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Paper short abstract

Based on fieldwork in Tokyo, this paper analyzes migrant-run restaurants as intercultural urban infrastructure. It shows how such restaurants play varied social roles—interethnic hubs, low-intensity contact zones, or intra-ethnic spaces—shaping everyday coexistence across diverse neighborhoods.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines migrant-run restaurants in Tokyo as forms of intercultural urban infrastructure, focusing on how they operate within neighborhoods that are commonly characterized as socially stable and ethnically homogeneous, yet increasingly shaped by everyday encounters with migration. Drawing on qualitative data from 30 in-depth case studies of migrant-owned eateries across Tokyo conducted in 2025, the paper shifts attention away from exceptionalized ethnic enclaves toward a broader range of Tokyo neighborhoods, where migration remains limited in scale but increasingly visible in commercial life.

Building on research on social infrastructure, conviviality, and intercultural third places, the paper analyzes how migrant restaurants mediate social relations under differing neighborhood conditions. The cases reveal considerable variation in the roles these establishments play, even within similar neighborhood contexts. In low-density residential areas, migrant restaurants more often operate as interethnic hubs that sustain repeated interactions, local familiarity, and informal ties between migrant owners and Japanese regulars. By contrast, in diverse commercial neighborhoods, more restaurants function as cautious or low-intensity contact zones, where interaction between migrant proprietors and a diverse population of customers is routine but socially bounded. Other establishments, however, serve as intra-ethnic clienteles, providing linguistic comfort, mutual support, and informational resources for migrant communities.

Rather than treating intercultural interaction as a universal outcome, the paper argues that migrant restaurants function as flexible forms of urban infrastructure whose social roles are contingent and relational. These roles are shaped by multiple factors, including neighborhood migrant density, cuisines and drinking cultures, perceived ethnic distance, length of operation, and restaurateurs’ own orientations toward sociability and community engagement. Positioned within the panel theme of “Japan on the Margins,” the paper reframes migrant restaurants as sites where the margins of migration are negotiated within otherwise mainstream urban neighborhoods. By foregrounding everyday, small-scale practices rather than dramatic conflict or policy intervention, the paper contributes an empirically grounded account of how intercultural coexistence is quietly negotiated in contemporary Tokyo.