Ashkenazi Jews and the benefits of expanding whiteness

As mentioned earlier, social and legal white racial identity have undergone radical expansion since the founding of the United States. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, various courts in the United States established citizenship for all “free white persons” (Jacobson Reference Jacobson1999). Exactly who was considered white by law, however, was far from settled. Legal precedence during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries only conferred white racial identity to a fraction of individuals who could have potentially been white. State and federal courts also moved from a legal standard based on “scientific” measures of race to a “common-sense” standard based on popularly held notions of race (Haney-Lopez Reference Haney-Lopez1997). Court decisions then slowly expanded the boundaries of whiteness to incorporate some previously excluded groups while sharpening legal boundaries between whites and “others” (Haney-Lopez Reference Haney-Lopez1997; Jacobson Reference Jacobson1999).

One European ethnic group that crossed the social whiteness divide was Ashkenazi Jews.Footnote ⁹ Ashkenazi Jews are individuals who trace their ancestry back to Central and Eastern Europe. Between 3.5 and 4 million individuals of Ashkenazi Jewish descent currently reside in the United States, and they make up about 70 percent of the total Jewish population (Brodkin Reference Brodkin1998; Waxman Reference Waxman2010). The majority of Ashkenazi Jews (hereafter referred to as Jews/Jewish) arriving in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries settled in the Northeast or upper Midwest and established niches within various garment, grocery, meatpacking, and financial industries (Brodkin Reference Brodkin1998; Waxman Reference Waxman2010). It should be noted that although contemporary audiences might find the commingling of religion and ethnorace as awkward, most laypeople treated both as tightly coupled concepts. In fact, earlier accounts of immigrant assimilation were as likely to include religion as the sorting mechanism as ethnorace (Gordon Reference Gordon1964; Herberg Reference Herberg1960; Rose Reference Rose1963).

As with other immigrant groups, Jews were overrepresented in a few sectors of the economy because those were often the best opportunities available to them in a highly segregated labor market. Unlike many European émigrés who arrived with rural farm backgrounds, most Jews in the United States emigrated directly from European cities where they worked in skilled or semi-skilled trades. Many Jews arrived ready to become skilled tradespeople or professionals, but their non-white social status effectively prevented the majority from accessing skilled jobs (Rose Reference Rose2017). Jewish inclusion into social whiteness in the United States accelerated after World War II. Although several factors were important, benefits from the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (also known as the GI Bill) and changes in residential settlement were most influential and long-lasting (Brodkin Reference Brodkin1998; Katznelson Reference Katznelson2005).

The GI Bill was designed to ease the reintegration of returning veterans from World War II. The impetus behind the bill’s creation and passage was concern that, without re-entry training and jobs programs, the United States might slide into another economic depression or experience widespread labor and political agitation like that which occurred after World War I (Katznelson Reference Katznelson2013). Some of the most impactful benefits provided through the bill were financial aid for college or vocational training programs, job placement counseling, unemployment assistance, and access to federally subsidized home loans. While the GI Bill was originally intended to be the first race-neutral federal benefits program in the United States, Southern legislators ensured local administration to retain racist Jim Crow practices (Brodkin Reference Brodkin1998). Local administrators were invariably white and often sought to either deny benefits to non-white veterans or steer them toward low-skilled jobs during vocational counseling. Although Jews, Italians, Greeks, and other Southern Europeans were still not considered fully white in many regions, most military veterans of predominantly European descent were able to access all the benefits entitled to them under the GI Bill. This was a crucial moment for the expansion of social whiteness because the benefits of the GI Bill – most particularly college education and home ownership – were primarily responsible for the greatest wealth accumulation and upward mobility into the middle-class in US history and would hasten the expansion of social whiteness to its present-day understanding.

