As increasing number of young adults migrate transnationally in their childhood, their language identity, the assumed or attributed relationship between their sense of self and languages (Block 2006, Leung et al. 1997), is gaining importance in the literature. Existing studies on the language identities of Japanese migrants have shown that their language identities are diverse in the degree to which they feel affiliated to Japanese or the languages of their immigrated countries (Kanno, 2003; Koshiba & Kurata, 2012), which is affected by schooling, community backgrounds and language policies (Oriyama, 2010). Despite the growing literature focusing on the migration between Japan and English-speaking countries, few had investigated the migration between Japan and another Asian country. Moreover, it remains unclear how language identity influences the migrants' life courses. To fill the gaps, this study focuses on Japanese young adults who had spent several years in China in their childhood and aims to examine (1) how the language identities of the Japanese returnees diverse, (2) how the language identities influence their life courses. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with three Japanese returnees and qualitatively analysed. The results showed that the returnees' language identities vary from claiming strong affiliation and expertise to both languages to expressing no affinity with Chinese. External factors, such as schooling and community backgrounds, experiences with close people, and stereotypical expectation of the majority Japanese on returnees, affected the returnees' language identities, while their subjective interpretation of these factors also played an important role. Furthermore, the language identities formed during migration influence the returnees' investment in language learning and future occupation choice.

Request has widely been investigated as an intrinsic face-threatening act in Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson 1987). Previous studies mainly focus on strategical differences among languages, claiming that non-native requesters may cause unpleasantness to native speakers resulting from pragmatic interlingual transfer. However, few researches have empirically investigated how “unpleasantness” occurs and changes during the conversation. The present study was performed to explore (1) how unpleasantness correlates with results or politeness strategies in requests; (2)the changing process of mental states in participants during request conversations andthe characteristics of unpleasantness. 2. Research Methods Open-end roleplay was used to collect conversation data, while questionnaire and interview by Stimulated Recall (Mackey & Gass, 2005) was used to collect the data of mental states. In total 20 Japanese university students (10 pairs) participated in the study. Interlocuters in each pair are friends in real life. Statistics and inductive qualitative coding were used to analyse the data. 3. Results (1)Analysis showed that accepting requests or employing politeness strategies is not necessarily correlated with preventing unpleasantness in requests. (2) The most important process in the change of the mental states during request conversations is twofold: (a) Participants interpret the situation and hold expectation and feelingsbefore the conversation begins; (b) When one of the participants receives an utterance from his/her interlocutor, he/she may pay attention to some part of the utterance, interpret and evaluate it, resulting to change of the initial mental states. Both situation and interaction may cause unpleasantness in a request. When the unpleasantness is attributed to interaction, expectation and interpretation for the same utterance between two interactants generally disagrees.