Search

Using interview data, the article demonstrates that Uzbekistani residents of Japan understand and explain their stay in Japan largely as temporary, in line with the concept of 'sojourning'. In contrast to previous studies that operationalise sojourning according to legal status or 'preparations to return home', this article claims that such 'sojourning' needs to be treated as a constantly changing socially shaped discursive category employed by respondents to mitigate challenges such as economic hardship, discrimination and cultural assimilation. Additionally, male expatriates may describe their sojourning in culturally specific religious terms, as wanderers (musofir) in search of life experience abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent news about China's attitude the human rights of Uighurs in Xinjiang and its crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong has drawn a great deal of attention in the western media, with China facing a barrage of criticism from that source. Shortly before these developments came to light, China was taken to task over violence against Tibetans, which some viewed as cultural genocide. In contrast, the plight of Inner Mongolians is not widely known. In 2020, the Chinese government announced a new language policy promoting immediate Mandarin-language education in schools in the region. This shows how actively China has been eradicating the identity of peripheral minority groups. This article begins with a brief historical overview of China's linguistic assimilation policy toward ethnic minorities, followed by an investigation based on existing research and media information on the current position in Inner Mongolia and in particular of Mongolians living in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers new qualitative insights into ongoing internationalization processes in Japanese higher education. Drawing on ideas from migration studies and informed by analysis of junior international faculty members' (JIFs) experiences in Japanese universities, we posit a novel, actor-centered typology of internationalization that delineates between integration, assimilation, and marginalization of mobile actors, and considers their implications in practice. Twenty-three interviews were conducted with JIFs from a variety of disciplines and institutions across Japan. Findings indicated a pattern of disillusionment with their role in internationalization, as many perceived themselves to be tokenized symbols of internationalization rather than valued actors within it. Participants identified various barriers which prevented them from participating in the academic "mainstream" and confined them to peripheral roles. We argue that their experiences are indicative of assimilative and marginalizing forms of internationalization, which pose persistent barriers to reform in Japanese universities despite decades of state-sponsored internationalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eight-year-long period from Japan’s initiation of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 to its unconditional surrender in 1945 forced Japan to invest its national economy and industrial and scientific technologies in the war. In addition, in the name of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan initiated its assimilation and Kominka (Japanisation) policies (皇民化政策) in the colonies Korea and Taiwan. Japan used education as a tool to expand its influence over members of society, and attempted the frequent use of Japanese and Kominka (皇民化) in daily life to penetrate the awareness of people in the colonies. Japan also started to enforce various assimilation policies. A comparison of the implementation of Kominka policies (皇民化政策) in Taiwan and Korea shows that, in terms of school admission rates and frequency of use of Japanese, the proportion of school admission rates for frequent speakers of Japanese to primary education in Taiwan are significantly higher than those in Korea. Moreover, in terms of primary education, national schools were implemented in both Taiwan and Korea according to the “National School Order” promulgated in 1941. Japan made use of the term “education equality” to win people over. In fact, it aimed to strengthen the concept of Kominka (皇民化), the education of militarism, and to force the Taiwanese and Koreans to become “imperial citizens” loyal to the Emperor. Japan’s ultimate objective was to create an environment that met military needs for civilian and military resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Under Japan's colonization of Ainu Lands (Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin), the Ainu were disconnected from their lands by relocations and deprived of their language and culture by regulations. In 1899, the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act came into force to finalize the assimilation of the Ainu into Japanese society. In 1997, as a result of Ainu efforts to scrap the assimilation policies, the Ainu Culture Promotion Act (CPA) replaced the Act of 1899. The CPA was expected to emancipate the Ainu from the sufferings caused by the assimilation policies, and yet it stipulated neither Ainu indigeneity nor their linguistic and cultural rights. It is still in effect even after the 2008 official recognition of the Ainu as an indigenous people in the northern part of Japan by the Government of Japan. This article attempts to examine Japan's past and present policies towards the Ainu language and culture in the international context for the revitalization of the Ainu language and culture as the Ainu desire. In order to do this, it first outlines the assimilation policies, and then traces the Ainu struggle for survival as a people. It also discusses the CPA and the Final Report written by the Advisory Committee for Future Ainu Policy, which both form the basis of Japan's present Ainu policies. Finally, in order to explore the revitalization of the Ainu language and culture, how the North Fennoscandian Sami policies have advanced is surveyed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights regarding the Bukatsudo and the sport of religious assimilation. The author discusses several topics which include production of the documentary film "Haafu" in 2009 which describes the diverse children's upbringing in Japan, Japanese public education system which complicates children's dual association with church and club activities, and author Robert Smith who claimed that is a social institution taught within a social context.

