This paper examines interactions between the global and the local in the context of Japanese mainstream schooling, by focusing on the development of local government policies to manage diversity in schools. This paper reveals how local governments developed education policies in interaction with grassroots professional groups, activists and schools, and by selectively incorporating national policies. These local policies are multicultural education policies but differ in two significant ways. The first is their predominant concern with human rights education, leaving celebration of cultural diversity as a marginal consideration, and the other is the official use of the term 'foreigners' in the title of these policies; both of which reflect the pre-existing local context. The paper demonstrates that new immigrants do not unilaterally impact on supposedly ethnically homogeneous Japanese classrooms, but that the pre-existing local contexts (national, local and institutional) have mediated global forces in effecting changes.