Case Studies of English-Japanese Bilingual Children in New York:
Parents’ Cultural Attitudes and Children’s Cultural Identity
Fujiu Motoko
Fukuoka Jo Gakuin University, Fukuoka, Japan
To investigate how parents’ cultural attitudes, along with their language policies and practices at home, interact with their children’s awareness of their cultural identity in immigrant families, the author conducted case studies of three Japanese families permanently residing in New York City. Adopting a post-modern view of identity, the author proposes a model in which the children’s identity is viewed as ripples in a pool of water affected by multiple factors in their social circumstances. To explore their identity from this perspective, the author employed semi-structured interviews with the parents and children in their homes, along with a method developed by the author to get the children to express their feelings towards their two languages and cultures through drawings. The children were interviewed by the author three times and after the second and third interviews, they were asked to draw visual representations of their feelings about various factors in their environment, including aspects of both of their cultures. They were told to draw themselves in the center of a series of concentric circles and then to draw the things and activities they liked best in the circles closest to themselves and things they disliked in circles further from themselves. The interviews and ripple drawings suggest that the parents’ personal and family histories and cultural attitudes influence their children’s cultural identity. In all three families, the parents expressed a belief that Japanese language proficiency is an essential element of Japanese identity, and this belief appeared to be successfully transmitted to their children. However, the parents seemed to struggle to find optimal ways to support their children’s language development. In addition, the status of Japan and Japanese culture within the historical and social contexts in which the families lived appeared to have an influence on both the parents’ and children’s cultural identities as Japanese.
