Loving from afar: Japanese language learners and their imagined target language communities in contemporary Hong Kong

1 Introduction

I interviewed participant John – a doctor in his 40s – immediately after Hong Kong lifted all pandemic-related travel restrictions in April 2023. John expressed his excitement at being able to travel to Japan in a month’s time. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting? I really love Japan”. Born and raised in Hong Kong and partly educated in the United Kingdom, John has been studying Japanese since 2013 and holds the second highest (N2) qualification of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). John was also enthusiastic about his learning. “My former teacher is coming back to the [language] school. I like her teaching”. John even considered moving to Japan around 2017 but decided against it. “I’m waiting to see how things go here [in Hong Kong]”. When I asked him why, John looked helpless. “If I lived in Japan, I’d always be treated like an outsider”. He then went on to describe Japan with a trope. “Japan is an exclusive club [that is] hard to get into. But on the positive side, being so exclusive may be good for protecting Japan’s attractive cultural uniqueness”.

Research has shown that Japanese language learners in Hong Kong tend to be affectively motivated by “a general liking for the people and cultural products associated with the target language” (Humphreys and Miyazoe-Wong 2007: 472, emphasis mine; for similar findings, see also Humphreys and Spratt 2008; Nomura and Yuan 2019; Nomura et al. 2019; Seo 2011). Since the “social turn” (Block 2003) in applied linguistics, language learners have been increasingly seen “as part of an inclusive social world” (Tajeddin et al. 2023: 893). As a socially situated alternative to the psychological concept of “motivation”, Norton (1995) proposes the notion of “investment”, which “carries connotations of [learners’] hopes of returns and benefits” (Kramsch 2013: 195) from their language learning. Norton (1995, 2001, 2013) views investments in a target language as the socio-economic actions of its learners in search of a wider range of symbolic and material resources. Hong Kong learners’ investment in Japanese can be understood as more symbolic than material, stemming primarily from their attachment to symbolic resources associated with Japan rather than from material benefits derived from Japanese.^[1] Indeed, such investment involves intangible symbolic resources such as social ethics (e. g. civility, empathy), which Hong Kong Chinese who learn Japanese associate not only with Japan but also vaguely with ancient China (Nomura and Yuan 2019). Most likely, learning Japanese in Hong Kong may also involve a learner’s “cultural identity”, defined as “the relationship between individuals and members of a group who share a common history, a common language and similar ways of understanding the world” (Norton 2013: 56).^[2] Cultural identity typically refers to a person’s association with their heritage language and culture (e. g. Schecter and Bayley 1997). And yet, cultural identity can also refer to how language learners seek to belong to the cultures beneath their target languages, despite the risk of discounting “the heterogeneity within the [cultural] groups” (Norton 2013: 56).

I argue that contemporary Hong Kong Chinese learners of Japanese want and need something deeper and more complex than a mere taste for tangible cultural objects. Their “symbolic investments”, defined as learners’ desire and need to acquire intangible symbolic resources such as language skills, academic credentials, social networks, and religious beliefs (Norton 1995, 2001, 2013) – as well as, in my view, security and well-being – are inextricably linked with Japan, the only nation that speaks their target language as its national language. What I tease out in this article is how Hong Kong learners of Japanese conceive of “imagined communities” (Kanno 2008; Kanno and Norton 2003; Norton 2001; Tajeddin et al. 2023) through which they pursue security, well-being, and other valuable intangibles through symbolic investment in Japanese and construct Japanese-speaking cultural identities as their modes of participation (or non-participation) in such imagined Japanese-speaking communities. Despite the challenge of defining “imagined communities” in applied linguistics, Norton (2013) sees them as settings in which language learners’ imaginations create a sense of belonging to target language communities that are not always easily accessible but that they may be able to join in the future. Such a definition has a wobbly and unwieldy focus on the future without a legacy that marks the past (e. g. memories, monarchs, monuments), which partly explains why imagined communities remain a growing yet unploughed field in applied linguistics (Tajeddin et al. 2023).

