Abstract
To a casual observer Japan appears to be a model of racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious homogeneity. Echoing his predecessor Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, Tarō Asō (in)famously declared during a ceremony at the new Kyushu National Museum in Dazaifu, Fukuoka prefecture, that, unlike any other nation, Japan has “one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture and one race.”1 Asō might perhaps have in mind the fact that of Japan’s population of 127 million, 98.5 percent are ethnic Japanese, the rest being composed of ethnic minorities such as the Ainu and the Ryukyuan peoples, and foreign workers, mainly Brazilians, Peruvians, Chinese, Koreans, and Filipinos.2 Asō’s claim of national unity for Japan can be justified at least since 1947 when Japan adopted a new constitution in favor of a democratic government. Japan’s cultural homogeneity is greatly facilitated by the fact that more than 99 percent of its population speaks Japanese as their first language. Interestingly, presumably because he is a Roman Catholic, Asō did not include Shinto in his list of the things that unite his fellow Japanese, since, as a “religion,” Shinto is arguably an “invented tradition” designed to unite all Japanese despite their different religious affiliations.3
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Notes
Of course, claims of racial and ethnic homogeneity for Japan have not gone unchallenged by both the ethnic minorities themselves and Japan scholars. See George De Vos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma, Japan’s Invisible Race: Caste in Culture and Personality, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972);
John Lie, Multiethnic Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and
Michael Weiner, ed., Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2009). The last-mentioned work is especially helpful in its analysis of six minority groups in Japan: the Ainu, the Burakumin, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Nikkeijin, and the Okinawans. Among the key themes investigated are the role of the ideology of “race” in the construction of Japanese identity, historical memory and its suppression, contemporary labor migration, Chinese communities, “mixed-race” children, and the construction of black otherness.
On Shinto as an “invented tradition” with its triple components of shrine, myth, and ritual, see John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). See also
Jason Enanda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), which provides a fascinating account of how Japanese officials invented the very concept of “religion” after 1853 to carve a space for Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, to enshrine Shinto as a national ideology, and to relegate the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of “superstition.”
Takamichi Kajita, Kiyoto Tanno, and Naoto Higuchi, Kao no Mienai Teijuka NikkeBraziljin to Kokka, Shijo, Imin Network (Nagoya: University of Nagoya Press, 2005);
Jeffrey Lesser, ed., Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003);
Daniel Linger, No One Home: Brazilian Selves Remade in Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001);
Joshua Hotaka Roth, Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002);
Takeyuki Tsuda, Strangers in the Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Transnational Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
See Stephen Castles, Hein de Haas, and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 5th ed. (New York: The Guilford Press, 2009).
On various aspects of migration, see the highly readable Paul Collier, Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013);
Alejandro Portes and Josh DeWind, eds., Rethinking Migration: New Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009);
Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield, eds., Migration Theory: Talking across Disciplines (New York: Routledge, 2008); and
Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser, and Eveline Reisenauer, Transnational Migration (Cambridge: Olity Press, 2013), 7–17.
One very helpful study of migration in Asia is Sunil S. Amrith’s Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Maxine L. Margolis, Little Brazil: An Ethnography of Brazilian Immigrants in New York City (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3–6.
Norio Kinshichi, Burajirushi, História do Brasil (Tokyo: Toyo Shoten, 2009), 267.
Masaaki Satake and Mary Angeline Da-anoy, Filipin-Nihon Kokusai Kekkon: Ijyu to Tabunka Kyosei (Tokyo: Mekong Publishing, 2006), 19.
Research and Legislative Reference Bureau, The Problem of the Immigrant Policy and the Foreign Workers Policy in a Depopulation Society (Tokyo: National Diet Library, 2008), 84–85.
Kevin Bales, Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 109–110;
Maria Rosario Piquero Ballescas, Filipino Entertainers in Japan: An Introduction (Quezon City: The Foundation for Nationalist Studies Inc., 1993), 77; Castles, de Haas, and Miller, The Age of Migration, 170–171; Satake and Da-anoy, Filipin-Nihon Kokusai Kekkon, 14–15.
Mike Douglass and Glenda S. Roberts, eds., Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society (New York: Routledge, 2000), 104; Satake and Da-anoy, Filipin-Nihon Kokusai Kekkon, 13.
Daiji Tani, Ijusha to Tomo ni Ikiru Kyookai (Tokyo: Joshi Pauro Kai, 2008), 113–114.
