Published papers

This study explores how self-reflexivity manifests among students in a bilingual intercultural communication classroom in Japan, where dominant discourses of cultural homogeneity often go unexamined. Grounded in Critical Intercultural Communication Pedagogy (CICP), the course was designed to challenge essentialist views of culture and encourage students to critically reflect on their cultural assumptions and positionalities in relation to dominant norms. Drawing on reflective writing from 26 students, the analysis shows that while many learners began to understand culture as fluid and socially constructed, others encountered discomfort and resistance–particularly when their internalised notions of ‘Japanese-ness’ were unsettled. Moments of cultural mismatch served as powerful triggers for reflexive learning. By centring student voices and localising CICP to Japan’s sociocultural context, this study offers empirical insight into how critical engagement with culture can be fostered in the classroom and highlights the pedagogical value of reflexivity in promoting inclusion, equity, and intercultural understanding.

Globalization, and the emergence of a multiethnic society in Japan, has posed an important question on how people with cultural differences should live together in this society. In order to promote a multicultural inclusive society, Japanese people also need to change their outlook as much as foreigners. This paper aims to discuss the design of educational programs aiming to promote a Japanese-style multicultural inclusive society while focusing on the Japanese majority. First, this paper proposes curriculum management (to consider an educational goal, concrete plan, action-research on the PDCA cycle, collaboration) as a framework for educational reforms. Second, this paper sheds light on the process of the creation of a multicultural inclusive society and focuses on the processes of construction to de-construction and re-construction of “Japaneseness” as the social norm and privilege. Third, this paper introduces a case study of a new educational program in a university based on the PDCA cycle of curriculum management. In the program, students with diverse cultural backgrounds collaborate and think over different multiethnic issues. Lastly, this paper points the importance of designing a multicultural curriculum to help create a Japanese-style multicultural inclusive society.

In a world with existential issues, inequalities/injustice are (re)emerging in varying degrees around the globe, and yet, each of us strives to sustain our life with our own disappointments/ griefs and desires/hopes. Then, identity formation research should elucidate how a human being makes sense of multifaceted voices/dimensions (‘selves’ and ‘(social) identities’) and what propels each to sustain/envision one’s desires/hopes in the future. Thus, based upon the legacy of identity-related research in applied linguistics, we present longitudinal research by a phenomenological approach focusing on ‘international students’ in Japan. In developing the approach, we utilized translanguaging as a holistic conceptualization of human communication and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis as methodology (interview analysis contextualized with observation and on/off line correspondence data). As a result, the first author interpreted that each student’s life theme/moral aspiration served as a pivot around which various categories/features revolved (solidified/loosened). In such dynamic relationalities, perceptions/ideologies towards named language(s)/identity categories transformed. We argue it is important to interpret why and how each uses/creates categories/labels/binaries as reference points in expressing oneself—not as objective/scientific but as (inter)subjective evidence.