Immigration to Japan

Japan is a land of immigration, with only two million foreigners on its soil arrived in two waves, Koreans and Chinese during the colonial period in the country, then Asia and Latin America from the 1980s.

These two million immigrants account for only 1.6% of the population of Japan, while the United States has 35 million people born overseas (12% of the population) and Eastern Europe West 32 million (10%).

The first wave of immigration that arrived during the years of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, Taiwan and mainland China. The inhabitants of these regions are then came to work in Japan, often against their will, especially in the 1930s and until the defeat of 1945.

When the Japanese Empire was dissolved, these immigrant colonies have lost Japanese nationality and resumed their original nationality, but many remained in the archipelago.

Some of these immigrants or their descendants have since adopted Japanese nationality. But some 500,000 of them are foreigners in Japan with the status of "special permanent resident".

Installed for several generations, speak and write fluent Japanese, but often suffer discrimination, they are the "oldcomers" (from old).

In contrast, the "newcomers" (newcomers) are economic migrants who have arrived since the 1980s. Among them, South Koreans and Chinese, but also Filipino, Thai or Vietnamese.

Arriving at a time when small Japanese companies began running out of manpower, this second wave of immigration has caused a debate on the arrival of foreigners in Japan.

In 1990, the government ruled in favoring the arrival of foreign populations of Japanese settled in Latin America. The idea of ??power was to reconcile the arrival of labor with the maintenance of the desired "harmony" of a homogeneous nation.