Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society by Gracia Liu-Farrer (review)

Early in Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society, Gracia Liu-Farrer notes one reason that many are so reluctant to recognize Japan as an immigration country: "Japan, to both its people and outsiders, is a racially homogeneous and culturally unique island country" (p. 3). What does immigration look like in a country that so many identify as ethno-nationalist, and thus not an appropriate home for those without Japanese ethnicity? This question is more challenging in the case of Japan because, as Liu-Farrer notes in her concluding chapter,

Japanese ethnicity is based primarily on the inseparable duo of ancestry and culture. The former focuses on racial purity and uninterrupted lineage, and the latter emphasizes its uniqueness and homogeneity. The ancestry marker excludes whoever does not have pure Japanese parentage, and the cultural criteria disqualify those who have not been brought up in Japan.

(p. 209)

In other words, both someone with Japanese ethnicity who was born in Brazil but migrated to Japan for labor and a Chinese national who migrated to Japan with her family as a small child and has native fluency in Japanese are, according to this strict reading of what defines Japaneseness, not Japanese.

In her impressive book, Liu-Farrer draws on interviews with 229 research subjects as well as ethnography, focus group analysis, stories of migrants from secondary literature, and her own experiences as a migrant to and naturalized citizen of Japan to examine how migrants to Japan negotiate issues regarding home and belonging (appendix A). Although she is forthcoming about the limits of her study—she notes that she has interviewed relatively few undocumented and casual laborers (p. 17)—the scope of her research is particularly impressive in three ways. First, she was able to conduct interviews in Japanese, Chinese, and English in addition to working with research assistants who conducted interviews in Korean, Tagalog, and Portuguese (p. 217). This allowed her to hear from representatives of all the countries that are major sources of immigrants to Japan (p. 41). Second, because "people who leave … make up the majority of foreigners who have migrated to Japan" (p. 105), Liu-Farrer made a special effort to examine this group—the topic of chapter 5—through a research trip to China (where she interviewed twenty-five returnees to Beijing and Shanghai), by following up with previous interviewees who had decided to leave Japan, and by making use of "chance encounters with former Japan-bound migrants in different countries" (p. 105). Third, she devotes chapters 7 and 8 to those who migrated to Japan as minors. These chapters paint a particularly rich picture of the ways in which foreign parents and children have negotiated the Japanese educational system, and Liu-Farrer's discussion of the extent to which children have decided to identify with Japan, with their countries of origin, and/or with some other categories is particularly compelling, as is her discussion of the decisions by some of her informants to "pass" as Japanese (or to encourage their parents to "pass").

My favorite section is chapter 6, "Home and Belonging in an Ethno-nationalist Society." Although most interviewees "spoke more assertively about belonging to their countries of origin" (p. 131), they also mentioned a variety of ways in which they felt a sense of belonging to Japan. For some, like Yu Jing, a Chinese woman in her forties who migrated to Japan at the age of twenty-one, a feeling of belonging in Japan is related to an individual neighborhood: "Sometimes my neighbors forget that I am not a Japanese person when we chat. I feel that I am already part of Japanese society, and completely fit into it" (p. 130; Yu Jing is a pseudonym, as are all other interviewee names presented in the book). For others, migration to Japan facilitated a situation in which "the sense of belonging was no longer...