In his long career Dr Rapatahana has taught English as a foreign language (EFL) in countries in the Pacific, Southeast, East and West Asia, where he noticed that sexual exploitation was common practice by former colleagues. This prompted him in his retirement to write a book about this difficult and important topic, where he draws on a wide range of sources, from academic papers to media reports, and from blogs to organisations which report on sexual violence against children, to assemble a compelling case for the widespread occurrence of sexual predation in the EFL sector.

The conversation addresses his new book, Sexual Predation and TEFL: The teaching of English as a Foreign Language Enables Sexual Predation (Brill, 2024) which explores how teaching English overseas intersects with and enables widespread sexual exploitation.

Trigger warning: this interview discusses sexual exploitation and related content that listeners/readers may find distressing.

If you liked this episode, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

For more Language on the Move resources related to this topic, see The dark side of intercultural communication, Orientalism and tourism, The dark side of TESOL and Child pornography and English language learning.

Transcript

Hanna: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hanna Torsh, and I ‘m a lecturer in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University. My guest today is Dr. Vaughn Rapatahana, Te Ātiawa. Dr. Rapatahana is an author, poet, and editor who commutes between homes in Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Aotearoa, New Zealand. He is widely published across several genres in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English, and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, and Spanish. He earned a PhD from the University of Auckland, and is a co-editor of two books, one called English Language as Hydra, and the other called Why English? Confronting the Hydra, published by Multilingual Matters in 2012 and 2016.

Today, we are going to talk about his new monograph, which was published in December 2024, entitled, Sexual Predation and TEFL: The teaching of English as a Foreign Language Enables Sexual Predation, published by Brill.

Welcome to the show, Vaughan!

Vaughan Rapatahana: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Hanna: I’d like to start by asking you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book.

Vaughan: I first started teaching English overseas, I put teaching in quotation marks, because I’m not sure if it’s actually teaching which we’ll talk about later, in the Republic of Nauru in 1979, so I’ve been doing that on and off over the years, ever since, until I retired completely from working in 2019 because I ‘m an old man now. But I’ve taught English overseas which I would equate to teaching English as a foreign language in many overseas locales, including the Middle East, Brunei, Jerusalem, Xi’an in China, Hong Kong, Philippines, where have I missed? Probably other places. And of course, in Aotearoa itself, because as you pointed out my first language is te reo Māori, so I’ve taught English as a second language in schools, Kaupapa, where Māori is the first language, so that’s here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I’ve always been interested in this topic.

Because I have met up with people who are sexual predators during my sojourn overseas. I’ve read lots of news reports, and I guess, like the proverbial rolling stone, the more I read and experience, the more I became interested, and wrote about it, and researched about it, and collated notes, and added to them all the time. It got to the stage I wanted to write a book about it, which I managed to do successfully.

Hanna Torsh: For those who haven’t read the book, one of the things you do at the beginning is you define some of these key terms. So, how do we define sexual predation, and then how do we define TEFL?

Vaughan: I’ve defined them in the book more widely than people probably accept them. Sexual predation, as I’ve noted here, is a control or power-based, exploitative, predatory, abusive form of behaviour, deliberate, often pre-planned. It’s all too often, sadly, by males. whether they be teachers or members of the public in countries where students have gone to learn the subject, or to learn English. It includes all forms of sexual harassment, so I’ve equated harassment and predation together. Doesn’t necessarily have to be physical, can be verbal, can be just the gaze. the sexualized gaze. So that’s sexual predation. And it’s generally male preying on female, whether they’re students, fellow teachers. socio-economically deprived women in countries where male teachers have gone to teach the language. And LGBTQ teachers and students as well are often other victims. So that’s predation. TEFL stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

