EMISIONES ATMOSFÉRICAS

randoseru, a typical Japanese schoolbag used by almost all primary school children in Japan, and fudebako, a solid square-shaped pencil case, again very typical of primary school pupils in Japan. Initially, I imagined that these items had been provided by the Hoshuko, since they were quite common even among children of intermarriage families, who were born in Britain and had never studied in Japan. It was therefore a surprise to discover that they had actually been purchased from Japan by the families themselves.

Such items further reinforce the sense of distinction and community that dominates the Hoshuko, helping to bridge the gap between pupils of different family backgrounds. My field notes recalled an instance when a girl who grew up in the UK came to show me her new fudebako depicting illustrations of popular Japanese animation characters, and explained that her grandfather bought it for her when she visited Japan (field note: September 2012). She showed it very proudly and happily to her friends, teachers and even to her friends’ parents. When I asked her if she also used it at the local mainstream school, she said she only brought it to Hoshuko. I also observed how her friends, their parents and the teachers all praised her brand new ‘Japanese’ pencil case, which, in addition to being a popular school item. This item also indicated implicitly that she went to Japan on holiday, and thus many people began asking her about her holiday in Japan. In other words, the Hoshuko context can also create a special field for the children, where many of them are familiar with Japanese popular culture and goods, and therefore ‘anything Japanese’ gains a symbolic value that could otherwise be lost in the local mainstream school context, where many brands are unknown to local children.

Kumiko, a mother, told me about another cultural episode around Halloween in 2012. For the Halloween party organised at her children’s local school, children have to dress up in various event-specific costumes, and her children had originally opted to dress up as the characters of a Japanese drama that was very popular at the time. Kumiko began preparing the requested costumes, only for her children to change their minds as Halloween-day drew closer. Her children said that they now “actually preferred to be a vampire and a cat.” She commented about this episode as follows (Kumiko, ethno- interview: November 2012):

Well, it is understandable that in the end they preferred ‘orthodox’ British characters for the school Halloween party. Even if they had dressed up like

126

Japanese characters, their friends at the school would not have understood. So it would not have been fun for them.

According to her, the real joy of the Halloween party is having their costume approved by their friends. Thus, dressed up as Japanese characters which are not well- known in the UK, it would be difficult to gain the approval of their classmates at the local mainstream school. She also added, laughing, that any dresses would have been acceptable if Hoshuko had held a Halloween party.

These comments indicate that Hoshuko is a place where being multi-cultural is valued, or at least accepted. This characteristic of the Hoshuko cultural space has further manifested itself through the fact that products that became highly popular in the UK – ‘loom bands’ for instance – were also brought in by children, reinforcing a different aspect of a shared sense of community (field note: March in 2014).

Although cultures are often described as separable in individuals’ narratives (denoting an essentialist view of ‘Japanese culture’ and ‘British culture’), as I have shown above, children’s practices at Hoshuko do not always treat ‘cultures’ as separate and separable. Another episode I observed is also indicative of this. During a play activity one child said she wanted to do hankachi-otoshi, a Japanese group game which was introduced during a nursery class around that time, to which another child, Eiji (aged 6), told everyone that he knew a similarly interesting game called ‘sakana chippusu.’ Both games seem to have similar rules, so in the end we enjoyed playing the ‘sakana chippusu’ as instructed by Eiji (field notes April 2012). Later I talked about this episode with Emiko, Eiji’s mother, and she said that this might have been a game he learnt at the British mainstream school, called ‘Fish and Chips’ (Emiko, ethno- interview: April, 2012). In fact, ‘sakana’ in Japanese means ‘fish,’ and ‘chippusu’ is phonologically applied to the Japanese pronunciation of ‘chips’ in English. In other words, he introduced a game he had learnt at the mainstream school as a new game in Japanese language, while using his knowledge of both hankachi-otoshi and ‘fish and chips.’ His Japanese adaptation is also remarkable in taking into consideration the Hoshuko context and avoiding – consciously or unconsciously – to exclude children who may not speak English; and indeed there was at the time in the group a girl who had just arrived in the UK and who was not very familiar with English words.

This was an impressive moment when a five-year-old boy showed his creativeness in going beyond the framework of essentialist perceptions of ‘cultures’ as having solid

127

boundaries between them, and applied all his knowledge within a wider resource pool to create new categories of meaning and practice that would, nevertheless, accommodate everyone participating in the activity. The Hoshuko context is very conducive to creating such hybrid practices, and compared to the official governmental and institutional discourses, individuals’ practices are more flexible and driven by moment- to-moment considerations. On one hand, a strong discourse of “Japanese cultural Teaching at Hoshuko” is reproduced, while on the other hand, when looking at individuals’ practices, Hoshuko rather provide a space where individuals’ multi- culturalism is accepted and valued.

5.2 Who should be the Students of Hoshuko?: The Gap between Discourses and the Social Reality

5.2.1 Reproduction of Categorical Nominations: ‘Chuzai-ji’ and ‘Kokusai-ji’