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Going Home to Japan
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14377 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1988 |
2,393 Words |
| Author
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Nobuo K. Shimahara
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THE JAPANESE OVERSEAS:
Can They Go Home Again?
Merry White
New York: Free Press, 1988
174 pp., $19.95
Never before have Americans been so curious about Japanese industry and education. Especially in the last decade, that curiosity has blossomed into full-blown fascination as Japan's influence on international trade has assumed formidable proportions. Japan's economy has continued to demonstrate resiliency and adaptability in the face of a soaring increase in the yen's value since 1985 and the crash of the New York Stock Exchange last October. Today, Japan's stock market makes up 42 percent of the capitalization of world markets. When Japan makes waves, the ripples reach well into the American interior.
The appeal of Japanese education for Americans can be traced to 1979, when Ezra Vogel defined the link between schooling and the competitiveness of Japanese industry in Japan as Number One: Lessons for America. Since American interest in Japanese education is in large part dictated by American perceptions of Japan's industrial success, Vogel's book opened the floodgate to a surge of publications--books, journal and magazine articles, and newspaper accounts--focused on Japanese education in the 1980s.
Merry White's latest book, The Japanese Overseas, is an attempt to address one of the hidden paradoxes resulting from Japan's expanding multinational economy. A timely publication on an important topic, it examines Japanese education and social structure in relation to the Japanese international economy as seen through the eyes of Japanese families returned from overseas. Although White's work will feed the general stream of American curiosity about Japan, it is a critical look at the practices of Japanese education and business by an astute scholar who has given sustained attention to the topic since the mid-1970s.
The Japanese Overseas looks at the dynamics of Japanese culture as it relates to the problems of returnees to Japan. Though it is a study of those particular Japanese, the author's theoretical interest is clearly to interpret how traditional Japanese group orientation functions in response to unprecedented events. White tries to explain the experiences and the complex problems encountered by the returnees using the Japanese concepts of uchi (inside), group, and boundary, which have been articulated by such cultural anthropologists as Chie Nakane.
As seen by White's subjects, the main problems confronted by returnees to Japan concern the child's schooling, the mother's role as the link between home and school, and the father's occupational mobility. One salient and common feature of these problems is the "differentness" represented by the child, mother, and father, which is occasioned by their overseas sojourn. Instead of offering the returnees an advantage, that sojourn becomes an obstacle for many, impeding their reentry into the Japanese social structure. Japanese society stresses homogeneity. That fact can become a problem for the child who returns to a schooling that ingrains that quality, and for the mother who seeks reintegration into her neighborhood community. The father, a corporate employee, because he has become an outsider, may find himself sidetracked from the mainstream path to advancement available
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