The (Im)possibility of ideal education: Hope, uncertainty, and being safe in a Korean international school in Japan

Kunisuke Hirano

Contemporary Japan, 2025, vol. 37, issue 2, 194-213

Abstract: Drawing on an in-depth ethnography of students, teachers, and parents at School K, a newly built Korean international school, this paper investigates how students choose their subjects to show their multi-faceted identities within the institutional goals of the school. Rather than promoting an expatriate Korean identity, School K bases its pedagogies on border-crossing and uses trilingual education to cultivate global citizens with the potential to thrive internationally, while embracing their own ethnic backgrounds. School K’s emergence indicates a shift in educational policies among Korean schools in Japan that increasingly seek to transcend the goal of ethnic solidarity and affective longing for the Korean peninsula. This study shows that in addition to the distinction between oldcomer and newcomer Koreans, students express various senses of “internal borders” and project their subjectivities to transcend them. In everyday school activities, such as learning the Korean language and/or interacting with neighbors, Japanese nationals, Koreans from Korea, and the Zainichi Korean students imagine multiple borders that are context-oriented and rather playful. Institutionally, conducting trilingual education requires more resources for a school than bilingual education and can result in financial difficulties, mainly due to non-endorsement by the Japanese government, which destabilizes the school’s management. While parents and students express dissatisfaction about school curriculum and management, they value the friendships made at school and think the school ultimately offers a safer space for Zainichi Korean students, providing middle-class Zainichi Korean families with an alternative educational choice.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/18692729.2023.2247738

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