Linking Language, Trade and Migration - Economic Partnership Agreements as Language Policy in Japan

This book examines the effect of trade policy on language which represents an underrecognized area in the field of language policy and planning. It argues that trade policies like Japan's Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) have important consequences for national language (education) policies and for discourses about language and nation. Since 2008, Japan has signed the EPAs with Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam to recruit migrant nurses and eldercare workers and manage their mobility by means of pre-employment language training and the Japanese-medium licensure examinations. Through the analysis of these language management devices, this book demonstrates that the EPAs are a manifestation and representation of contemporary language issues intertwined particularly with pressing issues of Japan's social aging and demographic change. As the EPAs are intertwined with welfare, economy, social cohesion, and international political and economic relations and competitiveness, the book presents a far more complex picture of and a richer potential of language policy.


Ruriko Otomo is Associate Professor at the Research Faculty of Media and Communication at Hokkaido University, Japan. She specializes in language policy and planning, with particular attention to the relationship between language, migration and labor. Her contributions appear in international journals and edited books such as Multilingua, Asian Studies Review, Routledge Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics (Routledge, 2019), and Language, Global Mobilities and Blue-collar Workplaces (Routledge, 2020).