ABSTRACT
Since foreign residents of Japan do not possess Japanese nationality and citizenship, they do not enjoy the full range of constitutional rights guaranteed to the majority. They have been failed by the model of the nation-state and citizenship, and disenfranchised as a result of this failure. Their presence clashes with the assumption behind the concept of the nation-state and citizenship -that people will spend their entire lives within secure borders and pass citizenship onto their children who will also spend their entire lives within the same borders; that these borders are the boundaries of both nation and state; and that the nation is homogeneous. Increased mobility, changes in national borders that leave large groups of people on the 'wrong' side of the line, and the realities of states that consist of a plurality of ethnic groups, have all served to expose the limits of this model (Castles and Davidson, 2000, p. viii). The consequences are large numbers of disenfranchised within modem democratic states. In other words, the issues discussed here are not limited to Japan.