The aim of my paper is to provide a reading of Sen'nen no yuraku ... (1982, A Thousand Years of Pleasure) by Nakagami Kenji ... (1946-1992) that draws on the tradition of the "old woman" (omina 1. Wakayama-ken Shingu-shi 2013, http://www.city.shingu.lg.jp/forms/top/ top.aspx. 2. Hisabetsu buraku literally means "discriminated community - hamlet". In contemporary Japan, hamlet areas (buraku ...) which are the focus of status (or caste) discrimination are called hisabetsu buraku. This term came into use in Japan in the late 1950s and was adopted by the media and in academic circles in the 1970s. Today, the term dōwa chiku ... (assimilation area) is used interchangeably as a way of referring to hisabetsu buraku. More precisely, dōwa chiku refers to hisabetsu buraku which have been designated by administrative agencies as being areas to which dōwa (assimilation) policies are directed. Excluding Hokkaido and Okinawa prefectures, there are six thousand such designated areas in Japan. People born in these areas are estimated to number about three million. Of the six thousand hisabetsu buraku areas, a 1987 government survey designated four thousand six hundred and three areas as dōwa chiku. Consequently it is generally acknowledged that there are more than one thousand hisabetsu buraku which, for a range of reasons, remain undesignated and lie beyond the application of the government's dōwa policies. See Teraki 1998, "The Buraku Question", Buraku Liberation News, 104, http://blhrri.org/blhrri_e/news/new104/new10402.htm. ...) as story-teller in monogatari ..., Japanese narrative. Nakagami was born in 1946 in one of the outcaste Burakumin districts in the Kumano region, Wakayama Prefecture. Nakagami's Burakumin narratives emerged from his interpretation of local oral folklore and the historical oppression of Kumano by the hegemonic centre. Through the production of narrative about the "silenced" outcaste community, Nakagami mounted a critique of the mainstream exclusionist ideology based on binary opposites which scaffolds discrimination against the Burakumin. His view resonates with that of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as argued in her essay collection entitled A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1996). I will use this essay as a key text to discuss Nakagami's literary representation of the silenced voice of the marginalised. In his note on Japanese narrative tradition, Nakagami explains that the primitive state of monogatari is oral and narrated by omina, the old woman. In my analysis of Nakagami's idea of monogatari, specific attention will be given to the chapter entitled "Enchi Fumiko" ... (1985) in the essay "Monogatari no keifu" ... (1979-1985, The Genealogy of Narrative). Referring to Nakagami's view of the tradition of monogatari as female narrating, especially narration by the old woman, I will examine Sen'nen no yuraku as a variation of the primitive state of monogatari narrated by omina. I will also draw on Spivak's discussion of the "(foreclosed) native informant" to consider how Nakagami presents the omina's perspective as the trace of the marginalised subaltern in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the assimilation policies of the Japanese Empire in Korea during the kōminka era from 1937-1945. The policies obliged Japanese settlers in Korea to increase their contributions to the war effort, while being denied civil rights like voting, autonomy and free speech. The kōminka policies also obliged women to promote Japanese culture in the peninsula in terms of clothing, food and sensibility.

