‘War on Illegal Immigrants’, national narratives, and globalisation: Japanese policy and practice of police stop and question in global perspective

Abstract

Policing, even stop and account, despite being tied to the local, has been confronted with the current pervasiveness of global interconnectedness. The complicated interaction between the global and local in the field of policing, however, is always the result of political and cultural assumptions in each society. This article firstly offers a brief description of recent Japanese policy and practice of police stop and account as part of a ‘War on Illegal Immigrants’. While reflecting on the global trend of criminalisation of immigration, it then explains political and cultural implications which have brought about this extraordinary policy and practice in the context of modern Japanese society. It concludes that recent development of Japanese police stop and account policy and practice can be best understood as the site for interaction between the national narratives in relation to crime and ethnicity, and the corresponding apparatus of globalisation.

Keywords:

• stop and search
• Japan
• immigration
• globalisation
• national narrative
• penal populism
• ethnicity

Notes

1. See Yoshida and Leishman (2006) for the examination of recent activity and function of the koban system in Japan.

2. As of the end of 2009, the total number of foreign national residents in Japan is 2,186,121, accounting for 1.71% of the total population, approximately 127,510,000. Of these registered foreign nationals, Chinese marked the largest number at 680,518, accounting for 31.1%, followed by North and South Korean (578,495 for 26.5%), Brazilian (267,456 for 12.2%), Filipino (211,716 for 9.7%), and Peruvian (57,464 for 2.6%). See Ministry of Justice (2010).

3. In Japan, whereas police power of stop and account is set out in primary legislation, stop and search is not a legally defined power, though police officers have been exercising the power of stop and search subject to the consent of the person.

4. This survey was conducted by way of distributing questionnaires among foreign nationals who visited a legal consultation centre in Tokyo Bar Association, and among those who linked to a number of NGOs for immigrants.