Fighting for Foreigners: Immigration and Its Impact on Japanese Democracy (review)

It would not be surprising to explore foreign influences when investigating democratic institutions and human rights policy in Japan. The title of Apichai Shipper's book, Fighting for Foreigners: Immigration and Its Impact on Japanese Democracy, suggests that this may be what he explores, but in fact he does something quite different and interesting. He uses the presence of foreign workers in Japan to illuminate the growth of an indigenous network of Japanese activism that he argues constitutes an important aspect of a democratic society.

In the introduction, Shipper positions his argument in relation to those of other political scientists who emphasize that democracy depends on formally defined membership statuses. The presence of undocumented migrants, who are, by definition, excluded from membership, would appear on the surface to decrease, rather than increase, the democratic quotient of a given society. However, Shipper argues that electoral politics should not be the sole criterion by which democracy is defined, and he makes the case that a range of deliberative processes are important elements of a vital democracy. He ably shows that in the Japanese case the presence of undocumented foreign workers stimulated the political engagement of a wide range of human rights activists, bringing pressure on the government to protect rights that may not have been properly protected even for full-fledged citizens themselves. This effect is most clearly demonstrated in the case of domestic violence, where the Japanese domestic violence law was passed in 2001 after support groups for Filipina, Thai, and Chinese women migrants had been raising awareness for some time.

Perhaps the most controversial part of Shipper's argument appears in the third chapter, on immigrant ethnic organizations. In contrast to the Japanese-run nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that work to protect undocumented foreign workers, immigrant ethnic organizations are portrayed by Shipper as unconcerned with the plight of their undocumented brethren in Japan. In fact, some of these organizations seem to be concerned only with their own status rather than with others in greater need. Other organizations seem obsessively focused on homeland politics, whether Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Burmese, or Philippine. According to Shipper, such a preoccupation with homeland politics necessarily distracts from a fuller engagement with the political process in Japan. But that is the case only if politics is defined in terms of explicitly political action. In much of the book, Shipper makes the case for going beyond formal political institutions to recognize the democratic contributions of Japanese NGO networks. Perhaps a similarly expansive approach applied to the immigrant ethnic organizations could have recognized more of their democratic potential. After all, by emphasizing difference and multiple attachments, such organizations directly challenge notions of Japanese cultural and ethnic homogeneity, notions that stand in the way of multicultural democracy. Of course, such a challenge could lead to a backlash, as appears to have occurred with the North Korean–oriented Chōsen Sōren, but that is not the inevitable fate of immigrant ethnic organizations. To some degree, Shipper's attempt to highlight the positive democratic impact of rights-oriented NGOs though a comparison with immigrant ethnic organizations may have led him to overlook the positive potential of the latter.

The rest of the book explores the activities of Japanese NGOs working for the benefit of undocumented foreign workers. Chapter 4 maps out the range of support groups for foreign workers, from faith-based ones that formed in the early 1980s to women's support groups, medical association NGOs, lawyers' association NGOs, and concerned citizens groups. Shipper notes that while the activity of these groups is focused on solving the specific problems that foreign workers bring to them, whether to find shelter from abusive spouses or to resolve issues with employers, over time these individual cases add up to make activists ever more critical of their society. In the process, they develop what Shipper calls "associative activism," based on networks of activists that provide each other with support toward the...