Another development that would reconfigure the United States in two fundamental ways during the postwar period was the growth of suburban residential housing. Almost all suburbs were explicitly designed to be white spaces through racially discriminatory lending practices in the financial industry and racially restrictive selling practices within suburban housing tracts (Jones-Correa Reference Jones-Correa2000; Massey and Denton Reference Massey and Denton1993). This provided a critical moment of inclusion for European ethnics like Jews who had previously been denied social whiteness. As whites moved from cities to suburbs, people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds became neighbors and intermingled in various civic institutions within suburban communities. Thus, suburbs were not simply white spaces; they were a new type of white space unlike any other up to that point in the history of the United States (Brodkin Reference Brodkin1998; Massey and Denton Reference Massey and Denton1993). In turn, white abandonment and neglect recoded many urban areas as explicitly black spaces (Hunter and Robinson Reference Hunter and Robinson2018). Just as whites were leaving northern cities and taking well-paying jobs and tax revenues with them, Blacks from the US south were arriving as part of the second Great Migration (Wilkerson Reference Wilkerson2011). These new arrivals found themselves in urban areas with outdated and overcrowded housing, decaying infrastructure, and declining industrial sectors. Given the lack of a sufficient tax base to dramatically improve conditions, the quality of life in the urban core continued to deteriorate, and serious blight and crimes of poverty became inescapable. Much in the way that suburbs became a new type of white space, the urban core became a new type of black space: one defined by social and economic marginalization that was a direct consequence of individual and government decisions that created relative affluence and safety in suburban white spaces (Hunter and Robinson Reference Hunter and Robinson2018; Wilkerson Reference Wilkerson2011).

Mexican ethnics and liminal whiteness

Like European ethnics, individuals of Mexican descent were legally white in the eyes of US courts, but socially “other” in the eyes of most native-born whites during the latter half of the nineteenth century. However, whereas European ethnics were deemed to be legally white almost as a matter of course, people of Mexican descent were established as legally white through terms stipulated in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which formally ended the American War in Mexico (Haney-Lopez Reference Haney-Lopez1997). Mexican legal whiteness was then upheld by the United States Supreme Court in the 1897 Rodriguez decision. Despite having court-affirmed legal whiteness, discrimination and violence against people of Mexican descent were severe and pervasive, especially in the West and Southwest. This gulf between legal and social whiteness has been a recurring theme for people of Mexican descent throughout US history (Martinez Reference Martinez1997).

One major difference between Jewish migrants and people of Mexican ancestry is in their ethnoracial composition. Although both groups comprise various ethnic groups, Jews in the United States mainly descend from Central and Eastern Europe. While many people of Mexican origin also have European descendants, a majority of Mexicans also claim indigenous descendants, and some recognize African and Asian ancestry owing to substantial migration from West Africa, China, and Japan during various periods after the European conquest (Gómez Reference Gómez2018). This relatively multiethnic background means that there is often a wide range of phenotypes among people of Mexican heritage and a sizeable number of Mexicans have darker skin tones (hence the common usage of the term “brown” to refer to people of Mexican descent) than many other whites. Although European ethnics also have various phenotypes, most individuals in the United States tend to identify social whiteness with features commonly associated with people originating in Northern or Western Europe. Thus, Mexicans often face significant pushback against claims of whiteness from whites of European ancestry (Jacobson Reference Jacobson1999).

Jewish and Mexican-descended individuals also differ in their ability to access modes of incorporation into social whiteness after World War II. As previously mentioned, changes in residential settlement and the expansion of the tertiary educational system made it possible for Jews to finally access social whiteness in the United States. This full embrace was mainly accomplished by the children or grandchildren of migrants who had already accumulated the substantial financial and social resources necessary for this transition. Although Jews faced daunting levels of social prejudice and persecution in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they still occupied a social position much closer to Western and Northern European-descended whites than did Mexican-descended people during the same period. This higher social position meant that Jewish individuals often received better treatment in labor and housing markets than did individuals of Mexican descent. Given their relatively lower social position, people of Mexican descent generally did not have the financial and social resources necessary to experience the same sort of deep penetration into social whiteness as most European ethnics and were subject to formal and informal exclusions that made the task impossible for all but the most well-placed elites (Jewell Reference Jewell2016).

A major political milestone with long-reaching social consequences was the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 (commonly known as the Hart-Celler Act). Hart-Celler ended strict racial quotas and preferences for admission and citizenship.Footnote ¹⁰ When coupled with geopolitical realignments and shifting immigration priorities resulting from anti-imperialist struggles and the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, Hart-Celler resulted in substantially increased migration from Latin America and Asia. Mexican migrants made up the bulk of this increase, expanding from around 600,000 in 1965 to over 9 million by 1999. Although most of these migrants settled in traditional immigrant gateways in the West and Southwest, Mexican-origin populations grew in all regions of the United States. This massive population increase resulted in two consequential group shifts: one within native-born whites of European ancestry and one among Mexican-Americans themselves.

