ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critically oriented discussion which traces the outcomes of three ecologically significant aspects of reality influencing the education of Japanese children in Singapore. The first concerns the fact that Japanese-medium schooling in Singapore caters primarily or exclusively for children of employees of Japanese corporations, a reminder that their presence is a key reason for its continuation. The second concerns the fact that an education based on the Japanese state curriculum suggests that certain statist and/or nationalistic aspects of education are felt to be in need of reaffirmation when schooling a younger generation in an overseas context. Such reaffirmation may in turn be viewed as a way of counteracting perceivably un-Japanese influences coming alongside the very forces of globalization which make it necessary for Japanese families to relocate overseas. The third relates to the teaching and learning of English and how, against the mercantile motivations of the first and the nationalistic motivations of the second, English teaching is realized singularly (if reductively) in the manner of its curricular, pedagogical and administrative practices. One facet of such reductive particularity is the adoption of a culturalist one-language one-culture approach traced to a protectionist agenda that legitimates elitist Japanese expatriate identities.
