Dual cultural anchoring: a qualitative account of long-term study abroad for Japanese learners

Long-term study abroad (SA) is widely held to produce more substantial non-linguistic change than short-term alternatives, an expectation broadly confirmed for L2 confidence and related variables, though less neatly for cultural ones. In a recent mixed-methods study of Japanese university sojourners, Neff and Apple (2023) reported a counterintuitive finding: ethnocentricity decreased meaningfully among short-term participants but remained essentially unchanged after a year abroad. This qualitative companion paper, drawing on interviews with nine Japanese university students conducted five to six months after return from one-year sojourns in four English-speaking countries, proposes that this non-finding corresponds to a pattern termed dual cultural anchoring: a strengthened, more articulated relationship to home culture that coexists with genuine host-culture affection, formed through a comparative orientation returnees bring back and continue to inhabit. The paper establishes the pattern across the corpus, attends to Japanese peer communities’ mediating role in its formation, takes up a heritage-background participant whose differing trajectory reveals candidate identity conditions on which the pattern depends, and traces the comparative disposition into post-return identity renegotiation and redirected futures. Implications for the ethnocentricity construct in SA research and for the L2 self are discussed.