But it’s not merely teachers, male or female, going overseas, to teach English. or students from countries where English is not a first language going to countries where it is, it’s also not just in schools, it’s in tuition centres, it’s, in aid programs, like Peace Corps, and volunteerism, the whole industry of volunteerism, which are advertised, especially online, where young people especially go overseas. sort of like a white saviour complex to go over and help the poor local indigenous person learn English. They think they need it, they think they need to do it, they think they are the white saviour. It’s in orphanages, orphanages, so there’s a big, huge orphanage tourism aspect. to things like the Peace Corps. Also, what Haley Stanton so cogently has written about recently, TEFL tourism, where people go overseas to teach English, but at the same time have a fun time in places like Thailand, going to the beach partying. dropping drugs, having indiscriminate sex. So, TEFL is much wider than just one person going to another country in a school. It’s huge, in volunteerism, TEFL tourism, orphanage tourism, Peace Corps, teaching English, or trying to teach English, or pretending to teach English, often by totally unqualified people. who only are there because they can speak English, is also TEFL.

Hanna: I think that’s really valuable, that definition, because it reminds us that we’re not just talking about classrooms and teachers and students, we’re talking about a whole industry and all the associated practices, many of which, as you say, take place in spaces that are less formal, that are less regulated, and often are associated with cultural practices that are nothing to do with teaching and learning. And how do you think that the way you’ve examined it is different from the kinds of stereotypes and common beliefs that people might have about this issue?

Vaughan: Because I think, as I’m trying to point out, it’s a much wider issue than dirty old men going overseas, traveling child sex offenders deliberately saying they’re going to teach English so they can go and pray on children. That is many people ‘s perception of sexual predation and TEFL. And it’s a key one, and it’s a very sad, unfortunate one, and it’s statistically not stopping, and there’s so many news reports about such people. The preferential sex offender, but it’s also all the other areas I ‘m talking about, it’s the TEFL tourists going overseas and smoking dope, and going to a brothel, and engaging in underage sex with the local prostitutes. That’s just one example of sexual predation in TEFL.

So, it’s much wider than the dirty old men. It includes, as I said before, often Asian girls, teenagers, young women, going overseas, thinking they need to learn English, and being molested or raped or in severe cases, murdered by males in the local population. It also includes what I call Charisma Man, that’s NET ‘s (native-speaking English teachers) who’ve got this  wonderful aura about them because they’re  in another country, and they ‘ve suddenly become charisma men, getting accolades from the local populace women and girls they wouldn’t get in their own countries, and taking advantage of it, and sort of boasting about their accolades and their sexual prowess in those new countries. So, these are just some of the things sexual predation and TEFL involve. It’s a much wider, much more complicated, with many aspects to it, and that’s why the book is so thick, well over 400 pages, because there’s so much in it.

Hanna: And unfortunately, we’re only able to talk about a few of those issues today, but I hope that readers do go and engage with the much wider scope that you’ve explored in your very thorough book. One of the things that struck me while reading your book is that this is an important conversation to be having, but this is one of the few publications that I’ve certainly, in my career in applied linguistics and TESOL, ever come across, so it’s a very under-researched context. And the second point is it draws an important connection between the kinds of, exploitation that you’re talking about. and this phenomenon that many of our audience might know, called linguistic imperialism. Could you expand on those two aspects for the audience? So, the first one is, you know, why is this one of the few books I ‘m seeing on this topic? And the second one is, what is this connection between sexual predation and linguistic imperialism?

Vaughan: There’s a blind spot, especially amongst practitioners of the tongue. That’s English as first language speakers and writers and authors and teachers. They don’t want to hear about this sort of aspect, sexual predation, in their industry. They want to go overseas and earn big money and have a good time, or have a stable career, because they’re not all TEFL tourists, of course. Many are stable, middle-class individuals who are having lucrative overseas careers. The last thing they want to hear about is, bad guys in their profession. And the legal aspects, publishers are wary as well, they don’t want to get too involved, especially if names are concerned, or news reports. There’s a certain amount of embarrassment, but mainly I think it’s just pushing it under the table, ignorance, and denial.

