Multicultural coexistence in Japan: Follower, innovator, or reluctant late adopter?

Abstract

Despite the reasoned claims and detailed research of many social scientists that much of humanity lives in an increasingly multicultural world, the ever-present threat of a set of partitions between “us” and “them” transnationally (but also within countries), seems certain to linger for some years forward. While there is no final answer to the question, “Can’t we all just get along?,” so seemingly simplified by Rodney King in the aftermath of his beating by Los Angeles police in 1991 and subsequent riots (which led to the deaths of more than 50 people three months later in 1992, when those officers who had brutalized him were acquitted of crimes of excessive force (National Public Radio, 2008)), the incommensurability on multiple levels of such a plea still haunts the supposed naïve proposal of tolerance and respect for difference, let alone celebration of diversity, embedded in a normative liberal multiculturalism.