The International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families from the 69th plenary meeting of the United Nations in 1990 states the following: Despite the presence of large numbers of non-Japanese or non-Japanese speaking students in the Japanese school system, the education system is designed to teach all students equally, despite their abilities, in what is known as the assimilationist model.
Of these students, the majority speak Portuguese, Chinese, Spanish, Tagalog, Korean, Vietnamese or English (in descending order).
Cummins and Swain (1986) argued that by not allowing for L1 support in the L2 environment of a minority-language-student will significantly affect the student's linguistic, cognitive, social and psychological development.
Early research by Cummins (1979) has shown that an ability to use the L2 in the playground does not imply that the student has the academic language to perform in the classroom.
Cook (1999) writes: "[t]he moral for teaching is to make the L2 non-threatening and to allow the learner to persevere long enough to feel the benefits."
However, Cummins (cited in Fujita, p. 17) writes: "[s]chools reflect the societal power structure by eradicating minority students' language and identity and then attributing their school failure to inherent deficiencies."
(Fujita, p. 19) Since there is no goal for maintaining either the L2 of returnee children nor the L1 of minority language students, with the exceptions of a few schools, immersion (or bilingualism) is not a Japanese educational reality.
With much linguistic support from society, school, and the family, returnee children are able to at least make the transition to the L1 (Japanese) channel, with various shades of ease and difficulty.
Another struggling minority student in Japan, a Peruvian sixth-grader, tells Vaipae: "[i]n my country I had a good life... everything goes as I like, for instance, soccer, volleyball, swimming, running, talking and studying.
Hirataka, Koishi, & Kato (in Noguchi and Fotos) studied the children of Brazilian workers in and around Fujisawa in Kanagawa where they lived with their laborer parents.