ABSTRACT
How to engage with the multicultural questions in a society that has not institutionally developed multiculturalism and related immigration policies at national level? In this chapter I examine this question by considering whether and how the conception of cultural citizenship, informed by cosmopolitan intellectual discourses and sensibilities, can be relevant to the consideration of multicultural questions in the Japanese context. Given that the Japanese government has refused to make immigration issues and multiculturalism a matter for the national policy agenda, support for migrants and ethnic minorities and the practices of citizenship have been increasingly occurring at local level. However, the cultural dimensions of citizenship have not been advanced in a way that counters a persistent essentialist definition of who Japanese citizens are. This is a rather urgent issue, as the Japanese government has recently become involved in pursuing a policy of “multicultural co-living” (tabunka kyosei) as a way of exploiting the significance of localities and avoiding the multicultural question as a national matter. I suggest that grassroots practices at local level are an important feature of Japan’s commitment to the multicultural question, but they should be combined with more effort to put forward a vision of Japan as a multicultural society that fairly recognizes and treats equally cultural differences. These considerations will highlight the issue of whether and how cultural citizenship can be realized without the institutional context that endangered its emergence as a model in the first place. I illustrate some limits of the conception of cultural citizenship, as well as the relevance of cosmopolitan perspectives that move beyond a deep-seated binary view of the nation and foreigners and advance currently existing practices of cultural citizenship in the localities.
