Walking on Glass: Reconciling Experience and Expectation within Japan

ABSTRACT

This article utilizes an autoethnographic story-telling perspective in which I situate myself as a critical participant observer. Through critiquing the “situatedness of the self and others” in context, I share a selection of narrative snapshots concerning place and positionality as a white male native speaker of English (i.e. an ethnolinguistic minority) employed within Japan for two decades. I structure the discussion around the dominant burden of representation that regulates workplace interactions, experiences, opportunities and inequities. This burden of representation is drawn from to highlight the dualities of privilege which emerge when attempting to move beyond generalized group appraisals toward recognition of a more individual-level experience. Informed by dominant assumptions and taken-for-granted ideologies, I contend that white male native speakers of English in Japan remain erroneously fixed as the privileged recipients of special treatment as opposed to the stigmatized recipients of reductive objectification as experientially evidenced. I further show how personal struggles to establish professional credibility are undermined via historically crafted semiotic meanings, cultural logic and the (in)actions of similarly defined colleagues who are content with an inequitable status-quo.

KEYWORDS:

• Autoethnography
• Japan
• native speaker
• positionality
• privilege-marginalization

Acknowledgments

Sincere appreciation is extended to the volume editors for their professionalism, critical engagement, and commitment to open scholarship.