午夜剧场

I have been researching immigration in the United States using theories and methods from sociology and demography. When people think of immigrants in the U.S., they might think of those of Mexican or Chinese descent, but there was also a period when there were many people of Japanese descent.

One of my research projects focuses on the socioeconomic trajectories of Japanese people who immigrated to the U.S. mainland during the Meiji and Taisho eras and their descendants. Despite facing hardships such as discrimination and forced internment during World War II, the U.S.-born second generation achieved such socioeconomic success that they were referred to as a "model minority." What was the background behind this success?

My research primarily involves collecting, organizing, and quantitatively analyzing various demographic data. For example, the rosters of over 100,000 Japanese immigrants and their descendants who were forcibly interned during the war include information such as educational background and prefecture of origin, making them valuable materials for understanding their social backgrounds in Japan. Additionally, panel data from the U.S. Census, linked by name and age, allows us to track occupational transitions. Analyzing individual records from a social survey of three generations of Japanese Americans held in the historical archives at UCLA reveals the shifts in social status across generations.

Research has shown that while the social classes of Japanese people who chose to settle on the U.S. mainland during the Meiji and Taisho eras were diverse, they included a significant number of people from the "old middle class," such as rural farmers and former samurai families. While not necessarily wealthy, they were slightly more affluent than the Japanese average at the time, and many had attended secondary educational institutions under the old system. It is believed that the education and cultural resources they acquired in Japan were passed on to their children in the U.S., forming the foundation for success across generations.

Theoretically, such phenomena are (partially) explained by "immigrant selectivity" and "contextual selectivity." While it is often assumed that immigrants come from the poorest segments of their home country, the various costs and barriers to migration mean that they are often skewed toward the middle and upper classes within the "context" of the sending country. For example, immigrants living in the U.S. today may be considered poor by U.S. standards, but they often belonged to relatively high social classes in their countries of origin. They, too, seek to pass on the advantages they held in their home societies to the next generation.

The flow of people moving between Japan and the rest of the world never ceases. In the future, I intend to expand the time frame of my research to the present day and study not only Japanese people living abroad—not limited to the U.S.—but also foreign nationals living in Japan.