Scholars such as Gutiérrez (Reference Gutiérrez1995), Hurtado et al. (Reference Hurtado, Gurin and Peng1994), and Jiménez (Reference Jiménez2007, Reference Jiménez2009) have shown that increased Mexican migration also increased the saliency of the Mexican cultural identity within Mexican-American groups. This was most acutely felt in communities that had no sustained contact with Mexican nationals or contemporary Mexican culture for multiple generations. The blending of Mexican and Mexican-American cultures had the effect of both widening and closing the gap between Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants. Some later-generation Mexican-American individuals felt a sense of kinship with newly arrived Mexican immigrants and embraced the chance to strengthen their cultural traditions. In turn, some Mexican immigrants integrated into existing Mexican-American communities and relied on later-generation Mexican-Americans for guidance on how to adapt to American culture and traditions. However, some Mexican-Americans distanced themselves from newer Mexican immigrants, and some Mexican immigrants felt that later-generation Mexican-Americans had lost any claim to being Mexican and were, in reality, simply white Americans. Mexican-Americans with lighter skin tones who felt this disconnect were more likely to move away from Mexican-American enclaves and partner with native-born whites of European ancestry, thus moving to the fringes of the Mexican-American cultural identity (Telles and Ortiz Reference Telles and Ortiz2008).

As more native-born whites of European ancestry had either direct or indirect contact with Mexican and Mexican-American individuals, the boundary between whites of European ancestry and those of Mexican ancestry became deeper and more profound (Jiménez Reference Jiménez2009). Whites of European ancestry were often quick to point out various cultural markers that supposedly distinguished Mexicans and Mexican-Americans from whites of European ancestry. The irony is that this conveniently ignores the fact that many supposedly unique Mexican cultural features (such as adherence to Catholicism, Machismo, and low-skilled agrarian roots) are the same cultural features that earlier generations of native-born whites identified to distance themselves from newly arrived European ethnics. Irony aside, the racialization of Mexicans in the United States has had a profound effect on individuals of Mexican ancestry’s ability to claim social whiteness. For those who express pride in their Mexican heritage, it often means distancing themselves from whiteness altogether, and those who express more comfort with a white identity often drift away from co-ethnics despite being identified as less-than fully white by a majority of native-born whites (Telles and Ortiz Reference Telles and Ortiz2008).

Arab-Americans: Zigzagging through whiteness

Arab-Americans certainly rank high on the list of groups with the most movement in and out of legal and social whiteness over the course of modern US history. “Arab” refers to individuals who claim an ethnic heritage with several nomadic tribes originating in present-day Syria and other areas on the eastern half of the Arabian Peninsula around 900 BCE. Nomadic Arab tribes eventually spread throughout Western and Central Asia, North Africa, West Africa, the Horn of Africa, and several islands on the Western edge of the Indian Ocean. Arabs are noted for spreading Islam and spoken and written Arabic, which often represented the first written language system in many areas where they settled. However, Arab populations have practiced other faiths (such as Christianity, Judaism, or none at all in some instances), and present-day Arab individuals may or may not practice Islam or speak Arabic (Lewis Reference Lewis2002).

Furthermore, individuals may claim both a national origin and an Arab ethnocultural identity. Early arrivers to the United States who might have considered themselves Arabs were known by a variety of terms, including Levantines, Ottomans, Syrians, Lebanese, Bedouins, Berbers, Maghrebis, and many more. This would lead to no shortage of confusion in court filings and rulings as individuals with Arab ethnic ancestry tried to obtain legal standing as white in the United States (Beydoun Reference Beydoun2013; McDermott and Sampson Reference McDermott and Samson2005). The first instance of individuals of Arab ancestry obtaining legal whiteness through the United States Supreme Court was the 1909 Najour decision, which ruled that Syrians met the burden of “scientific evidence” in establishing a claim to whiteness and were thus eligible to naturalize. However, the 1913 Shahid Supreme Court ruling overturned the 1909 Najour decision with the rationale that legal whiteness only covered those deemed white under the terms of the 1790 Naturalization Act (which did not cover individuals from any Asian sending society). The Shahid ruling would be short-lived, as it was overturned by the 1915 Dow decision, which was notable for moving from a “science-based” standard of whiteness to the “common man” legal standard and affirmed that “Syrians” met the common threshold of whiteness that had evolved since the 1790 Naturalization Act. It was not until the 1944 Mohriez Supreme Court decision, however, that “Arabian” individuals were explicitly included as legally white.

