The Impact of Immigrants on Long-lasting Ethnic Minorities in Japanese Schools: Globalisation from Below

Abstract

While the myth of ethnic and linguistic homogeneity prevails, Japan has always been a multiethnic and multilingual entity. The existence of ethnic minorities remained relatively invisible, and their activism to maintain their identities was not widely acknowledged in the public discourse. However, the influx of immigrants since the mid-1980s as a result of globalisation of the world economy, which forced education authorities to respond to their language needs, has made the multilingual and multiethnic student population more visible. This paper reveals how the responses by education authorities and schools to visible migrants differ from those to invisible long-existing ethnic minorities, and how these responses have impacted on invisible minorities, drawing on the case of ethnic Koreans. It argues that the combination of long-lasting activism by and for Koreans and the visible impact of immigrants offers the potential to challenge the mainstream Japanese schooling. First, responses to immigrants effectively acknowledged the ethnically and linguistically diverse nature of the student population in Japanese schools, and the special needs of minorities. Second, activism for Koreans also took up the cause of the visible immigrants, and this helped to highlight ethnic Koreans’ concerns. The focus on interactions between responses to these two groups illuminates the dialectic between globalisation and local forces.

Keywords:

• Japan
• Asia
• minorities
• immigrants
• language-in-education policy
• local activism