Published papers

This research aims to make clear the determinants of job shift patterns in Japan. Previous studies have highlighted the importance of both individual level of resourceand reward, and labor market structures which affect job mobility patterns. However, previous research on job mobility in Japan did not incorporate individual level of attributes such as resourceand reward into systematic theoretical points of view while the impact of labor market structure on job mobility drew distinctive attention in Japan. In addition, many previous studies did not take into account the context of job shift because of a lack of available sourceof information in survey data. The present research pays attention to the divergence between voluntary and involuntary job mobility. The result shows that firm-specific skills and occupational reward made it less likely for employees to quit a job. It corresponds to the model of reward and resource. However, there is no evidence that general human capital which is transferable across firm would increase the likelihood of quitting a job as is seen in the U.S labor market. In addition, the way in which labor market structure influences job shift patterns is almost identical to the model of segmented labor market. In contrast, the way in which macroeconomic conditions for labor market affects rates of job shift in Japan is deviant from the hypothesis for the U.S labor market. This paper highlights the differences between voluntary and involuntary job mobility in Japan. Compared to the previous studies in the U.S. the job mobility patterns in Japan appear to be roughly similar to the ones for the United States whereas it seems that the institutional arrangements specific to Japanese labor market could make the job mobility patterns substantially different from those for the other industrialized countries. Cross-national comparison of intragenerational mobility which has lacked empirical studies would be further needed so that we can make clear the underpinnings of job mobility structure and institutional arrangements of labor market which diverge job mobility across country.

Using 2010 Japanese census data, we critically interrogate the idea of integration through marriage in Japan. Intermarriage has been seen as a result of integration but the patterns of intermarriage and integration might depend on existing intersecting power structures in the receiving society. We explore assortative mating patterns in bi-national marriages in order to understand how citizenship status, race, gender, and educational level intersect and affect the patterns of intermarriage in Japan. We argue how ‘integration’ through bi-national marriage only perpetuates the structural hierarchy that premiers and maintain the status of the (male) native Japanese majority over Asian immigrants.

This study examines how migrant workers in Japan move across national borders and obtain jobs in the destination country. While recent research has paid increasing attention to migration infrastructures, referring to networks of private intermediaries often operating in coordination with institutions of state governments, conventional studies continue to emphasize the enduring roles of co-ethnic ties in facilitating transnational mobility and job matching. Meanwhile, drawing on the 2018 Survey of Life and Work among Foreign Citizens in Japan, based on a two-stage cluster sampling method, this study provides a comprehensive assessment of how different job-search methods relate to labor market outcomes. Furthermore, we shed light on how the place of education works in transnational mobility and job-matching processes. The results show that migrants educated overseas were more likely to rely on co-ethnic ties and private intermediaries when seeking their first job in Japan, while those educated in Japan tended to use formal job-search channels similar to native Japanese workers. We also find that reliance on co-ethnic ties and private intermediaries was associated with entry into unskilled and precarious jobs, whereas formal job-search methods are linked to better labor market outcomes.

This study investigates the manner in which labour market flexibilisation is linked to the incorporation of Brazilian immigrants and their prospects for upward mobility in Japan. Although earlier studies have documented these relationships in North America and Europe, little is known about the socio-economic circumstances and recent changes in institutional settings in several Asian countries that currently accept a large number of immigrants. The results of this study indicate that the human and social capital of Brazilian immigrants has played a minor role in helping them to obtain standard employment. The highly regulated labour market in Japan has hindered the efforts of Brazilian immigrants to gain access to 'good' jobs with stable employment prospects, regardless of the degree of human and social capital that is possessed by individual immigrants. In addition, the recent increase in labour market flexibility has rendered it exponentially more difficult for Brazilian immigrants to enter the core employment sector. These institutional conditions for Brazilian immigrants have shaped the mechanisms of their integration and thereby prevented them from achieving upward mobility in Japanese society. These findings also reflect a lack of public debate and institutional support for the integration of immigrants into the wider Japanese society. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