For the purposes of elucidating their connection to whiteness, large-scale Arab migration to the United States can be roughly divided into three eras: the early period (1870–1924), the Post-World War II period (1945–1992), and the contemporary period (1993–present). The early period saw mass migration due to the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The majority of these pioneer migrants were from areas within the boundaries of modern-day Syria and Lebanon, and many settled into occupational niches as itinerant peddlers of goods in the northeastern and midwestern United States. Arab migrants eventually established sizeable communities in places like Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Peoria, Illinois, and Detroit, Michigan. Michigan cities and suburbs would play a central role as the hub of an expansive Arab-American community for generations. Like many immigrants of the time, Arab migrants were expected to fully assimilate into the American mainstream, and many took this imperative seriously as the United States unquestionably became their permanent home. One cultural component aiding rapid Arab-American assimilation was Christianity: around 70 percent of the early arrivers were already Christian (Kayyali Reference Kayyali2018). Another feature hastening assimilation was that many of the first arrivers did not establish cultural institutions (such as Arabic language schools, ethnic primary and/or secondary schools, or ethnic heritage clubs). The relative lack of separate ethnic institutions was so profound that it served as an impediment to later historians seeking written cultural accounts beyond oral narratives (Kayyali Reference Kayyali2006). Although denied social whiteness by many of the native-born whites they encountered, these earlier Arab migrants were viewed no differently than the other legally white but not quite socially white migrants from Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. The event that brought this early period to a close was the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924 (also known as the Johnson-Reed Act), which prohibited Asian immigration and established national quota restrictions that choked off migration from most of the Eastern hemisphere.

By the time the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (also known as the McCarran-Walter Act) abolished national origin quotas and thus reversed the outright restriction on Asian immigration, geopolitical events had restructured much of the world. Chief among them were the anti-Imperialism and self-determination movements in much of the so-called “Global South” and Eastern Hemisphere. This helped to crystallize a much more politically conscious Arab identity among the newer arrivals. Another key difference was in the selectivity of the newer Arab migrants. While the first wave mainly emigrated as farmers, herders, and petty traders, the Post-World War II wave had more diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, including a sizeable number of professionals and educated elites. Furthermore, the newer wave of Arab migrants was more likely to practice Islam and was also more likely to put a premium on retaining Arab cultural forms, such as fluency in Arabic. Thus, much like with Mexican ethnic replenishment (Jiménez Reference Jiménez2009), Post-World War II Arab migrants who arrived in the United States met a co-ethnic community that was, in turns, both familiar and alien and proceeded to help redefine community notions of Arab identity. While the early wave Arab-Americans who were marginally attached to Arab culture tended to have children who out-married with native-born whites at particularly high rates, the Post-World War II wave arrived at a time of increasing racial and ethnic segregation and thus were far less likely to outmarry with native-born whites (Ajrouch and Jamal Reference Ajrouch and Jamal2007). Finally, the latter portion of this period (beginning with the 1973–1974 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo) would see increasingly negative depictions of Arab countries and Arabs in general in US media.Footnote ¹¹ Additionally, Arabs and Muslims were often conflated by the general public to the extent that both were viewed as synonymous by laypeople. These negative and stereotypical media portrayals had the effect of pushing Arab-Americans further away from social whiteness and began a rapid process of Arab racialization that would gain further momentum in the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) Bombing (Naber Reference Naber2000).

Negative and often racially inflammatory media and social commentary after the 1993 WTC bombing ushered in the contemporary era of Arab-American migration and identity. Hostility in the United States toward several Arab-majority countries and an ongoing narrative concerning a so-called “global war on terror” or “clash of civilizations” resulted in growing social distance between native-born whites of European descent and Arab-Americans. The situation became even worse after the events of September 11, 2001, which resulted in numerous hate crimes against individuals of Southwest and South Asian descent and various cultural institutions associated with them.Footnote ¹² Arab-American and Muslim communities were viewed as hotbeds of anti-American sentiment and terrorist activity. In response to increases in negative racialization, many younger Arab-Americans adopted a distinctly non-white social identity in the post-September 11^th period (Jamal and Naber Reference Jamal and Naber2008). It is unclear whether this trend will continue into the future. However, it is clear that although Arab-Americans remain classified as racially white, very few people, including Arab-Americans themselves, view them as socially white in present-day US society.

