The dissertation conducts a rhetorical analysis of Japan's foreign worker problem from the early 1980s to 2005. To this end, it provides three episodes in a two-decade case study in media representations of "llegal" foreign workers, specifically the emergence and the dominant framing of the foreign worker problem in the media and one organized resistance to the dominant framing of the problem.
Chapter 2 provides an overview of Japan's foreign worker problem to set contexts for rhetorical criticism in subsequent chapters. Specifically, it outlines Japan's immigration policies, offers a historical account of its foreign worker problem, and supplies statistical data to document the recent trends and current status of labor migration in Japan.
Chapter 3 explores the gendered nature of Japan's foreign worker problem. A distinctive feature of the migratory pattern in postwar Japan is that those who came to Japan for work initially consisted overwhelmingly of women. Nevertheless, their influx was not cast as a foreign worker problem; instead, it was generally framed as a peculiar issue of Japayuki-san. Importantly, the term Japayuki-san functioned to fixate the stereotyped image of female migrants as young sex workers from poor Asian countries.
Chapter 4 demonstrates that the popular media, through a barrage of alarming crime reports interspersed with frightening visual graphics, play a critical role in constructing the public knowledge that "llegal aliens" are posing an unprecedented security threat to Japan.
Chapter 5 underscores the importance of collective symbolic struggles by investigating how overstaying foreigners, activists, and academics collaborated during a special residence permission campaign from September 1999 through February 2000. The chapter also suggests that sustained and favorable media attention was crucial in bringing the campaign to success.
In conclusion, the dissertation stresses the need for contesting the very language used for framing the foreign worker debate. Under the current discursive frame, foreign workers are inevitably reduced to economic units, which in turn limits the scope of the controversy to assessments of economic benefits and costs from accepting foreign workers. A rhetorical move needs to be made from "foreign worker" discourse to "immigration" discourse so that full-blown discussions about immigration could take place.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-03132006-093210 |
| Date | 02 June 2006 |
| Creators | Morooka, Junya |
| Contributors | Lester Olson, Akiko Hashimoto, Peter Simonson, Gordon Mitchell |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-03132006-093210/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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