This paper reviews the theme of 2023 JAUS symposium, “Reconsidering Migration to Cities”. Migration and mobility is an old and new theme concerning cities and regions. Current academic interest is focused not only on migration, in which people move from one place to another, but also on the nature of a mobile society that are always on the move. Simultaneously, the trend of concentration to the Tokyo metropolitan area remains firm, with the excess of residents moving in even after the Covid-19 disaster. We intended to reexamine the rigid structures which encourages overwhelming domestic migration from non-metropolitan areas to metropolitan areas. These structures continues to operate even in an increasingly mobile society.
    Three perspectives are referred to discuss regional migration: the increasing complexity pointed out by mobilities studies, the social structures created through the social production of space, and the social consciousness on migration experiences. Urban and regional sociology can contribute by synthesizing these perspectives, making use of a wide accumulation of various empirical studies.
    Inter-regional and intra-regional disparities in mobility experiences are described in the latter half of this paper. In addition to the polarization into college-going migration and non-migration after high school graduation, there is also a polarization in the U-turn choice after higher education. The individual makes sense of his/her own situation and chooses not to deviate from the reference group, and the accumulation of their decisions creates the trend of migration. Mobile society does not necessarily mean that everyone can move in and out freely. It should be the role of sociology to delve into the ways in which people reflexively interpret their own lives, and to delve into the consciousness on “city”, “region”, and other spatial vocabularies.

    Traditionally, the theme of “migration to city” in Japanese sociological research has focused mainly on internal migration from rural to urban areas by Japanese nationals. However, it has been pointed out that studies on international migrants' choice of residence are close to studies on internal migration, and analyses of secondary migration (internal migration) by foreign nationals have been conducted. In response, this paper aims to present new suggestions on the theme of “migration to city” from the perspective of international migrants. To this end, this paper reviews the distinctive issues examined in discussing regional choice, mainly residential segregation, by international migrants and presents a method that focuses on assigning significance to regional choice by each individual. This paper then analyzes the case of Shin-Okubo area of Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo, as the base for various activities, including residence, business, and gathering, by newcomer Korean entrepreneurs and others. The analysis of the Shin-Okubo area confirmed that even in areas where regional choice continues to occur, changes in the form and nature of concentration can be observed due to changes in the character of the area and the immigrants. This result suggests that it is effective to analyze the meaning of each individual's choice regarding the regional selection of international migrants. At the same time, it may contribute to the study of “migration to city” in general in that it suggests changes in the current situation regarding the choice of inner city areas.

    By introducing the concepts of spatial organization of life and neoliberal motherhood, this paper examines the relationship between changes in married women's mindset and behavior, and the feminization of heading-to-Tokyo migration and downtown living.
    As economic growth rates stagnate and commonization of dual-earner couples, the spatial organization of life changes from an elongated one which is based on separation of workplace and residence and gender divisions of labor within household to a more compact one. Furthermore, women who have internalized the neoliberal motherhood that requests them to balance work and better child rearing would quest for more compact spatial organization of their lives in order to achieve both.
    Based on this hypothesis, this paper analyzes time budget and household expenditures with a focus on childcare. An analysis of time spent for child rearing reveals that married women living in large cities spend more time caring for children. Regarding household expenditures, households living in Tokyo's central area intensively invest their children's education, compressing their lives in time and space by paying high housing costs and using housekeeping services.
    Surely, only a limited number of women in the high-income bracket are able to realize the compact spatial organization of living in the city center and accomplish neoliberal motherhood. This may deepen the class differentiation between metropolitan areas and rural areas, and between the city center and the suburbs, and may lead to class fixation through generational reproduction. Furthermore, if many women have no choice but to abandon the norm of neoliberal motherhood, the trend toward later marriages, fewer people getting married, and fewer birthrates will be accelerated.

    Previous studies on the residential choices of immigrants have mainly focused on the locations to and from which they move, presumably assuming that immigrants are free to choose the residential locations they want according to employment opportunities. However, place stratification theory, which has not been fully discussed in the Japanese literature, predicts that some immigrant groups are less able to convert their socioeconomic resource into advantaged residential locations due to the ethnic/racial prejudice and housing discrimination. Using microdata from Census 2020, this study helps fill this gap by evaluating how the probability of having access to rental housing in advantaged neighborhoods differs between minority and majority groups. Analyses here reveal that except for American immigrants, all immigrant groups ― i.e., Korean, Chinese, Filipino, and Brazilian―are less likely to reside in advantaged neighborhoods compared to Japanese nationals. Only the immigrants from the United States can achieve better residential outcomes than the Japanese, even when controlling for related factors. Results also indicate that consistent with the place stratification model, the effects of occupation and education on residential attainment tend to be weaker for the Chinese, Filipino, and Brazilian immigrants than the Japanese with comparable SES. Overall, this study demonstrates that there are structural barriers the immigrant groups face in the private rental housing market in Japan.