This study explores the manner in which gender inequality in the transition into self-employment is associated with the institutional contexts of family and labour market structures in the East Asian countries of Japan, Korea and Taiwan. This work contributes to theoretical debates on gender inequality and entrepreneurship because prior research on female selfemployment has lacked a theoretical viewpoint on the mechanisms by which conditions for female entrepreneurship depend on the macro-structural arrangements of family and labour markets. By evaluating female employment in light of the patriarchal Confucian ideology, I examine gender disparities among individuals in terms of effects of paternal selfemployment, their experiences as family workers and their marital status on their transition into self-employment. The results of this study show that women in Japan and Taiwan do not benefit from the self-employed status of their fathers as much as their male counterparts. Additionally, female family workers in the three countries had considerable disadvantages in becoming self-employed, which implies that female family workers continue to be exploited by self-employed owners, namely, their husbands. In contrast, the effects of marital status, with both sexes, on their transitions into self-employment differed widely among the three countries, reflecting the various barriers to self-employment and the differing conditions for female employment in each country. Overall, this study demonstrates that gender inequality in the transition into self-employment is related to family structures unique to these East Asian countries. This study, however, did not compare the dynamics of self-employment between East Asian societies and other industrialised nations. Future studies should explore whether the findings of this study are applicable to other industrialised societies. Copyright © 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

This article assesses the impact of household composition and intermarriage on foreign-born women's labor force participation in Japan, Sweden, and the United States. Whereas previous literature on immigrant integration and intermarriage has treated social integration and labor force participation as tightly interlinked phenomena, we use new and previously unavailable data on Japan and the literature on institutional gender inequality to show that, in some cases, social integration through intermarriage might actually result in lower labor force participation for foreign-born women. We argue that the degree of institutional support for immigrants and families directly affects foreign-born women's labor force participation in the anticipated direction for each country. We argue that these cross-national differences are largely an outcome of differences in the degree of institutional support for working women and families within the host society and help clarify instances where social integration might have negative implications for labor force participation. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for both gender and social context when assessing the role intermarriage plays in receiving country immigrant integration.

Abstract: There have been fewer cross-national comparative works on social mobility in East Asian countries than in Western countries. The present study aims to explore the similarities and differences of intergenerational social mobility in three East Asian countries and to examine whether the Featherman–Jones–Hauser (FJH) hypothesis would fit well into the mobility tables for Japan, Korea, and China. Log-linear and log-multiplicative models are applied to the mobility tables of respondents’ occupations according to the father's occupation in the three countries. The analysis of relative rates of mobility did not completely support the FJH hypothesis in a strict sense, even though it reasonably accounts for the total association of origin and destination in the three countries. My analysis demonstrates that a level of social fluidity has been higher in Korea and China than in Japan. Focusing on how relative mobility patterns differ between the three countries, intergenerational mobility in Korea is characterized by lower rates of class inheritance compared to Japan, while there seems to be a similarity between the patterns of social fluidity in Japan and Korea, even though they are to a certain extent deviant from Erikson and Goldthorpe's core model. In contrast to Korea, class inheritance rates in China are almost as large as in Japan. However, the mobility pattern between classes appears to differ substantially between the post-socialist and two capitalist countries. In particular, both downward and upward mobility between the white collar bloc and the unskilled manual position are more pervasive in China than in Japan and Korea. These results imply that sociologists interested in cross-national comparison of the social mobility between the East Asian countries should pay attention to both political institutions and the local labor market situatuion which can substantially affect social mobility. © 2007 The Author.

In this article we focus on job mobility patterns in Japan and Taiwan, exploring how local institutional settings are linked to patterns of job mobility. Previous studies have distinguished between involuntary and voluntary job mobility. However, more diverse patterns of job mobility may also exist, which are not captured by this dichotomy. In this study we used representative national survey data from Japan and Taiwan and analyzed five types of job turnover: involuntary, positive voluntary, negative voluntary, family related and other. Using event history models we found significant differences between the two societies. First, the effect of higher education on voluntary job mobility was weaker in Japan than in Taiwan. Second, the effect of organizational size on voluntary job mobility was stronger in Japan than in Taiwan. Third, these tendencies were more significant for men than for women. These results suggest that the local institutional filters affect the turnover process. © 2014 The Japan Sociological Society.

