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.
