Coleman wins Fulbright to report from Japan
Professor of practice Joseph Coleman will report from Japan this summer and fall on a Fulbright grant.
Coleman will be one of several hundred U.S. scholars and professionals sent to approximately 130 countries with support from Fulbright. The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program is run by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Before teaching at IU, Coleman reported from Japan for the Associated Press for more than 10 years, serving as Tokyo bureau chief for five. He also reported from Latin America, Europe and Asia.
He plans to look at Tokyo as an emerging multicultural city and community for the project. Japan recently initiated a migrant worker program to increase foreign workers in its economy, leading to a significant population of Brazilian people in Japan, Coleman said. He is interested in how a country without a history of immigration evolves toward welcoming immigrants.
“The core questions are how are (immigrants in Japan) taking root, to what extent are they marginalized or woven into the society and how is that all changing,” Coleman said.
He will report in Japan for about six months beginning in July, with an optional three-month addition.
This is not his first reporting project on immigration in Japan. He used the 21st Century Japanese Politics and Society Initiative Travel Grant from the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies and IU’s New Frontiers Exploratory Travel Fellowship to report on Brazilian immigrants in the country starting in 2019.
Coleman, who specializes in international reporting, talked about a kind of cultural personality code-switching expats experience.
“When you live in a different part of the world, you develop part of a new personality,” he said. “Returning to Japan will mean returning to that part of yourself.”