Conclusion
REALITIES. CHALLENGES. AND PROMISES OF IM MI GRANT JAP AN
Many societies in the contemporary world are facing demographic crises and need immigrants to supplement their labor force, and yet many of these societies have ambivalent, if not hostile, attitudes toward immigration. Immigrants are seen as a threat to the host society's social order and cultural identity (Sniderman, Hagendoorn, and Prior 2004; Sides and Citrin 2007; Card, Dustmann, and Preston 2012). Japan is no different. The country is aging so rapidly that in 2018, over 28 percent of the population was older than sixty-five. A labor shortage is felt in all industries. Farms lay uncultivated. Fishing
boats are docked. Chain restaurants close down branches because of a lack of kitchen staff. An aging population needs care,
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but nursing homes are understaffed. Nevertheless, Japan still avoids coherent immigration policies for fear of social and cultural disruptions.
In March 2016, two months after Prime Minister Abe's "no immigration policies" statement, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on immigration and refugee issues in Japan. One official from the Ministry of Justice gave a presentation on the immigration control administration in Japan. He listed the possible consequences of immigration that Japanese policy makers were afraid of, from disrupting the social order to losing Japan's cultural characteristics. The top principle of Japan's migration policies is to protect "the public order and good moral standards [kjoryzoku] and ensure a safe [anshinanzen] society." In the conversation I had with him after the presentation, the official lamented the government's lack of action toward the demographic crisis, and added, "If you put kjoryzoku and anshinanzen as the first principles of migration policies, Japan will never become an immigrant country." Well-meaning as he was, his comments implied that he shared the idea that immigrants were threats to Japan's public order and moral standards, and could
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potentially jeopardize the safe society Japanese people live in.
In addition to the fear of social disorder, Japan is also afraid of foreign influences on its cherished cultural identity as a consequence of immigration. Rosenbluth, Kage, and Tanaka (2016) found that among people who had a more ethnocentric tendency or who support the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the fear of cultural dilution, more than economic insecurity, was correlated with their negative attitude toward immigration. Moreover, Japanese government officials and the Japanese public, including some well-meaning activists, also entertain another myth—that the Japanese language and culture are difficult for foreigners to understand. Everywhere I go people tell me how difficult the Japanese language is. When my Japan-born, Japan-educated daughter got a low score on a school test, the teacher offered her explanation, "Japanese is difficult, isn't it (nihongo ha muzukashi ne)l" Even the informants who were sympathetic to immigration and refugee protection constantly emphasized that "Japanese was very difficult." This discourse of Japanese being uniquely difficult for all foreigners reinforces the belief that Japanese culture is impenetrable. This, in addition to the general reluctance for Japanese people to use English at work or in daily communications, is believed to be a reason that Japan was not attractive to either high-skilled people or refugees.
Despite such policy hesitations and concerns with immigrants' disruptive influences, however, Japan is already an immigrant country. Nearly three decades after the 1989 Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, immigration has become a reality and immigrants have made themselves part of the social fabric of Japanese society. Indeed, immigrants confront many difficulties caused by Japan's lack of an institutional framework for immigration and a lack of social acceptance of this immigrant reality. At the same time, they have their reasons for migrating to and settling down in Japan. They look for opportunities this country can offer them, and they appreciate the society and culture they are taking part in transforming.
ublishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/22/2023 3:42 AM via UNIVERZITA PALACKÉHO V OLOMOUCI 6184  ;   Gracia Liu-Farrer.;   Immigrant  Japan   :  Mobility  and Belonging in  an Ethno-nationalist Society
The previous chapters in this book have narrated the motivations immigrants have for moving to Japan, the channels and processes through which they enter the country, the locations they occupy in the Japanese labor market and the economic contributions they provide, how they make decisions to leave or stay, how they construct a sense of belonging within this ethno-nationalist country, how they raise their children, and how the children negotiate and develop their identities. This book uses these individual tales to explore the realities, the promises, and the challenges of Japan as an immigrant country. Meanwhile, beyond the case of Japan, this book illustrates the development of new migration patterns and new phenomena that need to be examined with a revised understanding of population mobilities and people's relationships with places. This concluding chapter revisits some of the themes laid out in early chapters and their implications both for migration studies broadly and for Japan's own migration policies in particular.
