Migrant workers in the post-war history of Japan

Foreign Workers No Longer Uncommon Foreign (immigrant) workers are a part of everyday life in present-day Japan. While issues involving foreign workers are, of course, often mentioned still in newspapers and TV programs, the heightened attention or excitement once seen in the 1980s is no longer to be seen among the Japanese people. On the contrary, players from abroad give outstanding performances in the professional baseball leagues, soccer J-league, and even the Japanese national sport, Sumo. There is no uncomfortable feeling between those foreign players and spectators in Japan. In fact, seeing soccer players who were once foreigners but are now naturalized earnestly singing “Kimigayo” (the national anthem) with a hand over their heart, I have somewhat mixed feelings, forgetting about the dispute over the national anthem in Japan. I wonder what kind of country Japan looks like to them. What does, on the one hand, even the heightened, excessive interest in foreign workers observable between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when the bubble boom collapsed, and, on the other, the suddenly receding interest in them afterwards imply? If the ebbing interest indicates that Japan’s globalization has reached the stage where the Japanese accept people from abroad without any discomfort, it is not particularly difficult to understand such changes of view. Indeed, the number of non-Japanese entering the country, a mere 18,000 or so in 1950, totaled about 6.76 million in 2004, and is expected to maintain its upward trend. The number of registered foreign residents at the end of 2003 totaled a record high of 1.92 million, accounting also for a record high of 1.5 percent of Japan’s total population (Immigration Bureau, the Ministry of Justice, 2005). The estimated number of foreign residents working in Japan (apart from permanent residents) is 800,000, a full 1.3 percent (discounting those