1st Edition

Japan and Global Migration Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society

By Mike Douglass, Glenda Roberts Copyright 2000

    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.

    I: Global and historical perspectives on migration to Japan; 1: Japan in a global age of migration; 2: Foreign workers in Japan; 3: Japan in the age of migration; 4: The discourse of Japaneseness; 5: The singularities of international migration of women to Japan; II: Livelihood and living in Japanese workplaces and communities; 6: “I will go home, but when?”; 7: Aliens, gangsters and myth in Kon Satoshi's World Apartment Horror; 8: Local settlement patterns of foreign workers in Greater Tokyo; 9: Identities of multiethnic people in Japan; III: Government policies and community responses; 10: Labor law, civil law, immigration law and the reality of migrants and their children; 11: Foreigners are local citizens too; 12: NGO support for migrant labor in Japan

    Biography

    Mike Douglass, Glenda Roberts