Growing up in Japan

This chapter studies immigrant children's diverse strategies to make sense of their subjectivities and establish their relationships with Japanese society. In particular, it examines how changing environments, especially the different institutional contexts they go through in the course of their growing up, contribute to the shaping of their identities. Born to foreign parents, immigrant children in Japan are surrounded by a complex cultural and social environment and have to continually adjust their relationships to such contexts and modify their subjectivities in the course of doing so. Because nationality is a powerful identification, they also have to negotiate their own identity between Japan—the place where they live and are acculturated to but at times rejected by—and the country or countries where their parents are from and where their passports say they are from. This process of encounters and negotiations enhances their awareness of the limits and freedom of being immigrants in Japan. In the end, among a group of them, a cosmopolitan self emerges as a response to the limited repertoire of identity choice. In other words, many immigrant children, unwilling to resign to either nationality, choose to become citizens of the world.

Home and Belonging in an Ethno-Nationalist Society

This chapter explores how cultural backgrounds, migration experiences, socioeconomic circumstances, and social relationships as well as master narratives of nationhood and concepts of personhood affect immigrants' conception of home and belonging, perceived relationships with Japan, and future mobility intentions. While Japan has become home to some, others either attach their belonging to their homeland or gravitate toward a more localized and deplaced narrative of belonging. Intimate relationships, degrees of acculturation, metacultural narratives, and racial and ethnic characteristics affect immigrants' emotional geography, especially their ability to foster a sense of belonging in Japan. These mechanisms are obviously not mutually exclusive. Rather, they sometimes overlap, and other times are mutually causal. For example, the degree of acculturation has a lot to do with how much immigrants can begin to have meaningful social relationships with Japanese society. Race may also shape patterns of social inclusion. These conditions shape not only where one feels one belongs but also whether a sense of belonging can be fostered.

Immigrating to Japan

This chapter assesses what attracts people to Japan. Using narratives, it explains how Japan is positioned in migrants' imagined cartography of global mobility. First of all, Japan is a land filled with opportunities. Japan provides economic incentives for some, and education opportunities and career alternatives for others. At times it is a way to escape oppressive circumstances in immigrants' home societies. Second, Japan has also been a place imbued with fantasy; Japan attracts those who have genuine cultural interests in the country. Rising from the ruins of war, Japan dazzled the world with its rapid advances in technology and economic power. The economic miracle drew people in to explore Japan's social and cultural practices. Since the 1990s, Japanese anime, manga, and video games have gained worldwide fandom. Thus, for people with cultural interests, Japan is not merely one destination out of many; it is exactly where they want to be.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Japan as an immigrant country. Japan has become an immigrant country de facto. Starting in the 1980s, to stave off economic decline caused by labor shortage and in the name of internationalization, Japan has tried different programs to bring in foreign workers. In 2012, Japan became one of the most liberal states in its policies for granting permanent residency to highly skilled migrants. As a result, the population of foreigners has been rising for the past three decades and is likely to increase significantly in the near future. Why, then, do both the Japanese government and people inside and outside Japan hesitate to accept the discourse of immigration and the reality of its transformation into an immigrant society? This hesitation has to do with Japan's ethno-nationalist self-identity and the widespread myth surrounding its monoethnic nationhood, on the one hand, and the conventional, albeit anachronistic, definition of “immigrant country” and the difficulty for people to associate an immigrant country with an ethno-nationalist one, on the other hand.