The number of foreigners living in Japan has been increasing continuously except a disruption period after the Second World War. Especially, this growth accelerated during the period of "bubble economy" in the late 1980s. Foreign residents in Japan have been mainly discussed in terms of their concentration in a certain area. As a result, many studies about foreign residents in Japan have been done by urban or regional sociologists, who heavily focused on looking at particular ethnic community such as Shinjyuku, Ikebukuro in Tokyo and Hamamatsu-shi in Shizuoka prefecture. By contrast, the number of quantitative studies focusing on concentration of foreign residents, in particular foreigners' ethnic residential segregation, is few, Reflecting a situation that settlements of foreigners into Japan are progressing and social conflicts between foreign and the Japanese residents in some parts of Japan start to be seen, it is necessary to study residential segregation from the quantitative perspective. The present study computed the dissimilarity index of the top 10 percent of foreigner -concentrated municipalities, using the micro-areal data of the Japanese census in order to estimate the degree of foreigners'ethnic residential segregation in Japan. Based on this result, the present study uses the multiple regression model to identify some factors that accelerate or constrain foreigners' segregation. This model is founded on urban-ecological theory, containing factors such as the composition of nationality and the size of population or economic structure of each municipality. The result shows that the degree of dissimilarity index is greatly different from municipalities to municipalities, which reflects the difference of condition of foreigners' segregation in each municipality. Additionally, differently from other western societies, the result shows that foreigners' ethnic residential segregation is seen not in an inner-area of a large metropolitan area, but in industrial areas of remote areas from large metropolitan areas. The result also shows that the number of the Japanese Brazilians has a positive effect on the progress of residential segregation, although that of Filipinas has negative effect on segregation. This is because the Japanese Brazilians are migrant and temporal workers who live in the same dwelling such as a dormitory rented by an employer, which is called "faceless settlement process", although Filipinas tend to be a member of Japanese family as a partner of a Japanese male, which constraints their segregation structurally. In conclusion, the present study endorsed the results of the previous qualitative studies about foreigners' ethnic residential segregation in Japan. The result implies that the Japanese society is entering into a new phase of the history that we have to deal with foreigners' social integration as an immigrant receiving country.
View full abstract