Hong Kong is a postcolonial society with many residents still uncertain about their belonging to the Chinese nation (Lee and Chan 2024; Lui 2020). Hong Kong is also a linguistic enclave within China, with Cantonese (rather than Mandarin) retaining its status as the region’s dominant language. Given ethnic Chinese Hongkongers’ uneasy relationship with the imagined community that they are destined to join (i. e. modern China), their imagined Japanese-speaking communities may also have an impact on their fluid cultural identities. In post-war Hong Kong – where the British monarch left in 1997 – imagined Japanese-speaking communities may be more memorable, monumental, and therefore more imaginable than those of other foreign languages, because of the long-term massive symbolic and material influence of Japan (Consulate-General of Japan in Hong Kong 2022; Nakano 2002, 2009). The imagined communities of Japanese language learners and their impact on symbolic investments and cultural identities towards Japan in contemporary Hong Kong deserve attention to close a knowledge gap on the role of imagined communities in foreign language learning. Such imagined Japan-related, Japanese-speaking communities presumably force them to consciously and skilfully manage their modes of participation (or non-participation), thereby shaping their life trajectories – especially their symbolic investments and cultural identities – as ethnic Chinese Hongkongers learning Japanese. Indeed, there are seemingly contradictory facets to John’s trope: (a) his passionate symbolic investment in Japanese in the name of “love”, (b) his imagined Japanese-speaking community as “an exclusive club”, and (c) his Japanese-speaking cultural identity as “an outsider”. Thus, I contextualise the role of Japanese language learning in contemporary Hong Kong through in-depth qualitative interviews, using imagined communities as a theoretical lens. This study revolves around the following research question: How do Japanese language learners’ imagined communities shape their symbolic investments and cultural identities in contemporary Hong Kong?

2 Theoretical underpinnings

Nationalism is, according to Anderson (2006), is a result of discriminatory policies that forbade creole bureaucrats born in the Americas to work in the Spanish metropole and destined them to remain in the colonies of their birth. These creoles, confined to each colony, gradually imagined “[mostly unknown, unseen, unheard] fellow-members […] of their communion” (Anderson 2006: 6), giving rise to the Spanish-speaking nations of the Americas. While “national print-languages” (Anderson 2006: 67) served as a primary catalyst for nationhood, Spanish, English, and other colonial languages did not play as important a role in the “New World” as they did in the “Old World”, where such national languages belonged to “each language’s native speakers” (Anderson 2006: 71). Although Anderson (2006) does not provide a comprehensive analysis of “foreign” language learning, he attests to the power of language to create an imagined community and solidarity among its members. In Asia, Japan is a successful example of such nation-building. By suppressing regional vernaculars, nationalism invented a Japanese “language” – a kokugo ‘national language’ – that belonged exclusively to “Japan” and its people and was later imposed on its colonies such as Korea and Taiwan (Lee 2009). All these ideological enterprises were aimed at imagining Japan as a singular nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Japanese thus contributed to the construction and later expansion of the modern Japanese nation. No imagined community can exist without (also imagined) comrades and strangers, and one may need to imagine other nations as passionately as one imagines one’s own (Anderson 2006). In due course, Japanese language learners associate Japanese with the nation of Japan, where – unlike anywhere else – Japanese is imagined as the only national language.

Anderson (2006) coined the term “imagined communities” to explain how nations have taken root in modern people’s minds primarily through national print-languages. Drawing on his influential term, Kanno and Norton (2003) and other applied linguists have discussed how language learners construct their identities as future members of the (inevitably) imagined communities to which they want or need to belong. More than two decades have passed since Norton’s (2001) seminal work, but research on imagined communities in applied linguistics has primarily discussed second language learners (e. g. Gao 2012) and heritage language learners (e. g. Haneda 2005). Second language and heritage language learners tend to question how to align their cultural identities with their new or old nations. In contrast, the relationship between foreign language learners and imagined communities is less imaginable and therefore less explored (Kubota 2011).

Admittedly, foreign language learning is not as epistemologically “deep” as national identity, be it legal or cultural. Anderson’s (2006) theory of nationalism concerns almost everyone who must have a nationality in this late modernity. It is not surprising that an adult Chinese citizen speaks fluent Japanese, but it is inconceivable that the same person holds a Japanese passport.^[3] Quite apart from Anderson’s (2006) original argument, Norton (2001) employs the concept of imagined communities to portray the confused identities of two immigrant women learning English, who are not yet part of their imagined communities in anglophone Canada. While both learners of English attempted to fit into mainstream English-speaking society in their own ways, they committed non-participation in English language lessons because their teachers did not respect the imagined communities to which these women wished to belong. Worse, although both women invested time and effort in learning English, more experienced (and proficient) members of their imagined English-speaking communities stood in the way of their “legitimate peripheral participation” (Lave and Wenger 1991). Drawing on Wenger (1998), Norton (2001) distinguishes “peripherality” – which can facilitate novice participants’ fuller participation in their imagined communities – from “marginality” – which prevents novice participants from moving from the periphery to the centre of their imagined communities. “Non-participation was not an opportunity for learning from a position of peripherality, but an act of resistance from a position of marginality” (Norton 2001: 165), as these immigrant women embodied.

