ABSTRACT
This chapter examines narrative and interpretative data relating to Japanese-medium schooling in Singapore. Four institutions associated with Japanese education in Singapore make up the background against which subsequent developments are allowed to unfold. These storied enactments provide understandings of the cultural and political dimensions of the ways in which Japanese people imagine, approach, apprehend or otherwise adjust to life outside of their homeland. Of importance in the interpretative storytelling are the perspectival viewpoints which bear on perceptions of order, borders and boundaries which characterize references to their dynamic nature and treatment. Apportionment, enactment, perception and appropriation of space become relevant to ways in which operations of space are also revealed as expressions of particularized cultural geographies. Such geographies are translatable into issues concerning visibility or invisibility, inclusion or exclusion, placement or displacement, power or disempowerment and other indices of existence, identity and experience. The stories told are seen as important for understanding what Japanese perceptions of internationalization and multiculturalism mean for cross-border and cross-cultural interactions in manifestly non-Japanese domains. Observations of enactments of identity, community and communality reveal the tendency to adhere, defer or resort to patterned behaviors reflective of ingrained beliefs symptomizing the workings of nihonjinron ideology.
