that year (1992), she said, almost on the verge of tears, “Nobody would care if I disappeared.” She was caught in a moral dilemma: If she tried to be true to what she believed was her authentic self, the result would be isolation; if she withheld her objection to the kinds of community practices that went against her beliefs, she would not be accountable to herself. Craving for recognition, she seemed to lean toward the second option, which caused internal conflict: “It doesn’t feel like me at all and I feel really miserable (nasakenai). Many times I’ve felt like quitting university.” She looked decisively smaller than I had remembered. If this was what returning “home” did to a person, I thought, it was very cruel. “I feel I’m chutohampa. I mean, some kikokushijo are better at Japanese and others are better at English, right? But I feel, for me, both languages are hampa. I find it difficult to read a Japanese newspaper, especially when there are difficult words, but there are lots of words I don’t know in English papers, too (laugh). And that makes me wonder what nationality I am (jibun wa nanijin nano). It’s hard not to be able to master one or the other.” A recurring theme emerges in her story: a sense of alienation deriving from an insufficient acquisition of a language, whether it be English or Japanese. Having gone through a similar experience twice, she seemed utterly convinced that in order to be accepted as a full member of a language community, one must have native-like proficiency in the language of the community. When I further probed the issue of nationality and asked her what nationality she would name for herself if she had to, she answered that it would definitely be Japanese because she was more dominant in Japanese than in English. But she added that she would still call herself “a strange Japanese (hen na nihonjin)” because her Japanese was not complete. It is one thing not to fit into a foreign country, but it is quite another to find yourself a stranger in what you consider to be your home ground. ———————— Through this period of isolation, one solace Sawako had was her boyfriend. Atsuto was her classmate in hoshuko in Toronto, which incidentally makes him another one of my students. They started dating when she returned to Toronto for a month, after she passed the entrance exam of Kobe University. Their classmates and I all believed that their relationship was doomed:

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Sawako was going to a university in Kobe from that April, whereas Atsuto, returning to Japan one year later than she, was going to remain in Toronto until June and then move to Tokyo, 365 miles from Kobe. But their relationship proved far more resilient than any of us had predicted. With daily phone calls—I have never heard of a phone bill so phenomenal—and occasional visits, Atsuto remained her true confidant, the only ally she trusted unconditionally during her intense solitude. For Sawako, Atsuto was in a totally different league from all her university peers because he was part of her Toronto kikokushijo community. While she could fit into neither the genuinely Western nor the genuinely Japanese context, she felt at home in the place in-between, the kikokushijo community. In her life story, it was such kikokushijo communities that offered her an oasis: Chicago nihonjingakko, Toronto hoshuko, and kikokushijo cram school. In those places, she could project the sunny side of herself, which she wanted to believe as her true self, rather than the socially maladroit, often depressed character she seemed to be cast into recently. Atsuto was special because he shared her culture and her experience and he knew her the way she wanted herself to be known. There was one problem. After their relationship started, Atsuto took the kikokushijo entrance exams of several universities and failed all but one of them. Dokan University, a private university in Kyoto, to which he was admitted, ranked several levels below Kobe. It is what Sawako might describe as an “average” university. Sawako’s parents disapproved of their relationship, which irritated her immensely. But Sawako herself felt not an insignificant amount of insecurity about Atsuto’s ability to support his future family, in which she had quickly come to include herself in her imagination. She had little career aspiration herself. She was going to find a job on graduation like everyone else, but eventually she wanted to “stay home” and “stay behind a man (otoko o tatetai),” which meant that her future family’s standard of living would depend on her husband’s earning power. On the one hand, she loved Atsuto’s sincerity and quiet thoughtfulness and believed, despite his failure with entrance exams, that he was far smarter than she—a major attraction for her. On the other hand, part of her reluctantly agreed with her parents when they said that he would never make a corporate executive. Of course, one’s success in a Japanese company involves far more than the name of one’s university, although it is undeniably important. But Sawako had a tendency to think in extreme, dramatic terms. In her mind, going to Dokan University meant no hope for the future. Life in a cramped apartment, scraping every yen, a husband with a dead-end job . . . she was not sure if she liked the idea. Why doesn’t life live up to the perfect scenario? You get yourself in a frenzy of entering a prestigious university only to find yourself a black sheep there; you meet someone and fall in love but he can’t give you the kind of security your parents promised you. Up until

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university, success in Sawako’s world was epitomized by her father, whom she once described as a “working man (hataraku otoko) with his feet solidly on the ground,” and she had gone out of her way to live up to his vision of success and achievement. But working herself up on his success ladder did not seem to bring her happiness. The discrepancy between the story that was supposed to be, and the story that was, forced her to reexamine the whole point of seeking success the way someone else defined it. Sawako’s struggle against her parents’ values was a sign of a new identity emerging, one that was her own, separate from that of her parents. True, she was still formulating her thoughts as a reaction against the standards set forth by her parents and had not come to define standards of her own. Still, compared with a year before, the change was apparent. Sawako used to have a black-and-white way of saying things: “People are like this; this is how it works; I’m this, not that.” She could assert her perspective in such clear-cut terms because she had received it from the person who represented authority in her life. But through her disillusionment with university and her relationship with Atsuto, she came to question many of her own assumptions. She grew more reflective and became more attuned to the grey area between black and white. If nothing else, she seemed to have noticed that what was good for her parents might not necessarily be good for her. ———————— June 1993. Two years after she returned to Japan, 14 months after she entered university, Sawako finally decided to take personal responsibility for the problems she was facing. They were her problems, she said, which no one but she could solve. Looking back on the past difficult year, she said, “I think I’ve always used it [my kikokushijo identity] as a good excuse for evading responsibility. I told myself, ‘It’s not because of my personality I’m having problems; it’s because I’m a kikokushijo.’ ” I knew that many researchers had pointed out the possibility of personal growth as a result of cross-cultural experience (e.g., Adler, 1975; Anderson, 1994; Church, 1982; Meintel, 1973) and my experience certainly had been a source of my growth and better self-knowledge. But when I heard Sawako say this, it was the first time I saw it happening with a participant in this study. I was to encounter many such moments from then on. Two important developments had taken place that contributed to the change in her attitude. One was that she had successfully completed the first academic year, which made another 3 years of studying seem a little more manageable. When I asked her how her studies were going that March, she was unexpectedly optimistic. “I’ve learned that photocopies [of somebody’s lecture notes] will always come around from somewhere eventually. So there’s hope for me yet,” she giggled. “In the first semester I col-

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lected them desperately because nobody [in my club] had them. I thought if I didn’t, nobody was going to get them. . . . But then in the second semester I didn’t do anything, and then other people started to collect notes desperately at the last minute. . . . So the easiest way is not to move till the end (laugh).” On a more serious note, she said, “I’ve learned I can cope with my studies; I’m gaining more confidence in them, too. But still, when I become third or fourth year and get into a difficult specialized area, I might have tough time coping with others. So I have to start reading newspapers now so that I won’t be left behind (laugh).” The other important change was that she had started to locate people who were willing to accept her for who she was. No doubt by then she had also acquired some skills for communicating more smoothly with other Japanese. She went on a trip with other members of her club in February, and five of them became very close. Late night talks and an endless flow of beer helped nurture the bond. For the first time since she returned to Japan, she felt herself truly included. One of them said to her, “But I want people like you who can speak up your mind to be my friends. I’m glad we’ve become friends.” It was the first time that someone directly affirmed her way of being. As she gradually came to terms with her life in Japan, she started to value her kikokushijo identity much more. The label kikokushijo had always been a double-edged sword for her. It set her apart from the “ordinary Japanese” in a way that made her proud, an emblem of a broader vision that comes only with the experience of having lived in different parts of the world. She knew many things others did not. But the breadth of knowledge sometimes comes at the expense of depth. It was not as if the whole population of her age group in Japan had gone to sleep while she was abroad. The same length of time passed for them, with the kind of knowledge and experience she did not have accumulating on their side. They knew many things she did not. In front of people who had been groomed in a single tradition for 20 years, her kikokushijo identity often seemed to her to do nothing more than highlight her chutohampa existence. This ambivalence used to show in comments such as, “Though I’m glad I have a more global way of thinking than ordinary people and have had the opportunity to meet foreigners from various cultures, as far as academics are concerned I’m a loser.” But I noticed that she had come to place more emphasis on the positive side of kikokushijo identity than the negative, so that the two clauses in the prior sentence were flipped by June 1993: “Though I might be inferior to others in core five subjects [i.e., academic subjects in general] . . . kikokushijo have had the kind of life people can’t even imagine, right? I’m glad I’ve had that.” For a better part of the period I had known her, Sawako was the kind of person who measured her own worth by a scale set by the majority, both in

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Canada and in Japan. When she naturally came low on their scale, she understood it as evidence of her inadequacies. The shift of focus from the negative to the positive aspects of kikokushijo identity thus marked a substantial change in her frame of thinking, an important step forward toward selfaffirmation. Yet, she still depended on her kikokushijo identity for her self-worth. The label remained important to her. It was not yet the faith in her whole self as Sawako that allowed her to lay claim to her existence in the world. In a few years no one would make much of the fact that she was once a kikokushijo. The label would cease to have much meaning. Would she learn to outlive it by then? Would she come to appreciate the experience behind the label rather than the label itself and the self that the experience had nurtured? Atsuto, her boyfriend, seemed to share this concern with me. Sawako said, “Atsuto and I always talk about that. He doesn’t have any kikokushijo friends in his university. All his friends are ordinary people . . . . I said to him, ‘There are only a handful of kikokushijo in each university, so even after you’ve been back for years you can still brag about the fact you are a kikokushijo.’ He said, ‘But just because you’ve lived abroad only once, does that make you a kikokushijo even when you become an adult or even an old lady?’ So I wondered how long I can keep on saying, ‘I’m different from you ordinary folks because I’m a kikokushijo.’ When does its validity expire? Atsuto said, ‘Eventually when we’ve lived in Japan for many years, we will become ordinary Japanese. Don’t you ever think about that?’ So I snapped back at him, ‘No! Never!’ I said, ‘I’ll forever be a kikokushijo’ (laugh). Then he said to me, ‘In short, Sawako, you just want to stand out, right?’ ”

C H A P T E R

3 Kenji’s Story N

For a long time—probably even after I started interviewing him—I thought of Kenji as Rui’s best friend because I had a much stronger impression of Rui when I was teaching. I do remember, however, that Kenji was extremely considerate toward me in class. I was a novice teacher at that time, with no confidence in my teaching skills and no major prior teaching experience to support me. And my students were no enfants sages. There was no passive acceptance of teachers’ absolute authority over students nor was there the cooperation of mature students to create an environment conducive to learning. I had genuine difficulty securing everyone’s attention at the same time. If you are a novice teacher like I was, a student who is willing to cooperate at critical moments, offers jokes to soften tension in the classroom, and does not mind talking to you casually during the break is a godsend. Kenji to me was such a student. Because Kenji was returning to Japan a year later than everyone else, I did not start contacting him until 5 months after he had graduated from hoshuko. We met for the first time for this project in my university in August 1992. After stocking up on snacks in the cafeteria—boys of his age are always hungry—we went up to the 10th floor where my student office was located. When the elevator stopped, Kenji, who was standing in front of me carrying a carton of chocolate milk in one hand and a muffin in the other, held the door for me, gestured “after you,” and let me get off first. I expected him to follow me, but when I turned around, he was still holding the door for another person who was also getting off on this floor. I was impressed. I do not know many teenagers, Canadian or Japanese, who hold the door for another person. ———————— 47

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By the time Kenji left Japan for Toronto at the end of his 12th year, he was already quite used to moving. Because of his father’s job with a major automobile company, Kenji and the rest of the family had moved a great deal within Japan. Kenji was born in Kurashiki, a historic town in western Honshu, 140 miles west of Kyoto; at age 2 he moved to Kyoto; at 6 he moved to another part of Kyoto; and at 11 he left the western part of Japan for the first time and moved to Tokyo. Like many children who experience frequent relocation because of their parents’ jobs, Kenji had to learn to fit into a new place quickly. Once, I remarked on his ability to adapt—this was after he had returned to Japan and he appeared to be making smooth readjustment. He said, “Yes, I do have the ability to adapt. If I hadn’t had that—well, I think it has a lot to do with the moves that I had to do when I was small. I moved a lot within Japan, you know? So I had to fit in quickly, I had to compromise.” The timing of his father’s overseas transfer allowed Kenji to experience the Japanese junior high school for 9 months. Like many boys in Japan who are good at sports and who grew up glued to the TV set whenever a professional baseball game was on, the moment he reached junior high school, he headed straight to the school baseball club. The training was tough, but “There I learned the kind of Japanese education that was different from elementary school and I think that experience has been an important influence on my later life.” His attitude toward going abroad was very positive from the beginning. He reacted to the news of his father’s transfer with euphoria: “I leapt with joy. I was so happy. I really wanted to go abroad.” With the optimism that was characteristically his and of a child who was used to relocation, he thoroughly enjoyed the trip from Japan to Canada: “I had terrible jet lag, but the meals were good, we had our seats in the business class, I thought, ‘This is great!’ I had no complaints whatsoever.” I do not know any other kikokushijo, including myself, who was so genuinely euphoric about going abroad. Even I, who chose to go abroad, was not half as ecstatic when I left. In fact, I remember being rather lethargic, with the prospect of a hundred thousand challenges awaiting me. The thought of a 17-hour flight alone was enough to make me want to withdraw at the last minute. Those little concerns seemed foreign to Kenji. He subscribed to the “nantoka-narusa (things-will-work-out-somehow)” philosophy, and because he believed in it, things had a way of working out for him. Once he arrived in Toronto (he was turning 13 at that time), he set out to integrate himself into Canadian life. He could have chosen a school with other Japanese students, but he opted for a school near his new home in which there were no other Japanese. As far as he was concerned, socializing with other Japanese was something one could do in Japan. “I said, ‘I’m in Canada, so I’m going to learn things I can learn only in Canada.’ I heard in

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hoshuko that some Japanese were making a clique among themselves. I hated that. I said to myself, ‘I’ll never be like that,’ ” he told me. Kenji owed much of his positive attitude to his mother. Going abroad, according to him, had long been her dream. As a young woman, his mother taught herself English, worked as a secretary for a foreign executive, and saved her salary in order to study abroad. But circumstances prevented her from realizing her dream. She subsequently married and gave birth to two sons. But the dream lived on: She opened a private English class at home (Kenji believes that her intent was to teach her own sons English rather than to teach other children), encouraged Kenji and his brother Katsumi to watch Sesame Street on TV, and received American exchangeprogram students at home during summer. According to Kenji, the family’s Toronto sojourn itself was the fruit of his mother’s project; she had been strongly encouraging her husband to apply for an overseas assignment in his company. Kenji’s mother believed in letting her children take care of themselves, and her attitude helped Kenji make new friends quickly. As early as the second day after their arrival in Toronto, she took him to the new school, enrolled him in Grade 7, and left promptly. The first day in school went by smoothly—that is, until the time came for everyone to go home. Kenji realized then that he did not know his way home: “I didn’t know the address— besides, it was in English. I didn’t know the phone number. . . . So I stood in front of the school, and I was like, ‘Oh?’ . . . [Then] two boys that I remembered were in my class passed in front of me. I grabbed them for my life and—what did I say—I went to a K-mart near my home on my first day to buy my duvet or something. I thought I knew how to get back home from there. So I said, ‘K-mart!’ (laugh). Just ‘K-mart, K-mart.’ My friends still tease me about it today. They apparently asked me if I lived in K-mart but I had no idea. In any case, I followed them, saying ‘K-mart, K-mart’ and eventually got to the K-mart. I then found my way home from there. Those two became my first friends.” Learning English was tough. Although slightly more familiar with English than the average Japanese Grade 7 students thanks to his mother’s tutoring, he was essentially a beginner. Being a relatively older learner, he worried about making mistakes and was particularly self-conscious about his accent. Phonology is one area in second language acquisition that is particularly sensitive to the learner’s age. Achieving a native-like accent is considered extremely difficult unless first exposure starts as early as 6 (see Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991, for a review). Kenji says that he was at first so embarrassed about his imperfect pronunciation that he could not even bring himself to respond when the teacher was taking attendance. “I knew I just had to say, ‘Here.’ But I was like, ‘The pronunciation goes like this, or like that . . . Oh, no, this is too embarrassing!’ So I said, ‘Hai (‘yes’ in Japa-

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nese)’ instead. I spoke Japanese. Hmm, I still remember that. It was so embarrassing!” He added, with a disarmingly boyish smile and slight blushes, that speaking English in front of “cute girls” was an impossibility. His lack of confidence inhibited him from taking part in school and club activities, although he had been active in those areas in Japan. “Had I spoken English,” he said, “God knows how much more actively I could have participated in clubs and all kinds of school activities. But I felt that to saunter into those places without being able to speak, without the ability to carry out the job they would expect me to do, would be rude. A very Japanese way of thinking, I think.” Lebra (1976) argued that Japanese behavior is guided by “one’s awareness of the place assigned to one in a social group, institution, or society as a whole” (p. 67); to transgress the bounds of one’s assigned place is an act of arrogance. In today’s Japan, I am not sure how many people in fact believe this, but whenever Kenji talked about Japanese culture as a frame of reference that guided his behavior, he tended to refer to traditional values. Kenji promptly pointed out to me that teachers and other students around him were extremely warm and supportive from the very beginning. He had never been denigrated for his halting English; on the contrary, whatever effort and progress he made was always recognized. He illustrated his point by recounting the speech contest he entered in Grade 8: “It was only in the second year of my learning English and I thought there was no way I could pull it off. I thought people would laugh at me. But when I finished, they clapped. That made me feel I could manage somehow.” His initial shyness and inhibition were gradually replaced by boldness. By the time I started to interview him, he had learned that a person’s proficiency in a language has nothing to do with his right to voice his opinions and the importance of what he has to say: “Even if my English is somewhat wrong in terms of grammar or pronunciation, I have the right to speak up in front of people,” he said. Fortunately, if he was behind everyone else in English at the beginning, he had at least one thing he could do better than most: sports. He was an all-around athlete who had just gone through 9 months of rigorous training in a school baseball team in Japan. Canadian students playing basketball during the lunch break appeared hopelessly amateurish to him, and conversely, when he joined in, they were impressed with his performance. “I got a bit of respect in that area. . . . If you are meek, bullying does exist here, too. I’ve seen lots of people get bullied. . . . But even though I couldn’t speak English and had no confidence, I could prove myself in another area.” Being a good athlete was a definite asset in winning teenage boys’ respect. They flocked around Kenji and quickly accepted him as their buddy. Kenji commented that the philosophy of Canadian secondary-level education suited him better than that of education in Japanese. “People here

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value you for going out there and trying,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you fail; the important thing is that you’ve tried.” Coming from the competitive, result-oriented Japanese educational system, he found this process-oriented nature of Canadian education refreshing. Kenji was the kind of person who took his time; he did not seem to care if others were interested in the same thing or what they thought of him. I do not know whether this is the result of Canadian education or he had been that way all along. In any case, such a person would not fare very well in the Japanese secondarylevel education, in which what one must learn is largely influenced by university entrance exams, and great efficacy and speed is required to process the vast quantities of information one needs to memorize. In comparison, Canadian education is more relaxed and flexible enough to accommodate individual students’ needs and levels. Kenji believed it helped him grow out of the insecure boy he had been in Japan into a self-confident, outspoken young adult. Strictly in terms of his English development, however, his school was too lenient an environment, he claimed. Both teachers and students were so supportive of him from the beginning that he did not have to stretch his limits in order to lead a comfortable life in school: “Canadian schools accept [ESL] students with open arms. So the students get spoiled. Teachers, too; once they learn that you don’t speak English, they’ll explain to you gently until you understand. It’s that kind of environment, you know? It’s not like, ‘If you can’t speak, you go away!’ ” I told him I was envious; I learned English in a stricter environment (in Britain) that, I now believe, was unfairly punitive to the students. But he replied, “That’s why your English is good,” suggesting that his English too might have reached a higher ground if he had been pushed a little harder. His deep-seated insecurity about his English competence emerged at many points in our interviews. In the very first interview, for example, I told him casually that I wanted to ask him some questions about English, and he immediately sent me a red light: “Oh no, I have no confidence in English, Sensei. Don’t you interview me in English!” Apparently, his colloquial English was now good enough to occasionally trick some Canadians into thinking that he was a Canadian-born. But as far as he was concerned, English was still “a pain in my ass,” to use his expression. It was still someone else’s language for him, a language on loan with the generosity of the real owners. As a borrower, he was not free to modify it as he pleased. To illustrate his point, he said: Suppose he wanted to cite a poem off the cuff while he was doing a presentation. If it was in Japanese, he could give the gist of it even if he did not remember it verbatim. But if it was in English, he would not dare violate the language in the same way “in front of people who have been speaking it since they were born.” ————————

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While Kenji wanted to make the best of his Canadian experience, he did not want to sacrifice his Japanese soul. He desired integration, not assimilation. He insisted on behaving like a Japanese and at times exaggerated it to make a point to his peers that he was Japanese and ought to be recognized as such. He told me that he spent the first year in the Canadian school in the school uniform he had brought from Japan. The male uniform in the Japanese public school looks like the dress uniform in the U.S. military. It is black and has conspicuous brass buttons. A Japanese boy with a shaved head (a rule from his baseball club) and in a black uniform must have stood out among more casually dressed Canadian teenagers. He bowed to the teacher when he came in late for a class. And he insisted that his name be pronounced in full, despite English speakers’ tendency to anglicize it to Ken. He explained: “I insist on the Japanese way. I think of how I would behave in Japan, and [for instance] if it was a situation where I would have to give in in Japan, I would do the same [here].” I mentioned his holding the door for his seniors, which I witnessed that afternoon in my university. Kenji agreed that it was an example of how he believed a Japanese ought to behave. I noticed that his emphasis on Japanese identity exhibited itself in his language as well. He had a particular fondness for archaic expressions such as “ie o tsugu (carrying the family lineage)” and “danjo nana-sai nishite seki o onajyu sezu (a saying that means ‘boys and girls should be separated once they turn seven’).” A contemporary Japanese kikokushijo sounding like a character in a samurai movie, and at the same time relying on English words when his Japanese failed him, made for a rather humorous effect. Where did his insistence on the Japanese way come from? He believes that it can be traced back to his childhood in Kyoto. Kyoto is one place in today’s modern Japan where tradition still lives on. Historic buildings abound, skillfully maintained. The residents are fiercely proud of belonging to the community that gave birth to traditional culture and provided a home to the Japanese emperors for hundreds of years. Kenji had a natural exposure to the tradition since his maternal grandfather was a kimono craftsman. Recalling those days, he said to me, “I lived in the world of kimono.” ———————— His story of integration sounded so remarkably successful that I was almost willing to believe that he had known no major obstacles. I was thus surprised when the word racism was casually tossed in our conversation one day. I tuned in and asked, “Have you encountered racism here in Canada?” “Of course I have!” he replied, in a slightly forceful and inpatient tone of voice he used whenever he thought the answer should be obvious. He then went on to explain that a “super-minority (cho minority)” like him—he was the only Japanese in his high school—had no choice but to learn to over-

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come cultural and racial barriers if he wanted to make friends at all. Racism to him was part and parcel of socialization at school. It used to hurt, he said, when he was still a newcomer and people saw only a generic Asian face on him rather than his own personality. On occasions when he was attacked with explicit racist remarks, he had to bite his lip because he did not yet have enough English to fight back. “Whether I was called ‘Chink’ or told to get out of the court because Chinese can’t play basketball, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about that kind of stereotype. Even if I said, ‘No, I’m Japanese,’ they would just say, ‘Japanese? So what?’ ” He nonetheless believed that understanding was ultimately possible: “The important thing is to let them know who you are. I think now they understand. I’m not mean, I don’t depend on others, so now they include me.” He said he could not fathom why so many people were uninterested in communicating outside of their own ethnic groups, when in fact it was so much fun: “There’s no country like this, you know? It’s a place where people from all over the world who have experienced so many things and know so much gather. My school, for example, is said to be the most multicultural school in the world. You know that the United Nations has recognized Metropolitan Toronto as the most multicultural city in the world, right? And within Toronto, my school is said to be the most racially diverse school. So that means Number One in the world. . . . It’s a wonderful environment, it’s interesting. There’s a Sri Lankan next to me, an Iranian over there, an Indian here. There’s no place like this.” When we talked about this, I was growing increasingly fatigued by subtle racial discrimination I had been encountering in Toronto. Growing up as part of the majority in Japan, I sat very uncomfortably in the “visible minority” chair. My sojourn in Britain would have been a good opportunity to fall out of the majority seat and learn what it was like. But because it was a boarding school, I rarely ventured outside. Within the four walls of an international school, people pretended to be color-blind in the name of “international understanding.” Living in Toronto gave me the first taste of being a member of the “minority” and I hated it. Why did the supermarket cashier not say “Thank you” to me, when he said it to every white customer? Why did the secretary smile all of a sudden when I was accompanied by my English-Canadian husband? Was I simply imagining things? Was it all in my head? Kikuko once told me that the Japanese residents in Toronto who complained that they were racially discriminated against were simply overreacting. Yet, I seemed to encounter what I perceived to be discrimination too frequently in too many different places for it to be just my imagination. I grew cynical: If they didn’t like me, why should I like them? Kenji’s words hit close to home. I felt that he moved me a few inches away from apathy. ————————

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I had never heard of a kikokushijo’s mother like Kenji’s. I used to think of those mothers as women who were devoted to their husband’s career and children’s education, willing to set aside their own needs for those of their family. They struck me as having a shadowy existence, someone who is always referred to as “Mr. X’s wife” or “Y’s mother” rather than by her own name. To be fair to them, this is largely circumstantial: Their visa status (i.e., a dependent of a foreign professional) prohibits employment; their children need more attention in a foreign country; and they must learn to shop, do the banking, deal with schools, and supervise their children’s homework all in a language they typically do not speak fluently. But Kenji’s mother—it is a pity that I cannot refer to her by her own name rather than calling her “Kenji’s mother” for the sake of confidentiality—claimed her own identity. Soon after the family moved to Toronto, she prepared all the necessary documents and applied for permanent residence for the whole family. That way she could seek employment herself and her children would have another country to fall back on if life in Japan did not work out. Kenji speculated that the latter consideration figured large in her decision to apply. As a result, Kenji was technically a landed immigrant in Canada, the only one among my participants. When I started interviewing him, his mother was working partly as a Japanese language teacher in a language school in Toronto and partly as a travel agent. She was also taking some courses in a community college to become an interior designer one day. In Kenji’s family, his mother led and her three men followed. I was intrigued by Kenji’s infrequent mention of his father and one day pointed it out to him. “My father’s presence is rather weak in our family,” he said with a laugh. “Because my mother takes care of everything.” “She is an incredibly powerful ally if you get her on your side,” said her son. “She would do just about anything for you.” I was further surprised to learn that she was going to remain in Toronto after her two sons went back to Japan. Her husband had already returned, having completed his assignment in Toronto. Kenji told me matter-of-factly that with her satisfying career and active life in Canada, she had no reason to go back to the crowded, polluted, and noisy Tokyo. “My mother doesn’t get along with Japanese at all,” he said. “She’s always said, ‘Japan doesn’t suit me; this continent suits me much better.’ She’s absolutely right. Even from my point of view, she is not at all Japanese.” Her current ambition was to build a house in Vancouver, he said. I pride myself in being fairly radical for a Japanese woman, being married to a foreigner and pursuing my own career. But there are always other women who will out-radical you. I felt decidedly old-fashioned in comparison with Kenji’s mother’s independence and will to chart her own life. ———————— Unlike his mother, Kenji was going back to Japan. Being an immigrant and with his mother staying behind, he could have chosen to go to a Canadian

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university without causing an extra financial burden on his parents. But after much pondering, he chose to return to Japan. Becoming more conscious of one’s ethnic identity is probably true of any expatriate: Noticing one’s differences from others, missing one’s home cuisine, songs, colors, art, and stories, and being reminded daily by host nationals of one’s origin (“Are you Japanese?”) enhance one’s sense of where one comes from. Kenji expressed his strong desire to learn more about Japan because he felt he did not know enough. “I think that in order to know myself, I have to learn about Japan itself,” he said. The sense that his time was running out was strong: “I feel like if I missed this chance, I would never be able to encounter Japan like I can now. . . . It’s like if I missed it now, the time would never come when I can see things with so much critical awareness, see things with my heart—oh, that sucks, how should I put it—not with the mind but with the heart, you know? With this passion I have now.” Canada was a “country of hope” for him, he said, because it had shown him the possibility of people from different cultures coexisting. But it was after all not his country. It could not be, he said, because he did not choose to come in the first place: “If I went back to Japan and felt that Canada was after all better than Japan, that it suited me better, and decided, ‘OK, let’s live in Canada,’ then and not until then could I become Canadian.” Japan was a place where his heart belonged. “I believe that to work is to make some kind of contribution to society,” he said. “Then I have no reason to do that anywhere else but in Japan, where my family lives.” In our conversation, Kenji frequently made thoughtful, mature comments wholly devoid of cynicism like these that I found refreshing. However, he also possessed a surprising degree of lucidity and pragmatism for his age that enabled him to soberly assess his future possibilities in both countries. His conclusion was that Japan probably had more to offer. While he had challenged cultural and racial barriers indefatigably in his high school years, he was less willing to submit the rest of his life to the corrosive effect of discrimination. In Canada, he was after all just one of the “Asians,” with all the stereotypes attached to it. “But if I go back to Japan, maybe I can be a somebody,” he said. He did not believe that he was so exceptionally talented and strongwilled that he would be able to thrive in any country, déraciné. He could certainly make a contribution to this world, but only with the backup of his home country. And few countries nowadays provide as powerful a backup as Japan. Why not, then, take advantage of it? “I want to go out into the world with the backup of Japan. Do you understand?” ———————— Kenji considered himself no ordinary man, and he was not going to settle for an ordinary university. He wanted to work in the media industry in the future and thought it a good idea to go to a university that would give him a

