Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan (Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science, 13) 3031363302, 9783031363306

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Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science

Kimiko Tanaka Helaine Selin   Editors

Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan

Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science Volume 13

Series Editor Helaine Selin, Faculty Associate and Science Librarian at Hampshire College (retired), Massachusetts, MA, USA

The series Science Across Cultures: History and Practice, formerly called Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science, seeks to describe and document the scientific knowledge and beliefs of the world’s cultures. Comparative and revealing, the series challenges our preconceived ideas about science and culture. It is of special interest not only to those in the field of comparative history and the history of science, but also to social scientists and humanists whose interest areas are touched by the volumes in this series. This includes people working in areas such as textiles, ceramics, architecture, farming, parenting and psychology. Contributions are welcome from those working on topics involving the history and practice of science and culture around the world.

Kimiko Tanaka • Helaine Selin Editors

Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan

Editors Kimiko Tanaka Department of Sociology and Anthropology James Madison University Harrisonburg, VA, USA

Helaine Selin Faculty Associate and Science Librarian (retired) Hampshire College Amherst, MA, USA

ISSN 1568-2145     ISSN 2215-1761 (electronic) Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science ISBN 978-3-031-36330-6    ISBN 978-3-031-36331-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Kimiko dedicates her work to her grandparents and parents who emphasized the importance of women’s education, her spouse who strongly believes in gender equality, and her daughters who love to read.

Introduction

When I teach Japanese Society and Culture courses at college, some students pick topics such as population aging to claim that Japan has changed significantly over the past few decades. Others pick topics such as gender inequality to claim that Japan has not changed enough. The lag between dramatic demographic change and gradual cultural change makes it challenging to predict its sustainability, diversity, and equality into the future. This book is a rich collection of chapters written by experts in various fields including Anthropology, Public Health, Sociology, Education, International Studies, History, Business Administration, Tourism Management and others. These chapters provide great insights into understanding the wide range of challenging issues contemporary Japan faces.

 eyond Numbers: Japan’s Demographic Challenges B and Future Japan tops the world rankings based on the proportion of those over 65 years old. Changes in population derive from three demographic processes: mortality, fertility, and migration. These demographic processes are inseparable from transitions in families, health, and government policies. Understanding the transitions beyond the numbers is crucial to addressing current demographic challenges and discussing the future of Japan. Japan’s falling birth rate is inseparable from political, economic, and socio-­ cultural factors. The chapter by Yoshida and Meagher (Single and Unready to Mingle: The Insecure Lifeworlds of Never-­Married Japanese) provides multiple layers of explanations to understand the social phenomenon of “single-ization”. Their chapter suggests that single-ization is less a conscious rejection of marriage because many move into singlehood unintentionally, drifting into it unintendedly. Shirai’s chapter (Infertility in Relation to Japanese Parental Norms) posits that some local governments provide subsidies for fertility treatment for married couples to vii

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lift falling birth rates, but these supports are not available for singles and sexual minorities. The chapter bring voices of women pressured by the pronatalist norms that prevent them from seeking alternatives such as adopting a child unrelated by blood. Health and mortality issues are also deeply embedded in socio-cultural and political contexts. Saeki’s chapter (Patriarchy, Paternalism, and Politics of Reproductive Autonomy: Abortion Rights in Japan) sheds light on how patriarchal policies and conservative approaches in education and paternalism in medicine limit people’s autonomy in their reproductive decisions. Minagawa’s chapter (Aging, Health, and Gender) emphasizes the importance of addressing social and cultural factors to understand why women live longer but spend more years in poor health than men, and how women’s engagement in multitasking can negatively influence their well-­ being. Yoda’s chapter (A Chronology of the COVID-­19 Pandemic in Japan) provides chronological overviews of the government’s COVID-19 measures and people’s reaction to the pandemic. Berman’s chapter (Hikikomori and Belonging in a Post-­Pandemic Japan) sheds light on hikikomori, those who have withdrawn from employment and social activities and stay in their rooms for more than half a year. The chapter brings important discussions to investigate if COVID-19 altered or re-­shaped understandings towards mental health issues. As the Japanese population ages and shrinks, migration becomes a crucial issue. Miyazaki’s chapter (Migrant Long-­Term Care Workers in Japan) discusses new schemes in the migration system as a response to growing demands on long-term care (LTC) sectors. The chapter examines whether a major shift in labor migraiton policies made significant changes to LTC workers’ employment model. Tian’s chapter (Will Guestworkers Save Japan? Findings from a Nationwide Municipal Survey) addresses the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) for workers and how these workers are unfairly treated and marginalized in Japanese society. Suzuki’s chapter (Precarity and Hope Among Asylum Seekers in Japan) addresees how the existing Japanese immigration and asylum systems treat migrants as disposable forces. The chapter, based on ethnographic fieldwork, addresses daily struggles and coping tactics asylum seekers face through their stories. Takahata and Ruiz’s chapter (Japanese Society in the Eyes of Immigrant Families: Focus on the Survival Strategies of Filipina Single Mothers) explains that many Filipina migrants became single mothers through divorcing Japanese men. In-depth interviews with single mothers provide rich information to understand their vulnerability, hardship and survival strategy. Responding to unprecedented postwar demographic challenges requires creativity. Rural areas are especially vulnerable to population aging due to outmigration of the young. Klien’s chapter (Depopulation) allows us to grasp what it is like to live in depopulated towns in Japan. Zollet’s chapter (Rural In-­Migrants: Embracing Sustainable Lifestyles for a Post-­Growth Society?) sheds light on lifestyle migrants and their potential contribute to building sustainable and resilient rural communities. Tahara’s chapter (A Regional Revitalization Strategy for Areas with Declining Populations: Transforming Tourists into Local Actors) discusses the transition from

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Tourist 1.0 to Tourist 2.0, which could bring new resources for a new and sustainable regional revitalization strategy. Nakamura’s chapter (Creating a Sustainable Society Beyond Times of Crisis) suggests that the demographic crisis is a turning point in creating a sustainable society that embraces diversity and supporting one another. Sustainability has also become one of the important academic missions in higher education. Hourdequin’s chapter (Displacement and Return: University Campuses as Ba and Ibasho for Sustainability Co-­creation) provides great insights into environmentally sustainable practices and values that can be taught on campus through innovative programs and curricula.

 he Myth of Homogeneity: Ignorance, Discrimination T and Prejudice Towards Soto Japan is often seen as a homogeneous country and Japanese behaviors are strongly influenced by the concept of uchi (insider) and soto (outsider). Japan is often perceived as an egalitarian society known for its high literacy rate, low infant mortality and universal healthcare. Such reputations hinder socially vulnerable populations. Learning from the experiences of those labelled as socially marginalized groups is crucial to breaking the myth of homogeneity. Yamamoto’s chapter (Education, Cultural Capital, and Social Class Reproduction) addresses the link between academic outcomes associated and family socioeconomic status (SES). The chapter points out that, despite Japan’s egalitarian emphasis on its education system, parents with higher SES provide more resources and support for children’s academic success. Bondy’s chapter (Buraku Issues: Changes and Challenges) addresses the burakumin, who are racially and ethnically the same as the majority Japanese, thus often described as an invisible minority in Japan. The chapter points out that a lack of programs in schools or public policy that engage with Buraku issues leads to lack of awareness leading to a belief in false information. Hayashi’s chapter (Toward “No Homeless” Public Spaces? Homeless Policy and a Crisis of Japanese Urban Society) addresses how the imaginary construction of social homogeneity neglected the existence of homelessness although it has always been a part of Japanese history, and how the rise of homelessness in the 1990s challenged the norm. Nanahoshi’s chapter (Kodomo shokudo (Children’s Cafeterias): Changing Families and Social Inequality in Japan) provides great insights into child poverty through recognizing the gap between the myth of maternal love and family diversity. The chapter by Russell (Redefining Japaneseness: Blackness, Whiteness, and the Discordant Discourse of Diversity in Japan) addresses Japan’s internal struggles with diversity and racism, especially how anonymous spaces provided Japanese netizens a place to express their violent beliefs while it also provided a platform for victims to share their experiences. Sato, Aruga and Törngren’s chapter (Reimagining Japan Through the Experience of Mixed Japanese) discusses how narrowly defined

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Japaneseness created the dichotomy of Japanese and foreigners. The chapter also addresses how Western ideas of hierarchical classification of race influenced the relations between Japanese and other Asian/indigenous people. Park’s chapter (Questioning Xenophobia in Japan: Racism, Decolonization, and Human Rights) discusses Japanese-style xenophobia, and the intersectional violence of racism and sexism through the voices of Koreans in Japan. Finally, Okada’s chapter (Life Stories, Historical Background, and Current Situations of the Ainu: The Story of Noto) describes the history of discrimination towards the Ainu and explains how the global indigenous movement beginning in the 1980s led the Japanese government to improve living conditions and rights of the Ainu and change the future of Ainu youth.

 ender Inequality: Challenging Gender Roles G and the Gender Binary The discussion on gender is crucial because it significantly influences every aspect of social, economic, cultural and political issues and everyday life in Japan. Gender norms strongly influence feelings and choices and stigmatize people who cannot fit in the mold. What prevents Japanese from freeing binary gender roles and expectations? Dalton’s chapter (Japan’s Gender Inequality in Economics and Politics Since 1945 and the Policies That Engineered It) addresses the progress and stagnation of women’s political and economic status. Her chapter provides great insights into how industrial policies that took for granted the male-breadwinner model limited women’s financial independence, which resulted in greater gender gaps in regular and non-regular work. Marshall’s chapter (Japan’s Glass Ceiling: Contradictions in Gender Discourse and Institutional Support for Ie (Family)) explains how the concept of ie continues to influence various practices including inheritance, childcare, employment and the registry system (koseki). Taniguchi and Kaufman (Surnames and Gender in Japan) provide key insights to understanding how ie and koseki continue to exclude diverse family forms such as LGBT families and families where both spouses hope to keep their surnames upon marriage. Tanaka’s chapter (Family, Graves, and Gender in Japan) points out that the continuous influence of ie on Japanese families is reflected in Japanese graves. Based on survey data, her chapter addresses gender and age differences regarding how they wish to be buried. Saito’s chapter (Male Caregivers in Japan: Between Care and Masculinity) addresses an increase in male caregivers and their challenges in negotiating their masculine identities. The chapter highlights that the difficulty of juggling work and care is not only an issue for women, but also for the increasing number of male caregivers. The chapter by Carland (LGBTQ Activism in Contemporary Japan: Prospects and Perspectives) provides the historical overviews of LGBTQ activism and addresses unsolved challenges Japanese LGBTQ people face including

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same-sex marriage. Finally, Kawasaka’s chapter (Nationalism and Queer Politics in Postwar Japan) provides deep insights to understand the complex relationship between LGBTQ politics and Japanese nationalism, which is different from European and North American modern history where nationalism often worked against queer lives. Will Japanese society be sustainable? Can it minimize its social inequality? Will the nation embrace diversity? We hope reading chapters from this book will generate discussions about Japanese society and culture today and predicting its future.

Contents

Part I Beyond Numbers: Japan’s Demographic Challenges and Future Single and Unready to Mingle: The Insecure Lifeworlds of Never-Married Japanese ����������������������������������������������������������������������������    3 Akiko Yoshida and Caitlin Meagher  Infertility in Relation to Japanese Parental Norms��������������������������������������   23 Chiaki Shirai Patriarchy, Paternalism, and Politics of Reproductive Autonomy: Abortion Rights in Japan������������������������������������������������������������   35 Eiko Saeki  Aging, Health, and Gender ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   53 Yuka Minagawa  Chronology of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan������������������������������������   67 A Takeshi Yoda  Hikikomori and Belonging in a Post-­Pandemic Japan��������������������������������   77 Naomi Berman  Migrant Long-Term Care Workers in Japan������������������������������������������������   91 Rie Miyazaki Will Guestworkers Save Japan? Findings from a Nationwide Municipal Survey ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  109 Yunchen Tian  Precarity and Hope Among Asylum Seekers in Japan ��������������������������������  125 Taku Suzuki Japanese Society in the Eyes of Immigrant Families: Focus on the Survival Strategy of Filipino Single Mothers��������������������������  141 Sachi Takahata and Frieda Joy Angelica Olay Ruiz

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Contents

Depopulation����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  155 Susanne Klien Rural In-migrants: Embracing Sustainable Lifestyles for a Post-Growth Society?�����������������������������������������������������������������������������  171 Zollet Simona A Regional Revitalization Strategy for Areas with Declining Populations: Transforming Tourists Into Local Actors��������������������������������  187 Hiroki Tahara  Creating a Sustainable Society Beyond Times of Crisis ������������������������������  197 Hiroki Nakamura Displacement and Return: University Campuses as Ba and Ibasho for Sustainability Co-creation ������������������������������������������  211 Peter Hourdequin Part II The Myth of Homogeneity: Ignorance, Discrimination, and Prejudice Towards Soto  Education, Cultural Capital, and Social Class Reproduction ��������������������  231 Yoko Yamamoto  Buraku Issues: Changes and Challenges ������������������������������������������������������  249 Christopher Bondy Toward “No Homeless” Public Spaces? Homeless Policy and a Crisis of Japanese Urban Society��������������������������������������������������������  261 Mahito Hayashi Kodomo shokudo (Children’s Cafeterias): Changing Families and Social Inequality in Japan��������������������������������������  279 Junko Nanahoshi  Reimagining Japan Through the Experiences of Mixed Japanese��������������  293 Yuna Sato, Yu-Anis Aruga, and Sayaka Osanami Törngren Redefining Japaneseness: Blackness, Whiteness, and the Discordant Discourse of Diversity in Japan������������������������������������  309 John G. Russell Questioning Xenophobia in Japan: Racism, Decolonization, and Human Rights ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  327 Sara Park Life Stories, Historical Background, and Current Situations of the Ainu: The Story of Noto������������������������������������������������������������������������  343 Vince M. Okada

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Part III Gender Inequality: Challenging Gender Roles and the Gender Binary Japan’s Gender Inequality in Economics and Politics Since 1945 and the Policies Behind It������������������������������������������������������������  357 Emma Dalton Japan’s Glass Ceiling: Contradictions in Gender Discourse and Institutional Support for Ie (Family)������������������������������������������������������  377 Robert C. Marshall  Surnames and Gender in Japan ��������������������������������������������������������������������  393 Hiromi Taniguchi and Gayle Kaufman  Family, Graves, and Gender in Japan������������������������������������������������������������  411 Kimiko Tanaka  Male Caregivers in Japan: Between Care and Masculinity������������������������  425 Mao Saito LGBTQ Activism in Contemporary Japan: Prospects and Perspectives������������������������������������������������������������������������������  439 Patrick Carland-Echavarria  Nationalism and Queer Politics in Postwar Japan����������������������������������������  455 Kazuyoshi Kawasaka

About the Editors

Kimiko Tanaka is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at James Madison University. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Michigan State University. She has published articles on Japan to discuss aging, families, culture, rural depopulation, and gender. Her recent publication, Successful Aging in a Rural Community in Japan, provides the important insight that words such as “rural” and “depopulation” do not simply equate with negative outcomes for the elderly in rural Japan.  

Helaine Selin was a Faculty Associate and Science Librarian at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, from which she retired in 2012. She is the editor of the  Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in NonWestern Cultures  (3rd ed. Springer 2016) and ten books in Springer’s Science Across Cultures series, on Astronomy, Mathematics, Medicine, Nature, Childbirth, Parenting, Happiness, Death, Aging and a second edition of the Parenting book.  

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Part I

Beyond Numbers: Japan’s Demographic Challenges and Future

Single and Unready to Mingle: The Insecure Lifeworlds of Never-Married Japanese Akiko Yoshida and Caitlin Meagher

Abstract  The number of never-married singles has been rapidly increasing in Japan since the 1980s and significant numbers of men and women are projected to remain unmarried for life. This is a sharp contrast to Japan’s postwar period, when the majority married during the age range considered “appropriate” for marriage. This increase in the never-married population, which we propose to call the “single-­ ization” of Japan, is commonly considered to be caused by the changing nature of younger generations. Single people are stereotyped and stigmatized as, for example, willfully rejecting (traditional) marriage or lacking adult dispositions. In this chapter, we argue that single-ization is less a conscious rejection of marriage by individuals and more the consequence of structural changes since the 1980s, including the breakdown of the postwar “family-corporate system” (Allison A, Precarious Japan. Durham\London: Duke University Press, 2013) that promised a social safety (e.g., lifetime employment). The majority of singles wish to marry but outdated gender norms, postwar gender ideology, and employment status shape their chances of romance and marriage. At the same time, the market responds to the proliferation of single individuals in both exploitative and possibly empowering ways. Single-­ ization is a complex social phenomenon and experiences of singles are not as monolithic as commonly stereotyped. This chapter demystifies the single-ization phenomenon and discusses its implications for the future. Keywords  Japan · Marriage · Singlehood · Solo katsu · Gender · Inequality · Precarity

A. Yoshida (*) University of Wisconsin – Whitewater, Whitewater, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Meagher University of North Carolina, Ashville, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_1

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Introduction Increasingly higher proportions of the Japanese population are never married and this phenomenon, mikonka (which we propose to call the single-ization) is one of the notable changes in Japan’s social landscape since the postwar period. Postwar Japan (roughly between the 1950s and 1970s) is characterized by the orderliness of predictable patterns of life paths the majority followed (Brinton, 2011). During this postwar economic growth period, almost everyone married during the kekkon tekireiki, or the age range considered “appropriate” for marriage, which was early-20 s for women and mid- to late-20 s for men (Atoh, 1989; Sato et al., 2010; Yamaura, 2020). Today, not only are most women and men in their 20 s never married but the average marriage ages for those who do marry have climbed to 29.6 for women and 31.3 for men (in 2020) (National Institute of Population & Social Security Research (NIPSSR), 2022a). Record high rates of those in their 30 s, 40 s, 50 s, and early-60 s are never married and the government estimates about 28% of men and 18% of women will remain single for life (NIPSSR, 2022a). Many people no longer follow the normative postwar life course that included marriage as a rite of passage to adulthood, and marriage appears to be increasingly obsolete. However, the national surveys have shown that the great majority of singles in Japan intend to marry (NIPSSR, 2022b). Due largely to the direct association with Japan’s “demographic crisis” – declining fertility rates, aging population, and population decline – this phenomenon has been treated as one of Japan’s “social problems (shakai mondai).” Along with the breakdowns of other postwar social systems, such as the employment system that guaranteed job security and stable incomes, single-ization adds to the elevated sense of insecurity and precarity in Japan (Allison, 2013). There have been moral panics over the young generations that do not marry, and conservative politicians, social commentators, the mass media, and the general public have attributed the cause of single-ization to the (changing) nature of young Japanese (Allison, 2013; Shirahase, 2005; Yamada, 1999). Compared with their predecessors in the postwar period, they are depicted as more immature, selfish, materialistic, and passive. Social science research on singles, however, shows that the single-ization is a complex social phenomenon, the fundamental cause of which lies in macro-level structural changes. Most singles unintentionally “drift into singlehood” (Yoshida, 2010a, 2017), and the single population is not as monolithic as commonly stereotyped. Drawing on the wealth of research findings on singles, this chapter demystifies the single-ization phenomenon and discusses its implications for the future of Japan.

Singles in Japan In the postwar period the median age of (first) marriage was 25.9, 27.2, and 26.9 for men and 23.0, 24.4, and 24.2 for women in 1950, 1960, and 1970 respectively (NIPSSR, 2022a). Remaining unmarried past age 35 was rare. Only about 3% of

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women and men aged 35–39 were never married in 1950 and the corresponding rates were lower for older age groups (Ministry of Internal Affairs & Communication (MIAC), 2014a) and remained low for three decades (MIAC, 2014b, c). More than 90% of men married after achieving stable employment (Brinton, 1992) and women left the labor force upon marriage to devote themselves to childcare and housekeeping as sengyō shufu (“‘professional’ housewife”) (Goldstein-Gidoni, 2012; Ochiai, 2004; Ogasawara, 1998). Most people followed the predictable life path, the so-­ called “standardized life course,” – finish school, get a job, marry, become parents, and retire (Taga, 2003) – to the extent that this orderliness in life course stood out as a characteristic of Japan to foreign observers (Brinton, 2011). The never-married rates, however, began to steeply increase among men in their tekireiki between 1950 and 1980 (from 34.3% to 55.1% for age group 25–29 and 8.0% to 21.5% for age group 30–34) (Cabinet Office, 2004). What prompted public attention, however, was the jump in the rate from 1980 to 1990 (from 24.0% to 40.2%) among women aged 25–29 (Cabinet Office, 2004) due to the implications for Japan’s already declining birthrate (Retherford et al., 2001; Sato et al., 2010). In 1990, the government reported that Japan’s total fertility rate (the estimated average number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime) fell to 1.57 in 1989, below that of 1966, the previous lowest record (due by superstitions that women born in that “year of the fire horse woman” would make difficult wives). The government and media alarmed the public, calling it the “1.57 shock,” as the low fertility rates exacerbates Japan’s aging population. Never-married rates continued to rise and the most recent statistics show that the present rates are the record highest for all age groups of men and women (MIAC, 2021). The Japanese government estimates 28.25% of men and 17.81% of women would remain single for life (NIPSSR, 2022a). It is no longer just a matter of bankonka (late marriage), a term that implies temporary single status. Japan now seems to have become a mikon (never-married single) and/or shōgai mikon (lifetime single) society. If not the changing nature of younger generations, what caused the increased singlehood in Japan?

 hy More People Are Unmarried: Structural W and Cultural Barriers People often assume single status is a result of willful choice made by individuals, particularly women, as an act of “individualization” (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), but in fact the great majority of singles polled express a wish to marry (NIPSSR, 2022b). Social science studies on singles in Japan (e.g., Miwa, 2019; Sato et al., 2010; Yoshida, 2010a, 2017) point to structural and cultural barriers for individuals to marry or find marital partners. Qualitative interview research conducted by the first author (Yoshida, 2010a, 2017) argues that singlehood is a place many individuals in Japan “drifted into,” a destination unintended. A recent

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quantitative study by Raymo et al. (2021) shows the support for this argument that the majority of singles passively, unintendedly drifted into singlehood (instead of consciously choosing to stay single). Yoshida’s main argument is that the rapid social change – the rollercoaster ride-­ like Japanese economy since the 1980s (from the unprecedented boom to the severe recession and stagnation) –caused the state of anomie (Durkheim, 1951/1897), or an absence of normative guidance. This has disrupted patterns of gender expression and related behaviors  (Yoshida, 2010a, 2017, 2023). During the postwar period, societal norms were clear to follow and were backed by an abundance of good jobs for men. This allowed them to support the family with a dedicated full-time housewife (Goldstein-Gidoni, 2012). As the labor market first expanded the employment opportunity for women and then shrunk it to younger generations, the normative gender roles – breadwinning husband and homemaking wife – became contradictory or unattainable for many. Yet numerous studies (Cook, 2016c; Endo, 2018; Goldstein-Gidoni, 2012; Lee et al., 2010; Nemoto, 2008; North, 2009; Piotrowski et al., 2019; Yoshida, 2010a, b, 2017), both quantitative and qualitative, document that beliefs in gendered division of labor within marriage persist among the young generations. This indicates that many singles are caught in a web of cultural contradiction, or anomie (Yoshida, 2023). Postwar marriage was characterized by the strict division of labor by gender: male-breadwinner and female-homemaker model. The husband/father provided the central financial support for the family (as the metaphorical term for husband/father, daikokubashira, the central pillar of house, suggests). The ideal female (wife/mother’s) role is more of an assistant, in charge of household chores and family care, to the extent that it is considered a fulltime occupation (as the term sengyō shufu, professional housewife, indicates) (Goldstein-Gidoni, 2012; Ochiai, 2004). In their separate spheres, both men and women were expected to devote themselves to and prioritize their own “occupation” to a level often seen as self-sacrificial (Dasgupta, 2012; Hidaka, 2010; Long, 1996). It was not that every single marriage fit this model, but it was idealized and associated with middle-class status (which many aspired to achieve), and many couples indeed lived in such marriages. This ideal was not a mere imagination or belief but was backed by the corporate employment system, or more precisely, part of the social system structured for the country’s economic recovery and growth in the postwar period (Allison, 2013; Brinton, 1993;  Duss, 2011; White, 2002). In this so-called “period of rapid economic growth,” (kōdoseichōki), many companies could afford to offer “lifetime employment (shūshin koyō)” to men, including blue-collar workers. Pay increases were based on seniority, and thus matched the increases in expenses as men would marry, have children, send children to schools, etc., and thus encouraged longer lengths of service. Companies provided job trainings, typically company-specific, so they commonly practiced a blanket hiring of new graduates (Brinton, 2011). Because women were expected to quit a job upon marriage (in tekireiki marriage age), employers hired them to fill easy-to-replace, dead-end clerical positions (Brinton, 2011; Macnaughtan, 2020; Ogasawara, 1998). They were tacitly bridal candidates for male employees. Because many young people migrated from rural

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regions to cities for jobs and lived away from their families of origin, it was very common for supervisors to assume parent-like roles and matchmake their subordinates (Iwasawa, 2010; Iwasawa & Mita, 2007; Rohlen, 1974). Thus, the corporate employment system was aligned with family formation and the gendered division of labor in marriage, to the extent that Allison (2013) calls it the family-corporate system. However, from the mid-1980s to the beginning of the 1990s, Japan’s economy boomed to result in severe labor shortages. Unlike their predecessors who had been urged out the door when they reached tekireiki age, unmarried women were increasingly encouraged to stay employed past the traditional marriage age and some landed career jobs previously reserved for men (Yoshida, 2010a, 2017). At the same time, a much stronger Japanese currency opened up new leisure and consumption opportunities such as travel abroad and foreign brand name goods shopping for unmarried women (Kelsky, 2001; Yoshida, 2010a, 2017). Magazines targeting this new demographic proliferated the images of kyaria ūman (women in career) in stylish power suits and encouraged recreational consumption. Given the relative wealth, independence, and conspicuous consumption observed among these young kyaria ūman, it appeared as if young women were uninterested in or rejecting marriage, preferring to make the most of their prolonged youth and independence (Kinsella, 1995). However, qualitative interview research on this generation of single women (Nakano & Wagatsuma, 2004; Nakano, 2011, 2014; Yoshida, 2010a, 2011, 2017) indicates that most single women never planned to stay unmarried for life. Rather, these women were enjoying the fruits of the booming economy and put marriage on the backburner when they were passing the “marriageable age” and inadvertently “aged out” rather than consciously rejecting marriage entirely (Yoshida, 2010a, 2017). At this point, however, the phenomenon was seen as bankonka (later marriage), not yet mikonka (never-married single-­ ization) (Sato et al., 2010). In the early-1990s, Japan’s economy drastically changed to enter a decade-long severe recession. With accelerated deregulation of labor policies (that had started in the 1980s), companies restructured the employment system to reduce hires for regular (seishain) employment (full time with lifetime job security and fringe benefits) and replace many entry-level positions with irregular part-time or temporary employment. As scholars (Brinton, 2011; Genda, 2005; Shirahase, 2009, 2010) pointed out, this hit the young generation, men and women completing their education in the 1990s and after, hardest. Employers froze hiring of new graduates to regular employment for young men (and women) and filled many entry-level positions with temporary or part-time staff. Skilled jobs in the service sector (e.g., IT, finance, etc.) required higher education credentials, while most low-skilled service sector jobs (e.g., convenience stores, restaurants) had irregular, part-time employment (Brinton, 2011). Since the mid-1990s, thus, increasingly large numbers of new graduates have taken irregular casual employment with low wages and little job security. In this context, never-married rates continued to rise with higher rates observed among those in casual employment (Piotrowski et al., 2015; Raymo & Shibata, 2017; Sakai & Higuchi, 2005).

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In the meantime, the desirability of the postwar lifestyle of regular corporate employees was questioned for its single-minded devotion to the work world, represented by extremely long hours spent on work and work-related activities (e.g., after-hour drinking) and absence at home (Allison, 1994; Mathews, 2004). More young men, including college graduates (candidates for employment by elite corporate employees), were ambivalent about this supposedly “successful” life course expected of men (Mathews, 2004). This generation was bombarded by the neoliberal values that emphasize self-actualization and self-fulfillment (Arai, 2013). The furītā (“freeter”) lifestyle – so called “free employment,” essentially at-will contract work – was glorified and encouraged. More men took casual employment, instead of corporate regular jobs, to pursue their dreams or search for meaningful jobs (Cook, 2016c). Thus, the increase in casual employment was two-fold: some had no choice but to resort to irregular employment with low wages and others purposefully chose the non-salaried, freeter lifestyles. The former is more prevalent among those with lower education as the number of jobs in manufacturing, which used to hire many male high school graduates for regular employment, significantly declined, and high-skill service sector jobs require college degrees (Brinton, 2011). Cook’s ethnographic research of men in casual employment (2013, 2014, 2016a, b, c) shows that most of these men want to marry and that work is central in their identity, aspiring to find meaningful jobs or succeed in their dream jobs while being keenly aware of needs of full-time regular employment to be marriageable. In this context, one might expect that individuals would consider alternative models of marriage, such as dual-earning or reverse gender roles. One might imagine that women’s employability and high earnings would come to be valued. Studies, however, show that the majority of singles adhere to the postwar gender roles as “proper,” “natural,” and “normal.” Qualitative research on singles show that most single women intend to take the role of homemaking and childcare in their future marriage (Nemoto, 2008; Yoshida, 2010a, 2017), and most single men, both in stable and casual employment, firmly believe that breadwinning is their role (Cook, 2013, 2014, 2016a, b, c; Nemoto et al., 2012). But many are also ambivalent about their roles. For instance, some single women in full-time employment with good incomes are hesitant to leave the workforce as they wish to retain financial independence and/or gratifying work (Dales, 2014; Nakano, 2022; Nemoto, 2008). Others find the homemaker role “boring” and are unsure if they can fulfill this role (Yoshida, 2010a, 2017). Some men in casual employment are critical of the salaryman lifestyle that requires single-minded devotion to work or they had difficulties staying in such positions and became irregular workers instead (Cook, 2016c). Some men in stable employment say that they see the “provider” role as a “burden” (Nemoto et al., 2012). Accounts of interviewees in these studies indicate that many view marriage as restrictive. It is very common for single men and women to anticipate that they would have to give up on what they have achieved (Cook, 2013, 2016c) or enjoy currently, such as travel abroad or just the time for themselves or to hang out with their friends (Nagase, 2006; Nakano, 2022; Nemoto, 2008; Nemoto et al., 2012; Yoshida, 2010a, 2017). This reflects how their perception is shaped by the expectation of self-sacrificial devotion prescribed

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in the postwar marriage model. Moreover, some women are concerned that marriage leads to a loss of intimacy (Cook, 2016c; Nakano, 2022; Nemoto, 2008; Rosenberger, 2013; Yoshida, 2010a, 2017). Indeed, some single men with stable employment are observed to uphold a traditional view, rather than considering marriage as a site to build meaningful intimate relationships with their wives (Nemoto et al., 2012). Thus, many single women and men seem unsure of marriage and their anticipated role shaped by the postwar ideal, yet they tend to judge the opposite sex based on the postwar gender ideology. Most single men seem to want their future wives to be domestic, submissive, young, small, and “comforting” (iyashi) and reject career women as they are too strong or selfish (Cook, 2016c; Endo, 2018; Miles, 2019; Nemoto et al., 2012). Women in career employment indeed feel they are undesired and unapproached (Nemoto, 2008; Yoshida, 2010a, 2011, 2017). Yet these women also reject men with lower incomes, in unstable employment, and/or lacking decisiveness/leadership ability as “not masculine” (Cook, 2016c; Endo, 2018; Nakano, 2011; Nemoto, 2008; Yoshida, 2010a, 2011, 2017). Thus, many singles “adhere” to the postwar gender norms but in nuanced ways. Their feelings and thoughts are conflicted and contradictory but beliefs are strong. This shows how deeply the postwar ideal is internalized in their minds, even though it does not quite benefit them. It is a form of anomie – the state of absence of (working) normative guidance. It should be noted that people adhere to the postwar gender ideology not just because it is believed to be inevitable and unchangeable. It is also a preferred model under current exploitative and discriminatory employment practices. First, people spend extremely long hours at work and work-related activities. This is a well-­ documented fact about white-collar corporate male employees (Dasgupta, 2012; Hidaka, 2010) but studies on singles show that not only males in middle-class white-collar occupations (Nemoto et  al., 2012), but also single women in career tracks (Nemoto, 2008; Yoshida, 2010a, 2011, 2017) and single men and women in casual employment (Cook, 2016c) work long hours. As the labor market is increasingly precarious, both irregular and regular employees may accept requests to work extra hours because they consider themselves vulnerable to lose their positions if they refuse (Asahina, 2021; Cook, 2016c). When this is the norm, it is difficult for married couples to work full time with children. Second, despite former Prime Minister Abe’s “Womenomics” and the Japanese government’s much-ballyhooed commitment to the UN’s Strategic Development Goal (SDG) #5 of “gender equality,” gender discrimination in employment persists. The gender pay gap is the second largest in the OECD (World Economic Forum, 2020). Women fall behind men in consideration for promotion, and opportunities for reentry in full-time regular positions are limited for those who want to return to the labor force after childrearing (Nakano, 2014, 2016; Nemoto, 2008; Raymo & Iwasawa, 2005; Shirahase, 2005). It is therefore quite natural for women to seek marriage to a man in secure employment as the source of financial and emotional security (Dales, 2014; Dales & Yamamoto, 2019; Nakano, 2016; Nemoto, 2008) and for men to assume the primary breadwinning role (Cook, 2016c). Third, those who take casual employment after graduation are disadvantaged in the labor market and highly likely to find themselves stuck in precarious jobs

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(Brinton, 2011; Genda, 2005). Employers place new graduates or irregular workers in entry-level positions and are often prejudiced against those who worked for years in casual employment as lacking a strong work ethic, so strong is the ideological normativity of the seniority system and lifetime employment. Thus, the insecurity felt towards marrying a man in casual employment is quite legitimate.

Stereotypes/Stigma Attached to Singles While circumstances have changed, Japanese society has been loath to abandon the norms associated with postwar social arrangements: economically stable, aggressive men and economically dependent, submissive women. Unlike in the postwar period, remaining single in their 30 s and above is very common today, yet negative labels continue to follow them, stigmatizing single women as “unfeminine” and single men as “feminine,” in reference to the postwar ideal of femininity and masculinity (Charlebois, 2010; Dales, 2014; Nakano, 2014, 2020; Nakano & Wagatsuma, 2004; Prażmo & Augustyn, 2020). Narratives around single-ization, particularly around singles themselves, however, evolved to appear ambivalent and sometimes conflicting,  from stigmatization, spectacularization, and problematization to the beginnings of normalization. In popular discourse, Japanese slang has adapted quickly to give names to the gender archetypes associated with social change. Early references to single women were largely stigmatizing, based on the assumption that women don’t marry because of (self-centered) personal choice rather than circumstance; and/or that marriage eludes them due to some personal failure as opposed to unfavorable structural conditions (hypotheses we have already addressed and repudiated in this chapter). In either case, the single woman is positioned as solely responsible for her failure to marry. In the 1980s and early-1990s, single women past age 25 were called “Christmas cake,” leftovers as cakes are unwanted past the 25th of December (Brinton, 1992; Nakano, 2011, 2014; Nakano & Wagatsuma, 2004; Nemoto, 2008; Yoshida, 2010a, 2017). This label appears to have fallen out of favor as the average age of marriage creeps into the metaphorical new year. A slightly more recent term, parasite single, originally termed by sociologist Yamada Masahiro in 1999, has more staying power. It demonizes women for their failure to perform their social duty of devoting themselves to marriage and family, instead prolonging their unfettered youth by living with their parents, free to fritter away their paychecks on self-­ indulgences like fashion, entertainment, and foreign travel. The “parasite single” imagery of a woman gained traction in millennial Japan, likely due to amplified anxiety about the catastrophic consequences of the shōshikōreika (population aging due to declined fertility) with some forecasting Japanese extinction within a century. More recently, “Christmas cake” and “parasite single” were joined by another satirically denigrating term for unmarried women, but one that wryly mocks their image as pathetic rather than selfish and willful: make-inu or “loser dog.” This term emerged in 2003 with Sakai Junko’s book, Howl of the loser dog (2003), and was

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voted Japan’s “Vogue Word Award” in 2004 (Yamaguchi, 2006). Sakai’s memoir, in which she boldly self-identifies as a so-called “loser dog,” is a criticism of persistent postwar gender norms (according to which unmarried women are life’s losers) and an advocacy for lifestyle diversity. Despite the undeniable durability of these postwar gender norms that see marriage and family as the telos of a woman’s existence (in terms of her personal fulfillment, her orientation to and within society, and her duty to society and country), changing language use over the last 20 years indicates a gradual softening of attitudes regarding single women. The tremendous popularity of Sakai’s book and the resulting “reclamation” of the loser dog trope is one indication, as is the more recent ohitorisama (Dales, 2014; Ueno, 2007). Ohitorisama, the term used to refer to a single patron at a bar or restaurant, is suggestive of the way single women navigate and experience the world around them as independent consumers, a shift from earlier terms that depict singlehood as abjection. Thus, while it remains the case that a majority of young women still see marriage and housewifery as aspirational, an attitude and language that denigrates anything short of that ideal becomes more untenable as the number of singles rise. Popular ideas about and images of Japanese manhood have also shifted since the beginning of the economic recession in the early 1990s as the existing “salaryman doxa” (Roberson & Suzuki, 2003) becomes dismantled by the empirical realities of the labor market. As Allison puts it, the hitonami no seikatsu (the average life) for men that includes regular full employment as seishain becomes the “privilege of a dwindling few” (Allison, 2013: p. 33). As is the case with female singles, the language and imagery of normative manhood slowly adapts as it loses sync with contemporary realities. In the early 2000s, the so-called “freeter myth” was born to frame that underemployed men lack work ethics and maturity, reframing structural impediments as personal choice (Cook, 2016c). Men excluded from seishain employment remain plagued by this myth. As we discuss later, this myth harms their chances of finding a spouse by ascribing culturally undesirable attributes to them, in addition to their diminished wherewithal to support a family. In recent years, the term “herbivore men” (sōshoku-kei danshi) has gained popular currency to describe those men who take a less aggressive approach to career and dating than its antithesis, the “meat-eating men” (nikushoku-kei danshi), the normative masculinity of their fathers’ generation. The proliferation of sōshokukei – who are said to account for more than 60% of 30-something men (Ushikubo, 2008) – can be seen in part as a response to the changing structure of work. Metaphorical meat-­ eating is associated with another popular trope, the “corporate warrior” of the postwar period. Like his Tokugawa-era and wartime predecessors, the “corporate warrior” toiled relentlessly on behalf of another party, sacrificing individual needs to those of his employer (Dasgupta, 2012). With the dismantlement of the “social security net” associated with stable, lifetime employment and the shift to casual employment, the aggressive attitude to work would seem futile. The somewhat softer (though not complimentary) sōshoku-kei seems to acknowledge that “meat-eating” was the perquisite of men with the confidence of a robust salary and the ability to provide for a family, the quintessentially desirable postwar package in terms of a potential husband.

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While most women still prefer nikushoku-kei to sōshoku-kei, the latter is not nearly so maligned as the otaku, an icon of failed Japanese manhood at home and abroad. Otaku, the obsessive nerd, is by now a venerable stock character in Japanese media. The otaku is famously obsessed with things (especially technological goods) and with thing-ified women. This is most literally illustrated by the so-called “idol otaku” who devote themselves to popular culture idols, interacting with the literal objects of their affection through the consumption of images and commodities (Galbraith, 2019). The otaku became a laden symbol of Japan’s cultural decadence and decline in the 1990s (Kinsella, 1995). Japan’s technological achievements have enabled and/or exacerbated the otaku’s retreat from normative (and, importantly, procreative) conjugal activity in recent years. The epiphenomenal but sensationalized example of “kyara marriage” is one recent example. Then 35-year-old Akihiko Kondo gained significant attention when he announced on Twitter in 2018 his intention to marry two-dimensional computer-generated idol Hatsune Miku in a formal ceremony. The bride is a glass cylinder onto which moving images of “Miku-chan,” powered by artificial intelligence to be responsive to Mr. Kondo’s needs, is projected (White & Galbraith, 2019). Though this is not about stereotypes of singles, there are similar and interesting cases of jibunkon (self-marriage), in which individuals, predominantly women, purchase a wedding ceremony to “marry” themselves. This is certainly a playful riff on a familiar social institution, but it is difficult to determine whether the (mostly) women are committed to lifetime singlehood as the use of “self-marriage” would suggest, or whether it is light entertainment with a tinge of social commentary. The present moment is one in which outmoded beliefs about masculinity and femininity persist but also the “correct” structure of the family may be slowly being sloughed off. Images and discourses like the ohitorisama show promise of singlehood being conceived as empowering, if not normalized. But this process is a lengthy and ambivalent one.

Konkatsu: Marriage-Hunting Activities National surveys (NIPSSR, 2022b) have shown that the great majority want to marry yet many have no romantic partner. “Not having met an appropriate person” has been listed as one of the top reasons for their single status. While this could come across as them being choosy, some studies found that their chances of romantic encounters are limited due to structural barriers such as gender segregation at work (e.g., many women work in female-dominated occupations), long work hours, and a declined social system that help matchmaking singles (Iwasawa, 2010; Iwasawa & Mita, 2007; Kubo et  al., 1993; Tokuhiro, 2010; Yoshida, 2010a, 2011, 2017). Today’s singles, therefore, have to actively engage themselves in a new endeavor – konkatsu, or “marital partner search activities” (Yamada & Shirakawa,

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2008) – if they are to have a hope of encountering a suitable person to marry. The single-ization of Japan, which directly relates to the aforementioned population problem, is of obvious concern to the Japanese government, and its responses have included the unorthodox measure of publicly funding matchmaking programs. The central government provides funds to local governments to support such programs as speed-dating events and dating coaches. This type of marriage-hunting activity draws on long-standing and familiar practices in Japan. In addition to the workplace-­ as-­meeting-place, courtship in Japan has traditionally relied on parties outside the couple themselves – miai (arranged meetings) and so forth. There are also precedents of local governments funding international marriage services for rural men seeking spouses from elsewhere in Asia (Yamaura, 2020). While broader attitudes to the single-ization of Japan remain ambivalent and government responses are unequivocally expressive of grave concern, there is one area of society that has been quick to accept, adapt to, and accommodate Japan’s growing number of singles: the market. An industry providing opportunities for konkatsu has emerged in recent years. The category of konkatsu encompasses a broad range of services in the private sector, including gōkon, a kind of group dating for young people. While gōkon has a long history in Japan, originating in Meiji-era college student parties, many commercial interests now offer commoditized gōkon. For example, one national gōkon company, Konpa de Koipuran (Party Love Incubator, n.d.), offers singles throughout the country local and personalized introduction services, including singles parties (gōkon) and one-on-one meetings. A recent innovation, nominated for 2012’s trendy “word of the year,” is the machikon, a casual party for local singles, perhaps those intimidated by the relative formality of a sit-down gōkon, to gather and participate in a casual activity. These events can be booked by clicking the appropriate prefecture on the company website and specifying the preferred service. The process of commodification eliminates the limitations, serendipity, and subjectivity involved in more traditional forms of konkatsu, making this option both more and less personalized to the individual marriage-­ seeker’s needs and circumstances. A more recent addition to the slate of introduction services offered to young singles is so-called “table-sharing” (aiseki), where single men and women can book seats at a shared table for drinks or a meal. The website for national aiseki chain Oriental Lounge explains that: As you get older, your opportunities to interact with others become limited to the workplace. When your interests and personal challenges decrease, your opportunity to encounter new people decreases as well. We want to fill in this sadness in the world with tsunagari (“connection”). Oriental Lounge is a social meeting space that transcends gender and age… In this heart-connecting table-sharing service, it’s not just for men and women to meet, but like-minded friends and business partners” (Oriental Lounge website, n.d.).

It is worth noting, however, that this “table-sharing” is not blind to gender and age. Events are limited to men and women in their 20 s and 30 s, with incentives like free cake and all-you-can-eat table service for women in their 20  s; men over 30 are permitted at certain times only. There is a set number of seats reserved for male and

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female patrons at each event, and the remaining number of each available seat is evident on the website. The rhetoric of “friendship” and “human connection” only partially obscures the fact that this service is aimed primarily at those seeking opposite-­sex partners. The limited studies on konkatsu activities show that chances of romantic encounters are not equal. For instance, in order to register for trustworthy matchmaking sites for marital partner searches, men, but not women, are required to present proof of having stable jobs and income (Dalton & Dales, 2016). Online sites commonly provide graphs and charts on average income and/or income distributions of registered male members (Dalton & Dales, 2016). Parties for singles charge as much as twice the fees for men than for women and men feel they are expected to pay for dinner, gifts, etc. for their dates (Miles, 2019). Men receive attention from female participants simply by working at well-known elite corporations (Nemoto et  al., 2012). Some single men feel resentful that their desirability is gauged by spending power, not their individuality (Miles, 2019), an added barrier for lower-income men finding spouses. Women are also judged in reference to narrowly-defined “feminine” traits by the postwar standard and suffer on this new marriage market. Women’s income is irrelevant in matching site registration, but their domesticity is highlighted in subtle ways, such that a successful story of matchmaking for men is portrayed as being comforted (and thus being made able to focus on their jobs) by their wives who cook nutritious, tasty meals (Dalton & Dales, 2016). At singles parties, it is typical that women are asked whether they like cooking and children, and whether they plan to continue working after marriage. Those in certain occupations (e.g., flight attendants, nurses) are favored, as they are assumed to be submissive and nurturing (Endo, 2018; Nemoto, 2008). Knowing what appeals to men, some women strategically exaggerate “feminine” aspects by highlighting such occupations while hiding other types of aspirations, emphasizing their cooking abilities, and so forth (Endo, 2018). Konkatsu is not limited to activities through matchmaking sites and gatherings. There are numerous konkatsu literature, websites, and so forth to give guidance for successful konkatsu (Dalton & Dales, 2016; Miles, 2019). Men are expected to polish themselves, particularly in terms of communication skills, to be desirable by women (Miles, 2019). Indeed, research on single women indicates this expectation or frustration with men who are unable to converse (Endo, 2018; Kelsky, 2001; Nakano, 2011; Yoshida, 2010a, 2011, 2017). Many single men are, however, incapable of effective intergender communication (Endo, 2018; Miles, 2019). Some men find it too burdensome to take steps toward dating and reject dating, marriage, and women altogether (Miles, 2019). It is arguable that such awkwardness in intergender interaction is caused, at least partially, by gender segregation commonly practiced at work as well as adolescent schooling, school activities, and general social lives (Yoshida, 2010a, 2017).

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Other Market Responses to Single-ization and Its Implications The rise in unmarried people, and particularly unmarried women, has also given rise to changes in the housing landscape in Japan. One novel market-driven solution to the problem of housing young unmarrieds is the sharehouse, which provides a private room (in most cases) and (at a minimum) shared cooking and bathroom facilities. The so-called “sharehouse boom” began in 2005 as the generation most affected by Japan’s economic downturn came of age. The practical advantages of a sharehouse for young people in precarious employment include the lack of “key money” (the non-refundable equivalent of a security deposit typically paid at the start of a lease) and the flexibility of an at-will tenancy. Yet, as the second author of this chapter has argued (Meagher, 2021), a range of sharehouse marketing literature touts “non-economic charms” of the sharehouse, such as potential for self-development (jibunmigaki) and emancipation from age- and gender-based hierarchies in other spaces such as the family home. Another category of experience provided by the market that validates singlehood as an identity, especially for women, is the growing number of solo katsu (solo activities). The website for internet retail powerhouse Rakuten describes: Solo katsu is enjoyable time spent alone. It’s also the activities that were formerly called by the more negative images of “ohitorisama” and “bocchi.” “Solo katsu” is a purposefully positive term. While you may enjoy yourself with friends and partners, sometimes it’s nice to enjoy yourself alone. The biggest charm of solo katsu is going where you want as you want, and spending time enjoying the things you love to your heart’s content. Recently as the demand for solo katsu has risen, services for singles like solo yakiniku, solo karaoke, and solo saunas, have increased… (Rakuten, 2022).

In her 2019 book, Solo katsu joshi no susume (Solo Activities Recommendations for Girls), author Asai Mayumi (2019) outlines the significance of solo katsu for young women. The book was also adapted into a twelve-episode TV series in Tokyo in 2021. Asai’s book does provide specific recommendations for solo activities, but it is also, and primarily, a “recommendation” that women overcome their fear of engaging in solo activities. She argues, in the language of self-help, that it is only through solo katsu that people, and young women in particular, can truly get to know themselves, expand their worlds, and achieve emancipation from others. Thus, rather than simply a guide book to the experiential commodities available to young women (though it is, surely, also that), Asai’s book and television series presents solo katsu – eating yakiniku alone, kayaking alone, and so forth – as for their own personal development along the lines of jibunmigaki. It bears mentioning that solo katsu are targeted at women specifically because acts such as eating out alone have been common for men (Nango, 2018). Both solo katsu and sharehouse marketing literature that emphasizes emancipation and self-cultivation interpolate young, primarily female, single consumers to define themselves in terms of these experiential commodities. One notable difference between the two, however, is that whereas the sharehouse literature emphasizes community and communality, these concepts are entirely absent in solo katsu

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literature. Solo katsu instead trades on a radical individualism that relies on solitude and severance of all forms of reliance on others. This emphasis on self-reliance should be considered critically, however: specifically, whether it is necessarily empowering for all single women, regardless of their class position and financial wherewithal. Solo katsu are commodities, so there is obvious cost associated with this emancipation. The neoliberal emphasis on individual lifestyle choice implicitly denies differential access to these opportunities for personal enrichment. As with sharehouse marketing (Meagher, 2021), the rhetoric of self-help and personal emancipation seems secondary to the capitalist agenda. This begs the question: is it ultimately empowering, exploitative, or both? As we have described in the foregoing sections on konkatsu, the market aimed at singles, and specifically single female consumers, engenders and/or legitimizes singlehood as a new public identity. While social and governmental discourses around singlehood remain ambivalent, locked in postwar gender and family norms and anxieties around the rapidly declining birthrate, the ethical neutrality of the market with regard to such things makes it a bellwether, perhaps, of things to come. If this is the case, we might expect the future of Japan to be characterized by rapidly increasing singlehood, commodities to accommodate singlehood as a lifestyle, and a gradual but meaningful shift in perceptions of single people  – particularly single women.

Implications to the Future of Japan It is clear that the postwar nuclear family model is no longer the realistic household form and all indicators suggest that this trend is unlikely to reverse. Nonetheless, as we have emphasized, these postwar norms remain embedded in the Japanese collective psyche and are tinged with nostalgia for Japan’s postwar affluence and stability in a way that is not dissimilar to contemporary American nostalgia for the 1950s and 1980s. Marriage remains the norm and extra-marital cohabitation is rare and usually temporary (Raymo, 2003, 2022; Raymo et al., 2015). Common law marriage (naien) is likewise unusual and highly stigmatized. As Goldstein-Gidoni (2012) suggests, “professional” housewifery is still aspirational for a majority of young women, unlike their counterparts elsewhere in the OECD countries. Perhaps the longevity of postwar ideology reflects its lingering association with middle-class stability and security, longed for by many in a time of deep socio-economic precarity. The most recent national survey (NIPSSR, 2022b), however, shows a notable increase in men and women (ages 18–34) who expressed no intention of marriage (from 2015 to 2021, the rates increased from 12.0% to 17.3% for men and from 8.0% to 14.6% for women). The same survey also indicates a slight change in unmarried men and women’s expectations from their future spouses to desire those with non-traditional traits (i.e., abilities to take up household chores and child care from male partner; earning capabilities from female partner). The COVID-19 pandemic may have had diverse impacts on single people’s desires. An analysis of an

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original survey taken in 2021 (Yoshida, n.d.) suggests that a significant portion of singles increased the desire for marriage due to loneliness and social disconnection felt under the pandemic restrictions on social activities. The same survey, as well as the aforementioned national survey (NIPSSR, 2022b), also show an increase in the number of singles who feel fine about lifetime singlehood. These recent changes may indicate an increase in voluntary singlehood and diversification of marriage models in the near future. Single-ization has consequences, the most obvious of which is the precipitously declining birth rate. A lack of young people has visible, and profound, economic implications as the tax burden on working people becomes unsustainably high. As of this writing, each working young person shoulders the burden of care for more than two retired elders (Cabinet Office, 2020) and this burden will increase as the number of taxpayers decreases. The burden of care also increases at the micro (the household) level, as elder care remains primarily the responsibility of adult children. Not only are many singles, particularly daughters, providing cares for their elderly parents (Nakano, 2022), but they are concerned for their own future as most of them are childless (Yoshida, 2010a, 2017). Increasing singlehood in Japan is, to repeat, a consequence of rapid and dramatic structural change, particularly with regard to work: the increased penetration of women into the work force and the casualization and “flexibilization” of labor for all genders; and the present mismatch between cultural preferences and empirical realities facing, especially, young people. The atmosphere of “precarity” described by Allison (2013) is the backdrop against which the single-ization of Japan becomes a visible social problem. Whereas single-ization is largely the natural, if not inevitable, consequence of recent structural changes, effects of these changes have not been uniform across segments of Japanese society but depend on class status and gender. Seishain (full employment) status is no longer a safeguard against involuntary singlehood. Workplace demands that seep into one’s after-work life remain among the most stringent in the world, and this decreases the opportunities for male and female workers to meet spouses due to diminished spare time. For female career workers, their professional success might hamper their chances of romance and marriage as it intimidates many men. Male workers at the lower, more “casualized” rungs of the employment ladder, meanwhile, are still seen as relatively undesirable and may lack the self-confidence to pursue romantic relationships at all. To reiterate: it is not singles who caused a breakdown of postwar family model. Rather, it is the breakdown of postwar corporate-family model that increased singlehood. Many individuals drift into singlehood unintentionally and are unable to materialize such basic desires as wants of intimacy and family. Yet singles are blamed for their own single status, and are often caricatured as losers, deviants, etc. As we have discussed, experiences of singlehood are not as monolithic as commonly stereotyped, and are highly affected by class position and gender. Japan may be at a cultural crossroads. While difficulties in finding a suitable marriage partner have been exacerbated by the mismatch between persistent gender norms and structural realities, recent survey results (NIPSSR, 2022b; Yoshida, n.d.) and the media surveyed here suggest an emerging cultural shift in attitudes toward

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marriage and singlehood. Specifically, normative expectation of marriage as part of the “standard life course” of the postwar period might be slowly giving way, along with a softening of attitudes regarding singlehood. These include the recognition, if not the valorization, of independence (as in ohitorisama, sharehouses, and solo katsu), bringing cultural attitudes more in line with the empirical reality of increasing lifestyle diversity. At the same time, structural barriers and precarity discussed in this chapter seem to persist. It is too early to forecast what the longer-term effects of single-ization will be: it may disrupt gender inequality, it might further widen socio-economic inequality, or both.

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White, M. (2002). Perfectly Japanese: Making families in an era of upheaval. University of California Press. White, D. & Galbraith, P. W. (2019, January 25). Japan’s emerging emotional tech. Anthropology News. https://www.anthropology-­news.org/articles/japans-­emerging-­emotional-­tech/ World Economic Forum. (2020, March 8). How to narrow Japan’s widening gender wage gap. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/ international-­womens-­day-­japan-­gender-­gap/ Yamada, M. (1999). Parasaito shinguru no jidai. [The age of the parasite single]. Chikuma Shobō. Yamada, M., & Shirakawa, T. (2008). Konkatsu jidai. [The era of marriage hunting]. Discover Twenty-One. Yamaguchi, T. (2006). ‘Loser dogs’ and ‘demon hags’: Single women in Japan and the declining birthrate. Social Science Japan Journal, 9(1), 109–114. Yamaura, C. (2020). Marriage and marriageability: The practices of matchmaking between men in Japan and women in China. Cornell University Press. Yoshida, A. (2010a). Cultural lag, anomie, and single women in Japan. Ph.D. dissertation. Department of Sociology, the University of Oklahoma. Yoshida, A. (2010b). Role of cultural lag in marriage decline for Japan’s boom and bust cohorts. Marriage & Family Review, 46(1–2), 60–78. Yoshida, A. (2011). No chance for romance: Corporate culture, gendered work, and increased singlehood in Japan. Contemporary Japan, 23(2), 213–234. Yoshida, A. (2017). Unmarried women in Japan: The drift into singlehood. Routledge. Yoshida, A. (2023). Anomie, gender, and inequality: Developing sociological theory of singlehood from Japanese experiences. Journal of Family Theory and Review, 1–20. https://doi. org/10.1111/jftr.12493 Yoshida, A. (n.d.). Increased desire for marriage under the pandemic: Associated factors and gender differences [Manuscript in preparation]. Department of Sociology, Criminology & Anthropology, University of Wisconsin – Whitewater. Akiko Yoshida is Professor Emerit of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin  – Whitewater. Yoshida received the Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 2010. Yoshida’s research interests include singlehood in Japan, gender, parenting, and transnational family. Yoshida’s publications include a monograph entitled Unmarried Women in Japan: The Drift into Singlehood (Routledge, 2017), a refereed article, “Anomie, Gender, and Inequality: Developing Sociological Theory of Singlehood from Japanese Experiences” (Journal of Family Theory and Review, 2023), and a book chapter, “How to Collect Data: An Introduction to Qualitative Social Science Methods” in Studying Japan: Handbook of Research Designs, Fieldwork and Methods (Nomos, 2020).  

Caitlin Meagher is Lecturer of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She received her D.Phil. from the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford in 2018. She is the author of Inside a Japanese Sharehouse: Dreams and Realities (Routledge, 2021), “Coding and Theorizing” in Studying Japan: Handbook of Research Designs, Fieldwork and Methods (Nomos, 2020), and “The Price of Belonging in a Japanese Sharehouse” in The Price of Belonging in Asia (Springer, 2023). Her research interests include sex, gender, family, housing, and social change in contemporary Japan.  

Infertility in Relation to Japanese Parental Norms Chiaki Shirai

Abstract  The characteristics of fertility treatment in post-World War II Japan can be summarized in four points. First, marriage and having children are strongly linked, and fertility treatment is part of the framework of marriage. Second, until recently, health insurance did not cover fertility treatment, and part of the cost was covered as a measure for preventing the birth rate decline. Third, there is no law regarding reproductive technology involving a third party; thus, third-party reproduction is neither legal nor illegal. Fourth, people are unwilling to have a genetically unrelated child. On the other hand, a new trend is emerging. People increasingly choose to have children without genetic ties through egg donation, adoption, or foster care. Single women, lesbian couples, and transgender couples having children through sperm donation have emerged, and parents and children are becoming more diverse. The challenge for the future is for the legal system to match these changes. Keywords  Infertility · Marriage · Third-party reproduction · Parental norms

Birth in Wedlock and Fertility Treatment A characteristic of Japanese family formation is that marriage (kekkon) tends to take the form of legal marriage (kon’in), and marriage and having children are linked. Since Japan does not recognize civil unions, the actual status of de facto marriages is unknown. To be precise, it is possible to count couples that do not report their marriages in the family registers but report their current common residence in the resident registers (indicated as husband and wife “not reported”). However, the number of such households is not published, nor do de facto couples necessarily do C. Shirai (*) Shizuoka University, Shizuoka, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_2

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this. The actual status of paper divorces, in which a couple has a child within the marriage and then files for divorce but continues to be de facto married, is also unknown. However, the number of children born out of wedlock has remained consistently low (2%–3%) since World War II, indicating that legal marriage and having children are indeed linked. Moreover, a national survey showed that the percentage of never-married people in their early thirties who have experienced cohabitation is only 15.7% (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2022). Single people consider being able to have children an advantage of marriage— the item with the highest percentage among those listed as advantages of marriage in the 2020, After World War II., Annual Population and Social Security Surveys (the National Fertility Survey)—indicating that marriage is associated with the ability to have children. However, significant changes in attitudes toward having children can be seen over the past 5 years. In the 2020 Annual Population and Social Security Surveys, the proportion of respondents who said that couples should have children fell below 50% for the first time since the war: 36.6% for unmarried women and 45.8% for married women. In the 2015 survey, these percentages were 67.4% and 66.6%, respectively. Regarding the item “Reasons for having children,” an overwhelming majority of married respondents who wanted children agreed with the statement, “Having children makes my life more enjoyable and enriched,” while the statement, “It is natural for me to get married and have children” showed a declining trend. The statement, “Because I want to have children with the person I love” showed an upward trend among never-married men and married women and a downward trend among never-married women. It has also been reported that the percentage of “shotgun” weddings (sazukari-­ kon or dekichatta-kon), in which a woman marries because she becomes pregnant, is increasing. According to a national survey, having a child as the reason for deciding to marry accounts for 50% of women married under the age of 25 years (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2022). According to Vital Statistics, which calculates the timing of childbirths and marriages, about one in five marriages are “pregnancy-precedent” (2019 statistics; Special Vital Statistics Report, 2021). Some observers consider pregnancy out of wedlock a loosening of sexual behavior. On the contrary, it shows the strength of the legitimacy norm of trying to have a baby within marriage. From these facts, we can see the integration of marriage and childbirth. People do not cohabit before marriage or may enter into a de facto marriage but have children after legal marriage or marry because of a pregnancy and register their marriage when they marry legally. Furthermore, the percentage of stepfamilies is not as high as in Europe or the U.S., so there are few blended families. There are no official statistics on stepfamilies. However, it is known that about 60% of divorced couples have underage children, that the mother has custody in about 90% of divorces (the Japanese legal system allows sole custody after divorce), and that one in four marriages is a second marriage for one of the spouses (with wives accounting for 60%). Thus, it is estimated that about 10% of children may be stepfamily members (Stepfamily Association of Japan, 2020). In general, it can be inferred that only 2% of children are born outside marriage and

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that the standard form of a continuing first marriage is the common form of parent– child relationship. Reproductive technologies have been used to assist infertile couples in having children. However, in Japan, there is no law governing the use of such technologies. There are only guidelines issued by academic societies on obstetrics and gynecology. These guidelines differ between academic societies, and there are no specific penalties for disregarding them, although there have been cases of expulsion from societies for apparent disregard. The guidelines of the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the main relevant academic society in Japan, limited in vitro fertilization (IVF) coverage to legally married infertile couples until 2014 (JSOG, 2014). After that year, IVF coverage has remained limited to infertile couples, although marital status confirmation through the presentation of family registers is no longer required. Single women, sexual minorities (e.g., lesbian couples and transgender men who have not changed their gender in the family registers), and people who are not medically infertile but wish to undergo IVF are not eligible.

 ertility Decline and Health Insurance Coverage F of Fertility Treatment For a long time, fertility treatment was not covered by health insurance in Japan. However, the number of fertility treatment cycles (449,900 in 2020; Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 2022) is the highest in the world, and the number of IVF centers in proportion to the population is also the highest in the world. In Japan, 22.7% of couples have undergone or are currently undergoing infertility testing or treatment (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2022). In 2020, 60,381 babies were born with the help of reproductive technologies, such as IVF and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). This accounted for 7.2% of the 840,835 births. Thus, it can be said that Japan ranks among the top countries in terms of fertility treatment administration. As mentioned earlier, until recently, health insurance did not cover fertility treatment in Japan. To be precise, if, for example, a diagnosis of ovulation failure was made, a certain amount was covered by insurance, such as ovulation induction, several ultrasounds, but medically assisted reproduction (MAR), such as artificial insemination, IVF, or ICSI, was not covered. Although there were signature collection campaigns and petitions for insurance coverage, mainly by patients undergoing fertility treatment, they failed for various reasons. Japan has a universal health insurance system and medical fees that are determined by the Advisory body to the Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare. A flat reimbursement rate would force down the cost of treatment for specialty clinics with advanced performance. Procedures such as artificial insemination and IVF tend to be undertaken regardless of whether the diagnosis of the cause of infertility is confirmed through testing. When health insurance is applicable, coverage is limited to certain age groups. However, to our knowledge, there has been no overt opposition to health insurance coverage.

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Perhaps as a workaround for covering the cost of fertility treatment at the government’s discretion without troublesome discussions about health insurance coverage, a system for subsidizing a portion of the cost of IVF began in 2004 under the Specific Fertility Treatment Subsidy Program as a countermeasure to the falling birthrate. Some local governments also provide subsidies for artificial insemination and fertility treatment on their own. Some companies have also introduced leave programs or provided benefits for fertility treatment. Some de facto marriages were also covered in 2020. Since April 2022, general infertility treatment, including artificial insemination and assisted reproduction medical treatment, such as IVF and ICSI, has been covered by insurance at a uniform cost, with 30% co-payment. Thus, becoming a parent in Japan is tied to marriage, and single people and sexual minorities are not considered eligible to become parents and cannot receive MAR under the guidelines of academic societies. On the other hand, once married, it is considered natural to have children, and fertility treatment is covered. However, this link between marriage and childbearing in Japan is a modern concept. The expectations and pressure that modern women feel from their parents-in-law (Shutome and Shuto) to have children (Tanaka et al., 2018) were not the case in the premodern era. From the Tokugawa to Meiji periods, there was a path for childless women (Tanaka & Lowry, 2018). Ms. Teraoka, for example, describes the pressure from her parents-in-law to have children as follows: After about two years of marriage and no pregnancy, I went to the hospital to try anyway. It was a repetitive cycle of taking medicine and menstruating. Since I didn’t have children, I was working long hours, until I got fed up with fertility treatments and quit it. I did not go to the hospital for several years. When I moved to a new city, I started going to the hospital again. I didn’t have much of a sense of impatience to infertility for myself yet. I was more concerned about whether I would be able to continue working once we had children. However, since my husband is much older than me, people around me asked if we’d had children yet or whether we could have children. Some even asked me if I should stop working. Soon after we got married, my parents-in-law told us to move in with them when we had a child, so we lived near them. After years of not having children, we decided to move in with them. My mother-in-law has grandchildren, but it seems that she wants grandchildren who are the children of her eldest son (chonan), my husband, so when another family had a child, she told me straight out that she wanted one as soon as possible, either a boy or a girl. I wanted to have a child myself, but when my mother-in-law said that to me, I felt strangely repulsed and thought that I don’t want to have a child because my mother-in-law told me to. (Shirai, 2012)

Orientation Toward Genetic Linkage Under a romantic love ideology in which marriage—that is, legal marriage—is based on affection (intimacy) and conception is based on sex that occurs naturally out of love within the marriage, it is taken for granted that parents and children are blood relatives. There is a saying in Japanese, as in many places: “Blood is thicker

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than water.” It is often said that Japanese people care about blood ties, but this is based on the modern family model. In the premodern era, there were cases of adopting adults, such as married couple adoption, in which a couple who had a child was adopted by the entire family. Son-in-law adoption, in which a “son” is adopted by a daughter’s husband and becomes his legitimate heir as his eldest son, still exists today. Adoption is still practiced in various situations, such as when a single person adopts a single adult person as an inheritance tax measure, or when grandparents adopt a grandchild, because when children inherit from their parents, they pay less estate tax than with other relationships. These are called “regular adoptions,” adoptions which maintain a relationship with both the adoptive and the biological parents and children, and are distinguished from special adoptions, in which the legal relationship between the birth parents and their child and relatives is terminated for the sake of the child’s welfare,. On the other hand, special adoptions are rare. According to judicial statistics, in 2021, there were only 683 such adoptions (The General Secretariat of the Supreme Court of Japan 2022). In the aftermath of World War II, more underage children were adopted or fostered than now. With the advent of fertility treatments using medication and medical technologies, such as hormone medication, ultrasound, artificial insemination, IVF, and ICSI, the number of children born with the help of such techniques has increased (see Fig. 1). Many women who have fertility issues do not want to have genetically unrelated children through egg donation, sperm donation, adoption, or foster parenting. In a survey conducted by the author, when asked about their options, most (91%) said that their only option was to undergo fertility treatment using the couple’s sperm and eggs, 13.7% would consider adoption, 7.3% would consider foster parenting, 5.6% would consider egg donation, and 3.6% would consider sperm donation (Shirai, 2013). Thus, most couples engaged in fertility treatment because they wanted a child with whom they had a genetic connection. The main reason for never considering adoption or foster care as an option was that they wanted a child born to themselves and their spouses (67.5%). The next most common responses were “I am not confident about raising an adopted or foster child,” “I feel it is too far away from me,” and “I am not confident that it will be a good choice for the adopted or foster child” (48.4%, 25.6%, and 21%, respectively). These indicated that they did not consider adoption or foster care because they were not familiar with adopted or foster children in Japanese society, and they were anxious about their care. Although few respondents (17.8%) answered that they felt like they could not love another person’s child, since this is the other side of stating that they wanted a child born to two married people, it is likely that many people actually feel a sense of avoidance to another person’s child. What did women with fertility issues say was important to them about blood connection and childbearing? Approximately half of the respondents answered that they wanted to carry on their husbands’ genes, their own genes, and the genes of their parents, ancestors, or siblings (53.3%, 45.3%, and 43.1%, respectively). About one in three respondents agreed with the statement, “I feel like I am missing something if I do not give birth to my own children.” It is evident that the blood

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70000

60000

50000

40000

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20000

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Sperm Donated Child

Children in Foster Home

Children in Foster Family

Regular Adopon

Special Adopon

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Fig. 1  Number of unrelated parents and children and children outside the home

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connection extends beyond passing on one’s own genes to one’s children to include one’s spouse, parents, or siblings. After 5 years of continuous fertility treatment, including IVF, Ms. Iijima discontinued it. In her words, “I had tried everything I could do, but I that felt I was at my limits physically, emotionally, and financially.” Rather than feeling “refreshed after having done everything,” she said, “I felt like a marathon runner falling down at the finish line as if I couldn’t run anymore.” When she received MAR treatment and did not get a positive pregnancy test, she had the following feelings: I had the feeling that everything that had been connected all the way back to my ancestors and from my ancestors to my generation would be cut off here. Maybe it was a male kind of thinking, but I really felt that it was a regrettable [munen] feeling. My mother passed away, and I felt it was a shame that what was passed down from her to me could not be passed on to the next generation as a blood relationship. My siblings were not married or had no children. My husband’s siblings have children, and while the birth of a child within the extended family [miuchi] is a joyous occasion, it is quite complicated. My husband’s siblings have children, but the birth of a child in our kinship is still quite complicated [Author’s note: Even if Mr. and Mrs. Iijima do not have a child, her husband’s genealogy will not be interrupted.] (Shirai, 2012)

Castro-Vázquez’s (2017) extensive interview-based study of Japanese women stated that all mothers drew on a putative sociobiological account of motherhood as intrinsically embedded in women’s subjectivity. Childbirth, they averred, was most likely the result of instinctual behavior. The desire to have children appeared to them to be an integral element of a woman’s life cycle and, thus, inevitable. Ms. Kashiwagi said the following: Although I was unable to have a child even after fertility treatment, I still wanted to raise one. I wanted to raise an adopted or foster young child. However, bringing a child who was not related to us by blood into our family was realistically not an option in our rural home. Our neighbors and relatives are all like family in this environment, so without their understanding, it would be difficult. I know a woman who married a man who was adopted by a childless couple. Her husband told her, “Until you came here, I was all alone.” Even if he wanted to go back to his original home, he could not. Therefore, it is not a good idea for parents to discuss and decide on adoption. [Author’s note: Mr. Kashiwagi’s story is one of adoptions in which children are moved between relatives. Such adoptions used to take place in Japan, people who were grandparents arranged which grandchildren would be moved as adopted children to which kinship families, often the eldest son and his wife, who had no children born.] My ie [family] is an old rural family, and it is impossible for us to have no heirs. We have many ancestors and a family grave, so it is not possible to say, “We had no children, so we are done here.” My husband has two brothers, and fortunately, each of them had two boys. In other words, my husband has two nephews who are their second sons [jinan]. Before we started fertility treatment, we thought that one of them would come to us for adoption. [Author’s note: The second son is not the heir of the family and can be adopted by another family. In fact, she was told by her mother-in-law to “get the second son of the second son.”]

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C. Shirai Even if we were to adopt the child, it would be better if the child came to us of his or her own volition after he or she became an adult. Nowadays, no one wants to be adopted by another family, so we need to make sure that we have enough money and that the house is such that people will want to come and adopt him. [Author’s note: In the past, children adopted as heirs to a family were regular adoptees, meaning that they were adopted as adults and maintained their kinship with their original families.] Many times, I have been asked by foreigners why I do not adopt children, with great reserve. I explained that in Japan, blood is important. Talking to them, I thought that in the Christian world, the perfect love is God’s love. The child is entrusted by God, the child comes down from God, the woman conceives, gives birth, and raises the child, and when the person dies, they return to God. They are all God’s children, so they can be adopted. But for us, the perfect love is the love of a mother. Selfless love is love from our mothers, and it is imprinted on us from childhood that love from our mothers must be 100%. So when we get married, we are imbued with it because we were born women; we have to have children, and we have to be good mothers. This is why infertility is so painful.

Under the Civil Code, we no longer have the family system, and although we have adoption, it is practically impossible to adopt a child who is not related to me by blood. I am a daughter-in-law [yome], and if I can no longer follow this idea, the only option is divorce and me leaving this house. (Shirai, 2012)

Third-Party Reproduction As Shimazono and Hibino (2013) noted, third-party reproduction, or donor conception (DC), is rare in Japan. The increasing prevalence of infertility is associated with a tendency to marry late and delay the onset of procreative life, resulting in infertility caused by an age-related decline in ovum quality and ovarian function. Thus, the prevalence of infertile patients who may benefit from IVF using donor oocytes has been increasing. However, despite the wider acceptance of artificial reproductive technology: ART, donor oocyte IVF has been performed only sporadically. Uncertainties in public policies regarding third-party reproduction in general and oocyte donation in particular have contributed to Japanese fertility clinics’ reluctance to establish donor oocyte programs. Although medical, bioethical, and legal experts have called for the legal regulation of ART, no statute has thus far been enacted. In the absence of a legal framework, the regulation of ART is left to medical practitioners’ voluntary compliance with policy statements, guidelines, and recommendations issued by professional bodies and governmental committees. However, these are not in complete agreement with each other (Shimazono & Hibino, 2013, 331–332). Gamete donation is considered the next best thing in the modern family model because the child is half blood related to the couple, rather than completely unrelated to them like an adopted child (Shirai, 2013). As kinship becomes biologicalized (Finkler, 2001; Carsten, 2003; Shirai, 2010; Gunnarsson Payne, 2016), eggs are so special that to be able to mimic the modern family to the greatest possible extent, people choose half-blood egg donation over adoption. Some people choose a donor

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who looks as much like the aspiring mother as possible or feel a special emotional attachment to the donated egg, regarding it as a substitute for them (Shirai, 2019). In an interview conducted by the author, a woman who gave birth after egg donation stated that she chose it over adoption because, unlike the latter, it gave her a genetic link to her husband. She also said that she would have felt sorry not to pass on her husband’s genes (Shirai, 2018). Stigma and self-blame for not being able to conceive and give birth and feelings of wanting to have her husband’s child, even if it was not her own, were apparent. However, according to some people, “whether or not to use one’s own eggs is not particularly important” (Shirai, 2018), and “people of different ethnicities are also egg donor candidates.” Thus, new sprouts regarding genetic connections can also be seen. The media have also begun to report on lesbian couples who have become parents through sperm donation and gay couples who have become parents through surrogacy. Aki, who was interviewed by the author, had a child after egg donation. She chose egg donation because her husband did not wish to adopt and because he and the child would have a genetic link. However, because she was “particular about whether or not there is a genetic link between her and her child,” she said that if she had not been able to have a child through egg donation, she would have opted for adoption. Since the couple had lived abroad, where parents and children with different skin colors were the norm, they did not worry about ethnicity when selecting egg donors but considered them in order of donor timing and for being “good people” (education, profile such as hobbies, and appearance). The result was a Caucasian donor. She also wanted to “shake up the Japanese view of the family.” To the Japanese, her child looked unusual. When the mother and child were out together, she was asked, “What country is your husband from?” When her husband was with them, she was asked, “Did you remarry?” In such cases, she would reply, “This child was born through egg donation” because she did not think it was wrong or something that needed to be hidden. If the child asked, “Why is my hair this color?” she thought that it would be a good time to announce it. In the course of raising her child, she came to feel that genes were irrelevant, that it did not have to be her husband’s sperm, that if she could go back to a younger age, she would still want to have the baby with the donated egg of the child’s origin, and that it could be the other’s egg. (Shirai, 2018).

COVID-19 and the Future of Fertility Treatment in Japan In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the prime minister asked the public to avoid nonessential (fuyo-fukyu) outings. Though not an order, this request to refrain from going out restricted behaviors. On April 1, 2020, the Japanese Society for Reproductive Medicine issued a statement offering the option of postponing fertility treatment (Japan Society for Reproductive Medicine, 2020). Both fertility patients and medical institutions indeed often chose to postpone it—for example, by

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postponing the transfer of frozen embryos. On the other hand, people who were impatient and felt that they could not wait for a cycle for fertility treatment and those who were nearing the age limit for fertility treatment subsidies said that fertility treatment was not fuyo-fukyu but of urgent necessity (hitsuyo-shikyu). In Japan, the age limit for health insurance coverage for infertility treatment was restricted (coverage for up to three embryo transfers for people under 40–43 years old and no coverage for those over 43 years old). Moreover, the law regarding reproductive technologies involving third parties needs to be clarified. There are different proposals regarding the right to know one’s origins, use of commercial gamete banks, gamete donation to non-legally married couples, and surrogacy. The public debate on the issue has been insufficient, and there are still many issues to be resolved.

References Carsten, J. (2003). After kinship. (New Departures in Anthropology). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511800382 Castro-Vázquez, G. (2017). Intimacy and reproduction in contemporary Japan/Genaro Castro-­ Vázquez (1st ed.). Routledge. Finkler, K. (2001). The kin in the gene: The medicalization of family and kinship in American society. Current Anthropology, 42(2), 235–263. https://doi.org/10.1086/320004 Japan Society for Reproductive Medicine. (2020). Statement from the Japan Society for Reproductive Medicine (JSRM) on new coronavirus infection (COVID-19). http://www.jsrm. or.jp/announce/187.pdf Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology. (2014). Deletion of the word “marriage” in “opinions on in  vitro fertilization and embryo transfer” and “opinions on the cryopreservation and transfer of human embryos and oocytes”. http://fa.kyorin.co.jp/jsog/readPDF. php?file=74/7/074070749.pdf#page=17 Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology. (2022). Summary report of ART online registry for 2020 by the Ethics Committee of the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Acta Obstetrica et Gynaecologica Japonica, 74(9), 1408–1429. Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. (2021). Special Vital Statistics Report. National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. (2022). Annual population and social security surveys: The sixteenth Japanese National Fertility Survey, 2020. https://www. ipss.go.jp/ps-­doukou/j/doukou16/JNFS16gaiyo.pdf. Accessed 10 July 2023. Payne, J. G. (2016). Grammars of kinship: Biological motherhood and assisted reproduction in the age of epigenetics. Signs, 41(3), 483–506. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26552830 Shimazono, Y., & Hibino, Y. (2013). Japanese infertility patients’ attitudes towards directed and non-directed oocyte donation: Analysis of a Questionnaire Survey and implications for public policy. Asian Bioethics Review, 5(4), 331–343. https://doi.org/10.1353/asb.2013.0063 Shirai, C. (2010). Reproductive technologies and parent–child relationships: Japan’s past and present examined through the lens of donor insemination. International Journal of Japanese Sociology, 19, 18–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-­6781.2010.01126.x Shirai, C. (2012). Telling about infertility: 19 women’s life story. Kaimeisha. Shirai, C. (2013). Infertile women’s preference in non-blood parent-child relationships: From the perspective of the kinship-choice principle. The Annals of Sociology, 54, 69–84. Shirai, C. (2018). Attitudes and experience regarding disclosure of egg donation in Japan: Through longitudinal interviews with relevant parties. Journal of Reproductive Psychology, 4(2), 26–32.

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Shirai, C. (2019). Genetic ties and affinity: Longitudinal interviews on two mothers’ experiences of egg donation in Japan. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 12, 299–315. https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-­6995912 Stepfamily Association of Japan. (2020). Divorce and remarriage in Japan. https://stepfamily. info/2020/01/15/explainjp/ Tanaka, K., & Lowry, D. (2018). Stigma and childlessness in historical and contemporary Japan. In N.  Sappleton (Ed.), Voluntary and Involuntary Childlessness (Emerald Studies in Reproduction, Culture and Society) (pp. 337–353). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi. org/10.1108/978-­1-­78754-­361-­420181015 Tanaka, K., Johnson, N. E., & Lowry, D. (2018). Gender, family norms, and male-factor infertility in Japan: An analysis of internet blogs. Journal of Family Issues, 39(14), 3713–3731. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0192513X18796874 Chiaki Shirai is a professor at Shizuoka University, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and her major is sociology. In her JSPS KAKENHI Grant, she published Prenatal Testing and Disability in Modern Asia: International Comparison in 2020–2023 and Gender and Reproduction in Modern Asia: International Comparison in 2017–2019. Main Publications are Childbirth and Technology in Asia: The Frontiers of Reproduction (2022, the author and editor), Foster: Foster Families, Adoptive Families, Family Homes and Social Care (2019), and so on.  

Patriarchy, Paternalism, and Politics of Reproductive Autonomy: Abortion Rights in Japan Eiko Saeki

Abstract  While Japan ranks relatively high in overall health indicators with life expectancy and healthcare coverage, a plethora of problems exist when it comes to reproductive health. With the lack of comprehensive sexuality education, youth are at risk of experiencing sexual activity without essential knowledge. Furthermore, the dearth of access to reliable and affordable contraceptives, as well as the social stigma and various hurdles to obtain an abortion, impede women from exercising their sexual and reproductive autonomy. Focusing on the politics surrounding abortion, this chapter examines the structural mechanisms that obstruct people’s access to essential reproductive healthcare service. I argue that patriarchal notions in policy, conservative approach in education, and paternalism in medicine, along with the lack of respect for sexual and reproductive health and rights in all three fields, curtail people’s ability to exercise their agency in reproduction. Keywords  Abortion · Sexual and reproductive health and rights · Policy · Comprehensive sexuality education · Health system

Introduction While safety surrounding reproduction has improved significantly over the past several decades in Japan, many people in the country still face numerous challenges in exercising their sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). In fact, Japan is one of the countries with the lowest maternal mortality rate with 2.8 in 100,000 in 2020, compared to 176.1  in 1950. The rate for perinatal deaths (stillbirths after 22 weeks of gestation as well deaths of infants under 7 days old) has declined as well, with 3.2 cases in 1000 births in 2020, compared to 20.2 in 1981, with the 2020 E. Saeki (*) Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_3

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data making it the lowest in the world (MHLW, 2022a). However, with difficulty in access to comprehensive sexuality education (Asai, 2020; Motegi, 2018), reliable contraceptives (Hirayama, 2019; Matsumoto, 2005; Miyasaka, 2020; Ogino, 2008), as well as safe abortions (Norgren, 2001; Ogino, 2008, 2014; Tsukahara, 2014, 2022), people experience various barriers in taking control of their sexually and reproduction. The burden is experienced disproportionally by those who are marginalized not just by their gender but also by their age and social class (Nakajima, 2017), as well as immigration status (Tanaka, 2020). This chapter focuses on the politics surrounding abortion, one of the most critical aspects of reproductive rights, elucidating how institutional mechanisms create and reinforce stigma while hindering people’s ability to practice their agency in making their own reproductive decisions. The World Health Organization (WHO) insists that human rights entail access to health care, which includes comprehensive abortion care services. The International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) also declares that access to safe abortion as “a basic and non-negotiable tool for ensuring the human rights of every woman, not just in one region or country, but globally” (FIGO website). In order to illuminate the structural dynamics that inhibit an individual’s access to quality abortion care, I examine the three elements that the WHO Abortion Care Guideline (hereafter WHO Guideline, 2022:xx) lists as necessary for the provision of quality abortion services: “(1) respect for human rights including a supportive framework of law and policy; (2) the availability and accessibility of information; and (3) a supportive, universally accessible, affordable and well functioning health system.” Drawing upon governmental data as well as reports by organizations promoting SRHR, this chapter discusses how discrete social institutions, namely law, education, and the healthcare system, interact with one another leaving some women to fall through the cracks of the bureaucratic divides, rendering them as second-­ class citizens. This chapter is divided into three sections. First, I outline the policies pertaining to abortion. In Japan, the Penal Code prohibits abortion, but access to this health service is provided under the Maternal Protection Law (MPL), which gives exceptions to the Penal Code. The illegality of abortion generates the sense of stigma. Furthermore, with the patriarchal socio-legal regime, women are often unable to make their reproductive decisions independently, most clearly exemplified by the requirement for spousal authorization to abortion for married women. Second, I discuss the historical shifts and the current state of sexuality education in schools, highlighting how the backlash by the conservative forces in the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in the early 2000s stagnated its development nationally. I also note that the current educational approach in Japan posits a serious contradiction with how the Penal Code treats the sexuality of youth. While the educational systems bar youth from accessing essential knowledge about sexuality and reproduction for the reason of being too young, the Penal Code sets the age of sexual consent as 13  years old, regarding anyone older than 12  years old as capable of giving consent to sexual acts (though a bill to change this to 16 years old is currently under review in the Diet as of March 2023).

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Following the discussions of education, I focus on the dynamics in the health systems. I examine the barriers posed by the national insurance system to women’s access to necessary medical care on reproductive health in general, and abortion in particular. Further, I discuss how the professional organization, namely the Japan Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (Nihon Sanfujinka Ikai, JAOG), which began in 1949 as the organization for physicians licensed to practice medical procedures specified in the Eugenic Protection Law, prioritizes their vested interests over securing women’s safety or reproductive autonomy. [This should be distinguished from the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology (Nihon Sanka Fujinka Gakkai), which is a general professional organization for obstetricians and gynecologists.] Specifically, this section considers the abortion techniques used despite the warning by the WHO, as well as their opposition to the liberalization and deregulation of contraceptives, emergency contraceptives, and medical abortions. I conclude the chapter by considering how the elements of policies, education, and health systems interact with one another to create the situations we have today, and introduce recent feminist movements for SRHR in general, and abortion rights movement in particular, to highlight the social change we are about to observe.

Background Reproduction can bring with it myriad risks, some visible, some hidden, that reflect social and medical precarity. In Japan, with weak social infrastructure surrounding reproduction, if one struggles with pregnancy and cannot access medical services or social support, the outcomes are daunting. For example, lack of support for those who experience unintended pregnancy contributes to their poor mental health which could result in suicide. Research on unexpected deaths during pregnancy and within a year after birth in the 23 wards of Tokyo from 2005 to 2013 revealed that there were 63 cases of suicide, which included 23 cases that occurred during pregnancy. Among them, the highest number (12 cases) happened during the second month of pregnancy, around the time when women typically find out that they are pregnant (Takeda, 2017). Piccolare, a civil society organization, which provides support for those who struggle with unintended pregnancy, argues that it is not a coincidence. They receive numerous desperate calls for help by those who experience unintended pregnancy yet lack knowledge, financial means or social support. Challenges continue even after birth. Unwanted pregnancy in social isolation could also threaten the safety of their children. For example, according to data from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW), among 49 children who died as a result of abuse in 2020, 32 died before they turned 1-year-old, consisting of 65.3% of the total cases. Furthermore, 8 died within 24  hours after birth, and 8 within a month after birth, consisting of 50% of the total deaths within a year (MHLW, 2022a, p. 133, p. 179). The accused in most of those cases were the mothers (six cases within 24 hours and seven cases within a month, with unknown cases with two and one respectively), and this pattern has been consistent since data

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collection began in 2003. Within the 18 intervening years, 207 infants under 1 month old died as the result of abuse, and mothers were the perpetrators in the 87.4% of the cases (MHLW, 2022a, b, c, p. 181). Those who become pregnant young are most at risk, as is evident in the areas of perinatal deaths (MHLW, 2022a, b, c, p. 138). Giving birth at a young age is correlated with a higher risk of preventable infant death on the day of birth. For example, within the total 173 cases between 2003 and 2020, 47 cases (27.8%) were 19 years-­ old or younger; 34 cases (20.1%) were between 20 and 24 years old, and the percentage continues to decline as women get older (MHLW, 2022a, b, c, p. 186). This data is particularly striking when we consider that teen pregnancy is relatively rare. While only approximately 1% of births are by those under 20-years old, 16.9% of infant deaths caused by abuse from 2006 and 2020 involved teen pregnancy (MHLW, 2022a, b, c, p. 138). As Piccolare (2021) argues, these individuals, who experience unintended pregnancy in social isolation with limited knowledge about reproduction, support from others, legal protections, or medical care, were also victims of societal neglect.

Policies The WHO considers policy framework with respect for human rights as one of the central elements that enables provision of quality abortion services. More specifically, the WHO Guideline (2022) insists that abortion should be legal, safe (both physically and mentally), and accessible based on the free and informed consent of the woman, and post-abortion care should be provided. Furthermore, it urges that relevant laws must be based on the framework of the SRHR. This section focuses on the legal framework pertaining to abortion while examining to what extent policies in Japan are compliant with that standard. In Japan, the Penal Code prohibits artificial termination of pregnancy. Its predecessor was promulgated in 1880 in the Meiji period (1868–1912). It was revised in 1907, but the prohibition of abortion remained and became even more strict (Tsukahara, 2022, p. 13). Articles 212 to 216 of the current Penal Code are on artificial termination of pregnancy, with Article 212 stating that when a woman aborted her pregnancy using medication and other methods, she could be sentenced to up to 1 year of imprisonment. However, in the context of rapid increase in the number of births after WWII, the Japanese government established the Eugenic Protection Law in 1948 to, as Article 1 states, “prevent the increase of the inferior descendants from the eugenic point of view” (Ministry of Health and Welfare, 1960, p.  3), and allowed termination of pregnancies under certain circumstances. This law was created solely for the purpose of eugenics and population control, and numerous forced sterilizations were carried out under this law (Fujino, 2021). In the year after the law was enacted, financial reasons were added as a justification for obtaining an abortion. With this

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deregulation, abortion became a widely used medical practice with 1.17 million reported cases at its peak in 1955 (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2022). With the expansion of family planning initiated by the Ministry of Welfare and carried out by nurses, public health nurses and midwives giving instructions on how to use condoms to housewives (Tama, 2006), the number of abortions gradually declined. In 1996, the Maternal Protection Law (MPL, botai hogo hō) was implemented after removing eugenic elements from the Eugenic Protection Law. The MPL considers that abortion is justifiable if the pregnancy is under 22 weeks of gestation. The procedure is carried out by a physician certified with the MPL, and the pregnancy was caused by rape, or the pregnancy is believed to cause serious damage to the woman, either physically or financially. The law also requires the spousal authorization if the woman is married. The number of abortions has declined historically, but if we examine the age distribution at when abortions occur, it is evident that people in different age groups experience unintended pregnancy and decisions about abortion differently. In the Fiscal Year 2021 (April 2021 to March 2022), there were 126,174 cases of abortion reported. The overall abortion rate (number of abortions for every 1000 women) was 5.1, with the highest among the ages 20 to 24 (10.1). For women 19 years old or younger, the rate was 3.3 (7.1 among 19-year-olds, and 4.5 among 18-year-olds) (MHLW, 2022b, pp. 8–9). While the number of abortion cases was lower among women under 20 years old than the older cohort, they have a higher percentage of abortion within all pregnancies. 5,542 individuals under 20 years old, including 32 under 15  years old, gave birth (MHLW, 2022d, p.  13). The number of abortions among the same cohort is 9,093, which includes 125 cases by those who are under 15 years old (MHLW, 2022b, p. 8). This means that 62.1% of people under 20 years old who became pregnant (calculated as the sum of the numbers of those who gave birth or had an abortion) had an abortion, and for those who are under 15 years old, the number is 79.6%. While patient-centered medicine has become the mainstream approach in the Japanese health care system, abortion is an exception where medical paternalism remains the dominant mode of practice. One of the most problematic aspects of the MPL is that physicians, rather than pregnant women themselves, are the ones who decide if they should actually obtain one. In her analysis of the JAOG’s handbook on abortion, the prominent scholar and activist on abortion rights, Kumi Tsukahara found (2022, p. 68) there is no mention of SRHR in the handbook, and the handbook even states that Abortion is not something that (physicians) provide based on a request by a patient. It is something that should be carried out only when designated physicians determined it as appropriate. This is the difference between abortion and other types of medicine.

The handbook states that the purpose of the MPL is “to protect the health of motherhood,” and Tsukahara points out that by definition, those who wish to obtain abortion are not part of the protection (Tsukahara, 2022, pp. 66–67).

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In addition to paternalism, the MPL, as well as JAOG’s approach, conceptualizes reproduction squarely in the patriarchal framework. That is, when a married woman wishes to obtain an abortion, spousal consent is mandated, making Japan one of the eleven countries (and the only country in the G7) that place such limitations (Center for Reproductive Justice website). This stipulation of spousal authorization runs counter to the global standards.  The  WHO Guideline (2022) as well as the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (1994) state that a third-party’s consent should not be necessary when people wish to obtain an abortion. The spousal agreement is required even when the biological father of the fetus is not the husband, revealing it is not even about the idea of giving voice to the individual who impregnates the woman. Only in 2021, did the MHLW make an exception for spousal consent for women experiencing domestic violence. What is worse, common-law marriage is also regarded as marriage in this context, and because of the vagueness of this definition, many clinics require partners’ signature regardless of marital status to avoid a civil suit. Similarly, while the MPL does not require parental consent for minors, some clinics demand these signatures to avoid legal challenges. In one well-publicized case reported by the Asahi Shimbun (June 17, 2021) among others, a 21-year-old woman was arrested for manslaughter of an infant after giving birth alone in a public bathroom in 2020. She and the father both agreed to have an abortion, but after his friend said he might have been extorted, he ignored her text messages and phone calls. The woman had to cancel the appointment for abortion twice, and after multiple clinics rejected her request for the reason of not being able to acquire the man’s signature on the paperwork, she could not receive the procedure while still legal. In the trial, the woman said that she did not tell her mother because she did not want to make her mother sad, and she could not tell her friends for the fear of isolation and negative judgment. This case revealed that spousal agreement mandate could block women’s reproductive decisions regardless of their marital status, and stigma against abortion makes it difficult for women to seek help when they face challenges. As the discussion above demonstrates, the policy framework in Japan is not supportive for people to exercise their sexual and reproductive autonomy. The case described above is not an isolated incident, and there has been a pattern of desperate attempts by individuals to take control of their bodies and their lives. Such tragedy is preventable. Comprehensive sexuality education, reliable contraceptives, emergency contraceptives, and abortion function as safety nets to protect individuals who could become pregnant, but society fails them by not providing access. In terms of abortion, its illegality stipulated in the Penal Code makes it difficult for many people to recognize that they are entitled to safe abortion as part of their human rights. Furthermore, overall policy framework disempowers abortion seekers, as paternalism within the JAOG as well as patriarchal notion within the MPL tell them that physicians and men in their family, rather than the women themselves, should make decisions about their bodies.

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Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) Gaining accurate knowledge is critical for people so that they can make an informed decision on important reproductive choices including abortion. The WHO Guideline (2022) maintains that information must be available and accessible to create the environment that enables the provision of quality abortion care. As outlined in the International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education by UNESCO (2018), sexuality education should provide children and youth with evidence-based and age-appropriate knowledge and skills about sexuality and relationships, while fostering a positive mindset toward human rights, gender equality, and diversity, which empower them as they transition to adulthood. While CSE has experienced backlash by political and religious forces, an increasing number of countries are implementing systems where they can ensure its provision in school settings and beyond (Ponzetti Jr., 2016). The Japanese educational system fails to provide CSE, due to the pressures from conservative political forces. In Japan, public schools are required to follow the curriculum guideline set forth by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). Yet, CSE is not part of the official curriculum. Historically, the Ministry of Education began the policy of abstinence education (junketsu kyōiku, which can be translated as purity education) in the late 1940s, and sexuality education was virtually non-existent during the early post-WWII period (Tashiro, 2003). However, there was a shift in this trend with the creation of the Japan Sex Education Foundation in 1972, followed by the expansion of other groups and organizations for quality sexuality education. In the late 1980s, teaching of sexuality in schools further expanded with the concern over HIV/AIDS.  By the early 1990s, a growing number of teachers, researchers, and administrators were engaging with improving sexuality education (Motegi, 2018). This trend halted abruptly in the early 2000s, however. Conservative council members of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government publicly attacked teachers providing sexuality education in a special education school in 2003 (Kanazaki, 2005). The subsequent negative depictions and reporting on such education by the mainstream media generated the fear of similar attacks among teachers, resulting in serious stagnation of the development of CSE in Japan. As a result of this backlash, as well as its endorsement by powerful political figures within national politics including Abe Shinzo and Yamatani Eriko from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, a number of restrictions have been placed on sexuality education. The omission of critical information such as intercourse, the process of pregnancy, contraceptives and abortion in the curriculum guideline meant that most schools cannot teach youth this essential knowledge. Even when implied, the use of euphemisms such as the term “sexual contact” being used to refer to intercourse, facilitates the sense of taboo about sexuality. That is, silence on what is clearly there sends the message that this is something people should not talk about openly (Zerubavel, 2006).

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This does not mean that youth in Japan are detached from information or experiences pertaining to sexuality. Children are exposed to sexual content from a very young age with the Internet and other venues. Sexual images and businesses are ubiquitous, with magazines with adult contents being displayed in convenience stores and the sex industry is often visible on many city streets. The youth engage in sexual acts in their lives as well. According to the Japanese Association for Sex Education, 4.5% of girls and 3.7% of boys experience sexual intercourse in middle school. The number increases to 19.3% and 13.6% in high school, and 36.7% and 47.0% in college respectively (2018). Without adequate knowledge from the educational system, it is likely that they are exposed to various risks, including unintended pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, as well as exploitation. The high percentage of teen pregnancies resulting in abortions also reflects the realty that youth are not equipped with knowledge or skills necessary to take control of their reproduction. The lack of quality sexuality education results in low levels of knowledge about reproduction. In an international study, Japan scored the lowest among the developed countries in the fertility knowledge score (Bunting et al., 2013, p. 392). The lack of basic knowledge about reproduction is also noted by Piccolare, which stated that among the nearly 3,000 cases where they were contacted between 2015 and 2019, 1,847 cases (63%) were by those who were concerned that they (or their partner) might have become pregnant. Of those cases, 172 people said that they were worried about getting pregnant even though there was no intercourse (2021, p. 59). Studies show that neither students nor teachers are satisfied with the current situation. According to Naoko Kimura (2021), college students expressed their dissatisfactions about their experiences of sexuality education in school. A study of high school teachers’ experiences with sexuality education argued that while teachers were confident with the topics included in the curriculum guidelines, they felt uneasy covering other issues essential to understanding sexuality but that were not addressed in the manual, such as pregnancy and abortion, and wished for professional development (Sato et al., 2022).

Health System Finally, the WHO Guideline (2022) considers a quality health system as the third element that creates an environment for the provision of safe, timely and comprehensive abortion care. Specifically, such health systems entail: universal health coverage and affordability of care, availability of essential medicines and evidence-based sexual and reproductive health services and competent care based on the notion of human rights that facilitate autonomous and informed decision-making. To evaluate the situations in Japan, this section first examines the accessibility of services mainly through the perspective of cost and bureaucratic procedure, demonstrating that reproduction in general is not well-supported in Japan. The latter half of the section discusses the JAOG’s stance on abortion especially with regards to the

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techniques used in the country, highlighting that paternalism and the lack of interest in SRHR, as well as their priority in protecting their monopoly in the abortion business contribute to the present situation.

Insurance and Public Subsidy The public medical insurance system generally provides access to people’s basic medical needs in Japan. However, this system conceptualizes health as the lack of illness, rather than overall physical and mental well-being. The outcome of this framing means that support for reproductive care is not included as a part of the system so long as it does not involve any types of complications, based on the idea that reproduction is not an illness (Ōnishi, 2014). The exclusion of basic reproductive care from the insurance system poses several problems, including the high cost of service and difficulty in access. When insurance does not cover particular practices and medications, the fee is determined by each medical facility at their discretion, creating the tendency of a high price tag for such services. The government provides support to cover part of the cost of the reproductive care needs, such as routine check-ups during pregnancy as well as delivery and post-delivery hospitalization, but because such care is not integrated into the insurance system, access to this subsidy is complicated and cumbersome. For example, to receive the coupons issued by the government for check-ups during pregnancy, pregnant women first have to acquire the medical confirmation of pregnancy at a doctor’s office, and report their pregnancy at a local city office, where they are registered as residents. The initial visit to a doctor’s office alone costs between 8,000 yen and 15,000 yen, which is not affordable for those who struggle financially. Furthermore, pregnant individuals who do not live in the city where they are registered as a resident cannot access such resources provided at the local government office. The cost of delivery and subsequent hospitalization is a significant burden for many people as well. The government provides the Childbirth Lump-sum Allowance (shussan ikuji ichiji kin) of 420,000 yen to those who are enrolled in the public insurance system. However, according to the MHLW, the average cost of delivery is 467,000 yen for private and 452,000 yen for public hospitals, excluding the cost for a room, which is charged at some hospitals. The price is higher for urban areas, with Tokyo as the most expensive with 553,000 yen even for public hospitals (MHLW, 2022c). The government recently announced its intension to raise the allowance to 500,000 yen, but there has been a pattern of hospitals and clinics raising their price every time the amount for the allowance has been increased (Mainichi Shimbun, December 15, 2022). There is even less support for controlling reproduction. Oral contraceptives, emergency contraceptives, and abortions are not covered by insurance, and unlike pregnancy check-ups, delivery and hospitalization, there is no subsidy to ease the burden, other than the problematic use of childbirth allowance for mid-term abortion.

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Data on birth control methods also reflect the problems of access to reliable contraceptives. With the difficulty in accessing more effective options with high prices and the relative lack of knowledge due to ineffective sexuality education, many people resort to using no birth control or less effective methods. The Contraceptive Use by Methods 2019 report (United Nations, 2019, p. 15, 18) showed that, 46.5% of women in Japan between 15- and 49-years-old use contraceptives, compared to 48.5% worldwide and 57.0% in developed regions. With regards to types of method used, Japan is an outlier with its reliance on male condoms. Compared to 10.0% worldwide and 16.3% in developed regions, the rate is 34.9% in Japan, making it the highest in the 195 nations surveyed. The low percentage of oral contraceptives use (2.9%, compared to 8.0% worldwide and 16.5% in developed nations) is another striking characteristic. Sole reliance on male condoms is problematic because the failure rate is high (13%) (Hatcher, 2018, p. 844) and women cannot take charge of their own sexuality and reproduction with this method. Oral contraceptives (the pill) were legalized only in 1999, 9 years after the application for approval was submitted (Goto et al., 1999), making Japan the last country to approve it among the UN member states. After the expeditious approval of Viagra with a half-year of examination, the pill was approved later the same year, revealing the double standard (Castro-Vázquez, 2006; Potts, 2003). Even today, oral contraceptives remain expensive (approximately 10,000 yen a month). Emergency contraceptive is another method that allows people’s greater control over their own bodies, and today it is available as an over-the-counter (OTC) drug in 19 countries and available from a pharmacist with no requirement of prescription in 76 countries (Sorano et al., 2021). In Japan, it was legalized in 2011, but requires prescription by a doctor and costs approximately 6,000 to 20,000 yen (Sorano et al., 2021). With the demand from the public, the MHLW considered allowing OTC access in 2017. Within the month the government accepted public comments, 348 entries were submitted, of which over 90% of opinions (320 entries) were for the agreement to make it available OTC. Despite this, the proposal did not pass with oppositions raised by some members of the review committee. The JAOG was central in this opposition, arguing that the OTC provision cannot ensure the proper usage due to the low level of reproductive literacy among women. They raised concerns over an increase in the number of sexually transmitted infections and misuse by criminal organizations or the sex industry, all of which are against the WHO and the FIGO’s stance (Sorano et al., 2021). Online prescription became available in 2019, but those who used the service raised the concern that the time for the delivery as well as the cost of expedited delivery made the service hard to use (Fukuda, 2022). The hurdle for access is even higher for abortion. In the 80 countries where abortion service is available, 34 countries have full coverage of abortion cost through insurance and 25 countries have partial coverage (Grossman et al., 2016). In Japan, because elective abortion is not part of the insurance system, clinics decide on the price of the service with no regulation, and users of the service are expected to bear the entire cost on their own. Based on the research by a clinic in Tokyo, the cost of

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early abortion ranged from 80,000 yen to 400,000 yen in 136 clinics in Tokyo, with 40% of the clinics charging 150,000 to 200,000 yen, 32% charging 100,000 to 150,000 yen, and 18% charging over 200,000 yen (Tsukahara, 2022: 206). Between 12 and 22 weeks of gestation, it typically costs 300,000 to 450,000 yen, and some clinics charge even 600,000 yen (Piccolare, 2021, p. 92). Financial hurdles indeed inhibit pregnant women’s access to abortion. Among the inquiries that Piccolare received about abortion, there were 30 cases in which women said that they could not get an abortion though they wanted it. 27 of them said the reason was financial challenges (2021, p. 92). Some have difficulty in covering the cost of going to a clinic to get pregnancy confirmation. The MHLW began to subsidize the cost (10,000 yen) for this visit for vulnerable pregnant women when a healthcare worker (nurses, public nurses, or midwives) or an NPO staff member accompanies them. One could easily imagine that those who cannot afford the initial visit to doctor’s office are unable to pay the cost of actual abortion. For abortions after 85 days of gestation (approximately 12 weeks), those who are enrolled in public health insurance can receive a subsidy from the government, but it is only as the aforementioned Childbirth Lump-Sum Allowance, which is provided to those with over 12 weeks of gestation regardless of pregnancy outcome. This policy design is clearly not based on the experience or perspective of those who decided to terminate their pregnancies. The official Japanese name for this subsidy is shussan ikuji ichiji kin, which means lump-sum allowance for childbirth and childrearing, but neither childbirth nor childrearing reflect the experience of those who obtained abortions. Especially in the context where many individuals experience the sense of guilt about abortion (Piccolare, 2021), it further stigmatizes the practice and those who use the service.

Medical Professionals In addition to the financial burden, the abortion method widely used in Japan hinders people from receiving quality abortion care. While the WHO (2022) considers that vacuum aspiration and medical abortion are the safe methods, the most widely used method in Japan remains dilation and curettage (D&C). Vacuum aspiration is a method in which a healthcare provider uses a suction device to remove the content of the uterus. Compared to D&C, in which a physician dilates the cervix and removes the uterine contents using a surgical instrument called a curette, vacuum aspiration is much safer, easier to practice, and causes much less pain for patients. It became the dominant method by the early 1970s, where a growing number of countries legalized abortion (Tunc, 2008). Calling D&C “an obsolete method of surgical abortion,” the 2012 guideline by the WHO (2012, p. 31) repeatedly stated that it should be replaced by vacuum aspiration. Its 2022 Guideline stated that “As dilatation and sharp curettage (D&C) causes pain and suffering to women and is not recommended for use, its use is

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incompatible with numerous human rights including the right to health” (WHO, 2022, p. 66). In 2021, even the MHLW made a request to the JAOG to inform its members about electric vacuum aspiration and manual vacuum aspiration, yet D&C continues. A 2019 study by the JAOG on early abortion methods revealed that of 1,706 facilities surveyed, 28.2% used D&C as the most common method for induced abortion, 23.7% used vacuum aspiration (14.1% electric vacuum aspiration and 9.4% manual vacuum aspiration), and the rest of the facilities used the combination of curettage and vacuum aspiration (Nakamura et al., 2021). While an increasing number of facilities are using vacuum aspiration compared to when similar research was conducted in 2012 (Sekiguchi et  al., 2015), the change is slow due to the JAOG’s insistence on considering D&C as safe, despite the WHO’s warning. Critics also point out that the Japanese version of D&C involves the removal of uterine contents with a forceps prior to the use of a curettage, and for this reason, some clinics delay the procedure for a few weeks so that the physician can readily access the contents, causing further psychological pain (Tsukahara, 2022, pp. 52–53). Another method endorsed by the WHO is medical abortion, in which individuals take Mifepristone and Misopristol to terminate pregnancy. The introduction of this option revolutionized abortion practice (Parsons & Romamis, 2021). This method works for both first and second trimester abortion (Lerma & Blumenthal, 2020) and can be safely administered either at home or at a medical facility (Baiju et al., 2019). These medicines were added in the list of WHO’s essential medicines in 2019, in which medicines are selected based on their efficacy, safety, and cost-effectiveness for urgent healthcare needs. Home-based medical abortion allows greater sense of privacy and control over reproduction, and it became more accepted during the COVID-19 pandemic as access to medical facilities became a challenge (Tschann et al., 2021). The MHLW has been considering making medical abortion available in Japan, and the application for the approval of abortion pill was submitted in December 2021. While it is expected to be available in 2023, the MHLW and the JAOG proposed that they should be used only in tightly controlled medical settings, contradicting the global standard and experiences. The JAOG demanded that only designated doctors in a facility equipped with hospitalization should be able to prescribe the medication. Furthermore, they announced that the price would likely to be approximately 100,000 yen, comparable to the price range of current abortion procedure (Mainichi Shimbun, April 21, 2021), despite the fact that the average wholesale price of abortion pills is approximately between 780 and 1400 yen globally (Japan Times, February 27, 2023). It is evident that the  motive behind the JAOG’s proposal is the protection of their own vested interest, rather than the rights or wellbeing of the abortion seekers.

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Conclusion Abortion services available in Japan are not compliant with the WHO Abortion Care Guideline. The legal framework, educational system, and medical practices relevant to abortion are not designed with the idea of SRHR or the consideration of those who are most affected by the policies. This chapter highlighted that the abortion ban in the Penal Code, enacted in the Meiji period, remains effective. Though prosecution based on this law may be rare, people have difficulty in considering access to quality abortion care as part of their human rights so long as it remains illegal. Further, while the MPL allows partial abortion access, it is based on patriarchal principles. Other than the removal of eugenic components from the Eugenic Protection Law, it has not been updated despite the social change the country has undergone in the post WWII period. Most notably, with the requirement of spousal authorization, the MPL grants access to abortion only when the man in the family allows it. Because of the existence of the abortion ban in the Penal Code, clinics often demand such agreements even from unmarried abortion seekers. Issues in medical settings also stem from the MPL. By assigning the privilege of determining abortion eligibility to physicians, the law enables paternalism that is not accepted in other types of medical procedures today. The exclusion of reproductive care needs from the national insurance system also benefits obstetricians, who could set prices for services at their discretion, while disadvantaging pregnant women with high prices on medical care and the complicated process that they must navigate to access them. The irony is striking that abortion in Japan is exceedingly expensive, even though most people use financial reasons as the justification for acquiring abortion. While the legal framework, as well as the approach in formal education dictated by the curriculum guidelines are slow to change, a growing number of people are vocalizing their dissatisfactions with the status quo. Books on sexuality and reproduction are becoming popular. According to the Research Institute of Publication, there were 31 publications related to sexuality education in 2021 (Mainichi Shimbun, August 27, 2022). While the number was around 10 each year and they were mostly technical books for teachers up to 2018, today, there are numerous books available for children, youth, and parents. Popular online resources such as Meiiku (https://meiiku.com) for parents and Seicil (https://seicil.com) for teens, as well as a YouTube channel by a midwife, Shiori Onuki (https://www.youtube.com/@shiorine), among others, allow easy access to accurate information that may not be offered in formal education. Furthermore, Nandenaino (https://www.nandenaino.com) provides information about various forms of contraceptives. In terms of policy and medicine, Soshiren (http://www.soshiren.org), which began in the early 1980s as a group to block the government proposal to eliminate the financial clause from the Eugenic Protection Law, has been working to decriminalize abortion. The Professional Women’s Coalition for Sexuality and Health

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(https://pwcsh.or.jp) was established in 1997 to incorporate women’s perspectives in medical and health systems, and more recently, the Safe Abortion Japan Project (SAJP, https://safeabortion.jp) was established by physicians and midwives, as well as those with experiences with abortion and/or miscarriage to promote safer alternative to D&C. For those who struggle with unplanned pregnancy, the Japan Crisis Pregnancy Hotline Network (https://zenninnet-­sos.org) provides information about organizations in different parts of the country, including Piccolare. While change at the level of institutional authority in the fields of law, education, and medicine, may be slow, there are signs of social transformation at the grassroots level. The popularization of publications and websites on sexuality education indicates that a growing number of people are actively seeking to gain knowledge for themselves or for their children. The civil society organizations mentioned above are mobilizing people in various ways, including petitions, events, and encouragement to submit public comments to the government. People’s responses to such movements may be the sign that they are reclaiming autonomy in their sexuality and reproductive decisions.

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Kimura, N. (2021). Hinin, chūzetsu o manabu: Jendā-ron no jugyō kara [Learning contraception and abortion: From a course on gender]. Hiroshima Shūdai Ronshū, 61(2), 139–153. Lerma, K., & Blumenthal, P. D. (2020). Current and potential methods for second trimester abortion. Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 63, 24–36. Matsumoto, A. (2005). Piru wa naze kangei sarenainoka [Why the Pill is not Welcomed]. Keiso Shobo. Miyasaka, Y. (2020). Hinin gensetsu to kazoku no shinmitsusei. Nihongata kindai kazoku no rekishi shakaigaku [Birth control discourses and family intimacy: Historical sociology of modern Japanese families]. Shoshi Kurarute. Motegi, T. (2018). Nihon [Japan]. In Hashimoto, N., Ikeya, H., & Tashiro, M. (Ed.), Kyōkasho ni miru sekai no seikyōiku [Sexuality education in the world from textbooks] (pp. 151–181). Kamogawa Shuppan. Nakajima, K. (2017). Hyōryū joshi: Ninshin SOS Tokyo no sōdan genba kara [Stray girls: From Tokyo crisis pregnancy hotline]. Asahi Shinsho. Nakamura, E., Kobayashi, K., Sekizawa, A., Kobayashi, H., & Takai, Y. (2021). Survey on spontaneous miscarriage and induced abortion surgery safety at less than 12 weeks of gestation in Japan. The Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Research, 47(12), 4158–4163. Norgren, T. (2001). Abortion before birth control: The politics of reproduction in postwar Japan. Princeton University Press. Ogino, M. (2008). Kazoku Keikaku eno Michi: Kindai Nihon no Seishoku o meguru Seiji [Path for family planning: Politics of reproduction in Japan]. Iwanami Shoten. Ogino, M. (2014). Onna no Karada: Feminizumu Igo [Women’s body: After feminism] Iwanami Shoten. Ōnishi, K. (2014). Kōteki iryō hoken niokeru shussan kyūfu: Genkin kyūfu omeguru seiji katei. Ohara Shakai Mondai Kenkyujo Zasshi, 663, 17–32. Parsons, J. A., & Romamis, E. C. (2021). Early medical abortion, equality of access, and the telemedical imperative. Oxford University Press. Ponzetti, J. J., Jr. (2016). Evidence-based approaches to sexuality education: A global perspective. Routledge. Potts, M. (2003). Two pills, two paths: A tale of gender bias. Endeavour, 27(3), 127–130. Sato, T., Kataoka, C., McKay, C., & Izumi, A. (2022). Teaching sexuality education to secondary students in Japan: Reflections from Japanese health education teachers. Sex Education, 22(6), 641–654. Sekiguchi, A., Ikeda, T., Okamura, K., & Nakai, A. (2015). Safety of induced abortions at less than 12 weeks of pregnancy in Japan. International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics, 129, 54–57. Sorano, S., Emmi, S., & Smith, C. (2021). Why is it so difficult to access emergency contraceptive pills in Japan? The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, 7(1000095), 1–2. Takeda, S. (2017). Ninsanpu no jisatsu  – sono jittai [Suicide by pregnant women]. Retrieved March 1, 2023, from Japan Association of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists website: http:// www.jaog.or.jp/wp/wp-­content/uploads/2017/11/11643745157d48555ead55ae19d42a0a.pdf Tama, Y. (2006). “Kindai kazoku” to bodi poritikusu [“Modern family” and body politics]. Sekai Shisosha. Tanaka, M. (2020). Imin josei no sekushuaru ripurodakutibu herusu raitsu no jitsugen ni muketa kadai – Nihon de kurasu ryūgakusei to ginōjisshūsei no ninshin nikansuru ichikōsatsu. [Issues surrounding the realization of sexual and reproductive health and rights of immigrant women: Analysis of pregnancy among international students and technical trainees in Japan]. Kokusai Jenda Gakkaishi, 18, 64–85. Tashiro, M. (2003). Haisengo nihon niokeru junketsu kyōiku no tenkai to hensen [Development of abstinence education in post-war period]. In Hashimoto, N. & Henmi, M. (Ed.), Jendā to Kyōiku no Rekishi [History of gender na education] (pp. 213–239). Kawashima Shoten. Tschann, M., Ly, E. S., Hilliard, S., & Lange, H. L. H. (2021). Changes to medication abortion clinical practices in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Contraception, 104, 77–81.

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Tsukahara, K. (2014). Chūzetsu gijutsu to ripurodakutibu raitsu: Feminisuto rinri no shiten kara [Abortion technology and reproductive rights: From a feminist ethics perspective]. Keiso Shobo. Tsukahara, K. (2022). Nihon no chūzetsu [Abortion in Japan]. Chikuma Shobo. Tunc, T. (2008). Technologies of choice: A history of abortion techniques in the United States, 1850–1980. VDM Verlag. Zerubavel, E. (2006). The elephant in the room: Silence and denial in everyday life. Oxford University Press.

Government and Organizational Materials Center for Reproductive Justice. The world’s abortion laws, Retrieved March 1, 2023., from https://reproductiverights.org/maps/worlds-­abortion-­laws/ International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO): FIGO statement for International Safe Abortion Day. Retrieved March 1, 2023., from https://www.figo.org/ figo-­statement-­international-­safe-­abortion-­day Japanese Association for Sex Education (2018). Seishōnen no seikōdō: Wagakuni no chūgakusei kōkōsei daigakusei nikansuru daihakkai chōsa hōkōku [Sexual behavior of youth: The eighth report on middle-school, high-school, and college students in our country]. JASE. Ministry of Health and Welfare. (1960), Eugenic Protection Law in Japan. Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://www.ipss.go.jp/history/EnglishPamphletSeries/pdf/J000008736.pdf Ministry of Health Labour and Welfare. (2022a). Kodomo gyakutai niyoru shibō jikotō no kenshō kekkatō ni tsuite. Dai 18ji hōkoku [The 18th report on incidents on children’s deaths caused by abuse]. Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11900000/02.pdf Ministry of Health Labour and Welfare. (2022b). Reiwa 3nendo eisei gyōsei hōkokurei no gaikyō [Summary of data on public health administration for the fiscal year of 2021]. Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/eisei_houkoku/21/dl/gaikyo.pdf Ministry of Health Labour and Welfare (2022c). Shussan hiyō no jittai haaku ni kansuru chōsa kenkyū no kekkatō ni tsuite [Result of research on the costs of childbirth]. Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/12401000/000977521.pdf Ministry of Health Labour and Welfare (2022d). Reiwa 3nen (2021) Jinkō Dōtai Tōkei (Kakuteisu) no Gaikyō. [Summary of Demographic Statistics for 2021]. Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/kakutei21/dl/15_all.pdf National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. (2022). Jinkō Tōkei Shiryō Shū. [Data on Population Statistics]. Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://www.ipss.go.jp/syoushika/tohkei/Popular/P_Detail2022.asp?fname=T04-­20.htm Piccolare (2021). Ninshin kattō hakusho [Reports on struggles surrounding pregnancy]. Piccolare. United Nations. (2019). The contraceptive use by methods. Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https:// www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/files/documents/2020/Jan/un_2019_contraceptiveusebymethod_databooklet.pdf United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. (2018). International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education, Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://iite.unesco.org/ publications/international-­technical-­guidance-­on-­sexuality-­education/ World Health Organization. (2012). Safe abortion: Technical and policy guidance for health systems. Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/70914/9789241548434_eng.pdf World Health Organization. (2022). Abortion care guideline. Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240039483

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Newspaper Articles Japan Moves Toward Approving Abortion Pills in Major Shift. (2023, February 27). Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/02/27/national/japan-­abortion-­pill-­debate/ Keikō hininyaku shōnin shinsei e. Chiken saishū dankai [To the approval of oral contraceptives: The end of trial with 93% success rate]. (2021, April 21). Mainichi Shimbun, https://mainichi. jp/articles/20210421/ddm/012/040/096000c Muchi datta gomen. Seikyōikubon 21manbu, rejendo no nigai genten [Sorry, I was ignorant. The origin story of the legend of the sexuality education book that sold 210,000 copies]. (2022, August 27). Mainichi Shimbun, https://mainichi.jp/articles/20220826/k00/00m/040/005000c Ninshin tsutaetara LINE wa todaeta: Kōen de shussan shita haha no namida [LINE stopped coming when told about abortion: Tear of the mother who gave birth in a park]. (2021, June 17). Asahi Shimbun, https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASP6H43T1P50OIPE01R.html Shikyū fuereba hiyō mo … itachigokko no genjitsu: Shussan ikuji ichijikin hikiage [Subidy and costs … the realty of a cat-and-mouse game: Increase in the Childcare Lump-sum Allowance]. 2022, December 15). Mainichi Shimbun, https://mainichi.jp/articles/20221215/ k00/00m/010/280000c Eiko Saeki teaches sociology of the body, medicine and gender, and contemporary Japanese society at Hosei University in Tokyo. She specializes in the politics of reproduction. Her research foci include the diversity of families in Japan, as well as abortion politics in Ireland. She is particularly interested in the ways in which individual storytelling of reproductive experiences contribute to social change.  

