Glenn Toh - Japanese Schooling and Identity Investment Overseas: Exploring the Cultural Politics of Japaneseness in Singapore

This book is about education, ideology, power and identity investment and concerns an influential East Asian expatriate community. Specifically, it seeks to understand particular ways in which the Japanese white-collar elite live as a closed and self-referentially defined in-group, despite the manifestly multicultural ethos of their Singaporean domicile. The study attends to issues regarding schooling, unity, diversity and community based on grounded anthropological observations. Specific observations centre around the particularities of Japanese nation-state schooling practices set in cosmopolitan Singapore, a contrastingly non-Japanese setting. The insights therein are made possible by way of seeing education as an ideological domain and powerful discursive platform. Using this framework, cultural and identity-related practices are viewed dynamically and appreciated for their fluidic reflection of identity praxes.

Readers will gain fresh insights into the role of education and ideology in reproducing asymmetry and the value of sociohistorical analyses in surfacing hidden power relations. Researchers, educators and decision makers will appreciate the transparency of grounded ethnographic observation yielding insights into practices which imbricate inclusion-exclusion and privilege-marginalization debates within a neoliberal hegemony. Students of the social politics of education and the cultural politics of language, ideology and identity will find the book a provocative read.

Glenn Toh teaches in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has written books and articles on language, ideology, power and education and continues to maintain an ongoing interest in current developments in the area.

Routledge Research in International and Comparative Education

This is a series that offers a global platform to engage scholars in continuous academic debate on key challenges and the latest thinking on issues in the fast-growing field of International and Comparative Education.

Titles in the series include:

50 Years of US Study Abroad Students

Japan as the Gateway to Asia and Beyond

Sarah R. Asada

Informal Learning and Literacy among Maasai Women

Education, Emancipation and Empowerment

Taeko Takayanagi

Parental Involvement Across European Education Systems

Critical Perspectives

Edited by Angelika Paseka and Delma Byrne

Transculturalism and Teacher Capacity

Professional Readiness in the Globalised Age

Niranjan Casinader

Residential Schools and Indigenous Peoples

From Genocide via Education to the Possibilities for Processes of Truth, Restitution, Reconciliation, and Reclamation

Edited by Stephen James Minton

Transnational Perspectives on Curriculum History

Edited by Gary McCulloch, Ivor Goodson, and Mariano Gonzlez-Delgado

Japanese Schooling and Identity Investment Overseas

Exploring the Cultural Politics of Japaneseness in Singapore

Glenn Toh

Considering Inclusive Development across Global Educational Contexts

How Critical and Progressive Movements can Inform Education

Christopher J. Johnstone

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-International-and-Comparative-Education/bookseries/RRICE

First published 2021

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2021 Glenn Toh

The right of Glenn Toh to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Toh, Glenn, author.

Title: Japanese schooling and identity investment overseas : exploring the cultural politics of Japaneseness in Singapore / Glenn Toh.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020019090 (print) | LCCN 2020019091 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367538668 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003083559 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Japanese--Education--Singapore. | Elite (Social sciences)--Education--Singapore. | Japanese--Ethnic identity.

Classification: LCC LC3189.S55 T65 2021 (print) | LCC LC3189.S55 (ebook) | DDC 371.0095957--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019090

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019091

ISBN: 978-0-367-53866-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-08355-9 (ebk)

To Sakiko, Nobuyoshi and Megumi

I take this opportunity to acknowledge the role that people of wisdom and solid principle have had in my career as teacher and academic. These are respected educators who have given the better part of their lives to promoting the sound principles of fairness, equity and uprightness. I name with esteem Professors Masaki Oda, Robert Phillipson, Andy Kirkpatrick among the top people who have helped me become the educator that I am. I thank Professors Angel Lin, Ryuko Kubota, Nathanael Rudolph, Damian Rivers, Paul McBride, Kingsley Bolton and Darryl Hocking who have readily shared their thoughts, works, wisdom and passion with me at key and crucial moments. My deep appreciation also goes to Katie Peace and Jacy Hui of Routledge Singapore and the two anonymous reviewers who provided their thoughtful suggestions. Last but not least, I thank the love of my life, Sakiko, who apart from raising a Christ-centered family, is also a wonderful mother-mentor to our two children.