As NET myself in some of those countries, or all those countries I mentioned, I often used to write to the South China Morning Post when I lived in Hong Kong, and still return there all the time, saying, why have you got these NET teachers in your country earning such huge money with huge, gratuities and airfares every two years. What are they actually doing? Do the local population really need English? Of course, my answer was always no. Those letters were published in the South China Morning Post, and of course a huge barrage of letters coming in from other native English-speaking teachers who are then saying, of course we’re needed here, and of course the Hong Kong Chinese need to learn English. So, there’s that denial and defiance and sweeping under the table. But I know what I was talking about, because my family is Hong Kong Chinese. They can speak English; their first language is Cantonese. They had no need for native-speaking English teachers in their schools, absolutely no need at such huge expense. So, there’s the first part of the question. That’s why there’s very little written about it. It’s about time there was, and this is the book which I ‘m very proud of, because I think it’s my most important work, and I’ve written well over 50 books. This is my key one.

Hanna: Over 50 books, and this is the most important one. So, there’s a real vested interest there in people not exploring and uncovering these practices?

Vaughan: And the employing countries who think they need to have English to become wonderful countries turn a blind eye as well, because they think they need to have English, so they don’t have good hiring practices. This is a huge generalization. There are so many loopholes. People can get rehired, a traveling child sex offender who ‘s teaching English can go from one country to another, and there’s no overall global mechanism to even know that they’re moving from one country to another. So, the actual employing countries are just as bad as the employer countries. There’re so many loopholes involved. One example about such sinister predators, the preferential sex offenders, they can change their names, get new passports, and travel overseas again and escape the sexual offender registers in their own countries, like the UK, which is still ineffective in that area.

It’s an exploitative industry, summarized by my other two books published by Multilingual Matters, The [English] Hydra, this huge mechanism, earning huge amounts of money for certain vested interests, basically white, middle-class, Western, concerns, the Hydra is spreading linguistic imperialism, native-speaking English teachers, huge testing industry, textbooks, and they’re  going to turn a blind eye because of the money. Yes? And then, at the same time, the local people, the local countries, the cultures were not gifted English as a first language and never historically have been them, are being lulled into the sense that they need to have English. It’s pushed onto them. And a white face will always get a job, even if they have no qualifications. So, it’s exploitation, imperialism continuing. Robert Phillipson must take a lot of accolades there, and he was one of my co-authors in the first book, English Language Hydra. I’ve worked together with Robert and the late and lamented Tove Skutnubb-Kangas, his wife, we all worked together on those two early hydra books.

So going back to your second part of your question. I mentioned a term English language sexual imperialism, which, to me, is part and parcel of the hydra, part and parcel of linguistic imperialism. They go together. So, when English language is spread and forced and sold to places that think they need to have English. Sexual imperialism happens at the same time. through some of the channels I’ve already mentioned before, they go hand in hand in hand. I ‘ll read you a quote, if you don’t mind, from Joanne Nagel in 2003, “the history of European colonialism is not only a history of language dominance, it is also a history of sexual dominance.” I agree completely. So, they’re hand in glove via all the different ways I’ve mentioned in this book. So, in my own quote: “When the language is presented in English as a foreign language situation, at least potentially, so are patriarchal, sexist, chauvinist tropes and the correlated behaviours.”

Linguistic imperialism and sexual imperialism go together. And it’s been going on for hundreds of years, from the white man going to Africa and bringing his own sexual tropes there. That’s still going on. The male preoccupation with the exotic Asian female, for example. This is 2025, but nothing ‘s changed.

Hanna Torsh: In your book, you give us concrete examples of the kind of link that you’re talking about between English language teaching and sexual imperialism. In your book, you talk about the ways in which, the career of teaching English overseas is sexualized, even before potential teachers begin teaching. Can you tell our audience what you found that out about that?

Vaughan: It comes from just lots of experience, lots of reading, lots of research, and just the sheer obvious facts. For example, English itself is a sexualized language, just given the components, structures of the tongue itself are sexualized. If you want to read Lewis and Lupyan in 2020, a very good article about that, just how pronouncedly sexist English language as a language is, in terms of its words and the word use. Many TEFL textbooks, even in 2025, are still predominantly sexed or gender biased. That’s even if some of those countries receiving English as a supposed gift, even have textbooks. And if they do, they’re usually old ones, and there might be one shared between 50 students.

