The Internationalization of Japanese Education: “International” Without the “Multicultural”

Abstract

This paper focuses on the rhetoric surrounding “internationalization” in Japanese education. Internationalization is now used both in scholarly circles and in the media. Since discussions of internationalization are accompanied by calls for hiring more foreign faculty in higher education, increasing diversity, etc., one may be led to believe that the internationalization agenda also includes a multicultural one. However, a closer examination of 1) “foreign language activities,” routinely used interchangeably with “English activities” and 2) the rhetoric of so-called “foreigners,” shows that “internationalization” as used in these contexts lacks a multicultural perspective. The paper goes on to show that such views of “internationalization” without a multicultural perspective exclude those very populations which have the most to contribute to the development of a multicultural perspective in the Japanese context.