Local assemblies in 14 of Japan’s 47 prefectures have adopted statements in opposition to giving permanent foreign residents in Japan the right to vote in local elections since the Democratic Party of Japan took power last year, a Kyodo News tally showed Monday.
Before the launch last September of the new government under Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama who supports granting local suffrage, 31 prefectural assemblies took an affirmative stance, but six of them have turned against it since then.
The results underscored growing opposition to the government’s policy, with local assembly members, including those belonging to the main opposition Liberal Democratic Party, pressing for the adoption of statements of opposition in prefectural assemblies.
The Japanese government is considering formulating a bill that will grant local suffrage to permanent residents in Japan, and DPJ Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa has expressed the hope that such a bill will pass through parliament in the current Diet session.
But reservations remain within the DPJ-led coalition government about the idea, with collation partner People’s New Party President Shizuka Kamei reiterating his opposition last week.
Explaining the reason behind the Chiba prefectural assembly’s opposition, Naotoshi Takubo, secretary general of the LDP’s local branch in Chiba, said the change of government made it more likely than before that a law will be enacted to accept local suffrage.
“The political situation has changed and we now have a sense of danger for the Hatoyama administration,” he said. The Chiba assembly adopted a supporting statement in 1999 when the coalition government between the LDP and the New Komeito party was launched.
An LDP member of the Ishikawa prefectural assembly expressed a similar view, saying the assembly had been supportive because giving permanent residents the right to vote was not “realistic” before.
The Akita prefectural assembly, which adopted its opposing statement after the change of government, said that “a national consensus has not been built at all.”
The Kagawa prefectural assembly says in its statement that foreign residents should be nationalized first to obtain the right to vote.
The issue of local suffrage for permanent foreign residents in Japan came under the spotlight in 1995 after the Supreme Court said the Constitution does not ban giving the right to vote to foreign nationals with permanent resident status in local elections.
Since 1998, the DPJ, the New Komeito party and the Japanese Communist Party have submitted local suffrage bills, but their passage was blocked by the then ruling LDP.
Japan does not allow permanent residents with foreign nationality, such as those of Korean descent, to vote in local elections, let alone in national elections, despite strong calls among such residents for the right to vote on the grounds that they pay taxes as local residents.
Residents of Korean descent comprise most of the permanent foreign residents in Japan.
Japan grants special permanent resident status to people from the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan who have lived in the country since the time of Japan’s colonial rule over the areas, and to their descendants.
Discrimination
Japanese language a barrier for Indonesian and Filipino nurses
The Japanese health ministry has rejected a plan to make it easier for Indonesian and Filipino nurses to qualify for work in Japan.
A 2008 Economic Partnership Agreement allows a number of Indonesian and Filipino nurses and caregivers to train and work in Japan. But the compulsory national exam and the level of language the overseas workers must pass is for most too difficult – no Indonesian nurses passed last year’s exam.
“The Japanese Nursing Association’s Shinobu Ogawa says a dependence on anything from overseas is risky and therefore a policy seeking foreign healthcare providers will never be supported by the Japanese people. Medical sociologist Dr Yuko Hirano has followed the success of the foreign worker program since the deal was signed in 2008. She says the JNA attitude reflects wider community values, which makes the obstacles for the Indonesian and Filipino workers even higher.”
“[A] huge argument’s been going on here. And many of those people are saying it’s too early for the Japanese society to acommodate those foreigners because we have a still strong stereotype against those foreign workers in Japan, easily connected to the idea that if you introduce the foreign labour to the health sector, then the health sector, or health-related labour will be spoiled.”
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/connectasia/stories/201001/s2800514.htm
Ueda against letting foreigners vote
Saitama Gov. Kiyoshi Ueda said Tuesday he is against a bill that would give permanent foreign residents the right to vote in local elections.
“I have long been opposed to such a bill. I don’t think it is a matter to be decided by a majority of votes (in the Diet),” Ueda said.
Assemblies say ‘no’ to foreign suffrage
Fourteen prefectural assemblies have adopted statements opposing legislation that would give permanent foreign residents in Japan the right to vote in local elections, The Asahi Shimbun has learned.
