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Separate and Unequal: The Remedial Japanese Language Classroom as an Ethnic Project

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Robert Moorehead
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The economic downturn of the Great Recession has largely brought an end to the wave of ethnic return migration of Japanese South Americans to Japan, a wave that began in the late 1980s. By 2012, the number of South American residents in Japan had dropped by more than a third, contributing to the shrinking of the foreign resident population in Japan to the lowest level since 2005 (Ministry of Justice 2013). This emigration wave from Japan has been encouraged by growth in the Brazilian economy and by financial incentives from the Japanese government for Japanese South Americans and their family members to leave the country. However, despite these changes, the number of non-Japanese children in Japanese public schools who require remedial help in Japanese remains high. While the number of Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking children in Japanese-as-a-second-language (JSL) classes has dropped, the number of Chinese- and Tagalog-speaking children receiving these classes has increased (MEXT 2013).

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Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 11 , Issue 32 , August 2013 , e2
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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Copyright © The Authors 2013

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