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Seizures rising over unpaid health insurance premiums

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Municipal governments increasingly are seizing assets of individuals who are behind in their national health insurance premium payments, an Asahi Shimbun survey shows.

The survey showed such asset seizures rose an average 1.7-fold from fiscal 2001 to 2005 in the nation’s 15 largest cities and Tokyo’s 23 wards.

National health insurance programs cover self-employed people, farmers, job-hopping “freeters,” retirees and the unemployed. They are administered by municipal governments.

Health insurance programs are in the red in 64 percent of municipalities nationwide.

Legal action taken against delinquents, including seizures of bank accounts and properties, has risen as the collection ratio has fallen.

The collection rate has dropped to close to 90 percent nationwide on average and is hovering below 90 percent in large cities.

Health ministry statistics also showed that seizures of assets from nonpayers rose from 44,112 cases worth 15.6 billion yen in fiscal 2001 to 68,488 cases worth 24.5 billion yen in fiscal 2004.

Municipalities resorting to assets seizures jumped from 39 percent nationwide to 55 percent in the same period.

But some local entities remain cautious about taking such forcible steps because national health insurance typically covers more low-income earners than other programs, such as for salaried workers.

The ratio of self-employed people and those working in farming, forestry and fisheries fell to 21 percent of those in the insurance program in fiscal 2004, from about 70 percent 40 years earlier.

In contrast, the ratio of unemployed people jumped from less than 10 percent to 52 percent over the same period.

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200702050125.html

Magazine plays to Japanese xenophobia

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Available in mainstream bookstores, magazine targets Iranians, Chinese, Koreans and US servicemen

The recent release of a glossy magazine devoted to the foreign-led crime wave supposedly gripping Japan has raised fears of a backlash against the country’s foreign community, just as experts are calling for a relaxation of immigration laws to counter rapid population decline.Secret Files of Foreigners’ Crimes, published by Eichi, contains more than 100 pages of photographs, animation and articles that, if taken at face value, would make most people think twice about venturing out into the mean streets of Tokyo.

The magazine, which is available in mainstream bookstores and from Amazon Japan, makes liberal use of racial epithets and provocative headlines directed mainly at favourite targets of Japanese xenophobes: Iranians, Chinese, Koreans and US servicemen.

Human rights activists said the magazine was indicative of the climate of fear of foreigners created by conservative newspapers and politicians, notably the [racist right-wing] governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara.

“It goes beyond being puerile and into the realm of encouraging hatred of foreigners,” Debito Arudou, a naturalised Japanese citizen, told the Guardian. “The fact that this is available in major bookstores is a definite cause of concern. It would be tantamount to hate speech in some societies.”

One section is devoted to the alleged tricks foreign-run brothels use to fleece inebriated Japanese salarymen, while another features a comic strip retelling, in graphic detail, the murders of four members of a Japanese family by three Chinese men in 2003.

An “Alien Criminal Worst 10” lists notorious crimes involving foreigners from recent years, including the case of Anita Alvarado, the “Chilean geisha” blamed by some for forcing her bureaucrat husband, Yuji Chida, to embezzle an estimated 800m yen from a local government. Mr Chida, who is Japanese, is serving a 13-year prison sentence.

The magazine’s writers are equally disturbed by the apparent success foreign men have with Japanese women: hence a double-page spread of long-lens photographs of multinational couples in mildly compromising, but apparently consensual, positions.

Mr Arudou accused the mainstream press of exploiting the supposed rise in foreign crime by failing to challenge official police figures. Although the actual number of crimes has risen, he said, so has the size of the foreign population.

“The portrayal [of foreign criminals] is not one of a neutral tone,” he said. “They don’t put any of the statistics into perspective and they don’t report drops in certain crimes.”

The magazine’s publication coincides with warnings more foreigners should be encouraged to live and work in Japan to counter the economic effects of population decline and the greying society.

The current population of 127 million is expected to drop to below 100 million by 2050, when more than a third of Japanese will be aged over 64.

“I think we are entering an age of revolutionary change,” Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute and an advocate of greater immigration, said in a recent interview.

