Japan's "International Youth": The Emergence of a New Class of Schoolchildren Book

A striking aspect of Japan's growing international activity is the return home each year of thousands of children who have lived abroad as a result of their parents' work. Traditionally, it has been widely believed that these children were stigmatized and that they faced severe problems in adjusting to the realities of living in Japanese society. Drawing on his long-term fieldwork in one of the special schools set up to receive these children, this book is the first to challenge these ideas. Goodman argues that the convergence of several factors—particularly parental status and a powerful new political rhetoric stressing "internationalization"—is making these returnee children the vanguard of a new social elite.