The Future Trend of Migration in East Asia and Japan

What characteristics will international migration and migration policies have around 2020? In contrast with European countries, the cases of East Asia will give us insightful suggestions. Especially, an East Asian country, Japan, demonstrates peculiar future image, although it has developed with being similar to some European countries. Economic globalisation and depopulation strongly presses Japan to introduce labour migrants to its economic sector. Under this situation, Japan still keeps the policy dogma of "no-introduction of unskilled labour from abroad". Instead, it allows Nikkeijin (Japanese descendants from Latin America) to work even at unskilled jobs, then it is gradually enlarging the technical internship scheme where foreign interns de facto work at unskilled jobs. In addition, Japan introduces nurses/care workers in a quite limited way of Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA). This Japanese development of restrictive immigration policies can be recognised as peculiar, if compared to South Korean policies that started to introduce unskilled immigrants officially. What will happen to migration to Japan and immigration policies of Japan around 2020? This paper will submit a relatively pessimistic scenario: The present trend of restrictive policies will be continuous for a while, because, As the recent hate speech demonstration against Korean residents designate, Japanese ethno-national understanding of citizenship is quite stable without any reason to be changed in near future.