Multiethnic Japan

Japan's newest immigrants, Peruvian-Japanese and a larger number of Brazilian-Japanese, began entering Japan in increasing numbers in the mid-1980s in response to Japan's growing labor shortage. The 1.5 million nikkeijin (persons of Japanese descent living overseas) who lived in Brazil traced their ancestry back, sometimes five generations, to Okinawans and Japanese who went to Brazil in the early twentieth century to work on coffee and cotton plantations. The Japanese government revised the Immigration Control Law in 1990 to allow nikkeijin and their families to legally reside and work in Japan, at a time when the economic slump in Brazil and the wide differential between Japanese and Brazilian wages provided many nikkeijin with an incentive to leave Brazil. In 1995, approximately 200,000 Brazilian-Japanese were living in Japan, employed in factory and construction work that Japanese shunned as "3K"-kitanai (dirty), kitsui (difficult), and kiken (dangerous). Even in the economically stagnant 1990s, Japanese demand for their labor has remained quite stable.

Nikkeijin from Brazil were sojourners, seeking to save enough money from their Japanese wages to improve their situation in Brazil. Interviews with nikkeijin in the 1990s emphasize their identification with Brazil, which is not surprising given their poor command of spoken and written Japanese, their long work hours, and the social segregation that they encounter in Japan. At the same time, the average stay in Japan is lengthening, more nikkeijin are bringing their families to Japan, and a pattern of circular migration is emerging, thus suggesting that at least some nikkeijin were on the way to becoming permanent residents.

The term "nikkeijin" also encompasses the descendants of Japanese who immigrated to the United States. Despite wartime U.S. laws that sought to end or severely limit Japanese immigration that denied Japanese immigrants the possibility of acquiring citizenship, and that sent about 120,000 Japanese aliens and their Japanese-American children to detention camps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, most Japanese-Americans since then have chosen to affirm their American rather than Japanese identity.

Japanese-American men in Hawaii volunteered to serve in the U.S. armed forces in special regiments in 1943 and won numerous honors in European combat. In 1944, the U.S. government instituted a draft for Japanese-Americans, and approximately 25,000 men and women served in the armed forces before the conclusion of the war in 1945. Their personal accounts, which emphasize their self-affirmation as Americans, contrasts with the sentiments behind Japanese-American movements through the 1970s and 1980s to obtain redress for the wartime evacuation and denial of civil liberties.

The American example reminds us that Japan's maltreatment of ethnic groups is not unique. The historical experience of Ainus is shared by American Indians and Australian aborigines; the stigmatization of burakumin mirrors Indian treatment of untouchables. In many countries, not just Japan, new immigrant groups suffer discrimination because of their low occupational statuses, their semi-literacy or lack of language fluency, and their cultural behaviors. Japan is therefore more like other countries in its dealings with Koreans and Brazilian-Japanese. Moreover, there is clear evidence that the Japanese government has significantly altered its policies with respect to these groups.