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head start in the field. The university that satisfied his high standards was the Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) of Keio University, a then brand-new campus of the century-old university (which happens to be the university I graduated from). When SFC opened in 1990, there was an inordinate amount of media coverage. It was hailed as a model for a new form of higher education, an institution that would offer leadership in re-energizing the sterile and much-criticized Japanese university education. SFC placed a heavy emphasis on academic studies (that such an ordinary policy should be regarded as news speaks volumes about the state of Japanese university education). In order to facilitate students’ high-level learning, the campus was equipped with state-of-the-art multimedia technology and its curriculum was partly modelled after North American universities. Although it is a part of Keio University, SFC identified itself and established itself as if it were an autonomous college of its own. A traditionalist at heart, Kenji liked the fact that SFC was part of one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in Japan: “I thought I could trust it because it is something Keio University is doing,” he said. He also liked the idea of being on the frontline of a new ideal, especially when the ideal was as ambitious as changing the whole Japanese university education. It is easy to see why he was drawn to SFC; there were great similarities between them. Both were part tradition and part innovation. A son of a successful businessman moving upward on the corporate ladder, Kenji knew the material comfort, financial security, and social power that belonging to a large, long-established institution could bring. It was a security he did not want to forego. Yet, he was also a new breed. Simply following the footsteps of his father did not completely satisfy his multicultural perspective and curiosity. SFC allowed kikokushijo to start their program in September rather than the usual April, which was convenient for those who complete their high school in June in North America. Kenji thought it a waste of time to wait until the following April and wanted to get on with university as soon as possible. During the time that he was busy preparing his applications, I asked him if he anticipated any anxiety or inferiority with respect to other students who entered SFC through the regular entrance exam. At that time, Sawako’s inferiority complex to other Kobe University students was on my mind. “No, not at all!” Kenji replied emphatically. He said that he believed Japanese universities admit kikokushijo because they value the unique experiences and perspectives the students bring to the campus; in that sense, kikokushijo do not have to possess the same academic knowledge as the regular students because they have something else. “If it [university] is willing to offer me something, I am willing to offer something back to it.” He returned to Japan in June 1993. He immediately enrolled in a cram school for kikokushijo, as Sawako did. After a week of trying, however, he

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stopped going. He found the notion of cramming purely for the sake of getting into university unbearable. Besides, said the optimist with a healthy ego, there was no reason why SFC should reject him, was there? In fact, with the success rate of one in eight, the odds were against him. Luckily for him, however, his optimism prevailed once again. One month after his return, he received an offer of admission from SFC. It was not until half a year later, in December 1993, that I had a chance to visit him on campus. SFC was located in a newly developed, still somewhat isolated residential area in Fujisawa, about 30 miles south of Tokyo. The closest train station was 20 minutes away by bus—not a terribly convenient place for daily commuting. The isolated location apparently worked to the advantage of the university administration because once students came in the morning (and most did since language classes for which attendance counted highly were scheduled at 9:30 four days a week), temptations such as cafés and shops that would keep them away from classes were not easily accessible. The campus was stunningly beautiful, if somewhat still too new to acquire a character. The contrast between the vast green open space and the ultramodern white buildings almost blinded my eyes as I got off the bus. Spacious and airy (60 acres of land, I later learned), the campus reminded me of universities in North America. It certainly had no resemblance to the Keio University as I knew it: tiny, decaying, and overcrowded. It was hard not to feel envious. Kenji looked well, if somewhat thinner and more sun-tanned. Before we sat down for an interview, he took me on a “highlights of SFC” tour. The college pamphlet was not lying when it claimed that SFC was high-tech: The sight of rows and rows of state-of-the-art computers next to equally state-ofthe-art audio equipment in the library (which they called, rather pretentiously, the “Media Center”) was highly impressive. Kenji flashed a plastic ID card and demonstrated how it worked as a magnetic key to the computer room. It also worked as the library card as well as a device for recording one’s attendance in the physical education class, he told me. I was in awe. Like a boy who had just acquired a long-awaited toy, Kenji passionately extolled the superiority of SFC: How famous many of the professors were (“You get to be taught by those people you see on TV!”); how much work students put into their studies; how complete and lavish the facilities were; and how rapidly SFC was gaining social recognition. I remembered the numerous newspaper clips posted on the main campus notice board. I had browsed them while I was waiting for Kenji, who was habitually late for meetings. They were all articles featuring SFC, with particularly favorable comments highlighted in yellow. Evidently, SFC was an extremely self-conscious institution that reminded its students at every opportunity that they were in a very spe-

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cial place. With Kenji, it was certainly working: “When you hear all those professors repeat day after day that ‘This is no ordinary college’; ‘We are the cutting edge’; ‘We are opening a new frontier,’ you do think, ‘Oh yeah, we are on the front line,’ ” Kenji said. “It’s not a bad feeling.” Yet, he felt he was not making the best use of all the advantages that were within easy reach. Regular students seemed to clue in much faster and availed themselves of the abundant facilities and opportunities. “Some first-years are already attending seminars [which are usually designed for third- and fourth-year students]” he sighed. Those students had spent their high school years competing in the “survival of the fittest” game in Japan, whereas Kenji had spent his grazing in the Canadian meadow. He saw in them a drive that was simply foreign to him. “It seems that their level of perseverance is different from mine. The level of how far they think they should carry out a task is different from mine.” In short, a month in college amply taught him that the academic peak was not for him to aim for. “So, I thought if I wasn’t confident of my brains, I would go for my body.” He decided to join Keio University’s Taiikukai Golf Club. He had taken up golf while in Toronto, and it had become his favorite sport. Taiikukai clubs, the Japanese equivalent of varsity, compete fiercely in intercollege sports events and engage in rigorous training year-round. Many Olympic athletes belong to university taiikukai clubs and, after they retire, coach there. “When in trouble, play sports” was another dictum that figured large in Kenji’s story. In Toronto, sports opened the door for new relationships. This time, too, he hoped joining a group of athletes committed to the excellence of his favorite sport would give him an anchor he sorely needed in his college life. The only problem with his move was that this golf club was, as is often the case with taikukai clubs, a highly hierarchical and regimental organization. On his first day, he and a few other newcomers were directed to sit on their knees in a straight line on the hard, tiled floor. They were told to deliver at the top of their voice a prescribed line of self-introduction: “I AM KENJI, A FIRST-YEAR STUDENT IN THE FACULTY OF ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION. THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR ADMITTING ME INTO THE CLUB!” Once properly inducted, they were to assimilate the highly prescribed mode of behavior honorable enough for taiikukai members: “The lines you are supposed to say are all already prescribed. . . . When you make a mistake, you look straight into your senpai (senior)’s eyes and say, ‘Domo sumimasendeshita (I’m very sorry)’; when you leave the club room before your senpai, you say ‘Osaki ni shiturei-shimasu (Excuse me for leaving first)’; if a senpai leaves first, you say, ‘Shitsurei-shimashita. Otsukaresama deshita (Excuse me. Please rest well).’. . . It goes like this. Everything is fixed. You are supposed to do this until it’s in your bones. It an incredible world, Sensei,” said Kenji.

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I have already mentioned the senpai–kohai (senior–junior) relationship in Sawako’s story. In Japanese schools, as in Japanese society at large, paying respect to one’s seniors (determined by age, rank and, often—unfortunately—gender) is an integral part of social interaction. To reject this custom has its price, as we have seen in Sawako’s story. But Keio Taiikukai Golf Club members seemed to take the meaning of the senpai–kohai relationship to another level: Senpai’s authority was absolute. If your senpai told you to do 100 push-ups, you did 100 push-ups. If they told you to work at a golf resort on Sundays to raise money for the club, you woke up at 4:30 in the morning and arrived at the resort in the suburb of Tokyo by 7:00. If they told you to clean the club house washroom, you scrubbed the toilet bowls until they were so clean that you could practically drink water from them. First-year members at the bottom of the hierarchy, in particular, were considered too immature and inexperienced to qualify as “ichininmae no ningen (full human beings)” and were subjected to intense discipline. It was their duty to clean the club house, prepare and store equipment before and after the practice, take phone calls at the office, and to make sure that all members received announcements. By learning to perform such miscellaneous jobs efficiently and whole-heartedly during the first year, they would become enough of a member to supervise another batch of newcomers in the next spring. The community practice had it that, if a member failed to perform his duty properly or if he appeared to be slacking off in the eyes of a senpai, not only he but all the members of his year had to take the collective responsibility for it. The group penalty worked as an effective measure for enforcing discipline throughout the club: Nobody wanted to be penalized for somebody else’s error; therefore, nobody wanted to be the cause of the penalty and receive murderous glares from his peers. Kenji had to wake up at 5:30 a.m. during the week and at 4:30 on Saturdays in order to attend the morning practice. As he also had to keep up with his studies, he was chronically sleep deprived. But he said he did not need an alarm clock in the morning because he woke up automatically, out of fear—fear of being late for practice and causing all the other first-years to take responsibility for it. “So what exactly happens, if you did make a mistake?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to know the answer. “If you err, you get a shaved head (Soso o suruto bozu desu),” replied Kenji. As a matter of fact, he said, I could personally witness this happening if I planned to come the next morning (which I did); one of the first-year students had failed to pass on a senpai’s message and as a result all the first-year members were supposed to shed their hair for punishment. The due date was the next day. And true to his words, the following morning when I saw him again, his head was neatly shaved like a Buddhist monk, the scalp that had hardly been exposed to the sun shining in the sad hue of pale grey.

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The day before, I shuddered when I heard how Kenji automatically switched to the keigo (honorific) mode every time he mentioned his senpai. I thought: Was he so brainwashed that he had to employ keigo in deference to his senpai even in their absence? But the visual effect was even more disturbing. Was this person the same Kenji as the one I knew in Toronto? Was it not he who told me, back in Toronto, that 7 years of Canadian experience had taught him to appreciate his own individuality as well as that of others? How could he turn 180° now and sheepishly obey such a dehumanizing and sadistic order as this? Kenji himself seemed to vacillate between regrets about joining the club and die-hard determination to continue. He conceded that at times the nature of the taiikukai culture tried the limits of his tolerance. “You don’t get it, do you, even though you have lived your life in Japan. Think of me. I’m a kikokushijo, I have spent 7 years over there [in Canada], you know?” he lamented. When he had to apologize profusely to a senpai who humiliated him mercilessly for a minor offense he had committed, he burned with rage inside, inwardly cursing the person with the most sordid profanity. But unlike me, he clearly saw the point of continuing. For although he joked that joining taiikukai was “the biggest mistake” in his life and that he wanted to quit, it was obvious that he had no intention of actually doing so. So what was the point? Kenji explained that his strategy in encountering a new culture had always been to be open to it before making a judgment. A true kokusaijin (cosmopolite), he said, was someone who can suspend his judgment and take the vantage point of others. One could lose so many potential learning opportunities, he said, if one rejects the unfamiliar without trying. Canadian society has its logic. He had learned so much by being open to it. However, “as someone who grew up in Japan,” he was often frustrated by Canadians’ self-centeredness and the lack of group cohesion among them. “There were [sport] teams in Canada. But I wasn’t sure whether some of the people thought about the team at all or just about themselves. It was unpleasant. I often felt reluctant to pass the ball to people like that,” he recalled. Now he was back in Japan, a society that places a strong emphasis on group cohesion. “So I thought, I haven’t been doing that, why not try it?” Team spirit, he argued, allows people to achieve more collectively than the sum of each person’s individual effort and makes perfect sense in the Japanese context: “A country like Japan where people have no physical strength nor talent couldn’t have come so far without being that way.” Japan has its own way of functioning. It is not right to measure Japanese society with the Canadian yardstick. He wanted to try both cultures before he decided his own standpoint. Being open to Japanese culture had more serious implications for Kenji than being open to other cultures, for his intent was to seek his potential in a Japanese organization. He knew that if this was the case, he would sooner

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or later have to learn how to be part of a team, the basic philosophy of Japan, Inc. What would be a better place to learn team play than in university taiikukai? It is commonly known in Japan that companies like to employ taiikukai graduates because they arrive in the workplace already highly trained as team players. There are striking similarities between the structure of taiikukai and that of an average Japanese company. For example, first-year students are not supposed to speak directly to fourth-year students; they can only bring their questions and concerns to second-year students who are their immediate supervisors. The second-year students pass the first-years’ concerns on to their third-year senpai, who in turn consult their fourth-year senpai for a final decision. In other words, one is not supposed to jump the ladder in expressing one’s opinions, in much the same way as the bottom rank employees in a Japanese company are not supposed to speak directly to the manager but to their immediate section chief. Also, in taiikukai, first-year students take on miscellaneous tasks under the supervision of second-year students. As they advance to third- and fourthyears, they learn to run the whole organization and become a role model for kohai students. Within 4 years, in other words, they learn both how to work under a boss and how to be a boss. This is a highly desirable experience from the viewpoint of Japanese companies, where new university graduates start at the bottom of the hierarchy (thus, new employees of a department store start out by selling goods in the store, and those who work for a bank start by being tellers) before they assume higher positions. “In another 2, 3 years in here, I think I’ll become quite confident of my speech manners, my conduct in hierarchical relationships, in sum, how to play my assigned role in an organization,” Kenji said. Joining taiikukai and learning to behave competently as a member was, then, Kenji’s way of reacclimatizing himself to Japanese society. ———————— For the next year or so, Kenji continued with taiikukai, while complaining that it ate up too much of his study time. Although he was still very keen on computers (he discussed the Internet, in which no other participant except myself showed any interest, at length in our group journal. He was also the first person among the four who started to use e-mail and later persuaded a reluctant Rui to try it), his initial enthusiasm toward his studies seemed to have declined considerably. At the beginning of the first year, he boasted his intention to become fluent in Chinese, his choice of a required foreign language. By the middle of the second year, Chinese had all but disappeared from his story. When I asked him, “So how’s your Chinese going?” he affected an air of innocence: “Chinese? What Chinese?” As well, when I saw him again in June 1994, although he was still very positive about SFC in general, I heard him make several cynical comments,

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something he would not have done back in December. For instance, at the time of my visit, there was a huge bamboo decorated with multicolored origami ornaments in front of the Media Center in the tradition of Tanabata, a Japanese legend of two star-crossed lovers separated by the Milky Way, allowed to meet only once a year on July 7. Kenji explained that SFC held a small annual festival called Tanabata-Sai around this time of the year. “That’s really pretty,” I said to him, pointing to the bamboo. But he gave a dismissive look at it and said, “Well, that’s about the best people here can do together: small scale.” He seemed frustrated by the lack of cohesion among SFC students. “People here are the kind of people who studied to death to get into this college. Once they get in, they say, ‘Well, I’m in this [ideal] environment. Let’s study more!’ These are great, great people.” He had no problem with people’s desire to pursue their studies, he said, but he objected to their self-centeredness, the “your-loss-is-my-gain” mentality carried over from the examination war. It went against his basic philosophy in life, which was that people gathered in one place should communicate with one other and learn as much as possible from the interaction during the time they are there. The lack of cohesion among SFC students was not conducive to such an experience. It made him turn to taiikukai even more, where there was at least a will to work toward common goals. All in all, however, his life seemed to continue along the same line without much change. More change, in fact, was happening in the background of his story. His brother Katsumi had entered a college in Osaka and had moved to Kansai. His mother had decided that she wanted to live with her family after all and had returned to Japan, only to find a few months later that her husband received another overseas assignment, destination this time: Nigeria. So she unpacked and packed again, and before she had time to settle down in Tokyo, she and her husband left Japan. When I visited Kenji in June 1994, he was busy looking for an apartment to live by himself near SFC. He laughed that it was hard to find an inexpensive apartment that satisfied his priorities: not too far away from the train station, spacious, plus the view of the blue sky from the window. He might be trying to be Japanese, but his living standards were evidently Canadian. ———————— When I saw him for the last interview, in May 1995, he was just entering the third year of his program. The start of more specialized courses seemed to have stimulated his previously flagging academic interest. He was particularly enthusiastic about one course taught by a TV producer in which students were supposed to plan, direct, and shoot a short video program. He had always said he wanted to work in a media-related field, and he was becoming increasingly attracted to the world of TV. His tiny apartment was filled with audio visual gadgets, complete with three VCRs. “Why do you

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need three VCRs?” I had to ask. “Well, one is hooked up to my computer to take in visual images,” he said. “The other two are for when there are two programs I want to watch in the same time slot. I have to send videos to my parents, too.” Another change was that he had started to expand his social circle outside of the golf club. With a common background and similar curriculum setups, other September starters (i.e., kikokushijo) were the easiest to relate to. When I asked him to let me interview his close friends, the two students he introduced me were both kikokushijo. But as he started to engage himself more actively in his studies, participating in group projects and presentations, he discovered the joy of interacting with non-kikokushijo students as well. He confessed that he had held a prejudice against them, thinking that they were self-centered, lacking individuality, and only interested in studying; “But no, there are lots of interesting people.” He wished he had started to associate with them earlier. As his attention diffused to different areas, his devotion to the golf club waned correspondingly. “I was really slacking off.” he said. It did not take long before his senpai noticed. In March, he received a severe reprimand in front of all the club members. He was now a third-year student, supposedly a role model for kohai students, and the shame of being reprimanded in front of them was half the punishment. Regimental behavior was not his forte, he said. “I’m really not good at ‘Single file! Stand straight.’ ” It was interesting to note the resurgence of individualism in his story after 1 1 2 years of hiatus. In fact, his individualist orientation may have been the cause of more contention in taiikukai than he led me to believe. According to Takeru, Kenji’s best friend in the club, since joining the club Kenji had had small but numerous conflicts with his senpai because he questioned the principle of seniority based power. There was a period the previous autumn during which his disillusionment was particularly acute and he confided with Takeru that he “might have chosen a wrong path.” The reprimand in the public naturally hurt Kenji’s pride, and the thought of quitting on the spot crossed his mind. But he resisted, because he realized that, despite humiliation, he was learning an important lesson: “My previous lenience with myself was blown away. I felt I was really learning something. . . . In my life I had never been seriously scolded, and even when I was, I tried to blame the other person, never admitting my own fault. I always tried to cover it up. So when that tendency was pointed out to me bluntly by my seniors I spend so much time with—it’s their responsibility to do that, you know?—I felt, ‘I’ve never had an experience like this in my life!’ “It occurred to me that while you are a student, you can live a carefree life, covering up your mistakes well, but once you are out there in the real world, you won’t be able to get away with that. Even in the world of

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taiikukai, it’s this tough, so if I went into the real world as I am now. . . . So I’m glad I realized that before I start working. Then I thought, ‘I can’t quit now.’ There is a whole lot more I can learn here.” Almost 2 years had passed since his return to Japan, which meant that this was our last interview. So I posed a rather mean question to him: “What would you do if you could go back 2 years and start over from the point of your reentry into Japan?” I say “mean,” because in reality there is no going back and few of us would gladly repeat our lives without any change. But his answer was revealing. He replied without a moment of hesitation, “I don’t think I would join taiikukai.” Instead, he would devote the time and energy to other activities that would lead him to a career in the mass media, such as auditing seminars or working part-time in a TV production company. “I knew all along what I wanted to do. I even came to SFC for that. Now looking back, I wonder how on earth I let myself lose sight of it,” he said, revealing for the first time that readjustment after all had not been as easy for him as he had made it appear. Halfway through college, some of the third-year students, seasoned players in the “survival of the fittest” game, had already started to move toward job hunting. Kenji was more worried than ever about the prospect of losing in the race. Given the bleak job situation in Japan, it was quite understandable: There were, after all, only so many pieces to a pie, and chances were that those who reached it first would get their piece. But it seemed to me that he had been shoved and pushed out of his “Nantoka-narusa (Thingswill-work-out-somehow)” pace a little, which I did not want him to lose. For his strength lay in the breadth of experience. His was not a straight paved road, but a long, meandering trail with many side-tracks, and his personality was so much richer for it. After the interview, Kenji skipped his class to see me off. I was not sure if it was acceptable conduct on my part as a teacher, but decided to indulge myself for once. It was a gorgeous May day, too good to stay inside. The sun was shining. The green was endlessly green. It seemed as if everyone was out enjoying the sun, their youthful limbs triumphantly exposed. “Sort of like Canada,” I thought, and the irony of my thought made me laugh: Here I was, on my too-short trip home, which I spend the rest of the year dreaming about, and my heart was flying to my other home. Within 48 hours, I’d be there, no doubt by then longing for this one. Meanwhile, Kenji was here to stay, at least for another few years. That was the difference between us. When we reached the stairs at the edge of the campus that served as the entrance to this wall-less college, Kenji smiled, bowed me a goodbye as he always did, and dashed back to the spring of youth.

C H A P T E R

4 Kikuko’s Story N

Kikuko was one of the trio at hoshuko who were experts in Japanese popular culture. Having these three girls in class was like having the Japanese version of People magazine on hand. Who was in which TV drama, which singer was dating which actress, who recently changed her hairstyle—you name it, they knew it. They had been living outside of Japan for at least 4 years, and yet they were far more knowledgeable about the current popular culture in Japan than I was. As for me, barely a year away from Japan, I was already losing track of who was who in the pop scene in Japan. Many times these girls would mention their favorite actors or singers and I would say, “Who?” This, they thought, was a shame and they tried their best to keep me current. One of the trio, Ikuko, even lent me the whole series of one of her favorite comics—26 volumes in all—allotting me four or five volumes every week just as I assigned them a Kanji (Chinese character) exercise sheet every week. I must admit that I enjoyed their homework more than they did mine. For several consecutive weeks, I was entirely unavailable to anyone on Saturday night because I was too busy reading those comics. Kikuko was not just my popular culture informant, however; she was academically the best student in my class. As I read students’ essays, the sophistication of her Japanese stood out, especially her remarkably rich vocabulary. In general, the levels of the students’ Japanese literacy were good indicators of when they left Japan: Those who left Japan, say, in Grade 3 had more or less Grade 3 level literacy skills; those who left in high school were at a much more advanced level. Regular attendance at hoshuko every Saturday may have helped maintain the literacy they brought from Japan but did not seem to develop it further. There are, of course, exceptions, and Kikuko was one of them. She left Japan in Grade 7 but managed to upgrade 65

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her Japanese skills while living abroad. One of the most experienced teachers in hoshuko said that Kikuko’s literacy skills would match those of college students in Japan. I contacted Kikuko soon after she graduated from hoshuko, and in April 1992 I visited her home in Toronto for the first time. As soon as I entered the luxurious condominium where Kikuko lived with her parents—she was an only child—I felt something incredibly homey about the place. Being on the 22nd floor, the suite had a gorgeous view of Toronto. But the inside felt very “Japanese.” Kikuko’s mother gently led me to the living area, and my eyes opened wide at the sight of a kotatsu. A kotatsu is a table about 20 inches high with a electric heater on the back of the table. You put a thick cover over it, sit on the floor, and tuck your feet in to warm up. Sitting at the kotatsu, watching TV while eating tangerines is a typical domestic scene in a Japanese winter. I turned to Kikuko, pointing at the kotatsu: “Where did you get that?” She laughed: “Oh, we brought it from Japan.” Her mother invited me to sit down and tuck my feet into it. It was cozy, but I felt strange sitting on the floor in a Western-style condominium. I noticed a large collection of cassette tapes and videos, most of which had Japanese labels. Kikuko’s mother served us some home-made sweets and Japanese tea in a dainty Japanese tea cup on an elegant Japanese wooden saucer. I thought of the crude way I made Japanese tea in a Western tea pot and poured it into a big coffee mug and felt a little ashamed by the contrast. “How civilized,” I thought as I sipped my tea. ———————— Kikuko was born in Kobe and although she moved a few times, she stayed within Kobe until she went abroad. She described her younger self as a loner who was popular with teachers because she was a “good” pupil (both in terms of studying and classroom behavior) and not so popular among children because she was a teachers’ pet and utterly unathletic. If one imagines a child with glasses who is academically bright but socially awkward, liable to become the target of peer bullying and alienation, though a stereotype to be sure, one gets quite close to the Kikuko as a child. “I was a really depressed quiet child,” said Kikuko in an amused sort of way. It was hard for me to see such a child in the Kikuko I knew: highly articulate, independent, and cheerful. She attributed her loner tendency to being an only child: “I’m good at amusing myself because I am an only child.” This is something that came up repeatedly in our conversation as a personal conviction of hers and the one that I believe kept her going through stressful times during her overseas sojourns. Moving to a strange place is not as half frightening if one believes that one is capable of living with solitude. The close mother–daughter relationship emerged early on. Kikuko’s father, who worked for a moving company, was absent from home much of

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the time like millions of other Japanese salarymen, and child rearing was left mostly in his wife’s hands. One good outcome of their overseas sojourn, Kikuko’s mother later told me, was that her husband, by switching to the North American working hours, had more time to spend with their daughter. But before that, she said jokingly, she and Kikuko were like a “singlemother family (boshi katei).” The daughter agreed: She said repeatedly that she had little recollection of her father from her childhood. The presence of her mother was all the more important to her because she had no sister or brother and was not the kind of child who made friends very easily. ———————— When Kikuko was just about to finish elementary school, her father was assigned to work in Atlanta, Georgia. Unlike Sawako’s and Kenji’s fathers, who either expected or volunteered to work abroad, Kikuko’s father had never imagined that he would one day be transferred overseas. The news came as a total surprise. Initially the assignment seemed short-term, and Kikuko’s father headed for Atlanta alone, leaving his wife and daughter in Japan. However, it soon became apparent that his assignment was going to be much longer than expected and that managing two households was financially infeasible. It was thus decided that his wife and daughter should join him in the United States. Kikuko said she felt neither positive nor negative about going abroad; “Going abroad” was too abstract an idea to mean anything until she actually arrived in Atlanta. This contrasts sharply with Kenji, who, at the same age as Kikuko, reacted to the news of his father’s transfer with nothing short of euphoria. Kikuko had a chance to experience junior high school for 3 months before she left, and knowing that she was going to leave soon, she tried her best to absorb things Japanese—which, given her age, meant reading as many comic books as she could. She arrived in Atlanta at age 13. Her parents, unfamiliar with the American education system, initially placed her in Grade 6. It was a good place for a newcomer to start because it was the first grade in middle school and peer groups had not yet formed. Kikuko had many opportunities to make friends. However, her parents discovered within weeks that according to her age she should have been placed in Grade 8. Keeping an academically gifted girl two grades below her age, even considering the issue of learning English, seemed unwise, and a compromise was made to move her to Grade 7. The move was hard on Kikuko, who had already made a good start in Grade 6. In the Grade 7 class, peer groups had already been tightly established and it was difficult for any newcomer to be accepted into one, let alone a child who just arrived from another country. This was compounded by the language problem. Like most Japanese children, Kikuko had started

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to learn English in junior high school in Japan; 5 months later, barely familiar with the alphabet and “How are you?” she found herself in an American mainstream classroom, surrounded by American adolescents. There was not enough demand to implement formal ESL classes as few immigrant families lived in the area. Teachers were supportive, but essentially it was up to her to survive. Kikuko clearly remembered the stress she had felt then: “At the beginning, English did not come into my ears naturally, so I was always tense trying not to miss a word. Another thing was that I thought I had to speak back if someone spoke to me. Being surrounded by foreigners itself was stressful enough. If someone spoke to me once, my stress gauge would point to ‘1’; if they spoke to me once again, it would go up to ‘2’ (laugh).” Her lack of comprehension frustrated her classmates who tried speaking to her once or twice out of curiosity. They would invariably leave her in the end, saying, “Oh, never mind.” Kikuko was reluctant to speak English. Like Kenji, she worried about her nonnative-like pronunciation. For relatively older ESL students such as Kenji and Kikuko, who are too old to acquire a native-like pronunciation and too young to fend off peer pressure and appreciate their accent as a sign of their heritage and identity, accent can be a major deterrent in speaking English. Kikuko’s mother told me: “We would go to McDonald's, and my [saying] ‘Fillet-O’-Fish’ would be better understood than hers. Because I didn’t mind speaking up, you see? But she didn’t have enough confidence. [Yasuko: So she mumbled?] That’s right. And that made it worse; people would say, ‘What?’ At the beginning it was the repetition of that cycle. I told her, ‘Speak up.’ But she’d say, ‘Can you say it for me, Mom? I don’t want to.’ Well, by the end of our stay she would take over the phone [in English] when I asked her to, though she did complain, ‘Why me?’ (laugh).”1 Fortunately Kikuko was able to avoid total isolation in school since there was another Japanese girl, called Miki, in Grade 7, who was also a beginning English learner. Neither of them particularly liked each other at the beginning; they may not have become close friends had they not been the only Japanese in the entire school. However, under the circumstances, having a partner who spoke Japanese was infinitely better than being alone among Americans. Kikuko and Miki sat side by side, taking classes and eating lunch together, until Miki returned to Japan in Grade 9. It is interesting to see how little incentive Kikuko felt to learn English and to socialize with Americans. She said that she was glad when someone spoke to her, but I see little sign in her story of her initiating contact. Her 1 Kikuko had a different story to tell: “My mother was basically helpless then [i.e., in their Atlanta years]. She could not understand English. . . . So she would get stuck at the smallest trouble. When there was something a little complicated she had to do on a shopping trip, she would ask me, ‘Can you come with me?’ (laugh).”

