Limpieza y desinfección de equipos e instalaciones

From the governmental justification of Education Abroad – especially the mentioning of internationally accepted universal principles, such as the Equal Opportunity of Education – it is assumed that every child has a right to access Education Abroad. Whereas, the government also justifies the needs of Education Abroad by referring to the national development and profits for Japan – in this sense, it can also be interpreted that Education Abroad is for those who can contribute to Japanese national profits. In this section, I will analyse the government’s definition of who should be considered as a rightful ‘student’ of Education Abroad by using CDA’s analytic framework of representation of social actors (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001; Van Leeuwen, 1996; see detailed definition in section 3.4.2).

MEXT make a reference to Nihonjin-no-Kodomo [children of Japanese] in their policy documents, as students who can receive Education Abroad. This expression can be literally interpreted both as ‘children of Japanese nationality,’ or ‘children of Japanese nationals.’ Compared with the former, the latter case is not concerned with the children’s nationality, as long as at least one of their parents is a Japanese national. The ambiguity of this expression makes it difficult to infer the government’s position regarding the legal status of students.

Another expression often used by both MEXT and MOFA is “Zairyu-Hojin no Kodomo” [children of Zairyu-Japanese] (MEXT, n.d.-a, n.d.-c, n.d.-d; MOFA, 2011).

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According to Daijirin (Matsumura, 1995), a dictionary of contemporary Japanese, although Zairyu literally means ‘staying for a while in a certain place,’ it is often used specifically for ‘staying abroad.’ For instance, MOFA, which is responsible for administrating the movement of people beyond national boundaries, often employ the compound noun, including the element Zairyu on its own, for dealing with ‘Japanese nationals abroad’ (e.g., Zairyu-Todoke [declaration of staying abroad], Zairyu-Kikan [period of staying abroad]), and ‘foreign residents in Japan’ (e.g., Zairyu-Gaikokujin [foreign residents in Japan]). Thus, it is reasonable to assume that the use of a compound noun, Zairyu-Japanese, refers to ‘Japanese nationals abroad.’

Although MOFA do not clearly state who exactly ‘children of Zairyu-Japanese’ are in the policy documents of Education Abroad, there is a clear definition of ‘Zairyu- Japanese’ in a further MOFA document, the Annual Report of Statistics on Japanese Nationals Overseas (MOFA, 2013). According to this report, Zairyu-Japanese is referred to “a person living abroad who has a Japanese nationality; either ‘long stay resident’ or ‘permanent resident abroad’” (MOFA, 2013: 3; quotations in original). In their annual report, MOFA also clearly define that the category of “children of Zairyu- Japanese” does not refer to those children who have a Japanese national parent but who do not have Japanese nationality, as well as those children of Japanese nationals who have decided to take another nationality than Japanese – it is to be noted here that Japanese nationality law is highly restrictive of multiple citizenship, and Japanese citizenship is automatically lost if a person voluntarily opts for another citizenship (MOJ, 1950)21. Although this definition is specifically intended for the annual report, it can be reasonably assumed that when referring to “children of Zairyu-Japanese” in the policy of Educatioin Abroad, MOFA in fact refer to children who have Japanese nationality (i.e., intertextuality).

MEXT use another notable expression, Kaigai-shijo [children abroad] in their policies. Kaigai-shijo is also a compound noun, consisting of two nouns: Kaigai [abroad] and Shijo [children]. Although Shijo means children, another word, Kodomo, is generally preferred in reference to child/children in Japanese. For instance, according to a corpus analysis on Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (NINJAL,

21

Although this is an official rule, and no Japanese national above the age of 22 should have multiple citizenships, there are, in fact, many cases where Japanese citizens fail to report on having acquired a second citizenship.

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2009)22, the lexical item Kodomo appears 58,991 times,23 whereas the frequency of Shijo is of only 313 times – this strongly tells us how rarely the word Shijo is used in Japanese.

Interestingly, when MEXT refer to children in general, they intensively use a word, Kodomo, instead of Shijo. Thus, MEXT use Shijo merely as a compound noun, Kaigai- shijo [children abroad] in their policies. MEXT also use Shijo in another compound noun Kikoku-shijo [child returnees] in their various policy documents (e.g., MEXT, n.d.-b) when specifically denoting children who have returned to Japan after a long time spent abroad. When looking at the corpus data again, the compound noun Kikoku-shijo [child returnees] is widely used in various sources from literary fiction to online blogs, whereas Kaigai-shijo is almost always employed in governmental documents24. For this reason, the word Kaigai-shijo [children abroad] seems to be a word created by the government based on the widely used word Kikoku-shijo [child returnees]. Hence, my argument is that there is a strong connection between Kaigai-shijo and Kikoku-shijo, and MEXT’s use of Kaigai-shijo most likely refers not to all “children abroad” in general, but only to those children who are abroad but will become Kikoku-shijo [child returnees] in the future. Therefore, there seems to be a hidden connection between Kaigai-shijo and Kikoku-shijo, indicating the limited focus of MEXT only on ‘future returnees.’

This limited governmental focus – merely on future returnees – is also evident in their argument structure in Overview of Education for Children Abroad (MEXT, n.d.-a). MEXT mention the number of “Kikoku-shijo” [child returnees] before they justify the necessity of Education Abroad. Namely, the structure of the policy documents implies that MEXT legitimise the necessity of supporting Education Abroad based on the large number of child returnees. The following excerpt comes just before the one we have analysed in section 4.1.1 which legitimises Education Abroad:

Along the development of our country’s international activities, many Japanese nationals bring their children overseas. At present, on 15 April

22 _{Kotonoha Shonagon is a search engine for the data of the BCCWJ (Balanced Corpus of Contemporary}

Written Japanese), which has a 143 million word collection of samples of written Japanese language

from a wide range of genres, such as fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic, and the governmental documents, range from 1976 to 2005.

23

This result is the combination of 29,961 frequencies of 子供, 27,516 frequencies of 子ども, and 1,514 frequencies of こども, all of which were the different autographic system of Kodomo in Japanese.

24 _{There were 23 frequency counts of Kaigai-shijo: 9 were of governmental documents such as White}

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2012, about 67,000 children of Japanese at compulsory education stage are living abroad. Also, the number of children who returned to Japan after a long-period of living abroad was about 10,000 during the academic year 2011 (MEXT, n.d.-a).

我が国の国際的諸活動の進展に伴い、多くの日本人がその子どもを海外に帯同しています。 平成 24 年 4 月 15 日現在、約 6.7 万人の義務教育段階の日本人の子どもが海外で生活してい ます。また、海外に長期間在留した後帰国する子どもの数は平成 23 年度間には、約 1 万人 となっています。

As you can see in the excerpt above, MEXT mention Kikoku-shijo [child returnees] with the emphasis on their large number of 67,000. Thus, it may well be that MEXT support Education Abroad, but merely focusing on those children who are Japanese nationals as well as future returnees. This can be regarded as a generalising synecdoche, replacing “a semantically narrower expression with a semantically wider one” (Wodak et al., 2009: 44). Namely, although the words Nihonjin-no-Kodomo [children of Japanese], Zairyu-Hojin-no-Kodomo [children of Zairyu-Japanese], and Kaigai-shijo [children abroad] literary mean all those children abroad who have Japanese parents and/or Japanese nationalities, in fact, it appears to embrace only those children who are most likely to return Japan in the future, and MOFA and MEXT implicitly exclude those children who would remain abroad indefinitely or permanently, and/or those children who are not Japanese nationals.