Japanese Journal of Sociology最新文献

As labor markets become increasingly global, competition among industrialized nations to attract highly skilled workers from abroad has intensified. Spurred by concerns over future economic needs caused by the demographic challenges of an aging population, both Japan and Sweden have joined this global competition. This article examines Japanese and Swedish immigration policies for highly skilled migrants and compares the highly skilled migrants’ experiences in the two countries through interviews with these migrants. Despite Japan and Sweden's completely different approaches to immigration itself, both countries’ policies, as well as the experiences of the skilled migrants, are strikingly similar. Highly skilled migrants experience language barriers and prejudice in both countries, making it difficult to build social networks with natives. Career development seems to be perceived as a common problem, although less so in Sweden, where labor markets are more flexible. Overall, these issues reduce both Japan's and Sweden's ability to retain skilled migrants. While they share similarities, Sweden's famed work–life balance and gender equality give it an edge in the competition for skilled migrants, which Japan does not share. This comparison identifies which social conditions facilitate or impede skilled migrant settlement.

The Japanese government has encouraged the opening of the domestic market to foreign workers under the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) as a “special case” in order “to promote the trade relationship between Japan and the countries that sign the agreement” since 2008. According to the literature, the introduction of nurses and care workers is not at all economical. Many empirical studies indicate that the costs of accepting EPA candidates is crucial for accepting institutions. In this study, the authors developed a multiple regression model for the economic and psychological burden of EPA and evaluated the goodness of fit of the model by comparing hospitals and care facilities. The multiple regression analysis indicated a good fit model for hospitals, but not for care facilities. The authors speculate that there are some differences in management between hospitals and care facilities that should be considered in interpreting this phenomenon.

This article examines the social and historical conditions of negotiations for expanding migrant domestic workers partial citizenship under neoliberal policies. It uses a case study of Filipino domestic workers struggling for regularization in the Parisian region, 2008–2012. Under Sarkozy's neoliberal immigration policy called chosen immigration, Hortefeux, the then Minister of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Cooperative Development, authorized case-by-case “regularization based on work” in his circular of 7 January 2008. Consequently, led by a coalition of trade unions, sans papiers (undocumented) collectives and migrant support groups, large-scale mobilizations occurred demanding rights-based regularization. Although undocumented Filipino domestic workers remained socially invisible during this campaign, a quiet, small-scale but unprecedented mobilization took place among Filipino sans papières. Based on 10 months of fieldwork, this article shows how the neoliberal tendency in the two policy areas of immigration and personal services opened up the opportunity for Filipino migrant women to have access to the institutional resources of the Private Household Workers (PHW) trade union and to break the deadlock of “double irregularity”, that is, the dispossession of both their residential permit and labor contract. This case depended on the activism of a trade unionist of Filipino origin, a trailblazer who filled the structural hole between Filipino ethnic networks and the local domestic workers’ movement. Among the outcomes are the rising consciousness among Filipinos of the usefulness of learning French, as well as a new narrative that incorporates the struggles of Filipino domestic workers in the PHW trade union history.

This article focuses on the first group of Filipino certified care worker (kaigo fukushishi) candidates who joined Japan's caregiving workforce under the Japan–Philippines economic partnership agreement (EPA) in 2009. The arrival of this group marked the start of the arrival of Filipinos specifically to work and study for 3 years in a designated care facility in order to take Japan's unique national board exam in 2013. Based on the follow-up research on 49 of the first group of 190 Filipino candidates, this study examines the lives of those passing the board exam who decided to remain and continue to work in Japan. Being able to transfer to various care facilities for better employment conditions, their quality of life in Japan has improved, while the issues regarding their residential status and reuniting with their family have yet to be resolved.

Care work, once a sanctioned labor of love, is increasingly commodified in transnational contexts. The picture of migrant women shouldering the housework and child care of local professonal women may seem like a mutually beneficial arrangement—matching the “needs” of the haves and have-nots—, but the global care chain ultimately works to maintain the traditional gendered division of labor as well as global inequality. To this trend of globalization of care work, Japan has been an exception; however, how much longer it will be so is now in a question, as the government paves the way for importing domestic labor from abroad. This article focuses on Japanese expat wives in Hong Kong in order to locate Japanese women vis-à-vis the global care chain. The narrative analysis on how they decide whether to hire a domestic worker in their home away from home highlights the sociopolitical nature of their supposedly private choices. Some drew on cultural ideal of wifehood and motherhood to rationalize their choice while others referred to racialized or even overtly racist and classist images of foreign domestic workers. A few women spoke against the system itself, showing awareness of its inherent social injustice. All such narratives are never purely personal; their decisions and the rationalization behind them sustain the prevailing discourses of gender, race, ethnicity, culture, and class, which, in turn, envelop their attempts at global householding.

Health-care worker migration has emerged as a social issue in Japan, contrary to it has in Indonesia. This article shows how national contexts affected by globalization have shaped social understandings and policies towards health-care worker migration in the two societies over time. Analyses of news coverage in the Japanese and Indonesian national media reveal a gap of social responses toward this change. The Japanese are more likely to respond negatively to health-care worker migration; yet they intend to face cross-cultural challenges, although slowly, making revisions to related policies. In contrast, in Indonesia, from where health-care workers migrate to Japan and many other countries, this tends to be understood positively, overall, as providing economic benefits and permitting Indonesian professionals to contribute to the worker shortage in Japan. I interpret these results based on the literature on health-care worker migration, emerging global norms and local changes, and comparative research on employment and care work. This study contributes to the sociological understanding of worker migration and health-care issues.