Abstract
This article is about exposing and countering racism through critical pedagogy in the context of a Japanese EAP (English for academic purposes) program. Relevant issues are first raised through: (a) a review of academic work concerning Japanese constructions of language, race and culture commonly found in nihonjinron writings, a genre of literature concerned with depictions of Japanese uniqueness or Japaneseness; and (b) an examination of important historical developments in post-war Japan beginning with its occupation by the Allied forces after the nation’s unconditional surrender, which is conducted with a view to demonstrating how the empowerment of a conservative politics has contributed to discourses that reify Japan as a “monolingual” and “monocultural” nation. Following this, the article focuses on how critical counter-storytelling can be combined with a critical pedagogy aimed at exposing and dialogizing prevailing discourses and practices relating to nihonjinron. The article concludes with a reiteration of the importance of denaturalizing and destabilizing racialized and racist practices extant in socio-educational spaces and a prognosis of what the future may hold with regards to ongoing contestations surrounding Japanese constructions of race and culture.
Introduction
This article concerns how ongoing systemic and structural aspects of racism can be exposed and dialogized through critical pedagogy in the context of an EAP (English for academic purposes) program in a university in the Kanto region of Japan. I will begin my discussion by reviewing the literature on Japanese conceptualizations of language, culture and ethnicity to foreground salient issues concerning race, racialization and racism. I will then highlight relevant aspects of my own counter-story narrative representing my transcultural and hybrid positionings as an EAP teacher of Singaporean-Chinese extract teaching in a Japanese university. Finally, I will discuss my own attempts at combining critical race methodology and critical pedagogy in my practice as an EAP teacher with the aim of: (a) exposing different enactments of racialization and racism and the rhetorical and discursive forms that they assume in a Japanese higher education situation I am familiar with; and (b) responding reflexively to counter the oppressive and dehumanizing effects that racialization and racism have on teaching and learning.
As a preamble to my discussion it is important that I offer information relevant to the particularities of my positioning as a foreign teacher in Japan. I came to Japan by way of marriage to a Japanese national after teaching EFL (English as a foreign language), EAP, ESP (English for specific purposes) as well as TESL (teaching English as a second language) and TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) teacher-training programs for nearly two decades in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Laos, Hong Kong and my native Singapore. Soon after my arrival in Japan, I went to the local government office to inform them of my presence in the country and was accordingly registered as a resident alien and issued an alien registration card. My first job in Japan was in a conversation school in Shizuoka which was contracted to offer English for business to senior executives of Japanese multinational companies. Several months later, I was employed by a private university in the Kanto region, and it is this position which provides the background to my discussion.
Homogeneity, primordiality and bloodlines
Japan has been written about in relation to matters concerning racial discrimination, ethnocentrism and parochialism by writers who have taken issue with the matter of Japanese claims to cultural uniqueness and racial purity. These writers have frequently focused their interest on a genre of Japanese literature called nihonjinron (theories of Japaneseness) literature (Befu, 2001; Lie, 2001; Sugimoto, 2010). Nihonjinron literature seeks to plumb the depths of what it means to be Japanese or what constitutes Japanese uniqueness, “premised on the assumption that the Japanese people are a homogeneous ‘race’ and possess a homogeneous culture,” a so-called “primordial homogeneity” where “land, race, language, and culture” are held and construed to be equivalent (Befu, 2001: 68, 84). In their quest to define Japaneseness, nihonjinron thinkers resort to comparisons of the Japanese people with other ethnic groups “and then emphasizing real or imaginary differences” (Befu, 2001: 72). Such comparisons have resulted in a “racial or ethnic hierarchy” where Japanese are placed “lower than Westerners” but higher than “peoples of Southeast Asia and Africa … who are not White” (Befu, 2001: 75–76). With regard to its pervasiveness, it has been noted that “[v]ery little serious writing by Japanese on anything relating to their society is entirely free of nihonjinron influence. It is also amazing how much nihonjinron has crept into assessments by foreign authors” (van Wolferen, 1993: 347).
From a critical multiculturalist viewpoint, nihonjinron forms what May (2003) would call a totalizing metanarrative that invokes traditionalism as well as “ethnic or cultural rootedness” legitimating “a static, closed sense of national identity where majoritarian … ethnicities come to be elided/equated with national ones” (204). At a more partisan level, the pervasiveness of nihonjinron writing reaches ordinary Japanese workers and people-in-the street through what Hall (1998) describes as a “cottage industry of nihonjinron writing by some of Japan’s leading scholars as well as freelance hacks … to supply the … appetite of the Japanese public for what makes them different from others” (176).
