From resistance to attractiveness: The politics of values and regionalism in East Asia

Cultural citizenship or cultural dimensions of citizenship is one such academic endeavor, which, in its inception in the Euro-American context, criticized legal formulations of citizenship that overlook cultural spheres of membership and belonging. Multiculturalism comes under serious criticism in many Western societies; the management of growing multicultural situations has come to be increasingly officially discussed in East Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. This chapter suggests grassroots practices at local level are an important feature of Japan’s commitment to the multicultural question, but they should be combined with more effort to put forward a vision of Japan as a multicultural society that fairly recognizes and treats equally cultural differences. It illustrates some limits of the conception of cultural citizenship developed in Western contexts, as well as the relevance of cosmopolitan perspectives that moves beyond a deep-seated binary view of the nation and foreigners and advance currently existing practices of cultural citizenship in the localities.