Shaping Teachers’ Role in Supporting Immigrant Children in Japan Based on Ikeda’s Human Education

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Curricular Possibilities: Reflections and Narratives of (Cultural) Education (Table 26)

Abstract

Japan’s immigration issue is an important topic to consider as it reflects how people perceive vulnerable populations in society. In particular, immigrant children are struggling to fit into Japanese public-school environments (Freiermuth et al., 2022; Nae, 2022; Tokunaga et al., 2022). Applying Daisaku Ikeda’s notion of human education (Ikeda, 2021), this paper aims to examine what ways the idea of human education helps shape Japanese language teachers’ perception on supporting immigrant youth. This paper demonstrates that Ikeda’s educational philosophy can provide Japanese language teachers with a perspective to see unlimited potential in every student based on the idea of mutual growth, transcending a discriminative view that immigrants are inferior because of their cultural and linguistic differences.

Author

• Toko Itaya, DePaul University