Critics of nihonjinron have, in the main, argued that the notion of Japanese uniqueness is one of rhetorical construction and that in reality Japan is indeed not as “pure,” homogeneous or unique as is claimed by nihonjinron proponents (Befu, 2001; Hall, 1998; Kubota and McKay, 2009; Lie, 2001; Murphy-Shigematsu, 2006; Sugimoto, 2010). Scholars have provided vivid descriptions of resilient populations of Ainu, Ryukyuan, Korean, Chinese and Brazilian descent (Kubota and McKay, 2009; Lie, 2001; Murphy-Shigematsu, 2006; Sugimoto, 2010; van Wolferen, 1993) residing in the Japanese hinterland, a reality that is not acknowledged in nihonjinron literature in the way homogeneity and primordiality in Japanese bloodlines are powerfully reified through nihonjinron (Befu, 2001). An important part of this belief in primordiality encompassing “the symbolic importance of language, religion, sense of ‘community,’ the notion of ‘shared blood,’ and the idea of ‘common history’ and ‘shared tradition’ in defining an ethnic group” (Befu, 2001: 83) is its biological dimension, as demonstrated in the following description: In the nihonjinron perspective, Japanese limit their actions, do not claim their rights and always obey those placed above them, not because they have no other choice, but because it comes naturally to them. Japanese are portrayed as if born with a special quality of the brain that makes them want to suppress their individual selves. (van Wolferen, 1993: 347)
On the point of Japanese officials and officialdom, it has been noted that the pervasive influence of nihonjinron cannot be sustained without what Befu (2001) calls “official sponsorship” (66), when it is mobilized, “maintained and supported by the state” for hegemonic and ideological ends and policy purposes (81). The next section traces Japan’s recent history in relation to matters of state and officialdom, including the rise and perpetuation of a conservative politics that remains conducive to the sustained hegemonies and bigotries of nihonjinron.
Post-war Japan and its politics
Japan came out of the Second World War a defeated nation. Its occupation by the Allied forces, led by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (or SCAP), was unprecedented in Japanese history (Caprio and Sugita, 2007). The SCAP (both the person and the office) came initially with an agenda of high ideals, which included the democratization of the country while exorcizing it of the last vestiges of empire and militarism. The institution of post-war democracy meant land redistribution, the encoding of civil liberties, and expanding various avenues for political voice and participation, including allowing leftist groups to organize themselves politically and giving women the right to vote (Caprio and Sugita, 2007).
These epochal changes, however, belied the fact that the occupation left a good deal of pre-war administrative and even political structures intact. A substantial portion of the bureaucracy and officialdom remained functional (Caprio and Sugita, 2007). Moreover, occupational rule was indirect, with the SCAP’s authority exercised through a Japanese government that was not totally purged of officials involved in wartime institutions (Caprio and Sugita, 2007). Indeed, when the Cold War became a reality to contend with, it was not difficult for the SCAP to embark on a “reverse course” (Caprio and Sugita, 2007), which included the restoration of wartime officials including nationalists, militarists and powerful right-wing politicians (Caprio and Sugita, 2007; Dower, 2012; Nozaki, 2007). The SCAP’s “reverse course” was to eventually lead to the empowerment of the Japanese right and the establishing of a powerful Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), whose hegemonies have largely shaped the conservative and nationalistic ideologies that continue to influence powerfully racialized notions of Japaneseness and foreignness (Hall, 1998; Kubota, 2002, 2011a, 2011b; Lie, 2001; Nozaki, 2007). This was compounded by the SCAP’s attitude of suspicion towards Asiatics in general and Koreans in particular, their presence being viewed as a catalyst for “potential minority problems” (Caprio, 2007: 185). The SCAP responded accordingly by directing “the Japanese government to bear the financial responsibility for repatriation” so that the “Japanese population would then revert to the homogeneous state it had enjoyed” (Caprio, 2007: 185).
