Abstract
The article deploys the lens of the race-migration nexus (Erel et al., Ethnic and Racial Studies 39:1339–1360, 2016) to compare the racialization of migrants in the UK and Japan. It draws on qualitative data on the experiences of Central-East European (CEE) migrants in the two countries to unpack how whiteness is constructed in relation to different histories and patterns of immigration in each national context. While CEE migrants in Japan benefit from being perceived as implicitly white and Western ‘foreigners’, their whiteness represents a form of enduring exclusion from the ethno-nationalist Japanese society. In the UK, changing political contexts and internal European hierarchies of whiteness contribute to CEE migrants’ ambiguous position in an increasingly anti-migrant society. By comparing the mechanisms of racialization in each country through the analytics of visibility and exclusion, the article furthers ongoing debates about the intersections of race and migration. It furthermore extends the comparative analysis of whiteness to a non-Western setting, making a significant contribution to the study of local/global articulations of race.
Highlights
The article deploys the lens of the race-migration nexus (Erel et al, Ethnic and Racial Studies 39:1339–1360, 2016) to compare the racialization of migrants in the UK and Japan
Our analysis reveals that migrants’ lived experiences of racialization vary as a result of differences in how whiteness is assembled and the connotations it carries in the two countries, as well as how it is positioned in relation to the dominant social group
The sample used in this paper aimed to account for migrants from Central-East European (CEE) countries coming to Japan in different periods, using different visa schemes,5 and occupying different positions within Japanese society
Summary
The article deploys the lens of the race-migration nexus (Erel et al, Ethnic and Racial Studies 39:1339–1360, 2016) to compare the racialization of migrants in the UK and Japan. This article compares the ways in which local/global dynamics of race and disparate histories of immigration produce distinct processes of racialization in Japan and the UK by analyzing the experiences of migrants from the Central-East European (CEE) region in both countries. It contributes to the special issue’s focus on diversity and complexity by comparing subjective experiences of racialization, arguing for a more nuanced understanding of how migrants experience visibility and exclusion in distinct national contexts. Drnovšek Zorko and Debnár Comparative Migration Studies (2021) 9:30 that go beyond the better-studied examples of white-majority populations in the West on the one hand and the postcolonial dynamics of migration on the other
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