Multiculturalism in East Asia: A Transnational Exploration of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan
248
Multiculturalism in East Asia: A Transnational Exploration of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan
248Paperback
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| ISBN-13: | 9781783484980 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/28/2016 |
| Series: | Asian Cultural Studies: Transnational and Dialogic Approaches |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Multiculturalism in East Asia
A Transnational Exploration of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan
By Koichi Iwabuchi, Hyun Mee Kim, Hsiao-Chuan Hsia
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Koichi Iwabuchi, Hyun Mee Kim and Hsiao-Chuan HsiaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-498-0
CHAPTER 1
Rethinking Multiculturalism from a Trans-East-Asian Perspective
Koichi Iwabuchi, Hyun Mee Kim and Hsiao-Chuan Hsia
The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed the profusion of multicultural policies and discourses in East Asian countries, including in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, which have been historically identified as more "ethnically homogenous" than most other countries in the world (Castles and Davision 2000). While these three countries have not yet developed a comprehensive, consistent policy on migration and multiculturalism, the increasing number of migrants they have accepted and the intensifying cultural diversity that accompanies have already posed vital social issues they are faced with in this new century. This edited volume examines the growing multicultural encounters, the accompanying policy discussions and racialized discourses on cultural diversity, as well as the processes of political and cultural negotiation that the marginalized newcomers and old-comers are drawn into. In addition to a problematic legacy of the Japanese imperial project, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan share an experience of inter-Asian migration in the process of ethno-cultural globalization since the late 1980s. In these three countries — in addition to their own indigenous or long-term racial and ethnic minorities — the number of foreign-national residents, migrants, and people of mixed heritage has risen notably in the last two to three decades. Although none of the governments welcomed migrants with open arms, the influx of laborers and international marriage migrants has been observed, primarily from China and Southeast Asia. More recently, due to the sharply declining birth rate and the rapidly aging population, with a strong push from domestic industrial sectors, governments in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have begun to discuss under what conditions migrants should be accepted and what policies should be implemented. In this context, there has been a growing focus on increased multicultural interactions within their borders and the impacts of cultural diversity on the fabric of their nations in the three countries.
This book adds to the emerging scholarly literature on multiculturalism in East Asia (e.g., Kymlicka and He 2005; Parreñas and Kim 2011; Eng, Collins & Yeoh 2013; Nagy 2014; Kim 2014) and takes a unique trans-East-Asian comparative and collaborative approach to examining emergent multicultural situations in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. In addition to contextualizing the situation in each of the countries represented, the contributors to this volume have been asked to consciously reference and compare domestic situations with other East Asian cases as well as to situate their cases in a wider, transnational context. Our intention was to add relevant voices from East Asia to our understanding of multiculturalism as a set of policies, discourses and practices that manage, negotiate with, and embrace growing human mobility and accompanied cultural diversity — a field that has developed primarily in Euro-American and Australian contexts. Our book also aims to denationalize the discussion of multiculturalism as a policy for managing cultural diversity within the nation-state. A trans-East-Asian perspective is significant as it elucidates the shared-ness and the "similarity-in-difference" when examining multicultural issues in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, as it endows us with fresh insights into the multicultural issues in a more transnationally informed sense. A full understanding of both the possibilities and limitations of multicultural policies, discourses, and practices as they have been addressed by national policy makers, local communities, NGOs, NPOs, civic organizations, and the migrant subjects themselves in the three societies will contribute to a renewed discussion of how one might advance a more multicultural future in domestic contexts as well as through transnational cooperation, dialogue, and mutual empowerment. In the following, we will offer our rationale for the consideration of trans-East-Asian multiculturalism by discussing in more detail the socio-historical backgrounds and the key issues that the three countries share.
