Under the assumption that the number of foreign people is expected to increase in Japan, this paper examines the ideal way of regional Japanese language classes, within the framework of “literacy and Japanese” in Osaka.
In Osaka, there are more than 200 classes of literacy education, such as literacy and Japanese classes and evening secondary schools, the largest number in the country. Many of the learners in these classes of literacy education are foreign people.
Since the late 1960s, literacy movements in Buraku liberation movements and evening secondary school movements have been promoted in Osaka. Their commonalities were, firstly, the movements by the parties themselves to “recapture the characters and words” that were deprived by discrimination and poverty. Secondly, their movements were to seek a guarantee of the “right to education” as fundamental human right.
These movements were connected by the International Literacy Year (1990). In 1993, Osaka Prefecture and Osaka City established guidelines for promoting literacy measures, and literacy programs were promoted based on these guidelines. In these measures, the viewpoint of “guaranteeing human rights” was regarded as the basis of literacy learning activities, and support for learning Japanese for foreign people was also positioned as literacy and Japanese education. To disseminate the philosophy and practice of “literacy and Japanese” education and conduct surveys related to literacy, core functions of a network connecting each classes of literacy education are required, in Osaka, “Literacy and Japanese Center” played that role.
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