This article examines the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper to unveil the trends based on the number of published articles that include the term “multicultural coexistence.” In 2006, The government of Japan began prompting municipalities to initiate schemes to strengthen relations with foreign residents by considering them “community members.” Yet, only 47% of municipalities have developed such schemes to date, which implies the fragile basis of Japan’s multicultural environment. In addition to the number of articles, this paper reveals three peaks in articles published in the past 27 years, which quantitatively explains the close relationship between the media, the public, and policy agendas. Lastly, this paper analyzes the backgrounds of these peaks and notes the potential effect of economic conditions on the number of articles published.

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This paper examines educational strategies utilized by first-generation Thai immigrants and the ethnic identity of secondgeneration Thai single mother families living within an ethnic network. Thai single mothers tended to stabilize their lives and raise their children while taking advantage of the ethnic network they had built after coming to Japan. In particular, this ethnic network was very effective in passing on Thai culture to the children. On the other hand, despite inheriting Thai language and culture from their mothers, these second-generation Thai immigrants tended to experience a sense that their own ethnic identity had been undermined owing to a general lack of fluency in Thai language compared to that of new immigrants.

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This study examined eight Japanese university students serving as leaders during international educational activities to determine their relationship recognitions in actual situations of collaborative problem-solving. They participated in oneto two-hour semi-structured interviews from 2017 to 2019, reflecting on their leadership and the activities they were involved in, and analyzing the causes of any problems they had. A modified version of the grounded theory approach (M-GTA, Kinoshita, 2003) was used for data analysis. As a result of the analysis, ten concepts and four categories were extracted. The Japanese university students used distinct ways of forming interpersonal relationships in “Japanese to Japanese” and “Japanese to foreigner” situations. Indeed, they were conscious of only Japanese people in terms of leadership. It became apparent that practical education in leadership and group activities for multicultural groups, not limited to members of the same culture, would be a future challenge.

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The aim of this study was to analyze how Chinese living in Japan select acculturation strategies and the relationship between their choices and the their attitudes towards the two cultures. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine Chinese people who graduated from Japanese universities and were working in Japan as highly skilled professionals. After asking participants to select from a list of four categories that with which they most closely identified, three participants selected the “Chinese,” “integrationist” and “superordinate identity” respectively, while none selected “Japanese.” No strong consistency was found between the ways in which the participants dealt with the two cultures and the category they chose to describe themselves. The superordinate identity was confirmed in these participants as a variation of integrationist.

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