The purpose of noting these historical developments is that ensuing instances of conservative encroachments on notions of Japaneseness and foreignness may mistakenly be attributed only to a “Japanese culture” instead of political ideology, not least ideologies that have made Japan and the LDP deeply beholden to their American “benefactors.” Dower (2012) describes revealing aspects of the inner-workings of conservative politics, here with specific reference to a powerful right-wing politician and wartime official whom the Americans restored after a period of detention: We now know a little more about the U.S. role in abetting the consolidation of conservative hegemony in Japanese politics, for example, including C.I.A. subsidies to Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke in the late 1950s. Over the years, moreover, there have been various leaks of documents involving secret agreements or understandings between Tokyo and Washington – mitsuyaku in Japanese parlance – mostly revealing the extent to which the Liberal Democratic Party’s conservative governments gave assurance that, whatever they might be saying for public consumption, they supported U.S. policy on controversial key issues such as Okinawa and the development and deployment of nuclear weapons. (Dower, 2012: 186–187)
Beyond educational matters, there is the added dimension of Japan Inc. (Dower, 1999) epitomizing the symbiotic relationship between state and private business, which again is borne of American patronage of industrialists, big businessmen and their cronies in politics and bureaucracy as part of Japan’s cooptation into the Pax Americana (Dower, 1999). Japan Inc. and its ancillary human networks were a well-oiled combination that tapped on Japanese homogeneity and the supposed Japanese work-ethic (van Wolferen, 1993), the accompanying bigotries of which endure to the present day (Tabuchi, 2012). Tabuchi (2012: np) observes how corporate Japan is still “notoriously insular” to the extent that it “has long been wary of embracing Western-educated compatriots who return home” for fear that their western training may make them more candid, outspoken or simply not Japanese-like. Reminiscent of Dixson and Rousseau’s (2006) discussion of the “property value of Whiteness” (8) where “Whiteness” is vehemently guarded by those enamored of its benefits, Japaneseness can be seen to command “property” value for the advantages it bestows on those who now carefully guard it – regardless of its exclusionary and discriminatory overtones.
Hence, discrimination, while linkable in the first instance to the bespoken nihonjinron, the reification of Japanese homogeneity and uniqueness, and the hierarchical positioning of different groups vis-à-vis their racial superiority or inferiority to the Japanese mind (Befu, 2001), nonetheless carries nationalistic, mercantilist, capitalist and (lately) neoliberal meanings. Such meanings are, in turn, traceable to the powerfully conservative politics put in place during the post-war occupation and its aftermath.
Racialization of native-speakers of English
Claims of racial discrimination in the Japanese context (Befu, 2001) have been studied by academics writing in the area of English language teaching (Fujimoto, 2010; Kubota, 2002; Rivers, 2013; Seargeant, 2009; Stewart and Miyahara, 2011) predominantly in matters to do with the way native-speakers of English are subjectively racialized. Among the Japanese, it has been said that the notions of “alien,” “foreigner” and “White native-speaker of English” are closely collocated, so much so that critical writers like Sekiguchi (2002) call it a “distorted formula,” with reference to yet another set of collocations: “gaikoku = Amerika = eigo (English) = hakujin (Whites)” (Sekiguchi, 2002: 202). Honna (2008) notes how the Japanese image of an English teacher is typically personified as a White American, hence creating serious disconnections in the minds of Japanese students when they meet with a native-speaker (e.g. a Japanese-American) who does not conform to this image (Fujimoto, 2010; Kubota and Fujimoto, 2013). This is only to be reinforced by nihonjinron tenets that recognize the coterminous nature of “land = people = culture = language” (Befu, 2001: 71), bringing White native-speakers into diametrical juxtaposition with all things evoking and epitomizing Japaneseness. Following nihonjinron beliefs in Japanese uniqueness, the White alien becomes an obverse symbol – symbolizing everything non-Japanese. Indeed, English native-speaker subjectivities and expertise in the teaching of English are strongly linked to being a White American, to the extent that African-American teachers have been known to be on the receiving end of questions about whether they are able to speak “standard” English (Kubota, 2002). Asian teachers, for their part, are hard done by in matters of salary (being paid less than White teachers) while also viewed as being less capable in their jobs by parents and students (Kubota, 2002, 2011a; Kubota and Fujimoto, 2013).