Hizuru Miki and Yoshihide Sakurai, eds., Nihon ni Ikiru Imin tachi no Shukyo Seikatsu: Nyukamah no Motarasu Shukyo Tagenka (Kyoto: Minerva Shobo, 2012), 9.
Nelson H. H. Graburn, John Ertl, and R. Kenji Tierney, eds., Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), 121.
Liza B. Lamis, Raising Women’s Voices: Resisting Abuse towards Healing and Wholeness (Quezon City: National Council of Churches in the Philippines, 2006), 29.
Masanobu Yamada, “Anju no Chi toshite no Purotesutanto Kyokai: Mieken Beteru Fukuin Kyokai no Jirei,” in Americasu Sekai ni okeru Ido to Grobarizasyon, 188 (Tenri City: Tenri University, 2008a).
J. Gordon Melton and Martin Baumann, eds., Religions of the World: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Beliefs and Practices, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 1387;
Takefumi Terada, “Iglesia Ni Cristo: A Case Study of New Religious Movement in the Philippines,” The Southeast Asian Studies 19, no. 4 (1982): 432–433;
Albert James Sanders, A Protestant View of the Iglesia ni Cristo (Quezon City: Philippine Federation of Christian Churches, 1964), 66.
Raul Reis, “Media and Religion in Brazil: The Rise of TV Record and UCKG and Their Attempts at Globalization,” Brazilian Journalism Research 2, no. 2 (2006): 172;
Masanobu Yamada, “Brajiru ni okeru Purotesutanto Kyokai no Shakaiteki Ninchi,” Ibero Amerika Kenkyu 26, no. 2 (2004): 69–70.
Timothy Steigenga and Edward Cleary, eds., Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 221.
John Burdick, Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil’s Religious Arena (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993);
R. Andrew Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
Alec LeMay, “Teaching t he Second Generat ion: Understanding Multicultura l Dialogue through the Eyes of the Japanese-Filipino Family,” The Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 26 (2008): 82.
Maria Carmelita Kasuya, “Interview Record 4: Filipino Catholic Communities in Japan,” The Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 26 (2008): 167–168; Tani, Ijusha to Tomo ni Ikiru Kyookai, 63–64.
Castles, de Haas, and Miller, The Age of Migration, 154–155; 179–181; Youna Kim, Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters (New York: Routledge, 2011);
Nana Oishi, Women in Motion: Globalization, State Policies, and Labor Migration in Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
A monumental and indispensable tool for the study of World Christianity is Atlas of Global Christianity 1910–2010, edited by Todd M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), which was brought out in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh, 1910. Helpful general surveys of Christianity as a world religion (“World Christianity”) include:
Dale T. Irvin and Scott W. Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement: Volume I: Earliest Christianity to 1453 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001); and History of the World Christian Movement: Volume II: Modern Christianity from 1453–1800 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012); Douglas Jacobsen, The World’s Christians: Who They Are, Where They Are, and How They Got There (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011);
Sebastian Kim and Kirsteen Kim, Christianity as a World Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2008);
Mark A. Noll, The New Shape of Word Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2009);
Noel Davies and Martin Conway, World Christianity in the 20th Century (London: SCM Press, 2008);
Dyron B. Daughrity, The Changing World of Christianity: The Global History of a Borderless Religion (New York: Peter Lang, 2010);
Charles Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012);
Justo L. González, The Changing Shape of Church History (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2002);
Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley, eds., The Cambridge History of Christianity: World Christianities c.1815–c.1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and
Hugh McLeod, ed., The Cambridge History of Christianity: World Christianities c.1914–c.2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
See Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; third edition, 2011). Jenkins’s other works of significance for World Christianity include: The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia (New York: HarperOne, 2009); God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
As pointed out earlier, few studies of migrants in Japan have investigated their religious (Christian) communities and activities. Even in the West, scholarly studies of the religious life of migrants have just begun. To be noted are: Karen I. Leonard et al., eds., Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America (Oxford: AltaMira Press, 2005);
Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane I. Smith, and John L. Esposito, eds., Religion and Immigration: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Experiences in the United States (Oxford: AltaMira, 2003);
Michael W. Foley and Dean R. Hoge, Religion and the New Immigrants: How Faith Communities Form Our Newest Citizens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chaletz, Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations (Oxford: AltaMira, 2000).
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Kitani, K. (2016). Emerging Christianities in Japan: A Comparative Analysis of Brazilian and Filipino Migrant Churches. In: Padilla, E., Phan, P.C. (eds) Christianities in Migration. Palgrave Macmillan’s Christianities of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031648_6
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