Abstract
The increase of immigrants in Japan after the 1990s symbolizes the Japanese society's structural changes in the postwar years. While many studies have been conducted on immigrant settlement in Japan, few studies have focused on the fertility of immigrant women. It is important to reveal how immigrant fertility changes in accordance with the settlement process because immigrant fertility will determine the future course of settlement patterns through the creation of the “second generation” in Japan, which has strong ties to Japanese society.
The present study analyzes the effect of the migration process particularly immigrant settlement patterns—on immigrant women' fertility in Japan, an issue already addressed in various studies for Western societies. Accordingly, it is highly possible that the fertility of immigrant women differs among subgroups of immigrants of the same nationality and that adaptation/assimilation has a positive effect on fertility. One implication is that the process of immigrant settlement in Japan is entering its second phase of immigrant population expansion via reproduction.
Through analyzing macro-level data, this study reveals important facts concerning fertility differences among various national groups and the effect of settlement patterns on fertility in Japan. It goes without saying that they should be corroborated more fully using of micro-level data.