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loner tendency no doubt played a part here. But more importantly, she attributed her lack of integrative motivation to the absence of choice in coming to the United States: “I didn’t try to speak actively. I was a junior high school student, the kind of age you get shy very easily. If I had been a high school student who came of her own volition, then I might have thought I should speak more. At the beginning, I just had this sense, ‘I was brought here.’ So now I tell every expatriate student I meet ‘Remember, the first 2 years is the key’ (laugh).” Even on occasions when American students did approach her, she did not take advantage of the opportunity to make friends with them. For instance, a boy called John phoned her one day and asked her and her mother if they could teach him Japanese. He told them that he had looked up a Japanese name in the phone book and happened to find their number. It is the kind of opportunity which someone like Sawako would have jumped on in order to expand her network among English speakers. But Kikuko remained indifferent at best. John did come to her house and Japanese–English language exchange took place once a week for a few months, but Kikuko dreaded the day of the week to come because “speaking English was painful.” What was particularly hard for her was to be perceived as “dumb” by other students because of her limited English. The fact that the principal meaning of the word dumb has shifted from the state of muteness to stupidity is symbolic of people’s tendency to deny the intelligence of those who are deprived of the speaking ability. Kikuko had been considered an academically gifted student in Japan and that was an important part of her identity. But after she moved to Atlanta, her lack of English proficiency undermined her academic performance. She felt that some students looked down on her in class: “In my high school [in Atlanta], foreign language was compulsory for 2 years, so I took Spanish. Then a boy who came from the same junior high said, ‘Why do you bother taking Spanish when you don’t even speak English?’ I got really ticked off at that and was determined to get good marks in Spanish, because in that subject I was at the same starting line as everyone else. My marks were really high, always in the 90% range.” Achieving grade-appropriate academic language proficiency in a second language takes several years, which means that language minority students whose English exposure starts after 12 may not have sufficient time to catch up with native speakers by the end of secondary school (Collier, 1987, 1989; Cummins, 1981, 1984). This is hard on the children who are accustomed to being top students in their countries of origin. Kikuko needed to prove to others as well as to herself, for the sake of her dignity, that she was capable of surpassing them as long as there was nothing handicapping her. For the first few years in Atlanta, Kikuko kept hoping to return to Japan and re-enrolling herself in a Japanese school. She embraced a hope that her father would be transferred back to Japan, so that the whole family could

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go back together, but if not, she wanted to return by herself. “I guess I found it humiliating that I was behind in class. So I wanted to escape from my inferiority complex. That sounds grand (kakkoii), doesn’t it? No, it wasn’t that grand actually,” she laughed as she remembered her adolescent self. “I think the reality was that I wanted to wear the school uniform and wanted to have fun more than anything else; 80% of it was that. Another 10% was that I wanted to escape from foreigners (gaijin-san). And the last 10% was that I was feeling pressure about not being able to speak English and wanted to escape from that.” Although it is clear that Kikuko’s life in Atlanta was less than ideal, she did not seem to blame her father, whose job transfer brought her to the United States. I once discussed this matter with her mother. I told her that it seemed that her daughter would have preferred to go back to Japan had she been given the choice. Her mother acknowledged that the sojourn must have been hard on her daughter, but added, “I told her, ‘You know, your father may not have liked coming here, either.’ I said, ‘You and I can live thanks to his support, so it’s not for you to complain.’ That’s the principle in our household (laugh).” Whatever needs that could not be fulfilled in her English world—friendship, emotional support, recognition of her intelligence, and more—Kikuko sought in her Japanese world. She regularly rented the videos of Japanese TV programs and bought books when she and her mother visited a Japanese grocery store. When I asked her mother if there was anything in particular that she made her daughter do to maintain her Japanese, she replied that she felt no need to do so because her daughter sought Japanese materials by herself. Going to hoshuko on Saturdays was by far the highlight of the week since Kikuko could speak Japanese with other Japanese students to her heart’s content. It was not as if overwhelming friendship supported her there; loner that she was, it took her 3 years before she made a few close friends. But at least in hoshuko, she did not have to feel like an odd one out. An additional bonus there was that she suffered none of the disadvantages of studying in a second language. As long as everything was taught in Japanese, she had no problem being a top student. The contrast between the Kikuko in the American school and the Kikuko in the hoshuko reflects the polarization between English and Japanese that was emerging inside her. English was increasingly the language of humiliation, of frustration, someone else’s language shoved into her throat. Japanese was increasingly the language of self-expression, of a fair game. It was her language. As she passed from childhood to adolescence, she would probably have come to socialize more at school and would have become more independent of her mother, had she stayed in Japan. However, the particular circumstances of an overseas sojourn brought mother and daughter even

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closer together. Kikuko needed her mother in many facets of her life. For the first year or so, to complete even the simplest assignment in English was a major ordeal for her. In desperation she at times listed the words she did not know on a separate sheet of paper and asked her mother to look them up in an English–Japanese dictionary. She also had to depend on her mother’s driving to go anywhere in suburban Atlanta. Most of all, her mother was, with the exception of Miki, her sole communication partner during the week. In Kikuko’s mother’s words, she was simultaneously “a parent, a sister, and a friend.” I believe that the mother needed and depended on the relationship just as much as the daughter, as she was also cut off from her social network and thrown into an unfamiliar culture for the first time in her life. The word that comes to my mind when I think of the two is “ichiran-sei oyako,” mother and daughter who are as close to each other as identical twins. ———————— By the end of 3 years, life in Atlanta was becoming rather dull: “We were going into our fourth year, and we had got used to everything and were thoroughly bored. My mother and I said to each other, ‘Three years is about the limit one can live in one place.’ The rhythm of our life was fixed; there was no entertainment; the places we did shopping and ate out were fixed; even the day of the week we went shopping to the Japanese grocery store was fixed,” Kikuko said. When the news arrived that her father was likely to be transferred to either Los Angeles or Toronto, the two women responded enthusiastically. The family moved to Toronto when Kikuko was 17. Her preference was Los Angeles, where she knew there were a number of Japanese temporary sojourners and hence numerous shops catering to their needs. But Toronto, too, as far as she was concerned, was a major improvement over Atlanta: The subway system gave her more autonomy and independence because she no longer had to rely on her mother’s driving to go places; Japanese grocery stores were not numerous but sufficient to secure a constant supply of new videos and books. Most importantly, a number of other Japanese students attended her new school. Around the same time as Kikuko arrived in this school, three Japanese sisters also came from the United States. Together with a few other students, they formed a peer group. Kikuko became particularly close to Hiroko, second oldest of the sisters and the same age as she, having much in common in their backgrounds. Hiroko had also experienced isolation in America, and Kikuko said that commiserating with her about their past hardship was cathartic. Having finally found the friendships she had yearned for, she felt like she had regained her seishun (youth) as a Japanese—“Nihonjin no seishun o torimodoshita.”

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By then her academic English had improved sufficiently to liberate her from the inferiority complex she suffered in Atlanta; if anything, she was considered a top student in Toronto, her grade average being well above 80%. But social interaction in English outside the class was a different matter. Both the opportunities and the motivation to socialize with English speakers dwindled as she grew more and more involved in the Japanese group, so much so that she said her conversation skills “regressed” rather than improved after she came to Toronto. Like Sawako, Kikuko also talked about tension between English-speaking students and ESL students in her school. For example, she said, one Canadian complained in the school newspaper that an ESL student with whom he was to work on a project brought an interpreter with him because he still had trouble communicating in English. The Canadian student’s argument was that newcomers who had been here for a few years ought to be able to speak English fluently and that if they could not, there was something wrong with them. Kikuko concluded the story by saying, “When I read this, I thought people’s eye toward ESL may be quite severe.” Yet, unlike Sawako, who could not complain enough about the alienating attitude of English-speaking students, Kikuko showed little sign of resentment. For if English speakers were not interested in her, she was not interested in them, either. In our conversation, she consistently called native English speakers gaijin (foreigners) and explained that to her it was a shorthand for “white people who are different from me.” Asian students were of a different category from gaijin, and she called them “toyo-jin (Asians).” She distinguished Asians from gaijin because she felt closer to them; she felt closer to them because “they know a lot about Japanese culture and the ones in our generation, many of them are lovers of things Japan.” In other words, it was not that their cultures had much in common with hers but that they were knowledgeable about and favorable toward her culture.2 Yet she seemed to feel somewhat guilty about her lack of communication with Canadians. There was an assumption among my four participants—and I never questioned it when I was in Britain, either—that mixing with host nationals is inherently good. When I asked Kikuko what she thought about her and her group’s seclusion from Canadians, her reply was, “Some people may think it’s fine; I didn’t think it was, but I just couldn’t help it.” However, at the suggestion that many people in Japan think it a shame that recent Japanese expatriate students do not learn much about their host culture and language (Kuwagaya, 1991; Sato, 1992), she became more defensive: “There are some Japanese who say, ‘You have this great opportunity to live 2 When Kikuko read a draft of this chapter, she added another thought: “I was feeling a strange sense of camaraderie with other Asians because their position in Canada was the same as ours [in that we were both regarded as outsiders].” (April 1995)

2

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abroad; why do you only talk about things Japanese?’ I want to tell them, ‘Why don’t you try it yourself, then?’ . . . Isn’t it natural that being abroad makes you miss the taste of Japan? I wish they understood that.” Her argument was based on one indisputable fact to which she always returned, that expatriate students do not choose to go abroad. The message was clear: We were subjected to sudden, involuntary uprooting and disorientation. We cope with it the best we can. If some of us find our comfort in the circle of fellow compatriot students, who are you to accuse us of neglecting international understanding? In Kikuko’s home, “things Japanese” dominated even more. She had access to two Japanese national daily newspapers: Nikkei from her father’s company and Asahi from one of her Japanese neighbors. She continued to read Japanese books and magazines: Some were bought at a Japanese grocery store, some borrowed from friends and the library at hoshuko, and some purchased by her father on his business trips to Japan. In total, she said she read more than 10 Japanese books a month, covering all genres from samurai novels to the Japanese equivalent of Harlequin Romance. Reading Japanese was more a need than leisure: “If I have nothing else to read, I’d even read a horse racing sheet (keiba shinbun).” And then there were videos. Kikuko hardly watched English TV programs and relied on Japanese videos for family entertainment. Most Japanese grocery stores in North America rent videos of recent Japanese TV programs, each lasting 2 hours. Kikuko’s mother went to her favorite store at 9:00 every Saturday morning to join the queue of similar video watchers eager to put their hands on the latest arrivals before anyone else. She would rent five videos each week on average (“Two variety shows, two quiz shows, and a drama”). Usually by Wednesday they had watched them all and Kikuko and her mother would sometimes go back to the store for two additional videos. By her estimation, her family rented a total of more than 300 videos during the 2 years they lived in Toronto. ———————— Missing out on the best part of adolescence in Japan by coming to North America and therefore being somewhat “deficient” compared with teenagers in Japan are themes that run deep in Kikuko’s story. On one occasion she said to me, “There is this feeling in me that I haven’t had age-appropriate experiences (toshi souou no keiken o shiteinai).” When I asked her to elaborate on what she meant by “age-appropriate experiences,” she continued: “What I would have experienced had I stayed in Japan. For instance, studying for entrance exams, the regular ones, you know? Club activities, senpai–kohai relationships, things with classmates, boyfriend–girlfriend relationships—everything—relating to seniors, bitching about teachers (laugh). I missed all that. I lack knowledge in those areas. . . . When I go back to Ja-

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pan, it’s true that I don’t have this knowledge, so I guess I will be a bit like a child in that respect (laugh).”3 But I thought, it is not as if her life in North America had been a complete void; didn’t what she had experienced there compensate for what she had missed in Japan? “In my case, I guess not,” she soberly replied. The slowest area to develop, she remarked, was her romantic relationship. When the time came to choose a university—a Japanese one, that is, since the idea of going to a North American university never even occurred to her—Kikuko thought of it as a place where she could catch up with all the things she had missed during the past 6 years. I was not surprised when she told me that she wanted to study the Japanese language and literature as her major, though it is an unusual choice for kikokushijo. The majority of kikokushijo major in such subjects as foreign languages, international relations, international laws—something that matches their “cosmopolitan” backgrounds. Kikuko, by contrast, was drawn to Japanese literature, Japanese history, world history, English grammar, or “things ordinary [Japanese] people finish studying while they are young.”4 Her father’s assignment showed no sign of terminating, and the family’s house in Kobe was being rented out. She had to rely on her relatives for lodging to go back to Japan temporarily and take entrance exams. Her mother decided to accompany her in order to give her moral support during this potentially stressful period. They left for Japan in September 1992. If all went well, they were scheduled to come back to Canada by Christmas. The following February, Kikuko came to visit me with the good news that she had been admitted into the Department of Japanese Literature, Kwansei Gakuin University—her first choice. When she came in, the first thing I noticed was a change in her appearance: She had straightened her permed hair and had it cut short; she had her ears pierced and generally looked more “polished” than before. This is a characteristic of young women who return from Japan. I had noticed a similar change when Sawako came back to Toronto after taking entrance exams in Japan.5 They seem to come back with a better hair cut and more

3 After going back to Japan and entering university, Kikuko noted, “As it turned out, this was actually not at all the case. It’s true that I had never gone out with a boy until 20, but I was not considered childish. On the contrary, people said I was mature. Maybe it’s because I am a ronin [a person who enters university one year later]. I find friends around me who are ronin also more mature.” 4 Three years4 later she said, “Now I wonder whether I should have chosen English. I wonder if my perspective was too narrow. I still wouldn’t want to write my undergraduate thesis in English though.” 5 Kikuko 5 later commented, “I really noticed this when [Sawako] came back, though I can’t tell about myself.”

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fashionable clothes: a transition from baggy T-shirts to high heels and lipsticks—coming of age. She said she enjoyed her stay in Japan immensely. Everything was new and exciting there. Even going to a convenience store had a novelty value. She told me that knowing she was coming back to Toronto in 3 months, she could enjoy her stay in Japan with the mindset of a tourist. She stayed with a relative in Chiba and commuted 1 1 2 hours each way to a juku (cram school) specializing in kikokushijo entrance exams in Tokyo. Even that was most enjoyable, she said: “Normally, when you become a high school student, you buy a train pass and commute, right? I had never done it, so I enjoyed it, all the while thinking to myself, ‘My, I’m so juvenile!’ (laugh).” What was even nicer about Japan was that she could be the object of young men’s interests. She attributed her improved looks to having been conscious of male eyes for 3 months. In her Canadian school, she had hardly cared about her appearance, because the Canadian boys, she felt, had no interest in her nor she in them. She had always told me that she had no intention of dating or marrying a non-Japanese because communication would be a problem: “ ’Cause I can’t whisper love in English, right?” she said. “Even if you know the words—for instance, when Japanese boys say, ‘Let’s go out’ [in English], it doesn’t sound like their heart is in it. I don’t think I have familiarized myself enough with English to be able to whisper love from my heart. When I’m speaking English, I am too preoccupied with speaking English to worry about communicating my emotions. Japanese, on the other hand, is the language for communicating my emotions.” In Japan she only had to go to her juku to meet men who satisfied her basic criteria: someone of her age who spoke native Japanese. No major romance materialized, but it was certainly nice to have the possibility on hand. When she told me this, I realized for the first time how much the lack of romantic experience must have been bothering her. I had tended to think of her as an academically talented, hard-working student, and maybe in so doing had forgotten that she too had teenage-like desires, like boyfriends. She was a star in the juku. Teachers adored her for her exceptional Japanese literacy skills. The courses were not particularly impressive, she said, but she found the mock interviews rather amusing. Most kikokushijo entrance exams at the university level include interviews with professors. Kikuko’s juku offered special sessions to students on how to behave appropriately in the interview. “Open the door with your right hand and close it with your left,” “Stand on the left hand side of the chair and do not sit down until you are told to do so,” and “Look straight into the examiner’s eyes when responding but do not stare too much” were among the practical tips she learned in the juku. It is ironic that while universities claim, at least officially, that they want kikokushijo who have familiarized themselves with another culture, another way of life, the juku preparing kikokushijo for the en-

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trance exam focus on resocializing them in Japanese ways. I do not know how effective this kind of instant training is, but the fact that these sessions are offered in the kikokushijo juku and are deemed useful says something about the identity that Japanese society expects kikokushijo to don: Namely, kikokushijo ought to be thoroughly familiar with their host language and culture, and yet that is no excuse for failing to behave in accordance with the rules of Japanese society. ———————— I visited Kikuko in Kobe in June 1992, 3 months after she had entered Kwansei Gakuin University. I was supposed to meet her at the university and then accompany her to her house to spend the night there. As I approached the university, I joined a stream of students heading in the same direction. I was struck by their homogeneity in appearance. They were, on the whole, more fashionably dressed than Canadian university students. One could tell that they spent much money on clothes. But they all looked the same to me, like guppies swimming in the same direction. Who was I to say this, I thought, when I was one of them in my undergraduate days? Nonetheless, I felt I understood for the first time what Westerners mean when they say they cannot tell one Japanese from another. Kikuko was waiting for me at the gate together with three friends, and after a brief introduction, we all headed for the train station. She managed to hold two conversations simultaneously, one with me and one with the friends, code-switching between the standard Japanese (with me) and the local dialect Kansaiben (with them) with remarkable dexterity. I remembered her telling me once that she was bidialectal thanks to her mother, who originally came from Tokyo. She seemed completely relaxed with her friends, in her element, clearly enjoying their company. I thought of how tense and worn out Sawako looked when I visited her for the first time after she entered university. The contrast was striking. Kikuko’s house in the suburb of Kobe, the same house she had lived in before she moved to Atlanta, was tiny by Canadian standards but probably average as a Japanese house. It was cluttered with newly bought furniture and family possessions Kikuko and her mother brought with them from Canada, and had the look of a home that was not yet quite settled in. Nonetheless, the same unpretentious coziness I had felt in their Toronto home permeated this place. Only Kikuko and her mother lived there for the time being, but eventually, she said, her father and grandmother would join them once he was transferred back to Japan.6 The three students I had met 6

They had to wait for another 2 years for family unification. Kikuko’s father was finally called back to Japan in May 1995.

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earlier were not kikokushijo, she told me once we settled down for an interview, nor were her other friends at the university. She did not like associating with kikokushijo students, although there were many in Kwansei Gakuin, because “When they get together, they stand out.” She said with obvious contempt that kikokushijo as a group tend to talk about their experiences abroad and speak ill of Japan in a way that is most offensive to the ordinary Japanese. There is even a name for this kind of people, she said: “dewa-no-kami (gods of dewa),” because they characteristically start their sentences with “Amerika dewa (in America),” “Fransu dewa (in France),” and “Nihon dewa (in Japan).” She was not going to be one of them. Determined to develop her network among non-kikokushijo, Kikuko seemed to carefully orchestrate a self that defied the stereotypical image of a kikokushijo. Any potential differences her identity might imply were carefully foreseen and smoothed over: “I don’t look like a kikokushijo, do I?”; “Sorry, I can’t introduce blond, blue-eyed friends to you”; “The only thing about my English is that my pronunciation is a little better,” she told her peers. Common grounds, on the other hand, were advertised to the fullest. Her impeccable Japanese, her ability to speak the local dialect, and her knowledge of Japanese popular culture added credibility to her claim, “See, I am really no different from you.” Her desire to assimilate was so strong that when she inadvertently slipped into English in front of her peers once, she immediately apologized for her unseemly behavior. That Kikuko was really not at all like a stereotypical kikokushijo seemed to be the consensus among her non-kikokushijo friends. Later I had an opportunity to meet another set of her friends, and one of them said, “I had heard that she was a kikokushijo so I was wondering what she might be like. Then she started to sing in karaoke and Boy! Did she know all the songs!” Then Kikuko, who was there, started to repeat her usual explanation I must have heard a dozen times: “You know, you remember that kind of thing better when you are abroad, because you crave for it more and you play the same videos or CDs again and again.” Her mother seemed happy to see her daughter making an effort to fit back into Japanese society. When I interviewed her, she also showed a strong aversion to those who played dewa-no-kami: “I often heard [other Japanese sojourners in Atlanta] who came back from a short visit to Japan complain, like ‘It was hot in Japan’—because they usually go back during summer—and ‘We didn’t have a car.’ One must learn from the behavior of others; I thought we had better not say such things. So I told [Kikuko] never to say things like ‘It’s tiring not to have a car,’ or ‘I’m sick of the heat,’ when we went back to Japan.” As I listened to her talk, I thought, with a sense of guilt, of my behavior that morning that, had she seen it, would have received her total disapproval. Kikuko and I ran into an extraordinary rush

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hour that morning, as she had said we would, despite having left her home at 6:15. During the 30 minutes of a 100% over-capacity subway ride, I felt I would die from suffocation every time the train jerked. My arms became numb from pressure. I heard with repulsion the announcement from the conductor: “This train is crowded. We ask for your kind patience.” After we finally got off, I had no hesitation to play the typical dewa-no-kami in front of Kikuko and to curse the nation that allowed such an inhuman condition to repeat itself morning and night, day after day. Kikuko, a polite and gentle soul, did not object, but my words must have sounded extremely inconsiderate to her when I did not have to experience the ride ever again, whereas she had no choice but to use the subway daily. That said, I still could not help feeling that Kikuko was trying too hard to fit in. Did she really have to consciously avoid mentioning her overseas experience? Did she really have to memorize all the names and faces of her classmates? Did she really have to make a point of waving at a friend of a friend of a friend? She seemed to think so. She said she carried two elements that could make her stand out in university: (a) She was a year older (ronin) than other first-year students; and (b) she was a kikokushijo. In particular, the second element, that of being a kikokushijo, could become a major cause of alienation; one could never be too careful. “Even when everyone fools around to the same extent, kikokushijo get picked out,” she said. “They say, ‘She is fooling around because she’s a kikokushijo.’ No matter what you do, ‘kikokushijo dakara (it’s because she is a kikokushijo)’ follows you everywhere.” In order to overcome those differences, she seemed to believe, she had to make an extra effort to be liked. But perhaps I am oversimplifying Kikuko’s psychology, since in some ways she was becoming more positive about having lived abroad than before. Take her English, for example. English had been so closely connected with humiliation and degradation while she was abroad that she had once said to me, “Every time I felt insulted, I think it was always related in some way to English.” But now all of a sudden she found herself the best English speaker around: Americans who came to the video store where she worked part-time marveled at her English; her friends appreciated her help in English classes (they seemed to like her kikokushijo-ness when it was convenient to them); professors praised her translation. “Over there [in Canada] it’s normal that you speak English; but here it’s so nice because when you speak English they look at you with admiration. You feel recognized.” In comparison with her peers, her Japanese measured up to and often surpassed their levels of proficiency. She suffered no drawbacks in her studies. Any English competence she possessed was, therefore, a bonus. She was clearly enjoying the newly acquired recognition for her additive bilingualism that was never given to her in North America. ————————

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Five months later Kikuko fell in love with a young man who worked at the same video store. Their intense relationship lasted only a month. When I saw her, a week after their break-up, she was still visibly distressed, mending and reopening the wounds by simulating in her mind what she could have done otherwise. As I have mentioned, Kikuko had had little experience with boyfriend–girlfriend relationships. There is no question that when she entered university and met all the eligible and desirable men, and found herself eligible and desirable at the same time, her female self was tickled. Back in June she was all smiles when she talked about this man or that man she fancied. It seemed to me that this time, too, part of the excitement was that the opportunity finally knocked on her door. She agreed as much: “Maybe it wasn’t so much I liked him as I was satisfied with the idea of having a boyfriend.” Years of reading novels and watching TV dramas had taught her theories of romantic relationships. But practice was something different. She was like a novice driver with only a theoretical understanding of how a car runs. This was her first accident on the road, and she came out with a few scratches, having learned the pain. We are all a little crazy when we fall in love for the first time, and next time she would have more control, would know better what to do.7 ———————— By the following April, Kikuko was on the mend. She joined a band club in university, wanting to meet a wider range of students than the ones in her department. I was surprised when she told me, almost inconsequentially, that within this band she was often referred to as a kikokushijo. Wasn’t it a label she wanted to avoid at all costs? She looked at me mockingly, as if to say that my version of her story was a year behind, that she had moved on: “Oh, you know, by now I am thoroughly assimilated without having to try. Usually people don’t think of me as a kikokushijo anymore (laugh).” Indeed, now that she had spent a whole year in university and had established her place within it, she was less concerned about pleasing people. She distinguished her real friends from mere acquaintances and made no apology for it. She said, “Recently, I have come to realize that I’m not suited to acting like one of the group so I’ve stopped forcing myself to pretend that I am, and try to live more individually.” The previous year’s brief romance and its aftermath had taught her that not all the people she had closely associated with were well-meaning. Some were obviously jealous 7 Kikuko commented, “This is the last story in the whole history of humankind that I want to recall. It makes me realize how silly I was.”

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that she had found a boyfriend before them; a few of them looked rather pleased when they found out that she had broken up. Now Kikuko was satisfied with a few close friends. Since she knew that the people who truly mattered to her viewed her as Kikuko rather than a kikokushijo, she no longer felt the need to prove to the world how un-kikokushijo-like she was. Occasional reference to her kikokushijo background had ceased to threaten her. The label was becoming less relevant both for her and for her friends. The label may be, but not the content. If anything, she now seemed to feel a stronger need to rely on what she had learned abroad as her attention turned gradually toward the future. After the bubble economy had burst, the job situation for new university graduates in the mid-1990s was grim in Japan. The recession hit the female graduates of 4-year universities the hardest, because a majority of Japanese companies still consider female employees to be little more than secretaries who will leave after they get married or have a first child (Feinberg, 1993). When I was an undergraduate student in the late 1980s, with the Japanese economy at its peak, few of us thought about employment in practical terms until the beginning of the fourth year, knowing that each of us would be guaranteed several job offers. But nowadays, insecurity about future prospects seems to be on the minds of undergraduate students as soon as the excitement of entering the university wears off. Kikuko previously had her mind firmly set on becoming a magazine editor—a suitable choice for a kikokushijo who used to find her comfort in reading numerous Japanese magazines during her overseas sojourn. Part of the reason for majoring in Japanese literature had been to prepare herself for such a career. However, as “the realities of job hunting draw close to my face,” she said, she could no longer “keep on chasing after a dream.” She was “quadruplely disadvantaged” in terms of job search, she said, in that she was (a) a woman; (b) a 4-year university student; (c) a Japanese major; and (d) a year behind. In order to land any job in today’s recessionary Japan in spite of all these drawbacks, she would have to use whatever skills she has, she said. But what skills did she have exactly? When she looked, she realized that the only skill she had that distinguished her from others was her English. It is rather ironic that the language from which she wanted so much to escape in the end came around to her rescue. She started to consider becoming a professional translator. “What it amounts to,” she said without any hint of bitterness, “is that I have learned what I am worth (mino-hodo o shitta).” Renouncing her long-held aspiration did not seem to be as painful as it could be because she was starting to genuinely enjoy translation, that is, translating from English to Japanese. She was also very good at it, as I personally can attest. As part of my Japanese course at hoshuko, I assigned a translation task using an editorial from The Globe and Mail, a nationally cir-

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culated newspaper in Canada. Kikuko had a few problems understanding the content in English but once those were resolved, she produced a piece of translation that I felt could be published in a Japanese newspaper. I, having worked as a professional translator for 3 years, was not sure if I could produce another version that could match hers in quality. I remember writing in my comments, “I think you can immediately start working as a professional translator for 2,000 yen a page!” Ideally, a translator ought to be more proficient in the language into which she is translating (few people are balanced bilingual), which is why English is usually translated into Japanese by native Japanese speakers and Japanese into English by native English speakers. Kikuko’s strength as a translator lay in her exceptional ability to express herself in Japanese coupled with more than adequate passive competence in English. The aspect of English that had haunted her throughout her 6 years of sojourn, that of production, did not come into the picture here as long as she translated from English to Japanese. She said, “I like English as long as Japanese gets involved. . . . I like the area where Japanese and English influence each other.” The transition from resenting English to accepting it as one of her languages is only a part of a larger transformation that seemed to be happening inside her, which may be captured in the name of “coming to terms”: coming to terms with her history, which is to say coming to terms with who she really was. The theme of her story for the past 8 years had been “chasing after Japan,” with the first 6 years spent on creating a little Japan around her on the other side of the globe and the last 2 on catching up with the time lost. But now the chase was over; she was back where she had always wanted to be, growing her roots once again. Now she was able to give more credit to the time she had spent abroad in her story, able to accept that she was, after all, a product of two cultures. This she expressed in a characteristically catchy metaphor: “I eat hamburgers but I like Japanese food, too (laugh).” She said to me, “In the end, both [Canada and Japan] are my inaka, my hometown.” As I listened, I wondered why we kikokushijo always come back to this good old theme of home. “Canada probably will always be a place that feels homey whenever I go back,” she continued. “And Japan will always be that way, right?, because it is the place where I was born.” She joked that she would work hard in Japan so that she could retire in Canada. But she added an afterthought: She wanted her grave in Japan. “Even if you retire in Canada?” I asked. “Yep. I’d say, ‘Please bury my bones in Japan,’ ” and she laughed.