By focusing on educational institutions rather than individual language learners, Kanno (2008) reconciles Anderson’s (2006) explanation on nation-building and Norton’s (2001) interpretation of immigrant language learning. Through her research with bilingual children in six different schools in Japan, Kanno (2008) reveals that “schools create unequal access to bilingualism by envisioning different imagined communities for bilingual students of different socioeconomic classes” (p. 3). Institutionally imagined communities also directed bilingual children into such communities, thus reproducing a society-wide disparity of “capital” (Bourdieu 1987). According to Kanno (2008), underprivileged newcomer children in public primary schools were only allowed to imagine the narrowest imagined communities and consider the fewest identity options. She then concludes her monograph with an observation about the monolingual imagined community of Japan. “Either they [i. e. underprivileged newcomer children] can grow up to be monolingual Japanese speakers and become members of Japanese society, or they can maintain their L1 and eventually return to their own country – but not both” (Kanno 2008: 178, emphasis in original), stuck in restricted life options.

As noted above, applied linguistic research on imagined communities is more compatible with immigrants and their descendants. While newcomers need to acquire the dominant languages of the societies to which they have migrated as their second languages, oldcomers are often expected to maintain skills in their heritage languages. In Hong Kong, for example, Gao (2012) discusses the region’s South Asian newcomer children and their Chinese language teachers, who spoke Cantonese as their first language. These South Asian students committed non-participation in their Chinese language classrooms and Hong Kong’s imagined Chinese-speaking community, othering them as “linguistically deficient […] non-native speakers” (Gao 2012: 144). In Haneda (2005), Jim – a Japanese Canadian boy – felt excluded whenever he visited Japan. Jim went to a Saturday school to keep up his Japanese skills to “please his parents” (p. 277). Back in Japan, however, he was ridiculed as “a strange fellow” (Haneda 2005: 278) who looked Japanese but was not Japanese. Jim gradually diminished his cultural identity as a member of his ancestral nation.

Imagined communities are less explored in foreign language learning, reflecting the challenge for many foreign language learners to imagine their target language communities without pressing survival concerns (Kubota 2011). Exceptionally, Brown (2018) finds that Japanese university students learning English as a foreign language associated themselves with two imagined communities: (a) the Japanese nation and (b) “a sub-set of the larger imagined community of Japanese people” (p. 398), within which his participants formed cultural identities as Japanese speakers of English. While these Japanese university students located Japanese within their nation-bound imagined community, English was exclusively associated with the outside world beyond the boundaries of the Japanese nation, which nationalism has delineated through the Japanese language and other mechanisms (Anderson 2006; Lee 2009). In this way, Brown’s (2018) Japanese participants consolidated their “national” identities. However, further research is needed to explore the role of imagined communities in foreign language learning.

Kubota (2011) analyses adult Japanese who learnt English in the private (eikaiwa) sector using the term “consumption” rather than Norton’s (1995, 2001, 2013) “investment”. In Japan, where English is a widely learnt (but not so widely used) foreign language, Kubota (2011) concludes that “[l]earners consume goods and services for self-fulfilment and enjoyment in pursuit of social inclusion in an imagined community in which English, whiteness, and native speakerness are commodified” (p. 476). Drawing on Kubota (2011), Seo and his colleagues (2012) consider Japanese learners at Hong Kong’s lifelong learning institute as consumers who studied Japanese for pure enjoyment, with no desire or need to increase their symbolic and material capital. Kubota (2011), however, also suggests that “[s]triving to belong to an imagined English-speaking community [in Japan] brings hope and refuge” (p. 487) beyond mere enjoyment for some learners. More recent studies (e. g. Nomura et al. 2019) show that young people in Hong Kong used Japanese language learning as their “pedagogical safe houses” (Canagarajah 2004) in which they constructed alternative identities to safeguard their security and well-being from Hong Kong’s highly competitive educational culture. In this paper, I argue that learning Japanese as a foreign language in contemporary Hong Kong is more related to learners’ symbolic investments and cultural identities shaped by their imagined Japanese-speaking communities.