The statements were adopted from October to December after the Democratic Party of Japan, which favors foreign suffrage, took power from the conservative Liberal Democratic Party.
Of the 14 assemblies, seven reversed their stances on the issue. One assembly member even acknowledged that the previous show of support for granting voting rights to foreign residents was simply a token gesture.
In each case, LDP assembly members led the drive to pass the statements, which all said, “The awarding of voting rights to foreigners–who are not Japanese nationals–is problematic from the standpoint of the Constitution.”
The moves appear to be a concerted attempt by the LDP to differentiate itself from the DPJ ahead of the Upper House election in the summer.
LDP President Sadakazu Tanigaki has adopted the slogan of “upholding conservative values” to rebuild the party following its humiliating defeat in the Aug. 30 Lower House election.
Ahead of that election, the DPJ included the early realization of local voting rights for permanent foreign residents in its list of key policies. In December, DPJ Secretary-General Ichiro Ozawa said he believed that foreign suffrage “will likely become reality during the regular Diet session.”
The DPJ has faced protests and rallies from right-wing groups who say that granting voting rights to foreign nationals could allow them to take over the country.
According to the Justice Ministry, 910,000 permanent foreign residents live in Japan.
Akira Fukumura, secretary-general of the LDP Ishikawa prefectural chapter and a prefectural assembly member, said the assembly’s about-face in its stance on foreign suffrage reflects the “new circumstances brought about by the change in government.”
“In the past, we showed support because the legislation was unlikely to happen” under the LDP rule, Fukumura said. “We figured that it was just good policy to preserve the honor of those who wanted to show support.”
Seo Won Cheol, secretary-general of a task force on foreign suffrage at the pro-Seoul Korean Residents Union in Japan (Mindan), said the recent developments are “unfortunate, but in a way, show the true colors” of those who purportedly supported the drive.
Seo said the deaths in 2000 of former Prime Ministers Noboru Takeshita and Keizo Obuchi, both of whom supported foreign voting rights, and a rise in nationalism within the LDP turned the tide against granting suffrage.
According to the National Association of Chairpersons of Prefectural Assemblies, 30 of Japan’s 47 prefectural assemblies had adopted statements supporting voting rights for foreign nationals by 2000.
The Shimane prefectural assembly adopted its statement of support in 1995.
Shimane was the home turf of Takeshita, who also headed a Japan-South Korea parliamentarians league.
However, the assembly reversed its stance in December.
“In upholding conservative values, this is one thing we cannot give in to,” said Hidekazu Ozawa, an LDP Shimane prefectural assembly member.
He added that many people even outside the LDP are concerned that granting suffrage to foreigners could have a large impact on local elections, in which the margin of victory is considerably thin.
An official at the LDP’s headquarters in Tokyo said it has sent statements adopted by the assemblies to any prefectural chapter that shows interest in the issue.
One LDP Saitama prefectural assembly member who submitted a statement opposing foreign suffrage to the assembly said the move was an attempt to shake up the DPJ, “which is divided” on the issue.
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY201001080258.html
Human rights in Japan: a top 10 for ’09
They say that human rights advances come in threes: two steps forward and one back.
2009, however, had good news and bad on balance. For me, the top 10 human rights events of the year that affected non-Japanese (NJ) were, in ascending order:
7) ‘Itchy and Scratchy’ (tied)
Accused murderer Tatsuya Ichihashi and convicted embezzler Nozomu Sahashi also got zapped this year. Well, kinda.
Ichihashi spent close to three years on the lam after police in 2007 bungled his capture at his apartment, where the strangled body of English teacher Lindsay Ann Hawker was found. He was finally nabbed in November, but only after intense police and media lobbying by her family (lessons here for the families of fellow murdered NJs Scott Tucker, Matthew Lacey and Honiefaith Kamiosawa) and on the back of a crucial tip from a plastic surgery clinic.
Meanwhile Sahashi, former boss of eikaiwa empire Nova (bankrupted in 2007), was finally sentenced Aug. 27 to a mere 3 1/2 years, despite bilking thousands of customers, staff and NJ teachers.
