Growing up in Japan

This chapter studies immigrant children's diverse strategies to make sense of their subjectivities and establish their relationships with Japanese society. In particular, it examines how changing environments, especially the different institutional contexts they go through in the course of their growing up, contribute to the shaping of their identities. Born to foreign parents, immigrant children in Japan are surrounded by a complex cultural and social environment and have to continually adjust their relationships to such contexts and modify their subjectivities in the course of doing so. Because nationality is a powerful identification, they also have to negotiate their own identity between Japan—the place where they live and are acculturated to but at times rejected by—and the country or countries where their parents are from and where their passports say they are from. This process of encounters and negotiations enhances their awareness of the limits and freedom of being immigrants in Japan. In the end, among a group of them, a cosmopolitan self emerges as a response to the limited repertoire of identity choice. In other words, many immigrant children, unwilling to resign to either nationality, choose to become citizens of the world.