Global Mobilities and Immigration into Japan
Though a fabled monoethnic society, Japan has nonetheless become a country with increasing numbers of immigrants. This reality reflects that, first of all, globalization and demographic changes have diversified migration destinations and mobility trajectories. Migration has become a normative practice in the increasingly globalized world. People cross borders in search of the promise of riches, relative security, or a more desirable lifestyle. On the other hand, a transnational migration infrastructure has increasingly been established and expanded to link more geographic locations. The developments of information technology and cheaper and faster transportation have provided more material possibilities for mobility and wider access to previously inaccessible locations. More legal, institutional, and social channels have opened to allow and encourage cross-border mobilities, and intermediaries have emerged to bridge social and institutional gaps to facilitate migration (Liu-Farrer and Tran 2019). Regardless of whether it is for economic imperatives or humanitarian concerns, more and more countries are involved in global mobility networks.
Japan has emerged as a major immigration destination in Asia amid such a development in global mobility. This is because, first of all, a migration infrastructure has been established to channel people and provide opportunities to meet the individual economic aspirations. Instrumental mobilities are often less about the destination itself than the opportunity to move to better one's life. In most cases, the choice of destination is determined by the accessibility. As discussed in chapters 1 and 2, many immigrants ended up in Japan not because they chose Japan but because they were willing, or even aspiring, to leave their home country. The labor brokers or study-abroad agencies, their friends and families, or the institutions they were affiliated with presented them the option to come to Japan. Japan's migration policies, aiming to bring in manpower (while disguised to avoid the appearance of overt labor import), have in fact made border crossing easier for many categories of people. One informant from a study-abroad industry in Vietnam explained that the threshold for studying in Japan was the lowest among all the destination countries that recruit Vietnamese students, including Korea. Moreover, with labor shortages and a desire to globalize, Japan offers migrants abundant economic opportunities and roomy legal allowances to work in all kinds of capacities. Economic opportunities, including the potential earnings from the secondary labor market, have been an important reason that Japan has attracted a large number of international students from China around the late 1980s and earlyl990s and from Vietnam in the mid-2010s.
Furthermore, tourism and the globalization of cultural content create new patterns of migration (see, e.g., Benson and O'Reilly 2009; Thorpe 2012). Increasingly, migration is about lifestyle preferences and cultural choices. Japan is therefore also a specific destination for many who are drawn to its traditional and popular cultures. Short-term visits turn into long-term stays, and a semester exchange leads to enrollment in a graduate degree program. For some, as in the case of Stephen, introduced in chapter 1, the migration choice is "Japan or Bust." However, Japan as a particular cultural and lifestyle destination is a somewhat paradoxical choice. People are interested in Japan because of its perceived unique aesthetics, cultural expressions, and social practices. At the same time, the attractive Japanese characteristics and even quirks one appreciates as an outsider or a visitor can be disagreeable to a long-term resident, especially when it comes to how school, work, and one's social life are organized. Japanese firms and schools are especially inflexible in accommodating differences, and thereby frustrate, even drive away, immigrants. Moreover, as a recent immigrant country with a small presence of foreign residents, Japan has yet to adjust its social life to the reality of immigration. As discussed in the beginning of this chapter, the Japanese public in general is still resistant to the idea of immigration and concerned with the possible social and cultural changes that could occur because of the entry of immigrants. Many immigrants we talked to have experienced the xenophobic attitudes and felt very much on the margins of society. Yet, despite this discontent, most immigrants are attracted to Japan because it is a civil, peaceful, and orderly society, full of cultural charm. Immigrants always manage to find kind and helpful Japanese individuals and are highly appreciative of Japanese lifestyles.
Pragmatic Migratory Trajectories
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Not being a traditional immigrant country influences how people initially perceive their migration into Japan. In most cases, people arrive with temporary plans. However, as research in different receiving contexts repeatedly confirms, intentions do not predict outcomes. What the migrants' experiences in Japan illustrate is the pragmatism of mobility trajectories. Life is a multidimensional process. People's mobility decisions are influenced by a wide range of events. In the end, it is the actual and perceived opportunity structure, the cultural adaptive outcomes, social and intimate relationships, and the emotional fulfillment these relationships provide that determine immigrants' migratory trajectories. As a consequence, migrants demonstrate varied mobility patterns—transnational, circulatory and multiple migrations, and, of course, also settlement.
