Rethinking Race and Racism in and from Japan

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Notes

¹ See for example, Oguma, A Genealogy of Japanese Self-images.

² An important change in relation to this was the 1985 amendment of the nationality law, which now recognises the acquisition of Japanese nationality by birth even if only the mother is a Japanese national.

³ See article by Yuko Kawai in this issue.

⁴ George DeVos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma were the first scholars to use the term ‘invisible race’ in reference to discrimination against buraku people in Japanese immigrant society in the United States, although their approach to the issue raised academic and ethical questions. See DeVos and Wagatsuma‬, Japan’s Invisible Race.

⁵ See Takezawa, Racial Representations in Asia. Recently the issue of ‘mixed race’ has also attracted scholarly attention in Japan with the popularity of hāfu celebrities and the growing visibility of young people who have mixed heritage. Regarding the cultural politics over the representation of ‘hāfu’, see Iwabuchi, Hāfu to wa dareka, and the special issue ‘Critical Mixed Race Studies and Japanese Experiences’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 35:6 (2014).