Immigrants in a Non-Immigrant Society: Recent PhD Dissertations on Migration in Japan

Japan has been struggling with ‘immigration’—the ‘I’ word—for three decades (Roberts, this issue). Instead of calling it immigration, bringing in foreigners is packaged as absorbing global talents, as ethnic return, and as international aids.1 These disguises reflect Japan’s deep ambivalence toward immigration. The country is aware that in order to maintain economic power and material affluence, it is necessary to bring in ‘foreign people’, but it is unwilling to imagine changes to the cherished Japanese ways of life. Immigration is seen as a threat to national identity. However, despite political ambivalence and cultural resistance, immigration has in fact taken place in Japan. By 2016, over two million foreign nationals have lived and worked in Japan, and this does not include the 400,000 people who have naturalized since 1980 (Du 2015). Though some observers have labeled Japan a negative case of immigration (e.g. Bartram 2000), research on Japan’s migration and migrants thrives in this peculiar space between official avoidance and the unavoidable reality of immigration. Scholars are quick to point out the hypocrisy demonstrated in the various disguises of labor migration. Since the onset of contemporary migration in the 1980s, social scientists have put Japan’s migration policies under microscope and critically examined the problems emerged in the disjuncture between the reality of immigration and the inability to acknowledge it as such (see Kajita 1994; Iguchi 2001). Meanwhile, ethnographic studies investigating new immigrants in Japan have observed how this particular migration regime shapes migrant experiences and migration outcomes, including circular migration, identity dilemma, and transnational outlooks (see Roth 2002 and Tsuda 2003a on Nikkei Brazilians; see Faier 2009 on Filipino marriage migrants, and Liu-Farrer 2011a on Chinese student migrants).