Immigrants' mobility outcomes in Japan are first of all dependent on the legal and institutional framework for immigration control. Japan's immigration regime is selective but also lacks leniency. It courts highly skilled workers and
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wishes for them to settle. At the same time, it averts the long-term stay of those who contribute manual labor, even though they are equally, and, in some sense, more desperately needed. Japan also adamantly rejects irregular migrants and largely associates them with potential criminal behaviors (Yamamoto 2010, 2013). This hierarchy of desirability introduces many uncertainties into the mobility trajectories. Those who have vested interests in staying to earn a living are often the most susceptible to rejection. On the other hand, the ones who are solicited to stay have more resources and incentives to move on.
Second, immigrants' experiences in Japan show the importance of time for migration trajectories. The relationships between the migrants and the countries of both destination and origin change in the process of migration as well as in one's life course. Migration is a journey and a project. It requires efforts to settle in a new place for however temporary a period it is. In the course of making a living and building a life in the new country, immigrants find the initial unfamiliar and bumpy terrain in the new country increasingly easier to navigate, and the landscape at home that one takes for granted morphs into strangeness and fades into obscurity. One's perspectives of the opportunity structure consequently change. The longer one stays in the destination country, the more likely it is that the foundation of one's life will shift to the acquired environment. The findings from this study show that immigrants who have lived in Japan for several years inevitably shift the center of gravity from their home country to Japan because, in the end, where they live in Japan is the physical world their body occupies and their basic needs are satisfied. This tendency is observed even though almost all informants in this study used digital media and stayed connected to their homeland.
The needs and concerns at different stages of one's life course—another temporal dimension—also influence people's mobility trajectories. Japan can be attractive and repulsive in different stages of the migration process. As a single young person, one might appreciate many quirks in Japan, enjoying them as a form of cultural adventure and life experience. When they earnestly consider their work life and career future, some might decide that the Japanese corporate environment does not provide what they want, as some female informants' stories introduced in chapter 5 show. A critical juncture of mobility decision making for many is when their children enter school. Concerned with the experiences their children might have in Japanese public schools, some immigrants decide to leave the education system or the country altogether. On the other hand, any life-course event can potentially redirect immigrants toward a new place. Meeting a partner who is going to another country or finding a job that requires relocation will result in geographic mobility, either temporarily or permanently.
Finally, mobility and settlement are instrumental as well as emotional outcomes of a process that involves dynamic interactions between immigrants and their receiving contexts. Some work on migration has indicated what has been called an "emotional turn." Emotional geography, as a subfield of human geography, "attempts to understand emotion—experientially and conceptually—in terms of its socio-spatial mediation and articulation rather than as entirely interiorised subjective mental states" (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2007, 3). Emotional geographies are charted in a wide range of research inquiries (see Davidson, Bondi, and Smith 2007). As the stories in this book manifested, emotions are also potent drivers of mobility decisions and forces in altering trajectories, especially when they are tied to human relationships (intimate, familial, or communal). Because of a broken heart after her son died, Ms. Kondo fled the country to marry a man she did not really know (chapter 1). Tina decided to stay in Japan because of the positive feelings she had as an English teacher in a warm and friendly rural village (chapter 4). Loneliness resulting from the lack of an intimate relationship and meaningful social connections pushed George to leave Japan (chapter 5).
Emotions are not an independent motive for mobility but are nearly always mixed in with and result from economic and cultural experiences. For example, George attributed his failure in finding a romantic relationship to his meager income and small apartment—a material condition that made him unattractive. His workplace experience, particularly the feeling of marginalization, in his understanding, reflected the cultural and institutional constraints of Japan as a migrant destination.
