'Internationalisation' is 'Japanisation': Japan's foreign language education and national identity

Abstract

This paper looks at how the Japanese government's educational policy documents define 'internationalisation' explicitly or implicitly, and how the policy is related to the relationships between Japanese citizens and TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language). This is done by text analysis, identifying silences, abstractions and contradictions in policy documents. The paper shows that the commitment of the Japanese government to internationalisation in education actually means 'Japanisation' of Japanese learners of English. The paper emerges from my Ph.D thesis (Hashimoto, 1997) which is a social inquiry into TEFL in Japan.