Educational Reform for Immigrant Youth in Japan

Transnational migration is seldom associated with Japan even though Japan has been dependent on immigrants for several generations. The research presented in this article explores a reform effort viewed as radical within the Japanese context that took place in a metropolitan school known for having one of the largest number of immigrant students in Japan, most of whom hail from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and China. While many of these “Newcomers” are of Japanese ancestry, absence from the homeland for two to four generations has left them without the cultural and linguistic skills to navigate the nuances of Japanese society. As a result, schools, which have never had to respond to the needs of immigrant youth, find themselves at a loss as to how to integrate young people whose parents have been drawn back from the Japanese diaspora through government policies designed to assuage the labor shortage of the 1980s and 1990s. Over the course of 5 months of ethnographic field work in the community in which this school is located the author offers insights gleaned from extensive time spent with social workers, translators, government workers, teachers, staff, students, parents, and community liaison volunteers, all of whom shared their frustrations and challenges with the education of immigrant youth within the context and constraints of Japanese schools.