Aging, Health, and Gender Yuka Minagawa

Abstract  Japanese men and women enjoy high levels of life expectancy and health expectancy when compared with international standards. Relatively little is known, however, about health differentials among the population. Focusing on gender as a fundamental cause of health and mortality, this chapter summarizes the research findings on health inequalities between men and women in Japan. We pay particular attention to families as social arrangements that shape men’s and women’s health status. Our review suggests that differences between men’s and women’s lives, such as in the amounts of unpaid domestic work they perform, are related to health, with more unbeneficial consequences to women’s health. Fully understanding the mechanisms behind the gender gap in health requires research that examines the broader social conditions that create different experiences for men and women and how they lead to gendered health outcomes. Keywords  Life expectancy · Health expectancy · Gender paradox · Health · Mortality · Family · Division of household labor · Women’s health

Introduction The Japanese population enjoys good health as measured by life expectancy (LE) and health expectancy. Between 1947 and 2021, Japan’s LE at birth increased more than 30 years for both genders, reaching 81.47 years for men and 87.57 years for women in 2021 (Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, 2022). In line with the theory of the epidemiologic transition (Omran, 1971), mortality from non-­infectious diseases has become predominant. The leading causes of death in 2021 included neoplasm (cancer) (26.5%), heart disease (14.9%), and senility (10.6%; Ministry of Health, Y. Minagawa (*) Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_4

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Labour, and Welfare, 2021). The increased prevalence of chronic illnesses has made it critical to assess not just the length of life, but also the quality of life lived, since individuals live longer but spend many years in poor health (Crimmins et al., 1994). The Japanese population have high levels of health-related quality of life, measured by health expectancy. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study publishes annual estimates of health-adjusted life years (HALE), defined as the expected length of life spent in good health. In 2019, Japan had the second-longest HALE at birth, after Singapore, for both men (72.49 years) and women (75.13 years; Wang et al., 2020). There is strong evidence that Japanese people enjoy long and healthy lives relative to international standards, but little is known about variations in health, if any, within the population. Social demographers and medical sociologists alike have emphasized the roles of social factors, including gender, in the construct of physical and mental health (Link & Phelan, 1995). Recently, there has been growing interest in gender stratification in Japanese society. According to Sugimoto (2014), gender-­ based inequality is the most fundamental form of stratification in contemporary Japan. While inequality between men and women is visible in all aspects of Japanese society, limited attention has been directed toward health differentials between men and women in the country. The Global Gender Gap Index (GGI) found that, in 2022, the gender gap in health and survival was quite limited in Japan, with a score of 0.973 (1 representing perfect equity and 0 perfect inequality between men and women; World Economic Forum, 2022). Do these results allow us to conclude that men and women in Japan enjoy almost perfect equity in health? Is health therefore an exception to the long list of gender inequities in Japanese society? This chapter addresses these questions by assessing the available evidence on the physical and mental health status of Japanese men and women. We investigated how the broader social structure creates different health experiences for men and women, with particular attention given to the role of families. The discussion is divided into the following three sections. First, we summarize our knowledge of the gender gap in physical and mental health. We then draw attention to Japan and examine the results of recently released, nationally representative data from Kokumin Seikatsu Kiso Chosa (Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, 2019). Second, we focus on families as a key social structure that affects men’s and women’s health. We explore how gender inequity is embedded in the Japanese family structure and assess its consequences to health. Finally, we present summary implications drawn from this review and suggest important avenues for future research.

 ender Differences in Health and Mortality: Evidence G from Japan The Paradox of Men’s and Women’s Health Since Durkheim’s (1897) classic study on suicide mortality across European countries during the nineteenth century, there has been long-standing interest in how the broader social environments in which we are embedded are related to physical and

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mental health status. A large body of literature investigates how health is stratified by socioeconomic factors, such as education, income, wealth, and social class (Link & Phelan, 1995). There is widespread agreement among health scholars that gender is one of the fundamental social causes of health and mortality (Verbrugge & Wingard, 1987). In contrast to sex, which refers to biological differences between men and women, gender focuses on differences in life circumstances between them (Rieker et al., 2010). Since the discussion in this chapter is restricted to social conditions that shape the health experience of men and women in Japan, we use the term “gender” throughout. The literature has reported remarkable consistency in the patterns of physical and mental health status by gender. First, women live longer than men. According to the United Nations (2022), in 2019, there was a 5.4-year gender difference in LE at birth globally; LE at birth was 68.4 years for men and 73.8 years for women. In 2019, women’s longevity advantage was found in every region and country in the world (UN, 2022). While there are variations in mortality at younger ages especially in less-developed countries (Nathanson, 1984), it is a consistent finding that LE for women exceeds that for men. Second, although women outlive men, they experience more physical and mental health problems. Previous studies have found that women experience higher rates of morbidity and disability, report worse self-rated health (SRH) status, are more likely to express psychological distress and anxiety, and have lower qualities of life than their male counterparts (Rieker & Bird, 2005; Rieker et al., 2010). The fact that women live longer but spend more years in poor health than men has led researchers to describe this phenomenon as the “male-­ female health-survival paradox” (Oksuzyan et al., 2009). Numerous explanations have been proposed for the mechanisms underlying the gender paradox of health and mortality. These include biological processes (Bird & Rieker, 2002; Crimmins et al., 2003), differences in the types of chronic illnesses experienced by men and women (Case & Paxson, 2005), diverging patterns of health behaviors (Preston & Wang, 2006; Rogers et al., 2005), and differences in socioeconomic status (SES; Read & Gorman, 2010). While debate continues as to the extent to which biological and social factors contribute to gender differences in health, Rieker and Bird (2005) noted the importance of departing from the binary approach of “either biology or social circumstances” and instead focusing on their interplay in the construct of gendered patterns of health. Rogers et al. (2010) found that the gender gap in mortality remained strong even after controlling for biological, social, and behavioral factors, pointing to the complex ways through which social and biological factors interact and create different health outcomes for men and women.

Gender Gap in Health and Mortality in Japan Japan is no exception to the gender paradox of health and mortality. We begin by focusing on mortality as measured by LE. In 2021, LE at birth for women exceeded that for men by 6.10 years, and female LE was longer at all ages. The magnitude of

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the gap in LE at birth was somewhat limited in the middle of the past century (3.90 years in 1947), but it has widened over time, reaching its peak in 2005, with a 6.96-year difference (Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, 2022). Additionally, a female longevity advantage pattern has been noted at the prefecture-level. The government has published life tables for the 47 prefectures every 5 years since 1965. The estimates from 2015 show that LE at birth was longer for women than for men across the 47 prefectures. Aomori Prefecture had the largest gender gap in LE at birth, of 7.27  years, with men’s and women’s LE standing at 78.67  years and 85.93 years, respectively. Similar patterns of gender differences have been found in LE at different ages (Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, 2015). Next, we focus on the gap in health-related quality of life, measured by disability-­ free life expectancy (DFLE), denoting the average duration of life spent without activity limitations. Official DFLE estimates have been publicly available since 2001. The latest results (2019) show that DFLE at birth was longer for women (75.38 years) than for men (72.68 years). DFLE at birth also varied across prefectures. In 2019, DFLE at birth for women outnumbered that for men across all 47 prefectures. The size of the gender gap in DFLE at birth differed across prefectures, ranging from a 0.97-year difference in Kyoto Prefecture (72.71 years for men and 73.68 years for women) to a 4.69-year difference in Kochi Prefecture (71.63 years for men and 76.32 years for women). These results confirm Japanese women’s advantages in terms of LE and health expectancy over men. As noted earlier, however, it is a consistent finding that women experience greater physical and mental health problems than men do. A comparative approach to health and mortality sheds new light on these observed gender differentials. When the LE and DFLE results are converted into percentages of life spent in a healthy state, we see that women are expected to spend a higher percentage of their lives in an unhealthy state. In 2019, men’s LE at birth was 81.41  years, 89.28% of which (72.68, divided by 81.41, multiplied by 100) was expected to be spent without activity limitations, while the result for women was 86.20% (75.38, divided by 87.45, multiplied by 100). In fact, the percentage of life spent without activity limitations was consistently greater for men than for women between 2001 and 2019. These findings imply that women’s health disadvantages may be due to the fact that they live longer than men (Luy & Minagawa, 2014). To better understand the gendered health differences among the Japanese population, we now focus on the results of the 2019 Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions, a repeated cross-sectional survey conducted annually since 1986 by the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare. A large-scale survey with a health module has been conducted every 3 years, and the latest data collection was in June 2019. The survey used households as a sampling unit and employed a stratified sampling method to draw a nationally representative sample of community dwellers in the country. The health questionnaire includes a wide range of questions about physical and mental health, health lifestyles, and health-care utilization (for more details, see https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/k-­tyosa/k-­tyosa19/index.html). Several findings are instructive. First, there were gendered patterns in physical health outcomes. SRH provides a summary of overall physical health status and is

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closely linked to mortality, future health problems, and health-care utilization (Idler & Benyamini, 1997; Idler et al., 2000). Respondents who were 6 years old and older were asked to rate their health as “good,” “rather good,” “fair,” “not very good,” or “bad.” The results showed that more women rated their health as bad. The percentage of respondents who had bad SRH (“not very good” and “bad” combined) was higher among women (13.6%) than among men (11.6%). More women (332.1 per 1000) reported physical health problems, such as muscle pain, back pain, and joint pain, than men (270.8 per 1000). Second, health behaviors vary by gender. In 2019, 28.8% of male respondents were current smokers, as opposed to 8.8% of female respondents. More women took vitamins and supplements than men, except those aged between 6 and 19 years. The number of hospital visits was higher for women (418.8 per 1000) than for men (338.1 per 1000). Third, differences were observed in mental health status between men and women. Respondents 12  years old and older were asked whether they felt stressed in their daily lives and were allowed a dichotomous response of “yes” or “no.” Women (52.4%) reported greater stress than men (43.0%), and women’s stress levels were higher than those of men across all ages. The gender gap in stress levels was most salient among individuals aged between 30 and 39  years, with an 11.6-pecentage-point difference between men (48.8%) and women (60.4%). These results offer support for the established pattern of gender differences in health and mortality among the Japanese population. Although Japanese men and women both enjoy phenomenal health status, health differences based on gender persist. In what follows, we focus on families as social arrangements that differentiate between men’s and women’s lives, and discuss how families are linked to gendered health outcomes in the Japanese context.

Family, Gender, and Health in Japan J apanese Families and Recent Developments: Changing Women’s Roles Families are important social determinants of physical and mental health over the life course; they provide social, economic, and psychological resources that enhance or harm members’ health (Bianchi et al., 2006). Prior research has documented how families affect health, attesting to the importance of considering the composition (e.g., family members), transitions (e.g., separation, divorce, or widowhood), and contexts (e.g., relationship dynamics) of families (Carr & Springer, 2010). The health implications of families vary depending on the socio-demographic characteristics of the individuals involved, such as age, gender, race/ethnicity, and SES. It is important to note that families themselves are also set in a broader social structure, which in turn determines how they affect household members’ health status (Bianchi et al., 2006).

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Japan offers an especially strong case to assess the health implications of families. According to a  classic work by Benedict (1946), a central feature of the Japanese family system is its hierarchical structure, led by a household head, who is responsible for household matters and is usually a man (Sugimoto, 2014). Benedict (1946) maintained that observing hierarchy, or rank, is a critical component of Japanese people’s lives, and is deeply rooted in family life. Special emphasis is placed on maintaining the unity of the family under the concept of ie (household). The principles of ie are visible in various aspects of Japanese family life, such as the koseki (family registration) system, same-surname requirements after marriage, hyosatsu (family name plates on the front door), and family tombs (Sugimoto, 2014). While there is evidence of enduring ie ideology, Japanese families have gone through drastic changes over time, as have families in other industrialized countries, with the most profound changes occurring in terms of context. Perhaps changes in women’s roles have played a key role in the transformation of family contexts. Under the traditional ie system, women were homemakers and primary caregivers for the members of the household. However, an increasing number of women have been entering the paid labor force. In 2021, 71.3% of women aged between 15 and 64 years were employed, up from 58.1% in 2005 (Gender Equality Bureau, 2022). Recent upturns in labor force participation among women are linked to increases in educational attainment. In 2020, the rate of advancement to universities and junior colleges among women reached 50.9%, up from 2.2% in 1954 (Gender Equality Bureau, 2022). Increasing returns on education for women include better earnings and employment prospects. Furthermore, patterns of female employment have changed. Not only are more women now in paid work, but they are also likely to continue to work. Japanese women’s labor force participation rates have long followed an M-shaped curve, wherein women of reproductive age tend to quit paid work to focus on child care. In 2021, 86.9% of women aged between 25 and 29 years were in the labor force, with a slight decline among those aged between 30 and 34 years (79.4%). However, the magnitude of the decrease is smaller than that in 1981, when the female labor force participation rate declined by almost 20% for those age groups (Gender Equality Bureau, 2022). Women’ work values have changed as well. One opinion poll showed that, in 2019, 63.7% of female respondents noted the importance of continuing to work even after childbirth, changing from 26.3% in 1992 (Gender Equality Bureau, 2022). Indeed, more women now return to work after childbirth. Between 2010 and 2014, 51.3% of women who were employed prior to childbirth continued to work after the birth of their first child, while 39.2% did so between 1985 and 1989 (Gender Equality Bureau, 2022). The fact that the percentage of full-­ time female workers declines with age indicates how women change their employment arrangements, such as from full-time to part-time, across the life course to address the intense demands of work and family. With women entering the paid labor force at an unprecedented pace, the number of dual-earner households now exceeds that of households in which women are homemakers (Gender Equality Bureau, 2022).

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The changing status of women has had profound implications in the context of Japanese families. The Japanese population is aging rapidly, with 28.6% of the population aged 65 years and older in 2020 (Statistics Bureau, 2020). The growing size of the older population and lower fertility rates have posed significant challenges for social policy in the country, such as future medical requirements and pension provision. It is of particular importance to address the growing demand for long-term care. Traditionally, women, especially daughters-in-law, have assumed the role of primary caregivers for older parents. Continued increases in women’s labor force participation imply a shortage of caregivers, namely women, in the household (Yong & Saito, 2012). To address this issue, the government implemented the public long-­ term care insurance (LTCI) program in 2020 to provide long-term care services at home or care facilities for Japanese citizens aged 65 years and above and to those aged between 40 and 64  years with age-related conditions (Iwagami & Tamiya, 2019). Changes in women’s roles have highlighted the limitations of relying on informal familial care, leading to the introduction of a public long-term care program in the country.

Gender Stratification and Health in Japanese Families The evidence reviewed to this point indicates that fundamental changes in the context of Japanese families have been driven largely by women’s changing status. Programs and other measures have been implemented to help women navigate the tensions of work and family, such as increasing child care centers, extending the duration of parental leave, and offering financial support to families with small children. Despite these positive changes and developments, there is reason to believe that gender inequalities remain within Japanese families, as is exemplified by the differences in the amounts of unpaid work men and women perform, and that these inequalities produce harmful consequences for women’s health. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has conducted the Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities every 5 years since 1976. The survey includes a time diary component, where respondents are asked to report their activities over a 48-hour period starting from midnight on a specified day, along with the types of activity and with whom they were done. There are 20 activity categories, including sleeping, eating, doing household work, going to school/work, shopping, and doing sports (for more details, see https://www.stat.go.jp/data/shakai/2021/index.html). The results of the 2021 survey illustrate how the division of responsibility for domestic labor is gendered in Japanese families. On average, men spent 51 minutes doing domestic housework, while women spent 204 minutes doing it. Importantly, a gender division of labor in the home can be found even in dual-earner households with children. In 2021, employed women spent an average of 195 minutes doing housework per week compared to 24  minutes among employed men. Working men’s housework time has tripled, from 7 minutes to 24 minutes, between 1996 and 2021, and women’s share has declined slightly during the same period, from

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215  minutes to 195  minutes. Despite recent increases in men’s involvement in housework, women still shoulder the majority of domestic labor, even if they also work outside the home. Past evidence suggests that an uneven division of housework has significant health consequences, with women experiencing its impacts more directly than men (Bird, 1999). The impact on mental health status is particularly salient. A review by Ervin et al. (2022) reported negative associations between unpaid domestic work and mental health status, namely higher rates of anxiety among employed women, whereas no comparable patterns were found for men. Two sociological perspectives can help us understand how gender inequity at home can be detrimental to women’s mental health. First, equity theory maintains that an unbalanced exchange of resources in close relationships negatively affects individuals’ well-being (Sprecher, 2018). This suggests that a lack of shared responsibility for housework may create a sense of inequality among women, which in turn inversely affects their psychological well-being. Second, role theory illustrates how performing multiple roles may dampen women’s health. Women are more likely to multitask than men, and working women feel overwhelmed, frustrated, or stressed when balancing family and work (Nomaguchi & Milkie, 2006). Using data on dual-earner parents in the United States, Nomaguchi et al. (2005) found that feeling time deficits with family was related to lowered life satisfaction and distress among women, indicating the costs of multitasking for women’s mental health. The stress of work and family felt by women also has profound implications for children’s well-being. Nomaguchi and Milkie (2006) noted that maternal employment was associated with less support and less discipline but more physical or verbal assaults when children were small, providing support for the role strains perspective. A small but growing body of research has explored the link between the family and women’s well-being in Japan. Using survey data on Tokyo residents, Taniguchi and Kaufman (2020) demonstrated that perceived equity in the division of household labor was important for marital satisfaction among women. The study found that women who reported shared responsibilities for domestic work enjoyed higher levels of marital quality than did those who did not. Additionally, men’s involvement in housework, or lack thereof, is important for the well-being of women with small children. Tanaka and Lowry (2013) reported that the absence of spousal support was associated with a greater risk of reporting depression or neurosis due to child care among mothers with preschool-age children. An analysis by Minagawa (2023) elucidated the costs of raising young children for Japanese women’s well-­ being. Mothers with infants and preschoolers reported levels of well-being that were significantly lower than those reported by mothers with school-aged children, and the differences in well-being remained significant, even after support from one’s spouse, parents, and parents-in-law were accounted for. Taken together, the results show how gender remains a powerful factor in organizing domestic work in Japanese families and how women continue to perform the vast majority of household labor despite recent changes in their social roles. A lack of shared responsibility in the home has taken a toll on women’s well-being by elevating their sense of

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inequity, creating stress and intensifying conflict in their efforts to manage family and work.

Summary and Discussion Our review illustrated the health disparities between men and women in Japan, with women experiencing greater disadvantages. Although women live longer than men, women spend a greater percentage of their lives in an unhealthy state, report worse SRH, experience higher morbidity, and feel more stressed. These observations are in line with the well-established paradox of gender differentials in health and mortality (Case & Paxson, 2005; Rieker & Bird, 2005). This point poses a considerable challenge to the widely acknowledged notion that men and women in Japan enjoy a good health status, as shown in the results of the GGI 2022. The underlying health indicators used in the GGI report are the LE and health expectancy values in the GBD study. Health estimates in the GDB account for the impacts of numerous diseases and risk factors and quantify their roles on the length of life (Wang et  al., 2020). Missing from the GBD is a consideration of the social conditions that create different experiences for men and women and how these differences shape men’s and women’s health status. Japan stands out globally in terms of the health status of its population, but we have documented how the social environments in which Japanese men and women are embedded, specifically their families, create gendered patterns of health differences. As noted by Benedict (1946), central to Japanese family life is hierarchical interpersonal relationships, led by a male household head, suggesting that inequalities based on gender are rooted in family. Our review shows that despite recent changes in Japan’s family context, the amounts of time men and women allocate to the home are gendered; women complete the lion’s share of housework, such as cooking, cleaning, and child care, whereas men play a secondary role (Bianchi et al., 2012). The gap in housework time between men and women has narrowed, but the gender division of labor in the home remains unchanged, even in dual-earner households. These results demonstrate that men and women have become more similar in terms of their participation in paid work, but how they spend time at home remains strikingly gendered (Bianchi, 2011: Bianchi & Milkie, 2010). Furthermore, the work-family scholarship provides evidence that women’s engagement in multitasking negatively affects their well-being (Ervin et al., 2022). Perceptions of unbalanced labor in the home create a sense of inequity, distress, frustration, and anger among women (Taniguchi & Kaufman, 2020). Further, employed women are likely to experience time pressure and feel conflict between work and family (Milkie et  al., 2019; Nomaguchi & Milkie, 2006: Nomaguchi et al., 2005). Additionally, women’s lower well-being levels have negative spillover effects on household members’ welfare, such as verbal and physical assaults on children (Nomaguchi & Milkie, 2006). The health implications of housework vary according to one’s education, household income, job characteristics, and the

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availability of support, but Japanese women’s strains may not be fully addressed by individual-level factors such as informal familial support (Minagawa, 2023). This point is consistent with Esping-Andersen’s (2009) argument regarding the importance of a welfare state in the face of changing women’s roles. In October 2022, the Japanese government revealed details on its new family policy, characterized by increases in financial aid for pregnancy and childbirth. While tangible support is essential, it is important to address women’s needs in the long run. For example, counseling services for women in paid jobs or with care obligations are important, especially in Japan, a country where mental illness carries an enduring stigma (Griffiths et al., 2006). This chapter suggests several important directions for future research. The first issue concerns the health implications of family dynamics. This review focused mainly on the context of married life, but investigating the health consequences of various types of family arrangements, such as single parenthood and cohabitation, is warranted. Separation and divorce are limited in Japan relative to other industrialized countries. Yet, future research should focus on how various life events are related to physical and mental health among the Japanese population. Second, continued scholarly attention needs to be directed to the pathways linking families to health differences. We focused on the gender division of domestic labor as a key aspect of family life, but there is much more about families that affects the well-­ being of household members. These include the health status of family members (Yamaoka et al., 2016), relationship quality among couples (Umberson et al., 2006), the availability of socioeconomic resources (Myrskylä & Margolis, 2014), and the age (Minagawa, 2023) and gender composition of children (Negraia et al., 2021). Third, examining the interactions between biological and social factors in the construct of gendered health is an interesting avenue for future research. There is an increasing recognition that social factors and biological processes are interrelated and jointly influence health (Rieker & Bird, 2005). A growing volume of research has been using biomarkers to examine gendered patterns of health. For instance, the Midlife in Japan (MIDJA) study provides data on biomarker measures from men and women in the Tokyo metropolitan area. The use of biomarkers, including blood pressure and cortisol and cholesterol levels, can deepen our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the gender gap in health among the Japanese population. The present chapter shows that despite Japan’s universally recognized longevity, there remain substantial gender differences in physical and mental health status, and the social conditions in which men and women live play a key role in understanding the observed health differentials. This point has become particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has brought drastic changes to the organization of our daily lives, including work, school, and family. Despite these changes, in Japan and elsewhere, the pandemic has left untouched enduring gender disparities in the home, and even increased work-family demands for women. The findings of this chapter suggest that a commitment to addressing gender inequalities will not only promote women’s status in society but will also contribute to their well-being. More policy and scholarly attention should be paid to the profound implications of gender stratification for the lives of the Japanese population.

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Adeoye, A., Adetokunboh, O. O., Advani, S. M., et al. (2020). Global age- sex-specific fertility, mortality, healthy life expectancy (HALE), and population estimates in 204 countries and territories, 1950-2019: A comprehensive demographic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. The Lancet, 396(10258), 1160–1203. World Economic Forum (2022). Global gender gap report 2022. World Economic Forum. https:// www.weforum.org/reports/global-­gender-­gap-­report-­2022/ Yamaoka, Y., Tamiya, N., Izumida, N., Kawamura, A., Takahashi, H., & Noguchi, H. (2016). The relationship between raising a child with a disability and the mental health of mothers compared to raising a child without disability in Japan. SSM – Population Health, 2, 542–548. Yong, V., & Saito, Y. (2012). National long-term care insurance policy in Japan a decade after implementation: Some lessons for aging countries. Ageing International, 37, 271–284. Yuka Minagawa is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan. Her research program is focused on the social causation of health and mortality in Japan and the former Soviet republics, with particular attention given to gender differences in these patterns. She is also involved in research examining how support and strain occurring in family life affect women’s physical and mental health status in Japan.  

A Chronology of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan Takeshi Yoda

Abstract  The global COVID-19 pandemic continues to the present day. However, more than 2 years after the first reports of infection, countermeasures are changing from country to country. In this paper, I trace the chronological order of the Japanese government’s COVID-19 measures and the Japanese people’s feelings during the pandemic. After the first case was reported from Wuhan, China, COVID-19 spread rapidly all over the world. Japan’s first case was a person who returned from Wuhan. Soon after this was reported, there was a series of reports of infected persons throughout Japan. Initially in Japan, the government disclosed information on infected persons and investigated their close contacts. This investigation was called an “active epidemiological investigation,” and it was conducted by public health nurses in local public health offices. This type of information disclosure was thought to help contain the infection; however, it only facilitated the public identification of infected persons. Infected persons and their families were discriminated against by their communities. The government closed schools and public institutions, and businesses encouraged telecommuting. Health care workers and their families also suffered discrimination and restricted movement because they cared for COVID-19 patients. However, the situation changed as the number of COVID-19 patients increased, new variants emerged, and a vaccine was developed. By the time the Tokyo Olympics were held in 2021, nearly 70% of the total population had been vaccinated against COVID-19. Although the number of infected people increased during the Tokyo Olympics, the rate of severe cases decreased. When the omicron variant emerged at the end of 2021, it replaced the previous delta variant due to its highly infectious nature. While many countries have changed their measures against COVID-19 accordingly, Japan continues to deal with the disease much as it did in the early days of the pandemic. T. Yoda (*) Department of Public Health, Kawasaki Medical School, Kurashiki, Japan Department of Health and Sports Science, Kawasaki University of Medical Welfare, Kurashiki, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_5

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Keywords  COVID-19 · Pandemic · Active epidemiological investigation (AEI) · Vaccination · Tokyo Olympics · Omicron variant

Following the outbreak of a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019, this infection rapidly became a pandemic which was announced as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) caused by a novel type of coronavirus by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020 (Jee, 2020). Soon after, this novel coronavirus infectious disease was named COVID-19 by the WHO.  The first report of this infection in Japan was in January 2020, in a man returning from Wuhan (Japan Times, 2020). Subsequently, COVID-19 was confirmed in tourists from China and in tour bus drivers and bus tour guides. In February 2020, there was an outbreak of COVID-19 on board an international cruise ship. The Japanese government requested that the passengers and crew stay on board, the COVID-19 infection spread, and eventually as many as 172 people were infected (Kato et al., 2020). The Japanese government response at that time was later criticized worldwide. Since then, research and development of infection countermeasures and treatment against COVID-19 has progressed globally; however, the coronavirus has repeatedly mutated, and the infection itself continues to exist today. In this chapter, I trace the chronological order of the Japanese government’s measurements and the feelings of Japanese people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 OVID-19 Expansion and Its Countermeasures C in Japan in 2020 When news of an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, came in December 2019 (WHO, 2020), I had hoped, as all infectious disease epidemiologists did, that it would not be a repeat of the SARS pandemic in 2003. SARS was a severe acute respiratory syndrome that caused a global epidemic in 2003. Its pathogen was also a novel coronavirus, later named the SARS coronavirus. The natural host of the virus was the civet, particularly wild civets sold in Chinese markets, who infected people who ate them (Zhong et al., 2003). It soon became a virus that could be transmitted from person to person and spread to many countries around the world. The first cases of infection occurred during the winter season and spread to Europe and the Americas as Chinese people went abroad for the Chinese New Year holidays (Yoda et al., 2003). Fortunately, it did not land in Japan, and the epidemic naturally ended worldwide as soon as summer arrived. This new type of pneumonia, COVID-19, started the 2020 new year season with reports of the spread of the epidemic in China. The first cases of infection in Japan were as noted above, and like the wave of infections spreading around the world, infections in Japan also spread quickly. The first peak of COVID-19 cases in Japan

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occurred between March and April 2020 (Karako et al., 2021). This period in Japan is marked by major events including school graduation (March) and school entrance (April). COVID-19 is a respiratory infection, and since droplet infection is thought to be the main route of transmission, crowded conditions can cause an explosion of infections. As a result, all schools in Japan were closed from the end of February, and neither graduation nor entrance ceremonies could be held. Many companies also actively introduced telecommuting, and the government called for people to avoid unnecessary trips out of the office. After the introduction of these behavior restrictions, significant reduction of contact frequency was achieved by school closures and voluntary event cancellations. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the reduction was insufficient to contain the outbreak (Kurita et al., 2021). The closure of schools had a significant impact on students, with some students reporting negative psychological effects (Okuyama et  al., 2021) and others reporting an increase in child abuse at home (Usami et al., 2021). There were also reports of an increase in depression among working adults due to telecommuting (Fujii et al., 2021) and an increase in lifestyle-related diseases due to lack of exercise for older people (Yamada et al., 2020). In addition, an active epidemiological investigation (AEI) was conducted on all COVID-19-infected patients in Japan. An AEI is a detailed investigation into where the infected person went and with whom he or she met for the 2 days prior to infection, contacting people who were related to the infected person, and inquiring about changes in his or her physical condition. Stores where infected persons had visited were publicized as “cluster outbreaks” and thus labelled as “hotbeds for spreading COVID-19.” In addition, patient details such as sex, age, occupation, and route of infection were released by the health department at every stage. Such information made it easy to identify infected persons, even with anonymous information, in rural areas where the number of infected persons was relatively small. As a result, rumors quickly spread about who was infected because they could be identified by location and places they had visited. Infected persons were slandered to such an extent that they could no longer live in their towns, and sometimes such slander was directed at their families, so that some even committed suicide (Asahi Digital, 2020). In April of the same year, karaoke boxes, night clubs, bars, restaurants, and gyms ceased operating as they posed a risk of clusters of infection, and even outside venues where large numbers of people gathered (Imahashi & Shibata, 2020) were not permitted. After reports of some Japanese celebrity deaths from COVID-19, more and more people became fearful of this infectious disease, and discrimination against infected people and health care workers also increased. Healthcare workers should be appreciated for their hard work in providing medical care to those infected with COVID-19, but when some healthcare workers became infected in the course of their work, many people turned on them and assumed that all healthcare workers had COVID-19. This also led to discrimination, as hospital workers treating inpatients with COVID-19 could not go home after work and had to rent a hotel room, and family members of healthcare workers could not go shopping or go out (Denyer & Kashiwagi, 2020).

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The AEI defined a person who had been working with a COVID-19-infected person for 2 days prior to the onset of the disease as a “close contact.” Those who were identified as “close contacts” on the AEI were required to undergo PCR testing, even if they did not have symptoms, such as fever. If the result was positive, the person was placed in home quarantine as an infected person. Even if the result was negative, 14 days of health observation was required because of the possibility of false negative results. Initially, the public health centers monitored the health of these close contacts through daily phone calls, but as the number of infected persons increased, the workload of the health center staff became enormous. They had to check both COVID-19 patients and close contacts in addition to undertaking AEIs and other regular duties. Moreover, local public health centers were also tasked with finding hospitals willing to accept COVID-19 patients, a task that was difficult to coordinate because of the limited number of hospitals willing to accept COVID-19 patients, due in part to the aforementioned rumors. The number of infections subsided at the end of May, but increased again from the end of June, peaking again in August, when the Tokyo Olympics were scheduled to take place. In Japan, August 15 is the day of the Obon festival when people return to their hometown to see their parents, but in 2020 there were calls for people to “stay at your home during Obon” and to “meet parents online instead of going back to your hometown” (Mainichi, 2020). In actual fact, it was difficult to go back to hometowns because parents refused to have visitors. They believed that their children had brought COVID-19 to their communities from the “big city” and visitors would not be welcomed (Suzuki et al., 2021). It was also true that there was a strong negative feeling that “it is not fair for that person to leave the house when everyone else is staying home,” and bickering between members of the community was becoming stronger (Osaki, 2020). By this time, the development of a vaccine against COVID-19 had progressed worldwide and had reached the stage where it could be used clinically. At the end of November, two American companies announced that they had developed COVID-19 vaccines with 90–95% effectiveness (Polack et al., 2020). China and Russia were also developing their own vaccines and each reported positive results (Zhu et al., 2020; Caddy, 2020). Interest in vaccination in Japan was also growing considerably, driven by a desire to break out of the COVID-19 restrictions. In September 2020, a national survey was conducted on the willingness of the Japanese population to be vaccinated, and 68.7% of the respondents were willing to be vaccinated (Yoda & Katsuyama, 2021a). Vaccines against infectious diseases usually take several years to a decade to develop and implement, no matter how fast they are developed. The COVID-19 vaccine, however, was developed and implemented within a few months, an astonishingly fast process. Moreover, this vaccine introduced novel technology using messenger RNA, which is different from conventional vaccines (Tregoning et  al., 2021). As a result, many people were concerned about the safety of the vaccine and complained of fear of unknown adverse reactions. The government, medical professionals, and infectious disease experts were quick to release correct information and dispel such fears. The first COVID-19 vaccine was implemented in the United States in December 2020. In Japan, the first vaccine, from the United States, was administered 3 months later.

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 fter Vaccination and Appearance of a New Variant — A The Situation in 2021 There were many active proponents for vaccines in Japan in public opinion at the time. However, the COVID-19 vaccine, approved in February, was delayed in terms of supplying the entire population. Kosaka et al. cited the following three reasons for this delay: (1) the approval of the vaccine itself was slower than in other countries; (2) there was limited supply from Pfizer; and (3) there was a shortage of doctors and nurses to administer the vaccine, as well as a shortage of vaccination sites (Kosaka et al., 2021). There was also much debate about the order (who should be given priority) with regard to vaccination. In the end, it was decided that vaccinations should be given in the following order: 1. healthcare workers, 2. the elderly over 65 years old and those with underlying medical conditions, and 3. other adults. The first vaccination in Japan was scheduled for February 2021. Vaccination of older people and other adults began in April, but many problems arose with the reservations system and the securing of venues. During this period, the number of infected people kept increasing and decreasing, but the availability of the vaccine played a role in the decision that the Tokyo Olympics scheduled for 2020 would be held in 2021. However, the infection situation had worsened by the time the Olympics began, so a “bubble system” was introduced to isolate Olympic officials from the outside world, and most venues were held without spectators, an unusual situation. Andy Bull wrote in The Guardian that “Japan spent $17bn on an Olympic party no one could attend yet a shared message of overcoming hardship resonated worldwide.” In the second week of the Olympic period, daily cases of COVID-19 reached a new nationwide high. More than a third of them were in Tokyo, where the figures had almost tripled in the previous fortnight (Bull, 2021). Although the number of COVID-19 patients had increased, the mortality rate of COVID-19 was decreasing due to a lower rate of severe cases as a result of increased vaccination. This period was characterized by a relative decrease in infection among the elderly, for whom vaccination was given priority in the early stages (73% of the older people had completed two doses by the end of July), and conversely an increase in the proportion of infection among young people in their 20 s and 30 s, for whom vaccination was postponed, and among teenagers who were not eligible for vaccination at that stage (Mori & Naito, 2022). Even during the Tokyo Olympics, a state of emergency was declared, and restaurants remained closed. Medical institutions in Japan also had a major impact on overall healthcare, refusing to admit patients with other diseases or postponing standby surgeries due to the excessive number of COVID-19 hospitalized patients (Mainichi, 2021). Delta variant strains of COVID-19 became the mainstream at this time and were found to be more virulent than the conventional strains. With the rapid increase in the number of COVID-19 patients, some patients, especially younger ones, were unable to be hospitalized and died (Ikegami, 2021). The fear of the delta variant and the scientific view that vaccination decreases the risk of severe illness led to a strong recommendation for vaccination. However, there were also a few opponents to

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vaccines. Opponents can be broadly divided into those who were originally opposed to vaccines in general and those who claim that the COVID-19 vaccine is a conspiracy by the government or pharmaceutical companies. Some anti-vaccine groups have signed petitions and demonstrated in the street to call for vaccinations to be halted (Kimoto, 2021). Our survey revealed that those opposed or hesitant to vaccination are characterized by youth (in their 20 s and 30 s), low income and education, and use of social networking sites and YouTube as a source of COVID-19 vaccine information (Yoda et  al., 2022). Although there were some opposition groups, vaccination sites were filled with appointments every day; approximately 80% of the total population had completed two doses of COVID-19 vaccine by the end of November 2021 (Kurita et al., 2022). Since it had also been found that antibody titers decrease over time after vaccination (Levin et al., 2021), a third dose was recommended and provided for everyone. In addition, the momentum for vaccination of children who were not previously eligible for vaccination had increased. In April of 2021, before the COVID-19 vaccine was introduced to children, the authors conducted a survey of parents with children under 16 years of age to determine whether they wanted their children to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. The results showed that 42.9% of parents were willing to give their children the vaccine, while just as many (42.7%) were hesitant (Yoda & Katsuyama, 2021b). This was the result of a combination of both the fact that the rate of severe cases is lower in children than in adults, and concerns about adverse reactions and future effects of this new vaccine. However, the vaccination of children was also recommended by the government, based on the fact that vaccination has shifted the main source of infection from older people to the young. Following the start of vaccination of children aged 5–11 years in the United States in November, pediatric COVID-19 vaccination began in Japan in February 2022. Coincidentally, this was around the same time that a new variant strain of COVID-19, the Omicron variant strain, was circulating in Japan, and the number of infected children was the largest ever.

 ransition to the Omicron Variant Strain Epidemic T and Countermeasures The omicron variant was first reported to the WHO from South Africa in November 2021, followed by the spread of infection throughout Europe and the United States in December (CDC, 2021), with 160 cases confirmed in Japan by December 22nd, 2021 (Asahi Shimbun, 2021). The omicron variant was the mainstream of COVID-19 infection in Japan from January 2022, and the rate of severe cases was decreased compared to that in the summer of 2021, when the delta strain was the mainstream strain. This was a decrease compared to the summer of 2021. However, measures against COVID-19 in Japan remained as it was still considered a potent infectious disease, and all infected persons were registered with public health centers and

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placed under government control. Even during the surge of infected persons in summer 2021, AEI was conducted on all cases, and public health centers became dysfunctional due to lack of manpower. As a result, health monitoring of infected patients was inadequate, leading to deaths at home, and the situation was labelled a failure of the health system. However, the same countermeasures were repeated without any drastic reforms. Meanwhile, the mainstream variant had become omicron and, in February, England announced the elimination of all legal restrictions related to COVID-19 measures. Quarantine measures were abolished on February 24, and free large-scale testing was withdrawn on April 1 (Gov.UK, 2022). United States President Joe Biden also declared in a television interview in September 2021 that the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States was over (BBC, 2022). Travel restrictions were eased in many countries, and the wearing of masks was no longer mandatory. Although the Japanese government is gradually moving toward easing restrictions, many Japanese citizens still wear masks when they go out, and in many places, hand sanitizing and non-contact thermometer testing is required before entering shopping centers. Even at the end of 2022, the number of people infected with COVID-19 remains at the top of the news every day, and many Japanese people are still afraid of COVID-19. The law on infectious disease control labels COVID-19 as an infection of the second most dangerous level, but some politicians have suggested that it should be reduced to the same level as seasonal influenza. In fact, from October, it is now acceptable to report only the approximate age and number of patients, except for older people and those with chronic diseases. In November, restrictions on the entry of foreign travelers were also lifted, and quarantine measures were eased greatly. The definition of “close contacts” was also relaxed over the past 2 years, and PCR testing was no longer performed on asymptomatic persons. The home quarantine period for PCR test-positive persons was also reduced from 10 to 7  days (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2022). The measures taken in Japan have also been relaxed, albeit gradually, and the concept of living “with Corona” is expected to continue provided highly pathogenic variant strains do not emerge again in the future.

References Asahi Digital. (2020) Stone throwing and graffiti on houses of patients with COVID-19: the executives say “discrimination is unacceptable.” [In Japanese]. https://www.asahi.com/articles/ ASN4Q3SX5N4PONFB00P.html Asahi Shimbun. (2021). Community spread of variant spurs calls for stricter measures. https:// www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14508804 BBC. (2022). Covid-19 pandemic is over in the US  – Joe Biden. https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-­us-­canada-­62959089 Bull, A. (2021). Tokyo 2020 played out in empty arenas but bound eight billion people together. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/aug/08/tokyo-­2020-­played-­out-­in­empty-­arenas-­but-­bound-­eight-­billion-­people-­together

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Caddy, S. (2020). Russian SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. BMJ, 370. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m3270 CDC. (2021). SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.529 (Omicron) Variant – United States, December 1–8, 2021. MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 70(50), 1731–1734. https://doi.org/10.15585/ mmwr.mm7050e1 Denyer, S., & Kashiwagi, A. (2020). In Japan, coronavirus discrimination proves almost as hard to eradicate as the disease. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ world/asia_pacific/japan-­c oronavirus-­d iscrimination/2020/09/13/e82e5aa4-­e ea0-­1 1ea-­ bd08-­1b10132b458f_story.html Fujii, R., Konno, Y., Tateishi, S., Hino, A., Tsuji, M., Ikegami, K., et al. (2021). Association between time spent with family and loneliness among Japanese workers during the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-sectional study. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 786400. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyt.2021.786400 Gov.UK. (2022). Prime Minister sets out plan for living with COVID. https://www.gov.uk/ government/news/prime-­minister-­sets-­out-­plan-­for-­living-­with-­covid Ikegami, M. (2021). COVID-19 at-home deaths in Tokyo soar in younger patients. Asahi Shimbun. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14445450 Imahashi, R., & Shibata, N. (2020). Japan’s virus vigilantes underscore ‘suffocating’ society. Nikkei Asia. https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Asia-­Insight/Japan-­s-­virus-­vigilantes-­underscore­suffocating-­society Japan Times. (2020). Japan confirms first case of coronavirus that has infected dozens in China. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/16/national/science-­health/japan-­first­coronavirus-­case/ Jee, Y. (2020). WHO international health regulations emergency committee for the COVID-19 outbreak. Epidemiol Health, 42, e2020013. https://doi.org/10.4178/epih.e2020013 Karako, K., Song, P., Chen, Y., Tang, W., & Kokudo, N. (2021). Overview of the characteristics of and responses to the three waves of COVID-19 in Japan during 2020-2021. Bioscience Trends, 15(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.5582/bst.2021.01019 Kato, H., Shimizu, H., Shibue, Y., Hosoda, T., Iwabuchi, K., Nagamine, K., et al. (2020). Clinical course of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in individuals present during the outbreak on the diamond princess cruise ship. Journal of Infection and Chemotherapy, 26(8), 865–869. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jiac.2020.05.005 Kimoto, H. (2021). What factors have driven belief in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories in Japan? The Mainichi. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210908/p2a/00m/0na/027000c Kosaka, M., Hashimoto, T., Ozaki, A., Tanimoto, T., & Kami, M. (2021). Delayed COVID-19 vaccine roll-out in Japan. Lancet, 397(10292), 2334–2335. https://doi.org/10.1016/ s0140-­6736(21)01220-­4 Kurita, J., Sugawara, T., & Ohkusa, Y. (2021). Estimated effectiveness of school closure and voluntary event cancellation as COVID-19 countermeasures in Japan. Journal of Infection and Chemotherapy, 27(1), 62–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jiac.2020.08.012 Kurita, J., Sugawara, T., & Ohkusa, Y. (2022). Waning COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in Japan. Drug Discoveries and Therapeutics, 16(1), 30–36. https://doi.org/10.5582/ddt.2022.01000 Levin, E.  G., Lustig, Y., Cohen, C., Fluss, R., Indenbaum, V., Amit, S., et  al. (2021). Waning immune humoral response to BNT162b2 Covid-19 vaccine over 6 months. The New England Journal of Medicine, 385(24), e84. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2114583 Mainichi. (2020). Editorial: Japan gov’t guidance on Obon holiday travel amid virus surge a confused mess. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200807/p2a/00m/0na/011000c Mainichi. (2021). Ambulance crews in Japan struggle to get hospitals to accept suspected COVID patients. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210804/p2a/00m/0sc/027000c Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan. (2022). Coronavirus (COVID-19). https://www. mhlw.go.jp/stf/seisakunitsuite/bunya/0000164708_00079.html Mori, H., & Naito, T. (2022). A rapid increase in the COVID-19 vaccination rate during the Olympic and Paralympic games 2021 in Japan. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 18(1), 2010440. https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2021.2010440

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Okuyama, J., Seto, S., Fukuda, Y., Funakoshi, S., Amae, S., Onobe, J., et  al. (2021). Mental health and physical activity among children and adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Tohoku Journal of Experimental Medicine, 253(3), 203–215. https://doi.org/10.1620/ tjem.253.203 Osaki, T. (2020). Japan’s ‘virus vigilantes’ take on rule-breakers and invaders. Japan Times. https:// www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/05/13/national/coronavirus-­vigilantes-­japan/ Polack, F.  P., Thomas, S.  J., Kitchin, N., Absalon, J., Gurtman, A., Lockhart, S., et  al. (2020). Safety and efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 vaccine. The New England Journal of Medicine, 383(27), 2603–2615. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577 Suzuki, R., Iizuka, Y., & Lefor, A. K. (2021). COVID-19 related discrimination in Japan: A preliminary analysis utilizing text-mining. Medicine (Baltimore), 100(36), e27105. https://doi. org/10.1097/md.0000000000027105 Tregoning, J.  S., Flight, K.  E., Higham, S.  L., Wang, Z., & Pierce, B.  F. (2021). Progress of the COVID-19 vaccine effort: Viruses, vaccines and variants versus efficacy, effectiveness and escape. Nature Reviews. Immunology, 21(10), 626–636. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41577-­021-­00592-­1 Usami, M., Sasaki, S., Sunakawa, H., Toguchi, Y., Tanese, S., Saito, K., et al. (2021). Care for children’s mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. Global Health and Medicine, 3(2), 119–121. https://doi.org/10.35772/ghm.2020.01081 WHO. (2020). Emergencies preparedness, response: Pneumonia of unknown cause—China 2020. https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-­outbreak-­news/item/2020-­DON229 Yamada, M., Kimura, Y., Ishiyama, D., Otobe, Y., Suzuki, M., Koyama, S., et al. (2020). Effect of the COVID-19 epidemic on physical activity in community-dwelling older adults in Japan: A cross-sectional online survey. The Journal of Nutrition, Health & Aging, 24(9), 948–950. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12603-­020-­1424-­2 Yoda, T., & Katsuyama, H. (2021a). Willingness to receive COVID-19 vaccination in Japan. Vaccines, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines9010048 Yoda, T., & Katsuyama, H. (2021b). Parents’ hesitation about getting their children vaccinated against COVID-19  in Japan. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 17(12), 4993–4998. https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2021.1981087 Yoda, T., Rakue, Y., Jeng, H. W., & Mizota, T. (2003). The present conditions and the precautions against SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in Southeast Asia and China. Journal of Tokyo Medical University, 61(5), 455–459. Yoda, T., Suksatit, B., Tokuda, M., & Katsuyama, H. (2022). The relationship between sources of COVID-19 vaccine information and willingness to be vaccinated: An internet-based cross-­ sectional study in Japan. Vaccines, 10(7). https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines10071041 Zhong, N.  S., Zheng, B.  J., Li, Y.  M., Poon, L.  L. M., Xie, Z.  H., Chan, K.  H., et  al. (2003). Epidemiology and cause of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Guangdong, People’s Republic of China, in February, 2003. Lancet, 362(9393), 1353–1358. https://doi.org/10.1016/ s0140-­6736(03)14630-­2 Zhu, F.-C., Li, Y.-H., Guan, X.-H., Hou, L.-H., Wang, W.-J., Li, J.-X., et al. (2020). Safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of a recombinant adenovirus type-5 vectored COVID-19 vaccine: A dose-escalation, open-label, non-randomised, first-in-human trial. Lancet, 395(10240), 1845–1854. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-­6736(20)31208-­3 Takeshi Yoda is an associate professor in the department of Public Health, Kawasaki Medical School and Department of Health and Sports Science, Kawasaki University of Medical Welfare, Japan. He was a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. Before coming to Kawasaki Medical School and Kawasaki University of Medical Welfare, he taught and researched at the department of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, Kagawa University and Institute of Tropical Medicine, Nagasaki University. He holds a MD from Tokyo Medical University and Ph.D in Medicine from Nagasaki University. His research focus on issues related to infectious diseases control and prevention, aging problems in Southeast Asian countries, public health promotions in developing countries. He has authored papers in the area of Public Health, Geriatrics, and Vaccinology.  

Hikikomori and Belonging in a Post-­Pandemic Japan Naomi Berman

Abstract  A focus on the mental health impacts of the COVID-19 crisis has led to renewed attention on hikikomori in Japan. Hikikomori is a term used to describe a form of Japanese social recluses, or, more officially, anyone who has withdrawn from employment and social activities and not left their room/home for more than 6 months. Amid a current focus on the risks for the development of new, or exacerbation of existing, forms of hikikomori, no research exists on how the lived experiences of hikikomori may have been altered through the opportunities inadvertently thrown up by the significant transformations to social life, education and work. Although not as strict in Japan as in other countries, the lockdowns and restrictions globally re-framed not only understandings of social interaction and isolation, but also the boundaries of social and economic participation, which prior to this point had been central to prevailing negative hikikomori imaginaries. Amid a government and population-wide assessment on the social, emotional and health problems presented by the pandemic, the renewed importance of the centrality of community and our reliance on others in the human experience prevails, at the same time highlighting a need to re-evaluate the ways in which sense of belonging, social membership and participation arise and how this might configure hikikomori imaginaries anew. Keywords  Hikikomori · Belonging · Post-pandemic · Social isolation · Participation

Introduction While the specific experience of the COVID-19 crisis may vary within and between countries, the deterioration of peoples’ psychological and mental health arising out of feelings of loneliness, hopelessness, academic/work stress and insecurity N. Berman (*) Center for Global Studies, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_6

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continues to be documented in empirical treatments (Amerio et al., 2020; Eurofound, 2020; Franklin & Tranter, 2022; Luo et al., 2020; Taylor et al., 2020; Tull et al., 2020). Although the confinement sustained during the lockdowns was imposed, rather than an intentional withdrawal from social life, the extended period of reclusion in some cases mutated into a source of comfort and security such that there was a reluctance to re-enter social life once the lockdowns and restrictions were lifted. In part, fear of contracting the virus underpinned this reluctance. Research has shown that for older people in particular, the pandemic made social interactions and everyday spaces outside the home seem dangerous (Franklin & Tranter, 2022). The focus on the mental health impacts of the pandemic has led to renewed attention on hikikomori in Japan. Existing for several decades, hikikomori is a term used to describe a form of Japanese social recluses, or, more officially, anyone who has withdrawn from employment and social activities and not left their room/home for more than 6 months. Originally conceived as a neurotic condition causing a state of acute social withdrawal, there have been moves to emphasise its cultural characteristics (Saito, 1998). Over time, the concept has been popularized in academic, policy and pop cultural imaginaries. However, an enduring account of hikikomori is that these people are highly sensitive to their social and emotional surroundings such that when they encounter harassment, bullying and violence, often culminating in a loss of trust in and fear of others, they are driven to retreat to the safety of their homes (Ikegami, 2019). Much of the current research focus on hikikomori centres on the pandemic-­ inducing risk factors such as confinement to the home accompanied by increased time online, school closures and the subsequent digital delivery of education, precarious employment and a looming financial recession, which are viewed as potential triggers for new cases or forms of hikikomori (Gavin & Brosnan, 2022; Kato et al., 2020; Kimura, 2022; Kubo et al., 2022; Katsuki et al., 2021; Rooksby et al., 2020; Roza et al., 2020). Indeed, Rooksby et al. (2020, p. 399), proffer that lockdown lengths can be mapped along a hikikomori trajectory, whereby 3 months of lockdown is equated to a “pre-hikikomori” stage. While acknowledging that the social withdrawal during the COVID-19 global pandemic was forced and thus different from hikikomori, it is still conceptually treated the same regarding recommended treatment strategies (Dong et al., 2022; Rooksby et al., 2020). Furthermore, amid this current attention on the new risks for the development and exacerbation of hikikomori, limited research looks at how the shared experience of restrictions on mobility and social distancing measures experienced by people may have produced a degree of empathy for hikikomori (Wong, 2020). This chapter explores how the COVID-19 global pandemic might have re-­ shaped the lived experiences of hikikomori regarding the opportunities inadvertently thrown up as a result of the significant alterations to social life, education and work. This also includes whether any shifting public narratives, or changed perceptions of hikikomori in mainstream understandings, have contributed to this change. Although not as strict in Japan as in other countries, the lockdowns and restrictions globally re-framed not only understandings of social interaction and isolation, but

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also the boundaries of social and economic participation, which prior to this point had been central to prevailing negative hikikomori imaginaries.

Taxonomies of Hikikomori As of the beginning of 2019, the profile of hikikomori was as follows. Over a third (38.5%) are between the ages of 15 and 30 years. Of those 30 and under, 35% were already hutoko (school non-attenders) at school age. A further 33% are in their 30 s, 21% in their 40  s, and 7.5% are over 50  years of age (Kanagawa Prefectural Government, 2019). Around 50% of hikikomori have remained in their houses for over 5 years. Regarding gender, less than 25% of reported hikikomori are female (Kanagawa Prefectural Government, 2019). However, the rates of female hikikomori are under-­ reported due to a definitional peculiarity being that the status of “housewife” rules out their categorisation as hikikomori for reporting purposes. More startingly, just being responsible for chores in the home, regardless of marriage status, exempts a female’s inclusion under the current definition, having serious implications for their eligibility for support. It is widely known in Japan that parents are unwilling to reveal to friends or relatives that they have a hikikomori son or daughter, let alone report to a formal institution or agency. Traditionally, such families are reluctant to engage any agencies that might discover the situation at home. Unlike other countries with socialised health systems, such as Australia or the UK, where there is a culture of family physicians, no such informal monitoring system exists in Japan; family physicians are uncommon. Therefore, the trajectories by which hikikomori come to be recognised are happenstance, mostly occurring via education (for youth), recruitment organisations (for those in their 20 s and 30 s), and city halls, where the detection of older hikikomori (40+ age group), often occurs incidentally when their parents reach old age, often requiring a greater need for formal arrangements of social intervention. In such cases it is not uncommon for counsellors to discover a hikikomori son or daughter at the home of ageing parents. These pathways were sharply curtailed during the pandemic, arguably further enabling practices of concealment as people refrained from their usual interactions with authorities and agencies. It is widely held that hikikomori may also suffer from mental health issues and are reluctant to see a psychiatrist. This situation is complicated by a cultural stigma that results in shame for the individual and his or her family. According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW), 70% of hikikomori feel regretful to their family, and around half express that it is painful to live long. This situation is even more despairing for the over-40-year age group, of whom more than 30% report feeling that they want to die (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, n.d.). Importantly, the personal experiences and attitudes of hikikomori from their own voice is often elided in these mainstream, institutionally framed narratives.

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The handful of blogs and websites that exist offer stories of shared experience that provide brief fragments of their daily life worlds, with topics ranging from the relatively mundane accounts of everyday activities, to engaging in current/social affairs, or the broadcast of philosophical ruminations. These digital accounts, as well as a dedicated newspaper and online magazine produced by hikikomori, attempt to give a voice to hikikomori and provide a counter-narrative to mainstream negative portrayals (Berman & Rizzo, 2021).

 rom Crisis to a Reframing of Relationality: Dichotomies F of Loneliness and Belonging The situation described above presents a somewhat dismal picture of a vulnerable and hard-to-reach group isolated from society, making a consideration of how these conditions might have changed amid the significant social transformations experienced by Japan as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic evermore salient. In their work on youth policy and belonging, Harris et al. (2021) identify a normative construction of ‘conditional belonging’ whereby young peoples’ membership is limited to their participation in education, training and employment realms. Those at the margins are considered ‘deficient and morally distinct from the rest of society’ (Harris et al., 2021, p. 10). Hikikomori are, similarly, framed in a disempowering way because of their failure to meet these normative conditions of membership in public spaces. Indeed, prior to the pandemic, the prevailing imaginary of hikikomori relied on an assumed wilful disconnection from the social world posing an unspoken threat to social order. Paradoxically, under pandemic conditions, efforts to ‘shelter in place’ (Rooksby et al., 2020, p. 399) became somewhat virtuous, a measure of good citizenship. This discussion, therefore, seeks to explore whether this refashioned view of isolation extended to hikikomori, mitigating the negativity surrounding the phenomenon. Alternatively, did the forced restrictions and limitations around social interactions have an unfavourable effect on hikikomori, who have traditionally been viewed as wilful in their choice to remove themselves from social participation? That few seemed to enjoy, or benefit from, the extended period of reclusiveness might have provoked a backlash against those who willingly choose it. To what extent the social changes under the pandemic reinforced largely uncritical and normative understandings of belonging and contribution to society is a question that likewise would benefit from a deeper exploration. This also includes paying closer attention to the tensions, conflicts and contradictions that remain or have been created anew. Franklin and Tranter (2022) argue that one of the most important qualities of social relationships is the extent to which they offer a sense of belonging. While much research on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic focuses on mental health and wellbeing outcomes, few studies examine how peoples’ sense of belonging and

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participation were affected. This is somewhat curious given that the concept has ‘many registers’ (Harris et  al., 2021, p.  4), including social, political, economic, cultural and spatial, that all played a role in the experiences of isolation during the COVID-19 restrictions. In one investigation on the increased reports of loneliness arising out of the lengthy lockdowns and restrictions in Australia, Franklin and Tranter (2022, p.  152) argue that loneliness can be explained by the concept of belonging, which in longstanding psychological traditions is not only a ‘precursor to social connectedness but also a buffer against loneliness’. Belonging also includes: … membership, rights and duties, forms of identification with groups or other people and with places, and the emotional and social bonds that come of feelings of being part of a larger whole. It is about both the subjective and affective experience of connection and the social, structural processes of recognition, inclusion and exclusion (Harris et al., 2021, p. 3).

Given this definition, it is easy to see how notions of belonging might have been reimagined under a social environment transformed by crisis. Changes in our circumstances prefigure changes in our sense of belonging, corresponding with changes in the self that take place at the same time (May, 2011). Belonging is thus not fixed or static, but rather fluid, dynamic and actively constituted through everyday performances and practices. This also extends to both meaningful and mundane daily habits, routines, rituals of membership and responses of individuals within their social networks and places (Harris et al., 2021).

Hikikomori and Its Malcontents: Pre-pandemic Imaginaries As a topic for investigation, studies on hikikomori rely on medical and psychological explanations that have a tendency towards reductive and essentialising models of subjectivity. This also includes a set of ambiguously defined character traits and behavioural patterns, that, according to the research, can be corrected with the right treatment. Under these deficit approaches, hikikomori have been discursively constructed as having ‘parasitical tendencies’, an ‘indifference’ towards relationships, ‘impaired social networks’, ‘socially maladaptive’, prone to ‘truancy’, ‘misanthropic’, ‘avoidant’, ‘recluse’, ‘pathological social withdrawal’ (Kato et al., 2016; Heinze & Thomas, 2014; Li & Wong, 2015; Teo et al., 2015), and an inability to ‘… enter society or adapt to their surroundings’ (Suwa & Suzuki, 2013, p. 193). The overwhelming implication of such labelling is a voluntary withdrawal from responsibility as measured by participation in public and institutional spheres such as education and employment (Yong & Kaneko, 2016). However, amid this pathologizing imagery exists a handful of sociological and cultural counter-narratives that offer alternative ways of understanding hikikomori worlds. Overell (2018) critiques the prevailing trope of hikikomori as a wilful withdrawal from society, at the same time configuring them as a drain on family and the state. Rather, she contends that their ‘…  aberration from normative Japanese

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culture’ is a form of queering through resistance to dominant norms and values around masculinity and heteronormativity (2018, p. 207). Other critiques involve the identification of a distinct set of narratives that interact to discursively frame hikikomori in largely negative and disempowering ways. A previous paper by Berman and Rizzo (2018) explored the concept of isolation informed by cultural and social narratives that reveal tensions and contradictions, including questions relating to who has the power to define, and thus control, ways of knowing hikikomori. In Japan and abroad, mainstream media imaginaries consistently perpetuate cultural stereotypes (otaku, parasaito, neeto and furita) that position hikikomori as being socially inept, while often at the same time digital or technological postmodern vanguards. Such narratives highlight existing tensions between a medicalised or psychologicalised and a pop cultural imaginary. The persistent false narrative promoted through the media can have deleterious impacts on hikikomori, as demonstrated in 2019 when harmful media coverage of the Kawasaki stabbings that implicated a hikikomori led to a father murdering his hikikomori son due to an irrational fear that his son might “cause trouble to the society” (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, n.d.). Such persistent and enduring sources of othering, including shakai no o nimotsu (society’s baggage), ensures that social mores around the individual and society remain largely unquestioned. Yet, as will be discussed next, the pandemic has forced a reconsideration of unchallenged norms, assumptions and expectations surrounding relationships, participation and, importantly, who is deemed to belong to a society (Harris et al., 2021).

Recasting Social Isolation Unmistakably, the significant transformations to social life, including disrupted material and spatial realities, that have been a feature of the global pandemic, have had an impact on what it means to live, work and belong in society. The transition to online modes of work and education, coupled with restrictions on mobility and social interactions, precipitated a strong sense of shared experience, whereby among other things social isolation became of service to the protection of self and other. Assisted by heightened official and community surveillance and control, self-­ isolation was given value, simultaneously producing a form of reverse othering for those who were perceived to be flouting regulations and measures around virus containment. Amongst the ‘pandemic imaginaries’ (Dey & Lynteris, 2021), the figure of a pandemic citizen, who shows self-restraint across a continuum of social and personal behaviours, was prominent. Proactive and protective behaviours towards self and others such as refraining from going out, social distancing, mask-wearing, frequent vaccination and the inevitable self-isolation upon virus-contraction or identification as a close contact generated harsh stigmatising practices towards those who

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did not conform. In Japan, forms of anonymous slander were levelled against domestic visitors from areas in Japan deemed high risk. Particularly troubling were the widely known jishuku keisatsu, referring to citizens who ‘act similar to police officers and denounce “persons who don’t obey the self-restraint request” during the COVID-19 pandemic’ (Katsuki et al., 2021, p. 301). The recasting of isolation as virtuous, a sacrifice for the wellbeing of the whole, albeit temporarily and under forced conditions, has implications for hikikomori who exist in both public understandings and private experiences of self as set apart from society. Terms such as ‘sheltering in place’ likewise conjure connotations that bridge the ontological and epistemological gaps between different forms and significations of social withdrawal. Despite the shifting boundaries of belonging and avenues for participation, the question of what tensions and conflicts remain, indeed have been resistant to change, is worthy of exploring. Takahashi (2020) argues that hikikomori have come to be viewed as a source of insight on isolation. He adds, ‘while the term hikikomori was used colloquially prior to the pandemic, juxtaposing an understudied mental health issue with a global crisis is problematic because it risks overshadowing long-term hikikomori in need of help, and can create a false sense of understanding among the majority’ (2020, p. 8). For him, the assumption that they are better equipped to cope with conditions of isolation and restraint perpetuates existing ambiguities surrounding the definition and risks alienating them even further. Flippant references to ‘living like hikikomori’ were more than just passing anecdotes in mainstream COVID narratives. At the same time, the term ‘semi-­hikikomori’ emerged in Japan. Residing on a proto-threshold continuum for diagnosis, semi-­ hikikomori, as opposed to ‘pre-hikikomori’ who are nearing the 6-month marker (Kato et al., 2020), refers to someone who had not yet achieved full-blown social withdrawal, but is sufficiently curtailed for it to affect the quality of their lives (Su et  al., 2021). In such instances, the individual occasionally leaves the home for shopping or exercise, but likely does so at night in an effort to avoid encountering others (Wong, 2009). In the case of university students, semi-hikikomori has been applied to those who have no problem while studying, however the lack of social interaction presents issues after graduation (Higuchi, 2008).While the psycho-­ medical fields are currently concerned about an accelerated transition from pre- to semi-hikikomori as part of the suite of COVID-19 impacts, the term semi-­hikikomori has been co-opted in popular mainstream media narratives to refer to individuals who, although they can go outside, are reluctant to use public transport for work, preferring to stay online (Kimura, 2022). This appropriation of proxy-diagnostic categories of hikikomori broadly signifies an imagined commonality between hikikomori and non-hikikomori. Moreover, in an exploration of the benefits of perceptions of pandemic conditions as commonly endured, Tull et al. (2020) found that the widespread shared experience of COVID-19 contributed to an increase in closeness and social cohesion, as previously observed in past national tragedies. Accordingly, an impact of the extended periods of isolation and social distancing is the potential for greater understanding of and empathy for hikikomori (Wong, 2020). These new and unexpected identifications with the hikikomori world are broadly reflective of the shifting boundaries of

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social membership and belonging, and thus have important implications for hikikomori, to which this chapter now turns.

 ew Opportunities for and Forms of Membership, N Participation and Belonging Amid the attention on negative impacts of the pandemic on hikikomori, there is some evidence pointing to the benefits and opportunities to emerge out of the crisis. Not unsurprisingly, the explosion in online education and work opportunities (although the office culture of Japan that values face-to-face interactions for workplace solidarity made this transition slower than in other countries) provided pathways to participation that arguably were not previously available. There have been reports of increasing numbers of hikikomori now able to go outside because of the pandemic (NHK, 2020). During pre-pandemic times, they would be fearful of neighbourhood perceptions and attitudes, but with fewer people out and about, these fears were diminished. Conversely, government requests to remain indoors alleviated the pressure from family members to go outside, making it easier to be hikikomori, unencumbered by family and social expectations. Harris et  al. (2021) argue that work and education are important spheres for young peoples’ participation, and that non-participation in these formal institutions, in the ways expected, configures their un-belonging. Irrespective of age, traditional notions of belonging rely on the fulfilment of normative expectations around engagement with work and/or education and social life. In this way, according to May (2011), belonging is not merely a state of mind, but is bound up with being able to act in a socially significant manner that is recognised by others. Yet, belonging is also often ‘shaped through exclusion’ (McCann & Killen, 2019, p. 137), and amid the multiplicity of different belongings, Antonsich (2010, p. 650) suggests a bifurcated concept as being constituted by ‘… the side that claims belonging, and the side that has the power of “granting” belonging’. This often is illustrated in migration and citizenship political debates, where recognition of difference becomes the nexus where identity and belonging tensions and conflicts exist. In Japan, the COVID-19 crisis prompted the establishment of increased agencies, both public and private, to support people looking for employment. For individuals suffering mental health issues, services such as Employment Transition Support Service, Public Employment Security Office, and Job Café were established (https://hataractive.jp/useful/5186/). Although there is yet to be published data, it is believed there was an increase in hikikomori accessing these services with successful outcomes (Soudunsaari, 2022). In the education sector, as a result of the switch to online delivery, it was reported that for students who were hutoko (school non-attenders) at 9th grade, 40% went on to either vocational school or university; many of these were then able to find work after graduation. Numbers are reportedly increasing (https://konomirai.com/school-­refusal-­future/). At universities the

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traditional entrance examination was removed via a system called ‘Comprehensive Selection’, which unblocked previously rare pathways for hikikomori to enter higher education (https://konomirai.com/school-­refusal-­future/). These unforeseen opportunities have enabled hikikomori to participate in meaningful workplace, education and social spaces, at the same time re-shaping the attitudes and perceptions others have of them. Wong (2020) contends that a potentially deepened understanding of hikikomori, as a result of a sense of shared pandemic experience, may have the benefit of enabling better integration of hikikomori into the worlds of work and community. The practices and interactions, and the places and spaces in which they take place, that were severely disrupted and curtailed during the pandemic, have necessitated fundamental alterations in the sense of belonging for all members of society, simultaneously re-framing understandings of hikikomori.

New Risks: Uncharted Relational Landscapes While hikikomori may have benefited from greater access to employment and education during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan, not all is positive. As the pandemic deepened and attention was diverted to the welfare and wellbeing of the general population, it was easier for hikikomori and their families to go undetected and fall into greater levels of distress and need. It is commonly known that the pandemic has laid bare the vulnerabilities of a range of marginalised groups, as existing socioeconomic disadvantages and stigmatisations have been exacerbated by the COVID crisis (Lupton, 2022; United Nations, 2020). Additionally, research has highlighted how the home became an unsafe space for some both in Japan and abroad (Leigh et al., 2023; Kofman & Garfin, 2020). Even prior to the pandemic, evidence was coming to light on how the home was often contested territory for hikikomori, who were routinely exposed to disapproval and pressure to go out, or other sanctions, and in the worst case outright abuse. One such troubling account involved a 38-year-­ old male hikikomori who, after severe school bullying led to an inability to attend school at the age of 12, had made several attempts at suicide over the years. This situation brought wrath from both parents in the form of frequent beatings from his father, and one incident where his mother screamed at him to die whilst choking him (Tangi, 2022). While this is an extreme case, such events are unfortunately under-­ reported. Furthermore, that these families were already under the radar prior to the COVID-19 pandemic is highly concerning given the empirical evidence pointing to increased alcohol abuse and domestic violence in Japanese domestic spheres since (Ando, 2020; Kitanaka, 2021; NHK, 2021).

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Conclusion: Has Anything Changed? As Japan emerges under a new set of social and economic conditions, a key question guiding this discussion has been to what extent, if any, the COVID-19 pandemic altered or re-shaped understandings and the lived worlds of hikikomori. Amid a government and population-wide assessment on the social, emotional and health problems amplified by the pandemic, the renewed importance of the centrality of community and our reliance on others in the human experience prevails. For hikikomori, a previous concern was with how their disconnection from education, work and community life (all viewed as productive forms of participation) became a form of un-belonging. Sense of belonging is built and re-built through our surroundings and the interactions taking place within them, and as such resides in the nexus for the connection between the self and the social structures we engage in through our daily lives (May, 2011). That the pandemic has significantly shifted the boundaries for these social categories highlights a need to re-evaluate the ways in which sense of belonging, social membership and participation arise and how this might configure hikikomori imaginaries anew. The tensions and difficulties in trying to understand the phenomenon of hikikomori are captured by Tsalapatanis (2019, p. 22) who argues, ‘Our interpellation by others – the ways in which we are addressed through terms that we cannot avoid – has implications much more broadly than questions of belonging’. That the pandemic can be positively viewed for assisting in re-integrating hikikomori into society, under new forms of participation, remains problematic for normative understandings around what it is to be a citizen whilst ignoring the structural barriers that compelled them to this state of un-belonging in the first place. Creating different conceptual affordances of the idea of hikikomori in a post-­ pandemic world has implications for framing policy and research that ultimately come to bear on the daily worlds of hikikomori. For example, what should a new policy agenda to support this group look like? What changes to existing approaches are needed? Amid the renewed focus on the amplification of health inequalities that existed before the COVD-19 pandemic, there is justifiable concern in psychological fields that the pandemic will increase the existing vulnerabilities of hikikomori (Holmes et al., 2020; Wong, 2020). Relatedly, there are several avenues in which further research could be fruitfully pursued. As data continues to be gathered on the outcomes and impacts of the pandemic, a focus on what marginality looks like for this group, and how its traditional composition has changed, if at all, would be worthwhile. In Japan, it is now recognised that young people and females were the worst affected, in terms of mental health and job losses, by pandemic measures (Kajitani et al., 2021; Tahara et al., 2021). Given this, a deeper consideration how this might alter the composition of hikikomori in terms of age, gender and class would be usefully pursued. Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 pandemic has ‘… brought to light the civic, social and economic bonds that tie societies together as well as the structural faultlines that crises lay bare’ (Harris et al., 2021, p. 4). It has also affirmed the critical role of

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digital means for participation, and in doing so furnished a way for greater awareness and understanding of the impact the pandemic has had on ways of belonging and participation in a post-COVID world. With this in mind, the future possibilities for hikikomori in Japan look hopeful. Acknowledgements This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Kakenhi) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) [grant number 19 K03023]. I wish to thank Misaki Arai for her wonderful fact-finding efforts, which made an invaluable contribution to this chapter.

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Nihon housou kyoukai (NHK). (2020, June 10). Korona no mukougawa de (2) “kaiwa” yorimo “taiwa” wo [Rather than conversation, we should promote “dialogue” (Tamaki Saito)]. NHK haato netto [NHK Heart Net]. Fukushi jouhou sougou saito [NHK Welfare Information Website]. Retrieved from https://www.nhk.or.jp/heart-­net/article/365/ Nihon housou kyoukai (NHK). (2021, June 16). Anataha daijyoubu? Korona-ka no aruko-ru izon [Are you OK? Alcohol abuse under Corona]. Retrieved from https://www.nhk.or.jp/gendai/ articles/4558/ Overell, R. (2018). Queer will: hikikomori as willful subjects. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 19(2), 206–219. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2018.1463069 Rooksby, M., Furuhashi, T., & McLeod, H. J. (2020). Hikikomori: A hidden mental health need following the COVID-19 pandemic. World Psychiatry, 19(3), 399–400. Roza, T. H., Spritzer, D. T., Gadelha, A., & Passos, I. C. (2020). Hikikomori and the COVID-19 pandemic: Not leaving behind the socially withdrawn. Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry, 43(1), 114–116. Saito, T. (1998). Shakaiteki hikikomori: owaranai shishunki (Social withdrawal: Unfinished puberty). PHP-Kenkyujo. Soudunsaari, M. (2022). COVID-19’s impact on the recovering hikikomori individuals in Japan: A qualitative survey analysis through CHIME framework [Unpublished master’s thesis]. Ritsumeikan Asian Pacific University. Su, X., Li, T. M. H., & Wong, P. W. C. (2021). Expanding sources of recognition: Towards an experience-driven framework for reengaging hikikomori and semi-hikikomori. Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10560-­021-­00795-­4 Suwa, M., & Suzuki, K. (2013). The phenomenon of “Hikikomori” (social withdrawal) and the socio-cultural situation in Japan today. Journal of Psychopathology, 19(2013), 191–198. Tahara, M., Mashizume, Y., & Takahashi, K. (2021). Mental health crisis and stress coping among healthcare college students momentarily displaced from their campus community because of COVID-19 restrictions in Japan. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18, 7245. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18147245 Takahashi, T. (2020, May 16). The trouble with linking COVID-19 to hikikomori. The Japan Times, p. 8. Tangi, M. (2022, February 26). 10 nen ni wataru hikikomori seikatsu kara kiseki no dasshyutsu 38 sai dansei ga gyakutai sareta oya wo urandeinai riyuu jisatsu misui tasuu mo ima ha sekai ni yuujin oozei [“Getting away from 10 years of hikikomori” Why 38-year-old male does not hate his violent (or abusing) parents –Although attempting to commit suicide for several times, he now has a lot of friends in the world]. President Online. Retrieved from https://president.jp/ articles/-­/55008?page=1 Taylor, S., Landry, C. A., Paluszek, M. M., Fergus, T. A., McKay, D., & Asmundson, G. J. G. (2020). COVID stress syndrome: Concept, structure, and correlates. Depression and Anxiety, 37(8), 706–714. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.23071 Teo, A. R., Fetters, M. D., Stufflebam, K., Tateno, M., Balhara, Y., Choi, T. Y., Kanba, S., Mathews, C. A., & Kato, T. A. (2015). Identification of the hikikomori syndrome of social withdrawal: Psychosocial features and treatment preferences in four countries. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 61, 64–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020764014535758 Tsalapatanis, A. (2019). Naming belonging: When national vocabularies fail. In A. Tsalapatanis, M. Bruce, D. Bissell, & H. Keane (Eds.), Social beings, future belongings: Reimagining the social. Routledge. Tull, M. T., Edmonds, K. A., Scamaldo, K. M., Richmond, J. R., Rose, J. P., & Gratz, K. L. (2020). Psychological outcomes associated with stay-at-home orders and the perceived impact of COVID-19 on daily life. Psychiatry Research, 289, 113098. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. psychres.2020.113098 United Nations. (2020, May 3). COVID-19 Pandemic Exposes Global ‘Frailties and Inequalities.’ UN News. Retrieved from https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/05/1063022

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Wong, V. (2009). Youth locked in time and space? Defining features of social withdrawal and practice implications. Journal of Social Work Practice, 23(3), 337–352. Wong, P.  W. C. (2020). Potential changes to the hikikomori phenomenon in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 54, 102288. Yong, R., & Kaneko, Y. (2016). Hikikomori, a phenomenon of social withdrawal and isolation in young adults marked by an anomic response to coping difficulties: A qualitative study exploring individual experiences from first- and second-person perspectives. Open Journal of Preventive Medicine, 6, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojpm.2016.61001 Naomi Berman is Assistant Project Professor for the ALESA program at the Center for Global Studies, the University of Tokyo, Japan. A youth sociologist, in addition to her interest in hikikomori, her current research focuses on informal learning spaces in higher education. She is Associate Editor of the UNESCO Observatory Multi-Disciplinary Research in the Arts ejournal.  

Migrant Long-Term Care Workers in Japan Rie Miyazaki

Abstract  As of the 2020s, Japan is ageing at the fastest rate in the world, and its traditional family, gender and economic structures continue to change. In response to the decline in the active workforce, a major shift in labour migration policy was finally observed at the end of the 2010s. Focusing on the employment patterns of migrant care workers, this chapter aims to identify the following three points: first, the historical developments of migration and care policies, second, the actual conditions and classification of various migration programs for care workers, and third, Japan’s present employment model in the long-term care sector and future prospects from a cross-national perspective. This chapter shows that even after major policy reform in labour migration in the late 2010s, from a macroscopic cross-national perspective, Japan’s migrant caregiver employment model did not change significantly. In contrast, when focusing on the changes in migration pathways for care workers, there was clearly a tendency towards the deskilling of migrant care workers. Keywords  Long-term care (LTC) · Migrant workers · Care policy · Immigration policy · Deskilling · Employment model

Introduction Since 1995, the working-age population in Japan has continuously declined. As of 2020, Japan is the most rapidly ageing society in the world. In the 40 years between 1980 and 2020, the ageing rate increased from 9.1 % to 28.6%, and life expectancy increased by approximately 10 years for both men and women, to 81.6 years for men and 87.7 years for women (Cabinet Office, 2022a). As population ageing is

R. Miyazaki (*) Ohtsuki City College, Otsuki, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_7

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expected to progress further, Japanese society must address the increasing demands of the new labour force, especially the unskilled manual labour, health and long-­ term care (LTC) sectors. In fact, the number of LTC workers required in 2025 has been estimated to be 2.53 million, with an anticipated shortage of 380,000 workers (Uebayashi, 2015). Increasing demand for the LTC workforce in Japan is caused not only by an ageing population but also by family and gender issues, such as changes in the traditional asymmetric gendered division of labour in housework and family care. Japan has long been reluctant to accept migrant care workers compared with other countries. However, since approximately 2010, there has been a gradual shift in immigration policy, and the foreign worker population in Japan increased rapidly, by more than 5.6 times, from 139,861 in 1995 to 787,627 in 2014 (Machikita, 2015). Furthermore, while it has not fully recovered from the dramatic impact of COVID-19, migrant workers have increased significantly between the 2010s and the early 2020s (MHLW, 2022a). The latest data at the end of 2020 show that there are 2,887,116 foreign residents, corresponding to 2.3% of the total population (Immigration Bureau, 2021). Focusing on migrant LTC workers, this chapter discusses how Japan is addressing the unprecedented growing demands on the LTC workforce by introducing new schemes into the migration system. More specifically, in the sections that follow, we discuss the following three questions before concluding with a summary of findings and implications for future research in the final section: I) How have migration and LTC policies developed in Japan? II) Who are the migrant LTC workers who actually work in Japan, and what kind of migration system are they working through? III) Has the Japan’s LTC model in cross-national perspective changed or stayed the same since 2017?

 evelopment of Japan’s Immigration and Long-Term D Care Policies Policy Development in Migrant Work Since 1945, after World War II (WWII), and throughout the twentieth century, the Japanese government has not allowed the entry and settlement of foreign unskilled and low-skilled manual workers. Between 1920 and 2000, the share of foreign residents in Japan remained under 1% of the total population, except for 1940, mainly due to the Japanese colonial policy on Korea (Statistic Bureau, 2015). Indeed, the migrant policy from the end of WWII to at least the 1980s mainly targeted Korean and Chinese people who came to Japan before and during WWII and remained in Japan after the war (Tsukada, 2021).

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Since the late 1980s, the expansion and collapse of the economic bubble triggered a shortage of manual workers and a rapid increase in irregular unskilled migrant workers. While the relevant migrant policy for unskilled or low-skilled manual migrant workers was barely reformed between the 1990s and the mid-­2000s, these workers continuously increased during this period, often participating in undeclared work (Okamura, 2018), or gaining access to labour mainly through the permanent resident category or the Technical Internship Training (TIT) Program. In 1989, the resident status system was reformed, and the category ‘permanent resident’ was created, which in principle guarantees the freedom of choice of occupation and an unlimited duration of stay. Since the eligibility for this resident status was extended to a wider range of foreign citizens who are descendants of Japanese nationals, the number of second- and third-generation Japanese-Latin Americans (mostly Japanese-Brazilians) who engage in manual work has rapidly increased (Shimizu, 2008). In 1993, the TIT Program, which permits foreign trainees to work as manual workers for a maximum of 2  years in Japan, was established (Okamura, 2018). In the 2010s, during the gradual recovery from damage in the World Financial Crisis and Great East Japan Earthquake (2011), a workforce shortage in care, manufacturing and construction sectors became more pronounced (MHLW, 2018a). In May 2018, the Japanese government lifted the ban on unskilled and/or low-skilled foreign workers and issued a basic policy principle that broadly allows non/low-­ qualified migrant workers in construction, agriculture, long-term care, shipbuilding and the hotel industry to enter under the TIT and Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) programs that can be considered a follow-up to the TIT. National plans were issued to admit more than 500,000 foreign unskilled workers in these sectors by approximately 2025 (Nikkei, 2018).

 olicy Development in Long-Term Care (LTC) and Migrant P Care Workers In contrast to the retrofitted labour migration policy, the LTC policy for older adults developed earlier in Japan. In 1960, the Act on Social Welfare for the Elderly was enacted, when Japan was not yet an ageing society and the care responsibility for older adults was still strongly centred on the family. However, public LTC services have been provided based on the ability-to-pay principle and selectivism, where only those with low incomes are eligible for public benefits. Consequently, the public in-kind LTC system imposed a disproportionately heavier cost burden on middle-­ upper income households until the 1990s (MHLW, 2016). Around the 1990s, rapid population ageing and social and family changes gradually exposed the limits of this combination of welfare selectionism and emphasis on family responsibility for providing care for older adults: Between 1980 and 2019, among households with people aged 65 and over, single-person

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households increased from 10.7% to 28.8%, and the three-generation households which were once considered the standard household type under patriarchy, and intergenerational mutual assistance, decreased from 50.1%to 9.4% (Cabinet Office, 2022a). Additionally, the number of dual-income couple households more than doubled, from 6.1 to 12.5 million households, while the households with a single male earner and female full-time housewife (often considered an unpaid family caregiver) nearly halved from 11.1 to 5.7 million in the same period (Cabinet Office, 2022b). In 2000, aiming to “socialize long-term care”, the national long-term care insurance system (NLTCI), which provides public, in-kind LTC services, was enforced. The NLTCI is literally a social insurance system, and among insured persons aged 40 and over, those who are certified as requiring LTC basically receive in-kind services according to the degree of need for long-term care, covering approximately 80–90% of total long-term care costs. Between 2000 and 2021, the number of NLTCI service recipients increased from 1.49 million to 5.81 million, and the total expenditure of the system increased from 219 billion yen to 800.7 billion yen (Cabinet Office, 2022a). And the number of LTC workers covered by NLTCI increased from 549,000 to 2,106,000 between 2000 and 2019 (MHLW, 2022b). In 2009, Japan accepted migrant LTC workers for the first time under the EPA (Economic Partnership Agreement) system through bilateral agreements. However, the adoption of this system does not represent a response to a labour shortage but a promotion of exchanges of human capital in the LTC and nursing care sector. In 2016, two laws for receiving migrant care workers were reformed. The “NC (nursing care)” resident status was created and “care worker” was added as a job category to the TIT. Furthermore, in 2018, the migration law was amended, and the new resident status “SSW (Specified Skilled Worker)”, which was effectively considered a subsequent program after TIT, was added to the existing resident status. In sum, the ban on the provision of LTC by migrant workers in Japan has been gradually lifted since the introduction of the EPA system at the end of the 2000s, and especially loosened since the late 2010s, when the other three entry routes for migrant LTC workers (TIT, SSW, NC) were added one after another, leading to a significant expansion of their acceptance, at least in institutional terms (Sadamatsu, 2019; Sasaki & Ogawa, 2019). In addition to these four systems for migrant LTC workers exclusively in the public sector, there have also been unprecedented changes in the private sector. The Act on National Strategic Special Zones (Act No. 107) removed the ban on receiving migrant domestic workers in 2013. Since 2017, these migrant workers have begun to be employed by private enterprises and engage in domestic work in private households, limited to some municipalities certified as “Special Zone”. In the strict sense, these domestic workers are not allowed to provide care for older adults or children; however, it is not entirely out of their duties to accompany and watch over them in the households where they work (Sadamatsu, 2018).

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 tatus of Residence and Four Migration Systems for LTC S Workers in Japan Status of Residence in Japan In principle, foreign citizens entering and residing in Japan are required to obtain a status of residence defined by the Immigration Control Act. There are currently 29 statuses of residence, and according to the annual report of the Immigration Bureau (2021), the detailed connection between the status of residence and employment-­ related characteristics are classified into the following four categories: (a) The 19 statuses that are based on and classified by specific occupation. (b) The group assigned residence status based on ‘designated activities’, such as domestic servants of diplomats and working holiday users, where the availability of work in Japan is determined by identifying further specific categories of activities. (c) Four statuses, such as permanent residents, long-term residents and spouses of Japanese and permanent residents, are based on “status and position” or “status for residence” without any restrictions on the choice of occupation and activities. (d) Five statuses are not labour-related, including family stay, study, training, short-­ term stay, and cultural activities; work is prohibited in principle with these statuses. As shown in Table 1, there are very diverse and heterogeneous conditions for residency among the four groups, as well as within each group. In 2020, of the 3.58 million total new arrivals, 93.8% were “temporary visitors”, allowed up to 90 days, mainly for tourism, belonging to (d). On the other hand, the total number of foreign residents in Japan excluding “Temporary Visitors” was 2,887,116  in 2020, and approximately half (51.9%) of them had a residency status belonging to (c), which has no restrictions on employment activities (Immigration Bureau, 2021). The total number of foreign workers in Japan in 2021 was 1.727 million (MHLW, 2022a). Based on the four categories of residency, of the four migration pathways for LTC workers (EPA, NC, TIT, SSW), EPA belongs to category (b), designated activities, while all the others, TIT, SSW and NC, belong to category (a). All four migration pathways (and class of residency permits) are based on the premise that the migrant will work as a care worker after entering the country. In other words, migrant workers with these resident statuses are not permitted to work in occupations other than the LTC sector. On the other hand, since there are no restrictions on the employment of foreign nationals who belong to category (c), such as permanent residents and their spouses, or on the residents permitted for study and family stays in category (d), these residency categories also include LTC workers.

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Table 1  Status of residence in Japan (a) (b) Diplomat, official, Designated professor, artist, religious activities activities, journalist, (including highly skilled EPA) professional, business manager, legal/accounting services, instructor, engineer/specialist in humanities/international services, intracompany transferee, nursing caregiver (NC), entertainer, skilled labour, specified skilled worker (SSW), technical intern training (TIT) Freedom of choice of occupation is restricted

(c) Permanent resident, spouse or child of Japanese national, spouse or child of permanent resident, long- term resident

(d) Cultural activities, temporary visitor, student, trainee, dependent

Not restricted

Work permission

✓

✓

✓

Restrictions on occupational choice Pop. (%) of total foreign pop. (2020)

✓

✓

In principle, occupational activities are prohibited. ✓ for part-time job for “student” and “dependent”. ✓

130,212 (3.6%)

7381 (0.2%)

Resident status

Activities in Japan

13,008 (0.36%)

3,430,027 (95.8%) Temporary visitor: 3,360,831 (93.8%)

Note: The four migration systems for LTC workers are marked in bold Source: (Immigration Bureau, 2021)

Four Migration Systems for Long-Term Care Workers The outlines of these four migration systems (EPA, NC, TIT, SSW) for LTC workers are as follows: EPA (Economic Partnership Agreement)  the EPA complements trade liberalization by the WTO (World Trade Organization) based on bilateral agreements. The government emphasized that this system is intended to strengthen international economic partnerships. In 2008, the first LTC workers came from Indonesia, followed by the Philippines in FY 2009 and Vietnam in FY 2014 (MHLW, 2012). For the

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cases prior to 2017, the EPA was the only migration pathway for migrant LTC workers in Japan. In the EPA system, migrant LTC workers are referred to as ‘candidates’, and under the auspices of on-the-job training (OJT), they work in LTC facilities for at least 3  years before taking the National Test for Certified Care Workers (NTCCW) to acquire the Certified Care Worker (CCW) qualification in the fourth year. Their maximum length of stay in Japan is 5 years (MHLW, 2012). Previous studies on LTC workers in the EPA system have commonly provided critical views on its sustainability (Asato, 2012; Uebayashi, 2015; Ogawa et  al., 2018; Tsubota, 2018; Lan, 2018; Sadamatsu, 2019). Compared to other systems, the EPA system requires migrant LTC workers to have significantly higher education, work experience, and expertise. However, there was a definite mismatch between Japan, a host country that values cultural skills, and sending countries, which value professional and vocational skills. (Lan, 2018). Additionally, the Japanese government and long-term care facilities cover annual training costs totalling more than $2600 per migrant care worker, which is outstandingly high compared to training costs in Taiwan and South Korea (Tsubota, 2018). NC (Nursing Care)  The NC resident status was established in 2016 and has been in use since 2017. Apart from the EPA, the NC allowed, for the first time, migrant workers with CCW qualifications to work in the LTC sector in Japan for virtually no fixed period of time (Kondo, 2019). The Japanese government presents two major cases where NC status is applicable. First, these workers enter Japan with a resident status of “student,” which they hold for at least 2 years, to fulfil the requirements for those who plan to take the NTCCW. Then, if they take and pass the NTCCW, their resident status is changed from “student” to NC. Second, under TIT and SSW systems, migrant workers work in the LTC sector while preparing for the NTCCW exam, and if they pass, they will change their status of residence to NC (MHLW, 2017a, 2020). Since CCW is the only national qualification for direct care workers and requires the most advanced education in Japan, migrant CCW holders are regarded as (high-)skilled workers in the LTC sector in Japan. TIT (Technical Internship Training)  The TIT was established in 1993 under the pretext of contributing to developing countries by transferring technology and job skills to foreign trainees in Japan. TIT has mainly been applied in manufacturing and primary industries, such as casting, electric equipment assembly, welding and foodstuff processing. The TIT program continues to expand the job categories that allow stays of up to 5 years, reaching 77 categories as of March 2021. Trainees in TIT work under the name of OJT and have practically supplied the manual labour workforce in Japan. They are classified into three categories according to the length of their stay (Immigration Bureau, 2017, 2021), and they take compulsory skill evaluation tests at the end of each term. The TIT system has been subject to international criticism for its extremely low wages and abuse from institutions such as the US State Department and the ILO’s Committee on Forced Labour (MHLW, 2013). Notwithstanding the continuous TIT reforms since the 2010s, violations of the Labour Standards Law were identified at 70% of the implementing organizations,

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and the number of missing TIT trainees who are likely to become undeclared workers or undocumented migrants increased from 2005  in 2012 to 7089  in 2018 (Nakanishi, 2018; Kohari, 2018). On November 1, 2017, the new job status “care work” was added to the job categories. The “care work” category in the TIT is totally different from the other TIT job categories in that it was employed under the NLTCI system, i.e., in the public sector and not in the for-profit/private sector. It requires much higher Japanese-­ language communication skills. Sasaki and Ogawa (2019) were concerned that the TIT (and SSW), which effectively accepts unskilled and uneducated migrants in circulation as LTC workers, would lead to not only fewer settlements by highly skilled workers, such as in the EPA system but also exacerbate the stratification of migrant long-term care workers. SSW (Specified Skilled Worker)  In 2019, the new SSW resident status was founded to obtain “work-ready foreign human resources with certain professional expertise and skill” in the industrial sectors where there is a serious workforce shortage (Kondo, 2019), and “care work” was also included in such sectors. SSW is classified into two types: “SSW (i)” with “required constant job knowledge and experience” and “SSW (ii)” with high(er) job skills. Migrant care workers are classified as “SSW (i)” and can stay in Japan for up to 5 years. The job skills and language abilities of SSW applicants in “care work” are assessed by specific written exams before they enter Japan. Alternatively, the following three parties were exempt from the application test before entering Japan: trainees of TIT who had worked for more than 3 years, EPA candidates who completed their stay under EPA and failed to obtain the CCW qualification, and students who completed study at a CCW training facility (but had not obtained CCW) (Ministry of Justice & MHLW, 2019). For the latter two of these three parties, the transition to SSW is clearly deskilling, and this means that, for them, at least in the LTC sector, SSW is not considered a preferred migration pathway.

 ive Skill Levels of the Four Migration Systems F for LTC Workers The pre-and post-immigration requirements such as academics and work careers, training types, final exams, total training hours are summarized in Table 2. Among the four migration systems, the EPA requires the candidates to have the most advanced academic-professional careers in the countries of origin and the longest period of training without labour contracts both before and after their entry into Japan. Accordingly, EPA candidates with national qualification of CCW have the highest professional skills among all migrant care workers. The second highest skill level would be the NC with the CCW qualification. It should be noted that

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Table 2  Requirements for four systems for migrant long-term care workers in Japan Migration system

Pre-entry requirements

Post-entry requirements

Academic/work career Trainings Language test/Level Trainings (6)

EPA

‫( ݱ‬1)

6/12mths (4) JLPT N5/N3(5)

NC

‫(ݱ‬2)

None

SSW

None (3)

None

TITP

None

None

Total training

Total skill

Test/Test time hours/period (8) levels

2.5/6mths (7)

3.7 hrs

About 1yr

None

None

None

(2 yrs) (9)

‫ݱ‬

None

1.5 hr

None (10)

‫ݱ‬

2mths

1 hr

2mths

Higher

Lower

Source: JICWELS, 2021; MHLW, 2012, 2017a, b, 2018b, 2019; Minstry of Justice, 2017; Kondo, 2019 Note: (1) 4 year college graduate or 3 year nursing school + qualified nursing care worker (2) Already qualified as a CCW in Japan before their entry (3) Prior to entry, passing the tests on the level of Japanese language and LTC skills will be required (4) 6  months total for Indonesians and Filipinos, 12  months total for Vietnamese training on Japanese language and LTC skills (5) JLPT N5 for Indonesians and Filipinos; N3 for Vietnamese (6) Generally, post-entry training includes lectures and practical LTC skills exercises (7) 6  months total for Indonesians and Filipinos, 2.5  months total for Vietnamese training on Japanese language and LTC skills (8) Trainings and training hours/period do not include OJT with a labour contract (9) At least 2 years of schooling is required to obtain CCW (10) Some have maximum 5 years of LTC work experience in Japan under the TIT system

assessment of the skill level of NCs and EPAs will vary depending on which is given more priority: the higher level of Japanese communication and understanding of Japanese society in the NC, or the higher level of medical care and academic skills in the EPA. In contrast to EPA and NC, applicants to the TIT and SSW are required to have neither professional/academic careers and qualifications for LTC nor vocational and language trainings before their arrival. However, SSW is nominally for skilled workers which is effectively assumed to be a successive programme after TIT. Indeed, TIT trainees who complete 3 years of TIT are exempted from the Japanese language and LTC terminology tests that are required for SSW applicants. Based on this, TITP is subordinate to SSW in terms of institutional design.

 ho are the Foreign Care Workers in Japan? - Profile W of Migrant Care Workers Since the 2010s The “Employment Situation of Foreign Nationals” regularly published by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) is the only official source of statistics available on the latest total number of foreign workers by occupation and

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region. As the classification of these statistics does not strictly correspond to the status of residence or migration pathways for migrant care workers, it will not strictly specify the number of foreign care workers by their status of residence or migration pathway. However, it is the only statistic that gives a complete picture of the current number of migrant long-term care workers working in a wide variety of statuses in Japan. According to these statistics, as of October 2021, the total number of foreign workers was 1,727,221, of which 57,788 were working in the medical and social service sectors, equivalent to 3.3% of the total (MHLW, 2022a). This ratio is almost identical to that of the LTC workers to the total employed workers in Japan (Cabinet Office, 2022a). Of these 57,788, 16,337 workers were in the medical sector, or 28.3%, and 41,189 workers were in the LTC, social insurance and social welfare sectors, or 71.3% . With regard to the latter, most are engaged in LTC and not in social insurance and social welfare, taking into account that those two areas require a higher level of professional expertise and different types of residence permits. These 57,788 foreign workers in the medical and social service sectors were further classified into five statistical categories, as shown in Table 3. In a larger perspective, considering comprehensively these statistics of MHLW shown in Table 3 and the classification of status of residence shown in Table 1, all foreign LTC workers in Japan can be divided into three major types: 1. The first type came to Japan for the purpose of performing nursing care work, and their employment is limited to the LTC sector: those with a residency status such as NC, SSW, TIT, or EPA. Table 3  Foreign workers in the medical and welfare sectors by resident status (2021)

Statistical category Three major types Resident status category in Table 1 Resident status (migration system for MCW) Number of MW %

Personal status or position: permanent & long-term residents etc. 2

Activities outside the scope of qualification 3

Professional/ Technical field TIT 1

EPA

(a)

(b)

(d)

(c)

NC SSW TIT (NC) (SSW) (TIT)

Designated activities (EPA)

Study/family stay

Total

6219

57,788

9.3%

98.5%

9783

10,247 7430

Personal status or position: Permanent & Long-term residents etc. 24,106

16.9%

17.7% 12.9%

41.7%

Source: Immigration Bureau (2021); MHLW (2022a, b)

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2. The second type has no restrictions on occupational choice or other limitations by the current migration policy: those with status of residence such as “Personal Status or Position”. 3. The third type did not come to Japan for the purpose of working but can work exclusively as part-time workers with limited working hours: those with status of residence such as “Study/Family stay”.  While the exact number of foreign LTC workers cannot be specified for each status of residency, of the five statistical categories in Table 3, the overwhelming majority belongs to the category “Personal Status or Position”, which belongs to type 2 without any restriction on employment. Their numbers have reached 24,000, or 41.7% of all foreign medical and long-term care workers. The second largest group appears to be members of the TIT, which belongs to type 1, with 10,247 workers, who correspond to 17.7% of the total. In addition, even in type 3, which is basically a nonworking residency status, there were part-time LTC workers, who accounted for 9.3% of the total, since working up to 28 hours per week is permitted for the status “family stay” and “study” in this type (Nakanishi, 2018; Immigration Bureau, 2021). Furthermore, based on the three types mentioned above, type 1 consists of EPA, NC, TIT and SSW, in which in principle, LTC workers have a maximum length of stay of 5 years, accounting for the largest share at 47.5%. The second largest was type 2 (41.7%), which was slightly smaller than type 1, and these two types accounted for 89.2% of all foreign workers in the medical and LTC sectors. Table 4 shows the foreign workers in the medical and welfare sectors in Japan by nationality and region. Filipinos accounted for the largest share at 25.4% of the total, followed by Vietnamese at 22.0% and Chinese at 17.0%, while the rest were generally from Asia and South America. As the main reasons why workers from the Philippines account for the largest number in only this industrial sector, Lan (2018) concluded that the Japan-specific “sense of cultural intimacy and personal dignity” is a more highly desired and welcomed quality than professional skills in the LTC sector in Japan. That is, the commodification of femininity, youth, intimacy, and interpersonal communication skills, which were required in the Philippine former “entertainers”, is frequently desired and welcomed in the Japanese LTC sector (rather than professional care skills). Additionally, from a migration policy perspective, Takahata (2020) suggested that there is a career transition route from “Entertainer” to LTC workers for female Filipino workers: Since the establishment in 1989 of the resident status “Entertainer” with a 6-month period of stay, many poor and uneducated Filipino young women used this status to become employed in the night-time entertainment business until the early 2000s, when the number of the new arrivals with this status increased significantly, reaching a peak of approximately 80,000 in 2004. After the system was revised in 2009, some of these Filipino women received the status “Spouse or Child of a Japanese National” by marrying Japanese men or “long-term resident” by having children born out of wedlock to Japanese men (the number of women who gained their status this way is said to be 20,000 to 30,000).

Philippines 14,704 25.4%

Source: MHLW (2022a, b)

Nationality Number Num./Tot.

Vietnam 12,722 22.0%

China 9823 17.0%

Indonesia 4943 8.6%

Korea 2726 4.7%

Brazil 2015 3.5%

Table 4  Number of migrant workers in long-term care medical and sectors by nationality (2021) Nepal 1617 2.8%

Peru 944 1.6%

G7 1243 2.2%

Others 7051 12.2%

Total 57,788 100

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Both permits belong to the resident status “Personal Status or Position” without any employment restriction. With these permits, middle-aged Filipino women who once worked as entertainers could convert to work as LTC workers.

 as the Japan’s LTC Model in Cross-National Perspective H Changed or Stayed the Same Since 2017? From a cross-national comparative perspective, how can Japan’s LTC model, which has undergone the relevant policy changes for migrant LTC workers since 2017, be defined and classified? Has Japan’s LTC model in cross-national perspective changed or stayed the same since 2017? In previous cross-national comparative studies, Simonazzi (2009) showed that the occupational hierarchy and working conditions under which the majority of migrant care workers are placed largely depend on the mainstream care employment scheme in each of the major European host countries. Although Japan is not included in the analysis, some combinations between the national care model and the migrant care model identified in this study appear to be applicable to the analysis of Japan’s case as well. Furthermore, more globally, Addati et al. (2018) classified the employment models of care workers in 100 countries into four clusters, and Japan was classified in the cluster with a high share of employment in the care sector in combination with a very low share of domestic workers among all care workers, along with other Western European and liberal welfare states (e.g., the US, UK, Canada and Australia). Meanwhile, in previous studies mainly conducted in Japan, both the care-­ migration policies and welfare-LTC supply systems in Japan are very different from those in other countries, even within the same cluster above, as well as in East Asian countries (Ochiai, 2009; Soma & Yamashita, 2011; Peng, 2018; Sasaki & Ogawa, 2019). In Japan, there are a much lower number and proportion of LTC workers in the market economy, which also extends to the migrant workers in the LTC sector: As discussed above, the total number of LTC workers increased by 3.8 times, from 549,000  in 2000 to 2.1 million in 2019, and that of migrant LTC workers also increased rapidly due to the policy reforms after 2017. However, the share of all foreign LTC workers in the total number of LTC workers estimated that it remained in the 2% range. Based on both Addati and Simonazzi’s studies, if we apply the analytical framework of their LTC employment model, even after a series of major migration policy reforms for migrant care workers after 2017, no significant changes to Japan’s care workers’ employment model can  be recognized. This is because, in Simonazzi’s analytical framework, the diversity within the formal care sector, such as that of required skills, qualifications and work experience, was not included, presumably because in the major countries compared, such as three Mediterranean countries (Spain, Italy and Greece) and Austria, a considerable amount of LTC is mainly

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provided by informal migrant domestic workers who are considered to be nonexistent in Japan. Similarly, in Addati et al. (2018), since market domestic workers were included as LTC workers, the LTC employment model was analysed from a much more macroscopic view, from the whole labour market, as described above.

 uture Prospects of Migrant Care Work in Japan—An F Unchanged Migrant Care Employment Model After 2017? This chapter provides an overview of the highly complex migration systems for LTC workers in Japan. Since 2017, the Japan’s migration policy has changed significantly towards accepting short-term, circulatory unskilled or low-skilled migrant workers, and in the LTC sector, three new systems for migrant LTC workers were introduced (TIT, SSP, NC) in addition to the existing EPA. In 2021, just a few years after their introduction, the number of migrant LTC workers arriving through these three programs increased to more than one-third (34.6%) of all foreign medical and welfare workers in Japan. The levels of vocational-language skills, trainings and educational requirements of these four systems can be classified into five categories from the EPA, with the CCW qualification as the highest to the TIT as the lowest. Additionally, from when the first migration system for migrant care workers was implemented by the EPA system in 2007 to the latest SSW system introduced in 2018, Japan’s immigration system for migrant LTC workers shifted from providing advanced vocational and language education to a small number of highly skilled and educated migrant workers to providing only limited education to a large number of unskilled or lower-­ skilled workers with no educational requirements. The fact we should particularly focus on is that among the three newly added migration pathways for care workers since 2017, TIT (and SSW as a follow-up system of TIT), which does not effectively require any job skills or educational background before arrival in Japan as care workers, has been by far the largest and fastest growing group in recent years. This implies that the deskilling of migrant LTC workers in Japan has clearly intensified since the introduction of these programs. Sasaki and Ogawa (2019) showed that disparities in access to information among migrant students were linked to a new occupational stratification of migrant care workers. If we focus on the policy changes for migrant workers within Japan after 2017, it can be said that in these four pathways into the migrant care sector, a broadly bipolar categorization was identified. Systems targeting more highly skilled workers with a requirement (or goal) of obtaining a care worker qualification such as NC and EPA were at one end and systems targeting unskilled and/or low-skilled workers such as TIT (and presumably SSP) at the other. Simultaneously, however, if we look at migrant LTC workers in the three major types discussed in the section above, there was no significant difference between the share of migrant LTC workers in type 2 without restrictions on length of stay or

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choice of occupation, and that in type 1 with those restrictions which are rapidly increasing in the last few years since 2017. And even today in the early 2020s, the total population of foreign LTC workers make up the least share against that of all LTC workers in Japan. Additionally, the LTC workers make up the higher ration in the whole labour market, working almost entirely in the formal market, the public or quasi market, and almost entirely migrant LTC workers are also in the formal market. As a result, Japan’s LTC workers’ employment model has not fundamentally changed before and after the major migration policy reforms in 2017, even though this study identified that migrant LTC workers’ employment model are diverse. This Japan’s LTC workers’ employment model, whether for migrants or natives, can be mostly explained by the world’s highest ageing population and the national long-­ term care insurance schemes (NLTCI) that provide in-kind services. Last, for future research, especially in countries such as Japan, where the LTC provision in the state/public sector is the mainstream and that in the private market sector as well as by the migrant workers is residual and limited but continue to expand, a more detailed analysis and discussion of the combinations of migration and employment policies that contribute the upskilling and career-advancement of migrant LTC workers will be required. Acknowledgement  This study was funded by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (grant no. 18K02057; 21K01852).

References Addati, L., Cattaneo, U., Esquivel, V., & Valarino, I. (2018). Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work. ILO. Asato, W. (2012). Nurses from abroad and the formation of a dual labour market in Japan. Southeast Asian Studies, 49(4), 652–669. Cabinet Office. (2022a). Annual report on the ageing society FY2022. Nikkei Insatsu. (in Japanese). Cabinet Office. (2022b). The white paper on gender equity 2022. Shobi Insatsu. (in Japanese). Immigration Bureau. (2017). Immigration control 2017. http://www.mobj.go.jp/content/001241955.pdf. (in Japanese). Immigration Bureau. (2021). Immigration control 2021. https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/policies/policies/03_00014.html (in Japanese). JICWELS. (2021). Booklet for EPA candidates of foreign nursing and care worker candidates 2022. https://jicwels.or.jp/?page_id=16 (in Japanese). Kohari, Y. (2018). Foreign Workers’ Issues views by wages. Survey and Information, 1024, 1–10. (in Japanese). Kondo, M. (2019). Overview on policies for securing long-term care human resources. Issue Brief, 1034, 1–10. (in Japanese). Lan, P.-C. (2018). Bridging ethnic differences for cultural intimacy: Production of migrant care workers in Japan. Critical Sociology, 44(7–8), 1029–1043. Machikita, T. (2015). Real conditions on foreign labour force in Japan. Japanese Journal of Labour Studies, 57(9), 5–26. (in Japanese).

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MHLW. (2012). On accepting EPA care worker candidates. http://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/ shingi/2r985200000261i3-­att/2r985200000261r3.pdf. (in Japanese). MHLW. (2013). On present condition and subjects in Technical Intern Training Program. http:// www.moj.go.jp/content/000116717.pdf. (in Japanese). MHLW. (2016). On national long-term care insurance system in Japan. https://www.mhlw.go.jp/ english/policy/care-­welfare/care-­welfare-­elderly/dl/ltcisj_j.pdf. (In Japanese). MHLW. (2017a). New settlement of resident status “nursing care”. https://www.mhlw.go.jp/ file/06-­Seisakujouhou-­12000000-­Shakaiengokyoku-­Shakai/0000151592.pdf. (In Japanese). MHLW. (2017b). On peculiar requirements for care worker trainees in technical intern training program. (In Japanese). https://www.mhlw.go.jp/file/05-­Shingikai-­12601000-­ Seisakutoukatsukan-­Sanjikanshitsu_Shakaihoshoutantou/0000176644.pdf. (In Japanese). MHLW. (2018a). White Paper on the Labour Economy. Katsuki Insatsu. MHLW. (2018b). On EPA nursing and care worker candidates from Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam. http://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/seisakunitsuite/bunya/koyou_roudou/koyou/gaikokujin/ other22/index.html. (In Japanese). MHLW. (2019). New status of residence ‘Specified Skills’ in Japanese. https://www.mhlw.go.jp/ content/12601000/000485526.pdf (In Japanese). MHLW. (2020). Receiving of foreigners in the long-term care sector. https://www.mhlw.go.jp/ content/12000000/000704359.pdf. (In Japanese). MHLW. (2022a). Employment status of foreign nationals. https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/newpage_23495.html (In Japanese). MHLW. (2022b). White paper on the ageing society. Sanwa. Ministry of Justice. (2017). New technical intern training program. http://www.moj.go.jp/content/001223972.pdf (In Japanese). Ministry of Justice and MHLW. (2019). Operational guidelines for accepting foreign SSW. https:// www.mhlw.go.jp/content/12000000/000507687.pdf. (In Japanese). Nakanishi, E. (2018). General views on receiving foreign human resources in Japan. Legislations and Surveys, 405, 80–94. (In Japanese). Nikkei. (2018). Non-skilled work to foreign workers more than 500,000 in 2025 in Government Plan (May 30, 2018). https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO31103490Z20C18A5MM8000/ (In Japanese). Ochiai, E. (2009). Care diamonds and welfare regimes in East and South-East Asian Societies: Bridging family and welfare sociology. International Journal of Japanese Sociology, 18, 60–78. Ogawa, R., Chan, R., Oishi, A., & Wang, L.-H. (2018). Gender, care and migration in East Asia. Palgrave Macmillan. Okamura, M. (2018). Foreign workers in Japan. The Reference, 804, 29–53. (In Japanese). Peng, I. (2018). Shaping and reshaping care and migration in East and Southeast Asia. Critical Sociology, 44(7–8), 1117–1132. Sadamatsu, A. (2018). The international divisions of the reproductive sphere as constructed by new power elites. Japanese Sociological Review, 68(4), 514–530. (In Japanese). Sadamatsu, A. (2019). Labour issues and migrant care workers in the quasi-market. Journal of Ohara Institute for Social Research, 729, 29–44. (In Japanese). Sasaki, A., & Ogawa, R. (2019). Social stratifications of migrant care workers in Japan. Asean Social Work Journal, 7(1), 15–34. Shimizu, T. (2008). Changes in migrant policies and government’s proposals. National Diet Library Research and Legislative Reference Bureau, 2007(1), 31–41. (in Japanese). Simonazzi, A. (2009). Care regimes and national employment models. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 33(2), 211–232. Soma, N., & Yamashita, J. (2011). Child care and elder care regimes in Japan. Journal of Comparative Social Welfare, 27(2), 133–142. Statistic Bureau. (2015). Census 2015: Overview of the population and households in Japan. https://www.stat.go.jp/data/kokusei/2015/pdf/wagakuni.pdf (In Japanese).

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Takahata, S. (2020). Migrant women workers in entertainment and care. Annual Report of the Japan Society of Labor Sociology, 31, 30–57. Tsubota, K. (2018). Who pays the cost and who receives the benefit? Comparing migration policies for care workers in Japan and Taiwan. In R. Ogawa, R. Chan, A. Oishi, & L.-H. Wang (Eds.), Gender, care and migration in East Asia. Palgrave Macmillan. Tsukada, N. (Ed.). (2021). Migrant workers in long-term care sector in Japan. Akashi Shoten. (In Japanese). Uebayashi, C. (2015). Shortage in manpower for long-term care and the acceptance of foreign care workers. Journal of the Japan Institute of Labour, 57(9), 88–97. (In Japanese). Rie Miyazaki is currently professor of social policy studies at Ohtsuki City College in Japan. Her current interests are care and immigration policies, migrant care workers, and welfare familialism in the most aging societies. Her latest works are: Miyazaki, R. (2023) “Is There a Dualistic Protection System for Migrant Domestic Workers?” Global Labour Journal, 14(1):40–55. https:// doi.org/10.15173/glj.v14i1.5035; Miyazaki, R. (2023) “Long-Term Care and the State-Family Nexus in Italy and Japan-The Welfare State, Care Policy and Family Caregivers” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20 (3): 2027. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ijerph20032027; Miyazaki, R. (2021) “A descriptive analysis of three-generation households and mothers’ employment in Japan, 2002–2019”, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy (Emerald), 41(13/14):34–50. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSSP-04-2021-0075; Miyazaki, R. (2019), Migrant care workers and care-migration policies: a comparison between Italy and Japan, Asia Europe Journal (Springer), 17(2):161–177. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10308-­018-­0528-­3.  

Will Guestworkers Save Japan? Findings from a Nationwide Municipal Survey Yunchen Tian

Abstract  Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) workers form one of three backdoors, or unofficial pathways, for Japan to recruit unskilled and semi-skilled labor. However, compared to the other two categories of co-ethnic return migrants and part-time student workers, TITP workers are more numerous and much faster growing as a category. Moreover, local governments have adapted by treating the TITP and its participants distinctively from other categories of migrants. Until now, researchers have only had access to sporadic examples and anecdotal reports of local government policies directed towards TITP workers. In order to create a more comprehensive view of the phenomenon, I implement and discuss the results of a nationwide survey of municipal governments regarding their current and future plans for involvement with TITP workers, as well as perceptions regarding the main challenges facing local communities. The varying strategies for doing so, ranging from treating them solely as an economic input for local businesses to purposely trying to increase their interactions with local community members, signal different, competing understandings of what foreign migrant workers represent and offer to Japan. Keywords  Labor migrants · Local governments · Migrant policy · TITP · Survey Since its introduction in 1993, the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) has become Japan’s largest backdoor for lower-skilled foreign workers (Chung, 2021; Strausz, 2019). Although TITP workers are often referred to as working in unskilled or semi-skilled sectors, Oishi (Oishi, 2021) points out that the criteria used to create these discursive categories have shifted over time and that the changing use of these terms by officials to describe the same occupations constitute deliberate acts to alternatively promote or devalue certain forms of work. Although the program Y. Tian (*) Saint Martin’s University, Lacey, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_8

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officially exists to “[…] transfer skills, technologies, or knowledge accumulated in Japan to developing and other regions and to promote international cooperation […]”, it is widely recognized by workers, employers, officials, the media, and scholars alike as a thinly veiled guestworker program that provides a contingent and marginalized workforce to fill less-desirable positions (popularly described as 3 K (kitsui, kitanai, kiken, meaning difficult, dirty, and dangerous)) in a wide range of industries from lettuce cultivation to pre-packaged food preparation to textiles manufacturing (JITCO, 2021). The TITP has recently experienced a particularly rapid rate of growth in the period from 2010 to 2020, with four times as many participants in 2020 as it did just 10  years prior. The expansion of the TITP has also far outpaced the growth of Japan’s overall resident non-citizen population, rising from representing less than 5% of the overall non-citizen population in 2010 to over 14% in 2020. As of June 2021, the TITP program included participants from 20 nationalities, 19 from Asia and 1 from South America (Peru). However, out of the 354,104 TITP workers in Japan, over 89.5% belonged to just four main nationalities: Vietnam, China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. For much of the existence of the TITP, China provided the plurality, if not outright majority, of the workers. However, this has changed dramatically as domestic wages have grown. Vietnam, with 202,365 participants as of June 2021, now alone accounts for a majority (57%) of participants. According to 2021 statistics reported by OTIT, participants are overwhelmingly young adults, with over half (53.92%) being under the age of 24. The gender balance skews slightly towards men (57.47%) (reiwa ninendo gyōmu tōkei Operational Statistics for Reiwa Year 2, 2021). TITP workers are permitted to work in 156 designated occupations from eight major industrial sectors (JITCO, 2021). The largest sectors as of 2021 were construction (22.5%), food processing (19.0%) machinery and metals (14.2%), and agriculture (9.1%). The TITP program restricts by default the ability of workers enrolled in it to freely move between employers. This has made the TITP program uniquely valuable to remote and rural municipalities across Japan, where attracting and retaining both domestic and foreign workers is a daunting challenge (Hashimoto, 2011b). Nikkeijin (co-ethnic descendants of Japanese emigrants, primarily to Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia) migrants, for example, occupy a similarly low position in the labor market, but with their ability to change employers and move about the country freely, are largely concentrated in urban or suburban industrial areas in prefectures such as Aichi, Mie, Shizuoka, and Gunma. This also reflects their common employment as contract workers for larger firms. In contrast, employers recruiting foreign workers through the TITP tend to be smaller family-owned firms with low capitalization and productivity, making them less attractive as employment options for native job-seekers (Hashimoto, 2011a; Kameda, 2008, p.  26). For example, the Ministry of Justice found in 2013 that 51.5% of firms employing TITP workers had less than nine fulltime employees (Ministry of Justice, 2014). As a result, TITP workers have a much wider distribution. Although concentrated populations do exist in industrial regions such as Aichi, Saitama, and Gunma, they are also locally significant in rural areas such as Hokkaido, Miyagi, Nagano, and Ehime (Tian, 2018, p. 10).

