A study on the possibilities of Multicultural Schools in Japan through the perspective of school cultural theory

We know the condition of multiculturalization of today\u27s Japanese schools because that situation has come to be visible in many schools; many children from multicultural backgrounds now are attending Japanese schools with Japanese children. These children include Japanese-South American children, Chinese-returnee children, children of foreign students in Japanese universities, and others. The increase in enrollment of such children may pose new problems for Japanese schools, so that we now face the challenge of rebuilding Japanese schools into functional \u22Multicultural Schools.\u22 However, since we don\u27t yet know to proceed, the situation merits careful consideration. By \u22Multicultural School, \u22 we mean a school which embraces both children with various kinds of cultural backgrounds and Japanese children. Consequently, the question, concretely speaking, this paper addresses is how we can imagine multicultural schools within the framework of a public education in Japan which has previously been predicated on education solely for Japanese students. The purpose of this paper is to examine possibilities of change in Japanese schools under multicultural circumstances. I believe that for Japanese schools to change in accord with the process of multiculturalization, we have to be capable of imagining the \u22new school.\u22 This entails examination of attempts to describe the alternative to today\u27s Japanese schools. For this reason, I focus on the theory of Japanese school-culture as the starting point for my argument