2019 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Social inclusion and integration of diversity: Employers, newcomer migrant workers, and community response in Japan
| Project/Area Number |
19K02142
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| Research Institution | Waseda University |
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Principal Investigator |
ロバーツ グレンダ.S 早稲田大学, 国際学術院(アジア太平洋研究科), 教授 (40308242)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2019-04-01 – 2022-03-31
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| Keywords | social inclusion / migrant workers / Japan / community / integration |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Together with my RA, I visited the JA office in Kyoto, in July 2019, interviewing at two chicken farms, meeting some foreigner ginou jisshusei and Special Skilled Workers 1. On 12/3 we met farmers from Aichi at a reception in Tokyo where they had attended a presentation by the Ministry of Agriculture.
On 12/19, we returned to Kyoto-fu with the JA staff to discuss with local town representatives and a chicken farm manager how the foreign workers might get involved in town events. We saw farms in Yawata and learned of farmers' difficulties in securing workers who would stay long-term. We visited a JA meeting for local farmers, where a representative explained the new SSWI system.
We participated in two academic conferences:RA Noriko Fujita presented her research on 10/20 at a Diversity panel of the Japan Society of Policy Studies. The second conference was the Japan Labor Sociology conference on 11/3, where we heard a talk on dairy farms in Hokkaido. My RA and I compiled our preliminary findings from our field trips into a talk for the Waseda University/U. Birmingham international NODE migration conference in December, 2019.
On 5 February, we visited the town in Aichi where we had been invited to return, interviewing five women farmers about their roles managing foreign workers. They invited us back to stay for a longer trip, to do a homestay in order to understand more about their farming lives and needs.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
I and my research assistant carried out as many field trips to Kyoto and Aichi as we had planned in the past year. The trips were productive. We had great help from the JA representative as well as from the farmers in Kyoto prefecture and Aichi. We have been requested to return and stay longer in order to observe the daily life of the foreign workers. We are communicating with JA and with the Aichi farmers online. We have gained a good rapport with them. We presented preliminary results at NODE conference on migration, held with Waseda and U. Birmingham scholars, December 3-6, 2019. Our presentation was well received. We made collaborations with UK scholars for future research. The only problem was we could not present at the Association for Asian Studies in March due to Covid 19.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
We would like to make a follow-up trip to JA in Kyoto prefecture in July, if the Corona virus situation improves. Furthermore we will visit Aichi, to stay for a week or ten days' trip, in order to get to know the people there better, and find out to what extent the workers are being incorporated in local events. I will interview some of the local politicians, as well as Ministry of Agriculture staff, to understand their views on the SSWI program going forward. We will expand our contacts with farms who employ SSWI workers to have more of a variety of farms and stakeholders. I will be able to make more field trips in December 2020 as well as February 2021 if the virus situation has improved.
I will apply again to attend the Association of Asian Studies meeting next year in the US in March 2021. With a world pandemic, it is difficult to predict to what extent we can carry out the field trips, or join the conferences. I may delay applying to present my findings at the American Anthropological Association conference in November 2020,depending on the pandemic. Instead I will attend the final year of the grant. I will keep up with the news and scholarly accounts on this.
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| Causes of Carryover |
In the last fiscal year, I failed to spend 43,5818 yen because I had been invited to be on a panel with my RA for the project, Noriko Fujita, at the Association for Asian Studies to be held in Boston at the end of March. The project funds would have paid for us to attend and present at this important international conference. Unfortunately, due to the Corona Virus, the conference was cancelled. So, the money that would have paid for conference attendance was left in my project account. I will like to use this fund for the March 2021 AAS conference instead. I will apply again to the AAS.
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Research Products
(2 results)
