From reality to discourse: analysis of the ‘refugee’ metaphor in the Japanese news media

ABSTRACT

This article examines a recent trend in the Japanese news media of using the term ‘refugee’ as a metaphor. Japan is known for its extremely low refugee admission rate, granting asylum to less than 100 refugees each year. Why so few? In order to provide lexical observations on this situation, this article explores how the term ‘refugee’ (nanmin) is used in the Japanese news media. In 2007, a Japanese journalist popularised the sensational term ‘net cafe refugee’ for those who do not have a fixed address and sleep in 24-hour Internet cafes. The usage of ‘refugee’ in this context provoked a controversy and prompted cafe owners to release an official statement asking journalists to refrain from using the term. Despite the outcry, the term ‘refugee’ remains popular today as a metaphor for those who lack access to particular facilities, services, or experiences – for instance, ‘insurance refugee’, ‘information refugee’ and so on. Based on the analysis of textual data containing these metaphorical expressions, the article suggests that through the refugee metaphor, the term’s implications have shifted from visual to conceptual, and from international to domestic, with the possible effect of diverting public attention from the reality of refugee protection.

KEYWORDS:

• News media
• metaphor
• textual analysis
• refugee
• Japan

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

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Naoko Hosokawa

Naoko Hosokawa is a postdoctoral fellow at Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo. She holds a D.Phil degree in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford. She also holds a MA degree in Political Science from Columbia University and an MSc degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She previously worked at the French Academic Network for Asian Studies, the France-Japan Foundation of the EHESS, the European University Institute and the University of Strasbourg. Her fields of research include sociolinguistics and media textual analysis. She is interested in the question of language and identity with a particular focus on loanwords, metaphors, and language education. She has published articles in Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Irish Journal of Asian Studies, The Manifold Nature of Bilingual Education, as well as Myths in Crisis – The Crisis of Myth.