This study looks at how education policies in colonial Korea changed over time in order to accommodate the needs of the colonial authorities during the period of Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1910-1945). The colonial experience can be divided into four different periods according to the four Educational Ordinances issued in 1911, 1922, 1938, and 1943 by the colonial government with each period corresponding to a historic event or context. The constitutive relevance of colonial discourse for an understanding of education can be found in the gradual transformation of the education sector in Korea under colonial rule. It is evident that Japanese colonial policy was inherently contradictory in principle and in practice. On the one hand it sought the assimilation of the Koreans, while on the other it maintained its discriminatory and exploitative practices. Such contradiction was obvious within the colonial education system. As the principal instrument of assimilation, education was regarded as the primary means to subordinate the ethnic identity of the colonised and to transform them into loyal imperial subjects. An overview of the four different periods relevant to the changing circumstances to which the education sector responded reveals the social-historical implications of the instrumentality of colonial education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores the way in which acculturation can be used as a management control mechanism. Acculturation - inculcating values and norms of one culture to another culture- has been studied in relation to national cultures whereas, the application of acculturation to the study area of management control is novel. By using the ethnographic research method, this research examines as to how a Sri Lankan subsidiary of a Japanese company acculturates its employees to Japanese work values with a view to instituting a positive work culture. The study has illustrated the process through which workers unlearned indigenous Sri Lankan work values and assimilated new Japanese work values. The findings are useful for designing strategies to acculturate employees to create an effective management control regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Korea and Japan have had to confront rapidly declining working-age population projections, both countries kept their borders closed to unskilled workers from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, and met labour demands through de facto guest worker programs and preferential policies for co-ethnic immigrants. However, by the mid-2000s, government officials could no longer turn a blind eye to the swelling ranks of immigrants within their borders and announced two contrasting proposals for immigrant incorporation: centralized rights-based legislation that targets specific immigrant groups in Korea and decentralized guidelines that prioritize community-based partnerships in Japan. Instead of resulting from deliberate decision making by either state to manage the permanent settlement of immigrants, I argue that these divergent approaches reflect grassroots movements that drew on existing strategies previously applied to incorporate historically marginalized groups in each society prior to the establishment of official incorporation programs. Migrant workers in Korea made significant inroads in gaining rights largely because of the strong tradition of labour and civil society activism in Korea's democratization movement. In Japan, grassroots movements led by generations of zainichi Koreans from the 1960s set the foundation for decentralized, community-based strategies for incorporating new immigrants from the late 1980s. Comparing two seemingly similar countries in East Asia, this article identifies patterns of interaction between new immigration and existing practices that have shaped relationships between dominant and minority communities and between state and non-state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I outline different beliefs about assimilation, and show that these beliefs can influence attitudes toward immigration. Using data from a new national sample survey in Japan, I test whether and how beliefs about assimilation influence attitudes toward immigration. The results show two important conclusions. First, there is a large anti-immigrant sentiment in Japan. Second, after controlling for other known determinants of attitudes toward immigration, I find that those who are in favor of immigrant assimilation support higher levels of immigration, more immigrant equal rights, and have more accurate views about immigrant crime in Japan. This suggests that those favoring assimilation are not necessarily xenophobic in all cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daejangchon, a village community of Japanese immigrants in colonial Korea, was unique in that it was built in rural area, unlike other Japanese communities in Korea which were typically built near cities. The large-scale development projects of the Japanese colonizers, such as Hosokawa Farm in Daejang-chon, transformed a small village into a modern "town." The radical changes brought to Daejangchon by development resulted in alienation from surrounding villages. The failure of Daejangchon to promote substantial growth for Korean peasants made clear the failure of naisen ittai (Japan and Korea as one body), the professed assimilation policy of Japan. The rapid decline of Daejangchon after liberation proved that the colonial development did not encourage substantial progress in conditions for local Koreans and was unwelcomed by the locals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's advertising industry has a long history of employing foreign actors. This article probes the proposition that over time this media exposure affects advertising industry's willingness to change and meld the presentation of foreign people in local contexts in ads. An empirical study supports the proposition that some level of foreign-domestic advertising assimilation- dynamic is occurring in Japan. The article reports a content analysis examining 102 television advertisements run during 1992 and 2002 that confirms the principle proposition. Changes in verbal and nonverbal communication modalities suggest that foreign-actor domestic assimilation is occurring. The article illustrates how advertisers go about showing foreigners in Japanese contexts to transform the old saw, "Think global, act local" into the more actionable dictum, "Meld global inside local." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1930s, an entrepreneurial class began to form within the overwhelmingly working-class Korean minority community in prewar Japan. This article examines how certain Koreans attained socioeconomic success and how they became assimilated into Japanese society in the process. As a case study, it focuses on the career of prewar Japan's most successful Korean entrepreneur-turned-politician, Park Chungŭm, to reveal how the internalization of Japanese values that came with success disconnected such individuals from the vast majority of Koreans residing in Japan, while offering them only a problematic sense of identification with the Japanese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of Latin American immigrants in Japan to date have focused on Nikkei (of Japanese ancestry) from Brazil and Peru, considering their accommodation to Japanese society as a group with ethnic ties to Japan. In the last few years, however, Latin Americans of diverse backgrounds from countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Colombia have also migrated and settled in urban areas throughout Japan. These immigrants find few avenues to organise themselves or to integrate with the population at large. The Ministry of Justice handles the legislation and enforcement of immigration laws but provides limited social services and information. A handful of non-government associations operate for the benefit of all immigrants but their reach and scope are limited due to lack of human and economic resources. Social discrimination and an increasingly tight labour market complicate this situation. In this paper, I discuss the formal and informal networks that Latin American immigrants develop to overcome these obstacles to accommodate to their host society. I argue that the social and cultural negotiations that facilitate the functioning of these networks contribute to the creation of a pan-national Latin/o American culture in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recently, resident Koreans in Japan, former colonial subjects and their offspring, have had only two options for staying in Japan: naturalization, which required assimilation and the adoption of a Japanese identification, or zainichi status, which meant remaining Korean nationals and keeping their own ethnic identity. Choosing the zainichi option was a way for resident Koreans to express their resistance to Japan's naturalization system, which they saw as a legacy of assimilationist colonial policy. In the early 1990s, however, greater numbers of resident Koreans began to seek naturalization. In part, this was because they were beginning to redefine ethnicity as separate from nationality. Thus, they thought, they could retain their Korean identity even after naturalization. This development, coupled with the rise of a multiculturalism movement in Japan, set the stage for the recent emergence of a third option for staying in Japan, "Korean Japanese," that is, Japanese nationals with Korean ethnic identification. By analyzing articles written by Sakanaka Hidenori, an influential immigration official who has expressed support for the Korean Japanese option, this article demonstrates that this new identity option as presented by government officials is actually in line with the earlier colonial discourse of ethnic hierarchy and assimilation. While cautioning against an easy acceptance of the government's calls for the Korean Japanese option, the author explores its potential for revitalizing the political presence of resident Koreans in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines questions surrounding the assimilation and livelihoods of the Ainu in Japan in the early 20th century. Debates conducted in Hokkaido, Japan about the place of the Ainu people in the Japanese national community; Goal of Japan in the assimilation of the Ainu; Argument of Ainu activists regarding the effect of assimilation on their society.

The article presents post-pluralist understanding of religion from a Japanese perspective. In contrast to what John Hick sees in Birmingham, England and other places in the West where Christianity has long been the social and historical majority, the question was asked as "how should Christianity as an extreme minority maintain its distinctive character so as not to be assimilated into the sea of religions?" The religious majority of a society should indeed bear in mind its own overbearing presence, but the minority religion should also raise its voice to be heard, precisely for the sake of pluralism.

The article argues that the Christmas cake in celebration of Christmas holiday in Japan has become a symbol of the incorporation of American values by the Japanese society. The discussion begins with describing the social background of the assimilation of the modern American Christmas into Japanese lives. The analysis, in relation to the postwar economic prosperity of Japanese society, investigates what new values were instilled in Japan and how they were illustrated in the cake. Interpreting Japanese continuity of traditions, the author argues the acceptability of the cake within the dual aspects of Japanese culture. American images have had a considerable influence on postwar Japanese society beginning with democratization by American leadership. Americans presented images of Christmas to the Japanese through parades, gifts, and charitable activities by Christian organizations, which turned out to contribute to the democratization of Japanese society. The Christmas celebrations gave the Japanese the most tangible pictures that could convey images of prosperous modern lives in the U.S.

Explores the influence of Western cultural texts within Japanese popular cultural environment. Theoretical development of the concept of Western cultural influence; Significance of Western cultural influence on Japanese culture; Impact of mass media on readers and viewer's perception about Western cultural texts.