| Summary: | This dissertation examines "intercultural communication" (ibunka komyunikeshon) in Japan as an ideological construct that emerged in the early 1970s and has since spread through and become anchored in a variety of social institutional forms. Discourse about intercultural communication in Japan concerns much more than the social-interactional processes at play in the sending and receiving of messages between people who are culturally different from one another. Indeed, intercultural communication has often been depicted in Japan as substantially loaded with meaning, invested with aspirations and import that extend well beyond the immediate context of any particular communicative event itself. The aim of the dissertation is to shed light on the nature of Japanese interest in intercultural communication during the period in which it gained momentum and matured, from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, and to illuminate how discourse and practices in Japan related to intercultural communication have worked to define an ideologically invested approach to engaging with culturally defined others.
The following issues are examined in depth in individual chapters: the emergence and shaping of interest in intercultural communication in Japan in relation to internationalization discourse, from the early 1970s, such that the Japanese people themselves came to be envisioned as at once objects and agents of internationalization; the making of "Japanese-style communication" through intellectuals' published works in the middle-brow knowledge industry that developed in Japan following the end of World War II; the influence of anthropologist Edward T. Hall upon the Tokyo-based interculturalist community, among whom Hall is widely regarded as the father of the field of intercultural communication; the use of specialized intercultural communication training programs by Japanese corporations as part of their people-making ( hito-zukuri) efforts to cultivate a more globally competent workforce; and the place of "intercultural communication" amid contemporary Japanese concerns over immigration and the integration of foreigners into the social space of Japan.
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