The gender bias is apparent and still obvious. Males still continue to dominate in management, and TEFL conferences. Varinder Unlu, came up with the website ELTToo, and about the sexist basis of the English language teaching industry, the EFL, TEFL conferences and management structures. And she got repudiated and reprimanded by too many males for doing so, which goes back to that vested interest, not wanting to know and hiding it away.

English is taught in a sexualized fashion. For example, as in Spanish TV, a woman strips as she’s teaching English. Bizarre, but true. And it’s advertised, especially tuition centres, for example, in Japan, some of the advertisements are so blatantly sexualized and sexist. Dozens of examples are shown in the book. Another key point is the sex tourism. There’s a huge global trend, and it’s not just English teachers going overseas to partake in sex tourism, but the fact that so many people from Western countries and local countries might go to Southeast Asia for sex tourism encourages the teaching of English to cater for those tourists. The “sex pats”, another term, who just goes overseas to partake in sexualized adventures with the young, people who have no money, who are in the sex trade, because they have to be to survive, people like that. And the statistics shown by concerns that are trying to combat sexual predation in TEFL, like ECPAT and APLE Cambodia. There’re so many examples that they publish on their website and in their reports, shows the problem isn’t going away, it’s probably escalating. Despite the best efforts of places like EPAC and Apple to do something about it, and the poor efforts by local governments and countries sending the offenders overseas.

Hanna Torsh: And can you just, for the audience, explain what those acronyms are?

Vaughan: Good question. ECPAT is not just one organization, it’s an overall name for organizations that fight child exploitation, and protecting children being exploited. And APLE Cambodia is a specific example that works under EPAC, but it’s its own separate body in Cambodia, fighting child exploitation and protecting children over there. Many cases are of English-speaking teachers, tutors, or people going over and opening orphanages, or pretending to do aid out in rural communities, but actually are there as sexual predators, preying on youth. Often some of them are so cheeky as to marry a local say, Cambodian woman, and then exploit the woman ‘s children. So that’s APLE, Preda in the Philippines is another organization doing the same thing, preventing child exploitation, including by white men going there and running sex rings, paedophile rings, which is all in the book.

Hanna Torsh: Yeah, great, thank you. We are running out of time, Vaughan, and it’s such a big topic, but I ‘d like to end by asking, you’ve talked about the issue being bigger than the kinds of extreme, horrific crimes you’ve just talked about, that it’s actually permeating the whole industry, and that there’s this close relationship between English language teaching and sexual predation. What would you like our audience to go away with, in terms of the key message of your book, bearing in mind that a lot of our audience are emerging and established researchers in Applied Linguistics and TESOL.

Vaughan: Be aware of the problem, be far more aware. Report any incidents of sexual predation, even if they seem minor. If you think a student’s being harassed by a male teacher, or you think of fellow female teachers being harassed by a male teacher, or by local members of the community, report it. Get your own professional bodies to be far more proactive. They’re not proactive in fighting this massive problem across the board, all the different types of behaviours of sexual predation and TEFL, and it’s all its various guises.  Close loopholes globally, not so easy, but let ‘s get, say, UK government to say, how come sex offenders who are on the sexual offenders list can still go overseas and teach by changing their names through a passport? And be caught years later in another country altogether. And these are all documented cases.

And my final key point has always been, do we really need to teach English in other countries beyond first language countries? And my point is, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we don’t need English even to be taught. There’s no clear requirement for EFL in many places anyway. You can circumvent the hydra by just doing away with it. People can develop their own languages, because as Tove Skutnabb-Kangas said many, many years ago, linguicism comes in when linguistic imperialism comes in, and linguicism is the loss of your own Indigenous tongue, because English is taking over. We don’t need the hydra.

Hanna: You also make the point in your book that local teachers are often underpaid and undervalued relative to, imported teachers. And I thought that was a powerful message too, and linked to the idea of decolonizing, English language.

