東日本大震災と東京電力・福島第１原子力発電所事故の影響で、日本国内で働いていた外国人労働者が大量に国外流出した影響が深刻化している。原発事故後に一時、東日本や日本からの避難勧告を出した国々は勧告を解除し、欧米系の外国人は徐々に戻りつつあるが、中国など近隣のアジア系外国人の戻りは鈍いままだ。
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Will Japan Treat its Foreigners Better After the Earthquake?
Soon after the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northern Japan on March 11, Haruki Eda, a Korean-Japanese man living in the United States, posted a blog for Eclipse Rising, a U.S.-based organization that works to support and fundraise for Japan’s Korean community.
“This havoc will no doubt transform Japanese society,” writes Eda, “but in which direction?” His is an ambivalence common to many who call Japan home, but have yet to find equal footing there.
In a nation of 130 million, Japan’s foreigner population numbers just around 2 percent, and has been, until recently, a largely invisible class whose presence went unacknowledged by the government and drew resentment from local residents. Korean Japanese, or Zainichi, make up the largest such group, many of them descendants of those who came to Japan following its annexation of Korea in 1910. Together with ethnic Chinese, these two groups constitute what is referred to as the “old-comers,” as compared to the “new-comer” wave of immigrants who began to arrive in the mid-to-late ’80s from Asia, Latin America and the Middle East to fill the growing demand for labor.
These immigrants are the most vulnerable population in the aftermath of the Tohoku Quake and tsunami that struck the Sendai region. An estimated 10,000 people have been found dead, with twice that number still missing, immigrants and foreign workers among them.
On the morning of the quake, volunteers were attending a series of lectures on how to assist children from non-Japanese-speaking households to enter the public school system. These volunteers, mostly foreign women from other parts of Asia who had married Japanese men, became the key lifeline to the region’s foreign residents soon after the quake, as panicked phone calls began to flood the center.
“The desire to run away from the wreckage and horror around them and seek safety and sanity was enormous,” said John Morris, who teaches at Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University in the city of Sendai, near the earthquake’s epicenter. The urge to flee became more pronounced when embassies began to evacuate foreign nationals living in the affected areas, particularly after news emerged of damage to the region’s six nuclear reactors. “These women were trapped between their ties to their families in Japan and their ties to their parents and homeland,” he explained.
Many chose to stay, said Morris, to offer aid and solace to foreign residents and Japanese alike.
In years past, such groups have born the brunt of Japanese xenophobia, especially in times of crisis. Hwaji Shin, who teaches ethnic relations in Japan at the University of San Francisco, is a Zainichi and a survivor of the 1995 Kobe quake that measured 7.3 and killed some 6,500 people. She said that foreigners and immigrants were completely ignored by the central government in the aftermath of the Kobe disaster 15 years ago.
This time around, however, she noted, there seems to be far more awareness of their needs.
“I get the impression that the local government, central government and non-governmental organizations have been reaching out to the foreign population in the afflicted region better than they did in the 1995 Kobe quake,” said Shin.
Shin points to improved media coverage of foreign victims and the emergence of numerous government and NGO sites offering multilingual emergency services, including where to go for food and other necessities, as well as information on rolling blackouts, water safety and how to locate lost relatives or friends. She attributes the shift to “bitter lessons learned from past mistakes.”
Others are less optimistic.
Kyung Hee Ha with Eclipse Rising said that soon after the quake she began to see comments appearing on Twitter and other social networking sites directly targeting minority groups.
“Quickly after the earthquake and tsunami, xenophobic and racist comments and tweets about Koreans and Chinese exploded on the Internet,” she said. Such messages as “Koreans and Chinese are going to steal our land in the chaos,” or “Protect our women from the Korean rapists,” offer a sample of the vitriol that she said echo the anti-foreigner hysteria that fueled the mass killings of Koreans and Chinese immigrants following the Kanto quake of 1923.
Memories of the tragedy, and continuing discrimination against those who are not ethnically Japanese, inform the identity of foreigners residing in Japan today.
Still, Ha notes that hers and other organizations have worked to provide information to Japan’s foreign community. “While the majority of the Japanese national and municipal governments, as well as the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) that owns the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, tend to have the most updated information only in Japanese and English, many NGOs are providing information in languages such as Korean, Chinese, Tagalog, Portuguese, Vietnamese and Spanish,” she said.
On the ground, meanwhile, foreign residents continue to provide emergency aid, despite Western media reports that they have all fled. Writing for an online forum of Japan scholars soon after the disaster, John Morris noted the presence of Pakistanis serving Pakistani food at a relief center, Filipina and Chinese women “working overtime to help people within their communities,” and a group of 30 men from a local mosque serving “hot food” to those displaced by the disaster.
