ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes the constructs of ‘the educated citizen’ and ‘gender capital’ in offering an insight into Japanese-language acquisition by foreign children at public schools. The insight is grounded on a three-year ethnographic study which involved school participant observation and interviews with the main actors related to a Japanese-language tutoring program (nihongo no shidō). Since 1991, local education boards in line with the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture (officially abbreviated in English as MEXT) have implemented language tutoring for foreign children (gaikokujin jidōseito)—as they are officially identified—enrolled at public schools. Having joined the program from 2003 to 2006, I tutored three first-year children of Colombian descent at three different elementary schools in Tokyo. Tutoring aimed to facilitate Japanese-language acquisition; however, no structured program was available. Therefore, to direct and sustain tutoring, participant observation and a set of interviews with the officials, teachers, and parents involved were conducted. The observation notebook and interview transcripts constitute the core sources of information I have analyzed and reported in different manuscripts. An analysis of eighteen in-depth interviews with nine education personnel may be found in Castro-Vázquez (2009), and forty-six group/individual in-depth interviews with the three families of the children tutored are examined in Castro-Vázquez (2011). Finally, the present chapter deals with sixty in-depth interviews with thirty Japanese mothers who offered their views on education and language acquisition for foreign children. In analyzing their views, the chapter proposes ‘the educated citizen’ and ‘gender capital’ as two heuristic devices to explore how education, language acquisition, and gender matters influence the schooling of foreign children from the perspective of a group of Japanese mothers. More concretely, it attempts to answer the following questions:
What does being an educated citizen mean in a Japanese context in the eyes of Japanese mothers?
What is gender capital from the perspective of a group of Japanese mothers?
How are language acquisition and gender capital bound up with the educated citizen in the opinion of a group of Japanese mothers?