Vaughan: And it rankles with them. I was earning much more money than most of my fellow teachers in Hong Kong, and I wasn’t working the hours that they were putting into, or were expected to put in, and they weren’t getting the big, huge gratuities. Total exploitation. Totally unnecessary, but as I keep on saying, there’s a vested interest going on there, and they aren’t going to shut up. They want the money. Although in the last two years, finally, maybe they went back and read my letters to the South China Morning Post. the Hong Kong government now has now de-escalated the financial benefits for the NET scheme there and has now thrown open the budget that was formerly there for nets to be hired by schools, to the schools themselves to hire NETs, but at a lower rate. Why? Because fiscally, Hong Kong can ‘t afford what they were spending before, billions and billions of Hong Kong dollars on net teachers. So, ironically, socioeconomically, the net scheme is becoming disempowered because Hong Kong can ‘t afford to pay anymore.

Hanna Torsh: Wow. A good outcome for local teachers, potentially, and for schools, if they’re getting more of that funding. So that’s perhaps a nice place to finish up. Look, thank you so much, Vaughan, for this important work. It certainly got me thinking about my own teaching career as an English language teacher, and the various associations that I ‘m part of, and how particularly how this issue of sexual predation intersects with a lot of the work we talk about on LOM on native speakerism and now this new emerging, body of work on decolonizing English. So, lots of important food for thought. Thanks again. Do you have any final comments you would like to make before we say goodbye?

Vaughan: Tēnā koe. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I guess I ‘m going to have to say, find the book and read it, because it’s new, and it’s important. And it’s not been expressed sufficiently, or powerfully before. It’s telling things that people don’t want to hear, quite frankly.

Hanna Torsh: I couldn’t agree more. And if you’re like me working at a university, request that your library order Vaughan ‘s important book.

So, thanks again, Vaughan, and thanks everyone for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time.

“Speak English or Die!” Vilification on a Melbourne bus caught on camera

About a year ago, a video of a language-related altercation on a Melbourne bus was widely reported in the media and went viral on social media. The video and associated reports document the following sequence of events: Three French tourists, white women in their 20s, sat at the back of a late-night bus and sang a French song. This annoyed an Australian woman of similar age and racial appearance who began to shout “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie.” Another bus passenger then told the French women to “speak English or die.” From around there, the video starts and shows a quickly escalating ugly scene dominated by a middle-aged white Australian male pushing a pram with a baby and with a bewildered four- or five-year-old kid in tow: the man is ranting abuse at the French women, including grotesque violent threats. After he gets off the bus, the window closest to the French women is smashed, presumably by something he throws.

The video is a shocking example of mob hysteria and continues to exert viewers, as the ongoing discussions on social media demonstrate (at the time of writing, the latest of over 28,000 youtube comments had only been posted ten hours earlier).

What interests me is the way in which the incident has become labelled as “racist” in the media, where it has been described as “racist abuse,” “racist bus attack,” “racist rant,” or “racist violent bus abuse.”

However, the incident was obviously not triggered by race but by language, as the Sydney Morning Herald was one of the few to recognize with their headline “’Speak English or die’ – terror on a suburban bus.”

Once the abusive rant is underway, most of the swears uttered are sexist insults (the c-word figures prominently as does ‘bitch’) and most of the threats of violence are also specifically of sexist violence such as the threat to cut off the woman’s breasts. The only explicitly racist label used by the main agitator is ‘ding,’ which according to the Macquarie Dictionary is a derogatory term for Italian migrants used in Western Australia. Some contributors add that the term is used in Melbourne, too, and that it is sometimes extended to other southern and central European migrants, particularly Greeks and Yugoslavs.

In sum, the abuse is triggered by language and is mostly expressed in sexist terms. Even so, what the public sees is racism. There is no doubt that racism was an important part of the event: in addition to the use of ‘ding’ in the main speech act, another white middle-aged male bus passenger, seemingly taking his cue from the main abuser, starts to rant against black people. His tirade is not addressed at the French girls but the person who took the video on his mobile phone, stand-up comedian Mike Nayna, whose parents are from the Maledives and the Netherlands and who describes himself as “brown” while the media were a bit more coy describing him as having “light-brown skin.”

