The 'Problem' of Foreign Workers in Contemporary Japan Journal article by John Lie; Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 26, 1994

The claim that Japan is a monoethnic society is, however, empirically false. Japan became a modern nation-state by incorporating diverse ethnic groups. The Meiji state-making included the colonization of Ainu- moshir (Hokkaido) and Okinawa. The burakumin continue to be a discriminated-against minority group with an estimated 2 million burakumin in Japan in the 1960s. In the course of Japanese imperialist expansion; many Koreans and Chinese entered Japan, and some remained after the Pacific War.

The conservative racial ideology faced challenges from the politically organized communities of burakumin, Korean, Chinese, and others. Therefore, it became more palatable to argue this conservative ideology via the newcomers than via the longstanding, now well organized, ethnic communities. The spotlight on the new foreign workers effaced the history of various diaspora and oppressed communities in Japan.

The new immigrant workers have displaced earlier victims of capitalist exploitation and racial ideology. The amnesia of Japanese colonialism is critical in keeping buried the past atrocities as well as avoiding the problems raised by the earlier foreign workers. It is in this complex milieu that the new foreign workers have been judged a major problem because they directly threatened the dominant ideology of racial homogeneity and purity in Japan. The focus has elided the problems of the existing minority populations — the largest group of actually existing "foreign" workers — as well as the burakumin and other discriminated-against groups.



Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page