Burakumin: Outcaste identity

As previously mentioned, the main transition point to the modern Japanese state was the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Changes during the Meiji Era (1868–1912) were deep and many, including a host of political, military, economic, educational, and social reforms. Several of these aforementioned changes were initiated based on reports from official Imperial delegations dispatched to a number of foreign (mostly Western) societies to learn different modes of social organization and management. In turn, Japan began an Imperial expansionist project at the end of the nineteenth century that would expand its borders as well as demarcate the boundary between Japanese and “others” – something that had been largely ignored during the period of self-imposed international withdrawal known as sakoku. Footnote ¹³

One domestic “other” that would see drastic changes in their social status during this period was the Burakumin (which literally translates to “people who live in hamlets”). Burakumin is the preferred name for several social groups in Japan codified during the feudal era.Footnote ¹⁴ The original unifying feature of groups who would eventually become known as Buraku was that they worked in industries that were deemed “defiled,” such as animal slaughter, leather tanning, refuse collection, and human waste disposal. Much like with the relatively more well-known DalitsFootnote ¹⁵ of India, work in defiled industries was associated with impurity of the entire group and placed the Buraku outside of the feudal caste system.Footnote ¹⁶ This outcaste status made the Burakumin subject to severe social discrimination and laws that limited their interactions with other feudal groups, including forced ghettoization into specific areas of towns and cities with the aim of confining their perceived impurity (Bondy Reference Bondy2019). These state-level distinctions are crucially important for membership in Japanese society, as citizenship rights in the modern Japanese state were mapped onto the long-standing family registry, or koseki. A koseki is a record of family lineage dating back to the early Heian Era before being modernized in 1872 (Endo Reference Endō2024). All Japanese citizens must maintain a koseki, and the process for creating a new koseki is arduous even for the most well-resourced individual. Thus, individuals are effectively tied back to their family lineage as it was legible to the state during the early Meiji Restoration, and any Japanese with knowledge of Japanese spatial history would be able to reconstruct a speculative family history using few details despite various attempts by the Japanese government to tightly restrict access to such information.

If not for strict laws dictating where they could settle, whom they could associate with or marry, and their choice of occupation and dress, it would have been impossible to clearly distinguish Buraku community members from any other Japanese subject during the Feudal era up until the formal emancipation of the Burakumin in 1871. Furthermore, there were no shared physical features or social customs that would mark the dozens of groups and even more numerous socially marginal individuals who eventually were labeled as Buraku as similar and distinct from Japanese individuals not labeled as Buraku. Although individuals of Buraku status did not start out as culturally distinct from other Japanese people, they eventually developed a common diet, mannerisms, and a sense of community. This is a crucial difference between the initial social construction of marginalized ethnoracial groups in Japan versus the United States. Whereas the development and maintenance of ethnic boundaries in the United States moved from groups themselves and were then codified into law, the Japanese Imperial government was largely responsible for instituting top-down edicts defining the legal contours of out-group ethnoracial membership, and then individuals within these legally defined groups began to develop the social aspects of group membership. Both Buraku communities and identity continued to develop well after restrictions on residence and occupation were lifted, largely because Japanese society at large did not treat the so-called Shinhemin (new commoners) any differently than before the edict and discrimination against the Buraku remained pervasive in large part because there was little residential mobility among Buraku people until well after World War II (Brown Reference Brown2013).

Given that full inclusion within Japanese society went unrealized even after emancipation, Buraku individuals continued to organize social and political advocacy groups and mobilize the community to demand further protections and recognition from the government. The most notable of these advocacy groups, the Suiheisha (Leveller’s) Society (founded in 1922 and active until 1942), the National Committee for Buraku Liberation (founded in 1946 and reorganized as the Buraku Liberation League, or BLL, in 1955), the National Buraku Liberation Alliance (known by its Japanese acronym of zenkairen and founded in 1979), and the Buraku Heritage (founded in 2011 after the Tohoku triple disaster) all placed organized and concerted pressure on municipal and national governments to eliminate lingering vestiges of institutionalized discrimination against Buraku people and compel equitable investment in Buraku people and neighborhoods. Furthermore, each group targeted politicians, businesses, and private citizens who were known or suspected of openly discriminating against Buraku people (Neary Reference Neary2009; Shimahara Reference Shimahara1984).

