Constructing Collective Offenderhood: The Foreign Criminality Discourse in Contemporary Japan.

Criminologists have conventionally conceptualized criminality as the propensity to unlawful behaviors. The social reality of crime and criminality, however, does not correspond to actual law-breaking behaviors. While crime is an individual act, the discourse of criminality typically refers to a social category as a location of criminality. This paper examines the discursive construction of collective offenderhood in the foreign criminality discourse in contemporary Japan. After a decade-long decline of unauthorized migration, the Japanese government implemented punitive immigration control policies. What triggered this shift was the rising fear of foreigner-perpetrated crimes. The Japanese police discourse conflates foreignness and crime through four modes of linkage: statistical linkage, structural linkage, ecological linkage and cultural linkage. This paper argues that the demographic transformation, a belief in ethnic homogeneity as cultural orientation and the rise of the alleged security crisis contributed to the making of the foreign-crime nexus in Japanese consciousness. A criminality discourse magnifies the power of the marginalized and presents a distorted view of social stratification. A vision of collective offenderhood naturalizes social inequalities and rhetorically legitimizes further marginalization of the marginalized. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]