M (30 years old) who faces deportation on charges of overstaying, is currently (as of the end of August, 2018) incarcerated at the East Japan Immigration Center, located in Ushiku city, Ibaraki prefecture. He is a Nikkei who was a 10-year-old pupil at his arrival in Japan. Shortly after entering junior high school, he stopped attending classes, and ended up getting involved repeatedly in delinquent and criminal acts. While in prison, he lost his status of long-term resident, and became an illegal immigrant. Regarding the disposition of his case, he objected it by filing an appeal against the court’s decision, but he lost the lawsuit appeal in a district court and a high court. As well as M, not a few non-Japanese pupils in Japan are also being denied the opportunity for an education and have to go through similar experience. This paper presents and analyzes M’s life in Japan, where he has been living for almost 20 years, and aims to identify the issues and circumstances that surround non-Japanese pupils and illegal immigrants.

This article summarizes findings of sociological approaches to nativism and xenophobia, focusing on the relation between sociodemographic variables and anti-immigrant sentiments or support for the radical right. Our review of English literature shows the following: (1) the effect of demographic variables such as gender and age seems relatively strong, (2) relation between economic deprivation and support for the radical right are rather weak, and (3) radical right movements attract a variety of social class but those from lower socioeconomic strata tend to be overrepresented. Then we applied these three points to Japan and found the explanatory power of socioeconomic status was even weaker than western countries.

The present study explored social sharing of negative emotion on social media related to the 3.11 earthquake. A dataset was created from tweets that included one or more of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (F1-NPP) related vocabulary, which were extracted from all Japanese tweets from March 11th, 2011 to April 16th, 2012. The results show anger was less susceptible to attenuation over time and this trend was more obvious in regions farther from the F1-NPP. Anxiety was more commonly shared in regions with a nuclear power plant, but a tendency to decrease over time was observed and this trend was more prominent the closer one was to the F1-NPP.

In this paper, I examined hate speech as aggressive behavior from the perspective of social diagnosis and treatment. As the “symptom,” I examined whether hate speech is aggression, what kind of psychological and social damage it causes, and what characters it has as vicarious aggression. Next, as the “cause,” I examined psychological process of retaliation and its psychological reward. Finally, as the “treatment,” I argued the need for social regulation of emotion, establishment of the law for hate speech, and I examined the expected effect on weakening hate speech and restoration of social order from a social psychology perspective.

As a basic emotion, disgust is thought to have evolved as a biological function to protect human bodies from potentially dangerous foods. Along with the growth, elicitors of disgust have expanded to multiple domains: animals, body products, sex, death corpses, bad hygiene, body envelope violations and moral offenses. Rozin and his colleagues proposed that functions of disgust is to protect the body, soul and social order. They also proposed the CAD triad hypothesis (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999) which stipulates that people feel anger for violations of autonomy, contempt for violations of community, and disgust for violations of divinity. In this paper, a hypothetical assumption that disgust, as a moral emotion, may be an underlying motive to produce hostility, expulsions and hate crimes toward outgroups was discussed.

The behavioral immune system (BIS) regulates one’s cognition, emotion, behavior for avoiding diseases. History shows that disgust as the key component of the behavioral immune system has played a crucial role in the spread of extreme out-group exclusion. This article aimed to examine how the BIS influences negative attitude towards the specific group. A broad range of literature review suggested that the fundamental principles of the BIS, smoke-detector principle and functional flexibility principle, are essential for understanding this issue. Previous studies showed individual differences in disgust sensitivity and perceived vulnerability to disease affect the negative attitude towards the specific group based on the BIS. Presence of disease cues also facilitates the formation of such attitude. In addition, the literature review revealed information provides the disease context can easily alter an individual’s attitudes towards the specific group in a negative direction. Furthermore, based on these findings, the direction of future research is discussed.

This study aimed to clarify target groups of dislike feeling of Japanese people and analyze elements of the feeling. Web survey was conducted among 1,000 Japanese adults, whose ages ranged from 20 to 69 years old. The results showed that approximately two thirds of the survey participants could report target group(s) of dislike feeling, and Japanese new religions, three neighboring countries and the Islamic State were mainly reported as target groups. Sex and age differences were small in categories of reported target groups, and male’s hostile commitments for the groups were relatively higher than female’s. Sensitivities for threat in environment related to negative attitude for the target groups and the relationships were higher in males than in females. These results were consistent with general results of previous studies.