Japan and Global Migration

Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society

Mike Douglass, Glenda Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781134655090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Japan and Global Migration brings together current research on foreign workers and households from a variety of different perspectives. This influx has had a substantial impact on Japan's economic, social and political landscape. The book asks three major questions: whether the recent wave of migration constitutes a new multicultural age challenging Japan's identity as homogenous society; how foreign workers confront the many difficulties living in Japan; how Japanese society is both resisting and accommodating the growing presence of foreign workers in their communities.
This book contains the most up to date, original data on Japanese migrant culture available. Its inescapable conclusion is that the multicultural age has finally come to Japan; the question is whether foreign workers will be legally and socially assimilated into the fabric of Japanese society or will continue to be treated as temporary entrants with limited civil rights. The book is written with postgraduate students in Asian studies, Japanese studies, political science, sociology, anthropology and migration studies, in mind.

Part I

Global and historical perspectives on migration to Japan

1

Japan in a global age of migration

Mike Douglass and Glenda S. Roberts

Introduction

Long thought to be immune from the globalization of labor migration, Japan has over the past decade begun to experience quantum increases in the numbers of women and men who have not simply come to work and quickly returned home, but are also bringing families, forming new households with Japanese nationals, and residing in neighborhoods in cities and regions throughout the country. Many government representatives and citizens continue to believe that this is a temporary phenomenon, occasioned by acute labor shortages in low-wage occupations, which will be overcome through factory automation and off-shore relocation of corporate Japan’s labor-intensive industries. However the country’s impending population decline, rapidly aging society and growing low-wage service sector, along with widening income disparities between Japan and most of the world, point to a greater certainty that the global age of migration has come to stay.

Foreign workers and households continue to fit uncomfortably into the Japanese setting. Tightening immigration control, in a situation of continuing demand for these workers in Japan, has led many workers to endure illegal migrant status and the insecurities it entails, while others, even with proper visas, face institutionalized discrimination in finding housing and effectively utilizing legal and other services. Migrants from some parts of the world, such as those of Japanese descent from Latin America, fare better than others in terms of legal status and acceptance at the workplace and in the neighborhood. Personal attributes, choices and circumstances which add to the variety of situations produce a rich diversity of experiences rather than an archetypal experience. Yet government policies and public attitudes share a common perspective: they see the presence of foreign workers as a phenomenon to be tightly controlled and kept at arms’ length from the routines of Japanese life, rather than one that is to be accepted, which will bring about a new Japanese society that provides for a “co-existent citizenship” (Hirowatari 1998) of peoples from many ethnic and cultural heritages.

Insecurity, vulnerability and other factors such as feelings of isolation lead many, including those caught in government campaigns to crack down on illegal migration, to exit Japan and abandon thoughts of becoming long-term residents. Among these, a significant number, including tens of thousands of women in the sex and entertainment industry who are given short-term “entertainment” visas, routinely return to work in Japan, becoming part of transnational migration streams of people who chronically move among countries according to life-cycle events and job opportunities. While not finding a permanent footing in Japan, many of them have come to hold a certain attachment to living and working there and have learned how to construct a transnational existence bridging their countries of birth with Japan, and possibly other countries as well. Although these people are statistically counted as short-term stayers, the reality is much more complex as many begin to form long-term relationships, including marriage to and having children with Japanese nationals, which spill over national boundaries, immigration categories, and have an effect on future generations.

Trends suggest that, despite highly restricted immigration policies, increasing numbers of foreign workers and their families will end up staying in Japan for their lifetime, even though Japanese citizenship might never be afforded them. As the title of Chapter 6 by Yamanaka poignantly indicates, many migrants have an idea in their mind that they will return home but they are not certain when that will happen, and in the meantime they form relationships and develop new personal identities in Japan which make returning home awkward and difficult.

Whether they are short-term stayers, transnational migrants, or life-long residents of Japan, foreign workers and households are having a substantial impact on Japan’s economic, social and political landscape. In some sectors of the Japanese economy they have become indispensable to small- and medium-sized enterprises, and future demand for low-wage labor in many emerging service activities, ranging from restaurant dishwashers and busboys to workers in health care for the aged, is likely to be filled by foreign workers. In the sex industry, foreign women are now found in every prefecture of the country. In areas where they are concentrated, foreign workers are creating their own economy of food stores, restaurants and shops. Where enough of them gather, they are organizing their own festivals that also attract Japanese citizens in very large numbers.

