Abstract
This essay analyzes the Japanese workers' attitudes and possibility of change towards their foreign co-workers. This is based on my own participant observation interviews, and questionnaire research. This was conducted at the medium size machinery factory at Oizumimachi, Gunma Prefecture, Japan, where many Japanese-Brazilian and Pakistani workers have been hired.
Until now it has been argued in the school of social-psychology that racial stereotypes caused by an out-group homogeneity effect will vanish through the cognitive process of individualization of the out-group members within a multi-racial and cooperative situation. However, I believe that this social-psychological perspective can not entirely explain the essence of the actual transformation process of attitudes towards people of different races. The process is actually highly dynamic and has its own wide variety among people according to their different statuses in the micro-society of the workplace. I intend to explain that individualization of the out-group members does not result in the mere recognition of out-group members as a pile of distinctive individuals. Rather, there is a rejection of an overwhelming controlling racial framework by setting the alternative and trans-racial category of “good companions” which is based on the self-defined criterion in the reality of the factory.
However, such an emerging autonomous race relationship is confined within the micro-society of the factory, and doesn't easily lead to a general change in one's racist attitude. I also found that the strong influence of the negative representations of Asian foreign workers in the Japanese mass media exists in the background of such views.
