Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2014, Anthropology

In recent years, an increasing number of foreign students have been engaging in language and cultural immersion programs in Japan, raising issues of cross-cultural contact and exchange. Japan's enduring cultural nationalism produces an ethnocentric valuation of homogeneity, thereby affecting the ways in which Japanese natives engage with and respond to these students. This paper draws on two months of ethnographic research at two Japanese universities to examine how everyday, culturally embedded nationalism affects the experience, identity, and language instruction of western nonnative learners of Japanese with regards to the institution, the instructors, and the community around them. This discourse on issues surrounding the presence of foreign youth in a nationalistic society has application for discrimination reforms on the international level.

Committee: Haley Duschinski (Advisor) Subjects: Asian Studies; Cultural Anthropology; Educational Sociology; Foreign Language; Language; Linguistics; Pacific Rim Studies; Social Structure; Sociolinguistics; Sociology