This book explores the transition from the era of internationalization into the era of globalization of Japan by focusing on language and identity as its central themes. By taking an interdisciplinary approach covering education, cultural studies, linguistics and policy-making, the chapters in this book raise certain questions of what constitutes contemporary Japanese culture, Japanese identity and multilingualism and what they mean to local people, including those who do not reside in Japan but are engaged with Japan in some way within the global community. Topics include the role of technology in the spread of Japanese language and culture, hybrid language use in an urban context, the Japanese language as a lingua franca in China, and the identity construction of heritage Japanese language speakers in Australia. The authors do not limit themselves to examining only the Japanese language or the Japanese national/cultural identity, but also explore multilingual practices and multiple/fluid identities in "a transitional Japan." Overall, the book responds to the basic need for better accounts of language and identity of Japan, particularly in the context of increased migration and mobility.

This edited book draws on research on identity in language education to present a detailed and multi-faceted study of identity in language learning, teaching and revitalization settings in the context of Japan. It employs a diverse range of theoretical approaches, including poststructuralism, critical realism, cognitive behavioral theory, and complexity theory,, as well as methodologies such as linguistic ethnography, narrative enquiry, and critical multimodal discourse analysis. The authors focus on multiple dimensions of identity, illuminating linguistic, cultural and human complexity as manifested in language teaching and learning. This book will be of interest to advanced students and scholars of TESOL, applied linguistics, education, Japanese studies, East Asian studies, linguistic anthropology, indigenous languages and sociolinguistics.

Presenting new approaches and results previously inaccessible in English, the Routledge Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics provides an insight into the language and society of contemporary Japan from a fresh perspective. While it was once believed that Japan was a linguistically homogenous country, research over the past two decades has shown Japan to be a multilingual and sociolinguistically diversifying country. Building on this approach, the contributors to this handbook take this further, combining Japanese and western approaches alike and producing research which is relevant to twenty-first century societies. Organised into five parts, the sections covered include: The languages and language varieties of Japan. The multilingual ecology. Variation, style and interaction. Language problems and language planning. Research overviews. With contributions from across the field of Japanese sociolinguistics, this handbook will prove very useful for students and scholars of Japanese Studies, as well as sociolinguists more generally.

The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education provides the rapidly growing and globalizing field of heritage language (HL) education with a cohesive overview of HL programs and practices relating to language maintenance and development, setting the stage for future work in the field. Driving this effort is the belief that if research and pedagogical advances in the HL field are to have the greatest impact, HL programs need to become firmly rooted in educational systems. Against a background of cultural and linguistic diversity that characterizes the twenty-first century, the volume outlines key issues in the design and implementation of HL programs across a range of educational sectors, institutional settings, sociolinguistic conditions, and geographical locations, specifically: North and Latin America, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Cambodia. All levels of schooling are included as the teaching of the following languages are discussed: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian (Eastern and Western), Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Czech, French, Hindi-Urdu, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Pasifika languages, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Yiddish. These discussions contribute to the development and establishment of HL instructional paradigms through the experiences of “actors on the ground” as they respond to local conditions, instantiate current research and pedagogical findings, and seek solutions that are workable from an organizational standpoint. The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education is an ideal resource for researchers and graduate students interested in heritage language education at home or abroad.

Photography has been a key means by which Australians have sought to define their relationships with Japan. From the fascination with all things Japanese in the late nineteenth century, through the era of ‘White Australia’, the bitter enmity of the Pacific War, the path to reconciliation in the post-war period and the culturally complicated bilateralism of today, Australians have used their cameras to express a divided sense of conflict and kinship with a country that has by turns fascinated and infuriated. The remarkable photographs collected and discussed here for the first time shed new light on the history of Australia’s engagement with its most important regional partner. Pacific Exposures argues that photographs tell an important story of cultural production, response and reaction—not only about how Australians have pictured Japan over the decades, but how they see their own place in the Asia-Pacific. ‘Pacific Exposures presents the first study of the photographic exchanges between Australia and Japan—its photographers, personalities, motivations, anxieties and tensions—based on a diverse range of archival materials, interviews, and well-chosen photographs.’ — Dr Luke Gartlan, University of St Andrews ‘[Pacific Exposures] will become a key text on Australia’s interactions with Japan, and the way that photographs can inform cross-cultural relations through their production, consumption and circulation.’ — Prof. Kate Darian-Smith, University of Tasmania