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Since practically its inception, the TITP has been the target of criticism from both domestic and international human rights organizations and labor activists. The main aspects of the TITP widely criticized relate to both the innate restrictions of the program itself, and the wide acceptance of abusive and exploitative practices in the implementation and practice of the regime. Not knowing their legal rights under Japanese Labor Law and other employment protections, participants are often under pressure to work longer hours than reported, accept substandard living and work safety conditions, and tolerate abusive behavior from business owners and native Japanese employees. For example, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (MHLW) conducted 81,248 on-site inspections of TITP workplaces and found 5752 violations, for a violation rate of 70.8%. Most cases related to improper safety training (24.3%), improper working hours (15.7%), and improper payments of overtime wages (15.5%). Thirty-two particularly grievous cases were referred to public prosecutors for criminal and civil prosecution (Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, 2021). This is often compounded by the isolation of living and working in a rural or suburban environment where workers have few interactions with local community members or those who share a common nationality or language, especially if employers illegally confiscate phones and passports. Finally, although technically prohibited by the Japanese government, recruiting companies, officially termed sending organizations (okuridashi kikan), often charge migrants sums of 1,000,000 yen (USD 8800) or more up front for their initial training and other expenses (Hirayama, 2021; Iimure, 2019). This forces a significant portion of migrants into debt bondage before they even begin work in Japan and reduces migrants’ willingness to challenge employers or report abusive practice, lest they be deported or otherwise sent home before they can repay their debts. Employers’ threats and actual attempts to arbitrarily terminate employment and deport migrants, whether in response to financial difficulties or in retaliation for disputes such as the migrant in question becoming pregnant, form a substantial category of caseload for many organizations working with TITP-related disputes. Despite the growth in the number of foreign residents in Japan since the 1990s, the national government has not attempted to articulate a clear and serious vision for how to integrate and include non-citizen migrants as part of Japanese society and local communities. The government’s program of multicultural coexistence (tabunka kyōsei) has been critiqued for being vague and lacking engagement with the bigger questions of how to reimagine a definition of Japan that departs from the ‘myth of national homogeneity’ that has been central to government discourse since 1945 (Aiden, 2011; Nagayoshi, 2011; Nakamatsu, 2014).1 Vogt (2013) has described this deliberate lack of action as a ‘non-policy’ in the context of broader official non-­ recognition of immigration (especially of un-skilled and semi-skilled workers) to Japan, while Tarumoto (2018) and Aiden (2011) see it as part of the broader trend of devolution towards local authorities ongoing since the 1960s.

 I borrow this term from Oguma Eiji. For a full discussion, see Oguma, E. (2002). A genealogy of “Japanese” self-images (D. Askew, Trans.). Trans Pacific. 1

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As a result, local governments have been at the forefront of providing more inclusive access to information, services, and rights, in a process which has been termed by some scholars as expanding local citizenship (Tegtmeyer Pak, 2006; Tsuda, 2006). The focus of such efforts have historically been on long-term resident communities such as the multigenerational Zainichi Koreans, and more recently, co-ethnic Nikkeijin ‘return’ migrants primarily from Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia (Chung, 2010, 2020; Sharpe, 2010). Increased access to rights and services are not granted solely through policy decisions. As Chung (2010, 2020) forcefully argues, they can be the contingent products of sustained and contentious movements of claims-making by organized groups of non-citizens. However, the rights and access to inclusion accorded through these movements are uneven and usually limited to the groups that fought for them instead of being universal. At the same time, with many heavily marginalized migrants with less capacity to organize themselves, such as TITP workers and Nikkeijin, much of the advocacy work has relied upon native Japanese activists (Shipper, 2008). (Please see Suzuki Taku’s contribution to this volume). Unlike policies towards other foreign residents such as the Nikkeijin, local government policies regarding the TITP are sharply divided into two categories: social-supporting policies, or those targeting TITP workers themselves and employment-­supporting policies – those that subsidize employers for the costs of recruiting TITP employees (Tian, 2022). The adoption of these policies is highly uneven – while most municipalities have not adopted either kind of policy, it is also possible to find municipalities that have adopted only one type, as well as those that have adopted both. Employment-supporting policies involve providing organizational or logistical support, or more often, direct financial subsidies by the local government to employers of TITP workers. As they are targeted towards local businesses, they are mostly administered by the municipality’s Section for Industrial Promotion (sangyō shinkō ka) or closest equivalent. Organizational and logistical support takes the form of sponsored informational seminars, often involving invited speakers or consultants, which explain the process and requirements of recruiting TITP workers. Meanwhile, subsidies are often provided on a per-worker basis to alleviate the additional costs involved in the bureaucratic process of contracting with the sending country organizations that train and dispatch prospective TITP workers as well as applying and arranging for workers’ visas and sponsorship. Based on the policy search conducted, these subsidies typically range from 50,000 to 150,000 yen ($372.50 ~ $1117.50) per worker per annum. These policies are often officially named ‘subsidy project for the reception of foreign technical intern trainees’ (gaikokujin ginōjisshūsei ukeire kigyō). Social-supporting policies are aimed at providing services and programs directly targeting TITP workers. The most common example of such policies are cultural exchange programs where TITP workers and local citizens participate together in events such as culinary workshops, Japanese cultural experiences, or field trips to local attractions. Also common are government-sponsored language courses, which are held at night or on weekends. More unique examples include the inclusion of TITP workers’ football teams in Nikaho City’s local league, the creation of a dedicated permanent space in the local cultural hall as a resource center and lounge for

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local TITP workers in Monbetsu, and the municipal hiring of specialized bilingual staff to work as support workers in various rural municipalities (see Tian, 2022). As these projects are aimed at hosting cultural activities involving both local residents and TITP workers, they tend to fall under different municipal sections than that of employment-supporting policies. Common sections conducting social-support policies include Living Support Sections (seikatsu shien-ka) or Labor Policy Sections (rōdō seisaku-ka). One concern of local authorities is the pronounced separation of TITP workers from local communities and the perceived accompanying security concerns. Since TITP workers typically live in employer-assigned housing units if not directly on the properties where they work, they are largely absent in typical community spaces. In part, the marginalization of TITP workers has contributed to their portrayal as associated with petty and sometimes violent crime. Media reporting of the TITP has sensationally highlighted the numerous murders committed by TITP workers over the years, including the notorious 2013 Etajima stabbings in which a Chinese TITP worker stabbed 8 Japanese co-workers. Some local authorities consider TITP workers as a problem of visibility, describing them as an invisible presence (mienai sonzai). For example, the Miyagi International Association (MIA) adopted this perspective and developed programming to promote direct interactions and cultural exchange between members of the community and TITP workers, with the specific goal of “making TITP workers’ presence as local residents even just a little more visible” (ginōjisshūsei wo chiikijūmin toshite sukoshi de mo “ mieru sonzai” to suru tame). This name was chosen from a 2019 grant application titled Community building promotion project for coexistence with TITP Interns [ginōjisshūsei to no kyōsei no chiiki zukuri suishin jigyō]. While growing interest on the part of local municipalities to make TITP workers more visible provides definite benefits in workers’ access to information and services and may reduce the harmful effects of discriminatory stereotypes caused by separation from native residents and communities, the fact that many programs focus on cultural exchanges, such as culinary demonstrations and the display of national costumes, produce the effect of reifying cultural and national differences between TITP workers as transient guests (and representatives of their nations and cultures) and native Japanese residents. Kashiwazaki (2013) argued that similar multicultural co-existence policies directed towards newcomer residents such as Nikkeijin paradoxically led to improvements in integration while also further cementing the identity of foreigner. To understand the prevalence of such policies and possible reasons for their implementation, I introduce the 2019–2020 Survey of Japanese Municipalities on the Economic Structure and Social Issues (henceforth, “the survey”) which I conducted as part of my fieldwork. The survey name was chosen to be deliberately vague yet encompassing of the topics covered. In Japanese it is chihōjichitai nitaisuru keizai kōzō ya shakaimondai ni kansuru anketo chōsa. The wide breadth of the topics covered was both to evaluate general sentiment towards the economic and social outlook, as well as to avoid framing the survey as overly ‘leading’ towards the discussion of the potentially sensitive issue of migrants.

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This chapter will introduce the design of the survey and discuss how it can be used to investigate the apparently rising trend in municipal policies supporting guestworkers. After an overview of the results of the survey, I discuss how they can be interpreted to advance understanding of the attitudes and motivations of municipal actors while also opening the space for more questions and further inquiry. Primarily, I highlight that there is little direct link between perceptions of local economic and demographic crises and the presence of municipal policy initiatives to promote the employment of foreign workers. An additional empirical goal is to shed light on a rare phenomenon observed in local government involvement with labor migration: the subsidization of various aspects of migrant employment by local governments. Some scholars have looked at the case of temporary farm migrants in the United States and Canada (Binford, 2013; Taylor & Martin, 1997) as well as construction sector workers in Japan and Israel (Bartram, 2016) and reached the conclusion that labor migrant policies often serve as a form of public subsidy for employers in particular locations and sectors. However, little literature exists about direct subsidies themselves, primarily because it is so uncommon for (particularly local) governments to incentivize employers to seek migrant laborers. The closest analogue can be found in Israel, where dependence on temporary labor migrants is similarly high in construction, agriculture, and healthcare. There, employer subsidies exist in a limited form through national health insurance payouts for those employing guest-worker personal caretakers (Kemp, 2010). These authors characterize both subsidies for employers of guestworkers, and the guestworker policies themselves, as a form of rent or redistribution from public funds to narrow but powerful interest groups in certain industries. However, there has been scant exploration of the motivations guiding these types of policies, and the conditions under which they occur. Many localities, not only in Japan and Israel but also elsewhere, struggle with dire, seemingly insurmountable economic and social problems (Li et al., 2019; Matanle & Rausch, 2011). Yet why do only certain municipalities attempt to address this problem by promoting the employment of foreign migrant workers, while others do not? What are the distinctions that set these municipalities apart from their peers? Searches and analysis of policy documents through online public sources yielded evidence that municipalities were indeed involving themselves with labor migration regimes such as the TITP, and in a startling variety of manners. However, the search cannot be considered exhaustive, and so the nationwide prevalence and distribution of policies remained unknown. First, not all municipalities list their policies publicly on their websites in a way that allows them to be indexed by search engines and later retrieved. Some municipalities do not publish such documents online at all, perhaps out of lack of capacity. This also suggests that overreliance on internet searches could lead to sampling bias in favor of larger municipalities with the staffing and technical know-how to regularly publish and update information regarding current policies online. Second, the author’s experience is that web pages on Japanese websites are posted and removed at short intervals. Published content is often deleted entirely instead of archived once the information is no longer current or relevant. Therefore, conducting a survey using an internet search is likely to

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reveal only a limited snapshot of the situation at the time of the research, while failing to find subsidies and other policies that could have expired as recently as the previous accounting period. Moreover, searching for existing policies does not help explain how and why municipal actors have become involved, or the processes through which these practices have spread. Due to the lack of any other source reliably tracking TITP-supporting policies, a nationwide survey of all municipal governments in Japan was necessary to identify the distribution, extent, and possible sources of motivation and initiative for such policies. These challenges contribute to the need for a direct survey of municipal governments. In addition to being able to cast as wide a net as possible, conducting a direct survey also has further distinct advantages. First, this allowed me to survey the attitudes of respondents regarding the local economic and social conditions they face. This is crucial in helping generate a sense of what local priorities are seen as more important and helps reduce the need for assumptions made on the part of the researcher. Second, conducting a survey makes it possible to learn more about the (self-declared) reasons and motivations behind why policies are enacted or conversely, not adopted. The survey was framed and described to potential respondents as a tool to measure self-evaluations of local economic and social concerns, as well as their appraisal of the potential contributions and risks linked to foreign workers and residents. Thus, while part of the survey (i.e., questions regarding the current population, local industries, and whether subsidy policies for TITP employment were in place or not) aim to collect unambiguous data points, much of the rest asks for subjective evaluations that are designed to offer insight into relative differences in perceptions and attitudes rather than objective metrics. The major reason for this is the importance of looking for clues in the amassed survey data as these subsidies are often sensitive and difficult questions to ask in face-to-face interviews with government officials, and the answers given are often non-committal and carefully worded in the interest of public optics. This hypothesis can be tested indirectly through comparison between municipalities with and without TITP policies. Similarly, the survey also asks respondents about plans for new policies in the short-­ term future. This opens the door to anticipating future short-term trajectories in how municipalities are engaging with the TITP and employment of foreigners more broadly. I surveyed the entire population of 1741 municipal governments. The design of the survey was based on examples of local government surveys carried out in Japan by both public and private institutions with further consultation with more experienced researchers at my host institute.

Methodology Data collection for this study is through a variety of methods dependent on the scale and considerations of access. For the national level government and interest organizations, high level access has been difficult to access. Policy document analysis and media reports, supplemented by interviews when relevant, form most of the sources

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for this analytical level. At the local and regional levels, a wider variety of methods become feasible. Like the national level, databases of local government meeting records were searched with keywords related to the TITP and migrant workers in general to find instances of public debate and discussion regarding these topics. In addition, I monitored local newspapers which have online editions for similar references. To build a broader picture of subnational variation in approaches to labor migrants, policy document analysis has been coupled with a mail survey of all municipal governments (n = 1741). The survey was designed primarily based on Fowler (2009)‘s guidebook for survey design, adapted to fit existing design models derived from consulting pre-existing examples of government survey materials in Japan, with consultation with local polling experts at my host institution, the University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science, to reduce localization and translation problems. To boost response rates, I used personalized appeals, an included envelope, return postage, and a follow-up postcard, techniques highlighted as particularly impactful according to public opinion research studies (Yammarino et al., 1991). The option to submit the survey response online, as well as by fax, was also given to incentivize response. The goals were two-fold: first, the survey sought to establish a general picture of how municipal governments evaluated the presence and contributions of foreign workers in their communities, and whether they had adopted special policies directed towards either the migrants or their employers. Here, the questions were designed to be as unambiguous as possible and specifically asked for the policy positions of the local governments to ensure higher response rates by preventing confusion over whether personal opinions (which would likely result in a refusal to respond) were being requested.

Survey Implementation and Results The survey was conducted by mail between November and December 2019. Respondents were offered the opportunity to respond by mail through the included Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope (SASE), online form, or fax. Respondents were sent a reminder postcard 3 weeks after the initial mailing. Responses were collected until August 2020. The surveys were directed towards the offices responsible for industrial promotion and labor policy (sangyō shinkō rōdō seisaku tantō), a decision made based on analyzing which sections of local government were most commonly responsible for the policies discovered through online search. The possibilities for sampling bias due to this difficult choice are why I will refrain from making claims about whether social policies directed towards migrants’ well-being and cultural exchange are common compared to subsidies and other forms of support targeted at employers. A subtotal of 825 valid responses was received, of which 7 were duplicated responses from the same municipalities. In cases where one response was more detailed (free-response questions were answered, or census data was given more precisely rather than rough estimates, etc.), that response was used. In the rest of the

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cases, I kept the latest recorded response and discarded earlier ones. This left a total of 818 valid responses for a response rate of 46.98%. Almost all respondents (812/818) gave their names, allowing me to work with their data using location/ region as a factor. This portion of the data will be withheld for purposes of anonymity in the publicly assessable version of the dataset. Response rates by prefecture ranged from a low of 25.00% in Tokushima Prefecture to a high of 65.00% in Ehime Prefecture, with a median of 48.15%. Curiously, and almost certainly by coincidence, these two prefectures are two of the four prefectures that make up Shikoku, the smallest of the home islands of ‘mainland’ Japan. Out of the 818 responding municipalities, 720 answered the question of whether the local municipality has adopted policies promoting the employment of TITP workers. Of this, 107 municipalities, or 13.1% of all respondents, declared at least one current active policy. Municipalities declaring such policies in place ranged geographically from the far eastern ends of Okinawa to the northern reaches of Hokkaido and encompassed everything from small rural towns of a few hundred residents to the largest urban units. As t-testing revealed that the sample of respondent municipalities do not differ significantly from the population in terms of population and distribution of administrative levels (whether they are cities (shi), districts (ku) towns (cho/machi), or villages (son/mura), we can effectively rule out selection-­ bias based on scale or size of the municipality. The most popular approaches taken by municipalities are targeted at migrants themselves. 46 municipalities reported holding cultural exchange activities, and 40 municipalities reported language support programs. Support for TITP-employing firms was also present, with 33 municipalities reporting that they held informational seminars for prospective employers of foreign workers, 17 municipalities reporting use of a direct subsidy for employers, and 9 having a housing program. A further seven municipalities provided legal counseling for employers and TITP workers. Some municipalities had several types of policies in place, meaning that they are counted multiple times. Overall, intern-supporting policies were more commonly used than employer-supporting policies (n  =  93 vs n  =  56). 24 municipalities reported offering both intern-supporting and employer-supporting policies, indicating that these categories are not mutually exclusive. Subsidies are uncommon amongst respondents, indicating that they are still quite rare. Municipalities without any concrete policies in place were asked to declare their reasons. 790 answers were recorded as respondents could select multiple reasons. The main declared reasons why subsidy policies were not in place were related to capacity issues: municipalities had either not investigated the issue (n  =  214) or were interested but lacked the necessary information needed to proceed (n = 190). Interestingly, relatively few respondents claimed to have no interest, either because their municipalities hosted few foreign guestworkers (n = 129) or because they perceived no need for local government to involve itself (n = 86). This could be due to sampling bias, as under-resourced or apathetic officials may have declined to return the survey. Several respondents left free response answers elaborating on their lack of capacity, claiming that a lack of resources and knowledge of the topic hindered

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their ability to even formulate plans for action. Several more responded with a desire to find examples from their peers from which to base their policies. The survey also asked respondents whether they had concrete plans in the next 5 years to adopt any of the types of policies previously surveyed. 240 respondents, or 29.3% of those surveyed, responded that they planned to adopt at least one type of policy. This compares to 339 (41.4%) respondents who replied no, and 239 (29.2%) who either left it blank or did not know. With the assumption that most of the respondents currently employing such policies will continue to do so in the short term, this suggests that the number of municipalities with some form of policy support for TITP employment-related matters may roughly double over the next 5 years. Overall, the survey revealed that a small but substantial portion of municipalities actively supported the TITP program and promoted its use by providing social-­ supporting programs targeted at TITP workers themselves or providing employment-­ supporting programs that provided informational seminars on the TITP for local employers and subsidized them for the expenses related to recruiting foreign workers. Surprisingly, municipalities self-reported many more social-supporting policies than previously expected. This is likely because subsidy programs are more likely to be promulgated as official policy and recorded in municipal legal registers, the targets of the previous internet searches, than cultural exchange programs and language lesson services. Crucially, municipal respondents generally demonstrated a high level of interest in such policies, and the question about future plans revealed that the popularity of such municipal-level interventions are likely to increase by roughly two-fold over the period 2020–2025. The results of this survey confirm that the phenomenon of municipalities actively promoting and supporting the employment of TITP workers, through both policies targeted at the migrants themselves and their employers, is both relatively widespread nationwide, and distributed relatively evenly across the country. However, as previously discussed, the subsidization of foreign labor is generally a rare phenomenon. Why is it happening in Japan, and what consequences does this have for the resilience of the TITP as a labor migration regime?

Municipalities in Crisis? The foremost explanation for why municipalities would expend valuable resources to support an ostensibly national labor migration regime would be that they are pushed to do so by concerns over aging and de-population, particularly pronounced in rural areas, and the accompanying sense of socio-economic decline. The TITP, with its lack of geographic and employer mobility for its participants, is particularly appreciated by less competitive SMEs in a wide array of industries, especially if they are in remote or rural locales. Although TITP workers number just around 400,000 as of 2022, they can be of critical economic importance to regional, particularly rural, economies. In recent

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years, more than a few towns and villages across Japan have received (usually negative) attention in the domestic press for their economic dependence on – also known euphemistically as their resourceful use of – TITP workers to achieve record productivity and profits (See: Onoda, 2014; Yasuda, 2018 for discussions of Kawakami Village, Nagano). With the partial exception of Aichi’s Tobishima Village, which takes advantage of its proximity to Nagoya to support a mixed economy balancing agriculture with logistics and light manufacturing, the remaining nine municipalities are rural and lean heavily towards primary industries such as agriculture and seafood harvesting. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a municipal officer from a farming area in highland Nagano prefecture referred to TITP workers as ‘indispensable labor’ (kakasenai rōdōryoku). Economic dependence on an underclass of temporary labor migrants is already the current reality in some localities across the country. Similar sentiments can be documented and found throughout interviews, city council meeting minutes, and other reliable sources. However, if such perceptions are widespread, why do only some municipalities enact these policies? What drives their creation and implementation? To answer these questions and develop an understanding of how, where, and why policies are implemented in certain areas and not others, I analyzed the data gathered through the mail survey. Respondents were asked to evaluate their level of concern regarding a wide variety of socio-economic issues organized into three discrete sections, in addition to their perceptions of the importance of a variety of issues regarding foreign residents. Respondents were also asked to evaluate the perceived economic relevance of major categories of noncitizens. The structure and ordering of these sections are meant to understand the overall attitudes and perceptions regarding local social and economic factors and guide the respondent from broader to more focused questions over the course of the survey. All but one section used a 1–5 scale, with 5 being most pressing or relevant. One section used a 1–4 scale as the framing of the questions asked for discrete responses rather than a gradient. Respondents were also asked to check which industries were important to their municipalities. By using difference in means analysis and logistic model building, I point out that a statistically significant relationship does not exist between perceptions of socio-economic crisis and the presence/absence of TITP supporting policies. Instead, through qualitive examples from fieldwork and secondary literatures, I argue that while local socio-economic factors are one of the strongest motivating factors in municipalities involving themselves with labor migration regimes such as the TITP, the creation and implementation of such policies requires initiative, either endogenously from local leadership or business interests or externally from shared networks. The first set of questions relate to major demographic changes and their potential consequences. Overall, municipal respondents overwhelmingly expressed a sense of alarm at the rate of depopulation and aging, with most respondents choosing the highest level of concern. The same trend can be seen for the most immediate effects of this demographic trend, namely the decline of the tax revenue base as well as decline in municipal commercial neighborhoods. ‘Decline in Built-Up Areas’ refers to the decline of developed commercial neighborhoods often found at the centered

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around the areas’ main bus and rail stations, and analogous to ‘main streets’ in the American context. In Japanese, the terminology used was hankagai/shotengai. Deindustrialization and aging infrastructure were also rated as concerning, although to a lesser degree as compared to other topics. Overall, municipal respondents can be described as highly concerned regarding local demographic challenges. The second set of questions asked the respondents to evaluate major sources of pressure for local businesses and employers. Although the question is therefore direct, most respondents were officials in the municipal departments for the promotion of commerce and industry and could thus reasonably be expected to have a basic understanding of the main challenges facing their area. The main sources of perceived challenges continued to be related to demographic factors: respondents cited a lack of qualified talent and available successors as being most challenging. Family-owned businesses often require a successor to take over the business, and the adult adoption of a non-consanguineous successor is by far the most common case of legal adoption. See (Mehrotra et al., 2013). In comparison, and surprisingly, respondents responded much more moderately to other potential challenges such as lack of available financing, governmental support, and savviness in competing in an increasingly globalized market. Overall, the main business concerns continue to be largely based on demographic issues, while perceptions of concern are more moderated for issues relating to policy or internationalization. The third set of questions asked not about the level of concern, but rather the degree of interest and action taken in various areas of local economic and social policy. Here, the answers are more discrete and less suitable for numerical comparisons. However, the respondents have overwhelmingly answered 4 (policies are currently in place) for all six topics, much more than any of the other responses (other options included (1) no intent to implement policy, (2) intent to implement policy but lacking resources to do so, (3) policy currently in planning stages). Overall, municipal officials communicated eagerness to demonstrate that a proactive stance towards local demographic and economic challenges. Interestingly, another important observation from this set of questions is that business subsidies are extremely common form of policy amongst respondents, with well over three quarters of respondents claiming to offer them. The fourth set of questions asked respondents to rate the perceived economic and social importance of various categories of noncitizens to their municipalities on a scale of 1–5. The results are quite mixed, a positive indication for the reliability suggesting that most respondents are not hastily selecting the same response for each question in a set. Similar distributions can be seen for permanent residents, special permanent residents (mostly Zainichi Koreans), students, and business travelers, which suggested a subdued level of interest and perceived importance. In contrast, TITP workers and tourists show very different distributions through which respondents clearly indicate an increased level of importance. Similarly, the final set of questions shares two sets of distinct distributions. This set asks respondents to self-evaluate their level of concern regarding various issues regarding noncitizens in their communities to identify if any are more salient than others. Interestingly, cultural frictions and concern about public safety (the potential

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for crime) followed political participation in trending towards the neutral response. This is despite the fact that the increasing association of foreigners with crime, as well as not complying with Japanese cultural etiquette, have often been cited as major contributors to lukewarm attitudes toward immigration (Herbert, 1992, 1996; Tsuda, 2003; Yamamoto, 2005). The distribution of responses suggests that municipal respondents either do not share these sentiments and concerns or are unwilling to express politically sensitive opinions strongly. Meanwhile, less controversial issues such as increasing non-citizens’ economic participation and increasing language resources both in terms of language lessons and providing municipal materials in foreign languages show a distribution that leans more strongly towards a definite level of concern and interest.

Conclusion This chapter demonstrates that a small but significant section of local municipalities, as well as prefectural governments, have begun to directly support the TITP program through a variety of policies and programs. These municipalities could be found well distributed throughout the country, at all levels of the urban-rural spectrum, and across a wide range of local economic bases. Moreover, many more respondents indicated strong interest and intent to enact similar policies in the future, suggesting that this area of policy will continue to grow. Overall, the survey shows that most municipalities across Japan are concerned about the demographic decline and accompanying challenges facing them and are engaged in a wide range of policymaking to meet them. TITP workers were identified as the second most important category of noncitizens to local communities, closely behind tourism. Municipal respondents reported being moderately concerned with a range of issues concerning the role of non-citizens in their communities but worries about cultural conflicts and crime did not seem to factor prominently. With any survey design, significant assumptions and challenges are encountered in moving from the intent of the venture to the actual results. Some variables were unable to be adequately surveyed and evaluated in this municipal survey. First, this survey demonstrated that only a small proportion of municipalities were able to report on the numbers of TITP workers in their jurisdictions: out of 514 respondents (meaning that a further 37% of survey respondents did not answer the question), only 23.15% claimed to be tracking the information at a municipal level. This is even though almost all respondents (90.3%) who answered the question (64.3% of total answers were valid) whether TITP workers were present in their communities did so in the affirmative. Due to the large insufficiencies in TITP workers’ population data, further investigation, such as matching of outside census data to the survey dataset, will be needed to test for the relationship between the relative presence of TITP workers and the likelihood of having municipal policies in place. By looking at the policies of municipal offices by which office is implementing them, this study identifies entire types of policies hitherto undescribed in academic

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literature, both in English and Japanese. Specifically, I identify that economic planning and industrial promotion offices in Japanese municipalities have made policies subsidizing the employment of TITP workers as well as other associated expenses. While shying away from an over-enthusiastic characterization of these policies as evidence of a renewed developmental state, this work draws attention towards the need to situate the (sometimes contemporaneous) policies that treat foreigners as residents and those that treat them as resources, and how to evaluate their (co-) existence, origins, and implications. These tensions represent the varying attitudes towards foreigners in a society that, while never having been truly homogenous, is now facing an acceleration in inbound migration and residence not seen since the end of the Pacific War. The place that foreigners should have in the society and future of Japan is an unsettled, dynamic debate, with the translation of competing ideas into local level policy and activism a critical forefront of wider developments to come. Acknowledgments  This work was supported by a Japan Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship, grant number 10121648.

References Aiden, H. S. (2011). Creating the “multicultural coexistence” society: Central and local government policies towards foreign residents in Japan. Social Science Japan Journal, 14(2), 213–231. Bartram, D. (2016). Labor migration policy and the governance of the construction industry in Israel and Japan. Politics & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329204263068 Binford, L. (2013). Tomorrow We’re all going to the harvest: Temporary foreign worker programs and neoliberal political economy. University of Texas Press. Chung, E. A. (2010). Immigration and citizenship in Japan. Cambridge University Press. Chung, E. A. (2020). Immigrant incorporation in east Asian democracies (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107337077 Chung, E.  A. (2021). The side doors of immigration: Multi-tier migration regimes in Japan and South Korea. Third World Quarterly, 0(0), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/0143659 7.2021.1956893 Fowler, F. J. (2009). Survey research methods (4th ed.). Sage Publications. Hashimoto, Y. (2011a). Gaikokujin kenshūsei ginōjisshūsei ukeire kigyō no chingin to seisansei ni kansuru kōsa. Keizai Bunseki, 185, 67–91. Hashimoto Y. (2011b). Gaikokujin kenshūsei ukeire tokku no seisaku hyōka evaluation of the foreign trainee special zones (No. 11-J-048; RIETI Discussion Paper Series). Research Institute of Economy, Trade, Industry, IAA. https://www.rieti.go.jp/jp/publications/dp/11j048.pdf Herbert, W. (1992). Conjuring up a crime wave: The ‘rapid growth in the crime rate among foreign migrant workers in Japan’ critically examined. Japan Forum, 4(1), 109–119. https://doi. org/10.1080/09555809208721448 Herbert, W. (1996). Foreign workers and law enforcement in Japan. Kegan Paul International. Hirayama, A. (2021, May 19). “Exploitation was common practice” bribes to Japan, with interns paying the price ‘sakushu ga jōshiki datta’ nihongawa ni wairo, tsuke wa jisshūsei ni. Asahi Shimbun Digital. https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASP5C4CFBP5BUZOB01C. html?iref=ogimage_rek

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Iimure, K. (2019). Akitaken niokeru gaikokujin ginōjisshūsei ukeire e no kadai to teigen challenges and recommendations for accepting technical intern trainees in Akita prefecture: ~based on interviews in Akita prefecture and Vietnam~. Journal of the Institute for Asian Studies and Regional Collaboration, Akita International University., 9, 41–64. https://doi.org/10.24687/ iasrc.9.0_41 JITCO. (2021, March 16). Ginōjisshuseido no shokushu sagyō nitsuite About TITP Occupational and Work Categories. https://www.jitco.or.jp/ja/regulation/occupation.html Kameda, N. (2008). Gaikokujin rōdōsha mondai no shosō—Nikkei burajiru jin no koyō mondai to kenshū ginōjisshū seido wo chūshin ni. Reference, 4, 19–39. Kashiwazaki, C. (2013). Incorporating immigrants as foreigners: Multicultural politics in Japan. Citizenship Studies, 17(1), 31–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2013.764216 Kemp, A. (2010). Reforming policies on foreign workers in Israel. OECD. https://doi.org/10.178 7/5kmjnr8pbp6f-­en Li, Y., Westlund, H., & Liu, Y. (2019). Why some rural areas decline while some others not: An overview of rural evolution in the world. Journal of Rural Studies, 68, 135–143. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.03.003 Matanle, P., & Rausch, A. S. (2011). Japan’s shrinking regions in the 21st century: Contemporary responses to depopulation and socioeconomic decline (SSRN scholarly paper ID 1971833). Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1971833. Mehrotra, V., Morck, R., Shim, J., & Wiwattanakantang, Y. (2013). Adoptive expectations: Rising sons in Japanese family firms. Journal of Financial Economics, 108(3), 840–854. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2013.01.011 Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare. (2021). Public report of 2020 cases of supervision guidance and prosecutorial referrals regarding employers of foreign technical intern trainees gaikokujin ginōjisshūsei no jisshū jisshi mono nitaisuru reiwa ninen no kantoku shidō, sōken nado no jōkyō wo kōhyō shimasu. Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare. https://www.mhlw.go.jp/ stf/newpage_20618.html Ministry of Justice. (2014). Ginōjisshū seido ni kansuru kiso shiryō. Ministry of Justice. http:// www.moj.go.jp/content/001128653.pdf Nagayoshi, K. (2011). Support of multiculturalism, but for whom? Effects of ethno-National Identity on the endorsement of multiculturalism in Japan. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37(4), 561–578. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2011.545272 Nakamatsu, T. (2014). Under the multicultural flag: Japan’s ambiguous multicultural framework and its local evaluations and practices. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40(1), 137–154. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.830498 Oishi, N. (2021). Skilled or unskilled?: The reconfiguration of migration policies in Japan. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 47(10), 2252–2269. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1369183X.2020.1731984 Onoda, Y. (2014, December 19). “Nenshū nisen gohyakuman-en no mura” nagano kawakamimura osotta fūbun nichi ben ren ga kankoku, mura gawa wa hampatsu “250000 yen income village” rumors of Nagano’s Kawakami Village, Nichibenren gives counsel, village reacts. Sankei News. https://www.iza.ne.jp/article/20141219-­UXJ7YUMY3ZMO7O7BEKJZR5JGWI/ Reiwa ninendo gyōmu tōkei Operational Statistics for Reiwa Year 2. (2021, March). Organization for Technical Intern Training. https://www.otit.go.jp/gyoumutoukei_r2/ Sharpe, M. O. (2010). When ethnic returnees are de facto guestworkers: What does the introduction of Latin American Japanese Nikkeijin (Japanese descendants) (LAN) suggest for Japan’s definition of nationality, citizenship, and immigration policy? Policy and Society, 29(4), 357–369. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polsoc.2010.09.009 Shipper, A. W. (2008). Fighting for foreigners: Immigration and its impact on Japanese democracy. Cornell University Press. Strausz, M. (2019). Help (not) wanted: Immigration politics in Japan. State University of New York Press.

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Tarumoto, H. (2018). The limits of local citizenship policies in Japan. In T. Lacroix & A. Desille (Eds.), International migrations and local governance (pp. 191–213). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­65996-­1_11 Taylor, J.  E., & Martin, P.  L. (1997). The immigrant subsidy in US agriculture: Farm employment, poverty, and welfare. Population and Development Review, 23(4), 855–874. https://doi. org/10.2307/2137387 Tegtmeyer Pak, K. (2006). Cities and local citizenship in Japan. In T. Tsuda (Ed.), Local citizenship in recent countries of immigration (pp. 65–96). Lexington Books. Tian, Y. (2018). Workers by any other name: Comparing co-ethnics and ‘interns’ as labour migrants to Japan. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–19, 1496–1514. https://doi. org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1466696 Tian, Y. (2022). Workers, Neighbours, or something Else? Local policies and policy narratives of technical intern training program participants. Social Science Japan Journal, jyac023, 77–92. https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyac023 Tsuda, T. (2003). Strangers in the ethnic homeland: Japanese Brazilian return migration in transnational perspective. Columbia University Press. Tsuda, T. (Ed.). (2006). Local citizenship in recent countries of immigration: Japan in comparative perspective. Lexington Books. Vogt, G. (2013). When the leading goose gets lost: Japan’s demographic change and the non-­ reform of its migration policy. ASIAN STUDIES: Journal of Critical Perspectives on Asia, 49(2), 14–44. Yamamoto, R. (2005). Alien Attack? Japanstudien, 16(1), 27–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/0938649 1.2005.11826911 Yammarino, F. J., Skinner, S. J., & Childers, T. L. (1991). Understanding mail survey response behavior a meta-analysis. Public Opinion Quarterly, 55(4), 613–639. https://doi.org/10.1086/269284 Yasuda, K. (2018, January 27). jūmin no yonin ni hitori ga gaikokujin ginōjisshūsei naganoken kawakamimura no hansei reflections on Nagano’s Kawakami Village—Where 1 in 4 residents is a TITP worker. Toyo Keizai Weekly Plus.. https://premium.toyokeizai.net/articles/-­/17394 Yunchen Tian (or just Tian for short) is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at Saint Martin’s University in Lacey, Washington. Their research focuses on the governance and discursive construction of labor migration policies in Japan. They received a PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University with a dissertation titled Making Migrants Locally? Contention and Cooperation in the Multi-­Level Governance of Migration in Japan. Their work has been published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Social Science Journal Japan, and Citizenship Studies, with additional manuscripts under review.  

Precarity and Hope Among Asylum Seekers in Japan Taku Suzuki

Abstract  This chapter provides an overview of Japan’s asylum policies, and sheds light on some of the most acute challenges that asylum seekers face while living in Japan. It also examines how those asylum seekers whose applications for refugee recognition have been denied or are pending manage to survive as “provisionally released” subjects with severely restricted rights. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork among provisionally released asylum seekers and those who are currently detained by Japan’s Immigration Service Agency (ISA), and the interviews I conducted with non-governmental organization members and individual activists who help them, it suggests that the asylum seekers’ very survival while being denied to the “right to have rights” (Hannah Arendt) is an act of resistance against the Japanese state, which insists on an extremely strict interpretation of the “refugee” status eligibility. The provisionally released asylum seekers are confronted with “deportability” (Nicholas De Genova), a condition which constantly threatens individuals with the possibility of deportation, and “liminal legality” (Cecilia Menjívar), a gray area between authorized and unauthorized migrant status. By ethnographically portraying the opportunistic, collaborative, and networked tactics that deportable and liminally legal asylum seekers and their allies use to survive in Japan, the chapter proposes that their daily struggles and efforts to overcome them challenge the Japanese state’s continuing refusal to recognize their clear and present existence in Japanese society. Keywords  Immigration · Asylum seekers · Provisional release · Non-­ governmental organizations · Survival tactics

T. Suzuki (*) International Studies Program, Denison University, Granville, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_9

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Introduction When I first met Abbas in 2019 at the Immigration Service Agency (ISA)‘s East Japan Detention Center in Ushiku, Ibaraki Prefecture, he was being carted by an ISA staff member into a small, fluorescent-lit meeting room where a large acrylic board separated detainees from their visitors. Abbas was weak and bound to a wheelchair. He had been on hunger strike for 23  days, protesting his indefinite detainment–which at this point had lasted more than 2 years–and that of hundreds of others like him. ISA staff would place food for him and five other detainees at the entrance of their shared room. This is where it would remain. Abbas, an Iranian man, was 21 years old when he first sought asylum in Japan. He had been detained by ISA ever since. During the detention, he had attempted suicide twice. We sat across from one another in the Ushiku Detention Center, where he had been for the last 13 months. The only way out of the detention was for him to agree to deportation, which was not an option for Abbas, so he saw the refusal to eat as his last hope. The serious deterioration of his health, he thought, could grant him a provisional release, or karihōmen, which would allow him to live outside albeit under numerous restrictions. “Please,” in fluent Japanese, Abbas pleaded to me and a long-time Japanese activist who introduced me to detained asylum seekers at Ushiku, “give back to me the two years of my life. Two years during your youth are happy years, aren’t they? When I think about it,” he said, putting his right hand over his chest, “my heart aches.” The Japanese activist asked Abbas if there was anything he would want from her to improve his life inside the detention center. She promised Abbas she would write another letter to the Ushiku Center director to demand the provisional release of long-term detainees like Abbas, and encouraged him to rest. “This is beyond awful,” she agreed with Abbas, “we will do our best to help get you out of here.” This chapter provides an overview of Japan’s current asylum policies, and sheds light on some of the most acute challenges that asylum seekers face while living in Japan as a result of these policies. Through interviews with the asylum seekers and ethnographic snapshots of their daily struggles and coping tactics, it also attempts to highlight the asylum seekers’ pragmatism and resourcefulness for making a living in Japan, and Japanese individuals and organizations who make their survival possible. In so doing, it showcases grassroots social changes that are already underway in the pockets of Japanese society, in spite of the Japanese state’s refusal to recognize its multiethnic realities. The data used for this chapter is drawn from my ethnographic fieldwork in the Tokyo metropolitan area during July 2019 and from October 2021 to April 2022, during which I interviewed approximately 30 asylum seekers whose legal status has not yet been secured, and Japanese individuals who assist these asylum seekers as the members of volunteer groups and non-­ governmental organizations (NGOs). The names and other identifiable background information of the asylum seekers beyond their national origins are changed to protect their confidentiality, considering their legally precarious statuses in Japan. Most

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interviews with the asylum seekers were conducted in Japanese, except for those who were more comfortable with communicating in English, such as those who came to Japan from Sri Lanka, Ghana, and the Philippines.

The Japanese Asylum System Japan acceded to the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees on October 3, 1981, and then to the United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1982 (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, n.d.). The convention defined a refugee as someone who, “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his (sic) nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself (sic) of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his (sic) former habitual residence, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it” (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2010). By acceding to the Convention and Protocol, the states commit to the fundamental principles of protecting refugees. They stipulate that refugees should not be penalized for their illegal entry or stay, and prohibits the penalties charged to the asylum seekers with immigration or criminal offenses relating to the seeking of asylum, or arbitrary detention of them on the basis of their asylum seeking. Crucially, the Convention upholds the principle of non-refoulement, that no one shall expel or return (refouler) a refugee against his or her will, in any manner whatsoever, to a territory where he or she fears threats to life or freedom. Finally, the Convention lays down basic minimum standards for the treatment of refugees, including such rights as the access to the courts, to primary education, to work, and the provision for documentation, including a refugee travel document in passport form (UNHCR, 2010, p. 3). According to ISA, the number of asylum applications stayed under a hundred until the mid-1990s, but it increased dramatically from the late-1990s, from 52 in 1995 to 216 in 2000, and peaked at 19,629 in 2017 (Shutsunyūkoku Zairyū Kanri-­ chō, 2021a). The asylum granting rate each year is difficult to calculate from the available ISA data, because many asylum seekers apply for refugee status multiple times and asylum applications and decisions often take place in different years. The relatively high percentage of applicants, many of whom had arrived in Japan from the Indochina peninsula in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, were granted asylum during the first half of 1980s. Since then, the annual asylum admissions have remained extremely low, topping at 57 in 2008, when there were 1599 applications. During the 10 years from 2011 to 2020, ISA received 75,592 asylum applications, and granted 264. ISA also granted “Special Residential Permits due to Humanitarian Consideration” to the additional 963 applicants. In total, then, only 1.6% of the asylum applicants during the decade received legal residency (Shutsunyūkoku Zairyū Kanri-chō, 2021b). Critics have long pointed out ISA’s absurdly low asylum

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granting rate, compared with other advanced economies (for example, from 2018 to 2019, the United Kingdom received 32,693 applications for asylum and granted 10,555, or about 30%, of them [Home Office, 2019]), and the fact that the issuance of “Special Residential Permit,” the granting criteria of which are vague and are at the complete discretion of the Ministry of Justice, far outnumbers the formal asylum recognitions (Hirano, 2020, p. 185–6; Nemoto, 2017, p. 64–65). ISA has responded to the criticisms by arguing that unlike European countries, where many asylum seekers were arriving from the conflict zones in the Middle East, many asylum applicants in Japan came from such countries as Nepal, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Pakistan, which were not typically considered to be active conflict zones. Therefore, it argued, most of these asylum applicants were merely taking advantage of Japan’s asylum system to extend their stay and continue working in Japan (Hirano, 2020, p.  244). Indeed, despite the restrictive immigration laws, in order to address the acute labor shortage in manufacturing, service, and agricultural industries, many foreigners have been permitted–even encouraged–by the Japanese government to enter Japan with non-work visas (e.g., technical trainee and student visas) with a tacit understanding that they in reality would work as low-wage laborers. If these “trainees” and “students” want to extend their stay in Japan beyond their visa expiration, however, there are very few options but to apply for asylum, which would allow them to continue living and working in Japan until the asylum application is denied, and, subsequently, ordered to deport themselves (Miyajima, 2019). Critics, therefore, accuse the existing Japanese immigration and asylum system of treating migrants as a disposable workforce stripped of any rights, only to be forced out of Japan when they have outlived their usefulness, and replaced by newer and fresher migrant workers (Ibusuki, 2020). Additionally, critics have rebutted ISA’s claims by pointing out the Japanese government’s refusal to grant asylum to Turkish Kurds until August 2022, when a Turkish Kurd was granted asylum for the first time after a long court battle with ISA (Kyodo News, 2022), on the basis of political persecution by their home state, while North American and European states have granted Turkish Kurds asylum at much higher rates (Hirano, 2020, p. 245). Given these circumstances, one must conclude that the Japanese state systematically and continuously produces a large number of asylum seekers whose applications are pending, denied, or under the appeal process. Rejected asylum applicants are faced with few choices: Deport themselves, reapply for asylum or appeal the decision, or apply for a Special Resident Permit. While the vast majority deport themselves by paying their own airfares, others seek to remain in Japan for a variety of reasons. For some, there is a clear and imminent danger that awaits them in their countries of origin. Others know that their children, who were born and/or raised in Japan, already see Japan as their home, and would face tremendous challenges if they relocated to an unfamiliar foreign country. After their asylum applications have been denied, those who are reapplying for asylum and those appealing the asylum denial are frequently detained by ISA. The detention practice has been criticized by numerous domestic and international NGOs. In 2018, more than half of the detainees were kept in the ISA centers for more than 6 months, which is prohibited by the 1951 refugee convention (Mochizuki, 2019,

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p. 158). It is not unusual for someone to be held for 2 or 3 years before they agree to repatriate, are provisionally released, or are deported. Until ISA issues a provisional release, all asylum seekers can do is to wait. The result of their application is typically known after 2 months, but due to the backlog, it is taking longer. According to political scientist Tae-sung Oh, those detained at the Ushiku Detention Center used to wait for 46 days on average for the provisional release decision in 2013, had to wait 69 days on average in 2016 (Oh, 2017, p. 38). The ISA detention centers are notorious for their poor living conditions (e.g., lack of Internet access, limited physical exercise or socializing time), poor quality of food, unreasonably strict rules (e.g., prohibition of possession of cell phones, limited hours for meeting with visitors), economic exploitation (e.g., overpriced food items sold at a kiosk and high rate of phone calls for the only available payphones), and physical, verbal, and psychological abuses by the guards, and grossly inadequate medical care for the detainees. It is no surprise that there were 15 detainee deaths from 2007 to 2019 (Oh, 2017; Hirano, 2020; Tanaka & Wattles, 2019; Kishitsu, 2019a; Suzuki, 2020). Given these conditions of the migrant detention, Oh claims that the ISA detention centers function like “a waiting lobby for the deportable foreigners” (Oh, 2017, p. 36). Indeed, one can argue that ISA purposefully uses the migrant detention as a means to encourage the detainees to “voluntarily” return to their migratory origins, even when they are reluctant to do so due to safety concerns and other considerations.

Provisional Release (Karihōmen) After the detainees’ applications for refugee status or Special Residential Permits were denied and they were detained by ISA, the provisional release (karihōmen) is the only realistic option to leave the detention center. To apply for the provisional release, one must have a guarantor, residential address, and money to pay the processing fee. Typically, the detainees’ family and relatives, friends, or supportive NGO members and lawyers are chosen by the detainees as their guarantors. Unless the guarantor is the detainee’s family member, it is extremely difficult to secure a residential address, and, since the detainees often do not have income, it is difficult to pay what is typically around 300,000 yen required for the fee. In short, as Oh (2017, p. 37) points out, it is nearly impossible for the newly arrived asylum seekers to gain the provisional release from the ISA detention centers. The number of detainees who were provisionally released from the detention centers decreased from 3404 in 2014 to 2501 in 2018 (Kishitsu, 2019b), but the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the ISA, concerned about the virus’s spread among the detainees, to issue a far greater number of provisional releases in 2020–2021. As a result, there were 5910 individuals with provisional release status in December 2021 (Hōmushō, 2022). Among the provisionally released individuals in June 2019, Turkish nationals had the highest share (16.8%), followed by Filipinos (11.6%), Iranians (9.3%), and Sri Lankans (9.2%) (Shutsunyūkoku Zairyū Kanri-chō, 2019). According to one survey conducted by an NGO in 2021, among the 139 respondents with the

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provisional release status, 67% of them had lived in Japan for more than 10 years, and 16% of them for more than 30 years (Kitakantō Iryō Sōdankai, 2022, p. 4). The provisional release comes with extremely strict conditions. It prohibits the released subjects from paid labor, movement outside of the prefecture of their ISA-­ registered residence without approval, and social entitlement such as National Healthcare. It also requires them to report to the ISA office to renew the status every few months (in some cases, they are required to renew it every few weeks). The renewal of the provisional release is far from guaranteed. The asylum seekers may be re-detained by ISA without any stated reason. It is indeed common for the provisionally released asylum seekers to get their renewal application denied and detained again without any explanation from the ISA (Tanaka & Wattles, 2019, p. 3). As a result, critics like Oh (2018, p. 18) and Tanaka and Wattles (2019, p. 3) describe the provisional release status as “a prison without cells” or “a permanent purgatory,” where there is no freedom or redemption. The detained and provisionally released asylum seekers in Japan epitomize what anthropologist Nicholas De Genova calls “detainable” and “deportable” subjects (De Genova, 2010, 2016), living under a condition which constantly threatens them with the possibility of deportation, saddled with the status of what sociologist Cecilia Menjívar calls “liminal legality” (2006), a gray area between authorized and unauthorized migrant status.

Surviving Precarious Situations There are numerous studies and news reports that detail the precarity and uncertainty, or, what anthropologist Bridget Haas calls “existential limbo” (2017, p. 78), with which these detainable and deportable asylum seekers around the world are condemned to live. There are, however, scarce accounts of how those whom historian Mae Ngai described as “impossible subjects,” “whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility” (Ngai, 2004, p. 4), actually survive in their destination countries for an extended period of time. In the remainder of this chapter, I will portray some of the real-life challenges these liminally legal and deportable asylum seekers, who are denied what Hannah Arendt aptly called the “right to have rights” (Arendt, 2017 [1951]), face in their daily lives in Japan, and how they attempt to build their lives, often with support from their Japanese allies.

Employment and Income One important step the provisionally released asylum seekers must take to make a living in Japan is to find an employer who is willing to hire them. A vast majority of those Turkish Kurd asylum seekers with the provisional release status whom I met during my fieldwork worked for building demolition firms owned by fellow Turkish

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Kurds, who have managed to secure legal residency. Most new arrivals who have applied for asylum receive a temporary visa that allows them to work after about 6 months of a waiting period, even if the visa will likely be revoked upon the negative asylum decision. Taking advantage of this small window, some of those asylum seekers start their own demolition businesses. With little capital, they may not have any equipment or an office, but with the legal residency, they can still operate their businesses. With the steady flow of newcomers from Turkey, there are enough demolition firms that could use workers, including those who are on provisional release. On the list of registered demolition contractors in Kawaguchi City of Saitama Prefecture, there were more than 90 firms that list Turkish Kurds as their owners. While it is unclear how many of these business owners have secured legal permanent residency and how many are temporary visa holders, what is apparent is that many asylum seekers from Turkey on provisional release could find jobs with relative ease in these demolition firms. Mustafa, a Turkish Kurdish man in his fifties, came to Japan nearly 30 years ago and has worked for various construction and demolition companies over the years. Working for the employers of Japanese, Turkish, and other nationalities, he has managed to support his wife and three daughters, even after his legal residency was terminated. After his asylum application was denied and his appeals failed, he had spent a total of two and a half years in the ISA detention centers, and then had remained on provisional release for the past 6 years. He was, of course, fearful of random police stops, which could easily lead to re-detention, but he had managed to obtain a Japanese driver’s license and other licenses that allowed him to operate construction and demolition machinery, which helped him receive higher pay. He continued to find work by calling up the various contractors he had come to know over the years, whom he knew would not question his legal eligibility to work. Other asylum seekers follow the provisional release’s strict rules by depending on family, friends, and NGOs. According to an NGO survey conducted among those foreigners on the provisional release status, 70% of the respondents reported no earned income, and 66% of them claimed they have debts to family and friends (Kitakantō Iryō Sōdankai, 2022, p. 29–30). Nur, a Rohingya asylum seeker from Myanmar, had been on provisional release for 8 years after being detained for 1 year from 2012 to 2013. Soon after the release from the ISA detention facility, he moved to Tatebayashi City in Gunma Prefecture, where a sizable Burmese immigrant community exists (Tomita, 2019), and found a job at a factory where many other Rohingyas also worked. He then moved to Tokyo in 2014 and worked at a bar for several years. His fear of potential re-detention by ISA, anger towards ISA for its unjust and cruel practices, and concern about the worsening situation in his home country drove him to quit his job and focus on political activism. Nur said: “I became a leader for an organization that advocates for the provisionally released, and decided to make a firmer commitment to the democratization of Myanmar.” He lives in an apartment that the organization pays rent for. The same organization also provides him with “allowance money” every month. He is friends with several migrant rights activists who help him whenever he is in need.

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Amir, an Iranian man who moved to Japan in 1991 to work in Japan in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War that devastated the Iranian economy, had been detained by ISA for 10 months from 2011 to 2012, and 3 years from 2017 to 2020. After a Japanese friend, who is an active member of an NGO that supports immigrants and refugees, raised enough money for his provisional release, he was released to the custody of a member of another NGO. While Amir waited for the ISA’s decision for his second asylum application, he relied on his savings from working days and lived in an apartment, whose owner he had known personally for years before the detention. Once his savings ran out, he contacted a university professor who served as a board member of another refugee-supporting NGO, who connected Amir to an NGO that provides financial and housing support for the poor and homeless people. Living in an NGO-run shelter for which he does not have to pay rent or utilities, Amir lives frugally. He relies on a monthly stipend of 25,000 yen from the same NGO and receives his food from food pantries and cooks his own meals, and rarely eats out. As a fluent Japanese speaker who has lived in Japan for decades with a precarious legal status, he is frequently invited by university professors and NGOs to offer guest lectures on the challenges he faces as the provisionally released asylum seekers. For each of these appearances, he receives a small amount of honorarium. He does not want to return to Iran after spending much of his adult life in Japan, and he fears the Iranian government’s persecution after his vocal criticisms of the Islamic clerics over the years. Moreover, he is unlikely to be deported to Iran because the Iranian government does not accept the repatriates who have sought political asylum overseas. After years of struggling to make a living and various health problems he has been dealing with, Amir is “very tired,” but he is unsure of what to do in the future: “I am toughing it out right now, but I don’t know how long I can [live like this].” He has lived in Japan for more than three decades, and, with nowhere else to go, he is likely to continue living in Japan for years to come.

Housing Another major challenge for those deportable and liminally legal asylum seekers on provisional release is finding a place to live. Without a valid visa or legal permanent residency, they cannot go through a formal route to sign a lease with a landlord. Japanese landlords are wary of renting a property to those without a stable legal status, and there is no national law that prohibits housing discrimination against those who cannot prove their legal residency in Japan. Consequently, many of them look for their immediate or extended family members who have obtained a visa or permanent residency, typically through marriage to Japanese citizens. Tom is an asylum seeker who escaped from Ghana when he was sought by police, who thought he had witnessed police officers’ involvement in human trafficking. He was detained by ISA twice, for 10 months and 4 years, after overstaying his tourist visa, with which he entered Japan. He applied for asylum during his first detention, but being unable to hire a lawyer or collect sufficient evidence to support his case, it was

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denied. His Japanese girlfriend helped him get a provisional release from the ISA detention center, and he lived with her in her apartment. Since the release from the second detention, he has lived with his brother, who is married to a Japanese woman, in a Tokyo apartment. It was not an ideal situation, Tom admitted, because the apartment is small and his brother and his wife have young children, but he was grateful for a free shelter and food. Others who cannot sign the apartment lease due to their provisional release status turn to their employers to rent an apartment on their behalf. By designating the apartment units as the company housing for their employees, the employers can rent and sublet them to those who are unable to sign the lease. Many of the Turkish Kurds I interviewed lived in the apartment buildings in Kawaguchi City that were rented by their fellow Turkish Kurd employers who possess legal residency in Japan. Because there is an extensive network of Turkish Kurds in Kawaguchi City and its vicinity, some of whom have obtained permanent residency, those relative newcomers with the provisional release status can still find apartments for themselves and their families. Many of the provisionally released asylum seekers I met also found an apartment through humanitarian NGOs. One NGO manages an old apartment in eastern Tokyo that has four one-bedroom units. It allows the asylum seekers in need to live there free of rent and utility cost, and offers them a small amount of monthly stipend for personal expenses. While they must live frugally by using food pantries and other charity organizations for daily necessities, African and Asian asylum seekers on provisional release who lived there in 2021 were able to survive without violating the provisional release rules. Others have found Japanese benefactors who owned unoccupied properties. Michael, who came to Japan in 2013, to escape the tribal conflicts in northern Ghana, was provisionally released from the ISA detention center in 2020. After his first asylum application was denied, he filed an appeal, which was still pending. As he waited for the appeal decision, he struggled to find a place to live. He initially relied on the same landlord whose apartment he had rented prior to the detention. Then, a Japanese business owner, who met Michael through a mutual acquintance, offered him a chance to live in one of the apartment buildings she owned. It is rentand utility-free, and has Wi-Fi. She and Michael together regularly go to a food pantry, visit a Catholic Church that offers him 20,000-yen stipend every month or so, and shop at a grocery store together. He is grateful for the benefactor’s financial and housing help, but he feels conflicted about his complete dependency on her and other supporters. He told me: “I don’t want to ask for help. It doesn’t feel good to ask for help…. I want to work. I don’t need to be rich with a million dollars, but [want to] have a job, a wife, and kids.” Indeed, none of these arrangements made by employers, family members, NGOs, and benefactors offers a sustainable long-term solution, as they all depend on their goodwill and charity. By cultivating an extensive network of these individuals and organizations, however, these asylum seekers manage to make a living without working, which is prohibited by ISA, who seeks to make their lives in Japan impossible and leave them with no choices but to deport themselves.

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Healthcare In addition to the lack of income and housing, the biggest challenge the provisionally released asylum seekers face is healthcare. Because the provisionally released asylum seekers are not eligible for Japan’s National Healthcare, they are financially responsible for the entire cost of the medical care they receive. When acute medical needs arise, such as workplace injuries or dental problems for their children, the hospital visits could saddle them with medical bills worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of yen. Moreover, knowing the provisionally released asylum seekers’ ambiguous legal status and doubting their ability to pay the bills, many hospitals and clinics are reluctant to take them in. Bayya, a Sri Lankan man in his forties, was recently released from the ISA detention center. He was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, high blood pressure, high blood sugar level, and several broken teeth. Although his Japanese advocate, a university professor and a member of the organization that supports the provisionally released, strongly recommended him to receive psychiatric treatment, medication, and dental care, Bayya had no idea how to pay for them. Similarly, Young-joon, a South Korean man who was an anti-government activist during the Park Chung-hee dictatorship in the 1980s, was released from the detention center in 2012 after a ten-day-long hunger strike to protest the inhuman condition for the detainees. Having been prohibited from working and excluded from the National Healthcare, he has endured numerous health issues without receiving care for nearly 10 years: “I had a terrible toothache, and had to go to a dentist, which cost me more than 70,000 yen. I had to ask around people to donate money to pay for it. When I suffer from influenza and other illnesses, I just stay home and wait [until they subside].” When a provisionally released asylum seeker suffers from a severe illness or injury, a result can be catastrophic. Nurul, a Burmese man in his forties, developed a heart disease during the ISA detention in the early 2010s. Since the provisional release, he has lived alone in a Tatebayashi apartment, with minimal support from other Burmese community members in the area. In 2015, when his Burmese friend, who is fluent in Japanese, was visiting him from Tokyo, Nurul suffered from various worrying conditions. He had severe diarrhea, vomiting, excruciating jaw pain, while his body became ice-cold. Without health insurance, he didn’t want to go to an emergency room, but his friend convinced Nurul to go to see a heart specialist 2 days later, who found that Nurul was suffering from blocked heart arteries. He underwent a heart surgery immediately. Nurul said: “The doctor told me that I would have died if I had come a few hours later.” The surgery cost him 2,400,000 yen, which he still pays “little by little every month,” without disclosing the source of his income. For these provisionally released asylum seekers, family assistance and Japanese supporters frequently help to make it possible for them to receive the medical care they need. Omer, a Turkish Kurd man in his fifties, has lived in Japan since 2000, and has a wife and four children. He currently works for a building demolition

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company owned by a fellow Turkish Kurd. Prior to the current job, he had numerous jobs that required taxing physical labor, such as waste collection and sorting, water main installation and repair, and packaging at a factory. For more than two decades, including the two and half years he was detained by ISA, he and his family have had no health insurance. He lamented the burden of having to pay “20,000 to 30,000 yen just for a kid’s cold or something,” and 200,000 or 300,000 yen for more serious illnesses or injuries. Recently at a building demolition site, a rusty nail stabbed his forearm, and it cost him 20,000 yen to receive a tetanus booster shot to prevent infection. Whenever his family needs medical attention that would cost a substantial amount of money, Omer asks the hospital for a monthly payment installment plan. Then, he asks his Turkish Kurd employer, who is his distant relative, to give him the amount necessary for the down payment for the treatment, and subtract 10,000 or 20,000 yen from his subsequent monthly paychecks. NGOs and individual supporters also pitch in to support the provisionally released asylum seekers for their medical needs. They seek out care providers who are willing to offer discount medical consultation and treatment for asylum seekers and migrants without health insurance, accompany their hospital visits, negotiate the cost with the care providers, arrange their payments in installments, and sometimes even become a cosigner of their bill payments. For instance, an NGO called Northern Kanto Region Medical Consulting Society, or AMIGOS, as it calls itself, helps those on provisional release to receive medical care by not only providing free medical consultation but also introducing them to the conscientious clinics and hospitals that are willing to offer medical care with steep discounts. For more than 20 years, AMIGOS and other migrant-supporting NGOs regularly have organized free physical examinations and medical and dental consultations for migrants without health insurance, with help from volunteer physicians, dentists and translators (Kamitō, 2021). AMIGOS helps Nurul receive a regular checkup of his heart every 3 months with the heart surgeon who operated on him in 2015. His heart medication, without the National Healthcare, would cost 40,000–50,000 yen for each prescription, but AMIGOS found that a hospital in Ōta City, about an hour train ride from Tatebayashi, offers free prescription drugs for those in financial distress. He goes there every 3 months to receive his heart medication. His heart surgeon advises Nurul to have another heart surgery, because one of his two heart arteries is still clogged, telling him to make a surgery appointment “as soon as [he gets] health insurance.” Humanitarian NGOs like AMIGOS, as well as the individual allies and friends who support the provisionally released asylum seekers, invariably claim that they should be allowed to join the National Healthcare system, or that the ISA should grant them the Special Residential Permits, which would allow them to work and earn income to pay for their medical care (Kitakantō Iryō Sōdankai, 2022, p. 32–3). Until the Japanese government implements these changes, these humanitarian NGOs and individuals will continue to have to play a critical role in maintaining the health of the provisionally released asylum seekers.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I summarized the factors that have contributed to the significant presence of asylum seekers in Japan today, and how the Japanese state’s immigration and asylum system has deliberately created deportable and liminally legal subjects. A prime example of these subjects is those who are provisionally released from the ISA detention centers, many of whom have few choices but keep living under extremely precarious socioeconomic conditions. I also attempted to demonstrate the everyday struggles of detainable and deportable subjects and the diverse tactics and resources they draw on to continue living in Japan against the odds. In addition to informal tactics and resources depicted in this chapter, many of them also pursue a formal legal route to prolong their stay in Japan by filing multiple appeals to the ISA asylum decisions and taking the agency to court. With the help of Japanese supporters and sympathetic lawyers, others try to improve their children’s legal status in Japan by sending them to a university and obtaining a student visa, which can, in turn, lead to a work visa upon their graduation if their employers are willing to sponsor them. These tactics described here, of course, do not always succeed, and, even if they do, rarely provide them with a sustainable and prosperous life. Structurally, the existing humanitarian organizations are intended to help those who are in a temporary crisis, usually by connecting them to a public assistance infrastructure (e.g., national or prefectural government’s social benefits), to enable them to achieve financial and social independence in the near future. Even as they strive to provide the provisionally released asylum seekers with monetary, housing, and medical assistance as long as they can, they struggle with the facts that the provisionally released asylum seekers are legally prohibited by the state from accessing most of the public assistance resources, and from ever becoming financially and socially independent in Japanese society (Inaba, 2021). Despite these dire circumstances the provisionally released asylum seekers face, I still wanted to highlight in this chapter the fact that thousands of these deportable and liminally legal asylum seekers continue to make a living, support their families, raise their children, and try to improve their lives. I also wanted to draw attention to the various creative efforts by numerous NGOs, volunteer groups, and individual benefactors, who, despite their limited financial and human resources, have developed an extensive and tight-knit network that attempts to meet these asylum seekers’ needs. Moreover, as Auyero (2012), Bendixsen and Eriksen (2018), Conlon (2011), Griffiths (2014), Hage (2009), Jacobsen et al. (2020), Mountz (2011), and many others have argued, the state’s primary means of violence toward its liminally legal subjects, such as rejected asylum seekers and irregular migrants, is manipulation of time and temporality by subjecting them to indefinite waiting and radical disruption of their routine lives. I argue, then, that surviving 1 day at a time, building trust with others over time, and sustaining hope for a better future, in themselves, are radically subversive acts of creating their own personal temporalities and defying those imposed by the state. While the Japanese state continues to stumble on its

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own contradiction, as it faces the reality of more than three million foreigners already living in the country while it refuses to formulate reasonable, humane, and realistic immigration and asylum policies (Mochizuki, 2019), the deportable and liminally legal asylum seekers, with the unwavering support from the host state’s citizens, are and will be there to stay, continuing to defy the odds.

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Taku Suzuki is Professor of International Studies, East Asian Studies, and Global Health at Denison University in Ohio, USA.  Trained in cultural anthropology, he has conducted ethnographic research on such topics as ethnic and national identity formations among the Okinawans in Bolivia and Okinawan-Bolivians in Japan, and the politics of memory among the post-WWII Okinawan repatriates from the former Japanese colonies in Micronesia. Currently, he is engaged in collaborative research on digital divide in Central Ohio’s Bhutanese refugee community and a research on survival tactics among migrants and asylum seekers in Japan with provisional and liminal legal status.  

Japanese Society in the Eyes of Immigrant Families: Focus on the Survival Strategy of Filipino Single Mothers Sachi Takahata and Frieda Joy Angelica Olay Ruiz

Abstract  This chapter aims to investigate the survival strategy of Filipino single mothers in the Kansai Region including Osaka and Hyogo Prefectures of Japan. They have settled as former entertainers, marriage migrants, and professional workers. With the narratives of three Filipino single mothers in their 30 s, 40 s and 50 s, this study highlights three findings. First, the situation of Filipino single mothers differs by the mothers’ age bracket. Second, having livelihood assistance (seikatsu hogo) was a part of their survival strategy, but they made ways to achieve economic independence. Third, their network with local Japanese people plays a part to rescue them from their most challenging situation. Keywords  Filipinos · Single mother · Livelihood assistance (seikatsu hogo) · Domestic violence

Introduction The number of foreign residents in Japan was 2,760,635  in 2021, or a 23.7% increase from the number in 2015. Registered Filipino nationals in Japan account for 276,615 or 10.0% of the foreign population and this made Filipinos the fourth largest ethnic group in Japan in 2021. Geographically speaking, more foreigners live in metropolitan areas and industrial cities. In Tokyo, Filipinos make up 6.2% of the foreign population. Aichi Prefecture shows Filipinos comprising 14.8% of the total number of registered foreign nationals. In Ibaraki and Gunma Prefectures, S. Takahata (*) University of Shizuoka, Shizuoka, Japan e-mail: [email protected] F. J. A. O. Ruiz Osaka University, Osaka, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_10

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Filipinos make up 14.0% and 12.7%, respectively. Interestingly, this trend does not follow in the Prefectures of Osaka and Hyogo where there are many Koreans but fewer Filipinos. In Osaka, Filipinos are only 3.8% of the foreign population, while Hyogo shows a slightly higher percentage at 4.2% (Statistics of Registered Migrants in Japan, Ministry of Justice 2022). What these data reveal is that in Osaka and Hyogo Prefectures, Filipinos are clearly the minority. Since Filipinos do not have catchment areas or ethnic towns, employment and mutual assistance within the immigrant community is quite limited. In addition, compared to Chinese, Koreans, and Brazilians, the Filipinos are unique in that women make up most of the population in Japan; there were as many as 70.0% in 2021. Inequality continuously persists in Japan, and in particular, immigrant single mothers are more vulnerable than their Japanese counterparts due to their restricted civil rights and limited Japanese literacy skills. The reason for the large number of single mothers among Filipinos in Japan is that from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, tens of thousands of young women came to Japan each year as “entertainers”, married Japanese men, and settled in Japan. These women arrived in Japan as skilled workers with “Entertainer” visas. Many of them performed cultural dance and music in hotel lounges, downtown bars, pubs, and clubs all over Japan. However, according to Suzuki with Takahata (2007: 1), the category of ‘entertainment’ work performed by Filipino women (Filipina) migrant workers has been narrowly located within “the sex industry.” The term “Filipina” became a stereotype referring to Filipino female nighttime workers and their workplace was called “Philippine Pubs.” Many Japanese-Filipino intermarriages occurred. Between 1994 and 2020, about 160,000 marriages between Japanese men and Filipino women took place, resulting in the birth of about 100,000 children (Fig. 1). Their presence in Japan was the catalyst for the popularization of intermarriages in Japan. On the other hand, about 80,000 marriages ended in divorce (Vital Statistics of Japan). Many women wish to

Fig. 1  Number of marriage, divorce, and child births between Japanese and Filipinos, 1994–2020. Source: Vital Statistics of Japan. https://www.e-­stat.go.jp/stat-­search/files?page=1&touke i=00450011&tstat=000001028897

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remain in Japan after their divorces to raise their children in the fathers’ country. As they find it difficult to live on their own working income, applying for the livelihood assistance called seikatsu hogo, Japan’s social security system, is a realistic option. Social welfare benefits are given to Japanese and non-Japanese citizens based on humanitarian grounds as stated in the Japan government’s additional guidelines to the national social welfare law in 1954 (MHLW, 1954). According to the law, to be eligible to receive public assistance, a non-Japanese individual should hold a residential status of Permanent Resident, Long-term Resident, Spouse of Permanent Resident, or Spouse of Japanese National. The types of public assistance available are (a) livelihood assistance, (b) housing support, (c) education assistance, (d) medical assistance, (e) long-term care assistance, (f) maternity assistance, (g) occupational assistance, and (h) funeral assistance. Individual application is made through the Public Health and Welfare Center of the ward of one’s residence. After, the Center reviews the daily life situation, income, and other aspects of the applicant and his or her family to examine if public assistance is necessary, and if so, the level of support appropriate for each case. The support to be provided corresponds to the shortage of one’s household’s income in comparison to the minimum monthly living expenses determined by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW, 2021). The calculation is based on the number and age of the persons in the household and other factors; therefore the amount may vary from one applicant to another. For example, the minimum monthly living expenses for a single mother (20–40 s) with two children (elementary school and junior high school) was calculated to be JPY182,630 in Osaka City (MHLW), where the minimum hourly wage is JPY1,023 as of October 2022 (Osaka Prefectural Government). Data provided by the MHLW as in Table 1 shows that nearly half or 2481 out of 5041 of those receiving seikatsu hogo due to single motherhood are Filipinos.

Table 1  Number of households receiving seikatsu hogo whose head is a foreign national, by nationality of household head Household type Total

Korea

Other Latin China Philippines Vietnam Cambodia U.S.A. Brazil America Others

Total

45,623 28,952 5,744 5,125

620

83

192

Elderly

23,809 19,807 2,379

210

163

32

66

1,679 1,067 526

289

2,161 337

587 2,481

140

14

16

277

270

545

Single mother

5,041

711

With disabilities

3,465

2,338

411

220

50

5

26

144

79

192

Sick and wounded

5,751

3,254

1,022

567

78

9

40

271

145

365

Others

7,557

2,842

1,345 1,647

189

23

44

461

284

722

Number of protected households whose head of household is a foreign national, by nationality head of household, members Source: Survey of Public Assistance Recipients (July 2020) https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/list/74-­16.html

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Filipinos in Japan and Migrant Agency Filipinos in Japan have been discussed in the light of their being victims, mail-order brides, opportunists, and sexually and socially immoral especially during the 1980s (Suzuki, 2002). This stereotype had a profound impact on Filipino women living in Japan, where they often suffered prejudice and discrimination. They tried to overcome the negative stereotypes by actively introducing their culture to the Japanese and volunteering in the community. According to Mainwaring (2016), descriptions of migrants such as these mean that they are a mishmash of having immoral tendencies, dangerous agency, and having no agency. Additionally, these portrayals also have a gendered aspect because the images relate mainly to women. There  have already been studies that show Filipinos in Japan have some form of control over their actions and the consequences of their actions. At a household level, the discourse about Filipino women in Japan has indeed come a long way from the stereotyped images that were propagated in the 1980s. Suzuki (2004) argues that the wives in Filipino Japanese couples in the Tokyo area are able to negotiate power and influence over their husbands. She adds that negotiations occur every day inside the intimate spheres of their homes, such as using “culturally informed tactics” to control their marital lives to their advantage and to ensure their husbands’ perform obligations to their conjugal and familial relationships. At a local community level as well, in Nagoya City, Japan, there is a relative concentration of Filipinos in the inner city area (Takahata, 2021). In the city, Takahata (2018: 274) reveals that Filipino women are changing the local identity of the Sakae entertainment area, a place characterized by a concentration of “Philippine Pubs,” which was stereotyped as a dangerous zone. The area faced social issues and tensions involving real estate owners and tenants, undocumented foreigners, and lack of authority to enforce local multiculturalism. Since both Japanese locals and Filipino migrants suffered from the stereotype, they worked together for the project to overcome the unfavorable image of the area, with the intervention and support by ward officers since 2003. Their longtime efforts were officially awarded by the Prefectural Governor in 2013, and the project contributed to spreading the image of Sakae area as migrant-friendly town. Another example of immigrant activism in collaboration with local citizens is observed among Filipino women in Yuzawa City, Akita Prefecture. Akita Prefecture is in the north-eastern part of Japan and its main economic activities are in agriculture and to a lesser extent lumbering and fisheries (Yamanaka & Akiba, 2014: 66). According to the Yuzawa City official homepage (2022), its population as of September 2022 is only 41,680 (Yuzawa City Government). According to Yamanaka & Akiba, most of the discussions about immigrant wives of Japanese men in rural areas have focused on their cultural adaptation or assimilation into traditional farming family life. However, results in their research show that the Filipino wives have challenged the deeply rooted stigmas and prejudices in Japanese hierarchy which are based on nationality, gender, and class. The Filipino women in Yuzawa City

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actively participated in organized activism in everyday life, be it learning Japanese in classrooms or dancing and singing Filipino songs in the annual Christmas Party open to locals. As a result, they have renewed a sense of belonging while contributing to emerging multiculturalism and social justice for all. The findings in these studies indicate the importance of having support networks, such as one’s compatriot and local community involvement. Importantly, they show how migrants exercise some form of control on their lives.

Three Cases of Filipino Single Mothers in Osaka and Hyogo Given their minority status in Osaka and Hyogo Prefectures and the persisting gender inequality in Japan, what do Filipino single mothers do so they and their children can survive? Some may also have existing responsibilities to their family in the Philippines. They have double responsibilities in two countries, and in Japan, they have double difficulties being migrants and single mothers. We conducted in-depth interviews on three Filipino single mothers of ages ranging between 30 s and 50 s who are currently residing in Osaka and Hyogo to listen to their life stories.1

Ms. M, 30s Ms. M is 37 years old. She and her 14-year-old son live in Osaka, where she has worked as an English teacher for 6 years with a Technical, Humanities, International Services Visa. Aside from being the sole provider for her son, Ms. M is also the breadwinner of her family in the Philippines, a responsibility that she had from the time when she was still a college student. After graduation, Ms. M had various jobs to make ends meet. She did not plan on being a teacher, but opportunities came for her to teach English to Koreans online. She later took extra education units to be able to take the teaching licensure exam in the Philippines. She passed it and used this as an additional credential to apply as an English teacher in Japan. What finally pushed Ms. M to go abroad was her realization that her relationship with the Filipino father of her child was not going anywhere. According to her, the father of her child was an incurable womanizer. After breaking up with her partner, she thought that having a change of environment would be good for her. It was only after 2 years of her arrival in Japan that she was able to bring her son to be with her.

 The case studies are based on in-depth interviews. The authors obtained consent from the informants and were granted permission for their stories to be used for research and publication. The informants are assigned pseudonyms to protect their identity. Ms. M and Ms. R were interviewed separately in October 2022, while Ms. F was interviewed in August 2021. The interviews lasted for 1 or 2 h. 1

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Although her income is not enough for their living in Japan while sending money back home, a professional worker like Ms. M is not eligible for seikatsu hogo. Ms. M reveals that she receives monthly assistance amounting to JPY10,000 from the Japanese government and juku (cram school) assistance amounting to JPY10,000, a special provision by the Osaka City government. Aside from this she claims not to be aware of other types of assistance that are available for single mothers and for children with multicultural backgrounds. She gets information about living in Japan from Filipino colleagues due to the language barrier. “I hesitate to ask because I speak Japanese slowly. Then, I see that they always seem to hurry.” When told that there are translators available to help her with her concerns in the ward offices, she replies that she does not like the staff to be bothered just for her. Ms. M thinks that part-time work and the JPY20,000 that the government provides her are additional incentives and benefits on top of her salary as an English teacher. She shares that she is in a “better place” now and after the lowest point in her life, anything that happens is just manageable. Raising her child in Japan while sending money to her own family in the Philippines every month, Ms. M has no savings. The responsibility of monthly remittance is a big burden. She adds that in Japan, you can ease the financial difficulty by doing part-time jobs if you can speak Japanese. Because Ms. M has a long-term employment contract, nothing changed in her situation during the pandemic. She did not fail in sending remittances to her parents during the time that COVID-19 was at its peak. She says that there was no need for her to send extra money, but she wanted to give more. However, her salary is just enough for her and her son to make ends meet every month.

Ms. R, 40s Ms. R is currently 40 years old and lives in Hyogo with her 16-year-old son. She arrived in Japan 19 years ago on a three-month short stay visa under the Visiting Relatives category. She met her husband in Japan and they got married and now she is a permanent resident. Her first settlement was in Osaka with her Japanese husband and, at that time, their newly born son. Her husband was the sole breadwinner of their family and Ms. R stayed at home. However, due to domestic violence experienced at the hands of her husband, she and her son left their home with only one piece of luggage and JPY7,000 in her pocket. Her son was only 3 years old. She and her son were put in a shelter for 1 week, and they were not allowed to go out for safety reasons. After some time, the Japanese staff of the shelter looked for a house for them. The place was dirty and bare. However, she had already decided that she would not go back to her husband, would divorce him, and would fight in a legal battle for custody of her son. The trial against her husband lasted for a year. One time her former husband got hold of their son, but luckily, he returned the child to her because she had lawyers who made sure that her husband would not take the child away

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from her. During this period, she was put under seikatsu hogo which lasted for 6 years. The information of what she can do with her situation came from her Filipino friend who works in a non-government organization (NGO) that helps individuals who suffer from domestic violence. The same friend found her work as a cook for nuns as well as a daycare center for her son that offered free services while she was working. She was eligible to receive around JPY160,000 per month through seikatsu hogo. Ms. R decided to continue working because she wanted her son to see her as not only relying on government money. She was afraid that classmates would bully her son if they discovered the family is under government aid. This means that the more she earns, the less seikatsu hogo money she will receive. For example, if she earns JPY80,000, she will receive JPY80,000 from seikatsu hogo. She did not feel any constraints with the rules of being under welfare, such as the home visits for lifestyle checks once in 3 months, not being able to open a savings account, buy expensive items, travel, and have people stay in her household, among others. When she started earning more as an English teacher, the authorities told her that she would not be eligible to receive assistance anymore. Ms. R decided to stop receiving welfare and be a regular employee instead. On top of her regular job, Ms. R is now part of a direct selling networking business. When she thinks of her past, she says that her “journey of life” is happy and that there is such a thing as a happy conclusion. She reveals that in those difficult moments, she thought of the next step and consulted with her friend from the NGO. She also did her own research, “because we are in a different country, so that we know what our rights are.” Ms. R looks back and thinks of all the people who helped her get to the better state that she is in now. These are her Filipino friend from an NGO, Japanese acquaintances, and people that she met in a Catholic Church. She thinks of them in terms of interconnected links, “I got acquainted with many people through the introduction of others. It is here (in Hyogo) where the number of people I know increased.”

Ms. F, 50s Ms. F is now 53 years old and lives in Osaka. She was a Filipino entertainer who came to the same town with a tourist visa in the late-1980s. Like most Filipino workers of that time, she wished to work in Japan in any way to help her family. When she was overstaying her tourist visa, she had a Japanese boyfriend and got pregnant. She gave birth to a boy in 1992 and again in 1997. Although they were not able to register their marriage at city hall due to the boyfriend’s problem, the boyfriend legally recognized the babies before birth. With this legal process, Ms. F’s sons became Japanese nationals and Ms. F was granted long-term residential status as a legitimate mother of a Japanese. Ms. F says when she knew the Japanese boyfriend was not able to marry her, she made up her mind to be independent in any way to raise her children. She started to attend a Japanese language class held at a

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community hall near her house every Tuesday. Her dream was to raise the children until they finished university education in Japan and became responsible adults. In the beginning, her boyfriend was helpful and provided financial support for Ms. F and their sons, but after several years, one day he suddenly ran away from the responsibility. Ms. F was in financial hardship especially because at that time the second son was still a baby. Not being able to work long hours because of taking care of the baby and badly depressed, Ms. F shared the problem with the volunteer Japanese language teachers. They deeply sympathized with her and considered her situation not manageable by herself, so they accompanied Ms. F to the city hall to apply for seikatsu hogo. Luckily, after several interviews, Ms. F was granted seikatsu hogo to support her household with two small children. She then worked in food processing factories to supplement seikatsu hogo. In 2010, her dream came true when her elder son entered a private university in Osaka. After 5 years, the second son finished senior high school and found stable employment at a big automobile company through the recommendation by the senior high school that he graduated from. It was his own decision to work after graduation instead of going to college, and they finally stopped receiving seikatsu hogo. It was in 2015. “The three of us have our own responsibilities in household expenses. I am buying food. My first son is paying bills of electricity, gas, and water, and my second son pays apartment rent. We share the responsibility. My first son is paying back his educational loan. Among us, I think I pay the most because we all eat a lot!” Ms. F was happy to tell me about her current life. She was not able to apply for permanent resident status when they were receiving seikatsu hogo, but when they finally became financially independent, she became eligible and was granted permanent residential status. Thirty years have passed since she bravely decided to be a single mother. Now Ms. F lives with the grown-up sons and sometimes enjoys traveling around Japan, which they find  a small reward of the hard work that they all went through. The above cases reveal the optimistic attitude and hard-working character of Filipino single mothers at different stages of life. The crises that they experienced vary in terms of degree, but their predicaments are all weighty to be faced alone, so that it was necessary for them to seek help from other individuals, NGOs, Japanese language teachers, and the government. For a long time, Filipino women in Japan were stereotyped as entertainers and wives, but Ms. M’s case is an example of new generation Filipino single mothers, where a Filipino single mother comes to Japan as a professional worker. This new type of Filipino single mother has appeared from the 2010s onward. Due to her status of residence as a holder of a working visa as an English teacher, Ms. M is not eligible to apply for seikatsu hogo according to the national social welfare law. Single mothers who are in the same situation as hers resort to finding ways of adding to their income by themselves, and their strength is that they can teach English and work online. On the other hand, Ms. R’s case shows how Japan’s social security system functions for survivors of domestic violence. Ms. R and her son were once victims of the Japanese husband, but they were rescued by the shelter, and later put under seikatsu hogo. Despite receiving seikatsu hogo, she maintained her independence through

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working part-time as much as she could. In this situation, the total amount (approximately JPY160,000) that her household will be receiving monthly is the same, since it is only the difference that is shouldered by the government. Ms. R could opt not to work and receive the full amount the whole time that she was under seikatsu hogo, but because she wanted to set a good example to her son about the value of hard work despite being under welfare. To shield her son from bullying, she decided to continue working until the time came when she started earning enough and finally could be self-reliant. Ms. F’s case is like a continuation of Ms. R’s case. Her two sons are now working adults to help their mother financially, which is her dream come true and now she enjoys the fruit of her hard work.

 ransitions of Challenges and Vulnerabilities of Single T Mothers Along Their Life Course According to Giele & Elder (1998: 8–11), there are four key elements that play a role in an individual’s life course: human agency, linked lives (social relations), historical and geographical context, and the timing of life events. Drawing from the narratives of the three Filipino single mothers, it can be observed that their life course comprises major challenges and struggles which when they look back, is a turning point for them to be in their current comparatively better situation. They trace their problems to the same source, which is the father of their children. The three women relate that they would not be in the state that they are in now if not for individuals who they met and who later supported them. In the absence of an immediate family unit in Japan, aside from their children, the Filipino single mothers create and maintain relationships with other individuals and groups. This is common with overseas Filipinos in other parts of the world. Individuals and organizations have been pinpointed as important to the lives of overseas Filipinos to overcome one’s problems. The decision to migrate by the women is not just a one-off occurrence from the Philippines to Japan and should not be seen as an answer to problems. The reason for their migration to Japan was not solely economic incentive. For the three women, their migration journey figures in different and multiple stages of their lives. For Ms. M, moving to Japan was an answer to her wish to be in a different environment after her separation with the father of her child. Ms. R and Ms. F expected their lives would be better when they went to Japan. However, their movement became a prelude to the most difficult part of their lives. Indeed, migration opens a wide array of unexpected happenings, options, and possibilities for migrants. As the stories of the three Filipino single mothers and other research show, migrants can utilize their agency in making their own choices regarding decisions and exhibiting control of their lives. Aguilar (2002: 2) explains that “the migrant is seen not as a passive victim of structures, but as one with human agency and subjectivity who is able to navigate through and negotiate with formidable structural forces.”

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Various strategies are employed by Filipinos in Japan to survive, such as collaborating with local citizens (Yamanaka & Akiba, 2014), using “culturally informed tactics” (Suzuki, 2004), participating in and contributing to local community life (Takahata, 2018), engaging in local/international networking and inter-ethnic relationships (Takahata, 2007) and participating in shared and communal activities with fellow-Filipinos in their community (Ruiz, 2021a, 2021b). Aside from these, seikatsu hogo could also be seen as a way for survival. Ms. R and Ms. F were recipients of livelihood assistance from the Japanese government until they were able to reach financial stability. While Ms. M is not qualified to receive seikatsu hogo because she is employed, she also wishes that she could receive assistance because her son is approaching college and she finds it challenging to make ends meet as the main provider for her parents and relatives in the Philippines. Ms. R and Ms. F have already “graduated” themselves from being on welfare. According to them, while being on welfare puts them in an enviable position by compatriots in Japan and makes them lucky in the eyes of those who are not under seikatsu hogo, there are many regulations to follow such as living as one household, not letting relatives or friends stay in one’s house, not buying cars, not having credit cards, not going on tours, and if one travels to the Philippines, it should only be for very short stays. As graduates from seikatsu hogo, both Ms. R and Ms. F have the freedom to do more, such as to send money to their family in the Philippines and travel. Indeed, availability of seikatsu hogo to foreigners with long-term residential status has helped Filipino single mothers. However, these narratives about the sacrifices that migrants endure while being on welfare have not reached the Japanese populace and there are some who see foreign recipients of seikatsu hogo as merely enjoying money that they do not deserve. Backlash or hate speech against foreigners happen, especially in the time of economic recession when locals who applied for but were denied seikatsu hogo become jealous of foreign recipients of seikatsu hogo. For instance, criticism of the availability of seikatsu hogo for foreign residents by Japanese people on the social media platform Twitter have been reported. According to a Huffington Post Japan report by Karin Amemiya  (2022), a tweet “We oppose foreign welfare protection more than the state funeral (of former Prime Minister Abe),” has trended on September 9, 2022. On the other hand, Japanese people started to recognize the image of Filipinos having good English skills in the mid-2010s. The Japan Teaching and Exchange (JET) Programme commenced in 1987 with the aim “to promote internationalization in Japan’s local communities by helping to improve foreign language education and developing international exchange at the community level.” In 2014, the Philippines became eligible to send Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) under the program. The timing of life events with certain societal changes or events affects individuals and families. In the case of Ms. M and Ms. R, the ability to speak English at the time when the Japanese government is aggressively trying to make their students functional in English (Ohtani, 2010) and faster internet connectivity to provide English lessons online opened opportunities that were not available to Filipino single mothers in the past.

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Conclusion The role of seikatsu hogo in the life course of migrant single mothers was a temporary escape way for self-reliance, especially in Osaka and Hyogo where Filipinos are clearly a minority and there is no such thing as an immigrant community or ethnic town to absorb the employment needs of women in a deprived situation. Instead, their survival strategy depends on their own human capital, network of fellow migrants as well as Japanese citizens as bridge builders to the Japanese-speaking society, and public livelihood assistance like seikatsu hogo. This study highlights three findings. First, the situation of Filipino single mothers differs by the mothers’ age bracket. Since the massive influx of Filipino entertainers occurred from late 1980s up to mid-2000s, the majority of mothers who came then are former entertainers. This trend formed a dominant stereotype of Filipino women in Japan. However, there were marriage migrants of non-former entertainers as well. More importantly, there are new types of single mothers who come to Japan as professional workers like English teachers who are single mothers even before their arrival. Second, having seikatsu hogo is a part of their survival strategy, but they have several ways to make additional income, in which their human capital (teaching English) and social capital (direct selling) play important parts. The former coincides with current educational trends in Japan. The latter is a traditional commercial activity for survival in the Philippines. They normally utilize networks with fellow migrants to buy and sell among them, through the word of mouth in the twentieth century and now through Facebook, of items that they consume, such as cosmetics, health supplements, and jewelry. Third, their network with local Japanese people plays a part in rescuing them from the most challenging situations like being victims of domestic violence and sudden loss of financial support by the fathers of their children. Japanese friends serve as bridge builders to local government, and they assist Filipinos to fill in the extremely complicated forms to apply for seikatsu hogo. It provides them with a temporary financial relief to go onto the next stage of self-reliance. However, gaps have been observed in seikatsu hogo as it does not cover the new type of single mothers who come to Japan as professional workers. The findings in this chapter can open further discussion and research to understand more about their situation and how to be able to extend other assistance to the needy families. The strength of immigrant single mothers has paved the way for their children to grow up and develop their talents in Japan. The mothers make sure that their children know the value of hard work and education. In the process, they utilized specific public assistance available in their city of residence to ensure that their children will become self-reliant individuals in the future. There are more than 100,000 children of Filipino mothers in Japan, and their being taxpayers will overwrite any stereotype that they once suffered from.

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References Aguilar, F. V., Jr. (Ed.). (2002). Filipinos in global migrations: At home in the world? Philippine Migration Research Network and Philippine Social Science Council. Amemiya, K. (2022, September 26). Foreigners and seikatsu hogo. Huffington post. https://www. huffingtonpost.jp/entry/story_jp_632147bce4b046aa0239c6db?fbclid=IwAR3ljhTB82vuBvP 1FiLPWpDDKs-­t25yRsGZX_lBUlpF0_wM%2D%2DdhPJsvZxDs Giele, J. Z., & Elder, G. H., Jr. (Eds.). (1998). Methods of life course research: Qualitative and quantitative approaches. Sage Publications. Mainwaring, C. (2016). Migrant agency: Negotiating borders and migration controls. Migration Studies, 4(3), 289–308. https://ccis.ucsd.edu/_files/journals/13mnw013.pdf Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. (2021). Survey on seikatsu hogo recipients. https://www. mhlw.go.jp/toukei/list/74-­16.html Ministry of Justice. (2022). Statistics of registered migrants in Japan. https://www.e-­stat.go.jp/ stat-­search/files?page=1&layout=datalist&toukei=00250012&tstat=000001018034&cycle= 1&year=20200&month=12040606&tclass1=000001060399&stat_infid=000032030592&tc lass2val=0 Ohtani, C. (2010). Problems in the assistant language teacher system and English activity at Japanese public elementary schools. Educational Perspectives, 43(1–2), 38–45. https://files. eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ912113.pdf Ruiz, F.  J. A.  O. (2021a). The ethnography of connections of Filipinos in urban Kansai. [Doctoral dissertation, Osaka University]. Osaka University Knowledge Archive. https://doi. org/10.18910/81988 Ruiz, F. J. A. O. (2021b). Navigations of multi-layered identities through liminal spaces of Filipino migrants in Japan. In S. Becker, M. Trunk, & F. Schaefer (Eds.), Beware, utopia! (pp. 47–51). Institut für Angewandte Heterotopie. Seikatsu-ni konkyu suru gaikoku-jin ni taisuru seikatsu-hogo no sochi ni tsuite (Welfare Measures for Impoverished Foreign Nationals). (1954). https://www.mhlw.go.jp/web/t_doc?dataId=00 ta1609&dataType=1&pageNo=1 Suzuki, N. (2002). Women imagined, women imaging: Re/presentations of Filipinas in Japan since the 1980s. In F.  V. Aguilar Jr. (Ed.), Filipinos in global migrations: At home in the world? (pp. 176–206). Philippine Migration Research Network and Philippine Social Science Council. Suzuki, N. (2004). Inside the home: Power and negotiation in Filipina-Japanese marriages. Women’s Studies, 33(4), 481–506. https://doi.org/10.1080/00497870490445027 Suzuki, N. with Takahata, S. (2007). Filipino boxers and hosts in Japan: The feminization of male labor and transnational class subjection. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 5(4), 1–21. https://apjjf.org/Nobue-SUZUKI--Sachi-TAKAHATA/2404/article.pdf Takahata, S. (2007). The Filipino community in downtown Nagoya: Local and international networking. Contemporary Sociology, 8, 73–83. Takahata, S. (2018). Migrant women in a big city entertainment area: What have Filipino women changed in Sakae-higashi area, Naka-ward, Nagoya City 2002-2006? In J. O. Zulueta (Ed.), Thinking beyond the state: Migration, integration, and citizenship in Japan and The Philippines (pp. 255–280). De La Salle University Publishing House. Takahata, S. (2021). Filipino enclaves as products of migration industry: Cases in a big City’s downtown and a Port City’s coastal area. In Y. Ishikawa (Ed.), Ethnic enclaves in contemporary Japan (pp. 99–123). Springer. Yamanaka, K., & Akiba, T. (2014). Achieving local citizenship in rural Japan: Filipina wives in organized activism. In Y. W. Chan, D. Haines, & J. Lee (Eds.), The age of Asian migration: Continuity, diversity, and susceptibility (pp. 60–83). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Yuzawa City Government. (2022, September 30). Basic resident ledger statistics. https://www. city-­yuzawa.jp/uploaded/attachment/20315.pdf

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Sachi Takahata is Professor of the School of International Relations, University of Shizuoka, Japan. She completed her Ph.D. in sociology at Osaka City University. She has conducted fieldwork on Filipino migrants in Japan since the 1990s. Her recent publications include: “Filipino: a Nationwide Migrant Language and Culture,” in John Maher (ed.), 2022, Language Communities in Japan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.  147–155; “Filipino Enclaves as Products of Migration Industry: Cases in a Big City’s Downtown and a Port City’s Coastal Area,” in Yoshitaka Ishikawa (ed.), Ethnic Enclaves in Contemporary Japan, Springer, pp.99–123; “Migrant Women in a Big City Entertainment Area: What Have Filipino Women Changed in Sakae-Higashi Area, Naka Ward, Nagoya City, 2002–2016?,” in Johanna Zulueta (ed.), 2018, Thinking Beyond the State: Migration, Integration, Citizenship in Japan and the Philippines, Manila: De La Salle University Press, pp.255–280.  

Frieda Joy Angelica Olay Ruiz is a Specially Appointed Associate Professor at the Division of Foreign Studies, Graduate School of Humanities, Osaka University and teaches Ilokano, Filipino, Filipino Migrants in Japan, and other Philippine Studies-related subjects. She graduated from the University of the Philippines-­ Diliman with degrees in BA in Anthropology and MA in Anthropology. In 2021, she was conferred a PhD in Human Sciences by Osaka University. Prior to studying in Japan, she taught Anthropology and Sociology in the Philippines for 8  years. Her recent publications include: “Navigations of multi-layered identities through liminal spaces of Filipino migrants in Japan.” In, S. Becker, M. Trunk & F. Schaefer (eds.), 2021, Beware, Utopia!. Nuremburg, Germany: Institut für Angewandte Heterotopie, pp. 47–51 and “Definition of ‘Filipino roots’ among Filipino high school students in Osaka through analysis of speech contest scripts” in “Studies in Language and Culture,” 49. Osaka, Japan: Osaka University Graduate School of Language and Culture, pp. 245–272.  

Depopulation Susanne Klien

Abstract  This chapter aims to explore the meanings and effects of depopulation in primarily qualitative ways, rather than through statistics. Drawing on long-term fieldwork across Japan, findings show that depopulation is not necessarily taken as something inherently negative by residents. Given the rapid processes of ageing and depopulation in rural areas across Japan, the chapter shows that governmental and other actors have adjusted their views and reactions to the shrinking population, changing its understanding of it as something that needs to be battled to something that is inevitable. Hence, I argue that depopulation should be taken as a chance rather than as a burden, although numerous challenges need to be addressed to ensure that life in affected communities remain sustainable. Keywords  Rural Japan · Shrinking population · Aging · Ethnography · Creative depopulation · Entrepreneurship · Experimental grounds · Regional revitalization cooperation officers · Related population

Prologue In November 2022, I was driving from one field site to the next in the Sorachi area 2 h north of Sapporo after 7 pm to conduct a follow-up interview. The Sorachi area is situated between Sapporo and Asahikawa, with wide parts being former coal-­ mining areas and being used for farming nowadays. As I got closer to my destination, a small town of 12,000 residents surrounded by mountains and forests, darkness enveloped me. No cars, no people, no lights to be seen. This sense of profound solitude was echoed by my long-term collaborator, Mitsuo, a 40-year-old urbanite who relocated from Tokyo 6 years ago: “In winter, it’s like everyone has left, and there S. Klien (*) Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_11

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are enormous amounts of snow up here. Last year, it did not snow that much, but it felt like I am the last person left on earth (he laughs). Now with less corona infections, there are more gatherings to drink in the evening, but there are no young women around here.” Mitsuo lives with his beloved cat in a two-floor house. In the small town that he has moved to, every year, about 200 people die and 200 move somewhere else, mostly Sapporo. The aging rate is 49%, high even for rural areas. Mitsuo narrates that the other day, his favorite local restaurant closed because the elderly couple could not continue running the business and there were no successors to take over. Many small towns in rural areas across Japan face the same issue, with formerly bustling shopping arcades being largely empty nowadays, a phenomenon referred to as shutter dōri in Japanese. This issue is enforced by an increasing number of residents preferring to shop in large malls that are easy to reach by car and offer entertainment, shopping and eating out at once (Fig. 1). In the eyes of Mitsuo, however, such a closure constitutes an opportunity for newcomers keen on starting a new enterprise. Despite sustained efforts by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (e.g. the Special Measures Law to support the sustainable development of depopulated areas) to tackle depopulation since 1970, the trend of depopulation could not be reversed: In April 2022, according to the Hokkaido depopulation region sustainability development plan, the number of municipalities in Hokkaido that qualified as places of depopulation amounted to 152 (22 cities, 117 towns, 13 villages), which accounts

Fig. 1  Shopping arcade with empty shops in central Wakayama Town in southwestern Japan. (Photo taken by author, November 2022)

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Fig. 2  Abandoned thatched roofs and houses in a depopulated mountain village in Tokushima Prefecture. (Photo taken by author, May 2021)

for 84.9% of municipalities in Hokkaido.1 Nationwide, more than half of all municipalities in Japan defined as “depopulated” in early 2022 under the internal affairs ministry’s classification system established in 1970 (Fig. 2). The new special measures law for underpopulated municipalities which took effect in April 2021 refers to the value of depopulated areas for the first time, which constitutes a paradigm shift compared to earlier understandings of depopulation as exclusively negative – an issue that needs to be tackled by re-achieving growth. In the new law, depopulated areas are referred to as important since they hold multiple functions including diversity with regard to natural resources and valuable local traditions and hence require support.2 In a similar vein, in this chapter I argue that given recent paradigm shifts in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, depopulation should be taken as a chance rather than a burden, although I concede that it comes with numerous challenges that need to be addressed to ensure that life in affected communities remains sustainable. As Matanle observed, “Population reduction is potentially good news, providing opportunities for alleviating human-environmental pressures, reconfiguring the built environment, and improving lifestyles” (Butler, 2015; Conly, 2016; Matanle, 2017) (Fig. 3).  https://www.pref.hokkaido.lg.jp/fs/6/5/9/7/5/8/3/_/01%20%E5%8C%97%E6%B5%B7 %E9%81%93%20%E6%96%B9%E9%87%9D(%E6%A6%82%E8%A6%81%E7%89%88)R4%E 5%B9%B4%E5%BA%A6%E5%A4%89%E6%9B%B4.pdf, accessed on 27 November 2022. 2  https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_content/000743322.pdf accessed on 10 December 2022. 1

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Fig. 3  Increasing entanglement of man-made housing and nature, Tokushima prefecture. (Photo taken by author, May 2021)

Introduction What does “depopulation” actually mean? The terms generally used in Japanese are jinkō genshō (人口減少), jinkō shukushō (人口縮小) and kaso (過疎). According to the definition of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), depopulation refers to the rapid decline of population in a given community with the result that the vital functions of the community are weakened and the maintenance of everyday life, production and environment are difficult in comparison to other communities. The prefecture with the highest scope of depopulation in Japan is Shimane Prefecture, where all 19 municipalities are designated areas of depopulation. Officially designated areas of depopulation now account for 51% of all administrative areas in Japan (Koizumi, 2022).

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Depopulation generally coincides with aging as local youth increasingly leave the community and rarely come back to their hometown as they seek well-paid jobs and education not available in rural towns. Japan has become the super-aging nation as its population has been forecast to shrink by a fifth to 100 million by 2050 (The Economist, 2021) and its population is aging faster than any other country in the world. The ratio of the population over 65 is forecast to account for one third of its entire population by 2036 (Imasato, 2019: 133). As early as in 2007, Coulmas referred to a “hyper-aged society” (chōkōrei shakai), with 21% or more of the population 65 years old or older (2007: 4–5) (Fig. 4). Direct results of depopulation are the emergence of abandoned houses (akiya) and in some cases, deer, wild boar and other animals encroaching on human settlements. Abandoned cars of all sizes and types can also be found across depopulated rural areas, often next to empty houses or ruins of former housing. According to a 2018 government report, nearly 8.5 million properties across Japan are not occupied (Martin, 2022). This number accounts for 13.6% of total houses in Japan (Ji, 2020). Furthermore, the Nomura Research Institute forecasts the number of akiya to increase to 20 million or approximately one third of all homes in Japan by 2033 (Martin, 2022) (Fig. 5). Total population growth in Japan reached its peak in 2008 at 128,080,000 (Shiraishi & Matoba, 2019) and has seen faced gradual population decline. According to an article in The Economist in 2019, “half of Japan’s municipalities are expected to disappear by 2040.” Depopulation occurred as a consequence of Japan’s high economic growth period in the 1960s and 1970s, when cities offered convenience and the chance of a

Fig. 4  Abandoned house in Ashibetsu, Hokkaido, northern Japan. (Photo taken by author, November 2022)

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Fig. 5  Rusty car next to abandoned house in depopulated Ashibetsu, Hokkaido. (Photo taken by author, November 2022)

higher income, leading to widespread influx of rural populations to urban areas. As a result, Japan has an extremely high rate of individuals living in cities, 92% according to the United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). In comparison, back in 1950 it was only 53%. Other industrialized countries have considerably lower rates of urbanization, e.g. 83.10% for the US or 77.60% for Germany in 2022.3 As Atterton et al. argue, “Depopulation is shaped by a range of complex, interdependent factors, including migration patterns (themselves the result of a combination of different economic, social and environmental factors) and birth and death rates.” (2022, Introduction) (Fig. 6). We tend to think of depopulation primarily in quantitative terms – the numbers of citizens moving away and dying. Yet, John Knight has recently argued that “kaso is not only quantitative but also qualitative and it has to do with the reduction of human activity in the living space of the mountain village. Put simply, to live effectively in a mountain village you have to live actively there. Conversely, I came to understand kaso as a state of diminished environmental activity. Not just fewer people, but also those people remaining doing less – less farming, less weeding and vegetation removal, and even moving around the nearby village and the nearby forest less.” (Knight & Gohara, 2020). The practical and visceral impact of depopulation has also been depicted by Suzanne Culter about her fieldwork in Yubari, which is now notorious as a town of  https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-urbanized-countries, accessed on 27 November 2022. 3

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Fig. 6  Abandoned house in a depopulated mountain village, Tokushima Prefecture. (Photo taken by author, May 2021)

decline in Hokkaido as it lost 90% of its population since 1960 and went bankrupt in 2007: “I moved into the old local rōdōkaikan (workers’ dormitory). The only other residents were the elderly couple who were live-in caretakers. I fought off the bitter cold by feeding coal into the small iron stove in the middle of the tatami room and burrowing into the multiple layers of ancient, heavy futon at night. Water froze in my glass, and coal soot streaked my clothes and stained my skin. All the food shops in the district had long ago closed down; thus I relied on prepared food and supplies I had brought with me. The only way out of the area was by a long bus ride.” (Culter, 1999: 24). The lack of successors for shops is a widespread problem as the younger generation does not seem interested to follow suit, as Culter also observes, “Thirty-eight percent of the owners of family-run shops surveyed had decided to close down their businesses when they retired. Their children were now being educated to prepare for careers that would take them outside Yubari.” (Culter, 1999: 154). Visual documentation of depopulation in the daily lives of (aging) residents also needs to be mentioned. Kajii (2008), Koyama (2014) and Delano and Dickerman (2021) have portrayed the quotidian implications of shrinking communities in insightful ways. In general depopulation tends to be associated with remote mountain villages, but in fact, a shrinking population is an issue faced increasingly also by cities. Tokyo has areas close to Haneda airport that are widely depopulated and public housing complexes known as danchi, e.g. Toyama danchi, close to Waseda University in central Tokyo have also been increasingly depopulated. These have mostly aging

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residents remaining, which has caused alarm as lonely deaths (kodokushi) have skyrocketed as a result. Senior citizens die and go undetected for some time because of their lack of social networks. A majority of these public housing complexes were built in the 1960s and 1970s and not equipped with elevators and tend to be rather small in size and run down, hence making them unpopular for younger individuals. As Rachel Franklin explains, “Places lose population through a limited set of demographic mechanisms, all acting in concert: a surfeit of deaths over births, but also typically out-migration and a lack of net international migration.” In Japan, a rapid decrease of births has recently been further enforced through the COVID-19 pandemic as the number of newborn in Japan was less than 800.000  in 2022. Statistical data indicate that the percentage of decrease of newborns has been double the average over the past 10 years and forecast that the number of newborns will reach 500.000 in 30 years (nikkei.com, 2022). This recent development may mean that the entire population will shrink faster than anticipated initially, which in turn has widespread implications for the social security system. These demographic developments in Japan are in no way unique as most industrialized nations have faced similar issues of shrinking populations, but Japan is at the vanguard of these developments and can hence serve as a model to learn from, as suggested by the term “harbinger state” used by Philip Lipscy (The Economist, 2021). Similarly, Hara Toshihiko has called Japan a “precursor case of depopulation” (2021).

New Understandings of Depopulation Sociologist Ono Akira’s much-cited notion of “village at the limits” (genkai shūraku) refers to “settlements where more than 50% of the population is aged 65 or older and it is difficult to maintain social community life, including weddings, funerals, rice paddy farming, and road work” (Ono, 2005, 2008, 22). Somewhat vague in its definition, it has been criticized as potentially “encouraging a pessimistic view of local communities at risk of extinction.” (Okada, 2022: 227). Generally, the discourse about rural areas has been characterized by depressing adjectives such as “geriatric”, “stagnant”, “dying” and the like while cities were ascribed with modern civilization, success, career prospects and a variety of positive aspects. However, my own fieldwork over the years in rural areas across Japan suggests that many local residents do not necessarily see depopulation as a negative phenomenon. I vividly remember interviewing an energetic key local stakeholder in her 70s in May 2021 in Tokushima Prefecture who argued that she could not imagine a better life in her small town where she has spent most of her life. She regularly goes to Osaka for short-term trips but could not imagine herself moving to a city, “living in a tiny box and living in solitude” (interview on 4 May 2021). She has her network of friends and peers she does various activities with and points to her rich social life, despite the limited size of the town she has lived in for half a century. Drawing on such episodes I suggest in this chapter that as researchers, we need to approach

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depopulation with methods that go beyond quantitative tools and respect local interpretations of dwindling populations. Odagiri also mentions the need to assess depopulation in a more nuanced way by referring to the term “depopulation of the heart” (kokoro no kaso) coined by former prefectural governor of Oita, Hiramatsu Morihiko who observed, “The depopulation of humans is not scary. What is scary is the depopulation of the heart.” (Odagiri, 2021:1). Odagiri emphasizes that the attitudes of the local population are crucial to understand in analyzing contemporary depopulation and envisaging policies. Over many years of fieldwork in rural areas across Japan I have observed numerous episodes of the mutual enrichment resulting from intergenerational exchanges between local senior residents and younger urbanites, primarily socially and emotionally speaking. For locals who have spent most of their lives in a rural town, the perspectives of young in-migrants can be refreshening in the sense that they see new facets of their place of living that locals may have never contemplated. On the other hand, their rich local knowledge and vitality can open up a new world to the newcomers. Qu and Zollet emphasize that, “Given the multifaceted issues faced by declining rural areas and islands, increasing the resilience of local communities is crucial to their continued existence.” (2023: 112) They argue that “the role played by creative in-migrant newcomers as a force for transformation and (social and economic) regeneration in declining communities appears especially important.” (2023: 112). Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread changes to the urban-rural divide and further pushed mainstream discourses to reinterpret the role of depopulation and depopulated areas. Population density started to be associated with risk rather than opportunity; lack of infrastructure has been ascribed with opportunity and potential rather than stagnation. These paradigm shifts had already been ongoing well before the onset of the pandemic but were further facilitated by the virus. In this section I will discuss new understandings of depopulation at two levels, institutional and individual. As for the institutional level, as mentioned above, the new special measures law for underpopulated municipalities which took effect in April 2021 refers to the value of depopulated areas for the first time, which constitutes a paradigm shift compared to earlier understandings of depopulation as exclusively negative. A lack of residents has widely been associated with a lack of economic activity and hence income in the post-war mindset focused on permanent economic growth. Yet, depopulated rural areas can be understood as experimental grounds as they offer space and often social capital, as I have argued before (Klien, 2020a, 2022). Younger individuals who have time and innovative ideas can use rural areas to implement experimental projects and engage in entrepreneurial activities. Rather than hamlets at the limits (Ono, 2005), depopulated areas can be seen as “communities of hope” (Klien, 2020b). Urban youth have increasingly moved to rural areas in quest of alternative lifestyles and modes of working  – a trend that started after the 2008 Lehman Shock and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake that has been enforced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The changing understanding of remote rurality and consequently depopulation is also salient in the evolving role of the regional revitalization cooperation officers

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(chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai), a system established by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 2008 to entice urbanites to relocate to rural areas with the aim to settle there eventually. Such schemes at the national level are crucial given that “local communities in Japan have traditionally been based on blood ties as well as locality ties dating back to the days of the feudal system. Hence many local communities tend to be not very good at interacting with newcomers from outside” (Shiraishi & Matoba, 2019: vii). The regional revitalization cooperation officer system has brought in new people and fresh wind to rural depopulated areas as approximately 60% have stayed on in communities after the expiration of their contracts although there is regional variety on this point. Hokkaido for example has a higher rate of 70.5%. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), 70% of these officers are in their 20  s and 30  s and about 40% of them are female (MIC, 2022). Furthermore, one in three of the former officers who settled in the communities started an entrepreneurial activity – this percentage has gone up from 29% to 36% compared to the last report of MIC. Whereas in the beginning, individuals working in these schemes were often seen as volunteers by residents, the program has expanded impressively in size over the years, the pay has been increased recently and individuals who set up their own entrepreneurial activities after the expiration of their contracts have been on the increase. Initially, regional revitalization cooperation officers were often seen as back-to-the-land hippies who were not quite sure where they were going and were hence often not perceived as responsible members of society by local residents. But now overall social recognition of their efforts have increased, which in turn has resulted in higher popularity of the scheme and more attractivity ascribed to rural depopulated areas in the process. Individuals on these schemes have also had more freedom in shaping their contribution rather than following instructions as was common at the start of the program, although the amount of self-determined activity varies according to projects across Japan. In retrospect, the regional revitalization cooperation officer program has greatly contributed to promoting entrepreneurship in risk-averse Japan by offering relatively young urbanites the chance to experiment with entrepreneurial ideas in rural areas. This recent trend in younger individuals to choose flexible and sustainable lifestyles in rural areas with a greater focus on community rather than economic affluence also features in Ji’s fieldwork results (2020). In a similar vein, in this chapter I argue that recent paradigm shifts in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic increasingly indicate that depopulation should be taken as a chance rather than a burden.

 iving with Depopulation or Less Is More? L Creative Depopulation Ominami Shinya, the founder of NPO Green Valley in Kamiyama Town, Tokushima Prefecture, coined the term “creative depopulation” (Ominami, 2015). He argued that contrary to conventional assumptions of permanent demographic and economic

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growth, a shrinking population is inevitable in our present age and coexistence should be the goal, living with fewer people, but ensuring that a diversity of individuals live in rural areas. Kamiyama Town has become well known as a place that has attracted a growing number of creatives, IT start-up entrepreneurs and increasingly, digital nomads. According to Ominami, his hometown can prosper even in an age of depopulation as it has focused on securing a critical mass of fewer rather than more in-migrants and has recently emphasized education as another strategy. Both strategies are tied to the notion of kankei jinkō or related populations in the sense that permanent residence increasingly seems a futile goal and hence securing individuals who live in rural towns for a given period of time can be the next realistic option. Especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, urbanite settlers seem increasingly interested in lifestyles with several bases of work and life or education for their offspring that offers places of learning in both rural and urban areas. Another important recent aspect in depopulated areas are return in-migrants (“U-turners” in Japanese), individuals who are originally from the area, but typically left their hometown for education or work and spent some time working in cities. Since the onset of the pandemic there has been an increase in return in-­ migrants in many rural areas. Such individuals can draw on both internal networks and external perspectives and often function as an important link between local residents and urbanite lifestyle migrants. They often use their social capital in their hometowns for their entrepreneurial activities, combining work and leisure in innovative ways. With their small-scale niche activities, they may be perceived as being part of the “new rural development paradigm” defined by Woods in contrast to the modernization paradigm (2011: 140). For example, in Kamiyama Town, Tokushima Prefecture, I interviewed a coiffeur in his mid-30 s and had an excellent hair cut in his salon opened in the middle of the lush green forests in the mountains some 20 min by car from downtown Kamiyama. Conventionally, shops were located near the main road. But after his return from more than a decade of working in Nagoya, the owner used his parents’ house to open his salon and also added a DJ booth to the haircutting facilities, thus creating a venue for younger people at night, something that the town has lacked so far. Opposite of the salon there is a vacant house; on the way back downtown, I pass several deer in the woods. As part of the chihō sōsei policy established under the Abe government in 2014, a variety of funding is available for urbanites considering a rural move, returnees planning entrepreneurial activities and individuals interested in farming. The Japanese government has provided subsidies of up to 1.5 million JPY per year to be paid for a maximum of 7 years to new farmers under the age of 45 (Oishi, 2019: 116–7). Such subsidies have resulted in the recent rise of the number of new agricultural workers under 45 (Oishi, 2019: 117) (Fig. 7). These financial incentives aim to correct the imbalance of population between cities and rural areas and attract more individuals to the countryside. In addition to the Lehman Shock and Great East Japan Earthquake, the pandemic seems to have pushed more individuals pondering a rural move for a while to finally implement their relocation: In mid-2020, Tokyo had a larger number of departures than

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Fig. 7  Entrance and interior of hair salon in Kamiyama Town, Tokushima Prefecture. (Photos taken by author, May 2021)

newcomers and this trend seems to be continuing. For the first time in 25 years, the number of individuals leaving the capital behind exceeded the number of newcomers.4 In addition to individual lifestyle choices enforced through the pandemic, institutional changes have also contributed to a climate that facilitates more diverse and  www.stat.go.jp, accessed on 20 January 2023, Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC). 4

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flexible modes of working. Some companies have decided to cut down or eliminate office space in cities, others have decided to relocate their headquarters to venues in rural areas to reduce the risk in case of disasters. Furthermore, remote work programs like workcation have been introduced by numerous companies in Japan. Employees now have the chance to experience rural life while working for a given period of time; for companies they offer the benefit of reducing office cost. Such initiatives also constitute great opportunities for depopulated towns to attract related population or potentially newcomers throughout the year rather than in certain seasons. As Wiechmann notes, “There is no blueprint on how cities and regions should react [to shrinkage]. Creative and flexible urban strategies that consider the local and national contexts are needed in highly uncertain environments.” (2019: 23). In sum, both individual and institutional shifts in Japan indicate that the phenomenon of depopulation needs to be approached in more nuanced ways as a departure from the myth of permanent economic growth and hence a more multilayered understanding of depopulation has become a clear feature in both policymaking as well as individual interpretations and lifestyle decisions in a post-growth society. Recently, a hamlet called Nagoro in Tokushima Prefecture has attracted headlines as one of its 30 remaining residents, Tsukimi Ayano – a return migrant in her late sixties – has started reproducing the figures of former inhabitants as scarecrow figures to keep their memory – not for sadness, but because she enjoys making these figures and living in her hometown, even if it is shrinking (Jaffe, 2016). The village is now known as “scarecrow village” and the 400 dolls have attracted international visitors with a scarecrow festival being held for tourists. This is just one episode of an endogenous response that illustrates the multifaceted faces of depopulation and the pressing need for more nuanced analytical perspectives.

References Atterton, J., Dilley, L., Fukushima, C., Shinzato, S., Gkartzios, M., & Lamont, K. (2022, September 21). Japan Island depopulation: Lessons for Scotland. Research Report. https://www.gov. scot/publications/approaches-­island-­depopulation-­japan-­lessons-­scotland/. Accessed on 3 Dec 2022. Butler, T. (ed). (2015). Overdevelopment overpopulation overshoot. Goff Books. Cabinet Secretariat. Headquarter for Overcoming Population Decline and Vitalizing Local Economy in Japan. Regional empowerment for Japan’s growth: Overcoming population decline and revitalizing local economies: Japan’s long-term vision and comprehensive strategy, 15 pages, chisou.go.jp. Accessed on 27 Nov 2022. Conly, S. (2016). One child: Do we have a right to more? Oxford University Press. Coulmas, F. (2007). Population decline and ageing in Japan – The social consequences. Routledge. Culter, S. (1999). Managing decline: Japan’s coal industry restructuring and community response. University of Hawaii Press. Delano, J. W., & Dickerman, K. (2021, November 29). This is what rural depopulation in Japan looks like. The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2021/11/29/ this-­is-­what-­rural-­depopulation-­japan-­looks-­like/. Accessed on 3 Dec 2022. Dilley, L., Gkartzios, M., & Odagiri, T. (2022). Developing counter urbanisation: Making sense of rural mobility and governance in Japan. Habitat International, 125, 201595.