Quoting a local news report on their activities, Morris said these men and women stayed behind “because it is their town, and they want to participate in their community.”
http://newamericamedia.org/2011/03/will-japan-treat-its-foreigners-better-after-the-earthquake.php
Loyal Filipinas refuse to abandon elderly patients
“How can I leave these people who are relying on me?” [Juanay, a 45-year-old Filipino woman undergoing on the job training to become a certified caregiver] said.
Fanai is not the only Filipina who chose to stay on at the home despite the natural disaster and the aftershocks, coupled with the ongoing crisis at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
Sandra Otacan, 35, said she had no idea the nuclear plant was situated in the same prefecture.
Shirakawa sits well beyond a 30-kilometer radius from the plant, the zone the central government asked people to evacuate or stay indoors due to potential radiation exposure.
Still her family in Mindanao island said repeatedly that Japan is dangerous when they talked to her on the telephone.
Otacan said she tried to reassure them, saying readings of radiation levels are low.
Yoshio Sugiyama, who heads the general affairs division of the home, said he is grateful to the women for staying on.
“I was preparing for the eventuality that they would immediately return to their country,” Sugiyama said. “But none of them said they would go home. They are dedicated, careful and kind. I take my hat off to their approach to their work.”
Yukie Noda, an 88-year-old resident, also expressed appreciation for the women’s devotion. “They must be feeling anxious, being away from their family,” she said. “They are really kind and do their job with passion. I have great respect for them.”
Flight of Chinese workers leaves Japanese businesses in the lurch
With many of the tens of thousands of workers who had helped fill Japan’s labor needs having returned to China after the earthquake and tsunami, the country faces another obstacle to recovery.
As the manager of a sleek restaurant in Tokyo’s Ginza shopping district, Yu Yoshida never expected he’d be in the kitchen wearing a white chef’s hat and wrapping little dumplings. But that’s exactly what he was doing this week as customers in this still disaster-shocked city start to drift back, a welcome but also worrisome prospect for the 33-year-old manager.
That’s because 15 of his workers, all Chinese nationals, bolted within a few days of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, leaving Yoshida with a crew of just seven to wait tables, bus dishes and cook. Yoshida said he doubted that the departed employees, all foreign students working part time, would ever return. He knows it won’t be easy finding replacement help, not with Japan’s declining population and many young people unwilling to do such work.
“I’m in trouble,” he said, letting out a short grunt. For now, “we can cope with the existing staff,” he added, “but if [more] customers come back, I’ll be in trouble.”
Many other Japanese businesses face a similar bind. In recent years tens of thousands of Chinese students and so-called trainee workers have been helping fill the labor needs of this country. But after the twin disaster and the damage to a big nuclear power plant in the northeast, many of them returned home. China was the first country to organize mass evacuations, providing transport for at least 3,000 of its citizens from Tokyo and northern Japan last week. Other Chinese simply took off on their own, in some cases paying triple or more the regular airfare to get out in a hurry.
But if their departures left businesses in a lurch, it also exposed a more deep-seated and now urgent problem for Japan: a shrinking domestic workforce that could hamper the nation’s recovery after the destruction left more than 27,000 dead or missing and up to $300 billion in economic damage, according to Japanese officials.
With Japan’s economy in the doldrums for many years and its society aging, the construction industry hasn’t had much work and will now find it tough to get all the technical and manual help it needs, experts agree.
Hidenori Sakanaka, a longtime critic of Japan’s closed immigration policy, views the disaster as an opportunity to fix the nation’s demographics problem. “In order to recover, we have to rely on foreign workers,” said the executive director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, a private think tank.
Many Japanese businesses already had come to depend on the controversial foreign trainees program and to a lesser extent exchange students, whose work hours are limited to part time by law. Sakanaka estimates that those two groups combined number about 300,000. Most of them are from mainland China.
There are also hundreds of thousands of Americans and other foreigners, centered in Tokyo, who work in finance, technology and other better-paying industries. Many took off after the disaster as well, but most of them are expected to return.
That’s probably not the case with Chinese students or trainees. Yoshida, the Ginza manager, said most of his Chinese workers told him by phone they were leaving, saying nothing about returning.
At Shahoden, a high-end Chinese restaurant in Tokyo’s Shinjuku area, all six of its Chinese workers returned home. “If they want to go back, they should go back,” said Shahoden’s manager, sounding miffed by the whole thing. “There’s no problem, we can adjust,” he insisted, identifying himself only by his last name, Nakazato.
Such Tokyo restaurants tend to pay their part-time help about 1,000 yen per hour, about $12 at current exchange rates.
Others who work full time in fisheries and factories earn far less and are widely seen as exploited, in part by Chinese intermediaries who connect them with employers.
Hong Mengli, 22, was recruited to work in a Japanese fishery nearly two years ago through a partnership between her local government in southeastern China and the Japanese town of Ishinomaki, which was hard hit by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and the wall of waves that came down moments later.
She worked six days a week packing seafood on ice; her co-workers included 13 other young Chinese women. It was similar to the work that dominated Hong’s hometown. But at $900 a month, her salary was three times more than what she would have earned in China.
