Migration: Diversifying transnational flows under neoliberal transformation

Japanese style segmented incorporation of migrant workers into the labor market and its neoliberal restructuring

In the earlier stage of the inflow of ‘foreign workers’, Inagami et al. (1992) proposed the concept of a ‘loosely structured dual labor market’ as a heuristic model to understand the emerging heterogeneous labor markets formed through the incorporation of diverse and newly arriving immigrant labor in Japan. This modeling is based upon an understanding of the multilayered subcontracting systems typical of the Japanese manufacturing industry. According to Inagami et al., large manufacturing corporations – assemblers such as Toyota or SONY – did not rely on immigrant labor. Rather, it was the suppliers of parts and components that started to use immigrant workers. Specifically, the first or second tier of subcontractors increased their employment of legal settlers, who were mainly Brazilian nationals of Japanese descent. By contrast, the third-tier subcontractors or below, as well as small independent enterprises, tended to incorporate undocumented immigrant workers, mainly from Asia. These can be described as ‘Japanese style segmented labor markets’, and many scholars researching the incorporation of immigrant workers in Japan shared in these basic assumptions regarding the Japanese labor market.

During the 1990s, following the collapse of the bubble economy, the Japanese economy was dragged into a depression which led to a deep financial crisis between 1996 and 1998. Under this prolonged economic stagnation – the so-called ‘lost decade’ – the Japanese manufacturing system underwent drastic restructuring and the labor market experienced a profound transformation. The system of life-time employment, which once characterized the main sectors of the Japanese labor markets, had shrunk dramatically. By contrast, non-standard employment expanded at an unprecedented rate, particularly in manufacturing. Latin American workers employed by staffing companies were incorporated into this restructuring process. Since the mid-1990s, various important studies appeared on this topic. Watanabe (1995) presented a systematic collaborative research study on the historic development of the binational structure of the movement of Nikkei ‘trans-migrants’ between Japan and Brazil. The research showed how the trajectory of Nikkei Brazilians’ upward mobility within the Brazilian labor market was undermined by the economic crisis leading to Brazil’s ‘lost decade’ since 1982. This in turn led to the transnational mobility of Nikkei Brazilians beyond the constraints of national borders.

After numerous empirical studies were presented, a more systemic approach for explaining the role played by Brazilian immigrants in transforming the Japanese economy emerged in the 2000s. Kajita and colleagues focused on the transnational supply chains of immigrant labor which created a kind of ‘industrial reserve army’ beyond the borders of the country to provide just-in-time delivery of human labor to Japanese manufacturing firms (Higuchi and Tanno, 2003). With reference to Douglass Massey’s ‘migration system’ theory (Massey et al., 1987), they characterized this transnational supply chain as a ‘market-mediated’ migration system in contrast to the North American ‘migration system’ based on the ‘reciprocity principle’ of communal cooperation among immigrants. Based on this transnational perspective, they also identified the structural causes of social friction between Brazilian workers and their families, and the local native populations (Kajita et al., 2005). It was found that Brazilians were disembedded from local communities due to their hyper-mobility within Japan. The staffing industry dispatched and relocated a subcontracted workforce among manufacturing plants and between regions in response to industrial production demands. These studies contributed to the analysis of the increasing numerical flexibility of labor (Atkinson, 1984) in the Japanese labor market while incorporating insights from a transnational perspective.

Since the late 1990s the sociology of migrant labor in Japan has gradually shifted its focus to a newly expanding system of de facto immigrant workers, in the form of foreign trainees and technical interns. ¹ These new categories were established institutionally in 1993 with the justification that they would contribute to the transfer of technical skills to developing countries for their economic development. The official justification of this system as primarily for the transfer of skills was used to compel workers to stay in a specific job within designated industrial subsectors without the option of changing employers. This institutional arrangement led labor sociologists to investigate the labor processes within diverse industries. Researchers revealed that in many industries the actual functions fulfilled by trainees was solely to provide low-cost labor for processes often requiring no more than minimum skills in many sectors, and were characterized by low wages, inappropriate working conditions, and human rights violations (Kamibayashi, 2015: 161–194). However, ironically, in some industries, interns developed specialized skills and came to play a key role in production. In-depth research of the labor process showed that these de facto workers became indispensable in the reproduction of skills and contributed to maintaining high standards of craftmanship in areas such as construction, fishing, and the specialized garment industry (Tsuzaki, 2018). Ironically, within these sectors of the labor market, foreign ‘trainees’ are enabling the transfer of skills from generation to generation within Japan.