Even when labor demand levels off, as in the recession of the 1990s, migrants still come from abroad to find niches in the job market or to stay with friends from their home country as they engage in lengthier job searches. The great majority of foreign workers prove themselves to be hard working, responsible residents. Instead of being included in the daily life of Japanese society and receiving equal treatment under the law, however, they continue to face severe problems of exclusion and discrimination. Whether against “old-comers” from Japan’s past colonization of Taiwan and Korea or the “newcomers” of the bubble economy era (November 1986-December 1991), barriers to regular employment, housing, and social services are commonly encountered by foreign workers in Japan (Komai 1995, Itoh 1996, Tsuda 1997, Morita and Sassen 1994).

Discrimination against migrants is hardly exclusive to Japan. Most societies have problems in creating and sustaining peaceful multi-ethnic co-existence. Immigration tends to exaggerate racism, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism and, all too often, becomes the focus of socially-divisive political agendas. At the same time, voices rising among Japanese citizens are championing the rights of foreign workers to be treated equally with Japanese labor at the work place and with Japanese citizens in the community. Contemporary Japan has people and organizations whose stance on this issue covers all points of the compass. They range from an official from the Ministry of Justice who, in response to deliberations on the UN Declaration of Human Rights, declared that “the treatment of foreigners is totally up to the discretion of the Japanese government … We can do with them as we please” (quoted in Hirowatari 1998:88) to workers in non-profit organizations dedicated to ensuring that the rights obtained by Japanese citizens are also given in law and in practice to foreigners.

National and local governments also move in different directions with regard to foreign workers. Some local governments are in the forefront of efforts to provide social services to foreign workers. They even allow foreigners to work as civil servants. Most recently, the municipality of Tokyo has established a foreign residents’ council to act as an advisory board to the mayor. Nearby Kanagawa Prefecture has established committees comprised solely of foreign residents for the purpose of having their opinions reflected in local government policies (Japan Times 1997, Yoshida 1998).

Beyond the specific responses of governments and citizen organizations to the situations facing migrant labor from abroad, Japanese cities and regions are not only beginning to register the presence of foreign workers and households as co-workers and neighbors, but also becoming exposed to a variety of different cultural practices. Ethnic neighborhoods are appearing in cities, and urban as well as rural areas are seeing an influx of foreign brides who bring along their own cultural heritage and lifestyles.

The challenge for Japan is to decide whether the response to the increasing presence of foreign workers and families will be one of trying to marginalize these alternative expressions of social and cultural identity through, for example, an implicit policy of containing foreign workers in ghettos or one of creating the political and social atmosphere for a multicultural society to flower. Signs of both possibilities exist, and it is as yet uncertain which tendency will win out. In the short-run, however, it appears that a ‘sakoku’ (secluded country) attitude remains strong, buttressed by the myth of a pure Japanese culture (Itoh 1996, Lie ch. 4).

Migration to Japan in the contemporary world economy

Although in this volume the focus is on people from other countries coming to work and live in Japan, it is important to understand that, throughout most of its modern period since 1868, Japan has been a net sender of international migrants. Following Japanese government involvement in international agreements millions of Japanese people emigrated to settle permanently in other countries.

Migration up to the early post Second World War years

We return to the question of migration of foreigners to Japan. Records show Chinese migrants living in Japan in the seventeenth century, with their numbers increasing until the cession of Taiwan to Japan in 1895. By the end of the Second World War there were about 28,000 Taiwanese in Japan, of whom 14,000 elected to remain. Together with mainland Chinese who remained, they numbered 34,000 in 1948 (Vasishth 1997:131).

