‘Guarding the gate’: the hidden practices behind admission to an Elite Traditional International School in Japan

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the admissions practices of an ‘Elite Traditional International School’ (ETIS) in a large city in Japan. The school is seeing falling enrolment from its traditional clients e.g.‘transnational capitalist class’ families working for Embassies and its alumnus, whilst attracting an emergent aspiring locally-based body of parents representative of a ‘global middle class’ likely seeking advantages, and a new, distinct identity. The resultant tension, between dealing with market-led change (reflecting the reality) and trying to maintain and protect legitimacy as an ideologically driven institution serving the privileged ‘international community’ (reflecting the vision), creates a platform (the nomos) for admission practices that are potentially biased and largely hidden. Utilising a methodology grounded in the work of Pierre Bourdieu we identify how the school adopts a number of ‘unwritten rules’, to ‘guard the gate’. Moreover, the imagined ‘international community’ emerges as a major field of power.

KEYWORDS:

• Bourdieu
• Japan
• international schools
• admissions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tristan Bunnell

Tristan Bunnell is a Lecturer in International Education at the University of Bath.

James Hatch

James Hatch is an independent researcher in Tokyo, Japan, and obtained his Doctorate from the University of Bath in 2017.