Japanese as “Safe Houses”

An Ethnography of Adolescent Learners of Japanese in Hong Kong

Abstract

Hong Kong is characterized by a grade-oriented, highly competitive educational culture and a direct link between academic credentials and social status. Schools in Hong Kong have an enormous impact on adolescents’ lives, and those who cannot claim supremacy over their peers are subjected to powerful pressure and a sense of inferiority. This ethnographic study thus analyzes adolescent learners of Japanese in relation to Hong Kong's sociocultural contexts. It is shown that learning Japanese functions as pedagogical safe houses in which adolescent learners can take shelter from the pressure of their school lives. Japanese is an elective subject in the university entrance examination and has attained the status of a prestigious language in Hong Kong. Consequently, Japanese allows those adolescent learners to adopt subversive identities to escape from pressure. Even so, learning Japanese is not unrelated to Hong Kong's mainstream competitive educational culture. Through SNSs, adolescent learners of Japanese tend to vie with each other for language proficiency, cultural knowledge, and speed of obtaining new information.