Multiethnic Japan and Nihonjin

The recent increase of foreign residents in Japan (up to two million or 1.57 percent of the total population in 2005), which began in the late 1980s in response to labour shortages, has diversified the ethnic composition of the country, and has stimulated the spread of multiculturalism in a society that has been dominated by the ideology of ethnic homogeneity. In the mid-1990s, grassroots activists and school teachers started to empower newcomer foreigners, adopting the idea of multiculturalism introduced from Canada, the United States, and Australia. In the process of the dispersion of the idea, it was combined with ‘ kyōsei ’ (living together), which had been used as a guiding principle in the civil rights movements for people with disabilities and for women, and which was formulated as ‘ tabunka kyōsei ’ (multicultural co-living). By the beginning of the twenty-first century, this idiom has spread among various kinds of people, ranging from activists and educators to local administrators and business leaders, and even to officials in the central government. As I discuss below, different people employ the idiom with different meanings.