Language and migration in Japan

Urban translation and the 2020 Tokyo Games

“…One would also hear many diff erent languages-the languages of tens of thousands of Ryukyuans and more than 5,000 Ainus who migrated from the extreme south and north of the Japanese Archipelago to Tokyo (Aniya 1989 ;Watson 2014) and also the languages of Koreans and Chinese nationals who arrived in Tokyo already at the end of the 19th century (Maher and Yashiro 1995 ). The number of foreign residents that have arrived since the 1990s when immigration laws were changed in Japan has been steadily growing (Otomo 2019 ). In 1990, 220,000 foreign nationals were registered in Tokyo, but this number grew in the past fi ve years alone from 394,000 in 2014 to 567,789 (Ministry of Justice 2019).…”

“…This is the larger background into which all planning activities for the Tokyo Games were embedded. While Japan has by now a complex and ever-expanding policy that regulates immigration, a rough outline of a migrant society in Japan was only published in 2018, and Japan's once-celebrated self-image of a homogenous nation needed to be replaced by a new multicultural Japan theme in the process (Otomo 2019 ). In its 'Comprehensive measures for acceptance and integration of foreign human resources', the Japanese government proposes a range of objectives, identifi es a number of institutions concerned (school, employment, life services, etc.)…”