For Sahashi it’s case closed (pending appeal), but in Ichihashi’s case, his high-powered defense team is already claiming police abuse in jail, and is no doubt preparing to scream “miscarriage of justice” should he get sentenced. Still, given the leniency shown to accused NJ killers Joji Obara and Hiroshi Nozaki, let’s see what the Japanese judiciary comes up with on this coin toss.
6) ‘Newbies’ top ‘oldcomers’
This happened by the end of 2007, but statistics take time to tabulate.
Last March, the press announced that “regular permanent residents” (as in NJ who were born overseas and have stayed long enough to qualify for permanent residency) outnumber “special permanent residents” (the zainichi Japan-born Koreans, Chinese etc. “foreigners” who once comprised the majority of NJ) by 440,000 to 430,000. That’s a total of nearly a million NJ who cannot legally be forced to leave. This, along with Chinese residents now outnumbering Koreans, denotes a sea change in the NJ population, indicating that immigration from outside Japan is proceeding apace.
5) ‘Immigration nation’ ideas
Hidenori Sakanaka, head of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute (www.jipi.gr.jp), is a retired Immigration Bureau mandarin who actually advocates a multicultural Japan — under a proper immigration policy run by an actual immigration ministry.
In 2007, he offered a new framework for deciding between a “Big Japan” (with a vibrant, growing economy thanks to inflows of NJ) and a “Small Japan” (a parsimonious Asian backwater with a relatively monocultural, elderly population).
In 2009, he offered a clearer vision in a bilingual handbook (available free from JIPI) of policies on assimilating NJ and educating Japanese to accept a multiethnic society. I cribbed from it in my last JBC column (Dec 1) and consider it, in a country where government- sponsored think tanks can’t even use the word “immigration” when talking about Japan’s future, long-overdue advice.
4) Chipped cards, juminhyo
Again, 2009 was a year of give and take.
On July 8, the Diet adopted policy for (probably remotely trackable) chips to be placed in new “gaijin cards” (which all NJ must carry 24-7 or risk arrest) for better policing. Then, within the same policy, NJ will be listed on Japan’s residency certificates (juminhyo).
The latter is good news, since it is a long-standing insult to NJ taxpayers that they are not legally “residents,” i.e. not listed with their families (or at all) on a household juminhyo.
However, in a society where citizens are not required to carry any universal ID at all, the policy still feels like one step forward, two steps back.
1) The ‘repatriation bribe’
This, more than anything, demonstrated how the agents of the status quo (again, the bureaucrats) keep public policy xenophobic.
Twenty years ago they drafted policy that brought in cheap NJ labor as “trainees” and “researchers,” then excluded them from labor law protections by not classifying them as “workers.” They also brought in nikkei workers (foreigners of Japanese descent) to “explore their Japanese heritage” (but really to install them, again, as cheap labor to stop Japan’s factories moving overseas).
Then, after the economic tailspin of 2008, on April Fool’s Day of last year the bureaucrats offered the nikkei (not the trainees or researchers, since they didn’t have Japanese blood) a bribe to board a plane home, give up their visas and years of pension contributions, and become some other country’s problem.
This move, above all the others, showed the true intentions of Japanese government policy: Non-Japanese workers, no matter what investments they make here, are by design tethered to temporary, disposable, revolving-door labor conditions, with no acceptable stake or entitlement in Japan’s society.
Employers denying jobs to applicants based on medical histories, gov’t study finds
Some Japanese companies demand job applicants provide personal medical histories and deny employment based on their content, a Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) research group has discovered.
The ministry has directed employers not to ask for medical information unrelated to the positions in question, citing a risk of employment discrimination, while the research group will distribute an awareness-raising booklet based on its findings.
“Should medical information on completely recovered former patients be required for employment screening, even if that information is not used as a basic employment criterion, the request itself puts pressure on childhood cancer survivors, and can become a barrier to reintegrating into society,” says Keiko Asami, head of pediatrics at the Niigata Cancer Center Hospital.
There are no laws regulating the demand for medical histories on job application forms. However, according to the MHLW, “There is a risk of influencing employment decisions, and is thus connected to employment discrimination,” putting medical histories in the same category as personal beliefs and ancestry as information that “should not be considered” for employment purposes.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20100102p2a00m0na008000c.html
Public schools turn to non-Japanese teachers
Third-grade students at Osaka municipal Kita-Nakajima Primary School get insights into culture on the Korean Peninsula that many others do not.