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Feldhoff, T. (2013). Shrinking communities in Japan: Community ownership of assets as a development potential for rural Japan? Urban Design International, 18(1), 99–109. Franklin, R. (2019). What we talk about when we talk about depopulation. Regional Studies Association, RSA Blog, https://www.regionalstudies.org/news/what-­we-­talk-­about-­when-­we-­ talk-­about-­depopulation/. Accessed on 3 Dec 2022. Hara, T. (2021, December). The causes and consequences of depopulation in Japan. Conference Poster. Wittgenstein Center Conference on the Causes and Consequences of Depopulation in Japan. https://www.oeaw.ac.at/PDF/B3_full-paper_Hara. Accessed on 4 Dec 2022. Imasato, K. (2019). Prospects and challenges of the social security system and in realising “regional cohesive societies.”. In K. Shiraishi & N. Matoba (Eds.), Depopulation, deindustrialisation and disasters (pp. 133–154). Palgrave Macmillan. Inoue, T., Koike S., Yamauchi M., & Ishikawa Y. (2022). Exploring the impact of depopulation on a country’s population geography: Lessons learned from Japan. Population, Space and Place, 28. Jaffe, I. (2016, August 26). A dying Japanese village brought back to life – By scarecrows. NPR, https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/08/26/490687505/a-­dying-­japanese-­village-­ brought-­back-­to-­life-­by-­scarecrows. Accessed on 11 Dec 2022. Ji, Y. (2020). Remaking the rural: Alternative forms of revitalization in post-growth Japan. APRU sustainable cities and landscapes PhD symposium. The University of Auckland. https://auckland.figshare.com/articles/conference_contribution/Remaking_the_rural_Alternative_forms_ of_revitalization_in_post-­growth_Japan/13578257. Accessed on 6 Dec 2022. Kajii, S. (2008). Genkai Shuraku (Marginal Village). Foiru. Klien, S. (2020a). Demographic change in contemporary rural Japan and its impact on ritual practices. Journal of Religion in Japan, 9, 248–276. https://doi.org/10.1163/22118349-­00901008 Klien, S. (2020b). Urban migrants in rural Japan: Between agency and anomie in a post-growth society. State University of New York Press. Klien, S. (2022). ‘Living the life of my choice’  – Lifestyle migrants in rural Japan balancing between local commitment and transnational cosmopolitanism. Asian Ethnology, 81(1–2), 107–124. https://asianethnology.org/articles/2381 Knight, J., & Gohara O. (2020). From macaque’s point of view: Human-animal conflict and interspecies intimacy in Japan. More-than-human Vol. 5 Ekrits, An interview with John Knight, interviewer: Oribe Gohara, https://ekrits.jp/en/2020/10/3897/. Accessed on 27 Nov 2022. Koizumi H. (2022, April 22). Kaso chiiki, zenkoku no hanbun ijou ni seifu no chihō sōseisaku, jikkōsei usui [Over half of Japan’s municipalities are depopulated, the effect of regional revitalization is weak.] Asahi Shinbun. Koyama, N. (2014). Mamettai kurashi  – Naganoken kyu chuujoumura no chiisa na chiisa na shuuraku no 10nen [Living industriously  – 10 years in the small village Chuujoumura in Nagano prefecture]. Lucy K. Martin, A. K.T. (2022, March 28). For some shrinking towns in Japan, depopulation isn’t all bad news. The Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/03/28/national/social-­issues/ japan-­tokigawa-­depopulation/. Accessed on 4 Dec 2022. Matanle, P. (2017). Towards an Asia-Pacific ‘depopulation dividend’ in the 21st century – Regional growth and shrinkage in Japan and New Zealand. The Asia-Pacific journal: Japan Focus 15(6) Accessed on 27 Nov 2022, eprints.whiterose.ac.uk Matsunaga, K. (2015). Rōkaru shikō no jidai: Hatarakikata, sangyō, Keizai wo kangaeru hinto [The age of localism: Hints for thinking about modes of working, industry and economy]. Kobunsha Shinsho. MIC (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications). Reiwa Gannendo Chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai no teijuu jōkyō tou ni kakawaru chōsa kekka [Report about the percentage of settlement and other data in regional revitalization cooperation officers], Reiwa 2/1/17, soumu. go.jp. Accessed on 9 Dec 2022.

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Nikkei (Nihon Keizai Shinbun). (2022, December 2). Online edition, “Shusshou Kyuugen, 22nen 80manninware he, jinkou ichiokunin miman hayamaru osore” [Sudden decline of the birth rate towards less than 800.000  in 2022 with the total population moving towards less than 100 million quicker than anticipated]. https://www.nikkei.com/article/ DGXZQOUA27EOV0X21C22A0000000/. Accessed on 3 Dec 2022. Odagiri, T. (2021, October 1). Den’en kaiki to chiizukuri: Jizokukanou na toshi nouson kyousei shakai wo mezashite [Return to the countryside and regional revitalization: Moving towards a society that enables the coexistence of sustainable cities and countryside], Seisaku opinion no. 185, Institute for Peace Policies (Heiwa Seisaku Kenkyuujo). https://ippjapan.org/ archives/5887. Accessed 15 Oct 2022. Oishi, N. (2019). A new, sustainable form for farming villages and the role of migrants from the city. In K. Shiraishi & N. Matoba (Eds.), Depopulation, deindustrialisation and disasters (pp. 111–132). Palgrave Macmillan. Okada, N. (2022). Rethinking Japan’s depopulation problem: Reflecting on over 30 years of research with Chizu Town, Tottori prefecture and the potential of SMART governance. Contemporary Japan, 34(2), 210–227. https://doi.org/10.1080/18692729.2022.2131991 Ominami, S. (2015, May 26). With rural Japan shrinking and aging, a small town seeks to stem the trend. The Washington Post. Ono, A. (2005, March). Genkai Shuraku: Sono Jittai Ga Toikakerumono [Marginal communities: The questions raised by the actual conditions] (Vol. 5). Nousan to Keizai. Ono, A. (2008). Genkai Shuraku to Chiiki Saisei [Marginal communities and regional revitalization], Shizuoka Shimbunsha. Qu, M., & Zollet, S. (2023). Neo-endogenous revitalization: Enhancing community resilience through art tourism and rural entrepreneurship. Journal of Rural Studies, 97, 105–114. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2022.11.016 Shiraishi, K., & Matoba, N. (Eds.). (2019). Depopulation, deindustrialisation & disasters: Building sustainable communities in Japan. Palgrave Macmillan. Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of internal affairs and communications (MIC) (2022, December 22). Report about basic residents’ mobility. www.stat.go.jp The Economist. (2019, June 29). Rural areas bear the burden of Japan’s ageing, shrinking population. The Economist. (2021, December 11). “Special report Japan” 12 pages. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. (2019). World urbanization prospects: The 2018 revision (ST/ESA/SER.A/420). United Nations. https://population.un.org/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2018-­Report.pdf. Accessed on 27 Nov 2022. Wiechmann, T. (2019). Global trends in facing the triple Ds: Dynamics, challenges, and opportunities. In K. Shiraishi & N. Matoba (Eds.), Depopulation, deindustrialisation and disasters (pp. 3–27). Palgrave Macmillan. Woods, M. (2011). Rural. Routledge. Susanne Klien is associate professor at the Modern Japanese Studies Program (MJSP) of Hokkaido University, Japan. Her main research interests include (trans)local traditions, rural revitalization, tourism, demographic change, transnational mobility and alternative forms of living and working in post-growth Japan. She has conducted qualitative research at the intersection of Japanese Studies, anthropology and human geography. Her recent monograph Urban Migrants in Rural Japan: Between Agency and Anomie in a Post-growth Society (SUNY Press 2020) was awarded the 2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. Her current research project is about transnational migration of Japanese individuals.  

Rural In-migrants: Embracing Sustainable Lifestyles for a Post-Growth Society? Zollet Simona

Abstract  Aging and depopulation are among the most urgent challenges Japan is facing, with rural and regional areas of the country already experiencing the shrinkage or disappearance of entire communities and their consequences. At the same time, global environmental issues, such as climate change and the decline of natural resources, require a transition towards downsized economies and more sustainable, localized lifestyles. In Japan, there is evidence of a growing trend of urban-to-rural lifestyle migration, and among people going back to the countryside, sustainability-­ related goals appear to play an important role in the choice to move to rural areas and in the performance of rural lifestyles, although often in indirect ways. In response to the decline of rural and regional areas, the Japanese government has also launched policies aimed at regional revitalization, including programs to attract in-migrants. Such policies, however, tend to prioritize socio-economic regeneration and economic growth over broader sustainability goals. This chapter examines the everyday practices of rural lifestyle migrants from a sustainability perspective, highlighting key opportunities and challenges for the transitions towards more sustainable lifestyles, but also resilient communities, in post-growth Japan. Keywords  Depopulation · Urban-to-rural migration · Lifestyle migration · Sustainable lifestyles · Rural revitalization · Post-growth Japan

Introduction Many communities in rural and regional Japan are undergoing demographic, socio-­ economic, and ecological decline, and many face the concrete threat of disappearing over the next decades (Hara, 2015; Manzenreiter et  al., 2020). Longstanding Z. Simona (*) Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_12

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processes of aging, depopulation, and out-migration have resulted in a stagnating economy, the degradation of public services and infrastructure, the abandonment of farmland and dwellings, and a pervasive narrative of decline and hopelessness (Love, 2013). Concern over this trend has mobilized research and policy efforts aimed at the revitalization of rural areas, including strategies aimed at attracting new residents and fostering entrepreneurship and economic growth (Dilley et al., 2022). However, there is also increasing awareness that the trend of economic stagnation and population decline is unlikely to be reversed, and that approaches focused on quantitative growth are unrealistic in the face of the reality of most Japanese rural communities (Ganseforth & Jentzsch, 2021; Matanle & Saez-Perez, 2019). From a sustainability perspective, the imperative to stay within planetary boundaries and decrease rates of material production and consumption is another compelling argument against the pursuit of further capitalist growth and accumulation (Feola et al., 2021). An alternative way to approach rural revitalization may lie in prioritizing social and ecological well-being through a stronger focus on the post-­ capitalist elements that determine individual and community quality of life, echoing broader discourses on degrowth and the well-being economy (Matanle & Saez-­ Perez, 2019). These ideas are consistent with the emergence of alternative lifestyles and working patterns in rural areas, exemplified by the progressive increase in the number of people moving into rural areas seeking lifestyle change and more meaningful ways of living, a trend increased by the COVID-19 pandemic (Zollet & Qu, 2023). Despite growing recognition that these forms of lifestyle migration may play an important role in contributing to individual and community well-being (Margaryan et al., 2020), they have so far been overlooked in research and policy. This chapter explores the characteristics of urban-to-rural lifestyle migrants in post-growth Japan using principles drawn from sustainable production and consumption research in connection with previous research on rural revitalization. Through this framework, the study discusses the potential contribution of lifestyle migrants to building sustainable and resilient rural communities centered around individual, social, and environmental well-being.

 ustainable Lifestyles in the Post-Fukushima S and Post-COVID era From a global perspective, more sustainable systems of production and consumption are needed to address the environmental, social, and economic challenges of our age and ensure a more just and equitable future. Current patterns of over-­ production and over-consumption are responsible for a variety of environmental issues, from climate change to biodiversity loss, and for the depletion of finite natural resources (Hickel et al., 2021; Hoolohan et al., 2013). From a socio-economic perspective, the current system also relies on continuous economic growth, which is not only unsustainable on a finite planet, but also cause of economic instability and

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increasing inequality, as the benefits of growth and development are unevenly distributed (Brand et al., 2021; Wiedmann et al., 2020). The past decade has seen the popularization of alternative economic theories, from degrowth to well-being economies. These theories discuss ways to create economic systems capable of delivering sustainability goals in their multiple dimensions while ensuring people’s well-being and quality of life, decentering quantitative economic growth as the most important indicator (D’Alisa et al., 2015). Many of these theories emphasize the non-market (and non-capitalist) elements of the economy by foregrounding practices such as gifting, sharing, reciprocity, redistribution, and ‘prosumption’ (producing for self-consumption) (Bliss & Egler, 2020; Gibson-­ Graham, 2008). The recognition of already existing practices of economic difference can open spaces of possibility for alternative economic models and shift the focus to “dynamics of resilience rather than growth” (Gibson-Graham & Dombroski, 2020, p. 4). Examining these practices is also an essential first step to creating and developing spaces for ethical decision-making and solidarity-based modes of interconnection, thus shaping the contours of community economies guided by a commitment to social and ecological well-being. At the same time, there has been a growing focus on sustainable systems of production and consumption, with a strong emphasis on how to achieve more sustainable lifestyles. This term refers to practices and behaviors that individuals make in their daily lives to reduce their ecological footprint. These include, for example, reducing superfluous consumption and minimizing waste through voluntary simplicity and downshifting, eating a plant-based and locally-sourced diet, using renewable energy sources, and using public transportation or walking/biking instead of driving (Sandberg, 2021; Zollet et al., 2022). Individual lifestyle changes alone, however, cannot address the systemic and structural issues driving unsustainable consumption and production patterns, highlighting the need for practice shifts and systemic change at a societal level (Hargreaves, 2011; Strengers et  al., 2015). Therefore, a sustainable post-growth society would entail a reduction of overall consumption and production and a focus on increasing well-being through non-material means such as fulfilling work, supportive communities, and meaningful relationships (Schneider et  al., 2010). This shift, however, also requires a re-evaluation of values and aspirations both at the individual and societal level, and new, more equitable and sustainable ways of organizing and distributing resources (Beyeler & Jaeger-Erben, 2022; Gibson-Graham et  al., 2013; Hubeau et  al., 2019). Echoing international debates, in Japan some scholars have started exploring concepts such as ‘depopulation dividend’ (Matanle & Saez-Perez, 2019), and ‘creative depopulation’ (Sasaki et al., 2014) that deeply resonate with sustainability and degrowth principles. Furthermore, from a societal standpoint there are signs of change, often manifesting in the form of the search for more sustainable and self-sufficient lifestyles in rural areas (Klien, 2020; Obikwelu et  al., 2017). There is also evidence that periods of crises might strengthen this trend. In the case of Japan, an important turning point was the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, following which many people decided to relocate to rural areas, often to engage in sustainability-oriented occupations such as organic farming

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(Rosenberger, 2017; Zollet & Maharjan, 2021). Growing evidence from different countries, including Japan, also shows that the COVID-19 pandemic  might have increased the number of urban migrants moving to rural areas (Tsukimori, 2020).

 ifestyle Migration in Rural Japan: Between Revitalization L and Sustainability? Lifestyle migration (O’Reilly & Benson, 2009) is a key concept to connect sustainability and rural revitalization. Lifestyle migration refers to “the spatial mobility of relatively affluent individuals of all ages, moving either part-time or full-time to places that are meaningful because, for various reasons, they offer the potential of a better quality of life” (O’Reilly & Benson, 2009, p. 2). Lifestyle migrants, therefore, move to a destination for lifestyle reasons (i.e., not primarily family- or work-­ related). This concept has been discussed mainly in the international literature (Benson & Osbaldiston, 2016; Morén-Alegret et al., 2021), but finds both commonalities and differences with similar trends in the Japanese context (Ishikawa, 2018). Lifestyle migrants in rural Japan are predominantly Japanese nationals, particularly younger (20s–40s), formerly urban-based individuals seeking lifestyle change and more meaningful ways of working and living (Klien, 2020; Zollet & Qu, 2023). Their motivations are similar to those reported in the international literature on lifestyle migration, including the search for a slower life, better work-life balance, and the possibility to be one’s own boss (e.g., by starting independent businesses). A desire for natural amenities and a stronger sense of community are also common themes (Gosnell & Abrams, 2009; O’Reilly & Benson, 2009). In Japan, the possibility to engage in lifestyles that include farming and self-provisioning often plays an important role in the decision to move to a rural area (McGreevy et al., 2019; Zollet & Maharjan, 2021). This is exemplified by the popularity of the concept of han-nou han-x (half farmer half ‘x’) (Osawa, 2014), a term that describes people engaging in farming for self-sufficiency in addition to income-generating activities. What appears strikingly similar between Japan and other affluent countries are the commonalities between the motivations of lifestyle migrants (Ma et al., 2018; Osti, 2017), which suggest that similar societal trends may be at play within different post-growth economies and societies. From this perspective, lifestyle migrants in rural Japan, and elsewhere, appear to be embracing more sustainable lifestyles. It is therefore crucial to evaluate how these community- and sustainability-oriented values and practices might be more easily encouraged and performed in rural areas. In addition, urban-to-rural migrants and return migrants have been identified as key actors in countering the issues of depopulation and aging in rural communities. While the international literature on lifestyle and amenity migration often discusses the negative consequences on receiving communities, such as gentrification, rising property prices, social conflict, in-migrant enclaves and economic disparities (Kondo et al., 2012; Solana-Solana, 2010), the Japanese context appears remarkably

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different. In Japan, the ability to attract new residents is now seen as essential for the survival of rural communities (Zollet & Qu, 2019), with (domestic) in-migration being actively encouraged and even celebrated by the media. While in Japan this ‘move to the countryside’ until recently involved mainly return migrants going back to live in their rural birthplaces after retirement (Chang, 2015), an increasing number of younger people are now choosing to relocate to rural areas before reaching retirement age, despite the scarcity of conventional employment opportunities and relative lack of services. Many of these are urban-to-­ rural migrants resettling in rural towns and villages where they have no previous family ties. This category is usually grouped under the popular term “I-turners” (Iタ ーン) (Obikwelu et al., 2017). New or returning migrants are now at the center of many rural revitalization policies, on account of their vital role in bringing human resources back to declining peripheral areas. Community revitalization projects by local governments often focus on attracting new residents or encouraging former out-migrants to return. An example is the now well-established, government-sponsored Chiiki okoshi kyouryokutai (Regional Revitalization Cooperation Group) program, through which selected in-migrants receive a salary and housing for up to 3 years in exchange for engaging in activities that can benefit the local community (such as starting new businesses, social projects, etc.) (Dilley et al., 2022). This program, which started in 2009, also shows a shift from a sole focus on economic growth (generally measured through quantitative indicators, such as job creation and rates of firm growth) towards a stronger emphasis on addressing local social issues, quality of life, and well-being. Both because of these policy efforts as well as broader changes in societal conditions, most recently the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing number of people is indeed choosing to move to rural areas, facilitated by increased acceptance of remote work and enhanced digital connectivity (Tsukimori, 2020).

Methods This chapter draws from the insights emerging from 5  years of qualitative field research conducted in rural Japan through field interviews, participant observation, and filmmaking-based action research. The research participants are individuals or couples who moved from urban to rural areas and who engage in a variety of occupations, although sustainable farming, small tourism and catering businesses, and creative professions were the most represented. Nevertheless, all participants can be ascribed to the category of lifestyle migrants, and in most cases, lifestyle entrepreneurs as well, because their personal interests and desired lifestyle provided the foundation for their decision to move to rural areas and often to start their own businesses. The main corpus of primary data is composed of 60 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2017 and 2020. The interviews were first  transcribed and then analyzed through thematic content analysis, with a coding protocol focused on

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lifestyle migrants’ sustainable practices and engagement in community revitalization activities. The results and discussion elaborate on how rural-to-urban lifestyle migrants think and act in pursuit of lifestyles and businesses that value social and environmental goals over simple financial or personal success.

Results and Discussion  oving to the Countryside to Enable More M Sustainable Lifestyles An analysis of Japanese newcomers’ lifestyles and practices reveals a common thread, that is to say, the redefinition of the meaning of a ‘good’ life, and of what is necessary to ‘live well’, before and during the migration experience. This redefinition usually takes the move from a critical evaluation of one’s urban lifestyle, including its elements of unsustainability. Therefore, many of the interviewees, recalling the period preceding their move to a rural area, emphasized the desire for a simpler and downsized lifestyle characterized by decreased material consumption and the pursuit of sufficiency. After the move, a common approach among lifestyle migrants is to use creative strategies to make do with locally available resources: examples include re-using old tools or agricultural equipment, the practice of renovating old houses by oneself, and in general (re)using, repairing, and up-cycling existing objects and materials. The creative use of local resources also extends to commons, such as foraged plants and animals, where it is informed and shaped by ethical commitments, including an attitude of care towards the more-than-human world. Examples are particularly abundant among newcomer organic farmers, who often described their vision of a circular economy as a mix of sustainability-oriented activities: (re)using what is locally available, (re)cycling local resources (e.g. using organic waste as fertilizer) (Fig. 1), recovering abandoned agricultural landscapes such as terraced fields, and creating spaces for wildlife to coexist with human activities (Zollet & Maharjan, 2021). At the same time, their use of resources is mediated by self-imposed limits (using only what is necessary, avoiding waste…), in a way that attempts to embrace a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity. Most of the interviewees undertook activities that aimed to breathe new life into undervalued or discarded things, abandoned farmland, houses, materials and equipment, trying to create value from already existing and accessible resources. Furthermore, localized lifestyles and food self-sufficiency (and safety) were highly valued by interview participants; many mentioned growing their own food, or even establishing their own organic or sustainable farm, as one of the main motivations behind the choice of moving to a rural area. Many interviewees also reported taking less frequent trips into larger urban areas for shopping and entertainment, citing a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction with their simpler rural lifestyles.

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Fig. 1  Newcomer organic farmers collecting seaweed to use as fertilizer (photo by Author)

Although they did not do so out of an explicit desire to decrease their environmental footprint, this indirectly translates    into  having less environmentally impactful lives through decreased transportation. Among the lifestyle migrants who started their own business, the majority did not have growth and expansion as a goal, and did not consider growth, beyond a certain point, to be sustainable or even desirable. In this instance, ‘sustainable’ was variously described as a state of dynamic stability, balancing financial security (having enough for one’s needs) personal well-being (pursuing interests, achieving work-life balance, taking care of one’s family), and social connections (feeling that one’s work is appreciated and recognized by the community, and that it brings value to the community itself). Participants also described the choice of moving to a rural area as pushing them to take risks they could not bring themselves to take before, making them more willing to experiment in the process of building their new rural lifestyles. This frequently leads to the creation of enterprises representing more creative and innovative takes on traditional rural economic activities (e.g., organic rather than conventional farming, combining farming with processing to create new products), or even unexpected types of ventures in rural settings, such as creative or knowledge-based businesses. In addition, interviewees tended to prioritize flexible, multifunctional and diversified enterprises combining multiple skills and connecting different elements (production, processing, services) as a way to ‘do more with less’ and increase the resilience of their business (Qu & Zollet, 2023), while at the same time minimizing the use of different kind of resources, from material to financial.

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 ew Local and Translocal Networks for Sharing Knowledge N and Resources The creation of and engagement with a variety of networks, both local and translocal, is a common response to the geographic and social isolation that lifestyle migrants frequently experience in rural areas. These networks serve different purposes, such as providing practical and emotional support, facilitating cooperation among businesses, supporting knowledge exchange, or providing an interface to interact with people from urban areas. Through these networks, lifestyle migrants engage with a diversity of actors and can more easily tap into local and extra-local networks to access resources, information, and markets, giving rise to various kinds of formal and informal cooperation. Networks with other migrants, both in the immediate geographical area and at a regional level, were found to be especially significant. These networks play an important role in increasing the connections between localities, setting the stage for the sharing of experience, knowledge, ideas, and best practices, including those related to revitalization and sustainable practices. The sustained effort towards nurturing connections and building networks needs to be considered as a more-than-economic practice; within each community, lifestyle migrants also participate in various forms of non-market economies such as bartering, gifting, and sharing, which help sustain social ties and trust (Fig.  2). Looking at this diversity of non-market transactions and practices helps to capture activities driven by collaboration and sharing, in which the boundaries between production and consumption are blurred. This also sheds light on the relational aspects and social capital in entrepreneurial and individual agency (Larsen et al., 2022; Zollet & Qu, 2023).

Reimagining the Rural for a More Sustainable Future The narratives collected from lifestyle migrants’ interviews also reveal a strong sense of responsibility towards the local community. This sense of responsibility frequently becomes an explicit ‘revitalization mission’, as is the case with those respondents who were, or had been, members of the Regional Revitalization Cooperation Group. Many lifestyle migrants are attracted by the possibility of playing multiple roles in their local communities; a common remark among interviewees was that in small communities individual contributions are more valuable and valued, and therefore a source of deeper personal satisfaction and fulfillment. This is not to say, however, that the interaction between locals and newcomers is always free of conflict (Qu et al., 2020). In some cases, newcomers’ projects clash with the fixed mindsets and reluctance to change of long-time, often elderly, residents. Some of the interviewees had already lived in other rural communities beforehand and moved away from them, citing a lack of freedom or an excessive sense of social

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Fig. 2  A renovated old house that now functions as community cafe, meeting place, and platform for sharing unused items and selling locally made products. (photo by Author)

control (Qu et al., 2020; Zollet & Qu, 2023). Despite these conflicts, however, lifestyle migrants are playing a crucial role in redefining collective imaginaries around rural areas. Through the use of social media, such as Instagram or YouTube, for example, they convey positive images and narratives of rural life, at the same time popularizing and normalizing their lifestyles (Zollet & Maharjan, 2021) and making them appear more accessible and attractive. The everyday practices of urban to rural lifestyle migrants have many aspects in common with what are considered to be sustainable lifestyles, for example in terms of increased self-sufficiency through gardening, home cooking, and sharing;

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decreased material consumption and creative reuse of existing resources; and a reduction in mobility through remote work and more localized lifestyles (Zollet et al., 2022). To support a shift towards more sustainable practices associated with new rural-based lifestyles, however, local and national level policies need to act on various fronts, starting from decentralization and promotion of community-based or localized systems of provisioning based on circular economy models (James et al., 2021; McGreevy et  al., 2021). The need for a reduction in superfluous material consumption also suggests the importance of creating or strengthening hubs for co-­ working, sharing, repairing, or renting goods, and increasing knowledge and skills around these practices (Dartnell & Kish, 2021; Gkartzios et al., 2022). One way to provide these spaces might be through the adaptive reuse of the many empty and unused buildings that characterize the Japanese countryside (Matanle, 2016) (Fig. 3). In addition, land-use regulations should be reformed to support the recovery of abandoned farmland for sustainable food production, in connection with better policies to support new entrants in agriculture (Zollet & Maharjan, 2021). Although such policies already exist, they are currently geared primarily at aspiring newcomer farmers with a productivist orientation, a demographic quite different from that of lifestyle-oriented ‘han-nou han-x’ (Cassidy et al., 2019; Rosenberger, 2017). Finally, the key challenge for policymakers in post-growth Japan will be to find ways to support sustainable lifestyle shifts while at the same time maintaining the conditions for rural communities to keep attracting migrants. This implies maintaining a basic level of essential services such as schools, hospitals, transportation

Fig. 3  A chocolate factory and shop run collectively by a group of young lifestyle migrants, inside an unused local government building. (Author’s photo)

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infrastructure and internet connectivity, a task that might prove challenging in the face of ongoing aging and depopulation (Dilley et  al., 2022; Manzenreiter et al., 2020).

Conclusions This chapter has contextualized the lifestyles and everyday practices of lifestyle migrants in rural Japan within the broader topics of sustainable lifestyles and rural revitalization in Japan’s post-growth economy and society. The motivations behind newcomers’ reasons to relocate to rural communities, as well as their post-­migration practices, have much in common with emerging scholarship on post-growth economies and more generally with alternative approaches to lifestyles, livelihoods and economic practices prioritizing quality of life and social/environmental well-being over quantitative economic growth (Schmid, 2019; Schneider et al., 2010). Further research is needed to generate a more nuanced understanding of the processes of lifestyle migration to declining rural communities and their implications for sustainability and community revitalization, particularly regarding whether these lifestyles can be sustained in the long term. This is especially true of non-western contexts, which have so far been less researched. From this perspective, Japan is a key case study, as it is ahead of the curve in terms of demographic and economic decline and the country where the effects of these processes will soon become more and more evident. The combination of sustainable lifestyles and rural revitalization offers a new perspective on the lived experience of lifestyle migrants and on the dynamics through which they approach rural lives and new business creation in depopulating rural areas. This framework allows for a more contextualized and situated understanding of urban-to-rural lifestyle migration practices, but also offers new pathways for approaching rural revitalization while simultaneously steering society towards more sustainable lifestyles. Rural lifestyle migrants play an important role as agents of change: for example, they can show that different ways of living are possible and provide concrete examples of how individuals can live more sustainable but fulfilling lifestyles while having a positive impact in their rural communities. Small-scale entrepreneurship connected to rural lifestyle migration, for example, can enable people to enact desired rural lifestyles, thus helping to move away from the mindset that opportunities can be only found in urban areas (Qu & Zollet, 2023; Zollet & Qu, 2023). At the same time, moving to rural areas has also proved important as a form of experimentation with more sustainable ways of working and living consistent with the kind of downscaled patterns of production and consumption that are a feature of sustainable post-growth societies (Dax & Fischer, 2018). Although these entrepreneurial activities can have an economic impact, for example by creating new economic opportunities and jobs, it is also important to look at their beyond-economic implications, and encourage sustainable and resilient

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community-building through attention towards resource use, individual and community well-being, and networked local and extra-local relationships with other communities and actors (Gibson-Graham & Dombroski, 2020). Taken together, all these aspects offer pathways of change that can enable the Japanese society to face the concurrent challenges of depopulation and sustainability.

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Zollet, S., Siedle, J., Bodenheimer, M., McGreevy, S. R., Boules, C., Brauer, C., et al. (2022). From locked-down to locked-in? COVID-induced social practice change across four consumption domains. Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy, 18(1), 796–821. https://doi.org/10.108 0/15487733.2022.2127294 Simona Zollet received a Masters’ degree in Environmental Science and Sustainable Development from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and a PhD in International Development and Cooperation from Hiroshima University. She is now Assistant Professor at Hiroshima University and a 2021–2023 USASBE (US Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship) Rural Research Fellow. Her interdisciplinary research background includes sustainability science, rural sociology, sociology of agriculture and food systems, and rural entrepreneurship. She is currently conducting research on urban-to-rural migration and sustainable agri-food systems at territorial level.  

A Regional Revitalization Strategy for Areas with Declining Populations: Transforming Tourists Into Local Actors Hiroki Tahara

Abstract  This study clarifies the boundary between the “exchange population” (i.e., tourists) and the “related population” (i.e., a population having a relationship with a specific region, but not residing in it). I examine the signs of change among tourists in recent years by quantitatively analyzing the transformation process from “Tourist 1.0,” representing conventional tourism, to “Tourist 2.0,” who espouses a new, responsible tourism. I show that, through immersive experiences at tourist sites, including involvement with the related population, the Tourist 1.0 can transform into Tourist 2.0. This study forms the basis of a new and sustainable regional revitalization strategy for regions with declining populations. Keywords  Tourist 2.0 · Related population · Tourism experience · Local involvement · Responsible tourism

Introduction Once COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in 2020, the number of inbound tourists to Japan saw a massive drop. The number of domestic tourists also halved; still, by 2021, 270 million tourists traveled all over Japan, which helped maintain the tourism momentum. By 2022, inbound acceptance resumed, with expectations of a full return to tourism in the near future. I refer to tourists with a pre-COVID-19 tourism style as “Tourist 1.0.” These tourists view tourism sites as objects; they enjoy the experiences within tourist areas, consume local resources, and leave the area after a short stay. I call tourists who espouse a new, more responsible style of tourism post-pandemic, as “Tourist 2.0.” The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the relationship between tourists and H. Tahara (*) Faculty of Business Administration, Meisei University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_13

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local communities. The state of Hawaiʻi, which has been a major tourism destination since the twentieth century, declared “responsible tourism” to be a pillar of its post-COVID-19 tourism strategy. The Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority defines responsive tourism as follows: “Tourists are an element of tourism, and by taking responsibility for their awareness and actions, we aim to create a better tourist destination.” It emphasizes the need to be aware of the possibility that the actions of tourists may impose a burden on the region and the environment. In this vein, the state encourages the practice of autonomous actions. In Hawaiʻi, tourists are not seen as consumers but as service producers or co-creators of services and the constituent elements of tourism. This trend is likely to grow in Japan as well as constituent elements of tourism. This type of tourists prefers high local engagement. Such a tourist is not merely a consumer of leisure but seeks to create value in relation to local residents. Tourist 2.0 vacations over a longer duration and intends to re-visit the region. A stark difference between Tourist 1.0 and Tourist 2.0 is whether they are going through a process of transformation from “object” to “subject” in the region (Table 1). Tourist 2.0 exists on the boundary between the exchange population and the related population—that is, playing the role of an intermediary (see Fig. 1). While Table 1  Stylistic differences between Tourist 1.0 and Tourist 2.0 Style Position Purpose Local resources Length of stay Engagement frequency

Tourist 1.0 Object To enjoy Consumption Short term Mainly once, at most several times

Tourist 2.0 Subject To contribute to the community Value creation Medium/ long term Continuation

Related population TOURIST 2.0 (boundary point) TOURIST 1.0 Exchange population

Fig. 1  The process of transformation from the exchange population to the relationship population, and the boundary between them

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the related population is known to be conceptually different from the conventional tourist, the boundary between them is ambiguous. Since 2016, the term “related population” (kankei jinkō in Japanese) has gained prominence in tourism studies. Distinct from the conventional tourist, it refers to the exchange population, that is, those who have a relationship with a region but are not its long-term residents. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications defined this concept in 2018 as “those involved in diverse ways with a region and its people who are neither long-­ term residents nor short-term non-residents.” It conceptually differs from the division of non-resident population—people visiting a region for short periods of time—and resident population—the subjects of long-term migration. Similar studies overseas include Schlyter (2003) on multi-habitation (multiple families sharing a living space), Benson and Reilly (2009) on lifestyle migration (migration intended to improve quality of life), Becker (2008) on outsiders, and Hannonen (2020) on digital nomads (a new style of work that has recently attracted attention). In Japan, where population decline and aging are progressing rapidly, the related population is expected to become a new member of the region. In this chapter, I elucidate the transformation process from Tourist 1.0 to 2.0. Clarifying this process can help us determine the boundary between the exchange population and the related population.

Literature on Tourism and Immigration Repeat Tourism What factors influence repeat visits to a tourism destination? Prayag and Ryan’s (2012) quantitative survey of 705 tourists visiting Mauritius Island revealed four major factors that influenced repeat visits and recommendations to destinations: image of a destination, personal involvement, tourist satisfaction, and attachment to the destination. Jang and Feng (2007) showed that repeat visit intentions to tourist sites change over time, but satisfaction was a direct antecedent factor for short-term repeat intentions, whereas novelty was an antecedent factor for medium- and long-­ term repeat intentions. There is a substantial corpus of literature on behavior and psychology in the context of Japanese tourism. Sasaki (2000) categorized travel behavior at a destination into relaxation of tension, pursuit of entertainment, strengthening of relationships, promotion of knowledge, and self-expansion based on a survey of past literature, including Fodness (1994). Hayashi and Fujiwara (2012) expanded these categories to self-enhancement, enjoying nature, health recovery, knowledge acquisition, local exchange, novel experiences, and relationship strengthening. Omori et al. (2020) further included pseudo-experiences in content tourism to Hayashi and Fujiwara’s seven categories, noting that this factor deepened attachment to a region, motivated repeat visits to tourism destinations, and promoted new behavior toward others. Based on these factors, a causal model was constructed.

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Lifestyle Migration Most urban–rural migration can be attributed to external factors, especially economic ones. The voluntary migration of people in search of an ideal lifestyle is called “lifestyle migration” (Benson & Reilly, 2009). The relationship between lifestyle migration and tourism, especially experiences in tourist areas, often influences the decision to migrate (Cuba, 1991). Williams and Hall (2000) have noted that many economically advanced countries are undergoing a change in values as a reaction against post-modernism. This has led to the rise of new tourism through which consumers seek authentic experiences. Critics have argued that new tourism plays an important role in lifestyle migration and has resulted in rural gentrification (Phillips, 1993; Riebsame et al., 1996). Obara (2021) offered quantitative evidence to show that a positive experience at a tourist spot strengthens the emotional connection to that spot, which, in turn, influences the intention to migrate to that lifestyle. Obara defined the emotional connection to a tourist destination as involvement in the destination and clarified the causal relationship between three constituent variables: experience at a tourist destination, involvement in a tourist destination, and intention to migrate to a lifestyle.

Tourist 2.0: Saving Regions from Population Decline Although many studies explain how experiences in tourist spots promote specific intentions, such as to revisit tourist spots, recommendations, and lifestyle migration, they only capture the behavior and trends of Tourist 1.0—the tourists who seek leisure and consumption in tourist areas. To the best of my knowledge, no study has extended its scope to Tourist 2.0. What kind of experiences do tourists have in the region and what kind of change in consciousness is involved in transforming Tourist 1.0 into Tourist 2.0, which, in turn, brings new value to the region? Elucidating the transformation process is a socially significant question that reconfigures the subject of a region facing population decline.

Transformation from Tourist 1.0 to Tourist 2.0 Tahara and Shikida’s (2023) quantitative survey clarifies an important causal relationship: tourists reveal an intention to be continuously involved in a tourist area by fostering altruistic interest in that area through their experiences at tourist sites. Based on the results of this survey, I examine how Tourist 1.0 may transform into Tourist 2.0 (Considering the nature of this book, detailed statistical indicators and analysis results are omitted from this paper. Interested readers should refer to Tahara and Shikida [2023]).

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 ffect of Altruism on the Willingness to Be Actively Involved E in the Community Altruism, as I illustrate in Fig. 2, has a strong influence on the intention to be positively involved in an activity. Altruism itself exists on a scale, ranging from “supporting the locals” to “making the community happy.” Indeed, heightened egoistic emotions such as attractiveness and self-expression at tourist destinations can effectively promote purchasing decisions for products and services, as well as the intention to revisit tourist destinations or immigrate. In the present survey, I find that, even among Tourists 1.0, who visit tourist destinations for straightforward consumption or personal enjoyment, the tourism experience at the destination fosters altruism and influences the intention to be positively involved. In other words, altruism is an important factor in the transformation to Tourist 2.0.

Effect of Self-Expression on Altruism Self-expression has a strong influence on altruism. Although altruism directly influences positive engagement intentions, self-expression serves to mediate emotional connections to the community that lead from attraction to altruism. The question items that constitute self-expression include “Visiting this destination helps me express my individuality’‘ and “Visiting this destination will give others an impression of what kind of person I am,” and they pertain to a feeling of “place identity” (Fornell & Larker, 1981). That is, the locality is part of the visitor’s self-concept.

Related population

Fostering community engagement through three emotional processes

SELF-EXPANSION (Self-introspection type)

Charm

LOCAL EXCHANGE (AC type)

Selfexpression

Willingness to be continuously involved in the community, i.e., awareness change → behaviour change

INTENTION TO FOSTER ACTIVE RELATIONSHIPS

Altruism

Evocation of location identity

Local problemsolving, raising awareness

To Tourist 2.0

Four promotion conditions: Securing employment opportunities in the region Building good human relations with the local community Sharing values with the local people Enhancement of medical care, welfare, education, etc.

Fig. 2  Process of transformation from Tourist 1.0 to Tourist 2.0

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Tourists who enjoy the charm of a tourist spot thus foster an altruistic spirit by arousing the identity of the place.

 ffect of Sightseeing Experiences on Self-Expression (Local E Exchange/Self-Expansion) I now consider the types of tourism experiences that influence self-expression. Let us return to Fig.  2: the tourism experience with the greatest influence on self-­ expression was “local exchange.” Studies also report that the interactions of residents who settle in an area deepen their attachment to the area (Suzuki & Fujii, 2008; Hikichi et al., 2009; Tahara, 2021). However, the present study suggests that even tourists who temporarily visit an area, but do not reside in it, can enhance their self-expression through tourist–resident interactions. In particular, the variable of “self-expansion” affects self-expression. Self-expansion, as a concept, consists of experiences that encourage self-reflection and is explained by items such as “It was an opportunity to reexamine myself” and “It was an opportunity to think about my own way of life, work, and way of thinking.” The extraordinary opportunity for self-­ introspection in a tourist spot affects self-expression.

Conditions that Promote the Transformation Process As for the relationship between visit frequency and other variables, I find that heavy repeaters (11 or more visits) had an effect on attractiveness. However, there was no effect on self-expression, altruism, or willingness to be actively involved. This result deviates from established findings on revisit tourism intentions and migration intentions, such as Prayag and Ryan (2012) and Mcchugh’s (1984) results. I thus infer that improving the quality of the relationship with the region—than increasing the frequency of visits—will promote the transformation from Tourist 1.0 to Tourist 2.0. Figure 2 also illustrates four promotion conditions: “Securing employment in the community,” “Building good human relationships with the community,” “Sharing values with local people,” and “Enhancing medical and welfare education.”

Roadmap for Sustainable Regional Development As noted earlier, I aim to clarify the transformation process from Tourist 1.0 to Tourist 2.0 by clarifying the casual relationship of experience in a tourist spot and its effect on awareness of community involvement and the desire to continue this

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involvement. I show that altruism and self-expression are two important variables that determine this transformation, while four conditions facilitate this process (see Fig. 2). Through this process, tourists can transform into Tourist 2.0—a new candidate for local actors—by collaborating with related parties in the area and actively participating in community development activities. The related population and the exchange population centered on tourists have been treated as separate concepts thus far. However, as I have shown, the emergence of Tourist 2.0 is coupled with the possibility of transforming the exchange population into a related population. Thus, regional organizations may strategically create related populations in future. In the second phase of the Comprehensive Strategy for Local Governments, which began in FY2020, the national government set the goal of increasing the number of local governments working to create and expand related populations to 1000 by FY2024. If this strategy is followed, the policy will shift from increasing the exchange population of tourists to acquiring a related population. However, the results of this study suggest the possibility of converting the exchange population into a related population rather than a policy change. As already mentioned, although the number of domestic tourists in Japan has decreased significantly under the strain of the pandemic, total projections for 2021 were pegged at 270 million. This potential is very different from the estimated 18 million related population. The results presented herein challenge the conventional policy of targeting tourists and related populations separately in favor of supporting the process of transformation from Tourist 1.0 to Tourist 2.0. By discovering the possibility of transforming the exchange population into a related population, I present a new revitalization strategy that could solve various socioeconomic problems plaguing regions with population decline. Conventional tourism policies mostly aim to attract repeat visitors. However, there exists no causal relationship between the frequency of visits to the community and involvement in the community (i.e., self-expression and altruism). Policies aimed at numerically increasing the frequency of visits may thus be obsolete and ineffective. Instead, governments and tourism-related interests should devise strategies to enhance the content of tourism experiences at various sites regardless of the number of visits. The development of tourism spots should go beyond places of leisure and enjoyment and become places where tourists can interact with locals and reconsider their own identity. A change in perception is a prerequisite. An example of such efforts is found in the work of Kobayashi and Yamada (2014), who targeted temporary cafés in Nomi City, Ishikawa Prefecture. By functioning as a place where tourists and residents interact and visitors engage in self-­ introspection, local cafés attract people from outside the city as well as younger consumers, who are otherwise known to be less willing to cooperate with the community. Kobayashi and Yamada’s study confirms the potential of increasing visitors’ attachment to a local community through deeper visitor–resident involvement. Although these examples are localized phenomena within specific regions in Japan, they serve as examples for revitalizing entire and larger regions in future.

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References Becker, H. S. (2008). Outsiders. Simon and Schuster. Benson, M., & O’Reilly, K. (2009). Migration and the search for a better way of life: A critical exploration of lifestyle migration. The Sociological Review, 57(4), 608–625. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-­954X.2009.01864.x Cuba, L. (1991). Models of migration decision making reexamined: The destination search of older migrants to Cape Cod. The Gerontologist, 31(2), 204–209. https://doi.org/10.1093/ geront/31.2.204 Fodness, D. (1994). Measuring tourist motivation. Annals of Tourism Research, 21(3), 555–581. https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-­7383(94)90120-­1 Fornell, C., & Larcker, D.  F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi. org/10.2307/3151312 Hannonen, O. (2020). In search of a digital nomad: Defining the phenomenon. Information Technology & Tourism, 22(2), 335–353. Hayashi, Y., & Fujiwara, T. (2012). Effect of experience evaluation at tourist sites on travel satisfaction: From the viewpoint of tourism motivation and travel experience. Bulletin of the Faculty of Sociology, 114, 199–212. Hikichi, H., Aoki, T., & Obuchi, K. (2009). Formation mechanism of attachment to local area: Influence of physical environment and social environment. Journal of Japan Society of Civil Engineers D, 65(2), 101–110. Jang, S.  S., & Feng, R. (2007). Temporal destination revisit intention: The effects of novelty seeking and satisfaction. Tourism Management, 28(2), 580–590. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. tourman.2006.04.024 Kobayashi, S., & Yamada, H. (2014). A study of a third place formation model in which the intention to use one’s place and the intention to interact coexist: A case study of a temporary “hyokkori café” in Nomi City, Ishikawa Prefecture. Regional Revitalization Research, 5, 3–12. McHugh, K. E. (1984). Explaining migration intentions and destination selection. The Professional Geographer, 36(3), 315–325. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-­0124.1984.00315.x Obara, M. (2021). Effects of tourism experience and community involvement on lifestyle migration intentions. Tourism Research, 32(1), 33–46. Omori, H., Katano, K., & Tahara, H. (2020). Branding of experience and place. Chikura Shobo, 141–202. Phillips, M. (1993). Rural gentrification and the processes of class colonization. Journal of Rural Studies, 9(2), 123–140. Prayag, G., & Ryan, C. (2012). Antecedents of tourists’ loyalty to Mauritius: The role and influence of destination image, place attachment, personal involvement, and satisfaction. Journal of Travel Research, 51(3), 342–356. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287511410321 Riebsame, W. E., Gosnell, H., & Theobold, D. M. (1996). Land use and landscape change in the Colorado Mountains 1: Theory, scale and pattern. Mountain Research and Development, 16(4), 395–405. Sasaki, T. (2000). Psychology of traveler behavior (pp. 187–189). Kansai University Press. Schlyter, A. (2003). Multi-habitation: Urban housing and everyday life in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe. Research Report No. 123. Nordic Africa Institute. Suzuki, H., & Fujii, S. (2008). A study on the influence of “consumer behavior” on “community attachment”. Journal of Japan Society of Civil Engineers D, 64(2), 190–200. https://doi. org/10.2208/jscejd.64.190 Tahara, H. (2021). Regarding the impact of differences in consumption behavior of residents on the process of fostering attachment to the community: A case study of a temporary community platform in the Akigawa district. Japan Regional Policy Research, 26, 84–93.

A Regional Revitalization Strategy for Areas with Declining Populations: Transforming… 195 Tahara, H., & Shikida, A. (2023). Examining the possibility of changing from a non-exchange population to a relationship population: Relationship between fostering awareness of involvement through tourism experience and willingness to continue to be involved in the region. Journal of Japan Institute of Tourism Research The Tourism Studies, 34(2), 49–64. Williams, A. M., & Hall, C. M. (2000). Tourism and migration: New relationships between production and consumption. Tourism Geographies, 2(1), 5–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/146166800363420 Hiroki Tahara is a specially appointed professor at the Faculty of Business Administration at Meisei University. After working at a major travel agency (JTB), he completed a master’s program in policy studies at the Hosei University Graduate School of Policy Studies. He is currently enrolled in a doctoral program at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. His primary areas of expertise include regional revitalization, tourism policy, and regional brand theory.  

Creating a Sustainable Society Beyond Times of Crisis Hiroki Nakamura

Abstract Japanese society is facing a historical transition characterized by a declining population, a declining birth rate, and an aging society. This transformation process is unprecedented for humankind and has the potential to shake the foundations of Japan’s social economy and sustainability. Therefore, Japan needs to create a sustainable society. For instance, it is indispensable to achieve the desirable future society envisioned by the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs); Sustainable development is based on the happiness and the well-being of the society. One solution is to create a society that can accept diverse work environments and lifestyles by embracing and cherishing the concepts of sustainability, happiness, and social well-being. Keywords  Declining population · Aging society · Sustainability · Happiness · Social well-being

Introduction The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities and inequalities of societies worldwide. As a result, people’s needs and the possibility of cooperation and solidarity with each other to help scale solutions to various social problems have been highlighted (UN Global Compact & DNV-GL, 2020). Therefore, building more sustainable and inclusive societies in adherence to the core commitment to the 2030 global agenda for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires urgent attention (UN Global Compact & DNV-GL, 2020). Moreover, regardless of the pandemic, Japanese society is facing H. Nakamura (*) Center for Education and Research of Liberal Studies, Kurume University, Kurume, Japan Yunus & Shiiki Social Business Research Center, Kyushu University, Kurume, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_14

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a historical transition characterized by a declining population, a declining birth rate, and an aging society. This transformation process is unprecedented for humankind and has the potential to shake the foundations of Japan’s social economy and sustainability. Due to the population decline, there are growing concerns about problems associated with the contraction of the domestic economy, the demographic dividend, and a widening economic disparity. Therefore, Japan needs to create a sustainable society. For instance, it is indispensable to achieve the desirable future society envisioned by the 17 SDGs; the specific policies necessary for its realization should be urgently implemented. Sustainable development is based on the happiness and the well-being of the society. Socially vulnerable people are more likely to be socially isolated and at a greater risk of becoming more vulnerable. As economic inequality widens, trust in society declines and social order becomes unstable. Thus, a sustainable social design should be implemented.

Current Crises in Japan: An Aging and Shrinking Society Population Aging and Economic Shrinking in Japan Japan started its modernization and rose to world power status during the Meiji period (1868–1912). Since then, the population growth phase that followed along with modernization reached its peak in 2008 and is expected to continue to decline throughout the twenty-first century. There is no precedent for long-term population decline due to a declining birth rate, and unless the current situation changes, this process of decline will never end. Although the Japanese stock market continued to rise until the end of 1989 and land values until 1991, both began to fall subsequently. This situation is called “collapse of the bubble,” and young job seekers at that time had great difficulty finding employment for an entire decade, from the graduates of March 1994 until around 2005, in what was known as the “employment ice age” (The Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training, 2016). While the recession that began in February 1991 was fought with a variety of fiscal and economic measures, including increased public works spending, reduced taxes, deregulation, and disposal of bad loans, the working-age population (ages 15–64) peaked in 1995 (87.26 million), and has already declined by 12 million. By 2045, the population is expected to decrease by about 30 million from its peak, and by 2060, it is expected to decrease by about 40 million (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2017). On the other hand, the elderly population (the population aged 65 and over) continues to grow, reaching a peak of a 3.75 million increase from the current level by around 2042 (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (2017). Subsequently, the older adult population will begin to decline, but the aging rate (proportion of the population aged 65 and over) will hardly decline. Even now,

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Japan’s population aging rate is the highest in the world, but the impact of this rapid increase will be enormous. After that, it will continue to be the oldest aging country in the twenty-first century. A characteristic of an aging population is that the rate of increase in the older adult population becomes more pronounced as age increases. As mentioned above, the peak of the population aged 65 and over is approximately 3.75 million higher than the present, but the peak of the population aged 75 and over (around 2054) will increase by 6.5 million, and the peak of the population aged 85 and over (around 2062) will increase by 5.9 million (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (2017). Therefore, the rate of increase in the incidence and severity of events that increase with age, such as conditions requiring long-term care, exceeds the rate of increase in the population aged 65 years and over. Looking only at changes in the aging rate (proportion of the population aged 65 and over) would underestimate the seriousness of the aging population.

Social Problems Due to Aging and Shrinking Population decline, declining birthrates, and an aging population are more prevalent in  local regions with smaller population scales and densities. However, in urban areas that experience population aging and shrinking, the scale of the problem will be larger in the future. Japan will face an increase in the demand for nursing and medical care, especially end-of-life care. The population aging and shrinking that is currently in progress is expected to cause the following specific problems if it progresses as it is. First, the domestic economy will shrink. In other words, there are concerns about the deceleration and contraction of economic growth due to a declining and aging labor force, a shrinking and aging consumer market, a decrease in savings, investment, and capital input, and stagnation in technological innovation. Furthermore, from a broader and long-term perspective, population aging will progress not only in Japan but also throughout the world, from 2020 to 2050. The number of older people in the total population is increasing rapidly. According to the United Nations (2019), there were 727 million people aged 65 years or over in the world in 2020. Over the next three decades, the global number of older persons is projected to more than double, reaching over 1.5 billion by 2050. All regions will see an increase in the size of their older populations between 2020 and 2050. The share of the global population aged 65 years or older is expected to increase from 9.3% in 2020 to 16.0% by 2050 (United Nations, 2019). This unprecedented aging society is not only facing socioeconomic challenges, but also vulnerability to various disasters caused by climate change. In the numerous natural disasters that Japan has experienced in recent years, most victims have been older adults. In addition, many of the victims of diseases such as heat stroke and influenza epidemics in winter are older adults. As seen in the COVID-19 pandemic, this age group is likely to be  the target of emerging and reemerging

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infectious diseases. The aging of the world’s population in the future is likely to contribute to the resulting damage from natural disasters and extreme weather events will likely increase.

Beyond the Times of Crisis Social Well-Being for Human Lives In this way, the ongoing population shrinking and aging presents many difficult problems. However, such a society needs to consider the problems that should be solved. Is it possible to return the population pyramid to a literal pyramidal shape? For this reason, does society need to increase the number of births? If the working population is increased by accepting a large number of foreigners, will Japan’s competitiveness increase and will it be possible to achieve high economic growth again? Is that the kind of society which should be created? The preamble to the World Health Organization (WHO) Constitution states, “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (World Health Organization, 1948). The term “social well-being” is used to refer to a desirable state for an individual of a society. However, individuals are confronted with a variety of threats. These include fear (such as from conflicts and terrorism, natural disasters and environmental degradation, infectious diseases, and economic crises), and wants, such as those resulting from poverty, malnutrition, lack of education, health and other social services, and underdevelopment of the basic infrastructure. “Human Security” refers to the safeguarding of people’s freedom from fear and want, ensuring that they can live in safety and dignity (Japan International Cooperation Agency, 2010). According to the Commission on Human Security (2003), co-chaired by Sadako Ogata and Amartya Sen, human security means “to protect the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance human freedoms and human fulfillment.”

Sustainable Development Goals for Human Society Furthermore, in September 2015, the 70th session of the United Nations General Assembly adopted “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” (17 goals consisting of 169 targets) to be achieved by 2030 and the creation of an inclusive society where “no one is/will be left behind” was declared (United Nations, 2015). These are considered to comprehensively present a desirable image of human society. Japan’s SDGs achievement ranking is ranked 19th in the Sustainable Development Report (Sachs et al., 2022). After establishing the SDGs Promotion Headquarters in

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the Cabinet Office in 2016, the government established an implementation framework and vision for realizing the UN-led SDGs. Since December 2017, they have been formulating the “SDGs Action Plan” every year, which summarizes the government’s major efforts to achieve the SDGs. In addition, the SDGs Action Plans have been promoting the “Society 5.0” concept that is defined by the government as “a human-centered society that achieves both economic development and solutions to social issues through a system that highly integrates virtual and physical space.” Society 5.0 aims to realize comfortable lifestyles while solving social issues using the latest technologies, products, and services.

Government Strategies in Japan In 2021, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and the administration emphasized sustainability and people, leading to new investment and growth. The Administration proposed the “New Capitalism” based on two core pillars: growth strategies and distribution strategies. The growth strategies include: (i) promoting a nation of science and technology, including digital transformation; (ii) reviving the dynamism of Japanese companies, providing thorough support for start-ups and leaders of innovation; (iii) revitalizing local regions; and (iv) economic security. The distribution strategies include (i) support for strengthening distribution in the private sector, including in the medium and long term, and (ii) strengthening the distribution function in the public sector. One of the strategies of (i) is to strengthen the distribution of non-regular workers through new legislation to protect freelancers because the COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on freelancers. While an increasing number of businesses combine a commercial business with a business-related social mission (Porter & Kramer, 2006), consumers also need products and services to make social contributions (Vilá & Bharadwaj, 2017). To make such services and products more accessible to everybody, investment and finance are crucial factors for equipping businesses to work toward achieving the SDGs, while also being key to ensuring future resilience against the global COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, business finance tended to support projects that illustrated potential growth opportunities, in which risks were low and shared among various organizations (UN Compact and DNV-GL, 2020).

Importance of Social Business and Entrepreneurship In general, although all businesses must deal decisively and transparently with the abovementioned issues in a post-COVID-19 world (UN Global Compact & DNV-GL, 2020), “social businesses” or social entrepreneurship can play an increasingly important role in solving the social challenges in this context (Spieth et al., 2019). Prof. Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the founder of

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Grameen Bank, and a former member of the SDGs Advocate, introduced a new dimension for capitalism with the idea of social business: a business model that does not strive to maximize profits but rather to serve humanity’s most pressing needs. Social business is a new type of business and “social business entrepreneurs” are a new type of entrepreneurs who are not interested in profit-maximization. They want to provide better opportunities in life to other people and achieve this objective by creating and supporting sustainable social businesses (Yunus Center et al., 2020). Regarding support for start-ups, those willing to start business projects often encounter financial difficulties in obtaining initial funding. Therefore, the role of informal investors, including family members, friends, and business angels who invest in new ventures, is crucial for promoting entrepreneurship (Honjo & Nakamura, 2020). Interactions and networks between entrepreneurs, investors, especially business angels, and other stakeholders can promote entrepreneurship and form a cyclical entrepreneurial ecosystem (Mason & Botelho, 2016). Accessing investment is difficult, especially for social-purpose organizations (Bocken et al., 2016; Sunley & Pinch, 2012). Therefore, the viewpoint of “ecosystem” is especially crucial for social entrepreneurship and the sustainable management of social businesses, as they have to utilize their stakeholder networks to access and construct resources, as well as deploy persuasive tactics to build legitimacy and financial sustainability in cases where there is a lack of capital and resources (Sunley & Pinch, 2012). However, in Japan, the level of individual entrepreneurship, including social entrepreneurship, is not high compared to that in other countries, and its ecosystems with social support and investment are not strong (Honjo & Nakamura, 2020; Nakamura, 2022). Based on the current situation in Japan, how to create a future society beyond times of crisis is discussed with keywords such as sustainable, social well-being, social isolation, social problems, and social entrepreneurship, using the results of a questionnaire survey in Japan conducted by the author as concrete evidence.

 ata Analysis: Individual’s Perception for Local Society D and Future Perspective Data Collection To identify and analyze individuals’ perceptions of local society and future perspectives, necessary data were gathered via an online smartphone survey in Japan. Neo Marketing Inc. was contacted to conduct the survey and responses were collected between July 27 and August 1, 2022. The questionnaire included questions on sociodemographic determinants (gender, age, income, education status), and subjective questions to assess respondents’ daily lives and society. The respondents

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were randomly selected by Neo Marketing Inc. To construct a sample without bias, Neo Marketing Inc. distributed and gathered the questionnaires in proportion to the population of each prefecture in Japan by sex and age distribution. They contacted 62,173 individuals and obtained 10,599 responses (response rate, 17.04%). The data of individuals regarding local attachment, life satisfaction, perceived stress, social isolation, perception of local society, interest in social investment, social entrepreneurship, etc. were also collected.

Individual’s Perception for Local Society and Future Perspective Individual perceptions of local society and future perspectives were measured using various questions. The questions were as follows. 1. Local attachment: Do you have attachment to the local area where you live now? 2. Willingness to live: Do you want to continue living in the local area where you live now? 3. Dependable local area: Do you think there are people you can rely on in the local area you live in now? 4. Hope: Do you have hope for the future? 5. Life satisfaction: Are you satisfied with your life overall? 6. Job satisfaction: Are you satisfied with your current job and work style? 7. Financial satisfaction: Are you satisfied with the current financial situation of you and your family? 8. Social investment: Are you personally provided funds for a new social entrepreneurial activity started by someone else? The author studied individuals’ perceptions of local society, future perspectives, and the differences between male and female respondents. The results of the degree of attachment to and willingness to live in the area in which the respondents reside show that the mean values are high (0.545 and 0.557, respectively). This degree was higher in the case of women, although the difference was not statistically significant. However, there are statistically significant differences between men and women who think that there are people that they can rely on in the local area (mean values of males and females are 0.231 and 0.294, respectively). The overall values for life, job, and financial satisfaction were 0.385, 0.243, and 0.320, respectively. Although the value of job-specific satisfaction is low on average and the results in men are higher than that of women, women are more satisfied with their lives and financial situations. Regarding social investment, the values are low (0.044). This indicates that quite a few people do not have the experience of social investment to start businesses that provide products and services to solve social and local issues.

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Perceived Stress and Health A precise measure of personal stress can be determined using a variety of instruments designed to help measure individual stress levels, called the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). The PSS was originally developed in 1983 (Cohen et al., 1983) and the questions in this scale ask about the respondent’s feelings and thoughts during the last month as follows: 1. How often have you been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly? 2. How often have you felt that you were unable to control the important things in your life? 3. How often have you felt nervous and stressed? 4. How often have you felt confident about your ability to handle your personal problems? 5. How often have you felt that things were going your way? 6. How often have you found that you could not cope with all the things that you had to do? 7. How often have you been able to control irritations in your life? 8. How often have you felt that you were on top of things? 9. How often have you been angered by things that happened outside your control? 10. How often have you experienced difficulties piling up so high that you cannot overcome them? The mean value of PPS in the survey results is 18.991, indicating that Japanese people, on average, have moderate stress.

Social Network and Isolation The Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS) was developed and is often used to evaluate social networks (Lubben et al., 2006) This scale allows for a comparison of the relationship between the size and quality of social networks. The Japanese version of the LSNS, used in research such as Arimoto and Tadaka (2019) and Sugaya et al. (2021), comprises six items related to family and friends’ networks, as follows: 1. How many relatives do you see or talk at least once a month? 2. How many relatives do you feel at ease with to talk about private matters? 3. How many relatives do you feel close to, such that you can call on them for help? 4. How many of your friends do you see or talk to at least once a month? 5. How many friends do you feel at ease with to talk about private matters? 6. How many friends do you feel close to, such that you can call on them for help? The mean value of LSNS in the survey results is 9.141, indicating that Japanese people, on average, are socially isolated.

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Social Entrepreneurship Based on the data distributed and collected in the questionnaire survey, respondents were classified as “actual social entrepreneurs” (SOENT), “past social entrepreneurial experience” (EXSOE), “potential social entrepreneurs” (POTSE), “general social entrepreneurial interests” (SEINT), and “no social entrepreneurial interests” (NOINT). This classification is the same as that proposed by Nakamura (2022). Specifically, individuals were first distinguished from those without social entrepreneurial experience. Here, “social entrepreneurial experience” was defined as “experience of founding, owning, and running a corporation that paid salaries and wages to employees and owners, as well as all other expenses, for three or more months.” Respondents with social entrepreneurial experience were further categorized as “actual social entrepreneurs” (SOENT) if they were currently involved in a start-up business or as having “past social entrepreneurial experience” (EXSOE) if they had retired from or shut down a start-up business. Next, respondents with no social entrepreneurial experience who had no interest in social entrepreneurship were categorized as having “no social entrepreneurial interests” (NOINT). If they did have an interest, regardless of their interest in starting a business themselves, they were categorized as having “some social entrepreneurial interests.” Respondents in the latter group were further categorized as having “general social entrepreneurial interests” (SEINT) if they did not intend to start a business themselves. Conversely, if they did, they were categorized as “potential social entrepreneurs” (POTSE). Similar to the result of Nakamura (2022), social entrepreneurship is low. Most Japanese people (more than 80%) can be categorized as having no social entrepreneurial interests.

 nalysis and Results: Determinants of Individuals’ Perception A for Local Society and Future Perspective Eight models for analyzing the determinants of individuals’ perceptions of local society and future perspectives were considered using the eight binary data mentioned above as explained variables. The determinant explanatory variables were chosen based on previous studies, such as Nakamura (2022). No multicollinearity problems were found among the explanatory variables. As for the results of the analyses, there are eight models: 1. Local attachment; 2. Willingness to live; 3. Dependable local area; 4. Hope; 5. Life satisfaction; 6. Job satisfaction; 7. Financial satisfaction; 8. Social investment. The results for the results of the models “local attachment” and “willingness to live” show that there is similar tendency with statistical significance. For instance, in the case of people in their 40 s and older, the older they are, the more local attachment and willingness to live where they are residing they have compared to younger people. Additionally, people whose household incomes are between 3–5 or 5–10 million yen or whose

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cash savings are more than 10 million yen have more local attachment and are willing to live there compared to people who have household income and cash savings of less than 3 million yen. There is also a statistically significant association between these two local factors and LSNS, indicating that the larger the social network people have, the more they have local attachment to and willingness to live there. Interestingly, regarding the results of LSNS, all models except the model of “social investment” shows a positive association with significance. The interesting differences between the results of the two models are the variables EXSOE and SEINT. While willingness to live is not associated with whether people have social entrepreneurial experience or interests with statistical significance, local attachment is positively associated with general social entrepreneurial interests, but negatively with past social entrepreneurial experience. The result of the “dependable local area” model shows that the variables observing women and having a child/children are positively associated with the explained variable observing whether people have someone they can rely on where they live. People in their 50s and older exhibited fewer instances of having someone they can rely on where they live than younger people, although they have more local attachment and are willing to continue to live where they are. Regarding the relationship between social entrepreneurship, potential social entrepreneurs (POTSE) tend to have someone they can rely on there. Furthermore, the result of the “hope” model indicates that all social entrepreneurial types, especially potential social entrepreneurs (POTSE) and current social entrepreneurs (SOENT), have more hope for the future than people who have no interest in social entrepreneurship. Regarding life, job, and financial satisfaction, in general, the higher the household income and cash savings, the higher the satisfaction. However, women and people in their 70s have less job satisfaction, although they have more life and financial satisfaction. Furthermore, social entrepreneurs are more satisfied with life, finance, and especially their jobs than people who have no interest in social entrepreneurship. The results of the “social investment” model display a significant and positive link between social investment and social entrepreneurial propensity (SOENT, EXSOE, POTSE, and SEINT), in descending order of their odds values. This indicates that individuals with social entrepreneurial activities and experience are more likely to engage in social investment. Overall, our findings suggest a significant relationship between social investment and entrepreneurial activities and interests. Finally, in all the models, a variable related to cancer survivor is included. There are significant positive values of cancer survivors in the models “dependable local area,” “hope,” and “social investment,” indicating that people with health concerns, such as cancer survivors, have someone they can rely on where they live more often, more social entrepreneurship, and more hope than healthy people without cancer. Overall, while local attachment and willingness to live in a society where people are living are higher in the categories of people in their 50s and having higher household income and cash savings, they tend not to have someone they can rely on where they live and have social investment experience. On the contrary, people with social entrepreneurial activities or interests tend to have social investment

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experience and hope for the future, and current social entrepreneurs have higher satisfaction with life, job, and family financial situations. Women also had higher satisfaction than men, except for job satisfaction. These results indicate that it is necessary to promote policies to activate social entrepreneurial activities and investment, especially for people in their 50s and those with higher household income and cash savings. It is also indispensable to promote measures to increase job satisfaction for female workers and life satisfaction for male workers.

Conclusion: Toward a Sustainable Society Countermeasures against the declining birth rate have aimed to identify its causes and correct them. For example, it is often pointed out that young people tend to stay unmarried and marry later, or to become more educated and pursue a career. However, these are the result of a multitude of factors, including low wages and low incomes among young people, an increase in non-regular employment, inadequate childcare support policies, and a rigid view of marriage and family. It is no exaggeration to say that it is deeply rooted in the lifestyle and life course of Japanese people. At the very least, it is essential to realize improvements in wages and employment conditions, improve the child-rearing environment, and quickly implement the various systems and laws necessary to support diverse families. For instance, legal protection for various forms of marriage and family, such as the realization of gender equality and common-law marriage, has not necessarily been addressed in Japan. A major issue in a society with a shrinking and aging population is a decrease in the labor force due to a decrease in the working-age population. Labor shortages have a major socio-economic impact in that they lead to economic stagnation and the destabilization of social security. It should be remembered that a certain direction has already been presented regarding how to deal with labor shortages in anticipation of a declining birth rate and aging society. In particular, since the mid-1990s, the importance of expanding female and older adult labor force participation has been repeatedly discussed. In this way, when we focus on the quantity aspect of the labor force, the power of latent human resources such as women and older adults, who are unable to demonstrate their abilities, has to be utilized for our society. Reconsidering working and jobs from the perspective of a sustainable and well-­ being-­centered society, the main workers in Japanese society have been in productive activities that lead to income, and reproductive labor represented by family care tends to be neglected. It is important to carefully reconstruct the social system so that the appropriate reallocation of labor, including both productive and reproductive labor, can be achieved. In other words, men should reduce their productive working hours and increase their involvement in reproductive labor, while women should increase their productive working hours. We must realize a society with a good work-life balance that can be used for social activities. Considering the

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importance of each area of productive activity and reproductive labor, it is essential to build a society that assumes that men and women work and live together. Looking at the quality aspect of the labor force more broadly, there are children who are unable to develop their latent abilities and motivation because they were not provided with sufficient environmental and educational opportunities despite being born and raised in this society. This is a great loss not only to themselves but also to society. It is indispensable for this society to promote the importance and activities of social entrepreneurship and social investment policies that enhance social support for poor families with structural difficulties and single-parent families. Social entrepreneurship and investment policies, including focusing on early education for disadvantaged children based on nurturing them with care, re-education for adults, employment of women, work-life balance policy, and so on, should be implemented. Socially vulnerable individuals are more likely to become socially isolated and at risk of becoming more vulnerable. As social disparities increase, social trust decreases and becomes unstable. Happiness and well-being cannot be achieved by an individual. A happy and well-being-centered society can be realized when “no one is left behind,” as SDGs mention, and everyone supports each other. Thus, an inclusive social design that embraces diverse people should be developed. In addition, there are many people who suffer without being able to demonstrate their abilities, such as people with mental health problems and people with health concerns, such as cancer survivors. One solution is to create a society that can accept diverse work environments and lifestyles by embracing and cherishing the concepts of sustainability, happiness, and social well-being.

References Arimoto, A., & Tadaka, E. (2019). Reliability and validity of Japanese versions of the UCLA loneliness scale version 3 for use among mothers with infants and toddlers: A cross-sectional study. BMC Women’s Health, 19(1), 105. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12905-­019-­0792-­4 Bocken, N. M. P., Fil, A., & Prabhu, J. (2016). Scaling up social businesses in developing markets. Journal of Cleaner Production, 139, 295–308. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.08.045 Cohen, S., Kamarck, T., & Mermelstein, R. (1983). A global measure of perceived stress. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 24(4), 385–396. https://doi.org/10.2307/2136404 Commission on Human Security. (2003). Human security now. New York. https://digitallibrary. un.org/record/503749/files/Humansecuritynow.pdf Honjo, Y., & Nakamura, H. (2020). The link between entrepreneurship and informal investment: An international comparison. Japan and the World Economy, 54, 101012. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.japwor.2020.101012 Japan International Cooperation Agency. (2010). JICA’s “human security” approach features and case studies. https://www.jica.go.jp/publication/pamph/issues/ku57pq00002iztxl-­att/ human_security_en.pdf Lubben, J., Blozik, E., Gillmann, G., Iliffe, S., von Renteln Kruse, W., Beck, J.  C., & Stuck, A. E. (2006). Performance of an abbreviated version of the Lubben social network scale among three European Community-dwelling older adult populations. Gerontologist, 46(4), 503–513. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/46.4.503

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Mason, C., & Botelho, T. (2016). The role of the exit in the initial screening of investment opportunities: The case of business angel syndicate gatekeepers. International Small Business Journal: Researching Entrepreneurship, 34(2), 157–175. Nakamura, H. (2022). Characteristics and relationships of social entrepreneurs and social investors in Japan. Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1942067 6.2022.2090417 National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. (2017). Population projections for Japan (2016–2065). https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-­zenkoku/e/zenkoku_e2017/pp29_summary.pdf Porter, M. E., & Kramer, M. R. (2006). Strategy and society: The link between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility. Harvard Business Review, 84(12), 78–92. 163. Sachs, J. D., Lafortune, G., Kroll, C., Fuller, G., & Woelm, F. (2022). Sustainable Development Report 2022. From Crisis to Sustainable Development: The SDGs as Roadmap to 2030 and Beyond. Includes the SDG Index and Dashboards. Cambridge University Press. https:// s3.amazonaws.com/sustainabledevelopment.report/2022/2022-­sustainable-­development-­ report.pdf Spieth, P., Schneider, S., Clauß, T., & Eichenberg, D. (2019). Value drivers of social businesses: A business model perspective. Long Range Planning, 52(3), 427–444. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. lrp.2018.04.004 Sugaya, N., Yamamoto, T., Suzuki, N., & Uchiumi, C. (2021). Social isolation and its psychosocial factors in mild lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-sectional survey of the Japanese population. BMJ Open, 11(7), e048380. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-­2020-­048380 Sunley, P., & Pinch, S. (2012). Financing social enterprise: Social bricolage or evolutionary entrepreneurialism? Social Enterprise Journal, 8(2), 108–122. https://doi. org/10.1108/17508611211252837 The Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training (JILPT). (2016). Labor situation in Japan and its analysis: General overview 2015/2016. https://www.jil.go.jp/english/lsj/ general/2015-­2016/2015-­2016.pdf UN Global Compact & DNV GL. (2020). Uniting business in the Decade of Action. DNV GL. United Nations. (2015). Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/70/1&Lang=E United Nations. (2019). World population prospects 2019. https://population.un.org/wpp Vilá, O.  R., & Bharadwaj, S. (2017). Competing on social purpose. Harvard Business Review, 95, 94–101. World Health Organization. (1948). Constitution of the World Health Organization. World Health Organization. Yunus Center, The YY Foundation, & Studio Nima. (2020). Academia report 2020 on social business  – No going back. https://socialbusinesspedia.com/uploads/academia/original/ ua_733530084144238251449296372892.pdf Hiroki Nakamura, (Ph.D.), is a professor at Center for Education and Research of Liberal Studies, Kurume University. He has B.Eng., M.Eng., and Ph.D. in Eng. From the Tokyo Institute of Technology. His research work has been about Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and social business ecosystem in local communities. He worked at Departments of Urban and Environmental Engineering, Kyushu University as an assistant professor, Faculty of Commerce, Chuo University and Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo as an associate professor. He has published articles in peer reviewed journals such as Journal of Transport Geography, Safety Science, Tourism Management, and book chapters in Basic Studies in Environmental Knowledge, Technology, Evaluation, and Strategy  – Introduction to Asia Environmental Studies, Springer, Research Handbook on Climate Change Mitigation Law, Edward Elgar Publishing, and Handbook of Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation, Springer.  

Displacement and Return: University Campuses as Ba and Ibasho for Sustainability Co-creation Peter Hourdequin

Abstract  This chapter explores the impact of COVID-19 pandemic policies and practices on university campus life in Japan. Using the Japanese concepts of ba (place) and ibasho (place to be) as heuristics, the chapter examines the effects of COVID-19 countermeasures on the lives of students and professors, and the potential for Japanese university campuses to play new roles in sustainability co-creation post-pandemic. The author draws upon data from national surveys and narrates the experience of his educational research group to illustrate how changes have impacted education for sustainability development (ESD) on the Japanese university campus. The chapter concludes with recommendations for a transition to a more sustainable post-COVID or “with corona” reality in Japanese higher education.

Whenever we use space, we orient towards the messages we pick up in such spaces and we act accordingly. (Blommaert, 2013, p. 30).

One of the most salient features of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on university life in Japan was the timing of its arrival. The academic year at most universities in Japan begins in early April and typically finishes at the end of February, with graduation ceremonies usually taking place in mid-March. In March 2020, however—following the lead of national, prefectural, and municipal governments— higher education institutions across Japan began to adopt strict COVID-19 pandemic countermeasures. In order to adapt to the rapidly changing public health situation—and perhaps as importantly—to avoid the public shame of being stigmatized for hosting coronavirus clusters, most universities in Japan delayed the start of classes by a month or

P. Hourdequin (*) Tokoha University, Shizuoka, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_15

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more. Ando (2021) details a high-profile incident that set the tone for many universities. A university in Kyoto was singled out in media reports for holding graduation ceremonies that included students returning from abroad, who were accused of causing infection clusters throughout the country when returning to their hometowns: The university was targeted for criticism by the public, receiving threatening phone calls in regard to the university’s poor risk management … Public shaming and discrimination against the entire campus community, including students and their families as well as faculty and staff members, persisted. (Ando, 2021, p. 539)

When classes began in May of 2020, a month behind schedule, many universities shifted to emergency remote teaching (ERT) models of instruction (Hodges et al., 2020). Some universities, like my own— a medium-sized private regional university in central Japan —allowed students to return to campus for in-person learning. However, according to a MEXT [Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology] (2020) survey of 1069 universities and technical colleges in June of 2020, only 9.7% had returned to primarily in-person learning. Most institutions (60.1%) continued ERT or a combination of ERT and in-person learning (30.2%) (p. 1). By the academic year’s second semester—beginning in the fall of 2020—universities across Japan varied widely in the mixes of hybrid and in-person classes they were offering. And despite successively more severe waves of coronavirus infection and mortality throughout 2021 and 2022 following the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in Japan, most universities eventually returned to primarily face-to-face instruction amidst new campus cultures of virus mitigation vigilance. Throughout the 2022–2023 academic year, masks were still required on campuses nationwide, while plastic barriers, hand disinfection stations, and body temperature cameras remained common features of campus life. In addition, paper flyers, posters, and digital messaging that implored students, faculty, and staff to practice social distancing were still highly prevalent. In this chapter, by using the Japanese concepts of ba (place) and ibasho (place to be) as heuristics, I explore the effects of pandemic policies and practices on the lives of university students and professors, and the potential of Japanese university campuses to serve as places for sustainability co-creation post-pandemic. To do this, I draw upon data from multiple national surveys of university student experiences that were conducted during the pandemic, and I also narrate some of the impacts I have seen taking place on the campus of the university where I work and conduct research. I discuss how changes on campus impacted a research project that I led on education for sustainability development (ESD) and discuss how various initiatives within this project were adapted to new campus and societal conditions. Finally, I offer some broadly applicable recommendations for a transition to a more sustainable post-COVID or “with corona” reality in Japanese higher education.

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Ba, Ibasho, Place, and Belonging Nishida Kitarō, the renowned founder of what is known as the Kyoto School, is considered one of the most important voices in twentieth century Japanese philosophy. Nishida’s seminal concept of basho(場所、translated variously as “locus,” “topos,” and “place”) emphasizes the interconnectedness of all things and the idea that every individual entity has its own unique place in the world. This concept was further developed by Shimizu Hiroshi and has had a significant influence on various fields outside of philosophy as well (Maraldo, 2019). In the field of management theory, for example, Nonaka and Konno (1998) adapted Nishida’s concept to emphasize the importance of ba in knowledge creation through human relations, writing that “ba can be thought of as a shared space for emerging relationships.” They continue to explain that: What differentiates ba from ordinary human interaction is the concept of knowledge creation. Ba provides a platform for advancing individual and/or collective knowledge. It is from such a platform that a transcendental perspective integrates all information needed. Ba may also be thought of as the recognition of self in all. According to the theory of existentialism, ba is a context which harbors meaning. Thus, we consider ba to be a shared space that serves as a foundation of knowledge creation. (Nonaka & Konno, p. 40)

This explanation could just as well describe an ideal for contemporary higher education institutions: serving as centers for knowledge co-creation and meaningful student transformation. However, in the educational research literature, it is the related concept of ibasho (居場所、a place to be) that has received more consideration. In a recent special issue of Educational Studies in Japan, Tanaka (2021) describes ibasho as “a place or community where people feel at home” (p.  1). Tanaka (2021) traces the use of the ibasho concept in the Japanese academic lexicon to the publication of a 1992 Ministry of Education report on truancy, and further characterizes ibasho as connected to spatial, relational, and temporal dimensions (p. 7). Tanaka (2021) also equates ibasho with empowerment and identity construction, positing one definition of ibasho as “a place where one can be oneself” (p. 10). This gloss of the concept points to the peace of mind, or anshinkan (安心感) that is highly valued in Japanese society, and usually characterized by a physical, temporal and relational place to be and grow in the socio-material order of everyday life. Such an understanding of ibasho echoes Hofstede’s (2021) conception of “knowing one’s place” as the central characteristic of life in a collectivist society, and this has parallels to the word uchi, which can carry meanings of “home,” “self,” and “in-group.” Beyond this common use of place metaphors to indicate social positionality, considerations of physical place have often informed understanding of Japanese youth culture in the past. For example, place has been juxtaposed with mobility and the limits and affordances of available communication technologies, as in Ito (2005), which explored “the structuring force of place” (p. 134). Ito’s (2005) study was set amidst the emergence of youth mobile phone use in Japan when the devices were cast as power tools through which youth could mitigate the strictures of adult

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control. Ito (2005) observed that “Youth communications are regulated by peers or adults depending on place and time of day, and that access to mobile media takes a central role in managing and inflecting that control” (p. 134). In 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan, the ubiquity of smartphones meant that access to mobile communications was by no means a limiting factor for the college-aged. Conversely, in 2020 and in subsequent years, it was youth access to, and activity in certain physical places—ibasho such as college campuses—that  became highly restricted and regulated by the adults controlling Japanese society. As was the case elsewhere in the world, the move from relatively unfettered access to familiar campus physical places to prescribed participation in particular online spaces has impacted university community members’ sense of belonging. As Gravett and Ajjawi (2022) explain: Before this dramatic shift, belonging … could be contextualised through extracurricular activities (e.g., sports, culture, clubs), curricular belonging (e.g., engagement, peer friendship) and also the physical places and spaces of university campuses. With the shift online, however, these taken for granted spaces and places of belonging on campus have been displaced, and educators are increasingly preoccupied with questions pertaining to how to engage their students, how to foster a sense of community, and how to develop a sense of belonging within online and hybrid learning contexts. (p. 1386)

As I will explore below, this sudden change affected different campuses, cohorts and communities of faculty and youth in different ways, but it has undeniably altered the landscape of higher education in Japan and the dynamics of life on college campuses here.

The University Campus as Emerging Ibasho for Youth According to the most recent (2021) School Basic Survey conducted by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the number of 18-year-olds who advance to some form of tertiary education is at an historical peak of 83.8%. Further, the percentage of 18-year-olds who advanced to 4-year universities has reached 54.9.%, almost triple the advancement rate 50 years ago (MEXT, 2021, p. 5). For these youth, the four-year interval of university life exists as a transitional period between the high-pressured juken benkyo (entrance exam study) of the final year of high school and regimented full-time employment. It is traditionally a time for the construction of new identities through participation in academic and extracurricular activities and part-time work. In Japanese cultural terms, communities connected to a university campus offer students a new uchi, a sense of self that is intertwined with participation in a new in-group. Japan’s recent demographic changes and societal shifts, combined with its post-­ war economic miracle and neoliberal policies in higher education, have exerted a profound impact on the higher education sector in the country. Despite a 50%

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decrease in the 18-year-old population over the past five decades, higher education in Japan has seen rapid expansion to serve a wider range of students in the same period. This has been driven by a consistent increase in university enrollment rates and a heightened demand for higher education, which has resulted in an increase in capacity amidst growing competition for students. The establishment of numerous new two and four-year colleges, as well as a diverse market of other post-secondary educational institutions and pre-professional training schools, has been facilitated by Japan’s economic success and its embrace of neoliberal policies in higher education. As a result, some lower-level universities are now facing increased competition for students from within a shrinking pool of 18-year-old high school graduates. A survey conducted by Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO, 2022) during the 2020–2021 academic year revealed that 59.2% of four-year university students in Japan lived at home and commuted to campus. Thirty-four percent reported living in apartments, whereas just 6.8% reported living in university dormitories (JASSO, 2022, p. 4). For the almost 60% of students who attend university while living at home, the campus can be seen to function as a second place of belonging, and for those who live in dormitories or nearby apartments it could serve as a primary ibasho. However, in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, Japanese university campuses came under criticism for their drab and functional aesthetics, lack of relaxation space, and general inability to encourage students to stay around for anything other than classes and club activities (Berman et al., 2022, p. 5). Berman et al. (2022) point to a 2017 Science Council of Japan white paper that calls for the construction of university campuses in Japan which “… integrate the surrounding public” and “… provide enriching informal environments, such as hallways, parks and common spaces, for interdisciplinary exchange between students and professors, and places where students can share experiences and promote friendships” (p. 5). The “sticky campus” concept—which has informed campus design at Western universities for almost two decades—values informal learning spaces such as those known as learning commons. Incorporating such spaces into campus design had gained some popularity in Japanese higher education in recent years amidst a growing emphasis on collaborative learning and lifelong education (Donkai et al., 2011). However, as Berman et al. (2022) note: “… with the arrival of COVID-19, attention was diverted to greater investment in resources and digital infrastructure to support the shift to online learning” (p. 7). My own university was one of those in Japan which implemented a campus designs consistent with the “sticky campus” ethos. Open learning spaces, lounges, a café, and other inviting amenities designed to compete with off-campus facilities have become available as investments were made in wi-fi and other IT infrastructure upgrades as well. Universities with sticky campuses were thus well-positioned to become essential places, or ibasho, for Japan’s youth in the 18-21 year-old bracket. Just as the pandemic began, the steps that many campuses had taken towards being more porous and open to their surrounding communities were beginning to offer opportunities for students to develop more public personas as well.

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Displacement and Change The responses of Japan’s higher education institutions to the COVID-19 pandemic—which continues to shape university life at this time (February 2023)—have been particularly hard on university undergraduates (Shiratori et al., 2022). After 3 years, evidence of the severe impact of pandemic policies on university communities and campus life around the world has begun to accumulate. And though there are many commonalities in the way that university students have fared in different places, there are also important ways that societal and cultural responses have differed, causing harm to some while also affording new opportunities to others (see, e.g., Babbar & Gupta, 2022). The fact that so many university students in Japan lived at home during the pandemic may have blunted feelings of isolation that were characteristic of the pandemic’s effects on university students elsewhere. But for those living away from home, and for first-year students attempting to establish new identities and peer groups, the restrictions that were imposed were quite damaging. At the end of April 2020, The National Federation of University Co-operative Associations (NFUCA)—an umbrella organization of university cooperatives— conducted a national questionnaire-based survey of student life focused on the impacts of the pandemic on university students across Japan. The organization would conduct similar surveys three more times over the next 2 years, and though the surveys may lack statistical significance because of a lack of student verification and other sampling limitations, they nevertheless offer a valuable record of student concerns during the pandemic. The initial survey—conducted online via university websites and the organization’s homepage—drew 35,542 responses. It included 56 multiple choice questions and a final question that allowed students to freely express their thoughts and feelings about the state of their university lives. As might be expected given the sudden disruption students were experiencing to their university lives or transitions to that life, the NFUCA survey revealed that students were experiencing a very high degree of stress and anxiety. Responses to various questions told of very broad frustration and anxiety among respondents stemming from their sudden exile from campus spaces, the transition to ERT, and financial concerns related to their part-time jobs and searches for full-time employment after graduation. Though the NFUCA surveys collected demographic information, the published reports did not parse results by gender, student cohort, or any other characteristics. However, answers to individual questions indicated that approximately half of the students who completed the April 2020 survey were new first-year students, and 44% were students living alone in off-campus apartments. Some of the following comments were highlighted in a poster (published in both Japanese and English) that the NFUCA made to publicize the results: “I don’t have a real social connection and I feel anxious every day.” “I can’t get a part-time job, and I’m very worried about my finances.” “I’ve been living in a boarding house since spring. I cry every day” “I want to take face-to-face classes! Is it possible to review the academic year under this pandemic?” (NFUCA, 2020).

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One survey question which addressed first-year student concerns asked whether respondents were considering participation in clubs, circles, and other extracurricular activities. The vast majority of respondents indicated a desire to join such activities, but only 11% of students reported having done so at the end of April 2020. Another question asked how many new friends respondents had made at university. Thirty-seven percent (7669 of 20,694) of those who responded to this question chose “zero” as their answer (NFUCA, 2020). For first-year university students, the shift to online learning also coincided with their move from high school to university, and for many, from using online spaces for largely social purposes to using them for academic purposes as well. Healy (2021) notes that many students struggled to form new peer relations and academic identities during this period of upheaval, as individual identities are connected to participation in social contexts. The NFUCA surveys that were conducted during the rest of 2020 and in subsequent years garnered fewer responses and differing results for most cohorts. A strong trend back to normality was evident for all but the cohort that joined university at the start of the pandemic. As was also reported in Japan’s vernacular press, this cohort continued to suffer from feelings of isolation and hopelessness. A headline to a 2021 Asahi Shinbun article (Pandemic Survey, 2021) that summarized the 2021 NFUCA results proclaimed, “Pandemic survey finds students in college cut-­ off, alone, and depressed,” and focused on results which showed that second year students still reported a limited number of friendships, high levels of anxiety and depression, suicidal thoughts, and financial stress.

Japanese Universities as Ibasho for Sustainability Co-creation In 2020, many Japanese higher education institutions had been engaged in a slow and gradual shift towards increasing digitalization. However, the sudden shift to ERT led to a wholesale recalibration of the online-offline nexus. Further, at universities in Japan—as at those elsewhere—the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted students, professors, and administrators to reconsider what should be done locally, in physical places, and what might be better done at a distance and through a screen. Some, such as Iiyoshi (2021), have predicted that the shock of the pandemic and accompanying IT infrastructure investments will usher in a post-pandemic shift from the “C decade” of the 2010’s (characterized by collaboration, collectivity, commons, and cloud-based systems) to a “P decade” of the 2020’s where more attention is paid to personalization, preference, and prediction, and learning is more problem-based, project-based, and playable (pp. 18–19). Iiyoshi’s (2021) vision of the next decades of higher education in Japan leans heavily on the increasing use of internet communication technologies and continues to position students as consumers in a global educational marketplace. And while the trend he predicts seems somewhat inevitable, the vision Iiyoshi (2021) advances elides the p’s of physical infrastructure and place. Given the pressing

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environmental, social, and demographic issues Japan faces, a more hopeful vision might emphasize the importance of universities as places, or ibasho, for sustainability co-creation. Returning to the roles they had started to play before the pandemic, campuses might serve as hubs for ESD and local cultural development while helping to revitalize the communities within which they exist. Japan has been a global leader in the promotion and implementation of ESD at the primary and secondary school level for many years. At the tertiary level, however, ESD has advanced at a slower pace. Survey-based research conducted by Kitamura and Hoshii (2010) concluded that “a lack of internal consensus to promote ESD and shared recognition inside universities, combined with a lack of effective guidance designed to enable students to acquire cross-disciplinary perspectives” (p. 202). Though ESD has long existed on Japanese university campuses within the academic siloes of related disciplines, researchers have pointed to a need for alternatives to traditional classroom models. Dieleman and Huisingh (2006), for example, noted that ESD “requires teachers and students to become co-learners who are able to make the connections between the diverse domains of knowledge generation and knowledge application, in real life situations” (p. 840). Before COVID-19 countermeasures began to be implemented nationwide, there had been some promising signs from Japanese universities. For example, organizations such as the Japan Campus Sustainability Network (CAS-net Japan) had started to influence universities to take ESD more seriously. CAS-net Japan was established in 2014 to promote campus sustainability at universities across Japan. The organization—which models itself on partner organizations such as the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) in North America— aims to “contribute to more environmentally sustainable higher educational institutions, governmental institutions and private companies through promoting campus sustainability at Japanese universities and establishing cooperative relationships with campus sustainability networks overseas” (About Us, para 3). CAS-Net Japan has worked to share and disseminate information on best practices for campus sustainability, promoted the adoption of a campus sustainability assessment framework, and partnered with universities and campus sustainability organizations overseas to advance sustainability as an organizing theme in higher education. Due in part to these efforts, and in line with trends at many Western universities, the discourse of campus sustainability was gaining prominence at many universities in Japan before the pandemic (see, e.g., Hourdequin & Tani, 2017). Since ESD is now an increasingly mainstream discourse that pervades curricula and campus practices at many Western universities, it is natural that efforts in this area would be stepped up on Japanese university campuses in connection with the well-­documented push towards internationalization of Japan’s higher education sector. For their part, public universities—which became independent administrative entities in 2004—have become eager to attract and retain top talent as they compete for global human resources in transnational university rankings (Green, 2016). Some private universities—which are granted state support based on their

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educational missions—have followed suit as well, as they work to appeal to the communities within which they exist, and to broader national and international audiences. Trencher et al. (2017) have suggested that university-based education for sustainable development (ESD) should “include trans- and interdisciplinary learning, problem-based learning, values-based learning, experiential learning and social learning” (p. 193). Specifically, they called for the “co-creation of transformational knowledge” though direct university engagement with community stakeholders (p. 193). One example of faculty-driven sustainability co-creation was demonstrated in a large-scale local development project conducted by over forty University of Tokyo faculty members in the city of Kashiwa (University of Tokyo, 2015). In this case, various research projects addressed issues related to climate change and Japan’s super-aging society on the local scale where the research institution has a campus. In this example, the university campus served as a platform for sustainability co-creation. Ansell et  al. (2022) describe such platforms as “… relatively permanent, yet flexible, infrastructures that provide knowledge, resources, and organizational templates that local conveners can use when constructing, adapting, and multiplying temporary arenas for the cocreation of novel solutions” (p. 57). And though projects like those implemented at the University of Tokyo’s Kashiwa campus can be viewed as successful by many measures, an expert review found a lack of “explicit strategies to involve large numbers of students” (Trencher et al., 2017, p. 199). The absence of broad-based student and community participation in sustainability co-creation at universities in Japan is understandable. Whereas many universities campuses in Europe and North America house offices that focus explicitly on campus and local sustainability— employing student interns, holding awareness-raising activities, and working to inculcate environmentally sustainable practices and values across the campus and curriculum—such offices of sustainability remain largely absent from university campuses in Japan. This leaves the task of spearheading sustainability co-creation to faculty initiatives such as the one discussed above.

 Campus-Based Sustainability Co-creation A Project Interrupted The construction of a new campus—completed in 2018—by the private university where I work offers one example of the sticky campus trend in Japan, and the potential campus design offers university campuses to function as ibasho for local sustainability co-creation. The campus brought together five faculties—including my own Faculty of Foreign Studies—from two different campuses. The new campus included improved campus sustainability systems, facilities, and facilities designed with many affordances for informal learning: large open learning commons spaces (Fig.  1), a cafeteria and café open to the public, and many other inviting

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Fig. 1  A learning commons space at the author’s university, circa 2018

multipurpose spaces that offered opportunities for relaxation, socialization, and collaboration. The same academic year that my faculty moved to this new campus, a games and learning-focused research group (Tokoha Game Lab) that I led was awarded a grant to pursue a project entitled “Participatory Game Design as Education for Sustainable Development.” Our project has aimed to use participatory game design as a way to engage students, faculty, and community members in sustainability co-creation across disciplinary, cultural, generational, and other barriers. As its name suggests, participatory design is an approach that seeks broad-based participation, discussion, and input from various stakeholders in design processes. We aimed to make table-­ top board games that would serve our community not just as products, but also through the involvement of members in design processes. This approach seemed to align well with an ethos of sustainability co-creation, as we would use participatory design to engage students, faculty, and local community members through various hands-on workshops, game jams, maker-space events, and other activities. Our research group was itself a cross-disciplinary, multi-generational, and cross-­ cultural collaboration between teacher-researchers in our university’s faculties of Art & Design, Education, and Foreign Studies, and included researchers with roots in America, Japan, Thailand, and South Korea. The idea for our project grew out of many years running a university game lab while we were all co-located at one

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suburban (semi-rural) campus—a single ibasho—in a way that facilitated cross-­ disciplinary collaboration. In the first year of our project—the full academic year prior to the pandemic— we were able to begin advancing our engaged research agenda. Working with students from multiple faculties, we designed a cooperative card game called “Assistance” that allows players to explore overseas development assistance (ODA) solutions to problems represented by the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In doing this, we used our campus’ new learning commons as an effective space within which to engage with students and teachers from a neighborhood junior high school as we play-tested versions of the game, and we were also able to hold successful educational workshops with students from various university departments on our campus in which gameplay was followed by fruitful debriefing discussions about the practices and values represented in our game.

The Transformations of a University Ibasho Over the course of 2020, most universities in Japan continued to maintain distance or hybrid learning, especially at institutions in the metropoles (MEXT, 2020). However, as noted above, some regional universities—like my own—quickly shifted back to in-person learning, with distance learning mandated only during occasional spikes in local case counts, as determined by prefectural guidelines. But life on our newly built campus had changed. Students found their ibasho full of plastic barriers, body temperature scanning consoles, and hand sanitizing stations. Paper posters and persistent digital messaging implored students to practice social distancing, mokushoku (silent meals), and—during repetitive waves of rising local infections—to leave campus as soon as the day’s classes were complete. Masks— which had always been a common accessory for many in Japan during cold and flu seasons—were now required on campus. At my institution, the many new open collaborative learning spaces that had conformed to the sticky campus model were suddenly transformed to fit an adopted ethos of risk mitigation via social distancing and independent learning (Fig. 2).

Returning to Place – Adapting to Restrictions Though most faculty and students at our university seemed grateful for the administration’s strong commitment to maintaining in-person classes throughout the pandemic (while many other universities continued with distance learning), the sudden transformation of our campus from a place that encouraged face-to-face collaboration to one that extolled the virtues of social distancing has nevertheless had a chilling effect, especially during the first 2 years of the pandemic. Campus policies—which restricted and discouraged group work in public spaces like the university’s learning

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Fig. 2  The same learning space pictured above, here in early 2023

commons—were also a significant obstacle to my research group’s hands-on community collaboration project agenda. During the 2020 academic year, events that brought community members to campus were limited, and community access to the campus eateries and other spaces was revoked. However, because the university prioritized maintaining educational activities and community outreach, our campus’ community lecture series continued, with lectures being either cancelled or held online during spikes in sars-cov2 infection counts. My research group was able to hold two of three planned community collaboration events during this time, but we experienced weak community turnout and found it difficult to involve students amidst an extreme atmosphere of virus mitigation and infection cluster prevention. All of this prompted two shifts in our research group’s agenda. First, we realized that we would mainly need to work amongst ourselves to develop sustainability-­ focused board games while only involving our own students for play testing and help with off-campus community workshops when possible. Second, we decided to shift from a global issues-focused sustainability education agenda to a place-based learning approach centered on environmental and cultural characteristics of the region where our university exists. Below, I briefly describe some of these locally focused ESD initiatives that we were able to advance during the pandemic, despite various constraints.

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The Board Game FLOW At the beginning of the 2020 academic year when it became clear that continuing to closely involve students in hands-on extracurricular game design activities would be difficult, our research team decided to work amongst ourselves in developing a cooperative board game called “FLOW.” The game, which draws upon research by Kazuo Tsuchiya (described in Hourdequin et al., 2021), simulates an historical trade economy that existed in Shizuoka prefecture during the end of the Edo period and beginning of Meiji. To make FLOW, we explored the themes and game mechanics of various commercial board games and used an iterative design process to build multiple prototypes. We settled on a cooperative game mechanism that gave differing roles and responsibilities to each player. The Japanese concept of junkan (循 環、circulation) served as a guiding principal, and success in the game was achieved by successfully balancing environmental, social, and economic risks to reach a common goal—the construction of a stone storehouse. FLOW engages players to cooperate in maintaining a healthy local economy while  mitigating various risks. By understanding the trade-offs necessary for the sustainable forestry practices simulated in the game players could experience the type of decision-making and thought processes necessary to enable a healthy and resilient riverine and sea-faring trade economy in an imagined historical setting. Despite pandemic restrictions, we have been able to workshop our game several times at off-campus venues in places close to the historical sites depicted in it. These have included multiple area elementary schools, a nearby prefectural museum of environmental history, and in a class at Waseda University in Tokyo.

 ross-Cultural Collaboration Via Animal Crossing: C New Horizons Another initiative our game lab was able to run during the pandemic involved a collaboration with a researcher in the U.K.  The project (described in detail in Hourdequin & Hughes, 2022) involved students at our university meeting weekly to develop an island in the Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The process of developing a virtual island was used as a vehicle for rich discussions about local values and the meaning of sustainability. Because the university’s Foreign Language Study Support Center had a large television monitor and tables fitted with plexiglass barriers, two to five students and one instructor were able to meet on a weekly basis over the course of an entire semester for island development play and debriefing sessions. At the end of the term, students met with a collaborator in the U.K. to introduce their island and to discuss the sustainable development values represented therewithin while learning about the values and practices evident in virtual islands developed in the U.K. during the same time period.

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Digital Storytelling About Traditional Rural Living As the pandemic entered its third year, another grant-funded initiative that our game-lab undertook involved third-year students from the university’s Faculty of Foreign Studies in an exploration of rural living in our region. In this case, we secured a community innovation grant from a nearby city from which many of our students commute by train. We gathered a highly motivated group of students from this city and worked with them to plan multiple visits to an experiential learning center  called  Suishamura (水車むら、Waterwheel Village). Students were thus able to experience traditional practices of rural living that were common in the past such as chopping firewood, catching river fish, and cooking on a wood stove and open hearth. The students were also tasked with the challenge of planning, recording, and editing a mini documentary about the facility and the values that it extolls. This project—which we ran during the 2022–2023 academic year—specifically targeted third-year students because they were most significantly impacted by the onset of the pandemic during their transition to university. Many of these students were also disheartened by their inability to study abroad during their first 3 years of university, and it was with this in mind that we designed a project that involved sharing traditional local culture in English with a global audience. With our college campus still occupied by an atmosphere of virus mitigation vigilance, we also wanted to help students connect with each other in natural off-campus settings. The project afforded students multiple visits to the rural learning center with a mission of sharing what they learned about rural living in Japanese and English via social media.

 he Future of Japan’s University Campuses as Ba and Ibasho T for Sustainability Co-creation Japan has faced numerous interrelated sustainability challenges in recent years, including an aging population, continuing urbanization, decreasing food self-­ sufficiency, and declining regional communities. The role of universities in addressing these challenges is a topic of ongoing discussion and reflection that was interrupted by the emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated policies that transformed informal learning spaces on campus in the name of mitigating the spread of infection. Though Japanese higher education has been slower in its adoption of neoliberal ideology, in the years leading up to and through the pandemic, Japan’s higher education sector has nevertheless become increasingly focused on global higher education market competitiveness. The corporatization of national universities in 2004 was one example of this trend, and the licensing of many new universities to compete for a shrinking population of 18-year-olds is another. However, this approach is at odds with the idea of sustainability, which requires a longer-term perspective and a commitment to preserving and enhancing the well-being of local communities

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and the future generations who will inhabit them. By moving away from this narrow focus on efficiency and instead serving as local commons for knowledge co-­ creation, universities may be able to help revitalize communities and contribute to the creation of a more sustainable future. After pandemic restrictions are fully lifted in Japan, one way that universities can more effectively contribute to sustainability co-creation is by again embracing the value of the campus as a ba, a “shared space that serves as a foundation of knowledge creation,” as described by Nonaka and Konno (1998). This concept is rooted in the idea that knowledge is not created in isolation, but rather through collaborative processes that are necessarily shaped by the interactions of individuals within a particular time and place. The idea of reclaiming the campus as a ba would also help supplant destructive neoliberal values of cut-throat competition and consumerism that have begun to grip Japan’s higher education sector. Norberg-Hodge (2019) and many others have argued that global capitalism’s unsustainable obsessions with profits and unlimited economic growth have led to a homogenization of cultures and the destruction of local communities and environments. Even the United Nation’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) emphasize economic growth as an important goal without reference to limits and carrying capacity. The pandemic showed the world the vulnerability of global supply chains and pointed to the value of regional self-­sufficiency in the form of local production for local consumption—for self-sustaining communities that trade with each other for those things that they need but cannot produce themselves. By embracing the value of the university campus as a ba for sustainability co-­ creation and an essential ibasho for youth, universities might again begin to foster a sense of community and collaboration that transcends the isolated and competitive mentality associated with a global higher education market-place. Through this process, students, faculty, and staff can work together to create knowledge that is not only grounded in rigorous academic research, but also reflects the diversity of perspectives and experiences of individuals within the university and the community within which it is set. In doing so, universities can help to promote a more equitable and sustainable future by empowering individuals and groups to create knowledge that is relevant to the needs and aspirations of local communities. Acknowledgement  Some of the research described in this chapter was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 18K02372.

References Ando, S. (2021). University teaching and learning in a time of social distancing: A sociocultural perspective. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 31(1–4), 435–448. Ansell, C., Sørensen, E., & Torfing, J. (2022). Building cocreation platforms. In Co-creation for sustainability (pp. 57–72). Emerald Publishing Limited.

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Babbar, M., & Gupta, T. (2022). Response of educational institutions to COVID-19 pandemic: An inter-country comparison. Policy Futures in Education, 20(4), 469–491. https://doi. org/10.1177/14782103211021937 Berman, N., Mehta, D., & Matsuo, A. (2022). The sticky campus in Japan: Re-evaluating campus spaces (pp. 1–10). Globalisation. Blommaert, J. (2013). Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscapes: Chronicles of complexity (Vol. 18). Multilingual Matters. Dieleman, H., & Huisingh, D. (2006). Games by which to learn and teach about sustainable development: Exploring the relevance of games and experiential learning for sustainability. Journal of Cleaner Production, 14(9–11), 837–847. Donkai, S., Toshimori, A., & Mizoue, C. (2011). Academic libraries as learning spaces in Japan: Toward the development of learning commons. The International Information & Library Review, 43(4), 215–220. Gravett, K., & Ajjawi, R. (2022). Belonging as situated practice. Studies in Higher Education, 47(7), 1386–1396. Green, H. S. (2016). Top global soft power? Japanese higher education and foreign policy goals (p. 60). Toyo University Repository for Academic Resources. Healy, S. (2021). COVID-19 pandemic-influenced changes to Japanese university student digital identity. JALT Postconference Publication, 2020(1), 356. https://doi.org/10.37546/ JALTPCP2020-­44 Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T., & Bond, A. (2020). The difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. Educause Review, https://er.educause.edu/ articles/2020/3/the-­difference-­between-­emergency-­remote-­teaching-­and-­online-­learning. Hofstede, G. (2021). The 6 dimensions model of national culture by Geert Hofstede. Geert Hofstede. Retrieved February 10, 2023, from https://geerthofstede.com/ culture-­geert-­hofstede-­gert-­jan-­hofstede/6d-­model-­of-­national-­culture/ Hourdequin, P., & Hughes, B. (2022). Places, people, practices, and play: Animal crossing new horizons here and there. Ludic Language Pedagogy, 4, 71–94. Hourdequin, P., & Tani, S. (2017). The role of campus sustainability discourse on the websites of four Japanese universities. Language and Ecology, 3(2), 1–17. Hourdequin, P., Tsuchiya, K., & Tashiro, N. (2021). Designing an historical river ecology game as education for sustainable development. In Green 2020: Ridge to reef international conference on watershed management and coastal conservation (pp. 143–155). Iiyoshi, T. (2021). Kōtō Kyōiku 2050 ni muketa tenbō Nihon no daigaku ni okeru kyōiku-teki ICT katsuyō no suishin o meguru kanōsei to kadai [Higher education 2050: The use of information and communication Technologies in Japanese Higher Education]. Japanese Journal of Higher Education Research, 24, 11–31. https://doi.org/10.32116/jaher.24.0_11 Ito, M. (2005). Mobile phones, Japanese youth, and the re-placement of social contact. In Mobile communications: Re-negotiation of the social sphere (pp. 131–148). Springer. https://doi.org/1 0.1007/1-­84628-­248-­9_9 Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO). (2022, March). Reiwa 2-nendo gakusei seikatsu chousa, koutou senmon gakkou-sei seikatsu chousa, senshuugakkou-sei seikatsu chousa Jasso. Retrieved December 27, 2022, from https://www.jasso.go.jp/statistics/gakusei_chosa/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2022/03/16/data20_all.pdf Kitamura, Y., & Hoshii, N. (2010). Education for sustainable development at Universities in Japan. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 11(3), 202–216. https://doi. org/10.1108/14676371011058514 Maraldo, J. C. (2019). Nishida Kitarō. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2019). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2019/entries/nishida-­kitaro/ Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). (2020). Shinkatakoronauirusu kansensho wo fumae ta daigaku tō no jugyō no jisshijōkyō. [Implementation of classes at universities amidst the new coronavirus infection] Retrieved from https://www.mext.go.jp/content/20200605-­mxt_kouhou01-­000004520_6.pdf

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Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). (2021). Gakkō kihon chōsa  – reiwa san-nen-dō [School Basic Survey]. Retrieved from https://www.mext.go.jp/ content/20211222-­mxt_chousa01-­000019664-­1.pdf National Federation of University Co-operatives Associations (NFUCA). (2020) Urgent! Quick response to the Questionnaire for University Students and Graduate Students. Retrieved from https://www.univcoop.or.jp/en/report/committee03.html Nonaka, I., & Konno, N. (1998). The concept of “Ba”: Building a foundation for knowledge creation. California Management Review, 40(3), 40–54. Norberg-Hodge, H. (2019). Local is our future: Steps to an economics of happiness. Local futures. Shiratori, Y., Ogawa, T., Ota, M., Sodeyama, N., Sakamoto, T., Arai, T., & Tachikawa, H. (2022). A longitudinal comparison of college student mental health under the COVID-19 self-restraint policy in Japan. Journal of Affective Disorders Reports, 8, 100314. Tanaka, H. (2021). Development of the ibasho concept in Japanese education and youth work: Ibasho as a place of refuge and empowerment for excluded people. Educational Studies in Japan, 15, 3–15. The Asahi Shimbun. (2021, August 29). Pandemic survey finds students in college cut off, alone, depressed: The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan news and analysis. https://www.asahi. com/ajw/articles/14417200 Trencher, G., Nagao, M., Chen, C., Ichiki, K., Sadayoshi, T., Kinai, M., et al. (2017). Implementing sustainability co-creation between universities and society: A typology-based understanding. Sustainability, 9(4), 594. University of Tokyo. (2015). Urban reformation program for realization of a “bright” low-carbon society. Final Report. University of Tokyo. Dr. Peter Hourdequin is a teacher and educational researcher in the Faculty of Foreign Studies at Tokoha University in Shizuoka, Japan. His research and teaching focus on cross-cultural communication, sustainability, and place-based learning. In his most recent projects, he has collaborated with students and colleagues in various disciplines to create table-top board games and other media that afford opportunities for deepening local knowledge and sustainability co-creation.  

Part II

The Myth of Homogeneity: Ignorance, Discrimination, and Prejudice Towards Soto

Education, Cultural Capital, and Social Class Reproduction Yoko Yamamoto

Abstract  Education has played a fundamental role in people’s long-held view of Japan as a meritocratic society. The post-war educational system aimed to reduce educational inequality associated with family backgrounds. However, economic changes over the last few decades brought societal and media attention to disparities, especially educational inequalities related to family backgrounds. This chapter aims to present students’ educational opportunities and experiences related to family socioeconomic status (SES) in Japan. The chapter first provides an overview of Japanese education and educational outcomes associated with SES. Then it highlights theories that explain academic gaps depending on SES. Particularly, it focuses on economic and cultural capital as elements of creating different educational opportunities and experiences. This chapter does not bring a deficit-oriented view and does not conceptualize lower-SES families as lacking capital. The chapter also illuminates strengths displayed in lower-SES families and the meanings of education in community and life contexts. After describing the intersection of gender and SES and the impact of COVID-19 on students’ educational process, the chapter concludes with a discussion about implications and future directions. Keywords  Educational inequality · Parent involvement · Social class · Cultural capital · Japanese education

Education, Cultural Capital, and Social Class Reproduction Education has played a fundamental role in a long-held view of Japan as a meritocratic society. The post-war educational system aimed to reduce educational inequality associated with family backgrounds (Cummings, 1980; Kariya, 1995). Y. Yamamoto (*) Department of Education, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_16

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During that time, increased numbers of people viewed educational success as a tool for upward social mobility (Kariya, 1995; Sato, 2000). The belief that individual effort and not family backgrounds or social origins determine educational attainment became prevalent. Kariya (1995) calls post-war Japan a period of “mass education society (taishuu kyouiku shakai),” in which aspirations for educational attainment have rapidly grown. The economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s also enhanced educational values. It reduced the gap in income distribution per household compared to other countries, and socioeconomic differences associated with rural/urban gaps decreased (Hirota, 1999). Many families experienced a better lifestyle resulting from increased employment opportunities and better income (Hirota, 1999). A survey conducted in 1995 showed that over 90% of Japanese viewed themselves as middle class, ranging from lower to upper middle class (Hara, 2000). However, the collapse of the bubble economy and prolonged economic recession since the 1990s has challenged the view of Japan as an equal and meritocratic society. Increased part-time or contract-based jobs without economic securities challenged the long-practiced lifetime employment, and the poverty rate increased (Abe, 2008; Yamamoto, 2015). These economic changes brought societal and media attention to disparities, especially educational inequalities associated with family backgrounds. In 2000, a sociologist, Sato (2000), published a book titled “Unequal society, Japan: Goodbye all middle-class society” to point out the myth of Japanese society as egalitarian by revealing the significant impact of family socioeconomic status (SES) on educational and occupational attainment. Two years later, Kariya et al. (2002) published a cutting-edge research finding that demonstrated increasing academic gaps among fifth graders depending on students’ family backgrounds and home environments. Although there have always been significant associations between family SES and students’ educational outcomes in Japan (Hashimoto, 2006; Hirota, 1999), over the last two decades media and policymakers have paid increasing attention to educational discrepancies (kakusa) and inequality (fubyoudou) resulting from the growing poverty rate and income gap. This chapter aims to present students’ educational opportunities and experiences related to family socioeconomic status (SES) in Japan. The chapter first provides an overview of Japanese education and educational outcomes associated with SES.  Then it highlights theories that explain academic gaps depending on SES. Particularly, it focuses on economic and cultural capital as elements of creating different educational opportunities and experiences. This chapter does not bring a deficit-oriented view and does not conceptualize lower-SES families as lacking capital or being deprived. The chapter also illuminates strengths displayed in lower-­ SES families and the meanings of education in community and life contexts. After describing the intersection of gender and SES and the impact of COVID-19 on students’ educational processes, the chapter concludes with a discussion about implications and future directions.

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Is Japanese Education Egalitarian or Unequal? Japanese Education and Students’ Achievement The current Japanese educational system has 9 years of compulsory elementary and middle school education followed by 3 years of non-compulsory general and vocational high schools. After high school, there is an option to pursue junior college, mainly established for women, or a four-year university. Students can also pursue a vocational training school instead of college after graduating high school. Attendance at a preschool or kindergarten is not mandatory in Japan, but more than 97% of children attend a preprimary center or preschool for a few years before beginning first grade (Omameuda & Mitani, 2021). Although it is not mandatory, attendance at preprimary centers and preschools for children aged three to five has become free of charge since 2019. High school education is not compulsory in Japan. Yet, the rate of students who pursue high school after graduating middle school has been more than 98% (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; hereafter MEXT, 2021a). Japanese education has received much attention from scholars outside Japan since the 1970s. Japanese students have demonstrated consistently high academic performance in international exams, such as TIMSS (The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment). In 2013, Japanese adults displayed the highest levels of proficiency in numeracy and literacy across all countries participating in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) survey (OECD, 2013). Moreover, economic growth experienced during the 1970s and 1980s motivated scholars in other countries to examine how Japanese schools foster the nation’s human capital, a dedicated and competent workforce, in a society with limited resources (Cummings, 1980). To find key elements explaining their academic achievement, researchers investigated how Japanese students are socialized and educated at home and school, from preschool to high school (e.g., Hess & Azuma, 1991; Lewis, 1995; Stevenson & Stigler, 1992; Stevenson et al., 1986). Various early studies highlighted Japanese education as a successful and egalitarian model (Cummings, 1980; Lewis, 1995; Stevenson & Stigler, 1992; Stevenson et al., 1986). Cross-cultural researchers have shown that the nationally administered educational system, federally administered funding, and standardized curricula and instructions help to reduce the quality gaps across public schools (Cummings, 1980; Stevenson & Stigler, 1992). Elementary schools usually have no tracking systems or ability groupings that differentiate students’ contents or levels of learning. Students often spend time and learn in small groups of students with different learning abilities and attitudes (Holloway & Yamamoto, 2003; Lewis, 1995; Stevenson et  al., 1986; Tsuneyoshi, 2008). Scholars have also illuminated culturally unique values and practices that facilitate Japanese students’ learning and educational processes. For example, Japanese cultural beliefs place a high value on education and emphasize efforts to develop

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effort-oriented attitudes toward learning (Holloway, 1988; Stevenson & Stigler, 1992; Tsuneyoshi, 2008; Yamamoto & Satoh, 2019). Japanese teachers and parents tend to believe that effort, not natural ability, is the major determinant of students’ academic outcomes (Holloway, 1988; Yamamoto & Satoh, 2019). Teachers also often strive to improve their teaching practices. In addition to standardized pre-­ service teacher training, informal yet widespread practices called lesson study (jyugyou kenkyuu) provide teachers collaborative opportunities to plan, teach, observe, reflect on, and discuss each other’s lessons. These practices help teachers, especially novice teachers, improve their teaching skills and construct coherent instruction across classrooms (Lewis et  al., 2019; Shimizu & Takada, 2016). These cultural beliefs and practices were found to contribute to providing relatively equal educational opportunities to students within the nation.

Socioeconomic Differences in Education However, like in other countries, family Social Economic Status (SES) has been a powerful and consistent factor associated with students’ academic outcomes in Japan (Aramaki, 2000; Hashimoto, 2006; LeTendre, 1996; Shimizu & Takada, 2016; Yamamoto & Brinton, 2010). For example, there has been a significant difference in attendance in four-year universities depending on family SES.  Although Japan is often viewed as an “educational credential society (gakureki shakai),” where educational attainment is likely to increase occupational opportunities and future income, about half of the high school graduates do not attend a four-year university. The enrollment rate in four-year university, including those entering after a gap year (rounin), has dramatically increased from approximately 30% (43% including 2-year college) in 1994 to 50% in 2009. However, the rate remained between 50% and 55% from 2009 to 2022 (MEXT, 2021b). In 2022, the four-year university enrollment rate among high school graduates, including those with a gap year (rounin), was about 55% (59%, including enrollment in junior college). SES has been consistently and significantly associated with college attendance (Matsuoka, 2019; Sato, 2000; Yamamoto & Brinton, 2010). For example, the 2015 Social Stratification and Mobility (SSM) survey shows that 80% of adults in their 20s with a college-educated father, compared to 25% of adults in their 20s with a non-college-educated father, graduated from a four-year university (Matsuoka, 2019). In addition to college attainment, families’ SES is strongly associated with students’ academic achievement. Students from higher-SES backgrounds tend to demonstrate higher academic performance, such as in math and Japanese language arts, than students from lower-SES backgrounds from early elementary years (Matsuoka, 2019; Nakamura, 2019). Comparative studies reveal that the association between SES and adolescents’ academic performance is stronger in Japan than the average of OECD countries (Aramaki, 2016). SES remains significant even after controlling for the quality of schools (Baker et al., 2002). Socioeconomic gaps tend to be more salient within schools during elementary and middle school years, especially

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outside of metropolitan cities (Aramaki, 2016; Ochanomizu University, 2018). These studies suggest a powerful role of family resources and processes in students’ educational experiences, beyond the quality of education provided in Japanese schools. SES is also significantly associated with students’ learning attitudes and academic motivation, especially as children grow older (Kariya et al., 2002; Matsuoka, 2019). Quantitative evidence demonstrates that fifth graders with more cultural and economic resources spend more hours studying outside school than students with fewer cultural and economic resources (Kariya et al., 2002). In-depth qualitative studies delineated how adolescents from different socioeconomic backgrounds construct class-related dispositions, thoughts, and beliefs that guide or hinder their learning at school. Ethnographic research demonstrated that lowerSES students often grow disinterested in school learning whereas middle-SES students begin to spend more time studying to prepare for entrance examinations during middle and high school (Slater, 2010). On the other hand, research indicates that differences associated with SES are not salient among younger students. One study which examined first graders’ views of school learning using a storycompletion method found no socioeconomic difference in their beliefs related to school learning, including the valuation placed on school learning and the perceived benefits of schooling (Yamamoto, 2020). Interviews showed that most (93%) first graders reported that they enjoyed attending elementary school (Yamamoto, 2017). The degrees of association between SES and academic achievement vary over time. Yet, evidence consistently demonstrates that SES has been a powerful factor associated with students’ academic outcomes and experiences despite Japan’s egalitarian emphasis on its educational system.

Why Are There Socioeconomic Differences? Economic Capital and Supplemental Education One of the central questions that need to be addressed by theory is why there are SES differences in students’ achievement and attainment despite Japanese education’s emphasis on egalitarian education. Families’ economic capital is one factor that significantly impacts students’ access to education and educational opportunities (Abe, 2008; LeTendre, 1996; Shimizu & Takada, 2016). Limited financial aid available for college students in Japan is likely to discourage students from low-­ income backgrounds from pursuing higher education. Abe (2008) points out that 27% of Japanese parents in a 2003 survey reported that they could not afford college education for their children. Because attending high school is not mandatory in Japan, students’ high school attendance also brings financial burdens to families, especially those with limited financial resources (Abe, 2008; Matsuoka, 2019).