The first major victory of the early wave of activism was the passage of the Dowa Taisaku Tokubetsu Sochi Hou (Law on Special Measures for Dowa Projects, also known as the Special Measures Law or SML) in 1969. The SML outlined seven areas of Buraku concern that new policy would target the physical environment of traditional Buraku neighborhoods, guarantees against employment discrimination and denial of social security benefits, promotion of industries traditionally associated with the Buraku (mainly in forestry, fishing, and agriculture), education, social welfare and public health, promotion of small- and medium-sized firms employing or owned by Buraku individuals, and human rights protections.Footnote ¹⁷ Although the SML was only slated to last until 1979, the BLL and other affinity groups lobbied for their extension, which eventually ended in 2002. Although the SML provided much-needed economic assistance to Buraku individuals and communities, it did little to fully address the deeply pervasive discrimination against those who identify as Buraku. Continued discrimination against the Buraku by other Japanese nationals was often aided and abetted by several illegal “guidebooks” containing both maps of supposed Buraku neighborhoods and family lists of individuals thought to have Buraku ancestry (Amos Reference Amos2015). These guides are formally prohibited by law and are usually published by smaller imprints or individuals via the internet (Bondy Reference Bondy2019). Thus, many younger activists and older radicals pressed for a series of laws that would deal with Buraku discrimination head on. This culminated in the passage of the Act for the Promotion of the Elimination of Buraku Discrimination (or APEBD) in 2016, which is aimed at curtailing individual and institutional discrimination against Buraku, even if only symbolically (Bondy Reference Bondy2019). It is also important to note that Buraku communities and identity continued to expand and evolve well after the formal abolition of Buraku status. This latter-day group investment in Buraku identity, even when not visibly identifiable as different from the superordinate group, has much more in common with ethnoculture, which tends to be a bottom-up process, than the top-down process – where governments set the initial contours of subordinate groups – usually associated with Western conceptions of race (Bondy Reference Bondy2019; Gordon Reference Gordon2006).

Zainichi Koreans: Acculturation without assimilation

Although people from the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago have been in contact with one another for centuries and most of those encounters have been either benign or neutral in impact, the period since the Meiji Restoration has been punctuated with tense conflict. Korea was among the first states dominated by Imperial Japan under the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1876 before becoming a protectorate in 1905 and then being annexed outright in 1910 and governed through direct rule until Japan’s formal surrender after World War II on September 2, 1945. Over the course of the aforementioned period, Japan initiated a long and formal process of Japanization of Korean society and both forcibly compelled and incentivized Koreans to migrate to Japan and other Japanese territories in various forms of service to the Japanese Empire.Footnote ¹⁸

During the mobilization effort for World War II, Imperial Japan offered nominal membership as Japanese subjects to the various migrants living in Japan. As a result, many Koreans (as well as other migrants from colonized territories in mainland China and what would soon be known as Taiwan) became ostensibly Japanese, even if only recognized by law (Ching Reference Ching2001; Weiner Reference Weiner1995). However, any legal rights and privileges that both migrants and long-term-staying non-Japanese might have had during the Imperial period were revoked during the reorganization of Japanese political power after World War II. These individuals, who do not have citizenship yet have been granted long-term protections, are known by the term Zainichi, which literally means “foreigner in Japan.” While Zainichi originally implied a temporary stay, most Zainichi Koreans have a special right to permanent residency (tokubetsueijuusha), which allows them to stay indefinitely in Japan with the right to naturalize, and most have never lived outside of Japan (Kashiwazaki Reference Kashiwazaki2000).

