ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a set of interviews with the family members of Jenny, Alejandro and Yoko. As expressed earlier, the three families were based in Japan and were of partial or total Latin American origin. Jenny’s and Yoko’s mothers were Colombian prostitutes married to Japanese citizens and Alejandro belonged to a Colombian family that had overstayed their visas. In approaching the families of the three children it immediately became
evident that the challenge of tutoring language appeared to be negligible compared with their daily struggles and the perplexities of life in Japan. Even my experience of having taught primary school children in Mexico seemed to be of little help. Together with the views on foreign children expressed by the education personnel, any effective tutoring would have to be grounded in the social reality of the children’s lives. In disentangling the ways issues of ethnicity, gender and language influenced
Japanese language acquisition for the children; the notion of ‘enclosure’ appeared to be instrumental. The concept of enclosures was developed by the ethnographer Lorraine Nencel (2001) to describe the circumstances of prostitutes in Peru. Drawing from Corbin’s work on the regulation of prostitution in France during the late 1800s, the notion of enclosure is defined based on three principles:
It is essential to create an enclosed milieu, invisible to children, honest women, and even prostitutes outside the system; enclosure makes it possible to carry marginalization to the limit and to contain extramarital activity; it constitutes a dike to prevent any spillover. This enclosed milieu must remain constantly under the supervision
of the authorities. Invisible to the rest of society, it is perfectly transparent to those who supervise it … In order to be sufficiently supervised this milieu must be strictly hier-
archized and compartmentalized; by avoiding as far as possible the mixing of age groups and classes, observation is facilitated and, by the same token, the grip of the authorities is tightened [original emphasis].
