Re-made in Japan: Nikkeijin Disruptions of Japan's Ethno-Spatial Boundaries

Working to envisage a more hospitable Japan—one that can responsibly accommodate difference through acts of tolerance, plurality, and non-violence—this paper seeks to reformulate the nation's ethno-spatial hierarchy. By interjecting Deleuze and Guattari's “minoritarian” position into the majority/minority dialectic, a move instantiated by the incommensurability of Japan's Nikkeijin populations (i.e. neither resolutely “foreign” nor essentially “native”), this paper works to loosen the ubiquitous uchi/soto (“inside/outside”) distinction in a manner that moves beyond the barriers typically encountered by conventional approaches to Japan's minority issues. Insofar as the investigation is advanced through a series of engagements from a variety of genres—SMAP's 2003 “MIJ” advertising campaign, Kurosawa Akira's 1991 film Rhapsody in August, and NHK's 2002 asadora (“morning serialized drama”) Sakura—the analysis will not only demonstrate how popular fictions participate in the dramaticization of the nation's ethno-spatial boundaries, it will also afford new ways of thinking about and interceding in Japan's so-called immigration “problem.”