From Coexistent Society to Global City

• In Event: 315 - Open Refereed Roundtables Session. B. Table 01 Shared and Contested Spaces
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 05. Context, Ethics and Values

Abstract

How can we build a multicultural coexistence society in the process of 2nd modernization? In other words, how do people consume coexistence society? This is the research question of this paper.
As I noted before (Ohtsuki 2013), "Multicultural coexistence" called “kyosei” in Japanese is commonly used to describe the relationship between Japanese people and foreigners who reside in Japan. But unfortunately, the definition of this term is quite unclear. As pointed out in prior researches, even if people would approve of that kind of relationship, they still don’t know what is that at all.
Using quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, this paper pointed out the importance of contact experience and the difficulties of “Autonomous Coexistence. That is regarded as the most progressive relationship shown by modern individuals, whose outstanding feature is wishing to communicate with foreigners and supporting for the equality of rights.
In theoretical meaning, if Japanese society is in the second modernization process, it will be inevitably to reconsider the relationship with people from different races, ethnicities, and nationalities. In the case of Japanese society with especially high-homogeneity history, it suggests that the high homogeneity of those races, ethnicities, and nationalities is exactly the point need to be valued in the way different from Western countries during the second modernization process. Through these discussions the paper argue the possibilities of global city in Asia.

Authors

• Shigemi Ohtsuki, Tokyo Metropolitan University

• Chihiro Hosokawa, Tokyo Metropolitan University