Immigration and Citizenship in Japan

This book examines how state policies and immigrant advocacy groups shape choices for immigrant political incorporation in contemporary Japan through the lens of Japan's multi-generational Korean community. With immigrant agency at the center of its analysis, this book challenges conventional understandings of citizenship that associate citizenship acquisition with political empowerment.

Japan is currently the only advanced industrial democracy with a fourth-generation immigrant problem. As other industrialized countries face the challenges of incorporating post-war immigrants, Japan continues to struggle with the incorporation of pre-war immigrants and their descendants. Whereas others have focused on international norms, domestic institutions, and recent immigration, this book argues that contemporary immigration and citizenship politics in Japan reflect the strategic interaction between state efforts to control immigration and grassroots movements by multi-generational Korean resident activists to gain rights and recognition specifically as permanently settled foreign residents of Japan. Based on in-depth interviews and fieldwork conducted in Tokyo, Kawasaki, and Osaka, this book aims to further our understanding of democratic inclusion in Japan by analyzing how those who are formally excluded from the political process voice their interests and what factors contribute to the effective representation of those interests in public debate and policy.