In this article, we report on a National Science Foundation-funded immersive international summer research program for biology students. Six students, representing Cohort 1 of a three-year program, spent 9 weeks at one of three institutes in Japan, working on related molecular, cellular, and developmental research projects under the mentorship of…

This study empirically investigated the invisibility, or symbolic annihilation, in Japanese English education of social groups at risk of marginalization. To do so, I assembled a corpus of 3746 English teaching materials selected because they involved world social group representation and because they were disseminated through the JET Program, a…

While global human rights knowledge has become a central facet of curricula used to shape multicultural societies and develop cosmopolitan citizenry, such knowledge is shaped by sociopolitical context. Japan has a long history of incorporating human rights concepts into its citizenship curriculum; however, this curriculum is produced in a…

This paper tells stories from a higher education study abroad collaboration entitled "Investigating Diversity, Human Rights and Civil Society in Japan and Australia." Starting from a pedagogical focus on students' active learning about human rights, this project has come to value relationship building--between academic institutions,…

Asian countries have discussed for decades the necessity of implementing multicultural education as their societies are becoming more global. With the dramatically increasing number of foreign and multiracial/biracial populations in South Korea, public education has a great need for multicultural education and Korean language teaching. However,…

The present study is embedded in the contextual approach of acculturation research. It examines teachers' attitudes and behaviors, teachers' expectations as well as their teaching practices as risk and resource factors in minority students' school adjustment. The study applies the method of content analysis and uses a deductively developed and…

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…

Recent studies in the social sciences have focused the attention on the role of children in cultural politics, in particular on children's experiences in nationalism, as well as on their participation in inter-ethnic relations. In line with this research, this study aims to investigate the relationship between childhood and political action and to…

This project explores racial tokenism in the Japanese academy. It grows out of concerns regarding the low status of foreign university faculty in Japan along with a need to evaluate recent government initiatives aimed at fostering "internationalization" of Japanese higher education. In this three-year case study, I investigated the work…

This article utilizes an autoethnographic story-telling perspective in which I situate myself as a critical participant observer. Through critiquing the "situatedness of the self and others" in context, I share a selection of narrative snapshots concerning place and positionality as a white male native speaker of English (i.e. an…

This paper examines emerging far-right movements and xenophobia, and the challenges they pose for justice in education in Japan. It illustrates discourses on nationalism and cultural diversity in both education and wider society from the perspective of critical race theory. It explores the voice of educators, particularly about their concerns and…

As an increasingly internationalized society, Japan's influence globally is on the rise, especially in the lead-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. However, as an internationalized country, Japanese society still harbours an 'us' and 'them' attitude, displaying discursive strategies that enable majority views to prevail. A country based on…

Students in the United States and Japan from high and middle socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds are afforded greater academic opportunities due to the systemic presence of hegemony in public schools (Darvin and Norton in "J Lang Identity Educ" 13(2):111-117, 2014). Minority and immigrant students, the majority coming from low SES, are more…

Examining the gap between national level minority education policies and local implementation in Japan, this paper considers this gap as a "soft middle" whereby local communities and schools have considerable leeway in how they implement policies. In particular, this paper focuses on Japan's largest minority group, the…

Educating minority people has been a subject of multicultural education and is still practised in a framework of the nation-state. Multicultural education guarantees opportunities for minority people's education and tries to preserve their culture, but it is often a controversial point between the majority and minority. In a multicultural society,…