Given the serious shortage of medical and nursing care workers and nurses, lifting certain restrictions so qualified foreigners in these fields can apply their skills in this country is an obvious solution.
In its fourth basic immigration control policy plan compiled late last month, the Justice Ministry stated it would reexamine the mandatory limit on the length of time foreign nurses and dentists can work in Japan when they hold residential status.
Even if non-Japanese qualify to work as a nurse or dentist after passing state exams, they are not permitted to work here for more than seven years and six years, respectively. A four-year limit is imposed on public health nurses and midwives.
Many foreigners with such qualifications desire to continue working in Japan beyond the set limits. Their aspirations are rightful in view of the fact that they have passed national exams and conquered the Japanese language barrier.
The limits on working years for non-Japanese were mostly probably introduced out of concern that Japanese might be deprived of working opportunities. The restrictions have been criticized as excessive for years. The time limit for foreign doctors was dropped four years ago.
Speed up ordinances’ review
The ministry plans to revise relevant ordinances to abolish time restrictions on all remaining medical professions, including nurses. This is a necessary corrective step. We want the ministry to accelerate its work on revising these ordinances.
The ministry’s fourth basic immigration control plan incorporates a policy to study accepting foreigners in the nursing care field on condition they graduate from universities in Japan and pass state exams.
The population of elderly people requiring nursing care is growing at an ever-quickening pace. The nation has about 1.24 million nursing care workers today; estimates suggest the nation will need almost double that number in 2025.
Meanwhile, many Japanese who have earned qualifications as care workers then opt to work in another field. The physical and emotional demands of a career in nursing care, combined with the low pay, often are too much to bear.
To alleviate the manpower shortage in nursing care, the first step is to improve the working environment for Japanese. However, there is a limit to just how quickly the ranks of Japanese nursing care workers can be increased. Because of this, opening the door to foreign nursing care givers is the right decision.
Remove language barrier
More help also should be extended to the people from Indonesia and the Philippines whom Japan has been accepting as candidates to work as certified nurses and care workers based on economic partnership agreements with the two countries.
National exams for nurses and nursing care workers are dotted with difficult kanji. Last month, 254 foreigners took the exam for nurses, but only three passed.
Indonesian and Philippine examinees have acquired licenses and expertise as nurses and nursing care workers in their home countries. Considering that the pass rate for Japanese examinees stands at nearly 90 percent, the extremely low success rate for foreign examinees can be most probably be attributed to the kanji barrier.
The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry is reexamining the content of national tests. The revisions include replacing difficult terms with easier ones, such as “jokuso” [褥瘡] with “tokozure” [床擦れ] to mean bedsores.
We welcome this move. But the ministry should go a step further and print kana readings alongside kanji and allow examinees to use dictionaries in their exams.
Immigration
Wife presses for details in death of deportee
The Japanese wife of a Ghanaian who died last month while he was being deported for overstaying his visa called Tuesday on police and the Immigration Bureau to disclose exactly how he died.
“I want the government to unveil the truth as soon as possible to prevent a recurrence of similar incidents,” the wife of the deceased man, Abubakar Awudu Suraj, told journalists at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo.
The FCCJ agreed not to reveal the wife’s name.
Police said Suraj was confirmed dead in a hospital March 22 after an undisclosed number of immigration officers overpowered him when he became violent in an airplane before it departed Narita International Airport that day for Cairo.
The wife’s lawyer, Koichi Kodama, questioned the police investigation, which has not resulted in any arrests.
“If a man died after five or six civilians, not public servants, held his limbs, they would undoubtedly be arrested,” Kodama said, adding he told “exactly that to the prosecutors” he met with Monday in Chiba.
The Chiba police are questioning about 10 immigration officers and crew of Egypt Air, Kodama quoted a Chiba prosecutor as saying. Police said March 25 the cause of death was unclear after an autopsy. Kodama said a more thorough autopsy is being performed.
Suraj’s wife is considering suing the government, but she and Kodama are holding off pending further evidence of malpractice by immigration officers.
“Lawyers have no authority to collect evidence, and thus we have to wait for police to disclose evidence,” he said.
According to Mayumi Yoshida, the assistant general secretary of Asian People’s Friendship Society, she and Suraj’s wife went to the Justice Ministry, which oversees the Immigration Bureau, on March 25 to ask the ministry for details of how Suraj died.
Yoshida quoted a ministry official as saying immigration officers “seem to have used a towel for (Suraj’s) mouth and a handcuff.”
“That is all we know” about how Suraj died, she said.
Suraj came to Japan on a temporary visa, which expired in 15 days, in May 1988, according to Yoshida. He was arrested on suspicion of staying illegally in September 2006, and received a deportation order in November that year. The same month, his wife registered their marriage.
