Saturday is the busiest day for Kikokushijo Academy (K.A.).  A short train ride from Tokyo’s central station of Shinjuku, the school is one of the countless businesses that work invisibly in upper floor and back corridors and labyrinth warehouse districts—tiny, unassuming enterprises supporting the thriving, omnipresent economy of one of the world’s wealthiest cities, a “command center” in global capitalism.  Though close to Shinjuku, the transportation and governmental heart of the city, Kikokushijo Academy seems remote in its small neighborhood of Daitabashi clustered around a rusting train station on the Keio line.  A few blocks away a superhighway shadows a major thoroughfare 40 feet below, its roadway on level with a skyscraper housing offices of the ubiquitous Mitsubishi bank.  Tightly packed trucks with polished chrome mirrors and crisp black taxis pulse and rush, the purposeful traffic cutting sharp lines in the urban landscape that isolate Daitabashi further.  The trains hurtle past constantly as well, rattling the old wood framed windows above the aging Fuji Film processing stand.  On Saturday the children must time their arrivals carefully, plotting their journey across the city to Shinjuku or some other major hub in order to catch one of the less frequent and slow local trains.  When a train arrives the young people hurry from the cars onto the long, concrete platform and towards the single staircase leading underground.  They carry lumpy bookbags, some have smart satchels that complement their formal school uniforms.  At the ticket gate they clutch plastic cards filled magically with electronic money that they touch to black discs with blinking red lights.  They push through and rush up the ascending stairs leading to the neighborhood’s compact center, avoiding adults and teenagers who jostle one another on their way to a nearby private high school.  Upon reaching the surface again, people pause and take awkward steps to negotiate one another as each passenger finds themselves in relation to an older scale of the city, with streets coming in at sharp angles, ajar, agape to the surprise of the newly resurrected.  A small bookshop and a tobacconist, an open storefront with small, tidy clusters of vegetables and fruit, a noodle shop not yet open though the decorative noren, small curtains emblazoned with crests and shop characters, are already put out, marking preparations within for lunch customers.  At a prominent intersection of narrow roads evoking an older Edo-period scale of the city, stands an unlikely structure—a Mister Donut.  Its garish red and yellow interior is visible through long plate glass windows that give back a dull reflection of the morning.  Already a small queue of mothers and schoolgirls are gathered before the glass cases within.   The plastic trim outside is sun-faded and milky with age, the weathered sign, once casually cheerful, is now kept company only by the adjacent Fuji sign.  Both signs recall the 1980s boom when even this small stop, almost provincial, was discovered to have aspirations to affluence and post-war modernity and real estate to match, both worth cultivating by corporate chains and franchise branding.  Now though, apart from the ubiquitous conbini—convenience stores—the chains have retreated, leaving the neighborhood to small, particularized ventures, like Kikokushijo Academy, finding an unconventional  location in a two-story apartment building a few minutes walk from the station.  

The children come from across the world, from cities elsewhere and trudge down this narrow asphalt path between the massive wall protecting the train platform and the erratic remnants of the old neighborhood. A weather-beaten old wooden house stands next to a lot where a house once stood but now transformed into an awkwardly shaped automated parking lot with a surveillance camera and tire locks glinting where the yellow warning paint has been battered off, poised like mechanized bear traps for the next hourly prey.  Another wizened house faces the block wall forlornly and then a flimsy 2-story apartment building with a synthetic, pre-fab shell, dingy with the soot of the city and the dust of the trains marking its decline from the heady growth of the 1980s.  A small placard suspended from the wall shows a blue globe with a tiny plane in orbit around it, announcing Kikokushijo Academy.  Newcomers often stand confusedly outside, because there appears to be no entrance, only a wall of opaque glass blocks forming the exterior.  An unobtrusive door leads upstairs to a long landing with four unmarked doors.  Though the building was originally designed for residences, only one unit actually has someone living in it as the original architect intended.  The other three are occupied by small businesses—the academy and a cosmetology school, and these are bifurcated: the cosmetology school has the 2nd floor units at either end, while K.A. has a single upstairs unit and two more units on the ground floor, their doors also unmarked and opening directly onto the narrow street.

Begin this path

1. The Uncanny Difference of the Kikokushijo and Heterotopia
2. Kids in the City
3. Emiko: Every Tool is a Weapon
4. Kikokushijo Academy: Reconstituting the Past and Mimicking the Family
5. Difference Abroad, Difference at Home: Mimesis and Cultural Drift in K.A.
6. Mami: Kikokushijo Identity and the Global Rhizome of Memory and Fantasy
7. They Never Heal: Endless Questions
8. Normalized Risks for Abnormal Futures
9. Disappearing at the Threshold
10. Departures
11. Conclusion: What is this Place Called? Japan's Kids and Becoming

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