Sociocultural research has long recognized the necessity of sustained interpersonal interaction for language development. However, less is known about the underlying relationships that promote language acquisition and their relevance for language classrooms. Presenting cutting-edge research on social networks and their applications in language teaching, this book explores the relationships that mediate language learning in and out of classrooms. Highlighting the complexity of language in multilingual contexts, chapters engage social network analysis to understand the role of instructional practices, socialization, motivation, language status, online communications technology, and language policies in the development of social resources for language learning. Discussing popular language teaching frameworks such as translanguaging, Social Networks in Language Learning and Language Teaching provides a nuanced account of the influences of social context on language learning, exploring classroom applications and pointing the way to a robust research agenda.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and the City is the first multifaceted and cross-disciplinary overview of how cities can be read through the lens of translation and how translation studies can be enriched by an understanding of the complex dynamics of the city. Divided into four sections, the chapters are authored by leading scholars in translation studies, sociolinguistics, and literary and cultural criticism. They cover contexts from Brussels to Singapore and Melbourne to Cairo and topics from translation as resistance to translanguaging and urban design. This volume explores the role of translation at critical junctures of a city’s historical transformation as well as in the mundane intercultural moments of urban life, and uncovers the trope of the translational city in writing. This Handbook is critical reading for researchers, scholars and advanced students in translation studies, linguistics and urban studies.

Transcultural Flows of English and Education in Asian Contexts examines issues concerning the potential of English learning and teaching to go beyond the classroom and affect the multicultural realities of Asian societies. Asian societies often carry long histories and traditions that influence beliefs about identities,which are changing in our globalizing world. The authors in this volume explore the synthesis that occurs when culture is shared and re-constructed in different contexts. Specifically, the authors show how English is appropriated and refashioned through language and culture exchanges both inside and outside of traditional classrooms in East Asia (i.e., Japan, South Korea, China) and Southeast Asia (e.g.., Indonesia, Thailand). Inside the classroom, transcultural flows have the potential to result in take-up, exchange, appropriation, and refashioning of language and cultural practices that can generate transcultural realities outside the classroom. Understanding transcultural flows may also require understanding circumstances outside of the classroom—for instance, transcultural exchanges that lead to friendships and professional relationships; as companies embrace English and attempt to reach a global audience; as English facilitates access to global interaction in cyberspace; and as membership to nation states, recognition, and identity often confront the politics of English as a global language. For both teachers and students of English, the impact of transcultural connections reaches far beyond the teaching and learning experience. English connects people around the globe—even after students and teachers have finished their lessons or teachers have left the country. To examine the transcultural flows that result from English learning and teaching in Asia, this book addresses the following questions: What becomes of English when it is unmoored from local, national, and regional spaces and imaginatively reconceptualized? What are new forms of global consciousness and cultural competency? How is English rediscovered and reinvented in Asian countries where there are long traditions of cultural beliefs and language practices? How are teachers and students taking up and appropriating English inside and outside classrooms? How has English learning and teaching affected social, political, and business relationships? This book will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, anthropology, and education.

Over the last 70 years, Japanese Studies scholarship has gone through several dominant paradigms, from ‘demystifying the Japanese’, to analysis of Japanese economic strength, to discussion of global interest in Japanese popular culture. This book assesses this literature, considering future directions for research into the 2020s and beyond. Shifting the geographical emphasis of Japanese Studies away from the West to the Asia-Pacific region, this book identifies topic areas in which research focusing on Japan will play an important role in global debates in the coming years. This includes the evolution of area studies, coping with aging populations, the various patterns of migration and environmental breakdown. With chapters from an international team of contributors, including significant representation from the Asia-Pacific region, this book enacts Yoshio Sugimoto’s notion of ‘cosmopolitan methodology’ to discuss Japan in an interdisciplinary and transnational context and provides overviews of how Japanese Studies is evolving in other Asian countries such as China and Indonesia. New Frontiers in Japanese Studies is a thought-provoking volume and will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese and Asian Studies. The Introduction and Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book examines dilemmas faced by second language (L2) Japanese speakers as a result of persistent challenges to their legitimacy as speakers of Japanese. Based on an ethnographic interview study with L2-Japanese speakers and their L1-Japanese-speaking friends, co-workers and significant others, the book examines ideologies linked to three core speech styles of Japanese – keigo or polite language, gendered language and regional dialects – to show how such ideologies impact L2-Japanese speakers. The author demonstrates that speaker legitimacy is often tenuous for L2 speakers and argues that, despite increasing numbers of Japanese-speaking foreign residents in Japan, native speaker bias remains a persistent issue for L2-Japanese speakers living and working in Japan. This book extends the discussion of native speaker bias beyond educational contexts, and in the process reveals tensions between how L2 speakers aspire to speak and how L1 speakers expect them to speak.