Applied linguistic research on imagined communities has inherited the logic of modern nation-building from Anderson (2006) and the attention to vulnerable language learners from Norton (2001) and Kanno (2008). In order to address a gap in knowledge about the relationship between imagined communities and foreign language learning, I chose Hong Kong as my research site for three main reasons: (a) Hong Kong’s complex transition from a British colony to part of the Chinese nation (Lee and Chan 2024; Lui 2020), (b) the perceived marginalisation of Japanese-speaking Hongkongers from the local Japanese companies where they worked (Nomura and Yuan 2019), plausibly linked with the robust cultural (national) identity of the “Japanese” (Brown 2018; Lee 2009), and (c) the immense influence of Japan in Hong Kong, whether symbolic or material, traditional or modern (Humphreys and Miyazoe-Wong 2007; Nakano 2002, 2009; Nomura and Yuan 2019). In this paper on foreign language learning, I define imagined communities as settings in which learners invest in the target language and construct their cultural identities as modes of participation (and non-participation), mainly but not always for the future.

3 Research context and method

3.1 Research context

Hong Kong – a former British colony handed over to China in 1997 – is inextricably linked with its complicated postcolonial transition. Since the early 2010s, Hong Kong has witnessed historic events, including the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and the widespread protests triggered by the Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) in 2019. To quell unrest in its autonomous administrative region, China’s central government bypassed Hong Kong’s legislative body and enacted the National Security Law (NSL) in June 2020. A quarter of a century into the postcolonial era, the relationship between local (Hong Kong) and national (Chinese) identities – more amicable at the time of the handover – has recently become contentious, particularly among younger generations (Lee and Chan 2024). In 2022, Hong Kong experienced an outflow of 0.9 % of its population, leaving the authorities desperate for new talent (Census and Statistics Department 2023).^[4] The introduction of the NSL means that Beijing will no longer tolerate anything it deems anti-national, causing many Hongkongers to feel intense anxiety and despair about their future (Lui 2020). The NSL – reinforced by the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, passed unanimously by Hong Kong’s local legislature in March 2024 – has silenced public outcry, and many dissidents have subsequently been jailed or ousted (Lo 2021). In education, the NSL has forced “schools, colleges and institutions beyond the education sector to participate in a public jamboree of patriotic enthusiasm” (Vickers and Morris 2022: 200; cf. Figure 1).

Figure 1:

An advertisement promoting National Security Education Day on 15 April 2023 at a railway station in Hong Kong (own photograph).

Despite Japan’s occupation of Hong Kong between 1941 and 1945 and the ongoing territorial disputes between China and Japan, Japan has had a massive economic and cultural impact on post-war Hong Kong (Nakano 2002, 2009). Japan also attracts a huge number of travellers from Hong Kong. Almost a third of the total population travelled to Japan in 2019, and a third of these travellers had visited Japan more than ten times (Consulate-General of Japan in Hong Kong 2022). Not surprisingly, Japanese is widely learnt and spoken as an optional foreign language in Hong Kong. In 2021, up to 2.0 % of the multilingual region’s population spoke Japanese (Census and Statistics Department 2024b), and 27,665 people were enrolled in Japanese language courses at 73 institutes (Japan Foundation 2023). Cantonese is the dominant language in Hong Kong, and both English and Mandarin – the national languages of the past and present sovereigns – are also compulsory in schools. While so many people invest their time, effort, and money in Japanese primarily due to their affection for Japanese culture, investment in compulsory languages (i. e. English, Mandarin) is largely related to instrumental benefits (Humphreys and Spratt 2008).

