Integrating into the London-based Japanese community. Integrating into the Japanese community in London was fairly easy due to the area in which we resided. Unbeknown to us at the time, we moved to an area of London where there were many racially ‘pure’ Japanese families with babies and toddlers living in London on a temporary basis. I met many mothers and their offspring at local toddler groups. I was pleasantly surprised because this meant that I could integrate into the Japanese community in order to give my son, Timothy, a sense of Japaneseness even though my knowledge of Japanese was limited. In addition, I was happy that Timothy could mix with racially ‘pure’ Japanese children because at that time I felt that the quality of their Japanese language proficiency would be greater than his as they had two Japanese parents. I started attending Japanese evening classes so that I could also learn Japanese at the same time as my son in order to be a Japanese speaking mother. I paid little attention to Timothy learning English as I thought he would be able to acquire it naturally as we were living in England. I felt that we were welcomed into the Japanese community which was partly due to our difference, me being a White British woman and Timothy being big and strong89 (the envy of many Japanese mothers). Timothy and I spent a lot of time at my Japanese friends’ houses because similar to their partners, my partner was working for a Japanese company and he worked long hours. Timothy and I joined Momo90 Bunkō (Peach Library Group) with my friends so that he could further develop his Japanese language and cultural practices. We could borrow Japanese books and engage in Japanese cultural practices through the Japanese medium. We were welcomed into the group and I was the only non-Japanese mother in attendance. All the other children seemed to be ‘pure’ Japanese (see chapter 4). It was at this time that I realised that Timothy’s Japanese proficiency far outshone mine and I started to become demotivated about learning Japanese. However, my knowledge of Japanese did enable me to mix Japanese and English linguistic features when communicating within the home environment (Lewis, 2005) and when 89 I remember one English mother who was at my Japanese friend’s house who expressed surprise that my son was Anglo-Japanese because he was ‘too big to be Japanese’. Thus, he did not fit in with the stereotypical image of a Japanese toddler. 90 In order to anonymise my data I’ve changed the actual name to Momo (peach), which gives a...