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Supplementary education aiming to boost academic performance and test scores, such as tutoring and private academic schools (juku), are prevalent and play important roles in children’s academic development because test scores are used as a major and often sole assessment for high school and college admission processes (Kariya et al., 2002; Matsuoka, 2019). According to a 2007 survey collected by the MEXT, close to half of the sixth graders (45%) had attended juku (MEXT, 2008). Parents with higher SES are more likely to send their children to private academic schools or arrange for private tutors than parents from lower SES (Kariya et  al., 2002; Matsuoka, 2019; Nakamura, 2019). When children are young, higher-SES parents also are more likely to send their children to cultural and extracurricular classes (e.g., music, languages, sports) than lower-SES parents (Holloway et  al., 2008; Matsuoka, 2019). Attendance at supplementary education is highly correlated with students’ academic performance, time spent on academics outside of school, and academic motivation (Kariya et al., 2002; Matsuoka, 2019). Thus, participation in supplementary education influenced by parents’ financial resources is likely to lead to different educational opportunities and outcomes. Supplemental education maintains and exacerbates social inequalities. The impact of economic condition  on students’ educational opportunities has become more significant over the last few decades. Following the economic growth from the 1960s that led to the economic bubble in the 1980s, Japan experienced economic recession and stagnation from the 1990s which lasted for a few decades. There were changes to lifetime employment with increased part-time or contract-­ based jobs without financial securities, and the poverty rate increased (Abe, 2008). Children’s relative poverty rate increased over the last three decades from 10.9% in 1985 to 14% in 2000, higher than the average among OECD countries, and recorded 16.3% in 2012, the highest rate in Japan (Abe, 2008). Around 2000, Japanese parents’ aspirations for their children’s college education dropped, especially among parents from lower-SES backgrounds (Abe, 2008; Benesse Educational Research and Development Institute, 2015; Yamamoto, 2015). Due to economic stagnation, the collapse of lifelong employment, and diversified opportunities, parents, especially those with limited resources, might have questioned the benefits of college education in their children’s future occupational opportunities and economic prospects.

Cultural Capital and Social Class Reproduction Sociologists often draw from a theory of social class reproduction to explain SES differences in educational processes. In particular, Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) underscored the importance of cultural capital possessed by middle- to higher-SES families. According to this theory, financial resources do not automatically provide advantages to students from higher-SES backgrounds. Financial resources must be effectively “activated” through parents’ cultural capital, including skills,

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experiences, and knowledge related to education (Lareau, 2000). For example, middle-­class parents tend to be more involved in their children’s education by initiating contact with teachers, monitoring their children’s education, or providing indirect and direct support (Kataoka, 2018; Lareau, 2000; Matsuoka, 2019; Yamamoto, 2015). Social class reproduction theorists argue that, ironically, the role of school institutions is to reproduce the mainstream culture, such as norms and expectations possessed by privileged people. Thus, high- and middle-SES parents tend to know the expectations held by schools, feel more comfortable and efficacious in supporting their children’s education, and become involved in their children’s education in ways favored by school institutions in tacitly understood manners (Bourdieu, 1987; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Lareau, 2000; Yamamoto, 2015). This theory developed in France initially focused on high-brow cultural capital, such as literature, classical music, and art valued and rewarded in French educational processes (Bourdieu, 1987; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). They argued that students who had such forms of cultural capital are advantaged in schools because teachers are likely to evaluate them positively. One may question the validity and utility of the cultural capital theory in the Japanese context. Because the Japanese educational system places greater emphasis on test scores in assessing students’ academic performance and school admissions, teachers’ subjective views may impact students’ educational outcomes less. Moreover, because collectivism and mass culture are prevalent, signaling high-brow culture may not be appreciated in Japan as much as in France. Especially in Japan, where meritocracy is strongly emphasized, investment in educational activities that are tightly connected with school curricula is more valued by parents as an instrumental way to further their children’s academic success (Hirota, 1999; Kariya, 1995; Yamamoto, 2015). Cultural capital, such as literacy activities, may bring more human capital-­ enhancing or instrumental values, such as facilitating cognitive skills, than symbolic values in Japan. Engagement in music and activities may promote cognitive or linguistic skills, enjoyment, and familiarity with such activities. There are strong associations between SES and children’s literacy activities (Matsuoka, 2019; Yamamoto et al., 2006). Yet, it is unclear whether familiarity with literacy and cultural activities influences Japanese teachers’ evaluations of students. Over the last few decades, scholars in various countries have extended the notion of cultural capital to adapt it to the country’s social and educational contexts. For example, Lareau (2003) demonstrated that acquiring skills, such as verbally expressing and articulating their thoughts and ideas and confidently negotiating their needs with authorities, is a form of cultural capital that brings advantages to students in the U.S. Some argue that acquiring cosmopolitanism, such as being familiar with foreign cultures, especially Western culture, and acquiring English language skills, is a form of cultural capital that brings advantages to academic trajectories in East Asia, including Japan (Igarashi & Saito, 2014). Being cosmopolitan brings aesthetic value in a society striving for global significance. Because English is a core academic subject in addition to math and Japanese language arts in Japan, acquiring English language skills can also bring instrumental value to students’ educational processes. The valuation of cosmopolitanism legitimizes unequal educational

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processes because experiences with Western cultures and interactions with multinational people, which are often associated with SES, heavily influence its acquisition (Igarashi & Saito, 2014).

Habitus and Parental Aspirations Bourdieu (1987) also developed the notion of habitus (individuals’ dispositions, values, tastes, and attitudes), that functions subconsciously. Individuals acquire habitus in childhood through socialization and act, value, or expect in a particular manner when reacting to specific situations. According to this notion of habitus, an individual’s values on education, aspiration, and effort are dispositions reproduced from generation to generation. Under this theory, parental aspirations and expectations are conceptualized as conscious and unconscious processes reflecting class-­ based tastes, norms, and expectations. Middle-class parents’ higher aspirations of their children’s educational attainment align with the expectations of educational institutions that generally employ middle-class standards (Kataoka, 2018; Lareau, 2000; Yamamoto, 2015). However, studies demonstrate that in many countries, parents aspire for their children’s educational attainment regardless of SES (Lareau, 2000; National Women’s Education Center, 2007). Japanese parents tend to hold lower expectations of their children’s educational attainment than parents in other countries. In one international survey, Japanese parents demonstrated lower educational expectations than parents in France, South Korea, Thailand, and the United States (National Women’s Education Center, 2007). While more than 70% of the parents in these countries aspired to a college education or beyond for their children, less than half (47%) of Japanese parents did so. More recent studies have also presented a wide variation in maternal aspiration for their children’s college attendance, ranging from 53% to 78% (Benesse, 2015; Holloway, 2010; Nakamura, 2019; Yamamoto & Hosokawa, 2017). These findings may seem contradictory to previous studies demonstrating Japanese parents’ placing education as a central focus of school-aged children’s lives and high standards for academic achievement (Aramaki, 2016; Stevenson & Stigler, 1992). A large socioeconomic gap is one of the most significant factors explaining Japanese parents’ relatively low educational aspirations on average (Hirota, 1999; Matsuoka, 2019; Nakamura, 2019; Yamamoto & Hosokawa, 2017). There is a significantly positive association between parents’ aspirations for their children’s college education and SES.  For example, a survey conducted with urban and rural parents with a child aged 3 to 18 demonstrated that 94.5% of higher-SES parents and 33.3% of lower-SES parents hoped their children would attend four-year university (Kataoka, 2018). Other research also shows different degrees of parental aspiration depending on families’ SES measured using family income, parents’ educational levels, fathers’ occupations, or a combination of them (Holloway, 2010; Yamamoto & Hosokawa, 2017). These findings are unique to Japanese contexts compared to other developed countries where most parents, regardless of their

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socioeconomic backgrounds, tend to aspire for higher education for their children (National Women’s Education Center, 2007). A college education is often considered a familiar path and shared as an expectation among middle-class families, most of whom engage in a career as a company employee (Yamamoto, 2015). Kataoka (2018) proposes that children’s academic achievement is a symbol of successful parenting for the middle class and a critical path in pursuing a white-collar job. Overall, these studies demonstrate that the acquisition of cultural capital and habitus valued in the society impact students’ educational experiences. The social class reproduction theory helps us understand why there is a socioeconomic difference in children’s educational opportunities and experiences in Japan.

Beyond Deficit-Oriented Views Beliefs about meritocracy that one’s effort determines achievement often shield structural differences and challenges (e.g., economic difficulties, family responsibilities, mental health) facing low-SES students’ learning due to a lack of necessary public support. Focusing on what low-SES families “lack” or “can’t do” risks bringing deficit-oriented views without addressing structural and systemic barriers facing such families and historical and cultural contexts that created educational inequalities. Studies demonstrate that students from higher-SES backgrounds are more likely to be motivated and spend time for academic learning outside of school than students from lower-SES backgrounds (Kariya et  al., 2002; Matsuoka, 2019). However, different degrees of effort or time devoted to academic learning often  reflect structural and economic barriers due to unequal distributions of resources and a lack of adequate public support. Identifying the assets and non-traditional forms of capital possessed by lower-­ SES families and communities helps to deconstruct cultural hierarchy and the mainstream and dominant forms of cultural capital that legitimize educational inequality. Scholars began to focus on strengths and resilience found in low-SES families. For example, in her longitudinal ethnographic observations of a family whose parents did not attend college, Kinnan (2019) elaborated on warm and close mother-child relationships through spending time together, such as cooking and outdoor activities. The child spent a significant amount of time visiting grandparents or playing outside with other children in an environment where community ties were strong and appreciated. Through these experiences, the child developed interpersonal and communication skills, confidently and comfortably communicating and interacting with people from different ages and backgrounds. The mother was also involved in the PTA (Parent Teacher Association) and other groups to support her children. She used social networks to find reasonable athletic classes to compensate for limited financial resources. As the author concludes, her child-rearing model does not aim for achievement based on competition or maximizing children’s abilities. Instead, goals and values are placed on spending and appreciating happy and fun times that

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cultivate close human relationships with the community and family members. These families focus on fostering children’s healthy socio-emotional development while holistically supporting their learning and education. Kinnan’s research challenges the previous studies highlighting the importance of instilling cultural capital in lower-SES families and students to bring academic success. In general, Japanese parents place a high value on developing social and interpersonal skills, especially getting along with others (Holloway, 2010; Kataoka, 2018; Yamamoto, 2015). One recent study demonstrates that regardless of SES, Japanese parents rate being kind and empathetic as the first and being polite as the second most crucial developmental goal for their children (Kataoka, 2018). It has been demonstrated that low-SES families tend to value socioemotional development over academic development more than higher-SES families (Kataoka, 2018; Yamamoto, 2015). Studies reveal that lower-SES parents usually value education and hope their children do well at school (Kinnan, 2019; Yamamoto, 2015). However, the model of upward mobility through academic attainment may not match their ideal aiming to foster socioemotional well-being through close ties in their communities. Moreover, some parents may not perceive academic success which focuses on an individualistic goal and involves competition as compatible with important socioemotional goals, such as fostering kind hearts (Yamamoto, 2015). Values placed on human and social relations may also be associated with more stable residential patterns (as opposed to frequent transfers of salaried employees, for example). Despite economic growth and urbanization, working-class parents tend to live in a community with close social relations and spend more time with their families and in their communities than higher-SES parents (Kataoka, 2018; Kinnan, 2019). Pursuing academic attainment and employment in a large corporation, which often means leaving their communities/homes, may not seem attractive for families who value the needs of their families and communities. One study demonstrates that working-class parents often believe that acquiring vocational skills or credentials is more valuable than earning college degrees for their children’s future (Kataoka, 2018; Kinnan, 2019; Yamamoto, 2015). Accruing vocational skills may allow economic stability and cause people to engage in other commitments such as giving to their community and families. While still limited, these studies shed light on various forms of capital possessed by lower-SES communities where traditional values tend to be maintained. These studies suggest diverse meanings and purposes of education depending on socioeconomic contexts.

Gender and Socioeconomic Status The intersection between gender and SES is an important theme, especially in Japan, where gender inequality is salient. Gender inequality is especially prevalent in students’ educational opportunities and attainment in higher education in Japan. Female high school graduates’ university attendance has risen dramatically from 23% in 1995 to 50.7% in 2020 as more female students have pursued four-year

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university instead of a two-year college. However, it has never been higher than male students’ university attendance (57.7% in 2020), unlike in many other developed countries (Gender Equity Bureau Cabinet Office, 2021). A gender gap also appears in mothers’ expectations of their children’s educational attainment. A survey displays that about 85% of mothers with first graders desired a four-year college education for their sons, but only 60% did so for their daughters (Yamamoto & Watanabe, 2016). Family SES moderates the impact of gender on students’ college attainment and parents’ aspirations for their children’s education. Both men and women from higher SES backgrounds tend to pursue a college education. In contrast, men are more likely to pursue a college education than women when families’ financial resources are limited (Holloway, 2010; Yamamoto & Brinton, 2010). One study found that mothers with a four-year university degree aspire a college education for their children regardless of gender. Still, mothers with a junior college education were more likely to aspire to a college education for their sons than daughters (Yamamoto & Hosokawa, 2017). The qualitative analysis demonstrated that mothers without college education tended to downplay the role of higher education in women’s employment and instead hoped for vocational training for their daughters. However, mothers in those studies tended to value vocational education for their daughters more than their sons, regardless of SES (Yamamoto & Watanabe, 2016). Maternal expectations for their daughters’ occupations and futures have also changed due to changing economic contexts and increasing work opportunities for women over the last 20 years. In the early 2000s, many mothers with young children mentioned that they did not expect their daughters to continue their work after having children. They often expected their daughters to focus on their roles as mothers (Yamamoto, 2016). In research conducted in 2014 and 2015, mothers tended to expect their daughters to take a leave and return to work after having children. To do so, some mentioned that acquiring a license or vocational skills (e.g., nursing) would help women get a job and maintain a work-life balance after having children (Yamamoto & Hosokawa, 2017; Yamamoto & Watanabe, 2016). These narratives reflect mothers’ awareness of structural barriers facing women, especially when they have children. Despite overall changes, college-educated mothers expect their daughters to pursue a college education, while mothers without a college education tend to perceive college education as optional for their daughters (Yamamoto, 2016; Yamamoto & Hosokawa, 2017). Research on Japanese parents’ involvement in their children’s education has heavily focused on what Japanese mothers believe and do, not fathers, as gender roles tend to be distinctive in Japanese families. Ample evidence demonstrates that middle-class mothers tend to believe they are responsible for supporting their children’s education. Managing and monitoring their children’s education and daily lives to maximize their academic success is a critical part of their roles (Hirota, 1999; Yamamoto, 2015). Working-class mothers also generally emphasize their roles as mothers, but they often perceive their responsibilities to support and financially contribute to the family (Hirota, 1999; Roberts, 1994).

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Although increasing numbers of women have entered the workplace, especially as part-time or contract workers, husbands still take the role of breadwinners by working outside, while wives tend to support their family members (Ezawa, 2016; Holloway, 2010). The Japanese government has stressed the importance of fathers’ roles in raising children since 1999. Nevertheless, the dominant societal view places women taking the major, and often sole, role in raising and educating their children (Holloway, 2010; Yamamoto, 2016). The different expectations for their daughters depending on SES often reflect class-related gender roles and gender inequality persisting in Japanese society.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Educational Experiences The impact of COVID-19 on students’ academic performance and socio-emotional development has become a significant concern in many countries. At the beginning of March 2020, the Japanese government requested that all elementary, middle, and high schools across Japan be closed. Most schools continued to be completely closed for 2 to 3 months and tried to supplement student learning by using textbooks or other hard-copy materials. However, only 8% of elementary schools and 10% of middle schools employed online or virtual interactive classes (MEXT, 2020). According to a survey conducted by the MEXT, elementary schools provided other forms of learning support, including assignments to watch broadcasted TV classes (35%), videos created by the district (22%), or other digital materials (34%). However, it is unclear whether students could follow such expectations without direct interactions or guidance from teachers. Family responsibilities to support children’s learning increased during school closure. Many families went through challenges working remotely from home or increased childcare responsibilities and stress associated with financial difficulties related to COVID-19 (Kobayashi et al., 2020). It is reported that 91% of those elementary schools contacted families by phone or FAX. But 84% of the schools found it difficult to provide adequate learning support using technology, especially for students with different learning abilities. In the summer of 2020, about 95% of elementary and middle schools reduced summer vacation days and time spent on school events and non-academic activities to supplement lost classes. Several surveys reveal a gap in the amount of educational support provided to students depending on family SES during the pandemic. As found in other countries, students from higher-SES backgrounds tended to use technology more than students from lower-SES backgrounds (Kobayashi et al., 2020). Because there were no devices provided to students from school, students whose families did not possess computers at home were not able to access online resources. A survey demonstrates that 90% of families with an income of 10,000,000 yen (about $83,000) or more possess a computer or tablet compared to about 70% of families with an income of 4,000,000 yen ($33,000) or less do (Kobayashi et al., 2020). Decreased hours spent on school-related and academic learning were more salient among

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students living in poverty. One preliminary research study shows that a socioeconomic difference in students’ academic performance among sixth graders a year later was more significant in schools with more extended school closures (MEXT, 2022a). Interestingly, cross-sectional data suggest that school closure in Japan did not bring a long-term negative impact on students’ academic performance. Sixth-grade and eighth-grade students’ performances in math and Japanese language arts assessed in 2021 were not significantly different or slightly increased from those assessed in 2016 despite the fact that the former group experienced school closure in 2020 (MEXT, 2022b). It is speculated that supplemental instructions and classes provided during the summer helped students catch up with the delays they experienced. However, it is critical to note that more parents provided supplemental private education, such as juku, during the school closure. As described before, because higher-SES parents are likely to send their children to private academic classes, further research is necessary to examine a socioeconomic difference in the impact of COVID-19 on students’ long-term academic performance. Increasing research demonstrates the effects of school closure and COVID-19 on socio-emotional development, including students’ academic motivation. Further research is needed to examine whether such impact differed depending on families’ socioeconomic conditions.

Conclusion: Implications and Future Directions As in other societies, there is a strong association between students’ academic outcomes and SES in Japan. A review of research demonstrates that high-SES students tend to receive more extracurricular classes, be exposed to more literacy and cultural activities at home, and receive more educational support than lower-SES students. These studies suggest class-based patterns in educational opportunities and experiences despite Japan’s emphasis on its egalitarian educational system. However, the shared view of post-war Japanese education as egalitarian and meritocratic has discouraged educators and policymakers from paying attention to resources and processes that may create a gap in students’ academic achievement. Over the last few decades, Japan’s educational reforms have shifted toward more Western-oriented educational practices: individualized, child-driven learning and opportunities for creativity and choice (Tsuneyoshi, 2004, 2008). These reforms reflect growing urgency to foster twenty-first-century skills, such as creativity, collaboration, communication, and problem-solving skills in future generations (Zhao, 2015). However, the social reproduction theory posits that schools function to reproduce the dominant beliefs in society. Whether such educational reforms would widen gaps in students’ educational opportunities or not is a critical theme. In 2002, the Japanese government implemented an educational reform called yutori kyouiku, “relaxed education” or “low-pressure education”, to reduce academic stress, give more flexibility to students’ learning, and nurture students’ individuality and

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creativity (Tsuneyoshi, 2004). Studies demonstrate that this educational reform, with reduced school hours and content, decreased students’ overall academic performance and increased the socioeconomic gap in students’ academic performance (Kariya et al., 2002). Parents from more privileged backgrounds tended to provide additional educational opportunities to their children (Kariya et al., 2002; Yamamoto, 2015). Although there is insufficient evidence, recent research suggests similar patterns associated with SES during the school closure caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Reducing educational inequality associated with students’ backgrounds has received increasing attention in Japanese educational policies over the last 20 years. Although scholars and policymakers recognize it as crucial, it has been a challenging goal. For a long time, social class or socioeconomic status has been considered a sensitive topic in Japan. When my colleague and I conducted research in Japan in 2000, preschool directors were overly concerned about distributing the surveys that included questions about family income, parents’ occupations, and educational levels. They were concerned that these questions would make low-SES families uncomfortable, and our findings might become a source of discrimination against lower-SES children. After explaining the purposes of our research and the anonymous nature of our surveys, they helped to distribute the surveys with a condition to put those questions at the end. The strong reactions and a long discussion we had with the preschool directors showed that asking questions related to SES on surveys on children’s education could be perceived as unethical. As Kariya (2012) noted, addressing social class differences in scholastic ability or achievement became taboo, as people fear that it might lead to a sense of discrimination in children of lower backgrounds. Thus, in educational research, collecting data related to families’ SES, especially family income, has been challenging (Ishida & Slater, 2010). It is important to note that most research on SES and education has focused on academic outcomes and identified discrepancies between higher-SES and lower-­ SES students. Increasingly, studies have examined attitudes toward learning and academic motivation in relation to students’ backgrounds and available resources (Matsuoka, 2019; Nakamura, 2019). Examining diverse types of educational outcomes, such as socioemotional outcomes and non-academic skills, in association with SES, would also help us understand the effects and meanings of education in diverse community contexts.

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Buraku Issues: Changes and Challenges Christopher Bondy

Abstract  This chapter explores the changes and challenges faced by the Burakumin, the largest minority group in Japan. Though ethnically Japanese, the Burakumin, and their historical ancestors, have long been marginalized in Japan. By highlighting policies used by the Japanese state to address Buraku issues, I show that that at each opportunity to improve conditions, the state also took approaches that further perpetuated marginalization. Finally, based on a 2022 survey, I present how Buraku discrimination is viewed by young people in Japan. Keywords  Burakumin · Minority issues · Political and social movements · Prejudice Long recognized as Japan’s largest minority group, the Burakumin present an interesting lens through which we can explore the changes and challenges found in contemporary Japan. How is it a group of people who are no different from majority Japanese in the ways many marginalized populations elsewhere are marked  – Burakumin are racially and ethnically the same as majority Japanese, follow the same diverse cultural and linguistic practices as others in Japan  – are marked as different? They have long been described as an “invisible” minority group within English language scholarship (De Vos & Wagatsuma, 1966), though they are visible in their local communities and there are those who are far from invisible in their working for equality (Yoshino & Murakoshi, 1977). As this chapter will demonstrate, using the historical and contemporary experiences of the Burakumin, we can explore the challenges and changes Japan has faced. In particular, I note several points in time at which the Japanese government could have shifted policies and minimized the marginalization faced by Burakumin.

C. Bondy (*) International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_17

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However, as we shall see, at each of these moments, the Japanese state made policy choices that perpetuated the marginalization of the Burakumin. I will briefly explore the late Tokugawa and prewar history of the Burakumin before moving on to the postwar conditions and government actions that were taken in the latter part of the twentieth century. This historical summary will be exceedingly brief, for the history of marginalized populations is far more complex than I can truly address here. I leave that to the historians who are engaged in research on this  (Teraki & Kurokawa, 2019). Finally, the paper will highlight a new law to address Buraku discrimination, offer current perspectives on Buraku experiences and try to gain an understanding of some of the challenges Burakumin and Japan face going forward.

From the Mid Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries The histories of the Burakumin are far more nuanced and complex than what I highlight here. It is for the sake of situating the issues in contemporary Japan that a brief historical introduction is necessary. The marginalized populations under the Tokugawa regime and the Burakumin in the modern Japanese state were not passive participants in a system of oppression. From the mid 1800s through the lead up to the war, Burakumin repeatedly challenged the state and society in myriad ways, directly and indirectly. The groups we now consider as burakumin have as their historical antecedents a number of different groups who were on the margins of the Tokugawa social hierarchy. These groups were involved in a variety of occupations, such as tanners, butchers, gravediggers and other occupations that were, for religious and social reasons, on the margins of society. While it is tempting to attempt to draw a straight line between marginalized populations in the Tokugawa period to contemporary Burakumin, the reality is much more complex. The expansion of research by English language historians highlighting the diversity of experiences and social positioning of marginalized populations has expanded within the past decade and has brought about a reconsideration in how we consider marginalized populations historically and the Burakumin in contemporary society (Abele, 2018; Amos, 2011, 2019; Ehlers, 2018). As part of Japan’s modernizing project, Japan’s social, economic, and political systems underwent small and large changes. One of those changes that affected marginalized populations was the elimination of the status hierarchy of Samurai, Peasants, Artisans and Merchants that was dominant during the Tokugawa period (mibun seidō). Most of the population became known as “commoners” or heimin. This categorization brought opportunities under the new political system. The marginalized populations under the SPAM system were liberated under the Kaihō Rei, or Emancipation Edict that followed shortly after. This edict removed the hereditary position, and reclassified them as “new commoners,” or shin heimin. This new

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categorization brought few changes in terms of actual living conditions for many. Indeed, by referring to people as “new commoners” rather than “commoners” perpetuated a system of difference both socially and in official government documents (McCormack, 2013). In the original family registry, families were marked directly on government documents as “commoner” or “new commoner.” There were many among this “new commoner” category that found such clear marking of difference on the registry as counter to the newly embraced ideals of democracy and they protested to the government. Rather than rewriting the registries, the kanji for “new” was simply blacked out and left above the kanji for “commoner” leaving a clear indication that “something” was blacked out. Here, the government actions, rather than changing conditions faced by marginalized populations, simply presented new challenges. The family registry was now a tool for potential discrimination. Not surprisingly the discrimination against these formerly marginalized populations from the Tokugawa Era continued despite changes in terminology; changing terms rarely shifts opinions or actions. Rather than the former mark of marginalization coming primarily from occupation, it now shifted to the de facto residential segregation that the “new commoners” faced. It is this during this period that the term for Burakumin came in to play. Buraku refers to a hamlet, and those who resided there became known as the people of the hamlet, or Burakumin. The shift from the Edo era system to the constitutional monarchy presented an opportunity for change in how various social groups were treated in the new Japan. Once such change could have been for the government to provide aid for those whose were in new positions in society or whose economic livelihood was affected by the shift in socio-economic policies. The government, however, made no such effort. After having played a role in how the marginalized populations of Edo were now reclassified as “new commoners” (though still marked as different form nearly all the rest of the population), the government did not provide any aid to help with this shift. These changes and challenges then continued to leave many Burakumin marginalized, socially and economically, from the rest of society. Throughout the Meiji, Taisho in early Showa periods, Burakumin continued to be marginalized in Japanese society. This is not to suggest that Burakumin readily accepted their economic or social positions. As Neary (1989) describes, there were a number of social movements during these periods that took a variety of approaches in how to address Buraku inequality. The number of organizations and differing approaches highlights the variety of perspectives taken by Burakumin. The group that had the longest lasting impact was the Suiheisha a group that sought to bring about the most change in how the Burakumin were viewed. Their approach was to encourage a sense of pride in being Burakumin and to openly challenge discrimination where it was found. This approach was a change in the prevailing perspective taken by other groups such as the government-supported Yūwa Undō which advocated that the Burakumin themselves needed to change to fit within society (Neary, 1989). However, by the time Japan moved onto a more solid war footing in the late 1930s, these various groups were subsumed into the broader war effort.

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Postwar Changes and Challenges As Japan emerged from the war, there were many political and social changes that provided new and different opportunities for many. During the occupation there were those who encouraged a change in how the Japanese state addressed Buraku issues. Yet while it was brought up with SCAP, both SCAP officials and Japanese leaders declined to act. This was another chance for officials to address the Buraku issue, yet they did not (Buraku Issues and Japanese Occupation Documents 1999). During the longer postwar period, there were changes in how the state interacted with Burakumin, though these changes did take time and presented challenges in their own right. In the following section, I will explore two key areas that have shaped the postwar Buraku experience. One is the formation of the Buraku Liberation League (Buraku Kaihō Dōmei, or BLL) which traced much of its origin and approach from the Suiheisha. And the other is the largest policy change that affected Burakumin in the postwar period – the creation, implementation and ultimate termination of a series of laws and policies designed to aid particular Buraku communities: The Dōwa Laws. Burakumin have been mobilizing throughout Japan’s modern history and the postwar period saw this mobilization increase in number and intensity. While there were, and remain, a variety of perspectives on how to mobilize and what social and political approach to take, the most dominant organization for Burakumin has been the BLL.  The BLL has been involved in a variety of approaches to challenging Buraku discrimination, and one of its key tenets is that Burakumin should have a sense of pride in who they are and that being Burakumin is not something to hide or be ashamed of. Further, people should work to challenge discrimination whenever it is encountered. While there have been numerous challenges that Burakumin have faced in the postwar period, from individual acts of discrimination to famous cases of police and court actions against Burakumin (Davis, 2014), arguably the largest change that impacted the Burakumin in the entire postwar period was the implementation of the Dōwa Laws. In effect from 1969 to 2002, the series of laws (in large part a set of laws implemented to continue policies begun under the initial law, in place from 1969–1979), saw fundamental changes to many Buraku districts throughout the country. While many Buraku communities saw dramatic improvements (details of which I will outline below), not all saw such changes. The challenge of these laws was that in order to qualify for aid under the Dōwa Laws, communities would need to register with the government. Not all communities did so. Registering for aid under the Dōwa laws also meant that there would be an “official” government list of such communities. For a population historically marked as outsiders and having experienced the power of the state in perpetuating markers of difference, it should not come as a surprise that for some communities, a lack of trust in the government to act responsibly may have dissuaded them from participating in these policies. For those communities that did participate, there were clear changes in living conditions and opportunities.

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When viewed in their totality, these policies greatly improved the living conditions and opportunities for those within these communities. As Neary (2021) highlights, these policies were created to improve work and living conditions in specific communities, in addition to providing increased employment and educational opportunities. Educational rates increased, employment opportunities expanded, and the living conditions improved greatly (larger sized homes and smaller numbers of inhabitants), and even increased exogamous marriage (Noguchi et  al., 1998). Notably, one thing these laws did not do was to outlaw discrimination against Burakumin. There were no penalties for institutions or individuals who discriminated against Burakumin. This lack of an anti-discrimination component to the law meant that the changes that the Dōwa laws brought to the communities that received the aid and even those that did not was incomplete, leaving them with further challenges. Again, there was an opportunity for the government to take a leading role in truly addressing Buraku discrimination and they did not. An additional key element of how we can understand the outcome of the Dōwa laws is notable in its absence. The national government did not collect data on the outcomes beyond 1993, leaving us with an incomplete understanding of the long-­ term impact of the laws. This lacuna is also a challenge not just for researchers, but more importantly for Buraku activists themselves, for a lack of a national understanding of contemporary conditions faced by Burakumin makes addressing inequality an even harder challenge. For a variety of reasons that Neary (2021) describes, these laws were terminated in 2002. This termination, however, did not mean an end to Buraku discrimination that many faced. Let us now turn to the changes and challenges the twenty-first century has brought.

 he New Century: Improvements, Changes, T and New Challenges While the Dōwa Laws ended in 2002, this did not mean the end of discrimination nor was it an end to the challenges faced by many Burakumin. The termination of the laws and economic support it provided left many communities struggling. Some attempted to maintain parts of the laws, such as educational loans for children to continue to high school (compulsory education ends at the end of junior high school – 9th grade), but for most, the removal of funding meant a change to the opportunities available to the residents. Over time, however, even the communities that attempted to maintain some of the policies found that the economic reality was such that it became impossible. Nevertheless, over 30 years of aid meant that there were changes within the communities that received Dōwa funding. Living conditions, employment opportunities and educational outcomes all showed dramatic improvements during that period (Noguchi et al., 1998). What did remain, however, was that Burakumin continued to face discrimination in both direct and indirect ways.

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The new century brought with it expanding technology and along with it new ways of experiencing discrimination. This new way was closely connected with history, however. In 1935, the Japanese government undertook a survey of conditions in Buraku districts. As the survey noted the names of actual communities, the dissemination of the survey was seen as a possible source of discrimination and access was restricted. However, at the turn of the century, an anti-Buraku activist managed to gain access to a copy through a library. The activist then attempted to publish the work as an updated version of the work, tracing the older names of communities to the new names they may have changed owing to a process of municipal conglomerations that had happened since the original survey was conducted. The activist attempted to use the philosophy of the BLL in publishing the work, arguing that as being Burakumin was something to be proud of and not hidden, thus sharing the information fit within the goals espoused by the BLL. The BLL was not arguing for all information to come out, but rather that individuals should have the ability to openly share their background, but not to be outed by others. The activist attempted to put the book up for sale on Amazon Japan, and even as a pre-order, it became the number one best seller in the geography category. However, before it could be sold, Buraku activists filed a lawsuit arguing that the publication of the information would serve no other purpose other than for discrimination and Amazon pulled the book from its store. The victory by the Buraku activists was short-lived, however, as the anti-Buraku activists then placed the information online, using servers located outside of the jurisdiction of Japanese law. Further, the anti-Buraku activists then included information, such as addresses of individuals who were believed to be Burakumin or the names and locations of alleged districts. Ironically, much of the information that was placed on this site was factually incorrect. One positive result of the actions of the anti-Buraku activist was that it served as a reminder that discrimination against the Burakumin is not something that was simply “in the past” or “solved” by the Dōwa laws. It was, unfortunately, alive and well and becoming more pernicious owing to the ability to put information on the internet. There are myriad explanations for why people discriminate, but one longstanding perspective is that the lack of interaction and awareness of experiences may lead people to discriminate or hold prejudicial beliefs (Allport, 1954). With no programs in schools or public policy that engage with Buraku issues means that fewer and fewer people are aware of the reality of Buraku discrimination and are more likely to believe false information. Recognizing this problem, the Japanese government moved to act and in 2016 passed the “Act on the Promotion of the Elimination of Buraku Discrimination.” This law was quite different in scope and structure from the earlier Dōwa laws. While the Dōwa laws focused on the infrastructure of specific Buraku communities, including funding within schools, the new laws faced more on the awareness and engagement with Buraku issues. The law articulated that “(1) The State shall take measures to consolidate mechanisms to respond to requests for advice and support concerning Buraku discrimination in appropriate ways. (2) Local governments shall seek to take measures, consistent with their local

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conditions, to consolidate mechanisms to respond to requests for advice and support concerning Buraku discrimination in appropriate ways, on the basis of appropriate division of roles with the State.” (Article 4). The law also called for local governments to raise awareness and provide education on the Buraku experience and finally to have both local and national governments conduct surveys on local conditions affecting Buraku communities. This new law was notable in several ways. First and foremost, it was the first law that explicitly used the term “Burakumin” in its title and text. The previous Dōwa laws were notable in the absence of the use of the word Burakumin or Buraku. Using this terminology was important symbolically as it provided a sense of having their voices heard and their experiences of marginalization recognized (Bondy, 2019). Yet the law also ignored certain key issues. While it called for actions to be taken to raise awareness, along with surveys of the experiences of Burakumin, no funds were provided to conduct such policies. In systems where financial resources were already constrained, the lack of funding effectively meant wide-scale implementation was all but impossible. Nevertheless, it was a symbolic act that did raise awareness, though both activists and lawmakers have said that while it was an important first step, more needs to be done (Bondy, 2019). It has now been over 5 years since the law went into effect and it is worth considering what changes have come about based on this law. In short, as far as available data suggests, the answer is not very much. As noted above, the fact that there was no funding made available within the parameters of the law meant that making effective change would require local communities to shoulder the economic burden of implementing such policies. Coupled with the restrictions of COVID-19 limiting new outreach programs and interactive gatherings meant that there is little in the way of change that has happened. Further, there continues to be a dearth of national level data regarding Buraku issues. We are still dependent on using targeted data to understand the knowledge people have on Buraku issues. The question to consider for the remainder of the chapter is how are Buraku issues understood now? What are the viewpoints of majority members of society on Burakumin and Buraku issues? As part of a larger research project led by Mariko Akuzawa of Osaka Metropolitan University, we surveyed 1537 university students across six universities in Japan on their understanding of issues surrounding discrimination and Buraku concerns (Akuzawa, n.d.). Before we can consider the impact of the new law and the goals it sets out, we should begin with a question of how aware of the law are university students. Sadly, the answer is not very. Eighteen percent of the respondents noted that they were somewhat to very knowledgeable about the new law, and 82% had limited to no knowledge of the new law. For a law whose goal was to raise awareness, this seems a troubling outcome. The decision to not include funding for raising awareness means that many do not know of the law and its central components. Returning to the outcomes of the 2016 law, when the anti-Buraku activists put information online, we found that over half of the respondents first learned of Buraku issues in school (53%). In a separate question, we found nearly a quarter (24%) of the respondents noted that over the past 3 years they had used the internet

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to gather information on Buraku issues. This use of the internet, while not surprising, does highlight the concern over misinformation that exists online, though the expansion of misinformation is not just an issue that is found regarding Buraku issues. At the same time, the rise and expansion of (mis)information on Buraku issues online has clearly had an impact on how people view Burakumin. While we clearly cannot make a direct connection between viewpoints respondents have and what they have read online or learned elsewhere, we can understand how respondents view Buraku issues broadly. The results we have regarding university student’s views on Buraku issues can be considered as both encouraging and discouraging.1 13% of the respondents agreed with the idea that Burakumin are “scary” and 29% said it is better not to talk about Buraku issues. When asked if not talking about Buraku issues is the way to make Buraku discrimination disappear, 26% of the respondents agreed with this approach. This idea of how language is used, or in some cases, not used, provides an opportunity to consider ideas of silence and marginalization. Not talking about an issue does not make  it disappear. Indeed, it acts to perpetuate the underlying concern without having to openly engage with it. Yet not talking about Buraku issues is the prevailing approach many in Japanese society take. Silence is a mechanism that acts to maintain a symbolic marginalization (Bondy, 2015). Work, home and family are all areas where we all spend most of our time, indeed some of our most intimate time. Here, when asked about such familiar interactions with Burakumin, we can see that there was a decreasing level of willingness to be close with Burakumin. 12% of the respondents noted that they understand why an employer would not hire a Burakumin and 20% said they would not live in a Buraku district. When asked if it is discriminatory to be against marrying someone just because they are Burakumin, 68% said yes, and 24% said no, and 7% saying they did not know. While some of these responses cause concern, if we consider them in a different light, and when coupled with additional results, the future looks encouraging for broader engagement with Buraku issues. Eighty-four percent of the respondents disagreed with the statement that Buraku concerns are no longer a problem. Further, over 90% felt that Buraku activists are not making excessive demands for equality, and 93% disagreed with the comment that Burakumin are being given special treatment by the government. Even if we consider some of the numbers listed above, our responses showed that 86% disagreed with the statement that Burakumin are scary, and 80% would not have any problems living in a Buraku district. Obviously, these numbers are reflective of a specific population, but they provide an example of how a younger population considers these issues.

 The numbers may not add up to 100%, depending on rounding or missing answers.

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Buraku Issues Going Forward Historically, the discrimination the Burakumin faced followed similar patterns to other marginalized populations globally – and the role of the state in perpetuating this marginalization. Images of subpar living conditions or stories of overt discrimination in work and education continue to exist, but newer, less overt, but nevertheless harmful discrimination continues. The views of young people we surveyed suggest there are still areas for improvement. 2021 was the 150th anniversary of the promulgation of the Kaihō Rei, the decree that “liberated” the former outcasts in the new Meiji state. Over the past 150 years, conditions, experiences, and opportunities for Burakumin have improved considerably. Yet the changes did not come about smoothly or naturally; they were the result of actions by activists with the state responding, sometimes hesitantly, to these calls for change. In many cases throughout history, when presented with choices for more equality or less for Burakumin, the state has consistently chosen to do less rather than more. Nevertheless, changes have been made. The “Act on the Promotion of the Elimination of Buraku Discrimination” is the most recent example of the important, yet imperfect, steps the government has made. The law is symbolically important, but leaves room for changes to shape the law in new ways. What those changes might be, and who will shape them, remains an open question. As we move further into the twenty-first century, like all Japanese, the Burakumin are facing the demographic challenges of an aging population and low birth rate. While the Japanese government does not collect information specifically on Burakumin, local and prefectural data suggests this is the case. Fewer Burakumin means fewer activists to push the Japanese state to make changes and more effectively address Buraku concerns. Governments seldom make policy changes to improve conditions for marginalized populations without the work of concerned activists. The Buraku case in Japan is no different. Yet the activists who were so instrumental in raising awareness and keeping pressure on the government to create the Dōwa Laws are either gone or not able to be as active as they once were. Based on historical patterns, a new generation would be in the wings to take over and bring about new changes. However, the decreasing birthrate is making that more difficult. With the decreasing, and aging, population, expecting the government to put more effort and support into new Buraku policies seems unlikely. Buraku concerns are not only centered on macro-level polices, but also what it means to be a Burakumin. In an earlier project focusing how young Burakumin engage with their identity (Bondy, 2015), the salience of what it means to be Burakumin seems to be changing. As can be the case with others in a post-modern setting, many of the young Burakumin I interviewed described being Burakumin as one part of who they are, not their sole identity. One woman described herself as a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter and a Burakumin, suggesting each category or label was simply one part of who she was, not her primary identity. While for her it was one part, for others in the broader society, not all categories are treated equally.

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If being burakumin has less salience for younger people and there are fewer young people in general (meaning fewer activists), the future changes and challenges may seem bleak. However, while groups like the Buraku Liberation League may be aging, other groups that take newer, and different, approaches to addressing Buraku concerns and social change have made their presence known since the start of the twenty-first century. One such group is Buraku Heritage, a group comprised of young people who take a less confrontational approach to addressing Buraku concerns. [The BLL has had a history of direct, sometimes confrontational, approaches to challenging discrimination. See Rohleen 1976 for the most vivid example.] While a much smaller organization than the BLL, Buraku Heritage may serve as a model for different groups to address Buraku discrimination. The challenges Burakumin faced in the twentieth century that led to the implementation of the Dōwa Laws are different now. While some of the challenges continue, such as discrimination in work and marriage, much of the larger structural inequality that Burakumin faced have improved. While conditions have improved, discrimination remains. The lack of available data at the national level means we do not know how widespread it may be or how it is impacting people in their daily lives. A lack of data does not mean that the structural inequality and discrimination that many Burakumin face is gone. It simply means we do not know. In many ways it is not surprising that the Japanese government no longer gathers this data or provides economic support to the “Act on the Promotion of the Elimination of Buraku Discrimination” for this matches the pattern of the state response to Buraku concerns at so many other points in time in history. The continued pressure put on by activists, and by those in the government who do support addressing Buraku concerns, will hopefully make these changes happen.

References Abele, M. (2018, April). Peasants, skinners, and dead cattle: The transformation of rural society in western Japan, 1600–1890 [unpublished Ph.D. dissertation], University of Illinois. Akuzawa, M. (n.d.). FY2018–2021. Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research(C). Project number: 18K02034. Title: 現代社会における部落差別の変容に関する研究―差別意識とその表 出形態に焦点を当てて. Allport, G. (1954 [1979]). The nature of prejudice. Perseus Books. Amos, T. (2011). Embodying difference: The making of Burakumin in modern Japan. University of Hawaii Press. Amos, T. (2019). Caste in early modern Japan: Danzaemon and the Edo Outcaste Order. Routledge Press. Bondy, C. (2015). Voice, silence and self: Negotiations of Buraku identity in contemporary Japan. Harvard East Asia Monograph Series. Bondy, C. (2019). New law or old issues: Stakeholder expectations on the bill for the promotion of the elimination of Buraku discrimination. Japan Forum, 32(2), 244–258.

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Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute. (1999). Buraku issues and Japanese occupation documents research news, issues (pp. 1–33) [Burakumondai to Nihon Senryō bunsho Kenkyū nyūsu, gappon]. Davis, J.  H. (2014). Courting justice, contesting “bureaucratic informality”: The Sayama case and the evolution of Buraku liberation politics. In P. Steinhoff (Ed.), Going to court to change Japan: Social movements and the law in contemporary Japan (pp. 73–100). The University of Michigan Press. De Vos, G., & Wagatsuma, H. (1966). Japan’s invisible race: Caste in culture and personality. University of California Press. Ehlers, M. (2018). Give and take: Poverty and the status order in early modern Japan. Harvard East Asian Monograph Series. McCormack, N. (2013). Japan’s outcaste abolition: The struggle for national inclusion and the making of the modern state. Routledge Press. Neary, I. (1989). Political protest and social control in prewar Japan: The origins of Buraku Liberation. Humanities Press International. Neary, I. (2021). Dōwa policy and Japanese politics. Routledge Press. Noguchi, M., Miwa, Y., Komori, T., Ishimoto, K., Nabeshima, Y., Shimura T., & Kusuki, K., (1998). Zusetsu konnichi no buraku sabetsu dai 3-hen: Kakuchi no jittai chōsa kekka yori [Today’s Buraku discrimination, illustrated. Vol. 3: From the results of the investigation of various districts]. Kaihō Shuppansha. Teraki N., & Kurokawa M. (2019). A history of discriminated Buraku communities in Japan. (Ian Neary, Trans.). Renaissance Books. Yoshino, I. R., & Murakoshi, S. (1977). The invisible visible minority: Japan’s Burakumin. Toppan Printing Company. Christopher Bondy is a Senior Associate Professor of Sociology at International Christian University, Tokyo. His research examines contemporary buraku issues, with an emphasis on the day-to-day experiences of burakumin. In addition, he conducts research and has published on issues of minority education and law and social change. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology and his MA in Japanese Studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He has been a post-­doctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Education.  

Toward “No Homeless” Public Spaces? Homeless Policy and a Crisis of Japanese Urban Society Mahito Hayashi

Abstract  This chapter examines Japan’s regulatory strategies addressing homeless people in public spaces. Despite a relatively small number of homeless individuals in Japan, the country’s policies toward homelessness have been strict and harsh with regard to public spaces. The author argues that these policies can be understood in the context of historical discursive frameworks in Japanese society that mythically underscore the extreme homogeneity of the mainstream population, known as chūryū, and the regulation of public behavior through shared cultural codes. The political-economic concept of societalization as defined by Bob Jessop (The future of the capitalist state. Polity, Cambridge, 2002) is used to interpret these inherited chūryū discourses and their impact on Japanese homeless policy seeking to reinstate urban spatial homogeneity amidst rampant poverty. The author also explores how social movement actors have sought to challenge societalization in order to reform ground-level urban policies. The final part discusses the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and how Japan’s historical mode of societalization faces a significant crisis today. Keywords  Homelessness · Social movements · Urban policy · Societalization · Public space · COVID-19 · Chūryū Contemporary Japan has been experiencing, at varying times and locations, an increase in poverty rates, class divisions, and gender gaps and a significant weakness or deterioration in currency rates, parliamentary democracy, mass media freedom, sustainability of family-raising households, and provision of welfare services. On any given day we are likely to see media reports claiming that Japan will decline in these or other areas, if not forever, then certainly for the foreseeable future. My focus in this chapter is on poverty, with emphasis on one of its most acute expressions—homelessness in public spaces. M. Hayashi (*) Kinjo Gakuin University, Nagoya, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_18

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Public space homelessness became a widely acknowledged social phenomenon in Japan in the 1990s, when homeless people spread across city spaces and met with brutal evictions by urban administrators. Though the central focus here is on the manifestation of homelessness in the 1990s and later, homelessness during and after that period cannot be adequately understood without addressing its precursors and historical contexts. For instance, the significant social impact of homelessness in contemporary Japan can only be adequately understood by considering the somewhat homogeneous mode of social integration/organization to which Japan has long been committed. The rise of homelessness in the 1990s overwhelmed the inherited cognitive discursive frameworks of Japanese society, which was premised upon the discursive construction of national society by citizens who allegedly shared a set of sociocultural norms that regulated their public behavior. The traditional idea about Japanese society and public space exaggerated the cultural homogeneity of the Japanese people by neglecting the enduring existence of impoverished or discriminated populations marginalized from the living standards of mainstream society. Nonetheless, this inherited cognitive–discursive framework of Japanese social integration played an essential role in augmenting the normative formation of national society in support of the well-organized character of Japan’s postwar economy (for classical recognitions, see, e.g., Johnson, 1982). The rise of homelessness in the 1990s provoked new regulations and exclusions around public spaces in defense of these discursive layers that had long supported the imaginary construction of societal homogeneity in Japan. The (post-)1990s manifestation of homelessness contravened the homogeneity-oriented self-­ representation of Japan’s mainstream society by inserting in it the recalcitrant, contradictory, and contesting elements of homelessness, which could not be accounted for by any inherited mainstream discourses. This is why I hark back to Japan’s pre-­1990s social discourses to understand the impacts that the (post-)1990s manifestation of homelessness made on Japanese society.

Homogeneity in Question Societal homogeneity refers to social discourses and imaginaries that have led citizens, academics, or policymakers to believe that Japanese society has established a culturally standardized and monolithic national society as a result of Japan’s economic growth after World War II. This worldview was initially signaled in some government papers published in the 1960s, which reported an early expansion of chūryū (meaning people in the middle, or literally “a middle stream”) by using statistical data focused on the self-assessment of Japanese citizens (Kanbayashi, 2012). By the 1970s, intellectuals engaged in public debates that recognized and discussed the prevalent ideas of Japanese social homogeneity. In particular, key sociologists and economists debated whether Japan had already established a dominantly chūryū society in the form of what economist Yasusuke Murakami called the “new

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middle mass” (shin chūkan taishū)—a large, socioculturally homogeneous group of the populace enjoying (quasi-)Western living standards. Participants in this debate and other discussions differed in crucial respects, but they seemed to share the view that the somewhat monolithic ideas of Japan’s chūryū society had powerfully influenced the self-image of Japanese people in the context of Japan’s economic prosperity (for useful reviews, see Hara, 2008). Similar interest in the culturally standardized appearance of Japanese society was also found in classic Anglophone works (e.g., Johnson, 1982; Vogel, 1979) that characterized the harmonious, concerted, or patriotic outlook of the Japanese populace as a pivotal contributor to Japan’s economic ascent. Murakami (1986 [1984]; in English, see Murakami, 1982) demonstrated a fuller version of his celebrated mass society thesis, which characterized Japanese society as having been under a “de-structuration” process that advanced a breakdown of the traditional contours of class relations. This breakdown had already led to the formation of a “vast mass of people who are not structured into any stratification” within the Japanese territorial space (Murakami, 1986 [1984], p. 200). Murakami avoided using the term “chūryū” when emphasizing the advent of a new national society in which “homogenization is advancing and the power of stratification is slacking off” (199). Yet his thesis—appearing at the high point of Japan’s postwar prosperity— can be seen as an example of a discourse that essentially recognized a full chūryū society in which, to use his words, “no difference exists [among people] in terms of clothes and the way of speaking” (200). The notion of Japan’s societal homogeneity, the melding of traditional class divisions and social stratum into a singular mass consumptive society, which was applauded by Murakami and others, contained many elements of exaggeration (Ando & Ishikawa, 1980; Hara, 2008; Ishikawa et al., 1982). In fact, we find the persistent existence of social groups and classes that experienced acute poverty throughout the postwar period (Eguchi, 1979–1980; Hashimoto, 2001, 2009; Kamata, 1999; Kamata & Kamata, 1983). Rethinking the classic debates about Japan’s mass (chūryū) society today, however, we may find in these discourses, which increased in the wake of Japanese postwar growth (Hara, 2000), some elements related to the material and political-economic character of postwar Japan. Because Japanese postwar capitalism constantly suppressed wage growth (Hayashi, 2021; Itoh, 1990), and because its welfare state components were meager (Estevez-Abe, 2008) and marginalized some of the most disadvantaged groups/individuals (Hayashi, 2013), postwar Japan was prone to poverty even during the “golden years” of economic growth (Eguchi, 1979–1980). In this context, the homogeneity discourses and their popular variants played a crucial role in reconciling the enduring existence of poor people with the high standards of sociocultural integrity required to sustain disciplined Japanese capitalist development. In short, the discourses about Japan’s widespread chūryu society may be interpreted as a key cognitive–discursive framework for the societalization of Japan’s postwar capitalism. Societalization is a notion used in the state/regulation theory of sociologist Bob Jessop. It refers to “a pattern of institutional integration and social cohesion that complements the dominant accumulation regime and its mode of economic regulation.” This pattern intends to secure “the conditions for its [the accumulation

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regime’s] dominance in the wider society”, (Jessop, 2002, p. 56). To decode, a society based on the territorial construction of spaces of capital accumulation is prone to destabilization, not just when the economic performance of the accumulation regime deteriorates, but also when that society is no longer capable of reproducing threshold-level conditions of social integrity and sustainability around its central cultural beliefs, social norms, and organizational pillars. Seemingly for this reason, Jessop presents the view that capitalism at the social level needs broad sociocultural layers in which potentially deregulating, disobedient, subversive, or noncooperative forces/sectors/individuals are prompted toward (slightly) more prosystem forms in relation to the territorial development of capitalism. Jessop thus shows that territorial capitalist development can become sustainable when it dovetails with central cultural principles that underpin the capitalist processes of labor reproduction, commodification, and participation (for further theoretical elaborations in this direction, see Hayashi, 2023). I argue that the main arenas of societalization in Japan have been delineated by the academic, journalistic, and popular discourses articulating the mass influence of chūryū society and its ability to organize public spaces and the relations among people, beyond any class divisions. These discursive spaces and their public space formation supported Japan’s developmentalist capital accumulation, which required citizens/laborers to reproduce their participation in disciplined civil society in support of the quick expansion of Japanese capitalism. In these discourses, the threshold of Japanese societalization—the high cultural standards required of citizens/laborers in public spaces—was defined, elaborated, and promulgated beyond the dehomogenizing pressure of poverty that Japanese capitalism occasionally released through its inherent instability and the weakness of its welfare state components. This widespread mode of societalization in support of Japanese capitalist development was most plausible, though it was still mythical, around the 1970s and 1980s, when poverty became less and less conspicuous from the perspective of public space formation and its mainstream social integration. Yet, beginning in the 1990s, even these spaces started to see disrupting moments of urban poverty in the form of homelessness. Homelessness has always been a part of Japanese history, but the appearance of homeless people in the 1990s surprised mainstream society because they emerged, widely and almost ubiquitously, in Japan’s well-ordered public spaces, which were formative to its disciplinary social integration. Homeless people in/after the 1990s significantly impacted Japanese society because of this historical background, destabilizing Japan’s inherited cultural layers of societal integration.

Disruptions and Homeless Strategies Homelessness within Japanese public spaces erupted in the critical “postbubble” context of capitalist development. After running down a speculative boom that began in the mid-1980s, Japanese capitalism in the early 1990s fell into a sustained period of credit crunch and profit deterioration. The unprecedented level of

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homelessness emerged at this critical juncture of Japanese capitalism. Homelessness was particularly apparent in metropolitan areas, where many kinds of public spaces (streets, parks, sidewalks, the riverside, the seaside, and means of transportation) started to accommodate homeless people’s everyday practices—eating, sleeping, socializing, or working—which was disruptive to the normal ways of using public space in Japan, which was expected to be well-ordered, highly disciplined, and clean. By limiting our view to the postwar period, we can distinguish at least two different phases of homelessness. First, the few years immediately after the war saw a significant uptick in people living in public spaces that had become burned-out fields during the war. These postsurrender homeless people included adults and children who had lost housing in the war. Second, when Japan started down the path of strong economic growth around the mid-1950s, this postsurrender geography of homelessness began converging on the particular inner-city areas called yoseba zones, which accommodated male day laborers. Homelessness was always inherent among these day-laboring populations because their employment was precarious (Eguchi, 1979). Compared to these earlier patterns, the growth of homelessness in the 1990s had some unique characteristics. Most importantly for my discussion, Japanese homelessness during this period grew after Japan had already finished a significant part of its postwar economic growth, which made the discourses about Japan’s homogeneous societalization more plausible than ever before. This does not mean that Japan before the 1990s was a society without poverty. As Kenji Hashimoto (2009) emphasizes, the long-term trajectory of Japanese capitalism has repeatedly animated the tendencies of impoverishment and income polarization. Key urbanists such as Saskia Sassen (2001) and Takashi Machimura (1992) have promulgated the view that the metropolitan region of Tokyo in the 1980s was already catalyzing a local process of global-city formation, a process that already connoted the rise of elite/nonelite gaps in local labor markets, even before the 1990s. However, it is possible that a different urban-social dynamic was operating alongside these processes of social polarization by the 1980s. As Makoto Itoh (1990, 2000) suggests, Japanese capitalism relatively successfully overcame the 1970s crisis of global capitalism by redirecting its glut of productive capacity and capital to international markets, and ultimately to domestic speculative sectors, leading to the bubble economy. Social polarization may have been harder to perceive because the populace was able to share the urban-centered understanding that continuous economic growth, which was perceptible in the city, would soon make everyone more prosperous. In turn, this or similar urban-centered imaginaries about “rich Japan” may have been supported by urban public spaces, where the existence of homeless people became increasingly rare by the late 1980s, and where new capital investments continually updated the facade of the city. Immediately after these closing years of postwar economic ascent, homelessness spread widely in these urban public spaces and therefore alarmed Japanese society. In terms of population, these new homeless populations were probably not so new, because they had strong continuities with local day laborers who dwelled in the traditional inner-city yoseba areas (Aoki, 2000; Nakane, 1999). These day laborers,

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being economically superfluous during the severe downturn of the 1990s, became roofless and started wandering public spaces, looking for sites to sleep, work, and socialize. Despite these continuities in population, however, homeless people in this period still seemed novel to mainstream society because postwar Japan had long been free from this level of homelessness after the 1950s and because the facade of metropolitan urban spaces had been much updated and beautified under the speculative bubble economy of the late 1980s and early 1990s. As homeless people became broadly distributed in the city space, their survival practices also became conspicuous, making significant disruptive impacts vis-à-vis mainstream society. Homeless people’s production of housing in public spaces is a primary instance of how homeless people’s survival practices alarmed Japanese society. Because many users and administrators tacitly assume that Japanese public spaces are to be used normatively, in line with restrictive regulatory codes, homeless people’s construction of housing in public spaces created sharp dehomogenizing effects on the assumptions of mainstream citizens. The encounter of housed citizens with the housing action of homeless people drove urban administrators to advance intensive public space policing in the 1990s and 2000s. In this regulatory context, homeless people struggled against the heightened regulatory pressure by carefully devising and practicing viable local/locational strategies for continuing homelessness in public spaces (Hayashi, 2014; Yamaguchi, 1998; Kitagawa, 2001; Yamakita, 2006). In addition to this use-value dimension of homeless people’s action, in which homeless people produce housing in public spaces, their action also entails exchange-value components, in which these people develop ways to generate a cash income by reworking public spaces. Many homeless people during this period gathered waste materials—empty cans, home appliances, weekly magazines, and so on—from public dumping sites, street corners, or railway cars in order to sell them at recycling shops or to passersby. This exchange-value side of homeless people’s productive action was essential. Although many homeless people participated in the labor market only sporadically, if at all, they still needed a modest level of cash income in order to buy food, clothes, and various services. Homeless people showed innovative processes for generating cash income from public spaces by carefully considering how they could gather waste from public dumping sites and other public spaces without excessively frustrating local communities (Hayashi, 2014, 2018).

Growth in Homeless Policy Even as homeless people made efforts to avoid regulatory tensions, the rise of homelessness at the beginning of the 1990s remained a shocking event for mainstream society. In order to manage the impacts of homelessness, urban homeless policy expanded in the period after the early 1990s, addressing sites and realms perceived as being impacted by homelessness.

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Such policy focused in part on public spaces, and the policy often took extreme and exclusionary forms. In the 1990s and 2000s, busy commercial zones in metropolitan centers manifested antihomeless characteristics in the form of large-scale eviction and well-planned policing. In one well-known example from the mid-­1990s, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government advanced a concerted framework of homeless removal, targeting a broad underground square that existed around Shinhuku’s main railway station building and announcing that the government soon would start constructing “moving walkways” in this area. The project appeared to use this construction plan as a pretext to justify the eviction of more than one hundred homeless people living at this site (Kasai, 1999; Sakokawa, 2013). Toward the early 2000s, large-scale or well-planned evictions took place in other metropolitan areas of Osaka, Nagoya, and Yokohama (Hayashi, 2014; Fujii & Tamaki, 2003; Ikuta, 2007), as many commercially valuable sites in the city, experiencing ever denser distributions of homelessness, grew intolerant of the widespread form of homelessness. Even users of less busy public spaces began to lose patience. These spaces are the main sites of housed citizens’ neighborhood lives, and the spread of homelessness to these local areas was a completely new phenomenon for most urban dwellers. These increasingly diversifying local/locational spatialities of homelessness alarmed a broad spectrum of residents and led to antihomeless coalitions/networks among police officers, municipal workers, residential leaders, and so on, who formed vigilante groups policing “adjacent homelessness” by targeting conspicuous places of homelessness (Hayashi, 2023). Apart from public spaces, another realm significantly affected by the rise of homelessness in the 1990s was the marginal regulatory space around the public assistance program (Sēkatsuhogo), a central legal framework of Japanese citizenship. Indeed, the ambiguous regulatory area around the public assistance program became a hotbed of new policy formation at the local welfare offices that administer this program and decide who should be included or excluded. Japan has a universal legal concept of citizenship whereby the government is asked to provide every needy citizen with housing and other benefits, through the public assistance program. In this realm, the legal concept of citizenship is inclusive, stating that every citizen in a destitute situation can improve their living conditions to “the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living” that “all people shall have the right to maintain,” according to Article 25 of the constitution. The long-term problem in Japan is that public assistance, although egalitarian and universal in law, has not been universally applied to ameliorate the poverty of Japanese citizens (Iwata, 2000). In particular, although homeless people in public spaces clearly may be construed as experiencing poverty without meeting “the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living,” these people often have been categorically excluded from the public assistance program. When administering it, the local welfare office has tacitly developed codes of exclusion through which homeless people are marginalized in the program. Even though such exclusory procedures with regard to homeless people’s (non) access to public assistance were widespread, more homeless-friendly efforts also emerged to address homelessness through local urban policy. One of the most

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“prohomeless” examples in this vein is found in the city of Yokohama. Between the early 1990s and late 2000s, this municipality vigorously mobilized its program of food and accommodation tickets in order to maintain homeless people’s dietary and housing needs in Yokohama’s yoesba zone (the Kotobuki district), so that people excluded from the public assistance program would be supported by this local welfare program (Fig. 1). Though the assistance provided by this local program was less than satisfactory, this case suggests that urban homeless policy did develop supportive welfare-providing services for homeless people (for policies in other Japanese cities, see Fujii & Tamaki, 2003; Iwata, 1995; Kiener & Mizuuchi, 2018; Yamasaki et al., 2006). In the early 2000s, these localized patterns of urban homeless policy began to be managed by the Japanese state itself, which for the first time began some national efforts to regulate the formation of urban homeless policy. A significant outcome of this move was the Japanese state’s introduction of the 2002/2003 system, a national framework of homeless policy with several new characteristics. At its heart, the 2002/2003 system was based on a new statutory framework, the Act on Special Measures Concerning Support for Homeless People’s Self-Help, or the Self-Help Act. The core philosophy of the 2002/2003 system was to facilitate the self-help of homeless people by encouraging their participation in the labor market. In addition to this act, the system’s many regulatory protocols were official guidelines provided Fig. 1  Food ticket provided by the City of Yokohama. (Source: Author photograph) Note: At the top, it is labeled as a “shokken” (food ticket). In the middle, the expiration date is indicated, as well as the names of four local food shops that accept this ticket

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by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW). There were three core characteristics of this system. First, the 2002/2003 system laid out new administrative protocols for constructing workfarist policy frameworks in order to solve the localized contradictions of homelessness by facilitating homeless people’s participation in the labor market. A workfarist policy is based on the principle of rewarding, encouraging, and enforcing work. On this side, the 2002/2003 system decided that homeless people who were able to work should primarily be treated not as a recipient of the public assistance program but as a self-helping manager of one’s own labor. This commodifying approach to homeless policy formation was intended to rehabilitate the working capacity of homeless people by providing training programs at public shelters. At the same time, this workfarist regulation of homelessness was subject to difficulty. As Jamie Peck (2001) suggests, using cases from North America, it is intrinsically difficult to manage poverty by trying to reintegrate needy people into the labor market, and such an approach is unlikely to achieve its stated goals, despite optimistic projections. This difficulty has lingered in the Japanese case as well. Second, the 2002/2003 system revealed the Japanese state’s sharp assumption that urban public spaces must be defended against the dense, broad, disruptive distributions of homelessness in the city. The system assumed that homeless people could hinder the proper use of public facilities and judged that in the face of such cases of hindrance, local authorities could remove homeless people and their belongings from public spaces at their discretion. This policing component of the 2002/2003 system has probably been more effective than other parts of the system in decreasing the visibility of homelessness in Japanese public spaces. Finally, the 2002/2003 system also asked municipalities to create local networks of volunteer organizations with good knowledge about local homelessness. With these three characteristics, the 2002/2003 system pushed municipalities to produce a set of local workfarist and policing regimes that would relieve the local homelessness crisis in each city. It should be noted that some municipalities made efforts to assist homeless people through what might be considered more benign approaches. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government, for instance, demonstrated the local flexibility in homeless policy under the 2002/2003 system. The government operated a new “housing-­ first” program in the mid-2000s, giving accommodation to homeless individuals living in Tokyo’s major public parks (Kasai, 2005; Toda, 2005; Yamamoto, 2005; Yasue, 2005). However, even this supportive measure was accompanied by renewed policing of public parks (Yamada, 2005).

Social Movements for Homeless People Apart from these administrative approaches, social movements in support of homeless people give us an alternative perspective on Japanese homelessness. Activists and supporters have developed alternative social discourses and practices for

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homeless people, beyond the administrative policing practices that inherently subscribe to the myth of Japan’s chūryū society, devoid of poverty and homelessness. Here I will develop some narratives about local social movements for homeless people by using cases from the city of Yokohama, where I have conducted fieldwork (Hayashi, 2014, 2018, 2023). In Yokohama’s inner-city Kotobuki district, a social movement for homeless and near-homeless people emerged in 1975  in response to a surge of homelessness among Yokohama’s day-laboring population accommodated in the district. Combative elements of this activism may be best summarized by referring to some radical events, such as the occupation of the City of Yokohama’s main office building in 1975, the occupation of a municipal building in the yoseba zone between 1975 and 1979, and the creation of coalition networks of local workers outside of the Kotobuki district, and of other yoseba laborers in Japan, in the late 1970s. Under pressure from this movement, Yokohama’s municipality began operating new policy tools, including the food/accommodation tickets discussed in the previous section. From the 1990s onward, as the city experienced an increase of homeless people and their new, ever broader distributions in the locality, Yokohama’s activists constructed new frameworks of mobilization and claim-making that focused on the two regulatory realms of welfare provision and public spaces. First, in terms of welfare provision, activists requested that the municipality improve the quality of the historical food/accommodation tickets, which remained inadequate to support homeless people hoping to move on from street-based lives. Activists also rebutted the municipality’s exclusion from the public assistance program of individuals whom administrators considered able to work. These political demands led to real improvements in local welfare provisions for homeless people. Second, Yokohama’s activists started claim-making politics addressing the brutal evictions of homeless people from public spaces. In this endeavor, activists created new movement groups that specifically targeted public spaces in which homeless people dwelled. These groups conducted well-executed homeless visiting tours called “patrols” (patorōru), methodically visiting the sites of homeless people in the city and providing them with information, food, clothes, blankets, and much-needed social and medical services, with the help of nurses, doctors, and social workers. While social movements in Yokohama and other cities also advanced these claims for welfare provision and public spaces and questioned the viability of urban homeless policy (for the case of Tokyo, see Hasegawa, 2006), their effects remained local. That is, despite the significant local policy outcomes of these movements, they were unable to catalyze positive changes in national policy, even though such change on the national scale could improve homeless people’s condition in more comprehensive ways. The feat of speaking up to national policymakers became real in 2008. At a public park in front of the main buildings of key national organs, including those of the MHLW and the Diet, Tokyo’s activists created a tent village of (nearly) homeless workers. Using this urban geography, they exposed and tried to change the long-­ term administrative focus of national policymakers who had omitted homeless people from the design of welfare provision (Toshikoshi Haken Mura Jikko I’inkai,

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2009; Utsunomiya & Yuasa, 2009). This movement created a powerful reverberation in mass media and with broader audiences in civil society. Using this as a springboard, it stimulated the MHLW to circulate new guidelines for municipalities, encouraging their use of the public assistance program for homeless people regardless of apparent eligibility for work (Hayashi, 2014). Thereafter, the use of the public assistance program for homeless people became more popular in Japanese cities. Even after this improvement in national policy, however, many local welfare offices have continued to treat homeless people in discriminatory ways with regard to the public assistance program. That is, the citizenship of these people still has been watered down. Nonetheless, the administrative move to cover homeless people with public assistance, a move triggered by a major mobilization event in Tokyo in the late 2000s, did have a positive effect, as these people now have more extensive access to accommodation and food.

Decreased Homelessness and Mass Poverty Since the late 2000s, there has been a constant reduction in the visibility of homeless people in public spaces in Japan’s metropolitan areas. The presence of homelessness has significantly declined even in many public spaces where homeless people continue to exist. In all of these public spaces, decreasing the presence of homeless people, who may disrupt housed citizens, has rehabilitated the intrinsic role of Japanese public spaces, which is to augment the sound organization/integration of society by providing the populace with clean and well-ordered spaces for consumption. This reduction in homelessness is a significant outcome of activists’ long-term, patient efforts to create better welfare-providing conditions (Mugikura, 2006). By working both locally and nationally, these activists have stimulated municipalities to provide shelters or rooms for homeless people. At the same time, the actual levels of support permitted by public programs—including the public assistance program, a central citizenship program in Japan—remain lower for homeless people. Therefore, it is far-fetched to say that the recent reduction in the visibility of homelessness in Japanese cities has been solely due to compassionate policy (re)formation on behalf of homeless people. For instance, the welfare office and the housing system in Japanese cities still discriminate against (ex-)homeless people by informally categorizing them as “irresponsible,” even after public assistance is permitted. As a result, homeless people often are directed not to normal housing units but to unpleasant shared housing operated by third-party organizations that receive inflated rent in exchange for a tiny room, substandard food, and routine surveillance. The recent reduction in the visibility of homelessness also has been related to another dimension of regulation: the regulation of public spaces. Today’s regulatory management of urban built environments powerfully deters roofless individuals from occupying public spaces. Each time homeless people are removed from a

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particular location, the location is quickly filled with antihomeless elements, such as flowerpots, which are commonly used as antihomeless barriers; benches equipped with blocking shields to prevent people from lying down; high-tech cameras or frequent security visits that discourage homeless people from staying. In other cases, public spaces formerly occupied by homeless people are entirely destroyed and then rebuilt as new urban areas in which antihomeless equipment is more naturally embedded. In this context of heightened levels of public space regulation, therefore, homelessness today tends to appear in enclosed spaces that are less visible to the public. Internet cafés that are open 24/7 are one typical option; these cafés are often used as flexible living/sleeping spaces for the (nearly) homeless urban population today (MHLW, 2007; Tokyo Metropolitan Government [TMG], 2018), partly because public spaces are increasingly closed to the processes and practices of homelessness. Public spaces are constantly remade into spaces where it is difficult for homeless people to maintain their lives. It is in this context that I reiterate my theoretical argument that the users and administrators of Japanese public spaces have subscribed, and still subscribe, to the mythical imaginaries that public spaces should be reserved for normal housed citizens, without any taint of poverty or inequality, even though contemporary Japan is highly prone to such inequality. Mainstream imaginaries that resemble the old image of homogeneous Japanese society is still an organizing pillar of well-ordered Japanese public spaces, and by extension, of Japanese society. It should be emphasized that this reduction in visible public space homelessness has happened even as Japan has experienced greatly increased poverty in various other sectors and sites. Recently, many Japanese people—both employed and unemployed, men and women, old and young, married and unmarried—feel at ever-­ increasing risk of becoming poor(er), and even of becoming roofless. Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, various scholars and journalists writing in the Japanese language across the political spectrum have increasingly emphasized that today’s Japan encourages poverty and inequality not just at the fringes of society but also at its center (Estevez-Abe, 2008; Hashimoto, 2018; Sato, 2000; Tachibanaki, 1998, 2005; Shirahase, 2013). Why is Japan so eager to decrease the visibility of homelessness when poverty in general is ever more prevalent in society and in cities? It is possible that by rehomogenizing social relations in and around public spaces, and by removing homelessness from streets and parks, today’s Japan is seeking to prolong, at least for a while, the inherited chūryū imaginaries of societalization in public spaces, where the poverty crisis can be most troublesome by manifesting itself as a perceivable form of societal crisis and moral panic. This management of Japan’s poverty/societal crisis through the realization of homeless-free public spaces is a desperate attempt to find proof of its previous imaginaries of chūryū in society. It has become harder and harder to find such proof, and yet many people are not ready to face the new situation, in which social homogeneity is now not just implausible but actually entirely illusory.

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The COVID Context The poverty-stricken character of contemporary Japanese society was more clearly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, which made apparent the large but previously hidden population that potentially suffers housing precariousness, by putting them on the verge of rooflessness. During the pandemic, many people rushed to a housing benefit program—Jyūtaku Kakuho Kyūfu Kin (Benefit for Securing Housing)—whose regulatory criteria were relaxed by the Japanese state to help Japanese citizens avoid a loss of housing tenancy due to COVID-induced income loss (Takazawa, 2020). This newer appearance of needy people around a benefit program clearly indicates how easily Japanese people’s living/housing conditions can become unsustainable, and how much of the inherited imaginaries of Japan’s mass chūryū society can become a thing of the past. At the same time, benefit programs have not been adequate to respond to the growth of needy populations in the COVID context. For example, the Benefit for Securing Housing program, a central policy tool for decreasing housing insecurity under COVID, cannot be used to assist homeless people. This program was established in 2015 specifically to support, on a temporary basis, those who have difficulties maintaining a current housing tenancy. Under COVID, the Japanese state loosened the criteria of this time-limited benefit program and made it available for broader populations, but homeless people, who do not have an existing housing tenancy, are excluded from this program. Even worse, the traditional benefit program of Japanese citizenship, public assistance, which was made more open to homeless people in the 2010s, has not been used effectively to address the plights of those people under COVID. One of the most striking cases of discriminatory treatment against homeless people occurred in February 2021, when a homeless woman visited a City of Yokohama welfare office and asked for an application for the public assistance program. The municipality rejected her request, saying that she would not be given access to public assistance because she was reluctant to live in an unpleasant shared house operated for (nearly) homeless individuals, even though such discriminative treatment is unlawful. Similar treatment is frequently reported with regard to poor or homeless people’s application for benefit programs other than public assistance (Ishikawa & Hisanaga, 2020; “Sēkatsuhogo shinsē madoguchi”, 2020), making activists believe that the local welfare office is trying to reduce the levels of support for poor and homeless people and to limit the growth of new welfare recipients under COVID.  In this formidable context, activists and volunteers have been busy responding—online and in the streets—to individuals who need their help and support, outside the realm of public provision, which remains insufficient to ameliorate COVID-induced impoverishment. Activists report that considerable numbers of people experienced housing/food crises under COVID without effective outreach on the part of public social workers and programs (Amamiya, 2021; Inaba et al., 2020).

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Coda: Japanese Society at a Critical Juncture Japanese postwar society has always included elements of homelessness, but before the 1990s, these elements were less harmful to Japan’s disciplined mode of societal integration, which uses well-ordered public spaces as a site of societalization. “Societalization” refers to the development of sociocultural layers in which deregulating, disobedient, or subversive forces, sectors, or individuals are stimulated to take more system-supporting forms in relation to the territorial development of capitalism (Jessop, 2002). Japan’s postwar societalization discursively constructed a single space of mass (chūryū) society that allegedly could make any signs of poverty obsolete and unobservable. This societalization was a relatively sustainable myth when Japanese capitalism was vital and capable of promulgating the image that all Japanese citizens would soon be integrated into a luxurious high-­consumption society. However, the rise of homelessness in the 1990s put significant pressure on this inherited mode of societalization as it reignited the appearance of poverty in the midst of public spaces. Because Japan’s societal integration around the mythical chūryū discourse had been promulgated through well-ordered public spaces, the spread of homeless people in these public spaces alarmed society and provoked various antihomeless reactions from public space users and administrators. This disciplined mode of societalization around Japanese public spaces may explain why Japanese homelessness does not take the incisive form of homelessness that can be found in other societies, such as in the United States, which has allowed homelessness to take the aggressive form of what Neil Smith (1996) calls a “class struggle on Avenue B.” Japanese social movements for homeless people have tried to change, and actually have changed, the antihomeless patterns of urban regulation in local and even national governance arenas, facilitating the formation of homeless-­ supporting policies on both levels. However, even this activism could not radically open up Japanese public spaces and programs for homeless people. In this context, it may be said that the reduced visibility of public space homelessness since the late 2000s—a process with positive aspects for homeless people—also played a systemic role in adjusting public spaces back to the traditional mainstream expectation that urban encounters in public spaces can be devoid of any elements of poverty, class divisions, or social antagonism. Due to its weak distribution and redistribution mechanisms for the working class, Japanese capitalist development today is highly prone to poverty and homelessness that can dehomogenize public spaces. At the societal level, however, Japan seems to be continuing a desperate attempt to reinstate the homogeneous mode of societalization around well-­ordered public spaces, even as the ongoing growth of poverty almost entirely destroys the plausibility of a chūryū-centered society. The recent COVID pandemic has further increased the deregulating pressure emanating from poverty and homelessness. In this context, today’s Japan is driven to acquire a new, more viable mode of societalization compatible with the increased pressure of poverty in society.

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Toward “No Homeless” Public Spaces? Homeless Policy and a Crisis of Japanese Urban… 277 Tachibanaki, T. (1998). Nihon no Kēzai Kakusa: Shotoku to Shisan kara Kangaeru [Japan’s economic divides: Considering income and assets]. Iwanami Shoten. Tachibanaki, T. (2005). Confronting income inequality in Japan: A comparative analysis of causes, consequences, and reform. MIT Press. Takazawa, Y. (2020). Shingata Korona de Sumai o Ushinau Osore no Arumono no Genjyō to Haikē ni Tsuite [The Current situations and background of those having risks of loosing accommodation because of COVID]. A pamphlet distributed at the Empawamento Renrakukai workshop in Yokohama (November 17, 2020). TMG. (2018). Jyūkyo Sōshitsu Huantē Shūrousha Nado no Jittai ni Kansuru Cyōsa Hōkoku Sho [Research report on the actual conditions of precarious homeless workers]. Tokyo Metropolitan Government. https://www.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/tosei/hodohappyo/press/2018/01/26/documents/14_02.pdf. Accessed 27 Oct 2021. Toda, Y. (2005). Hōmuresu Chiiki Sēkatsu Ikō Shien Jigyō no Sēkatsu Sapōto [Life support through the programme to facilitate a community-based lives]. Shelter-less, 25, 82–89. Toshikoshi Haken Mura Jikko I’inkai. (2009). Haken Mura: Kuni o Ugokashita Muika Kan [Haken Mura: The six days that changed the state]. Mainichi Shimbun Sha. Utsunomiya, K., & Yuasa, M. (Eds.). (2009). Haken Mura: Naniga Towarete Irunoka [a village of dispatched workers: What is questioned?]. Iwanami Shoten. Vogel, E. F. (1979). Japan as number one: Lessons for America. Harvard University Press. Yamada, S. (2005). Sēsaku ga hito o korosu toki [When a policy kills people]. Shelter-less, 26, 228–233. Yamaguchi, K. (1998). Shinjuku ni okeru nojukusha no ikinuki senryaku: nojukusha kan no shakai kankē o chūshin ni [Survival strategies of homeless people in Shinjuku: social relationships among homeless people]. The Annals of Japan Association for Urban Sociology, 16, 119–134. Yamakita, T. (2006). Nojukusha ni okeru nakama to iu komyunikēshon [Comradeship within communities of homeless people]. Japanese Sociological Review, 57(3), 582–599. Yamamoto, H. (2005). Chiiki sēkatsu ikō shien jigyō (Yoyogi Kōen) [The programme to facilitate a community-based lives (Yoyogi Park)]. Shelter-less, 26, 214–219. Yamasaki, K., Inatsuki, T., Morimatsu, N., Okuda, C. and Hujimura, O. (2006). Hōmuresu Jiritsu Shien: NPO, Shimin, Gyōsēkyōdō ni Yoru “Hōmu” no Kaihuku [The support of homeless ­people’s self-help life: The restoration of “home” by NPO, citizens, and their collaboration with the municipality]. Akashi Shoten. Yasue, S. (2005). Motto fukaku nojyukusha no naka ni haitta sesaku o [We need policies more deeply engaged with homeless people]. Shelter-less, 25, 94–106. Mahito Hayashi teaches urban studies and comparative Japanese studies at Kinjo Gakuin University, Japan. Professor Hayashi is the author of Rescaling Urban Poverty (Wiley, 2023, published in the Royal Geographical Society’s book series), and an award-winning Japanese-language book entitled Hōmuresu to Toshi Kūkan [Homelessness and Urban Space] (Akashi, 2014). Articles on poverty, labor, social movements, urban theory, regulation theory, or state theory have appeared in journals including Antipode, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environment and Planning A, and Japanese Sociological Review. He currently sits on the editorial board of the Sage journal Critical Sociology.  

Kodomo shokudo (Children’s Cafeterias): Changing Families and Social Inequality in Japan Junko Nanahoshi

Abstract  In Japan, a social initiative, Kodomo shokudo, was initiated in 2012. These are free or low-cost cafeterias where children can come alone and feel safe. Within 10 years, more than 7000 such cafeterias were established across the country. Does it mean that activities expected of families in the past, such as feeding their children, have been created outside school lunches and markets? To get a closer look, we present the current situation of child poverty, which is one of the triggers for the spread of Kodomo shokudo, then present an overview and typology of Kodomo shokudo. Next, the environment surrounding family and child-rearing in Japan and the slow change in family norms related to child-rearing are discussed through the analysis of interviews. Keyword  Kodomo shokudo (children’s cafeteria) · Family transformation · Family norms · Familism · Child poverty · Ibasho

Introduction In 2012, a food-based civic initiative, mainly targeting children, was launched in Ota Ward, Tokyo, Japan. The person who first initiated this initiative named it the Kodomo shokudo as a “free or low-cost cafeteria where children can come alone and feel safe.” This initiative has exploded in popularity. There were 319 places in 2016, 3718 in 2019, and 7363 in 2022 (an increase of 1349 places in 2022 compared to 2021 figures) (NPO National Kodomo shokudo Support Centre, Musubie, 2023). Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of cafeterias is increasing annually and their voluntary activities are expanding.

J. Nanahoshi (*) Education and Research Organization for Humanities and Social Sciences, Chiba University, Chiba, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_19

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The spread of Kodomo shokudo has not only been driven by people’s interests but also by several initiatives. For example, in 2016, the Kodomo shokudo Summit 2016 was held. Organized by the Kodomo shokudo Network on a regular basis, the summit served as a liaison to promote exchanges between Kodomo shokudo operators and the dissemination of their activities. This regularly held event provides an opportunity to report how Kodomo shokudos are created and to exchange case studies of their activities (Kodomo shokudo Network, n.d.). In September of the same year, a tour was organized across the country to promote an understanding of Kodomo shokudo (“Spread! The Circle of Kodomo Shokudo” National Tour Executive Committee, n.d.). The increasing numbers of these cafeterias suggests that the initiative garnered the support of many people. The person who named Kodomo shokudo came up with the idea for this activity after hearing from a schoolteacher that some children do not get adequate food other than school lunches on days when their mothers are sick and unable to cook meals (Yuasa, 2020). It is not known whether poverty is the reason for this episode, but it is said that one of the characteristics of Kodomo shokudo activities is that they also target poverty issues (Kashiwagi, 2018). For a long time, social initiatives for children in Japan focused on exam wars, games, and the impact of the Internet but never on economic issues. This is because Japan has been considered a completely middle-­ class society (Abe, 2008). Understanding the background behind the conception of Kodomo shokudo leads us to the reality that families have difficulty in fulfilling one of the basic features of the modern family, which is “the responsibility to reproduce and guarantee the livelihood of family members” (Yamada, 1994, p. 44). It seems that “the structure of the family provides a cover for poverty and amplifies it” (Matsumoto, 2017, pp. 1–2). Kodomo shokudo provides ibasho, a place where they can be themselves. (cf. Yoshida, 2016; Murota, 2017). These places are believed to have originated in free schools for children who were not attending school in the 1980s and continued to expand as places where children can feel safe and be themselves, distanced from school and home (Sumida, 2003). The first official document published by the Ministry of Education in 1992 states, “schools should also be a place for the heart” (Hagiwara, 2018). In the 2016 Outline for the Promotion of Support for Child and Youth Development, ibasho appeared as a place of livelihood support for children in single-parent families that help “address the issue of child poverty” (Cabinet Office, 2016, p.  18). Children’s place, which began as a way of distancing them from school and home, has become a term used in policy and seems to have taken on the aspect of moving closer to school and home. In this way, behind the demand for Kodomo shokudo is the presence of families with difficult living conditions and children who need ibasho outside of school or home. In Japan, changes in children’s eating habits have been linked to criticism about families and mothers (cf. Adachi & NHK “Good Morning Square” Team, 1983; Iwamura, 2003). Even today, meals accompanied by hearty gatherings tend to be seen as symbols of family relationships. (Noda, 2015). The birth and prosperity of the Kodomo shokudo can also be viewed as a manifestation of the gap between the norm that children’s diet should be provided within the family and the reality.

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One of the characteristics of Kodomo shokudo is that they provide meals to children by people outside the family. Rather than criticizing the family for the child’s lack of a proper diet, as has been the case in the past, Kodomo shokudo transferred activities that were expected of families in the past to places outside the family. Is the rise of these Kodomo shokudo a manifestation of the changing family? What impact does this have on the link between eating and family?

Overview and Typology of Kodomo shokudo Kodomo shokudo has “children” and “eating” as their common denominator; other things vary from across children’s canteens. Some Kodomo shokudo mainly cater to children, while others are community interaction centers that can be used not only by children but also by a wide variety of people. The governing bodies include voluntary organizations, non-profit organizations, and individuals (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, 2018), Some activities are held once a month, while others are held every week or every day. Some are held on weekday evenings, some on weekends, and some during breakfast. The places of activities are also diverse, including community centers, meeting places, and welfare facilities. As mentioned above, the cost of a meal at a Kodomo shokudo is free or low for children, whereas for adults, the cost is set at, for example, 500 yen in some cases. However, this cost is not high. Food is provided by users’ meal fees, donations of cash and food (from people interested in the activities, neighboring farmers, businesses, etc.), and preparation in cooperation with food banks in some places. In some cases, a register is prepared for users to write down their names, addresses, schools, allergies, and so on. Where children are set up to pay for their meals, some have a piggy bank, considering that some children may find it difficult to pay. If they cannot pay, they decide that it is permissible to put, for example, a penny or a coin from a game into the piggy bank. The piggy bank does not allow others to know whether a payment has been made. Meal menus, for example, include “Curry with cheese, salad, and dessert” (“Spread! the Circle of Kodomo Shokudo” National Tour Executive Committee Text Project, 2017), menus that children might like, home-cooked meals, or menus devised from donated food. In some places, the meals are eaten all together, with a signal of Itadakimasu (appreciation for the people who prepare the food and for all the food we eat), whereas in other places, the users receive their meals in the order they arrive and sit down at an empty table, sometimes communicating with each other. Besides meals, some have the time and space to learn, play together, or have books and playthings available. Many also celebrate festivals, such as Christmas. Some have a few staff members, while others have from 20 to 30. Some of the staff are single people who participate after work, but most of them are from three main generations: older people, mainly baby boomers, people who are raising children or have finished raising children, and young people of high school and university age (Sung & Ushijima, 2020, p. 117).

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In addition, Kodomo shokudo works with a wide range of partners, including local schools, neighborhood associations, community associations, welfare commissioners, children’s welfare, children’s centers, social welfare councils, prefectures, cities, universities, and learning supporters. Yuasa (2021) categorizes Kodomo shokudo in terms of the philosophy of the initiative. Yuasa observes two functions of Kodomo shokudo—as a “regional exchange base” (community building) and as a “measure against child poverty”— and adds the perspective of the target group being limited or not to the categorization. According to Yuasa, many Kodomo shokudo operations can be broadly categorized into two types. The first is the target-non-specific/community-building symbiotic cafeteria, which is a place aimed at building communities for all, not just children. The second is the target-only/casework-type cafeteria with care, which targets children with difficulties, for example, from poor families, and is based on trusting relationships created through eating (Yuasa, 2021, pp. 170–172). During the COVID-19 pandemic, some of them continued their activities while changing their forms, such as the distribution of packed lunches and side dishes, and food distribution. Both target specific/community building types and non-target specific/case-work types of Kodomo shokudo also appeared (Yuasa, 2021, pp. 168–176). The former is, for example, a place where “food drives for single-­ parent families are widely called for throughout the community” (Yuasa, 2021, p. 194). The latter is a place where individuals can talk about their plight in an open setting, made possible by the fact that people were connected before the pandemic as a place for community interaction (Yuasa, 2021 pp. 174–175). The Kodomo shokudo No. 1 is a “symbiotic cafeteria” according to Yuasa’s classification, as it does not limit the target group and is a place where both children and adults can visit. Therefore, the roots of Kodomo shokudo can be found there (Abiru, 2017). This classification is not a clear-cut division but a relationship in which one of them has a center of gravity or complements the other. Yuasa (2021) introduces Kodomo shokudo. At one of Kodomo shokudo, the children start arriving at approximately 16:00. Children play in large spaces on the ground floor. High school and university students, as well as young professionals, work with the children, while local women cook in the kitchen. Children play in the ground floor space but also on the stairs and in the corridors, where they read books together, play with old-fashioned toys, chase each other, and so on. Some of the children come to the kitchen to enquire about the menu and help a little (Yuasa, 2021, p. 65–67). One high school student spoke of the lack of a “backyard” in the Kodomo shokudo and describes how the people who come to the Kodomo shokudo are both the operators and participants. One high school student had once been a truant, so he was consulted by the person running the cafeteria about how to treat a truant junior high school student (Yuasa, 2021, p. 44–49). In addition, a single mother with two primary school-aged children was always with her children at home and did not have time to leave them. However, when she started coming to the Kodomo shokudo, the children played on their own with fewer restrictions, and because high school and university students and adults from the

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community looked after them, she could spend time away from her children without worry. She felt that they were like family (Yuasa, 2021, p. 57) because she did not have to pay so much attention to them. As this mother has a tight schedule between the end of her workday and her children’s pick-up, the head of the Kodomo shokudo picks up her older children. Furthermore, this mother received an entrance gift from the Kodomo shokudo (before entering primary schools in Japan, each family prepares school bags, gym clothes, school shoes, and school supplies, etc.) (Yuasa, 2021, p. 56–61). Another mother mentioned not having to cook dinner as an appeal for the Kodomo shokudo. She said that her husband usually comes home late, and she eats with her two children. According to Yuasa, such mothers are sometimes frowned upon in Japan as “spoiling mothers and lowering their family power” (Yuasa, 2021, p. 35). Yuasa notes, however, in Kodomo shokudo, there is an environment where children can share in the preparation of meals and where there is an adult other than themselves who is available to help with the children. They also provide a place for mothers to take a break from the housework and childcare they would have to cope with alone at home (Yuasa, 2021, pp. 34–41). Thus, although the spread of Kodomo shokudo was triggered in part by poverty issues, the development of Kodomo shokudo is not limited to poverty alleviation. In the next section, we discuss the background of family and child-rearing in Japan in order to determine whether the prosperity of the Kodomo shokudo is a manifestation of family transformation.

Child-Rearing Norms That Do Not Change Much Esping-Andersen (1999) noted that the Japanese welfare regime is characterized by familism. As a result, there is a strong belief that care, including child-rearing, should be addressed within family relationships. Sakai also points out that “in Japan, the family is the only place for individuals to depend when they fall into difficulties” (Sakai, 2017, p.  147). In particular, family responsibilities for child-­ rearing are heavy. This partly contextualizes the depiction of mothers’ sense of security that they have gained a little source of dependence outside the family by participating in Kodomo shokudo. Today, the number of dual-earner families is increasing, but actual child-rearing is often performed by women. According to “Results of the Basic Social Life Survey, 2021 edition” by the Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (2021), husbands with children under 6 years of age spend, on an average, 1 hour 54 minutes on housework (housework, care/nursing, childcare, and shopping), while wives spend 7  hours 28  minutes, a gap that has narrowed slightly over the years but remains substantially large. This is not to blame the husband who probably spends much of his time at work. Education and upbringing costs in Japan depend on the family, and fulfilling this financial responsibility is also a major burden. Japan’s primary to post-secondary education expenditure as a

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percentage of GDP (2020 or latest available) is 2.4% (OECD  – Average 3.1%; United States: 3.2%), and tertiary education expenditure is 0.5% of GDP (OECD – Average 0.9%; United States, 0.89%) (2020 or latest available) (OECD, 2023). It has been pointed out that opportunities for families to eat together have been decreasing recently, partly due to the discrepancy in family time (Shinada, 2015). As stated by a mother who came to the Kodomo shokudo, it is not uncommon for mothers and children to have dinner alone in the absence of their husbands, partly because husbands work long hours. The relative poverty rate for single-parent families in Japan is 48.3% (OECD, 2018). Among single-parent families, the proportion of single-mother families was 86.8%, and the employment rate of single mothers was 81.8%, of which 52.3% had non-regular employment (2016) (Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office, 2022). Despite the high employment rate, the relative poverty rate is high. Incidentally, Japan’s ranking in the Gender Gap Index in 2022 is 116 out of 146 countries, and its ranking in “Economy” is 121 out of 146 countries (World Economic Forum, 2022). It appears that in this social situation, even if single mothers work, more than half will be employed on a part-time basis, which may lead to a difficult economic situation and child-rearing environment. Ochiai stated that Japanese families in the 1960s had stronger kinship networks than today and “were able to raise children and care for the elderly without seeking assistance from neighborhood networks or public facilities” (Ochiai, 2004, p. 95). Subsequently, the nature of the kinship relationships surrounding the family also changed, with a shift to nuclear families and a decrease in the number of people in the household. According to Yamada (2013), Japanese society in the 1970s and the 1980s was a period when many people could easily form “modern families”. The prevailing image of the family was one in which the man was mainly responsible for financial duties and the woman was mainly responsible for housework and childcare (Yamada, 2013). Subsequently, the situation became a post-industrial economy due to the effects of globalization, neoliberalism, etc., and people began to have difficulty forming modern families, owing to unstable employment and low incomes (Yamada, 2013). At the same time, around the 1980s, in contrast to society’s perception of the myth of maternal love, the existence of mothers with vague anxiety about raising children became apparent (Makino, 1982). During the same period, it was reported in the media that a certain number of primary school children ate alone at home. This was the opposite of eating together as a family happily and was at the time perceived as a family crisis. In addition, the fact that the child ate alone or that the meal was simple was linked to criticism against the mother (Adachi & NHK “Good Morning Square” Team, 1983). In Japan, since the Meiji period (around the 1870s and the 1880s), textbooks and other materials have continuously spoken of the ideal image of eating together as a family (Muta, 1996; Omote, 2010). Omote (2010) argues that the norm of family gatherings at the dining table, an image of a warm dining table that many people still admire today, may have had influence on the popularization of the modern family in Japan. Moreover, cooking is also associated with affection (Yamao, 2004), leading to the fact that even today, meals accompanied by hearty gatherings are spoken of as symbols of family relationships.

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Furthermore, the 1980s saw the emergence of children who were not attending school, and free schools appeared in 1985 as places for learning outside of school. Later, school values such as competition and examinations became more important at home, and children began to seek a third place, which was neither school nor home. Such places are also called “children’s ibasho,” and are sought as places where they can feel psychologically safe and accepted (Sumida, 2003). Thus, around the 1980s, when the formation of the modern family peaked, various problems that could not be solved within the family began to emerge. However, they were basically dealt with by individuals and families. Some children, both families and schools can feel uncomfortable, and social initiatives to create other places for children were initiated. However, it was assumed that food, clothing, and shelter were provided within the family. According to Yamada (2004), one type of individualization of the family is when the family is able to choose norms and behaviors toward, for example, the community, neighborhood, and relatives. The other is when each individual is able to choose how to respond to norms and behaviors within the family. These two types of individualization in the Japanese family occurred at similar times in the 1990s. Along with liberation from the oppressive nature of modern family norms, there was an increasing tendency for parenting responsibilities to be concentrated more within the family amid economic instability and changes in  local communities, neighborhoods, and kinship relationships. In Japan, measures to combat declining fertility began in 1989, when the total fertility rate reached 1.57. The birth rate continued to decline, and in 2005, the Government of Japan indicated that “it is important to ‘socialize child-rearing’ so that child-rearing is not solely the responsibility of the family but is tackled by society as a whole” (Cabinet Office, 2005, p. 185). However, as mentioned above, criticism of mothers has occurred even in the case of Kodomo shokudo, an initiative that is not held as frequently as it should be. Even if the socialization of child-rearing has advanced, the normative efficacy of the desirability of child-rearing by mothers has been maintained (Inoue, 2013) and the normative logic regarding the family of child-rearing has persisted even when the carers are outside the family (Matsuki, 2013). There are norms that centralize three concepts related to child-rearing: care, private space, and parent-child relationships (Toma, 2017). Thus, although real families have become more diverse due to fluctuations in gender roles, work and lifetime employment during the period of rapid economic growth, the change in norms has been gradual. Against this backdrop, in 2012, the child’s eating place, the symbolic and expected core activity of family reproduction, was created outside the family as a social initiative. Its rise is also a sign that there can be more than one place in society where people outside the family provide meals to children from other families. Kodomo shokudo is also looking at poverty issues, but they are becoming a form of comprehensive support through food assistance, including support for children eating alone at home and for their mothers. While women are more likely to become caregivers of family members and those outside of the family in need of care, the members of Kodomo shokudo are also becoming more diverse. Are these signs of family changes in child-rearing?

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Interviews with the Members of Kodomo Shokudo The comments presented below are interviews with members of Kodomo shokudo (A, D, E, F) and those involved in an intermediate support role (B, C) (interview periods: April–July 2017 and June–July 2019). Interviews were conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic. Naturally, they do not represent the whole of the Kodomo shokudo, but we believe that they provide a foothold for examining the signs of family transformation. Owing to space limitations, we would like to introduce only a small part of the interviews. One person describes how they started to get involved in Kodomo shokudo as follows. It started when I was told that there were children who seemed to eat only one banana for every meal other than school lunch, that is, dinner and breakfast. (A)

Those who decided to get involved in Kodomo shokudo were shocked by the difference between their image of children and parenting families and the reality of the situation. The shock resulting from the poor prevailing conditions for children was so great that it did not lead to family criticisms such as “spoiling the parents.” However, the avoidance of family criticism also comes from sources other than the shock of the existence of these children. Times are changing, so the cliché that parents should do it because they used to do it is not quite right. Of course, family is the foundation, but I think wherever possible, support should be supplemented by society. (G) There are many mothers in their 60s who say that if they had such a place, I would have wanted to use it, too. Therefore, regardless of whether they work, I think it is very good for mothers to have such a place, and it might be even better for single fathers. (A) What I think about when I am involved in the activity is that the mothers may not have much experience with having meals prepared for them as children. So, now, we are cooking together with parents and children, and if it becomes fun, maybe they will do it at home. (F)

It is becoming more common to use social resources to carry out child-rearing and caregiving, previously expected of families, and from this point of view, they are no longer immediately linked to criticism of individuals or families. Furthermore, perhaps due to the intergenerational linkage of child poverty, it has not been immediately linked to parental criticism. The mothers did not usually receive much praise or acknowledgment. I feel that mothers come here not only for eating but also for human interaction. (D)

As mentioned above, mothers are still the primary child-rearing providers, and if child-rearing is accomplished within the family, it is invisible to everyone and may be taken as a matter of course. However, showing them among others is an opportunity to recognize and praise each other for their hard work. However, this is not to say that it orients toward the de-familialization of meals accompanied by hearty gatherings. They are shocked by the lack of family meal experiences and see the value of family meals accompanied by hearty gatherings.

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I was concerned about child poverty; I was very shocked when one child told me that “It’s so weird to eat with family.” (B) I think that if you do not have a happy circle in the family, the negative feelings will continue to grow, and that family life, eating, and sitting around the table will save your life in many ways. (E) Meals used to have a role in connecting people, and conversations started to take place around the table, but it does not, nowadays. We did not experience it 60% of the time. (C)

C. states that approximately 60% of the respondents no longer had the experience of sitting around the table with their family because of the increase in the number of single-parent households and dual-earner households, as well as the gap in their living time, and a sense of crisis was felt. Although it is desirable to have meals with the entire family, they are also aware that the actual social situation is difficult. So, the experience that eating together is delicious and enjoyable is the poverty of experience, rather than economic poverty. That kind of poverty can be covered, although we cannot cover economic poverty. We must do what we can do to cover it; let us do it, we must do it; these thoughts are probably spreading now. (B) I guess it’s a neighborhood auntie kind of relationship (G). When I was a kid, if I did something bad and was kicked out of the house, the auntie next door said, “Come here “. She would call me over and let me have a snack or take me to the beach with her. I remember that I had a lot of fun, and she took me along on family trips. I wonder if any child experiences that way nowadays, or maybe it’s just the times we live in. I want to repay the kindness I have received from others. (F)

Kodomo shokudo, cannot be regarded as a primary poverty alleviation measure (Takenaka, 2018). Members of Kodomo shokudo position the lack of experience of family shared meals as “poverty of experience.” Positioning themselves as neighbors and referring to their own experiences of neighborhood relationships, they believe that although they are not family members, there are certain things they can do to address the declining experience of co-eating without denying the family. There is also an aspect of members of Kodomo shokudo relationships with their children that they enjoy talking about. No matter how good the food is, it is lonely to eat by yourself, and you cook because there is someone to eat it with, and eating with that person is, well, living. This is what we are currently doing. (F) We do not need them to remember our faces, but we want them to remember the experience of making things together. Like when we made Shaomai or dumplings together. (E) I want the children to remember what was fun and exciting at that time and the feeling of having fun, even though 10 or 20 years from now, there may be more convenient recipes. (G)

In Kodomo shokudo of E. F. G., they cook and eat with their children. They also focused on communality in cooking. It is important to have meals with the family, but they do not criticize the family for not having that experience. Instead, they want the children to have positive food experiences, even if it is outside the family. They talk happily about cooking with their children and imparting cooking skills. Some wanted their children to learn skills in managing food, including cooking, so that

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they could survive if the family was not capable of managing their food. If this is difficult for the family, the idea of supplementing outside the family is shown. Although this is only a small part of what is presented here, one thing that is clear from the narratives of the members of Kodomo shokudo is that the experience of the Kodomo shokudo has also provided an opportunity for adults to relativize their image of children, their view of the dining table, and their view of the family. Yuasa mentions the relativization of children’s values through interactions with a variety of adults at Kodomo shokudo (Yuasa, 2021, pp. 24–29), and this can be said to apply to adults as well. This is an experience brought about by encounters with diverse children and their families. Second, although they believed that the image of meals accompanied by family gatherings is desirable, they also understood the reality that this is difficult to achieve. From the perspective of generalizing the use of social resources in care and imagining child poverty, it does not become a criticism of families, such as spoiling their parents. Alternately, the Kodomo shokudo was born from the point of wanting children to have enjoyable food experiences. The Kodomo shokudo has made it possible to reach out and provide food to children other than those from their own families. The spread of Kodomo shokudo also indicates that there are people who want to do something for children, even if they are not their own children. It is also a place for those who want to do something about the predicament children are in. They also positioned themselves as “neighborhood uncles and aunts” to the children. Although people outside the family provide meals to children from other families, they do not deny the family. This lack of radicalism and diversity of activities may have led to the inclusion of diverse values regarding family food, which has earned the approval of many people.

Conclusion While socioeconomic conditions have changed and families have become more diverse, the change in family norms regarding child-rearing has been gradual. Under such circumstances, there are children who are unable to eat sufficient food. Regarding this issue, we looked at the possibility that the Kodomo shokudo which emerged as a social initiative rather than a traditional criticism of the family, could influence the relationship between eating and the family. It is difficult to assert anything at this stage, as Kodomo shokudo has been in existence for less than 10 years. The interviews also suggested that even if the meal providers are outside the family, the modern family norm regarding food, where meals with family gatherings are desirable, is still referred to and sustained. However, Kodomo shokudo provides a mechanism where several people outside the family can be loosely involved in children’s meals, and the fact that there are more than a few people who want to take advantage of the system that allows them to provide meals, not just for their own children, can be said to be a sign of the

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relaxation of family norms on food. Even if there are diverse ideas about food places outside the family, the rise of the Kodomo shokudo symbolizes social acceptance to having multiple child-centered eating places. The places for children to eat outside the family, where non-family members are involved, is where participants, whether members or users, bring their views on children, family, and dining. As the people interviewed described their shock about the difference between their image of children and parenting families and the reality of the situation, their understanding of the socialization of parenting and their interpretation of the mothers they had met through the activities, the interaction in Kodomo shokudo may have the potential to change their views of children, families, and dining. It allows the closed boundaries of the private sphere of the family to be relaxed by moving back and forth with social initiatives. This is the implication of the rise of Kodomo shokudo for family transformation. Some of Kodomo shokudo ceased their activities after the COVID-19 pandemic, while others have continued their activities in different forms, such as take-out of side dishes and food distribution. We must acknowledge that, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kodomo shokudo have continued their activities for those who need them, and the number of cafeterias has increased. Some have now reopened congregate Kodomo shokudo or held them in combination with food pantries and take-outs. It is also an image that has been covered in the media more often in the context of poverty, which could strengthen the image of poverty reduction and the direction of food support. This may have created a certain image of the family, and both the requirements and functions of Kodomo shokudo may change in the post-COVID-19 world. Some members of Kodomo shokudo may also feel burdened by such societal expectations, and it is not a good idea to overburden voluntary activity. However, it can be said that rather than spoiling parents, there is now a certain acceptance that there are people who need food support and a place to stay outside the home. In addition, there is a need for careful discussion around how children position their experiences in Kodomo shokudo. We conclude this study by pointing out that there are probably some children who need an adult who cares a little more about them. Acknowledgements  This chapter is based on a part of my doctoral dissertation and has been modified. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to those who participated in the interview survey and those who spoke to me. I would like to thank the editors for their many suggestions.

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Reimagining Japan Through the Experiences of Mixed Japanese Yuna Sato, Yu-Anis Aruga, and Sayaka Osanami Törngren

Abstract  Despite the myth of ethnic and racial homogeneity, the population of Japan has been and is increasingly becoming diverse. Among these diverse population are those so called hāfu, mixed Japanese born to a Japanese and a foreign parent. The narrow conception of Japaneseness often leaves mixed Japanese to be excluded from Japanese society and question their claims to being Japanese. This chapter provides a historical overview and transformation on how individuals labelled as “mixed” were treated socially and politically in Japan before 1945 and up to the present. We also present a brief state-of-the-art of the emerging field of hāfu studies and suggest the future direction of this field. Keywords  Mixed Japanese · hāfu · hāfu studies · Discrimination

Y. Sato (*) Graduate School of Human Relations, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan Hawke Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] Y.-A. Aruga Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] S. Osanami Törngren Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_20

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Introduction Although Japan is an ethnically and racially heterogeneous society, the myth of ethnic and racial homogeneity in Japanese society is widespread, both at home and abroad (Befu, 2001; Lie, 2001; Oguma, 1995). The idea of nihonjin (Japanese people) – i.e., Japaneseness – is narrowly defined in post-war Japan by culture, race, ethnicity, nationality, behaviour or residency status (Kowner & Befu, 2015; Lie, 2001; Sato, 2021; Sugimoto, 1999), creating the dichotomy of Japanese and gaikokujin/gaijin (foreigner). The concept of “foreigners” lumps together all persons who do not fit the narrowly defined idea of Japanese and even includes persons of Chinese and Korean descent whose phenotypes are often visually indistinguishable from those identified as Japanese (Kashiwazaki, 2009). Against this backdrop, individuals born to both a Japanese and a foreign parent are often considered “mixed” in contemporary Japan, with the most common label of hāfu, which probably derives from the English word “half” (Okamura, 2017, p. 44). Historically, the narrow conception of Japaneseness ignored and excluded “mixed” individuals, who were often problematised as a social issue and discriminated against (Shimoji, 2018). Even if they self-identify as Japanese, they are regularly seen and perceived as “foreigners” (Osanami-Törngren & Sato, 2021). Legally, gaikokujin (foreigners) refers to persons who do not hold Japanese nationality; however, informally, gaikokujin are assumed to not only lack Japanese nationality but also to appear and behave differently from the majority (Kashiwazaki, 2009). Nonetheless, in recent decades, mixed Japanese have increased their presence in Japanese society as a result of globalisation and immigration. The visibility of celebrities and athletes, especially whose mixedness is marked by phenotypical features, is prominent, including the world-famous tennis player, Naomi Osaka. This mixed population is also expected to grow in the future. In 2015, the number of individuals born to both a Japanese and a foreign national was approximately 804,000, constituting 0.6% of the total population. This share is expected to increase to 1.8% (approximately 2,030,000) by 2040 and to 3.8% (approximately 3,485,000) by 2065 (Korekawa, 2018). This chapter will first provide a historical overview of those who were seen as mixed and how they were treated socially and politically in Japan before 1945 and up to the present. Then we present a brief state-of-the-art of the emerging field of hāfu studies and suggest the future direction of this field. We use “mixed” in this chapter to refer to the population known as hāfu in the Japanese context.

Historical Overview of Perception of Mixed Japanese Throughout the country’s history, mixed persons have always been present in Japan and have been referred to with various labels by different actors such as the parents of mixed children, activists, educators, policymakers and mixed people themselves (Okamura, 2017). The label of mixedness has been historically conceptualised and

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recognised as people who are born to two people who are ethnically defined as Japanese and non-Japanese – foreigners and indigenous people of Japan. In this section, we briefly lay out how political and societal conditions have defined who and what kind of mixed persons were seen as social problems over the course of modern Japanese history and how this has affected the emergence of different terms referring to the current mixed population in Japan.

Views on Mixed Japanese Pre-WWII Japan One of the first significant moments for Japan to recognise mixed populations emerged in the late-nineteenth century, when modern Japan imported Western ideas of classification and hierarchy of race and appropriated this knowledge to the relations between the Japanese and other Asian/indigenous people (Kawai, 2015). Ainoko (mixed-breed) was the most prevalent term used to refer to people of mixed parentage in the Japanese language from this period on, together with the terms konketsu-ji (mixed-blood children) and konketsu (mixed-blood), which first appeared in the late 1890s and early 1900s respectively (Okamura, 2017, pp. 42–43). The latter two terms later became those used most commonly in publications in the twentieth century (Shaitan & McEntee-Atalianis, 2017; Okamura, 2017). Some scholars began to pursue pseudoscientific studies on the mixed population as far back as the late-nineteenth and the early-twentieth centuries (Sakano, 2009, p. 189). As Japan was already incorporated into the globally spreading ideas of racial hierarchy and the country internalised its inferior position from a Western perspective, some Japanese scholars promoted the “racial improvement” of Japanese people through the mixing of Japanese with White Europeans (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016; Kawai, 2015; Sakano, 2009). Parallel to the promotion of marriages between Japanese and White Europeans, racial mixing between Japanese and Ainu people – the indigenous population of the northern island of Hokkaido – was promoted by the Japanese government in the 1930s as a way to assimilate and “civilise” Ainu people and erase the Ainu category (Sekiguchi, 2005, p. 477). At the same time, pseudoscientific research on children born of a Japanese and an Ainu parent increased (Sakano, 2009, p. 190). Underlying this increase was the rapid growth of attention given to the eugenics and genetic phenomena in the 1930s, in addition to the already existing sexual contacts between the Ainu and the Wajin, a term referring to mainland Japanese vis-à-vis the ethnic Ainu population (Sakano, 2009). Against this historical background, in contemporary Japan, Ainu people are often falsely seen as “(n)eolithic remnants of the people who populated the Japanese archipelago in ancient times” (Sjöberg, 2008, p.  212) and individuals with these heritages are not recognised within the contemporary category of hāfu. The same period, the 1940s, when the Empire of Japan began invading various parts of Asia in earnest, saw an increase in the pseudoscientific studies of people of mixed blood with diverse backgrounds, including Western European, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Indonesian and Micronesians (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016; Sakano, 2009, p.  190).

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Behind this trend was Japan’s complex identity crisis. In this, racial projects where the fear that “pure” Japanese people might disappear as a result of the growing miscegenation coexisted with the encouragement of mixed marriages specifically between Japanese and the colonised Koreans/Taiwanese in order to assimilate the colonised citizens (Sakano, 2009, pp. 191–192).

Views on Mixed Japanese in Post-WWII Japan Following the country’s defeat in World War II, the Empire of Japan was dismantled and the country was occupied by Allied Forces from 1945 to 1952. During this period, Koreans and Taiwanese – who had been once considered Japanese and their intermarriages with the Japanese promoted – gradually became classified and seen as foreigners (Kashiwazaki, 2009). As a result of the US occupation, the mixing of other Asians and other “inferior” racial and ethnic groups with Japanese people became less relevant (Kawai, 2014, pp. 41–43). Instead, attention was focused on GI babies – konketsu-ji (mixed-blood children) – who were born to Japanese women and foreign soldiers (Shimoji, 2018). These GI babies were depicted as a “societal problem” in the Japanese media (Fish, 2008; Okamura, 2017; Shimoji, 2018; Shimoji & Ogaya, 2019). This was partly because many of these children were considered to have been born from prostitution (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016) and they stood out due to their phenotypes, forming a clear perception of racial differences. The media discussions concerned Japanese attitudes towards them (Fish, 2008; Okamura, 2017). These included how to educate the children in school and whether the Japanese could accept and absorb these children, who reminded some Japanese people of the country’s defeat in the war and of the Japanese women who became the wives or prostitutes of foreign soldiers (Okamura, 2017). Some of the children were sent for adoption to the families of American military personnel stationed in Japan; the reasoning behind this was concerns that they would face discrimination and racism in Japanese society. Those who stayed within the structures of Japanese society, particularly those with an African American heritage, did indeed experience bullying, marginalisation and discrimination (Burkhardt, 1983). Moreover, many of these children were raised in poverty by Japanese single mothers (Burkhardt, 1983; Fish, 2008). Two contrasting assimilation and segregation approaches were proposed (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016). The Japanese government took an assimilationist stand to educate them in Japanese public schools so that they could become Japanese citizens, while institutions such as the Elizabeth Saunders Home and St. Stephano Gakuen took a separationist approach whereby mixed orphans were removed from Japanese society and raised and educated under the homes’ protection (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016; Shimoji, 2018). In the meantime, the mainstream Japanese society in the 1950s and 1960s adopted various White American cultural trends – such as fashion, films and music – which cultivated positive images of white people (Lie, 2001; Shimoji, 2018). This Westernisation and Americanisation of cultural consumption triggered a konketsu

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būmu (mixed-blood boom) in which many TV shows, films or magazines featured mixed white people in the late 1960s and peaked in the 1970s, coinciding with the time when the first generation of post-war-born mixed people became adults (Okamura, 2017; Shimoji, 2018). These images of konkestu and hāfu were racialised and gendered; many of these celebrities and idols were women who had both Japanese and White heritages (Shimoji, 2018). The term konketsu was gradually, if not completely, replaced by hāfu in the 1970s when a female pop group named gōruden hāfu (Golden Hāfu) gained popularity among the masses (Okamura, 2017; Shimoji, 2018). It was not until 1994, as a result of lobbying by the NGO Kumstaka – a support organisation for immigrants in Japan which claimed that the term konketsu-­ji was discriminatory – that the term konketsu-ji was gradually replaced by kokusai-ji (international children) in formal media outlets such as newspapers (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016).

Views on Mixed Japanese Since the 1990s The focus on mixed Japanese continued to diversify as Japan gained economic power and became more internationalised. For example, the increased presence of Japanese-Filipino children (JFC) led to them being singled out as a social problem in the 1990s, in both the Philippines and Japan. As a result of the increase in trips to the Philippines by Japanese male tourists and businessmen in the 1970s, as well as the increase of Filipina migrant women who started going to Japan in the 1980s, the number of JFC increased (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016). Several Japanese newspapers in the mid-1990s reported that the number of JFC in the Philippines was estimated at more than 10,000. JFC were also called Japino (Japanese-Filipino), nippi-­ konkestu-­ji (Japanese-Filipino mixed-blood) or nippi-kokusai-ji (Japanese-Filipino international children). JFC’s status was precarious, both in Japan and in the Philippines; some were abandoned and not legally recognised by their Japanese fathers. Moreover, Japanese nationality law up until 1985 – based on patrilineal jus sanguinis – left many of them stateless. The attention given to GI babies evolved into discussions around Amerasians (mixed Americans and Asians) in the 1990s (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016). While the origin of the term “Amerasian” dates back to the 1960s and refers to mixed children born to American military men and Asian women, Japanese people have seen the Amerasian issue as something specific to Okinawa, a southern Japanese island where approximately 75% of the US bases in Japan are located (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016). Amerasians were marginalised in Okinawa due to anti-American sentiments. Stereotypes against them included an association with violence, prostitution and extramarital affairs. A common issue between JFC and Amerasians was their lack of Japanese citizenship due to the patrilineal jus sanguinis (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016). In 1998, five single mothers of Amerasian children founded the AmerAsian school in Okinawa with its motto “daburu” not “hāfu” (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016). The

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term daburu, meaning double, was promoted in the 1990s and gained traction by some parents of mixed children, researchers, support organisations, members of the zainichi Korean community and the AmerAsian school in Okinawa (Okamura, 2017; Shimoji, 2018; Shimoji & Ogaya, 2019). Advocates of daburu interpreted the term hāfu as discriminatory and emphasised that people of mixed parentage have “double” cultures, languages and identities (Shaitan & McEntee-Atalianis, 2017). Today there are critiques of the word simply because the term did not emerge from self-identification as daburu among the mixed population. Mixed people are either not aware of or cannot identify with the term daburu as meaning that they have two cultures or languages because the connotation does not fit their realities (Shimoji, 2018; Shimoji & Ogaya, 2019). In light of the importance of mixed people’s self-­ identification, some prefer to self-identify as daburu, while the majority continue to identify as hāfu (Murphy-Shigematsu, 2002; Shaitan & McEntee-Atalianis, 2017; Shimoji, 2018). The past two decades of heightened social and political awareness about the mixed population in Japan are characterised by the movements of mixed individuals themselves. This is in contrast to the past, when those surrounding mixed people had more say and voice (Shimoji, 2018). With technological advancement, it became easier for mixed individuals to communicate and connect with each other via websites or social networking services (SNS), and to form peer support groups and advocacy activities (Okamura, 2017). These exchanges between mixed Japanese, which have become more prominent since the early 2000s, have expanded to projects such as the “Hāfu project”, a photographic study of hāfu that began in 2008 and led to the production of the documentary film Hāfu (2015) directed by mixed people (Nishikura & Takagi, 2013). Mikkusu-rūtsu (mixed-roots) is a term coined by the organisation Mixed Roots Japan, established in 2006 by mixed Japanese, to refer not only to mixed people but also to immigrants and to indigenous and monoracial Japanese who were brought up in culturally and racially diverse contexts (Yoshitomi & Sumoto, 2016). Today, mikkusu, the abbreviation of the term mikkusu-rūtu together with the English term “mixed race” (Okamura, 2017), is slowly gaining recognition among mixed individuals as a means of self-identification. Increased agency in self-identification, however, does not mean that there are forces that label who mixed Japanese are. In the realm of the entertainment and fashion industry, the late 2000s witnessed hāfu būmu again (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016), in which many mixed individuals were labelled and/or self-produced as hāfu talento (hāfu celebrities) and hāfu moderu (hāfu models). As in the 1970s, the stereotypical images of hāfu persisted in being those of Japanese and White mixed women. Commodified representations of mixed people emphasise cosmopolitan cultural capital such as bilingual skills in English (Iwabuchi, 2014a; Kō, 2014) and cuteness and exoticism (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016). However, some mixed celebrities, pop stars or comedians today do contest the racialisation and essentialisation of hāfu through actively sharing their identities and experiences of facing prejudices and discrimination (Shimoji, 2018)  – leading up to the present where use of the terms hāfu talento or hāfu moderu are fading away.

