Volume: 2  Number: 1  Page: 32–46  doi:10.2167/md043.0

Internationalising Japan: Nihonjinron and the Intercultural in Japanese Language-in-education Policy

Anthony J. Liddicoat Research Centre for Languages and Culture Education, University of South Australia, Magill, SA, Australia

Language learning is frequently justified as a vehicle for promoting intercultural communication and understanding and language-in-education policies have increasingly come to reflect this preoccupation in their rhetoric. This paper examines the ways in which concepts relating to interculturality are constructed in Japanese language policy documents. It will explore in particular the ways in which ideologies of nationalism and Japanese identity have an impact on understandings of the nature and purpose of interculturality and how these are developed discursively in Japanese language-in-education policy. Japanese language policies construct a discourse of interculturality that focuses on the development of a nationalistic adherence to a particular conceptualisation of Japanese identity, which is unique, homogenous and monolithic. A multiculturalist perspective is taken in re-examining these themes in the contexts of Japanese policy documents relating to foreign language teaching, minority languages and Japanese language spread.

Keywords: Japan, nationalism, policy discourse, language learning, interculturality

© 2007 A.J. Liddicoat

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