Is Japan a Multinational Democracy? 
A critical reflection on the legal, political and discursive mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion delimiting the norms of Japanese subjectivity, the current article aims to push beyond the conceptual and typological limitations of the literature on Japanese minorities, multicultural Japan, and multi-ethnic citizenship. Working from a feminist intersectional analysis of diversity that understands nation, race, culture, gender and hetero-normativity as mutually constitutive systems of oppression, we look also to the comparative literature on multinational democracy as a more comprehensive approach to thinking about the complex intranational and multinational diversity constituting contemporary Japanese citizenship. Through a genealogical exploration of Japan’s colonial past, and a case study of a contemporary multinational marriage between a Japanese woman and a Zainichi Korean resident, we uncover and critically explore the juridical and political contradictions about subjectivity and belonging across multiple axes (nation, diaspora peoples, indigeneity, minorities, race, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality) that are actively reproduced and perpetuated through the Japanese family registry system and nationality law.