Full Description
A striking aspect of Japan's growing international activity is the return home each year of thousands of children who have lived abroad as a result of their parents' work. Until now, it has been widely believed that these children were stigmatized and that they faced severe problems in adjusting to the educational, linguistic and psychological realities of living in Japanese society. Drawing on his long-term fieldwork in one of the special schools set up to receive these children, the author challenges these ideas. He argues that the convergence of several factors - in particular parental status and a powerful new political rhetoric which stresses "internationalization" - is making these returnee children the vanguard of a new social elite which will guide Japan in the next century.
