Imagining ethnicity and polyphony at margins: Nikkei migration, school, and everyday life in Japan

At this moment in history, Ethnic and National identities still unite people under State Sovereignty. Durkheim tells us that the original idea of national education systems was to foster social solidarity and national cohesion as observed. But both ethnicity and nation are not essential concepts---they are imagined. In 1990 a new immigration law of Japan based on Japanese "ethnicity" legitimized the residential and employment status of the Nikkei (foreign Japanese descendants), especially from Latin America.; This law brought cultural and linguistic diversity to Kawabe Elementary School, which is the focus of my research. Kawabe is situated in an urban industrial and "multiethnic" context with a history of migration from the Korean Peninsula and Okinawa. The presence of Nikkei children at the school has illuminated a discrepancy between the official educational policy, governed by the official assumption of "ethnic" homogeneity, and the actual conditions at the local level.; By studying the experiences of the Nikkei children crossing the borders of national school systems, this dissertation presents an ethnographic investigation into how this imagined concept of Japanese "ethnicity" tends to constrain the Nikkei's involvement in the school as well as in everyday practice. The study attempts to decode the hegemonic process of Japanese ethnonational identity operative in the school, and identify a counter hegemonic response, as a process of identity-formation that has lately been emerging.; The study finds that Japanese ethnonational identity has powerfully formed not only official educational practice but also the popular notion of schooling at the local level. What this study identifies are what Victor Turner has called "anti-structural" process, which can be seen at work at the school and illuminated in various ways in each child's roots/routes.; The study concludes with the analysis of the tension between the structural mechanism of the hegemonic process and the emergence of counter-hegemony by referring to Bourdieu's "practical sense." By presenting the analysis of Kokusai Kyoshitsu (international class) lessons, the study suggests that a reconceptualization of the concept of "schooling" might promote a civil society that unites people in a new kind of unity.