Imin No Sumu Basyo (Where Immigrants Live - An Empirical Analysis of Housing Disparities in Japan)

Housing choices are often treated as matters of personal preference or luck. For immigrants, however, seemingly minor hurdles, such as housing discrimination or the requirement for a Japanese guarantor, can accumulate and quietly narrow available options. Behind these barriers lies a “black box” in which occupation, nationality, gender, and the host society’s institutions and informal practices intersect. This intersection effectively draws the boundary between where one can and cannot live, in ways that individual attributes such as income or education alone cannot explain.
 
This book opens the black box through a multifaceted analysis of microdata from Japan’s Population Census. Comparing Japanese nationals with major foreign national groups—Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, Americans, and Brazilians—reveals systematic differences in housing outcomes and residential locations.
 
Previous research on immigrants in Japan has often approached housing descriptively, emphasizing “neighborhood problems” in immigrant-concentrated areas or local “coexistence” initiatives. By contrast, this book reframes housing as a “housing trajectory” across the life course and reconstructs it as an issue of disparities between groups. Drawing on New Assimilation Theory and adapting it to the Japanese context, this study links urban sociology, migration studies, and housing research, fields that have often developed in isolation.
 
Empirically, the book examines: (1) how socioeconomic status relates to homeownership; (2) why immigrants’ homeownership rates remain low; (3) how ethnic communities shape pathways to homeownership; (4) group differences in housing choice mechanisms; (5) the “Japanese-spouse premium”; and (6) discrimination in the private rental market. The analyses show that immigrants’ housing and neighborhood outcomes are not solely determined by individual resources. Constraints on status of residence under immigration control system, mortgage screening practices that implicitly rely on a male-breadwinner model, and persistent discrimination in the private rental sector restrict housing options, even among migrants who have achieved upward mobility.
 
The contribution of this book goes beyond documenting immigrants’ hardships. By bringing housing into debates on assimilation and social mobility, this study offers a new lens for understanding inequality in Japan through the domain of housing. It also shifts attention away from explanations that attribute housing outcomes to immigrants’ “effort” or “luck,” instead highlighting the institutional and social structures on the host society’s side.
 
Analyzing housing disparities among immigrants also means rethinking the distortions built into Japan’s housing system and broader social stratification. More than three decades after the 1990 revision of the Immigration Control Act, Japan has been moving de facto toward becoming an immigrant society. As the second generation of “newcomer” immigrants born and raised in Japan enters adulthood and reaches life stages such as marriage and home purchase, housing-based inequality will become an even more pressing challenge for social integration. Through the familiar topic of “housing,” this book invites readers to reconsider contemporary Japan and the often overlooked structures that shape a multicultural society.
 

(Written by: KIM Heesang / August 21, 2026)