Imagined Conditions of the “Japanese”:

Social Category Analysis of Internet Survey Data

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze tendencies and differences in imagined conditions of the “Japanese” as a national identity among Japanese people by employing Boolean social category analysis, which was first proposed by Ishida (2007). To capture people's imagined conditions of the Japanese in detail, I conducted an Internet survey with 2,000 respondents in 2013. In this survey, I employed 16 types of vignette questionnaires that described typical combinations of conditions relevant to national identity—nationality, resident, blood, and language—and asked respondents to judge whether a person with a certain combination of conditions is regarded as Japanese or not. In the paper, the relevance between types of imagined conditions as well as demographic and socio-economic status is analyzed.

The research yielded the following findings. First, the analysis of aggregated images of the Japanese revealed the condition of blood as necessary, which probably reflects jus sanguinis in Japanese nationality law. Second, in terms of the relationship between attitudes of nationalism or anti-foreignism and images of the Japanese, I identified strong relationships between national pride and “inclusion by blood,” anti-foreignism and “exclusion by blood,” and assimilation and “exclusion by culture.” Third, there are various individual images of the Japanese. Among these individual images, there are two directions of expansion of the common core image: expansion in terms of nationality and expansion in terms of blood. As a result of logistic regression analysis, I found that contact experience with foreigners in a community as well as demographic and socio-economic status relevant to tolerance of foreigners enhance the possibility of nationality-expanded images and decrease that of blood-expanded images of the Japanese.