Exclusion of undocumented immigrant labor and the emerging regime of new controls

Until the early 1990s, a major part of urgent demand for labor in the booming economy in Japan was supplemented by undocumented migrants. In the Japanese case, most of them were visa overstayers, i.e., those whose visas had expired but who had remained in the country to work. The undocumented immigrant population in Japan is said to have reached approximately 300,000 in the early 1990s and remained almost at the same level throughout the 1990s. However, after 2001, in conjunction with the intensifying of immigration regulations by the US and other nations in the post-9.11 era, Japan started to implement immigration control laws that excluded more immigrants. This new strategy stimulated another current in the sociology of immigration in Japan analyzing the social impacts of immigration regulation and its impact on the working and living conditions of migrants.

Suzuki (2009) investigated undocumented male immigrants who had become increasingly excluded from the public’s attention and socially isolated in each workplace. This ethnographic analysis showed the diversity of life experiences of undocumented immigrants who for more than 10 years had been living and working in Japan. The study showed that these workers were not necessarily unskilled workers but had acquired specialized skills in specific plants or workplaces under the conditions of their ‘forced immobility’ brought about through immigration control mechanisms. By showing this paradoxical process of skills acquisition, Suzuki challenged the established stereotype that undocumented immigrants are unskilled and unwanted immigrants in Japanese society. Whereas Nikkei Brazilian immigrants with legal status tended to be disembedded from local communities and had limited language proficiency due to their dependence on the staffing industry, undocumented immigrants often attained Japanese language proficiency through efforts to seek job opportunities and adapt themselves to the local society (Tanno, 1999).

Focusing on another aspect of immigration control, Higuchi et al. (2007) turned their attention to undocumented immigrants now living overseas having been deported from Japan. They traced the expelled returnees back to their countries of origin, such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Iran. They discovered how returnees re-embedded themselves in local societies and invested funds they had accumulated during their stay in Japan, once back home. Some of them invested their funds in small businesses they had already owned. Others started new businesses when previously they had worked for others. It was the more aggressive deportation policies in Japan beginning in 2003 which reduced the number of visa overstayers from approximately 300,000 to less than 70,000 in 15 years, which prompted this type of research. Such researchers could be regarded as pioneers preceding the field of ‘post-deportation studies’ that developed at a global scale following the US mass deportation policies carried out under the Obama administration.

In regard to research on internal immigration controls, Takaya (2018) analyzed the shifting political discourse regarding immigration control in Japan. By conducting a content analysis of media – especially major newspapers – she found perception towards undocumented immigrants had changed dramatically over the last 30 years. Common vocabulary used to describe undocumented immigrants shifted from overstayers, to irregular immigrants, and now ‘Fuhou-imin’, a word equivalent to ‘illegal alien’. Media reporters from major media organizations began discussing this phenomenon using new discriminatory rhetoric without critical scrutiny. This content analysis of reporting in the media as well as in-depth ethnographic research on undocumented populations revealed the growing tendency of the Japanese government to ‘criminalize’ undocumented immigrants remaining in the country. The ideological framework to categorize undocumented immigrants as a ‘threat’ to the ‘nation’ has helped produce the hegemonic discourse observed after 2003.