Where it gets really confusing is in the fact that all the reports I have read identify one of the French women, Fanny Desaintjores, as the target of the “racial abuse.” By contrast, the evidence suggests that Desaintjores became the target of abuse because of her linguistic difference and her vilification took mostly the form of sexist insults. The expression of linguistic and sexist prejudice against Desaintjores then ‘licensed’ the expression of racial insults to Nayna in a bigoted melange where various prejudices fed off each other.

Does my insistence on distinguishing linguistic, sexist and racist prejudice matter? At one level, it doesn’t because bigotry usually comes as a package. However, at another level, the distinction I am making is highly important: the injunction to “speak English” is ubiquitous in Australian society and expressing intolerance against linguistic diversity in this way is not usually seen as problematic. On the contrary, telling someone to speak English may even be seen as an expression of good manners.

As the Melbourne incident shows, all kinds of intolerance feed off each other. Expressing linguistic intolerance is ‘cheap’ – it can be expressed without even being recognized as intolerance. By contrast, it is much more ‘costly’ to come straight out with sexist or racist abuse – everyone recognizes these as discriminatory and there are social sanctions against vilification. Would the man on the Melbourne bus have racially insulted Nayna if he hadn’t felt the expression of racial intolerance was ok because other bus passengers were also expressing intolerance? Unlikely.

While linguistic intolerance may be expressed where racial intolerance is sanctioned, the two must be recognised as connected, with linguistic intolerance becoming both a pretext for racial intolerance and enabling its expression.

It is worth remembering Ovid’s injunction in Remedia Amoris: Principiis obsta. Sero medicina parata, cum mala per longas convaluere moras. (‘Resist beginnings! It is too late to intervene when evil has grown strong through delay.’)

These are the kinds of comments I have been hearing ever since the Guardian published an article last month on sexless young Japanese as the reason behind the nation’s low birth rate. As these reports went viral on social media, several people asked me for my thoughts on sexless Japan.

The gist of the currently trending discourse is this: The world’s third biggest economy’s population is shrinking and aging rapidly. By 2060, Japan’s current population of 126 million is predicted to drop by one-third because fewer and fewer babies are being born each year. These articles claim that the reason behind Japan’s declining birth rate is that many young Japanese are not having sex while others are in paid-for relationships with virtual anime girlfriends.

In her Guardian article, Abigail Haworth begins with an interview with sex and relationship therapist Ai Aoyama, aka Queen Love, who is photographed in her red kinky outfit, standing next to a middle-aged male client cuddling a small dog. Queen Love is quoted as saying “Both men and women say to me they don’t see the point of love. They don’t believe it can lead anywhere… Relationships have become too hard.”

Citing recent official statistics on young people preferring to stay single and losing interest in sex, Haworth goes on to report on the views of career-oriented women who claim that a marriage would only jeopardize their professional and private lives, as well as those of so-called soshoku danshi (“grass-eating men”) who have little sexual appetite and regard relationships as ‘troublesome’. Both groups are presented as having little to no interest in sex and, consequently, their generation is single-handedly leading their nation to the brink of extinction.

Anita Rani, the presenter of the BBC documentary series “No Sex Please, We’re Japanese” has a different group in the same generation of young adult Japanese to blame, namely Japan’s ultra geeks, known as otaku. In her article Japanese men who prefer virtual girlfriends to sex, Rani explains that otaku find real relationships troublesome and are instead enjoying virtual relationships with Nintendo-computer game characters. The reporter also cites ‘several surveys’ that show that even when men and women are in relationships, they barely have sex, and only 27% claim to have sex every week.

Then Rani claims that Japan’s shrinking birth-rate is a time-bomb and the country’s reluctance to accept migrants is another serious, contributing factor. This leads Rani to ponder: “Japan has managed to preserve its unique culture in an increasingly globalised world but could that very sense of identity stand in the way of solving its population problems?”

So, what do I make of all this?

Orientalist discourses of exotic Japan and its weird inhabitants are centuries- old. Unfortunately, they continue to be disguised as scientific facts and are increasingly commodified for media outlets’ profits in today’s digital age. In the global media, sex sells, weird Japan sells, and combining these two discourses sells big time. Journalists such as Haworth and Rani may well have been physically in Japan, but their analysis was obviously done through a stereotypical way of seeing and with the stereotypes of their Western audiences – and the dollar sign – in mind.

