| Chapter 1: | Reconsiderations of Race, Ethnicity, and Identity: Transnational Migrants in Post–World War II Global Society |
another new language or two to communicate with their in-laws and relatives. Besides the national language, they might also have to learn Javanese, Sudanese, or Chinese, and the corresponding customs and culture.
Yoshida believes many Japanese women eventually become adept and flexible in dealing with Indonesian religion, cuisine, and languages. However, regarding their children's education, they are not so compromising. This seems quite common. Both Okamura and Yoshida reported that Japanese transnational migrants will not give up the idea of getting a Japanese education for their children. Regardless of country or economic opportunity, few transnational Japanese women do not wish for their children to learn the Japanese language and maintain connections to Japan.
But we can see, also, how things have changed. For example, while Japanese transnational migrants of Brazil in the early 1900s wanted their children to maintain their Japanese language (see Adachi, chapter 3), current Japanese migrants, especially women, demand that their children become bi-cultural in order to survive in an increasingly global society. Concern for the language abilities of children of transnational migrants do not just focus on gaining local acceptance or maintaining connections to home. Now the concern is how their children will fit into the global economy.
Eriksen (1993, 9) says that “Instead of viewing ‘societies' or even ‘cultures' as more or less isolated, static and homogeneous units as the early structural-functionalists would have tended to do, many anthropologists now try to depict flux and process, ambiguity and complexity, in their analyses of social worlds. In this context, ethnicity has proven a highly useful concept, since it suggests a dynamic situation of variable contact and mutual accommodation between groups.”
“Ethnicity,” then, is like “society” and “culture” in that the notion is itself not static, but dynamic—continuously developing in the context of circumstance and discourse. In other words, the term does not define but, rather, describes certain social phenomenon. As I argued earlier, the boundaries of ethnicity have become blurred and are created throughpeople's relationships. When social moments change, the boundaries expand or contract. Many of the chapters in this book show how concepts