For many decades, Japan was the only advanced industrial country in the world that did not rely on unskilled foreign labor. For many observers, the Japanese case demonstrated that a country could fully industrialize and sustain high levels of economic growth without becoming dependent on large populations of immigrant workers. Instead of importing immigrants, Japan was able to meet its increasing demand for unskilled labor power by effectively mechanizing and rationalizing production and further utilizing untapped sources of labor (female and elderly workers). Because of the country's insistence on ethnic homogeneity and its refusal to accept unskilled foreign workers, Japan had been forced to optimize domestic labor productivity and supply, creating a highly efficient and competitive industrial system capable of economic expansion without immigration. This implicitly sustained a “myth of Japanese uniqueness”—the notion that Japan's economic system was unique because it was based on distinctive Japanese ethnocultural qualities.
Countries of immigration are generally faced with a dilemma: they wish to accept immigrants for economic purposes, but also to restrict immigration for ethnonational reasons. This is especially true in ethnic nation-states, where immigration is seen as a threat to ethnonational unity more than in civic nation-states. However, in recent decades, various ethnic nation-states have adopted immigration policies that have encouraged their diasporic descendants born and raised abroad to return to their ethnic homeland. Ethnic return migration apparently solves the immigration dilemma by providing ethnic nation-states with a much-needed unskilled labour force without causing ethnonational disruption because the immigrants are coethnic descendants. After comparing ethnic return migration policies in European and East Asian countries, this article analyses the development of such policies in Japan and their eventual failure to solve the country's immigration dilemma. As a result, Japan (and other ethnic nation-states) have imposed restrictions on ethnic return migration.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.