Their homeroom teacher is Lee Chi I, 31, a third-generation South Korean living in Japan. Lee’s grandfather came from South Korea’s Gyeongsangnam-do, but she was born and raised in Aichi Prefecture.
Students at the school in Yodogawa Ward include children of Koreans living in Japan, but Lee introduces musical instruments such as the chango, a Korean drum, to all the pupils in her music class.
Lee is one of an increasing number of foreign nationals teaching at public primary, middle and high schools across the country. An estimated 200 non-Japanese teachers, mainly Koreans living in Japan, teach at schools in 25 prefectures, including Osaka, Hyogo, Kanagawa and Kyoto.
The government approved the hiring of teachers with a foreign nationality at public schools in 1991.
According to the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry, foreign national teachers can be “full-time lecturers with unlimited tenure,” but they are not eligible to hold management positions, such as being the senior classroom teacher. They have the same educational authority as Japanese teachers, and can be homeroom teachers.
The Osaka prefectural and municipal governments started hiring foreign national teachers on their own accord in the 1970s. Although they stopped this practice in 1982 in line with an instruction from the central government, they resumed hiring non-Japanese in 1993 following the abolition of the Japanese nationality requirement. This academic year, 135 non-Japanese were teachers in the prefecture.
Lee had gone by the Japanese name Chisato Miyamoto until she graduated from university.
“I felt deep down as if I was hiding my true self,” she said of those years.
Lee decided to identify herself by her real Korean name following advice from members of the Osaka Municipal Board of Education and the principal who hired her as a teacher six years ago.
“They told me children who have roots on the Korean Peninsula would be encouraged if I used my real Korean name,” Lee said.
Lee now teaches children about Korean culture and has explained her ethnic background to students and their parents.
An estimated 60 percent to 70 percent of foreign national teachers in Osaka Prefecture have revealed their ethnic roots in their schools.
Fifty-two foreign national teachers from 11 cities in the prefecture shared their experiences at the inaugural meeting of a network of teachers with roots in foreign countries, held in Osaka on Nov. 7. They plan to hold meetings to discuss their ethnic backgrounds and educational issues.
Too innocent for prejudice?
Are kindergarteners racist? Do they discriminate between children with different skin colors?
“Children are too innocent,” one Japanese mother told me in a survey of parents’ views. Her conclusion: “They do not hold racial prejudices.”
As innocent as children may be, extensive research conducted in the United States and Europe has shown that children as young as three have the capacity to discriminate against others based on race. However, little research on this topic has been conducted in Japan, a more culturally homogeneous society than most in the West.
The issue of prejudice among children is particularly relevant for Japan, a country projected to have the world’s oldest population by 2025. With this demographic reality looming, there are concerns the Japanese economy will be unable to sustain itself without the help of millions more immigrant workers. Some economists believe it will be necessary to allow 610,000 immigrants into the workforce per year for the next 50 years to counter the effects of the declining birthrate. With unprecedented diversity in Japan looking increasingly inevitable, issues of racial prejudice are bound to bubble to the surface more often — even among young children.
All this begs the question: to what degree are Japanese children racially biased? Are there differences in the attitudes of Japanese children attending international schools and those that study in less diverse environments? If a kindergarten-age child is prejudiced, how did this come to be? Understanding the answers could suggest ways of reducing bias and preparing Japan to meet the challenges of demographic change.
I worked with over 60 children, and amidst long stretches of answers that extended no further than “yes” or “no,” there were occasional moments when students opened up and elaborated expressively on their answers.
“This boy has dark skin. I’m scared of that,” said one child.
“I want to play with everybody because everyone is my friend,” said another.
While these individual comments were enlightening in themselves, the overall results were much more intriguing. Children from different types of schools did have different attitudes.
In the U.S., people of all different races identify themselves as American and not an eyebrow is raised. But in Japan, people who look or speak differently are often labeled a “gaijin,” an outsider. No matter how “Japanese” a person might feel, this label acts to set them apart from the Japanese people at large. This is harmful and unfair.
A level playing field for immigrants
Despite Japan’s looming demographic disaster — you know, the aging society and population drop due to low birthrates and record-long life spans — we still have no immigration policy. No wonder: The people charged with dealing with non-Japanese (NJ) — i.e. the Ministry of Justice’s Immigration Bureau and sundry business-sector organizations — just police NJ while leeching off their labor. Essentially, their goal is to protect Japan from the outside world: keep refugees out, relegate migrant workers to revolving-door contracted labor conditions, and leash NJ to one- to three-year visas. For NJ who do want to settle, the Justice Ministry’s petty and arbitrary rules can make permanent residency (PR) and naturalization procedures borderline masochistic.
This cannot continue, because Japan is at a competitive disadvantage in the global labor market. Any immigrant with ambitions to progress beyond Japan’s glass ceiling (that of either factory cog or perpetual corporate flunky) is going to stay away. Why bother learning Japanese when there are other societies that use, say, English, that moreover offer better lifetime opportunities? It’s time we lost our facile arrogance, and stopped assuming that the offer of a subordinate and tenuous life in a peaceful, rich and orderly society is attractive enough to make bright people stay. We also have to be welcoming and help migrants to settle.
As in any society, police are here to maintain law and order. The problem is that our National Police Agency (NPA) has an explicit policy mandate to see internationalization itself as a threat to public order. As discussed here previously, NPA policy rhetoric talks about protecting “citizens” (kokumin) from crimes caused by outsiders (even though statistics show that insiders, both in terms of numbers and percentages, commit a disproportionate amount of crime). This perpetual public “othering and criminalizing” of the alien must stop, because police trained to see Japan as a fortress to defend will only further alienate NJ.
In other words, the 2000s saw the public image of NJ shift from “misunderstood outsider” to “social destabilizer”; government surveys even showed that an increasing majority of Japanese think NJ deserve fewer human rights!
Let’s change course. If Hatoyama is as serious as he says he is about putting legislation back in the hands of elected officials, it’s high time to countermand the elite bureaucratic xenophobes that pass for policymakers in Japan. Grant some concessions to noncitizens to make immigration to Japan more attractive.
Otherwise, potential immigrants will just go someplace else. Japan, which will soon drop to third place in the ranking of world economies, will be all the poorer for it.
Political shift gives hope to gays
The likelihood that the Democratic Party of Japan, the last party to submit [an antidiscrimination law] bill, will dominate the powerful House of Representatives in an alliance with the Social Democratic Party, which speaks out for homosexual rights, has raised hopes that the inertia may at last be overcome.
This was echoed by Boris Dittrich, advocacy director of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender program at Human Rights Watch, who visited Japan last month. He met with key opposition party figures to discuss Japan’s future on issues of sexual orientation.
“There is no law in Japan that protects people who are being discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation,” Dittrich told reporters on July 22.
“So for instance, a landlord would evict somebody because he is gay or she is lesbian and there is no law that you can refer to for protection,” he added. Dittrich himself was a publicly gay politician in his home country, the Netherlands, where he was a pioneer in securing homosexual rights.
In Japan, a government-sponsored antidiscrimination bill submitted to the Diet in 2002, but later abandoned, would have protected the rights of homosexuals along with other groups, including “burakumin,” or descendants of former outcast communities such as tanners, according to Kanae Doi, Tokyo director of Human Rights Watch. The 2002 bill and another one proposed by the DPJ were both scrapped because the lower chamber was dissolved before they could be fully deliberated and voted on.
SDP leader Mizuho Fukushima, who also met with Dittrich during his trip, agreed human rights is a sensitive topic in the Diet, and the subject of sexual orientation faces a particularly tough time as people do not necessarily feel it is relevant to them.
If the DPJ wins Sunday, Fukushima predicts a slow but steady improvement in homosexual rights.
“It won’t be, for example, that same-sex marriages will be recognized immediately. But for now we must educate people, eradicate bullying and make people understand that these problems exist in society,” she said
According to Human Rights Watch’s [Tokyo director Kanae] Doi, Japan is falling behind global standards by not having an antidiscrimination law other than that protecting gender equality.
“An antidiscrimination law exists almost everywhere else in the world. But in Japan, since there is no law protecting sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity or race, it is difficult for such people to prosecute,” she said.