K.A., an English-language juku or cram school, serves a very specific population of children, primarily Japanese young people who have lived abroad for a period of time, often because of a parent’s occupation, and to a far lesser degree, children of mixed-nationality/linguistic families.  In both cases, English is a significant component in the child’s educational and/or domestic/social life.  While for some children attending K.A. may be simply a way to maintain English skills acquired abroad or to improve abilities to better communicate with family members or in preparation for living with relatives outside Japan, far more often attendance is a central feature for preparing the child for the future.  These children, because of their foreign experience, occupy a distinct category within Japanese society, one they will exist within for the rest of their lives: kikokushijo   (帰国子女), literally, returned-to-the-country-child.  Because of their bi-or multilingualism and cultural indeterminacy, the children are seen as unstable figures within Japanese society.  Reading the kikokushijo identity through Nihonhinron theories of Japanese exceptionalism, Roger Goodman summarizes the concept of ba or “frame” as conferring identity and subjectivity: “An individual’s ‘frame’ determines his position in society, and it is on this basis that he can communicate with others. On the other hand, an individual without a ‘frame’ is marginalized in Japanese society, is essentially without a social identity, and may find himself ostracized (murahachibu sareru)” (Goodman 1990, 62). In the culture-and-personality studies comprising the broader literature substantiating popular notions of Japan’s unique and “natural” group-oriented, vertically-structured culture, it is a truism that Japanese identity is perpetually vulnerable to dissipation and dissolution when a person adapts to non-Japanese culture. Children, as one might imagine, are depicted as especially sensitive to this “zero-sum game” (Befumi 1983, 246). Goodman focuses especially on the 1979 work of Minoura which famously coined the concept of the kyūsai no kabe or “the nine-year old wall”—the age after which “cultural grammars” cannot be unlearnt and permanently affect the disposition and capacity of a person to integrate properly into Japanese society and orient oneself constantly to the group or the “other” rather in relation to the desires of the self (Goodman 1990, 65).  Language is a central aspect of Japanese identity as attested to the formula put forward by Ebuchi Kazukimi, a leading Japanese researcher on children and culture in the 1980s: “Japanese blood plus Japanese cultural skills plus Japanese language” (Goodman 1990, 65).

They represent a category of privilege simply by having been circulated as familiar surplus through the networks of professionalized labor and having been outside Japan and by extension seeming to have acquired a coveted cosmopolitanism (Goodman 1990, 8).  Yet they also exist as risky figures precisely because of this contact with the foreign outside and the lacks the children now manifest, both linguistically and more subtly in their performance of a positive, uncomplicated cultural identity as “Japanese children.”  These risks are discursively localized around academic ability.  Because the kikokushijo have been absent from the rigidly sequential Japanese national education system, they are behind their peers in crucial entrance examination subjects such as history and Japanese language, and thus unable to compete equally for coveted places in schools, from junior high to college. This quantifiable deficiency led parents of kikokushijo to lobby the government vigorously for a special track for such students, resulting in new forms of exceptional inclusion, albeit within a still segregated category. (For more on this see Goodman 1990, 203.)

K.A.’s main mission is to prepare children with English-language education backgrounds to sit entrance examinations in English at the few schools, often elite, that offer this option to kikokushijo.  Beyond this overt goal, K.A. offers itself as a site of cultural community, where the multi-valenced selves the young people have developed through their various experiences are encouraged and the sense of alienation (and in some cases physical threat) suffered in public schools is alleviated.  K.A. is in this way a sanctuary, a term the founders use to describe it even as they underscore the academic purpose (and the reason for its financial success).  On the juku’s website, Charles Knudsen, K.A.’s co-founder, describes his concern for returnee children who find themselves out-of-place—they serve as K.A.’s primary motivation: “I’m troubled that upon returning home, (returnee children) are unable to find a place of their own in Japan. It was for these children that K.A. was founded. It is significant that Charles uses the word ibasho to convey a “space of one’s own.” Anne Allison defines this term as “a space where one feels comfortable and at home” (Allison 2013, 174). It frequently appears in popular discourse in the negative as ibasho ga nai—to not have a space of one’s own. Allison argues this negative formation is the more common because it delineates a state of “not feeling quite right, not sufficiently secure, noticeably not human. A slippage from a time when things were (remembered or fantasized to be) better” (Ibid.,175). The affective connotation of ibasho is mirrored in Charles’ assertion and Anne’s analysis with opposing teleologies: space for the self is difficult or absent for kikokushijo but available in the pedagogical sociality of K.A. while for the broader society, the present is a spatialized time of intimate scarcity and it is only in the past that fragments, traces and constitutive memories survive for momentary solace. Charles’ invitation from the K.A. homepage affirms the overtly globalized identity of returnee children, seeking to help each person “fly the world as an international citizen.” Ibasho is available to those uneasily positioned on the edges of an uncomfortably internationalized Japan through the affective labor and repurposed space of K.A. It is a surplus generated within the intimate interior of social relations formulated in the de-territorialized zones of global circulation—from Bern to Manila, from L.A. to Singapore—condensed through the careful structures and practices of the juku and the relationships it fosters among children and staff. Even with this present oriented towards a becoming-in-flight, recalling Charles’ “fly the world” wish, the past still serves as critical foil and memory of an ideal time elsewhere gives shape to the present. A parent of two elementary school children writes in a testimonial posted on the K.A. site: “…every time I see the children having lively conversations in English with the teachers, it seems that time slips back (タイムスリップしたように思えます ) to a local school in America.” The borrowed expression “time slip” is used to convey the feeling of an experience out-of-place and a return to a distant, still-retrievable memory-body. Time slides along a perpetually unstable fault line of bodies intersecting space in an earlier moment.  Rather than being an unruly disjuncture, the slippage overlays the former instance replete with liveliness and locality atop the singularity K.A. represents: a mimetic site of the past capable of organizing futures from the outside in. Envisioning the juku in this way, if only briefly, weighs the anchor on Foucault’s image of the heterotopic space and puts it to sail—a parallel, lived reality reflecting back to us the immanent possibility of an emergent utopia. Heterotopias, Foucault writes, are where “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault 1986, 24).