C H A P T E R

5 Rui’s Story N

Knowing Rui is a humbling experience. I joked with Sawako, who was very fond of Rui, that he was good at so many different things that it was rather irritating. Academically, he was one of the top students in both his Canadian school and in hoshuko. He was also athletic: He and Kenji and some other students playing basketball on Saturday afternoon was one of hoshuko’s weekly rituals. He was artistic, too: He played the violin and won several prizes in music festivals, including the Kiwanis Festival. He drew and painted. During this project, I received two hand-made New Year’s cards, both artistically executed, bold colors fusing into one another. I would buy them if they were sold in a store. “Immensely talented” is the way I find myself describing Rui to other people. His multiple talents were a bit of a curse as well as a gift. His brilliance was so apparent, even through a thick veil of modesty, that it intimidated people. His introverted and taciturn personality added to the mystique that surrounded him. In hoshuko he was more respected than “chummed,” revered as the “bright and diligent Rui-kun” but somehow kept at a distance. Kikuko told me that Rui appeared too talented—too “high up there”—for most hoshuko girls to consider him as a realistic target for a boyfriend. Not many girls, she said, were confident enough to approach him. ———————— Rui left Japan for Perth, Australia, when he was three. His father worked for a Japanese trading company, and his career required him and his family to alternate several years abroad and a few years home. His parents were convinced that their children, Rui and his younger sister Akari, were lucky to have the opportunity to experience other cultures while still very young. 82

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They actively encouraged the children to mix freely with Australian children. At the same time, they tried to provide some continuity at home by speaking to Rui and Akari in Japanese and giving them reading and writing lessons. Rui spoke only English at school because there were no other Japanese students; at home he spoke Japanese with his parents but spoke a mixture of English and Japanese with Akari (this is common in bilingual families; see Minoura, 1979). Rui said he did not remember having any regular contact with other Japanese nationals outside of his family for the entire 6 years he was in Australia. “I had no awareness that I was Japanese, nor had I an awareness that I was Australian. It didn’t matter, so I had no problem jumping right into the culture without making barriers. However, I do remember I knew I was racially different” (his English, original emphasis).1 He returned to Japan at age 9 and enrolled in Grade 3. Rui did not recall having much problem in terms of language. In fact, he remembered being complimented by his teacher on his reading ability. This suggests that his parents’ Japanese instruction in Australia was probably more extensive and his Japanese steadier than he remembered.2 Fitting in was more of a problem. He was a quiet and self-effacing child, but his new classmates knew that he “came from abroad,” and he felt that every move he made was watched with intense curiosity. He remembered getting more than his share of bullying for standing out. Still, “By Grade 5, I had got really used to life in Japan and had become ‘Japanese,’ ” said Rui. But the stability did not last long, as his father received another overseas assignment when Rui was in Grade 6, only 3 years after he had returned to Japan. The news came as a shock to him; he was not expecting to leave Japan again. Having barely completed one major adjustment, he was not yet ready to go through another one. But whether he was ready or not was of little relevance. There is not much option for a 12year-old when his parents must go abroad. So he left Japan again in 1985, this time for Toronto. Another round of adjustment began for him. The first 15 years of Rui’s life look like a continuous cycle of moving, getting settled, being adjusted, and then moving on again. This time, adjustment did not come easily. His life in Australia was very upper-middle-class: going to a private school and socializing with white children of privileged family backgrounds. It did not prepare him for life in an urban, multiethnic public school in Toronto. Even 1 1 In interviews Rui insisted on speaking Japanese (as discussed later in this chapter). However, his e-mails and feedback on this chapter were in English. Some of the English quotes in this chapter are therefore originals (i.e., not my translation). Whenever it is the case, I indicate this in parentheses. 2 Rui commented: 2 “Perhaps so. It’s also incredible how at a young age, children learn to cope with new languages so quickly (e.g., my quick adaptation into Canadian schools)” (his English, June 1995).

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so, he was much—and he emphasizes the word much—better off this time than other Japanese expatriate children because of his knowledge of English. It is hard to know now exactly how good his English was when he arrived. According to his memory, after about a month of living in Toronto, he could say more or less whatever he wanted. He was transferred from the ESL program to the regular class after 6 months. I am aware that children of limited English proficiency are often removed from the ESL program before they are academically ready for mainstream education (Cummins, 1981, 1989; Harklau, 1994) and that a child’s exit from ESL does not always mean he has reached a sufficient level of English proficiency. However, exiting after 6 months seems exceptionally fast. In a Toronto elementary school where I once observed an ESL classroom, students spent at least a year in the pull-out ESL program before they were completely mainstreamed. Also, Kenji, who arrived in Toronto at age 13 with a minimum amount of English, continued to go to ESL classes for 2 years. It is, therefore, probable that Rui arrived in Toronto with fairly advanced English. Rui added, “I had absolutely no problem in all the other classes; even way before I exited from the ESL program. So when I think of it now, I wonder how effective ESL was in my case, and also on what grounds people are taken out of the ESL program. It’s kind of scary knowing I was taken out of the program by mere coincidence”—Here he was referring to a spelling test he happened to write in a regular English class that he attended because his ESL class was canceled that day. He scored high on this test and as a result of this, he was transferred to the regular program from the next day on—“If I hadn’t taken that spelling test in that regular English class, what might have happened? One lousy spelling test changed everything!” (his English). ———————— It strikes me now, in comparison with other participants, how little time Rui and I spent discussing the issue of integration into Canada. I believe this was because by the time I met him, integration had ceased to be a problem for him. He was achieving close to a 90% grade average in school; he had many friends from various ethnic backgrounds and was playing a major role on the school baseball team; and his English had improved to the point where he could score 643 on the TOEFL, well above the 550 to 600 range required for admission into the graduate programs in North American universities. He even said, “By this time I considered myself a native speaker and taking the TOEFL test (English as a Foreign Language) was kind of strange” (his English, original emphasis). In sum, he was very comfortable in the Canadian part of his life. With the Japanese side of his life, he was not so comfortable. Despite his immersion in Canadian culture, or perhaps because of it, he had a strong at-

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tachment to his Japanese identity. But he was a person who had spent more than half of his life outside of his home country. Considerable insecurity entailed self-examination: Am I Japanese enough, or do others think of me as Japanese or some kind of half-and-half? He needed the reinforcement of compatriots to feel fully Japanese. Whenever he was invited to a hoshuko member’s party, he could not say no for fear of being excluded from the community. “To me, being excluded from that group would be the same as being denied my Japaneseness.” Among all those traits that signified Japaneseness to him, the ability to speak Japanese was the most important one. He jealously guarded his ability to speak the language. After a few years of living in Canada, he stopped reading English books for pleasure. He was afraid that too much contact with English might be detrimental to his Japanese. Every time he caught himself thinking in English, he consciously switched to Japanese. “If an English word pops up in my head first, I always try to translate it into Japanese,” he explained. “If I can’t translate, I think to myself: This is not good! (laugh).” He practiced his “Japanese only” principle not only with himself but with any other Japanese around him. He insisted, for instance, that his sister speak to him in Japanese. Akari, he said, was far more assimilated than he was, becoming more and more “Canadian” every year.3 “In the eyes of a Japanese, she wouldn’t look like a 16 years old,” was how Rui described his sister. “I mean, she’s recently started to put on makeup. Her hair is long, comes down to here. And she wears earrings.” Despite this, he continued to speak to her in Japanese and to ignore her whenever she spoke to him in English, because “I want my own sister to be Japanese, I guess.” “She is Canadian—totally. But, in spite of that I don’t want her to lose the part of her that is Japanese.” I, too, was subject to his rule. In our conversation he insisted that we speak Japanese. Describing in Japanese events that take place in English is essentially an act of translation and can be quite tedious. The other three students had no hesitation throwing words, phrases, even whole sentences in English into their Japanese if that was easier. It was obvious that Rui, too, had trouble converting his experiences into Japanese, in fact more so than 3 Akari’s assimilation seems just as much of a conscious choice as Rui’s resistance to total assimilation. According to him, she had closely associated with other Japanese children in an early stage of her sojourn in Canada, but by the third year or so she had completely switched to a Canadian peer group. By the end of her sojourn, she was far more dominant in English than in Japanese. She continued to attend hoshuko but with reluctance. As the time to return to Japan neared, she vehemently resisted it, locking herself up in her room whenever the topic came up. She did go back, but after 2 years of living in Japan, she came back to Canada and eventually went onto a Canadian university. This shows the extent to which one’s choice of identity has a far-reaching consequence.

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the others. But he was adamant. He would take a long pause, looking for the right word in Japanese. In one early interview, the weight of frequent pauses became unbearable to me and I offered to speak English with him. He flatly refused my offer, saying that he could not bear the unnaturalness of speaking English with another Japanese. As a result, the transcripts of his interviews contain much fewer English words than those of the other participants, although he was by far the best English speaker of the four. Rui was extremely sensitive to other people’s comments on his Japanese. Even what was intended to be praise could arouse a sense of insecurity in him. Because he had been away from Japan for such a long time, it was not unusual for the parents of his hoshuko peers to compliment him on his Japanese. They would say, “Your Japanese is excellent for someone who’s been here [Canada] for 7 years.” This to Rui was an ultimate insult: “I am Japanese and I don’t see why I should get comments like that,” he said. “It ticks me off that people expect my Japanese to be bad.” I can relate to his indignation because I now feel slightly offended when someone tells me, and people still do, that I speak really good English. There was a time when comments like that could send me vaulting over the moon, but not anymore. A Chinese colleague of mine in Toronto once told me that he was insulted when his term paper came back from a professor with an A+ and a comment, “I don’t know any nonnative speaker who writes English as well as you do.” He said that since he was competing with native speakers, it was irrelevant if he wrote well as a nonnative speaker. “It would have been much better,” he said, “if the professor had said that I write well, period.” For all the good intentions contained in the comment, “You speak the X language well,” it reveals the speaker’s presumption that he or she is the rightful owner of the language and the interlocutor is merely borrowing it. Native speakers of any language would not compliment each other for merely speaking the language fluently.4 An anthropologist cited in Brislin’s (1981) study put it well when he said, “I knew I had learned the language well enough to do a complex study when members of the culture stopped telling me how well I spoke the local dialect” (p. 284, original emphasis). Rui’s decision to go back to Japan for university was also directly related to the idea of being Japanese: “I want to know that I am Japanese, want to confirm it, I suppose.” He had once contemplated going to a North American university, but a short visit to Japan at the end of Grade 11 became an important turning point in making up his mind about where to attend uni4 Rui later commented, “Nobody (well I don’t remember anybody) told me in Canada that I spoke good English. That’s why it also ticks me off when English-speaking foreigners in Japan tell me I speak good English without a Japanese accent (well I can’t complain too much because my English is getting rusty). Identity-wise, I don’t consider myself fully Japanese, so I don’t feel comfortable when people expect my English to be bad. But I felt more strongly about this with my Japanese while I was in Canada” (his English, original emphasis).

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versity. Before then, he had held a negative stereotype of Japanese students of his age: He believed that they lacked individuality, spent hours studying every day, and had little time for socializing with friends. It was a time when he was finding it more and more difficult to resist assimilation in spite of himself. A good sign of this, he was starting to lose interest in hoshuko. But visiting Japan for the first time since he moved to Canada felt like coming home. The scenery, which he had not seen for 5 years, was surprisingly comforting. He met his old friends from elementary school and discovered that their life was not as all-consumed by preparing for entrance exams as he had thought. Teenagers in Japan did not seem so radically different from teenagers in Canada. He felt he could come back. Like Kenji, Rui knew exactly what he wanted to study and in which university. He talked passionately about his wish to major in architecture in Tsukuba University, a national university some 45 miles northeast of Tokyo. I thought that architecture suited him very well because I knew his talent and interest in design. But his choice of Tsukuba University was unexpected. My only knowledge of the university at that point was that it was a fairly competitive university but that it was “in the middle of nowhere.” Tsukuba University is part of Tsukuba Gakuen Toshi (Tsukuba Academic City), a town artificially created by the government in the 1960s in a remote area of Ibaragi Prefecture in order to amalgamate various research institutes in one place (Goodman, 1990). I thought—my Japanese sensei self coming out—that with his marks and talents, he could very realistically aim for Tokyo University, the most prestigious university in Japan. But no, he had more important reasons to go to Tsukuba. First, he explained, Tsukuba had a reputation of being internationalminded—whatever that means—and as a good sign of this, it allowed kikokushijo to start their programs in September rather than the usual start of term in April. Rui, like Kenji, considered waiting until the following April a waste of time and wanted to get on with university as soon as possible. Second, the university pamphlet said that Tsukuba promoted a multidisciplinary approach to education, which greatly appealed to Rui. He thought it important to educate himself to be a well-rounded person. Third, because of its isolated location, it had an unusually large campus for a Japanese university, spreading over 600 acres of land. Having been accustomed to the Canadian standards of space, Rui did not think that he could stand a university with a tiny campus in overcrowded Tokyo. He wrote in our group journal, “Last summer, when I visited Vancouver, I stayed in the UBC [University of British Columbia] residence. The campus was spacious with lots of trees and I thought I definitely want to live on a campus like this.” Listening to all this, I could not help thinking that he was basically looking for a university that was close to North American universities in its structure, academic standards, and atmosphere but was located in Japan. In other words,

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he wanted the best of both worlds. And I remember thinking, If that is what he is looking for, he is in for a big disappointment. ———————— Bilingual individuals with high proficiency in both languages can often enjoy membership in two ethnic groups. Some even claim that they can operate as full members in each community without ever hinting their belonging to another (Dalley, 1989). But membership comes with not only rights but duties and commitment. It seems to me that the bilinguals sometimes use their dual identities to evade commitment to either group. Dalley called it “sitting on the bilingual fence” (p. 37). I recognize this tendency in myself as well as in other bilingual individuals. I often catch myself complaining about people or customs in North America, bad service in a store for instance, never failing to add the ultimate: “This would never happen in Japan!” But when I am in Japan, the crowd at the airport alone is enough to make me mutter to myself, “What’s wrong with these people? Canadians would never put up with this!” It is easy to be noncommittal and dissociate oneself from all the shortcomings of a community. No community is perfect. When one commits oneself to a community, one must accept its ugly side, too: greediness, petty politics, unfairness, etc. Sitting on the bilingual fence “is at times convenient because I hold obligations to no group,” said Rui (his English). It makes you feel as if you were above petty community practices in which others wrap themselves up and therefore you had the right of a clairvoyant to say, “The trouble with this group of people is . . .” I recognized Rui’s tendency to sit on the bilingual fence, no doubt, because I am prone to the same habit myself. Something keeps me from identifying completely with either Japanese or Canadians. As far as I know, this “something” involves a certain kind of fear, the fear of becoming so engrossed in one group that I lose my link with the other. I saw the same restraint, the same fear, in Rui. Whichever group, Japanese or Canadian, he turned to, two contradicting emotions accompanied him: wanting to get close to them and wanting to remove himself from them. Sometimes strong feelings of empathy took over and he would humble himself, thinking that there was much to learn from his peers. Other times he sat on the bilingual fence, a detached and critical eye cast on the same peers, quietly refusing to be included in the “us.” For instance, he was not at all impressed by the way his Canadian peers on the school baseball team practiced. He wrote in his journal, “This is probably one area where difference between Japan and Canada (or North America) comes up. I was a member of a baseball team in elementary school in Japan and know a little bit about the Japanese’s attitudes toward sports (especially team sports). The practice was disciplined and extremely

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efficient. The ‘team’ was deemed number one goal and all the members acted as one for the team. On the other hand, it seems to me that Canada puts priority on the individuals over the team. ‘As long as I look good,’ ‘As long as I enjoy myself’—it’s ‘Me first’-ism. So practice is inefficient and goes on and on aimlessly.” He was equally, if not more, critical of his Japanese peers at hoshuko. By the time I met him, he was emotionally more involved with this group than with Canadians and it made him react more intensely against the negative traits he perceived in the former. Isajiw (1992) pointed out that “negative images of one’s own ethnic group, accompanied by a high degree of awareness of one’s ethnic ancestry, may be still another form of ethnic identity” (p. 14). Rui felt that too many students at hoshuko were indulging themselves in the relentless pursuit of pleasure—drinking, cruising, partying—taking advantage of the affluence of their parents and their break from the entrance exam pressure in Japan. Joining them in all-night karaoke parties was enjoyable in a frivolous way, he said, but a part of him inevitably felt, “konna koto yatterarenai (I have no time for this).” But above all what kept him at arm’s length from the hoshuko peers most was their apparent lack of will to integrate into the host community: “I thought the image of a kikokushijo in Japan was someone who has lived abroad for 7, 8 years and has been immersed in a foreign culture. But actually, many of them went back after 2, 3 years. . . . They went back without learning very much English. They were hanging out only with other Japanese. So I thought that’s not good for them. It wasn’t their choice to become a kikokushijo, so maybe you can’t impose too much on them, but I thought they had an obligation to immerse themselves completely in life here and think things through a bit. I thought few people did that.” When I asked him if he practiced what he preached, his reply was a firm, “Yes.” His ambivalence toward hoshuko peers made him feel hypocritical: “Am I looking down on them when it’s convenient for me?” On the one hand, he wanted to be accepted as one of them; their recognition was vital for him to feel like a full-fledged Japanese. This kept him going back to them no matter how futile he felt their activities were. On the other hand, he secretly drew a line between himself and them, thinking that he had made a concerted effort to learn from the host culture and in return was rewarded with the acceptance of the host community, whereas they never bothered to mix with anyone but Japanese and therefore remained marginal in the host society. ———————— Rui returned to Japan in July 1992, a young man of 18 years. Almost immediately, he started to distance himself from the Japanese, with whom he had once identified so eagerly. I was fascinated by this dramatic change, made even more dramatic for me because for 6 months after he left Canada, our

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communication was by mail. The last time I had seen him, he was telling me passionately how important it was for him to be Japanese. Then a month later, a thick envelope with a copy of journal entries arrived, with a message loud and clear throughout the text: “I DON’T WANT TO BE JAPANESE ANYMORE.” Rui’s sudden identity shift reminded me of the autobiography of Japanese-Canadian David Suzuki (1988), in which he recounted his first visit to his ancestral country: For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who all looked like me. While sitting in a train and looking at the reflection in the window, I found that it was hard to pick out my own image in the crowd. I had grown up in a Caucasian society in which I was a minority member. My whole sense of self had developed with that perspective of looking different. All my life I had wanted large eyes and brown hair so I could be like everyone else. Yet on that train, where I did fit in, I didn’t like it. (pp. 13–14)

Neither did Rui, obviously. Looking back now, I recognize signs of change even before he returned to Japan. Just before leaving Canada, Rui went on a shopping spree buying English books, including Shakespeare—this after many years of adamantly refusing to read English in his spare time. In Vancouver, where he stopped over on his way to Japan, he saw many tourists from Japan. He commented in his journal, “In front of these ‘genuine Japanese (honkakuteki-na nihonjin)’ coming from Japan, I find myself no longer as Japanese as they are, though perhaps I would not go as far as to say that I am a foreigner.”5 Almost anything about Japan and its people, from the humidity to the lack of space to the ubiquitous black hair, seemed to repel Rui. It took him less than a week there to declare that he no longer felt Japanese. Even he must have found this sudden inner change uncanny as he wrote in his journal: “My attitude toward the Japanese seems rather critical (or even hostile). Just as I was proud of my Japanese roots in Canada, now I look down on the Japanese on the pretext that I’m a returnee coming back from abroad. I used to think that Canadians were narrow-minded but Japanese are no different. In Canada, I thought of myself as fundamentally Japanese but paradoxically, once back in Japan, I no longer consider myself Japanese. I wasn’t expecting much culture shock, but it may be quite hard to get used to Japan from here on.” He knew few people in Anjo, a suburb of Nagoya, where his family settled, and as if to compensate for the lack of an outlet, he wrote voluminously in his journal during this period. In particular, he took to commenting on differences between Canada and Japan. Reading his observations 5 5 Rui comments: “This incident is really interesting, even to me, and I realize that the fear of losing one side of me was definitely there” (his English, original emphasis).

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was a revelation to me; they made me realize how much of an outsider he really was with respect to Japanese culture. No matter how strongly he had identified with the Japanese during his Canadian sojourn, the evidence was in his journal that he had cultivated an eye that belongs to a foreigner. He wrote one day, “There is absolutely no communication among strangers,” referring to an episode in a supermarket. When he went shopping, he saw a man with a young son who was trying to cajole his father into buying some sweets. It was a cute scene and Rui and his father smiled at them. When the man noticed them, however, there was no reaction. “In Canada,” Rui wrote, “it would be normal to smile back. A word or two might also be exchanged. That’s not how it goes in Japan.” He also analyzed the interviews of Olympic athletes he watched on TV. Nineteen ninety-two was a year of the Summer Olympic Games, and Rui spent many hours in front of TV. Watching interviews with Japanese athletes who won medals, he was put off by their routine display of kenson (modesty): An American would say, “I felt good all season and I was certain I had enough talent to win a medal; it was just a matter of carrying out what I had been doing all season long, and that was exactly what happened, so I’m happy [his English].” But Japanese athletes say, “It is thanks to the understanding and encouragement of people around me [that I won]. Thank you so very much.” What a bullshit! Sports are sports for what efforts each individual makes. No matter what others do, it is what you do that determines the result.

Attributing one’s achievement to others while playing down one’s own talent and self-discipline is often expected in Japan. These athletes were probably quite genuine in expressing their gratitude to others. But to Rui, who had been accustomed to the ideal of independent and autonomous self in Canada, their display of kenson was nothing more than hypocrisy. By commenting on what felt strange and bizarre, he was revealing his own cultural values, which were much more Canadian in character than Japanese. Rui’s attitude toward his two languages changed, too. His focus was now on how to preserve his English. A journal entry regarding his English is strongly reminiscent of the way he worried about the attrition of his Japanese in Canada: the same concern, a different language. “I haven’t used English at all and that really worries me. I have no idea how much English ability I have now. . . . I am not reading any [English] books. I think about everything in Japanese. It makes me insecure that I have no contact with English.” In general he seemed to regard his bilingualism as a zero-sum phenomenon: If his Japanese improved, it was at the expense of his English, and vice versa. Although there is no scientific evidence to suggest that this is the case (Baker, 1996; Collier, 1989; Cummins, 1979; Cummins & Nakajima,

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1987), his alarm went off whenever the environment favored one of his two languages and he quickly moved to protect the more vulnerable one. And that, I now understood, was how he always situated himself in relation to his milieu. When I was following his story in Canada, I thought that he cared particularly for his Japanese identity and language and wanted to protect them for that reason. But seeing the same pattern repeat itself in a different context made me realize that it was not his love of the Japanese language and culture per se that compelled him to come to their aid in Canada. Rather, it was his desire to remain bilingual and bicultural. The point was to maintain a balance between the two, being careful not to tip over to one side too much.6 ———————— The process of university application and exam taking was extremely smooth for Rui. All of the students in this study had a relatively easy time with entrance exams compared with domestic students, but Rui’s experience was the smoothest of the four. He knew exactly which university he wanted to apply to, did not even attend juku (cram school), wrote the exam almost right after he returned to Japan, and passed it. The whole process took such a short time that the first thing I heard from him after he went back was the happy news of his gokaku (admission offer). Its unusually spacious campus meant that Tsukuba University, unlike many colleges in urban cities in Japan, had student dormitories on site. Its isolated location necessitated them, too.7 The idea of students living and studying in the same place appealed to Rui; it added to the university’s similarities to North American colleges. He arranged to live in one of the dormitories, and in early August finally arrived in Tsukuba. After finishing administrative paper work, off he went to what was to be his room. But— “I was shocked by the dirt. The walls have yellow and black stains, the floor is chipped, dust is piling everywhere. There is some mud and even bits of rice. The bed is placed in a funny position (You can’t get to the desk unless you climb over it). On the window sill there are some dead bees and horseflies. The sink is full of cigarette ash and is almost completely blocked up. Large parts of both the ceiling and the walls are darkened with mould. The bed, locker, and shelves are made of iron and they are all rusty. Old scotch tapes and stickers are here and there and everywhere. A broken plastic hook is stuck on the wall. The bottom of the mirror is rusty. It’s awful. My first impression was ‘This place is not fit for human habitation.’ ” After all those inflated expectations, the reality hit hard. He thought of the University of British Columbia residence where he had once stayed: 6

6 7

Rui remarked, “Yes! Because that was me!” (his English, original emphasis). Having dormitories for students is not the norm in Japanese universities. 7

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“The UBC residence was wonderful. It was like a high-rise apartment and even had a lobby like a hotel. The service was good. Of course people had private rooms. The carpet was clean. The bed was clean. The furniture was clean. No complaints whatsoever. When the residence is so clean in the first place, people who live there take care to maintain it that way.” That image, not the one in front of his eyes, was what he had associated with university life. The gap was depressing. Symptoms of maladjustment showed up physically: nausea, indigestion, lack of appetite. They were very similar to the symptoms reported by many international students going through culture shock (see Furnham & Bochner, 1986, pp. 117–119 for a review). Ward (1967, as cited in Furnham & Bochner, 1986, p. 119) noted that being physically ill is more acceptable than admitting psychological problems for many people and that cultureshock-related psychological stress thus tends to manifest itself as physical problems. Evidently, the reentry process in one’s native country can be just as stressful as adjustment in a foreign country. Classes started in September, and that was another culture shock. Rui came to this university above all to learn. A constant source of intellectual stimulation had always been very important to him. Viewing education Canadian-style, he believed that serious academic learning started in university. But for many Japanese students, college is a place where they take a 4year hiatus between high school and work. They worked hard to get into university and now they deserve to enjoy life. Rui lamented that not only students but even professors seemed to take it for granted that students did not attend every class. One professor, he said, announced to the whole class that he would pass any student who attended more than half the lectures during the year. The classroom filled from the back rows, leaving an embarrassingly empty space in front. Students rarely asked questions or gave comments in class. On odd occasions when a professor threw out a question to the whole class, students averted their eyes so as to avoid being called on. Rui often found himself to be the only one around him who was taking notes frantically; everyone else was either sleeping or chatting. Echoing one of his American professors, he wrote to me, “In Japan, universities pretend to educate while students pretend to learn” (his English). To make matters worse, because he started his program in what to the rest of the university was the middle of an academic year, he as well as other kikokushijo students who entered university in September were subject to many restrictions on course selection during the first term. In Rui’s case in particular, his major, architecture, required a number of practicum courses. But they were scheduled in such a way that they had to be taken sequentially from April. As a result, while he was bursting to start his “real learning,” Rui was left with a lot of empty slots in his timetable during the first term. Moreover, he discovered that because of this curriculum setup,

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he would have to spend 4 1 2 years, instead of the usual 4 years, in university and graduate with the students who were entering university in the following April. In other words, he found himself in a place where he was not getting what he had expected and was also told to stay there for an extra half year. He felt trapped. Another major disappointment for him—as if he needed more—was the “internationalism (kokusaisei)” of Tsukuba University. Tsukuba purports to be, and has earned the reputation of being, an “international (kokusaitekina)” university. “The University of Tsukuba,” Goodman (1990) noted, “has a reputation for being ‘international’ owing to its comparatively open policy on accepting foreign researchers and students and, more recently, because it has been appointed by the government as one of the major new centres for training native teachers of Japanese as a foreign language” (p. 99). This was one of the characteristics of the university that attracted Rui in the first place. He was hoping that being in such a university would allow him to make friends with students from diverse cultural backgrounds, although maybe not to the same extent as he did in Canada. And sure enough, he saw a fair number of foreign students wandering on campus. But the majority of these students were either taking Japanese language courses or were enrolled in graduate programs. They had little to do with regular undergraduate students like him.8 Desperate for interactions with English speakers, he sometimes approached international students on campus in spite of his introverted personality and expressed a great relief whenever his English received sorely needed outlet this way. But unless he literally went out of his way to approach international students, opportunities to communicate with them were rare. Even when he did, these encounters, devoid of a shared context, did not develop into long-term friendships. Living on a 600-acre campus, Rui felt claustrophobic: He was cut off from the rest of the world. His worst nightmare was to be so thoroughly indoctrinated in the Japanese way that he would not be able to get out of Japan in the future. After all the disillusionment, he had no desire whatsoever to remain in Japan any longer than absolutely necessary to obtain his degree. He wrote numerous letters to his friends and teachers as well as to me in Canada and saw this as his only way to maintain a link with the outside world. He wrote in a letter to his friend David, “Do you know what? You guys were right, I’m actually regretting the fact that I chose a Japanese university over a Canadian one. Somehow, I don’t feel comfortable; well, another way of saying it is that it’s been hard adjusting.” He then went on to say, “Please, please, please write; everyday I look in my letter box, and 8 Rui added, “Plus, why would someone who has come to Japan to learn about the Japanese language and culture want to speak to a Japanese national in English?” (his English).

