Views on immigration in Japan: identities, interests, and pragmatic divergence

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how material-based and identity-based concerns influence views on immigration in Japan. Our analysis, based on in-depth interviews with 28 local residents and public and policy opinion leaders conducted in 2015 in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, found widespread opposition to immigration with the exception of the immigration of care workers. General opposition to immigration stemmed from identity-based concerns, while openness to and support for the immigration of care workers was related to material-based concerns. Our findings suggest that while the identities approach to understanding anti-immigration sentiment has explanatory power in Japan, material-based concerns can, when sufficiently strong, override identity-based concerns in a phenomenon we call ‘pragmatic divergence’.

KEYWORDS:

• Japan
• immigration
• care and careworkers
• gender
• pragmatic divergence

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for their generous grant support for this research. This research was made possible by the SSHRC Partnership Research Grant on Gender, Migration, and the Work of Care (File No: 895-2012-1021), Ito Peng, PI. This research has received clearance from SSHRC and University of Toronto’s Human Research Ethics Protocol.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Interview with Hidenori Sakanaka, April 6, 2019. Sakanaka was a former director of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau and currently heads the Institute of Immigration Policy in Tokyo. He is a pro-immigration advocate who was closely associated with former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and regularly advised him on immigration policy issues.

2 On October 28, 2018, former Prime Minister Abe stated, “The government is not considering adopting a so-called immigration policy” (“政府としては、いわゆる移民政策をとることは考えていない”) in response to a question from the opposition party about the implications of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s policy reform proposal to expand the intake of foreign workers.

3 Sharpe (2014), similarly, found that Japanese politicians and policymakers prefer granting citizenship to Zainichi Koreans over Nikkeijin co-ethnics from Latin America.

4 Both co-authors are fluent in spoken and written Japanese.

5 Different immigrant-receiving nations have different working definitions of the term ‘immigrant’ (OECD 2007). Our definition, an individual who migrates to a foreign country with the intent to settle as a permanent resident or naturalised citizen, aligns with the definition of immigrant used in many countries with robust immigration systems. In Canada, for example, an immigrant is defined as a person that has been granted the right to live in Canada permanently by immigration authorities and includes individuals who have obtained Canadian citizenship by naturalisation (Statistics Canada 2019). In the United States, an ‘immigrant visa’ “is issued to a foreign national who intends to live and work permanently in the United States” (U.S. Customs and Border Protection 2018).

6 Although it is often thought that Japan is a non-immigrant accepting country, it actually has a limited immigration policy. Between 1967 and 2019, a total of 552,557 people were naturalised. Over half of these were Koreans and about one third were Chinese (MOJ 2020). Japanese immigration policy also allows high-skilled workers to gain long-term residency. Currently, there are 150,000 Latin-American Japanese (nikkeijin) permanent residents living in Japan. The total population of foreign nationals is approximately 2.6 million, about 2% of the total population, while total stock foreign labour force population is 1.3 million (2% of the total Japanese labour force) (JIL 2019; MOHLW 2019).

7 For further discussions about the use of ambiguous language in the debate about immigration in Japan, see Akashi (2014) and Roberts (2018).

8 Japan’s migration legacy is more complex than Japan’s understanding of itself as a ‘non-immigration nation’ suggests (see: Endoh 2009; Sharpe 2014; and Tsuda 2003) and more research is required to clarify the nature of the conceptual confusion over terms such as ‘foreign worker’ and ‘immigrant’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 895-2012].