K.A. as Heterotopia

The Saturday morning scene at the beginning of class time begins to draw out this inversion of Japan, reflecting back the history of journeys outward and the struggles of reincorporation within. Seen through the eyes of the anonymous parent, the juku classroom reenacts the past and brings its remembered happiness into the fraught present, orienting this conjuring towards a productive, reintegrated future. How can the school function as reconciliation, temporary convalescence from the “outside” pressure of everyday Japanese life, continuation of an “outsider” subjectivity, and a becoming into a different kind of (productive) Japaneseness—all at once? What kind of space is this anyway? The contradictions are profound, but not a crisis of definition, in Foucault’s view. In his third principle of the heterotopia he offers the garden as a living illustration. The garden represents for Foucault “a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity” juxtaposing several incompatible sites (Foucault 1986, 25-26). The heterotopia here also re-attaches the inhabitant or participant to previous self in a former, bounded time. In this case, it is the time of the journey outside, the life learned and lived abroad, in another city or cities with all those possibilities.

Like the garden as heterotopia in Foucault’s description, K.A. stands apart within the city while also guaranteeing and constituting its very multiplicity, becoming the very zone of diversity. Within the “garden walls” exists a conducive microclimate for the exploding multiplicity the kikokushijo represents and coalesces, not only in themselves in terms of language, desires, affects, interests, comportment, fantasies, and friendships, but also in the way the classrooms function, the motley crew of teachers assembled to teach them, and of salient importance, the native Japanese staff who effectively run the school and serve as the critical interface with the neighbors, parents, and the wider public. As I will explore further, K.A. cultivates multiplicity as an idealized form of internationalization, capitalizing on (neo)liberal ideology of the global subject who can successfully embark on “a flight around the world.”

 It is certainly true that K.A. is an intensively capitalistic enterprise and derives profit from providing asylum and rehearsing linguistic-cultural disciplinary surfaces upon which aspirational future utopias take flight. However K.A. also illustrates a heterotopia of deviancy, being nothing less than an asylum, doubling as safety and quarantine. The metabolizing, neoliberal function of the school is not to be underestimated, but nor should we mistakenly and hastily reify its orthopedics of difference. The students gather and flow, following multiple trajectories to alight in laughing flocks in this unlikely neighborhood. Their parents look on, shivering as time slips and a narrow Tokyo street channels so many outside energies into a magic, heterotopic space camouflaged within this faltering apartment building, itself a memorial to a lost economic utopia. Channeling the power of the heterotopia to invert and juxtapose, K.A. sutures together in time and space dislocated emotional and social selves that are slippery and slip between present norms, past lives, and future spaces.

The Harry Potter series was enormously popular with my student-informants at K.A. and very little imagination is needed to see the parallels between the “half-blood” wizard protagonist Harry Potter and the returnee children with their doubling, splitting identities. Like Harry, they move back and forth between different linguistic and cultural worlds, occasionally living in various unconventional family arrangements, and habituated to educational institutions celebrating and disciplining their “special” mimetic powers. K.A. shares characteristics with many other crisis (of kids) heterotopias transformed into heterotopias of deviation that populate the landscape of popular fictions. Foucault names the boarding school as one form of a crisis heterotopia reserved for adolescents in a temporal juncture of change. Though K.A. is not a boarding school like Hogwarts, it is a reserved space of unique separation where the children can pass in because of their ability and their unstable but mimetic capacity while their parents linger in the street outside. In Japanese popular fiction young protagonists frequently find their friends and their purpose in special, segregated institutions. Special schools, qua crisis-heteropia, often serves an embattled nation or metropolis, serving as sanctuary, training facility, laboratory, playground, and prison in series or all at once. In the famous anime film, “Akira,” Shotaro Kaneda and his bōsōzoku bike gang—The Capsules, including the ultimately risky character of Tetsuo, are all enrolled in a high school for juvenile delinquents as a liminal holding space—“a last chance” before the boys are sent to the courts. Seemingly without parents, terrorizing the streets and living in the filthiest corners of a rebuilt city haunted by its recent total destruction, the boys are a dispossessed class and an unexpected reserve of potential embodied in Tetsuo’s dramatic and violent mutation that comes to threaten the entire city once again. Erupting from the crisis heterotopia of the reform school onto Neo-Tokyo’s super-highways on their motorcycle appendages, Kaneda’s crew engage the city with fearless speed and renegade subcultural autonomy in which they exhibit the tension between their corporeal techniques and the disciplinary regime of the state through their symbol: a capsule pill encircled by the slogan, “Good for Health, Bad for Education.”

In the massively popular anime and manga series Neon Genesis Evangelion, Tokyo has again been completely destroyed and in the apocalyptic aftermath a young teenage boy is enlisted to pilot a huge, bipedal bio-machine. In this exceptional role, he lives with other adolescent pilots as they struggle to harness their emotions and desires to changing bodies, morphing machines, and shifting social spaces as they wage deadly combat against supernatural alien forces in an effort to preserve the city-state. A following series, “Neon Genesis Evangelion: Campus Apocalypse” echoes this concept of the crisis heterotopia turned heterotopia-of-deviation.

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