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Today, self-organised advocacy activities and peer-support organisations continue to emerge. For example, the African Youth Meetup Japan (AYMJ) was established in 2019 (Miura, 2020). More and more projects led by mixed Japanese growing up both in and outside Japan are available – such as Hāfu2Hāfu (Miyazaki, 2019), a photographic project exploring the identity of hāfu, and Whole (Kawazoe, 2021), a film featuring the identity struggles of mixed people in Japan. Individual mixed people also share their experiences using the hashtag #hāfu aruaru – meaning the common experiences of mixed people in Japan – on social media platforms such as Twitter, Tiktok or Instagram (Keane, 2017; Shimoji, 2018; Shimoji & Ogaya, 2019). This advocacy and activism organised by mixed individuals sheds light on the diverse experiences of racism and identity which mixed people face. Taking an active voice, mixed Japanese are challenging the biased image and discourse surrounding the mixed population and challenging Japanese society to reimagine what it means to be mixed and Japanese.

Contemporary Issues for Mixed Japanese As mixed populations’ presence and voices have become more visible and active, two main issues surrounding the lives of mixed Japanese have become central in understanding their experiences. The first is the issue of dual citizenship. The current Nationality Act maintains jus sanguinis, in which Japanese citizenship is acquired by blood descent (both maternal and paternal). It effectively prohibits Japanese citizens from holding dual citizenship, the prohibition of which is not a simple matter for those who are born to parents of different nationalities, especially after the amendment in the Nationality Act in 1985. For those who were born before 1985, it is simply assumed that persons with dual citizenship have chosen to maintain their Japanese citizenship. For those born after 1985, they may maintain their dual citizenship up until the age of 20. With the enactment of The Act Partially Amending the Civil Code in April 2022, the upper age limit for a person with dual citizenship was lowered from 22 to 20 years of age (Ministry of Justice, 2022). They are then asked to report their Declaration of Choice, an intention to maintain their Japanese citizenship and make an active effort to renounce the other nationality/ies that she or he holds. Currently the government does not take any active measures to ensure that individuals have actually renounced their non-Japanese citizenship, creating confusions and de facto tolerance towards dual citizenship for those who are born with multiple citizenship by birth (Osanami Törngren & Okamura, 2017). In 2016, when Renhō, a mixed Taiwanese-Japanese female politician, was elected as the leader of Japan’s Democratic Party, she became the first multiethnic person to head a major political party in Japan. She was interrogated about whether or not she had actually renounced her Taiwanese citizenship and was forced to revise her statements to renounce it (Takeda, 2018). The controversy over dual nationality was resurrected in 2019, when Naomi Osaka, a professional tennis player born to a Haitian-American father and a Japanese mother, announced that she

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would relinquish her American citizenship and chose to compete as a Japanese with her Japanese citizenship (Boren, 2019). However, as the third author argued elsewhere, Renho’s case – and even Osaka’s – does not represent the real issues that most mixed people with dual citizenship face. The Declaration of Choice itself does not resolve the issue of dual citizenship, nor – as stated earlier – does the current law state an obligation to prove whether a person really has renounced his/her foreign citizenship, leaving most of the dual citizenships to be de facto maintained (Osanami Törngren & Okamura, 2017). However, the current de jure intolerance and de facto tolerance of dual citizenship do indeed affect the families, especially the parents of mixed Japanese, because the aforementioned rule only applies for individuals who are born with multiple nationality by birth without their active seeking to gain multiple citizenship. In 2018, eight Japan-born persons who were living in Europe with European citizenship filed a lawsuit to the effect that the first paragraph of Article 11 of the Nationality Law, which states that a Japanese national loses his or her nationality on obtaining a foreign nationality, is unconstitutional. However, in 2021, The Tokyo District Court ruled that the legal provision banning dual nationality was constitutional (Abe, 2021). Citizenship played a divisive role under the COVID-19 pandemic, when the border measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 were initially based on Japanese citizenship. The policy was later relaxed to include permanent residents or family members of Japanese citizens. However, this resulted in the separation of many foreign nationals from their family members in Japan (Kasahara, 2020). A second core issue is the recurrent and visible discussion on racial discrimination against mixed people. Protests against discrimination and racism have been increasingly visible in various social contexts, with international celebrities and athletes in particular playing major roles. For example, Ariana Miyamoto, the first multiracial winner of Miss Universe Japan in 2015, and Priyanka Yoshikawa, the first multiracial winner of Miss World Japan in 2016, were both inundated with comments questioning their suitability to represent Japan (Russell, 2018). Prominent multiracial Japanese athletes such as Naomi Osaka and Rui Hachimura, who openly expressed their support for The Black Lives Matter movement, were also heavily criticised in Japanese social media and accused of being “non-Japanese” (Keane, 2020). Similarly, Louis Okoye, the famous Nigerian-Japanese baseball player, told his story of racist victimisation on his Twitter account. Louis Monica – a basketball player and Louis Okoye’s younger sister – and Allen Hachimura, basketball player and Rui Hachimura’s younger brother, both revealed that they had received racist abuse online. Parallel to celebrities utilising their status to vocalise statements against racism, anonymous mixed Japanese voices serve to amplify experiences of racism on social media and impact on society at large. For example, in 2022, an anonymous mixed university student posted a tweet claiming that Yoshinoya, the largest chain of fast-food restaurants in Japan, cancelled her participation in a meeting at a recruitment session, once the company saw the applicant’s name and assumed that she was a foreign applicant, despite her Japanese nationality. The tweet became so viral that the influx of criticism forced the company to apologise (Okuyama, 2022).

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Racial discrimination against mixed people is also problematised in relation to the issue of so-called “racial profiling”. In December 2021, the US Embassy in Japan posted a tweet which warned foreigners about an increase in suspected racial profiling cases by the Japanese police, stating that: The US Embassy has received reports of foreigners stopped and searched by Japanese police in suspected racial profiling incidents. Several were detained, questioned and searched. US citizens should carry proof of immigration and request consular notification if detained.

In the absence of an official investigation into racial profiling to date, lawyers from the Tokyo Bar Association’s Committee on the Rights of Foreign Nationals took the lead in 2022. Of the 2094 valid responses to the survey, 62.9% of respondents said they had been stopped and searched within the past 5 years and, of them, 70.3% said they were “offended” by the attitude of the police officer during the interrogation. Specifically, 50% of multiethnic respondents who experience racial profiling said the attitude of police officers was not at all polite (Tomita, 2022). While this result is illuminating, it should also be noted that the majority of respondents are foreign nationals, with Japanese nationals comprising only 16% of the respondents; the survey was not conducted based on random or representative sampling. At present, Japan’s Human Rights Bureau, a branch operating under the Ministry of Justice, does not implement any official steps to tackle racial profiling, although it may consider acting if the issue becomes widely acknowledged as problematic by public opinion (Take, 2022).

The Emergent Field of hāfu Studies In the United States, along with the multiracial movement, the field of mixed-race studies has developed since around 1990 (Brunsma & Strmic-Pawl, 2020; DaCosta, 2020; Osanami Törngren et al., 2021). The scholarship especially focused on the Black/White mixed people due to the prominence of the binary (DaCosta, 2020; Osanami Törngren et  al., 2021). However, studies focusing outside the English-­ speaking context have also been growing since the 2010s (Brunsma & Strmic-Pawl, 2020; Osanami Törngren et al., 2021) and explore diverse types of mixed people that goes beyond Black/White binary including not only racial but also ethnic or religious mixedness. The global studies of mixedness have examined commonalities and differences in the patterns of mixing and experiences of mixed people (Osanami Törngren et al., 2021). In Japan, too, with the growing presence of mixed populations, hāfu kenkyu (hāfu studies) have emerged and developed, especially since the 2010s. Research within the field explores how the discourses and experiences of mixed people in Japan have been historically transformed (Fish, 2008; Noiri, 2022; Okamura, 2017; Shimoji, 2018; Shimoji & Ogaya, 2019), and how they have been represented in media outlets (Horiguchi & Imoto, 2016; Kimura, 2021; Okamura, 2017; Want,

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2017). Discrimination and prejudices against mixed people and their identity construction have also been major topics in previous studies of hāfu. These studies address how they experience discrimination and prejudice in their daily lives (Shimoji, 2018) and how they perceive and negotiate their ethnic and racial identities (Imasato, 2017; Keane, 2017, 2019; Kuraishi, 2007; Lee, 2016; Murphy-­ Shigematsu, 2002; Osanami Törngren, 2018; Osanami-Törngren & Sato, 2021; Seiger, 2019; Takeshita, 2020; Tanu, 2019; Uehara-Carter, 2014). While some studies focus on mixed individuals without limiting their backgrounds, others study those with specific backgrounds – in particular, Amerasians or AmerAsians (mixed Americans and Asians) (Murphy-Shigematsu, 2002; Noiri, 2022; Uehara-Carter, 2014), JFC or Japanese–Filipino children (Miura, 2015; Seiger, 2019), and mixed Japanese and zainichi Koreans (descendants of Koreans who came to Japan under the influence of the Japanese rule of Korea) (Kuraishi, 2007; Lee, 2016). Most studies examine people in Japan, although a few explore the hāfu population abroad (Tanu, 2019). There are theoretical discussions on multiethnic/racial experiences and identities in Japan which greatly differ in their race, locality, gender, class or sexuality (Iwabuchi, 2014b; Takezawa, 2016). The findings of empirical studies also have shown that the visibility and invisibility of mixedness through phenotypes or other characteristics are an important factor that diversifies the experiences of mixed people (Osanami Törngren, 2018; Osanami-Törngren & Sato, 2021; Shimoji, 2018; Takeshita, 2020; Takezawa, 2016). In addition, some studies focus on the intersectionality of mixed identity and gender (Want, 2017), locality or educational systems (Tanu, 2019).

 uture Directions in Advocating Mixed Japanese’ Voices F through Research Existing research tackles issues that mixed people themselves have addressed and advocated in Japanese society; they examine how the narrow notion of Japaneseness affects the experiences of mixed people and how it is negotiated and challenged by them. They also address important questions that need to be further explored; how and whether their identities potentially challenge what it means to be Japanese? Shimoji (2018), for example, highlights the racialisation of mixed Japanese under the dichotomy of either nihonjin (Japanese) or gaijin (foreigner) through different interactions in society. In a similar vein, Osanami-Törngren and Sato (2021) pointed out that, while the Japanese/foreigner binary is resilient, there is an emergence of hāfu as a racialised category which could be interpreted as the development of a “tri-racial state” (Bonilla-Silva, 2004). Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argued that the traditional bi-racial order of “Whites/non-Whites” in the United States was transforming into the tri-racial system of “Whites”, “honorary Whites” and “collective Blacks” (Bonilla-Silva, 2004). The trichotomy of Japanese, foreigners or hāfu in Japan might be replacing the conventional dichotomy of Japanese/foreigners. Through focusing

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on the assigned categorisation as hāfu in Japan, Sato (2021) also revealed the racialisation as hāfu experienced by individuals whom she interviewed who do not have any mixed background but are frequently misrecognized as hāfu or gaijin (foreigner). We see a need for future researchers to devote more analytical attention to diversity within these mixed populations. For example, we note a research gap due to the fact that the majority of empirical studies have solely focused on individuals who are categorised or who self-identify as mixed; only a few studies have investigated the majority monoethnic/racial Japanese or minorities’ attitudes toward mixedness and mixed people. To further explore how and whether mixedness challenges Japaneseness (and minority-ness, e.g., Zainichi-Koreanness), it is imperative to examine empirically these questions longitudinally, focusing on the majority society. Another aspect that needs to be examined longitudinally is the boundary of mixedness and who constitutes a mixed population, as the definition of mixed people is not as clear as researchers may believe (DaCosta, 2020; Song, 2021). Osanami-­ Törngren and Sato (2021) also address the gaps that may exist in identification. We have demonstrated how the vision of people as mixed both socially and politically has evolved over time in Japan and that how these changes expand, limit or exclude certain hafu identification should be addressed. In relation to who constitutes a mixed population, research should pay further attention to the diverse social contexts and situations that mixed Japanese people encounter in their lives. For example, in the English-speaking context where research on mixed populations is more mature, there are studies addressing the social and political attitudes, cultural practices and local and transnational ties of multiracial people (e.g., DaCosta, 2007; Davenport, 2018; Masuoka, 2017; Song, 2021). Research has evolved to explore not only mixed identities involving racial majorities but also minority–minority mixes, such as a mixture of Black and Asian (Davenport, 2018) or “multi-generation multiracials” (Song, 2021). The equivalent research is non-existent in Japan at this point in time. Here, questions of urban/rural upbringing, of class, gender, specific ethnic background, generation or parental migration background also needs to be centralised and intersectionally addressed. From the above, it is obvious that the underrepresentation of some mixed combinations/backgrounds needs to be recognised in both research and advocacy work. Although studies focusing on the marginalised within mixed groups are emerging (e.g., Keane, 2019; Miura, 2015), advocacy activities and research tend to focus on individuals whose mixedness is phenotypically visible  – rendering Asian mixes, especially those whose phenotype is similar to that of the monoethnic Japanese, invisible in the discourse of hāfu (Kimura, 2021). The majority of studies in the context of Japan simply define and focus on a very limited group of mixed/hāfu, i.e., those who were born to parents of Japanese and foreign origin. While it is reasonable to research these individuals given the size of the population and the possibilities of identifying them statistically, this focus may overlook the mixed identification of minority–minority mixes and/or multigenerational mixed people who do exist in Japan, such as the Zainichi Koreans and Ainu people (Osanami Törngren & Okamura, 2020).

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Concluding Remarks The 2021 documentary film Being Japanese (Nihonjin towa) explores the questions: What makes a Japanese person Japanese? Is it the blood that runs through their veins? A parent they were born to? The country they grew up in? Is it how they look? How they act? How they speak? Their citizenship?

In October 2022, Japan mitigated its border procedures, allowing non-Japanese citizens to travel and enter the country on condition that they show either a valid COVID-19 three-dose vaccination certificate or a certificate of negative test results of a pre-departure COVID-19 test (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2022). Immigration through different schemes is expected to resume. The Japanese government aims to regain the number of foreign students entering Japan and Japanese students studying abroad by the year 2027, so it is equal to the number prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (Osumi, 2022). More than 2000 Ukranians have now been granted temporary protection in Japan due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Immigration Service Agency of Japan, 2022). The Korean, Chinese and Brazilian diasporas are in Japan to stay – the majority of them have in fact already been in the country for generations (Korekawa, 2019). They are all part of the 2.3% of the Japanese population today who may stay or leave the country, form family relations and be an active part of redefining Japan. The numbers of immigrants, mixed families and children are growing in many industrialised societies and Japan is not alone in this. It is time to reflect on and reimagine Japan as a multiethnic and multiracial nation, where the term “mixed Japanese”, whatever that may mean, will play a significant role in our understanding of what makes a person Japanese.

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Uehara-Carter, M. (2014). Mixed race Okinawans and their obscure in-betweeness. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 35(6), 646–661. Want, K.  M. (2017). Hypervisibility and invisibility of female Haafu models in Japan’s beauty culture. In J.  L. Rondilla, R.  P. Guevarra, & P.  Spickard (Eds.), Red and yellow, black and brown: Decentering whiteness in mixed race studies (pp. 163–177). Rutgers University Press. Yoshitomi, S., & Sumoto, E. (2016). Mikkusu Rūtsu Japan to GLOCOL Tono Renkei [Collaboration between mixed roots Japan and GLOCOL]. GLOCOL Booklet, 18, 93–103. Yuna Sato is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Keio University, Japan, and the University of South Australia. She specializes in ethnic and racial studies, with a special focus on mixed identity in Japan. Her latest publication is “‘Others’ among ‘Us’: Exploring Racial Misidentification of Japanese Youth”, Japanese Studies 41:3 (2021).  

Yu-Anis Aruga is a Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary Information Studies, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, at the University of Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include multiethnicity, identities, racism, representation in Contemporary Japan. His latest publication is “When was Racial Discrimination a Problem? Categorical and Moral Order of the “Konketsuji Problem” in Post-war Japan”, Japanese sociological review 72:5 (2022).  

Sayaka Osanami Törngren is Associate Professor of International Migration and Ethnic Relations and a senior researcher at the Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM), Malmö University. She is engaged in research on intermarriage, identities, representation, racisms and discrimination in Sweden and Japan. Her most recent publications can be found in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Comparative Migration Studies and Ethnicities.  

Redefining Japaneseness: Blackness, Whiteness, and the Discordant Discourse of Diversity in Japan John G. Russell

Abstract  Japanese constructions of whiteness have been shaped by mainstream media and popular culture, which both reproduces and localizes the western discourse of whiteness. At the same time, the growth of the internet, social media, and online culture have exposed Japan to contentious debates in the United States (and elsewhere) concerning racial representation, race-switching, and diversity, as well as providing a platform for Japanese to reexamine contemporary Japanese racial attitudes. This chapter explores the impact that the discourse of representation and diversity in the United States, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and demographic changes, particularly the growth of diasporic African communities in Japan since the 1980s, have had on Japanese perceptions of “whiteness,” “blackness,” and “Japaneseness.” Keywords  Caucasian whiteness · BLM–Black Lives Matter · Dual heritage · hāfu · Intersectional racism “Japanese society is rife with prejudice and I’ve paid for it since childhood, suffering all kinds of remarks at school especially. Most Japanese people don’t even realize this is an issue. When I told my Japanese grandparents what had happened to me, they were shocked and didn’t understand why. That shows that they are not at all aware of the issue.” —African American Japanese English teacher Alonzo Omotegawa on being racially profiled by Japanese police (Mas, 2021).

“I’m so used to it my mind has gone numb.” —Nigerian Japanese basketball player Okoye Monica on the racist direct mails she receives on Japanese social media (Okoye, 2022).

J. G. Russell (*) Gifu University, Gifu, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_21

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In recent years, diversity has emerged as a pressing topic for twenty-first century Japan. In part, this has been spurred by both internal and global factors, including demographic changes within Japan, particularly the growth of immigrant diasporic African communities (Capobianco, 2015, 2018; Schans, 2012) that have resulted in the rise of dark-skinned, visible minorities, including dual-heritage black1 Japanese, compelling majority Japanese to begin to rethink the myth of Japan as “tan’itsu minzoku kokka,” a homogeneous, monoethnic nation state, and the nature of Japanese identity. (For a discussion of this myth see Befu, 2001, Weiner, 2008, Oguma, 2002, and Lie, 2001.) According to government statistics, in 2022, the registered African immigrant population in Japan was 19,681 (Shutsunyūkoku, 2022), a notable increase from that reported in 2014 when there were some 9,000 documented African residents. (Capobianco, 2015, p. 190). Factoring in undocumented immigrants, visa overstayers, and those who have entered the country on non-­ African passports and who have naturalized, the number may have been as high as 50,000 (p.190). It has also been fueled by the expansion of the internet and social media platforms which, as recently witnessed by online discussions of the Black Lives Matter movement, have not only exposed Japanese netizens to the American discourse of racism and diversity, but also unveiled Japan’s own internal struggles with diversity and racism as it grapples with diversification and rampant online hate speech (Akuzawa, 2016; Yamaguchi, 2013; McLelland, 2008).

The Matter of Hāfu Lives In 2015, Nagasaki-born Miyamoto Ariana, an African American Japanese, became the first hāfu2 (half, a person of “mixed race”) to be crowned Miss Universe Japan, opening the door for other dual-heritage candidates to follow. Indeed, in 2016,  In this chapter, I have chosen to use lowercase for racial designations traditionally based on skin color, while I use uppercase for those derived from geographic regions. I am aware of the philosophical and political issues surrounding such capitalization, particularly in the wake of the endless police murders of black people in the United States and the fact that many media outlets and other institutions following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 now capitalize the word Black. While this typographic change has important symbolic resonance, it has had little impact on the implacable reality of systemic anti-black racism in the United States and elsewhere, as the expanding list of victims of subsequent extrajudicial executions attests. The victims of police violence are dead; their murderers for the most part remain at large whether police reports, newspaper articles, academic papers, or death certificates describe them as “black” or “Black.” I have decided not to capitalize the term until substantive reforms are adopted. 2  The Japanese term “hāfu,” like the earlier appellation “konketsu-ji” (child of mixed blood), and the English-term “mixed-race,” is problematic in that it implies incompleteness and the existence of racially “whole,” or “pure,” persons. However, it is also used by some persons who are socially ascribed to the category as a label of self-identification, self-affirmation, and affiliation. In this chapter, I will use it by default, as it is part of the vernacular. Otherwise, I will use the term dual-­ heritage to refer to persons who have parents from different racial or ethnic backgrounds. 1

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Yoshikawa Priyanka, an East Indian Japanese, was crowned Miss World Japan. Four years later, in 2020, Tochigi Aisha Harumi, a Ghanaian Japanese, and Kaminashi Raimu, a Nigerian Japanese, were selected Miss Universe Japan and first-runner up, respectively. In fact, four of the pageant’s top five spots that year went to dual heritage persons, including a New Zealand Japanese and Filipino Japanese. While dual-heritage black Japanese have been present in Japan since the Occupation, if not earlier, the popular image of hāfu has primarily been of white Japanese. While both groups are perceived as outsiders and are targets of bullying, ostracization, and discrimination, the physical attributes associated with whites and the power and status of Euro-American culture elevated them above black Japanese. Generally, black hāfu were seen as a shameful and tragic product of Japan’s postwar defeat. Their presence, when acknowledged, was seldom discussed affirmatively. In contrast, white Japanese were largely idolized, their faces and bodies adorning magazine and record covers, movies, and television shows where they projected an aspirational image of glamor, beauty, cosmopolitanism, sophistication, and affluent modernity. The legacy of this thinking survives today, where it can be seen in the term “hāfu-gao,” which is used in plastic surgery clinic advertisements and YouTube makeup tutorials to describe the idealized appearance of white Japanese hāfu faces sought by their clientele and subscribers. (https://www.takasu.co.jp/futaemabuta/ sekkai/column/74.html, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvq6I1DpPSY). The increased visibility of dual-heritage black Japanese in both the media and daily life has gradually nudged open the door to discussions of anti-black racism, a phenomenon that Japanese have traditionally viewed as largely western and consequently deemed of little relevance to a country that sees itself – and is often seen abroad  – as singularly homogeneous. In the case of Miyamoto, while the mainstream media reported her selection, its coverage could not be described as celebratory, nor did it devote much coverage to the controversy her selection generated. In contrast, the internet and social media relentlessly interrogated her “Japaneseness.” Miyamoto directly addressed these concerns in interviews, stating that while she had initially had no interest in the pageant, she decided to compete following the suicide of a white Japanese hāfu male friend who, like herself, had been bullied (Takahashi, 2015), informing the media that her aim was “to tell the world that even a half-Japanese can represent Japan” (Ripley, 2015). However, as a consequence of publicly recounting her experiences, Miyamoto’s critics labeled her han-Nichi and han-Nihonjin (anti-Japan and anti-Japanese) (“Moto,” 2016), vilifying her with xenophobic, anti-black epithets, with several online posts calling her kuronbo, the Japanese equivalent of “nigger” or, borrowing the English-language slur and rendering it in katakana, “ニガー” (nigā) or “ニガ” (niga). Indeed, the fact that Miyamoto herself addressed the issue head-on fueled the angry, Japan-bashing foreigner trope, exacerbating her detractors’ doubts about her Japaneseness since, according to their racial purist, all-or-nothing logic, she could

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not be fully Japanese if she acknowledged her black half and its impact in shaping her lived experience in Japan. Conversely, these open displays of hostility and derogation toward Miyamoto served to raise public awareness of the reality of Japanese anti-black racism. At best, online reaction to Miyamoto and other black Japanese pageant winners was – and remains – decidedly ambivalent. Some saw their selection as auguring a new, more cosmopolitan Japan that is more willing to accept and appreciate its own internal racial and ethnic diversity. Others saw it as an assault on Japanese national identity. Still others saw it as an omen portending the day when hāfu would dominate such competitions, since, they believed, hāfu would stand a better chance of successfully competing in international contests than “pure” Japanese because they appealed to the biases of foreign judges. Still others suggested that their selection was not a true reflection of Japan’s incipient acknowledgement of its internal diversity at all. It was a strategic calculation by pageant organizers that was designed, in anticipation of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, to rehabilitate the nation’s image as insular, xenophobic, and racist. It did this by demonstrating its acceptance of diversity and inclusion in an age when such concepts have become touchstones of modernity, and to convince foreign nations – and perhaps Japanese themselves – that Japanese people are not racist. In addition to beauty pageant contestants, the 2000s has seen an explosion of dual-heritage black Japanese in the fields of sports and entertainment, the majority of whom are of African/Afro Caribbean and Japanese descent, including such luminaries as Osaka Naomi (tennis, Haiti); Cambridge Asuka (track and field, Jamaica); Abdul Hakim Sani Brown (track and field, Ghana); Hachimura Rui (basketball, Benin); Nun Ira Karen (judo, Ghana); Yano David (musician, Ghana); Howbert Dan (soccer. Liberia); Okoe Rui (baseball, Nigeria); Suzuki Musashi (soccer, Jamaica); Maholo Issey (soccer, Congo); Soejima Jun (actor, America); as well as the Mawuli sisters, Stephanie and Evelyn (basketball), who were born in Japan to Ghanaian parents. The emergence of prominent dual-heritage black Japanese has also brought into bold relief the question of whether the apparent public acceptance of such persons, particularly in areas in which blacks are stereotypically thought to excel, is representative of the experience of ordinary hāfu. For although the media initially presented Miyamoto’s selection as emblematic of color-blind Japan, the darker narratives presented by both prominent and ordinary hāfu that emerged in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) soon belied such racially utopian visions as they began to share the reality of their experiences of anti-black racism on social media, a medium which itself has become a growing source of pain, insult, and trauma. In fact, social media has come to play a pivotal role in partially dismantling the myth of racism-free Japan, though how it has accomplished this is not without morbid irony: On the one hand, it has provided an open, largely anonymous space where Japanese netizens can express their most virulently racist, xenophobic, and

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misogynist beliefs without fear of censure while simultaneously providing its victims a platform to share their experiences of abuse. It has also provided, as we shall see, a means of articulating and observing intersectional racism, wherein racist hatred targeting one group of perceived outsiders – blacks and/or black Japanese – merges with that targeting others – Zainichi Kankokujin, or ethnic Korean residents.

 LM and the Matter of Black and Black Japanese Lives B in Japan The discourse of race and diversity in Japanese social media has also been facilitated by a series of domestic incidents that serve to debunk the myth of a racism-free Japan. In the summer of 2020, in the wake of the global BLM movement and following a series of events in Japan involving domestic cases of racial profiling, many Japanese had begun to rethink their easy dismissal of racism, particularly anti-black racism, as a western problem. On May 22, three days before reports of public demonstrations sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a 33-year-­ old Kurdish man was dragged from his car and shoved to the ground by police in Shibuya, Tokyo, for an alleged traffic violation (Saito, 2020). A video of the incident was recorded by a friend who uploaded it to social media. On May 30, a group of 200 foreign and Japanese protesters marched on the Shibuya police station to denounce the man’s treatment and to voice solidarity with BLM (“Hundreds Protest,” 2020). On June 6, some 500 protestors gathered in solidarity with BLM (Siripala, 2020; Tamaki, 2020), and on June 14, some 3,500 demonstrators marched in Tokyo in support of BLM and against Japanese racism (Takahashi, 2020; Kalled, 2020). Similar protests, involving thousands of Japanese and foreign demonstrators, were held in Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Okinawa, and other locales throughout the summer. Another incident occurred in Tokyo on January 27, 2021, when Alonzo Omotegawa, a black Japanese hāfu man, was stopped and questioned by police because he was wearing dreadlocks (Montgomery, 2021). In a video of the incident he posted to the Japan for Black Lives website, the officer tells him he was stopped because “in my experience, people who wear dreads and dress fashionably tend to be in possession of illicit drugs” (Watashi no keiken to shite sore wa doreddo hea ga warui wake de wa nai kedo, yappari, oshare na kata de, kekkō yakubutsu wo motte iru kata ga watakushi no keiken de okatta) (Japan 4 Black Lives, 2021; Mas, 2021). A similar incident involving a Nigerian Japanese hāfu man occurred in Chiba on June 11. When he asked one of the officers why he was stopped, the officer responded, “To be honest, I stopped you because it’s been my experience that we are likely to find drugs by stopping people like you” (Shōjiki de iu to, Onisan mitai na kaniji no kata ni koe wo kakete, ma, doraggu mitai na mono ga deta koto ga aru

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desu yo, to iu keiken kara koe wo kakemashita) (“Nihon no shokumu,” 2021, emphasis added). The issue of racial profiling by police resurfaced in December of that year, when the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo issued an alert on its Twitter account warning its citizens about the matter (U.S. Embassy, Tokyo, 2021). In September 2022, the Tokyo Bar Association released its pioneering report on police racial profiling of 2,094 people with foreign roots. According to the survey, 63% responded that they had been questioned by police in the past 5 years; 70%, said that they had been questioned multiple times; and 85% suspected they had been stopped because of their racial/ethnic background. By ethnicity, the highest percentage of those stopped, 84%, reported Latin American ancestry; 83% reported African ancestry; and 76%, Middle Eastern ancestry (Tokyo Bengoshi Kai, 2022). Significantly, while the Japanese media covered the global BLM protests, domestic coverage was limited; neither the May 30 nor June 6 demonstrations in Japan received much national attention. As for American coverage, while early mainstream media reports on BLM protests focused on the police murder of George Floyd and the global protests that followed, later coverage focused on incidents of violence and looting by demonstrators. On June 7, NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, devoted a segment of its popular current affairs children’s program Kore de Wakatta Sekai no Ima (Now I Understand the World) to the American BLM protests, but its handling of the topic sparked controversy online when it uploaded to its Twitter account an 80-second-long animated clip that attempted to explain “the source of black rage.” The clip begins in the middle of the street where Mr. Shippu, an animated version of the show’s chimerical, nautically-themed, beige-skinned mascot character, now inexplicably brown-skinned, has traded in his seafaring attire for a wide-brimmed hat and sleeveless blue suit. Perched somehow painlessly atop a fire hydrant, he strums a guitar, as around him a riotous mob of black men and women, some carrying looted televisions, angrily raise their arms and stomp their feet as ominous plumes of smoke billow from the torched buildings and overturned cars behind them (Osumi, 2020). An angry, muscular black man, clad in a white tank top, enters the scene and, clutching an empty anthropomorphized purse, explains in guttural, rage-filled tones through clenched teeth that in America a huge wealth gap exists between blacks and whites and that the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affects black people. These disparities, Mr. Shippu concludes, are the reason for black anger. Inexplicably, the clip fails to mention the killing of George Floyd and any of the number of extrajudicial killings of black people by police that sparked the protests. Although Japanese and foreign media criticism of the broadcast focused on the animated clip’s use of racist tropes, the studio segment was hardly an improvement. It too begins with looting demonstrators, though this time TV news footage is shown. Although it does mention police brutality, it fails to mention by name George Floyd or other victims of police violence. Throughout the segment, the protests are associated with violence. At one point, the screen is filled with a map of the U.S. dotted with areas tagged with flame graphics marked bōtoka (riotous mob) to indicate places where rioting had occurred (Russell, 2020; Takeda, 2020).

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NHK was not the only broadcaster to misinform the public. Some 5 days before, BS-TBS, a satellite channel of Japanese News Network, broadcast an episode of Hōdō 1930, another current affairs program, this one aimed at adults, that contained a remote interview with Japan-born, Yale University graduate, and white supremacist Jared Taylor, the founder and editor of the online white nationalist magazine and erstwhile YouTube channel American Renaissance, during which he justified the killings of Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown and blamed black criminality, not racism, for America’s social ills (Hōdō 1930, 2020). (On June 29, 2020, YouTube banned American Renaissance and other white supremacist channels for violating its policy prohibiting hate speech (Spangler, 2019). However, in January 2021, it resurfaced under the name Amren Video Fan.) The Hōdō 1930 broadcast was not the first time Taylor had been invited to appear on Japanese television. Following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, Taylor appeared on several Japanese news programs where he opined on U.S. race relations, immigration policy, and black genetic intellectual inferiority without rebuttal from his interlocutors, who, typically, listened politely as he calmly and articulately spews white supremacist disinformation in fluently mellifluous Japanese, and intermittently nod in polite agreement at the insights being dispensed (Dougho’s World., 2018; t ts, 2018). Indeed, after concluding their interview, TV Tokyo journalist Ikegami Akira and his two female co-interviewers discuss their impressions of their guest, one confessing that the more she listened to Taylor, “the more I found myself nodding in agreement” (hanashi wo kiku uchi ni dondon jibun no unazuku kaisū ga fuete iru nan chatta) (t ts, 2018). At no point during the broadcast was Taylor challenged by the program’s host and guests, which included Waseda University political scientist and former member of Japan’s House of Representatives, Nakabayashi Mieko and Miyamoto Yūji, a former ambassador to China and Consul General to Atlanta, who, not to be upstaged by Taylor, opined that black people “unlike Japanese are not bound by traditional values” (wareware mitai ni dentō͘ ya kachi-kan wo motta so iu mono ga tsunegatte inai’n desu) and that downtown Atlanta is populated by “drug-dealing black men and single mothers and grandmothers who live on welfare” (Atoranta no dauntaun wa hontō ni okasan mo obāsan mo shiseiji wo umi, soshite shakai hoshō de ikite iku to, nokotte  iru dansei-tachi wa nani ka to iu to yaku no bainin) (Hōdō 1930, 2020; Russell, 2020). Nevertheless, to their credit, some Japanese netizens were having none of it. Several Twitter posts criticized the TBS-BS broadcast, some rhetorically wondering whether the program would have invited Sakurai Makoto, the notorious former head of the far-right anti-Korean hate group Zaitokukai, to discuss anti-Korean discrimination in Japan. (kakeshobo, 2020; Han-reishizumu Jō͘ hō͘ Sentā, 2020). Others saw the broadcaster’s decision as chillingly indicative of the intersection of white supremacist admiration of Japan’s illusionary homogeneity and the high regard some Japanese hold for racist white intellectuals. Wrote Dōmoto Kaoru, a New York-­ based blogger:

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J. G. Russell In the first place, Japan is not a monoethnic nation, and it is now far more racially and ethnically diverse than it was in the 1960s and 1970s, when Taylor lived in Japan. White supremacists still believe that Japan is a mono-ethnic and homogeneous nation and are filled with a warped longing for the country […] White supremacists have a misguided admiration for Japan, and Japan respects white supremacists as intellectuals. The only way to resolve this horrifying relationship is to show the world that Japan is a multi-racial nation with many immigrants (Nihon wa somosomo tan’itsu minzoku kokka de wa naku, katsu genzai wa Tairā ga kurashite ita 1960-70-nendai to wa kurabemono ni naranai hodo jinshu ya minzoku ga taiyō͘ka shite iru. Sono Nihon wo ima mo tan’itsu minzoku kokka, kinshitsu kokka to shinji, nejireta dōkeishin wo fukuramasete iru no ga hakujinshijōshugisha da [… ] Nihon ni ayamatta akogare wo idaku hakujin-shijō͘shugisha to, sono hakujinshijō͘shugisha wo shikisha toshite tattobu Nihon. Kono ozomashii kankei wo hodoku ni wa, Nihon ga imin mo ō͘i taminzoku kokka de aru to, mizukara sekai ni shirashimete iku hoka wa nai no de aru) (Dōmoto, 2020, para. 28, 30).

The myth of Japanese homogeneity holds a particular attraction for those who aspire to make Europe and America white again by preserving their racial purity in the face of what they, echoing the fears of century-old racist nativists, perceive as a rising tide of color. As GermanicYork, a self-described “angry British/White Nationalist, Anglo-Saxonist/Nordicist and Confederate sympathizer” posted to the neo-Nazi website Stormfront, “Japan should remain Japanese! Japan has done a great job at preserving their [sic] nation and culture, I admire and respect this and traditional Japanese culture. I would like Japan to stay Japanese!” (GermanicYork101, 2020). (See Federalefifthcolumnist, 2019, 2021; Mesimaki, 2017; and Stormfront, 2020a, b for further articulations of anti-black Japanophilia.)

If the Shoe Fits: Intersectional Racism In 2020, Nike released to the internet “The Future Isn’t Waiting,” a 2-minute commercial that depicted the bullying of Zainichi Koreans and dual-heritage black Japanese (Twomen Advertising, 2020). Critics of the commercial charged that it unfairly and inaccurately depicted Japan as a racist country, with some urging a boycott of Nike and alleging the company is “pro-North Korean” and that the commercial itself was “sponsored” by Chō͘sen Sō͘ren (Chongryon (The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan), a Zainichi Korean resident group tied to North Korea (“Enjō͘,” 2020). The Nike commercial implicitly points to the intersection of anti-black, anti-­ black hāfu, and anti-Korean prejudice in Japan. Produced in response to the BLM movement, it locates the issue of racism squarely within Japan itself in racist acts directed toward these groups and expands the context of racism beyond the familiar black/white binary, although it never explicitly uses the word “racism” (jinshu sabetsu) to describe these acts. This might be because its creators were aware of the sensitivity surrounding the issue in Japan. Instead, the commercial visually and narratively frames the discussion in the context of school bullying (ijime), a topic the media has already acknowledged as a serious social problem, as it depicts the

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struggles of three high school-aged Japanese girls to find their place in a society that taunts and rejects them and learn to embrace themselves. One striking feature of the commercial is the parallels it draws between the treatment of dual-heritage black Japanese and Zainichi Koreans, which  ultimately intersect when anti-black and anti-Korean sentiments merge in real world and virtual settings beyond the confines of dramaturgical high schools and playgrounds. A legacy of Japan’s own imperialist and colonialist history in Asia, hate speech, particularly that against Zainichi Koreans, has become a fixture of Japanese cyberspace, and has revealed the once hidden face of Japanese domestic racism (Itagaki, 2015). Zainichi Koreans remain the principal target of rightwing nationalists and their online brethren, netto uyoku. By 2015, anti-Korean hate speech had become so serious that the Ministry of Justice launched an enlightenment campaign to combat it (“Promotion activities,” n.d.; “Heito,” n.d.). In 2016, Japan enacted the Honpōgai Shusshin-sha ni taisuru Futō na Sabetsu-teki Gendō no Kaishō ni Muketa Torikumi no Suishin ni Kansuru Hōritsu (Act on the Promotion of Efforts to Eliminate Unfair Discriminatory Speech and Behavior against Persons with Countries of Origin Other than Japan), or simply the Hate Speech Elimination Act. While the act and other municipal ordinances enacted in its wake have seen a reduction in organized hateful street rallies and arguably raised public awareness about the issue, their impact on reducing online hate speech has been minimal (Mochida, 2020; Sato, 2022). John Dower (1986) has observed in the context of American and Japanese use of racist rhetoric during the Second World War that racist code words are “free-floating and easily transferred from one target to the other” (p.  309). In Japan, although largely directed at Koreans, online hate speech is similarly promiscuous, providing a venomous space where dehumanizing anti-black discourse almost inevitably jumps the shark and segues into equally rancorous attacks on Koreans. When Serena Williams complained of biased refereeing during her 2018 U.S. Open match against Osaka Naomi, posts in several online threads accused her and black people in general of having a victim mentality, an affliction they claimed blacks share with Zainichi Koreans: Blacks are just like chon [an anti-Korean epithet]. Always ranting discrimination, discrimination. (http://hayabusa9.5ch.net/test/read.cgi/ mnewsplus/1537217279. Comment no. 275: “Kokujin ‘tte chon mitai da na Sabetsu sabetsu urusē yo.”) [Blacks have] the same victim consciousness as Koreans. (https://hayabusa9.5ch.net/test/ read.cgi/mnewsplus/1537217279. Comment no. 878: “Chōsenjin nami ni higaisha-ishiki takai na.”) Gorillas and Koreans can’t follow rules. (https://hayabusa9.5ch.net/test/read.cgi/mnewsplus/1537217279. Comment no. 880: “Gorira to Chōsenjin ni rūru wa mamorenai.”) Other posts facetiously suggested that Williams is a “Korean national” (http://hayabusa9.5ch. net/test/read.cgi/mnewsplus/1537217279. Comment no. 621: “Chōsen-seki na no de wa?”) and “an honorary Korean” (http://hayabusa9.5ch.net/test/ read.cgi/mnewsplus/1537217279. Comment no. 77: “Meiyo Chōsenjin”).

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Where dual-heritage blacks are concerned, posters may baselessly assert that the Japanese parent is “ese-Nihonjin” (fake Japanese), that is, a Zainichi Korean passing as Japanese. For example, despite Miyamoto’s maternal Japanese bloodline, one poster claimed she had “dominant Korean genes,” denying her Japanese  roots (https://hayausa3.5ch.net/test/read.cgi/mnewsplus/1:446526513/-­100. Comment no. 13:“Uwā/Yappari Chōsenjin no idenshi 'tte kyōretsu da na.”). Still, for at least one poster, black people were grudgingly preferable to Koreans. When Tochigi was crowned Miss Universe Japan, one internet poster wrote, “Next, it’ll be a chon. Black people are okay, but there’s no way I’ll ever accept a chon!!!” (https:// rosie.5ch.net/test/read.cgi/akb/1604055833/. Comment no.107: “Tsugi wa chon mo ari ni naru zo/ Kokujin toka dō de mo ii kedo chon dake wa danko kyohi suru!!!”. These slanders are further compounded when one of the parents is, in fact, ethnic Korean. In the case of African American ethnic Korean singer Crystal Kay, posts fused anti-black and anti-Korean epithets: Is this one a nigger chon [ニガチョン] , too? (https://hayabusa3.5ch.net/test/read.cgi/ mnewsplus/1442720302/-­100. Comment no. 13: “Koitsu mo niga-chon?”) She’s a black-chon half-breed. (https://hayabusa3.5ch.net/test/read.cgi/mnewsplus/14505 79938/-­100. Comment no. 20: “Kokujin to Zai-chon no ainoko yaro.”)

The contemptuous conflation of blacks and Koreans is also revealed in the racist portmanteau韓黒人 (Kankokujin), a pun that combines the first half of the Chinese character compound for Korea (韓国, kankoku) with that for black people (黒人, kokujin), which is used to attack blacks who complain about Japanese racism. As one post put it: “Attacking Japan again? Die shitty Kankokujin.” (https://kaikai.ch/ board/132225/ Comment no.  330: “Kuso Kankokujin wa, mata Nihon-tataki ka, shine.”). Employing the pun, a site entitled No Korea Blog states that BLM protests who blame white society for discrimination resemble anti-Japanese Koreans, concluding that “like poor blacks who complain about racism, Koreans who badmouth Japan while drinking Jinro [a Korean rice wine] will never rise out of poverty” (Kankokujin, 2022) (“Jinro wo nominagara Nihon no waruguchi wo itte iru Kankokujin wa itsu made mo binbō͘ kara nukedasenai’n darō͘ ne.”). In the roiling, racist imaginary of Japanese cyberspace, both blacks and Koreans are regarded as volatile, hyper-emotional groups that dwell on the past and seek special privileges based on claims of past and present abuses. While the medium for its expression may be new, the intersection of antiblack and anti-Korean racism is not. A 1962 Doshisha University survey of Japanese college students that asked them to rank 12 ethnic groups found that they showed the least preference for Jews, Africans, and Koreans (Goodman & Miyazawa, 2000, p. 4). Another 1960s study (Wagatsuma & Yoneyama, 1967/1998) found that regardless of the class, occupation, and educational background of the respondents, when nationalities, ethnic groups, and races were ranked in terms of favorability, blacks and Koreans alternated for last place (pp.116–134). Thirty years later, a survey that asked Japanese to evaluate foreigners found that they held consistently negative images of Asians, particularly Koreans, and blacks (Kosakai, 1996, p. 98).

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Intriguingly, nearly a century after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which saw the massacre of more than 6,000 Koreans by police, vigilante groups, and the military in response to baseless rumors that they had placed poison in wells, old libels have found additional targets of racial hatred. Following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, rumors that Zainichi Koreans and blacks were poisoning wells spread on Twitter and other social media platforms (Osako, 2021). Ten years later, following another earthquake offshore of Tohoku, the poisoned well trope resurfaced, this time blaming Black Lives Matter (“Ido ni doku,” 2021). The prevalence of Japanese hate speech and the fact that it is now readily accessible both domestically and internationally have served to debunk the myth that racism and discrimination do not exist in Japan. After the BLM protests, several prominent dual-heritage black Japanese began to share their experiences of anti-­ black racism on Japanese social media platforms and with the mainstream media (Aoyama, 2020; Hafuposuto, 2021; FC2, 2021; TBS News Dig, 2021; Kunizaki, 2022). Many pointed out that, despite having been born and raised in Japan and being culturally Japanese, they were bullied because of their appearance and not accepted as Japanese. John Lie (2001) has argued that “most Japanese people are, at worst, passive racists. It is very difficult to locate irrefutable evidence of Japanese racism; rather, I mainly heard statements that indict other Japanese” (p. 175). Whatever the truth of this statement, the internet and social media have amplified the voices of active Japanese racists by providing them with a platform from which to launch attacks against those whose existence in Japan they consider undesirable and threatening and whose only transgression is to challenge notions of what it means to be Japanese – and human.

(Re)drawing the Color Line Demographic changes within Japan and the growth of social media have also served to expose and raise awareness about colorism in Japan and how its preference for light skin, whether Japanese or caucasian,3 negatively impacts dark-skinned people. The global popularity of Japanese anime and the discourse generated about it, particularly the issue of Japanese racial representation of themselves and others, has become the subject of an often intense online transnational debate that focuses on representations of whiteness as it relates to depictions of both white people and Japanese. Beginning in the early 2000s, a popular topic on English-language internet sites devoted to Japanese anime and popular culture was whether Japanese anime  The term ‘caucasian’ is presented in lower case throughout this article, except where it appears in citation, to avoid the appearance of racial essentialism and of privileging those to whom it refers. The term “caucasian whiteness” is used to distinguish it from Japanese “whiteness,” since Japanese perceive their own skin color as shiroi (white), iro-jiro (fair), or hada-jiro (white-skinned). 3

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characters were caucasian (Thorn, 2004; Ashcraft, 2010, 2012, 2018; Kawano, 2020). This discourse criticized western readers for misreading Japanese anime characters as white, arguing that such readings constitute a projection of western racial bias and assume that Japanese aspire to be white when it is actually westerners who are socially conditioned to read the characters as whites by default (Ashcraft, 2010). With the growing availability of online translation technology, Japanese netizens have translated these blogs and threads into Japanese and discussed them, often heatedly, in message boards and so-called matome blog sites that summarize discussion threads circulating in cyberspace (see, for example, “Kaigai,” 2010; “Anime kyara,” 2010; “Hakujin,” 2015; “Gaikoku,” 2021). In general, Japanese posters tended to agree with the assessment that Japanese anime characters are not only not “white,” that they do not look “white,” and that it is  an insulting act of racial hubris for westerners to read them as such. Japanese anime characters, they argued, transcend both race and reality and represent a type of fabulistic humanity – animejin (anime people). In this view, physical characteristics associated with whites in the west such as blond hair, blue eyes, tall, narrow noses, and well-defined facial features are not exclusively caucasian racial attributes (although, Japanese also associate these traits synecdochically with caucasian whiteness) but simply an expression of mukokuseki (無国籍, “stateless,” or of indeterminate ethnicity), a style of graphic representation Japanese artists customarily employ to render such characters. That is, the physical appearance of Japanese and caucasian anime characters is perceived as essentially interchangeable, with Japanese readers viewing anime characters with such attributes as Japanese by default, unless they are overtly marked linguistically, sartorially, or culturally as non-Japanese. However, as Jeeshan Gazi notes, while the racial hybridity of whiteness allows “white persons and Japanese persons [to] become visually interchangeable, we find that everyone else is left out. And […] this exclusion does not just encompass non-white, non-Asian ethnicities but also non-Japanese Asian ethnicities as well” (Gazi, 2016, p. 4). This is not to say that dark-skinned characters are not rendered in mukokuseki style; occasionally they are, but they may also be read as tanned whites or Japanese. Generally, in order for them to be read as “black,” they must be rendered with distinctive, exaggerated racial features, hairstyles, and stereotyped cultural/linguistic markers that signal their “blackness”. Nevertheless, the “stateless” universality and “raceless” ambiguity of anime characters (most of whom reside in a fabulistic Global North) seems to apply only to light-skinned ones. While several Japanese posters were offended when westerners read Japanese anime characters as white, they did not seem to object when they were reimagined with physical features that even more closely resembled those of caucasians than the original characters they were based on. For example, in 2020, as part of what would eventually become known as the hashtag #SailorMoonRedrawChallenge. several social media platforms such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Deviant Art hosted submissions of fan art depicting the popular anime character. While many western anime fans were critical of submissions that claimed the character had been whitewashed by reimagining her with what they considered caucasian-appearing facial features (see, for example, glimpen (2020) and

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Darpustoshi (2020)), few Japanese posters themselves objected to such depictions, even though they suggested that in doing so, the artists were reading the original character as white. However, renderings of the character as Asian or black proved more contentious. Many Japanese anime fans were outraged when an artist drew the character with Asian facial features (Silverjow, 2020). Borrowing the language of America’s culture wars, online critics condemned the depiction as “politically/racially correct” (seiji-teki/jinshu-teki tasdashii) for reproducing what they deemed racially offensive western orientalist tropes by depicting the character with “tsurime” (slanted eyes) and black hair. Initially, posters assumed that the artist, Silverjow, was white; in fact, he is Malaysian and stated, in response to the criticism, that he modeled the image on his sister, not Japanese (Baculi, 2020, para. 11). (For a sample of Japanese Twitter reaction to the image, see https://twitter.com/search?q=セーラームーンを アジア人&src=typed_query&f=top.) Black versions of the character were not only denounced as “blackwashing” (burakkuwoshu), they were often conflated with blackface (kuronuri), despite the fact that these renditions did not depict the character with stereotypically exaggerated racial features. Others condemned them as “black supremacy” (kokujin shijōshugi), “ethnic cleansing” (minzoku joka),” and “cultural  appropriation” (bunka tōyō). Similar outrage was ignited in 2022 by reports that a black anime fan had posted a black reimagining of Anya from the popular manga/anime series Spy X Family. Interestingly, posters could not agree on the original character’s race, with some reading her as caucasian, others as Japanese, and still others as an anodyne animejin. Those objecting to the race switch maintained that it violated the original intent of the character’s creator, that Japanese characters are essentially “raceless” and rendering them as black unacceptably introduces race into the picture and constitutes a form of “Black Pollution” (Tanoshii matome da, 2022, comment 48) that taints the original work. For others there was simply no need to depict blacks at all because “there are no blacks in Japan” (Nihon ni kokujin ga inai) or their presence negligible at best. Tellingly, online discussions seldom consider the possibility of such characters being simultaneously both Japanese and black, as if the two are inherently incompatible and irreconcilable, the mere concept arousing paroxysms of cognitive dissonance. For example, in a video of street interviews, YouTuber That Japanese Man Yuta shows Japanese pictures of light-skinned anime characters and asks them what race/nationality they think they are (That Japanese Man Yuta, 2017). Despite the common assumption that Japanese uniformly read anime characters as Japanese, many of those interviewed were uncertain, some reading the characters as Japanese while others read them as western, Asian, or various combinations of hāfu. Still, one wonders if they had been shown pictures of dark-skinned or black anime characters would they have identified them as Japanese. Instead, there is a tendency to view dark-skinned anime characters as default gaikokujin (foreigners) – hardly surprising given the fact that actual dual-heritage black Japanese are also perceived as such – and to attribute their presence in anime

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to pressure on producers of anime and video games to diversify racial representation in their products in order to appease vocal western critics who complain about the paucity of black characters. Given this tendency, the question is not merely whether or not Japanese anime characters can be black, but whether they can be black and remain Japanese. The question is not just for fans of Japanese anime but is one painfully relevant to black Japanese: “In our town, people stared at me and pointed at me, ‘look, a foreigner,’” says Sophie, a black Japanese, “It was so sad, it made me depressed. I didn’t want to go out except for school. Although I was Japanese, I was never considered to be Japanese” (quoted in van der List, 2021). How this question is answered will depend on how Japan responds to its emergent diversity and the growing visibility of African and other diasporic black communities, many of whose members are Japan-born and Japanese by culture, descent, and citizenship but who will continue to be perceived and treated as outsiders until a new definition of Japaneseness more reflective of the shifting realities of modern Japan and its place as an unexpected site of the global black diaspora emerges. Acknowledgement  This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP22K01095.

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Itagaki, R. (2015). The anatomy of Korea-phobia in Japan. Japanese Studies, 35(1), 49–66. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10371397.2015.1007496 Japan 4 Black Lives. (2021, February 1). Gaiyō ran hitsudoku: Mita me no kotei kannen de shokushirsu shi, mochimono kensa wo suru Nihon no keisatsu [Required reading: Japanese Officer racially profiles man and searches his bag] [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=WjyHY0IomVc Kaigai no hanō͘: Nihon no anime kyarukutā wa hakujin ni nisete iru wake de wa arimasen [Overseas reaction: Japanese anime characters resemble whites] (2010, October 6). Toriisogi. http://gyanko.seesaa.net/article/164842555.html kakeshobo. [@kaleshobo] (2020, June 3). [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/kageshobo/ status/1268042899255463936 Kalled, J. (2020, June 16). Black lives matter forever and everywhere. Tokyo Weekender. https:// www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-­life/news-­and-­opinion/black-­lives-­matter-­tokyo-­march/ Kankokujin. (2022, April 25). No Korea Blog. [Blog]. http://no-­korea.blog.jp/archives/14402607. html#more Kawano. K. (2020, October 18). Why blonde-haired, blue-eyed Sailor Moon is neither white nor Japanese. Japan Today. https://japantoday.com/category/entertainment/ why-­blonde-­haired-­blue-­eyed-­sailor-­moon-­is-­neither-­white-­nor-­japanese Kosakai, T. (1996). Ibunka no juyō no paradokkusu [The paradox of cross-cultural acceptance]. Asahi Sensho. Kunizaki, M. (2022, September 8). Okoye Monika san no jinshu sabetsu DM no higai: Hachimura Aren-san ga rentai. “Mushi suru koto ga kantan kedo…” [The damage of racist DM sent to Okoye Monika. Hachimura Aren shows solidarity: “It’s easy to ignore but…”] HuffPost Japan. https://www.huffingtonpost.jp/entry/story_jp_6319793be4b0eac9f4d385a2 Lie, J. (2001). Multiethnic Japan. Harvard University Press. Lim, A. (2018, January 6). The alt-right’s Asian fetish. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/alt-­right-­asian-­fetish.html Mas, L. (2021, March 2). Video: Japanese policeman admits to searching Black man because of his dreadlocks. The Observers: France 24. https://observers.france24.com/en/asia-­ pacific/20210205-­japanese-­police-­officer-­admits-­to-­searching-­black-­man-­because-­of-­his-­ dreadlocks McLelland, M. (2008). “Race” on the Japanese internet: Discussing Korea and Koreans on ‘2-­channeru. New Media and Society, 10(6). https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444808096246 Mesimaki, S. (2017, July 11). Why Trump supporters admire Japan. The Diplomat. https://thediplomat.com/2017/07/why-­trump-­supportersadmire-­japan Mochida, J. (2020, December 29). Milestone or minor progress? Japan’s strongest antihate law takes effect in Kawasaki. Nippon.com. https://www.nippon.com/en/in-­depth/d00648 Montgomery, H. (2021, February 16). What it’s like being black, Japanese, and constantly stopped by police for no reason. https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxanv/what-­its-­like-­being-­black-­japan Moto Misu Yunibāsu Nihon daihyō ga hanenoketa ‘han-Nichi’ retteru [Former Miss Universe Japan brushes aside “anti-Japanese” label]. (2016, July 11). Josei Jishin. https://jisin.jp/ domestic/1623088 Nihon no shokumu shitsumon “reisharu purofairingu” to iu sabetsu: Racial profiling in Japan. (2021, July 7). Japan for Black Lives. https://japan4blacklives.jp/2021/07/ourepisodes/ racialprofilinginjapan/ Oguma, E. (2002). A genealogy of Japanese self-images. Trans Pacific Press. Okoye, M. [@okoyemoni] (2022, September 7). Mo kokoro ga mahi suru kurai, nareta yo. Twitter. [Tweet]. https://twitter.com/okoyemoni/status/1567447115940646914 Osako, M. (2021, February 15). False rumors spread again following recent earthquake off Northeast Japan. The Mainichi. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210215/p2a/00m/0na/016000c Osumi, M. (2020, June 10). Japan broadcaster NHK under fire for flawed video on anti-racism movement. The Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/06/10/national/ nhk-­video-­black-­lives-­matter

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Promotion activities focusing on hate speech: Stop! hate speech (n.d.). Ministry of Justice. Retrieved October 30, 2022 from https://www.moj.go.jp/ENGLISH/m_jinken04_00001.html Ripley, W. (2015, March 25). The beauty queen criticized for not being Japanese enough. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/25/asia/japans-­biracial-­beauty-­queen/index.html Russell, J.  G. (2020, September 1). “Mindo” and the matter of black lives in Japan. The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 18(17). https://apjjf.org/2020/17/Russell.html Saito, M. (2020, June 6). Kurdish case becomes rallying cry for Japan protest against police. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-­minneapolis-­police-­protests-­japan/ kurdish-­case-­becomes-­rallying-­cry-­for-­japan-­protest-­against-­police-­idUSKBN23D0JG Sato, Y. (2022, September 16). Online platforms like Twitter are missing a brutal wave of hate speech in Japan. Time. https://time.com/6210117/hate-­speech-­social-­media-­zainichi-­japan Schans, D. (2012). Entangled in Tokyo: Exploring diverse pathways of labor market incorporation of African immigrants in Japan. African Diaspora, 5(1), 73–89. https://brill.com/view/journals/ afdi/5/1/article-­p73_5.xml?language=en Shutsunyūkoku Zairyū Kanrichō͘ [Immigration Services Agency of Japan]. (2022, December). Kokuseki, chiiki-betsu zairyū shikaku (zairyū mokuteki)betsu zairyū gaikokujin [Foreign residents breakdown on basis of nationality, region, residency status (purpose of stay)]. e-Stat seifu tō͘kei no sō͘gō͘ madoguchi [E-Stat Portal Site of Official Statistics of Japan]. https:// www.e-­stat.go.jp/stat-­search/files?page=1&layout=datalist&toukei=00250012&tstat=0000 01018034&cycle=1&year=20220&month=12040606&tclass1=000001060399&tclass2val=0 Silverjow [@silverjow_art] (2020, May 20). As a Sailor Moon fan I feel obligated to participate in this challenge. [Image attached]. [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/silverjow_art/ status/1262770845300060160/photo/1 Siripala, T. (2020, June 8). Japan holds anti-racism rally, protesting homegrown police brutality in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. The Diplomat. https://thediplomat.com/2020/06/japan-­ holds-­anti-­racism-­rally-­protesting-­homegrown-­police-­brutality-­in-­solidarity-­with-­black-­ lives-­matter Spangler, T. (2019, June 30). YouTube bans white supremacists David Duke, Richard Spencer and Stefan Molyneux for hate speech. Variety. https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/ youtube-­bans-­stefan-­molyneux-­david-­duke-­richard-­spencer-­hate-­speech-­1234694079 Stormfront. (2020a). Japan seems so much better. [Online forum]. https://www.stormfront.org/ forum/t1317506 Stormfront. (2020b). Black Lives Matter pushes Japan to confront ‘racism’ [Online forum]. https:// www.stormfront.org/forum/t1317928 t ts. (2018, August 19). Shocking! Japanese journalist challenges white supremacist, is owned by him. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH3LY5cF5lQ Takahashi, K. Miyamoto (2015, May 10). Eriana-san “jinshu e no henken to sekai kara nakushitai” (Ms. Miyamto Ariana: “I want to rid the world of racial prejudice.” HuffPost Japan. https:// www.huffingtonpost.jp/2015/05/07/miyamoto-­ariana-­interview_n_7229170.html Takahashi, R. (2020, June 14). Black Lives Matter spreads to Tokyo as 3,500 people march to protest racism. The Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/06/14/national/ black-­lives-­matter-­spreads-­tokyo-­2000-­people-­march-­protest-­racism/ Takeda, O. (2020, September 15). NHK and “Black Lives Matter”: Structural racism in Japan. The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 18(18). https://apjjf.org/2020/18/Takeda.html Tamaki, T. (2020, June 8). Hundreds march in Osaka against racism and the death of George Floyd. The Asahi Shimbun.. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13440082 Tanoshii matome da. (2022, April 22). Kokujin-san, Supai Famirī no Anya wo kokujinka shite shimai, dai enjō͘ [Black turns Anya into a black, flame war ensues] https://tanoshii.youblog.jp/ archives/14352965.html#more TBS News Dig. (2021, May 7). Nihon de mo jinshu sabetsu wa nichijō hachmira kyōdai-ra ga uketa higai to wa? [Racial discrimination is common in Japan: What kind of damage did the Hachimura brothers and others suffer?] [Video]. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=U-­QLBkbmOew

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That Japanese Man Yuta. (2017, August 15). Do anime characters look white to Japanese people? (Interview). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_Xd2xLAjDM&t=109s Thorn, M. (2004). The face of the other. Mangagaku [Manga studies]. http://www.matt-­thorn.com/ mangagaku/faceoftheother.html Tokyo Bengoshi Kai no Kenri ni Kansuru Iinkai. [Tokyo Bar Association Rights Committee]. (2022, September). 2021 nendo gaikoku ni rūtsu wo motsu hito ni taisuru shokumu shitsumon (reisharu prurofaingu) ni kansuru ankēto chōsa saishu hōkokusho [2021 Survey of police questioning of people who have foreign roots]. https://www.toben.or.jp/know/iinkai/foreigner/26a6 af6c6f033511cccf887e39fb794e_2.pdf Twomen Advertising. (2020, December 29). The future isn’t waiting  – Nike [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWn_wjsYF9Y U.S.  Embassy, Tokyo ACS [@ACS Tokyo] (2021, December 6). The U.S.  Embassy has received reports of foreigners stopped and searched by Japanese police in suspected racial profiling incidents. [Image attached] [Tweet]. Twitter https://twitter.com/acstokyo/ status/1467629914857816065 van der List, B. (2021, January 13). Why the Black Lives Matter movement fell flat in Japan. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3gq3g/why-­t he-­b lack-­l ives-­m atter-­m ovement-­f ell-­ flat-­in-­japan Wagatsuma, H., & Yoneyama, T. (1998). Henken no kōzō [The anatomy of prejuduce]. NHK Books. (Original work published in 1967). Weiner, M. (Ed.). (2008). Japan’s minorities: The illusion of homogeneity. Routledge. Yamaguchi, T. (2013). Xenophobia in action: Ultranationalism, hate speech, and the internet in Japan. Radical History Review, 2013(117), 98–118. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-­2210617 John G. Russell is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Gifu University. His research focuses on representations of race and gender in Japanese and American popular culture. He is the author of Nihonjin no kokujin-kan [Japanese Perceptions of Blacks] (Shinhyōron, 1991) and Henken to sabetsu ga dono yō ni tsukurareru ka [How are Prejudice and Discrimination Produced?] (Akashi Shoten, 1995). His chapter “Anaconda East: Fetishes, Phallacies, Chimbo Chauvinism and the Displaced Discourse of Black Male Sexuality in Japan” is included in Tamari Kitossa (ed,), Appealing Because He Is Appalling: Black Masculinities, Colonialism, and Erotic Racism (University of Alberta Press, 2021).  

Questioning Xenophobia in Japan: Racism, Decolonization, and Human Rights Sara Park

Abstract  This chapter delves into the examination of racist discourse in Japan and the process of problematizing it to elucidate the nuances of human rights and discrimination within Japanese society. Since the mid-2000s, explicit manifestations of racism have occurred on the streets of major Japanese cities. A series of counter-­ hate movements, initiated by both Japanese and Koreans, have heightened awareness regarding hate speech in society and successfully influenced the enactment of the Act on Promotion of Efforts to Eliminate Unjustifiable Discriminatory Speech and Behavior against Persons of Non-Japanese Nationality in 2013. Nevertheless, despite the ongoing discussions surrounding the so-called “Japanese-style xenophobia” that have spurred broad support for regulating racist discourse in Japan, this very concept can potentially obscure the intricate and multifaceted dynamics of racism and nationalism, resulting in the continued limitation of human rights for foreign residents. Keywords  Racism · Hate-speech · Koreans in Japan · Immigration policy · Decolonization

Introduction  acism and Hate-Speech in Japan: Background and the Topic R of the Chapter Xenophobic hate speech has posed a persistent challenge in Japan over the span of approximately two decades. The targets of such hate speech predominantly include other Asians, notably Koreans and Chinese individuals residing in Japan. The S. Park (*) Department of Cultures, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_22

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historical context of colonial rule, wars, and conflicts in the twentieth century has resulted in Koreans and Chinese being regarded as foreign residents within Japan. Addressing the inequality between Japanese citizens and Koreans/Chinese individuals in Japan emerged as a significant societal concern during the early 1970s and 1980s, commonly referred to as ethnic discrimination or the “foreigners’ problem”. To mitigate these issues, Japan took steps towards resolution by ratifying the UN Refugee Convention. Furthermore, in the early 1990s, Japan witnessed an influx of foreign residents following a series of reforms to the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, which had been amended from the original Immigration Control Act. However, starting from the early 2000s, the landscape of racism in Japan underwent a transformation, with the dissemination of racist discourse expanding from predominantly online platforms to the public sphere. Notably, the Action Conservative Movement (Kodo suru Hoshu) has garnered attention for its primary focus on Koreans and Chinese people (Moro’oka, 2013; Higuchi  2014; Yasuda, 2015; Gill, 2018). Within this context, the Citizens’ Association for Zainichi Privileges (Zainichi Tokken wo Kangaeru Shimin no Kai), commonly known as Zaitokai, which operates under the umbrella of the ACM, has gained international notoriety as a representative group propagating racial discrimination in Japan. Initially, both law enforcement agencies and political parties largely overlooked this movement. However, after years of anti-discrimination campaigns spearheaded by Japanese and Korean activists, the Act on Promotion of Efforts to Eliminate Unjustifiable Discriminatory Speech and Behavior against Persons of Non-Japanese Nationality (commonly referred to as the Hate Speech Countermeasures Act) was enacted in 2013. This chapter delves into the exploration of racist discourse in Japan and the process of intricate engagement with it. In doing so, it seeks to elucidate the nuances surrounding the meaning of human rights and discrimination within Japanese society. Drawing upon an analysis of existing literature on the subject of Japanese-style xenophobia, this chapter further endeavors to address lingering issues that warrant further discourse. The first matter concerns the intricate interplay between racism and nationalism. As previously mentioned, Koreans, who are the primary targets of current racism, are categorized as foreigners, thus relegating racism against Koreans in Japan to the realm of xenophobia rather than racism. The question of whether Koreans are viewed as foreigners hailing from other nation-states or as members of Japan instigates an ongoing debate, which remains unsettled due to Japan’s history of colonization in Korea. Secondly, the issue of the legal status of Koreans in Japan stimulates discussions surrounding the significance of migrants’ human rights within Japan. Post-war Japanese immigration policies have been shaped by the foundational framework of controlling Koreans, Chinese, and Taiwanese individuals, who were former colonial subjects that lost their Japanese nationality following Japan’s reclamation of independence from the Allied military occupation subsequent to the Pacific War. While the Supreme Court has acknowledged that both Japanese citizens and foreigners enjoy the fundamental human rights enshrined in the Constitution of Japan, the absence of anti-discrimination laws raises inquiries

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regarding the true essence of fundamental human rights. Therefore, a comprehensive examination of recent instances of racist hate speech, their complexities, and legal responses will shed light on the intricate relationship between human rights and the nation-state.

Research and the Counter Activism Against Hate Speech In recent years, there has been a growing body of research in the fields of law, sociology, and social psychology focusing on the phenomenon of discriminatory behavior in public settings perpetrated by far-right organizations. Within the realm of law, scholars have extensively examined hate speech regulations and anti-discrimination laws across different countries, with a specific interest in exploring effective legal frameworks for addressing hate speech in Japan  (Moro’oka, 2013; Mori et  al., 2014). Kim Sang-Kyun seeks “equality before the law” that is not only “respect for the individual” (Kim, 2014, pp.  167–168) and discusses the legal basis for hate speech control laws in Japan concerning freedom of expression. Moro’oka (2013) examines hate speech control laws mainly in Europe and the U.S. and addresses the need for a comprehensive anti-discrimination law in Japan. Maeda (2013) also examines hate speech regulation and anti-discrimination laws not only in Europe and the United States, but also in Asian, African, and Latin American countries, and argues that “punishment [to hate-speech] based on the Japanese Constitution” (Maeda, 2013, p. 181) is possible. These studies are driven by a pressing need to establish regulations to combat the proliferation of hateful expressions within Japan. Consequently, the discourse centers around key questions such as “how can discriminatory expressions be effectively regulated,” “what legal frameworks exist in other countries to address discrimination,” and “is it feasible to regulate hate speech while safeguarding freedom of expression.” Sociologists in Japan have investigated xenophobic attitudes and xenophobic groups in Japan and abroad, as well as hate speech on the Internet. Tanabe (2001) has pointed out that age, education, occupation, amount of networking, and experience interacting with foreigners have inhibitory effects on Japanese attitudes toward xenophobia. Nukaga (2006) examined the effect of education on Japanese attitudes toward xenophobia, and found that the higher the years of education, the more contacts with foreigners, and the higher the percentage of Koreans in Japan among foreign residents, the less likely people are to have poor attitudes toward xenophobia. Nagayoshi (2012) also conducted a comparative analysis of the proportion of foreign workers in low-skilled occupations across different prefectures, revealing that variations in nationality within the labor market impact the extent of xenophobic attitudes. Although quantitative studies on xenophobia in Japan have not extensively explored the specific characteristics of xenophobia itself, (Higuchi  2014), through both biographical interviews with racist activists and historical analysis, spreads the term of “Japanese-style xenophobia”. Higuchi points out that the target groups of xenophobia are Korean and Chinese residents in Japan, “groups that are

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less likely to be targeted in the recent European context, for example” (Higuchi, 2014, p. 5). Furthermore, he argues that Japanese-style xenophobia should be contextualized within the geopolitical dynamics of East Asia, as it intersects with issues of foreign suffrage and political and diplomatic disputes in East Asian countries, including historical and territorial conflicts. (Higuchi, 2014, pp. 6–7). In essence, legal research has been primarily concerned with the regulatory aspects of discrimination and hate speech, while sociological research has focused on unraveling the distinctive features of xenophobia in Japan.

Remaining Questions All the aforementioned studies employ the term xenophobia to denote the manifestation of racist rhetoric and conduct directed at ethnic minorities  in Japan. This usage suggests that the recipients of racist discourse  are perceived as foreigners. Prior academic inquiries in the fields of law and sociology have significantly contributed to comprehending the characteristics of hate speech and formulating strategies to address it in Japan. The investigation into Japanese-style xenophobia may share a fundamental premise with the xenophobia it critiques, as it perceives individuals who are not ethnically Japanese as foreigners or aliens. Studies focusing on xenophobia in Japan have yet to explore the specific identities of the foreigners who are targeted by this so-called xenophobia. This omission likely stems not from the researchers’ personal perceptions, but rather from the framework of the postwar immigration control system in Japan. In essence, it is precisely due to the researchers’ indifference towards the immigration control system, which amalgamates factors such as origin, nationality, and legal status, that they do not perceive a necessity to address the question of who precisely constitutes the “foreigners” subjected to xenophobic attacks. However, it is also challenging to entirely equate the purported Japanese-style xenophobia with racism. Fumiaki Taka regards online hate speech aimed at Koreans in Japan as racism and establishes a connection with the study of racism in the United States. Taka highlights the distinction between discrimination against Koreans and the persecution faced by African Americans, who are among the targets of racism in the United States. In other words, “while the words ‘go home’ are probably not thrown at American blacks as often, Koreans in Japan are often told to ‘go back to Korea/North Korea’“ (Taka, 2015, p. 180). The rationale behind urging Koreans in Japan to return to Republic of Korea or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea stems from the perception of Koreans as foreigners, rather than as a racial minority integrated within Japan. Investigating the circumstances that allow for the conflation of race and nationality will make a valuable contribution to the field of racism studies. The question of whether racist discourse targeting Koreans in Japan should be categorized as xenophobia, ethnic discrimination, or racism cannot be addressed without taking into account the immigration system that initially designated Koreans

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as foreigners. The persistence of Korean nationals and the rhetoric of “go back to North/South Korea” and “if you dislike discrimination, just naturalize” demonstrate that even after 70 years since the conclusion of World War II, Koreans in Japan remain entangled in the issue of nationality. Moreover, it signifies that the concept of “foreigner” in Japan encompasses not only nationality or residency status but also serves as a basis for discrimination rooted in one’s origin.

What Is Hate Speech in Japan? Racist Groups and Their Activism Let us examine the contemporary landscape of racial violence in Japan. Firstly, it is noteworthy that the prevalence of right-wing factions in the country has exhibited a consistent downward trend over the years. The National Police Agency’s annual white papers, which contain police statistics, reveal that in 1972, there existed 500 far-right organizations comprising a collective membership of 120,000 individuals (National Police Agency, 1972). In 2010, there were 4860 groups totaling 13,400 members with 3890 vehicles (National Police Agency, 2010, p. 164). Against the backdrop of this context, the emergence of a novel strain of far-right organization, namely the Action Conservative Movement (ACM) and more specifically, the Zaitokukai, since around 2006, has sent shockwaves throughout society. Their targets have encompassed various groups, including Korean ethnic minorities, newly arrived labor migrants, and women’s organizations, with Koreans bearing the brunt of Zaitokukai’s aggression. In December 2009, Zaitokukai launched an attack on a Korean elementary school located in Kyoto Prefecture, citing their opposition to the school’s use of a local park for recess and sporting activities. A multitude of Zaitokukai members gathered in front of the school gate, vociferously expressing their disdain through megaphones, labeling the schoolchildren as “North Korean spies” and “potential criminals”. Subsequently, in 2009, the Zaitokukai, alongside other ACM factions, initiated a series of rallies, commencing in Tokyo and subsequently extending to Osaka and other major cities in Japan. These gatherings propagated animosity towards Koreans, accompanied by the utilization of slogans such as, “Hello, cockroaches in Shin-Okubo! We are exterminators for all of Japan, cleaning Japanese society”. According to a report published in Fiscal Year 2016 by the Center for the Promotion of Human Rights Enlightenment under the Ministry of Justice, Legal Affairs Bureau (2016)  a staggering number of hate speech demonstrations were recorded during the three and a half year period from April 2012 to September 2015, amounting to an average of 329 cases per year or nearly daily occurrences of racial hateful speech demonstrations and street propaganda activities across Japan. The highest number of incidents, 378, was reported in 2014. When examining the geographical distribution, the capital region accounted for the largest share at 45.7%,

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followed by the Kinki region at 24% and the Chubu region at 11%. Notably, the most densely populated areas, namely the four metropolitan prefectures in the southern Kanto region (Saitama, Chiba, Tokyo, and Kanagawa) and the three prefectures in the Kinki region (Kyoto, Osaka, and Hyogo), witnessed a significant number of demonstrations and street protests. Additionally, a certain number of demonstrations were observed in key regional cities such as Sapporo, Sendai, Hiroshima, and Fukuoka. In terms of participant demographics, the majority of participants were male, and in terms of age, there was a prevalence of middle-aged individuals in their 30s to 50s. Journalists and researchers have extensively deliberated on the various factors contributing to this surge in racist violence. Hajime Kanbara, who actively engages in counter-protests against racist groups and has also served as a lawyer in hate crime lawsuits, posits that “the ideology underlying recent hate speech has its origins in the ‘anti-Korean’ and ‘hater’ ideology that was formed in subcultures such as manga and the Internet in the early 2000s. If we look back to the 1980s, we can see a pattern of incitement to discrimination by governments, politicians, and the mass media, followed to some extent by hate crimes and hate speech by the public” (Kanbara, 2014, p. 87). This analysis reveals that the phenomenon of racism, previously influenced by politicians since the 1980s, solidified its presence in the 2000s through its integration with subcultures present on the Internet. Higuchi (2014) highlights the connection between certain influential figures within a neo-Nazi organization in Japan, known as the National Socialist League, established in the early 1990s, who subsequently became involved with Zaitokukai. Furthermore, it is noted that the leader of a group implicated in the attack on a Korean school had previously been associated with an anti-China movement, exploiting the Tibet issue as a pretext. It can be said that “the racist movement in Japan today has gained know-how from the ‘right-wing crumbles,’ a lightweight agenda from historical revisionism, and the mobilizing potential (support base for the movement) of the Internet right wing from the Internets” (Higuchi, 2014, p. 11).

Intersectional Violence Racist individuals affiliated with the ACM frequently target Korean women. Shinhae Lee, a Korean female journalist, brought a legal suit against Makoto Sakurai, the leader of Zaitokukai, and emerged victorious in November 2017. Prior to filing the lawsuit, Lee had reported to the police that Sakurai subjected her to repeated harassment, including distressing remarks such as “send this woman a five-sided nail,” while other individuals sent her explicit videos and images on a daily basis. Despite enduring attacks on her appearance, all these incidents were dismissed. Lee asserts: I was able to file a lawsuit because Mr. Sakurai directly verbally abused me and threatened to kill me. I am the sole Korean individual, the only woman, who has been subjected to name-calling and hate speech from Sakurai over an extended period. I made the decision to take legal action against Sakurai, believing that if I, as an individual, could fight against

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him, then I would. Furthermore, I aimed to build a robust case highlighting intersectional discrimination, which combines racial and gender discrimination. However, even the police failed to comprehend the significance of this matter (Lee, 2018).

Lee achieved victory in the initial trial, but Sakurai appealed the ruling on the grounds of unfairness. In the subsequent trial at the Osaka High Court, it was determined that Sakurai’s online broadcasts from 2013 to 2014, wherein he referred to Lee as a “Korean hag” were “insulting beyond limits” and constituted “combined racism and discrimination against women” (Mainichi Shinbun, 2018). Lee is not the sole victim of intersectional violence rooted in racism and sexism. In August 2021, Kang-Yi-Jia Choi, a third-generation Korean woman residing in Kawasaki City, initiated a lawsuit against a man in his 40s living in the northern Kanto region of Japan, seeking compensation amounting to 3.05 million yen (Ohira, 2021). Kawasaki City has been plagued by recurrent demonstrations featuring racist  speech since 2013. In November 2015, a racist demonstration titled “Japan Purification Demonstration” targeted Sakuramoto, a residential area for Korean residents in Japan located in Kawasaki City. Choi, an employee at the Kawasaki City intercultural house of Fureaikan in Sakuramoto area, actively protested against the demonstration alongside her family and other residents. On March 22, 2013, Choi provided a testimony to the House of Councilors Legal Affairs Committee, advocating for the establishment of the Hate Speech Countermeasure Act. In her statement, she disclosed her name and workplace, recounting the severe discrimination she had experienced. Consequently, ten members of the Legal Affairs Committee visited Choi’s workplace in Sakuramoto at the end of the same month, ultimately leading to the enactment of the Act on Promotion of Efforts to Eliminate Unjustifiable Discriminatory Speech and Conduct against Persons of Foreign Origin in Japan. Yasuko Moro’oka, the attorney handling Choi’s case, highlights the fact that this exposure subjected Choi to numerous anonymous attacks on the Internet (Moro’oka, 2022). The analysis by Fuchs and Schäfer (2020) focused on the examination of misogynistic rhetoric targeting female politicians in Japan and reached the conclusion that expressions of negativity and hostile attitudes towards female politicians have seemingly become a prevailing pattern on Twitter, particularly directed at those who hold controversial views or possess greater prominence. While the issue of racial discrimination against Koreans has gained attention, it is worth noting that there exists ingrained discrimination against women in Japanese society. Presently, the instances wherein individuals have faced relentless attacks and resorted to legal action primarily involve Korean women. Conversely, racism against Koreans may have significantly undermined the prevailing male dominance within the Korean community residing in Japan. As portrayed in various films, Korean men in Japan have traditionally exhibited their physical strength and masculinity through their labor. However, this perception has been challenged when they experience emotional distress or fear due to non-violent racist rhetoric. Lim (2018) conducted a study of two major ethnic organizations of Koreans in Japan, Mindan and Chongryong, and pointed out that acknowledging shock, terror, fear, sadness, and despair invoked by hate demonstrations openly and

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correctively contains a dilemma for nationalistic and male-centered Korean advocacy. According to Lim, “Pride in the resilience of its members makes it difficult also for Chongryon to admit that Zaitokukai hate demonstrations are, in fact, terrifying” (Lim, 2018, p. 227).

Hate-Speech Countermeasure Act and Thereafter In response to such acts of racist violence, both Japanese and Koreans collaborated in organizing a series of counter-movements. The anti-hate movement, which has gained momentum across Japan, particularly following the assault on the Korean elementary school in Kyoto, encompasses a diverse range of initiatives. These endeavors can be broadly categorized into three distinct groups: advocacy activities spearheaded by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community-based initiatives, and social movements utilizing the Internet  (Hatano, 2018, p.  51–52). The advocacy endeavors carried out by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were spearheaded by the NGO Network for the Eradication of Racial Discrimination (ERD-Net). Established in 2007, ERD-Net aims to implement the recommendations on racial discrimination put forth by the UN Special Rapporteur in 2005. Since its establishment, the organization has actively engaged in inter-institutional meetings, study groups, and participation in the Japanese review conducted by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Additionally, ERD-Net played an instrumental role in including the case of the Kyoto Korean School attack in the 2014 review conducted by the UN Committee on Civil Liberties and the CERD, as part of their concerted efforts to advocate at the UN. Consequently, as a result of their diligent lobbying, both the UN Committee on Civil Liberties and the CERD issued stringent recommendations to the Japanese government, calling for decisive action against hate speech. Kawasaki City, located in Kanagawa Prefecture, serves as a prime example of community-based initiatives. Particularly, the Sakuramoto area within Kawasaki City has been a longstanding residence for numerous Koreans, who migrated prior to the war for factory construction and civil engineering work, rendering it the largest Korean population center in the Kanto region. Choi, the Korean female activist previously mentioned, stands as a central figure within this movement. Following the enactment of the Hate Speech Countermeasure Act, various citizen groups in Kawasaki fervently urged the mayor to address hate speech demonstrations. As a result of these collective efforts, the mayor made the decision to prohibit hate speech demonstration organizers from utilizing parks as their rallying grounds. Within the realm of social movements, there exists a diverse array of groups and practices, ranging from those engaging in peaceful demonstrations with placards and balloons to those willing to employ physical force in order to impede hate-­ related protests. The composition and activities of these groups are characterized by a high degree of fluidity. In an interview conducted with lawyer Hajime Kambara, Yasumichi Noma, one of the leaders of a counter-movement, sheds light on the direct correlation between the anti-hate movement and his ongoing anti-nuclear

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campaign in front of the National Diet Building, which was sparked by the nuclear power plant disaster triggered by the Great Northeast Japan Earthquake in 2011. According to Noma, around 2012, the Zaitokukai organization “began to disrupt the anti-nuclear power protests, leading the individuals gathered in front of the National Diet Building to recognize Zaitokukai as adversaries from that point onward. (...) Since the Zaitokukai disturbed our activities in front of the Prime Minister’s Office, they were already identified as our direct adversaries.” (Kanbara, 2014, p. 178). As a result of the anti-hate campaign, the Hate Speech Countermeasure Act was enacted. However, Powell (2022) and others have characterized the law as ineffective due to its absence of punitive measures. Coupled with the longstanding practice of granting extensive discretionary powers to national and local governments, which effectively bestows significant influence over policy implementation, many Japanese laws function more as policy indicators than as regulatory bodies with punitive capabilities. Moreover, the law is not specifically tailored to directly address discrimination against indigenous populations such as the Ainu, Okinawans, or Burakumin. Consequently, even after the enactment of this law, instances of discrimination targeting Koreans have not ceased (Hatachi, 2021). In August 2021, a 23-year-old Japanese individual deliberately set ablaze a warehouse in the Utoro district of Uji City, Kyoto Prefecture, which is home to a substantial Korean population. The arson resulted in the destruction of seven residential houses and claimed the life of a resident’s dog. Prior to this incident, the perpetrator had also set fire to a Korean school and a building owned by the Korean ethnic organization, Mindan, in Nagoya City (Nihon Hoso Kyokai, 2022). The Utoro warehouse fire additionally caused significant damage, including the destruction of 50 items, including materials intended for display at the upcoming Peace Memorial Hall, which aimed to convey the historical significance of the area. During the trial, the defendant openly admitted to harboring hostile sentiments towards Koreans and stated that his intention was to impede the opening of the Peace Memorial Hall. It is evident that the defendant’s actions were motivated by clear racial animosity, underscoring the presence of racist motivations behind the arson attack.

The Three Concepts Hate Speech As mentioned previously, racism in Japan is often characterized as xenophobic hate speech, and measures have been implemented to raise awareness and educate the public, albeit without accompanying penalties. This classification of racism as xenophobic hate speech has contributed to the widespread recognition of discrimination against Koreans as a significant social problem in Japan. However, by labeling racism solely as xenophobic hate speech, certain aspects have been overlooked. This section aims to address the aspects that have been overlooked concerning the three concepts of hate speech, xenophobia, and privilege.

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First, let us examine the concept of hate speech. As mentioned above, racism in Japan has been described as xenophobia or hate speech, and not so much as racism. Ryan (2016) examined anti-racism policies in EU member states and the United States and found that these policies were legislated in the 1960s and 1970s as criminal law (Germany), civil rights law (United States), and anti-discrimination law (Western European countries), and were then revised in the 1990s and 2000s. In contrast, Japan has no anti-discrimination legislation at all except for the Act on Equality Between Men and Women (Ryan, 2016: 219–220). This is not unrelated to the fact that “hate speech” was understood and spread in Japan as an expression of hateful feelings rather than an incitement to racial discrimination. Furthermore, Ryang criticized the movement against ethnic discrimination against Koreans that spread in Japan from the late 1970s to the 1980s, saying that “the illegality of racism itself was not questioned” (Ryan, 2016, p. 242). To rephrase Ryang’s critique, hate speech regulation in Japan primarily focuses on educational and awareness-raising initiatives to prevent discriminatory expressions and actions without directly addressing the underlying issue of racism itself. The reality is that race and nationality are interconnected, yet racial discrimination remains a relatively marginalized topic within Japanese politics. In fact, one could argue that the term “hate speech” has somewhat obscured the profound extent of racism within Japanese society by conflating acts of incitement with mere expressions of violence.

Xenophobia Next, let us consider the concept of xenophobia (Park, 2017). As demonstrated by Arita (2013) and Higuchi (2014), the discrimination faced by Koreans in Japan has been denoted as xenophobia since the 2000s. However, this terminology might oversimplify the intricate historical context concerning the legal standing of Koreans residing in Japan. Following Japan’s colonization of Korea in 1910, Koreans migrated to Japan and established ethnic enclaves, predominantly in major urban centers such as Tokyo and Osaka. Throughout the Pacific War, young Korean males were subject to coerced relocation to Japan and compelled labor (Tonomura, 2012). Consequently, by 1945, the Korean populace residing in Japan had reached an approximate figure of two million. Subsequently, upon learning of Japan’s surrender to the Allied forces in August 1945, a considerable number of Koreans opted to repatriate to Korea, resulting in a significant reduction of the Korean population to about a quarter of its original size. Nonetheless, certain Koreans who were living in Japan refrained from returning due to stringent limitations on the amount of property they could transport, the unsettled political climate prevailing on the Korean Peninsula immediately after liberation, and the exceedingly challenging economic circumstances. Moreover, there were individuals who endeavored to undertake irregular migration from Korea to Japan amidst the tumultuous events occurring prior to and following the Korean War (Morris-Suzuki, 2012). The issue of determining the appropriate legal status

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for the Koreans who remained in Japan posed a relatively minor yet complex dilemma for both the Japanese government and the occupying Allied forces. It is noteworthy that Koreans had held Japanese citizenship since the annexation in 1910 (and Taiwanese since the cession of Taiwan to Japan by the Qing Dynasty in 1890). In 1947, the Japanese government initially imposed restrictions on irregular migration from the Korean peninsula. During this period, Koreans were regarded as foreigners in Japan, despite being nationals by virtue of their Japanese citizenship. (Park, 2016). Koreans who attempted to immigrate to Japan were forcibly repatriated to Korea, except in cases where petitions from family members seeking to remain in Japan were approved. Subsequently, in 1952, when Japan signed a peace treaty with the Allied Powers and regained its independence, the Japanese government unilaterally revoked Japanese nationality from Koreans and Taiwanese without enacting any legislation. This action was based on the premise that Korea had become an independent country, and thus Koreans should belong to that independent nation. Moreover, ethnic Korean organizations did not oppose the Japanese government’s decision to strip them of Japanese nationality, as they did not accept Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. Consequently, until 1991, when Japan’s Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act was amended to establish a special permanent residency status, there was no residential status that encompassed all former colonial residents. Considering this historical context, characterizing racism against Koreans as xenophobia could be viewed as potentially oversimplifying the intricate issues surrounding decolonization. In essence, it overlooks a crucial aspect necessary for comparative historical analysis, which is how the legal status of former colonizers, in terms of nationality and residency, should have been addressed. Furthermore, asserting that Koreans are foreigners and should be subject to the immigration control system shares underlying assumptions with racist groups like the ACM and the Zaitokukai, as discussed below. A more contentious assumption pertains to the idea that ethnicity and nationality are inherently interchangeable and that ethnic Koreans should automatically forfeit their Japanese nationality. In August 1945, Koreans celebrated their liberation from colonial rule, but they certainly did not rejoice at the loss of their residency status in Japan. While Koreans are indeed distinct from the Japanese in terms of ethnicity, they are also integral members of Japanese society. Their inclusion should be determined by the complex interplay of their historical backgrounds and individual circumstances. To label racism against these members as xenophobic aligns with the notion that ethnic minorities are inherently perceived as foreigners.

Privilege The question of whether Koreans can be appropriately categorized as foreigners directs our attention back to the issue of “zainichi privilege,” as propagated by hate speech groups, as exemplified by the name of Zaitokukai, the Citizens’ Association

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for Zainichi Privileges. Noma (2013) conducted a comprehensive examination of these unfounded privileges and condensed them into four primary categories: subsidies for ethnic Korean schools, preferential treatment in accessing welfare benefits, widespread use of common names, and special permanent resident status (Noma, 2013, pp. 16–17). However, it should be noted that subsidies for Korean schools and preferential treatment in obtaining public assistance do not exist. Furthermore, the use of common names is accessible to individuals regardless of their nationality or ethnicity. Consequently, the claim that Koreans possess privileges over the Japanese population is currently limited to the realm of online right-wing communities on the internet. However, it seems that only the status of special permanent residency is not vehemently challenged. As mentioned earlier, the establishment of special permanent residency in 1991 aimed to address the situation of former colonial subjects who were unilaterally stripped of their Japanese nationality. The Zaitokukai group criticizes this relatively stable permanent resident status as being “privileged” due to its comparably higher level of stability when compared to other residency statuses. Sociologist Kim Myeong-soo observes that “although some wild zainichi privilege falsehoods seem to be coming to an end, the zaitokai’s claim that special permanent resident status is a zainichi privilege appears, on the contrary, to be beginning to gain some support with the endorsement of some politicians and the media” (Kim, 2014). There is little to be appended to Kim’s argument, save for the observation that if the status of special permanent residency is perceived as a privilege, it is primarily due to Japan’s inadequate immigration policy. Japan’s immigration control system was established immediately following World War II, primarily targeting individuals from former colonies, particularly Koreans. Despite subsequent revisions, the fundamental characteristic of the system, which prohibits the acquisition of permanent residency for individuals lacking Japanese citizenship, remains unchanged. The basis for Special Permanent Resident status lies within the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, as well as the Act on Special Measures Concerning the Immigration Control of Persons Who Have Renounced Japanese Nationality in Relation to the Treaty of Peace with Japan (Immigration Special Measures Act), which necessitates the possession of a special permanent resident certificate rather than a residence card. Re-entry permits are valid for a maximum duration of 6 years (5 years for permanent residents), while the period deemed as re-entry is limited to 2 years (1 year for permanent residents). Employers are not obligated to report the employment status of special permanent residents, unlike their permanent resident counterparts. Furthermore, while permanent resident status may be revoked upon conviction resulting in imprisonment or graver penalties, special permanent resident status is only rescinded in the event of actions deemed detrimental to the interests of Japan. The sole prerequisite for obtaining special permanent resident status is either having lost Japanese nationality due to the Peace Treaty with Japan or being a descendant of such an individual.

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In contrast, permanent residence is less preferable to the special permanent resident status. The first condition for obtaining permanent resident status is, in principle, to have lived in Japan continuously for at least 10  years. The Migration Integration Policy Index defines permanent residence as “the path to permanent residence for newcomers in Japan is long (10 years) and mainly linked to their ability to fulfill economic requirements”. “The wait for permanent residence is exceptionally long and unfavorable in China, Denmark, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Switzerland, Turkey, and the UAE” (Migration Integration Policy Index, 2020). In reality, the criteria for obtaining permanent residence in Japan extend beyond a mere 10 years of residency. Applicants must also demonstrate good conduct, the ability to support oneself financially, and the potential to contribute to the nation of Japan. More specifically, the following factors are also assessed during the permanent residence application process: compliance with tax obligations, minor infractions related to traffic, timely payment of national health insurance, adherence to payment deadlines, annual income exceeding 3 million yen, stable employment history, enrollment in social insurance, manageable number of dependents, and a spouse who possesses work eligibility. Comparing these requirements to those for Japanese naturalization, with the exception of the restriction on multiple nationalities, the threshold for naturalization is lower than that for attaining permanent resident status. In other words, within the framework of Japan’s residency management system, it is more challenging for a foreigner to secure permanent residency in Japan than for a foreigner to become a Japanese citizen. While the level of Special Permanent Resident status, in contrast to the level of recommendation from the United Nations or permanent residency in many OECD countries, may not  appear comparatively privileged, it holds a distinct position among the various residential statuses in Japan. Hence, it becomes evident that if Special Permanent Resident status is to be perceived as a form of privilege, it must be predicated on the notion that Japan’s residency management system is notably stringent in granting permanent residency and lacks stability in doing so. When critiquing the notion of Zainichi privilege, it is essential to scrutinize the underlying conditions that contribute to the perception of Special Permanent Resident status as a privilege.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the conceptualizations of human rights and discrimination within the context of Japan, with a particular focus on the problematic nature of the discourse surrounding racism. In Japan, discriminatory attitudes towards Koreans and Chinese have been implicitly accepted since the early 20th century. In the 21st century, the emergence of online subcultures facilitated by the Internet has further normalized existing forms of racism. The frequent endorsement of discriminatory practices by both national and local politicians has contributed to a

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diminished aversion towards racism. Racism against Koreans, specifically, encompasses instances of intersectional violence targeting Korean women. Both Japanese and Koreans have protested against such racism, leading to the enactment of a law in 2013 aimed at educating and raising awareness about the detrimental effects of hate speech. However, it is important to note that this law does not explicitly prohibit racial discrimination, which has raised doubts about its effectiveness. Additionally, labeling racial discrimination against Koreans as xenophobic hate speech poses three significant issues. Firstly, it trivializes human rights concerns by reducing them to expressions of hatred and violence. Secondly, it oversimplifies the complex historical context of decolonization and wrongly assumes that race, ethnicity, and nationality are interchangeable concepts. Thirdly, it highlights flaws in Japan’s immigration control system, particularly the significant barriers faced by non-Japanese individuals seeking permanent residency. On the other hand, if racism against Koreans had been approached as a fundamental and universal human rights issue, Japan may not have felt the need to pass the Hate Speech Regulation Law. Scholars have criticized the inadequacies of this law, as evidenced by the occurrence of arson cases targeting the Korean community even after its implementation. Nevertheless, the recognition that expressions inciting discrimination are morally reprehensible signifies progress in advancing the understanding of human rights in Japan. The effectiveness of the Hate Speech Countermeasure Act in eradicating racial discrimination and fostering a society that values human rights will depend on the future actions of Japanese society members.

References Arita, Y. (2013). Heito Supichi to tatakau: Nihonban Haigai Shugi Hihan. Iwanamishoten. Fuchs, T., & Schäfer, F. (2020). Normalizing misogyny: Hate speech and verbal abuse of female politicians on Japanese twitter. Japan Forum, 33(4), 553–579. https://doi.org/10.1080/0955580 3.2019.1687564 Gill, T. (2018). The nativist backlash: Exploring the roots of the action conservative movement. Social Science Japan Journal, 21(2), 175–192. https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyy023 Hatachi, K. (2021, March 26). Zainichi Korean satsugai honomekasu heito kyohaku bunsho mata Kawasaki no shisetsuni. BuzzFeed. Retrieved January 11, 2023, from https://www.buzzfeed. com/jp/kotahatachi/kawasaki-­hate17?bfsource=relatedmanual Hatano, A. (2018). Han heito supiichi no shimin undo: Kyoto Chosen gakko shugeki jiken sosho wo meguru torikumi wo jirei ni. CiNii Research. Retrieved January 11, 2023, from https://ci.nii. ac.jp/naid/120006457323 Higuchi, N. (2014). Nihongata Haigai Shugi: Zaitokukai Gaikokujin Sanseiken higashiajia chiseigaku. Nagoyadaigakushuppankai. Kanbara, H. (2014). Heito supīchi ni kōsuru hitobito. Shinnihonshuppansha. Kim, M. (2014). Tokubetsu eiju shikaku ha “zainichi tokken” ka? SYNODOS. Retrieved January 11, 2023, from https://synodos.jp/opinion/politics/11245/ Lee, S. (2018). Tai zaitokukai heito saiban, jinshu sabetsu to josei sabetsu no fukugo sabetsu Ri Shinhae san. Retrieved January 11, 2023, from https://www.jinken.ne.jp/flat_special/2018/10/ post_32.html

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Lim, Y. (2018). Responding to hate in contemporary Japan: Fragmenting factors obstructing effective ethnic advocacy. Social Science Japan Journal, 21(2), 213–233. https://doi.org/10.1093/ ssjj/jyy022 Maeda, A. (2013). Naze Ima heito supichi nanoka: Sabetsu Boryoku Kyohaku Hakugai. San-­ ichi shobo. Mainichi Shinbun. (2018). Korean resident of Japan’s legal battle for dignity ends in her favor but problems remain. The Mainichi. (2018). Retrieved January 11, 2023, from https://mainichi.jp/ english/articles/20180320/p2a/00m/0na/003000c Migration Policy Index. (2020). Japan: MIPEX 2020. www.mipex.eu. Retrieved January 11, 2023, from https://www.mipex.eu/japan Ministry of Justice, Legal Affairs Bureau. (2016). Heito supiichi/gaikokujin no sabetsu ni kansuru jittai chosa. Retrieved January 11, 2023, from https://www.moj.go.jp/JINKEN/stophatespeech_ chousa.html Mori, C., Yasuda, K., Nakamura, I., Endo, H., Kotani, J., & Sakuraba, O. (2014). Heito speech ni kansuru shobatsu no kanosei. In Heito Supichi no Hoteki Kenkyu (p. 176). Essay, Horitsu Bunkasha. Moro’oka, Y. (2013). Heito supīchi to Wa Nani Ka. Iwanami Shoten. Moro’oka, Y. (2022). Choi Kan-yi-ja san no netto heito Minji saiban. Retrieved January 11, 2023, from https://shiminrengo.com/archives/5618 Morris-Suzuki, T. (2012). Borderline Japan: Foreigners and frontier controls in the postwar era. Cambridge University Press. Nagayoshi, K. (2012). Effects of the split labor market on xenophobia in Japan. Japanese Sociological Review, 63(1), 19–35. https://doi.org/10.4057/jsr.63.19 National Police Agency. (1972). Dai 7 sho Koan no iji. Showa 48 nen Keisatsu hakusho. Retrieved January 14, 2023, from https://www.npa.go.jp/hakusyo/s48/s480700.html National Police Agency. (2010). Heisei 22 nen Keisatsu Hakusho. Retrieved January 14, 2023, from https://www.npa.go.jp/hakusyo/h22/honbun/pdf/22p04000.pdf Nihon Hoso Kyokai. (2022, September 28). Kyoto Utoro chiku hoka jiken hikoku ni choeki 4-nen no hanketsu, Kyoto chisai. . Retrieved January 11, 2023, from https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/ html/20220830/k10013794281000.html Noma, Y. (2013). Zainichi Tokken no Kyoko: Netto Kukan ga umidashita heito supichi. Kawadeshoboshinsha. Nukaga, M. (2006). Xenophobia and the effects of education: Determinants of Japanese attitudes toward acceptance of foreigners. Ohira, K. (2021, November 19). Tokumei no sabetsuteki burogu, tokosha wo tokutei shite teiso Kawasaki no zainichi Korean. Asahi Shinbun Digital. Retrieved January 11, 2023, from https:// www.asahi.com/articles/ASPCM2WDJPCLULOB00B.html Park, S. (2016). “Who are you?”: The making of Korean “illegal entrants” in occupied Japan 1945–1952. International Journal of Japanese Sociology, 25(1), 150–163. https://doi. org/10.1111/ijjs.12042 Park, S. (2017). Inventing aliens: Immigration control, ‘xenophobia’ and racism in Japan. Race & Class, 58(3), 64–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396816657719 Powell, R. (2022). Toothless rhetoric or strategic polemic? A textual and contextual analysis of Japan’s hate speech law. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue Internationale De Sémiotique Juridique, 35(6), 2303–2322. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-­022-­09883-­9 Ryan, Y. (2016). Nihongata Heito supīchi to Wa Nani Ka: Shakai O Hakaisuru Reishizumu no tōjō. Kage Shobō. Taka, F. (2015). Reishizumu O kaibōsuru: Zainichi korian Eno Henken to intānetto. Keisōshobō. Tanabe, S. (2001). Effects of personal networks on attitude towards foreigners. Comprehensive Urban Studies, 76, 83–94. Tonomura, M. (2012). Chosenjin Kyosei Renko. Iwanamishoten. Yasuda, K. (2015). Heito supīchi: Aikokushatachi no Zōo to bōryoku. Bungeishunjū.

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Sara Park  (Ph.D., Kyoto University) is a lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki in Finland. With a focus on nationalism and historiography, her research explores the history of migration control policy of Japan and the meaning of history and memory in post-war Japanese society. She published her works in English, Japanese and Korean, including “Colonialism and Sisterhood: Japanese Female Activists and the “Comfort Women” Issue”, “Documenting the undocumented: State identification of non-nationals in post-war Japan”, Writing Family History (Japanese, Chikuma Shobo).

Life Stories, Historical Background, and Current Situations of the Ainu: The Story of Noto Vince M. Okada

Abstract  In 2008, the Ainu were finally recognized by the Japanese government as an indigenous people of Japan. For over a hundred years, forced assimilation and discriminatory policies resulted in the erosion of the Ainu’s identity and sense of worth, the confiscation of their homelands, and considerable suffering over several generations. Thanks to the Ainu Culture Promotion Act (1997), government recognition (2008), and the Ainu Policy Promotion Act (2019), a number of programs and projects have been launched to familiarize people with Ainu culture, including their language and traditions. This chapter introduces Noto, an Ainu youth leader who has taken advantage of those initiatives in recent years and shown growth and transformation in her life. She has enjoyed her life as an Ainu, and her dream is for Japan to become a better nation in terms of accepting the diversity of the people and their cultures by respecting one another and acknowledging everyone’s strengths and unique qualities. Noto is looking forward to being part of the transformation. Keywords  Ainu · Indigenous People · Hokkaido · Japan · Colonization · Youth Leader

Kanto orowa yaku saku no arankep shinep ka isam.

The above Ainu proverb translates: “Everything in this world exists with a given role.” It is a great reminder that everyone should respect each other’s individual strengths and unique characteristics. Each individual has his or her own unique story.

V. M. Okada (*) Hawaiʻi Pacific University, Honolulu, HI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_23

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Ainu The word ainu means people and humans. The Ainu are indigenous people from the northern region of the Japanese archipelago, particularly the northern part of Japan’s main island (Honshu), Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands (Chishima), and the southern part of Sakhalin (Karafuto). By the thirteenth century (Uemura, 2008), the Ainu had developed their culture and settlements—called Ainu Mosir, referring to the great calm lands where people reside. They were typically located near the ocean or river, and their chief methods of earning a livelihood were fishing and hunting. Their language and beliefs were distinguishable from those of the Japanese.

Early History of Ainu Mosir Because the Ainu language did not have a system of writing and depended on oral communication, much of the history and of these people remains unknown (Ainu Minzoku Hakubutsukan, 1993). The first historical or documented appearance of the Ainu occurred during the time of the Yuan dynasty of China in the twelfth century. It concerns a record of the people living in the Sakhalin region (Namikawa, 2004). From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, the Ainu were also subject to the rule of the Yuan dynasty, and consequently, trade within groups across the Sea of Japan remained active. During this period, the Ainu engaged in indirect trade with the Ryuku (currently Okinawa), Kamakura, and Muromachi governments of Japan. The first known evidence of the Ainu’s existence appeared in a fourteenth-­ century Japanese document. Suwa Daimyojin Ekotoba (1356) depicted the Ainu through an image of Oni (the devil), which was drawn as a means of discrimination against foreign people. Around this time, the Wajin (the term used to describe the dominant ethnic group of Japan) began living in the region of Matsumae and Hakodate (the southern part of Ezo or Ezochi, or what was eventually called Hokkaido). Around the early fifteenth century, the Wajin’s trade with the Ainu became more exploitative (Namikawa, 2004) under the control of the Ando family. This led to the Koshamain Revolt (Koshamain No Ran) of 1457, which was started by the Ainu because of the Wajin’s unfair business practices and exploitation of Ainu resources. Trade between the Ainu and the Wajin in Ezochi became somewhat more stable under the rule of the Matsumae Han (clan) and was strengthened to ensure stable supplies from Wajin amid the prolonged conflict between the Qin dynasty of China and Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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Shift from Ainu Mosir to Hokkaido Due to its interactions with other groups, especially trade, Ainu society has changed over the years. It was divided into groups and had multiple leaders in different regions. Although the Ainu never formed a unified nation, the Japanese government considered the Ainu a foreign group (Namikawa, 2004; Walker, 2006). Trade practices remained unfair for the Ainu, and there was a series of revolts in 1669 (Shakushain’s Revolt) and 1789 (the Menashi—Kunashir Rebellion). After these incidents, the government implemented a stricter policy by which it could control the Ainu in Ezo. The government established Ezochi Bugyo (governing magistracy) and made efforts to assimilate the Ainu and force them to adopt Japanese customs, thus putting forth the claim, “Where the Ainu (Japanese) live is Japan.” The Ainu began to experience the ramifications of the political maneuvering between Japan and Russia in the late nineteenth century (Okada, 2012). The Japanese government sensed that the Russian government would also seek to extend its holdings, chiefly in undeveloped territories in and around Ezo (Uemura, 2008). Japan and Russia negotiated a border between their newly claimed territories. Initially, Japan and Russia drew a line between the Kuril Islands of Urup and Etorofu as the border, according to the Treaty of Shimoda (1855), which also set out that Sakhalin would be a shared land. In 1869, just after the Meiji Restoration (“Meiji Ishin” literally means “starting something new” or “reorganization”), the Japanese government considered Ezo part of Japan, and its name was changed to Hokkaido. Later, the Treaty of St. Petersburg (1875) between Japan and Russia was based in part on the proposal that Russia would control Sakhalin and Japan would claim the Kuril Islands. As a result, the Ainu had to choose their citizenship. Those who were forced to leave their homeland were treated badly in their new environment (Uemura, 2008), as some were forced to move to isolated locations and work as poorly paid laborers.

Colonization in Hokkaido In 1869, the central government sent commissioners to survey the land and create a plan for the development of Hokkaido as Japan claimed that undeveloped Hokkaido was part of its territory. It wanted to promote relocation from the mainland to Hokkaido and therefore enacted a series of laws to allocate land for development. The promotional campaign was a big success. The favorable treatment allowed by these laws attracted businesspersons and corporations to Hokkaido, particularly in the 1890s. Nevertheless, starting with the Hokkaido Undeveloped Land Allocation Law (1897), all such allocations excluded the Ainu. In fact, the Ainu language,

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culture, and traditional ways of living were prohibited. These prohibitions included tattoos on women and piercings on men, among others. For the Ainu, this Act constituted part of the forced assimilation that was perpetrated against them. Furthermore, the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act—passed in 1899 to protect people in Hokkaido, including the Ainu—was modeled on a piece of US legislation, the Dawes Act for Native Americans, which was passed in Oklahoma. However, this Act ignored the fact that the Ainu’s livelihood depended on fishing and hunting. Prior to the Act, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the Ainu’s traditional fishing and hunting activities were banned by the government to promote farming and controlled production. The Act’s main goal was to allocate land to the Ainu as a means of promoting farming. It also set a quota that allowed the allocated land to be taken away if success could not be proved within 15 years. Most Ainu people, who were not accustomed to farming, did not succeed in their attempts. Those who failed at farming were sent to factories and mines, where they worked as poorly paid laborers (Ainu Minzoku Hakubutsukan, 1993; Uemura, 2008). Another goal of the Act was to promote education. Teaching was conducted in the Japanese language. Some Ainu children were forced to move to Tokyo to be educated, but the curriculum was intended to ensure cooperation with the central government. In the name of protection for the Ainu who struggled, the 1899 Act prohibited their language, traditions and culture, then deprived them of their land and ultimately identity (Fumoto, 2002). The Act was in force until 1993. For over a hundred years, forced assimilation and discriminatory policies set by the Japanese government resulted in the erosion of Ainu’s identity and sense of worth, confiscation of their homelands, and considerable suffering over several generations. Such policies were unknown to the Japanese public, who remained ignorant of Ainu cultural values and traditional ways of living, thereby devaluing them and relegating them to an invisible status (Okada, 2012). Nibutani, a small town in the Hidaka region of Hokkaido (about one hundred kilometers east of Sapporo), became a trigger for increased awareness of the Ainu’s existence owing to a landmark legal case involving the Nibutani Dam injunction. The Saru River was a sacred place for the Ainu because salmon— which they considered important gods—gathered there for the spawning season. After two landowners, Shigeru Kayano and Tadashi Kaizawa, refused to sell their land, the government implemented the Land Expropriation Act and claimed it. The dam’s construction began, but Kayano and Kaizawa sued the government. The former became a politician and continued his efforts to show that the government had implemented many unfair policies and laws that disadvantaged the Ainu. He also taught his own community and the broader Japanese public about traditional Ainu culture. The dam was completed in 1996, but the Ministry of Works allowed the Ainu to use the lake for traditional events such as Chipusanke, a ceremony for launching new canoes, and Asircep nomi, a celebration of salmon hunting.

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 ransformation in Ainu Communities with the Support T of the Global Indigenous Movement Beginning in the 1980s, the United Nations and international indigenous peoples’ rights and advocacy organizations initiated various efforts to draw attention to the world’s indigenous peoples. As a result, there has been much discussion about education, culture and tradition, protection, self-determination, and land rights at the global level. These organizations have served to monitor each nation. Japan’s policies for indigenous peoples have not been viewed as ethical; however, the government has responded to calls for change—or gaiatsu (foreign pressure)—from the global community (Okada, 2012). For example, in 2007, the General Assembly adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Japan supported. Although it is not a legally binding, enforceable law, it demonstrates the commitment of the United Nations membership to set a standard for the treatment of indigenous peoples, eliminate human rights violations against them, and assist them in combating discrimination and marginalization. This led to the passage of a resolution by the Japanese government in 2008 to create a new law to help the Ainu recover their status, regain their culture, and rebuild the relationship between the Ainu and other communities in Japan. In June 2008, just before the G8 summit held in Hokkaido, the Japanese government—for the first time in its history—officially recognized the Ainu as an indigenous people and promised to create a new law and improve policies to support them. The Democratic Party of Japan defeated the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party in May 2009, and Yukio Hatoyama, a politician from Hokkaido, became prime minister of Japan. Prime Minister Hatoyama joined the Advisory Council for Future Ainu Policy (the Advisory Council), including Ainu members and the governor of Hokkaido Prefecture, with the aim of improving the living conditions and rights of the Ainu. Erik Larson et al. (2008) asserted that the global norm of movements as an empowered, transnational actor in indigenous rights shapes the potential for the Ainu to influence the domestic government. The last few decades have seen some major achievements: (1) the Law for the Promotion of Ainu Culture and the Dissemination and Advocacy of Knowledge in Respect of Ainu Traditions (1997), (2) the recognition of the Ainu as indigenous people during the Nibutani Dam decision (1993), (3) progress in the International Negotiations on Intellectual Property meeting, (4) the creation of the liaison committee of ministries and agencies (1996), (5) the Foundation for Research and Promotion of Ainu Culture—currently the Foundation for Ainu Culture (1997), (6) Japan’s voting for the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), and (7) the government’s recognition of the Ainu (2008). To influence the government and further promote the movement of the Ainu, some Ainu leaders have chosen to use outsider strategies or collaborative efforts with overseas human rights support groups and other indigenous groups from all over the world. The gap between the increased awareness of the global human rights movement especially for support of indigenous rights and the lack of

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recognition of the Ainu as an indigenous people in Japan creates a continual motivation “to push for recognition in a variety of matters” (Larson et al., 2008). The chief cabinet secretary requested that the Advisory Council produce a report about its discussions of Ainu related policy changes. It has often been discussed whether the creation of a special policy or the specific treatment of a particular population under the law would be contrary to Article 14 of the Constitution of Japan, which sets forth the principle of equality. The report justifies the existence of Ainu policy as valid with the historical considerations and Article 2(2) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, n.d.). Article 13 of the Constitution sets forth that individuals should be shown basic respect. Policies that value Ainu culture and spirituality, including the Ainu language, are important as a means of upholding this principle and allowing the Ainu to choose to live with a strong sense of identity. Addressing gaps in education, socioeconomic status, and quality of life are crucial to meeting the intent of the Article. The Advisory Council’s report also highlights the importance of ethnic harmony, which refers to how members of a modernized multicultural nation can respect each other’s individuality, culture, and dignity. Thus, the government has recognized the Ainu as an indigenous people, and with these new policy changes, all Japanese society should follow suit with respect and appreciation for diversity. The Act on the Promotion of Measures to Realize a Society that Will Respect the Pride of the Ainu (the Ainu Policy Promotion Act) was enacted in 2019. The aims of this Act are to create and promote the spaces and opportunities in which the Ainu traditions and culture, which are sources of pride among the Ainu, are placed; to realize a society in which the pride of Ainu people as an ethnic group is respected; and to contribute to the development of a diverse culture in Japan by promoting Ainu culture and disseminating Ainu knowledge and traditions. Moreover, discrimination against the Ainu is also indicated (Article 4), and fund allocation to Ainu-­ related projects is promoted more. Continued discussions among people at different levels of society and more implementation plans in tandem with the Ainu’s voices being heard will be beneficial for Japan as it endeavors to become a truly multicultural nation.

Current Situation of the Ainu According to the Ainu Association of Hokkaido (2013), there are approximately 16,000 Ainu descendants or people who identify as Ainu living in Hokkaido. However, many Ainu have moved away from Hokkaido. Furthermore, the Japanese government has not yet conducted a census of the Ainu. The actual number of Ainu people in the world could be 10 times more than the number indicated earlier. Although some studies show significant gaps in socioeconomic status between the Ainu and Japanese, little is known, especially because the data produced by the government and scholars are still sparse (Okada, 2012).

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Thanks to the Ainu Culture Promotion Act (1997), government recognition (2008), and the Ainu Policy Promotion Act (2019), a number of programs and projects have been launched to familiarize people with Ainu culture, language, and traditions. Upopoy, the National Ainu Museum and Park, opened in 2020 as part of governmental efforts to establish a “symbolic space for ethnic harmony” and raise public awareness about the Ainu. The Japanese public has become increasingly aware that the Ainu are not from the past but an extant group with a rich history, traditions, and culture. The government and private organizations have created new opportunities to relearn Ainu culture and traditions. The Foundation for Ainu Culture, established in 1997 by the government at the request of the Hokkaido government, conducted several overseas study tours for Ainu youth. Many Ainu have traveled overseas to learn from the cultures of other indigenous groups and to interact with each other.

A Story of Noto — Maya Sekine Here is a story of Noto, an Ainu woman, youth leader, and social entrepreneur who has a dream for herself, the Ainu, and Japan. Maya Sekine (Ainu, lives in Kanagawa, Japan, personal communication, 2021, January 22), whose name in the Ainu language is Noto, has become an influential person over time. Noto is an Ainu descendent woman. She was born in Pipauskotan Nibutani, which is located near the middle reaches of the Saru River. In her town, Nibutani, approximately 70–80% of the population is said to be descendants of the Ainu. Ainu culture and values still remain in this area. Noto grew up surrounded by her family members, who have skills in crafts, such as wood carving and embroidery. Her father is Japanese, but he married Noto’s mother, who is an Ainu descendent from a well-known family that has taught and promoted the Ainu’s crafts, art, language, and culture. Her father studied the Ainu language, and now he is an expert. Her parents are always supportive to Noto. Noto often recounts that she was raised with the activities of picking wild vegetables, hunting deer and preparing it for meals and other uses, and fishing after school. Every night, she and her family gathered at a dinner table and listened to the stories and wisdom of the elders. Noto believes that Nibutani is where the Ainu can learn the most about their community in Japan (Fig. 1). She recently graduated from one of the prestigious colleges in the Kanto area. She engages with the media as much as possible in an attempt to spread her knowledge about Ainu language and culture. Her father and she hosted a radio program with Ainu language lessons. Using YouTube and other platforms, she strategizes how the Ainu language and culture and information on what is going on with the Ainu can be disseminated. As a result of these efforts, Noto has become the face of the Ainu youth. When she was in elementary school, Noto had classes about Ainu culture and language, but that was only for 10 h every year. That was not enough for Noto. She took private Ainu language lessons in Nibutani. Since she was young, her father

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Fig. 1  Noto on a frozen Saru River. (Photo taken by Maya Sekine)

often played clips from the Ainu language archives in the car and their house. This enabled the Ainu language to naturally become a part of her. She used to follow her father’s meetings with elders who could speak the Ainu language. She loved listening to oral literature, songs, and old tales. Nibutani is well known as a famous tourist spot with deep Ainu culture rooted in it. Noto was motivated to do more for her community and felt privileged to be in an environment where she could be proud of her identity. However, Noto said, “there was a time when I was younger and felt ashamed of being Ainu. I wanted to hide the fact that I was Ainu from other people. I decided to go to a boarding school in Noboribetsu where I did not divulge information about my roots and family to my classmates” (M. Sekine, personal communication, 2021, January 22). Her mother was not considerably worried about this because she just wished what was best for her, no matter what that entailed.

Interaction with Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) “I hope I do not need to openly identify myself about Ainu since I lack confidence.” Noto asked the program coordinator of The Change Academy, an immersive summer leadership learning program for high school youth from Japan and Hawaiʻi run by a Hawaiʻi-based nonprofit organization, Lōkahi Foundation. Her mother suggested that Noto participated in the program solely to experience the international experience and interactions with people from Hawaiʻi during the summer of 2016. The coordinator encouraged Noto to participate in the program as Noto and not as an Ainu youth.

