ABSTRACT
Key issues relating to the book’s concern with Japanese identity investments and Japanese overseas schooling are first outlined: (1) enactments of Japanese identity investments among Japanese people living outside Japan; and (2) outworkings of the performative nature of Japanese identity in English-speaking English-dominant cosmopolitan Singapore as being part of the reproduction of particularized forms of Japaneseness crucial for assertions and preservations of the same. Concerning Singapore’s Japanese population, critical observations are made of ways in which Japanese identity is marked and staked. Education is seen as a form of investment that implicates identity negotiations toward the reproduction of particularized realizations of Japaneseness. In ensuing discussion on autopoietic systems, Japaneseness is posited as an internally organized framework which specifies the way external changes are internally perceived. In self-creating, self-affirming and self-ordering manner, Japaneseness as an autopoietic framework influences internal specifications of external changes (challenges). To facilitate discussion, a performative, ecological, interactive, co-constructed view of identity and identity investment is adopted. Events and motivations leading to the writing of the book are moreover accounted for narratively. Also highlighted is the hope that situations where dominant ideologies perpetuate inequitable practices, misperceived or dehumanized meanings, can be changed for purposes of greater fairness and equity.