“That was my goal,” Hong said. “To save money and send it back home.”
Hong’s first impression of Ishinomaki after her arrival was how clean it was compared with China. “There’s no trash on the floor,” she said. “Everything is so organized.”
When the earthquake hit March 11, Hong and her co-workers were not especially alarmed. But Ishinomaki lay next to the ocean. Everyone who lived there was trained to head for the elementary school on higher ground. Hong grabbed her bicycle and rode as fast she could. It was only after she arrived that she realized the enormity of the disaster.
“A huge wave came ashore and just swept all the houses and cars away,” Hong said. “The water took away the walls on the first floor of our dormitory.”
For the next five days, Hong slept on the floor of the school with dozens of evacuees. Because the city was a prime destination for Chinese labor, about two-thirds of the facility was filled with fellow expatriates. The local volunteers handed out rice balls and made what they called a Chinese soup with tofu, vegetables and egg to comfort the foreign workers.
Officials from the Chinese embassy then arrived and bused the group about 200 miles away to the western city of Niigata. There, about 90 Chinese workers stayed in a sports auditorium waiting for a chartered flight to Shanghai paid for by their government.
In China, Hong’s family waited for her at a bus stop on the side of the highway outside Wenzhou. About a dozen other families were there too, ready to greet the evacuees.
“Everyone was crying,” Hong said.
Though a year and two months were left on her contract, she said, the manager voided all the agreements with the Chinese workers because rebuilding the business wasn’t certain.
At the time of the disaster, Hong was resolved never to return to Japan. But now that she’s back in China, she feels lost and overwhelmed over having to find work.
“In Japan, I had a stable job,” she said.
http://articles.latimes.com/print/2011/mar/25/business/la-fi-quake-chinese-workers-20110325
Linguage Sued For Unfair Labor Practices
Today at the Tokyo Labor Commission, Zenkoku Ippan Tokyo General Union sued language school Linguage (AKA Linguaphone) for a host of Unfair Labor Practices under the Labor Union Act (Act No. 174 of June 1, 1949).
「私たちはここに残る」 外国人介護士・看護師 被災地で奮闘続く
東日本大震災の被災地では、多くの医療関係者が昼夜を違わず活動を続けている。その中には、日本との経済連携協定（ＥＰＡ）に基づく看護師・介護士候補者の派遣事業で滞日中のフィリピンやインドネシアの女性たちも含まれる。「お年寄りを見捨てて去れない」「地震も津波も怖くない。みんなを助けたい」。彼女たちの献身的な姿勢には「国の誇り」（インドネシア政府）、「介護のヒロイン」（フィリピンのメディア）などと称賛の声が上がり、被災者たちも感銘している。
Foreign arrivals at Narita airport dive 60% since quake
The number of foreign arrivals at Narita International Airport near Tokyo plunged about 60 percent from a year earlier to some 67,000 between March 11, the date of the massive earthquake, and March 22, officials with the Immigration Bureau said Thursday.
In contrast, non-Japanese who left Japan through the country’s biggest international gateway during the same period jumped about 20,000 to roughly 190,000, they said.
Foreigners’ departures peaked at some 40,000 on March 13, a day after the Japanese authorities expanded the evacuation zone to areas within a 20-kilometer radius from the troubled nuclear power station in Fukushima Prefecture.
Many appear to have left temporarily because some 6,000 applied for permits for reentry into Japan between March 11 and March 22, the officials said.
Both departures by Japanese from Narita and Japanese arrivals at the international airport sank 100,000 from a year earlier to about 200,000 each way.
”Many might have canceled their trips because of the quake although schools let out this time of year,” a bureau official said.
Number of foreigners leaving Japan soars 8-fold
An immigration official says more than 161,000 foreigners have left Japan since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that triggered an unfolding nuclear crisis.
Taichi Iseki, an immigration official at Japan’s major airport, Narita, said Friday the number of foreigners flying out from March 11 to March 22 totaled 161,300 — an eightfold increase from about 20,000 in the same period last year.
The quake and giant tsunami decimated much of northeast Japan, while the crisis at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, one of the quake-hit areas, triggered a massive exodus of foreigners.
The number of foreigners arriving at Narita from March 11 to 22 plunged 60 percent year-on-year to 33,400.
看護師試験合格のインドネシア人「被災地に行かせて」
看護師国家試験に合格した兵庫県姫路市のインドネシア人スワルティさん（３２）が２５日、勤務先の姫路赤十字病院で記者会見。東日本大震災に触れ「できれば（被災地に）行かせてほしい」と涙ながらに話した。
Expats in Japan Tiptoe Back to Work
Life in Japan is showing tentative signs of returning to normal, but a fresh challenge may be facing the expatriates and Japanese who left and are now trickling back to their offices: how to cope with ostracism and anger from their colleagues who have worked through the crisis.