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On the first day of the program, Noto met the kupuna (elders) of Hawaiʻi, who shared their culture following a protocol before the group visited the sacred place, Kūkaniloko. Noto noticed that the kupuna always smiled and looked happy when they shared stories about their traditions and culture. Noto could not wait to demonstrate the crane dance that she had learned from her grandmother to her program mates and Hawaiian kupuna. One of the kupuna was stationed in Aomori as an air force service member who knew the historical challenges and struggles of the Ainu. He shed tears and told Noto, “Please tell your grandparents that you shared your culture, tradition and part of you in Hawaii. I can tell … they are proud of you.” (Fig. 2)

Fig. 2  Noto with The Change Academy cohort. (Photo taken by author)

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During her school breaks, Noto began visiting her grandmother in Nibutani to pick wild vegetables and share stories with her. Noto became proactive in participating in many interactive programs that were organized by the government and organizations to visit Hawaiʻi to meet Hawaiians one more time, Aotearoa or New Zealand to meet the Māori, and Scandinavia to meet the Sámi. One bit of advice that Noto follows is to keep going. She believes she must keep going, no matter what, even if people do not pay attention; then, when the time comes, she is confident she will be an agent of positive change (Fig. 3). “Meeting other indigenous groups gave me considerable confidence and validation about myself” (M. Sekine, personal communication, December 8, 2022). She noticed that enjoying her life as an Ainu was what her family and ancestors wanted, and ultimately, that was what she wanted as well. Noto gained more confidence and harbored pride in herself as an Ainu. Noto has been posting videos about her culture and language on YouTube. She has been interviewing her family members and elders in Nibutani and now records videos, hoping that there will be more opportunities for people to learn about the Ainu. Fig. 3  Noto picked up wild vegetables with her grandmother. (Photo taken by Maya Sekine)

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Vision of Noto Noto says of her dream, “I want Japan to become a better nation in terms of accepting the diversity of the people and their cultures by respecting one another and acknowledging everyone’s strengths and unique qualities. There have been many opportunities for us to do so.” (M. Sekine, personal interview, December 8, 2022). She hopes that Japan will become a society where everyone can be proud of their roots and characteristics and learn from one another. The language and culture of the Ainu can teach us many things that can contribute significantly to the world. Many people want to live like the Ainu, including Noto’s family. As an Ainu, Noto has been able to share the knowledge and lessons of her community with the world. She is motivated to continue learning more, do her best to promote her existence and culture, and help others understand and accept the Ainu. Noto wants to be a role model for the coming generations. Similar to how openly her supporters accepted her, she wants them to accept who they are. Further, Noto wants to say to the world it is okay to be different and everybody can work together better with differences, instead of being afraid of them. She continues working with Ainu communities, visiting schools all over Japan to share information about the Ainu and interacting with other indigenous groups to gain more knowledge and develop strategies for her to do her work better. Noto is optimistic about the future because she was able to shift perspectives and broaden her worldview so that everyone can have experiences similar to hers as well. She also believes that learning flexibility and patience are necessary. The COVID-19 pandemic was difficult for everyone, but becoming everyone online created more opportunities for Noto so that she could meet with people from all over the world. The Ainu believe that everything has spirits and purposes. Noto thought of the duties and messages that the COVID-19 pandemic entailed and saw it as an opportunity. Due to the increased use of social media platforms and online communication tools, Noto was able to connect with more people from around the world. She was often invited by international groups, schools and event coordinators to talk about the Ainu. By learning from others, she is more motivated.

Conclusion Since the Ainu were recognized as Japan’s indigenous people by the Japanese government in 2008, various possibilities and opportunities have emerged in Japan, not only for Ainu society but also for Japanese society as a whole. The Japanese government insidiously controlled the wealth and dignity of the Ainu for more than a century. Even though the recent recognition has brought global attention to the Ainu’s struggles, there is still a lack of awareness about the Ainu’s situation in Japanese society. The Ainu community emphasizes the measures required to improve its future, including education, leadership, and law or policymaking.

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Improvements in these areas are important to enhance not just the well-being and happiness of Ainu communities but also Japanese society as a whole. After all, what is most important to bestow on future generations in order to recover and rediscover the wealth, dignity, and values that each human being inherently possesses? Purposeful support and the recognition of the strength of diversity by the Japanese government, citizens, and Ainu society will help Japan become a truly multicultural nation in the future. Each story we listen to conveys its messages to other places. To exist in life, each of us should have a role as the Ainu proverb indicates—Kanto orowa yaku saku no arankep shinep ka isam (Everything in this world exists with a given role).

References Ainu Association of Hokkaido. (2013). Ainu no seikatsu jittai(アイヌの生活実態) [Ainu lifestyle data results]. https://www.ainu-­assn.or.jp/ainupeople/life.html Ainu Minzoku Hakubutsukan. (1993). Ainu bunka no kiso chishiki (アイヌ文化の基礎知識) [Basic knowledge about Ainu culture]. Soufukan. Fumoto, S. (2002, November). Kindai Nihon to Ainu shakai. [Modern Japan and Ainu society]. Yamakawa. Larson, E., Johnson, Z., & Murphy, M. (2008). Emerging indigenous governance: Ainu rights at the intersection of global norms and domestic institutions. Alternative, 33, 53–82. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (MOFA). (n.d.). Arayuru keitai no jinshu sabetsu no teppai ni kansuru kokusai joyaku (あらゆる形態の人種差別の撤廃に関する国際条約) [International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination]. http:// www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/gaiko/jinshu/conv_j.html#1 Namikawa, K. (2004, August). Ainu minzoku no kiseki (アイヌ民族の軌跡)[Paths of Ainu minzoku]. Yamakawa Shuppansha. Okada, M. V. (2012). The plight of the Ainu, Indigenous people of Japan. Journal of Indigenous Social Development, 1, 1–14. Uemura, H. (2008). Shitte imasuka, Ainu people? (知っていますか、アイヌ?) [Did you know about Ainu people?]. Kaihou Shuppansha. Walker, B. (2006). The conquest of Ainu lands: Ecology and culture in Japanese expansion, 1590–1800. University of California Press. Dr. Vince M. Okada is a BSW program director and assistant professor of social work at Hawaiʻi Pacific University. He completed his Ph.D. in social welfare at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His interdisciplinary research focused on Japan’s indigenous people, the Ainu, their welfare, and related policy issues. Dr. Okada is deeply committed to community development with a focus on diversity, well-being, and social justice for Japan, Hawaiʻi, and the Asia-Pacific. He shares these principle missions along with the goal of expanding youth leadership, international education, and the field of indigenous knowledge including identity formation and resurgence and sustainable community development.  

Part III

Gender Inequality: Challenging Gender Roles and the Gender Binary

Japan’s Gender Inequality in Economics and Politics Since 1945 and the Policies Behind It Emma Dalton

Abstract  This chapter considers Japan’s contemporary gender inequality by tracing the progress and stagnation of women’s political and economic status since 1945, the year that women were able to cast their votes and run for office in the first democratically held elections. Women’s social, economic and political roles have of course improved since 1945 but according to many international indices, Japan has a very poor record on gender equality, and it is in these two important domains— economic empowerment and political representation—where it is most striking. Keywords  Gender inequality · Women’s economic disempowerment · Female political underrepresentation · Family wage

Introduction Every year, when the World Economic Forum publishes its Global Gender Gap Report, resigned disappointment radiates from Japanese feminist communities. Even though Japan does as well as most other prosperous, democratic countries in health, and—almost, but not quite—in education,1 the stubborn gender inequality in

 While the gap between females and males in education has certainly shrunk, the GGI indicates the gender gap in literacy levels and access to education, and does not reflect enduring inequalities shown in the following data: in 2021, 45% of university students and 88% of junior college students were female; 49% of female, and 51% of male high school graduates continued to tertiary education and 15% of male and 6% of female university graduates continued to postgraduate studies (NWEC, 2022). Japan’s top university, Tokyo University, has an undergraduate student cohort that is only 19.7% female and a faculty cohort that is 18.5% female (Hayashi, 2022). There is 1

E. Dalton (*) Department of Languages and Cultures, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_24

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economics and politics keeps the country’s Global Gender Gap Index ranking very low, the lowest amongst advanced industrialised countries. This statistic reflects women’s near complete absence—with a few notable exceptions—from influential positions in areas ranging from politics, bureaucracy, medicine, academia, business, sports bodies, agricultural organisations, labour unions, and the media. This chapter considers Japan’s contemporary gender inequality by tracing the progress and stagnation of women’s political and economic status since 1945, the year that women were able to cast their votes and run for office in the first democratically held elections. When it comes to political representation, women’s relative absence is striking. After the 2021 national elections for the lower house, of 464 members, only 46 are women (9.9% c.f. 26.5% world average) and after the 2022 national election for the upper house, of 248 members, 64 are women (25.8%, which is also the world average). In local level politics the situation is also less than ideal. Approximately 18% of all local councils have no women on them, and 25% have one woman: in other words, 43% of local councils across the country have either no women or only one. Two of the country’s 47 governors are women, around 4% of city mayors, only 1% of town and village mayors are women, and only 2 of the 23 special wards are headed by a woman (NWEC, 2022). When it comes to economic disempowerment, women in Japan occupy the periphery of the workforce—they are shut out of the mainstream, core workforce and denied career progression and liveable wages. They are not only absent from top positions; they are comparatively rare in middle management. Instead, they are immiserated in low-level, low paid, and low status industries like child and elderly care, education, retail, hospitality and customer service, often in non-regular jobs that are poorly paid and offer little stability or career opportunities. As of 2019, the average annual wage in Japan was 4.36 million yen. On average, men earn 5.4 million yen per year, whereas women earn 2.96 million yen (Fujita, 2021, p.  65). Japanese women hold only 18% of their country’s total wealth, which is around half the average for Asia, and less than half the figure for the US (French et al., 2023). Affecting women’s role in the workforce have been industrial policies that have, since as far back as the 1920s, been based on the ‘family wage’ concept which assumes a male breadwinner worker with a wife at home. As sociologist Kimoto Kimiko (1997, p. 11) explains, the family wage has its basis in a wage structure that includes an allowance for a wife and children and is characterised by seniority-­based wages and lifelong employment. In exchange for this stability and concomitant materially comfortable lifestyle, workers (men) committed themselves wholly to their employer. The result for the female population has been financial disempowerment. systemic discrimination against girls taking exams to enter certain universities (Yajima & Masutani, 2018) and even some Tokyo high schools (Danjobetsu tein, 2022). Moreover, there is a conspicuous disciplinary sex imbalance at the tertiary level: women are over-represented in the humanities and comparatively absent in STEM or engineering (NWEC, 2022). Graduation from the latter disciplines is more likely to lead to higher-paid and career-oriented jobs.

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Despite much legislation designed to redress inequality, including the 1986 Equal Employment Opportunity Law, women remain politically and economically marginalised. This is largely because the family wage concept remains entrenched both discursively—in normative assumptions about gender and family—and materially—as seen in policies that continue to privilege the male breadwinner family model.

The Immediate Postwar Years The democratisation of Japan after WW2 by the Occupying Forces saw women gain many rights, and Japan was seemingly put on the path towards gender equality. Article 14 of the Constitution which took effect in 1947 states, ‘All of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in politics, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin’. In addition to new rights in the Constitution, according to the new Civil Code, promulgated in 1947, women were afforded inheritance and property rights; men and women were now able to marry without consent from families; married couples were to choose either the man or woman’s surname, women could now initiate divorce with some rights to the children from the marriage and women received political rights (Jones, 1975, p. 621).

Women Exercise Their New Political Rights: 1946–1950 Democratic measures put in place by the Occupying Forces were not new concepts to Japanese women who had been fighting for political rights for decades. There was groundwork for reformation of the Civil Code before the Pacific War, and developments after 1945 were not sudden. A Shikoku woman, Kusunose Kita, first demanded the right to vote in 1872 (Sievers, 1983, p. 29). Amidst democratic developments during the Taisho era, and a burgeoning suffrage movement, in 1933, the Lower House had decided to ‘elevate the character of married maidens and raise their status’ by revising the Civil Code and abolishing the use of the word ‘incompetent’ to describe women (cited in Kaji, 1984, p. 14). Japan, however, descended into war with its neighbours before the proposed revisions could be carried out. It was not until after the war that women were granted the right to vote. In 1945, the struggle for universal suffrage was won when the Election Law was revised to extend voting rights to all adult men and women over the age of 20. The following year, women participated for the first time in a national Lower House election. Approximately 67% of all eligible women voted, and 39 of the 79 women who ran for office won. This resulted in 8.4% of all Lower House seats being occupied by women, a figure that was not surpassed until 2005. And in 1946 the Local

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Autonomy Act was passed, enabling women to be elected as heads of local governments and members of local assemblies. In 1947, another national election was held after the introduction of the new Constitution, under a revised electoral system. The proportion of women elected dropped to 3.2%, and this was not surpassed until 1996 when it rose to 4.6%. The type of electoral system can have an impact on female candidates’ performance in elections, as we will see again below. Before Japan’s descent into the Asia-Pacific war—specifically during the period between 1870 and 1930—the proportion of women in the industrial labour force averaged 60%, which was higher than any other nation (Sievers, 1983, p. 85). How did this reality coexist with the cherished ideal of womanhood of the era of Japan’s nascent industrialisation—ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother)? Ryōsai kenbo was a combination of the imported western ideals of upper-class European womanhood and the values of patriarchal Japanese society. It was also a well-planned policy of the government to designate women’s place in society, and to control their behaviour. The non-extension of the right to vote during the Meiji era is an example of this attempt to keep women out of the public sphere (Nolte & Hastings, 1991, p. 152). The words of a Meiji Education Minister, Kikuchi Dairoku make plain the official stance of the time: The man goes out to work to earn his living to fulfil his duties to the State; it is the wife’s part to help him, for the common interests of the house, and as her share of duty to the State, by sympathy and encouragement, by relieving him of his anxieties at home, managing household affairs, and above all, tending the old people, and bringing up the children in a fit and proper manner (cited in Uno, 1993, p. 230).

As with most normative constructions, ryōsai kenbo was proscriptive rather than descriptive. Women in the higher classes were able to limit their activities to domestic duties and child rearing. Wealthier women who did not work were expected to educate their children, the future leaders of the nation (Uno, 1993, p. 230). Even though this image of the ideal woman was impractical for the lower classes who could not afford to live on one income, the working class aspired to this feminised ideal because it was part of the cherished notion of the ‘modern family’. The ‘modern family’ included the ‘family wage’, which was earned by the breadwinner who was presumed to have to provide for a family with his wage, and which led to improvements in living conditions—an aspirational goal for the working class (Kimoto, 1997, p. 9). Additional to this domesticated ideal were laws that curtailed women’s freedoms. Under Meiji law, a woman was not recognised as an individual; she was devoid of rights because of the household ie system which made the oldest male the head of household with full legal authority for all family members. When a woman married, she left her own family and became a part of her husband’s household. Her main role now was to serve her parents-in-law and to give birth to a male successor. The high proportion of women working therefore did not mean those women were financially or otherwise empowered. Women working in factories were mostly young and unmarried, and had very difficult lives—there was no widely accepted

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concept of sexual equality and workers’ rights were contested. The only law for these workers was implemented in 1911. The Factory Law mandated a maximum working day of 12 h, and 2 days off each month. It was not until after WW2 that labour conditions improved.

 apid Economic Growth and the Domestication of Women: R 1950s, 1960s and 1970s  In the 1950s Japan’s economy began to recover quickly from the catastrophe of war, and in the 1960s, started growing rapidly, only slowing in the late 1970s. In the 1960s, Japanese economic growth averaged 12.1%. This was far greater than other countries whose economies were also growing—West Germany grew at 5.7%, the UK at 3.1% and the US at 4.1% during the same period (Babb, 2000, p. 51).

The Cherished Ideal of the Gendered Division of Labour Rapid economic growth brought about a labour shortage, which had a significant impact on women. An increasing number of people migrated from the rural areas to the cities, and agricultural industry gradually dwindled. The percentage of women employed in family enterprises and farms dropped from 52% of the female labour force in 1955 to 22% in 1980 (Robins-Mowry, 1983, p. 167). By 1970, the majority of female workers were found in the tertiary sector, which accounted for 47.8% (Iwao, 1994, p.  157). Apart from the change in industry, this era also witnessed changes in marital status, age, and length of service of working women. Until the mid-1960s a woman’s place in the labour force had been taken for granted (Robins-­ Mowry, 1983, p. 166). They were very young and worked at a cheap rate until they married. Therefore, there was a very high turnover, and companies were able to employ fresh, low-salaried females. Japan’s economic growth relied on a division of labour between men and women. Prime Minister Ikeda introduced the National Income Doubling Plan in 1960, indicating a slight shift in the government’s approach to economic growth. Rather than being central to the pursuit of national power, economic growth was now important for the Japanese people. The state promoted the idea of economic growth as something that would benefit every individual (Chiavacci, 2007, p. 38). This plan shaped Japan’s development into an increasingly competitive society and strengthened the division of labour between full-time housewives and full-time male workers. State and business encouraged the post-war family model. In 1961, the government introduced spousal tax exemption for spouses who earned less than one million yen a year (Sechiyama, 2000, p. 135). This was an effort to recognise the work housewives did inside the house, as ‘helpers’ to their salaryman husbands (naijo no

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kō) (Higuchi, 1997, p. 106; Sechiyama, 2000, p. 135). Spouses who earned more than one million yen were taxed and this incentivised married women to limit their income to under that. Meanwhile, corporations encouraged the post-war family model with family wages that sometimes included a marriage bonus, healthcare, housing subsidies and bonuses for each child born (Borovoy, 2005, p. 74). Many employers saw the salaryman/housewife couple as beneficial to the efficiency of both corporations and households. In the late 1940s, the New Life Movement emerged, which aimed, among other things, to encourage women’s domesticity so that male employees could dedicate themselves to their company without worrying about home life (Gordon, 1997, pp.  246–47). This included education programs targeting housewives to increase frugality, morality and domestic hygiene. In 1955, the New Life Movement received government endorsement when Prime Minister Hatoyama created and funded the New Life Movement Association to coordinate and promote activities that, among other things, encouraged the housewife/salaryman household (Gordon, 1997, p. 255). Once high economic growth had been achieved, industrial policy shifted from heavy industry to the post-industrial information industry—things like electronics and computers. By the 1970s, the average female worker was middle aged and married, whereas 10 years earlier she had been in her early 20 s and single. The proportion of married women in the female labour force increased from 38% in 1960 to 51% in 1970 (Iwao, 1994, p. 158), and nearly 70% by 1983 (Fujita, 1987, p. 591). Women’s reasons for working had also changed. Now women were working to earn an extra income for the family, and also because they found spare time once their children had started school. In earlier years, young women worked for a few years before quitting upon marriage. Due to the major labour shortage created by rapid economic growth that was exacerbated by the development of mass education, and the restrictions on energy consumption imposed after the 1973 oil shock, companies started to hire from a relatively untouched labour market. Recruited by companies when business was booming, and laid-off when they were no longer needed, women effectively became the safety valve of Japan’s economy (Kawashima, 1995, p. 281). Women found that parttime work could be combined with domestic duties, and a supplementary income was handy, and companies needed an unskilled, cheap labour force. And women’s labour did come cheap: writing in 1987, Fujita laments that women’s wage was only 56% that of men, and in some industries, less than half (p. 591). With an increasing number of married women entering the labour force, the terms sengyō shufu (full-time housewife), and kengyō shufu (part-time housewife) gained popularity. The term shufu originated in the Meiji period (1868–1912). Becoming a shufu was prestigious mainly because the class of urban workers was higher in social status than the peasants (Ueno, 1998, p. 137). The picture of domesticity—a salaried male worker and a full-time housewife—became a much sought-­ after lifestyle in the 1960s. Still, it was only elite women who could afford to stay at home while their white-collar husbands went to work for companies. Working

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women envied those who were fortunate to marry a company worker and able to stay at home during the day.

Company Society as Social Welfare During the 1960s, social and welfare expenditure was not a priority for the central government because its focus was financing infrastructure, such as bridges, freeways, airports and industrial parks. In fact, there was no increase in social/welfare spending programs by the government between 1955 and 1970 (Fujita, 1987, p. 592). Industrial policies were built into the development of Japan’s welfare state and were based on the idea of the male as core worker—women were support figures for this male worker, both at work and at home. Social welfare developed on the foundation of a ‘company society’ wherein the welfare of a worker over the course of his life was taken care of by his employer (Kimoto & Hagiwara, 2009, pp. 204–205). The family wage concept that had emerged in the 1920 and 1930s coalesced with increasing affluence, modern family sensibilities and material realities in the postwar era and was cemented under the company society structure. The nenkō lifetime wage system, for example, based on seniority, maps men’s typical life courses and adjusts for marriage, fatherhood and retirement. In this company society, women were provided for as dependents of employees and in return they performed child and elderly care, which kept state welfare expenditure down. Japan was able to offer generous protection at a low cost because, up through the 1980s, the nation’s firms and women were willing and able to carry a significant share of the load for “free.” When women stayed home from work to care for elderly relatives and when firms chose not to lay off workers during recessions, these actions helped provide income and care for the needy without the expenditure of a single yen by the state (Schoppa, 2011, p. 37).

Industrial policies took for granted the male breadwinner household, thus limiting women’s full economic potential or financial independence and strengthening the gendered division of labour inside the family. The male-breadwinner model had taken firm hold in the family and in the way industrial and corporate policies were created.

Stagnation for Women in Politics Underscoring the economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s was the establishment in the 1950s of a powerful, stable and pro-business government, led by the Liberal Democratic Party. The LDP formed in 1955 in a context that some argue was conducive to a ‘gangster’ style of politics, a characteristic of which was corruption. [See Babb (2000, pp.  28–35) for an argument that Tanaka Kakuei’s style of

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bribery-fuelled politics created a template that other political leaders emulated for decades. According to this argument, the democratisation of postwar Japan included the democratisation of corruption.] Japanese politics came to be understood by voters as ‘dirty’: the common phrase ‘money politics’ (kane to seiji) was a popular description for the situation of the time. Over time, the LDP came to form one side of the iron triangle of politics, the bureaucracy and business. Business favoured long-term LDP rule because of continued postwar economic success under successive LDP governments. The LDP ensured that bureaucrats created pro-business policies, and those bureaucrats were rewarded with positions in the party. Businesses rewarded the LDP by making political donations to the party, factions and individual politicians and buying blocks of tickets to political fundraisers (Kishimoto, 1997, p. 112). Stereotypical notions of masculinity, such as ambition, aggression, and ruthlessness, are prized in the world of politics, and so the centrality of the discourses of shufu and motherhood to Japanese womanhood presented challenges for politically ambitious women. In this context, women were imagined as antithetical to politics (and to some extent continue to be), and when they did enter the political world, they often did so on a platform of cleaning things up (Dalton, 2013, p. 37). In other words, it was generally understood that women could purify the system because of their cleaner image compared to men. This was a continuation of the suffragists’ promise to clean up electoral politics in the 1930s (Mackie, 2003, p.  63). The domestication of women during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, which was a defining element of the company society, was engineered by pro-business policies created by LDP governments, and the masculinised culture of postwar, LDP-dominated politics. It meant that the separation of women from electoral politics was fairly normalised. As noted above, the number of women in the national legislative assembly—the Diet—remained extremely low. It was not until the 1980s that there was at last a notable increase in the number of women in office.

The Mountain Has Moved’2:the 1980s For women in many countries, the 1980s was a decade of important gains. Resulting from the first UN Conference on Women was the 1979 Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination, signed by many countries, including Japan. Ratifying this meant introducing a workplace anti sex discrimination law. This, domestic pressure from the increasing number of female workers suing their employers for discriminatory practices, and a domestic feminist movement that had emerged partially in response to feelings of oppression and discontent created by the formation of a marginal labour force that consisted mainly of women (Tanaka,  The comment derives from a poem written by poet and women’s rights activist Yosano Akiko (1878–1942). Japan Socialist Party chair Doi Takako made this comment after the historic 1989 election. 2

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1995, p. 345). This led to the introduction of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL) in 1986. Discrimination in hiring and promotion on the basis of sex was now legally prohibited. The wording of the law, however, allowed employers to circumvent the spirit easily, and it was not until more than 10 years later that the law was given teeth.

Labour Pains: The EEOL Before the enactment of the EEOL, women were often simply refused work by companies. When recruiting, companies could legally advertise for ‘males only’. Women were refused work or told to quit when they reached a certain age or got married. Employers justified this type of treatment saying that most women quit when they married or had children, so it was a waste of time and money to train them for jobs with long-term responsibility (Takeuchi, 1982, p. 320). In general, women and men were hired for different purposes and with different expectations. Men were hired to carry out core business on the basis that they would stay for life and receive benefits accordingly under the nenkō family wage system. Women performed clerical work and poured tea on the basis they would quit once they got married. Male employees were expensive to fire because of the training that been invested in them. Women were not trained, so they were cheaper than men to let go; they also did not acquire career skills. The EEOL was supposed to address this, but large corporations got around this discriminatory treatment by implementing the personnel management two track system, whereby new hires were put onto either the general track—the track a new recruit would choose if they wanted a career, or clerical track—the track chosen by those not wanting a career. In effect nearly all men were put onto the general track, and nearly all women were put onto the clerical track. Labour policies have been adjusted throughout history to suit market demand, but women have been excluded from the mainstream labour force. The same year the EEOL was implemented, the Temporary Workers’ Law was also introduced (haken rōdōhō). This law made it easier for employers to utilise workers on a more flexible basis. The gains women made thanks to legislative changes were weakened with the beginning of labour deregulations that worsened working conditions and career opportunities for many people, especially women. The EEOL promised much, but it was ultimately a compromise between government and business, a disappointment to feminists, and its goals (which are revised every few years) have been derailed by neoliberal industrial policies that keep women on the periphery of the workforce.

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Doi Takako and the Increased Importance of Politics for Women The 1980s was a decade of progress for female political representation. The percentage of women in the Lower House of Japan’s Diet stagnated at around 2% until the mid-1990s, but things were different in the Upper House. After the 1989 election, women came to constitute 17.5% of seats, up from just under 8%, the point at which women’s representation had stagnated for 10 years prior. In local assemblies too, women’s share of assembly seats increased from 1.1% to 2.1% in the 1987 election. Iwamoto (2001) specifies five factors behind this increase. First, the 1970s saw more women attracted to the idea of sex equality as they became subjected to the realities of harassment and discrimination in the workforce. Second, the Nakasone government (1982–1987) cut welfare funding in the 1980s, the effects of which trickled down to local councils and negatively impacted on women who were faced with decreased funds for childcare and school lunches. Third, the ruling LDP had attempted to make abortion completely illegal, prompting women to organise and run for office. Fourth, the opposition parties—the Komeito, and the Japan Communist Party—developed a new strategy to gain more votes: they started endorsing female candidates in urban areas. And fifth, Doi Takako became the first female leader of a political party, the Japan Socialist Party. She was immensely popular. Even before she became chair, the JSP devised what was called the ‘Madonna Strategy’ in the mid-1980s to counter its loss of non-unionised support and the drop off in eligible candidates after a new rule was introduced where candidates had to resign from their union membership to run for office. This strategy involved recruiting women from peace movements, trade union members’ wives and daughters of previous councillors for local elections. This strategy extended to and peaked in 1989 when a record number of women were elected to the Upper House. 1989 was also the year that the term ‘sexual harassment’ won the annual word of the year award, an indication of an increased awareness of women’s unequal treatment at work and increased availability of language that women could now use to talk about their subordination to men.

The First ‘Lost Decade’: The 1990s Japan’s ‘lost decades’ since the country’s stock market and asset bubbles burst in 1990 are known for low levels of economic growth, wage stagnation, and flatline price indexes. In the first lost decade, GDP growth averaged just 1% per annum between 1992 and 1999, down from over 3.9% between 1981 and 1991 (Genda & Rebick, 2000, p. 86). For everyday people, this has meant increased financial hardships—particularly for the vulnerable—a stagnant or worsening standard of living, increased relative poverty rates (Fukuda, 2021, pp. 133–144) and increased precarity in the job market. Women have been disproportionately affected by this, due to their already

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vulnerable status on the periphery of the workforce. This will be discussed later, but first, let us turn to why the 1990s is often remembered as a positive one for women.

‘Women’s Rights are Human Rights’: Feminism Makes Its Mark The early 1990s did not see a significant increase in the number of women elected to political office, but 1991 did see the first female mayor, Kitamura Harue, elected. Then in the Lower House elections of 1996 and 2000, there was a marked increase in elected women: the percentage grew from 2.7% in 1993 to 5.6% in 1996 and 7.3% in 2000. This growth might be partially explained by the introduction of proportional representation seats to the Lower House in the electoral system revisions of 1993. Proportional representation has been shown to be a system that is easier to succeed in for women and other candidates who lack the backing of large political parties or other organisational support (Paxton, 1997, p.  445; Iwamoto, 2007, p. 191). Since the 1993 revisions, women candidates are generally more likely than male candidates to win in PR seats when they run in an election (and are less likely to win in single-member electorates). This indicates that a key element in the under-­ representation of women in the Diet is that very few women run for election. Reasons for this are multifarious, and include: the gendered division of labour supported by industrial policies, as discussed above, whereby women are responsible for domestic duties like child and elderly care and housework and so do not have time for a political career (Kubo & Gelb, 1994, p. 134; Mikanagi, 1999, p. 91); the lack of political or financial connections usually needed to run for office in Japan (Funabashi, 2004, p. 28), an image of politics as a male space unsuitable for women (Puwar, 2004; Iwai, 1993, p. 104) and sexual harassment in politics (Dalton, 2021). The increase in the late 1990s in the number of women in political office was marked but the figure stayed below the 1946 election when women first ran for office. Political scientist Mari Miura (2012) nevertheless suggests that the 1990s was a decade of gains for women politically because of the policies implemented. Here, I refer to the broader meaning of the word ‘political’. While women did not see a large improvement in electoral gains, women as a class of people became potentially better off due to an improvement in the quality and quantity of women-­ friendly policies. In 1995, the United Nations Conference on Women was held in Beijing, and a significant delegation from Japan attended. The idea that women’s rights were human rights was strongly influenced by debates and demands raised at this conference, which filtered their way back to Japan. Notable policies include the 1992 Childcare and Family Leave Law (Ikuji Kaigo Kyūgyō Hō), revisions to the EEOL mandating sexual harassment prevention measures in workplaces, and including soft targets to increase women in leadership roles, legalisation of the contraceptive pill, a ban on child prostitution and child pornography and outlawing domestic violence and stalking (Chan-Tiberghien, 2004, p.  40). [See Wakakisa, 2013 for a discussion of changes to and effects of the EEOL after 1986.] The decade

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ended with the largest sum to date for a sexual harassment case being awarded to the victim of sexual harassment by very popular Osaka governor, Yokoyama ‘Knock’. For these reasons, the 1990s has been widely reflected on as a decade of gains for women in Japan (Chan-Tiberghien, 2004; Miura, 2012). Women’s issues and gender equality were no longer marginalised; issues like sexual assault and domestic violence slowly came to be redefined both legally and culturally, not as private matters but as matters of human rights for women. It was also the decade that Korean women broke their silence and demanded compensation from the Japanese government for the system of sexual slavery it had set up during WW2, known as the comfort women system. Another significant law to be enacted during this decade was the Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society. The 1999 Basic Law and its accompanying policy document, the Basic Plan for a Gender-Equal Society, were heralded as positive and important developments for gender equality in Japan. The law is nonetheless a set of guidelines rather than something enforceable (Assmann, 2014). What’s more, like many of the gender equality measures introduced in Japan since the 1990s, the driving motivation was not feminist or even the pursuit of gender equality. The measures were part of a rational approach to addressing the declining fertility rate and economic malaise. It was now crucial that women’s labour  be harnessed as efficiently and productively as possible for the labour market. Certainly, the enactment of the Basic Law reflected quite significant shifts in social attitudes at the time, but it is overly sanguine to assume that these shifts have led to many concrete positive outcomes for women. The Basic Law was revised in 2010 to include specific targets to increase the number of women in decision making roles. These were a further codification of targets put in place by former Prime Minister Koizumi in the early 2000s—to fill all leadership positions with women by 2020—but even these modest aims were not achieved. And this is despite further efforts by the late Prime Minister Abe’s administration to pursue these goals. Under Abe, the set of policies called ‘Womenomics’ was rolled out in 2013, confirming the government’s commitment to the 30% goal by 2020, and then in 2016, the Act on Promotion of Women’s Participation and Advancement in the Workplace was enacted. This law obligated large companies to publish Action Plans, including their gender targets. Despite all of this, in 2020, the government conceded failure and pushed the Basic Law’s deadline to 2030. [See Noble, 2019 for an enlightening and encouraging discussion of the increase in women to appointed positions, such as advisory and deliberative councils. He argues quite convincingly that this is evidence that even soft targets are achievable where there is political will.] Until the early 1990s, and especially after 1986, women’s employment had been increasing, even if it was mostly in part-time and non-regular jobs. Furthermore, some labour scholars observed that one of the effects of the EEOL was that employers were treating women workers less as marginal workers and more as essential employees (Asakura, 1998, p. 319; Lam, 1992, p. 138), and so one of the main positive effects of the law was improved social attitudes and expectations (Genda & Rebick, 2000, p. 95). These shifts would assumedly then permeate into employment practices. Changed attitudes are always a welcome step to progress, but the material

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reality is that labour market conditions seem to be the major determiner of women’s role and status in the workforce. The recession of the 1990s hit women hard economically and revealed that the EEOL was no match for market forces or sexist industrial policies. The years around 1994–1995 were the beginning of the so-called ‘ice-age for job hunters’, and women were negatively impacted during this period. During the ‘ice-age’, high school and university graduates struggled to find stable work because of the burst of the economic bubble in the early 1990s. This cohort, known as the Lost Generation has been formally recognised as being unfairly disadvantaged. In 2019, the Japanese government admitted its culpability in allowing a substantial portion of a generation to reach middle age without financial security and acknowledged that its failure to address the problem would result in further economic ruin for the country when this generation reaches retirement age. Consequently, the government announced an assistance package for one million people of the Lost Generation that would help them find jobs by providing bonuses to recruitment agencies (Kobayashi, 2019). Since then, women’s economic standing has stagnated, and in some areas, deteriorated.

Deregulation of the Workforce and Political ‘Assassins’: 2000s Today’s economic malaise is a continuation of the stagnation from the lost decades but can also be traced to recent events (Brinton, 2011). The 2008 Lehman Shock saw 2.65 million people lose their jobs (Fujita, 2021, p. 19). The Global Financial Crisis of 2009 and the Great East Japan Earthquake and nuclear disaster of 2011 left the country with rising unemployment, declining domestic consumer demand, and record levels of income inequality (Gottfried, 2013). Ordinary people encounter these macro-economic trends most concretely through Japan’s labour market, and Yoichi Funabashi (2016) writes that ‘[t]he fragility of Japan’s employment system became apparent following the 2008 Lehmann Shock, with most of the negative outcomes hitting nonregular employees largely made up of young people’ (p. xxix). Today, Japan is the only advanced-industrialised country to see real wage rates lower than 20 years ago (‘Chingin suijun’, 2019). Miura Mari (2012) attributes this situation to the country’s unique failure to award nonregular casual, contract, temp or part-time workers benefits enjoyed by full-time regular workers. Even part-time workers do not qualify for equivalent benefits, which means the equal-pay-for-­ equal-work principle is inoperable in Japan, she notes.

Nonregular Work Women’s concentration in nonregular work has accelerated since the 2000s. Women who joined the workforce in the late 1990s and onwards are less likely to begin their careers in regular work than those who entered the workforce in the 1960s (35% and

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60% respectively) (Gordon, 2017, p. 26). The nonregular (hiseiki) work category incorporates a range of employment modes in Japan, as Miura (2012) mentions above, but all are fundamentally distinguished from regular (seiki) employees who attract full-time salaries, benefits, and relative stability and future sustainability. Men occupy two-thirds of regular positions in the labour market, and secure regular employment at rates close to 80% (Statistics Bureau, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, 2023, p.  1). Women, in contrast, make up the majority of irregularly employed workers in Japan, even while only 51% of Japan’s female population over the age of 15 are in the workforce (‘Hataraku josei’, 2019). The gendered gap between the low pay and non-existent benefits of nonregular workers (mostly women) and people in standard employment (mostly men) is not lost on several scholars (Gordon, 2017; Miura, 2012; Nemoto, 2013; Tachibanaki, 2011). These authors see the 1986 EEOL as undermined by this sex-segregated state of Japan’s labour market. Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates that one in three single female workers between the ages of 20 and 64 are impoverished (in ‘42-sai hiseiki josei no kunō’, 2019). Mothers who stay in work are also vulnerable. Gordon (2016) cites recent statistics showing ‘20 per cent…of the 2.75 million women in the categories of dispatch labor or contract employee…[as] household heads or self-supporting’ (p.  90). Further, the positive effects of more corporations adopting a merit-based approach to wages instead of the longstanding seniority-based approach (Assmann, 2014), have been diminished by the increasing proportion of the workforce that is nonregular. One of the key figures behind many of the policies to deregulate the labour market was Koizumi Jun'ichiro, the same man who engineered a significant increase of women elected to the Diet in the 2000s. 

Lack of Support for Elected Women In 2005, Prime Minister Koizumi called a snap election, in which he fielded hand-­ picked candidates called ‘assassins’ to replace the representatives who opposed his plan to privatise the postal system. Many of these ‘assassins’ were high profile women. The result was a significant increase in the percentage of women in the lower house. Many of these women however did not last much longer than one term: gender parity was not Koizumi’s goal after all, and so they did not receive the support needed for first-time political novices. [See Iwamoto (2007, pp. 202–204) and Dalton (2015, pp. 55–60) for arguments that Koizumi’s tactical ‘positive action’ of fielding high-profile women was an element of his image strategy that promised progressive reform and transformation of the status quo.] In the 2009 general election, DPJ leader Ozawa did a similar thing and a similar hike in elected women to the Diet was seen. Again, many of these women did not last very long in their seats. After decades of sluggish growth of the proportion of women in politics, in 2018, the Law to Promote Co-participation of Men and Women in Politics was introduced. This law encourages political parties to implement gender quotas so that more

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women get elected. The law has no binding power and there are no penalties for non-compliance. Like the Basic Law for a Gender Equal Society, it is more a set of proposals or guidelines than an enforceable law. Miura Mari (Miura, 2020, p. 9), who was a driver of the implementation of the law claims that the law has been effective. But the causal relationship between the law and the small increase in the number of women elected since its implementation is unclear. Surveys of political parties at election time, and results of elections demonstrate that even though the smaller political parties follow the spirit of the law, the ruling, and largest political party, the LDP does not. This is important because the LDP wins most seats, overwhelmingly. Moreover, the success rates of LDP and its coalition partner Komeito female candidates are high: of the 82 and 24 women the LDP and Komeito fielded respectively in the 2022 upper house elections, 63 and 13 won. The same figures for the JCP and CDPJ by comparison, were 4 winners from 58, and 16 from 51 respectively (‘Dai 26kai’, 2022). Unless the LDP loses power, which is unlikely, or starts fielding more women as encouraged in the law, it is doubtful that female political representation will increase soon. In other words, despite the existence of a law that encourages political parties to implement gender quotas, it is excessively sanguine to believe that it will be effective—that is, unless the LDP decides to follow it (French et al., 2023).

Conclusion: The Pandemic and Beyond Women’s already weak status in Japan’s workforce was highlighted and exacerbated by the effects of the global pandemic, which arrived in Japan in early 2020. Of the 850 thousand nonregular workers who became unemployed in the 12 months between October 2019 and October 2020, 530 thousand were women (Fujita, 2021: 64). Women lost their jobs more than men because they were in insecure work (and therefore easier to let go); there was a spike in domestic violence against women, a spike in suicide of women; and they were overburdened at home because of schools and day care centres closing during the lockdowns. A research group created in the Gender Equality Bureau Cabinet Office (2021) called the situation a ‘women’s recession’. Economic stagnation and recession have meant the erosion of the family wage in many companies, but the values that underpin it continue to shape women’s role in society and in the economy. Social worker and public commentator, Fujita Takanori, who has fielded a huge increase in consultation by desperate young people during the pandemic, found that when young women apply for social welfare on their own, they are often turned away with dismissive suggestions: ‘Don’t you have a boyfriend you can rely on?’, or, ‘You’re young, you can work at night’; or worse, from male local government workers: ‘If you can’t find a man to rely on it’s because you lack female attractiveness’ (Fujita, 2021, pp. 77–79). Fujita puts this down to the jikosekinin (self-help) imperative that has characterised Japanese society since the 1990s when neoliberal economic reforms began being introduced. Certainly, the

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jikosekinin imperative is experienced differently by men and women (Dalton, 2021, pp. 120–121). The idea that ‘women (can) rely on men’ can also, however, be traced back as the basis of the family wage concept. It is a deeply ingrained idea encoded into industrial policies and cultural expectations that limits women’s capacity for independence. Despite the existence of myriad laws in Japan to pursue gender equality, structural factors continue to prevent de facto equality. Meguro (2016, pp.  320–321, 334–338) argues that since the 1940s, external and economic issues have been the mediator—specifically, because of the declining fertility rate, the ongoing recession and Japan’s responsibility to the international community as a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Japan has been forced to take action to pursue gender equality. The action has often been superficial, however, and rarely within the spirit of pursuing genuine gender equality. The Equal Employment Opportunity Law, as we have seen, was implemented in response to both domestic factors and international pressure, but the result was a law that catered to business while appearing to be concerned with gender equality. Any positive impact on women’s status in the workforce it might have had was negated by not just the cultural factors that Meguro notes, but industrial policies that have treated men as breadwinners and women as dependents. Although changing, remnants of the concept of the ‘family wage’ remain—they remain in policies such as the spousal tax exemption for spouses whose annual income is less than one million yen, and in industrial policies that have adapted over time to suit the needs of the neoliberal market, which is today stratified into the gendered regular (male) and nonregular (female) workforce. Working women as independent actors are neglected and men are assumed to need a family wage to support a family, which includes a low—or non-earning wife. For women in Japan to become economically and politically empowered, they need to be conceived more—both culturally and legally—as autonomous human beings and less as appendages to men. The concept of the family wage that emerged in Japan in the 1920s and was codified into industrial policies during the high growth period is based on the sexist, risky and false assumption that nearly all women eventually marry a middle—or upper-class man who will provide for her and their children. This assumption is a normative fiction, like the cherished feminine ideals of ryōsai kenbo and sengyō shufu. It is sexist because it treats men and women unequally; and risky because it bars women from the freedom and power that comes with financial independence and puts them in danger of abuse or, in the absence of adequate and accessible welfare, falling into the sex trade. It is also false because not all men can provide for a whole family—this has always been true and is even more so now in today’s Japanese economic climate.

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Japan’s Gender Inequality in Economics and Politics Since 1945 and the Policies Behind It 375 Noble, G. (2019). Staffing the state with women. In G. Steel (Ed.), Beyond the gender gap in Japan (pp. 229–246). University of Michigan Press. Nolte, S. H., & Hastings, S. A. (1991). The Meiji state’s policy toward women. In G. L. Bernstein (Ed.), Recreating Japanese women, 1600–1945 (pp. 151–174). University of California Press. NWEC (National Women’s Education Center). (2022). Women and men in Japan 2022. Paxton, P. (1997). Women in national legislatures: A cross-national analysis. Social Science Research, 26(4), 442–464. https://doi.org/10.1006/ssre.1997.0603 Puwar, N. (2004). Space invaders: Race, gender and bodies out of place. Berg. Robins-Mowry, D. (1983). The hidden sun: Women of modern Japan. Westview Press. Schoppa, L. J. (2011). Race for the exits: The unraveling of Japan's system of social protection. Cornell University Press. Sechiyama, K. (2000). Shufu hogo seisaku no daitenkan o: Jidō teate giron o kikkake ni shite. Ronza, 11, 134–145. Sievers, S. L. (1983). Flowers in salt: The beginnings of feminist consciousness in modern Japan. Stanford University Press. Statistics Bureau, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. (2023, February 14). Rōdōryoku chōsa. https://www.stat.go.jp/data/roudou/sokuhou/nen/dt/pdf/index1.pdf Tachibanaki, T. (2011). The new paradox for Japanese women: Greater choice, greater inequality. International House of Japan. Takeuchi, H. (1982). Working women in business corporations. Japan Quarterly, 29(3), 319. Tanaka, K. (1995). The new feminist movement in Japan. In K. Fujimura-Fanselow, A. Kameda, & Atsuko (Eds.), Japanese women: New feminist perspectives on the past, present, and future (pp. 343–352). Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Ueno, C. (1998). The declining birthrate: Whose problem? Review of Population and Social Policy (7), 103–128. Uno, K.  S. (1993). 11. The death of “good wife, wise mother”? In A.  Gordon (Ed.), Postwar Japan as history (pp.  293–322). University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.152 5/9780520911444-­013 Wakakisa, A. (2013). Changes in human resource management of women are the 1985 equal employment opportunity act. Japan Labor Review, 10(2), 57–81. Yajima, D., & Masutani, F. (2018, October 12). Fukusuu igakubu, nyuushi de danjo ni sa o settei, Daigaku mei wa meigen sezu. Asahi Shinbun. https://www.asahi.com/articles/ ASLBD36HFLBDUTIL00M.html Emma Dalton lectures in Japanese Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Women and Politics in Contemporary Japan (2015), Sexual Harassment in Japanese Politics (2021), and the co-author of Voices from the Contemporary Japanese Feminist Movement (2022).  

Japan’s Glass Ceiling: Contradictions in Gender Discourse and Institutional Support for Ie (Family) Robert C. Marshall

Another disadvantage of fallacious problems is that they bring about solutions that are equally fallacious. – Jorge Luis Borges As is often the case, what is actually observed gives quite a misleading picture of the principles that underlie it. – Noam Chomsky

Abstract  Japan’s discourse on gender inequality for the last 70 years has misled understanding by asserting both that women might even be dominating men, and that the fundamental location of Japan’s battle of the sexes is between husbands and wives in the home, where accepted norms give women a high degree of autonomy and responsibility. As a result of the immediate postwar phase of this discourse, Japan is under the misapprehension that there are nuclear families (kaku kazoku) in Japan that have somehow replaced the historic ie (family). Current Japanese gender discourse fails to locate the well-spring of the legitimacy of gender inequality in the structure and dynamics of widely embraced gender roles arising from ie norms. Consequently many institutions and practices which directly and indirectly support the ie are not recognized to be doing so. Neither have steps taken elsewhere in the world to reduce gender inequality worked in Japan. Keywords  Gender · Discourse · Power · Family · Inequality · Glass ceiling

R. C. Marshall (*) Department of Anthropology, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_25

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Introduction: Family, Gender and Public Discourse Japanese women rank among the most financially secure, physically safe, highly educated, healthy women in the world. They have low infant mortality, high life expectancy and all of the personal freedom that Japanese men have to choose the life they want to lead. Yet they are scarcely to be found in the higher levels of Japan’s political economy and public life compared to women in the world’s other wealthy nations according to the UN’s Gender Inequality Index, Social Watch’s Gender Equity Index, and the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index (Assmann, 2014). The December 2019 Gender Gap Report ranked Japan 121st, its lowest position yet. Japan was 144th in women’s representation in politics by nation (Japan Times, 2020). As Steel (2019, p. 1) frames the issue: What is puzzling, though, is that despite the inequity in a system that places “unsustainable burdens on women” (Schoppa, 2006, p. 183), most Japanese women do not feel that they are “struggling”; they do not feel powerless and frustrated. Most studies show that Japanese women are happier than men and enjoy their lives more (Inoguchi & Fujii, 2009). Why do women enjoy a high sense of well-being in this context of inequality?

A solution I have previously offered to this conundrum looks inward toward ie, Japan’s perduring stem family (Marshall, 2017). An ie is not a group of related co-­ residents or a scattered group related by descent: it is “a corporate entity whose continuity supersedes the lives of its individual member-caretakers” (Robertson, 2018, p. 66). The ie comprises a small number of highly specific features: not more than one co-residing married couple in each generation, perpetuity, and an estate with impartible inheritance. Its members reproduce their ie over time by identifying a successor, arranging a marriage, and expelling second sons. Continuing contradictions in Japan’s discourse on gender arise from the consequences of structural violence done not to women, but to the successor’s younger brothers (“second sons”) who are gently but explicitly and without exception expelled from the ie, before or when the successor marries. This way of forming families has long raised wives’ status above that of the successor’s brothers through her importance to the success and continuity of the family into which she has married. However, the status of wives remains ambiguously below that of their successor husbands, which situation I have come to call a “moderately high-level status trap” for those women with ambitions outside the home. As Alpert (2022, p. 12) writes, “The belief that women need a home and children to be happy – and a home needs a housewife to prosper – has not necessarily become less entrenched in Japan, even as more women work after marriage and childbearing.” Nemoto (2016, p.  44) observes that “the full-time homemaker continues to earn more cultural respect in Japan than in the United States.” This intermediate position and the attractions of the occupation “professional housewife” (sengyō shufu) help us understand the acceptability of the indeterminacy of this debate. This occurs even while seeing how acting on the symbol ie locks women in place as professional housewives in the private sphere, excludes them from the public male sphere of breadwinner, and precludes second sons becoming heirs to family estates entirely.

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The present chapter extends this argument by reversing that earlier perspective to look outward from ie toward the broader society, to examine six related practices entangled in Japan’s long-fraught discourse on family and its articulation with the broader society. These and many other aspects of Japanese life are debated publicly as obstacles to the continued elevation of women in public life. Societies routinely obscure deep contradictions through discourse, public discussion and debate in mass media in terms that cannot lead to a resolution of the issue by avoiding what they take for granted, “the invisible part, the unthought thought” (Veyne, 2010, p.19). Godelier (1999, p. 173) reminds us why we hide such matters from our social selves: “…there is something in society which is part of the social being of its members and which needs opacity in order to produce and reproduce itself.” Consequently, this not being able to talk about something, that something necessary and important to group solidarity and even group existence can only function as long as it is not talked about, makes society work, even as it keeps us from understanding our own collective creations. One particular misrepresentation has made discourse on Japan’s glass ceiling especially opaque (Marshall, 2017, pp. 264–266). Since the 1950s it has been thought in Japan that families could be identified as a “nuclear family,” that nuclear families (kaku kazoku) exist in Japan, and that they have substantially replaced ie as Japan’s dominant family form. In actuality, the policies and practices adumbrated below and their apparent failure to dislodge the status quo support ie and the gender roles ie-logic develops. Among structures, practices and institutions which have remained relatively immune to change, and so inhibit change in family life over the past several decades or longer, are: 1. ie property, inheritance, and succession; 2. family registry system (koseki); 3. mothers and early childhood; 4. husbands and housework; 5. women and employment; 6. household income tax. A list is not an explanation, of course, nor is an analogy. But I want to begin this discussion with just that, imagining the ie itself as the body of a gothic cathedral and these many distinct practices, laws, institutions, customs, beliefs as its flying buttresses. There are many of them, slightly off to the side, delicate in appearance and weakly attached, but their strength is critical even while their mode of operation is not immediately evident. Attached and yet separate, appearing delicate and yet sturdy enough to absorb forces which, undeflected, would cause the collapse of the cathedral and likewise the ie, they form a coherent support system. Although this list could never be made complete, taken together these six rubrics show the stable articulation of ie and Japan’s gendered political economy. The following  brief narrative strings these separate elements into a unified account. After WWII the US wanted to dismantle the ie as the capillary bed of militant nationalism. The new constitution gave equal rights to women, gave all children an equal share in the ie’s estate through inheritance, and made all ie property the

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property of individuals. It did not, however, end ancestor worship or change the pattern of succession to headship and the exclusion of second sons from the ie, or end koseki. Since the late 1940s, second sons and daughters have signed away their inheritance to the successor explicitly. In Japan the purpose of marriage is to have and raise a child to be the ie’s next generation. Ie without sons choose a satisfactory son by  adopting a young adult male, usually either a close relative’s child or the husband of their daughter, to become the successor. The family registry system (koseki) maintains these categories, identities and relationships within families by law. The successor’s wife has the responsibility to provide the ie with its next generation and raise its successor, usually the first son, as well as she can. To do so, she must devote herself exclusively to that child’s first 3 years, not working away from home if she does not absolutely have to. She alone takes care of her child, and, as well, her husband, who works long hours for his family. Babysitters are known but unused in Japan. Mothers say they simply don’t know where to find them (Japan Times, 2016b). Mothers manage cooking and cleaning, their children’s education, and their household’s finances as a respected professional housewife. Over the years more and more women have come to work full time for several years after leaving school and before marriage. Seeing marriage coming, and certainly seeing a first child coming, employers expect and even require women to leave their jobs, the notorious katatataki, the “tap on the shoulder”. Once her children are raised, she returns to the labor force, but now part-time at a different occupation and employer, often after ten or more years outside the employed labor force. Income tax law, by distinguishing between a household’s primary and secondary incomes, provides a strong incentive for wives to devote at least half their time to caring for their family after they return to employment.

Ie Property, Inheritance and Succession Following WWII the Allied Occupation inserted Article 24 into Japan’s new Constitution to denature ie by converting an estate with impartible inheritance into private personal property. Families since then have routinely subverted the Civil Code sections implementing these changes. Hendry (1987, p.  36) observes that, “Despite the new law that inheritance should be divided equally between all children, family land or property can often not stand division, and non-inheriting children will sign away their rights for the sake of the ie, if one of their number agrees to take on the responsibility for the family home.” Japanese families are obliged to provide care for older relatives, and inheritance within the family is legally protected. Despite the Japanese laws that prescribe equal rights for all children, “it is sons, especially co-resident sons, who are most likely to inherit the family wealth intact” (Izuhara, 2002, p. 75). Only one married son is ever co-resident in an ie.

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All that differs from previous practice now is the explicit documenting of acknowledgement by the other children. The Occupation aimed at the substance, but neglected the form, failing to outlaw the office of household head and successor (atotsugi) while targeting the family estate. As a result, the current legal facts of individual ownership of all property and the abolition of ie property cannot be reconciled reasonably with the requirement that all children are entitled to an equal share of ie property, but which entitlement they can abjure on the atotsugi’s promise to care for their parents. The Japanese practice of adoption helps us understand both the organization of ie, and the value people place on the related aspects of its prosperity and continuity. The Japanese pattern of adoption was not outlawed by the Occupation’s changes to the constitution, nor was the legal position of household head or successor. “While adoption of a male child is customarily limited to agnatic kin in China, no such preferences exist in Japan, and in some cases, a man with proven capabilities may be adopted as an heir when the natural heir-to-be proves incapable” (Maeda, 2010). “In Japan, a surname identifies the corporate household [ie] to which one belongs…. The frequent name change in Japan, or the lack of aversion to name change, reflects the flexibility of the kinship and family systems.” [See the chapter on Surnames in this volume]. Having the same family name in Japan does not make people think they might be related. Japan has a vast number of family names. O’Neill (1972) gives pronunciations for the characters of 13,500 family names, as well as 11,000 personal names. Adoption takes place to provide a successor to the ie, and for no other purpose. The Economist (2013) recently looked at Japanese adoption compared with other nations. They found that adoption rates are highest in the US and in Japan, but while families overwhelmingly adopt young children in the US, over 98% of Japanese adoptions in 2009 – almost 90,000 adoptees – were adult men in their 20s and 30s, up from 80,000 ten years earlier, in a population declining in numbers. Many of these men are the husband of a daughter of the family, an “adopted son-in-law” (mukoyōshi). That “adopting a minor does not seem to have an accredited place in Japanese society” (Castro-Vázquez, 2017, p.  134) is not simply because there are so few young children available. Mehrotra et al. (2013) has suggested adoptions of successors may be a result of a lack of able sons due to the falling birthrate, but if so, this has been the case in Japan traditionally. Gordon (2003, p. 29) finds that infanticide between 1720 and 1860 among wealthy as well as poor families may have led to slower population growth for a very long time. Mehrotra et al. (2013) find further that inherited family control is not only still common in Japanese business, but that family firms are “puzzlingly competitive,” outperforming otherwise similar professionally managed companies. “These results are highly robust and…suggest family control ‘causes’ good performance rather than the converse” (Economist, 2013). And this is not just “family control,” but control by one heir and successor, other places being found for any other children.

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Family Registry System (koseki) Ie membership is recorded in the family koseki, a system of vital statistics records begun in 1871 with the Meiji restoration, building on earlier patterns. Koseki record the relation of each household member to that ie’s household head. Most Japanese women take their husband’s family name at marriage. Men often change their surnames on adoption into an allied or spouse’s family. Married-in sons-in-law [mukoyōshi] always change their surname to that of the wife’s family name. Unless one’s surname has significance in terms of social value and status, abandoning it does not seem to pose a difficult choice for the Japanese (Maeda, 2010, p. 78).

But even more than this, in an important sense being recorded in one’s ie’s koseki makes one Japanese: Japanese citizenship does not depend exclusively or ultimately on either of the two common standards for citizenship, blood descent or territory of birth. Members of an ie (typically the parents) record a child’s birth in their koseki and specify what that child’s relation is to the household head. As non-citizens are not recorded in the koseki and every citizen in principle is recorded in the koseki, “the koseki constitutes a ledger of the citizens of Japan. The principle that every citizen shall be koseki registered has existed from the first Koseki Law of 1871 and continues today” (Krogness, 2014, p. 2).

Motherhood and Early Childhood A great deal of research has been done on Japanese childrearing, and perhaps even more has been said about how Japanese children should be raised. The ideology of care in Japan has been closely and exclusively linked to the biological role of mother for the last 60 years or so. Through the media, the government has introduced policies and commissioned several reports to promote women’s roles as housewives and the importance of forming a maternal bond during the first 3 years of their children’s lives (Holloway & Nagase, 2014, p. 73).

Perhaps the most important point here with regard to the glass ceiling is that these first 3 years are considered the most critical, during which the child’s mother must be in almost constant physical, emotional, and intellectual contact with her child. No one else can do this, no one can take a mother’s place for the first 3 years of her child’s life in this widely held view (Japan Times, 2016b). This 3-year period creates a bond between mother and child that serves as the basis for the fundamental concepts of uchi (private) and soto (public) in Japanese culture and so attaches the child to their ie through their mother. Once this bond is established, by attending pre-school a child can then be prepared to face the wider world (Peak, 1991). Since virtually all women wish to marry and have children (Nemoto, 2019, p. 78), this period creates a gap in almost all women’s work records. As well, however, women are rarely hired as new school leavers into positions destined for a continuing full-time career as men are, and when women return to the

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labor market, they go to different firms and different occupations from those they left before raising their children. Consequently, no constituency has made a compelling political push to create sufficient nursery or day care resources that would allow mothers with very young children to share their care with anyone else and so continue employment at the same firm and position with relatively brief breaks for childbirth, common in other wealthy nations (Japan Times, 2016a). Estévez-Abe and Kim (2014) offer an extended comparison of Japan’s and Korea’s efforts in expanding public assistance for care for the elderly and for children younger than 3 years old over the approximately 20 years from 1990 to 2010. Both countries put in place substantial support for the elderly, but only Korea raised its levels of early childcare to over 50% enrollment, levels achieved elsewhere only in Northern Europe. Japan, on the other hand, was able to add support of less than 0.1% of GDP, from 0.3 to 0.4% over this period, keeping it at the level of much poorer countries such as Estonia or countries with much different systems such as Germany and Italy. “Yet despite nearly 30 years of talk of childcare coverage expansion, the Japanese government has failed to produce anything comparable to the far-reaching measures produced in Korea. Japan’s inaction in childcare stands in sharp contrast to its response to elderly care” (Estévez-­ Abe & Kim, 2014, p. 669). The contrast between Japan’s establishment of eldercare and its failure to do so for young childcare is especially telling. All of Japan was surprised at how quickly and easily Long-Term Care Insurance (kaigo hoken) was established (Campbell & Ikegami, 2000). Those who favored the development of private care services required that family members not be reimbursed for in-home eldercare, with the expectation that the successor’s wife would be the caregiver as she was at present. They did this in order not to lose a potentially lucrative profit center simply to subsidize women who would be doing this work anyway. Yet, family members do not necessarily give the best care available, nor are subsidies the best way to support the integrity of families (Sugiura et al., 2009). Feminist advocates for these homemakers agreed entirely with this point. They wanted to create paid positions for women who had acquired many of these skills in the course of life and were looking especially for paid positions for women over age 50, against whom it remains legal to discriminate in hiring in Japan (Sakuraba, 2018). The introduction of kaigo hoken dramatically increased demand for home care attendants, and so, for their training as well (Tsutsui & Muramatsu, 2005, p. 225).

Husbands and Housework All this caregiving must be understood as another buttress of family as effects of such policies. It helps us understand the role and status of “professional housewife” at best and an employed wife at worst. A pandemic can throw a society’s mundane miseries into high relief (Rich, 2020). The unequal sharing of housework and childcare is both ubiquitous and unambiguous: men in Japan do fewer hours of

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household chores and childcare than in any of the world’s wealthiest nations. “Women who work more than 49 hours a week [emphasis added] typically do close to 25 hours of housework a week. Their husbands do an average of less than five” (Rich, 2019). And yet, the number of women this busy with jobs can only be a miniscule fraction of the women of Japan, namely married women working full time. Only 40% of men still worked the standard postwar male full-time work week of 49 hours – five 9-hour days and a 4-hour Saturday morning – by 2011 (Ogasawara, 2016, p. 173). As Japan’s population decreases, the number of continuing households headed by first sons increases at the expense of households and ie begun with the marriages of second sons. In North’s sample of households, 88% of husbands were first sons, somewhat more than but consistent with the figure of 70% for all men born first sons after 1964 (North, 2009, p. 27). North (2009, p. 40) documents the naturalization of this distinction within the household: “Socialized for natural dominance and characterized as coddled and spoiled, first sons were defined by what they did not do at home, regardless of their wives’ earning power or occupational prestige.” And yet Nakamura and Mito (2016, p. 88) find for wives, as long as they know other women are in approximately the same boat, they “actually managed to be happier, even when their division of labor is unbalanced.” These conditions still persist (Rich, 2019). About half of working women in Japan are employed in part-time or contract jobs without benefits, which is to say virtually all married working women, compared to just one in five men. This has reinforced a sense among men that their paid work takes priority over their wives’ jobs, leaving women to carry the bulk of household chores (Rich & Ueno, 2020).

Women and Employment Sometimes a picture helps. Figure  1 shows aspects of the classic “M-shaped” employment pattern for women in Japan, in 2007 and 2017, compared to 2015 data for the US and Germany. The title of this business-oriented news magazine article “Japan’s Female Labor Force Set to Toss Out M Curve” works an exhausted media trope, that Japan is just about to really change a lot, contingent upon one or two minor details. Close examination of the evidence for this routinely unfulfilled expectation reveals what remains unidentified in this discourse, namely those patterns of women’s work which result in the long-familiar M-curve. Note, to begin, that while this graph shows more women in the labor force from 2007 to 2017, the shape of the M remains unchanged. It also shows that women continue to put off marriage longer and longer. But simply a widening spread of ages at first birth combined with fewer children per mother will raise the bottom of the valley, without any changes in employment practices at all. What this graph fails to reveal is that the women working on the younger side of the mid-40s valley bottom are generally working full time and the women working on the older side are overwhelmingly working part time. Close to half of working women are employed part time (Rich,

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Fig. 1  M-curve. Source: https://asia.nikkei.com/ Politics/ Japan-­s-­female-­labor-­ force-­set-­to-­toss-­out-­ M-­curve

2019), and these are overwhelmingly the older married workers on the right-hand side of the M’s valley. Two passages in the article which undermine the claims of its title stand out. First, “The biggest factor behind the trend [of the vanishing M] is that many companies are now making concerted efforts to prevent their female employees from quitting. These efforts include childcare leave and other benefits. In Japan, more than 80% of working women take childcare leave after giving birth, although the figure has been trending down a bit.” In reality, “many companies” means “very few,” because those companies large enough to afford such benefits do not want or expect these young women leaving to begin their families to come back into the jobs they leave. Nor do these women expect to return. “Childcare leave” is their severance package. From the 1970s on businesses pulled more and more women into the labor force of a rapidly growing economy to work full time for several years after leaving school and before marriage, and part time after marriage (Ueno, 1987, p. S80). Nemoto (2019, p. 80) records that now “the number of non-full-time working women is rapidly increasing.” Life-long full-time employment is a component of the male breadwinner ideal. And the second: “For the M-shaped curve to be completely resolved, nursery school shortage will be a hurdle. The number of children on nursery school waiting

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lists has grown to more than 26,000 – up from 21,000 in April 2014. This is due to the number of female workers rising faster than the national government had expected.” It is difficult to credit the good faith of such expectations. Women continue to marry later and have fewer children each year; and as women marry later, more remain in the full-time labor force before marriage. This entirely predictable steady trend shaped the decades before 2007 to 2017. This trend can have no bearing on women entering the labor force once their families are completed and raised at least to school age. This increase in numbers of wait-listed children comes in a population with a decreasing number of births each year. This article asserts as well that although the government has plans to help the day care industry accommodate an additional 220,000 children, progress in urban areas has been slow. It concludes: “If Japan Inc. wants to increase the number of its female workers, it will have to redouble efforts to reward them with higher wages and better family benefits. A sticking point – wage growth remains sluggish.” Increasing the numbers of female workers per se, already equal in numbers to the US and Germany, seems unlikely. Japan’s glass ceiling bars women from working in the full-time, life-time employment track that men work in, and from virtually all higher positions in public life as well.

Household Income Tax Wages for married women in Japan are not sluggish, they are deliberately anchored by public policy. Household income tax laws are structured within the mother-infant bonding discourse. The lack of support for infant care, and employers’ human resource departments’ common practices, insure that women with infants and young children will not return to work quickly or full-time work at all. The wages of married women are not living wages but classified in tax law as “secondary” wages, intended to support the effort of their husbands to sustain their family, and they remain near minimum wage. A major mechanism to maintain married women’s wages at a low level, at a level precisely calculated to allow a woman to work 20 hours but not more per week tax free at just above minimum wage, is the Family Income Tax Exemption Law. For that small number of married women in high salary, high prestige occupations such as executives, university professors, and physicians, the law is an irritant but not decisive. For the vast number of married female part-time employees, it is. “A wife who earns in excess of 1.03 million yen loses her dependent status and has to pay her own social security taxes and health insurance” (Mason & Naohiro, 1998, p. 15), as well as disqualifying her family from an exemption of about $4000 US. The 0.03 million yen was deliberately added to the original law specifying one million yen so the law could no longer accurately be called, as it had been, the “Million Yen Wall” (hyakuman-en kabe). In its editorial discussion of proposals to end this deduction, the Japan Times (2014) spells out the arrangement clearly:

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The spousal tax deduction cuts the taxable annual income of the household’s main earner by ¥380,000 if the dependent spouse is earning ¥1.03 million or less a year. By reducing their taxable income, the main earner and the household pay less taxes overall.

One million Yen can be taken as $10,000 US over recent decades. Effectively, married women can earn up to $10,000 US tax free, but then lose to taxation the rest of any income they earn up to $20,000 US, approximately what they would make at the same job if they worked full-time. About 60% of women working part time say they are doing so because of the exemption of this tax law. These women are all married, necessarily, and overwhelmingly over 40.

Discussion and Conclusion The Japanese ie is a household-centered corporate stem family with bilateral (not unilineal, never patrilineal, and not now becoming matrilineal) descent, only contingently extended and patrilocal. An ie exists in perpetuity, for the continuity and prosperity of which its current members are assigned, and take, responsibility to its ancestors in each generation. Japan has never had the joint extended households formed by patrilineal families, a cohort of married brothers living under their father’s roof until his death. Neither does Japan create conjugal non-perpetuating families which end with divorce or the death of a spouse, now often called “nuclear families.” Only marriages of second sons necessarily begin a new family in Japan. An ie begins with a marriage; it ends not with a divorce or a death, but the absence of a successor. As Senda (2013) expresses this reality, “The idea that a married couple might enjoy a simple life together has never taken root in Japan.” What has deep roots in Japan are expectations that families will last forever and that this matters for their members. The assumption of the immensely popular Doraemon anime franchise, from the very first paper comic book episode of 1969 to the current video and film empire, is that a seven-generations-down-the-line descendent of little Nobi Nobita has enough at stake in Nobita’s life to send back from the twenty-second century to our present the slightly defective blue robot cat Doraemon. Doraemon’s task is “to whip the disappointing boy into shape” (Orbaugh, 2002, p. 113) and get him to amount to something for the good of the Nobi family’s future (Marshall, 2019). There are no nuclear families in Japan, not even in the Tokyo suburbs of everyone’s imagination. The misapprehension underlying discourse on the family, that there are nuclear families in Japan somehow different from ie, shields Japan from locating the wellspring of its unusual gender inequality in its ever-renewing family, ie. As an institution, ie could not and never has existed on its own, but only as part of a broader Japanese society in which support for the family continues with great strength. Kumagai (2008, p.  11) credits Nasu (1962) with the concept “modified stem family” to capture “the persistence and continuity of the traditional stem family throughout the life course of each individual.” Public support for each of these

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elements of Japanese culture and society discussed above remains in place because they each in their own way support the continuation of ie. This institution remains not simply legitimate but the positive source of great value and knowledge in Japan of how to live in a family as a parent and child, husband or wife, a daughter, an older or younger son. The effects of the contradictions in these particular practices examined here each individually, and together systemically, support family formation and the legitimation of Japan’s gender inequality. This keeps men and women on separate tracks to life’s opportunities, reshaping while maintaining the status quo. The dislocation of family and gender discourse has led to the failure to identify the source of Japan’s deep and specific gender inequality. The mistaken view that Japan has nuclear families, that Japan’s many small households and small families had somehow ceased being ie and become nuclear families, is widespread and now taken for granted. Although the present discussion does identify and examine a number of secular changes in family life in Japan, it does not distinguish methodologically among several Japanese words, all of which can be glossed ‘family’ in English. The decision to not distinguish ie as “lineage” and kazoku as “family” arises from the observation that the effects on gender relations of the domestic and public practices of family life are substantial but remain largely tacit in Japanese discourse. This distinction reflects a basic category error, namely the identification of ie (family) with traditional three-generation extended household residence and kazoku (family) with “nuclear family” (kaku kazoku) and two-generation co-­ residence, conflating residence practice with family form (Marshall, 2017). Japan does not have two or more kinds of families: ie focuses the family in its greatest historical depth and kazoku is its candid snapshot. The word kazoku is itself a late nineteenth century neologism invented to translate European concepts of the connubial family. A profound misunderstanding of family and its gendered role relations has arisen among analysts on this point, erected upon the methodological error of thinking that ie and kazoku are two different things, while kazoku and kaku kazoku are the same thing. To give just one example of this confusion, the “separate surnames” (fūfubessei) movement advocates changes to the family registration system (koseki) to allow husbands and wives to each choose their own post-marriage surnames. The Japan Supreme Court took up the legal question for the first time in 2015, explicitly declaring this change illegal and re-affirming in 2021, reasoning that a marriage establishes a relationship between two families rather than two individuals. Toyoda (2020) writes on this movement: One of the Occupation’s major goals was the eradication of the strict Japanese household system, called the ie-system (White, 2017). The term ie carries a wide range of connotations, in addition to its literal meaning of “a house” or “a household.” It does not just refer to the nuclear family (father, mother, children), but also to the clan, the lineage, hierarchy, and social norms.

Krogness (2014) stresses how the superficial nature of this common view conflates ie and the three-generation household. As Bachnik’s study of ie recruitment strategies concludes: “although ‘parents’ and ‘children’ do exist in the ie, its organization

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is not based on such relationships, nor is their existence necessary for its continuity. Kinship … is merely one recruitment option for the group-defined continuity of the ie” (Bachnik, 1983, p. 178). Far from having been eradicated, the fundamental organizational principles of the ie remain the Japanese sense of family. “Nuclear family” remains a vacuous concept into which reformers of every stripe might and do pour their ideals and aspirations, but not a cultural form through which anyone can live their family life. Yet although conservative Japanese courts also currently deny the legality of same sex marriages, it is apparent that ie-logic could easily accommodate such arrangements through the usual sort of adoption and registration in the koseki right now. What is of primary importance to its members is that the ie prosper and continue, not the sex or gender of its members. The uniquely high degree of personal security and autonomy, and low level of participation in higher public life among Japan’s women, and the apparent satisfaction of so many women with these circumstances, presents a puzzle in the face of steps taken which elsewhere have raised women’s opportunities across the board. Public discourse commonly presents Japanese families as essentially two generation households, kaku kazoku, with a shrinking remnant of three generation households in the countryside, some old and some young couples living without co-resident children, and a growing number of singletons who do not by themselves constitute families. For people holding this view, there can be no connection at all between the fate of a successor’s brother and the failure of the national government to provide long-promised and badly needed nursery care to employed mothers with infants. The connection requires a re-conception of Japanese family as the continuously adapting traditional corporate stem family and the roles the ie provides its living, dead, and not-yet-born members across the life course.

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Rich, M. (2020, March 16). Stuck at home, men in Japan learn to help. Will it last? New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/16/world/asia/coronavirus-­japan-­household-­work.html Rich, M. & H. Ueno. (2020, September 13). Shinzo Abe vowed Japan would help women ‘shine.’ They’re still waiting. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/world/asia/japan-­ women-­abe.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage Downloaded 9/25/2020. Robertson, J. (2018). Robo sapiens Japanicus. Robots, gender, family and the Japanese nation. University of California Press. Sakuraba, R. (2018). Nihon ni okeru koyō bunya no nenrei sabetsu (Age discrimination in the employment sector in Japan). Legal Policy Research, 19, 39–50. Schoppa, L. J. (2006). Race for the exits: The unravelling of Japan’s system of social protection. Cornell University Press. Senda, Y. (2013). The Japanese family on the brink of change? Available at: http://www.nippon. com/en/currents/d00095/ Steel, G. (2019). Introduction. In G.  Steel (Ed.), Beyond the gender gap in Japan (pp.  1–21). University of Michigan Press. Sugiura, K., Ito, M., Kutsumi, M., & Mikami, H. (2009). Gender differences in spousal caregiving in Japan. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, 64B(1), 147–156. Toyoda E. (2020). Japan’s marital system reform: The fūfubessei movement for individual rights. The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus. 18, 3. Downloaded 9/25/2020 https://apjjf.org/2020/13/ Toyoda.html Tsutsui, T., & Muramatsu, N. (2005). Care-needs certification in the long-term care insurance system of Japan. Journal of American Geriatric Society., 53(3), 222–227. Ueno, C. (1987). The position of Japanese women reconsidered. Current Anthropology (supplement), 28(4), S75–S84. Veyne, P. (2010). Foucault: His thought, his character. Polity Books. White, L. (2017). Gender and the koseki in contemporary Japan: Surname, power, and privilege. Routledge. Robert C. Marshall is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at Western Washington University. He has been conducting field research on cooperation in both urban and rural settings in Japan for over 40 years, and has recently turned his attention toward the world of the imagination in the Doraemon anime franchise. “What Doraemon, the Earless Blue Robot Cat from the Twenty-second Century, Can Teach Us About How Japan’s Elderly and Their Human Caregivers Might Live with Emotional Care Robots” can be found at https://anthro-­age.pitt.edu/ ojs/index.php/anthro-­age/article/viewFile/124/174, and “Explaining Doraemon’s Perduring Popularity: Structural Analysis, Specious Technology and Mother’s Indulgent Affection.” Contemporary Japan, 31, 1, 79–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/18692729.2018.1522075  

Surnames and Gender in Japan Hiromi Taniguchi and Gayle Kaufman

Abstract  With Article 750 of the Japanese Civil Code, Japan is the only industrialized country where married couples must share one family name. This law has been upheld repeatedly in the past decade despite changes in gender, marriage, and family patterns. This chapter first provides a brief history of the shared marital surname rule as a defining feature of the Japanese patriarchal family system within institutional contexts such as ie (patriarchal and patrilineal family unit) and koseki (family registry). It then considers the current context and advocacy movements for fūfu bessei (for both spouses to retain their surnames). Finally, it examines attitudes toward surname rule using the Japanese Social Survey from 2000 to 2016 and the Government Cabinet Office Public Opinion Survey of 2021–22. While Japanese are split on the revision of the current law, there seems to be a shift in more recent years to supporting individual couples’ freedom to make their own surname decisions. This issue of surnames is increasingly important not only for women’s rights but for LGBT individuals and transnational married couples. Keywords  Surnames · Gender · Family law · fūfu bessei movements · koseki Japan is the only industrialized country where married couples must share one family name. This law, per Article 750 of the Japanese Civil Code, was upheld by the Supreme Court in December 2015. That decision was reaffirmed in 2021 when the highest court dismissed the requests of three couples filed in 2018 to retain their separate surnames after municipal governments rejected their marriage registrations (Japan Times, 2021). Despite the law’s allowance for choosing the husband’s or wife’s surname, it is almost always women who adopt their husbands’ surnames H. Taniguchi (*) University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA e-mail: [email protected] G. Kaufman Davidson College, Davidson, NC, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_26

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after marriage. Advocates for changing the law to permit fūfu bessei (for both spouses to retain their surnames) argue that the current law is discriminatory against women and violates individual freedom and human rights. Meanwhile, the country seems split on the legalization of dual conjugal surnames. According to the Public Opinion Survey administered to Japanese adult citizens from late 2021 to early 2022, only 29% support a selective dual surname system for married couples while 27% unconditionally support the current law. Instead, the largest group, 42% approve the current law if it is modified to facilitate one’s ability to use their former surname as an alias (Cabinet Office, 2022). Much of the current debate on the over 120-year-old surname rule reflects the country’s changing familial landscape where marriage happens increasingly later, divorce is more socially accepted, and cross-­ border, international, and transnational marriages have been on the rise (though with some downward trends due to stricter immigration control in the mid-2000s, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake/tsunami, and more recently COVID-19). Changes in behaviors and attitudes surrounding marriage and family suggest the one-surname-­ per-couple practice is not only inconvenient but also diminishes the quality of life for an increasing number of people in Japan. In this chapter, we provide a brief history of Japan’s surname rule for the married, contextualize the current debate on the surname law, and analyze public opinions and attitudes toward surnames for married couples in the twenty-first century. Our analysis extends the study published in Gender Issues (Taniguchi & Kaufman, 2020) by incorporating more recent data. Our goal is to promote discussion on how the current surname rule and convention otherize many individuals and to challenge the archaic but obstinate patriarchal norms that continue to impose inordinate influence on contemporary Japanese families of various shapes and forms.

Brief History of Japan’s Surname Law for the Married The legal requirement for fūfu dosei (common surname for a wife and a husband) originates in the Meiji era (1868–1912) ushered in by the Meiji Restoration, the revolution that defeated the Tokugawa military government, restored imperial rule, and laid the foundation for consolidating the modern political system. In those years, Japan was a mostly agricultural, underdeveloped country facing the colonizing pressure of Western Europe and the United States. For the country to remain sovereign, the Meiji government introduced various new systems to unify and modernize itself to be equal with Western countries (Beasely, 1990). Although Meiji elites understood the need to adopt the Western concept of contractual citizenship, they feared that Western ideas such as individual rights could weaken the moral base of citizenship (i.e., “traditional” family relations) and disrupt the political order (Lo & Bettinger, 2001). As part of the Meiji nation-state building project, the leaders codified ie, a patrilineal, patrilocal, patriarchal, and primogenitary family. Once

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limited to the warrior elites in the Edo era (1603–1867), ie was extended to all through the Family Registration Law and Family Law (or Domestic Relations and Inheritance Law) (Hashimoto & Traphagan, 2008; Shin, 2008; Ueno, 2009). The 1871 Family Registration Law stipulated koseki (family registry) and relevant concepts such as permanent domicile, which is the location of family registry. Family registration, which is now required of all family households, was originally intended to centralize systems of taxation, conscription, and education and strengthen the country economically and militarily vis-à-vis the West. The 1875 Family Registration Law required every citizen to have a surname and imposed the two filing rules: one surname per register and the same surname for a father and his sons. These rules made no reference to a wife’s surname, which caused some confusion among the public (see Shin (2008) for the political debate on wives’ surnames following the 1875 koseki law), but eventually, the Family Law of 1898 required wives to take their husband’s surname. The shared marital surname rule in the Meiji period and onward is a defining feature of the Japanese patriarchal family system within institutional contexts such as ie and koseki (Shin, 2009). Over time, koseki became a record of citizens organized by family household, listing its members’ given names, birthdates, birthplaces, and relationship to head of household by consanguinity, marriage, or adoption. Based on primogeniture, eldest sons were expected to remain in parental households. Younger sons were expected to leave the parental home after marriage and establish a new ie household, resulting in the removal of their record from the original register and the start of a new one. When daughters got married, they were expected to leave the parental home and have their record crossed off in the original registry and entered in their husband’s koseki. Certainly, the above are socially prescribed behaviors, and adhering to this norm became more difficult as the country’s modernization continued, pushing the progressive faction of lawmakers to try revising the law over time (Toshitani, 1994). Meanwhile, Ueno (2009) argues that it was around the time when the shared surname rule was set out for the general population that female hypergamy (women marrying men of higher status) had the effect of strengthening patriarchy. She argues that Japan’s shared surname rule served to weaken wives’ ties to their native kin and thus their bargaining power relative to their husbands, making it much harder for wives’ parental families to intervene in cases of domestic abuse. From the post-Meiji era to World War II, the patriarchal family system (that the conservatives sought to strengthen) put into place a motif of the family-state where all Japanese citizens are imagined to be blood related to one another, and ultimately to the Emperor or the Son of Heaven and imperial family (Lo & Bettinger, 2001). Discerning the original shared surname rule against the backdrop of modern, ethno-­ nationalism is useful to critically assess how today’s surname law excludes non-­ Japanese nationals who reside, work, and have significant ties to Japanese society. Scholars have noted both the change in and continuity of the patriarchal family system after Japan’s defeat in World War II (Hashimoto & Traphagan, 2008; Lo &

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Bettinger, 2001; Matsubara, 1969; Toshitani, 1994). Under the influence of the US Occupation, ie was abolished as it was closely associated with Japan’s wartime imperial ideology. The Civil Code, including family law, was revised with “the language of equality, individual rights, freedom of choice, and voluntary unions … derived from a Euro-American paradigm” (Hashimoto & Traphagan, 2008, p. 5). In the Meiji era, the notion of katei (home based on a marital union) was already familiar to Japanese and coexisted with ie, whose rigidity gradually disintegrated during the industrial revolution (Matsubara, 1969; Muta, 1994; Nishikawa, 1996). Before WWII, progressives tried, though unsuccessfully, to revise the original family law in various ways, including limiting the authority of the patriarch, extending wife’s legal status, and relaxing the exclusivity of succession to the household head, as evidenced in the Civil Code revisions released in 1927 (Toshitani, 1994, p.  70). What the US Occupation did, however, was to institutionalize the nuclear family based on the principle of gender equality (Matsubara, 1969; Nagai, 1969). The Family Law of 1947 showcased the concept of “modern small family” in place of ie, and consciously stipulated “family relations,” without using the word kazoku (family), such as conjugal relations and parent-child relations (Toshitani, 1994). The new family law set out equal inheritance rights for all children regardless of their gender, and rights of children to choose their own spouses. Indeed, the 1947 law may be seen as progressive from a cross-national comparative historical perspective in its stipulation of marital surname by agreement to be either husband’s or wife’s. Toshitani (1994) pointed out that the same thing became legal in Germany as late as 1976. Despite its apparent progressiveness, the law contains “blank clauses” in various areas, including marital surname, leaving actual decision making in the hands of adjudicators (Toshitani, 1994). Toshitani (1994) warned that these blank clauses, while facilitating “flexible” conflict resolution, allow social norms (e.g., traditional gender roles) and power relations between affected parties to unduly influence the adjudication process, perpetuating social (e.g., gender) inequality. Meanwhile, koseki and thus the traditional practice of fūfu dosei were kept. Today, koseki continues to serve certain key functions in the lives of Japanese citizens. Major life events including marriage, adoption, childbirth, divorce, and death must be registered under koseki. Family registry is almost exclusively for Japanese citizens, and for them, it serves as a proof of self-identification and of Japanese citizenship. Koseki is also a tool for background checks used by others—e.g., parents of an adult child who want to be reassured about their prospective son or daughter-­ in-­ law, and private companies about their prospective employees. Koseki is based on the prototype of a heteronormative nuclear family, with negative influences not only for married women wanting to exercise the right not to change their former surname to their husbands’, but for divorced women and their children and many others. As alternative family forms, such as single parent families, LGBT families, and families formed by international marriage, become more common, much debate has focused on how the institution of koseki with the same surname rule marginalize and cause difficulties for an increasing number of individuals living in Japan.

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 he Surname Law, Gender, and Family T in Contemporary Japan Names are part of personal, social, and political identity (Dion, 1983; Finch, 2008; Shin, 2008). Surnames in particular act as signposts of “We” identities, indicating that one is part of a family (Elias, 1991). But surnames also play a role in doing gender as “surnaming practices are subject to interpretation and evaluation, and they are part of the process whereby gender is determined, attributed, and authenticated in ongoing interaction through practices of embodied named identity” (Pilcher, 2017, p.  819). Even without restrictive naming laws, in marriages involving different-­gender couples, women rather than men are expected to change their names. Name change, if involuntary, can be disruptive to self-identity. On the other hand, women’s retention of their surname may still reinforce patriarchy. For instance, in Korea, it is legal (and customary) for women to retain their given surname while their children take a paternal surname. This practice can be used to brand wives as outsiders to their husband’s lineage (Tanaka, 2012; Ueno, 2009; White, 2018). In Japan, surnames are more associated with ancestors, despite the fact that ordinary Japanese only began to have surnames in the late nineteenth century. The ancestral emphasis in Japanese surnaming likely explains part of the desire of many individuals to keep their surname by birth and to endorse a dual surname option for others. The current surname law, along with the social norm of adopting one’s husband’s surname upon marriage, poses a challenge for women who desire to marry but also continue their own family name, especially if they are the only child (Omura, 2019). Unlike in Japan, shared surnames in many countries need not be either spouse’s former surname. By hyphenating their former surnames, or creating a new one entirely, newlyweds may consider their name change a life milestone. In these instances, surnames have a couple-centric meaning. In countries where the idea of marriage as an equal partnership took root, the practice of spouses’ keeping their surnames separate by choice has been not only legal but widely accepted. The practice of dual surnames resonates with the ideal of egalitarian marriage where spouses are their own persons, equitably share responsibilities of running the household, and work towards each other’s personal development (Finkel et  al., 2014). Indeed, in most Western countries gender belief and feminist orientation are shown to be linked to attitudes, preferences, and decisions regarding marital surnames (Gooding & Kreider, 2010). For instance, in Norway, women with stronger gender-role egalitarianism are more likely to keep their former name after marriage (Noack & Wiik, 2008). A study of students at a large US public university finds self-identified feminists to be less likely to support traditional surname practices for married people (Stoiko & Strough, 2017), while a study of Canadian undergraduates similarly finds that women who are more concerned with gender equity have a lower preference for traditional surname practice (Lockwood et al., 2011). In Japan, Taniguchi and Kaufman (2020) confirm the same pattern: individuals who hold more gender egalitarian beliefs tend to disapprove of the traditional surname practice more firmly. Keeping one’s surname may thus indicate an equal partnership, or at least an attempt to establish one.

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The contemporary debate on the marital surname law and convention in Japan partly mirrors the literature on the gendered practice of surnames for the married in Western societies (e.g., Castrén, 2019; Lockwood et al., 2011; Noack & Wiik, 2008; Stoiko & Strough, 2017). Yet, because married couples in Japan cannot legally have dual marital surnames to begin with, research on Japan’s surname problem tends to focus on experiences of individuals who are adversely affected by the marital surname law as well as the advocacy movements for fūfu bessei. While a wide range of grievances connected to surname change after marriage has been reported, the most common type mentioned are hassles with the paperwork involved in having one’s surname changed for bank accounts, credit cards, driver’s license, national health insurance card, passport, and other documents. Because it is usually wives who undergo surname changes, these grievances are critically debated in terms of gender discrimination, injustice, and inequality. Legal scholars who support major revisions to the 1947 family law argue that its “progressive” stipulation of gender equality (e.g., conjugal surname by agreement to be either husband’s or wife’s) is too formal or abstract to overcome social norms (e.g., the expectation that a woman should adopt her husband’s surname after marriage) and as a result is powerless to resolve gender inequality (Toshitani, 1994, p. 78). In recent years, since December 2015 when the shared marital surname law (Article 750) was upheld, fūfu bessei movements have been reinvigorated with a renewed determination to change the law to allow married couples to assume dual surnames. To reiterate, these movements advocate a “selective” dual surname system which is intended only for those married couples where both spouses want to keep their surnames at birth. The implementation of this system is “Pareto-­ improving,” meaning it generates no losers and only winners (Omura, 2019). Fūfu bessei movement organizations give their members, married or otherwise, space to exchange ideas or receive legal consultation on surname problems (e.g., what to do with family members opposed to a couple’s intention to keep their separate surnames after marriage). Moreover, they are “social change organizations” (Ostrander, 2010) lobbying local governments, often successfully, to pressure the central government to legalize dual surnames for the married (Mainichi Japan, 2019a, b), which would mitigate the sense of deprivation for individuals variously affected by the current law. In an interview, Naho Ida (who prefers to go by her given name), Director of a volunteer group Sentakuteki Fūfu Bessei Zenkoku Chinjo Akushon (optional different surname national petition action), shared her own experience: “I went through 100 bureaucratic processes with various institutions, including bank accounts, passport, and credit cards to change my family name. I felt like I was losing my dignity and sense of identity” (Yamamoto, 2021). Surname changes tend to violate privacy of (mostly) women as they publicly reveal life events such as divorce and remarriage that individuals may prefer to keep private. Organizations such as Naho’s are fighting for individuals’ rights to decide whether to keep or change their surname after marriage and pushing for a legislative change to facilitate that choice.

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In practice, married women can use their maiden names as an alias for various purposes. Married women have traditionally conjugated their marital and maiden names in everyday lives. The use of maiden names is accepted in certain occupations and workplaces. It has been common for married female university professors to use their former surnames professionally. In 2017, the government began to allow national bureaucrats to use their former surnames while in office. Many professionals with national qualifications—e.g., lawyers, certified public accountants, and physicians—are allowed to keep using their former names at work as long as they notify their professional associations about the use of their alias. Moreover, some government-issued papers permit the conjugation of current and former surnames. Conjugated surnames are allowed in passports and “my number” cards with an IC chip that stores personal data. The government has been pushing the individual number system in recent years to unleash digital transformation (Tsukimori, 2020). Proponents of the shared surname law argue that because of the custom of married women’s alias use, there is no need for a legal change. Nevertheless, the opponents of the law argue that the acceptance of alias use in society is uneven, necessitating the juggling of one’s legal surname and alias, which is disruptive to personal, occupational, and professional identities. Opponents of the shared surname rule also point out that allowing individuals to list their former surname side by side with their current, official one does not negate the fact that the alias has no legal basis— one cannot buy a house and register it under their alias; one still needs a koseki document (which obviously allows no alias) to apply for a Japanese passport. Although some individuals may prefer to have their alias acknowledged for some purposes, listing an alias can come with certain risks. For example, Tomomi Inada, a member of the Japanese House of Representatives and of the Liberal Democratic Party, Japan’s largest most powerful party, told a House of Representatives Committee on Judicial Affairs session that “aliases are not recognized in other countries, and you may get mistaken for a suspicious individual” (Mainichi Japan, 2021). Certainly, researchers and activists alike have not only treated the marital surname law as a matter of discrimination against women, or more specifically, heterosexual married women, but framed it as an issue of personal choice (or the lack thereof) affecting various other individuals (Maher, 1999; Omura, 2019; Toyoda, 2020; Toyoda & Chapman, 2017, 2019). As discussed above, one cannot understand Japan’s surname issue without considering koseki as Japanese state’s tool to monitor its populace, reinforce patriarchy, and marginalize non-conformists (e.g., LGBT individuals and children of divorced parents) and outsiders (e.g., foreign nationals and stateless individuals) (Chapman & Krogness, 2014). Exclusively considering the surname rule a married women’s issue misses the fact that there are LGBT folks who want to be in the same koseki as their loved ones and share the surname but cannot have that choice. There are also unmarried Japanese mothers who decide not to register births fearing that doing so would label their children as “illegitimate” (Chapman, 2019). These individuals are virtually stateless without officially

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recognized surnames. Meanwhile, divorced mothers with child custody often worry that their children will be marked as being from a broken family, whether they keep their fathers’ surname or change it to their mothers’ surname because of the normative expectation that children’s family name should be the same as both of their parents. Since the 1976 revision of the Marriage Law, individuals who took their spouse’s surname are allowed to retain that name in case of divorce (Toshitani, 1994). However, divorced mothers may wish to change back to their former surname. Moreover, if they remarry, keeping their former spouse’s surname is out of the question. It is true that in countries where separate marital surnames are allowed legally, married partners who initially opt to retain their respective surnames may decide instead to share their surname once they have children so that all family members have the same surname, presumably for practicality or family unity. In those countries, whether children’s parents have the same surname is not a marker of parents’ marital status, but in Japan, it is a clear marker as to whether the child is from an intact family. In short, Japan’s surname rules and koseki otherize individuals who do not fit the normative family model. Yet, it is important to note that there remains resistance to changing the surname law. For example, Nippon Kaigi, a far-right lobby group, argue that allowing individuals to keep their surnames would ruin Japanese family and thus society. There is a particular concern that changes will diminish “Japaneseness.” As such, organizations like this engage in scaremongering as well as labeling fūfu bessei supporters as selfish feminists and the like (Toyoda & Chapman, 2019).

 ublic Opinions on Surnames for the Married P in the Twenty-First Century Given the tensions between pro- and anti- fūfu bessei organizations and their attempts to sway public opinion, we next consider how the Japanese public feels about the surname law and practice. Media reports tend to highlight the increase in public support of a legal change that accommodates the needs of individuals wishing to keep their surname after marriage (e.g., Japan Times, 2021; Yamamoto, 2021). However, data sources vary in terms of sampling, questions asked, and mode of delivery (e.g., “paper and pencil,” phone, and online). In this section, we take a closer look at the Japanese General Social Survey (JGSS), which asked about opinions on conjugal surnames eight times in the period spanning 2000 to 2016. We supplement our analysis with results from seron chosa, the Government Cabinet Office Public Opinion Survey on Family Law administered in December 2021 to January 2022. It is important to note that the JGSS and Cabinet Office surveys were both administered only to Japanese citizens and exclude foreignborn permanent residents and native residents of non-Japanese descent including zainichi Koreans.

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Japanese General Social Survey The Japanese General Social Survey (JGSS) has asked a single-item question on attitude toward conjugal surnames several times since the initial survey year 2000. Respondents were asked about what a married couple should do with their surnames and could select one of the following categories: 1=“The wife should take her husband’s surname without question”; 2=“It is preferred for a wife to take her husband’s surname under current conditions”; 3=“The couple should claim a common surname, however, it is up to them to decide whose name they will keep”; 4=“There is no need for either to change their names.” Our prior study (Taniguchi & Kaufman, 2020) examined determinants of attitudes towards conjugal surnames with a focus on traditional gender beliefs, using JGSS data from 2000–2003, 2006, and 2010. The study found that individuals with stronger traditional gender beliefs are more likely to endorse the shared surname at all levels, and this was especially so at the highest level of support for the traditional surname convention. Here, we incorporate data from the 2015 and 2016 JGSS (which were unavailable for our prior study) and replicate our earlier data analysis. 2015 was an important year to raise the public awareness of the surname issue, ending with the December Supreme Court decision that upheld (10 to 5 votes) the constitutionality of Article 750 of the Civil Code, or the shared conjugal surname law. As shown in Table 1, the breakdown of responses on attitudes toward conjugal surnames in 2015 is just like in the prior years. From 2000 to 2015, the most liberal attitude recognizing absolutely no need to change one’s surname after marriage is uncommon across years for both men and women, mainly concentrated between 12 and 15%. The most traditional attitude that unconditionally supports the shared surname is more common than the most liberal attitude, especially for men though men are fairly evenly split across weak, moderate, and strong support. Yet, women most commonly show weak support for the shared surname, with 35 to 39% preferring to leave the name decision to individual couples, which still leaves approximately half of women split between moderate and strong support. We see a noticeable shift in the breakdown of surname attitudes in 2016, where 41% of men and 52% of women show only weak support, saying that the surname decision should be up to individuals couples. Unconditional support for the shared surname dropped considerably, with only 11% of women and 19% of men showing strong support. The 2015 JGSS was conducted in February through May ahead of the Supreme Court decision on the surname rule in December. The 2016 JGSS likely captures the rising public awareness of the need for a legal change following the court decision. As for traditional gender beliefs, men’s average score is only slightly higher than women’s score. There is a slight decrease in the scores for men and women after 2006, indicating a move toward less traditional beliefs. Results from our replication analysis are fairly similar. Using these results, we plot predicted probabilities of giving no support, weak support, moderate support, and strong support to the shared conjugal surname practice corresponding to the

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Table 1  Summary statistics of the key study variables by gender 2000 2001 Support to the shared surname practice Men: % no support 13.5 13.1 (13.9) (13.8) % weak support 28.2 28.4 (29.7) (29.8) % moderate support 29.4 26.5 (30.0) (27.7) % strong support 28.9 32.0 (26.4) (28.7) Women: % no support 14.5 16.0 (14.5) (16.5) % weak support 35.3 35.5 (35.8) (37.6) % moderate support 24.6 21.3 (24.6) (20.4) % strong support 25.6 27.2 (25.0) (25.6) Traditional gender belief [1,4]a Mean for men: 2.6 2.6 (2.6) (2.5) Mean for women: 2.4 2.4 (2.4) (2.4) Sample size 2730 2621

2002

2003

2006

2010

2015

2016

14.3 (15.1) 29.4 (31.5) 25.4 (25.2) 30.9 (28.2)

11.1 (12.4) 28.3 (30.7) 27.7 (27.6) 32.9 (29.3)

12.3 (12.6) 24.1 (25.5) 33.8 (34.0) 29.8 (28.0)

12.0 (12.9) 29.4 (31.1) 27.4 (27.0) 31.2 (29.1)

13.6 (13.8) 27.9 (28.6) 26.6 (26.3) 31.8 (31.4)

14.1 (14.0) 41.1 (41.2) 25.4 (25.5) 19.4 (19.3)

14.2 (14.4) 37.9 (38.8) 22.9 (22.2) 25.0 (24.6)

13.0 (13.4) 37.1 (38.4) 23.8 (23.8) 26.0 (24.4)

12.5 (12.3) 35.6 (36.1) 28.7 (28.1) 23.2 (23.5)

12.4 (11.7) 37.4 (36.7) 24.6 (24.5) 25.6 (27.1)

12.6 (12.1) 39.0 (38.1) 24.7 (24.8) 23.7 (25.0)

14.4 (13.8) 52.0 (51.8) 22.6 (22.9) 11.0 (11.5)

2.6 (2.5) 2.4 (2.4) 2774

2.6 (2.5) 2.5 (2.4) 1812

2.6 (2.6) 2.6 (2.6) 2020

2.4 (2.4) 2.3 (2.3) 2399

2.4 (2.3) 2.2 (2.2) 1984

2.2 (2.2) 2.1 (2.1) 918

Notes. Weighted proportions/means in parentheses a The JGSS has included items to gauge gender beliefs variously over the years. We use two items which were included in all years considered in this study. Except in the 2006 JGSS, respondents were asked to rate their level of agreement on a 4-pt scale (1  =  agree; 2  =  somewhat agree; 3  =  somewhat disagree; 4  =  disagree) to the following statements: “A husband’s job is to earn money; a wife’s job is to look after the home and family”; “It is more important for a wife to help her husband’s career than to have one herself.” The 2006 JGSS uses a 7-pt scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree,” and we rescale it to a 4-pt scale for compatibility

level of traditional gender belief. As Fig. 1 shows, gender belief predicts conjugal surname attitudes at the lowest (“no support”) and highest level (“strong support”) better than the surname attitudes at the intermediate levels. The stronger one’s traditional gender belief is, the less likely it is that one gives “no support,” and the more likely it is that one gives “strong support,” to the traditional surname practice. Those with the lowest score, and the highest score, on the traditional gender belief scale have 0.33 and 0.03 probabilities, respectively, of giving no support for the shared surname practice (see the grey solid line). They each have 0.08 and 0.56 probabilities of giving strong support for the practice (see the black solid line).

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Fig. 1  Probabilities of support for shared surname practice by gender belief. (Source: Japanese General Social Survey)

Although many Japanese seem to recognize the need to modify the law, there is limited support for fūfu bessei per se. Our analysis of data from the Japanese General Social Survey (JGSS) suggests that Japanese citizens are not very supportive of fūfu bessei, and a sizable proportion of citizens give either moderate or strong support to the traditional practice for married couples. It also suggests that “no support” to the shared surname practice (the most liberal position) is negatively associated with traditional gender role attitude whereas “strong support” to the practice (the most conservative position) is positively associated with traditional gender role attitude.

Public Opinion Survey of 2021–2022 The Cabinet Office has gauged the level of public support for changing the conjugal surname law over the years. We have no access to micro data from the government opinion surveys and use summary reports of these opinion surveys available from the government website to look at the breakdown of support categories: 1=“Husband and wife should share the surname and it is not necessary to revise the current law”; 2=“The law should be revised so that husband and wife who want to retain their original surnames can do so”; 3=“Although husband and wife should share the surname, it is permissible to revise the law so that those who changed their surname after marriage can use their original surname as an alias everywhere” (see Fig. 2).

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Fig. 2  Public opinion on the conjugal shared name law, 1996–2022. (Source: Cabinet Office, https://survey.gov-­online.go.jp)

The percent of people who support a selective dual surname system declined from 42.5% in 2017 to 28.9% in 2022. However, in the latest survey in 2022, 42.2% supported a limited change which would allow the use of an alias, whereas 24.4% did in 2017. This could be because survey designs and modes of data collection are not the same across the survey years, making it difficult to describe any apparent change conclusively. Whereas all previous surveys put the response option for those endorsing the legal change to facilitate optional dual surnames (2) in the middle spot, the 2021–2022 survey put the same response category in the last spot, leading some observers to suspect that the change in order of the response categories resulted in the drop in the proportion of those who support the major change in the conjugal surname rule, as reported in the Asahi Shimbun (2022). Another possible artifact is that the most recent survey was done by mail (presumably due to COVID-19) whereas all other surveys were administered in person, which could have affected the responses. In our view, the gap in survey methods between 2021–22 and previous years perhaps inadvertently led respondents to “moderately support” the law change (in terms of allowing the use of an alias in all places). As discussed earlier, the Japanese government has been permitting the use of an alias in many settings, and Japanese citizens are likely to feel more at ease with the idea of changing the surname law only by legalizing the use of aliases. In this context, putting the “alias” option in the middle response categories could have encouraged choosing it. Indeed, this may have lowered not only support for major change but also support for no change.

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Individuals may support the current surname law for various reasons. 54% of the respondents felt that surname change after marriage marks the beginning of a new life and gives a sense of joy. This rate was higher than in any of the previous five surveys, ranging between 42 to 48%. Although 62% of the respondents believe that whether all family members share one surname has no influence on their family unity (contrary to the viewpoint of conservative politicians and activists opposed to the revision of the current rule), 69% felt that dual surnames adversely affect children. Meanwhile, Japanese, especially women, are sympathetic to those affected by the surname law. 48 and 56% of men and women respondents felt that the current surname law inconveniences or disadvantages those changing their surname. Moreover, 82% suspected that some couples avoid legal marriage because of the surname rule. Therefore, individuals who are concerned about the low marriage rate in Japan may be inclined to support dual conjugal surnames. The rate in 2022 is much higher than in any of the earlier years where it ranged from 57 to 67%. Despite the strong support for the limited change to the law with the use of alias noted above, 59% of the respondents felt that the use of alias will not fully remove the inconveniences or disadvantages attributed to the current surname law. On the hypothetical question of whether to keep their former surname after marriage asked to the respondents who support the system of selective dual surnames (regardless of their current marital status), only 30% said they would.

Discussion It is difficult to make sense of the social world without studying families. Exploring Japan’s surname problem, or ultimately koseki problem, is one way to gain insight into its diverse familiar landscape set against the nationalist and patriarchal norms which regulate individuals’ lives and put burdens on nonconformists. Beyond personal anecdotes, we are unclear how much the current surname law discourages marriage for young adults who are already confronted with many other issues discouraging marriage—e.g., workforce casualization and gender inequality in labor markets. Yet, the possible adverse effect of the surname rule on marriage is ironic by itself and is especially so given the emphasis the government places on marriage promotion to increase fertility and tackle problems associated with population aging. Since the Supreme Court decided to uphold the shared conjugal surname law in December 2015, the fūfu bessei social movement has shifted its efforts to the legislative front. Elected members of the opposition parties are more supportive of the change to legalize separate surnames for married couples, but some (usually female) members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) also indicate support for the change. By contrast, the conservative faction of the LDP and their ideologues see the dual surname option as erosive of family unity as conceived in the traditional Japanese way. But how much does this political view resonate with the public?

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The Japanese public, especially the young, may be increasingly open to a legal change that allows dual surnames for married couples, as was found by the government and other surveys. In March and April, 2021, a Kyodo News survey found 60% of the respondents endorsed optional dual conjugal surnames and 38% were opposed to the idea (Japan Times, 2021). However, Japanese overall appear to be on the fence about drastically revamping the current surname rule. It may take continuous effort for fūfu bessei advocates and organizations to convince the public that the surname issue is not only about women’s right to keep their surname after marriage but about fighting against social inequalities more broadly. Because, as of today, Japan does not allow LGBT individuals to legally marry, they could not share their partners’ surname even if they wanted to. Meanwhile, Japanese citizens married to foreigners can keep their surnames regardless of their spouses’ surname changes. Indeed, when Japanese marry a foreign national, they are not required to update their koseki record in the usual Japanese way, implying that foreign spouses do not qualify to form a legitimate nuclear family. One may argue that the “choice” afforded to these couples does little to legitimate their marital status in the eyes of the state considering that foreign spouses are not given a proper spot but mentioned in a footnote in the family registry. The current civil code and koseki law ultimately serve to socially stratify partnered individuals into the legally and legitimately married vs. those in other forms of partnership (and, thus, children of the legitimately married vs. other children). Beyond the national politics and (mostly) domestic fūfu bessei movements, one may ponder the potential role that international pressure could play in keeping the current momentum for changing the surname law. As part of either Meiji nation-­ state building or the social reforms following the country’s defeat in WWII, Japanese family law came about under the great influence of external forces, i.e., the colonizing pressure of Western Europe and the United States and US-led Allied Occupation Forces, respectively. As Nagai (1969) observed more than a half century ago, especially in the formulation of the post-WWII family law, forces “from without → from above” (p. 396) helped modernize Japan’s family system to upend patriarchy and become gender egalitarian. In the process, conservatives won concessions from the Western powers who themselves were not exactly the exemplars of gender equality. Domestic progressive forces were present in both periods, but not sufficient to overcome conservatives who considered traditional family relations the moral base of civility and thus necessary to keep social order (Lo & Bettinger, 2001). In recent periods, the Japanese government has continued to face international pressure to amend the country’s conjugal surname rule and other parts of family law so as not to violate basic human rights. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women has for many years been pressuring the Japanese government to allow dual conjugal surnames (United Nations, 2016). The 2015 Supreme Court decision upholding the surname rule has gained much notoriety internationally. The media coverage (e.g., newspapers and TV news) originating outside Japan has been generally sympathetic to individuals in Japan adversely affected by the rule and presented it as outdated and unjust. Just as the Meiji elites

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sought to impress the Western powers to establish themselves as equals in the international community, Japan’s elites today are surely aware of the country’s image problem. For example, the Global Gender Gap Index (World Economic Forum, 2022) ranked Japan 116th of 146 countries, lagging behind all OECD countries except Turkey (ranked at 124th) and many other countries including ones in Asia. It is possible and even likely that the ongoing negative publicity of aspects of Japan’s family law will somehow help bring about the long-awaited necessary revisions to the 1947 Family Law (Toshitani, 1994) including but not limited to the conjugal surname rule. Nevertheless, in the end, the change would need to come “from-within → from below” (Nagai, 1969). One may be somewhat skeptical of whether even the revised surname law allowing dual conjugal surnames would do much good if it came with the sort of “blank clauses” that Toshitani (1994) discussed in his analysis of the Family Law of 1947. In order to address social inequity in the familial arena, all sectors of Japanese society—governments, businesses, NPOs, and individuals— must challenge the heteronormative, patriarchal family model, of which the current conjugal surname law is only one part. Acknowledgement  The Japanese General Social Survey (JGSS) is designed and carried out by the JGSS Research Center at Osaka University of Commerce (Joint Usage / Research Center for Japanese General Social Surveys accredited by MEXT) with support from the Osaka University of Commerce. JGSS-2000-2008 was funded by Gakujutsu Frontier Grant from the MEXT. JGSS-2010/2012 was supported by MEXT Promotion of Joint Research Center Program. JGSS-2015/2016 received funding from JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP26245060, JP15H03485, JP24243057, the Institute of Amusement Industry Studies at Osaka University of Commerce, Research Grant on Labor Issues 2015 (PI: Hachiro Iwai), and Japan Center for Economic Research 2014 (Noriko Iwai). JGSS-2000-2005 was conducted in collaboration with the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo. JGSS-2006-2012 was conducted in cooperation with the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo. JGSS-2016 was conducted in collaboration with the Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University.

References Beasely, W. G. (1990). The rise of modern Japan: Political, economic, and social change since 1850. St. Martin’s Press. Cabinet Office. (2022). Kazoku no hosei ni kansuru seron chosa (public opinion survey on family law). Castrén, A.-M. (2019). Becoming “us”: Marital name, gender, and agentic work in transition to marriage. Journal of Marriage and Family, 81(1), 248–263. Chapman, D. (2019). Article 772 and Japan’s unregistered. Japan Forum, 31(2), 235–253. Chapman, D., & Krogness, K.  J. (2014). The koseki. In D.  Chaplan & K.  J. Krogness (Eds.), Japan’s household registration system and citizenship: Koseki, identification and documentation (pp. 1–18). Routledge. Dion, K. L. (1983). Names, identity, and self. Names: A Journal of Onomastics, 31(4), 245–257. Elias, N. (1991). The society of individuals. Oxford.

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Finch, J. (2008). Naming names: Kinship, individuality and personal names. Sociology, 42(4), 709–725. Finkel, E. J., Hui, C. M., Carswell, K. L., & Larson, G. M. (2014). The suffocation of marriage: Climbing Mount Maslow without enough oxygen. Psychological Inquiry, 25(1), 1–41. Gooding, G. E., & Kreider, R. M. (2010). Women’s marital naming choices in a nationally representative sample. Journal of Family History, 31(5), 681–701. Hashimoto, A., & Traphagan, J.  W. (2008). Changing Japanese families. In A.  Hashimoto & J. W. Traphagan (Eds.), Imagined families, lived families: Culture and kinship in contemporary Japan (pp. 1–12). SUNY Press. Japan Times. (2021, June 23). Japan’s top court says forcing couples to share surname is constitutional. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/06/23/national/crime-­legal/ top-­court-­surname-­ruling Lo, M.-C. M., & Bettinger, C. P. (2001). The historical emergence of a “familial society” in Japan. Theory and Society, 30(2), 237–279. Lockwood, P., Burton, C., & Boersma, K. (2011). Tampering with tradition: Rationales concerning women’s married names and children’s surnames. Sex Roles, 65(11–12), 827–839. Maher, J.  C. (1999). Fufu bessei: Marriage and change-name policy in Japan. The Japanese Journal of Language in Society, 2(1), 25–36. Mainichi Japan. (2019a, January 27). Volunteers petition local gov’ts to allow married Japanese to choose different surnames. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20190127/ p2a/00m/0na/006000c Mainichi Japan. (2019b, December 4). Name recognition: Separate surnames for spouses gains traction in Japanese society. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20191203/p2a/00m/0na/019000c Mainichi Japan. (2021, April 17). Japanese lawmaker questions gov’t move to allow use of maiden names as aliases. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210417/p2a/00m/0na/004000c Matsubara, H. (1969). The family and Japanese society after world war II. The Developing Economies, 7, 499–526. Muta, K. (1994). Images of the family in Meiji periodicals: The paradox underlying the emergence of the “home”. U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal English Supplement, 7, 53–71. Nagai, M. (1969). Social changes in postwar Japan. The Developing Economies, 7, 395–405. Nishikawa, Y. (1996). The modern Japanese family system: Unique or universal? (Sakai Minako & Gavan McCormack, Trans.). In D.  Denoon, M.  Hudson, G.  McCormack, & T.  MorrisSuzuki (Eds.), Multicultural Japan: Paleolithic to postmodern (224–232). Cambridge University Press. Noack, T., & Wiik, K. A. (2008). Women’s choice of surname upon marriage in Norway. Journal of Marriage and Family, 70(2), 507–518. Omura, M. (2019). Why can’t I keep my surname? The fairness and welfare of the Japanese legal system. Feminist Economics, 25(3), 171–200. Ostrander, S.  A. (2010). Social change organizations. In H.  K. Anheier & S.  Toepler (Eds.), International encyclopedia of civil society. Springer. Pilcher, J. (2017). Names and “doing gender”: How forenames and surnames contribute to gender identities, difference, and inequalities. Sex Roles, 77(11–12), 812–822. Shin, K.-y. (2008). ‘The personal is the political’: Women’s surname change in Japan. Journal of Korean Law, 8, 161–179. Shin, K.-y. (2009). Fufubessei movement in Japan: Thinking about women’s resistance and subjectivity. In C. Bose & M. Kim (Eds.), Global gender research (pp. 141–148). Routledge. Stoiko, R. R., & Strough, J. (2017). ‘Choosing’ the patriarchal norm: Emerging adults’ marital last name change attitudes, plans, and rationales. Gender Issues, 34(4), 295–315. Tanaka, K. (2012). Surnames and gender in Japan: Women’s challenges in seeking own identity. Journal of Family History, 37(2), 232–240. Taniguchi, H., & Kaufman, G. (2020). Attitudes toward married persons’ surnames in twenty-first century Japan. Gender Issues, 37, 205–222.

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The Asahi Shimbun (2022, March 29). Noda doubts poll showing falling support for dual surnames. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14584895 Toshitani, N. (1994). The reform of Japanese family law and changes in the family system. U.S.Japan Women’s Journal English Supplement, 6, 66–82. Toyoda, E. (2020). Japan’s marital system reform: The fūfu bessei movement for individual rights. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 18(13:3), 1–26. Toyoda, E., & Chapman, D. (2017). Resistance and reform: discourses on marital law in Japan. Japan Forum, 29(4), 470–495. Toyoda, E., & Chapman, D. (2019). Family matters: Nippon Kaigi and keeping things normal. Japanese Studies, 39(3), 371–390. Tsukimori, O. (2020, September 30). Japan looks to My Number cards to unlock country’s digital transformation. The Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/09/30/national/ japan-­number-­card-­digital-­transformation/ Ueno, C. (2009). The modern family in Japan: Its rise and fall. Trans Pacific Press. United Nations, CEDAW. (2016). Concluding observations on the combined seventh and eighth periodic reports of Japan. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/833895?ln=en White, L. E. (2018). Gender and the koseki in contemporary Japan: Surname, power, and privilege. Routledge. World Economic Forum. (2022). The global gender gap report. https://www.weforum.org/reports/ global-­gender-­gap-­report-­2022/ Yamamoto, S. (2021, April 16). Japanese surnames: a call for change. NHK-World. https://www3. nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1599/ Hiromi Taniguchi is an associate professor of Sociology at University of Louisville, USA. Trained as a life-course researcher, she has studied work-family interface, personal relationship, and civic engagement in the United States, in Japan, and from a cross-country perspective  

Gayle Kaufman is Nancy and Erwin Maddrey Professor of Sociology and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Davidson College, USA. Their areas of research are gender and family attitudes, marriage, fatherhood, work and family, and LGBTQ+ families. They are the author of Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Family in the twenty-first Century (2013) and Fixing Parental Leave: The Six Month Solution (2020) and co-editor of the Journal of Family Studies  

Family, Graves, and Gender in Japan Kimiko Tanaka

Abstract  When the average number of children per family was more than two, it was often the role of the eldest son and his wife to take the major responsibility for the ritual services for the deceased and the succession to the family grave. However, this became a significant issue when the fertility level fell below two children. This chapter discusses two key concepts to understanding the Japanese family grave, ie system and danka system. Then it explains why more people started to become proactive in seeking alternative options to the family grave and addresses minority populations marginalized in these systems. Finally, the chapter illustrates how Japanese people think about the ideal grave and their plan to inherit their family grave based on the Japanese General Social Survey (JGSS) 2015 data. Keyword  Family grave · Ie system · Danka system · Shūkatsu

Introduction Today, Japanese fertility continues to decline, which accelerates the speed of aging in Japan. In 1880, only 5.72% of the population was 65 and above, increasing to 5.73% in 1960, 17.36% in 2000, and 28.88% in 2020. It is projected to increase to 37.68% in 2050 (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2022). The total population growth has turned negative since 2011, and the population size could drop below 100 million by 2050 from the current population size of 127 million (Hashimoto et al., 2020; Thang et al., 2023). Outmigration of the young creates rural depopulation, resulting in Japan becoming both a rapidly ageing society but also an urbanized society with 78.8% of the population concentrated in K. Tanaka (*) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_27

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urban areas based on the Population Census 2005 (Murakami et al., 2009). Rural depopulation results in more empty houses (akiya), especially in rural areas, and some estimates say that as many as one third of total houses may become empty houses by 2033 (Hashimoto et al., 2020). In Japan, many worship their ancestors, and the family grave is an object of worship. The family grave consists of a gravestone inscribed with the family name. Beneath the gravestone, there are vessels each containing ashes and bones of the deceased. The family grave is for a household, not for an individual. It mostly passed on from father to son because Japanese women are expected to change their surname upon marriage unless they are the only child in the family. If they are the only child, these women could ask their spouses to change their surname upon marriage so that they could inherit their family grave (Tanaka, 2007). The emphasis on the succession of the family grave is based on a belief that one’s soul floats as a muenbotoke (disconnected soul) without proper ceremonies on anniversaries for years after death (Marr, 2021). With proper ritual care by family members, a soul can join the anonymous collectivity of the ancestors to become part of living family’s ancestors (Payne, 1999). Turning into a muenbtoke is not only a fear for individuals, but also for  the household, because of the belief that ancestors protect family members if families continue to pay proper ritual attention, especially on special religious holidays. Neglecting the rituals can displease their family ancestors and bring misfortune (Connor & Traphagan, 2014). When children do something bad, parents often use the phrase bachi ga ataru, meaning such behavior will incur divine punishment. This is one example where Japanese use spiritual beings for social control in everyday conversation. Today, there are alternatives to the family grave. A good example is a grave with perpetual memorial services by a temple (eitai kuyobo), where temple priests instead of family members provide ritual care for the deceased after death, which saves them from becomming a disconnected soul. However, those who choose alternative options to the family grave are still a minority. This chapter addresses how postwar demographic change has challenged the relationship between family and temples and discusses why alternative options remain the minority regardless of their availability.

 wo Systems Continue to Influence Japanese Families: T Danka-­seido and ie-seido To understand the Japanese family grave, it is important to understand two systems, danka system (danka-seido) and ie system (ie-seido). In Japan, many funerals and family graves follow the system called danka-seido, which is an affiliation system of temples and households. Although this system can be tracked back to the Heian period (794–1185), the relationship between a temple and its parishioners were somewhat loose during the late medieval period. The system became an obligatory relationship in the Tokugawa period (1603–1867) when the Tokugawa Shogunate

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forced people to register at their local Buddhist temples to confirm their allegiance to the Buddhist faith. It was a way for the Tokugawa regime to monitor religious elements that could undermine its political authority by forcing Christians to become Buddhist temple parishioners. Feudal lords burned down churches, destroyed Christian graveyards, and captured Christians to force them to convert to Buddhism. Those who refused to abandon their faith were imprisoned (Tamamuro & Williams, 2009). The Tokugawa regime stressed loyalty and dependence. Mandatory household affiliation provided economic support for temples and increased the temples’ dependence on the state. Despite its legal end in the late nineteenth century, the danka system continues to influence the temple-family interactions as a bond of obligation (Gould et al., 2019). In the danka system, the smallest unit is the household, and the individual existed merely as a member of that unit (Marcure, 1985). In other words, without any individual initiation, people become Buddhist through asking for ritual performances for their family graves to their local temples (Tajima, 2016). Decreased birth rates and an aging population negatively influenced rural towns more than they did in urban areas due to dramatic rural-urban-migration in post-war Japan. In a rural farming town called Nantan City in Kyoto, 70 households decided to dismantle their family graves (haka-jimai) for the temple to create a community grave because increasing numbers of families find it  difficult to succeed to their family graves due to lack of successors. The proportion of the population 65 years old and above in the region is 42%. Since the elderly need to go up a steep slope to visit the gravesite, it also became increasingly challenging for them to maintain the site (Ota 2022). Dismantling a grave involves removing the ashes and bones of those buried inside the grave and then placing them in a columbarium (Chan & Thang, 2021). Other alternative options to the family grave include perpetual memorial services by temple (eitai kuyobo). Individuals must pay for permanent ritual services when they are alive, and the cost varies by geographical locations, gravesites, and options. There are various options for the grave with perpetual memorial services. People can be buried in a communal grave after death or they can be buried in an individual grave or the grave with their spouse for a number of years, then move to the communal grave. The latter option provides more time for their close family members and friends to visit their grave without placing any burden on them. For the grave with a perpetual memorial service, instead of the surname, Japanese characters that describe peace, love, or gathering are inscribed on the communal gravestone, which allows people who do not share the same surname to be buried in the same grave. Tree burials (jumokusou) and scattering ashes are other alternative options for those who do not want to have a tombstone. However, these alternative options are still the minority due to the persistent influence of the ie system. Japanese families continue to be influenced by the ie system, which is the household system that grant absolute authority to heads of the household, mostly the eldest sons, on all household matters. Defeat in World War II legally ended the ie system. However, such influence of the ie custom did not easily fade out even after the democratization of postwar Japanese society. The succession of the ie continues

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to influence Japanese families as customs. Funerals, family graves, and ritual services for the deceased are good examples. Analysis of Japanese General Social Survey (JGSS) 2001 data suggests that younger generations feel greater responsibility to take care of their family grave because more than half of the respondents in their 20s and 30s have only one sibling whereas more than half of those in their 50s, 60s, and 70s have three siblings or more. Influenced by declined fertility, the chance and the responsibility of inheriting  the family grave became greater for younger generations than older generations (Tanaka, 2007). A civic group formed the Grave-Free Promotion Society (GFPS) in 1990 to promote the scattering of ashes. However, despite historical precedents of scattering ashes in the ancient and medieval periods, the family custom of asking for temples to care for the family graves since the Tokugawa period makes the public support for the GFPS far from universal (Rowe, 2003). Ando (2020) calls it “ie-mentality”, which explains why more than 60% of Japanese hope to be buried in the family grave. Searching for “dismantling grave” and “permanent ritual care” online in Japanese, various websites addressed cases where relatives were absolutely against the idea of ending the family grave. These websites suggest having good conversations with them to avoid possible troubles before proceeding. However, having such conversations is emotionally draining. Legally, only one person can inherit the family grave. Following the custom, the eldest son is more likely to be appointed to be the successor. The successor’s male siblings are expected to build his family grave, and female siblings are expected to be buried in their spouse’s family grave. If these siblings are single, it is possible for them to be buried in the family grave with permission from the successor. If their siblings are single parents, it can create some challenges because a child indicates a successor, which violates the rule of one successor in a household per family grave. When an only child marries another only child, there is an option to merge both family graves to create one family grave with an option to inscribe two surnames on the gravestone or Japanese characters they like. However, it involves tedious procedures and significant costs in addition to persuading relatives from both households. Furthermore, even after getting approval from relatives, regulations of who can be buried in the family grave vary by gravesites. Some gravesites are managed by temples, and differences in religious sects of Buddhism can add another layer of complexity.

