Multiculturalism as an Unfinished Project: Race, State, and Diversity in the United States
（Tokyo University Press,2021）
Fuminori Minamikawa
（Professor, College of International Relations, Ritsumeikan University (until March 2022)/ Professor, Graduate School of Global Studies, Doshisha University (from April 2022)）
I am truly honored to receive the prestigious 38th Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Foundation, the jury members, and all those who have supported my research.
This book discusses policies, social movements, and debates on multiculturalism in the United States. Multiculturalism gained attention in the 1990s as a controversial vision for a society which consists of multiple cultural groups. In the 21st century, criticism that multiculturalism “divides” the national societies spread in Western countries. It is said that Brexit and Trumpism during the 2010s determined its “failure.” The starting point for this book was my intellectual desire to clarify “what multiculturalism actually was in the United States” in the period of its “retreat.”
My research based on historical materials pursues the roots of multiculturalism in social movements and federal policies in the 1960s and its institutionalization in federal and local governments in the 1970s. Since the 1990s, multiculturalism had faced federal government’s withdrawn and fierce controversy called “culture wars.” I showed that multiculturalism policies in the 21st century have moved away from concerns for anti-racism and lacked effective interventions to racial inequality. Today, COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the hardships of the inequality and voices of “Black Lives Matter” are spreading around the world. These crises and hopes in the 2020s are a product of the history of multiculturalism.
In the “Afterword” to this book, I also mentioned that Japan continues to be a “zero” on the Multiculturalism Policy Index. Japan has never even stood on the threshold of multiculturalism in terms of state policy. I hope that this book will help us learn from the experiences in the United States and pursue its potential under the “Pacific Basin Community Concept.”

Profile
Fuminori Minamikawa was born in Aichi in 1973. He finished the doctoral program in 2001 and received Ph.D (Sociology) from the Graduate School of Social Sciences, Hitotsubashi University in 2006. He is now a Professor at the Graduate School of Global Studies, Doshisha University. He was an Associate Professor at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies and Professor at the College of International Relations, Ritsumeikan University. His major is sociology and American studies, focusing on race and ethnicity, multiculturalism and Japanese American history. His major works in Japanese include E Pluribus Unum: A Historical Sociology of Multicultural America, New Edition (Horitsubunkasha, 2022) and Historical Sociology of “Japanese America”: Ethnicity, Race and Nationalism (Sairyusha, 2007)