An Introduction to Japanese Society

Japan has long been portrayed as a distinctively uniform society both racially and culturally despite the firm reality that it has many social groups that are subjected to discrimination and prejudice in ethnic and quasi-ethnic terms. This chapter first examines a few aspects of Japan’s ethnocentrism and then addresses the fallacy of the homogeneity thesis by delineating four ‘minority groups’ in Japan: the indigenous Ainu, burakumin, resident Koreans, and foreign workers. Based on the analysis of minority issues, the latter part of the chapter calls into question the monocultural definition of ‘Japaneseness’ and explores multiple ways of defining ‘the Japanese’.