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whenever there is a letter, well I exult and jump up and down, and cry out of joy. Well, not exactly, but there is a sense of comfort, because I still don’t have a sense that Japan is my home. Perhaps Canada really is” (his English). ———————— I thought that given his introversion and the awkward starting time, making friends would prove to be a major headache for Rui. But as it turned out, he was much more fortunate in this respect than, say, Sawako, because there were 27 other kikokushijo students who entered university at the same time. United by a shared kikokushijo background and the same rather unusual way of entering university, these students quickly formed a close-knit group. Some socialized in this circle and simultaneously developed their network among regular students, but Rui associated exclusively with the kikokushijo group. Lack of contact with non-kikokushijo students bothered him, but he simply found little in common with them. He said, “The Japanese don’t look at you in the eyes. Everyone in my department knows me and yet they avoid eye contact, so sometimes I don’t even get the chance to say hello. With things like that, I still haven’t been able to fit in.” In contrast, he felt relaxed and at home with other kikokushijo. Even his usual inhibition and shyness seemed to diminish when he was with them. Kikokushijo tend to want to stick together, he said, because of their ambiguous position in the university community: “We do not consider ourselves ‘pure (junsuina)’ Japanese, and yet we are not foreign students either. It makes it hard for us to know where we belong.” Such sense of camaraderie is common among returnees, wrote Brislin (1981): After people return to their home country, they form friendships with other people who have also had a cross-cultural experience. The countries in which the experiences took place may be very different. . . . There is no common interest in the same part of the world that can be shared, nor a common interest in the same social problem. The shared experience is probably the set of feelings stemming from the confrontation between old and new reference groups, and the feelings of satisfactions stemming from resolution of the tensions. (pp. 117–118)

I thought of how students in hoshuko supported and depended on each other and how much this meant to those who found integration into Canada difficult. When Rui said “we kikokushijo,” it had the same sense of camaraderie, the same “us-against-the-whole-world” sentiment. The presence of this support group in turn seemed to reinforce each member’s kikokushijo identity. Rui certainly could not have held onto it as long as he did all by himself. As a group, they regarded themselves as distinct from regular students. Rui told me a story about this: One day several

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of them were chatting away, blocking a busy but narrow path on campus. They were obviously inconveniencing other passers-by, but one of them said, “Oh well, this is another privilege of us kikokushijo (kore mo kikoku no tokken da)!” They even invented a pejorative term for non-kikokushijo students, “ippan piipuru (ordinary people),” sometimes shortening it to “panpii.” I must say that in my eyes, their attitude as a group sometimes appeared rather arrogant.9 For instance, Rui told me that they had a tendency to look down on language courses offered by Japanese instructors. Tsukuba was no exception to other Japanese universities in its heavy reliance on the grammar-translation method for foreign language instruction. Classes taught by Japanese professors, he said, consisted of students taking turns in reading aloud passages from an assigned text, usually a literary one, in the original language and then translating them into Japanese. Foreign language education from junior high school to the tertiary level consistently places a heavy emphasis on the memorization of grammatical rules and vocabulary. It has long been a subject of severe criticism in Japan (Kato, 2000). Most high school graduates, after 6 years of learning English, are incapable of holding the most basic of conversations with an English speaker (Duke, 1986). But it seemed to me that Rui and his kikokushijo friends dismissed those language classes not so much out of a careful analysis of their pedagogical shortcomings as out of the sense of superiority stemming from the fact (a) that their Japanese instructors’ pronunciation was often not as native-like as theirs, and (b) that they learned English and other foreign languages in the countries where they are spoken. While they were abroad, they borrowed English from people who owned it; now that they were in Japan, it was their turn to claim ownership over the language. Nonetheless, Rui was well aware that kikokushijo like him benefited from the less-than-ideal condition of the current foreign language education in Japan. The fewer competent speakers of English the Japanese education system produces, the more advantages kikokushijo have in this area. As Mead wrote, back in 1934, “We have to distinguish ourselves from other people and this is accomplished by doing something which other people cannot do, or cannot do as well” (p. 208). Rui told me that English was important to him because he felt it was the only symbol of the kikokushijo identity that clearly distinguished him and his fellow kikokushijo from “ippan piipuru.” His sense of self-worth was greatly threatened, therefore, whenever he met a student who had never lived abroad but who nevertheless demonstrated a high level of proficiency in English. ———————— 9

9

Rui later commented: “You’re right. Now, I think so too!” (his English).

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The kikokushijo group was his home community within the university: “a place to go back to,” as he called it. But there was another community outside of university that gave him a sense of belonging: the church. It was Rui’s mother, who was a devout Christian, who found a church near Tsukuba University. Rui’s parents in general did not exercise direct control over their children, trusting that the children were capable of making the right decisions at critical junctures in their lives. Rui’s mother took him to the church in question and introduced him and herself to the pastor. Once the initial contact was established, she left the decision to her son whether to continue going or not. Because of his mother, the concept of Christianity and church had been familiar to Rui since he was small. Her friends from church frequented their house, and Rui often heard them discuss and recite passages from the Bible. On special occasions like Easter and Christmas, the whole family accompanied her to church. Nonetheless, she was the only one in the family who actively identified with Christianity; the rest of the family supported her faith without committing themselves. When I asked Rui earlier in the project if he was a Christian, his answer was a brief but clear “No.” After the first visit, what with moving in, registration, and classes at university, the church slipped out of Rui’s mind for a while. But as his disillusionment with university life deepened, he started to frequent the church on a regular basis. He was initially attracted to it for nonreligious reasons. For one thing, he was looking for a place where he could take up the violin once again. He had joined the orchestra at the university, but for some reason—he thought because of his late arrival—he did not feel much welcomed and found it uncomfortable going there. The church had an ensemble that played at weddings and Christmas concerts and they could use an extra violinist. If he went there every Sunday, he could play to his heart’s content with people who appreciated music as much as he did. The church also had a few foreigners attending service regularly. The opportunity to speak English with them naturally made the place attractive for a kikokushijo who was feeling confined and craving for contact with the outside world. Most importantly, it was a place that gave him a sense of belonging. People were warm and friendly, ready to include any newcomers, a trait he rarely found elsewhere in Japan. One of his kikokushijo friends at Tsukuba who later visited the church at his invitation told me, “They make you feel like you are one of them from the start.” When Rui was exploring the church, it was the time he was beginning to appreciate the importance of being different from the majority for his sense of self. It was comforting to be with people who shared that critical element of identity, as only a scant 1% of the Japanese population is Christian. The church offered him a sanctuary at the time when his life was most trying. In contrast to the “apathy” and “stagnation” he felt at the university

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during the week, Sundays at church were filled with “activities,” “movement,” and a sense of “fulfilment.” He said that when his depression over university became at times overpowering, he told himself, “At least there’s Sunday,” and that this thought kept him going. ———————— One month before a new academic year started in April, he and all the other kikokushijo students who had entered university in the previous September took an intensive English program, which was part of the university’s special arrangement for kikokushijo. Rui had been quite concerned that as people in the kikokushijo group became accustomed to Japanese culture and university life, they would gradually be absorbed into the mainstream university community and that, in inverse proportion, their camaraderie would wear off. He was afraid of being left alone in his kikokushijo fortress, stubborn soldier that he was, with all his trusted allies surrendering to the majority side. But 5 days of taking classes together from 9:00 to 5:00 reinforced their solidarity. Since all the students were kikokushijo, their cross-cultural experience was the most obvious topic of discussion in class, and much to his delight, many of the professors showed great interest in their stories. For him, it was a time to renew his kikokushijo identity and to discover that his desire to keep a distance from the mainstream Japanese society was shared by other kikokushijo. He was an outsider to Japanese society, gladly so, but it was much merrier to be there with fellow outsiders. When a Canadian professor affirmed their distinctness by saying, “What you’ve all experienced is very different from others. I mean, look, you behave differently, you even dress differently [original in English],” Rui was jubilant: “Our difference may be small, but I was pleased that she recognized it.” If the English program helped to improve his social life by consolidating the bond among the kikokushijo, the start of a new academic year brought about a dramatic change in his intellectual life. The restrictions on course selection during the previous term no longer applied. With a sense of renewal, he opened the university bulletin and was pleasantly surprised: “Look, aren’t there lots of interesting-looking courses!” In a counterreaction to the long winter of boredom, he packed his timetable to the limit. His excitement was palpable even on the other side of the globe, with letters such as “Three out of 5 days a week I have a full day of classes, and I am savoring the taste of fulfilment.” When I visited him in June, he talked with passion about his love of architecture. From the way he discussed it, major progress in his learning clearly came across even to someone like me who has little knowledge of the field. He used to speak of architecture as a hybrid of art and engineering. But now he understood it as something far more comprehensive, involving

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thoughtful manipulation of a multitude of given conditions that are intertwined in a complex manner. He took to calling it “the study of the miscellany (zatsugaku)” because knowledge of any and every other field was potentially relevant and beneficial to it. Far from being overwhelmed by the vastness of the field he had just stepped into, he seemed to thrive in it, embracing the final arrival of challenges long overdue. I recalled the quote by Isaac Newton he had cited in his journal during the last days in Canada, when he was excited about the prospect of studying in Tsukuba University: I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me. (Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 4th edition, p. 494)

The playful and curious spirit of the boy was awakened again, and after a long dormant period, he was ready to explore the ocean. Perhaps the part of life in Tsukuba that was hardest for him was the lack of contact with non-Japanese individuals and the feelings of confinement that stemmed from it. He could write numerous letters to his friends in Canada, but that still was a meager substitute for the direct, face-to-face interaction with English speakers he had once taken for granted. But in this respect, too, a positive change was in sight. For one thing, his father had changed companies and had been living in Malaysia for some time. This meant that Rui could visit him during holidays and explore Southeast Asia without having to spend too much money. On the other hand, Rui’s exceptional English proficiency had made him a name among faculty members of his department and professors started to ask him for help. During the first year alone, he was approached twice to serve as an interpreter for academic presentations by foreign scholars. There was also talk about the possibility of helping a professor with an architectural project in Malaysia during summer (this plan did not materialize in the end). The professors might have thought of him as an economical substitute for a professional translator, but from Rui’s point of view, such jobs provided him with opportunities to utilize his English. Having secured a place abroad to visit semiannually on the one hand, and finding odd occasions on campus to speak English on the other, he became hopeful that maybe he was not so totally cut off from the rest of the world as he had once felt. More settled and stable, Rui now seemed to understand that his experiences abroad, all the memories and languages and identity and important learning that went with them, were not as ephemeral as he had once thought and that he need not hold onto them so tightly: “Up to now I have been impatient (assette-ita).” This thought, the conviction of stability,

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seemed to lessen the rigidity in his attitude: no need to build layer after layer of wall between himself and other Japanese if he was secure in his understanding of who he was. Yet, he was just as firm about his position in relation to Japanese society, placing himself outside of it. In the previous December, he had told me that he had no country as his home, that he was “floating in the middle” between Japanese culture and Canadian culture, and that this was “fine” by him. Always a visual person, he described his state of being as in Fig. 5.1. Three months later, he was still there, more comfortable and in fact growing rather fond of the place in-between, despite his increasing familiarity and ease with the pace of Japanese college life. One day, he said, he was watching a TV program on the experience of Korean-Japanese who were born and raised in Japan but who “returned” to Korea to attend university. He was surprised to hear one of the students comment, “I feel like I am floating in the air.” “Boy, isn’t that exactly how I feel!” he wrote to me. “Neither Korean nor Japanese—what is happening to kikokushijo is happening to these people, too.” In terms of language, too, he was beginning to place himself between two languages, not so much to let the whole world know that he was bilingual (as he used to) as to get closer to his ideal self. In other words, he now saw his two languages not as an emblem of his special identity, but as constituents of who he was: “I have two languages, therefore I am,” as he put it. “There is a self who thinks in English and there is another self who thinks in Japanese. I haven’t seen the English self for long so when he comes up all of a sudden, I get shy with him,” he wrote to me. “The conversation among us kikokushijo is always in Japanese, so we know each other only in the selves who think in Japanese. On the other hand, each of us has a self that thinks in a foreign language, and we do not know this side of each other. When the four of us got together, one of us said, ‘Well, why don’t we speak English

FIG. 5.1. Rui’s self-described identity.

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from now on!’ But we could not really talk much despite our effort. After all, everything we have known about each other, in information and experiences, is through Japanese, so when we shift into English all of a sudden, it feels like we have gone back to being total strangers with one another.” In October, Rui and 20 other kikokushijo students in Tsukuba organized a craft show for the university’s annual festival, gakuensai. Most Japanese universities hold student-organized gakuensai once a year, usually in autumn, and it is a time for students to put their creative imagination to use. Pop concerts, plays, and variety shows are held side by side with more serious academic symposia and lectures. Improvised snack bars and restaurants pop up everywhere on campus. The idea of doing something for gakuensai was initially raised among Rui and his friends while they were taking the intensive English program in March. With a help of the new batch of kikokushijo who entered university in the following September, they produced hundreds of handmade accessories and sold every one of them. They even received the Best Merchandise Award from the festival organizers. The glass is half empty or half full depending on one’s point of view. We all tend to project the tone of our internal landscape onto our surroundings. Through a series of positive events that brought about a major improvement in the aspects of his life that were important to him, Rui had learned to “look on the bright side of things (choten o miru).” Thus, spending an extra half year in university that once seemed but a waste of time now meant that he had the time to take extra courses of his liking; the remote location of Tsukuba University that once felt so isolating and confining was now much appreciated because it meant that students could live on campus and socialize 24 hours a day. As a sign of the new outlook on life, Rui started to draw sketches of various aspects of life in Tsukuba. Always carrying around a small sketchbook with him, he sat down and drew whenever something interesting caught his eyes, whether a professor lecturing, a sleeping student, a panoramic view of the campus, or a “daily special” in the cafeteria (see Figs. 5.2.1–5.2.4). He had ceased to write his text journal for some time, but those sketches, together with commentaries here and there, virtually became a new journal for him. As in the previous journal entries, he dutifully shipped a copy of those sketches to me, and I found it interesting to see the change in tone: In contrast to the intense frustration, disorientation, and puzzlement that ran through his previous journal, those sketches have a relaxed, almost pastoral air about them. One can see that he enjoyed drawing them. He later noted that during the first year, in which he hated every minute of being in Japan, it never occurred to him to take up drawing. Why, after all, he said, would anyone bother to reconstruct on paper the landscapes he hates? So in that sense, “Those sketchbooks are really significant in that they symbolize my new outlook of ‘looking on the bright side of things’ ” (his English).

FIG. 5.2.1. Lecture.

FIG. 5.2.2. University cafeteria.

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FIG. 5.2.3. Lunch at the university cafeteria.

In a letter that reflected the tremendous inner growth he had undergone over the past year, he wrote, “I am getting along, and I now realize that I must take advantage of the situation; that I am in a good university that has definite potential to shape my life in many positive ways.” Then he added, “Quite a change since last year, don’t you think?” (his English, original emphasis). ———————— In December 1993, Rui became a Christian. I was utterly unprepared for this. I did not know how to react, and despite my intention to congratulate him calmly with a profound-sounding blessing, the only thing that came out of my mouth was, “Doshichatta no!?—What have you done!?” Now, looking back, my astonishment seems out of place. After all, I knew that he had been attending church for over a year. Becoming a full-fledged Christian was a logical next step. Yet the news caught me completely off guard. I believe that it is largely due to Rui’s careful downplaying of the religious influence on his life to me. He was not ready until then to share the spiritual aspects of his life with me, not until he had made up his mind about them

104 FIG. 5.2.4. Panoramic view of the campus.

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himself. Although we had certainly discussed his church going in detail, he kept it as secular as possible, citing the opportunity to socialize as the principal reason that led him to church every Sunday. Now he had made his decision, enough trust had been established between us, and he was ready to talk. He said he had always been “certain” that he would one day be baptized. Over the years, he had watched his mother entrust herself completely in the hands of God, always confident, despite all the relocation she had to go through, that wherever she was, God would show her the way. He admired the stability her faith gave her, and so it was not the question of if he would ever become a Christian himself but when. The when question was resolved for him through the process of undergoing a difficult readjustment in Japan and coming out with a positive outlook on life. It brought home to him, more than anything that had happened in his life before, that he was “led by God.” Perhaps by then my secular bias was written all over my face. “Well, if you said, ‘You just got used to life in Japan,’ that’d be the end of it,” he laughed, reading my mind. “But still, if it was just me getting used to it, then I am not sure if I’d have adjusted this well [pause]. It’s not so much that I did something [pause] as I was led. So I have no worries now. I don’t worry about things anymore, because I think that way now.” One of his friends later observed that after being baptized, Rui became a much more stable person, no longer the worrier that he once was. My bafflement aside, I interpreted his move as a way of grounding himself between two cultures. Bilingual and bicultural people like him, and like me, cannot hold onto a particular language and culture the same way monocultural people can. If you know only one language and one culture, you can take them to be absolute. But we have experienced too many cultures to believe in the monocultural faith anymore. We know that what is taken for granted in one culture is not so in another. It is hard to live in such a world of relativity. I thought that Rui might have been attracted to Christianity because it does not vary from one place to another and therefore provided him with something constant. I asked him, “Is that why you became a Christian?” Rui seemed amused by my interpretation and wrote to me, “It was interesting to learn how my becoming a Christian appears from an objective point of view within the framework of this research.” But he made it clear that my interpretation was wrong: “In my case, I wasn’t aware of the relativity of culture and language and I don’t think that I was looking for something constant to deal with the fact that I am a kikokushijo (But I think there are many Christians like that).” He acknowledged, however, his appreciation of the anchoring that his faith brought to him: “As my faith deepens, I am beginning to understand, as a consequence, how much it is becoming a constant source of security (yoridokoro). As it turned out, this has become

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the biggest anchor in my life, and when I come to think of it, all the anchors I have gone through may have been a process leading toward this one.” Whether cause or consequence, it still seems rather fitting to me that Rui, who has long been engaged in a quest for an identity that transcends national boundaries, should in the end find his anchor in one of the most widespread religions in the world. He used to tell me back in Canada that his definition of a cosmopolite was a person who has abandoned his concern for a particular nationality or ethnic group. Throughout the period of our collaboration, he was striving to become that person. In the light of this, his decision to become a Christian appears, at least to me, like a finishing touch to this endeavor, finally finding a name for the way of life he had been trying to embody. Having found a more stable anchor in his life, he was now ready to let go of the kikokushijo label that once meant so much to him. He wrote to me the following March, “What I am convinced of now is that being a kikokushijo itself is not important. What is important is rather that I have lived abroad and that my experience there has shaped me to become the person that I am now. Also, the fact that I grew up abroad is no different from someone growing up in Osaka or Hokkaido; it has no special meaning.” There was no longer a false sense of superiority to others. Instead, there was a sense of appreciation of his own background and those of others. He said that cross-cultural experience was so much part of his life that he still could not imagine what he might have been like had he lived all his life in Japan. But what was important to him was no longer the label kikokushijo but what he had learned from the experience and the self that had emerged from it.

C H A P T E R

6 The Development of Bilingual and Bicultural Identities N

Having told four kikokushijo’s identity narratives, in this chapter I analyze the trajectories of their identity development in these narratives. I divide their narratives into three phases: their sojourn to North America, reentry to Japan, and later reconciliation. Each of these phases was relatively distinct, with its own set of themes. As I mentioned in chapter 1, the students themselves talked about sojourn and reentry as separate phases in their lives. Their initial reentry and later—roughly 1 or 2 years later—reconciliation, although more subtle, also seem qualitatively different enough to be divided into separate phases. Analyzing their stories in terms of these three phases—sojourn, reentry, and reconciliation—then, helps us recognize changes in their identities, that is, the process of their maturing as bilingual and bicultural individuals. I argue that as they exit adolescence and enter young adulthood, the four kikokushijo became increasingly better at striking a balance between two languages and cultures. In the early parts of their narratives, the students assumed that one can keep only a single linguistic and cultural allegiance—if you are Canadian, you cannot be Japanese, and vice versa. Gradually, however, they awakened to the possibility that it is possible to be bilingual and bicultural. SOJOURN “Canadians Look Down on Us”: The English Barrier Unless children from other countries arrive in North America already equipped with advanced English proficiency, as Rui did, the first task they must face is to learn English. As Wong Fillmore (1983) noted, “This task is 107

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not a small one; it is about as complex and demanding as any they will encounter in their total educational experience” (p. 157). The presence or absence of English competence at the time of arrival makes a tremendous difference in the newcomer’s experiences. The stories that Kikuko, Kenji, and Sawako told were ESL stories in a way Rui’s was not. Rui, who arrived in Canada already bilingual, hardly ever discussed his desire or need for acceptance and recognition from Canadians. These things were a given to him. For the other three students, in contrast, the learning of English was a formidable challenge, inextricably intertwined with their struggle to negotiate their identities in the host country. Sawako, who had had the experience of receiving a warm welcome from Americans when she lived in Los Angeles, expected a fast and easy integration into Canadian society as well. When she failed to make friends with English speakers, she attributed her failure to the ESL program and the close-mindedness of English-speaking Canadians. Her bitterness remained long after she left Canada; she wrote to me as part of her feedback on an earlier version of her chapter that I sent her in 1995, What I want you to let people know through this project is not the old story of “ESL students make a clique of their own, stay quiet, and do not get into the mainstream.” What I want you to emphasize is that we want desperately to get into the mainstream, but we can’t because Canadians don’t allow us and also because we know that they look down on us and despise us. (Kanno, 1999, pp. 128–129)

While resenting her exclusion from English-speaking peer groups, Sawako nonetheless refused to accord other ESL students the status of full members in Canadian society. Since she was friendly with other ESL students, many of whom were legally Canadian or very close to becoming so, she was in many ways already participating in Canadian society. But she thought of other ESL students as second-rate citizens whose recognition did not count because it did not help her move closer to the core: “As long as I hang out with ESL students, I feel like I don’t get to know life here, like I am not interacting with people who belong here” (emphasis added). Kikuko also expressed some frustration at her isolation from English speakers. “Every time I felt insulted,” she said, “I think it was always related in some way to English.” But she gave up faster than Sawako and decided instead to focus on Japanese friends. Once her mind was set that way, she had enough of a Japanese community of her own, even in her Canadian school, to regard English speakers as irrelevant in her world. The word “foreigner (gaijin),” which she constantly used to refer to them, symbolizes her psychological distance. Miller (2000), in her study of three Chinese ESL students in Australia, reported that one of the students, Nora, also frequently

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used the word foreigners to refer to Australians. Miller commented, “I found it endearing that the tables were turned in this quintessentially Chinese perspective, in which all those not from the middle kingdom (China) are outsiders or foreigners” (p. 84). But clearly, one does not have to come from the middle kingdom to call the host nationals “foreigners.” Beyond being simply “endearing,” to me this marked use of the word by the ESL students suggests two possibilities. The first is that their access to communication with the host nationals is so limited that it does not influence the worldview they brought from their home country. The second possibility, not necessarily incompatible with the first, is that some ESL students maintain the original worldview—in which their home country, and by association they themselves, are the center of the universe—in order to resist internalization of negative identities that often accompany the label ESL student. Certainly, by drawing on the positive identities fed by her Japanese-speaking world while rejecting—most of the time—the negative ones originating from her English-speaking world, Kikuko managed to preserve much of her self-respect. Sawako, by contrast, proved more vulnerable on that score. The ordeal of ESL students that Sawako and Kikuko described involves a quintessential Catch22 situation: In order to improve English, they need access to meaningful communication—beyond “Hi” and “Bye” in the hallway— with English-speaking peers; to gain entry into an English-speaking peer group, however, they need to be able to speak English in the first place (Norton Peirce, 1993). In light of this, Kenji’s fast integration into the host school despite his late arrival is remarkable. His popularity among Canadian peers originated partly from his athletic abilities. As he said, “Even though I couldn’t speak English and had no confidence, I could prove myself in another area.” McKay and Wong (1996) also described one of their focal ESL students, Michael, who managed to break the English barrier with his athletic ability: “Michael’s proficiency in sports contradicted the ‘nerdy’ stereotype of model-minority discourse, fit into the gender expectations of American school subculture, and helped him with friends of various racial/ ethnic backgrounds” (p. 592). Kenji’s gift in sports is likely to have worked in a similar fashion. If an ESL student can show that he has an ability that has a high symbolic value in the North American teenagers’ culture, his entry into that community is significantly facilitated. Students like Kenji and Michael who excel in sports, music, or arts are fortunate in that their forms of expression are not hampered by the lack of language proficiency. They can develop peer relationships with native-speaking students through these activities and obtain vital opportunities to practice English. At the same time, Kenji’s very success at gaining fast entry into Englishspeaking communities might have curbed his investment (Norton Peirce, 1995) in further English development. Even with his “broken” English, he was already so well accepted by peers and teachers that there was little

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need for him to strive for more accurate and complex English. Kenji’s experience reminds me of a student in Saville-Troike’s (1984) study who also found it fairly easy to establish relationships with English-speaking peers. Saville-Troike observed that “some of the more successful communicators with English-speaking peers . . . ‘plateaued’ at fairly early levels of development, suggesting that their very success may have reduced their motivation to learn more complex linguistic forms” (p. 210). As Lave and Wenger (1991) wrote, learning is part of changing participation in various communities of practice; the flip side of the coin is that one learns only to the extent the desired form and degree of participation necessitates it. It seemed that in order for Kenji to participate in the school community in a way that was satisfactory to him, he did not need to learn high-level English. His English, therefore, plateaued prematurely. One aspect of this study that came as a surprise to me with respect to ESL education is how little faith my participants had in the ESL programs. The Ontario Ministry of Education (1988), which stated ESL policies in Ontario schools during the period in which the four students were in Toronto, noted that the goal of ESL education is “to give students the opportunity to develop the language skills and knowledge of the environment necessary for successful integration into the school and the community” (p. 16). I came to this research thinking that today’s ESL students are lucky to have such a support system. I learned English with the sink-or-swim method. I know firsthand the long-lasting psychological damage it could inflict on students. The ESL programs appeared to me a definite sign of improvement in the education of language minority students. The students in this study had little faith in the ESL system, however. Sawako and Kenji, in particular, passionately argued that the ESL programs divided rather than united students. The focus of ESL education, at least at the secondary level, is predominantly on the development of academic skills in English. But because my participants, armed with a solid educational background and education-conscious parents, had little difficulty coping with academic work, they did not see the point of being separated from the English-speaking students for the purpose of academic training. Where they could have used extra support (i.e., entry into English-speaking social networks), the ESL programs, far from promoting integration, achieved just the opposite by physically segregating language minority students from language majority students. It was already difficult enough to make friends with Canadians, said my participants. Schools did not have to make it harder. School not only systematically blocks participation but simultaneously sends the message to language minority students that they are not allowed in because they are not worthy enough. Studies by McKay and Wong (1996) and by Harklau (1994) both pointed out that ESL is generally “stigmatized