Have sex or not have sex, Japanese are never normal from the perspective of ill-informed journalists and researchers. Their sex life has become a commodified concern, and this ‘concern’ is deeply patronizing and racist as Beckie Smith argues in her recent article in The Independent:

We have a kind of voyeuristic fascination with Japan’s strangeness, spurred on by irresponsible journalism and sensationalised headlines. These stories gain traction because they support a simplistic view of East Asia which is at best patronising and at worst overtly racist. Lazy journalism supports these prejudices; every poorly written puff piece and ill-researched documentary serves, as one viewer charmingly put it, as “confirmation of Japanese weirdness”.

But if it is not heartless, materialist Japanese women, grass-eating Japanese men without any sex drive and creepy otaku that are behind the nation’s falling birth rate, what is? Well, Japan has slipped to 105^th place among 136 countries in the gender equality list; 25% of pregnant women have experience in being harassed in their workplace; 22,000 children are on waiting lists for day-care centres; and all five awardees of the Order of Culture and all 15 Persons of Cultural Merit selected by the Japanese government this year are male. Unfortunately, for women having children is largely incompatible with holding a job and the stay-at-home mum is an increasingly unattractive and economically unfeasible option.

A series of ethnographic research conducted by Ingrid Piller and myself with single Japanese women of this generation fleshes out this perspective further.

The women we interviewed in Australia mentioned sexism and gender inequality in the workplace as the main reasons why they had left Japan in the first place. Although all of them were seeking love and romance, most of our participants continue to remain unmarried and childless. This has nothing to do with the fact that they are all hard-nosed career women – they are not – and everything to do with the fact that ‘flexible’ mobile jobs such as those in the hospitality industry are incompatible with raising a family.

For instance, the bilingual Japanese flight attendants in their 20s and 30s we spoke to for research that has just been published in Language, migration and social Inequalities: A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work (Duchêne, Moyer and Roberts, 2013) had limited opportunities to pursue romantic goals due to their irregular shift work and frequent absence from their social networks. Their long-term goal was to marry, have children and quit their job. However, as their jobs did not enable them to save and the job was incompatible with that goal, the only scenario that made this a likely outcome was to find a bread-winner husband and revert to traditional gender roles.

In a neoliberal employment regime – of which low-cost airlines provide a prototypical example – there is less and less opportunity and time to enjoy intimacy, to care for children and to nurture family relationships. The women we spoke to were under continuous pressure to compete and to be ever more productive. They were well aware that their jobs were perpetually on the line in Japan’s ageist, sexist and cut-throat job market where the tradition of life-long employment has long gone.

Young adult Japanese women may have sex but they don’t want to procreate. Does that make them so different from their globally mobile but economically insecure peers in other countries? I don’t think so. It is not only this generation of Japanese that is opting out of starting families; the same is true internationally: Generation On-the-Move is trapped in perpetual insecurity and competition (aka ‘flexibility’), and the stability necessary to raise a family becomes increasingly difficult to achieve.

In addition to gender inequality and socio-economic insecurity, there is another way of looking at the issue of the shrinking Japanese population. Put in the bigger picture, a smaller population is more sustainable on a planet with limited resources. Ultimately, a sustainable approach needs to undergird the engagement with the root cause of perpetual gender inequality; it also needs to involve rethinking the issue of the shrinking national population itself in light of the world’s overpopulation and the promotion of multicultural Japan.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2006). A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market. In A. Pavlenko (Ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation (pp. 59-83). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

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Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2013). Language work aboard the low-cost airline. In A. Duchêne, M. Moyer & C. Robers (Eds.), Language, Migration and Social (In)equality. A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Takahashi, K. (2012). Multilingualism and Gender. In M. Martin-Jones, A. Blackledge & A. Creese (Eds.), Handbook of Multilingualism (pp. 419 – 435). London: Routledge.

Takahashi, K. (2013). Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.