Japan is currently facing a demographic shift that will alter the nation’s social, cultural, and economic institutions significantly in the years to come. Due to a declining and aging population, foreigners have steadily comprised a greater portion of Japan’s population and workforce for the past three decades. Although foreigners currently comprise only 2% of Japan’s population, some experts predict an increase to between 8% and 27% by 2050. If even the most conservative of these estimates are true, this would raise serious questions about Japan’s future. Historically, Japan has relegated cultural and ethnic difference to the social margins, leaving little room for the integration of cultural Others. This has produced problematic relationships between Japan and its minority communities. Foreign and cultural Others have been denied rights and recognition within Japanese society and their presence has been largely overlooked. These recent demographic changes, however, are producing novel interactions between foreigners and Japanese in schools, restaurants, retail establishments, and other public spaces. Yet, the current research on Japan has not updated our knowledge of Japan with a critical look into the recent shift and its effects. This dissertation examines the parameters of Japan’s diversification and explores its broader social impacts. Specifically, it uses the novel contexts through which Japanese and non-Japanese people are coming into contact as a backdrop for examining questions about how Japanese-foreigner relations, Japan’s identity (internally and externally), and the ways foreigners are being positioned within contemporary Japanese society. In doing so, this thesis explores topics such as the newfound ways that Japanese and non-Japanese workers are coming into contact with one another, the role of language in facilitating multicultural encounters, and how biracial people destabilize conventional idea about Japanese identity and compel critical reconsiderations of it. This research incorporates data from over thirty formal interviews, and many more informal interviews from diverse voices, to expound upon the conceptual and material ramifications of Japan’s demographic changes and pose implications for the trajectory of Japan in the near future. In exploring these questions, this dissertation also draws upon theories of race, ethnicity, space, place, and communication to understand these demographic changes and their impacts. This work examines contemporary theories about the intersection of race and ethnicity, and how they relate to a non-Western and quickly changing sociocultural milieu. It also examines the ways that contemporary migration patterns destabilize and reconfigure notions of spatiality, which are closely linked to identity constructions. It further considers theories about intercultural communication and language learning to show how communicative and linguistic processes facilitate the novel encounters that are unfolding between Japanese and non-Japanese people. The primary finding from this research is that Japan’s demographic changes are compelling new forms of sociality and interpersonal dynamics between Japanese and foreigners that heretofore have not been observed. The novel characteristics of these encounters are creating a new social milieu within in which Japanese and foreigners are crossing paths more frequently in everyday life. This is leading to more critical inquiries about Japan’s future and the role of non-Japanese people within that future. This work gives voice to the actors on the ground who are living out these changes firsthand and presents their experiences, ideas, and aspirations of future Japan.

Univ., Diss.--Freiburg, 2005. / Literaturverz. S. [503] - 526.

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Stockholm, 1988. / Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-316).

Thèse--Université de Paris. / At head of title: Université de Paris.--Faculté de droit. Has especial reference to the "Arrangement commercial entre la France et le Japon" of May 13, 1932. "Bibliographie": p. [vii]-viii.

Thesis (M. Soc. Wk.)--University of Queensland, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--M.A., University of Hong Kong, 1986.

published_or_final_version / Japanese Studies / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Japanese teachers are a key component in the success of the Japanese educational system. They work long hours, and are responsible for a variety of tasks within the school, including administration, discipline, and cleaning. This study was designed to facilitate a more thorough understanding of the various roles of the teacher in both lower and upper secondary schools in Japan.This research took place in Morioka City, Iwate Prefecture, Japan, and utilized a combination of personal interviews and sustained direct observations of individual teachers as they went through their daily routines schools. A questionnaire was also administered to in Iwate Prefecture in order to quantify the data, and the responses were subjected to a comparative analysis to determine the percentages of time teachers spend on different kinds of activities.The roles of the teachers were interpreted after analyzing the case studies and questionnaire responses, the results indicated that Japanese secondary teachers spend over sixty hours a week performing various functions within their schools. The roles range from police officer, friend, individual guidance counsellor, and administrator, to career councellor, librarian, and surrogate parent. Japanese teachers take their roles and responsibilitis seriously and are committed to insuring that all their students succeed. / Department of Secondary, Higher, and Foundations of Education

Medieval Japan was a fluid society in which many wanderers, including religious preachers, traveled the roads. One popular band of itinerant proselytizers was the jishū from the Yugyō school, a gender inclusive Amida Pure Land Buddhist group. This dissertation details the particular circumstances of the jishū nuns through the evolving history of the Yugyō school. The aim is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the gender relations and the changing roles women played in this itinerant religious order. Based on the dominant Buddhist view of the status of women in terms of enlightenment, one would have expected the Buddhist schools to have provided only minimal opportunities for women. While the large institutionalized monasteries of the time do reflect this perspective, schools founded by hijiri practitioners, such as the early Yugyō school, contradict these expectations. This study has revealed that during the formation of the Yugyō school in the fourteenth century, jishū nuns held multiple and strong roles, including leadership of mix-gendered practice halls. Over time, as the Yugyō school became increasingly institutionalized, both in their itinerant practices and in their practice halls, there was a corresponding marginalization of the nuns. This thesis attempts to identify the causes of this change and argues that the conversion to a fixed lifestyle and the adoption of mainstream Buddhist doctrine discouraged the co-participation of women in their order.

This dissertation discusses Japanese capital market deregulation for 1980:12-1996:12, which began gradually with the capital procurement of the most multinationalized firms and differentiated them from the pure domestic firms. We try to quantify what actually happened in the Tokyo Stock Exchange during the period to see whether the policy design could have contributed to the problems of non-performing loans and monetary policy ineffectiveness in the 1990s. We first outline the process of deregulation by a literature review. Then, the dissertation compares the statistical properties of monthly share returns for the internationalized corporations with the rest. We detected that the portfolios of internationalized and domestic firms appear to have unequal data generating processes, and possibly different structural break points, around 1984 and 1990, in their relationship with the global market. Next, we use the mild segmentation model (Errunza and Losq March 1985) to analyze the process of internationalization for the two types of firms. Our estimation suggests the internationalized share appraisal priced not only the world factor but also domestic influence more heavily than the pure domestic stocks, which leads us to reject the hypothesis for our data. We suspect the result may be attributable to the deregulation without an introduction of new valuation rules. The research concludes with an analysis of the changing function of the call rates as a traditional Japanese monetary policy tool, using the intertemporal capital asset pricing model (Merton 1973). The estimation results report that the pricing of internationalized firms could allocate no importance to the conventional domestic monetary policy instrument. Moreover, the pure domestic shares stopped reacting to the call rate in the 1990s, which implies the traditional monetary policy lost influence over asset pricing in its totality for the 1990s. Derived from these findings we conclude capital market liberalization / deregulation as an attempt to control the globalization of firms could generate unexpected reactions in the domestic market. Our estimation advises that liberalization ought to consciously reorganize the domestic capital market regulation, and the monetary authority should be flexible enough to find a way to interact with the domestic market valuations during deregulation. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2003. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 219-236). / Electronic reproduction. / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / xiv, 236 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm