Newspaper Discourses on the Acceptance of Refugees in Japan from the 1970s to the 1980s

ABSTRACT

Japan has been criticised internationally for its reluctance to accept refugees. In the late 1970s, however, the Japanese government decided to implement special measures to accept refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Between 1978 and 2005, 11,319 Indo-Chinese refugees were resettled in Japan. In this article, I analyse newspaper discourses on the acceptance of Indo-Chinese refugees and the subsequent arrivals of Chinese asylum seekers in Japan. While opening Japan’s borders and accepting Indo-Chinese refugees was perceived favourably as a process Japan should experience from the 1970s to the late 1980s, asylum seekers arriving by sea in Japan were perceived as a threat in 1989, when many Chinese were found to be included among them. I explore these changing newspaper discourses with reference to the concepts of national identity, kokusaika and governmental belonging. Any discussion of the acceptance of others into a nation becomes inextricably bound up with the notion of national identity. In the case of Japan in the 1970 and 1980s, the concept of kokusaika (internationalisation) was pertinent because it intersected with such discussions. A theoretical perspective is offered by Ghassan Hage’s notion of ‘governmental belonging’, whereby those in a dominant position claim the power to position others in the nation.

Notes

¹ This figure is much lower than the number of refugees recognised annually in other developed countries. For example, in 2018, the number of people recognised as refugees was about 57,000 in Germany, 35,000 in the US and 29,000 in France (UNHCR, 2019a).

² There are also some people who are not recognised as refugees but given special permission to stay in Japan (zairyū tokubetsu kyoka) based on humanitarian considerations. Between 1991 and 2019, 2,628 people were granted such special permission (MOJ, 2020).

³ Refugees accepted through the refugee recognition system are called ‘Convention refugees’ (jōyaku nanmin). Refugees accepted in Japan can be classified into three main categories: Indo-Chinese refugees, Convention refugees and Burmese refugees who were accepted in the special resettlement program launched in 2010 (MOFA, 2019).

⁴ Asylum seekers are ‘individuals who have sought international protection and whose claims for refugee status have not yet been determined’ (UNHCR, 2019b: 63). As the status of Vietnamese people arriving in Japan by sea was not decided at the point of their arrival, in this article, I use the term ‘asylum seeker’ to denote those who arrive by sea.

⁵ The majority of asylum seekers who arrived by sea wished to be resettled in a third country such as the US (Cabinet Secretariat, 1993: 16–17). Between 1975 and 1995, 13,768 asylum seekers arrived in Japan by sea (RHQ, 2018), but only 3,536 of them chose to resettle in Japan (Tables 1, Tables 2).

⁶ I did not include articles on pages about prefectural news.

⁷ The Monroe Doctrine was a principle of US foreign policy which President James Monroe announced in 1823. The doctrine advocated non-interference with conflicts in Europe and the refusal of further interference in North and South America by European countries (Gilderhus, 2006: 8). In the newspaper editorial above, the term is used to mean Japan’s refusal of foreign interference with its immigration policy.

⁸ Kaikoku, which literally means to open the country, is an open-door policy the Tokugawa Shōgunate government was forced to adopt in the middle of the nineteenth century (Itoh, 1998: 23–24).

⁹ Employers who employed Indochinese refugees were able to receive subsidies for the first six months (Ikeuchi, 1983).

¹⁰ This was revealed when a Chinese student studying in Japan asked Japanese authorities about her husband whom she supposed had arrived in Japan by boat (Mukae, 2001: 127).

¹¹ Wakabayashi points out that economic liberalisation in China in the 1980s enabled the surplus rural population to move freely and a part of the flow started to reach Japan (1990: 38–39).