The Place That Was Promised: Japanese Returnees at a Foreign Language University in Japan

Abstract

Japanese who travel outside Japan in their childhood or adolescence, and then return to the Japanese educational system, are referred to in Japan as kikokushijo [帰国子女] or returnee students. In this year-long narrative analysis study I focus on three such students in their first year at a gaikokugo daigaku [(外国語大学) foreign language university] in Japan. My purpose is to explore their life stories, including their experiences abroad as children, their returns, and their choices and experiences in their university education. Data gathering includes multiple, in-depth, semi-structured interviews, field notes based on my own post-interview reflections, classroom experiences and interviews, and written texts in the form of participants’ emails and online social networking posts. Using sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s (1992) primary thinking tools (p. 160) of field, capital, and habitus, I examine to what degree the participants’ perceptions of their lives and life trajectories fit into what they see as possible or appropriate. I consider participants’ views on the promise of realizing themselves as “global citizens” at the foreign language university, their attitudes toward Japan and Japaneseness, and the prospect of going abroad again. I attempt to help fill the gaps of the lack of studies of returnees at foreign language universities, the lack of studies focusing on emergent international studies programs in Japanese universities, as well as a lack of studies examining the perspectives of individual returnees. Employing narrative re-storying, I present the participants’ stories chronologically in consecutive chapters, covering their early youth through their first times abroad, then into their first year in university, following this with a thematic analysis of the stories using Bourdieu’s sociological lens. I found that the participants possessed different social, cultural, and economic capital at each stage, including in their host situations when abroad, and this affected both how they experienced their sojourns, and their re-acclimation after they returned. On enrollment to the foreign language university, they felt the institution served as a sanctuary of sorts from the wider social field of Japan, and a staging ground for a longed-for return to living overseas. The desire to exit the social and wider fields of Japan was common among the three participants.