Structural Violence Toward Foreign "Newcomers" Workers in Contemporary Japan:

An Anthropological Approach to Health care, Welfare and Low-intensity Conflict

Mitsuho IKEDA and Jeremiah MOCK Center for the Study of Communication-Design, Osaka University

We confront with the new national scheme of immigration policy in which the number of foreign "Newcomers" workers has grown after the Immigration Law reform in 1990. This situation reminds us that it would be necessary to construct new form of fulfillment their needs on health care and welfare. However we have not yet complete them on various social levels from personal and family to community and national level.

This presentation do not only understand that the problem and its solving of the foreign workers' social and welfare issues as simplified care-takers and care-givers issue, but interpret as “structural violence” and reconciliation relationship. According to Johan Galtung (1969), the word corresponds with the systematic forms in which a given social structure or social institution may harm people indirectly by interrupting them from resourcing their basic needs; the structural violence consequently contrasts against personal violence or direct one. It may be useful to understand actual political economy of health care and welfare for foreign workers using the concepts on structural violence, but Paul Famer (2004) points correctly, the explanation indicating not human and/or agent subjects but non-human "structure" seems both "sinful" and ostensibly "nobody's fault." This language pragmatics has an ambivalent potential both to uncover how have rooted socially the structural violence and to hide who are the responsible of it.

We are able to observe some pioneer civil groups on supporting healthcare and welfare for foreigners in various social contexts, e.g. medical translator in health setting. We need encourage some civil sectors to discover "mechanisms of hiding structural violence" toward foreign workers in Japan. And we will propose some our liberating approach in our presentation.

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• Structural Violence Toward Foreign "Newcomers" Workers in Contemporary Japan (in Japanese)
  

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