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and remedial” (Harklau, p. 259) and regarded as a “dummy program” (McKay & Wong, p. 586). When the normalizing climate of the school culture creates the “deficient” image of the ESL student, this image may be internalized by the bilingual students themselves—recall how Sawako and her Chinese friend reacted to a Canadian student’s blatant insult (“Are you deaf or ESL?”). Anyone with any sense of self-worth would react with rage. Instead, they settled for a sigh of resignation, as if they, too, believed that being an ESL student was a disgrace. In the end, then, I came to the conclusion that the North American schools that my participants attended did not have an effective mechanism to facilitate non-English-speaking students’ “legitimate peripheral participation” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in the school community. What was supposed to function as such a mechanism, namely the ESL programs, often achieved the opposite by creating a physical and psychological distance between ESL students and English-speaking students. It is astonishing that these schools failed to enable three ESL students who were highly intelligent, willing to integrate, with the full support of education-conscious parents, to shed their self-image as ESL students even after several years of residence. They never reached the point where they could say with confidence, “Yes, English is one of my languages.” This strikes me as particularly serious given that language proficiency is one of the most fundamental conditions of social participation—as Sawako said, “Nothing starts unless you speak the language.” “I Survived Thanks to Saturdays”: Hoshuko and Japanese Identity Unlike Sawako and Kikuko, Rui did not have to worry about being accepted by English speakers; however, he fit uncomfortably in the hoshuko (Japanese supplementary school) and the larger Japanese expatriate community. Given the absence of his direct contact with people in Japan, hoshuko represented “Japan” to him, and therefore it was extremely important for him to be accepted as a member. He felt compelled to take part in activities that appeared to him as frivolous and pointless, such as all-night parties, as long as others were keen. To me and in his own journal, he voiced his criticism of hoshuko peers: how they took for granted their parents’ affluence and how they neglected associating with Canadians. But there is little indication that he ever voiced those concerns in front of this group. No doubt he felt his membership to be too precarious to attempt any control over the nature of this group. When one desperately wishes to be a member of a community, one’s ability to negotiate terms of belonging is severely limited. One feels that one must follow what is expected of a member. Wenger (1998) spoke of the

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“inherent tension between identification and negotiability” (p. 207). On the one hand, membership in certain communities enables us to get closer to who we want to become—that is why we seek membership in the first place. On the other hand, belonging to these communities, especially wanting to belong, substantially constrains our behavior and attitudes. “Membership is therefore both enabling and limiting of identity; it is both a resource and a cost” (p. 207). There was certain rigidity in what Rui felt he had to do to gain recognition from his hoshuko peers. Membership could have been gained without having to attend every single party. Kikuko, for instance, could not join many of their late-night get-togethers and ski trips because she had a curfew and her parents did not approve of a group of teenagers taking an overnight trip by themselves. But I do not think that she ever had a moment of doubt that she had the right to belong to this group. What probably mattered more to secure membership in this group was not so much a conscious effort to attend many of their events but rather spontaneous interest in Japanese popular culture, knowledge and use of up-to-date slang, and experience of isolation in local schools. Rui’s sense of marginality stemmed largely from not sharing many of these traits. But belonging to this group increased his credence as a Japanese—if to no one else, then at least to himself—and for that, it was worth going out of his way to try to belong. For the other three students, hoshuko provided a sanctuary where they could speak Japanese to their hearts’ content. When dealing with an L2 brings inevitable stress, recourse to one’s mother tongue can provide uplifting moments. For all his surface fluency in English, Kenji said, it would never replace Japanese in terms of the sense of security and confidence it offered: “Japanese to me is . . . it’s my language after all (laugh). It’s the language my jaw developed speaking.” Houser (1982), in describing a nihonjingakko (full-time Japanese school) in London, wrote, “Passing through the school’s portals is like stepping into Japan itself” (as cited in Goodman, 1990, p. 28). The hoshuko in Toronto where I met the four students, although physically housed in a local Canadian school whose classrooms it rented on Saturdays, also had a similar atmosphere of total immersion. Every Saturday, I felt as if I stepped into Japan. After having spent the whole day there speaking Japanese and interacting with Japanese adults and children, getting on the streetcar to face a melange of races again, and thus to “come back” to Canada, always presented a mild shock. Spending one out of every 7 days in such intense linguistic and cultural immersion is bound to make a difference in expatriate students’ relationship with their home country. Kikuko managed to keep her self-confidence intact despite all the negative feedback she received from her English world because she had a Japanese world that sustained her. Hoshuko provided an important public arena

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in that world. The match between her self-image and others’ image of her was infinitely better there than at her Canadian school: In English-speaking settings Kikuko was a quiet and invisible ESL student; at hoshuko she was an academically talented and thoroughly outgoing teenager. Being given a chance to live out her “star student” self once a week made an enormous difference in the way she perceived her own worth. Recalling her early years in Atlanta, she told me, “It would not be an exaggeration to say that I lived for Saturdays. I managed to survive the first 2 years or so thanks to the Saturdays.” Kenji made a strategically wise choice of socializing with Japanese at hoshuko and with Canadians at his local school, where there were few other Japanese. This way, he did not have to face conflicting allegiances in one place. He seemed contented and secure in both places, sharing none of the acute anxiety that Rui and Sawako exhibited. But in his case, too, allegiance was kept to one culture. Despite many positive experiences in Canada, he said that he could never become Canadian because of the circumstances of his arrival: It was not his choice to come to Canada in the first place. In order for him to become Canadian, he would need to leave once and then choose to return to the country of his own accord, he said. As far as he was concerned, he was a Japanese who happened to live in Canada for a while. His occasional comments made me think that he kept a distance from Canadians and even regarded them with a bit of disdain. He once blurted out, “I get carried away easily, so sometimes I act stupid like Canadians—” at which point he remembered that my husband was Canadian and quickly tried to mend the situation: “I was talking about my friends of course. Sometimes I act stupid and insensitive like them. But I do draw a line and try not to forget the Japanese spirit, or the Japanese character.” When he talked about Japan, he did so in a more involved fashion. He said that he had a love/hate relationship with Japan—“Nikui-kedo suki-na hito” as he put it. He recognized the country’s many shortcomings—that is the nikui (hate) part— but he said, “Still, it’s a country I can’t hate totally, because if I did, I would have no place to go back to. I think everyone must have a country they can go home to. No matter how much internationalization progresses and how small the world gets, even when some countries become as multicultural as Canada, there must be a home country for each one of us, in our hearts. To me, that is Japan.” “I Need to Ensure That I Have an Option of Leading a Secure Life”: Parental Influence The host school and hoshuko were two major stages on which the four students’ lives in North America played out. A third one was their home. Together with their peers in both sets of schools, their families, especially

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their parents, were the major participants in their lives. Their presence was much more pronounced in their stories than I had anticipated. I believe that part of the reason why parents appear prominently in kikokushijo stories is that they, together with siblings, are the few people with whom kikokushijo have long-lasting relationships. Discontinuity is a rule in kikokushijo’s lives. While each move allows them to make a fresh start, it also invariably severs relationships they have nurtured in each place. They may continue to stay in touch with a small number of close friends, but even in those cases, without physical proximity the relationship will not be the same. Long-time friends from childhood are rarely heard of in kikokushijo’s stories. Parental influence was particularly noticeable in the area of values that my participants associated with Japanese culture. Any macroculture at the national level is not a tightly knit, coherent system of meaning. Rather, it consists of numerous microcultures, values represented by some of them at odds with those represented by others (Banks, 1997). Society is fluid and complex enough to allow such cacophony. Those who are born and raised in one country learn their macroculture from socialization in multiple communities, and in doing so, they become acquainted with various microcultures. However, what passes as the “Japanese culture” among people in the Japanese expatriate communities is a highly homogeneous subset of Japanese culture. Such communities are composed of the financially privileged, education-conscious, upper middle class. The “Japanese culture” expatriate students are exposed to and eventually internalize is a variation of Japanese culture shared among this particular class of people. Kenji once said, “There is this, something like an instinct in me that tells me I must groom myself in a way that enables me to fare well in this world. [For that end] I must get into a good university, at least name-wise—it’s handy that we can get in through the kikokushijo system—and find employment with a fairly major company. Looking at my father, I can see that working for a major company has a lot of advantages . . . I think it’s important for me to ensure that I have an option of leading a secure life.” I do not know a better articulation of the values embraced by the members of the Japanese expatriate community. Among the participants in this study, Sawako was the only person who openly acknowledged her own elitism and the pressure of having to measure up to her parents’ expectations. Nonetheless, that the other three students had also assimilated at least some of the worldview and values of this particular subset of Japanese culture is unmistakable. If nowhere else, it shows up in the names of the universities they eventually entered—Kobe, Tsukuba, Kwansei Gakuin, Keio; these are all “brand” names that are frequently mentioned when people speak of Japan’s top universities.

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REENTRY “She Finds Joy in Not Looking Like a Kikokushijo”: Readjustment Strategies Upon their reentry into Japan, the four kikokushijo showed two patterns of coping. Rui and Sawako emphasized their kikokushijo identity, whereas Kenji and Kikuko tried to fit into Japanese society by playing down their kikokushijo background. Although their coping mechanisms were opposite, their fundamental understanding of their situation was the same: They were strangers entering a homogeneous culture with highly codified norms of behavior and values. Kenji and Kikuko assumed that differences must be minimized and that the onus fell on them to narrow the cultural gap. Kenji joined taiikukai and was quite willing to submit himself to its strict regimen. No doubt he persevered partly for the love of the sport. But he acknowledged that it was also because it was an effective and fast method of assimilating back into Japanese society. His competence to function effectively as a member of Japanese society had gone rusty during his overseas sojourn, and there was nothing like taiikukai to force its reawakening. As he put it, “In another 2, 3 years in here, I think I’ll become quite confident of my speech manners, my conduct in hierarchical relationships, in sum, how to play my assigned role in an organization.” When I heard Kenji say this, I thought that it was a highly unusual path for a kikokushijo to take. I was surprised, therefore, when Kenji’s kikokushijo friend, Takeru, whom I had a chance to interview, also told me that he joined the club for the same reason. It is, in fact, misleading to call Takeru a kikokushijo because he was born in the United States and had never lived in Japan until his “return” at age 17. He said, as someone who had never lived in Japan before, the taiikukai’s group orientation frequently violated his sense of morality, more than Kenji’s, in fact—at least Kenji had lived in Japan for 13 years. But, Takeru added, like Kenji, he considered himself Japanese and if that was the case, collective behavior was something he would have to acquire soon or later in order to be recognized as Japanese, and for that matter, the sooner the better. I do not think that Japanese culture is so monolithically collective that one needs to assimilate the taiikukai level of collective behavior to function effectively in this society. I have met many individualistic Japanese who seem to function perfectly well and feel comfortable in Japan. But kikokushijo like Kenji and Takeru, in devising their readjustment strategies, seemed to reduce Japanese culture and people to its stereotypical simplicity and actively try to fit into those stereotypes themselves. It was as if they

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devised a set of conditions one needs to clear in order to belong to Japanese society, conditions that may not have existed. Kikuko also set out to meet the self-imposed requirements for belonging. In doing so, she almost “out-Japanesed” her non-kikokushijo peers: She emulated their manner of clothing, conversation topics, their socialization patterns to a T. “She finds joy in not looking like a kikokushijo,” said her mother with an amused air. Indeed, Kikuko did seem to enjoy playing the part of a regular Japanese student and feel vindicated that she could pull it off so well. On the other hand, she kept a conscious distance from other kikokushijo at Kwansei Gakuen. Just as she had given up on socializing with Canadians in opting for the company of other Japanese, she regarded membership in kikokushijo and non-kikokushijo communities to be incompatible. Rui and Sawako moved in the opposite direction of emphasizing their uniqueness. Rui’s change of identity was dramatic. Although in Canada he had longed to be accepted as Japanese, hardly a week in Japan passed before he decided that he was no longer Japanese. With a mind all too ready to criticize, it was easy to find fault with Japan. What annoyed or bothered him may have been general characteristics of Japanese society, or it could have been idiosyncratic characteristics of particular situations he happened to encounter. But he was quick to generalize all these specific cases to the whole Japanese society, saying, “The Japanese don’t look at you in the eyes,” and “In Japan, universities pretend to educate while students pretend to learn.” Criticisms of Japan were often accompanied by the contrast with an idealized Canada. He played the part of what Kikuko called dewa-no-kami (“In Japan . . . in Canada . . .”) with a vengeance. His identification with the Japanese, which was once so strong, was replaced by an equally strong identity as a kikokushijo. The same story repeated itself again in a different context, with a different language–identity combination: Just as he had guarded his Japanese language proficiency as a proof of his Japanese identity in Canada, now he carefully protected his English as an emblem of his kikokushijo identity. As Rui himself noted, “As a kikokushijo, I have acquired a foreign language, and I want to keep it as my uniqueness in Japanese society, among the Japanese. A phenomenon of identity maintenance?” After he entered Tsukuba University, he associated almost exclusively with other kikokushijo students. It was interesting to observe that the returnee group that represented Japaneseness in Canada, into which he fit rather awkwardly, now symbolized non-Japaneseness to him—the same group, different contexts. And for the very foreignness it represented, membership in this group was important to him. This time he fit in more comfortably, naturally. Sawako also thought that being a kikokushijo was something she should accentuate. Just before returning to Japan, she told me, “I say I am a kikokushijo, right? That would help start a conversation. I’d be happy if

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people ask me, ‘What’s it like abroad?’ ” Indeed, for a while after she entered university, Sawako’s identity as a kikokushijo was welcomed by members of the band club she joined. It did not take long, however, before tension developed. Despite their ripped jeans and bleached hair, Sawako’s peers favored consensus in decision making and hierarchy among members. When she spoke her mind or when she approached her senpai (seniors) as equals, her behavior stood out. She was accused of being ignorant of “Japanese common sense.” Linde (1993) pointed out the normalizing effect of so-called common sense: Common sense is . . . an issue of morality disguised as an issue of universal factuality. . . . The act of disguise is a deliberate or near-deliberate attempt by those in power to use the discourse of normalization to make the achieved order of the world appear to be a fact of nature, because then their dominant position in this order is also a fact of nature, and hence cannot be changed. (p. 195)

It is laughable that a group of 19- or 20-year-olds should claim themselves to be the proprietors of “Japanese common sense,” but they clearly thought that they had more “cultural capital” (Bourdieu, 1991) than Sawako to claim this status over her. If their and her ways of thinking differed, she ought to do the adjusting because theirs is how it is done in Japan. And just as clearly, Sawako accepted this unequal positioning of power because she in the end complied, albeit with a great deal of resistance. “There’s Something Lacking in Me” and “You Feel Recognized”: Loss and Gain All four participants—in fact, all of the students I taught at hoshuko who subsequently returned to Japan—entered university through the special kikokushijo quota. But exactly why kikokushijo are admitted into university separately from regular students was one of the topics in our group journal that inspired an animated discussion. Rui wrote that he felt uncomfortable when a non-kikokushijo student at Tsukuba asked him, quite innocently, why kikokushijo can get into top universities. Kikuko responded by saying that whenever she encountered such a question, she settled the matter by answering that kikokushijo get a separate exam because they are too stupid to take the regular kind. Kenji, on the other hand, expressed his contempt at such a self-deprecating attitude. He wrote, “I wonder if we kikokushijo must live with a sense of inferiority complex in Japan. Are we behind? Are we inferior to the regular Japanese because we have been educated differently? . . . I think you guys could have a little more self-confidence.” Sawako, too, said that she felt vindicated when she heard her father explain the nature of the kikokushijo entrance exam to his friend, by saying, “[In the

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kikokushijo exam] you have to write [an essay] about what you’ve read in the newspaper or what you’ve learned abroad. So just like Sawako could not do well on the regular exam, regular students would have a tough time with the kikokushijo exam. It would be difficult for them.” The kikokushijo’s self-conscious comparison of themselves with nonkikokushijo students in the same university is related to the larger issue of losses and gains in cross-cultural experience. Having spent several years abroad means that they have been absent for the equal number of years in Japan. In many ways, the kikokushijo have had unique experiences that non-kikokushijo students have no access to; at the same time, they have also missed out on many of what non-kikokushijo students would consider ordinary experiences in Japan. The question is: Are their gains greater than their losses? The confrontation with the regular students who “made it” to their prestigious universities sent the kikokushijo looking for what they had that the regular students did not. Rui and Kenji argued that they came out favorably in the comparison. Rui said, “I made friends with many people of different races and experienced kinds of things that one cannot do in Japan. I am proud of that.” Kenji shared Rui’s pride: “I grew up in a pretty unique environment, so in that sense I tend to have a different perspective from others and can stimulate people that way. It was like that when I was in Canada and I am still like that after I came back to Japan . . . I have something that other people don’t have.” Kikuko and Sawako, on the other hand, when comparing themselves with non-kikokushijo students, tended to dwell on what they lacked. Kikuko talked at lengths about her lack of “age-appropriate experiences.” She adhered to the story line that her involuntary and prolonged overseas sojourn deprived her of the opportunity to experience life in Japan: “I don’t have confidence in my English abilities, so I feel that going abroad has brought me more loss than gain (my fault, I know). The only weapons kikokushijo have are things like being thoroughly familiar with English, French, German, or any language other than Japanese or having learned to look at things from a global perspective through the learning of the culture of the host country, right? I don’t have any of that (laugh), so if people expect typical kikokushijo elements (I don’t really know what they are. Have to ask the ordinary Japanese) from me, I can’t offer them. On the other hand, it is not as if I have the same knowledge as the people who have been in Japan all their lives. I’m not saying I’m inferior because of it, but I think it’s true that there is something ‘lacking’ in me.” Sawako, on the other hand, suffered an inferiority complex in her academic abilities: “I’m glad that I have a more international perspective than ordinary people and have met foreigners from various cultures, but as far as studying is concerned, I am a loser. We [kikokushijo] say, ‘[Preparing for the entrance exam] is not real learning.’ But those guys who have gone through the entrance exams are in-

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credibly smart and know lots of things. In short, the entrance exam preparation is not useless.” It was not as simple as some kikokushijo focusing exclusively on gains and others focusing on losses. The four students all knew and felt both their strengths and weaknesses compared with non-kikokushijo students. It is only that some stressed benefits and others, disadvantages. All of them, however, were proud of their English proficiency and believed that it gave them an edge. And an edge it unmistakably was: All of a sudden they found themselves to be by far the best speakers of English around. Proficiency is relative: Among native speakers of English, most kikokushijo’s English sounds nonnative-like; among Japanese students who have never lived abroad, their English sounds exceptionally good. To put it differently, in Canada they were ESL students or nonnative speakers; back in Japan they became bilingual speakers. This change in their status as English speakers redefined my participants’ relationship with English. Somewhat ironically, it took their removal from the English-speaking world for English finally to become their language. Evidence of this change can be observed in the stories of all four students. Sawako wrote in our group journal that some Japanese teachers of English deliberately avoided calling on her in class. She interpreted it as a sign of the teachers’ insecurity about having a student in their class whose English pronunciation was better than their own. Rui responded enthusiastically to Sawako’s entry, saying that he had exactly the same experience in his English classes. Even Kikuko, for whom English had been closely connected with humiliation, came around in her attitude toward English after she started to receive positive reinforcement in Japan: “Over there [in Canada] it’s normal that you speak English; but here it’s so nice because when you speak English they look at you with admiration. You feel recognized.” Kenji also showed some possessiveness toward the Western world. He told me with contempt that when he had an interview with professors as part of his entrance exam, they “pretended to be knowledgeable about North America.” This annoyed Kenji: “I have been living there myself!” he exclaimed on the phone. To him, North America was his specialty; no one else was supposed to claim expertise in it. RECONCILIATION “I Eat Hamburgers but I Like Japanese Food Too”: Coming to Terms With Hybrid Identities About a year to a year and a half after they entered university, changes started to take place. First of all, all four students started to socialize in different circles. When they first entered university, they associated with

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peers who happened to be close by: club members, people in the same department, other kikokushijo who entered university at the same time. Since their proximity was created by not their personal affinity but by the structure and rhythm of university life, the chance of finding among these people a community that could give them a sense of belonging and comfort was not particularly good. But the kikokushijo experimented with these initial encounters anyway—one has to start somewhere. Later on, while they did not entirely sever their relationships with these initial groups, they expanded their networks, identifying or forming other groups that were a better fit. While Rui continued to enjoy the company of other kikokushijo, he eventually stepped outside the campus and gradually increased his involvement with the church. Kikuko and Sawako both moved away from their initial peer groups and formed new ones that were more compatible with who they wanted to be. Sawako was initially desperate to be accepted by her band members. Their rebellious demeanor and their passion for heavymetal music—so cool in the context of an elite, conservative university— held a certain allure for her. However, she gradually began to question whether these really were the people she wanted to socialize with: “Initially it was a lot of fun to be hanging out with those guys, but as I hung out with them, I found myself going to classes less and less because they don’t go at all, and just ended up lazing around with them. And really, I don’t like lazing around. People I like as friends are the ones that I can respect, who are good at academics,” she said. And Kenji stopped his total commitment to the taiikukai and diverted his attention to other kikokushijo and classmates. In short, they moved away from the communities onto which they latched as the only possibility and moved on to find new ones that better matched their values. In doing so, they stopped focusing exclusively on one group and began their involvement in several different communities, their social networks sometimes extending beyond their campus (e.g., colleagues at a part-time job, a church group). This “mix and match” approach to socialization suggests both their growing ability to negotiate membership and their stronger awareness that they do not always have to be chosen but that they themselves can choose who they want to be with. In expanding their social networks, the four students awakened to the fact that even in an allegedly “homogeneous” society like Japan, there are in fact people with markedly different values and ways of thinking. Not fitting into one group does not mean that you cannot fit into another. Even within the same club, for example, some people criticized Sawako for what they considered “typical” kikokushijo traits, whereas others valued her for the same qualities. One ally told her explicitly, “I want people like you who can speak up their mind as my friends. I’m glad we’ve become friends.” In other words, where the students used to see only homogeneity, they began

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to recognize diversity. A culture or society is not a single coherent system but consists of numerous small and large communities with their own shared practices, norms, and expectations. An exposure to a wider range of people with markedly different values helped the kikokushijo feel more comfortable with their own differences. The result is that they became more positive about their overseas experience and actively reintroduced it into their stories. Sawako’s shift of focus from the lack of comparable academic knowledge to the benefits of knowing the wider world (“Though I might be inferior to others in the core five subjects . . . kikokushijo have had the kind of life people can’t even imagine, right? I’m glad I had that”) is a good example of this transition. Both Kikuko and Kenji adjusted their stance on total assimilation. It was amusing to observe that, after months of desperate efforts to blend in, and highly elaborate reasoning they had concocted to justify their decision, both came to feel that they could not, and did not want to, fit in. After relating the problems he had had with his taiikukai peers, Kenji told me, “I’m really not good at ‘Single file! Stand straight!’ ” Kikuko, too, reflected, “Recently I have come to realize that I’m not suited to acting like one of the group so I’ve stopped forcing myself to pretend that I am, and try to live more individually.” As Linde (1993) noted, a new twist in one’s life story requires a reconfiguration of the whole narrative, since the nature of narrative is that parts and the whole are constantly in dynamic interaction. Thus, while they were focusing on blending in, both Kikuko and Kenji had highlighted why that was the most natural and desirable progression from their past experience. Once they moved away from the pressure to assimilate, they had the freedom to fit into their narrative those aspects of their identities (such as their individualistic streak) that were not compatible with the past story line. If Kenji and Kikuko moved to a middle ground from the position of total assimilation, Rui reached a similar moderate position from the opposite end of total rejection. He spent the first full year rejecting almost everything Japanese and regretting his decision to come back to Japan. Tsukuba’s isolated location, September entry for kikokushijo, the dormitory life—all the factors for which he had chosen his university he interpreted as a trap that cut him off from the outside world. However, he eventually began to view his circumstances more positively. In terms of friendship, for instance, he had this to say: “I am confident that I have made several friends who will remain good friends for the rest of my life. It’s a great feeling, and I owe it to the fact that this university is located outside of Tokyo, in a relatively quiet, seemingly inactive area: exactly the characteristics I didn’t like about the university one year ago” (his English). One of his closest kikokushijo friends told me that Rui had grown much more open. Whereas before he had created a barrier around himself and did not let others in very easily, he now was a more relaxed person who approached people of his own accord. “I

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don’t have to carry a chip on my shoulders,” Rui said, “I’m doing OK. I’m moving forward.” The point is that they moved away from the simplistic strategy of total assimilation or total rejection, and shifted to more flexible ways of negotiating bilingual and bicultural identities. They used to believe that in order to be part of a society, they had to assimilate a certain set of behaviors and worldviews. If one takes this view, one’s choice is either to accept all of a culture or reject it altogether. However, they later expanded their networks and encountered various other people, not just those who happened to be nearby. Meeting a wider variety of people opened their eyes to the possibility that one does not have to submit oneself to a single way—the so-called “Japanese” way—of doing things in order to be part of the society. Even the world of a university student includes a multitude of communities whose practices vary widely from one another. The kikokushijo in this study learned this lesson as they slowly expanded their social networks. Having learned this lesson in turn helped them accept both languages and cultures, since they realized that in order to belong to a society, one does not necessarily have to sacrifice parts of oneself. As Kikuko cleverly put it, “I eat hamburgers but I like Japanese food, too.”

C H A P T E R

7 Theoretical Implications N

The experiences of kikokushijo, who are temporary sojourners in their host countries, are significantly different from those of immigrants, who constitute the core subjects in most studies of SLA and bilingualism. In this chapter, by highlighting those differences, I raise questions about some of the taken-for-granted assumptions in the field, in terms of both content and methodology. More specifically, I examine three issues: (a) the influence of sociocultural context on bilingual youths’ identities; (b) differences between immigrants’ identities and those of temporary sojourners; and (c) narrative links among multiple identities.

SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT FOR CHANGE I argued, in the previous chapter, that as the four students became older, their understanding of and strategies for social participation became more sophisticated and that, as a result, they became better at balancing themselves between two languages and cultures. An interesting question is what prompted this shift. The literature suggests that college age is when bilingual individuals often learn to accept their hybrid identities. Baetens Beardsmore (1986) mentioned in his book on bilingualism that many bilingual adults he worked with “were extremely satisfied with their adult bilingual status,” but that they noted a period of “unease and confusion about the values of the bilingual element in their lives during adolescence” (p. 156). Tse (1999) and Kondo-Brown (2000) also found college to be a place and time in which many minority students undergo a major shift in their identity—in their cases, from a strong and exclusive identification with the 123

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white American culture to interest in and involvement with their own ethnic language and culture. Kondo-Brown (2000) described one of her participants’ explanation: [It] was probably because her elementary and secondary schools were very different from the university in terms of dealing with multilingualism and multiculturalism. Before she entered college, she felt a constant pressure from her teachers to learn English only, whereas her college teachers talked about promoting linguistic and cultural diversity. (p. 14)

As this college student pointed out, university, not just in the United States but also in Japan, is a place that allows students to mix with people from much more diverse backgrounds than they have been accustomed to. You would not encounter the kind of ethnic diversity on Japanese campuses that you do in many American or Canadian colleges. But you do meet people from all over Japan, which presents a kind of cultural diversity that is not seen in more region-bound elementary and secondary schools. The ethos of university, which presents and appreciates cultural and linguistic diversity, is also conducive to encouraging bilingual students to experiment mixing with a variety of people and consequently learn to appreciate their own unique backgrounds. However, I also believe that the fact that they were now in their own country also helped accelerate the process of reconciliation. First, being a legitimate member of a society allows you to take a certain degree of freedom to shape your participation in a way that you would not be allowed in a foreign country. It is rather like owning a house as opposed to renting one. In a rented place you are not free to knock out a wall or renovate the kitchen the way you can in a house you own. Similarly, if you are a guest in a foreign country, your ability to negotiate terms of your stay is considerably limited: If you want to live there, you more or less have to follow the rules imposed by the host.1 Back in your own country, you have more power to negotiate and influence the practices of the communities in which you participate. You do not just belong but also help shape the communities. Second, even after several years of absence, for the kikokushijo students, Japan was not entirely an unfamiliar country the way their host countries had been when they first arrived there. They had lived in Japan before, and even during the sojourn, they had continued to relate to its culture through their parents, the media, and hoshuko. They might have come 1

The fact that non-citizens in many countries do not have the right to vote although they must pay taxes is a perfect manifestation of this principle. So is the U.S. regulation of requiring aliens who are in the process of petitioning for a permanent resident status to ask for a parole in order to leave the country temporarily.

