International Migration and Socio-Cultural Transformation in the Asia Pacific

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As a result of joint research activities with this grant for two grant years of 1999-2000, we formulated a larger joint research plan and proposed to establish with it a special research field under the titie of "Polyhedric Studies on Globalization and Social Transformation in the Asia Pacific". This is a plan to investigate into social and cultural transformations taking place under the impact of recent globalization in all the societies of the Asia Pacific region. Investigations should be carried out by area studies specialists over many relevant aspects, with bird's-eye-view methods and with international cooperation. The research activities in the past two yoars proved to be indispensable for designing this large scale research proposal which we firmly believe has an utmost value and necessity to be carried out.In our proposal we list a dozen aspects to be investigated in which serious social and cultural transformations are taking place under the globalization. Initial investigations over some of those aspects have already been taken up by the members of this grant project. They are such aspects as international migration, transformations in ethnic relations, internationalization of corporate activities, transformations of work culture. IT and education, transborder traffic and trade, and cultural diversity and cultural management.Other than the major result just mentioned, we carried out a pilot study, with the Population Research Center of Chulalongkorn University, of Thai-Japanese migration originating from certain villages in north-eastern Thailand, published some results of Japanese migration studies on an international journal, and constructed an English web site in order to disseminate internationally information of migration and ethnic studies in Japan.