CRISIS OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION AND THE MIGRATION "BOOM"
We have been observing the growing impact of globalization and neoliberalism resulting in domestic and interregional migrations, which in turn has generated a wide range of changes that have deepened interdependency among and mobilities across nation-states in this new "age of migration" (Castles and Davidson 2000). East Asian countries are not exceptions to this trend, though they were latecomers in accepting migrants. Unlike the United States and European countries that encouraged family migration when faced with labor shortages after the 1960s, the three nations of East Asia — Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — managed to achieve rapid economic development relying on their own ample domestic labor and, thus, did not actively accept migrants. However, these nation-states have been facing a demographic crisis of considerable proportion since the 1980s due to low fertility rates, a rapidly aging population, and a decline in able-bodied workers. In 2013, the birth rates in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were 1.39, 1.24, and 1.11 respectively. According to the United Nation's International Migration 2014, the percentage of the population over 65 years in Japan stood at 24.8%, South Korea at 12.3%, and Taiwan at 11.6%. In Japan, the number of foreign-national residents (except short-time visitors) as of 2015 was 2,232,189 according to the Japanese Ministry of Justice, which is nearly 1.8% of the total registered population. In South Korea, at the end of 2014, there were 1,797,618 foreign residents, who accounted for 3.1% of the total registered population of 51,141,463. That means that 1 out of 32 persons is a foreign resident. In Taiwan, as of February 2016, the number of foreign-national residents was 642,991 (excluding those who were married to Taiwanese nationals and who entered with temporary visas) and the population of non-Taiwanese married to Taiwanese nationals (including those who are already naturalized) was 511,623, which is 4.9% of the total registered population. Of these foreign residents, 53.0%, 55.3%, and 71.73% were female in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, respectively. All the three countries sought to tackle these demographic changes to secure workforces through interventions in marriage and family structures, but were faced with challenges. This was mainly due to the significant increase in the tuition fees with the marketization of education and the lack of welfare benefits to support care for children and the elderly population, which have brought substantial financial burdens on families, and hence have thwarted the expectations for a better quality of life through having a family.
All three countries eventually turned to recruiting temporary labor from abroad to supplement their labor force since the late 1980s, when they faced serious labor shortages — particularly in the low-paying and low-technology jobs. Japan was the first to adopt such policy measures, the Industrial Training System, in 1990. Taiwan followed in 1992 with its Employment Services Act, and South Korea followed soon after with the Industrial Trainee Program in 1993. The three programs bore similarities; unless they were skilled migrants, most foreigners were admitted as workers only who, upon completion of their employment contracts, were forbidden from remaining and settling in the country and seeking permanent residency or naturalization. These restrictions have much to do with the three countries preserving jus sanguinis citizenship, which accords citizenship on the basis of a blood relationship with the dominant ethnic group in each nation-state, conventionally determined by the male line of kinship. Furthermore, the "guest" workers were not allowed to bring close family members (e.g., spouses or children) with them during their period of legal sojourn. Thus, from the start, these countries introduced an explicit system to control the number of temporary migrants within their borders.
Because of historical ties with their expatriate populations, Japan and South Korea gave preference to people with the same "ethnic" root when recruiting migrants — a system we can term "co-ethnic" migration. Thus, Japan turned first to the "Nikkeijin" — its out-migrants resident in Brazil, Peru, and other Central and South American countries, encouraging "return migration" under specific conditions in the 1990s. Differentiating these Nikkei from other migrants, the government issued a special visa that allowed them to stay in Japan for a long term, eventually permanently. South Korea, upon adoption of its Employment Permit System (EPS) in 2003 to replace the much abused and maligned "guest worker" system, began to accept workers from 15 Asian nations to work in small- and medium-scale labor-intensive industries. However, much like Japan, rather than opening the doors to all Asian citizens equally, they adopted rules that were skewed toward their own "co-ethnic" populations from Northeast China (called "Choson-jok" in Korean) and from Central Asia (the "Koryo-in"), which gave particular advantages through what they called the "work and visit system." On the other hand, due to political reasons, despite requests from many employers who would prefer to hire migrants from the same linguistic and cultural background, Taiwanese policy has strictly forbidden the entry of Chinese migrants from the People's Republic of China (PRC). PRC workers are permitted to work only as crewmen and not allowed to set "foot" on Taiwan's land (Tseng 2004). Taiwan looked instead to migrants from Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam, for human resources.
Another important point that the three nations have in common is the feminization of migration. While migrants used to be predominantly male from less developed countries in Asia to supplement the domestic labor force, the most prominent feature of the new age of migration in East Asia is the drastic rise of female migrants from Asian countries for international marriage, working in the caring professions and light industry. The number of Asian female migrants crossing national boundaries to marry, to work as domestic helpers and nurses, and to perform service labor has increased dramatically since the late 1980s (Parrenas 2001; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002; Piper and Roces 2003; Hsia 2004; Constable, ed. 2005; Suzuki 2005). Reproductive and caring labor, which used to be confined to the private and domestic sphere, has increasingly become a marketable commodity with concrete exchange value on the trans-Asian market. This is due not only to the widening of the economic gaps within Asia, which has activated intra-Asian migration in parallel to that from Asia to the West, but also to the crisis of social reproduction experienced in these three East Asian countries.
Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan share the welfare state regime — characterized as predominantly productivist developmental state under the influence of Confucianism (Holliday 2000). That is, caring for frail family members including young children and elders is considered to be a family responsibility, typically women's, rather than a social issue to be dealt with by the state. While it is becoming increasingly difficult for women in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to stay at home to carry out these care duties within the family, as the rate of female employment and the size of the aging population increase, many married women look for substitutes when they are unable or unwilling to perform these duties. The lack of public intervention has thus turned the rising need for care work into a profitable market niche. Migrant women from less developed countries are therefore recruited to provide reproductive labor for the "maintenance" and "renewal" of productive labor (Burawoy 1976) in these countries, including migrant domestic workers and marriage migrants. This reproduction crisis has resulted in "the restructuring of reproduction," in which women from less developed countries migrate to perform reproductive labor for the more developed countries — that is, in the reverse direction to the restructuring of production (Hsia 2015).
It may seem contradictory that, while implementing policies to prevent the permanent settlement of migrants in their countries, a rapid increase in the number of female marriage migrants has been encouraged in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. However, one must understand that deep social changes in the gendered division of labor, which drove this phenomenon of gendered labor migration, had already become prominent in the three countries as early as the early 1980s. A classically patriarchal family structure — where men bear the responsibility for being the family breadwinners while women are homemakers/home-managers — worked to support rapid economic development when jobs were plentiful. However, the position of the male breadwinner became more tenuous as more women began to receive higher levels of education and entered the labor market. The number of lower class men who were no longer able to share in the economic growth and became increasingly disadvantaged in the marriage market rose in both urban and rural areas, while the number of women who could reject marriage as the "natural" life choice grew. Recent studies emphasize this growing devaluation of low-class men on the marriage market from the 1990s onwards, particularly those from rural farming-fishing villages (Lee 2010, 2013; Yen-Fen Tsen 2010).
In Japan, the men who take over farmland from their aged parents have primarily become the domestic partners of international marriages. Of all marriages, 0.4% were international in 1965, 0.93% by 1980, which had jumped to 5.77% by 2005 (Liaw et al. 2010: 53). The rate of international marriages peaked in 2006 at 6.11% of all marriages (40,000 couples) and seems to have stabilized at about 20,000 couples per year. The number of international marriages in 2014 represented 3.3% of the total of all marriages in Japan; 1 in 30 marriages is between a Japanese national and a foreigner. In Japan's case, the difficult work, the maintenance of tradition, and the rural-to-urban migration of young women all contributed to the severity of the problem of unmarried men in the farming villages, especially in the north-eastern provinces. In the 1980s, 56% of the non-Japanese wives were of Korean extraction, but since the 1990s this expanded to include Chinese, Filipina, and Thai women. The Japanese national government lacks any central policy, and all of the "multicultural"-related services have been dealt with by local governments, as discussed in Chapter 4.
Of the three Asian countries, Taiwan has been experiencing the most rapid increase in international marriages, with typically the farmers and men in unskilled manufacturing partnering foreign brides. Beginning in the mid-1980s, and growing rapidly in the 1990s, by 2002, one in every four new marriages in Taiwan was between a domestic citizen and a foreigner, although the percentage decreased after 2003 and has hovered between 15% and 20% of all marriages registered annually. In 2014, 12.3% of all newly wed couples were Taiwanese nationals and foreign spouses, among whom 77.5% were female foreign spouses. The vast majority of foreign spouses are women from Mainland China and Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Cambodia. As of 2015, over 510,000 women had moved to Taiwan through marriage migration.
Following these two countries, South Korea also began to actively recruit foreign brides for farmers and urban working-class men who occupied disadvantaged positions in the domestic marriage market. The term "multicultural family" sprang up in South Korea to describe such cross-border marriages in a context where such foreign women were seen as participants in a national project to sustain the reproduction of Korean families as building blocks of the nation and to compensate for the country's declining population (Kim 2011). As of the end of the year 2013, 73.9% of international brides came from just three countries: China (33.1%), Vietnam (31.5%), and the Philippines (9.2%). Of the 235,942 female marriage migrants, 86,178 (about 30%) have been granted Korean citizenship (Korea Bureau of Statistics 2014).
In Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, with a strong sense of "ethnic homogeneity," the mounting birth rate of children of mixed heritage as well as the increase of migrants has begun to cause some concern, as it not only seriously challenges the traditional view of "ethnic homogeneity" but also of ethnicity-based citizenship. The next section will discuss this key issue shared among the three countries in detail to provide a renewed perspective to the discussion of multiculturalism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Multiculturalism in East Asia by Koichi Iwabuchi, Hyun Mee Kim, Hsiao-Chuan Hsia. Copyright © 2016 Koichi Iwabuchi, Hyun Mee Kim and Hsiao-Chuan Hsia. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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