    Although previous studies have identified causal relationships between residing in disadvantaged neighborhoods during adolescence and lower university enrollment rates in Japan, the underlying mechanisms remain insufficiently explored. In this paper, I examine how junior high school students and their mothers living in disadvantaged neighborhoods perceive the economic returns of enrolling in high school and university and the extent of their aspirations to attend university. In addition, I investigate whether their attitudes toward education are influenced by compositional or contextual effects of neighborhood disadvantage and whether they affect the academic ranking of children's high school choices. The results indicate that while junior high school students and their mothers living in disadvantaged neighborhoods do not underestimate the economic benefits of attending university compared to those living in other neighborhoods, they place a relatively higher value on the economic benefits of finding employment after high school graduation and have lower aspirations to attend university. This study observed a clear neighborhood effect on high school choice, with contextual effects manifesting only in mothers' aspirations for their children's university enrollment.

    Community Bins are managed by a neighborhood association “Chonai-kai”, “Jichi-kai” on a mutual aid basis in some Japanese municipalities. However, these systems are expected to become inoperable because of a decrease in the membership of “Chonai-kai”, “Jichi-kai”, and the aging population. In this sense, it is unsustainable to keep the relationships in which municipalities depend on communities.
    The purpose of this paper is to explain how this system was constructed. For this reason, Hamamatsu has been selected as a case study because this city first introduced the garbage collection system using garbage bags, and using garbage bags is indispensable to manage Community Bins in Japan. Thus, this paper introduces the transition of the garbage collection in Hamamatsu, and points out some problems associated with garbage collection in Japan.

    In the recent studies on urban public space, despite their analytical importance, the roles of strangers in the process of improvising the publicness of space have not been well examined. This paper explores how people engaged themselves in the political discussion with strangers in Shinjuku West Exit Underground Plaza in the late 1960s. Previous research have argued that the antiwar activists, folk guerrillas, and the urban structure of Tokyo stimulated the passersby to debate. These approaches, however, cannot explain how the debate had begun a year before the guerrillas appeared. The question is how the passersby in the plaza could form and continue the discussion sessions with strangers. This article perceives the street discussion in the plaza as the spontaneous interaction among strangers and explicates its process through highlighting their spatial techniques of debate in urban space. At first, some student radicals were collecting donations and signatures in the plaza and some passersby asked them why they adopted violent ways of protest. Then another commuter supported and defended the students, which eventually lead to the debate among passersby. This process was catalyzed by the makeshift stalls set up around the pillars across the plaza by some fundraisers and vendors. When the discussion reached a deadlock, some onlookers and hecklers surrounding the debaters intervened in and moderated the heated conversation. People utilized the architecture of the plaza to watch the sessions and joined the discussion in their own ways. In conclusion, the dynamic formation of discussants, listeners, and moderators through the appropriation of urban space and the conversation among passersby will be elucidated. By emphasizing the interaction among strangers and their spatial techniques of discussion, this article critically develops the studies on the publicness of urban space, which have centered on the organized activism or the everyday interaction.

    The purpose here is to investigate the factors that affect sibling relationships among elderly women. The data were obtained from a survey of women aged 65 to 79 in one of the cities within the Melbourne Metropolitan Area, Australia in 2005 and 2006. The multilevel analyses revealed the following five findings. (1) Women from foreign countries met each of their siblings more often than women from Australia, and women from non-English speaking foreign countries had more frequent contact with each sibling through phone, letters, and email. (2) The closer women lived to their siblings, the more frequently they met them, had more frequent contact with them via phone, letters and email, and could expect more emotional support from them. (3) Women tended to meet their sisters more often than their brothers, had more frequent contact with their sisters through phone, letters and email, and could more often expect emotional support from their sisters than their brothers. (4) The presence or absence of a spouse or children had no effect on their relationships with siblings. (5) Age, educational attainment, the level of physical fitness among women, whether they were driving a car or not, and the number of siblings influenced their sibling relationships as well. Overall, a woman's country of origin has an effect on sibling relationships, even after residing in a country for an extended period.