“Our views on how the nation should be and our views on foreigners need to change in order to maintain our society.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2004645,00.html

Racist Comic Book on Convenience Store Shelves

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Here?s a … publication, apparently available at convenience stores, courtesy of friend Steve (who took the trouble to purchase, scan, and help publicize this issue). Entitled ?GAIJIN [sic] HANZAI URA FILE?, it publicizes all the underground evils that gaijin in Japan [supposedly] do…

Here are some ?highlights?:
Back Page:
??????????????47000?!!
47,000 crimes by foreigners each year!!
There then follows a ?danger rating? (???) of each country, scattered on a world map surrounded by knives, guns and syringes:
China: 14
Russia: 5
Korea: 9
Brazil: 8
Colombia: 3
Etc.
None for the USA, Canada, Australia or the whole of Europe?

http://www.debito.org/index.php/?p=192

Number of non-regular workers up nearly 1 million

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The number of non-regular workers with employment contracts of up to one year increased by 995,000, or 14.8%, in 2005 from 2000, a government report showed Wednesday, underscoring that companies are refraining from employing regular workers to cut labor costs.

The number of non-regular employees totaled 7,716,000 in 2005 while that of regular workers with contracts of more than one year fell 1,425,000, or 3.4%, to 40,617,000, according to census figures released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

 http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/397788

4 temp firms ‘in 300 mil. yen tax dodge’

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Four temporary staffing agencies in three prefectures have been accused of evading more than 300 million yen in consumption tax by establishing dummy companies to which they pretended to outsource job placements, The Yomiuri Shimbun learned Thursday.

The revelation comes at a time when the national tax authorities have been stepping up investigations into evasion of consumption tax due to the public’s high interest in the tax, which accounts for about 20 percent of the total state tax revenue.

Three of the four job placement agencies are located in Hadano and Ebina, Kanagawa Prefecture, and in Numazu, Shizuoka Prefecture, and are operated under the same name, AA TOPIC. The other agency is located in Osaka Prefecture.

The Tokyo and Nagoya regional taxation bureaus have filed a tax evasion complaint with the Yokohama and Shizuoka district public prosecutors offices against the three firms and their former president, Tomoyuki Sato, 48.

The three companies allegedly made it appear that they had dispatched personnel to clients through dummy outsourcing firms though they actually sent their employees directly to the clients, thereby evading consumption tax totaling about 230 million yen over four years until the business term ended in March last year.

They allegedly repeated the practice of establishing and liquidating dummy outsourcing companies to conceal instances of tax evasion.

According to a private credit research company, the three companies sent about 1,000 temporary factory and clerical workers to major carmakers and precision machine makers in Kanagawa and Shizuoka prefectures.

An executive of the Numazu company, whose name has been changed to Area Staff, admitted that the company had been investigated for tax evasion, but would not elaborate, saying, “Only former President Sato knows the details.”

The special investigation squad of the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office has arrested Seiji Fujiwara, 48, president of job placement company Interu in Tadaokacho, Osaka Prefecture, on suspicion that the company evaded a total of about 82 million yen in consumption tax.

The Osaka Regional Taxation Bureau has joined the prosecutors office to conduct a probe into the case.

According to the investigation, the company dispatched its employees to a pachinko parlor for three years until the business term that ended in June 2005, but it evaded payment of the due consumption tax by making it appear that it outsourced the dispatch of temporary staff to a dummy job placement firm.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070126TDY01003.htm

Recruiter held over dispatch of trainee

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Police on Wednesday arrested the representative director of an Okayama-based recruitment cooperative on suspicion of illegally dispatching an Indonesian trainee to an unauthorized local factory.

The Okayama and Hiroshima prefectural police jointly began investigating Keisuke Tsuruno, 60, the representative director of Sanyo Intec, earlier in the day on suspicion of violating the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law.

According to the police, the Indonesian trainee was accepted by the cooperative under the government-run foreign trainee system in October. Tsuruno then dispatched him to the factory to work, although it was not a training site designated under the system.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070125TDY02004.htm

Osaka Labor Bureau probes Yamada Denki

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The Maebashi-based firm, one of the nation’s largest consumer electronics retailers, is suspected of ordering the salespeople to confirm and promise to follow 35 instructions on a checklist at the Labi 1 Namba outlet in Naniwa Ward, Osaka.

The labor bureau will clarify the circumstances surrounding the dispatched salespeople.

The outlet has not revealed how many salespeople were dispatched by the electronics manufacturers. However, The Yomiuri Shimbun discovered at the end of last year that at least 60 dispatched salespeople were working at the outlet at the time.

According to sources, the outlet gave each of the salespeople a checklist on their first day of work, including instructions concerning dress code and breaks. The salespeople were also required to brush up on other popular home electric appliances manufactured by rival firms.

The dispatched salespeople were asked to confirm each item on the list by checking it off. They then had to sign their names and put their seals on a printed statement agreeing to follow the instructions and work to the best of their ability.

