Abstract
Gracia Liu-Farrer’s Immigrant Japan draws upon nearly two decades of ethnographic research in Japan and incorporates insights from the author’s own lived experiences as an immigrant and eventually naturalized citizen in Japan to refute the all-too-common tendency to overlook the country as a migration destination worthy of particular attention and interest. She, instead, forcefully demonstrates that Japan is a site of substantial immigration that, while not a complete outlier, features several institutional and societal distinctions that meaningfully impact immigrants’ experiences and trajectories. Immigrant Japan’s analytical focus is anchored by two deeply inter-connected themes: mobility, the push-pull factors which first drew Liu-Farrer’s informants to the country and subsequently lead them to either stay or leave, and belonging, the process of relationship building between informants and members of their host society, which has the potential to create strong affective ties that help anchor migrants in their adopted setting.
Liu-Farrer points out that a wide variety of pathways for legal immigration to Japan has existed since the first significant inflows of migration began during the post-war economic boom. However, the Japanese government’s tendency for deliberate reluctance in publicly engaging the topic (with former Prime Minister Abe famously denying that Japan was a country of immigration on several occasions) and creating discursive space for migrants in broader society has led to uncertainty and pragmatism in both how immigrants are viewed and accepted and how migrants think of their current and future place in their adopted home. Liu-Farrer argues that this combination of a viable, if indifferent and byzantine, bureaucratic process for long-term migration to Japan and the lack of a broadly promoted immigration narrative and discursive space means that immigration to Japan is often a step-by-step process contingent on immediate life circumstances and unforeseen strokes of individual fate.
Liu-Farrer’s insights are embedded in her extensive and masterfully executed ethnographic research, which includes work with more than two hundred first-generation immigrants and children of immigrants. This body of data is remarkable in both its breadth, covering a range of different migration pathways, socio-economic backgrounds, and gender, ethnic, and racial identities, and its depth, with many informants offering intimate experiences across a decade-long period. However, the book intentionally draws upon a sample of longer-term migrants and largely excludes several significant populations, such as short-term and irregular workers, guest workers (through the Technical Intern Training Program), and others without legal status. This lack of access is readily understandable, considering the often-isolated conditions in which these most precarious of migrants live and work, exacerbated by linguistic barriers and well-founded fears of the immigration enforcement machine. At the same time, the temporal depth of Liu-Farrer’s research allows her to include the voices of migrants that have left Japan, either to return to their origin countries or to move on to a third destination, as well as those who left the country for various reasons and later returned.
Immigrant Japan is well organized, covering various migration pathways and migrants’ socio-economic positions in Chapters Two and Three, respectively, before transitioning smoothly from mobility toward belonging and the dynamics of settling down and putting down roots (Chapter Four) and making the decision to leave, whether temporarily or permanently (Chapter Five). Chapter Six offers a remarkably intimate look into the private inner lives of Liu-Farrer’s informants and how their experiences of romantic and family relationships are mediated by their status as migrants, while Chapters Seven and Eight cover the complex intergenerational dynamics of migrants’ children and how their senses of belonging and identity are particularly mediated by both institutional factors such as Japan’s conservative education system and cultural expectations of conformity and homogeneity.
One commonality in the experiences of Liu-Farrer’s diverse sample of immigrants is the Japanese state’s absence in mediating and structuring their settlement beyond basic administrative functions. Under a relatively muted discursive framework in which there is no expectation that Japan is an (at least semi-) permanent destination country, even the naturalization ceremony itself is a spartan, bureaucratic handover of papers. More surprisingly, however, Liu-Farrer writes little of local government initiatives and policies in the experiences and recollections of her interviewees, despite the fact that many localities have undertaken either largely home-grown initiatives, coordinated through working groups such as the Committee for Localities with a Concentrated Foreigner Population (Shujutoshi), or programs and policies implemented under the national government’s “multicultural co-existence” initiative, suggesting that immigrants to Japan could be even more alienated from their state and local administrations than those in other developed countries.
With a powerful combination of wide-ranging breadth of sampling and intimate dives into informants’ lived experiences, Immigrant Japan will be useful as a reference and starting point for studies of longer-term migration in Japan. It will also be a compelling read for scholars of other traditionally non-immigrant societies, such as South Korea and its closely intertwined institutional and policy legacies with Japan and Germany, the most commonly raised example of an ethno-nationalist counterpart to Japan in the West.