裏側のニッポン

日系南米人の出稼ぎと学校教育

抄録

Australian sociologist M. Waters defines globalization as “a social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and in which people become increasingly aware that they are receding.” Also, American sociologist R. Robertson sees it as “the compression of the world.” The aim of this paper is to explore aspects of the globalization of Japanese schools, focusing on the educational experiences of the South-American Japanese children.
Many South-American Japanese have come to Japan to work since the late-80s. As of 1997, over 230, 000 Brazilians, 40, 000 Peruvians and others from the South American continent were registered under the Alien Registration Law, amounting to more than 20% of all foreign residents in Japan. The Brazilians are now the biggest “newcomer” foreign population in Japan, surpassing the Chinese. This paper examines the meaning of Japanese schooling for those South-American Japanese, based on field research done in Yokohama City.
A brief outline of the globalization of Japanese classrooms is presented in Section 1. In the following sections, the educational experiences of South-American Japanese children are located in three different contexts: the classroom, the community, and internationally. In Section 2, the process of their adaptation to Japanese classrooms is considered on the basis of observational data obtained in a particular primary school. In Section 3, the attitudes of their parents toward Japanese schools are examined on the basis of interview surveys. The key concept used is the “family story.” In Section 4, after briefly examining the international relationship between Brazil and Japan, the experiences of children who have returned to Brazil after several years in Japan are examined.