An Analysis of Imagined Boundary of the "Japanese": Results from an Internet Survey in Japan

This paper aims to analyze tendencies and differences of imagined boundary and definitions of the “Japanese” among Japanese people.

There is a legal definition of the Japanese, that is, the Japanese is the people having Japanese nationality. However, a personal definition to distinguish people between Japanese (or “real Japanese”) and non-Japanese may vary from person to person according to their experiences and social status. Especially, judgment in terms of grey zone cases, for example naturalized immigrants or Japanese diaspora, is controversial and delicate issue in Japan.

For capturing people’s imagined boundary and definition of the “Japanese” in detail, I conducted an internet survey with 2,000 respondents in 2013. In this survey, I employed 16 types of vignette questionnaires which describes typical combination of conditions relevant to national identity, i.e., nationality, resident, blood, and language, and asked respondents to judge whether a person who has a certain combination of conditions is regarded as the “Japanese” or not. 

By using this data, we can capture a person’s imagined boundary of “Japanese” as a set theoretic diagram, and a person’s imagined definition as a Boolean algebraic equation. In the paper, results from the survey will be demonstrated in detail. Besides, the relevance between types of imagined boundary and definitions and demographic and socio-economic status will be discussed in the paper.