Serving a Piece of National Nostalgia : Female Foreign Workers in the Multiculturazing Hospitality Sector in Japan

Abstract

This thesis will examine Japan’s national nostalgia and how its political narrative manifests in the country’s multiculturalizing hospitality industry through the experiences of foreign female workers. I apply the theoretical framework of “national nostalgia” and the inductive method of thematic analysis to the primary data collected from semi-structured interviews to analyze the data generated from six women who have worked in Japan’s hospitality industry. I put particular emphasis on the concepts of “uniqueness,” “hospitality,” and “care work”—all of which symbolize Japan’s hospitality concept, omotenashi, characterized by its nationalist self-image. Due to the lack of scholarship on foreign female workers in the hospitality sector and how the nationalistic discourse of Nihonjinron—theories of Japaneseness—affects the integration of foreigners, this study aims to find answers to how the national nostalgia imbued narrative of “cultural homogeneity and uniquity” influences the perceptions of “Japaneseness” and how this correlates with the obstacles to building a multicultural society. Furthermore, as the service-intensive hospitality concept is charged with the gendered notion of care work, I shall explore how the female gender role manifests in the hospitality sector and how social roles influence foreign female workers in Japan. This study’s starting point originates in the researcher’s own internship-turned-fieldwork experience of working at a traditional Japanese inn (ryokan) that belongs to the female-dominated service sector. Through the comparison of my own field experience and interview data, the research findings suggest that the national-nostalgia narratives employed by the country’s leading elite construct an extremely gendered working domain that affects foreign female workers via the enhanced female–male gender binary. In addition, this national nostalgia-based narrative also serves as a significant obstacle hindering Japan’s aspirations to transform into multicultural society (tabunka kyōsei shakai) which contradicts with the nation’s growing need of foreign labor.