In recent years, the presence of cross-national marriages has been prominent. In 2013, the Society of Intercultural Education in Japan did special research projects on how women raised their children in three instances of cross-national marriage: Chinese women bringing up their children in a Japanese agricultural village, Japanese women bringing up their Amerasian children in Okinawa, and Japanese women married to Korean men bringing up their children in Korea. The study focused specifically on the languages the children were made to use at home and school, the women’s aspirations for their children, and how the women oriented themselves in the societies in which they lived.

This paper explains the keystone of this project, which considers the meanings of language and displacement for the women raising children in cross-national marriages. It also describes the statistics of cross-national marriages. Further it defines the word, kokusaikekkon. The word is reflected by the character of the Japanese society which emphasizes the difference of nationalities in marriages.

The purpose of presenting three patterns of cross-national marriages is not simply to display their diversity or to categorize by their attributes, rather the three cases indicate the women’s ways of living for better positioning through child-raising.

This is an article based on personal interviews about the education strategies of Chinese women married to Japanese men and living in a semi-rural city of Japan. All of the women have children in high school. In order to clarify the differences in the education strategies by school level, this work compares their eperiences with other personal interviews from three Chinese women with children in elementary school in the same area.

The aim of this article is to understand the difference of education strategies that the Chinese mothers in intermarriages use based on school level, and to explore the education strategies, such as language selection and school selection, and the causes of changes. The Chinese women have taken education strategies that place ‘Independence’ and ‘Mobility’ as important, based on their own experiences as immigrants. As their children progress through school, the mother’s views on ‘Independence’ are clarified more in respect to the school or an abstract expectation of future occupations. The paper demonstrates that in addition to geographic movement between countries, we should consider class movement, based on how the women assimilate to broader values in Japanese society.

As a result, by taking the strategy of respecting the child’s decision, the children who grew up in Japanese society have assimilated to Japanese social values, including an emphasis on gender response to the influence of sexual division of roles of Japan. These features will be different from images of Chinese urban families. Thus, this paper brings into focus the changes in education strategies undertaken by Chinese mothers, even in settings they are not used to.

In intermarried families that use multiple languages, the problem of which language to use with the children is likely to arise. Therefore, in this study, our intention was to bring to light the factors that influence language choice in Korean–Japanese families. Toward this end, we used questionnaires and interviews with mothers. Questions centered on Japanese language heritage and aimed to clarify the mothers’ relations to society.

Results showed that in many families, Japanese language heritage is being transmitted, and that “the status of the native language in society,” “the support of foreign spouses,” and “the understanding of the host society” are factors that influence such heritage. We also observed a conscious self-identification of being a “foreigner” among the Japanese mothers. Unlike in the past, when such women before World War II were labeled as “Japanese wives residing in South Korea” and who tended to hide their Japanese ancestry and live with the goal of putting down roots in Korea, a new way of thinking is emerging in these intermarried families, namely of “living as a foreigner.” In this way, a society is being built in which parents have “hopes for increasing children’s future options,” such as the fact that speaking to children in the mother’s native language is “something natural” and that they are providing their “children with opportunities for contact with the Japanese language.”