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Multicultural Japan? Discourse and the ‘Myth’ of Homogeneity [Indonesian Translation Available]

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

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It is not sufficient to fight against myths by destroying one myth and replacing it with another, as in, for example, criticising the myth of the homogenous nation by replacing it with the myth of the mixed nation (Oguma 2002: 349)

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Copyright © The Authors 2007

Footnotes

[Indonesian Translation Available Here] http://japanfocus.org/data/indo.multiculturaljapan.pdf

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