Multiethnic Japan

Multiethnic Japan challenges the received view of Japanese society as ethnically homogeneous. Employing a wide array of arguments and evidence—historical and comparative, interviews and observations, high literature and popular culture—John Lie recasts modern Japan as a thoroughly multiethnic society.

Lie casts light on a wide range of minority groups in modern Japanese society, including the Ainu, Burakumin (descendants of premodern outcasts), Chinese, Koreans, and Okinawans. In so doing, h...