Paper long abstract:

What will Japan 2050 look like? By 2055 Japan’s current population of 127 million will decline to 90 million due to the low birth rate, and the number of people over sixty-five years will increase to 40 percent of the total population. This is an ultra-aged society. Within this demographic framework, there is an argument that Japan needs to “import” foreign labor force for the survival of her economy. Therefore, some presume that by 2050 Japan will have 10 million foreign residents as compared with the current 2.2 million. This leads to a scenario of Japan becoming multicultural. This paper examines the Japanese way of “living together” (kyosei) within a multicultural environment from the viewpoint of Filipina migrants who came to Japan as entertainers, who have married with Japanese men, and given birth to children of mixed descent, while hoping that these children may grow up as “ordinary” Japanese.