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across to their non-kikokushijo peers as somewhat “foreign,” but they were nonetheless grounded in many of the country’s social practices. I suggest that their relative familiarity with the culture of the society helped them adjust faster and consequently led them to the position where they could begin to negotiate their participation. Notice that it did take them a while—a year to a year and a half after reentry—before they stopped accepting or rejecting existing community practices and began to stake out their own stance on belonging. Most importantly, their brand of bilingualism and biculturalism had more value as symbolic capital in Japan than in North America. Despite the rhetoric of cultural diversity, in the mainstream North American context, Japanese culture is, after all, one minority culture, the Japanese language one minority language. Being bilingual and bicultural more often than not reduces your credence as a legitimate member rather than enhances it (Kondo-Brown, 2000). But in Japan, knowledge of the Japanese language and culture is vital in social participation; in addition, the knowledge of English and North American culture has high prestige—largely because Japanese public education has been so spectacularly unsuccessful at producing competent English speakers (Kato, 2000). In recent years, in particular, politicians and the business world seem to view the state of English education in Japan with a real sense of urgency, arguing that the people’s lack of English proficiency seriously undermines Japan’s competitiveness in today’s increasingly English-dominated global market (“Eigo ga dame,” 2000; Kawai, 2000; Nagashima, 2000; Takahashi, 2000). A proposal was even made recently, by an advisory panel to the prime minister, that English be made Japan’s second official language (The Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century, 2000). When society grants recognition to a particular competence, it is easier to incorporate it into one’s positive identity. I argue that this is part of the reason why my participants were able to affirm their bilingual and bicultural identities in Japan. In particular, after my participants grew more competent at fulfilling the role of a member of Japanese society, the additive aspects of their bilingualism and biculturalism, for the first time in their narratives, became squarely recognized. Once they grew competent in Japanese social interaction, whatever else they had was a “bonus,” a bonus that carried a significant weight in Japan.

IMMIGRANT AND SOJOURNER IDENTITIES One major characteristic of the participants of this study, in contrast with those in most research on ESL education and bilingualism, is that they were temporary sojourners in the host country as opposed to permanent residents. They arrived in North America knowing that one day they were going

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to leave. Our identity is not just about our past and present; our future trajectories, too, influence our current relationship with the world (Norton, personal communication, March 1999). Thus, the pattern of leaving home, living abroad, and coming home is bound to differentiate young sojourners’ identities from youths who emigrate to another country for good. As most studies focus on immigrant students (including second-generation immigrants) and tend to generalize from this population to all bilingual students, one of the most important contributions of this study is that it suggests potential differences that the trajectory of going home makes to the identities of young sojourners. And it turns out that considerable differences do exist. First of all, the literature on the ethnic identity of minority youths shows their tendency to desire assimilation into the dominant culture when they are young (KondoBrown, 2000; Phinney, 1989; Tse, 1999, 2000). The desire for assimilation is often accompanied by contempt for and shame about their own ethnic group. The findings of this study suggest sojourning students’ identities to be more varied. Each of the four students showed a different identity pattern from the others. There are people like Sawako, who show a strong desire to identify with the dominant culture, like minority students reported in the literature. But Kikuko led a life in which the dominant culture and the host nationals were largely irrelevant; Kenji socialized actively among Canadians but fundamentally believed himself to be Japanese; and Rui desperately wanted to be recognized as Japanese. Generally speaking, sojourner students’ identities seem more grounded in their ethnic group than those of immigrant youths. Also, when immigrant students are attracted to the dominant culture, they seem to want to alter their appearance to look more “white”: I wished I had blue eyes and blond hair. In my high school, it was a fashionable thing for people to use Scotch tape, and make their eyes look more like whites. You can do it so that you make your lids have another fold. . . . More people would dye their hair lighter—instead of black, they would make it brown. (Lee, 1991, as cited in Tse, 2000, p. 193)

By contrast, my participants never mentioned their appearance as hindrance nor did they express any desire to look “white.” Rather, they singlemindedly considered the lack of proficiency in English as what hampered their integration. I ultimately do not know why this difference in emphasis—on appearance or on language proficiency—occurs, but I have my speculations. One possible reason is that immigrant or second-generation Asian Americans that Tse (2000) featured in her study already possessed native or native-like proficiency in English and were also culturally assimilated to a considerable

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degree. In that case, it must appear to those who desire assimilation that the only thing that marked them as different from the members of the dominant group of the society is their physical appearance. In contrast, to those who have recently arrived in the host country, there are other differences— linguistic and cultural—that they have to overcome first before they can start worrying about their physical differences. This suggests that for those who desire assimilation, linguistic and cultural differences are seen as more primary differences that need to be mediated. A second possible reason why sojourning students do not show anxiety about their non-Caucasian looks is that they know that in their home country—where they came from and where they are eventually going back—they are members of the dominant group of society. Over there, everyone’s physical beauty is measured according to the standards of their ethnic group. The memory of having sat in the majority seat, I conjecture, helped save my participants from falling into the mentality of measuring their physical attractiveness according to the “mainstream” North American standards, which are extremely biased toward whites. In terms of their bilingualism, my participants were again much more grounded in their L1 than immigrant students in general. Pease-Alvarez and Hakuta (1992) reported that despite the widespread public perception that immigrant students are not learning English, basic research shows that they are learning English steadily with full encouragement from their parents. What is more neglected, rather, is their L1 maintenance. They stated, “Don’t worry about English; they are learning it; instead. . . . if you are going to worry about language, worry about the lost potential in the attrition of the native language” (p. 6). This statement applies less well to sojourning students. The prospect of returning home one day compels both the parents and the students (but especially the parents) to make sure that the children maintain (preferably continue to develop) their L1 proficiency, including literacy skills. The wish for L1 maintenance leads the majority of the Japanese expatriate parents in North America to send their children to hoshuko. Hoshuko in turn provides intense cultural and linguistic immersion on a regular basis and serves as a forum where Japanese students can socialize in their L1. Indeed, hoshuko was so closely tied with the idea of returning to Japan that not attending or quitting the school was generally taken to be a sign that the student had decided not to return to Japan and to advance to a North American university—and become a permanent resident. On the other hand, the firm grounding in the Japanese language generally meant lack of opportunities to use English. Language use does not come by itself but implicates socialization with speakers of the language and allegiance to the community of those speakers. Time to socialize with Japanese speakers was time away from socializing with English speakers;

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belonging to Japanese groups, as Kikuko and Sawako argued, precluded your chance of belonging to English-speaking groups. Some studies of adult immigrants found that some adult learners have remarkably little exposure to English although they live in an English-speaking country because they either are confined to the home, looking after their family, or work in an environment where the majority of their coworkers come from the same ethnic/linguistic background (Goldstein, 1996; Norton, 2000). By contrast, the general assumption is that children have abundant exposure to English. Some of my participants’ English use resembles that of adult learners more than that of child immigrants. Their exposure to English, especially their opportunities to engage in meaningful interactions in English, was limited only to the class time. The presence of other Japanese in the school, the tightly knit expatriate community, the parents’ emphasis on Japanese, and ultimately the prospect of returning to Japan all combined to enable the sojourning students to be less reliant on English to meet the needs of daily life than may be the case for immigrant students. Rui said the following toward the end of our data collection: “I no longer have much of a bond with Canada . . . partly because I always knew that it was going to be a temporary stay there while I lived there and therefore could not ‘give in’ completely (it’s not the right word but it’s the only one I can think of now) or ‘surrender’ myself completely to Canadian culture” (his English). With his history of the longest residence abroad and the best English proficiency of the four students, his experience in Canada would have most likely resembled that of an immigrant student. But even in his case, the awareness of the temporary nature of his stay in Toronto kept him from identifying entirely with Canada. What happens to bilingual students’ identities once they return to their home country has rarely been documented in research in SLA and bilingualism because of the overwhelming reliance of these studies on immigrant/second-generation populations. A further contribution of this study is that by following a group of bilingual students longitudinally, it showed how bilingual and bicultural identities evolve, especially after sojourning students returned to their home country. Previous studies that indicate minority students’ identity development over time show a gradual shift from polarization to the dominant culture to increased appreciation of their ethnic culture and community. This study has shown that the identity shift is not always from the dominant to one’s ethnic culture; rather, it may be more accurately characterized as a move away from polarization to a middle ground. Put another way, it is a move away from an either–or orientation to bilingualism and biculturalism toward a more balanced both–and approach. In the case of the immigrant/second-generation population, the initial polarization is predominantly toward the dominant culture. Consequently, the later balancing act necessarily involves increased identification with their

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FIG. 7.1. Difference between immigrant youths’ identity trajectory and that of kikokushijo.

ethnic group. However, in the case of kikokushijo, they may be polarized equally to the host and home culture, so the later adjustment to a middle ground can happen in either direction (Fig. 7.1). Kikuko’s identity change is thus characterized as a move away from a strong, and exclusive attachment to the home culture to the affirmation of her experience abroad. Rui, in contrast, began his life back in Japan identifying himself with Canada, but he gradually came to appreciate what Japan could offer him. He thus moved from the opposite end of the pole from Kikuko and moved to a similar, more balanced position. The direction of their adjustment is the opposite; the end result of the affirmation of both cultures as part of their identities is the same. This suggests that bilingual youths’ identity development— whether immigrants or temporary sojourners—tends to follow the trajectory of initial identification with one culture to a gradual acceptance of both cultures. Choosing one culture over the other offers a simple solution to adolescents who find it difficult to resolve conflicting cultural allegiances. As they grow older and become capable of more complex dealing with life’s conflicts and contradictions, they may gain a better grasp of what to pay attention to and what to ignore in order to fulfill their own needs as well as to maintain sufficient harmony with their environment, thereby establishing a better balance between the two worlds. That brings us to the second point I want to make with respect to the later parts of bilingual students’ identity development. Existing studies that claim that minority youths travel from identification with the powerful majority to embracing their ethnic culture tell us little about the process of this change. What prompts it? This study suggests that the kikokushijo’s coming to terms with their bilingual, bicultural identities was accompanied by their more sophisticated skills at negotiating social participation and their growing understanding of the complexity of culture. Initially, their strategy of negotiating social participation was quite simple: They focused

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on one group and assessed their chance of being accepted, by considering their apparent eligibility for membership. They neither considered to what extent and in what fashion they might want to belong nor attempted to have an impact on the nature of the group. By contrast, their later socialization pattern is characterized by a clearer articulation of their preferences and multiple memberships. Rather than worrying about “fitting in,” they shifted their focus to the question of who they wanted to associate with. They also no longer expected to have all their needs fulfilled in one community and actively sought out diverse groups, each of which responded to different interests and needs they had. As a result, their social networks were much more diverse, more “mix and match.” Their understanding of culture became more sophisticated, too—probably as the result of their interaction with a more diverse range of people. Moving away from the monolithic characterization of each culture and the dichotomy between the host and the home cultures (i.e., “Canadian culture is like that; Japanese culture is like this”), they became more attuned to the diversity within each culture. They came to identify with parts of each culture they were comfortable with, and by participating in those aspects, they were able to affirm that they belonged to both cultures. Of course, these changes may be part of the quite ordinary transition that everyone undergoes from late adolescence to young adulthood—part of growing up, in other words. However, in the case of bilingual youths, these changes also seem to help them come to terms with their own bilingual and bicultural identities.

COHERENCE, MULTIPLICITY, AND NARRATIVE LINKS: THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY The current trend in SLA when discussing issues of identity is to highlight its multiplicity. Norton Peirce is largely responsible for setting this trend with her seminal article in 1995. Drawing on poststructuralist thinkers such as Weedon and Bourdieu, Norton Peirce (1995) argued that the L2 learner’s identity is “multiple, a site of struggle, and changing over time” (p. 14). Objecting to the traditional notion of identity that characterizes the learner as unidimensional, static, and unchanging, Norton Peirce showed how a learner’s various identities create a complex picture of his or her language learning: In order to understand the learner’s investment in language learning, one has to understand the multiple roles that he or she plays out, not just in the classroom. I strongly endorse the notion of multiple identities and the efforts to characterize a language learner as a complex, multidimensional being. It is particularly welcomed when considering the tendency in SLA to reduce the

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learner to a set of variables. On the other hand, I consider the current trend in SLA to focus on the multiplicity of identity without trying to connect these different identities unfortunate. Identities are multiple—I do not dispute this point—but it seems to me that the key to understanding how these seemingly disparate identities affect one’s SLA lies in analyzing the narrative links between them, by examining how the actor integrates them in his or her life story. At first glance, the narrative approach to identity and the poststructuralist/postmodernist focus on multiplicity and contradiction appear incompatible—one focusing on coherence and the other on fragmentation. Postmodernism rejects the notion of a unified self, conceptualizing the self to be decentered and fragmented (McLaren, 1993; Quantz, 1992; Tierney, 1993). Quantz (1992) stated that “poststructuralism/postmodernism . . . suggests that the fractured Self is not abnormal and is, in fact, all there can be” (p. 176). Narrativists, on the other hand, hold faith in the unity of the self achieved through humans’ capacity to connect individual experiences into a coherent whole. Polkinghorne (1991) wrote: It is the narratively structured unity of my life as a whole that provides me with a personal identity and displays the answer to “Who am I?” My self-story gives a unified context in which it becomes clear how I am living my life and what is the nature of my individual existence, character, and identity. (p. 143)

I argue, however, that both perspectives reflect the nature of our identity. We humans do take on different labels, social roles, personas—in short, different identities—in different aspects of our lives. At the same time, we strive to make connections among these different identities in order to maintain a sense of purpose and direction in our lives and to function as a whole person—with a varying degree of success. Some concrete examples from the present study may help clarify this point. Let me start with the multiplicity of identities. In the context of hoshuko, Sawako enjoyed the company of other Japanese students, whereas in the context of her local Canadian school, she viewed them as a hindrance to her desired association with Canadians. Rui desperately wanted to be accepted by his hoshuko peers; at the same time, he was critical of their decadence and regarded playing with them a waste of time. Back in Japan, Kikuko was careful not to display her English proficiency in front of her peers, and yet when she occasionally had the chance to use English, such as at her part-time job in a video rental store, and received compliments, she expressed real pleasure. These are some examples of the nonunitary and contradictory identities that the students exhibited synchronically. If we expand our scope to diachronic changes, we find even more dramatic examples of multiple identities. One is Rui’s radical rejection of Japanese identity after his return to Japan. Another is Kenji’s engagement in taiikukai, whose

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practices are in complete opposition to the liberal, individual-centered education in Canada he had embraced. These multiplicities are indisputably there. But so is the actor’s urge to seek connections and coherence among them. For example, when Kenji decided to join taiikukai and submit himself to its regimented practices, it was clearly a violation of the values he had espoused in Canada. But note that he did not resolve the conflict by affirming the fragmentation of identities. He did not say, “Well, I am one way in Canada and another in Japan, and that’s OK.” Rather, he tried to reconcile the conflicting identities by explaining, both to me and to himself, that because he had been out of Japan so long and was out of practice of behaving according to the Japanese norms of behavior, joining taiikukai was an expedient way to get back into the habit. This way, he was able to maintain a degree of coherence between the self in Canada and the self in Japan. Showing Kenji’s two different identities does not tell us much about his relationship with bilingualism and biculturalism; it is only when we examine the narrative links he makes between the multiple identities that we begin to understand his complex attempts to seek his position between two languages and culture. Of course, we are not always successful in integrating different aspects of our lives into a single coherent story. Personally, I am still struggling to integrate my pre-Britain story with the post-Britain one; my sojourn in Wales—the first time I lived abroad, the first time I left my parents—had such an impact on my life that I find it hard to remember many of the events prior to that period, let alone to give meaning to them in relation to what has happened since then. Postmodernists posit that such a disintegration of the self, incoherence, and contradictions are a basic condition of the postmodern age—“all there can be.” Many narrative thinkers acknowledge that life is fraught with discontinuity and fragmentation that poses a serious threat to the unity of the self (Carr, 1986; Johnson, 1993; Somers, 1994). However, they also believe that despite such obstacles, humans instinctively seek as much narrative coherence in their lives as possible: Narrative coherence is what we find or effect in much of our experience and action, and to the extent that we do not, we aim for it, to produce it, and try to restore it when it goes missing for whatever reason. (Carr, 1986, p. 90)

What we have as identity narratives—as opposed to works of fiction—are fragments of stories that do not fit perfectly together. They are not pieces of a brand-new jigsaw puzzle; rather, they are more like fragments of an ancient tapestry that an archaeologist is trying to piece together. Some fragments fit nicely; others could be positioned in several ways; still other pieces are missing. The complete fit with 100% certainty is impossible, and yet we strive endlessly for that impossibility.

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Even with the case that Norton (2000; Norton Peirce, 1995) gave as a typical example of multiple and nonunitary identities, it is relatively easy to make a narrative link among the different identities. One of her participants, Martina, was “an immigrant, a mother, a language learner, a worker, a wife” (Norton, 2000, p. 126). As an immigrant woman, she felt uncomfortable speaking English with native speakers because, as she put it, “they speak fluently without any problems and I feel inferior” (p. 126). However, she did not avoid contact with English speakers and on occasion even confronted them even though she was linguistically and socially in a more vulnerable position. According to Norton (2000), the reason why Martina spoke up despite the sense of inferiority, the possibility of humiliation, and odds of winning the argument was because she knew that as a mother and a primary caregiver, she had to protect the interests of her family. If she did not speak up, no one else would speak up on behalf of her family. Norton argued that “the multiple sites of identity formation explain” unexpected behaviors on the part of Martina (p. 126). What is perhaps not emphasized enough in Norton’s analysis is the narrative connections between Martina’s multiple identities: Her identities as a mother and a caregiver fed into her identity as a language learner, telling her that she “couldn’t give up” (p. 126). Unless we acknowledge the links between different identities in Martina’s language learning story, we cannot explain her iron-clad will to speak up. In other words, it is not “the multiple sites of identity formation” themselves that explain Martina’s behavior as Norton argued, but rather the narrative links among these identities. In summary, I argue that locating multiple identities that a learner may possess in different settings is only one half of the necessary investigation into the relationship between identity and language learning. The other half is to explore how the learner makes implicit and explicit connections among these identities and integrates them into his or her story of language learning. I do not mean to suggest that recent studies in SLA that adopt the notion of nonunitary, fragmented identities tend to stop at the level of displaying a learner’s multiple identities. Often, the researchers do make implicit connections between the learner’s different identities in order to explain why a particular form of language learning took place. However what is not explicitly acknowledged, in a preoccupation to emphasize the dynamic nature of identity, is that the researcher or the actor himself or herself is engaged in the act of weaving these identities together. It is in the narrative weaving where lies the key to understanding the relationship between identity and language learning.

C H A P T E R

8 Conclusions N

This study examined the development of bilingual and bicultural identities by analyzing the identity narratives of kikokushijo. The period from adolescence to young adulthood is marked by major growth, both emotional and intellectual. Just as they mature in other areas, bilingual youths also become better at being bilingual and bicultural: not only in the sense of becoming more proficient in two languages or learning more about each culture, but also knowing what to do with the knowledge and abilities they have gained. They grow more skillful at striking a balance between the two worlds and become more confident about their hybrid identities. It was this process of growth in bilingual and bicultural youths that I wanted to capture in this study. We still know precious little about what happens to bilingual youths as they grow up. We busy ourselves focusing on their problems and difficulties—which are plenty—but forget to take notice of what fine and interesting persons many of them grow up to be. So let me take care of the problems first. When we think of the relationship between individuals and communities of practice in which they participate, it is important to remember that not only do the individuals change as a result of their learning and social participation but so do the communities. Lave and Wenger (1991) noted that “communities of practice are engaged in the generative process of producing their own future” (pp. 57–58). A dynamic community that can sustain its vitality and relevance over time may be characterized as one that is capable of rejuvenating itself by integrating the input of newcomers into its practices. In this study, however, two educational institutions that had a large impact on the bilingual students’ experiences—local schools in the host country and universities back home—were found to be highly resistant to change. Their practices im134

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peded rather than assisted the development of bilingual and bicultural identities. Although at the entrance these institutions seem open enough to students of diverse backgrounds, once inside they expect students to adapt to their system, rather than adjust their system to the needs of a changing student body. And since these institutions were traditionally developed for the education of monolingual and monocultural students, bilingual and bicultural students have major adjustments to make. This arrangement contributes far more to the maintenance of the status quo and hegemony in the community than to their own personal growth. Paley (1992) pointed out that this is how institutions have traditionally allowed entry to outsiders and suggested an alternative: The [traditional] approach has been to help the outsiders develop the characteristics that will make them more acceptable to the insiders. I am suggesting something different: The group must change its attitudes and expectations toward those who, for whatever reasons, are not yet part of the system. (p. 33, as cited in Toohey, 1998, p. 82)

The educational institutions that my students attended were intent on asking whether the students were good enough for them, but they rarely considered whether they were good enough for the students. The most important finding of this study is that it is possible for bilingual youths to reach a balance between two languages and cultures. The trajectories of their identity development show a gradual shift from a rigid and simplistic approach to bilingualism and biculturalism to a more sophisticated skill at negotiating belonging and control. Initially, the students tended to focus on one particular community of practice, equating its membership to membership of a culture. They assumed that there is a set of characteristics and competences—above all, language proficiency—that one has to assimilate in order to become a member of a culture, and they accepted those conditions without attempting to negotiate. When they were secure in their status in the target community, it gave them a center around which they could build their lives with a sense of stability. When their membership was precarious, however, desperation trapped them into a rigid, self-imposed idea about legitimate membership and eligibility for belonging, both of which appeared frustratingly out of their reach. They viewed each culture as a single, coherent system of meaning that applied to all groups across the board, so that when they failed to fit into one community, they were quick to conclude that they did not fit into American, Canadian, or Japanese society as a whole. Moreover, since belonging to a culture was assumed to involve such a heavy alignment of one’s identities to the norms and expectations of the culture, active participation in two cultures was deemed impossible.

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They eventually moved on, however. As they spent time in university and settled into the life of a college student, the kikokushijo became more sophisticated in their understanding of culture and their strategies in negotiating their identities with various communities of practice. Socializing with a wider variety of people brought home to them that culture is not entirely monolithic, but multidimensional and often contradictory: There are people with remarkably different ways of thinking and communities whose practices vary widely. One does not have to accept all of a culture—no one does—in order to belong to it. This realization seemed to make it easier for them to negotiate their place within Japanese society and to accept their bilingual and bicultural identities. For it is no longer a matter of bilinguals versus monolinguals, but every member of a community sharing larger or smaller degrees of differences from one another. The kikokushijo became more discriminating in choosing which communities of practice they joined, and started to claim a say in the shaping of these communities. Indeed, it is only in this stage that their dealing with various groups can be called “negotiating identities” (Cummins, 1996)—making choices from an empowered position, clearly expressing their preferences, while making concessions where it was acceptable for them to do so.

EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS There are many educational implications one can draw from the findings of this study. In this section, I present five educational implications in the form of questions. For some of these questions I have a definite position; for others I have a partial response; for still others I have no definite answer. Yet, I do know, based on the findings of this study, that these are all critical questions that educators involved in bilingual/language minority education need to ask themselves. Are ESL Students’ Needs for Social Participation Adequately Addressed? When educators talk about ESL education, they focus predominantly on academic performance (e.g., Collier, 1989; Cummins, 2000; Early, 1992; SavilleTroike, 1984; Thomas & Collier, 1997; Toohey, 1992; Toronto Board of Education, 1988). They are concerned with how lack of English proficiency might hinder students’ learning of academic subjects and might increase their chances of dropping out. These are, of course, very serious concerns, especially when the ESL students in question have not received adequate academic training in their countries of origin. But when we compare these adult concerns with those of the participants in this study, an obvious gap

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emerges. When the students talked about English, it was above all about making friends, getting respect and recognition, and establishing themselves as full-fledged members of the school community. In short, they associated English primarily with social participation. Current ESL education in North America roots its educational philosophy in the cognitive perspective of learning. Teachers pull ESL students out of their regular classrooms and place them in a separate class, so that the students can focus on simpler tasks in English. Once they have acquired the basic skills in the ESL class, the assumption goes, the students can then transfer these skills to deal with the demands of the regular class. But by pulling students out in the name of helping them learn basic skills, we are removing them from the very social interactions in which they eventually have to learn to participate. It is questionable whether the kinds of social interactions in the protected atmosphere of the ESL classroom resemble the complex social interactions of the larger school community in which the students eventually have to learn to compete for resources, to engage in the practices, and to have an impact on the nature of the community. Academic performance is certainly a very important aspect of student life, but the learning that students must go through in order to become full and effective members of the school community involves much more than academic performance. Even if we limit our attention to academic matters, the barrier between ESL students and English-speaking students can hinder their will to work together, as Sawako attested: “[In a class where both English-speaking and ESL students are present] you understand the content of the class, but when you have to find a partner and do some group work together, you can’t get into a group actively. You are too embarrassed to find a partner. You feel like you are going to be a burden on your partner, so you don’t ask them; you wait for them to ask you.” In other words, even in the realm of academic performance, the abilities to compete for attention, to negotiate activities, to establish one’s authority as a legitimate member of the group—in other words, what students must do on the playground and in the hallways—affect in a significant way the quality of their academic learning within the classroom. I am not suggesting that ESL students should be simply thrown into the mainstream classroom from the beginning to survive on their own. I am a product of such a submersion education, and I can attest personally that if it does not destroy the child, it can at the very least inflict unnecessary pain. What I am suggesting is that ESL educators think of ESL students’ learning of English in terms of helping increase their chances of establishing themselves as full and competent members of the school community at large, rather than limiting their English acquisition to linguistic and cognitive terms. The challenge, it seems to me, is how to provide necessary sup-

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port to ESL students without depriving them of the very access to the social interactions in which they need to learn to participate. Under What Conditions Is Language Minority Students’ L1 Maintenance Successful? One important difference of the group of students I worked with from many immigrant students in North America is that they were highly successful at maintaining their L1 proficiency, including literacy skills. Obviously, their intention of going back to Japan one day probably contributed to their L1 maintenance more than any other factor. However, I suggest that another reason for their high L1 maintenance is their regular attendance at hoshuko. Although hoshuko opened once a week, in the Japanese community it was considered just as important as the local school. Ueda (1986), who conducted an ethnographic study in the Toronto Japanese expatriate community, noted that many Japanese parents think of the local school only as a place for their children to learn English, expecting all the real academic learning to take place at hoshuko. Because of this prominence in the community, hoshuko served as a place where students could develop another public identity, with a different reference group and in a different language. It raised the status of the Japanese language by giving it a public and academic function and prevented the students’ bilingualism from turning into a diglossia whereby English was the public and status language and Japanese was merely the language of the kitchen. I believe that the opportunity to own a public identity and to engage in academic learning in L1 is a key to language minority students’ successful L1 maintenance. The question then becomes: Should L1 maintenance be supported in the regular school system or as a separate “ethnic” school or program? Some researchers argue for the placement of heritage language classes in the regular school. For example, Okamura-Bichard (1985) maintained, Learning of two languages outside the structured in-school program can be very demanding for children, and two parallel modes of learning activities may create a conflict in terms of time and attention in some children leading them to failure in one of the languages. (p. 87)

I recognize the advantages of heritage language classes within the regular school setting. Such a system may help increase the legitimacy of their L1 in the eyes of language minority students. Also, as Okamura-Bichard argued, if L1 classes are part of the regular school curriculum, the students would not have to negotiate two school systems and conflicting demands that different schools make on their time and effort. On the other hand, a separate school or program independent of the regular school has its advantages as well. A separate school run by the ethnic

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community can create an environment where their language and culture are the central concern. Within this setting, they are the majority, the norm. This radical shift of perspective is next to impossible in the heritage language classes in the mainstream school, where the primacy of English reigns. In other words, heritage language programs situated in the mainstream school are not powerful enough to challenge social hegemony. By contrast, a separate school such as hoshuko can provide a learning environment where students have opportunities to see adults of their ethnicity working as legitimate and respected members of the community, use their language in a wide range of academic and social functions, and study according to the curriculum that directly addresses their needs. In other words, separate ethnic schools can enable language minority students to experience what happens when their language and culture are the norm. How Can We Ensure the Educational Reintegration of Returnee Students? This study also suggests the importance of expanding the scope of bilingual/multicultural education to include the reintegration issues of returnee students. In the discussion of the education of culturally diverse students, we tend to concentrate on the reception of newly arrived immigrant/international students. In contrast to the vast literature available on how to support new arrivals, there is a conspicuous dearth of information on how to support those students who return to their home country after a prolonged sojourn abroad. The fields of SLA and bilingualism, in particular, have practically nothing to say on the subject. (The field of intercultural communication has historically paid much more attention to the topic, although researchers in this field are generally more interested in returnees’ psychological adjustment than their educational reintegration; see, for example, Martin, 1984, 1993; Storti, 1997; Werkman, 1979, 1983.) Moving to another country and staying there permanently—that is, the “standard” case of immigration—is not the only form of global-level migration. With increasing globalization, it is no longer so uncommon for one to live in several different countries during one’s lifetime or go back and forth between two countries. As the boundary between immigrants and temporary sojourners starts to blur—“immigrants” deciding to go back to their country of origin and “temporary sojourners” who end up staying in the host country permanently—the educational reintegration of returnee students should be just as important a part of bilingual/multicultural education as the reception of newly arrived students. One question that the results of this study raises is: How do we ensure the educational reintegration of returnees without making it a preferential treatment, especially at the college entry level? Two aspects of my partici-

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pants’ experiences with college entry stood out for me. The first was the remarkable ease with which they secured admission into the universities of their choice. Some of them did attend cram schools, but compared with nonreturnee domestic students, many of whom spend years preparing for university entrance exams, it is fair to say that the returnees’ entrance exam experience was relatively painless and short-lived. Compared with the situation in the 1970s, when returnee students had difficulty finding a high school, let alone a university, that was willing to admit them, or even in my time (i.e., the mid-1980s), when only a handful of universities were starting to open their doors to returnees, the abundance of choice available to returnee students today is astounding. On the other hand—and this is the second notable aspect of my participants’ experiences with regard to college entrance—because they got into prestigious universities through a separate route and did it so easily, after their entry, the legitimacy of their membership in the university community was sometimes called into question. It was as if they had skipped an important rite of passage, and they remained the uninitiated among the initiated and were stigmatized as a result. In a competitive situation, whenever a different set of criteria is applied to one particular group of candidates, even for a good reason, such a practice is bound to be interpreted as preferential treatment. It casts the qualifications of the target group into doubt. The returnee quota system at many Japanese universities is facing this dilemma. I do not believe that we should think even for a moment of reverting to the dark age when the only way for kikokushijo to be admitted into university was to take the regular entrance exams, which tested the knowledge of the Japanese school curriculum. A better solution, it seems to me, is to have multiple sets of selection criteria, a trend many Japanese universities are moving toward. Instead of evaluating all the candidates in one set of exams, many universities are now offering a variety of selection processes to different groups of students. For example, some universities now offer admission to those students who have a particular talent in one area (e.g., sports, music, or art) or who have made a strong commitment to activities outside of school, such as volunteer work. International students are also often selected on a different set of criteria from regular students, as are “mature” students. Most of these measures are grudgingly adopted because many Japanese universities are now desperate to maintain their student enrollment against the demographic trend of a rapidly dwindling college-age population. However, even if this is a product of desperation, the move for universities to open doors to a variety of groups and to have different selection processes that are appropriate for them is a good one. Kikokushijo then become one of many such groups, rather than the only group that is pitted against the “regular” students.

