Differentiated Citizenship and Ethnocultural Groups: A Japanese Case

Abstract

It is a widely shared view that Japan is a culturally homogeneous country. This view is often deployed as justification for certain policy orientations to preserve cultural homogeneity. The goal of this article is to show that this line of thought is not acceptable on empirical and normative grounds. By considering two representative ethnocultural minorities—Ainu and Koreans—in terms of cultural, social, and political rights, I illustrate that there exists not only a plurality of ethnocultural groups in Japan with distinct claims to differentiated citizenship but also institutions and practices accommodating them. Moreover, a set of principles of differentiated citizenship underlying those institutions and practices are outlined. Finally, on the basis of the foregoing analysis, I argue that public policies attempt to preserve a cultural homogeneity that does not exist and such political aims as “enhancing social unity” are morally and prudentially undesirable.

Acknowledgements

An earlier draft of this article was presented at an international workshop on “Pluralism and Society in East Asia”, held at the United Nations University, Tokyo, in August 2004. I am grateful to the workshop participants for their thoughtful remarks. Furthermore, I would like to thank Nana Oishi, John Maher, James Alvey, the Citizenship Studies Editor, and reviewers for helpful comments on later drafts. Thanks to Kunihide Matsutani for research assistance.

Notes

¹ Similar statements were reiterated in 2001 by the Minister for Economy and Industry Takeo Hiranuma and lawmaker Muneo Suzuki. For the intellectual background, see Maher (2002, p. 171).

² According to the Hokkaido Ainu Association (Hokkaido Utari Kyokai, 2004), there are 23,767 Ainu living in Hokkaido (it is very difficult to identify and count Ainu who moved from Hokkaido). For a detailed description of the historical development of the Ainu movements in the period before the Ainu Culture Promotion Law of 1997, see Siddle (1996). For consideration of the Ainu from the perspective of the politics of ethnicity and multiculturalism, see Hanazaki, 2001; 2002. Okinawans constitute the largest ethnocultural minority group (1.6 million), although I do not deal with them in this article.

³ Concerning the issue of residential rights, permanent residence is guaranteed to residential Koreans, since the status of ‘special permanent resident’ was introduced in 1991.

⁴ Another important claim is the demand that children graduating from Korean schools be not denied access to higher education and occupational possibilities (cf. Rally for the 50th Anniversary of Hanshin Education Struggle, 1998).

⁵ It is also noteworthy that some prefectures have given more subsidies to Korean schools than other “miscellaneous schools” (Iwasawa, 1998, p. 198). Of course, this is not to deny the possibility that local municipalities seek to implement public policies incompatible with multicultural rights of resident Koreans. For example, in December 2003 the Tokyo Metropolitan Government filed a lawsuit with the Tokyo District Court against the elementary school run by the pro-Pyongyang General Association Korean Residents in Japan, seeking the 4,140-square-meter plot back where the school sits, and 400 million yen for its “illegal” use since the lease expired in 1990 (Japan Times, 2004).

⁶ One problem, among others, is that the Livelihood Protection Law, the law regulating the public assistance system, permits only a mutatis mutandis application to permanent aliens. Strictly speaking, they have no legal right to public assistance, which is for them merely discretionary in character (Kondo, 2001a, pp. 17–18; Tanaka, 2002, pp. 39–40)

⁷ A good example is the issue of public employment, for which only Japanese nationals were eligible. Today, many local municipalities open up the possibilities of public employment for resident Koreans, by removing the nationality requirement. According to Kondo (2001a, p. 22), about 30 percent of municipalities had abolished the nationality requirement for general administrative officials in 1992.

⁸ Parekh views the conventional concept of citizenship as characterized by “a unitary, unmediated, and homogeneous relationship between the individual and the state”, by “abstracting away cultural, ethnic, and other identities and seeing oneself solely as a member of the state” (Parekh, 2000, p. 183).

⁹ In her influential article, Iris Young (1989) deploys the concept of differentiated citizenship to argue first for group representation as a device of participatory democracy and second for group-specific rights that attend to group difference in order to undermine oppression and disadvantage. My concern here overlaps partially with the second argument; the differentiated concept of citizenship that I present aims not only at group-specific cultural rights, but also at extending citizenship rights to those groups and individuals categorized as non-nationals. My concept of differentiated citizenship corresponds roughly to Rainer Bauböck's concept of societal citizenship (Bauböck, 1998).

¹⁰ Various other terms are similarly proposed: quasi-citizenship (Castles and Davidson, 2000, p. 85), residential and universal citizenship, post-national citizenship, la nouvelle citoyeneté, Niederlassungsrecht, eiju shiminken (Kondo, 2001b, p. 229), and local citizenship (Higuchi, 2001).

¹¹ Japanese naturalization and immigration policy differs from the common pattern that residential period for acquiring a permanent residence permit are shorter than for naturalization. Thus, the hurdle of a permanent residence is higher than the hurdle of naturalization because the government prefers an assimilation policy of citizenship to an integration policy of permanent residence permits (Kondo, 2001b, p. 232).