Foreign Workers, Precarity, and the Changing social "Laborscapes" of Contemporary Japan

外国人労働者とプレカリティ：現代日本の社会変動を考える

Interdisciplinary Conference at Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture

Japan has entered a new phase in its relationship with foreign labor. Once framed as temporary and peripheral, foreign workers and working refugees now occupy central roles in sustaining key sectors of the Japanese economy and the everyday life of communities across the country. Yet their presence is accompanied by deep policy ambiguity, intensifying nativist sentiment, and widening gaps between economic necessity, public discourse, and lived experience.

In recent years, the Japanese government, major media, and much of the policy community have focused attention on so-called "high-skilled" migrants--engineers, professionals, and the global talent schemes designed to attract them. However, the most immediate labor needs, and the largest inflows of foreign labor, are concentrated in sectors that depend on low-wage, physically demanding, and often precarious manual and service work, often part of the informal economy. This includes technical interns, 特定技能 (specified skilled) workers, and the rapidly growing population of international students who, refugee asylum seekers etc., who, effectively sustain the bottom tiers of the labor market through long hours in convenience stores, food factories, delivery work, cleaning, caregiving, and other essential services. Understanding this broader landscape is crucial for any meaningful engagement with Japan's emerging migration regime.

This conference will bring together scholars from anthropology, sociology, law, political science, economics, migration studies, refugee studies, and related fields to examine the rapidly evolving social, political, and labor dynamics shaping the lives of foreign workers and displaced people in contemporary Japan. We invite papers that explore questions of precarious labor, legal status, demographic change, racialization, community formation, governance, and migrant agency. Contributions grounded in ethnography, policy analysis, historical inquiry, conceptual work, or comparative perspectives (with a primary focus on Japan) are welcome.

We aim to build an interdisciplinary conversation that not only documents current transformations but also interrogates the assumptions, institutions, and ideologies shaping Japan's emerging migration regime.

Possible themes include (but are not limited to):

• Labor precarity and the restructuring of low-wage sectors

• Technical Intern Training Program, 特定技能, and evolving labor-migration pathways

• Refugees and asylum seekers as part of Japan's labor force

• International students and the hidden labor economies of "study-work" migration

• Legal status, governance, and forms of everyday bordering

• Racialization, xenophobia, and moral panics

• Community formation, migrant agency, and solidarity practices

• Brokerage, recruitment, and transnational labor infrastructures

• Local government responses and multicultural coexistence

• Care work, agriculture, manufacturing, and logistics

• Comparative insights from East Asia or global migration regimes

Conference, leading to publication
We will convene in late June (probably 20-21st or 27-28th 2026) at Sophia University, Tokyo. This will be an in-person event with the possibility of hybrid participation. 

English-language presentations (with Japanese discussion welcome)

More plans will be shared as we move forward to assemble papers for a collected volume; a publisherer is already secured.

Submission Guidelines

For full consideration, please submit the following by February 15th, 2026:

• Paper title

• 150-word abstract

• Affiliation

• 50-word scholarly bio (including current position or status)

Please send all materials as a single PDF to: foreignworkersjapan@gmail.com

Megha Wadhwa, Sophia University

Hee Eun Kwon, Tokyo University

David Slater, Sophia University