Since the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, anti-Asian racism has garnered scholarly attention worldwide. However, this literature focuses primarily on Asian panethnic frameworks in the North American context and obscures the significance of Sinophobia as a distinct facet of global anti-Asian racism across different societies. This oversight is consequential in Japan, where Chinese immigrants constitute the largest immigrant group and are increasingly characterized as highly skilled. Drawing on 54 in-depth interviews with first-, 1.5th-, and second-generation Chinese immigrants in Japan, the author examines their experiences with Sinophobia by investigating how they interpret their position within the Japanese ethnoracial hierarchy vis-à-vis other immigrant groups. Using a relational ethnoracialization framework, the findings highlight that Chinese immigrants found themselves caught in a paradoxical social location. Although many achieve socioeconomic mobility, Japan’s colonial legacy and its geopolitical conflicts with China create distinct marginalization patterns that persistently ethnoracialize them as culturally incompatible, perpetual outsiders lacking “proper” social manners. Consequently, Chinese immigrants believed that they were ranked along multiple social dimensions: ethnoracially subordinate to Whites yet above Southeast Asians along the axis of socioeconomic status. This research contributes to our understanding of ethnoracialization experiences beyond Western contexts and has implications for how Sinophobia complicates social boundaries within East Asian societies.
Xiaorui Zhang (Wed,) studied this question.