This study explores functions of labor market institutions in perpetuating earnings gap between different categories of workers with focusing on people’s views of earnings gap between regular and non-regular workers in Japan, South Korea, and the United States. An original cross-national factorial survey was conducted to measure the extent to which respondents admit earnings gap among workers with different characteristics. We found that Japanese and South Korean respondents tended to justify the earnings gap between regular and non-regular workers. In Japan, non-regular-worker respondents accepted the wide earnings gap against their economic interests, which was explained by assumed difference in responsibilities and on-the-job training opportunities. Specific institutional arrangements contribute to legitimating earnings gap between different categories of workers by attaching status value to the categories.

This study investigates the effect of social capital on the psychological well-being of Brazilian immigrants in Japan. Social capital in immigrants has drawn considerable attention from sociologists and other social scientists because many advanced countries have accepted a large number of immigrants from other countries. Previous studies of immigration in the US have emphasized the important role of bonding social capital with family and co-ethnic friends in helping immigrants obtain social and emotional support from others. Conversely, other studies of immigration in European countries have suggested that bonding social capital with co-ethnic members does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. These contrasting findings demonstrate that social capital is largely embedded in the institutional settings within which immigrants deploy it. In this study, we explored how the psychological well-being of Brazilian immigrants in Japan depended on different forms of social capital. The results indicate that despite the lack of economic resources in their ethnic communities, Brazilian immigrants benefited significantly from bonding social capital with their extended families in terms of improved mental health. This study suggests that the effectiveness of bonding social capital substantially differs in terms of the objective and subjective realities of immigrants.

This study explores how the contexts of immigrant reception were related to unemployment of immigrants in Japan during the global economic crisis in the 2000s. Little is known concerning what shaped unemployment of immigrants in institutional settings outside of North American and European countries during the financial crisis. This study focuses specifically on unskilled immigrants because this type of migrant worker has been highly vulnerable to economic cycles. We focused on Nikkeijin immigrants from Brazil and Peru and Asian immigrants from China, Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam. We explored how immigrants’ unemployment in Japan was linked to immigration control policies, integration programs for refugees, labor market structures, and conditions of social capital. Empirical findings demonstrate that the trainee program strongly determined whether immigrants could remain in Japan during the unemployment period and that a significant difference in unemployment existed between Brazilian and Peruvian immigrants in Japan. Whereas ties with kin and co-ethnic friends did not help immigrants avoid unemployment, ties with Japanese spouses hindered unemployment among male immigrants, although this was not the case for female immigrants with Japanese spouses. Hence, immigrant unemployment depends considerably on how immigrants have been received in Japan. Conversely, we did not find any evidence of a positive role of the state government in mitigating immigrants’ unemployment in this study. Instead, the existing institutional context of immigrants’ reception in Japan has worsened the socioeconomic conditions of immigrants and strengthened their social marginalization, reflecting the lack of public debate regarding—and the lack of institutional support for—the integration of immigrants into the mainstream society.

This study examines the mechanisms through which grandparental resources and advantages increase the opportunities of grandchildren to access college, using longitudinal data from Japan. It also focuses on the heterogeneity in the transmission of grandparental advantages by lineage and gender. Although recent studies of social mobility have increasingly recognized the accumulation of inequality across multiple generations, relatively few studies have identified the underlying mechanisms or explored the roles of extended family structures in shaping multigenerational mobility. To advance this line of inquiry, we investigate how grandparental resources and contact are associated with grandchildren’s college enrollment in Japan—a context characterized by strong intergenerational ties and mutual support. We draw on two key mechanisms to explain multigenerational social mobility: the contact-based and noncontact-based mechanisms. In addition, we examine variation by grandparents’ lineage and gender. Our findings show that contact with paternal grandparents and grandfathers on both sides facilitates the transmission of their advantages to grandchildren, whereas no such pattern is observed for maternal grandmothers. These results underscore the importance of contact with grandfathers and patrilineal lineages in shaping multigenerational mobility in Japan. This contrasts with studies based on U.S. data, which emphasize the role of grandmothers. To deepen our understanding of multigenerational mobility, future research should shed light on how grandparental contact and resources operate across diverse family and societal settings.