As explained in chapters 5 and 6, immigrants are also haunted by nostalgia and homesickness. Immigrants who arrive in Japan as adults and are directly thrown into Japanese workplaces or families often have difficulties in acquiring full linguistic and cultural competencies to feel at ease in the host society. Moreover, being foreigners in a country that embraces an ethno-nationalist narrative, many immigrants feel marginal. Some of them, from the start, considered migration
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a job and their stay in Japan a sojourn. They usually look forward to the day their mission can be accomplished—their children have successfully entered college, a piece of land has been purchased in their homestead, or, as in the cases of several women who married Japanese men, their Japanese husbands could retire from work. Whether they will end up returning to home countries remains unclear. Going home often becomes a comforting idea and a narrative they use to make sense of their migration, though not necessarily a real outcome.
Possible National Belonging and Impossible National Identity
The narratives of belonging and identity by immigrants in Japan indicate diverse possibilities of belonging, including that toward Japanese society. At the same time, immigrants have more difficulty in claiming a Japanese identity. This is because belonging is more a subjective evaluation of one's relation toward the place and group, while identity is more a personal narrative, influenced by a range of other competing narratives.
Pfaff-Czarnecka (2013) argues that belonging can be conceived of as "a position in social structure, experienced through identification, embeddedness, connectedness and attachments," and "a combination of individually acquired, interpersonally negotiated and structurally affected knowledge and life-experience" (13). In other words, through examining individual immigrants' sense of belonging, we understand how they navigate through "diverse collective constellations," experience different moments of social inclusion and exclusion in the course of their migration journey, and find attachments to material or immaterial things in the host country.
The narratives of home and belonging in this book show that immigrants carry a multidimensional notion of home, employing this term in different contexts to mean, respectively, a feeling, an abode, a geographic location, and a national body. Moreover, immigrants' senses of belonging are influenced by a range of psychological as well as cultural mechanisms, from intimate relationships to the cultural nationalist discourses. It is clear that immigrants in Japan, despite its image as a nonimmigrant country, are capable of a sense of belonging anchored in practical routines and a certainty of one's material environment and social relationships within this country. However, it is equally clear that people can feel belonging to communities, localities, and institutions nested within Japan without claiming belonging to Japan as a nation.
Among immigrants who express a sense of belonging in Japan, this sentiment is less about an attachment to the nation itself than feeling at home in its environment. It is accomplished by gaining cultural understanding and competencies; a situatedness through attachments to families, organizations, communities, or other specific social constellations; and a membership justified through fulfilling the prescribed conditions or making instrumental contributions, such as paying taxes. Being able to express a sense of belonging in Japan, in fact, conveys immigrants' confidence in their having a structural position in this country. In comparison, those who lack adequate cultural skills, who are excluded from Japanese social space, who have no intimate relationships, or who attain no social attachment to particular groups tend to adhere to a homeland belonging or to convey an absence of belonging.
In addition, we see the narratives of deplaced belonging. Individuals who are culturally competent, structurally well positioned, and emotionally and securely attached do not necessarily want to tie their belonging to any particular place, neither in the host country nor in the home country. We even see, as in the case of Bai Shicheng (chapter 6), a celebration of individualism, freed of collective belonging. Such deplaced, or "un-rooted," belonging can be understood as resulting from increased deterritorialization of social space. Migrants are able to create new social space independent of geographic boundaries where they claim membership and anchor their subjectivities. It is also a manifestation of what Pfaff-Czarnecka (2013) calls "individual biographic navigation." Individuals navigate through the diverse constellations of belonging and make "more or less conscious choices when it comes to the constructions of the self, to new normative orientations, to negotiations and positionings" (22). The pluralization of social life-worlds allows belonging to be tailored to one's "own longings and aspirations, while assigning, defining and attributing different relevance to its diverse dimensions according to one's own needs, desires, ambitions, allegiances and apprehensions" (28). In the case that collectives prove to be too constricting, some individuals opt out of a group-oriented belonging.
Under the diverse expressions of belongingness, however, we see the influences of existing cultural narratives on immigrants' perceptions of their structural positions as well as their subjectivities. People might "feel" a particular emotional relationship with things or places, but how they make sense of and then express it is conditioned by the vocabulary and narratives available to them. Therefore, when immigrants verbalize their sense of belonging, as they do in interviews, they are also employing cultural tool kits (Swidler 1986, 2001) in expressing and often justifying such an emotional geography. Because immigrants are exposed to complex and sometimes contradictory cultural frameworks, their narratives of home and belonging have also become inconsistent and situational. The most prominent cultural tools in immigrants' expressions of belonging are the meta-narratives of nationhood. Not only are Japan's cultural nationalistic discourses used by immigrants as a framework to explain their experiences and justify their inability to belong to Japan, but the nationalistic discourses from their home countries, such as the immutable roots and the equating of home with homeland, show up in many immigrants' explanations of their belongingness.