Regarding the more technical aspects of regulation, researchers identified a series of new institutional and technical developments in systems for controlling immigrants. The introduction of a new system for registering all foreign residents in Japan, the ‘Zairyu kado’ (Residence Card [for Foreigners]) in 2012, which must be carried at all times, was regarded as a pivotal system for monitoring the presence of immigrants in the workplace, schools, and in residential areas. This new ID system which incorporates IC chip technology containing the biometric information of individuals, was seen as a new instrument of governmentality for controlling immigrants in a comprehensive and ubiquitous manner. Significantly, the new system completely excludes and makes invisible those who do not have permission to reside in the country (Suzuki, 2017). This is similar to the new E-Verify system in the US, which turned out to be qualitatively different to earlier systems in the sense that it is a highly centralized and internet-based system.

Dynamics of ethnic businesses and the paradox of limits to highly skilled migrants

As immigrants adapted into complex Japanese economic and regional structures, their occupations became diversified in the process. Some immigrants established businesses within and outside of their communities. After 2000, a new wave of research produced case studies on the proliferation of such entrepreneurs, within Brazilian, Muslim, and Vietnamese ethnic/religious communities, among others. The large number of Brazilians in Japan led to the development of ethnic markets for: food, restaurants, clubs, and Brazilian specific media such as newspapers and satellite broadcasting mainly for those living in Japan. Muslims of multiple ethnic origins have developed halal food markets and created supply chains for properly processed meat from slaughterhouses to restaurants throughout the greater Tokyo metropolitan region.

However, new immigrant entrepreneurs do not only rely on ethnic markets. Some of the immigrants extended their reach beyond their ingroup markets. Higuchi (2012) analyzed the opportunities for businesses based on two structural dimensions: (1) ethnic group member consumers vs. outside consumers; (2) group specific goods (e.g., food) vs. general goods (e.g., PCs). This seemingly simple approach for understanding the historical development of a gap between the two dimensions opened up broader horizons for an economic sociological approach to be used by a new generation of sociologists for analyzing the proliferating migrant business sector.

Pakistanis are a culturally distinctive and small ethnic group in Japanese society, which would seem to limit their ability to develop sizable ethnic businesses. However, Fukuda (2012) found that some Pakistanis have been quite successful in Japan’s used car market and have become major players in the business. They have been keeping the lion’s share of used automobile exports from Japan. Pakistanis discovered that Japanese second-hand automobiles were worth far more in Pakistan and other countries than in the domestic Japanese market. After the Pakistan government implemented import-substitution restrictions on such imports to encourage domestic industrialization by inviting Japanese automakers to be based in the country, Pakistani entrepreneurs transformed their binational businesses into multilaterally structured businesses connecting Japan, the UAE, various countries in Africa, and Australia. They even penetrated the emerging Russian market by using their social capital. Pakistanis have created a dynamic multi-directional transnational business network throughout Japan.

At the turn of the 21st century, the need to transform the Japanese economy to be more information intensive was seen as urgent, and the government started making efforts to emulate the American success in developing its IT sector in the 1990s. One of the strategies of the Japanese government was to invite ‘highly skilled’ immigrant engineers from India and other countries to boost technological innovation. Yet, while digitalization of the economy made some progress, the policy has not led to a trajectory of accelerated innovation through the incorporation of highly skilled immigrants because of a failure to recruit them in large numbers. This paradoxical situation faced by a technologically advanced country that has failed to attract creative talent in the IT industry for so many years, spurred a new current of research.

Oishi (2012, 2018) pointed to the fact that Japanese immigration control has been very open to highly skilled immigrants in stark contrast to the regulations against those considered to be of low skill. It does not set upper limits to the number of high skilled immigrants that can be admitted in any given year, nor does it impose fees on firms who recruit such talent that would be equivalent to the cost of training domestic workers. Recently the government shortened the period required to acquire permanent residency status for certain categories of highly skilled immigrants. Despite these efforts, their numbers have not risen as expected. Oishi found that factors that significantly reduced the attractiveness of Japan for creative talents were outside of policies related to immigration control itself, but were rather related to: Japanese employment customs; the hurdle of learning the Japanese language; as well as the lack of effective social integration policies, such as school assistance for foreign students.

