State management of bilingualism: a comparative analysis of two educational language policies in Japan

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a comparative analysis of two language policies developed in the 2000s by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). The two language policies analyzed in this paper are the ‘Action Plan to Cultivate Japanese with English Abilities’ and ‘JSL [Japanese as a Second Language] Curriculum in School Education,’ developed within the same temporal and spatial frame at the turn of the millennium in Japan. Focusing on lexical labeling in language and population management, it is argued that these two policies have dealt with mutually exclusive groups of the student population, for whom different kinds of bilingualism and Japanese language are imagined. Cumulatively, these two policies represent an unequal access to bilingualism in the Japanese context, combined with the Japanese dualism that indexes national and other speaker-hood through the distinction between kokugo- and nihongo-Japanese education, which has been a key mechanism in the creation of national boundaries in modern Japan. Through this analysis, this paper identifies the particularities of the Japanese case, as well as situating it in the global trend of unequal management of bilingualism.

Abbreviations: MEXT: Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan [Monbu kagaku sho]; CNL: Council of National Language [Kokugo shingi kai]; CCA: Council of Cultural Affairs [Bunka shingi kai]; CJGTC: Commission on Japan’s Goals in the Twenty-First Century

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• language in education policy
• Japan
• Japanese language dualism
• language ideologies
• intertextual analysis

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Jim Cummins, Monica Heller, Normand Labrie, Shiho Satsuka, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments on the earlier versions of this paper. Preparation of the final manuscript was supported by the Discourse Studies Article Writing Programme (2014–2015) at the Jyvaskyla Discourse Hub & Peripheral Multilingualism Project (supported by the Academy of Finland 2011–2015). I am deeply grateful to Francis Hult, Peter de Costa and Sarah Compton for their comments through this program, and Sari Pietikainen and Kati Dlaske for organizing the program. Lindsay Brooks, Grant Otsuki and Will Simpson helped me finalize the manuscript. All the remaining errors are of course my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kyoko Motobayashi holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and is Assistant Professor at Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, Japan. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, language policy studies, and discourse analysis, in particular, those related to bilingual contexts. Her articles appear in journals such as Multilingua, Language and Sociocultural Theory, and Japan Journal of Multilingualism and Multiculturalism.

Notes

1 It should be noted that my argument here is not to take the national/international dichotomy for granted. Rather, taking the complexity of actual language diversity (as research in sociolinguistics or linguistic anthropology has effectively demonstrated) into consideration, it remains useful to examine the ways in which state language policies tend to polarize the national and international spheres, dealing with the management of internal diversity and the strategy to participate in international society separately. It is now widely agreed that language policy includes a variety of actors on a variety of scales (Hult 2014), which could have an impact on the community and on individual beliefs and norms. Among these actors and levels, the focus of this paper is on what Spolsky calls ‘language management’ (2009, 2012), which is ‘the explicit and observable effort by someone or some group that has or claims authority over the participants in the domain to modify their practices or beliefs’ (Spolsky 2009, 4). Through the case of MEXT, this paper examines a form of language policy set forth in official documents as de jure language policies (Schiffman 1996) at the scale of the central government (Spolsky 2009, 166). With this focus noted, terms such as language policy and language management are used interchangeably in this paper.

2 The relationship between kokugo- and nihongo-Japanese is complex due to the two meanings that the term ‘nihongo’ has: nihongo-Japanese as conceptually distinct from kokugo-Japanese, and nihongo-Japanese that includes kokugo-Japanese (Hirano-Hubbard 2010; Lee [1996] 2010). The two meanings of ‘nihongo,’ either as including or distinct from kokugo-Japanese, are combined in an attempt to create a non-ideological, apolitical, and universal image of the nihongo-Japanese language. This has become even more complicated in the recent context of globalization. However, in the context of education, the distinction between kokugo- and nihongo-education remains.

3 [Kokugo Shingi Kai Kengi].

4 [Bunka Shingi Kai Toshin].

5 An overview of the MEXT press release documents related to primary and secondary level education between 2001 and 2005 (Motobayashi 2006) suggested that during the early 2000s two language-in-education policy issues were under intense debate: the reform of English language education for Japanese students, as represented by the proposal of the JEA Action Plan, and education of immigrant children at Japanese schools, for which the JSL Curriculum was being developed by MEXT. Then an examination of the goals, target population, and target language issues of each of these policies resulted in identifying the following as lexical labels for language: eigo ‘English’, kokugo ‘national language’, nihongo ‘Japanese language’, and bogo ‘mother tongue’ in the JEA Action Plan; and ‘JSL nihongo’ and bogo ‘mother tongue’ in the JSL Curriculum. Further, an analysis of representations of learners and their bilingualism revealed that kokugo was emphasized in the JEA Action Plan as the ‘mother tongue’ of the ‘Japanese nation’ and as the language of primary importance for them, while English was understood to be constructed on the solid foundation of kokugo-Japanese. On the other hand, the term ‘JSL nihongo’ was used in the JSL Curriculum with a short reference to supporting the ‘mother tongue’ of the learners referred to as ‘foreign children and students’ whose ‘mother tongue is not Japanese’, and ‘children who have barriers in daily academic activities due to their insufficient ability in nihongo-Japanese’ (Motobayashi 2006).

6 [kokugo no kyoiku no shinko ni tsuite].

7 [heimei de, tekikaku de, utsukushiku, yutaka].

8 [kokugo no risouteki imeeji].

9 [(1) kokugo ha, wareware ni totte ningen katsudou no chuusuu wo nasu mono de ari, ningen no jiko keisei to juujitsu, syakai no seiritsu to koujou, bunka no souzou to shinten ni kaku koto no dekinai mono de aru. (2) kokugo ha, wareware ga sosen kara uketsugi, sarani shison ni tsutaete iku rekishi teki dentou teki na mono de ari, kokumin no shisou, bunka no kiban wo nasu mono de aru. (3) kokugo ha, kyouiku no zentai wo tsuranuku kihon wo nasu mono de aru].

10 [korekara no jidai ni motomerareru kokugo ryoku ni tsuite].

11 [bogo to shite no kokugo].

12 [chiteki katsudou].

13 [kansei, joucho].

14 [komyunikeishon nouryoku].

15 In the post-WWII development of Japanese applied linguistics, nihongo-Japanese education has been subdivided into education of nihongo-Japanese as a Foreign Language (hereafter JFL nihongo), nihongo-Japanese as a Second Language (hereafter JSL nihongo), and nihongo-Japanese as a Heritage Language (hereafter JHL nihongo), following the Western trends of applied linguistics (see e.g. Quackenbush-Chinen 2005; Ikegami 2005).

16 According to MoFA (2009), Japan accepted a total of 11,319 Indochinese refugees during the period from 1978 to 2005.

17 According to MHLW (n.d.), A total of 20,879 ‘Japanese remaining in China after the war’ and their family members came to Japan for ‘permanent return.’

18 This amendment formally authorized the Nikkei population (descendants of Japanese emigrants overseas) to work and stay in Japan with the visa status of long-term residents, and as a result, a significant number of the Nikkei population, mainly from South American countries, flowed into Japan as unskilled workers (see Castro-Vazquez 2011; Gottlieb 2012; Hirabayashi, Kikumura-Yano, and Hirabayashi 2002; Tsuda 2001 for further details).

19 The term ‘immigrant-like’ is used by Kobayashi (1993) to refer to the group of newcomers that includes ‘Japanese’ war-orphans and their family members returning to Japan.

20 Of course, it should be emphasized that the argument here does not at all encourage a mere assimilation to the kokugo education by the linguistic minority students. Rather, the focus here is to understand how the category is created.