| Typically the children of Japanese expatriates working overseas, Japanese Returnees, are a conspicuous population in contemporary Japanese society who has confronted various problems in their attempt to re-assimilate into Japan's social system and cultural scenery due to their prolonged overseas sojourns. Both public opinion and established research on this social issue tend to consider the returnees as a pitiful or problematic population in need of special attention and treatment for their better re-assimilation into their homeland. However, Georg Simmel's classic sociological essay, The Stranger (Der Fremde, 1908), paves the way to an alternative approach yielding a better understanding of the ontology of the Japanese returnee population and the semantics of the returnee problem at large. The stranger, as a special form of sociological interaction, is a positive social relation constituted by a unity of absolute spatial fixation and symbolic wandering. In contrast to their negative conventional image, Japanese returnees, as the sociological form of the stranger in Japanese society, are intellectually privileged at the expense of their social marginality. While spatially fixed in the social and cultural systems of Japan, the returnees gain the intellectual freedom made possible by a higher degree of detachment from the local culture of Japan. |