Immigrant youth and the Japanese school system

Since the mid-1990s, the Japanese school system has faced a serious challenge in incorporating a growing number of immigrant children of diverse origins. Major new challenges came from the arrival of Brazilian children. After some years of living in Japan, Nikkei Brazilian immigrants started to bring their families to Japan, including children of various age cohorts. The rapid increase in the numbers of arrivals, many of whom did not speak Japanese and were not familiar with the culture, made this process a serious challenge to the postwar Japanese educational system. Educational sociologists examined the problems using multiple methods: institutional analysis, ethnographic participatory observation, and discourse analysis of teachers, students, and parents (Shimizu, 2006). Regarding the educational attainment and social mobility of immigrant children, the segmented assimilation perspective presented by Alejandro Portes and colleagues has set the trend for research in this area worldwide (Portes and Rumbaut, 2001). The approach emphasizes human capital, social capital among immigrant groups, and the social context of reception (legal status and reaction from the majority population). However, it has been criticized in Japan for not paying enough attention to the differing characteristics of national school systems (Higuchi and Inaba, 2018).

By contrast, educational researchers with a focus on immigrant children in Japan have paid far more attention to the institutional effects that the post-Second World War democratic school system has had on immigrant children. First, the fundamental disadvantage faced by immigrant children in Japan stems from the constitutional stipulation and understanding that elementary and secondary education is compulsory for Japanese citizens, but not for foreign residents. Even though public school is also free for foreign children, it has been regarded as no more than an ‘offer’ from the Japanese state. This is thought to have contributed to long-term non-attendance of immigrant children during periods of economic downturn. Secondly, these researchers found that paradoxically, the postwar Japanese democratic educational practices in public schools were excluding children of immigrants from fully participating. The postwar Japanese school system emphasizes to a greater extent than in other countries, the need for everyone to progress in educational attainment at the same pace. That the entire class or entire grade must progress together. In this system, teaching methods have traditionally emphasized lessons directed at the entire group, rather than tailoring lessons to suit individuals and providing support by teachers depending on the level of the student. Under such arrangements, students with limited Japanese proficiency could not find proper support when they were falling behind (Shimizu, 2006). Paradoxically, the postwar educational system that was intended to promote egalitarianism among students became the main driver of inequality between native students and students of immigrant origin.

Regarding the effects of social capital, ethnographic research has found that students with immigrant parents were not only falling behind in their Japanese language ability and in other academic subjects, but also experienced less parental support compared to Japanese students. Because of their terms of employment, Brazilians were under pressure from staffing firms to work longer and more flexibly, even at night or on the weekend. This made it difficult for parents to communicate with children, their teachers, and other parents. Researchers often attributed insufficient academic achievement of Brazilian migrant children to their lack of cultural capital and social capital. In this regard, the unique characteristics of the just-in-time delivery of labor system contributed to the underdeveloped social capital of this immigrant group and constrained the educational performance of their children.

After 2000, an increasing number of children of immigrants were facing the next stage of challenges in their education. Unlike in the American system, the Japanese high school system requires that after three years of study in junior high school, students sit specific entrance examinations to gain entry to senior high school. This exam at the age of 15 functions as a differentiating mechanism for the majority of youth in Japan based on which senior high school they are able to enter. However, for the children of immigrants, this examination tends to set a high bar limiting their chances for continuing further in their education, for two reasons. First, it requires detailed knowledge of the Japanese writing system with numerous Chinese characters which can be difficult for them to learn. Secondly, many children of immigrants can be moved up a grade without having attained the required knowledge for that level. This is how the postwar egalitarian system for Japanese citizens had a paradoxical function. It ostensibly created a policy of ‘no children left behind’ even when children could not achieve the minimum requirements in each year of study. These practices often caused immigrant youth to fail to enter senior high school, which has been the de facto minimum standard of school education considered necessary for joining the Japanese labor market.

