Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables and Figures
- Conventions and Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Immigration and Citizenship in Japan
- Introduction: The Contradictions of Japan's Immigration and Citizenship Politics
- 1 Is Japan an Outlier? Cross-National Patterns of Immigrant Incorporation and Noncitizen Political Engagement
- 2 Constructing Citizenship and Noncitizenship in Postwar Japan
- 3 Negotiating Korean Identity in Japan
- 4 Citizenship as Political Strategy
- 5 Destination Japan: Global Shifts, Local Transformations
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Introduction: The Contradictions of Japan's Immigration and Citizenship Politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables and Figures
- Conventions and Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Immigration and Citizenship in Japan
- Introduction: The Contradictions of Japan's Immigration and Citizenship Politics
- 1 Is Japan an Outlier? Cross-National Patterns of Immigrant Incorporation and Noncitizen Political Engagement
- 2 Constructing Citizenship and Noncitizenship in Postwar Japan
- 3 Negotiating Korean Identity in Japan
- 4 Citizenship as Political Strategy
- 5 Destination Japan: Global Shifts, Local Transformations
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Summary
Achieving greater ethnic diversity within Japan has the potential of broadening the scope of the country's intellectual creativity and enhancing its social vitality and international competitiveness.
– Prime Minister Obuchi Keizō's Commission on Japan's Goals in the 21st Century, 2000Foreigners are all sneaky thieves.
– Kanagawa Governor Matsuzawa Shigefumi, 2 November 2003On 20 November 2007, Japan reinstated its fingerprinting requirement for foreign residents as part of a counterterrorism measure. The bill had been passed in the Diet with little fanfare and received minimal coverage in the Japanese media. A small group of mostly North Americans, Europeans, and Australians worked with a handful of Japanese activists to organize a campaign against the bill in collaboration with Amnesty International Japan and the Solidarity Network with Migrants Japan (SMJ). Although this group contacted numerous proimmigrant and foreign-resident organizations and human rights activists, surprisingly few showed up for the rallies that the group organized in August and November 2007 to protest the measure. Most significant was the relative lack of participation by the largest foreign-resident groups in Japan: Chinese, Korean, Nikkei (ethnic Japanese) Brazilians, and Filipinos.
In many respects, the reinstatement of the fingerprinting requirement, with the stated aim of preventing the entry of potential terrorists and criminals into Japan, was consistent with developments in other industrial democracies to control their foreign populations following the 11 September 2001 attacks.
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- Immigration and Citizenship in Japan , pp. 1 - 27Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010