By far the largest foreign presence in contemporary Japan is that of Koreans. Korea was colonized in 1910, and Korean workers subsequently came in increasing numbers as recruited workers as well as forced labor. By 1938, approximately 800,000 Koreans resided in Japan, compared to 30,000 in the 1920s (Yamawaki 1996 and this volume). During the Second World War, Koreans were brought to Japan in three phases: company-directed recruitment (1939–41), government assisted recruitment (1942–4), and forced draft (1944–5) (Weiner 1994:194). By 1945, there were 2,100,000 Koreans residing in Japan (ibid.: 198). Even after repatriation of colonized peoples living in Japan following the Second World War, several hundred thousand Koreans continued to live in Japan.¹ In 1996, the number of permanent residents registered in Japan included 572,564 North and South Koreans, 30,376 Chinese and 23,100 others. In total, Koreans make up 91.5 percent of Japan’s permanent resident aliens (JIA 1997a:14).

In April 1947, under a new Alien Registration Ordinance, Korean and Taiwanese residents were deemed aliens. This Ordinance became the Alien Registration Law when the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect in 1952, and Korean and Taiwanese residents became disenfranchised of the Japanese nationality they had held during colonial rule (Hirowatari 1993). This excluded them from many social welfare benefits and kept them from public sector employment (Vasishth 1997). At the same time, processes for becoming a Japanese national were severely assimilationist, requiring naturalized citizens to assume Japanese surnames and cease to use their own. As a result, many people who would have naturalized refused to do so, while many of those who did met with ostracization from their kindred. Due to strong pressure from Korean and other citizen’s groups, the naturalization procedures have become somewhat less constraining in recent years (Hicks 1997, Murphy-Shigematsu ch. 9), perhaps partly because of this, more people are now seeking naturalization.²

With a vast supply of returning soldiers and rural labor reserves available to provide cheap labor power for Japan’s recovery and stellar economic rise, migration to Japan from all countries was minimized after the Second World War up to the late 1970s (Morita and Iyotani 1994). This distinguished Japan from Western Europe, which was already highly urbanized. In 1950 almost half of the Japanese labor force was in agriculture. In less than two decades Japan subequently experienced an accelerated urban transition which had taken almost a century in Europe.

The 1970s and 1980s

While Europe was massively recruiting immigrant “guest workers” in the 1960s, Japan was still able to use rural migrants as its pool of low-wage labor (Morita 1992). But this was changing rapidly. By the mid–1970s, less than 1 percent of the population lived in communities of fewer than 5,000 people. Village Japan had been decimated, and the share of national population residing in urban places had increased from a little over one-third in 1950 to more than three-quarters (Douglass 1993). With incomes and wages rising, the stage was being set for foreign migration into urban Japan. This began to be acted out in the 1980s when labor scarcities combined with the rising value of the yen against the dollar to confront Japanese employers, especially those in small to medium-sized manufacturing and construction industries, with severe problems of reducing costs to compete in foreign as well as domestic markets. Although from the 1970s Japanese women in increasing numbers began to fill low wages jobs as so-called “part-time” workers in manufacturing and services—especially married women past child-bearing age—they were not sufficient to meet the demand (Roberts 1994). The use of foreign migrant labor became Japan’s next source of low-cost workers in the 1980s.

As noted, Japan remained a net international exporter of low-wage migrants until the 1960s. Trends in the worker emigration and immigration began to reverse by the 1970s and 1980s as more foreign labor began to enter Japan than Japanese workers to leave the country. The first reversal in the 1970s took the form of the recruitment of Asian women into Japan’s domestic sex industry. By the 1990s, well over 50,000 women were coming to Japan annually as so-called “entertainers.”³ While the vast majority of sex workers come in shifts under short-term six-month visas, in 1992 alone 90,000 foreign women were classified as visa overstayers, with an estimated 90 percent of these coming from the sex industry (Komai 1995:72).

Thus, unlike other high-income countries of the world, Japan’s labor migration initially consisted overwhelmingly of women (Tiglao-Torres 1993). But the migration of foreign women into Japan’s sex industry suddenly began to be matched from the latter half of the 1980s by the immigration of men into low-wage jobs often described as “t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Global and historical perspectives on migration to Japan
• PART II Livelihood and living in Japanese workplaces and communities
• PART III Government policies and community responses
• Index