Around 2010, the opportunity for immigrant youth to study at college or university started to emerge as an important issue. Some second generation immigrants had succeeded in entering and studying at a tertiary level. Nevertheless, among their immigrant youth peers they were the exception. Researchers focused on the different levels of educational achievement for immigrant youth based on their countries of origin, by applying quantitative research methods to census data. Some researchers consciously applied the analytical schemes used to analyze ‘segmented assimilation’. Higuchi and Inaba (2018) used Japanese national census data to analyze the differences in educational outcome indicating the levels of disadvantage experienced by students from different groups. Students of Korean and Chinese nationality showed comparable levels of tertiary educational attainment to their Japanese peers, indicating that those who have spent a longer time in Japanese society (a significant number of this cohort are second and third generation immigrants) and who have higher levels of literacy in the Japanese language, had a higher chance of entering college. On the contrary, the probability that students of Brazilian and Vietnamese nationality would attain tertiary education was only half the rate for Japanese students. In fact, the probability that the second generation of these origins would achieve a college education is slightly lower than that for the first generation. From their analysis of the data, the researchers believe that a kind of segmented assimilation is taking place in Japan. Unique patterns identified in the Japanese case is that upward social mobility comes mainly from the influence of the human capital of parents while the effects of social capital produced by being part of an ethnic group seemed to be limited. Another important aspect is the crucial function played by the hierarchically ordered Japanese high school system in differentiating immigrant students between those who can go on to higher levels of secondary and tertiary education, and those who cannot (Higuchi and Inaba, 2018).

Recently, new quantitative studies conducted by a new generation of researchers have emerged, such as those in a collection edited by Korekawa (2019). These studies also analyzed the social mobility of immigrants drawing on insights gained from the segmented assimilation approach. They found that immigrant groups showed differentiated patterns of adaptation into the Japanese context of social stratification. The advancements made by such studies are constrained by their limited link to qualitative research on classroom-level ethnography and interviews with families. They could not incorporate insights from qualitative research into their survey research methods in the same way as was done in the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS). Further efforts must be made by those engaged in quantitative research to link with the research designs of other studies in the field by incorporating more insights gained from qualitative methods including ethnographic observation.

Gender and migration

Regarding the issues of gender and migration, in the Japanese case, significant numbers of female immigrants started coming to the country without necessarily following the migration of male ‘foreign workers’ from the same countries of origin. One of the first waves of this newcomer immigrant labor started arriving in the early 1980s: South East Asian women recruited to work in Japan’s ‘night-time entertainment industry’ in bars or live entertainment clubs. In other words, the feminization of migration in Japan is not a recent phenomenon. It was in this same period that gender started being adopted as a key concept into Japanese sociology. This chronological coincidence stimulated cross-disciplinary discussions in gender and migration studies that produced a series of important research.

More systemic research designs from a gender and mobility perspective were developed particularly after 2000. The critically low fertility rate ² and acceleration in the aging of the Japanese population prompted the government initiative to incorporate immigrant workers into various new sectors of the economy (medical nurses, care workers, and domestic workers) to complement the reproductive sphere that has been experiencing serious crises. There emerged important collaborative research groups of feminist sociologists who analyzed the sphere of reproduction from a transnational perspective.

The first new issue that has become a focus for many studies is the government decision to start accepting nurses and care workers under the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. This program was intended to create further economic integration with these countries by offering employment for health care professionals (nurses and care workers), while responding to the needs of hospitals and elderly care centers. The deteriorating conditions faced by nurses in Japan, overburdened by a shortage of new workers and the increase in work due to the rapidly aging population, led to contradictory responses from key actors. On the one hand, hospitals – particularly private – started to plan for the organized recruitment of foreign nurses in response to the introduction of the EPA scheme. On the other hand, the Japanese nurses’ union, which is quite a strong organization, has been critical of the importation of foreign nurses as they fear that incorporating new vulnerable workers into the sector will worsen already problematic working conditions for nurses. A delicate power balance between these two groups set the conditions of admission for nurse candidates that were very demanding, i.e., the need to pass the national license examination in the Japanese language in just two years. These conditions ended up limiting the number of licensed nurses able to enter the Japanese labor market until recently (Hirano, 2018).

