Abstract
This edited volume approaches a question that, while deceptively simple, is quite consequential. Instead of asking whether migrants are attractive to host societies, should we not be asking whether those host societies are attractive to migrants? Aeneas Zi Wang, Aimi Muranaka, and Florian Coulmas view this inversion as the book’s main contribution, reframing “attractiveness” from an asset that migrants must have to an obligation that host states are required to fulfill. As demographic pressures intensify across Japan and Germany, the terms of the migration relationship are, unmistakably, shifting.
This volume is part of the Routledge Contemporary Japan Series and contains 11 chapters authored by experts in migration, language policy, labor, and immigration law. Its organizational structure centers on quality of life and subjective well-being (SWB), drawing on the original work of Ed Diener (Diener, 1984; Diener et al., 1985), who defines SWB as the scientific analysis of how people evaluate their lives—both momentarily and over longer periods, spanning emotional responses, moods, and judgements about satisfaction in domains such as work and family—and extending to social, linguistic, cultural, and political aspects of migrant life, while leaving the prevailing economic orientation of the discourse on skilled migration.
Chapter 1 by Wang and Muranaka provides the necessary demographic scaffolding. Japan’s population decreased from 127.59 million in 2012 to 124.95 million in 2022, and the 75-and-over age group reached a record high of 15.5%. In Germany, population growth is illusory, masking a workforce expected to contract by two million in the mid-2030s. Both states have responded with distinct policy revamps: Japan through visa pathways such as J-Skip and J-Find, targeting highly skilled professionals, and Germany through the 2023 Fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetz (Skilled Immigration Act), which permits post-arrival recognition of qualifications. The editors frame this structural parallel carefully, avoiding the overstatement of symmetry between two “non-traditional immigrant societies.”
Chapters 2 through 4 form the book’s most cohesive cluster. Schroeder (Chapter 2) explains that Germany’s Residence Act links specific residency permits to levels of language proficiency, such as A1 for spousal reunification, B1 for permanent residence, and C1 for family reunification of adult children, thereby transforming linguistic ability from a potential opportunity into a liability. Asahi (Chapter 3) introduces an interesting paradox. While local authorities promote their multilingual offerings as omotenashi (hospitality), this chapter characterizes them as providing tatemae administration, where engagement is merely superficial, intended to show effort without delivering substantive engagement, and predominantly constructed through machine translation, which produces nonsensical and unintelligible results. Kimura (Chapter 4) comparatively demonstrates that both Leichte Sprache (easy language) in Germany and Yasashii Nihongo (easy or gentle Japanese) in Japan were designed for constituencies other than migrants and remain unevaluated from their perspectives. These three chapters collectively demonstrate that the promise of attractiveness can dissolve at the threshold of arrival, before migrants even enter the labor market.
Whereas the language chapters reveal circumstances associated with the point of entry, Chapters 5, 6, and 10 delve into how institutional and field-related logics distort migrant journeys across disparate domains. Using Bourdieu’s and Wacquant (1992) field theory, which frames a field as a structured network of positions where actors compete according to their relative capital, Fujii (Chapter 5) demonstrates that Japanese visual art and music trainees prefer Germany not to do well on national ranking lists, but because of field-related conceptions of Honba (the supposed center of their discipline) and networks of decisive sensei-students that influence them in choosing to move there and back. The chapter’s distinctive contribution is its analysis of the sequential and relational dynamics of cross-border mobility, which goes beyond pre-departure motivation. The recruitment industry in Japan assumes that Vietnamese IT and engineering workers are shin-nichi (Japan-loving). Muranaka (Chapter 6) finds that, in her fieldwork, most interviewees had placed Japan as a stepping stone, discouraged by the strict seniority systems and inflexible routes to permanent residency. Chiavacci (Chapter 10) presents the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) as a transnational total institution and commits interns to their employers through their families’ financial liabilities and the real impossibility of transferring to another workplace. Although the art pupils of Fujii and the interns of Chiavacci are placed in opposite locations in the migration scene, both chapters illustrate how structural logics constantly take precedence over migrants’ choices.
The rest of the chapters take on the policy from historical and institutional angles. In Chapter 7, Joppke analyzes Germany’s Spurwechsel (the “track change” from the asylum track to the labor track) as a move from restriction-oriented governance to pragmatic integration, as well as changes in federal governance. Using both countries’ diplomatic records and audio-visual materials, Adamopoulou (Chapter 8) outlines how West Germany merged economic motivation and bilateral diplomacy in order to court Greek workers in the 1960s, leaving the implicit question of whether today’s nations are producing similar conditions. Using historical institutionalism, Endoh (Chapter 9) traces three reform rounds in Japan’s deportation regime since the 1980s, noting the recurring rebalancing strategy in which increased restrictions offset apparent liberalization. Coulmas (Chapter 11) integrates the volume via kyosei shakai (symbiosis society) and interprets the spread of Japanese new words like karyiu rojin (impoverished elderly) and kodokushi (lonely death) as sociological indicators of demographic shifts, treating changes in vocabulary as signs of societal change.
A core issue in these contributions is the structural reliance on foreign labor and the systemic encasements of institutions that undermine migrants’ quality of life. This conflict is arguably most effectively conveyed through the contrast between Chapters 6 and 10, which show the glorious beginnings of immigration liberalization policy in Japan and demonstrate that the results of such beginnings fall far short of the promises.
The main constraints on the volume are structural: Japan has five dedicated chapters, while Germany has only three, and the comparative architecture set out in Chapter 1 is only partially carried forward. Providing a more detailed theoretical explanation of how the different meanings of “attractiveness” across the chapters connect would enhance the conceptual contribution. Moreover, some chapters are primarily based on policy papers and other sources, and a longer-term analysis of migrants’ own testimonies would support the main argument.
These reservations notwithstanding, Immigration and Quality of Life in Ageing Societies is a substantively rich contribution to migration studies. Attributing blame for attractiveness to states, rather than to migrants, raises questions that extend beyond Japan and Germany, particularly for emerging non-traditional immigrant countries in the Asia-Pacific that face similar demographic pressures. Readers who study Japan and Germany need this work, as do those who face the broader problem of how ageing societies cope with demographic pressures and policy stalemates, as well as the realities of migrants in their daily lives.
