Destination choice of the 1995-2000 immigrants to Japan: salient features and multivariate explanation

The purpose of this paper is to identify the salient features of the destination choices made by new immigrants who entered Japan in the 1995-2000 period, and to provide a multivariate explanation for their choice behaviors. The salient features can be summarized as follows; first, destination-choice patterns differed markedly by ethnicity; second, the higher the educational qualification of the immigrants, the greater the attraction of the Tokyo prefecture and the less dispersed the destination-choice pattern; and third, among female immigrants, those with the household status of daughter in law were more prone to go to the Tohoku region, where the maintenance of the traditional stem-family system was a serious concern. Our multivariate analysis has revealed that the destination choices made by the new immigrants were indeed subject to the selective effects of labor-market conditions, the distributions of coethnics, and the spatial patterns of marital opportunities in theoretically meaningful ways, and that labor-market conditions were most important, whereas marital opportunities were least important.