Cultural homogeneity in Australia and Japan

At the start of the 20th century both the Japanese and Australian nations were organised around an ideology of cultural homogeneity. At the start of the 21st century, Japan is still committed to monoculturalism while Australia has instead shifted to an ideology of multiculturalism, or cultural heterogeneity. We investigate how two nations with similar ideologies initially have moved in such different directions. We focus on the reasons behind migration, in particular the need for labour, to help us understand the different directions the two nations took. We argue that Japan's negative experience with its unskilled foreign worker intake from Korea around WWII, which caused assimilation problems and threatened Japanese cultural homogeneity, is the main reason why the Japanese government is still reluctant to open its doors to foreign countries. We further argue that Australia's relatively positive experience with its post-war migrants, coupled with international pressure on Australia to drop the White Australia policy, led it to become a multicultural nation.