Global Labour Migration in Japan

Global Labour Migration in Japan: The Everyday Spaces of Invisible Workers investigates the shifts in Japan’s immigration regime and their implications for the lived experiences of unskilled migrant workers.Despite Japan’s steadily increasing intake of migrant workers, most studies of global labour migration are mainly concerned with Europe, North America, and Australia; the Japanese context has been largely neglected.

This book fills that literary gap. Based on years of ethnographic and archival research, it argues that the structured social practices of global labour migration have facilitated and simultaneously challenged the transformations of social relations of (re)production and the modern nation-sate within the context of neoliberal globalization. The book explores the everyday struggles of unskilled migrant workers, whose existence has been largely “invisible” to the majority of Japanese nationals and, indeed, to many people in the world under the prevailing myth of Japan as a homogeneous society. It provides topical and vital insights about the relationships between globalization and migration, including contemporary migration and refugee crises and the related rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in receiving societies.

Global Labour Migration in Japan will be of interest to students and scholars in International Political Economy, International Relations, Sociology, and Asian Studies.