Afterlife Planning (Shūkatsu) The mean ages of marriage are now 31 years for men and 29 years for women, and 20% women are projected to never marry (Raymo et  al., 2021). Prolonged life expectancy gave older adults more time to contemplate how they want to live their lives after retirement (Chan & Thang, 2021). Playing a tug-of-war with ie-mentality, the inevitable graying of Japanese society led more people to be proactive and seek alternative options. Funeral preparations were community-based that required assistance from relatives and neighbors in pre-war Japan. However, rapid rural-to-urban

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migration in the 1950s and 1960s weakened community ties and funerals became commercialized. Urbanization created nuclear families who maintain a relationship by occasionally visiting to attend ancestral rituals for their deceased family members. Prior to COVID-19, some local taxi companies began providing services to visit the family graves on behalf of the elderly. COVID-19 made it difficult for some people living in cities to visit their family graves in rural areas, and people may continue to use such services in the post COVID-19 era by paying about 8,000 yen to ask them to clean up the family grave (Katayama, 2022). Children of these rural-­ to-­urban migrants eventually find it difficult to sustain their relationship, and some try to move their family grave to a geographically closer cemetery or else to close it (Tajima, 2016). Furthermore, urbanization and the nuclear family mean that many elderly couples are living alone. According to the 2010 Census, three-generational households decreased to 5% and single-person households increased to 32% (Tsuji, 2018). Kodokushi (lonely death) describes the phenomenon in Japan where solitary elderly with almost no social contact with anyone were found dead after weeks or months because nobody noticed their disappearance. According to data from the Tokyo Metropolitan Medical Examiner’s office, the number of deaths at home of those living 65 and above in Tokyo metropolitan area increased from 1,451 cases to 2,869 cases from 2003 to 2013 (Kato et  al., 2017). As the funeral industry expanded, beside the graveyard attached to temples, more options became available and increasing numbers of those that lack successors or those living apart from their children decided to take more control over their options in mortuary ceremonies and graves. Very gradually, growing old began shifting from a collective responsibility to a personal matter where individuals gather information to make choices to plan and prepare in how they want to live their lives (Chan & Thang, 2021). In the past, there was a strong custom for adult children to look after their elderly parents in extended families. Taking care of funerals, graves, and ritual performance for the deceased was the responsibility of family members, which left not much choice to individuals. Shūkatsu is a term coined in 2009 and it means to actively plan for one’s end of life including one’s own funeral and grave while one is still alive. The word mimics the homophonous term for job hunting in Japanese (Mladenova, 2020). Instead of following traditional norms, shūkatsu encourages older adults to individualize and customize their plan to take control of their end-of-­ life and afterlife. To put it differently, the increased popularity of shūkatsu reflects a weakened taboo to discuss death in public as well as increased choices provided to individuals in a super-aging society (Keiichi, 2017). Shūkatsu programs include writing a parting note that includes memories of their lives, wishes regarding their funerals, and messages to their family members. In one of the programs offered at Nagano Prefecture through a non-profit organization (NPO), they take the elderly to burial grounds that offer natural burials. As shūkatsu became popular, businesses and trust banks began sponsoring exhibitions of products and services, resulting in the value of death preparation business in Japan estimated to be 1.84 billion yen in 2018 (Kim, 2023). Transition from family responsibility to individual responsibility creates dilemmas. Since the rituals for the

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deceased require years of transition and was inevitably built on the support of family members, so writing ending notes can increase the burden on family members to fulfill what they wished. Furthermore, it is extremely challenging to predict everything in regards to one’s death ahead of time, and many end up leaving the decisions up to their family members (Kim, 2023). When to begin shūkatsu is another challenge, as it requires years of planning to accumulate enough savings to take care of one’s end of life without relying on family members. Based on the Japanese Life Course Panel Study, Raymo and his colleagues (2021) found that two-thirds of unmarried men and women can be classified as drifting into singlehood while less than 5% are classified as rejecting marriage. As Japan faces ever-increasing numbers of the elderly, the physical, emotional, and financial burdens for children to take care of their elder parents are also expected to increase. Hoping to marry someday or spending so much time taking care of one’s parents, in reality, some may not have enough savings and time for their shūkatsu.

Marginalized Populations As Japan faces significant population decline, to combat labor shortages, there are expected to be more migrants especially from nearby Asian nations including the Philippines, South Korea, China, and Vietnam. In 2018, 115,000 new immigrants arrived Japan on a long-term or permanent basis, which is 15.8% more than 2017. 57.4% of them were labor migrants, and 27.7% were family members (OECD, 2020). Japan Broadcasting Corporation aired a documentary that featured foreigners who cannot find a grave that would accept them. They interviewed Brazilian families with Japanese decent. They were rejected from purchasing the cemetery plot because their nationality is not Japanese. One of them said, “I could not understand Japanese well, so it was hard to gather the information. I gave up because Japanese gravesites are only for Japanese nationals and their families” (NHK, 2021). The program also featured Muslim migrants. Cremation goes against the tenets of their religion. But in Japan, 99% of the deceased are cremated. Because there are only nine cemeteries where a body can be buried, Muslim migrants are more likely to end up being buried somewhere away from their local communities (NHK, 2021). Under the myth of Japan as a homogeneous nation, the LGBTQ population also felt marginalized because they cannot fit into the patriarchal ie system. There are LGBTQ couples whose family members refused their being buried together, and some temples refused LGBTQ couples because accepting them could worsen the danka-system established between temples and households. There are cases of LGBTQ couples scattering ashes of their partners into the ocean because they have no other choice (Fukaseko, 2020). The Japan Buddhist Federation (JBF) offered a symposium in 2020 to show support for the LGBTQ community by emphasizing the core beliefs of Buddhism that all creatures should live happily. One of the presenters was Kodo Nisimura who is a LGBTQ activist, artist, and Buddhist monk. In

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an interview with Time, he said that when he came out to his parents, his father who is a professor of Buddhist studies told him to live the life he wants, and his well-­ respected master told him that Buddhism does not deny anybody based on their sexuality, ethnicity, sex or disability (Chen, 2021). Gradually, more temples and cemeteries offer an option of a family grave based on the family of choice where people voluntary chose family members based on the relationship not bound by legal relationships. Furthermore, because of greater family dissolution and growing economic uncertainty, some urban day laborers’ districts (yoseba) have transformed into welfare colonies. The residents of these districts often do not have close families and enough savings for permanent ritual care; so they fear lonely deaths and becoming disconnected souls. Kim (2016) conducted ethnographic research at Kotobuki, which is known as one of the three largest districts for day laborers. An increasing number of these laborers became permanently homeless. Activists and supporters accompanied the homeless to apply for livelihood protection (seikatsu hogo) and the Kotobuki became a final refuge for single elderly men. Lonely death occurs more frequently there, and even after the caseworker of the deceased calls, the relatives tend to decline holding funerals or claim the remains. The bodies of those who died due to lonely death are most likely to end up in the public cemetery run by the city (Kim, 2016). The Ohaka Project is the Buddhist-Catholic-secular collaborative project aiming to ensure marginalized men, mostly itinerant workers, have a respectful death without becoming disconnected souls in their afterlives (Marr, 2021). Understanding the challenges faced by the marginalized population is crucial to designing and redesigning cemeteries that reduce anxiety in regards to after death from everyone.

 nderstanding Trends in Desire about Grave Based on JGSS U 2015 Data The Japanese General Social Survey (JGSS) is a large-scale social survey with a randomly extracted sample from Japanese men and women aged 20–89 years living in Japan at the time of the survey. JGSS is a unique survey because not many publicly available surveys ask a question in regards to their desire about a grave. In 2015, JGSS asked respondents “How do you feel about your own interment? Where would you like to be buried when you die? Please choose only one that best describes the way you feel.” Respondents have the following seven choices: (1) Family grave of my parents; (2) My spouse’s family grave; (3) I want to start a family grave which starts with my spouse and myself; (4) Grave only for my spouse and myself; (5) Grave only for myself; (6) Communal grave with others; (7) I want my ashes to be scattered over the ocean or mountains. Figure 1 summarized respondents’ desires about graves. As expected, alternatives to the family grave such as communal grave with others was a minority (4.7%),

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and the most popular response was to be buried in one’s parents’ family grave (36.6%). However, the percentage of those who wish to be buried in their spouse’s family grave was only 14.8%, which is smaller than those who responded that they want to scatter their ashes over the ocean or mountains (16.1%) (Fig. 1). These percentages reflect not only the continuance of the ie-mentality to succeed  to their family grave, but also the fragility of the family grave in the future because the succession requires more people, especially women, to respond that they wish to be buried in their spouse’s family grave. Figures 2 and 3 compared the proportion of those who want to be buried in to the family grave of their parents and those wish to be buried in their spouse’s family grave by gender. Across all age groups, a majority of respondents chose their parents’ family grave (Fig. 2). By contrast, there is a great difference by age groups among women. Influenced by the patriarchal ie-mentality, the majority of women 70 years and above expressed their desire to be buried in their spouse’s family grave (43.5%). By contrast, for women in their 20s to 50s, the proportion of those who

Family grave of my parents Family grave that starts with my spouse and myself My ashes to be scattered over the ocean or mountains My spouse's family grave Grave only for my spouse and myself Communal grave with others Grave only for myself 0

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Fig. 1  Desire about graves (n=2,042)

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Fig. 2  Family grave of my parents or my spouse’s family grave (Men, n=936)

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Family grave of my parents or my spouse's family grave (Women, n=1106) 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

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Fig. 3  Family grave of my parents or my spouse’s family grave (Women, n=1106)

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Fig. 4  Inheritance of one’s ancestral family grave (Men, n=940)

desire to succeed to their parents’ family grave was greater than those who desire to succeed to their spouse’s family grave (Fig. 3). JGSS 2015 asked another question. “Are you inheriting your ancestral family grave?” Respondents choices including (1) Yes, I am; (2) Not yet, but I will in the future; (3) No, because my sibling or relative is; (4) I have no family grave; (5) other; (6) the ancestral grave has or will be under the care of permanent memorial service or public cemetery; and (7) I do not know. Figures 4 and 5 looked at popular responses in addition to those who responded that their ancestral grave has or will be under the permanent memorial service or public cemetery. These figures show that the percentage of those who plan to terminate their ancestral family grave was trivial, one percent or less for all age groups. The majority of men in their 50s, 60s, and 70s responded that they have already inherited their family grave, implying that they take a major role in performing ritual services. Since men in their 20s, 30s, and

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Inheritance of one's ancestral family grave (Women, n=1096) 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

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Fig. 5  Inheritance of one’s ancestral family grave (Women, n=1096)

40s are young enough and their parents are possibly performing the role, a nontrivial proportion of them responded that they would eventually inherit their family grave in the future (Fig. 4). The most popular response for women was that they are not planning to inherit their family grave because their sibling or other relatives will. Such trend reflects the continuous influence of the patriarchal ie-mentality (Fig. 5). Interestingly, Fig. 5 shows that close to 30% of women in their 50s, 60s, and 70s responded that they would succeed to their parent’s ancestral family grave. In Japan, it is estimated that 28.25% of men and 17.81% of women are never married at age 50 (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2022). In other words, men have a higher chance of remaining never married at age 50 than women. Other than the possibility of being the only child, the increased proportion of never-­ married, especially never-married men in middle age, may be a reason for these women to inherit their parents’ family grave. Looking at women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, over 30% responded that they have or will succeed to their family grave. Although the most popular response was that they have siblings who will inherit their family grave, as marriage rates continue to decline, the proportion of women succeeding their parents’ family grave is expected to increase with age.

 iscussion and Conclusion: The Grave and the Family D in Japan for the Future Aging and a shrinking population means more people feel a tension between the family grave as the symbol of succession and the grave as one’s choice. The former symbolizes the ie system and the other symbolizes diversity and individuality. It is hard to predict if and whether Japanese graves will transition from the former to the latter due to the persistent influence of “ie-mentality”. Due to declining fertility

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rates, younger men are more likely to be the only male child; thus they feel a great responsibility to succeed to their family grave. However, in order to continue the succession, they need to marry and have a child, and their spouse and child need to agree to be buried in the same family grave. The analysis of JGSS 2015 data suggests that across all generations, the majority of men desire and succeed to their family grave by following the ie custom. However, for women, the result was more complex and hard to predict. One’s desire for an ideal grave may change as more women go through various life events such as getting married, becoming parents and grandparents. Their decision to inherit their ancestral family grave can be also influenced by the family trajectories of their siblings. Furthermore, women, especially younger women, held more diverse responses on the ideal grave and the succession of the ancestral family grave than men. This result may not be simply a reflection of their resistance form the patriarchal ie system. It may be a reflection of changes in the relationship quality between mothers and daughters. Several studies suggest that preference for daughters over sons became common since the 1980s. Fuse’s study based on the 11th Japanese National Fertility Survey suggests that traditionalism drives gender preference differently for men and women. For men, traditional gender role attitudes were associated with son preference. However, for women, traditionalism was linked to daughter preference. This article suggested that traditionally minded women are less likely to be economically independent. Therefore they may want companionship and old-age support from their daughter (Fuse, 2013). Bryant (1990) finds that a possible reason for the continuing practice of son-in-law adoption through marriage in Japan is the growing desire for parents to receive care from their own daughters. In the past, women left their parents’ home after marriage or a new job, and these events took place early in their life course. Today, more women spend a longer amount of time at home, and there is substantial period between retirement and death for parents. For women who want to work after marriage, being able to receive continuous support for childcare and household tasks from their parents through co-residence is an attractive option. Despite such attractiveness of sons-in-law, it affects only a minority of marriages because declining family size results in fewer families willing to give their sons for adoption (Bryant, 1990). In addition, son-in-law adoption creates additional legal steps for couples in divorce, because the ex-son-in-law remains an adopted son of his ex-wife’s family. Thus, in case of divorce, they need to nullify the adoption as well as complete the paperwork. To conclude, even though the majority of people consider the family grave to be ideal, it is hard to conclude whether patriarchal “ie-mentality” will fade out soon in Japan. As families become more diverse and these forms of families become socially accepted through social movements, alternative options to the family grave or the new type of family grave that combines two family graves of both spouses may become more attractive. While more people are interested in shūkatsu, legal and financial issues involved with succeeding to and making any changes to the family grave make people reluctant to discuss this with their parents and relatives at earlier stages in their  lives. Without any changes to make alternative options easier for

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anyone by reducing cultural, legal, and financial burdens and barriers, it may increase muenbo, grave of any relatives to succeed, in the future. Acknowledgement  The Japanese General Social Surveys (JGSS) are designed and carried out by the JGSS Research Center at Osaka University of Commerce (Joint Usage / Research Center for Japanese General Social Surveys accredited by Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology), with support by the Osaka University of Commerce. JGSS-2015 received funding from JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP26245060, JP15H03485, JP24243057, the Institute of Amusement Industry Studies at Osaka University of Commerce, Japan Center for Economic Research 2014 (Noriko Iwai), and Research Grant on Labor Issues 2015 (PI: Hachiro Iwai).

References Ando, K. (2020). New systems for the disposition of remains and the contemporary family. Japanese Journal of Family Sociology, 32(1), 83–98. https://doi.org/10.4234/jjoffamilysociology.32.83 Bryant, T. L. (1990). Sons and lovers: Adoption in Japan. The American Journal of Comparative Law, 38(2), 299–336. https://doi.org/10.2307/840102 Chan, H. H., & Thang, L. L. (2021). Active aging through later life and afterlife planning: Shūkatsu in a super-aged Japan. Social Sciences, 11(1), 3. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci11010003 Chen, A. (2021, October 13). Next generation leaders. Time. https://time.com/6103204/ kodo-­nishimura-­next-­generation-­leaders/ Connor, B.  P., & Traphagan, J.  W. (2014). Negotiating the afterlife: Emplacement as ongoing concern in contemporary Japan. Asian Anthropology, 13(1), 3–19. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1683478X.2014.879438 Fukaseko, S. (2020, September 3). Issho ni ohaka ni hairenai (Challenges the LGBTQ population faces for their burials). Tokyo Shimbun. https://www.tokyo-­np.co.jp/article/52974 Fuse, K. (2013). Daughter preference in Japan. Demographic Research, 28, 1021–1052. Gould, H., Kohn, T., & Gibbs, M. (2019). Uploading the ancestors: Experiments with digital Buddhist altars in contemporary Japan. Death Studies, 43(7), 456–465. https://doi.org/10.108 0/07481187.2018.1544948 Hashimoto, Y., Hong, G. H., & Zhang, X. (2020). Demographics and the housing market: Japan’s disappearing cities. IMF Working Papers, 20(192). https://doi.org/10.5089/9781513557700.001 Katayama, K. (2022, July 22). Ohaka no katachi wa angai kawattekita (Changing Japanese graves). Yomiuri Shimbun. https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/column/chottomae/20220720-­OYT8T50029/ Kato, T.  A., Shinfuku, N., Sartorius, N., & Kanba, S. (2017). Loneliness and single-person households: Issues of Kodokushi and Hikikomori in Japan. In N. Okkels, C. B. Kristiansen, & P.  Munk-Jørgensen (Eds.), Mental health and illness in the city (pp.  205–219). Springer Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­981-­10-­2327-­9_9 Keiichi, N. (2017). What is behind the increased debates on Shukatsu (making preparation for one’s death)? Exploring the issues regarding funerals and tombs. Women’s Studies Forum, 31, 227–249. https://doi.org/10.18878/00005388 Kim, J. (2016). Necrosociality: Isolated death and unclaimed cremains in Japan. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 22(4), 843–863. Kim, H. (2023). Everyday rehearsal of death and the dilemmas of dying in super-ageing Japan. Modern Asian Studies, 57(1), 32–52. Cambridge Core. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0026749X21000445 Marcure, K. A. (1985). The Danka system. Monumenta Nipponica, 40(1), 39–67. JSTOR. https:// doi.org/10.2307/2385001

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Marr, M.  D. (2021). The Ohaka (grave) project: Post-secular social service delivery and resistant necropolitics in San’ya, Tokyo. Ethnography, 22(1), 88–110. https://doi. org/10.1177/1466138119845393 Mladenova, D. (2020). Optimizing one’s own death: The Shūkatsu industry and the enterprising self in a hyper-aged society. Contemporary Japan, 32(1), 103–127. https://doi.org/10.108 0/18692729.2020.1717105 Murakami, K., Gilroy, R., & Atterton, J. (2009). Planning for the ageing countryside in Japan: The potential impact of multi-habitation. Planning Practice & Research, 24(3), 285–299. https:// doi.org/10.1080/02697450903020734 National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. (2022). Population statistics 2022. https://www.ipss.go.jp/syoushika/tohkei/Popular/Popular2022.asp?chap=6 NHK (Director). (2021, July 21). Ohaka ni hairenai... Nihon de saigo wo mukaeru gaikokujin tachi (Foreigners challenges to be buried in Japan). In Close up Gendai. https://www.nhk.or.jp/ gendai/articles/4574/ OECD. (2020). International migration outlook 2020. OECD. https://www.oecd-­ilibrary.org/sites/ b140958b-­en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/b140958b-­en Ota, Y. (2022, September 17). Isshono hana ni hairou shudan zenin de hakajimai, Kyoto Nantan-­ shi (The joint monument replaced ancestral graves in Nantan City, Kyoto). Sankei Shimbun. https://www.sankei.com/article/20220917-­ECFWYQW6AVMVVL4L7QCXOCDD3Q/ Payne, R.  K. (1999). 15. Shingon services for the dead. In G.  J. Tanabe (Ed.), Religions of Japan in practice (pp.  159–165). Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.151 5/9780691214740-­021 Raymo, J. M., Uchikoshi, F., & Yoda, S. (2021). Marriage intentions, desires, and pathways to later and less marriage in Japan. Demographic Research, 44, 67–98. Rowe, M. (2003). Grave changes: Scattering ashes in contemporary Japan. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 30(1/2), 85–118. Tajima, T. (2016). Ethnic buddhist temples and the Korean diaspora in Japan. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 11. [Kimiko, is there any more information to add?] Tamamuro, F., & Williams, D. (2009). The development of the temple-parishioner system. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 36(1), 11–26. Tanaka, K. (2007). Graves and families in Japan: Continuity and change. The History of the Family, 12(3), 178–188. Thang, L.  L., Yui, Y., Wakabayashi, Y., & Miyazawa, H. (2023). Promoting age-friendly community of support and care in Japan’s aging neighborhood: The Nagayama model. Aging and Health Research, 3(1), 100111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ahr.2022.100111 Tsuji, Y. (2018). Evolving mortuary rituals in contemporary Japan. In A. C. G. M. Robben (Ed.), A companion to the anthropology of death (pp. 17–30). John Wiley & Sons, Inc. https://doi. org/10.1002/9781119222422.ch2 Kimiko Tanaka is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at James Madison University. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Michigan State University. She has published articles on Japan to discuss aging, families, culture, rural depopulation, and gender. Her recent publication, Successful Aging in a Rural Community in Japan, provides the important insight that words such as “rural” and “depopulation” do not simply equate with negative outcomes for the elderly in rural Japan.  

Male Caregivers in Japan: Between Care and Masculinity Mao Saito

Abstract  This chapter examines the relationship between care and masculinity, based on the actual caregiving practices of male caregivers in Japan. As the country with the highest aging rate in the world, the number of male caregivers is on the rise. However, the quantitative increase in the number of male caregivers has not only had a positive impact on the quality of caregiving. This chapter focused  on four specific difficulties faced by male caregivers in Japan: difficulties in managing housework, isolation from the community, difficulties in balancing work and caregiving, and even cases of abuse and murder by caregivers. Men’s involvement in care does not lead to an automatic deconstruction of masculinity. While care as a “job” rooted in traditional masculinity leads to improving the welfare system, it also makes it harder for male caregivers to raise SOS. Keywords  Male caregivers · Caring masculinities · Traditional masculine identity · Peer support

Introduction In Japan, providing elderly care has been regarded as a women’s job, especially for daughters-in-law. However, we are now entering an era where we cannot escape the responsibility of elderly care regardless of whether we are working, raising children, or living away from our aging parents. In Japan one out of every three caregivers is male. In recent years, the concept of “caring masculinities” has been drawing attention in regard to the connection between care and masculinity in the field of men’s studies (Hanlon, 2012; Elliott, 2016). Gender equality of responsibility for caring is a very important issue, but there is no common consensus about what M. Saito (*) Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_28

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gender equality of caring should look like because caring-related behaviors and social norms are deeply associated with femininity in modern society. Male carers have to negotiate their masculine identities through their experiences of caring (Kramer & Thompson Jr., 2002). As the concept of “caring masculinities” has focused mainly on fatherhood, consideration of male care for the elderly is neglected. What kinds of changes in the care system and the living environment of families are linked to the increase in male caregivers? What does the quantitative increase in male caregivers mean? How does the increase in male caregivers impact the improvement in the quality of care? How does involvement in elderly care change traditional masculinity? In 2009, the author and others launched “the National Network of Male Caregivers and Supporters” and worked on activities to prevent the isolation of male caregivers (Saito, 2021). This chapter considers the issues concerning Japan’s family caregivers and gender while introducing the social background of the increasing number of male caregivers and the challenges they are likely to face.

Changing Image of Family Caregivers and Gender Japan is known for the rapid progression of its aging society over a short period, unlike the gradual progression in Europe and the United States. According to the government’s statistics, Japan’s total population decreased by 820,000 compared to the previous year, while the elderly aged 65 and over increased by 60,000 compared to last year to 36.27 million, which is the highest number ever. It accounts for 29.1% of the total population (the Statistics Office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications). The office estimates that the number of elderly aged 100 and over is more than 80,000 and will be more than 500,000 in 2050. According to a survey by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, the incidence of dementia increases with age, and more than half (47.1% of males and 58.9% of females) of those aged 85 and over are dementia patients (The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, 2015). However, we are yet to see improvement in the declining birth rate. The total fertility rate in 2021 stood at 1.30—down for the sixth consecutive year—and the number of births also fell to a record low of 810,1604 (29,231 fewer births compared to the previous year). In addition to these demographic factors, such as the aging population and the declining birth rate, drastic changes related to family, such as the tendency to delay marriage and increases in divorce and dual-income households, are having a considerable impact on how people provide care to family members. The so-called “nuclear family,” composed of a married couple and their unmarried children, is no longer the standard household in Japan. In particular, if we look at the households of elderly people aged 65 and over, there is a marked increase in single households and couple-only households, driving up the number of smaller families (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1  Households with persons aged 65 and over Source: “Basic Survey in Welfare Administration” by the Ministry of Health and Welfare Before 1985 and “Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions” by the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare after 1986 Note: The fig. 1995 excludes Hyogo Prefecture, the 2011 figure excludes Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures, the 2012 figure excludes Fukushima Prefecture, and the 2016 figure excludes Kumamoto Prefecture

These changes to the attributes of families are reflected in the gender ratio of caregivers within the family. One is the increase in dual-income households where both wife and husband are working due to women’s participation in the labor market (Fig. 2). The proportion of daughters-in-law as the most typical caregivers has drastically decreased, while male caregivers such as husbands and sons have emerged as new caregivers. According to national statistics, 35% of the primary caregivers living together are men (National Life Survey 2019, Fig. 3). Figure 3 shows that nowadays, the main forms of care are inter-partner care by a husband or a wife and care of one’s parent by a son and daughter. We can also expect a rise in the number of working caregivers who take care of their parents while keeping their jobs, sandwich caregivers who are responsible for childcare and elderly care, and separated care by children living apart from their parents. Families centered on full-time housewives, who exclusively undertake housework, childcare, and elderly care, are becoming a minority.

10 thousand households

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1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Households with a non1114 952 897 955 916 863 797 687 664 641 606 582 employed housewife Dual-income households 614 722 823 908 942 988 1012 1052 1129 1188 1219 1245 Source: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, “Labor Force Survey”

Fig. 2  Households by income earner Source: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, “Labor Force Survey” Notes: 1. “Households with a non-employed housewife” means a household in which the husband is employed in a non-agricultural industry and the wife is not working 2. “Dual-income households” means a household in which both husband and wife are employed in non-agricultural industries

Fig. 3  The changes in the types of main caregiver living together Source: The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, “the Basic Survey of National Life”

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Difficulties Faced by Male Caregivers Work-Focused Life Course Unlike childcare, where parents have a preparation period beforehand, a caregiver often has to suddenly begin and become involved in elderly care, regardless of the situation with them or their families. From the perspective of gender equality in elderly care, we should welcome men’s commitment to elderly care itself (Saito, 2016). However, the reality is that a rise in the number of male caregivers has not necessarily resulted in a positive impact on improving the quality of care. It is still the case that the behavioral patterns and lifestyle models that Japanese society requires of men are difficult to reconcile with their full involvement in housework, childcare, and elderly care. Since Post World War II, the so-called corporate warriors, represented by salaried men, have become the archetype of Japanese men’s lifestyles. It has deeply internalized norms and values such as rationality and efficiency, and men are required to build and maintain their positions in competition with others (Dasgupta, 2013). However, types of care such as childcare and elderly care belong to an area of life that is incompatible with rationality and efficiency. Unlike human relationships based on competition and independence, they are based on interactive relationships to respond to the needs of others. Therefore, the involvement of men in caregiving more or less causes friction with the masculine identity that society has demanded of men until now. So, what specific difficulties do male caregivers face by taking on the responsibility of care? My colleagues and the author conducted the first fact-finding survey of male caregivers in 2005 (Tsudome & Saito, 2007). This chapter discusses the issues men tend to face, as revealed by the survey.

Difficulty over Life Independence As a consequence of the fact that lifestyle models of men have been built with economic independence as the central axis, lifestyle independence, including housework, has lagged behind, which has a significant impact on caregiving. Housework is still considered to be a job for women under Japan’s traditional family norm, and men have been kept away from such chores from a young age. In the case of elderly men, who have been taught that no man should be in the kitchen, they have little experience in cooking and have left all housework and child-rearing to their wives. According to our survey, some men in their 70s replied that they had never made a cup of coffee. Doing housework is a big hurdle for these men even before giving care. The series of tasks involved in eating—shopping for food, cooking, assisting with meals, and cleaning up afterward—are unfamiliar to them in the first place, and it takes an enormous amount of time to learn. In addition, when caring for people

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who require a special diet, such as those with diabetes, high blood pressure, and kidney disease, these men need to be sensible about not only what to cook but also how to cook ingredients and help with eating. The problem is not only about meals: they do not know which box contains a laundry detergent, how to use the washing machine, where the seasonal clothes are stored, the size of their wives’ underwear, and where the bankbooks are kept as they used to let their wives do all the housework. Whether they can perform domestic chores is crucial for male caregivers.

The Difficulty of Juggling Work and Care The second difficulty concerns the balance between work and providing care. Many male caregivers are husbands and sons who care for their wives and parent/s, respectively. In the case of the former, they tend to be older men, whereas the latter tend to be working men. When it becomes necessary for his parent to receive care, the son is more likely to be a caregiver rather than relying on his wife because she has her parent/s to look after. In particular, balancing care and work becomes a significant issue when the man is the chief earner of the household. If the breadwinner quits his job, it will not only destabilize the economic foundation of the caregiver but also cause an immeasurable impact on the whole family. Work is in an area of life that is diametrically opposite to care. In modern society, the care-less man model—a way of working without the responsibility for caregiving—has become mainstream as women have carried the burden. With a rise in women’s participation in the labor market, we are becoming aware of the significance of work–life balance. However, its main issue is childcare. Balancing childcare and work is easily institutionalized based on principles such as prenatal/ postnatal leave, maternity/childcare leave, and shorter working time. However, in the case of elderly care, the support for caregivers to manage both work and care remains limited as the nature of elderly care differs from that of childcare. Some caregivers have to start caregiving suddenly, without any preparation period. The relationships between caregivers and the cared are diverse, and it is hard for them to see when the job will end or when they need to provide care longer or to a greater level. The previous survey also clearly reveals the problem of handling elderly care and work at the same time. The number of people quitting their jobs because they need to care for or nurse a relative has reached 99,000 in 1 year. Since the previous survey conducted 5 years ago, the number has remained more or less flat, and there is no prospect of improving the situation (2017 Employment Status Survey, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications). We can find even shocking figures, that there is an increase in the number of missing workers who left their jobs to become caregivers but cannot return to society even after their roles have ended. It is thought that there are 720,000 unemployed in their 40 s and 50 s (people who are out of work and seeking employment),

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and 1.03 million missing workers (people who are out of work and not seeking employment) who cannot even take part in job-hunting (The NHK Special Team, 2020).

Relational Poverty The third difficulty is the relational poverty of male caregivers. Since the workplace has been the central area of a man’s life until he becomes a caregiver, it is often the case that men do not have deep involvement in local activities or intimate interactions with neighbors. Compared to women, Japanese men do not network with the local community well, and as they age, they tend to stay solely with their wives. In other words, they do not have personal relationships, apart from that with their wives, where they can show their weaknesses and discuss their problems. For men to get on with daily caregiving, it is crucially important to have informal support through casual exchanges with neighbors or a social place they can easily visit locally to relax, in addition to the professional help from experts and the use of care services. Male caregivers’ isolation from the community was evident in our survey. Male caregivers tend to have limited community contacts even before the start of caregiving, and these tend to shrink even further once caregiving begins. Some of them never ask even their family members for help, insisting that they should not give any trouble to their children (Tsudome & Saito, 2007).

Abuse and Killing by Caregivers Finally, we must mention the problem of abuse, killing, and murder–suicide committed by caregivers. Although the Act on Prevention of Elder Abuse came into force in Japan in 2006, the overwhelming majority of abuses were committed by family members rather than the workers of care facilities According to the number of cases deemed as abuse for the year 2019, the number of abuses committed by care facility workers was 595 (a decrease of 7.6% compared to the previous year), while that by family caregivers was 17,281 (an increase of 2.1% compared to the previous year). Furthermore, in terms of the abuser’s relationship with the victim, sons and husbands accounted for 39.9% and 22.4%, respectively, which shows that male abusers account for more than 60% (2019 Survey Results on the Readiness based on the Laws on Prevention of Elder Abuse, the Support for Elderly Caregivers, etc., the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare). It is difficult to grasp the exact number of killings by caregivers since the motives are often combined with different factors. According to the data from newspaper articles collected by Yuhara (2016), the number of killings/murders–suicides by caregivers was as many as 663 between 2000, when the system of Long-Term Care

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Insurance was introduced, and 2015. Yuhara takes notice of the data that the number of murder–suicide/attempted murder–suicide accounts for 38.5%, the number of households consisting of two people accounts for 37.4%, and the cases where the perpetrator himself had a disability or health issues (30.6%) as a common denominator. Moreover, the characteristic of killings/murder–suicides by caregivers—the most significant case in relation to the theme of this chapter—is the gender of the perpetrators: men account for 72.3%.

A Synthesis of Care and Masculinities: Caregiving as a Job  he Pitfalls of Caregiving as a Job – Weaknesses in the Skill T of Asking for Help The nursing style of male caregivers demonstrates masculinity through care in some situations (Gollins, 2002). Through education and work, men learn conventionally masculine values, such as responsibility and rationality. This also has a significant impact on the ways male caregivers provide care. For example, they methodically keep a record of the care they give in a notebook every day. They buy a recipe book or record TV cooking programs to improve their poor cooking skills and go to a library or search for detailed information on the internet to gain knowledge about illnesses and treatment methods. They visit a local government office and negotiate with a manager at the help desk set up for doctors, care managers, and nursing services over elderly care policies until they are satisfied. We can recognize the style of male caregivers in their attitude of prioritizing the rational management of caregiving rather than giving flexible responses according to the need of the person under their care. Such a style that regards caregiving as a job has advantages and disadvantages (Kramer & Thompson Jr., 2002). Let us look at the advantages first. Through studying and information gathering, caregivers can gain skills related to housework and elderly care that they did not have the chance to learn earlier. Furthermore, male caregivers’ proactive behaviors and consultations, such as the active use of the services and pointing out the problems in the system, might help in developing the issues related to elderly care as those of society as a whole rather than keeping them simply as problems for individuals.1 However, it also has disadvantages. In this style, caregivers want to see the result of their efforts or to feel a sense of achievement. Some caregivers put rationality or efficiency above the need of the person under their care by implementing a rigorous  When a male caregiver was charged for a full day’s food regardless of the number of meals his mother had when his mother used the short-stay service, he persisted that the practice was unreasonable and appealed to the local government and related groups. As a result, Kyoto City they lived in issued an ordinance stipulating the charge must be for each meal in 2013 ahead of the rest of the country. Some other local governments have adopted this ordinance since its introduction in Kyoto (Hayashi & Hayashi, 2013). 1

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rehabilitation program or lifestyle management. In caregiving, however, there is no guarantee that they will be rewarded no matter how much effort they have put into it. Sometimes, they are tormented by a sense of despair or a cruel reality they would rather not face. The biggest problem with male caregiving as a job style is that the strength of their sense of responsibility can hold back caregivers from seeking help from others when it is appropriate and necessary. As a distinctive characteristic of male-specific communication, it has been pointed out that, while men are good at creating reports solely to inform facts, they are poor at creating a rapport that contains their emotional expressions. In other words, they are not good at building trusting relationships (Ito, 1996). The strong sense of responsibility can make them hesitate to share with others the excessive burden of their task or anxiety caused by the uncertainty of when their role would end and hinder them from seeking help at appropriate times.

Double Alienation What emerges from the difficulties faced by male caregivers in Japan is the reality that men’s involvement in elderly care is not necessarily linked to the automatic deconstruction of masculinity. We cannot achieve gender equality in care by equalizing the hours they devote to the role of caregivers. We recognized the double trouble unique to male caregivers: exclusion and marginalization from the male society and the struggle with their masculinity through nursing activities. Obviously, male caregivers cannot be a homogeneous bunch of men (Kramer & Thompson Jr., 2002). Some have lived alone for a long time or away from their families on a job assignment and are good at managing domestic chores. Some of them can also change nappies. However, it is not enough to simply recognize diverse masculinities among male caregivers. We need to pay attention to the complex intertwining between caregiving and gender identity and understand the interplay through a thorough examination of how caregiving affects their male identity or what acts of caregiving tend to be prompted by male identity (Calasanti & Bowen, 2006; Hanlon, 2009, 2012).

The Future of Family Caregiving I solation of Family Caregivers During the Coronavirus Pandemic This chapter has touched on various difficulties Japanese male caregivers face, such as difficulties in managing housework, isolation from the community, quitting jobs to be full-time caregivers, and even cases of abuse and murder by caregivers. These problems are not solely due to the personal elements of male caregivers. At the root

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of the difficulties Japan’s family caregivers face, there is, above all, an abdication of public responsibility by politicians based on “new familism under neoliberalism” (Minowa, 2017) that leaves family caregivers to resort to self-help as a family issue. According to Minowa, the development of neoliberalism has demanded a change in the family model, from the modern family model where a family is dependent on the husband’s earnings (the single income model with a full-time housewife) to the family of multiple earners. This is directly linked to the system of supply of care in the home. Under the modern family-type caregiving system, the roles of an earner and a caregiver were divided by gender. These days, however, there is a growing situation where family members must mobilize to secure income for survival and to address intermittent care needs simultaneously (Saito, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these difficulties with family caregiving. The suspension of social services and paralysis of medical facilities due to the spread of COVID-19 infection hit caregiving families who could not survive without these services. The restriction of movement under the slogan “Stay home” has led to their further isolation. There has even been a situation where those who needed care could not receive any services when the caregiver tested positive for COVID-19. In 2021, an organization for male caregivers in Yamanashi Prefecture (Yamanashi Yaro no kai, 2022) conducted a fact-finding survey of male caregivers (the Yamanashi Survey) as a project commissioned by the prefecture. In the question for long-term care support specialists (“Do you know any male caregivers who seem to be isolated due to their role as caregivers?”), more than 60% of those who responded were aware of the isolation of male caregivers. Regarding the factors that can lead to their isolation, prominent ones were those we may consider the characteristics of masculinity, such as “never complain” and “pride”. The state of isolation is extremely serious for family caregivers who had lost contact with society during the coronavirus pandemic. In Japan, the increase in suicide among women and children due to the pandemic drew our attention. However, it is getting harder to recognize the state of isolation among male caregivers as it has become more latent and less visible.

Building a Network of Male Caregivers Japanese male caregivers tend to lose the foundation of life built around their work and become isolated from the community when they take on the responsibility as caregivers. However, we can also notice the emergence of a new relationship between caregiving and masculinity with the exploration they have started to engage in their local communities. It is a different way of thinking from the exertion of masculinity through caregiving and involves the construction/reconstruction of emotional intimacy that has been regarded as men’s weakness. Creating a place they can belong to in the community provides an important base that supports male caregivers who tend to become isolated. Since the beginning, the

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National Network of Male Caregivers and Supporters has regularly invited male caregivers to post their essays and publish them, emphasizing the activity that delivers their direct voices to many more people. The network has also been encouraging the creation of a place where male caregivers can directly interact with one another by hosting social gatherings and setting up groups in each region (Tsudome, 2021). There are now more than 160 organizations and meetings of and for male caregivers nationwide. Male caregivers tend to prefer the task-oriented program to chat, such as providing care service workshops and cooking lessons, as it plays a preventive role against isolation for male caregivers. Furthermore, they form places where male caregivers build emotional intimacy, which has been regarded as men’s weakness. In other words, those social gatherings not only provide a place for male caregivers to acquire nursing skills and obtain useful information about caregiving but to share their worries and collaboratively create new values and ways of life. They present male caregivers, who initially found caregiving bewildering, with opportunities to re-examine their previous ways of working or interacting with family members and locals as they share their thoughts and troubles with other male caregivers who have similar experiences. Those gender-sensitive male-friendly support programs (Saito, 2010) play a significant role in achieving gender equality in caregiving. In the future, we will have to broaden the perspective and re-examine how these male networks built through caregiving will impact traditional masculine identity and dominant relationships – i.e., homo-sociality.

 onclusion – Campaigns for Male Caregivers C and Gender Equality Male caregivers face difficulties with the unfamiliar nature of their tasks and struggle over gender identity. However, they also possess great strengths for the role, which is their social experience gained through playing an active role in the central stage of society, such as politics and economy, before becoming caregivers. Such experiences and knowledge can make men ready to become major contributors to building new care systems. The aforementioned community initiatives that connect male caregivers serve not only to prevent isolation but also as a base for building new types of caregiving and political systems, including caregiver support. Male caregivers have the potential to become a powerful driving force that will give concrete shapes to caregiver support by pointing out issues in society and engaging in political activism regarding the issues of caregiving. The question is whether these efforts by male caregivers that depend on traditional masculine identity will expose the deep-rooted gender inequality existing in every corner of the social system. What kind of relationship is there between the involvement in caregiving and activities such as the economy and politics? For example, can men create a new corporate culture where they can continue working while caring for their family members rather than continuing to hide that role from

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the workplace? When we consider the very exciting social practice of male networking built through caregiving and movements for caregivers that will follow based on traditional masculine values, we can recognize the potential for various connections between caregiving and masculinities. The question being asked now is whether men can connect the re-examination of their ways of life, prompted by the experience of caregiving, to the transformation of their ways of working and the state of politics derived from masculine values. Can they link those agendas to gender equality?

References Calasanti, T., & Bowen, M.  E. (2006). Spousal caregiving and crossing gender boundaries: Maintaining gendered identities. Journal of Aging Studies, 20, 253–263. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jaging.2005.08.001 Dasgupta, R. (2013). Re-reading the salaryman in Japan: Crafting masculinities. Routledge. Elliott, K. (2016). Caring masculinities: Theorizing an emerging concept. Men and Masculinities, 19(3), 240–259. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X15576203 Gollins, T. (2002). Male carer: A study of the inter-relations between caring, male identity and age, Sheffield online papers in social research shop. Hanlon, N. (2009). Caregiving masculinities: An exploratory analysis. In K.  Lynch, J.  Baker, & M.  Lyons (Eds.), Affective equality: Love, care and injustice (pp.  180–198). Palgrave Macmillan. Hanlon, N. (2012). Masculinities, care and equality: Identity and nurture in men’s lives. Palgrave Macmillan. Hayashi, A., & Hayashi, M. (2013). Tabetehen no ni haraunka? Shoto sutei no shokuhi: 94 sai no uttae, Kyoto-shi to kuni o ugokasu [We have to pay for meals even if they didn’t eat them? meal charges at short-stay care: A 94-year old’s appeals move Kyoto City and the nation]. Win Kamogawa. Ito, K. (1996). Danseigaku nyumon. [Introduction to Men’s Studies]. Sakuhinsya. Kramer, B. J., & Thompson, E. H., Jr. (Eds.). (2002). Men as caregivers. Prometheus Books. Minowa. A. (2017). Shinjiyusyugika niokeru nihongata seikatsu kozo to kazokuizon no henyo [Transformation of family dependency structure in the age of neo-liberalism]. In M.  Ichiro (ed.), Kodomo no hinkon wo toinaosu [Reconsideration of child poverty: From the perspective of family and gender] (pp. 99–119). Horitsubunkasya. Saito, M. (2010). Kaigosha shien no ronri to dainamizumu: Kea to jenda no aratana shatei [Logic and dynamics of carer support: The new perspective on care and gender]. Ritsumeikan Social Sciences Review, 46(1), 155–171. https://doi.org/10.34382/00003349 Saito, M. (2016). Current issues regarding family caregiving and gender equality in Japan: Male caregivers and the interplay between caregiving and masculinities. Japan Labor Review, 14(1), 92–111. Saito, M. (2021). Male carers and gender-specific support in Japan. In D. C. d’Argemir & S. Bofill (Eds.), El cuidodo de mayores y dependendientes, avanzando hacia la igualdad de genero y la justicia social (pp. 143–145). Icaria. The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare. (2015). Nihon ni okeru ninchisyo no koureisyajinkou no shoraisuikei ni kansuru kenkyu: soukatsu kenkyu houkokusyo [Future population projections of elderly people with dementia: summery research report]. The NHK Special Team. (2020). Missing Worker no shogeki: Hatarakukoto wo akirameta 100 mannin no chukonen [Missing worker: One million middle aged people giving up working]. NHK shuppan shinsho.

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Tsudome, M. (2021). Otoko ga kaigo suru: Kazoku no kea no jittai to sien no torikumi [Male Caregivers: Situation of Family Care and Support]. Cyuko Shinsho. Tsudome, M., & Saito, M. (2007). Dansei kaigosha hakusho: Kazoku kaigosha shien e no teigen [White paper on male caregivers: Proposals for family caregivers’ support]. Kamogawa Shuppan. Yamanashi Yaro no Kai. (2022). Yamashina ken ni okeru dansei kaigosha no genjyo to kadai: Kaigo shien senmonin oyobi dansei kaigosha chosa hokokusyo [The situation on male caregivers and support issues in Yamanashi Prefecture: Research report of care managers and male caregivers]. Yuhara, E. (2016). Kaigo satsujin jiken kara miidaseru kaigosha shien no hitsuyosei [The necessity of the caregiver support to be found from the criminal cases of homi-cides or murder-suicides by family caregivers]. Journal of Social Welfare, 34, 9–30. Mao Saito is a Professor at the Department of Social Sciences, Ritsumeikan University, where she teaches Family Sociology and Qualitative Research Methods. Her work focuses on the intersection between care ethics and masculinities studies. She is one of the organizers of the National Network of Male Carers and Supporters. Currently, she is the leader of the Young Carers Action Research Project (YCARP).  

LGBTQ Activism in Contemporary Japan: Prospects and Perspectives Patrick Carland-Echavarria

Abstract  Since the 2010s, the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have become a topic of increasing debate and public attention in Japan. On the one hand, the visibility of LGBTQ people in Japanese media and society has grown significantly in recent years, and public opinion polls show increasing support for legalizing same-sex marriage, anti-discrimination legislation, and other legal reforms. On the other hand, political divisions within Japan’s current ruling party have prevented many pro-LGBTQ initiatives from being passed at the national level, while opposition from conservative politicians and groups has grown more visible in recent years. This article presents a historical overview of LGBTQ activism in Japan from the 1980s to the present, highlighting key events and debates that have shaped contemporary concerns, and examines some of the major issues for LGBTQ activists in Japan today. Some of the consistent threads that have characterized LGBTQ activism in Japan include debates over cooperation with public authorities versus confrontation; the nature of anti-LGBTQ discrimination and its role within Japanese culture; and the relationship between LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups in Japanese society. Keywords  Japan · LGBTQ · Activism · Queer · LGBT activism · LGBT history · Japanese history

Introduction At a session of the Japanese Diet on January 26, 2023, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio was asked by an opposition party legislator about the apparent reluctance of his party, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (Jimintō, hereafter LDP), to P. Carland-Echavarria (*) University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_29

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legalize-­same sex marriage. In response, Kishida emphasized the need for caution, stating that, “As this is an issue that concerns the core of the nature of the family in this country, I believe it requires extremely careful consideration.” (TV News Asahi, 2023). While at first glance this plea for “careful consideration,” (kiwamate shinchō na kentō) of the issue may seem like a reason to be optimistic for future change, Kishida’s words are in fact perfectly in line with those of his immediate predecessors. In 2021, Kishida’s predecessor, Yoshihide Suga, gave an almost identical answer regarding his party’s stance towards same-sex marriage, stating that, “Because this concerns the core of the nature of the family in this country, it requires extremely careful consideration,” (Asahi Shimbun, 2021). Both answers, in turn, echoed former Prime Minister’s Abe Shinzō’s 2015 statement that same-sex marriage was a “problem that concerns the core of the nature of the family,” and which required a “cautious stance,” (shinchō shisei) (TV News Asahi, 2015). The continued reluctance of the current ruling party aside, LGBTQ activism is more visible and prominent than ever before in Japan. Particularly over the past decade, which has been called the ‘LGBT boom’ by some commentators, sexual minority communities have seen a rapid rise in visibility in mainstream media and political discourse. Some of these shifts reflect transnational trends in LGBT human rights discourses in the 2010s, but they must be attributed foremost to LGBTQ activists and organizations in Japan that began to emerge as early as the 1970s. At the same time, LGBTQ activists have also had to contend with various forms of backlash and hostility from social conservatives and politicians, while individual activists and groups often find themselves divided on issues of strategy. Furthermore, despite significant progress in passing legislation establishing same-sex partnership systems and anti-discrimination ordinances at the local level, the lack of national legislation means that many issues for Japanese LGBTQ people, including same-­ sex marriage, adoption, and restrictions on gender transition, remain unresolved. The goal of this chapter is to make clear these factors by providing an overview and analysis of recent LGBTQ activism in Japan. The first part of the chapter will provide a brief historical overview of LGBTQ activism in Japan from the 1970s to the present day, focusing on key events, organizations, and social shifts during that period. The second half will examine some of the major social and political issues emphasized by Japanese LGBTQ activists in recent years. These concern the legalization of marriage for same-sex couples (dōseikon), the passage of anti-LGBTQ discrimination legislation, and a loosening of restrictions on gender transition, as well as broader efforts by activists to positively shape public perceptions of LGBTQ people in communities and municipalities across the country. While this chapter will be far from comprehensive, it should ideally provide a sense of the state of LGBTQ activism in Japan in the early 2020s, a time when activists have both made significant gains in changing social perceptions of media representation and simultaneously been frustrated in achieving many long-term political goals.

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History of LGBTQ Activism in Postwar Japan 1960s–1970s: Beginnings of Gay and Lesbian Activism Except for a brief ban on sodomy from 1873 to 1881, Japan is distinct from many countries in that it has not historically criminalized same-sex sexuality. Despite a lack of formal criminalization, however, LGBTQ people enjoy few formal legal protections and report high levels of social and interpersonal discrimination in familial, educational, and professional settings (Taniguchi, 2020). Some scholars have described homophobia in Japan as taking a ‘soft’ form as opposed to the ‘harder’ form found in the West, one that manifests most clearly in the form of communal pressure and peer disapproval (Kawaguchi et al., 1997). Many individuals choose either to not come out publicly, or only to disclose their sexuality to a very small number of close friends (Tamagawa, 2019). Moreover, it is notable that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has in recent years used Japan’s ostensible cultural tolerance towards homosexuality as a form of soft power as well as a justification against pro-LGBTQ legal initiatives (Kawasaka, 2018). Despite these attitudes, media focusing on homosexuality and other ‘perverse sexualities’ (hentai seiyoku) flourished during the early years after World War II, while gay bars proliferated in Japan’s urban centers, such as Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward and Osaka’s Doyama neighborhood (McLelland, 2006; Mitsuhashi, 2008). Larger-­ scale publications and groups for same-sex attracted men and women began to emerge in the early 1970s. In 1971, the magazine Barazoku became the first mass-­ market publication in Japan focused on male-male sexuality. It was quickly followed by other magazines including Sabu (1974–2002) Adon (1974–1996) Samson (1982–2020). Also in 1971, Suzuki Michiko founded the Wakakusa no kai, the first social group in Japan for same-sex women. The 1970s also saw the rise of feminist activism and the women’s liberation (ūman ribu) movement in Japan (Mackie, 2003). Organizations and publications created by these groups, particularly in the small-scale, self-published magazine (minikomi) format they pioneered, were also crucial for the emergence of lesbian media in the late 1970s in the form of publications such as Subarashii Onnatachi (1976), Za Daiku (1978) and Hikari Guruma (1976–79) (Sugiura, 2007, 2019). Political activism centered on LGBTQ issues, however, remained rare in Japan until the late 1980s. According to the lesbian activist Kakefuda Hiroko, the mainstream ūman ribu movement marginalized same sex attracted women and at times even excluded them from some shared spaces (Welker, 2017). At the same time, mass-market publications for same-sex attracted men such as Barazoku tended to dismiss the emerging U.S. gay rights movement as foreign and inapplicable to Japan (Mackintosh, 2010). This was not universally the case, however. The Homosexual Liberation Alliance (Dōseiai Kaihō Rengō), formed in 1975, was one of the first groups founded with the explicit goal of gay liberation in mind. Although it was

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small and short-lived, having less than a dozen members at its peak, its emergence points to shifting understandings of sexuality in postwar Japan. Another notable gay activist who came to prominence in the 1970s was Tōgō Ken, the founder of the ‘Miscellaneous Peoples’ Party’ (Zatsumin no tō) who ran for a seat in the Diet more than eight times. Tōgō “campaigned tirelessly in support of a range of sexual minority issues,” and appeared on the NHK multiple times during his campaigns for a Diet seat (McLelland, 2012).

1980s–1990s: AIDS Crisis and Early Legal Cases The AIDS crisis of the 1980s strongly incentivized the growth of LGBTQ organized activism in Japan. The first widely reported case occurred in March 1985 of a gay man who had been living in the United States. This was not the first case of HIV/ AIDS transmission in Japan proper, which occurred years early as the result of infected blood transfusions, but rather the first case widely publicized by Japanese mass media. [For more, see Kawaguchi & Kazama, 2010; Shingae, 2013.] Despite this, the Japanese Ministry of Health did not respond to the pandemic until 1987, when it designated men who had sex with men (MSM) as well as sex workers and recipients of intravenous injections as high risk groups. In the early 1980s, the issue of how to respond to AIDS divided members of Japan’s gay male communities. Some magazines, such as Barazoku, described the crisis as an issue of personal responsibility and called on gay men to exercise restraint, while others, like Adon, argued for a more concerted, political response (Shingae, 2013). The Ministry of Health’s 1987 designation of gay men as a ‘high risk’ category and comments the same year by Health Minister Shiokawa Yūichi that those with ‘healthy sexual lives’ were not at risk of infection outraged sexual minority communities and incentivized activists to begin organizing within their own communities (Kawaguchi & Kazama, 2010: Horie, 2015). In 1984, the International Gay Association Japan (IGA Japan, later renamed the International Lesbian and Gay Association) was formed as a branch of the Sweden-­ based International Gay Organization by the activist Minami Teishirō (1932–), a founding editor of the gay male-focused magazine Adon. A participant in the student protest movements of the 1960s, Minami and other early activists sought to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS transmission and prevention as well as to combat negative perceptions of gay people fueled in part by the pandemic. In 1985, a candlelight vigil for victims of HIV/AIDS was held in Tokyo, an event gay activist and scholar Fushimi Noriaki has described as the first gay protest in Japanese history (Fushimi, 2004). Soon after IGA’s founding, several organizations dedicated to gays and lesbians were founded in the late 1980s, perhaps most notably the Osaka Gay Community (OGC), a former branch of IGA that split off in 1987, as well as the Ugoku gei to rezubian no kai (‘Group for moving gays and lesbians), usually abbreviated as OCCUR (Akā). Activists with OCCUR vocally pushed back against policies and

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language they saw as homophobic and discriminatory, particularly in the context of the AIDS crisis. In 1991, the group successfully petitioned the publisher Iwanami Shoten to change the definition of homosexuality (dōseiai) in its popular Kojien dictionary series, which had previously described it a “form of abnormal sexuality,” while in 1993, they protested the Japanese Red Cross’s decision to reject blood donations from gay men and their description of them as a “high-risk group,” prompting the Japanese Ministry of Health to remove that description (Horikawa, 2015). At the same time, relationships between governmental authorities and these groups were not entirely antagonistic, with many assisting the Ministry of Health in etiological surveys of HIV/AIDS patients and promoting preventions of HIV transmission in gay bars and other spaces in the 1980s and 1990s (Shingae, 2013). OCCUR achieved the first major legal victory for gay activists in Japan after a 1990 incident at the Fuchū Dormitory, a municipally owned space made available for youth organizations by the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education. OCCUR activists were set to make use of space but quickly faced hostility and were ultimately excluded by municipal authorities as a threat to the morals of other youth organizations using the dormitories (Taniguchi, 2006). This exclusion prompted OCCUR to sue the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Education Board for discrimination that year. Several LGBT-focused organizations and publications supported OCCUR’s legal efforts during this period, including the magazine Adon, which wrote editorials supporting the group, and Minami’s organization IGA/ILGA, which helped fundraise for them. At the same time, however, support for OCCUR efforts was not universal in Japanese gay and lesbian communities. The readers and editors of Barazoku took a more critical stance towards OCCUR, with many opining that OCCUR’s legal battle was misplaced and risked raising the ire of mainstream society towards sexual minorities. In response to such criticisms, OCCUR’s supporters argued that the case was important precisely because it illustrated the clear existence of homophobia in Japanese society and the need to address it (Kazama, 2019). At the same time, as Kakefuda Hiroko wrote at the time, the discourse surrounding the OCCUR case focused primarily on male homosexuality and was brought to court by a male-led organization, underlining the prevalence of gender inequality within activist groups themselves (Kakefuda, 1992). OCCUR was ultimately vindicated in 1994, when the Tokyo District Court ruled that the group’s rejection from the dormitory was illegal and discriminatory (Taniguchi, 2006). This decision was upheld in 1997 by the Tokyo High Court after an appeal by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. OCCUR’s legal victory was widely celebrated by activists in Japan and abroad and helped lend crucial momentum to LGBT activism in the 1990s. At the same time, the differences in perspectives illustrated by the case point to long-standing divergences amongst LGBT activists over the efficacy of more confrontational legal and social strategies versus more conciliatory efforts to change social attitudes. Although these veins of activism are as often complementary as they are at odds with one another, the tension between these strategies and frameworks has remained a recurring feature of LGBT activism in Japan since. In this way, the OCCUR case served as both a major historical

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moment for LGBTQ activists while also illustrating many of the themes and issues that would animate subsequent debates on rhetoric, strategy, and inclusion.

1990s–2000s: The ‘Gay Boom’ and Backlash OCCUR’s landmark legal victory coincided with a sudden surge of popular and mainstream attention towards sexual minorities in Japan that has been termed the ‘gay boom’ by some scholars (McLelland, 2006: Wakamatsu, 2018). In particular, the early 1990s saw a flood of media attention as well as films and television shows featuring sexual minorities and exploring issues of homophobia and transphobia in society. The Tokyo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival was inaugurated in 1992, while in 1994 Japan’s first Pride Parade was also held in Tokyo. Mass-market publications also began to take an interest in sexual minorities, such as the women’s magazine CREA, which ran a special feature in 1992 on Japan’s “gay renaissance,” while films such as Takehiro Nakajima’s Okoge (1992) and Hashiguchi Ryosuke’s Hush! (2001), TV shows like Dōsōkai (1993) and autobiographies by openly queer individuals such as Kakefuda Hiroko’s Rezubian de aru to iu koto (On being a lesbian, 1992) and Fushimi Noriaki’s Gei to iu ‘keiken’ (The ‘experience’ of gay, 1991) all drew unprecedented mainstream attention to sexual minorities. The 1990s also saw the emergence of organized transgender activism in Japan. Until recently, conceptions of transgender identity have been more fluid in Japan than in many other countries. Prior to the 1970s, gay male and transfeminine identities were often placed on a continuum and associated with gay bars and other red-­ light establishments in urban spaces (McLelland, 2006: Mitsuhashi, 2006b). The emergence of so-called homo media in the 1970s aimed at male-identifying gay men helped to initiate a general shift in this perception (Mackintosh, 2010; Suganuma, 2012) and a broader distinction between gay and trans identities. The legal history of sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) in Japan is also complicated. These surgeries were legal in Japan during the early postwar period, and there is further evidence of some individuals successfully petitioning to change the sex designation on their birth registries during this period (Mitsuhashi, 2006a). After a court decision in 1969, sexual reassignment surgery was deemed illegal and banned nationwide, resulting in many people’s traveling to countries such as Thailand to receive treatment (McLelland, 2005). In the late 1980s and 1990s, transgender communities also began to more actively organize within Japan. The first newsletter for transgender men (FtM) was founded in the late 1980s by Torai Masae, while first person accounts by transgender individuals also began to appear in Japanese media. This period was marked by a shift in discussions towards the concept of Gender Identity Disorder (Issei seidō shōgai, hereafter GID), with transgender identities increasingly framed in medicalized and pathologizing terms. The concept of GID has proven to be both useful and limiting as a framework for transgender activists. In 1997, The Japan Psychological Association published its Report and Proposal on Gender Identity Disorder

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advocating the legalization of SRS, and in 1998 the first operation since the 1960s was successfully performed at Saitama University. Efforts to formally recognize GID culminated in the passage in the Special Law for Gender Identity Disorder in 2003. This law formally legalized SRS and outlined procedures for legally changing the sex designation of one’s birth registration (kōseki). At the same time, however, the law stipulated a number of conditions that must be met in order to transition, including undergoing psychiatric evaluation, being unmarried and without dependents, and being sterile. These conditions have been criticized by activists, as well as international organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, as violating the human rights of transgender people (HRC, 2021). The ‘gay boom’ of the 1990s coincided with a rise in feminist-led legal and political initiatives in Japan. Feminist activists and politicians sought to improve workplace conditions for women, expand access to social welfare, and promote gender-equal public education (Kano, 2016). These efforts benefited the goals of LGBTQ activists as well. Under the Basic Law for Gender Equality passed in 1995, for example, human rights charters were drafted by “male-female joint planning committees,” around the country, many of which explicitly listed sexual orientation (seiteki shikō) and gender identity (sei jinin) as protected categories (Yamaguchi, 2014). By the late 1990s, however, a conservative political backlash began to form against both gender-inclusive legal initiatives and rising LGBTQ visibility. Conservative critics accused feminist activists of attempting to eliminate gender differences altogether and characterized gender-equity initiatives as efforts to undermine and even destroy the traditional Japanese family (Kazama, 2007). Within this backlash, LGBTQ people and pro-LGBTQ initiatives came under attack as well. As Kazama Takashi and Akiko Shimizu have written, within the discourse of the backlash, LGBTQ people were framed as deviants and potential threats to Japan’s economic and demographic future (Shimizu, 2007, 2020). This was illustrated by attacks on sex education reform initiatives as well as efforts by conservative politicians and activists to remove sexual orientation from human rights charters around the country (Kazama, 2000) The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) supported these efforts during the early 2000s, with future Prime Minister Abe Shinzō being selected to head a committee against “radical” sex education reforms in the Diet in 2003 (Saitō, 2018). The backlash of the late 1990s onward had a negative impact on LGBTQ activists in Japan. According to Akiko Shimizu, it also exposed fissures between feminists and LGBTQ activists, who were often rhetorically pitted against one another within backlash discourse (Shimizu, 2020). It also came about during a period of growing internal disagreements amongst activists themselves. In 1996, disagreements between the organizers of Tokyo’s annual Pride Parade came to a head when the stage of the closing ceremony was occupied by critics of the parade’s corporate sponsors and partnerships (Oikawa, 2018). The parade’s organizing committee was subsequently disbanded, and parades were held intermittently in the city in the 2000s as organizers struggled to reform themselves. While the LDP would temporarily lose power during the period between 2009 and 2012, its temporary replacement, the center-left Democratic Party of Japan, did not pursue major legal reforms

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for LGBTQ people, although it did oversee the passage of a law allowing Japanese nationals to legally register same-sex marriages conducted overseas in Japan (Nikaidō, 2017).

2010s: LGBT Boom and Rise of Transnational Activism Despite these setbacks, however, LGBTQ activism in Japan gained mainstream visibility once again by the late 2000s. This was partially the result of a global shift in LGBTQ human rights discourse at institutions such as the U.N. as well as a generally broadening of the scope of LGBTQ activism globally. The U.N. adoption of the Yogyakarta Principles in 2006 was a key impetus in the growth of global LGBTQ human rights activism during this period, while the rising prominence of debates over issues such as same-sex marriage and anti-LGBTQ discrimination in countries around the world had a strong influence on Japanese activists. One sign of this influence has been the rapid growth in usage of the acronym LGBT itself in Japanese language media since the early 2010s (Fotache, 2019). The 2010s saw a rapid growth in the number of LGBTQ activist organizations in Japan. This is likely at least in part due to changes in Japanese law in the 2000s which made it easier to form non-profit organizations. Some of these groups, such as the Japanese Alliance for Legislation (LGBT hō rengō kai, f. 2018) and Marriage for All Japan (f. 2019) focus on achieving and building support for specific legal and political goals. Many others have taken a more general approach and focus on raising public awareness and understanding (keihatsu) of sexual minorities amongst the general public. These activities involve consulting with local government offices and businesses, conducting seminars on LGBT issues, and organizing public awareness campaigns through means like book and poster displays. There has also been an increase in coordination between Japanese activists and global organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, as well as with global corporations and businesses (Kawasaka, 2013; Shingae, 2021). A high-profile victory for LGBTQ activists came about in March 2015, when the first same-sex partnership (hereafter SSP) system in the nation was implemented in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo. The successful passage of the SSP ordinance was the product of cooperation between LGBTQ activists, local politicians, and other community leaders. Activists like Sugiyama Fumino of the group New Canvas and Matsunaka Gon of Good Aging Yells built close working relationships with the then-mayor of Shibuya Ward, Hasebe Ken, to build community as well as political support for the ordinance (Toshinari, 2019). Publicly, they built support for the measure by emphasizing that it would showcase Shibuya’s diversity and status as a creative and cosmopolitan city. Following the passage of Shibuya’s system, the number of municipalities and prefectures with similar systems has grown exponentially. As of this writing, more than 60% of the country’s population live in areas that have implemented some form of SSP system. Marriage For All Japan maintains a regularly updated list of prefectures and municipalities that have implemented same-sex

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partnership systems. [For details, see https://www.marriageforall.jp/marriage-­ equality/japan/.] The past decade also saw increasingly hostile rhetoric towards LGBTQ communities amongst conservative politicians and commentators. In 2010, former Tokyo governor Shintarō Ishihara suggested that LGBT people were genetically deficient, while in 2018, LDP representative Sugita Mio claimed in an article that LGBT couples lack productivity (seisansei) spurring large-scale protests and calls for her to resign (Carland-Echavarria, 2022). At the same time, some activists criticized larger LGBTQ organizations for working too closely with political and business interests and emphasizing same-sex marriage at the expense of other issues (Shimizu, 2015). Conversely, others have criticized recent protests by LGBTQ activists as extreme and potentially alienating to mainstream audiences (Okada, 2019). The remainder of this chapter will present an overview of some of the major issues and areas of concern for LGBTQ activists in Japan in the present. As the preceding section has shown, the current debates have been shaped by several decades of rapidly changing social and political understandings of LGBTQ people in Japanese society. As the legal and political landscape changes, it can be assumed that the goals and concerns of activists will change and evolve as well.

Current Issues for LGBTQ Activists in Japan Same-Sex Marriage Perhaps the most widely discussed political issue relating to LGBTQ rights in Japan in recent years has been the legalization of same-sex marriage. This issue has gained increasing salience with the rapid proliferation of SSP systems across the country since 2015. At the moment, same-sex couples in Japan are not eligible for many tax benefits available to married heterosexual couples, and lack rights including inheritance, hospital visitation, and adoption. Although SSP systems have attempted to provide some of these rights and benefits, their effectiveness is limited by their lack of recognition at the national level. Popular support for legalizing same-sex marriage is relatively high, reaching 65% in 2023 according to a Nihon Keizai Shimbun survey (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 2023). Despite this, the LDP has steadfastly refused to bring forward a bill to legalize same-sex marriage at the national level. Some conservative politicians have justified this reluctance by claiming that legalizing same-sex marriage will accelerate the demographic decline of the nation, while others have presented it as an existential threat to traditional family values (Nōgawa, 2018; Shimizu, 2020). At the legal level, the Japanese constitution is generally considered to disallow same-sex marriage on the basis of Article 24, which states that marriage is based on the mutual consent of both sexes (ryōsei no gōi). This reading, however, has been increasingly challenged by legal scholars such as Kimura Sōta of the University of

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Tokyo. A related problem is the legal structure of the family registration system. Under Japan’s family registration law, marriage and family registration are almost inseparable: marriages require the formation of a new family registration, which itself requires the presence of both a husband and wife (Maree, 2014; Shimizu, 2020). These restrictions, which have long criticized by transgender and feminist activists, pose legal barriers for same-sex couples as well. In 2019, the organization Marriage For All Japan filed lawsuits in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and Sapporo district courts, calling the limitations on same-sex marriage in the Civil Code unconstitutional. The status of this litigation is ongoing. In 2021, the group won an initial victory in the Sapporo High Court, but in June 2022, the ban on same-sex marriage was found constitutional by the Osaka District Court (The Japan Times, 2022). The final status of these legal challenges as well as other challenges to Japan’s civil code and family registration law remain undecided as of this writing.

Anti-LGBT Discrimination Legislation Another major goal of LGBTQ activists in recent years has been the passage of legislation combating discrimination (sabetsu) towards sexual minorities. This issue has gained salience in recent years, which have seen several high-profile cases of discrimination and nonconsensual outings of LGBTQ individuals. Organizations such as the Japan Alliance for LGBT Legislation cite prevalence of bullying in professional and educational institutions as reasons to pass laws outlawing anti-LGBT discrimination. Since 2016, most of the leading opposition parties, including the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) and the Democratic Party of Japan (CPJ) have endorsed the passage of a LGBT discrimination elimination (LGBT sabetsu kaishō) bill in the Diet. For its part, the LDP has criticized these efforts and claimed that Japan’s cultural tolerance makes such legislation unnecessary (LDP, 2016). Instead, some in the LDP have promoted the passage of an LGBT Comprehension-Raising Bill (LGBT rikai zōshin hō), the product of the party’s committee on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) formed in 2016. Yet even this modest effort, which lacks the legal penalties of the anti-discrimination bill endorsed by other parties, has come under attack from members of the party’s right wing. As a result of these divides, recent efforts by the party to introduce the bill have failed (Nikaidō, 2021).

Transgender Legal Reforms As previously noted, the conditions for legally changing one’s gender designation in Japan as outlined by the 2003 GID Special Law have been criticized by activists both domestically and abroad. As a result of these requirements, many transgender

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people are legally unable to change their names and sex designations and remain legally unrecognized, increasing their difficulty in acquiring healthcare and treatment. Efforts to change the law and perceptions of regulations on gender transition have gained steam in recent years. In 2020, the Science Council of Japan called for scrapping the 2003 GID law and for the passage of “gender designation change law” (seibetsu kisai henshin hō) as well as a shift away from medicalized understandings of transgender identity towards a human rights-centered framework (Pride Japan, 2020). Despite these reform efforts, however, the most high-profile legal challenge to the 2003 law failed in 2019 when the Japanese Supreme Court upheld its restrictions, despite stating the law “impinges on freedom from invasion of bodily privacy.” This leaves legislative reform as the only viable avenue for legal change, but the LDP has demonstrated a similar reticence towards amending the 2003 law as it has other proposed pro-LGBTQ legislation.

Local Outreach and Community Support Beyond legal and political reform efforts, many activists focus on providing support and social services to local LGBTQ communities as well as on promoting understanding of LGBTQ people through public outreach. Such activities are particularly important in areas outside large metropoles such as Tokyo and Osaka, where general awareness of LGBTQ issues is relatively lower than in urban areas (Sugiura & Maekawa, 2022). In recent years, regional groups like Pink Dot Okinawa, Rainbow Pride Aomori, and Rainbow Fest Kansai have staged large-scale events, particularly pride parades, as ways of connecting with local LGBTQ populations as well as with the broader community (Sunagawa, 2015; Horikawa, 2015). Such events help to bring visibility and attention to LGBTQ-related issues in areas where relatively few LGBTQ people are publicly out with regards to their sexuality or gender identity. Surveys have shown that LGBTQ people living in rural areas report higher levels of loneliness and are much less likely to come out publicly (Yoshimoto, 2021). As a result, many regional organizations focus on providing social services and other forms of support for local LGBTQ communities, ranging from social events to educational seminars. Many manage social spaces in the form of cafes or community centers, through which they conduct events and other forms of outreach. It is difficult to quantify the number of regional activist organizations in Japan, but the number has risen significantly since the late 2000s. The NPO Nijiiro Diversity maintains an online list of active LGBTQ advocacy organizations in Japan, including their locations and founding dates, that can be found here: https:// nijiirodiversity.jp/649/. A similar archive being built by the Queer Japan Web Archiving Project at the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation can be found here: https:// guides.library.yale.edu/QueerJapan. The impact of their activities on local attitudes and perceptions of LGBTQ people has thus far remained under-examined in academic scholarship (Sugiura & Maekawa, 2022). Yet it seems clear from recent shifts

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in public opinion as well as in the wide proliferation of SSP systems that they have had a significant impact on political discourse at the local and municipal levels.

Conclusion As the beginning of the chapter noted, while there is no doubt that social perceptions of LGBTQ people have improved markedly over the past several decades, many political, legal, and social challenges remain for LGBTQ activists and their allies. On the one hand, they have been successful in markedly changing social perceptions of LGBTQ people in the past decade alone, as seen by continuously rising levels of support for same-sex marriage as well as the proliferation of SSP systems around the country. The fact that the LDP has formed a Diet Committee on issues of gender and sexuality and expressed tentative support for a LGBT Comprehension Raising Bill shows the degree to which activists have successfully shifted the terms of the debate. At the same time, this progress has come in the face of a ruling party and national government that has remained steadfastly impassive to proposed legal reforms and expressed strong misgivings regarding the stated goals of LGBTQ activists. As recently as February 2023, Arai Masayoshi, a member of Prime Minister Kishida Fumio’s cabinet, caused consternation for saying he wouldn’t want to live next door to an LGBT person (The Japan Times, 2023). Such comments indicate the continuing hostility towards LGBTQ rights on the part of the political right in Japan. Although some members of the LDP have expressed a greater openness to LGBTQ issues, the party as a whole has sought to avoid these issues, likely to avoid exacerbating internal divisions. So long as the LDP’s political dominance continues, it is likely that this status quo at the national level will remain unchanged. Yet this should not be taken to mean that all political progress has stalled. A key development worth mentioning in this regard is the slow but steady growth of openly LGBTQ politicians in Japan. These individuals include Kamikawa Aya, the first transgender woman elected to the Setagaya Ward Municipal Council in 2003; Kanoko Otsuji, the first openly gay woman, elected 2003 to the Osaka Municipal Assembly; Ishikawa Taiga and Ishizaka Wataru, gay men elected municipal assemblies in 2011; and Hosoda Tomiya, a transgender man elected to the Saitama City Council in 2017. In 2017, Miyakawa, Hosoya, and several other LGBTQ politicians formed the Municipal LGBT Legislators Alliance (LGBT Jichitai Gīn Renmei) as a way of expanding their cooperation and furthering pro-LGBTQ legislation in legislatures around the country. The country’s largest opposition parties, including the CDP and CPJ, have also become increasingly vocal about LGBTQ rights and offered increasingly detailed policy proposals on LGBTQ issues in their public campaign manifestos. Ishikawa, now a member of the CDP in the lower house of the Diet, has spoken optimistically of a growing synergy between LGBTQ activists and other marginalized groups and the potential for diversity as a unifying message for future electoral campaigns (CDP, 2019).

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As of the early 2020s, LGBTQ rights remain one of the most hotly debated topics in Japanese politics. The past decade alone has seen a massive shift in public opinion and media discourse and a marked increase in support, particularly at the local and municipal levels. It has also seen the consolidation of a natalist and vocally anti-LGBTQ ideological cohort of politicians and commentators, particularly within the ruling LDP. To find continued success, LGBTQ activists will have to face these challenges directly and continue to find new ways of influencing public debates, building political support, and promoting greater awareness and understanding of sexual minorities in Japan.

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Okada, K. (2019). Fukanzen ni ‘kuia’: Seiteki shōsusha wo megure aidentitei/bunka no seiji to LGBT no ‘seisansei’ gensetsu ga motarashita mono [Imperfectly “queer”: What the discourse surrounding LGBT “productivity” and the cultural politics of sexual minority identity has shown]. The Annual Review of Cultural Studies, 7, 7–26. Pride Japan. (2020, September 25). Nihon gakujutsu kaigi ga “Dōsei issei shōgai tokureihō” no haishi to “seibetsu kisai henshin hō” no seido wo teigen, igaku moderu kara jinken moderu he [The Science Council of Japan calls for the abolishment of the “GID Special Law” and creation of a “gender designation change law,” from a medical model to a human rights model]. Pride Japan. https://www.outjapan.co.jp/pride_japan/news/2020/9/31.html Saitō, M. (2018). Bakkurashu to kansei konkatsu no renzokusei [The continuity of the backlash and government-sponsored marriage activities]. In T. Hayakawa (Ed.), Maboroshi no ‘nihonteki kazoku’ [The illusionary ‘Japanese family’] (pp. 79–116). Seikyūsha. Shimizu, A. (2007). Scandalous equivocation: A note on the politics of queer self-naming. Inter-­ Asia Cultural Studies, 8(4), 503–516. Shimizu, A. (2015). “Yōkoso, gei furendori na machi he: supēsu to sekushuaru mainoriti,” [Welcome to a Gay-Friendly City: Space and Sexual Minorities]. Gendai Shisō, 43(16), 144–155. Shimizu, A. (2020). “Imported” feminism and “indigenous” queerness: From backlash to transphobic feminism in transnational Japanese context. Jendā Kenkyū: Ochanomizu Daigaku Jendā Kenkyūsho Nenpō, 23, 89–104. Shingae, A. (2013). Nihon no ‘gei’ to ‘eizu’: Komyuniti kokka aidentiti [“Gay” and “AIDS” in Japan: Community, nation, identity]. Seikyūsha. Shingae, A. (2021). “Daibashiti suishin to LGBT/SOGI no yukue: Ichijō ka sareru shakai undō”, [Diversity promotion and LGBT/SOGI: the marketization of social activism]. In K. Iwabuchi (Ed.), Tayōsei to no taiwa: Daibashitei suishin ga mienakusuru mono [A discussion on diversity: Things obscured by diversity promotion] (pp. 36–58). Seikyūsha. Suganuma, K. (2012). Contact moments: The politics of intercultural desire in Japanese male-­ queer cultures. Hong Kong University Press. Sugiura, I. (2007). Lesbian discourses in mainstream magazines of post-war Japan: Is onabe distinct from rezubian? Journal of Lesbian Studies, 10(3–4), 127–144. Sugiura, I. (2019). Sen kyū hyaku nana jū nendai ikō no shutoen ni okeru rezubian komyuniti no keisei to henyō shūgōteki aidentiti no imi zuke jissen ni chakumoku shite [The formation and changes of capitol-area lesbian communities since the 1970s with a focus on the creation of a collective identity]. In N. Kikuchi, Y. Horie, & Y. Iino (Eds.), Kuia sutadīzu o hiraku: Aidentiti, komyuniti, supēsu [Exploring queer studies 1: Identity, community, space] (pp. 15–51). Kōyō Shobō. Sugiura, I., & Maekawa, N. (2022). “Chihō” to seiteki mainoriti: Tohoku rokken no intabyū kara [“Regional areas” and sexual minorities: Interviews from six Tohoku prefectures]. Seikyūsha. Sunagawa, H. (2015). Tayō na shihai, tayō na teikō [Various kinds of domination, various kinds of resistance]. Gendai Shisō, 43(16), 100–106. Tamagawa, M. (2019). Japanese LGBT diasporas: Gender, immigration policy and diverse experiences. Springer. Taniguchi, H. (2006). The legal situation facing sexual minorities in Japan. Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, 12. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue12/taniguchi.html Taniguchi, H. (2020). LGBT. In H. Takeda & M. Williams (Eds.), Routledge handbook of contemporary Japan (pp. 369–379). Routledge. The Japan Times. (2022, June 20). In LGBTQ rights setback, Japan court says barring same-sex marriage not unconstitutional. The Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/06/20/ national/crime-­legal/japan-­court-­same-­sex-­marriage-­ruling/ The Japan Times. (2023, February 5). Kishida fires senior aide over homophobic comments. The Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/02/05/national/politics-­diplomacy/ masayoshi-­arai-­japan-­same-­sex-­marriage-­hate/

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Toshinari, Y. (2019). Chihō jichitai no seisaku tenkan ni okeru SNS o mochiita shakai undō no furēmingu kōka: Shibuya ku “dōseiai pātonāshippu jōrei” no seitei katei o jirei ni [The framing effect of social movement using SNS in policy change of local government-based on the case of the policy making process on Shibuya city’s “same-sex partnership ordinance”]. Annual Review of the Institute for Advanced Social Research, 16, 1–16. TV Asahi News. (2015, April 2). Abe sōri “Dōseikon” mitomeru hōseika ni shinchō shisei [Prime Minister Abe takes a cautious stance towards the legal recognition of same sex marriage]. TV Asahi News. TV Asahi News. (2023, January 26). Dōseikon no dōnyū “Kiwamete shinchō na kentō o yō suru” Kishida sōri [The introduction of same-sex marriage “Requres extremely careful consideration” Prime Minister Kishida]. TV Asahi News. https://news.tv-­asahi.co.jp/news_politics/ articles/000284881.html Wakamatsu, T. (2018). LGBT Konjaku: 1990 nendai gei būmu saikō, LGBT [LGBT then and now: Reconsidering the gay boom of the 1990s]. Aichi Shukutoku Daigaku Ronshū Kōryū Bunkagaku Hen, 8, 115–127. Welker, J. (2017). Toward a history of ‘lesbian history’ in Japan. Culture, Theory and Critique, 58(2), 147–165. Yamaguchi, T. (2014). ‘Gender Free,’ feminism in Japan: A story of mainstreaming and backlash. Feminist Studies, 40(3), 541–572. Yoshimoto, T. (2021, November 15). Toshiken wa “chishiki aru tanin jisō,” chihōbu wa “gokairyū sare sō” ga ōi!? LGBTQ+ chōsa 2020 chiiki betsu no bunseki hikaku [Are there lots of “indifferent people with awareness” in cities and “people who misunderstand” in rural areas? A comparative analysis of 2020 LGBTQ+ survey divided by region]. Dentsūhō. https://dentsu-­ ­ho.com/articles/7966 Patrick Carland-Echavarria is a PhD Candidate in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on transnational queer cultures and history in postwar Japan. His dissertation project, provisionally titled Finding the Rainbow World: Translation, Affect, and Queer Literary and Artistic Exchange in Cold War Japan, examines the language translation and globalization of modern Japanese art and literature from the 1940s to the 1970s using a queer and translation studies perspective.  

Nationalism and Queer Politics in Postwar Japan Kazuyoshi Kawasaka

Abstract  This chapter explores how LGBTQ activisms have challenged and negotiated with heteronormativity embedded in nationalism in postwar Japan. In the history of Japanese queer politics, nationalism has been one of the central forces for both inclusion and exclusion of sexual minorities. It aims to examine how Japanese ethnonationalism has transformed Japanese queer activisms as well as how it has set the limitation for their political effectiveness. First, the chapter discusses how male homosexual political discourses utilised Japanese nationalism to join political struggles and points out that male homosexual and feminist discourses had a different approach to Japanese nationalism before the AIDS crisis. Second, it explores how the AIDS crisis changed the social gaze towards homosexuality and analyses political impacts of the emergence of sexual identity based on sexual orientation. Third, it considers how nationalist anti-gender movements influenced not only gender equality policy in Japan but also LGBTQ politics. Finally, the chapter discusses the limitation of LGBTQ activisms relied on by Japanese nationalism through analysing the Japanese long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s discourses on diversity and LGBTQ rights for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics. As a conclusion, this chapter will point out that the limitation of postwar Japan’s LGBTQ activisms was attributed to the incapability of nationalism as a  universal reason for social inclusion. Keywords  LGBTQ activism · Queer · Feminism · Anti-gender movements · Anti-LGBTQ · Religious right

K. Kawasaka (*) Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Tanaka, H. Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan, Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Science 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36331-3_30

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Introduction Nationalism and queer politics have had a complicated relationship, although queer politics often situates itself against nationalism. In European and North American modern history, nationalism has often worked against queer lives as heteronormativity has been embedded in the idea of a healthy nation and people (Mosse, 2020; Foucault, 1980; Peterson, 1999). Although LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Transgender/ sexual and Queer) rights are now institutionalised in Europe and North America, contemporary populist nationalist movements still often target LGBTQ rights when they challenge mainstream politics (Corrales & Kiryk, 2022). Japan also has a history of nationalist politicians and activists campaigning against LGBTQ people and their rights since the 2000s (Kawasaka, 2023). On the other hand, mainstreaming LGBTQ rights has become a source of nationalism against immigration and cultural others such as Muslims and Russians (Ammaturo, 2015; Altman & Symons, 2016). Jasbir Puar calls the phenomenon ‘homonationalism’ (Puar, 2007). In this sense, LGBTQ rights can be both a source of nationalism and a target which nationalists campaign against. In the history of Japanese queer politics, nationalism has been one of the central forces for both inclusion and exclusion of sexual minorities. Due to lack of religious authority nor criminalising law against same-sex conduct in postwar Japan, many activists have focused on challenging the heteronormativity embedded in Japanese society. In their political campaigns and discourses, ethnonationalism has been one of a few political resources they could utilise, especially for male activists. This chapter aims to examine how Japanese ethnonationalism has transformed Japanese queer activisms as well as how it has set the limitation for their political effectiveness. First, the chapter discusses how male homosexual political discourses utilised Japanese nationalism to join political struggles and points out that male homosexual and feminist discourses had a different approach to Japanese nationalism before the AIDS crisis. Second, it explores how the AIDS crisis changed the social gaze towards homosexuality and analyses political impacts of the emergence of sexual identity based on sexual orientation. Third, it considers how nationalist anti-gender movements influenced not only gender equality policy in Japan but also LGBTQ politics. Finally, the chapter discusses the limitation of LGBTQ activisms relied on by Japanese nationalism through analysing the Japanese long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s discourses on diversity and LGBTQ rights for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics.

Homosexual Politics and Nationalism Before the AIDS Crisis Japanese male homosexual politics had a different relationship with Japanese nationalism compared to Japanese feminism. For postwar feminism, Japanese nationalism caused dilemmas about their relationship with the past (issues of

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women’s war-time responsibility) and other women who were victims of Japanese imperialism (Mackie, 2003; Ueno, 2004; Wöhr, 2005). However, Japanese post-war male homosexual politics did not face such difficult issues. Because homosexuals in Japan did not experience criminalisation of same-sex conduct, they were not urged to commit political activisms for legal reform and therefore did not grow a strong sense of political identity and community until the 1980s when the AIDS crisis emerged. In this sense, the state and nationalism were not something male homosexuals had to challenge in the early stage of history of male homosexual politics. Rather, Japanese nationalism has been one of few discursive resources to legitimate their desires and sexuality in public. Before the modernisation, Japan has a long history of same-sex intimacy and conduct especially among Buddhist monks and samurai class. Even under rapid westernisation, Japan did not criminalise same-­ sex conduct except during a short period (1872–1880) and Japanese religious authorities did not target same-sex sexuality. Male same-sex sexuality was slowly repressed and marginalised through the introduction of western morality and medical discourses (Pflugfelder, 2007). At the same time, the Japanese past became a source of nostalgia and resistance against such marginalisation. Through reading Japanese canons of pre-war literature, Keith Vincent (2012) points out how the Japanese premodern homosexual past made cultural room for men to appreciate same-sex desires and intimacy as a form of nostalgia against normalisation of heterosexuality. In this sense, Japanese nationalism has been double edged for Japanese male homosexuals. While Japanese nationalism can be a vehicle for their exclusion when the nation embraces heterosexuality as a norm, it can also offer them justification for Japanese homosexual men, for example calling for the Japanese ‘tradition’ of male-male intimacy in history. In the early stages of male homosexual politics, Japanese nationalism as well as the emperor who symbolically embodies the nation were utilised to legitimate or politicise homosexual desires within Japanese society. Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) is arguably the most controversial figure who expressed his same-sex desires in a nationalist way. He is one of the most famous gay writers from Japan who is still a popular gay icon in Japan (Mackintosh, 2012). At the same time, however, he is a notorious far-right activist who burst into a base of the Self-Defence Force of Japan to attempt a coup d’etat in 1970. Mishima presented his far-right politics in a highly homoerotic way. He left many naked self-portraits as a ‘modern samurai’ and his ideology was based on a strong passion for the emperor which is almost indistinguishable from same-sex ethos. [For close analysis of Mishima’s political discourses, see Kawasaka, 2018]. Keith Vincent once described him as a ‘everyone’s favorite homofascist’ (Vincent, 2003). Mishima’s controversial politics shows how nationalist politics could have offered opportunities to express homoerotic ethos as part of political aesthetics. Similarly, an early homosexual activist expressed sexual minorities’ situations through the Japanese emperor system. Tōgō Ken (1932–2012) was groundbreaking in Japanese gay activism and challenged numerous national elections since 1971 as an openly homosexual candidate — earlier than Harvey Milk’s run for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1973 (Oikawa, 2007; McLelland, 2012). He

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called himself homo and okama which are derogatory terms against homosexual men and represented himself as a stereotypical flamboyant homosexual man rather than trying to be a serious political candidate. He wore a kimono instead of a formal suit with a tie and used half-naked bodybuilders as his electoral campaign staff. During electoral campaigns, he often insisted on the liberation of all desires and sexual conduct  — not only homosexual acts, but also incestuous affairs (Tōgō, 1979, pp. 157–158). For his provocative radical sexual liberation, his highly theatrical politics also targeted the emperor to challenge the public’s common sense through sexualising him. He reported about the emperor’s sexual activities in his private time during electoral campaigns and ridiculed him by publishing a satirical cartoon about the emperor being penetrated by Douglas MacArthur, which caused an incident that resulted in a far-right activist attacking Tōgō (Oikawa, 2007; McLelland, 2012). He politically utilised the emperor to provoke the public for presenting sexual issues as the political, not a private secrecy. Although Tōgō’s leftist political goal is an opposite pole of Mishima’s, they both presented same-sex desires as the political via the emperor. Mishima redefined a same-sex desire as the sublime passion for nationalist politics which would protect the emperor from the leftists who claimed abolishment of the emperor system while Tōgō weaponised sexual taboos against the emperor who embodies Japanese political and social order. In this sense, the Japanese national past and nationalism has offered discursive sources to homosexual intellectuals and activists to politicise their desires in the age when discursive and political resources were limited for sexual minorities’ political issues. Compared to political discourses of male homosexuals, lesbian activisms did not rely on Japanese nationalism, especially the emperor system, for publicising their discourses and positions. First, there are very few cases, if none at all, in Japanese history in which lesbian activisms were able to utilise assimilating to Japanese nationalist politics compared to male same-sex sexuality which used to be a part of premodern patriarchy among a warrior class. Rather, lesbian activisms and scholarship prioritised tackling the invisibility of female autonomous desires and lesbian identity in Japanese society where women have been objectified by male-centric gazes and desires (Kakefuda, 1992; Horie, 2015). Second, Japanese feminism already had rich discussions about risks and the responsibility of assimilating to Japanese nationalism so that the Japanese state and nationalism has been perceived as an object that social activists must have been cautious of. In prewar and interwar Japan, some feminist intellectuals and suffrage activists such as Ichikawa Fusae, Takamure Itsue, and Hiratsuka Raichō sought to establish the women’s position within Imperialist Japanese order and assimilate to nationalism based on the emperor system (Hayakawa, 1995; Mackie, 2003; Bruce, 2014). Hiratsuka recalled that in Shinto’s mythology the origin of the emperor’s ancestor was the goddess Amaterasu (Germer, 2013). After the destructive result of Japan’s aggressive war driven by nationalism, postwar Japanese feminists had to face the responsibilities of women’s participation in Japan’s war and subordination to the totalitarian system rooted in the emperor system. When Japanese lesbian activisms started to grow from the 1970s, such views were widely shared among women’s right activists

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including lesbian activists. Thus, there are different strategies and contexts of movements between male and female activisms by sexual minorities. These different paths came close in the 1980s and 1990s when Japanese national identity did not offer enough sense of political inclusion for male homosexuals.

The AIDS Crisis and New Sexual Identities The AIDS crisis in the 1980s–90s functioned to symbolically tie homosexuality to threats from outside of Japan. Shingae Akihiro (2013) pointed out that issues from AIDS were introduced to Japan with the connotation of xenophobia without scientific evidence (p. 70). The first discovery of a person with AIDS announced by the AIDS Surveillance Committee in 1985 was a gay male Japanese artist living in the US, who was diagnosed as HIV-positive during a return visit to Japan. However, some researchers were sceptical about this identification (Kazama, 1997; Hirokawa, 1993). The first outbreak in the AIDS epidemic in Japan was among haemophiliacs infected by contaminated blood products, imported mainly from the United States. Although groups of haemophiliac patients had already pointed out the risk of HIV/ AIDS from contaminated blood products from the US, demanding in 1983 that the government approve the use of heated blood products, the government continued to allow the use of unsafe blood products until 1985. Kazama Takashi (1997) observes that, according to the national newspaper Asahi shinbun, the government had found out haemophiliac patients were infected by HIV through imported contaminated blood products two days before the AIDS Surveillance Committee’s announcement of the first Japanese person with AIDS (p. 407). Keith Vincent and Kazama insist that the Japanese government utilised homophobia among Japanese people to smother their failed AIDS policy (Vincent, 1996; Kazama, 1997). As a result, Kazama pointed out, ‘homosexuality’ came to have politically negative connotations in Japanese society (Kazama, 1997, p. 407). The government’s announcement well reflected the Japanese stereotype of AIDS as a foreign disease, arising in far away countries. The first person with AIDS was a homosexual artist living in the US, who was easily conceived of as a special person unrelated to most Japanese people (Iino, 2008, pp. 145–147). The symbolic power of AIDS with foreign threats was so strong in Japan that the tenth International AIDS Conference held in Yokohama in 1994 used an Ukiyoe (woodblock print) of Black Ships for their poster (Shingae, 2013, p.134). Although the AIDS crisis changed the gaze towards homosexuals in Japan with the disease which was symbolically tied to harm and threats from outside of Japan, US activisms also have become a model for Japanese activists. Sexual identities and social visibility became central to sexual minorities’ politics: Lesbian and gay identities have become discussed as something positive by a new generation of activists (Kakefuda, 1992; Kawaguchi et al., 1997; Kawaguchi, 1997) and a Lesbian and Gay parade was started in Tokyo in 1994 for social visibility of LGBTQ people. Translation of sexuality studies from the English language in the 1990s offered new

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terms such as ‘homophobia’, ‘closet’, ‘coming-out’, and ‘heteronormativity’, and contributed to how activists theoretically discussed the Japanese social situations of sexual minorities. They became more widely used over traditional political terms such as the emperor system compared to the old generations. Common sexual terms including homo, rezu, okama, which had been widely used in Japan for calling sexual minorities, gradually became regarded as derogatory and offensive for a new generation of activists who tried to constitute a pride with their sexual identities (Fushimi et al., 2002). New sexual identities also changed the views on Japanese nationalism in sexual politics. Gei sutadīzu (1997) is the first academic book of gay studies published in Japan and was intended to politically claim a gay identity to challenge heteronormativity in Japanese society. The authors insisted Japanese male homosexuals did not constitute a gay identity which would be a source of pride and political agency against social repression. They were also opposed to follow an Anglophone academic trend at that time which tried to deconstruct sexual identity by queer theory and postmodernism. For constituting political agency against heteronormativity in Japan, Keith Vincent, one of Gei sutadīzu’s authors, criticised  the influence of Japanese nationalism over male homosexual representations and politics. He felt that homosexuality was deeply attached to far-right politics in postwar Japan, for example notorious political performance and discourses of Mishima Yukio, so that leftist movements have exploited homophobia against right wing movements, especially their worship of the emperor (Kawaguchi et al., 1997, p. 82). In such a political environment, homosexuality and gay identity could be understood as if it were something harmful to a liberal democracy although the majority of gay people had nothing to do with far-right movements nor its ideology. At the same time, Vincent also criticised a popular view in the Japanese gay community that comparison between Japanese and other gay cultures often fell to discussions of Japanese national identity, sliding issues of sexual identity to national identity ones (Kawaguchi et al., 1997, p.157). He insisted that gay people’s strong attachment to Japanese national identity rather than sexual identity was one of the reasons why gay people were de-politicised in Japan and failed to challenge heteronormativity which was deeply rooted in the nation (Kawaguchi et al., 1997, pp. 157–161). Lesbian identity was also claimed against Japanese national identity which can enforce a national border and exclude national others. Rezubian de aru, to iu koto (being a lesbian) by Kakefuda Hiroko (1992), the first openly lesbian writer in Japan, defined lesbian as not only as a category of female same-sex desires but also as a political identity against Japanese repressive social norms (p.  21–23). For Kakefuda, being a lesbian means to embrace a disadvantaged position in Japanese society and reject a repressive and patriarchal Japanese family system (ie-seido) as lesbians do not need a patriarchal figure (Kakefuda, 1992, p. 84). As the Japanese family system (ie-seido), which was also based on the emperor system, is a foundation of Japanese nationalism, Kakefuda’s view of being lesbians meant also being beyond the Japanese national boundaries. Although she recognised her own limitation which was rooted in her experience as a Japanese citizen living in Japan, she still tried to contextualise her own experience as a lesbian within worldwide

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contexts in the book: ‘However being repressed and discriminated against, even being murdered, women who loved women have never ceased to exist in Japan and in the world’ (Kakefuda, 1992, p. 242). In these words, Kakefuda understood lesbian identities beyond a national limitation. Expanding Kakefuda’s discussions of lesbian identities in Japan, Horie Yuri (2015) also understands a lesbian identity as a political agency rather than merely referring to a sexual identity. She recognises diversity among lesbians which cannot be reduced to one identity but she re-claimed the name ‘lesbian’ as a social standpoint against repression and erasure of women who love women and solidarity among them (Horie, 2015, pp. 27–45). She tries to explain a lesbian identity within transnational contexts of activisms and politics by sexual minorities rather than Japanese women’s history, which is a popular narrative employed by English-­ language Japanese studies. For such understanding of lesbian identity, nation and ethnicity are not understood as a foundation for ensuring cultural identity nor political participation but rather a repressive factor which standardises the people by heteronormativity and erasing lesbian political agency. This is why Horie as a lesbian theorist rejects the emperor system as a source of heteronormative family ideology and xenophobia (Horie, 2015, 245–253). Similarly, Iino Yuriko criticised Japanese ethnocentrism in a lesbian community (Iino, 2006). Japanese sexual politics and terms before the AIDS crisis are described as ‘indigenous’ and the one after it as ‘westernised’ as the latter is obviously influenced by the US activisms and discourses (McLelland, 2005, Ch.5). However, such a simplified dichotomy helps not only to reduce social contexts of sexual politics each time to the differences of cultures and western influences but also to enforce Japanese nativist backlash against LGBTQ rights which claims LGBTQ human rights are a result of western-rooted movements.

 acklash Against Feminist and LGBTQ Activisms B and Academic Research New emergence of gay and lesbian political identity also changed its relationship with feminism especially for gay activisms. Throughout the 1990s, feminism and gay politics started to find a common ground to challenge social norms for their political agenda. First, new activisms such as Lesbian and Gay film festivals (which started in 1992 in Tokyo) and Lesbian and Gay parades (which started in 1994 in Tokyo) created space for people from diverse backgrounds to cooperate with each other and gradually made gay activists realise gender issues were important for their own political goals. As lesbian and transgender activists had had a long history to work on both gender and sexual issues, their participation and criticisms of gay male centric activisms showed a limitation of these movements based on a single issue of male sexuality. Second, academic institutionalisation of sexuality studies offered an opportunity to the new generation of activists to learn academic

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discussions including feminism and pursuing academic careers became one of their career plans while committing to LGBTQ activisms. In addition, translation of new academic discourses including Judith Butler’s and Eve K. Sedgwick’s works stimulated both feminists and LGBTQ activists to bridge perspectives of gender and sexuality to understand the Japanese social structure they were dealing with. In this sense, feminism and gay activisms have influenced each other to question heteronormativity in Japan since the late 1990s. However, the backlash movements by the radical right also started to target feminist movements in the 2000s (Fujimura-Fanselow & Wakakuwa, 2011). Japanese anti-gender movements, so called bakkurasshu [backlash], rapidly grew just after the enactment of the bill of the Basic Law for a Gender Equal Society (1999), which is regarded as one of the most important feminist legal achievements because it was specifically intended to improve gender equality. The movements targeted a term jendā furī [gender-free], which was popular among feminist gender-awareness movements and civil service at that time, because they regarded it as the term to deny social gender roles and separation including biological differences all together. The anti-gender movements organised the grassroots movements against gender equality policies, especially of education and local gender equality ordinances as the anti-gender movements were led by not only powerful nationalist politicians including Abe Shinzō but also politically influential and affluent religious right groups such as the Association of Shinto Shrines [Jinja Honchō] and Unification Church [Tōitsu kyōkai] (Yamaguchi et  al., 2012; Yamaguchi, 2014, 2018). Anti-­ gender movements sensationalised sex education and gender equality policy which especially included LGBTQ related awareness and protection. Their language against gender equality was intended to evoke anxiety over family and sexual norms by feeding homo−/transphobia, such as the introduction of unisex toilets for transgender people as being a project imposing ‘soft fascism of sexual perverts’ (Nishio & Yagi, 2005, p. 262). In such remarks, the radical right movements well exploited homo−/transphobia against feminist movements and succeeded in reversing gender equality policy and attenuate academic institutionalisation of gender and sexuality studies as being ‘a lost decade for feminism’ (Yamaguchi et al., 2012, p. v). The assassination of Abe Sinzō in July 2022 attracted public attention about the close connection between social conservative politicians especially of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Unification Church which originally worked against communist movements during the Cold War but was now working on social value issues including gender equality and LGBTQ rights issues. Their relationship was also central in anti-gender backlash movements in the 2000s (Yamaguchi et al., 2012; Yamaguchi, 2014). As the Unification Church worked against communism, of which the political branch is called the International Federation for Victory over Communism (IFVOC), anti-gender backlash discourses in the 2000s were characterised by anti-communist rhetoric. For example, Nishio Kanji and Yagi Shūji, nationalists and leading anti-gender intellectuals, insisted that ‘gender-free’ was a Marxist project of the Revolutionary Left and gender sensitive education was similar to teaching children radical communist ideas (Nishio & Yagi, 2005, pp. 195–199;

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Yagi, 2005, p. 102). Thus, Japanese anti-gender discourses had two characteristics in the 2000s. First, the anti-gender discourses appeared as the re-used nationalist discourses against communism during the Cold War. Although Mishima Yukio utilised similar nationalist and masculinist discourses against communism for legitimating same-sex ethos within Japanese politics in the 1960s, the anti-gender nationalist discourses now labelled homosexuality as the result of gender confusion by feminism and moral decay. They insisted that heteronormativity was the essential moral force to maintain the nation. Second, they exploited homophobia and transphobia to sensationalise the issues by appealing to audiences’ emotions. By such incitement of emotions, especially anxiety and hate, their extreme and unrealistic discourses such as ‘gender-free’ denies all gender separations and roles and ‘gender-free’ was to be considered a Marxist project of the Revolutionary Left (Nishio & Yagi, 2005, pp. 195–199; Yagi, 2005, p. 102). These were treated as if they were valid statements by influential nationalist politicians in the ruling party LDP including Abe. The backlash movements in the 2000s campaigned against feminists and LGBTQ people as national threats just as society treated gay people during the AIDS panic. In this time, the well organised campaigns by nationalist and religious right groups undermined gender equality policy as well as gender sensitive and sex education in Japan, which regressed the political situation for women’s and LGBTQ human rights issues for the next decade in Japan. As a result, the Japanese situation on gender equality and LGBTQ human rights issues are now far worse compared to other G7 nations. Similar attacks on LGBTQ rights still continue even now especially when the same-sex marriage and partnership have become political issues. IFVOC set four annual doctrines in 2021 and one of them was to ‘stop legalisation of same-sex marriage and extreme “LGBT” human rights movements and promote accurate views of marriage and family’ (IFVOC, 2022) in addition to organising Constitution revision movements. As counter-movements against LGBTQ human rights movements were included as a part of their doctrines which is equivalent to Constitution revision movements, anti-LGBTQ policy is one of the core values of the Japanese religious right. The Unification Church has a strong influence over the LDP and their influence over local politics also started to be reported in the Japanese media (‘One in 10 Local Politicians Have Unification Church Ties’, 2022). One of the reasons why feminist and LGBTQ movements failed to counter the anti-gender movements in an effective way was that they failed not only to organise cooperation against the backlash movements but also to learn from the experience of other countries’ movements. Even though transnational feminist and LGBTQ movements had a long history of countering against such dire and demeaning campaigns. (For detailed discussion, see Kawasaka (2023). The anti-gender backlash movements tried to label feminism and LGBTQ rights as part of a communist project which threatened Japan. What is ironic is that actually transnational capitalism has become a driving force to make gender equality and LGBTQ rights progress under the second Abe administration in the 2010s.

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‘ Disguised’ Diversity Under Nationalism: Globalisation of LGBTQ Rights and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics While the anti-gender backlash movements in the 2000s labelled feminism and LGBTQ people as national threats to Japan just as communism was, social transition has occurred among the liberal democratic countries so that the term ‘diversity’, including women’s empowerment and LGBTQ inclusion, has become regarded as a part of soft power and a source of national pride since the late 2000s. In the United States, LGBTQ rights became a symbol of progress under the Obama administration including the ‘Don‘’t Ask, Don‘’t Tell’ Repeal Act (2010), ending the Legal Defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (2011), and the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015). Tolerance and acceptance of LGBTQ people has become a sign of cultural superiority over other cultures and a source of nationalism in North American and European countries as Jasbir Puar (2007) called the phenomena ‘homonationalism’ (p. 2). In addition to LGBTQ rights protection in US domestic politics, the Obama administration tried to internationally promote LGBTQ rights through diplomacy such as when President Obama issued a Memorandum for ‘International Initiatives to Advance the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons’ in 2011 and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech, ‘Gay Rights are Human Rights’, at the United Nations in Geneva on the same day. In Japan, the US embassy actively advocated LGBTQ equality and knowledge in Japan including the US ambassadors’ messages and participation in the Tokyo Pride Parade, the invitation of openly gay rights advocator and Japanese American actor George Takei to Japan, organising LGBTQ related events, and giving a platform to Japanese openly LGBTQ politicians. By these efforts, the US embassy played an important role in making LGBTQ issues mainstream in Japanese society (Kawasaka, 2013). Reflecting international changes of attitude towards LGBTQ rights, Japanese society also slowly started to embrace the idea of diversity and LGBTQ rights. A same-sex partnership certificate system was introduced in Shibuya and Setagaya wards in Tokyo in 2015 and rapidly spread to other local municipalities across Japan. In 2023, more than 250 local municipalities have a similar system (‘Historical timeline’, 2023). However, as the national government controls family law in Japan, the same-sex partnership certificate system does not have legal protection nor benefits; thus it is considered as a symbolic support for same-sex couples by local officials. In addition to institutionalisation of same-sex partnership by local governments, the idea of LGBTQ inclusion has become mainstream in the Japanese business community. The concept of an ‘LGBT market’ was advocated by economic think tanks and marketing companies such as Dentsū. Diversity including LGBTQ people was starting to be recognised as essential for Japanese corporations to modernise their management and status in the new international environment (Keidanren, 2017). In such social development, the idea of ‘homonationalism’, which means the social tolerance of LGBTQ people will mean Japan’s national superiority over

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others, is influencing Japanese activisms and society. For example, Tokyo Rainbow Pride employs a language of Japanese nationalism for promoting LGBTQ visibility. They set a target to make Tokyo’s parade the largest in Asia and utilised symbols such as national flags and a Shintō shrine gate (Torii) in their events which used to be avoided by previous LGBTQ activists. The new style of LGBTQ activism also shows how it has become mainstream in Japanese society in the 2010s, although many Japanese conservative politicians do not fully embrace LGBTQ rights. The Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics functioned to couple the new nationalism embracing diversity and traditional Japanese nationalism during the 2010s. Tokyo was elected as the host city in 2013 just after the second Abe administration (2012–2020) started. As Abe Shinzō himself visited Buenos Aires to appeal to the International Olympic Committee members for Tokyo to be the host city, Abe often politically capitalised the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics for his vision of a ‘new Japan’. In his statement for the New Year in 2015, for example, Abe associated the upcoming Olympics with a ‘new Japan’ of increasing economic and international power by recalling how the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 became the symbolic event for post-war Japan as a new, rising nation with growing economic power (Abe, 2015). In this narrative, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics represented a national nostalgia of the good old days before Japan’s 30 years long economic slump. At the same time, hosting the Olympics and Paralympics exposed Japan’s slow reformation for protecting human rights of social minorities and foreigners. After observing fierce boycott movements against the Sochi Winter Olympics over Russian ‘gay propaganda law’ in 2014, Japanese policy makers started to recognise the need to improve Japan’s LGBTQ rights situation for organising successful Games. In this context, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics represent a contradiction between two forms of nationalism of Japan: one of a national nostalgia of Shōwa’s society with economic growth and the other of nationalism including the idea of diversity to show Japan’s ability to associate with international changes. When Tokyo was elected as the host city for the Olympics, Japan at the national level and Tokyo at the local level did not have a single law recognising LGBTQ rights such as same-sex marriage, same-sex partnership, anti-discrimination law, nor any human rights protection law in general. Tokyo metropolitan city moved quicker than the national government to institutionalise protection of human rights and diversity. In 2018, Tokyo passed an anti-discriminatory ordinance focusing on discrimination against LGBTQ people and banning hate speech against foreigners, which is called the ordinance for respect of human rights protected by the Olympics Charter [Tokyōto orinpik-ku kenshō de utawareru jinken sonchō no jitsugen wo mezasu jōrei]. As the name of Tokyo’s ordinance refers to the Olympics Charter, the legal protection was intended to appeal to their efforts to an international community and the IOC rather than simply improving the Japanese situation on human rights issues. However, national politics did not actively embrace legal reformation for diversity policy as Tokyo metropolitan city did. The diversity policy has to be accepted by the religious right group in the majority party, the Liberal Democratic Party and Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, who led the anti-gender backlash movement in the

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2000s. Therefore, the LDP’s policy was presented as if Japan would advance diversity for the Tokyo Olympics while protecting Japanese conservative values. For example, the LDP issued their view about promotion of LGBTQ equality in 2016. According to the LDP’s view, Japan is a traditionally LGBTQ friendly country embracing sexual and gender diversity as we see in Japanese classic literature and theatre such as Kabuki but the westernisation during the Meiji era changed the view on homosexuality (The  LDP, 2016, p.1). In contemporary Japanese society, they said, there were still stereotypes and discrimination against LGBTQ people and many LGBTQ identifying people could often be experiencing difficulty. However, legally banning discrimination without public consensus would create offenders without malicious intent and cause an isolation of LGBTQ people in society (The LDP, 2016, p.1). Thus, the LDP concluded that they needed to promote people’s understanding about LGBTQ people. According to the LDP, an objective of gender and sexual diversity should not be a society which LGBTQ people can come out but a society in which LGBTQ people do not need to come out while respecting existing law, which does not recognise same-sex partnership nor anti-discrimination law (The LDP, 2016, p. 1). In the LDP’s reasoning on their diversity policy which only focuses on promoting people’s attitude towards minorities while resisting legal reform, they presuppose two contradicting characteristics of Japanese society: tolerance and ignorance. Although Japan has a traditional tolerant culture of gender and sexual diversity, there is still ignorance about LGBTQ issues among Japanese people. Thus, even though LGBTQ people are experiencing some discrimination and difficulty in society, these discrimination cases are not happening by malicious intent but by their ignorance as Japan must be a traditionally tolerant country embracing diversity of gender identity and sexual orientation. Kazama Takashi (2020) regards the LDP’s emphasis on Japan’s traditional tolerant culture as an example of inclusion of LGBT people by nationalism and a sort of homonationalism, ‘emphasising Japan’s tolerant culture places it in a superior position compared to other nations. By doing so, the LDP places its SOGI [Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity] diversity effort squarely in the framework of nationalism’ (p. 48). The LDP’s emphasis on Japanese traditional tolerant culture was presented to oppose the introduction of legal reform such as anti-discrimination laws or human rights protection laws including sexual orientation and gender identity (Nikaidō, 2017). Japanese nationalist politicians tactically utilise discourses of a tolerant culture, as well as orientalist discourses which celebrate Japanese sexual culture as fundamentally different from the West, to oppose institutionalisation of LGBTQ rights. In this sense, Japanese nationalists repressed demands to improve LGBTQ rights protection more tactically than Russia which brutally denied LGBTQ existence as they regarded them as a sign of Western moral decay (Persson, 2015). As of 2016, the LDP already set a policy on gender and sexual diversity to block substantive reform on LGBTQ rights such as same-sex partnership, same-sex marriage or anti-discrimination laws while promoting understanding of gender and sexual diversity in society to avoid international criticisms during the Olympic Games as Russia had received. In 2021 when the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics

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was approaching, the nationalist group of the LDP did not even try pretending. A bill of law on promoting LGBTQ understanding, which was promised in the LDP’s policy in 2016, failed to be read in the Diet due to opposition from an ultraconservative group within the LDP although other minority parties supported the bill. As a result, the bill was scrapped just before the Olympic Games started in 2021. Although the bill did not include illegalisation of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, nationalist politicians in the LDP opposed the language in the bill ‘discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity shall not be tolerated’ and news media reported that some MPs expressed bluntly homophobic views in the LDP internal meeting, such as ‘LGBT goes against the preservation of the species’ (Doi & Kyle, 2021). Many LGBTQ activists believed the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics would be one of the historic opportunities to improve the LGBTQ rights situation in Japan and the Olympics related LGBT activisms such as Tokyo 2020 D&I Actions and Pride House Tokyo Legacy were launched (Tokyo, 2022, pp. 16). The LDP’s ultraconservative group’s sabotage, however, betrayed such hope for improving LGBTQ rights in Japan. Ironically, the Tokyo Olympics committee’s report for Gender Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (2022) concluded that the Tokyo 2020 Games worked hard to include LGBTQ voices (p.15) and ‘Tokyo 2020 sent a strong message for inclusion to the world with the highest number of athletes competing ever, openly LGBTQ’ (p.16). The narrative of the report for the diversity of the Tokyo Games is very similar to the LDP’s report published in 2016, which said that when there are LGBTQ people, Japan is already inclusive and diversity is wide enough. Indeed, this is a good example of inclusion by a sense of nationalism and failure of securing rights and equality by the state.

Conclusion Although modern Japanese nationalism has incorporated heteronormativity and functioned to marginalise the queer population, this nationalism has been an important factor to understand post-war queer politics in Japan. For politicisation of sexual minorities’ situation and desires, Japanese nationalism and national symbols such as the emperor and samurai custom were utilised to claim for inclusion, attract public attention, or challenge social norms, especially before the emergence of identity politics. Japanese nationalism is even now a popular discursive source in term of ‘localising’ LGBTQ politics and connecting to the general public. However, nationalism can be a vehicle against LGBTQ people as we can see examples from the AIDS panic and anti-gender backlash movements by social and religious ultra conservatives. What is problematic in the relationship between LGBTQ politics and Japanese nationalism is that the mechanism of inclusion and exclusion has not been stable, always changing depending on the domestic and international environment. The incapability of universal reason or stable function for inclusion by nationalism as a political source is not only the limitation of sexual

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politics relied on by Japanese nationalism but also one of the reasons why Japanese LGBTQ politics has been unstable and failed to form a continuous movement in postwar Japan. Especially, the Japanese majority party LDP’s hypocrisy and confusion of diversity policy for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics exposed a limitation of inclusion of social minority by nationalism. The discourses of the LDP’s policy on diversity indicate two problematic features of inclusion by nationalism. First, the inclusion of social minorities easily turns to an argument of national interests so that the issues of minority lives will be judged based on whether their inclusion will serve national benefits or not. From this viewpoint, social conservatives in the LDP raised an objection against LGBTQ rights. For example, Sugita Mio, a LDP lower house member, said LGBT people were ‘unproductive’ because they would not make children (Sugita, 2018, pp. 58–59). Second, the inclusion by nationalism does not secure LGBTQ rights and protection as the LDP tried to send a message that Japan is already embracing diversity because LGBT people exist in society. This means LGBTQ inclusion by nationalism does not necessary challenge heteronormativity in society. The relationship between LGBTQ activisms and nationalism is a key factor to understanding how LGBTQ activisms have grown in Japan as well as how conservative politics exploits it to repress progress of human rights protection in contemporary society. Acknowledgments This chapter is based on research funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in the framework of “Sexual Diversity and Human Rights in twenty-first Century Japan: LGBTIQ Activisms and Resistance from a Transnational Perspective” (KA 5082/2-1).

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