The labor bureau felt the checklist was evidence the outlet supervised salespeople who were not contracted to the firm.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070125TDY02005.htm

Government to propose legal ban on age limits in recruitment

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The ruling coalition parties agreed Wednesday to call for a legal ban on age limits when companies recruit workers, member lawmakers said. The proposed ban is aimed at helping young people and retired workers find jobs, they said.

The elimination of age restrictions in recruitment is currently a nonbinding target for companies under the existing law. But many firms set age brackets for eligible job applicants when they put up help-wanted advertisements, making it difficult for people in their late 20s or older to find full-time jobs. The practice is expected to gravely affect the labor market as the massive mandatory retirement of baby-boom workers begins this year, prompting many of them to seek new employment.

http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/397092

Election puts overtime-pay exclusion on hold

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Wary of an upcoming election, the ruling bloc is backing off on a highly contentious bill that would exclude certain white-collar workers from overtime pay.

But debate over the issue, which unions fiercely oppose, will resurface because the government’s retreat is widely believed a mere postponement until after the July Upper House election.

Certain white-collar workers would be excluded from legal work-hour restrictions under the Labor Standards Law, which limits work hours to eight hours a day and 40 hours a week and obliges employers to pay for overtime.

The government says the proposed system is modeled after one in the United States with the same name.

Unions and opposition parties branded the proposal the “elimination of overtime pay bill,” provoking fear among salaried workers that they would receive no extra pay even if they have to continue working long hours. This worried lawmakers in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito whose eyes are on the summer Upper House election.

Unions are against the system itself because changes to the hour limitations would mean abolishing the most basic protection for employees.

They argue that without changing Japan’s notorious penchant for requiring long work hours, the new system would only make matters worse and workers would get less pay.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20070124a3.html

Japan Mulls Importing Foreign Workers

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The prospect of a shrinking, rapidly aging population is spurring a debate about whether Japan is so insular that it once barred foreigners from its shores for two centuries should open up to more foreign workers.

Japan’s 2 million registered foreigners, 1.57 percent of the population, are at a record high but minuscule compared with the United States’ 12 percent.

For the government to increase those numbers would be groundbreaking in a nation conditioned to see itself as racially homogeneous and culturally unique, and to equate “foreign” with crime and social disorder.

“I think we are entering an age of revolutionary change,” said Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute and a vocal proponent of accepting more outsiders. “Our views on how the nation should be and our views on foreigners need to change in order to maintain our society.”

Schooling is compulsory in Japan until age 16, but only for citizens. So foreign kids can skip school with impunity. Arrangements such as special Japanese classes for newcomers are ad hoc and understaffed. Many of the foreigners [are illegally denied] pensions or the same health benefits as Japanese workers because they’re hired through special [and for the most part, illegal] job brokers.

The population is 127 million and is forecast to plunge to about 100 million by 2050, when more than a third of Japanese will be 65 or older and drawing health and pension benefits. Less than half of Japanese, meanwhile, will be of working age of 15-64.

Fearing disastrous drops in consumption, production and tax revenues, Japan’s bureaucrats are scrambling to boost the birthrate and get more women and elderly into the work force. But many Japanese are realizing that foreigners must be part of the equation.

Few support throwing the doors wide open. Instead, they want educated workers, engineers, educators and health professionals, preferably arriving with Japanese-language skills.

Corporate leaders are prime movers. “We can create high-value and unique services and products by combining the diversity of foreigners and the teamwork of the Japanese,” said Hiroshi Tachibana, senior managing director of Japan’s top business federation, Keidanren.

But government officials are so touchy about the subject that they deny the country has an immigration policy at all, and insist on speaking of “foreign workers” rather than “immigrants” who might one day demand citizenship.

Immigration in Japan does not have a happy history. The first wave in modern times came a century or more ago from conquered lands in Korea and China, sometimes in chains as slaves. Those still here the largest group being Koreans and their descendants still suffer discrimination and isolation.

Even today, the policy seems to lack coherent patterns. In 2005, for instance, about 5,000 engineers entered Japan, along with 100,000 “entertainers” _ even after that vaguely defined status was tightened because it was being used as a cover for the sex trade and human trafficking.

“Everybody, I think, is agreed on one thing: We want to attract the `good’ foreigners, and keep out the `bad’ ones,” said Hisashi Toshioka, of the Justice Ministry’s Immigration Bureau.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/20/ap/world/mainD8MP5VG00.shtml