McVeigh (2003) describes how Japanese students are “[r]aised on images of cheerful, friendly, good-looking, and ‘White’ foreigners” (142), accounting for “why English instructors are hired for their ‘foreignness,’ more specifically, their ‘Whiteness’ rather than ‘qualifications and credentials’” (McVeigh, 2003: 143). The drawback for the native-speakers so hired is that many students expect them to teach “a sort of pretend ‘fantasy English,’ in which exoticized, eroticized and Occidentalized visions of the Other push aside just plain studying” (143).
As can be seen, such native-speakerist ideologies (Houghton and Rivers, 2013) can be fairly degrading towards White native-speakers in the way they are exploited for their physical appearance and advertisement value and less for professional know-how (Rivers, 2013). At the same time, the overall exoticism of Whiteness reifies for the Japanese their own uniqueness.
In the next sections, I turn to matters concerning my own counter-story as an English teacher of Chinese extraction in Japan.
Ingredients for my counter-story narrative
In the course of my time as an EAP teacher in Japan, I have faced questions, both direct and indirect, about my positioning as a Chinese man teaching English in Japan, where the profession is predominantly made up of White native-speakers.
My own counter-story involves the socio-historicity of recent encounters in Japan as well as erstwhile matters that trace back to my southern-Chinese ancestors who migrated in the late Ching dynasty to far-flung locations such as British Malaya, the Philippines and New South Wales. Such counter-storytelling, while traceable by way of origins to critical race methodology (Ladson-Billings, 1999; Parker, 2003; Solorzano and Yosso, 2002), is nevertheless also a vital aspect of the personal–professional dialectic often featured in teacher-generated narratives depicting struggles with language, ideology, power, race and, in some cases, marginalization and displacement, as found in the work of Morgan (2004), Curtis (2010), Luke (2010), Canagarajah (2010), Rivers (2013), and Kubota and Fujimoto (2013), among a growing number of examples.
The maternal side of my family can be traced back to the New South Wales of the late 1800s, where my great-grandfather and later my uncles worked in restaurants, fruit shops and market gardens. This was while my paternal ancestors were busily running rice mills and small businesses in Luzon, Penang and my birthplace, Singapore. I grew up speaking Cantonese, Fujian, Mandarin and English before subsequently learning Indonesian, Thai, and Lao in the course of my work as teacher-trainer in the respective locations. These experiences, alongside my work as an English teacher in Australian, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Japanese high schools and universities, have over the years instilled in me a humbling respect for heterogeneity and diversity, as well as transcultural and hybridized identities, all the more reinforced by my cross-cultural marriage to a Japanese national.
While my presence in Japan can be rationalized by my being husband to a Japanese woman, my work in Japan has exposed me to complexities arising from my “foreign-teacher,” “ethnic-Chinese foreign-English-teacher” and “non-White foreign-English-teacher” subject positionings, which predictably make up the ingredients of my counter-story narrative. “If you are Chinese, why are you teaching English? Can you teach Putonghua as well? What do students feel about a Chinese teaching them English?” questions such as these have been part and parcel of this narrative. My experiences working in Japan have been of constantly having to defend my ability to teach English despite my extensive experience and qualifications. As a course co-ordinator, I have had to justify decisions such as my appointment of other non-White English teachers on several occasions. I faced queries when I assigned a well-qualified and experienced teacher from Sri Lanka to teach the Spoken English section of an EAP course. I was also questioned when, as chairperson of an interview panel, I decided to recommend a Jamaican as a part-time teacher. These queries came with attendant racial innuendoes. As for the students, many have traveled to and lived in different places including Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and different parts of the Asia-Pacific, helping to make them more open-minded. However, to some students, the absence of White native-speaker teachers is tantamount to their being shortchanged when it was their presence on campus and in advertising brochures that persuaded these students to enroll at the university.
Needless to say, regardless of whether they have been students or colleagues, the nature and extent of such encounters made it necessary for me to look reflexively at my positioning and praxis as teacher (Mayo, 2008), not least into those matters concerning critical and transformative approaches to pedagogy (hopefully) as a way toward changes for the better.
Combining critical pedagogy and counter-story narrative
My practice of critical pedagogy has been forged over my years of teaching students from various countries and cultures and is guided by a recognition that issues in education are inherently power-laden and often inequitable. Coming alongside this recognition has been my professional quest for: (a) greater equity and humanization through education (Freire, 2000; Mayo, 2008); (b) a deeper appreciation of diversity, heterogeneity and difference (Kubota and McKay, 2009); (c) affirmation of the discursive, situated and generative nature of identity, semiosis, knowledge production and meaning making (Giroux, 2003; Lillis, 2003; Lin and Kubota, 2011; Morgan, 2004).
