Ethnic Residential Segregation in Japan in Foreigner-Concentrated Municipalities

Yu Korekawa, University of California, Irvine

This study computes dissimilarity and exposure index by using micro-area data of Japanese national census to show the situation of the ethnic residential segregation among the top 94 foreigner-concentrated municipalities in Japan. The story is motivated by the spatial-assimilation theory, which argues that ethnic minority disperses from ethnic-enclaves in poor inner-city to wealthy suburbs, as foreigners are assimilated into a host society. Significant ethnic residential segregation exists in many of the municipalities, while still moderate, compared to that of the U.S. and Europe. Multiple-regression analysis further reveals that this segregation and its process are not a variation of the spatial-assimilation case; because the ethnic residential segregation is not in the inner-city area of big cities but in suburbs and the remote-areas from the metropolitan areas, and nationality rather than socio-economic status or the time length matters to determine the variations of segregation between municipalities.