Iranian immigrant workers in Japan and their networks1

This chapter draws on thirty-six interviews I conducted in Tehran, Iran, during the summer of 2000 together with a Meiji University lecturer, Tomoko Yamagishi. Out of the thirty-six Iranians we interviewed, twenty-eight had lived in Japan as illegal foreign workers, while four studied at Japanese universities and four were married to Japanese. We found these twenty-eight foreign workers through a Japanese volunteer, who worked for many years helping Iranian workers in Japan, and a key Iranian informant who had acquaintances especially in G City, Saitama Prefecture.2