Japanese culture constructed by discourses: Implications for applied linguistics research and ELT

Some of the recent applied linguistics literature on teaching writing and critical thinking to ESL students has presented pedagogical arguments by drawing on cultural differences between ESL students and the target academic community. In these arguments, authors tend to create a cultural dichotomy between the East and the West, constructing fixed, apolitical, and essentialized cultural representations such as groupism, harmony, and deemphasis on critical thinking and self-expression to depict Japanese culture. This article takes Japanese culture as an example and attempts to critique these taken-for-granted cultural labels. The article argues (a) that the essentialized cultural labels found in the applied linguistics literature parallel the constructed Other in colonial discourse; (b) that cultural uniqueness is also appropriated by the Other itself as seen in the discourse of nihonjinron (theories on the Japanese), which represents cultural nationalism and a struggle for power against Westernization; and (c) that emerging research is generating new knowledge on educational practices in Japanese schools and a new understanding of concepts in cultural contexts, challenging the essentialized notion of Japanese culture. Finally, this article offers another way of understanding cultural differences from a perspective of critical multiculturalism and presents a perspective of critical literacy that supports both cultural pluralism and critical acquisition of the dominant language for social transformation.