Japan's 1990 revised immigration law established a renewable ‘long-term resident’ visa category for non-citizens with Japanese ancestry (Nikkeijin) and their dependents. By the mid-1990s, this had resulted in an influx of more than 200,000 Nikkeijin workers, most of them from Brazil, of whom more than 40 percent were female. In the absence of governmental policy to incorporate immigrants into the nation's political and legal structure, Brazilian children growing up in Japan have encountered great difficulty in acquiring an adequate education. In response, a group of Brazilian mothers founded an organization, ALA Brasil, to help their children cope with study in a public school in Hamamatsu, Japan. In so doing, they collaborated with Japanese parents, teachers, local administrators and community activists, many of whom were also women. Global migration has thus brought dedicated citizens and non-citizens together in pursuit of shared goals, stimulating among them multicultural awareness and grassroots activism. In this process, gender has been found to play a pivotal role. This underlines the importance of gender analysis in achieving an understanding of social processes that can lead to the expanded participation of women in public roles in this era of decentralized power.
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