- Convenors:
-
Steve Richard Entrich
(University of Zurich)
David Chiavacci (University of Zurich)
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- Chair:
-
Gracia Liu-Farrer
(Waseda University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Anthropology and Sociology
Short Abstract
This panel revisits kokusaika as a contested framework shaping migration, education, and labour mobility in Japan. Through policy analysis and empirical studies using the latest available data, it shows how internationalization enables mobility while reproducing stratification and inequality.
Long Abstract
Since the 1970s, kokusaika (internationalization) has been a central yet deeply ambivalent framework shaping Japan’s engagement with global migration, education, and labour mobility. While internationalization has been promoted as a means to enhance Japan’s global standing, economic competitiveness, and human capital, it has coexisted with persistent narratives of ethnonational homogeneity and institutional arrangements that reproduce social stratification. This panel revisits kokusaika as a contested and evolving policy frame and examines its differentiated effects across immigration regimes, higher education, labour markets, and individual life courses.
Bringing together four empirically grounded papers, the panel analyses internationalization at multiple levels: state discourse and policy-making, institutional structures, and migrants’ and citizens’ lived experiences. The first paper traces the changing role of kokusaika in Japan’s immigration policy debates since the 1970s, demonstrating how international ambitions have intermittently shaped policy reforms in humanitarian immigration, high-skilled migration, and labour import, while remaining fragmented across policy subfields and political phases. The second paper shifts the focus to Japanese citizens, examining how international student mobility affects labour market outcomes and life satisfaction among younger cohorts, and highlighting persistent gender inequalities in the returns to transnational experience. The third paper addresses the “other side” of higher education internationalization by analysing how field of study and place of education interact with Japan’s firm-specific employment system to shape migrants’ economic integration, with particular attention to STEM degrees (science, technology, engineering, and math). The fourth paper examines Vietnamese trainees’ subjective experiences under the Technical Intern Training Program, conceptualizing the program as a form of total institution and assessing how extreme regulatory control produces stratified vulnerability in the context of recent policy reform.
Taken together, the panel advances a sociological understanding of kokusaika not as a linear process of openness, but as a differentiated and stratifying regime. By linking discourse, institutions, and individual outcomes, the contributions highlight how internationalization in Japan simultaneously enables mobility and reproduces inequality. The panel thus contributes to broader debates in Japanese Studies on globalization, migration, and social change, while offering comparative insights relevant beyond the Japanese case.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This study examines how international student mobility (ISM) affects labour market outcomes and life satisfaction among Japan’s post–ice-age generation, highlighting gendered differences and the potential of ISM to support more equitable life-course trajectories.
Paper long abstract
As transnational human capital gains importance in Japan’s globalizing economy, international student mobility (ISM) has been widely promoted as a strategy to enhance individual careers through the acquisition of global skills and competencies. Existing research, however, has focused predominantly on economic returns, paying limited attention to broader individual outcomes and to gendered inequalities in the effects of ISM. This paper addresses these gaps by examining the impact of ISM on both labour market outcomes and life satisfaction among the so-called post–ice-age generation—cohorts entering the Japanese labour market after 2004.
Integrating perspectives from job competition theory and well-being research, we analyse whether and how ISM enables younger Japanese adults to deviate from traditional, gender-stereotypical life-course trajectories. Using longitudinal data from the SSJDA Panel (2021–2025), we assess gender-differentiated returns to ISM with respect to earnings-related outcomes and subjective life satisfaction.
The results indicate that ISM of substantial duration (but less than one year) is associated with higher labour market outcomes and greater life satisfaction for both men and women. At the same time, the magnitude of these effects is significantly larger for men, pointing to the persistence of gender inequality in the translation of transnational experiences into labour market and well-being returns. Nevertheless, the findings also suggest that ISM may support more progressive and gender-equitable work and family orientations, offering an alternative pathway to the traditional gendered life course in Japan.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the role of internationalization (kokusaika) in Japan’s immigration policy since the 1970s. It shows how international ambitions have competed with other frames and how their influence has varied across immigration policy subfields and phases of political debate.
Paper long abstract
Internationalization (kokusaika) has constituted an important and influential framing in Japan’s immigration policy toward refugees, international students, and foreign human resources. Since the 1970s, the conservative establishment has envisioned two contradictory trajectories in Japan’s national identity. On the one hand, it emphasized ethnic homogeneity as central pillar of Japan’s economic success. On the other hand, it aspired to a significantly expanded role for Japan in the international community, commensurate with its growing economic power. Despite this tension, internationalization has received considerably less attention in the scholarly literature than Japan’s ethnonationalism and identity discourses. While Japan has frequently been characterized as a paradigmatic ethno-nationalist state with a correspondingly restrictive and defensive immigration regime, its immigration policy has rarely been analysed from the perspective of Japan’s international positioning and global ambitions.