In various mutually reinforcing ways (which I will explain), the critical pedagogy I have sought to practice has come to be closely woven in with my own professional (and personal) narrative, in other words, my own counter-storytelling (Ladson-Billings, 1999; Parker, 2003; Solorzano and Yosso, 2002). Moreover, being a non-Japanese in Japan, with its attendant challenges relating to my subjectivization (and registration) as foreigner and alien, as well as a non-White English teacher working in Japanese higher education, my counter-story invariably encompasses the plurality of my multiple trajectories and subjectivities (Morgan, 2004). To my mind, my voice and experience cohere and inhere in my teaching and counter-storytelling – and separating the two would be practically impossible. In this regard, I am reminded of writings that highlight the socio-historicity of text and narrative (Lillis, 2003; Lillis and Turner, 2001; Prior, 1998), not just in the way they affirm my counter-storytelling, but also in the way they argue for the situatedness of signification and meaning.
In the next section, I address matters regarding the nature of signification and meaning and how they can be harnessed to raise questions about nihonjinron and the monolithic conceptualizations of people and culture that it reifies.
Denaturalizing naturalized conceptualizations
Given the nature of my workplace experiences and the way they inhere in my counter-story narrative, I have long felt the need to present students with alternative ways of conceptualizing Japanese-ness, foreign-ness, people, place and identity that nihonjinron modalities and formations do not permit. This need is compounded by the fact that as an EAP teacher, I am all too aware of the importance of letting students acquire the necessary academic literacies to understand the different ways knowledge and meaning are configured in language, and how frequently they enact dominant ideologies, including those that marginalize people racially (Lillis, 2003; Lin and Kubota, 2011; Parker, 2003).
The way I have chosen to do this, as I have noted earlier, is to cast my own thoughts back to the hybridities and synergies of my own narrative as a foreign teacher of English, child of migrant parents, and husband and father in a cross-cultural marriage, to see how they can be incorporated into the teaching material which I describe here.
Transculturality in teaching material
I have been fortunate enough to have access to a good choice of materials which have allowed me to encourage students to examine issues critically (Lillis, 2003). “Harukanaru” [Distant bonds] and “99-nen no Ai” [99 years of love] are two very thought-provoking productions that have challenged my students to engage dialogically with enactments and portrayals of race, culture and identity.
“99-nen no Ai”
“99-nen no Ai” begins in the early 1900s. A young man by the name of Chokichi Hiramatsu emigrates to America from Japan. Upon arrival, he experiences his first encounter with racism at the wharf when a food vendor refuses to sell anything to a “Jap.” Chokichi marries a fellow Japanese and has four children. After the Pearl Harbor attack the family is interned. Chokichi sends his daughters to Japan in the wake of abuses against Japanese women. Both girls have never seen Japan. One of the girls, Sachi, is sent to an Okinawan relative. At school, she is wickedly bullied by classmates because she is American. When Japanese-Americans are able to enlist, Chokichi’s eldest son, Ichiro, goes to fight in Europe and is killed.
“Harukanaru”
“Harukanaru” is the story of a Japanese boy, Kido Kan, who is brought up in China by a doting Chinese foster-mother when his parents leave him there after the war. Eventually he finds his Japanese family again but struggles to be accepted by them as they regard him as a Chinese peasant. Kan marries a Japanese woman and they have a family. Years later, his grownup daughter studies as an overseas student in China where she meets her Chinese boyfriend. The story ends with Kan’s tearful visit to his old village with his daughter.
Countering essentialism
Both sets of material strike a chord with me. The events find deep parallels in my own counter-story and racial memory of migration (my ancestors of old to British Malaya, the Philippines and New South Wales), war (my 82-year-old parents’ recounts of the Second World War), relocation (mine to Australia and New Zealand where I taught English in high school and university; my parents’ and siblings’ to Australia and New Zealand), disorientation, dislocation, discrimination, and rejection, before eventual and hard-earned integration (in the places I have lived), love and marriage (to my Japanese wife), hope, renewal and regeneration (as seen in our bilingual–bicultural children), often amid the brutal challenges of racial prejudice, cultural barriers and petty bigotries. Where the stories touch on the critical dimension is where they bring me and my students out of our comfort zones of stereotyped representations of people, places and cultures (May, 2003), into a mode of critical reflection and critical race praxis (Parker, 2003). We are presented with hybrid and synergetic combinations – Japanese boy and Chinese adoptive-mother, Japanese girl and Chinese boyfriend, ethnic-Japanese US army soldier – all of which shatter the myths of racial purity, racial uniqueness and, very importantly, racial stereotyping.
