Abstract
Recent increase of newly-incoming foreign population has called attention to the issues of foreigners' living environment in the Tokyo metropolitan area. In order to obtain an empirical perspective on residential and social environments of foreign new comers in Tokyo, spatial relocation and selected friendship pattern of overstay foreign workers in the inner area Tokyo were examined. Data collected through a questionnaire survey suggested firstly that residential relocation patterns of the survey respondents was conditioned largely by such intertwining factors as the extent of cohesive ethnic network, degrees of individual adjustment, potential job opportunities and politico-economic marginal status. While ethnic information network was apparently the dominant influence on spatial structure of their movements, the latter two components functioned as deeper-rooted structural determinants of potential field of migration. In regard to the pattern of their social interaction, cohesive ethnic networks were identified; they were not necessarily confined to local neighborhoods but rather extended spatially, even though the intensity of association is substantially conditioned by spatial distance between individuals. For an understanding of such network type ethnic communities, elaborations of “classical” normative expectations, which are predicated a conceptual foundation that simply correlates social and spatial distances, seem to be integral to an analtical framework of ethnic segregation in Tokyo.