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However, although the national narratives affect immigrants' ability to claim national belonging, they still can. They can "belong to Japan as a foreigner." What none of them, even children who have grown up in Japan, have the confidence to claim is their Japaneseness. The ethno-nationalist discourses on Japaneseness made this national identity unavailable to them. Japanese has become a racially, historically, and culturally fixed identity; even an identity such as Korean Japanese or Indian Japanese is not perceived as possible. This, as I will further elaborate in the next section, is a challenge an immigrant Japan confronts.
Japan's Future as an Immigrant Society
In an essay, Kelly and White (2006) named five types of people—students, slackers, singles, seniors, and strangers—as agents who could potentially transform Japan, because these people disrupt the normative patterns that characterize the social organization of the family-state. Strangers here denotes immigrants. Earlier studies on different types of immigrants in Japan have revealed the ways in which immigrants are in effect deeply embedded in every institution of Japanese society, challenging it through constant negotiations for social positions and through demands for legal recognitions and cultural acceptance. Indeed, the future of Japan, to a large degree, depends on how it incorporates immigrants, one of the transformative agents. Nonetheless, what kind of immigrant society Japan can become depends also on how it deals with several challenges: the fundamental assumptions about Japanese nationhood—especially the identity markers of Japaneseness—and the increasingly versatile and uncertain global population mobilities. I want to end this book by arguing that these are not insurmountable obstacles. National identities, like individual identities, evolve in changing contexts. Similarly, the diversifying patterns of population movements and the increasingly hostile environments in many traditional immigration destinations might be opportunities for Japan to emerge as an attractive destination.
Changing Identity in a Changing World
According to McCrone (2002), identity markers are "those characteristics that people use to attribute national identity to others and to receive claims and attributions made by others" (308). These markers include "place of birth, ancestry, place of residence, length of residence, upbringing/education, name, accent, physical appearance, dress, behavior and commitment/ contribution to place" (308). In the case of Japan, the nationalist discourses of Japaneseness that emerged in the early twentieth century and became dominant in the postwar era narrowly delimit the criteria of what constitutes Japanese nationals. A Japanese identity is based primarily on the inseparable duo of ancestry and culture. The former focuses on racial purity and uninterrupted lineage, and the latter emphasizes its uniqueness and homogeneity (Dale [1986] 1990; Yoshino 1992; Befu 1993, 2001; Fujitani 1993; Weiner 1994, 2009). The ancestry marker excludes whoever does not have pure Japanese parentage, and the cultural criteria disqualify those who have not been brought up in Japan (Sugimoto 2000).
This book has shown that many of Japan's problems with immigration have to do with Japanese being such a narrow identity concept. This had led to the policy to bring back ethnic Japanese families from Latin American countries. Because the primary purpose of this ethnic return policy is labor import, Nikkei Latin Americans have been brokered into the manufacturing sector as temp workers. It has resulted in their occupational concentration and social isolation, and a sense of alienation from the purported ancestral homeland (Tsuda 2003, 2009a, 2009b). Consequently, their relationship with Japanese society has become uncertain. Nikkei Brazilian children's thwarted social and education mobility, to an extent, has to do with this uncertainty because many parents are still preparing themselves as well as their children for the eventual return to Brazil.
A cultural and racial definition of Japaneseness also sets an emotional hurdle for immigrants to apply for Japanese citizenship. Most immigrants choose permanent residency over naturalization. This is not only because naturalization signals a long-term settlement plan—a mobility decision many immigrants hesitate to make—but also because citizenship is tied to national identity. Most immigrants do not perceive themselves fitting the identity markers of Japaneseness. Among a minority who have naturalized, most stress the utilitarian reasons for doing so, separating this decision from an identity choice. People frequently justified their decisions to naturalize with reasons such as the convenience of business travel, as in the case of most Chinese immigrants. Others also believed a Japanese nationality made entrepreneurial practices easier. Still others, especially those whose appearance fit the racial profile, naturalized in order for their children to be able to pass as Japanese so as to avoid bullying.