4 Findings

5 Discussion and implications

Thus far, I have attempted to answer the following research question: How do Japanese language learners’ imagined communities shape their symbolic investments and cultural identities in contemporary Hong Kong? The findings suggest that the Japanese language learners who participated in this study invested symbolically and actively in Japanese based on their association with imagined Japanese-speaking communities, from which they derived security and well-being (cf. Excerpts 1, 2, and 4). Despite the participants’ diverse and personalised symbolic investments, they tended to feel marginalised from fuller participation in such imagined Japanese-speaking communities but somehow coped with the perceived marginalisation in the form of moderate non-participation (cf. Excerpts 7 and 8). At the same time, the participants deliberately remained on the periphery of their imagined Japanese-speaking communities in order to maintain a sense of Japan as a safe haven and to break away from the difficult realities in Hong Kong (cf. Excerpts 11, 15, and 16). Taken together, the imagined Japanese-speaking communities drive these ethnic Chinese Hongkongers to learn Japanese primarily for their own security and well-being and to construct Japanese-speaking cultural identities that allow them to cherish Japan from afar and stay away from its downsides. In the context of contemporary Hong Kong, it is misleading to equate learning Japanese as a popular foreign language option with any allegiance to the nation of Japan, although people’s stances toward the current situation of Hong Kong is not always straightforward (cf. Excerpts 12 and 17). But at the very least, all of my Hong Kong Chinese participants embraced Japanese-speaking but non-Japanese cultural identities. None of them seemed to seek “similar ways of understanding the world” (Norton 2013: 56) with the “Japanese”, despite their desire or need to speak the same language, occasionally with traces of a shared heritage (cf. Excerpt 2). In fact, even the participant with partial Japanese ancestry identified himself as a “foreigner” in Japan (cf. Excerpt 9), among all the others.

The findings of this study support previous researchers (e. g. Humphreys and Miyazoe-Wong 2007; Nomura and Yuan 2019) who claim that Japanese language learners in Hong Kong are motivated affectively rather than instrumentally. This study goes further to analyse this affection in terms of imagined communities, a term coined by Anderson (2006) and later imported to applied linguistics by Norton (2001). In Norton’s (1995, 2001, 2013) terms, Japanese language learners in contemporary Hong Kong make symbolic investments in exchange for intangibles such as security and well-being, while their life trajectories may also involve material investments for profit and income. As Norton (2001) predicts, Japanese language learners in Hong Kong also seem to engage in moderate non-participation when they feel marginalised, but curiously, such moderate non-participation can coexist with symbolic investment. At the same time, they seem to deliberately remain on the periphery of imagined Japanese-speaking communities, even when they seem to be able to deepen their levels of participation. Peripherality refers to “the fact that some degree of non-participation can be an enabling factor of participation” (Norton 2001: 161, emphasis mine). One can also choose to remain on the periphery for as long as one wishes, although Lave and Wenger’s (1991) model of situated learning supposes that legitimate peripheral participation – despite the possible peaks and troughs – progresses towards fuller participation over time. One of the theoretical contributions of this study is the finding that my participants engage in voluntary peripheralisation. Japanese language learners in Hong Kong skilfully control their participation in imagined Japanese-speaking communities to gain security, well-being, and other valuable intangibles through their symbolic investments.

Voluntary peripheralisation is, in a sense, a distance management strategy between language learners and their imagined target language communities. Not only does voluntary peripheralisation allow language learners to continue their symbolic investments, but it also enables them to maintain friendly relations with their imagined target language communities and to construct positive, trouble-free language learner identities. In contemporary Hong Kong, Japanese is optional and therefore harmless. In Kanno’s (2008) terms, the multilingualism of Japanese language learners is “additive” rather than “subtractive”, as learning Japanese enriches the learner’s language repertoire rather than damaging it. Anderson (2006) is silent on foreign language learning. However, based on my findings, voluntary peripheralisation seems to help Japanese language learners to peacefully connect with their imagined Japanese-speaking communities from afar.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, Japan’s successful nation-building has led the Japanese to “imagine themselves [as] members [of the unified nation]” (Anderson 2006: 97), while disregarding “non-Japanese Japanese language” (Lee 2009: 216) spoken by non-native speakers. Japanese learners of English thus consolidate their identity as Japanese citizens by learning English as a means of communicating with the world outside Japan, but not with their compatriots who are “native” speakers of Japanese (Brown 2018). My findings, however, do not provide firm evidence that Japanese language learners in Hong Kong are similarly cementing the Chinese-speaking cultural identities of my participants, which may reflect the complexities of the sovereignty transition and the youth of full-fledged nationhood in contemporary Hong Kong (Lee and Chan 2024; Lui 2020). Suffice it to say that learning Japanese, however much they may love Japan, tends to make contemporary Hongkongers think of Japan as an imagined “foreign” community and themselves as “foreigners” or non-members of the Japanese nation.

