Jumping out of enclosures: Ethnicity, gender, education and language among Latin Americans in Japan

Abstract

This article presents one aspect of an investigation concerning a Japanese language-tutoring programme for foreign children. Here, I draw on a wider, three-year ethnographic study that was conducted with three Latin American families whose children attended three public Japanese primary schools. This article attempts to disentangle issues of ethnicity, gender and language in the children’s schooling from the families’ perspective. A total of 46 group/individual interviews with the informants and extensive participant observation were conducted from 2003 to 2006. In two of the households the mothers were Colombian prostitutes married to Japanese citizens; the third was a Colombian family who had overstayed their visas. Bourdieu’s notion of different forms of capital is used in the analysis of the interviews, which suggested that education was key to understanding the circumstances of these families. Although the informants encountered difficulties at Japanese schools, schooling was reported as a means to break the pervasive influence of their ethnic, gender and language ‘enclosures’.