Despite their birth and upbringing, the claim of Japanese identity is not readily available to immigrant children either. These strict identity markers make identifying with Japan the nation psychologically impossible for most of them. They have to tackle the incongruence among their cultural competencies, blood lineages, and social belonging when making sense of their subjectivities. Some resort to the strategy of passing and concealing; others waver between the choices of home and homeland; and still others, unwilling to resign to either nationality, choose to become citizens of the world.
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Though immigrant children demonstrate creative ways of self-identification, many remain on the periphery of the Japanese social world and struggle with self-doubts and inferiority complexes. This is problematic for Japan. This country is rapidly aging, and immigrant children occupy an increasing share of the youth population. Japan's future national security and economic prosperity will depend on whether these young people of foreign parentage can achieve a sense of ownership and identify themselves with this country.
Without a doubt, Japan has to change its ethno-nationalist discourses of nationhood and acknowledge its diverse social and cultural landscapes. Japan has never been racially homogeneous (Lee 2008). Because of the colonial legacy, migrants have always been a part of the society. With the new stocks of migrants, Japan, like most industrialized countries in the contemporary world, is facing the reality of super-diversification (Meissner and Vertovec 2015). How can such a national identity marker be transformed? One suggestion is to change it in the places where it is the most institutionally and socially enforced—the schools. As detailed in chapters 7 and 8, the most problematic institution is the monocultural national education system. It is an environment where the nationals are shaped. The current Japanese school system, as critiqued by many scholars, is ill prepared to accommodate diversity, and immigrant children's cultural and ethnic differences are often penalized. Not only should multicultural content be introduced earlier and given more importance, but Japan should also consider having multiethnic and multicultural faculty and staff in the school system, not as a token presence but as real actors in education.
At the same time, children of immigrants or children of mixed backgrounds have become increasingly visible in varied representations of Japaneseness. Naomi Osaka's accomplishments as a global tennis player instigate both pride and anxiety in Japanese society. It is imaginable that the emergence of more and more Naomis and the constant challenges their presence poses toward a monoethnic Japanese identity will eventually transform the notion of Japaneseness.
An Attractive Japan amid Changing Patterns of Global Mobility
Another reality that confronts Japan is the increasingly fluid global population mobility. Rapid global population mobility poses two challenges. First, how can Japan attract and retain immigrants, especially the ones it seeks? Second, how is social integration possible when settlement becomes unpredictable and migration patterns are varied and fluid?
One major goal of Japan's immigration policy is to attract global talent, especially highly skilled professionals. Given the low number of highly skilled migrant professionals currently in Japan, the general impression is that Japan is not the desired destination of these high flyers. Researchers have discussed the reasons why Japan has not been able to attract and retain the best and brightest. The unfavorable institutional frameworks, such as tax codes and the education system, are cited as causes of Japan's failure to keep talent (Tsukazaki 2008; Oishi 2012). Corporate Japan's organizational practices, which lead to gaps in expectations and skill mismatches, are also widely understood as causing international students to avoid Japanese firms (Moriya 2012).
These are legitimate concerns. As demonstrated in the previous chapters, some of the existing policies and institutional practices are obviously problematic. On the other hand, Japan is not so hopeless. The difficulty in retaining immigrants is not a situation Japan alone faces. Individuals have come to see geographic mobility as an integral part of one's career development and a lifestyle practice. For example, an editorial in Europe described the Chinese migrants in Europe as "roam[ing) Europe as a chessboard seeking work prospects" (Smith 2004, cited in Denison and Johanson 2012, 310). With the globalization of the economy and the expansion of a migration infrastructure, immigrants' labor market opportunities have increased. Migration has become not only one of the "capitals" that can be utilized for economic and social advancement (Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004) but also a practice that constitutes one's identity (J. Chu 2010) and a form of established culture in many parts of the world (Kandel and Massey 2002; Cohen 2004; Asis 2006; Ali 2007; Horva th 2008; Coates 2018).
