The Changing Implications of ‘Tabunka Kyōsei in Regional Societies’: The Confused Reformation of Official Concepts of Multicultural Co-Living in Japan in the 2010s

ABSTRACT

While ‘multicultural co-living (tabunka kyōsei) in regional societies’ was established in the mid-2000s as the principle justifying public policies for foreign residents in Japan, it was often criticized for espousing a logic that hides foreign residents’ lack of participation in Japanese society. Responding to such criticism, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) and an academic advocating ‘tabunka kyōsei 2.0’ tried to reform the concept to promote community cohesion and foreign residents’ social participation by introducing the values of interculturalism and inclusion. In the same period, however, through the development of ‘regional empowerment (chihō sōsei)’ policies, another interpretation of ‘tabunka kyōsei in regional societies’ emphasizing the utilization of ‘foreign human resources’ to compensate for declining populations and economies in local areas emerged. It became the dominant logic justifying the Japanese government’s new ‘society of kyōsei with foreign nationals’ principle until the end of the 2010s. The MIC’s interpretation of tabunka kyōsei in regional societies was marginalized due to its internally confused logics. This article critically examines the complicated intertextual reformation process of concepts and principles around tabunka kyōsei in Japan in the 2010s through detailed text critiques of numerous official documents published by the central and local governments.

KEYWORDS:

• Tabunka Kyōsei (multicultural co-living)
• foreign nationals in Japan
• migration policies
• multiculturalism
• discourse analysis

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

¹ While the Japanese term ‘chiiki shakai’ often implies community in the sociological sense, that is, a relatively small population group rooted in a limited area of land with relatively informal and intimate communication with each other, ‘chiiki’ can also mean a more institutionalized social life of a larger number of people in the broader area. Therefore, this article translates the former as ‘community’ and the latter as ‘regional society’.

² This article is therefore not intended to be an empirical analysis of the policy-making process of tabunka kyōsei in regional societies and the (narrowly defined) power relations among the various actors involved in it. The policy documents analyzed in this article have been produced with the involvement of various relevant ministries, politicians, and intellectuals, but such texts can represent implications that are independent of the intentions of their producers and can be accepted and influenced by the readers. Therefore, the empirical analysis of the policy-making process and the intertextual and ideological analysis of the logics inherent in the policy texts can be two interrelated but independent research topics. While the former is important, this article focuses on the latter and aims to make the analysis more precise than previous studies have done.

³ KH Coder is a free software for quantitative content analysis that is popularly used for text mining analysis of Japanese documents (https://khcoder.net/en/). I analyzed the official documents on multicultural co-living policies of local governments listed in Table 1 by correspondence analysis and extraction of characteristic words to identify similarities and differences among them. I reported the results of the quantitative analysis at the annual conference of the Mita Sociological Society on 3 July 2021. However, it was only a preliminary and supplementary analysis for this article, and the analysis in this article is based primarily on a qualitative reading of the texts in the official documents.

⁴ This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 20K02070 and 19H00607.

⁵ While these reports do not emphasize economic aspects, the ICC program conducted in Europe included economic aspects similar to the idea of ‘promotion of regional economy’, which aims to utilize cultural diversity in business (CLAIR London Office, 2014: 14).

⁶ Tokutei ginō is a residential status that aims to introduce semiskilled foreign labor to compensate for the labor shortage in specific industries.