“Who is regarded as ‘Japanese’?”: National Identity and Teachers in Multicultural Society

This article examines the national identity of Japan, by using a mixed method approach: a comparative study of a statistical analysis of the International Social Survey Program and a qualitative analysis of data obtained from interviews with public school teachers concerning ethnic and cultural diversity. The study finds that (i) “Japanese” is imagined as an ethnic and cultural sense of belonging, (ii) however, it is not imagined and shared in a civic sense, as national identities in the other countries are, (iii) the school teachers who teach the immigrant children express three different types of national identities : civic, ethnic, and cultural, and (iv) most teachers expect the immigrant children to maintain the ethnic and cultural identities associated with their (or their parents’) home countries. Based on the findings, the article discusses the role of schools and teachers in a multicultural society, and whether respecting ethnic and cultural diversity promotes or hinders the immigrant children’s equal participation in the host society, particularly within the social context where the ethnic and cultural national identities are widely shared, but the civic national identity is not. In addition, the author argues that within an ethnically and culturally diverse context, school is a place where the traditional ethnic Japanese national identity is challenged and reconstructed, and a civic Japanese national identity (which may enable the children to have a “hyphenated Japanese” identity) emerges