Under such circumstances, what a country needs to do to retain and integrate immigrants is a big question. In Japan, what I see is a bundle of contradictions, even in the corporate employment practices. While the flaws of a corporate internal labor market are undeniable, the organized recruitment process allows international students to enter the primary labor market and gain stable employment. In a globalizing labor market where flexible and skill-based labor practices have become the norm, some young people are coming to Japan looking for career opportunities (Hof 2018). Similarly, the lauded aspects of life in Japan, such as the orderliness, convenience, and courteous services, entail a high degree of social control and a disciplining and training process. They are often achieved at the cost of sacrificing one's personal time and suppressing individuality—aspects that are undesirable to most immigrants.
Integration amid increasingly fluid population movements is also a challenging issue. As studies show, migration takes many forms. Aside from transnational movements, people move seasonally (Gustafson 2002), circularly (Hugo 1982; Skeldon 2012), and multinationally (Paul 2017). These changing migration patterns have created unpredictability for all immigrant-receiving countries. For example, the seasonal migration of Europeans who move from the North to the South of Europe for lifestyle reasons has created foreign enclaves in the host society, and these migrants have made few attempts to integrate themselves into the local communities (Gustafson 2002). Japan has no overarching integration policies but relies
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on localized multicultural coexistence programs to provide foreign residents linguistic and cultural assistance. These programs are often considered superficial and ineffective, even reifying cultural differences (Aiden 2011; Kibe 2016).
Nonetheless, in Japan, immigrants are often more "invisible" in Japanese social life. On the one hand, it has to do with the relatively small immigrant population. The racial composition of the immigrants, with the majority of them from East Asia, contributes to this invisibility. On the other hand, it is because immigrants are more embedded in Japan's institutions, such as families, workplaces and universities. Immigrants are more aware and willing to absorb Japan's cultural practices. They perceive Japan as having its own established systems, understand their positions as outsiders, and feel the pressure to adapt. In addition, as explained, Japanese culture lures people to Japan. Immigrants appreciate these cultural practices and are willing to conform. Moreover, there is little residential segregation. At least at the time that I was writing this book, there were not many immigrant enclaves in Japan. There are neighborhoods that have a relatively high percentage of immigrants, such as Shin-kubo in Tokyo, or some neighborhoods in Hamamatsu city, but none are genuinely ethnic enclaves. Most socialization in Japan is conducted in mixed public spaces. Immigrants who have lived in Japan for a substantial amount of time therefore have plenty of exposure to and are tuned into the Japanese way of life. One Chinese immigrant expressed alarm when she visited her high school friend who had immigrated to the United States. "She still lived like a Northeastern Chinese in the US. In Japan, we have all changed a lot and are more like the Japanese."
In summary, processes of immigration and integration are challenged by the increasingly unpredictable global mobilities and changing patterns of movements. Japan is not alone in facing this challenge. On the one hand, Japan undoubtedly needs to reform many institutional practices in order to be ready for the cross-border population flows and to be competitive as a hub in the global highway of mobility. On the other hand, the empirical findings in this book show that part of Japan's attraction comes from its particular social and cultural traits. There is no fixed formula for a perfect equilibrium. Much has to depend on social experimentation. It is obvious that Japan cannot keep its front door shut and hold onto institutions geared solely toward the domestic population. On the other hand, as one informant points out, the last thing Japan wants is to be an "America Jr." America cannot be the model for migration scholars studying Japan either.
What kind of society Japan becomes depends on how it acts at a time when immigration is inevitable for economic sustainability, mobility has become a way of life, and the world is increasingly connected through technologies. This book focuses on depicting the reality of immigration and immigrants' lives in Japan. These individuals' tales illustrate the potential as well as the challenges of Japan as an immigrant country. Some of the challenges are particular to Japan, or ethno-nationalist societies like Japan. However, Japan's transition to an immigrant society also takes place in a global context where policy as well as public opinion regarding immigration is hostile. Anti-immigration becomes the main platform of populist party politics in many major destinations of immigration. In other words, more countries are embracing ethno-nationalism. These developments, however alarming to many observers, are also potentially creating opportunities for Japan because they are shaping a new geography of global migrations and are likely also to redefine the image of an immigrant society as well as the map of attractive destinations of immigration.
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