Informal economies, immigrant entrepreneurship and drug crime in Japan

With few exceptions, criminal entrepreneurship has been excluded from the broader scholarly and political debates over immigrant business. Drawing on the case of illicit drug markets in Japan, I argue that entrepreneurship has increased during the 1990s, though not to the extent claimed in the public debate over immigrant criminality. Immigrant entrepreneurship patterns in the illicit drug trade appear to be shaped by the resources of different migrant groups and, more importantly, by interrelated and shifting opportunity structures found in Japan's formal, informal and criminal domains.