The second issue taken up by researchers is the admission of foreign domestic workers, which emerged as an issue around 2016. In the postwar era, Japanese families, except very wealthy ones, have not relied on domestic workers even after rates of female participation in the labor market rose significantly. Under the neoliberal ‘structural reforms’ accelerated by the Abe administration, the Japanese government planned to establish ‘National Strategic Special Zones’ in various regions around the country for specific purposes. Most important for this discussion are the ‘Special Zones for Domestic Workers’ within which foreign domestic workers can be employed in Japan legally for the first time by Japanese citizens. It is justified as a policy measure to boost economic growth by enabling highly skilled females to join the workforce through the incorporation of foreign domestic workers. Sadamatsu (2018) investigated the constellation of interests in creating this institutional framework, and discovered the important role played by a new type of migration and staffing industry for domestic workers, as well as its strong influence over the policy making process. Sadamatsu as well as other researchers have conducted fieldwork on the increasing and expanding training sites in the Philippines and Indonesia (Ogawa and Sadamatsu, 2020). These recent studies show how the system selects workers, and then trains them so that they can adapt to Japanese households. They also revealed the mechanisms for supplying foreign domestic workers to individual households. These studies identified another form of transnational supply chain for different types of workers. They have provided new insights into the transnational structures created by the staffing industry, which have parallels to that of the just-in-time casually employed Brazilian immigrant workers, or that of the technical interns from (mostly) East and South East Asia.

A rigid immigration control regime and the fragmentation of transnational mobility

This review has shown how Japanese sociology has actively responded to the diversifying patterns of migrant incorporation in Japan and how it has produced a wide variety of research. The paradoxical diversification of migration to Japan has been produced by deepening contradictions between official ethno-national principles of nationhood vs. neoliberal principles of economic management. On the one hand, the Japanese official policy has been to maintain an ethno-national state by strongly regulating the inflow of immigrants. On the other hand, there has been an increasing influence of neoliberal ideology as a justification for incorporating foreign labor. These ideologies are seemingly in conflict but are in fact mutually complementary. Exclusive and restrictive immigration policies blocked the front door for legal labor migration in general but opened multiple ‘side doors’ for de facto labor migration in response to specific needs of various industrial sectors (Koido, 2019). Meanwhile, the government has insisted on calling them ‘foreign workers’ rather than ‘immigrants’ and denied the possibility for their longer-term settlement. This official ‘restrictive’ policy has meant these migrants have remained a fluid and disposable workforce. This policy has functional affinity with a neoliberal economic strategy to recommodify the labor force and reduce the fixed costs for their reproduction.

Ironically, this official policy which suppressed longer-term residency status resulted in generating transnational supply chains of labor in different forms, as described above. This led many researchers to focus on specific institutional structures and transborder arrangements. Researchers also concentrated their efforts on identifying the effects of these patterns upon migrants’ working conditions, living conditions, including that of families, and social relations with other local inhabitants. Scholars have been inclined to analyze the idiosyncratic aspects of these transnational structures.

It is noteworthy that most Japanese sociologists studying migration share an important finding: this is the development of the migration industry and the social consequences of the commercialization of transnational human mobility. This development has been produced by the widening gap between official ethno-national principles that helped maintain tight immigration control policies and the newly rising neoliberal market doctrine of state management. Ironically, the tight migration controls have created opportunities for profit seeking migration industries and these can be found even among actors involved in policy making (Sadamatsu, 2018). It seems that neoliberal principles are penetrating more and more into Japan’s de facto immigration policies as these principles affect state management practices in general. While earlier side doors for immigration were grounded more upon ethno-national principles, recent administrations, especially the Abe cabinet, have tended to base the legitimacy of policies more on neoliberal principles. The National Strategic Special Zones are a graphic example of this trend. Japanese researchers are analyzing the complex interplay between ethno-national principles, which turned out to be a superficial disguise for state policy, and the rising power and influence of neoliberal ideology, which has eroded the ethno-national conception of Japanese nationhood for more than two decades. In this era where global neoliberalist tendencies predominate, Japanese migration sociology will continue to make an important contribution to the comparative analysis of the delicate interactions between transnational flows and migration regulations.