The experience is not unlike Befu’s (2001) description of the way: [A] Japanese might travel to North or South America and encounter third or fourth-generation Japanese who, though genetically “pure” representatives of the people, are unable to speak any of the language. This experience may force the traveler to abandon the tenet of nihonjinron that claims proficiency in Japanese to be genetically based. (Befu, 2001: 77)
Teaching material describing similar encounters can be found on the web and in print. I am reminded of materials featuring Senator Daniel Inouye, a Japanese-American politician and war-hero who fought in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team of the 100th Battalion of the US Army. Senator Inouye was the third in line to succeed as American President. Such materials and the stories in them serve to reinforce how language, culture, identity and human subjectivity are malleable, fluid, dynamic, and negotiated, as opposed to being static totalizing notions (Befu, 2001; Lin and Kubota, 2011; May, 2003; Morgan, 2004), and how certain preconceptions of people are actually discursive constructs and not preexistent “truths.” As a teacher of academic literacies (and critical literacies in this case), these lessons are good opportunities to reinforce students’ appreciation for the constructedness, situatedness, and potential richness of knowledge, semiosis and meaning (Lillis, 2003; Lin and Kubota, 2011).
Journal reflections
Students write journal reflections as part of fulfilling course requirements. In the journal reflections I have read are comments that support Ichiro’s stoically principled decision to join the American war effort. The bullying that Sachi suffers at the hands of her Japanese classmates was singled out for criticism. Students wrote about their discomforts over a cultural conditioning where everyone is expected to be “the same” and where “outsiders,” who are invariably perceived as being different, are subject to the traumas of bullying. Students shared in their reflections cases of racially motivated bullying they knew of, often the bullying of a classmate of mixed Japanese and European or some other mixed parentage that signaled a “corruption” of primordial bloodlines.
By far the most touching moment in the material, as evident from the journal entries, is the scene where Kan’s Chinese mother collapses in sorrow on the train platform when her adoptive-son takes his final leave. Students’ journal entries reveal feelings of being shortchanged because “schools don’t teach the effect of the Second World War,” reminiscent of earlier discussion on textbook revisionism (Nozaki, 2007), or about racism. Others mention being influenced by anti-Asiatic ideas (Caprio, 2007), like how “all Chinese” receive “anti-Japanese education,” acknowledging that this is indeed not the complete truth; or how their lack of knowledge of certain matters in history (e.g. the adoption of Japanese children by Chinese foster-parents, the traumatic experiences of rejection suffered by war-orphans who returned to Japan, the internment of Japanese-Americans or their role as soldiers on the European front) have led to misconceptions of people, time and place.
Conclusion
I began this article by examining how nihonjinron, racial homogeneity and their political underpinnings have helped systemically to sustain racism in Japanese institutional spaces and practices. I have sought also to examine how such beliefs and practices infiltrate and animate racialized typifications of foreigners, especially native-speakers of English. Moreover, through critical pedagogy and counter-storytelling, I have sought to expose and denaturalize dominant racist ideologies with a view to offering alternative understandings of race, language and culture to counter the oppressive and dehumanizing effects of racialization and racism extant in educational spaces. These alternative views will hopefully help problematize the larger and better-known picture that depicts Japan and Japan Inc. (under the sway of politicians and conglomerate kingpins) as having done very well for themselves given the powerful arrangements that legitimate Japanese homogeneity. By critically destabilizing myths of primordiality and the purity of bloodlines upon which much of such homogeneity is legitimized, I hope that discussions like mine will also draw attention to various forms of particularized and parochial behaviors ranging from the racialization of foreign teachers to mean-spirited denials of discounted train tickets to students of ethnic schools – while calling the bluff of nihonjinron beliefs.
As for the future, teachers of similar mind will have to continue with concerted efforts to encourage critical reflection and praxis, and in doing so hopefully unseat stubbornly entrenched prejudices and bigotries toward the engendering of broader mindsets. Even so, change may not come quickly.