The findings of this study have implications for the pedagogical practice of language teachers. Since Norton’s (2001) seminal work, research on imagined communities in applied linguistics has tended to invite language teachers to “be aware of their learners’ imagined communities of practice and discuss them in classes” (Tajeddin et al. 2023: 905, emphasis mine). While Norton’s (2001) suggestion that “teachers might encourage learners to think of themselves as living in […] the imagined community” (p. 170) remains relevant, at least in Hong Kong, it may well be a challenge for a learner to openly discuss their imagined communities in class. At least two of my findings relate to this challenge. First, in contemporary Hong Kong and other sensitive societies, people, including my participants, tend to be cautious about expressing their identities – whether legal or cultural – and futures (e. g. emigration) in public or when being recorded. Second, perhaps with the advent of social networking services on the internet (e. g. YouTube), each learner’s symbolic investment has become increasingly diverse and personalised, as most participants suggested (see also Nomura et al. 2019, for similar findings). Japanese popular culture is no longer shared across society as it was at the end of the last century, when many Hongkongers enjoyed the same TV series from Japan (Nakano 2002). Given these two findings, I recommend that teachers use channels such as the exchange of individual assignments, personal communication before, after, or between classes, and even one-on-one interview tests – what Canagarajah (2004) might call pedagogical safe houses – to build rapport with their learners and then move on to discuss their investments, identities, and imagined communities. Where personal and societal security may be in conflict, such pedagogical considerations are particularly beneficial.

Before concluding this discussion, I need to be clear about the limitations of this study. Firstly, the findings of my study cannot and should not be overgeneralised, as each participant was unique in their own way. The relatively modest sample size (n = 18) also makes me hesitant to claim any generalisability. As I mentioned earlier, the participants were relatively well-educated and affluent with stable jobs, although I appreciate the genuineness of each participant’s voice. Secondly, the data came from qualitative interviews with my participants but not from elsewhere. Perhaps, other research methods, such as classroom observations, would have made the data richer and more compelling. Lastly, while this study focuses only on my participants’ learning of Japanese as a foreign language in Hong Kong, the learning (and use) of Japanese as a second language by Hongkongers in Japan remains unexplored. It may also be worthwhile to understand the symbolic investments and cultural identities of Hongkongers living in Japan and using Japanese as a second language “deemed essential for survival” (Kubota 2011: 474). The recent depreciation of the Japanese yen may encourage migration from Hong Kong to Japan. The function of imagined Japanese-speaking communities among such Hong Kong newcomers in Japan also deserves theoretical attention.

6 Conclusions

I have explored how Japanese language learners’ imagined communities shape their symbolic investments and cultural identities to uncover what lies behind contemporary Hongkongers’ “affective motivation” (Humphreys and Miyazoe-Wong 2007; Humphreys and Spratt 2008) for learning Japanese. The findings suggest that ethnic Chinese Hongkongers symbolically invest in Japanese language learning in exchange for valuable intangibles. Japanese language learners sometimes feel marginalised from imagined Japanese-speaking communities, especially during their stay in Japan. However, they also tend to voluntarily remain on the periphery of imagined Japanese-speaking communities to continue to love their “Japan” from afar and to preserve it as a safe haven from the uncontrollable realities of contemporary Hong Kong. Ultimately, these affectively motivated learners of Japanese – or skilful “investors” in Japanese – tend to conceive of their “Japan” as imagined foreign communities from which they seek security, well-being, and other valuable symbolic resources, to which they do not wish to fully belong, and in which they choose to remain foreigners. Such cultural identities may seem non-committal, but they are necessary. Japan needs to be “attractive” and “entertaining”, yet “exclusive” and “distant”.

Future research can shed light on foreign language learning in more diverse contexts to assess the theoretical utility of “voluntary peripheralisation”. I have found that Japanese language learners in Hong Kong skilfully manage their distance from imagined Japanese-speaking communities to keep their affective motivations or symbolic investments alive. Whether such a distance management strategy applies to foreign language learning in other contexts remains to be explored. As a context, Hong Kong is of an outstanding value. Perhaps few other postcolonial regions that did not become independent nations have struggled as much to forget the old nation and learn to belong to the new one (Lui 2020). Learning foreign languages in contemporary Hong Kong, including English – if it can be considered a “foreign” language – awaits further research. I hope that the present study will encourage future researchers and educators to gain a deeper and more contextualised insight into imagined communities in which language learners may negotiate their complex identities.