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Do We Have Enough Faith in Who Our Students Are Capable of Becoming? The multiplicity and changeability of identity raises questions about the judgments that we as educators make about bilingual students in one context at a given point in time. We often encounter students or research participants in a particular milieu, at a certain point in their lives, and proceed to label them as “lacking confidence,” “well-assimilated,” “very social,” “immature,” et cetera. We assume that we have figured out who these people are because we believe that who they are is a property of those individuals and, therefore, does not change across time and place. Immersed in the practices of one institutional setting, we also often remain oblivious to the role we are playing in shaping the students’ identities in the community. As the narratives of the four bilingual students in this study clearly show, identities emerge out of social interaction. As we move from one sociocultural context to another, our identities shift as well. Knowing Sawako as an extremely gregarious and popular figure at hoshuko, I was surprised to hear her isolation from Canadians in her local school; her teachers at the Canadian school in turn would have been surprised to see her active as she was at hoshuko. In addition to the multitude of identities across different contexts at a given time, there are also long-term changes in a person’s identities to which we need to pay attention. In this study we have seen many examples of long-term changes in the participants’ orientations toward language and culture, especially before and after their reentry into Japan. One example that I would like to emphasize here is Kikuko’s attitudes toward English and North American culture. She was so extreme in her lack of interest in the host language and culture that anyone who observed her only during her sojourn would have concluded she was a typical case of a language minority student who withdraws into her ethnic enclave. That observation would have been true to an extent: It does reflect the tendency she manifested in the host countries. But it would have entirely missed the complexity of her identities that the later part of her narrative revealed: namely, that she came to appreciate English and her sojourn abroad. Her example shows clearly that even if a person is heavily leaning toward one culture now, the other culture may make an unexpected comeback later in life, proving that its influence has been there, despite being hidden, all along. By making hasty judgments about our students, we educators may run the risk of narrowing the range of identities that they can have. The kinds of identities that a school community allows individual students to assume are likely to have an impact on their experiences, as Harklau’s (2000) study has effectively shown. Her immigrant participants were heralded as “an inspiration to everyone” (p. 46) in the high school setting, but in the community college they were compared with the newly arrived international stu-

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dents and were unfavorably viewed as having assimilated “the worst of American students’ habits” (p. 52). As a result, from being hard-working, highly motivated students, they shifted to playing the part of resistant, unmotivated students. Harklau argued, “It is only in looking at the same individuals across institutional settings that the contextual particularity and homogenizing effects of representations of identity such as ESOL student are made clear” (p. 62). Similarly, in negotiating their membership and identities in school/college communities, the students in this study had to contend with the stereotypical images attached to the labels ESL student and kikokushijo. Sometimes they were able to appropriate such representations, for instance when Rui wanted to distinguish himself from the “ordinary” Japanese. But more often, the representations attached to the identities such as ESL student and kikokushijo became a constraint, the onus falling on them to prove that they were more than what the labels suggested. Toohey (2000b), who worked with young children, argued that identities of the students are “produced” (p. 125) to a large extent by the specific practices of the classroom community to which they belong. Having worked with older students, I believe that as students become older, they become more capable of exerting their agency and negotiating their identities as they engage in community practices. Those of us who work with school-age children are assisting in that transition. The worst we as educators can do is imprison them into negative representations of a particular label with no possibility of a way out, and deny our hand in the act. The best we can do is believe in their potentials, seeing our interactions with our students as a first step toward who they could be 5 years, 10 years, or even 20 years from now. Are We Listening to Our Students’ Voices? Student voice has traditionally not been a large part of educational discourse (Erickson & Shultz, 1991; Nieto, 1994, 2000). In order to bring student perspectives into, and claim their legitimacy in, the discussion on the education of bilingual students, this study draws almost entirely on student stories. Their ability to report and interpret their experiences and to analyze their own particular choice of words, when probed, should attest to the contributions that students could make in enriching educational discourse. Having learned to listen to student stories through this study, I am now much more attuned to the stories my students tell in my capacity as a teacher as well. Before this project, I am not sure how careful I was to listen to what my students had to say. The participants in this study were originally my students; I had taught them for a whole year. And yet once the project started, I was ashamed to discover how little I knew about them and on what little ground I used to judge them. And these were the students

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who interested me personally more than others. I had thought that I knew my students, but I must have been viewing them as two-dimensional beings, present only in my classroom. After I learned to be more attuned to my students’ stories, I became able to see them as three-dimensional beings, each with a unique history behind and a unique future trajectory ahead. Being listened to and being the focus of the whole attention of another person is an extremely powerful experience, as a student in Lawrence Lightfoot (1983) discovered: “When you look at me so directly and listen to me so intensely I feel what I used to feel when my mother brushed my hair in the evenings” (p. 16). At the beginning of this project, my participants were incredulous that anyone seriously wanted to hear their stories, and they were worried whether they were supplying me with the information that I wanted. “What do you want to know?” “Am I giving you the right answer?” they would ask. However, once they became convinced of my genuine interest to hear their stories—I think 40-page transcripts and trips halfway across the world made a good case for my commitment—they clearly came to enjoy the attention they received. Every time we met, especially after they returned to Japan, they were extremely eager to talk, which suggested that perhaps they did not have many people with whom they could share their stories of overseas experiences without being judged (and true enough, talking about living abroad was often taken as boasting, as Sawako’s narrative shows). For them, I probably was an ideal person to take stock with periodically: While I knew them well, I was oddly removed from the circle of people who were the main participants in their everyday lives. They could tell me anything without being afraid that what they said might have a repercussion in their social network. I suggest that teachers could also play the role of a careful listener in many bilingual students’ lives. They, too, are usually a little more removed from the students’ lives than their family or friends, and yet know enough about the students to enter into their stories easily. That comfortable distance may be quite conducive to educative story telling and listening. It is not often, given the number of students in a school, that individual students receive the full attention of a caring adult; however, for the rarity of it, when it happens it affirms their being more powerfully than any cleverly devised educational initiatives. I do not think, however, that the sharing of stories, cathartic though it may be, is enough. The findings of this study suggest that for bilingual students, the achievement of a more balanced, secure sense of self is accompanied by the ability to negotiate membership in multiple communities to their advantage. But such an ability is not acquired instantly: Before getting there, many bilingual students may go through a period in which they are apt to take a rigid, judgmental view of their situation, deciding simplistically who is in the center and who is in the periphery of the school community.

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Teachers would do very well to examine the school structure that makes certain groups of students (such as the dominant language group) seem more powerful and closer to the core of the community and other groups (such as minority groups) less powerful and closer to the margins. At the same time, teachers can also help students become better attuned to the multilayered and overlapping communities of practice that constitute a school. It is not as if all members of a school community were positioned on a one-dimensional terrain with some closer to the center and others closer to the periphery: “There is no place in a community of practice designated ‘the periphery,’ and most emphatically, it has no single core or center” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 36). Instead, every member is simultaneously involved in different overlapping communities of practice, more intensely in some and only tangentially in others. Once students learn that everyone is simultaneously a full and peripheral member of various communities of practice and that all these communities are constantly moving and changing, then they may be able to view their own positions in a new light. For example, after all, it may not have to be the “last resort” to make friends with other ESL students; for a while, it may be more productive to practice English in a less pressured environment and to socialize with those peers who are more receptive to one’s bicultural background. Similarly, it may be fine to associate with fellow returnees at the beginning of college life and use it as a basis for expanding one’s social network, rather than deciding a priori that one is going to socialize only with nonreturnees. What teachers can do is gently challenge assumptions and prejudgments that underlie students’ stories, helping them move toward a more flexible and complex way of relating to their world.

POSTSCRIPT A couple of years ago I had a chance to visit Vancouver, Canada, for a conference. I took advantage of the trip to meet with Rui, who was studying architecture in Vancouver. I had not seen him for almost 3 years, and he appeared so much more mature, confident—all grown up. I nearly fell out of my chair when he told me that he was 26—the age I was when I first met him and the other students at the hoshuko in Toronto. Coming back to Japan, I told Kikuko about my shock of discovering their turning 26. She in turn seemed to be surprised to discover that I was their current age when I first taught them—10 years of history seen from the opposite perspectives. One good thing about working with the same participants over a long period of time is that you never quite lose contact with them even after all the data are collected. After my dissertation was completed in 1996, I had kept in occasional contact with the four participants. But for the preparation of

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this book, I got in touch with them formally again in order to ask them to check my manuscript one last time and also to find out what they were doing now. And here are the updates. Since graduating from university, Sawako has been working for a company that makes digital pianos. She says that she likes the company because many of her colleagues chose this company because of their love of music. Even her middle-aged bosses still play in bands. As she put it, “The salary is so low that unless you are committed to music, you would not come here.” She is working in the area of marketing communication and as the company exports a large part of its products overseas, her job involves frequent use of English. Although she was not hired particularly for her English skills, her colleagues seem to refer to her as an English expert, often asking her to check their English. She said, “Whether you actually use a particular expression or not [in authentic English] is something only those of us who have lived abroad can tell. . . . That knowledge has been really useful.” Sawako also got married recently, not to Atsuto, but to one of her colleagues. He is also a kikokushijo, and he and Sawako apparently had lived in Chicago around the same time—a discovery that no doubt led to an animated conversation. “Make sure you write down in your book that I got married to a kikokushijo,” she told me jokingly. Sawako used to tell me that she would quit work when she got married and would become a housewife. As it turns out, she is still working. Yet she says she is not sure whether she will keep on working for this company much longer. She is thinking of studying translation, but her future plans remain open at the moment. Kenji works for one of the major TV networks in Japan. The company has started to expand its business to other forms of information technology, such as the Internet, mobile, and Broadband, and Kenji works as a system designer for its Internet division. Working in the media industry has obviously had an impact on his fashion sense: When we met at a Starbucks in Shinjuku, he was clad in black, wearing glasses with a slick celluloid frame, and had his hair dyed brown. It was quite amusing to see him looking “cool,” knowing that how little he cared about his appearance when he was a “kid.” Kenji seemed extremely happy with his current job. He said, “I used all my advantages in getting here. I don’t think I was wrong in my direction setting. So where I am is not a coincidence but a result of careful calculation (laugh). I went abroad, came back as a kikokushijo, and entered university. Under these given circumstances, I thought carefully about how I can be what I wanted to be, and I followed that path.” He still keeps his own pace and is not overly concerned about maintaining harmony with his colleagues, but, he says, his colleagues let him be because they know that he grew up abroad: “They say, ‘Oh well, what can you do. You are Canadian!’

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They let me get away with it. It’s one advantage [of my background] to be able to assert my own character that way.” Kikuko worked as a secretary for a senior professor in a medical college in Kansai for about 5 years, but, unable to give up on the idea of living in Tokyo at least once, she quit her job and moved to Tokyo alone to start over. When we met, she had just started to work for an Internet company that was expanding its business to an online bookstore. Reflecting on the recent difficult job-hunting experience, she lamented that given her background, head hunters insisted on referring her to jobs that involved a heavy use of English, even when she explicitly told them that that was not what she wanted. “Even if I don’t want to use that [skill], I guess if someone looks at my resumé, that’s what stands out.” She is nonetheless quite happy with the job she landed: She had developed a strong interest in the Internet and had been running her own Web site for quite some time. She keeps a journal on her Web site, which attracts a number of devoted readers. No doubt her knowledge of and interest in Web design helped her find her current job. She is still ultimately dreaming of becoming an editor for a publisher, but given the recent development in online publishing and her small success with writing on the Web, it is not farfetched to imagine her turning into a freelance writer who publishes her own writing on the Web in a few years. Rui is now finishing up a master’s degree in architecture at the University of British Columbia. It is interesting that he should end up in the university that he had idealized as the university of universities while he was going through a difficult period in Japan. When we met, he talked passionately about a shelter for the homeless he and his colleagues were designing. He seemed to draw great satisfaction from engaging in the kind of work that benefits the socially disadvantaged. “You are not going to be a rich architect, are you?” I teased him and he laughed. As we walked on the streets of Vancouver, he pointed out differences in architectural design between buildings in Vancouver and in Toronto, allowing me to see things that would have entirely escaped my attention. Returning to Canada after almost 6 years of absence, this time of his own accord, Rui seems to have finally found his home. He has applied for permanent residence in Canada and now lives with his sister, who is already a landed immigrant and works in Vancouver. He wrote to me, “I have no intention of working in Japan, so it looks like I am going to follow a similar path to my sister. I feel like I can really be me in Canada.”

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Author Index

A Adler, P. S., 44 Anderson, L. E., 44 Applebaum, S. D., 35 Arendt, H., 9–10

B Baetens Beadsmore, H., 123 Baker, C., 91 Banks, J., 114 Bayley, R., 5 Bell, J. S., 8 Blackledge, A., 13 Bochner, S., 93 Bourdieu, P., 5, 117 Braine, G., 5 Brislin, R. W., 86, 95 Bruner J., 9 Byrne, J., 11

C Carr, D., 132 Casey, K., 21 Church, A. T., 44 Clandinin, D. J., 8, 9 Collier, V. P., 69, 91, 136 Conle, C., 8, 11 Connelly, F. M., 8, 9 Cook, V., 7 Cummins, J., 69, 84, 91, 136

D Dagenais, D., 5, 14 Dalley, M. P. M., 8, 88 Dewey, J., 8 Domoto, A., 18 Duke, B., 96

E Early, M., 136 Eckert, P., 12 Enloe, W., 18 Erickson, F., viii, 142

F Feinberg, W., 80 Furnham, A., 93

G Gardner, R. C., 11 Geertz, C., 17 Giles, H., 11 Goldstein, T., 128 Goodman, R., 17, 19, 29, 39, 87, 94, 112 Green, M. J., 14 Grosjean, F., 7–8 Guba, E. G., 22

H Hakuta, K., 127

181

182 Hardy, B., 10 Harklau, L., 7, 13, 84, 110–111, 141–142 Hatch, J. A., 9 Horoiwa, N., 17

I Isajiw, W. W., 89

J Johnson, M., 132

K Kaigaishijo Kyoiku Shinko Zaidan, 18 Kaigaishijo Kyoikushi Hensan Iinkai, 17, 18, 29 Kanno, Y., 11, 17, 35, 108 Kato, S., 96, 125 Kawai, H., 125 Kerby, A. P., 9 Kitsuse, J. I., 18 Kobayashi, T., 17 Kondo-Brown, K., 6, 11, 123, 124, 125, 126 Kramsch, C., 5, 12 Kuwagaya, M., 72

L Lam, W. S. E., 5, 12 Lambert, W. E., 11 Lantolf, J. P., 10 Larsen-Freeman, D., 49 Lave, J., 6, 12–13, 110, 111, 134, 144 Lawrence Lightfoot, S., 143 Le Page, R. B., 4, 11 Lebra, T. S., 50 Lewin, P., 18 Li, X., 8 Li, X.-M., 2 Lincoln, Y. S., 22 Linde, C., 10, 23, 117, 121 Long, M., H., 49

M MacIntyre, A., 9 Markus, H., 37 Martin, J. N., 139 McConnell-Ginet, S., 12 McKay, S. L., 4, 109, 110, 111 McLaren, P., 131 McNamara, T., 3 Mead, G. H., 96 Meinteil, D. A., 44

AUTHOR INDEX Miller J. M., 7, 13, 108, 109 Mink, L., 9 Minoura, Y., 83 Mishler, E. G., 21 Monbukagakusho [Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology], 17 Murase, A. E., 18

N Nagashima, Y., 125 Nakajima, K., 91 Nieto, S., 142 Norton (Peirce), B., 3–4, 6, 11, 13, 109, 128, 130, 133 Nurius, P., 37

O Okada, M., 29 Okamura-Bichard, F., 138 Ontario Ministry of Education, 36, 110 Osawa, C., 18

P Pavlenko, A., 4–5, 11, 13, 14 Pease-Alvalez, L., 127 Phillipson, R., 5 Phinney, J. S., 126 Polkinghorne, D. E., 9, 10, 131 The Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century, 125

Q Quantz, R. A., 131

R Rampton, B., 4 Rogers, J., vii

S Sato, G., 17, 72 Saville-Troike, M., 110, 136 Schecter, S. R., 5 Shibuya, M., 17 Shultz, J., viii, 142 Skutnabb-Kangas, T., 5 Somers, M. R., 132 Storti, C., 139 Suzuki, D., 90

183

AUTHOR INDEX

T Tabouret-Keller, A., 4, 11 Takahashi, J., 125 Taylor, C., 23 Thomas, W. P., 136 Tierney, W. G., 131 Toohey, K., 6, 7, 13, 135, 136, 142 Toronto Board of Education, 36, 136 Tse, L., 6, 11, 123, 126–127

U Ueda. Y., 138

W Ward, C., vii Weeden, C. 3 Wenger, E., 6, 12-13, 110, 111-112, 134, 144 Werkman, S. L., 139 White, M., 17 Widdershoven, G. A. M., 9 Willis, D., 18 Wisniewski, R., 9 Wong Fillmore, L., 107-108 Wong, S.-L. C., 4, 109, 110, 111

Y Yamamura, Y., 18 Yashiro, K., 17

Subject Index

A Agency, 14 Alan Hall, 1 Asian-Americans, 6, 126–127 Assimilation, 8, 79, 115, 121, 127

B Belonging, 12, 14, 33, 97 Bicultural, biculturalism, vii–xi, 2–3, 92 Bilingual, bilingualism, vii–xi, 2, 5, 7–8, 21, 23, 78, 81, 88, 91–92, 100, 108, 125, 127, 128, 135, 139 additive bilingualism, 78, 125 Bilingual and bicultural identities, see identity Bilingual fence, 88 Bilingual learners, vii, 5–6 Bilingual students, 6, 23, 128, 135, 142–144 marginalization of, viii Bilingual youths, viii, 130, 135 Bilingual adults, 4, 88

C Canada, 108, 144, 146 kikokushijo’s views on, 55, 60, 81, 88–89, 90–91, 94–95, 128 Canadians, 108, 113 Catch22, 109 Chutohampa/hampa, 2, 4, 31, 36, 37, 42, 45

Commonsense, viii, 40, 117 Communities of practice, vii, ix, 3, 6, 8, 11–13, 134, 135, 144–145 center, 143–144 community changes, 134 legitimate peripheral participation, 12–14, 111 multimembership, 12, 112, 120, 130 negotiability, 112, 124, 135 periphery, 143–144 social participation, 13, 110, 111–112, 123, 129 Community practices, 12, 13, 59, 124, 125, 134–135 Cram schools, see Juku Cultural allegiance/orientation, 2, 6, 107 Cultural capital, 117

D Dewa-no-kami, 77–78, 116 Discourse, 4 Diversity, 124

E Elitism, 114 English and adult immigrants, 128 and child immigrants, 127, 128 as second official language in Japan, 125

185

186 as symbol of kikokushijo identity, 96, 116, 118 barrier, 107–111 humiliation, 108 kikokushijo’s attitudes toward, 49–51, 68–69, 70, 74, 78, 80–81, 84, 91–92, 94, 100–101, 108, 119 kikokushijo’s proficiency in, 72, 84, 96, 118, 119 ownership of, 2, 119 status in Japan, 41, 125 English education in Japan, 1, 96, 98, 125 ESL, 6–8, 16, 24, 34–36, 51, 68, 72, 84, 107–111 ESL education, 136–138 and academic performance, 136–137 and social participation, 136–137 curriculum guidelines, 36, 110 in American schools, 68 in Canadian schools, 34–36, 50–51, 84, 108, 110 programs, 108, 110–111 research of, 2, 136 ESL students, 2, 6–7, 34–36, 108–109, 137, 142 relationship with English-speaking students, 35, 72, 108–109, 137 transformation from ESL students to bilingual speakers, 2, 119 Ethnic identity, see Identity

F Foreigners, 108–109, see also Gaijin French immersion, 14

G Gaijin, 70, 72, 108–109 Grammar-translation method, 1, 96

H Hakujin, 24, 28, 36–37 Home, 14, 24, 81, 95, 100 Hoshuko, 14–18, 19, 24, 27, 42, 47, 49, 65–66, 73, 80, 82, 85–87, 89, 95, 111–113, 127, 131, 141, 144 and L1 maintenance, 127, 138–139 background, 14, 18 membership, 112 socialization among students, 32–33, 70, 89, 111–112 variation among students, 15–17

SUBJECT INDEX

I Identity, vi–xi, 8, 141–142 and learning, 12 as labels, 10, 106, 142 bilingual and bicultural identities, vii, viii, 2, 3, 6–8, 12–13, 16, 88, 92, 100, 107, 122, 129, 130, 135–136 changes, vii, 2, 5–6, 10, 45–46, 107, 123–124, 128–129, 131–132, 135–136, 140, 141–142 coherence, 130–133 definitions, 3, 11 either-or orientation, 128, 135 ethnic identities, 6, 126 fragmentation, 130–133 future trajectories, 126 immigrant identities, xi, 13–14, 123, 125–130 Japanese identity, 42, 52, 83, 85–86, 89–90, 91, 111–113, 116 kikokushijo identity, 40, 44, 45–46, 60, 95, 96, 98, 106, 116–117, 142 linguistic and cultural identities, 11 middle ground, 121–122, 128–129 multiplicity of, xii, 3–8, 14, 22, 130, 141 negotiation of, vii, 2, 3, 13–14, 112, 120, 122, 129–130, 136, 143 research of, 3–8 sojourner identities, xi, 33, 123, 125–130 trajectories, 107, 126, 129, 135 Integration (linguistic and cultural), 8, 84 Intercultural communication, 139 Interviews, 21–22 language of, 23 Investment, 3–4, 130

J Japanese-American, 28 Japanese common sense, 117 Japanese culture, 60–61, 114, 115–116 Japanese identity, see Identity Japanese language kikokushijo’s attitudes toward, 26, 70, 73, 81, 100–101, 112 maintenance, 6, 85–86 Japanese literacy, 27, 31, 39–40, 65–66, 78, 83 Japanese people, 15, 17, 24, 36, 49–50, 54, 59, 61, 66, 73, 86–87, 90 kikokushijo’s attitudes toward, 89–90, 95 Japanese regular university students, 56 attitudes toward kikokushijo, 40–42, 77–78, 80, 117

187

SUBJECT INDEX kikokushijo’s attitudes toward, 58, 62, 63, 77–78, 96, 117–118 Japanese society diversity in, 120 kikokushijo’s views on, 42, 55, 60–61, 75, 87, 90–91, 94, 98, 100, 115, 116 Journals, 21–22, 88–90 individual journals, 28, 88–89, 99, 101 group journals, 21–22 Juku, 38, 56–57, 75–76, 92

K Keigo, 41, 60 Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC), 56–58, 61–62, 64 Kenji, ix, 19, 24–25, 28, 47–64, 82, 84, 87, 109–110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 126, 131, 145–146 career, 62, 64, 114, 145–146 father, 48, 54 friend (Takeru), 115 “K-mart” story, 49 mother, 24, 49, 54, 62 nantoka narusa, 48, 64 taiikukai, 58–62, 63–64, 115, 120, 121, 131–132 views on Canadian schools, 48–50 views on Canadians, 113 Kikokushijo, vii, 2, 39, 40, 78, 81, 89, 98, 100–101, 105–106, 122, 123, 124, 136, 139 advantages, 45, 96, 117–119, 121 arrogance of, 95–96 background, 17–19 definition, vii, 17 disadvantages, 45, 73–74, 117–119, 121 discontinuity in their lives, 114 institutional treatment, 17–19, 38–39, 139–140 maladjustment, 18 Kikokushijo entrance exam, 18–19, 31–32, 38–39, 43, 56, 57, 75, 92, 117–119, 140 Kikokushijo identity, see identity Kikokushijo quota, 117 Kikuko, x, 19, 24–25, 28, 53, 65, 82, 108–109, 112–113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 126, 127–128, 131, 141, 146 age-appropriate experiences, 73–74, 118 boyfriend, 24, 74, 75, 79–80 career, 80, 146 criticisms of kikokushijo, 76–77 Japanese friends in Toronto, 71 Japanese popular culture, 65, 73

mother, 22, 24, 66–68, 70–71, 76–77 non-kikokushijo friends, 76–77, 116 Kobe university, 38–40, 42 Kokusaijin, 60 Korean-Japanese, 100 Kwansei Gakuin University, 74, 76

L Language attrition, 127 Language crossing, 4 Language ideology, 4 Language minority, 5, 14, 138 L1 maintenance, 127, 138–139 Longitudinal perspective, vii–viii, 2, 5–7, 128

M Middle ground, see Identity Monolingual, monolingualism, 5, 7–8, 135 Multicompetence, 7

N Narratives, ix–x, 9–11, 23, 36, 130–133, 134, 141 and experience, 8–9 and identity, 9–11, 131 changes in, 10–11 identity narratives, vii, ix, 2, 14, 9–10, 132 narrative coherence, 132 narrative links, xi, 130–133 organization, 23 reconfiguration of, 121 story telling, 8, 21, 143 themes, 22–23, 24–25 Narrative inquiry, vii, ix, 3, 8–11 Nihonjingakko, 18, 29, 112 Nonnative English speaker, 2, 5, 86

P Parents, 113–114, 128 Participants, 19–21 feedback to drafts, 23 selection criteria of, 19, 27–28 use of real names, 19 Poststructuralist, poststructuralism, 3, 131 Power, 5

Q Qualitative research, 8

R Racial discrimination, 24, 52–53

188 Readjustment strategies, 60–61, 77–78, 115–117 Reconciliation, 107, 119–122, 124 Reentry, 107, 115–119 Returnees, see Kikokushijo Rui, x, 19, 24–26, 28, 47, 82–106, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121–122, 126, 131, 146 architecture, 87, 98–99 Christianity, 97–98, 103–106 Christianity and kikokushijo identity, 105–106 contact with English speakers in Japan, 94, 99 criticisms of Japanese universities, 93 disappointment in university, 92–95, 97 idealization of North America, 87–88, 92–93, 116 intellectual stimulation, 93–94, 98–99 kikokushijo friends, 95, 97, 98, 101, 116, 121 mother, 97 sister (Akari), 24, 82–83, 85 sketches, 101–104

S Sawako, ix, 19, 23, 24–25, 27–46, 82, 95, 108, 109, 110, 115, 116–118, 118, 120–121, 126, 127–128. 131, 137, 141, 143, 145 academic performance, 37, 39–40, 44–45, 121

SUBJECT INDEX “Are you deaf or ESL?”, 35 attitudes toward ESL students, 36, 108 boyfriend (Atsuto), 22, 24, 42–44, 46 brother (Shota), 28–29 entrance exam (high school), 31–32 entrance exams (university), 38, 118–119 experience at Canadian school, 33–34 father, ix, 28–31, 38, 44, 117–118 “parallel-park,” 41 peer relationships, 37, 39–41, 45, 116–117, 120–121 piano, 28–31, 40 Second Language Acquisition (SLA), 128, 130–131, 133, 139 Senpai-kohai relationship, 41, 58–61, 117 Sociocultural context, 123–125 Sojourn, 107–116 Sojourners, viii, 123, 125–126, 139 Stories, see Narratives Student voice/perspective, viii, 142–144 Symbolic capital, 125

T Toyo-jin, 72 Tsukuba University, 87, 92, 94, 97, 99, 101, 121

Y Yasuko, 1–2, 132