This paper analyses the development of the internationalization frame and its changing influence on immigration policy from the 1970s to the present. Methodologically, it draws on existing studies examining the relationship between immigration and internationalization (e.g., Gurowitz 1998; Tsutsui 2018; Yamawaki 2001), primary sources of immigration policy, and mass media coverage of Japan’s internationalization. Together, these materials allow us to trace half a century of interaction between internationalization narratives and immigration policy reforms.
More specifically, the paper focuses on seven periods of intensified immigration policy debate and examines the fluctuating role and influence of internationalization discourse within each: the small-scale guest worker debate around 1970, the refugee debate around 1980, the foreign students debate in the early 1980s, the reactive immigration debate around 1990, the proactive immigration debate of the late 2000s, the labour-shortage-driven immigration debate of the late 2010s, and the current immigration backlash debate. The analysis covers three immigration policy subfields: humanitarian immigration, the recruitment of highly skilled foreign talent, and the admission of low- or medium-skilled foreign workers. In addition, the paper examines which policy actors actively mobilized internationalization narratives and assesses the degree of influence they exerted across different periods and policy subfields. This approach enables a deeper understanding of institutional fragmentation, differentiated policy arenas, and the long-term trajectory and critical turning points of Japan’s immigration policy.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyses Vietnamese trainees’ perceptions of policy gaps in Technical Intern Training Program. Drawing on interviews and survey data, it shows how extreme regulatory control produces stratified vulnerability and assesses implications for the new Employment for Skill Development system.
Paper long abstract
This study aims to determine the subjective perceptions of Vietnamese trainees on Japan's Technical Intern Training Program (TITP). The TITP imports unskilled labour as a side-door in Japan’s restrictive immigration policy, revealing significant policy gaps between the official mandate of international cooperation and the actual outcome of vulnerable TITP intern trainees. In 2024, Japan finally announced the abolishment of TITP, marking a drastic shift in Japan’s simple labour import from TITP-oriented acceptance to Specified Skilled Worker (SSW (i))-oriented acceptance.
Amid this transition, this study employs the concept of total institution (Chiavacci 2024), examining how extreme regulatory control over work mobility, migration commercialization, and life options shapes 156 Vietnamese trainees' experiences and extracts implications for the New System: Employment for Skill Development (ESD; Ikusei-Shūrō-Seido).
This study corroborates Chiavacci's (2024) three layers of extreme regulation. An interesting finding of this study is significant variation in how trainees experience them. Interview and survey data demonstrated that the trainees perceived restricted work mobility as a core policy flaw of the TITP that induced mal-implementation by employers. Moreover, trainees differ in debt levels, motivation (family obligation vs voluntary choice), and pre-departure information access. Those under more extreme regulatory control experience more mal-implementations in TITP, including what they describe as 'Sabetsu' (discrimination) and 'Kubetsu' (differentiation) in work conditions and treatment. This is reflected in survey findings where over 90% of respondents indicated they would not choose to work under TITP in Japan, if they could go back in time of decision-making again (n=105).
The New System reforms target some core structures of the previous TITP that trainees perceived as the roots of the gaps, such as job change prohibition. However, the clauses restricting job changes within the same job category, language proficiency, designated years they must serve before they request the job changes, will stratify the trainees, in which trainees under more extreme regulatory control would not be compensated but continue to be trapped in the system.
Paper short abstract
This study examines the role of education acquired in Japan in facilitating economic integration among migrants. The study of international migration has addressed the issues of international transferability of skills and educational qualifications acquired abroad over several decades.
Paper long abstract
This study examines the role of education acquired in Japan in facilitating economic integration among migrants. The study of international migration has addressed the issues of international transferability of skills and educational qualifications acquired abroad over several decades. Previous literature has demonstrated the economic disadvantages of educational degrees acquired abroad among migrant workers in destination countries. However, recent research sheds light on how a field of study, regardless of their place of education, can mitigate the economic disadvantages of migrants as compared with natives because recent technological development boosted the value of the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) knowledge and skills across the globe. This study focuses on migrant workers in Japan. The significance of this study lies in the institutional settings of the Japanese labour market that put emphasis on firm-specific skills. Given this point, the STEM degree migrants obtained in colleges or post-graduate schools may not help migrants in Japan to attain their parity with natives. Conversely, employers may treat migrant workers with the STEM skills in a different manner as compared with natives who were employed as the core administrative workers in large organizations in Japan. Employers may assign specific jobs to migrants with this expertise and such migrants may earn as much as the natives with similar educational degrees. Hence, this study addresses the issues of how the Japanese labour market has changed the employment of migrant workers and how the intersection between field of study and place of education is associated with economic integration of migrants in Japan. We use the data derived from the survey of social stratification and mobility implemented in 2025, because this survey focuses on both migrants and natives in Japan.