Reviewed by: Help (Not) Wanted: Immigration Politics in Japan by Michael Strausz Susanne Klien (bio) Help (Not) Wanted: Immigration Politics in Japan. By Michael Strausz. SUNY Press, 2019. xvi, 197 pages. $95.00. cloth; $32.95, paper. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown, once again, that Japan is still light years away from the status of a "de facto immigrant nation," as previously argued by Gracia Liu-Farrer.1 After all, in contrast to those of other advanced industrialized nations, Japan's borders were closed to foreign nationals with residence status for six months in 2020 while holders of Japanese [End Page 202] passports continued to be eligible for free movement into and out of Japan. Non-Japanese academic faculty working in Japan who wished to return in March 2020 from overseas business trips and many foreign students who had been granted scholarships by the Japanese government were refused (re-)entry; precarious foreign pretenure academics had to wait for many months for permission to enter Japan to take up their scholarships. The fact that Japanese citizens were granted re-entry after overseas trips without PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests in the initial phase of the pandemic provides strong evidence of the continuing idea of the soto/uchi (inside/outside) binary. These episodes make Michael Strausz's recent analysis of Japan's immigration policy extremely timely. Although written well before the onset of COVID-19, this monograph helps understand the historical and socioeconomic background of Japan's restrictive policies with regard to migrants. Admittedly, the country has gradually accepted more immigrants in the last decade; the reality is, however, that the overall share of non-Japanese residents accounted for just 2.25 per cent of the total population of 127 million in 2020. The key question is evidently why the Japanese government has continued to be so reluctant to admit more immigrants despite pervasive issues of demographic decline and aging and a resulting acute labor shortage in many sectors. Given the fact that the number of Japanese citizens fell by more than 500,000 from the previous year in 2020, a rethinking of immigration policies and visions seems urgently needed. The book consists of seven chapters. After the introduction, the author outlines immigration restriction policies, providing institutional explanations. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in Japan, political scientist Strausz compellingly argues that Japan's restrictive immigration policy is due to two main reasons: first, the failure of labor-intensive businesses such as construction, farming, and care work to defeat anti-immigration circles in the Japanese government and, second, the lack of elite support for viewing immigration as beneficial for the country. In contrast to countries such as Germany, in Japan immigrants are associated with potential unrest and threat to the social order in the eyes of such elites, many of whom continue to embrace the ideology of Japan as a one-ethnicity country. Chapter 3 dissects minority rights and minority invisibility, focusing on oldcomer Koreans and their calls for access to legal rights and protections, for example voting rights for foreign residents in Diet elections. Strausz offers insightful analysis of how, in the 1960s, governing elites including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs started to realize they might need to revisit the separatist idea about Japan's national identity, that is, assumptions about Japan's ethnic homogeneity as a source of national greatness and the inclusion of only ethnically Japanese in the definition of Japanese citizens. This section introduces the groups of the "assimilation optimists" [End Page 203] and "assimilation pessimists" that discussed whether it was possible and/or desirable to assimilate oldcomer Koreans and other foreign residents of Japan (p. 49) in the Japanese government, business, and media, showing the persistent prevalence of the key idea of Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Entitled "The Crow is White: Foreign Labor and the Japanese State," chapter 4 provides information about foreign laborers and visa categories for foreign residents in Japan, discusses the types of labor shortages currently faced by the island nation, and examines decisions to admit (or not to admit) foreign laborers. Japan revised the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act in 1989, introducing a new...
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Sep 17, 2024
Satoshi Nambu 
Open Access