Despite maintaining the right to become Japanese citizens, the majority of Zainichi Koreans are strongly opposed to naturalization for two reasons. First, the process of gaining citizenship in Japan during the latter half of the twentieth century was relatively invasive and involved renouncing prior national allegiances and adopting a Japanese name. Given the legacy of forcible Japanization efforts in Korea and strong diasporic ties to the Korean peninsula,Footnote ¹⁹ naturalization was inescapably linked with Japanese cultural imperialism (Armstrong Reference Armstrong1989; Iwasasa Reference Iwasawa1986). Second, Zainichi Koreans have endured sharp and pervasive discrimination from almost every corner of Japanese society. Several prominent Korean activists have argued that the denigrated social status endured by Zainichi Koreans in Japan must be fought by Zainichi Koreans as Zainichi Koreans and criticize naturalization as an insidious form of social erasure (Chung Reference Chung2010; Ryang and Lie Reference Ryang and Lie2009; Suzuki Reference Suzuki2016). Zainichi Korean activists have been influential in pushing for an end to ethnic discrimination across all institutions and greater inclusion in Japanese society as ethnic Koreans. The two most notable sociopolitical advocacy groups are Mindan (the Republic of Korean Residents Union in Japan), founded in 1946, and Chongryon (the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan), founded in 1955. The major dividing line between Zainichi Korean sociopolitical groups is their orientation or policy toward the two Koreas, with Chongryon maintaining ties with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and Mindan oriented toward the Republic of Korea (South Korea). Zainichi Korean activists have notched several important political victories in post-War Japanese society, most recently pushing the city of Kawasaki to apply criminal penalties to violations of the 2016 Hate Speech Act passed by the Japanese government without any enforcement mechanism to nominally comply with United Nations anti-discrimination provisions. While there are strong parallels with the social and political advocacy of marginalized ethnic groups in many Western societies, it is important to emphasize that sizeable numbers of Zainichi Koreans have and still do continue to “pass” as ethnically Japanese in various public venues to avoid discrimination from majority ethnic Japanese individuals (Lie Reference Lie2009). This is quite different from the reality faced by most racialized minorities in the West, where racial passingFootnote ²⁰ has shifted from a strategy employed by racialized minorities to one employed by majority white individuals for material or social gain (Beydoun and Wilson Reference Beydoun and Wilson2017).

This second argument against naturalization is similar to the exhortation of Buraku activists to fight against social and legal discrimination while maintaining their identity and social cohesion. However, a key difference between individuals who claim a Buraku identity and Zainichi Koreans is that Burakumin status was socially imposed and then became culturally distinct from majority Japanese status, while Zainichi Korean identity is based on a pre-existing ethnic identity that began as quite distinct from majority Japanese identity. This highlights an important feature of ethnocultural discrimination in Japan: that ethnicity and culture are tightly coupled for social inclusion as Japanese in Japan. The vast majority of Zainichi Koreans are third-generation residents in Japan or beyond and, like the latter-generation descendants of immigrants in most countries, have native-born linguistic fluency, live in majority Japanese neighborhoods, work in majority Japanese jobs, maintain various social contacts with native-born Japanese people, and participate in mainstream Japanese culture.Footnote ²¹ Despite deep and consequential forms of acculturation and integration into the Japanese social fabric, Zainichi Koreans are viewed as having retained a distinct ethnic heritage and are thus treated as not fully Japanese even in instances when individuals have completely assimilated and are visibly indistinguishable from their majority Japanese peers. This is quite different from the case of contemporary racial distinction seen in the United States, where all individuals with a European heritage (whether first generation or latter) are now seen as white regardless of ethnic or cultural differences.

Brazilian Nikkeijin return migrants: From “insider” to outsider

Japan’s empire-building and war mobilization efforts also resulted in many Japanese émigrés settling in various parts of the world. The Americas received the bulk of this resettlement, and no country accepted more Japanese arrivals than Brazil. Between 1908 and 1942, almost 200,000 Japanese migrants arrived, and by 2010, an estimated 1.3 million individuals of Japanese descent resided in Brazil, the largest population of individuals of Japanese ancestry in any country outside of Japan.Footnote ²² Many early Japanese migrants to Brazil were young single men from rural areas who could not inherit family land,Footnote ²³ the poor, and socially marginalized families seeking a better life.

Most of the newly arrived Japanese migrants came specifically to farm, but a number became shopkeepers, tradespeople, or factory laborers. Over time, individuals of Japanese descent living in Brazil experienced upward mobility to middle- and upper-middle-class socioeconomic status in Brazil. Although people of Japanese descent were eventually accepted as Brazilian, many continued accentuating their Japanese ethnic heritage while living and primarily associating with other Japanese ethnics far after the elimination of most formal barriers to mobility. In addition, as community members accumulated more financial and social capital, they found ways to strengthen direct ties with politicians and cultural institutions in Japan. In this manner, Japanese ethnic identity continued to play an important role in the lives of many Japanese Brazilians (De Carvalho Reference De Carvalho2003; Nishida Reference Nishida2017).

