How can students attending Japanese schools break free from the Japanese bubble? Connections between expatriate children and local communities

• In Event: Virtual Roundtable Session 3
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Innovative Approaches to Learning and Teaching: Peace Literacies, Cross-Cultural Engagement, and Teacher Mentoring

Proposal

Education plays a significant role for social reproduction of global middle class (GMC) (Ball & Nilita, 2014). International mindedness is a platform for class solidarity of GMC (Bunnell et al., 2022). “Being international”—an open and tolerant attitude—is valued by parents of international schools (Hayden et al., 2000). Global citizenship education in international schools can promote social justice or prepare students for the global market (Schippling, 2020). While international schools provide a place for expatriate children to make international friends (Sivatte et al., 2017), they serve to create a “bubble” to separates from the local (Tanu, 2016). Although a few Western expatriate parents choose the local education system, there are many barriers to escape a “bubble of privilege” (Groves & O’Connor, 2018).

Besides international schools and local schools, Japanese expatriate families have another choice as Japanese schools abroad. Nearly half of Japanese children living in Asian countries outside Japan attend Japanese schools. Although Japanese schools have been encouraged to incorporate understanding of local culture, they usually provide less localized experiences than international schools and local schools（Tsuneyoshi & Nukaga, 2011）. Therefore, this study focuses on how students attending Japanese schools in Asia can break free from Japanese bubble and build meaningful relationships with the local community.

For this purpose, I conducted 90-minute semi-structured interviews with seven Japanese women aged 18 to early twenties who had attended Japanese schools in Asia for more than one year. The recorded interviews were transcribed and analyzed from the perspective of their relationship with the local community.

Most of the interviewees described their lives as “closed off”, commuting between the expatriate neighborhood and the Japanese school by school bus. Their intercultural experiences at Japanese schools, such as cultural exchanges with local schools or field trips to local museums, were only vaguely described.

Akari (pseudonym), however, constructed strong relationships with country X, where the political situation was especially difficult, both at Japanese school and at home. At Japanese school, she clearly remembered the peace education including the historical relationship between X and Japan during World War II. She felt uncomfortable that her classmates were unaware of the privileges they enjoyed as Japanese. She formed close friendship with a student whose mother was native to the country. At home, she learned the local language and music from local people alongside her mother, who preferred visiting local sites over meeting Japanese expatriate families. The fact that her sibling had a disability and that she herself had experienced discrimination heightened her awareness of minorities. She questioned why differences in nationality or disabilities were not accepted. After returning to Japan, she felt uneasy that her new classmates perceived X only as a “dangerous country” because the Japanese media focused on the political difficulties of X. Therefore, she began activities to convey the ordinary lives of X.

This study demonstrates that expatriate children can deepen their empathy for local people by recognizing their own minority status and take more proactive action by acknowledging their own privileges.

Author

• Maki Suzuki Shibuya, Japanese Red Cross College of Nursing