In the early 1980s, almost 80 years after the first formal agreements that paved the way for Japanese migrants to settle in Brazil, sizeable numbers of Japanese Brazilians began returning to Japan. This return migration was initially seen as a net positive for both countries, as Brazil was counting on remittances from migrants to make up for revenue lost after a minor exodus of skilled and semi-skilled workers due to prolonged economic stagnation and Japanese firms during that period were unable to find enough manual laborers to work in a variety of industrial settings. The Japanese government eventually amended the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act in 1990 to allow up to the fourth generation (yonsei) of Japanese descendants, their spouses of any nationality, and their children to work in any industry in Japan. These revisions resulted in more than a threefold increase in the population of return migrants from Brazil, from around 60,000 in 1990 to over 220,000 in 2000.Footnote ²⁴ So many Brazilian Nikkeijin (“person of Japanese descent”) left for Japan that Brazilian media eventually coined a special term: Dekassegui, a Brazilian Portuguese play on the Japanese dekasegi, which originally referred to both seasonal labor migration and internal Japanese rural-to-urban migrants.

The first wave of Dekassegui to Japan was predominantly middle-class second-generation (nisei) Japanese Brazilians who spoke fluent Japanese and phenotypically resembled the native-born Japanese majority. After the 1990 immigration code revisions, however, the Dekassegui community became more heterogeneous: many of the more recent san- and yonsei migrants to Japan were working-class, spoke little to no Japanese, were from mixed ethnic backgrounds, and were visually distinguishable from most native-born Japanese. Furthermore, the average Dekassegui had very limited interactions with the Japanese majority, given both their high degree of clustering within a few sectors of the low-skilled labor marketFootnote ²⁵ in the Chuubu Footnote ²⁶ (central) region of Japan and the tendency for many to work long hours to send remittances back home to Brazil.

Given the above, public sentiment toward the Dekassegui began to quickly sour in Japan. In 1990, around two-thirds of the Japanese had a favorable opinion about Japanese Brazilians. However, in 2000 (after 10 years of sizable Dekassegui migration to Japan), the trend had reversed to a mostly negative opinion (Tsuda Reference Tsuda2003). The evaporation of fellow feeling toward Brazilian Nikkeijin exposes a fundamental component of ethnocultural membership in Japan. In a direct parallel to the situation with the Aussiedler Footnote ²⁷ population in Germany, both Japanese government officials and citizens assumed that any individual with a majority Japanese ethnic background would be able to quickly and fully adapt to Japanese society. This is attributable to both ethnicity and cultural fluency residing “in the blood,” or deep within the collective memory of various Japanese ancestry groups. As it became obvious that the majority of Japanese from Brazil were, in fact, very much culturally Brazilian and had little knowledge or understanding of contemporary Japanese society, most Japanese people began to regard them as wholly Brazilian and not at all ethnically Japanese. This denial of Japanese ethnicity was also compounded by negative beliefs about the lineage of the Dekassegui (mainly, that their ancestors had failed to thrive in Japan because they were morally deficient and that the present-day Dekassegui had arrived back in Japan because they too had failed to thrive in Brazil). This is particularly important because the process of ethnocultural differentiation and discrimination faced by Brazilians of Japanese descent differs from racialization in that the racialization process generally occurs over a longer time period, while ethnocultural distinction can occur quite rapidly. Curiously enough, Brazilian Nikkeijin went from inhabiting a relatively high social status among ethnic groups in Brazil to occupying a relatively low social status in Japan. Although several Dekassegui and other sympathetic activists have put forth considerable effort in pushing back against the marginalization of Brazilian Nikkeijin in Japan, most of those efforts have not resulted in a serious change in public sentiment or the material conditions experienced by Dekassegui residing in Japan (Nishida Reference Nishida2017). By the late 2000s, the number of Dekassegui returning to Brazil began to climb steadily and continued at relatively high levels due in part to paid repatriation sponsored by the Japanese government,Footnote ²⁸ the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011, and the lingering aftereffects of the global recession of 2008.