In February 2008, the Tokyo District Court ruled the deportation order be waived. But in March 2009, the Tokyo High Court repealed the district court’s ruling on grounds the couple was childless and the wife was economically independent, Yoshida said.
Foreigner suffrage opponents rally
Conservative politicians express outrage at DPJ plan
Conservative intellectuals and key executives from five political parties were among the thousands who gathered in Tokyo on Saturday to rally against granting foreign residents voting rights for local elections.
On hand were financial services minister Shizuka Kamei, who heads Kokumin Shinto (People’s New Party), Liberal Democratic Party Secretary General Tadamori Oshima, former trade minister Takeo Hiranuma, who recently launched his own political party, Tachiagare Nippon (Sunrise Party of Japan), and Your Party leader Yoshimi Watanabe.
Jin Matsubara, a Lower House member from the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, also attended.
According to the organizer, a total of 10,257 people attended the convention at the Nippon Budokan arena in Chiyoda Ward, including representatives of prefectural assemblies and citizens from across the nation.
Oshima, the LDP’s No. 2, promised that “in the name of protecting the nation’s sovereignty” the largest opposition party would do everything in its power to prevent such a bill from being enacted.
Your Party chief Watanabe accused the DPJ of using the suffrage issue to lure New Komeito, which supports foreigners’ local election rights, before the upcoming Upper House election. “This is nothing but an election ploy by the DPJ,” he claimed.
In an opening speech preceded by the singing of the “Kimigayo” national anthem, Atsuyuki Sassa, former head of the Cabinet Security Affairs Office and chief organizer of the event, expressed his concern about granting foreigners suffrage.
“I was infuriated when I heard of plans to submit to the Diet a government-sponsored bill giving foreign residents voting rights,” he said.
“Our Constitution grants those with Japanese nationality voting rights in return for their obligation to pay taxes,” he said. “Granting suffrage to those without Japanese nationality is clearly a mistake in national policy.”
Sassa also pointed out that 35 prefectures have adopted statements against granting foreigners suffrage, up from less than half that number in January.
“Our local governments clearly do not desire granting suffrage to foreigners,” he said.
DPJ heavyweights Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa are advocates of giving foreigners the right to vote at the local level, and the party has been preparing to craft the legislation it has been calling for since the party’s launch in 1998.
But the government scrapped a plan to submit the bill during the current Diet session after encountering fierce opposition from the financial services minister.
Taking the podium to a round of applause, Kamei emphasized his party’s role in preventing the government from submitting the bill to the Diet, and said that “it was obvious that granting suffrage will destroy Japan.”
Kamei, who has in the past argued that giving foreigners voting rights could incite nationalism during polling, went so far as to declare that his party would leave the ruling coalition if the government submitted the bill to the Diet.
Foreign nationals cannot vote in national or local elections, and changing the law has long been a controversial issue, particularly under the administrations of the LDP, whose conservative ranks have argued against granting suffrage, insisting that permanent foreign residents must first become naturalized citizens.
As of the end of 2008, 912,400 foreign nationals were registered with the government as permanent residents. Among them, 420,300 were special permanent residents, including Koreans and Taiwanese who lived in Japan before and during the war and were forced to take Japanese nationality, and their descendants. The remainder are general permanent residents.
Japanese population declines by record 180,000 to 127.51 mil.
Japan’s estimated population decreased for the second year in a row, declining by a record 183,000, or 0.14 percent, from a year earlier to 127,510,000 as of Oct. 1, 2009, government data showed Friday.
By prefecture, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba, Aichi, Shiga and Okinawa saw population increases as they did in 2008.
Okinawa saw the largest year-on-year increase with a 0.45 percent rise to 1,382,000.
Tokyo remained the most populous region with 12,868,000 people as of Oct. 1, accounting for 10.1 percent of Japan’s total population. Tokyo was followed by Kanagawa with 8,943,000 and Osaka with 8,801,000.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20100417p2g00m0dm036000c.html
Population shrank by record 183,000 in ’09
Japan’s population has entered full-scale decline and shrank by a record 183,000 people over the past year, government data showed Friday.
As of Oct. 1, the population stood at an estimated 127,510,000 after shrinking by a record 0.14 percent, contracting for the second year in a row.
The year-on-year drop is the third to strike Japan since 1950, when comparable data first became available, the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry said in the report. The other two shrinkages occurred in 2005, when it fell by 19,000, or 0.01 percent, and in 2008, when it contracted by 79,000, or 0.06 percent.
Japan’s population has entered a stage of full-scale decline as both men and women recorded natural decreases, ministry officials said.
The figures in the latest report included foreigners who stayed in Japan for 91 days or more and foreign students. The number of Japanese came to 125,820,000, revealing a decline of 127,000, or 0.10 percent.
The number of people who entered Japan totaled 3,114,000, up 250,000 from the previous year, while those who left the country stood at 3,237,000, up 329,000, meaning that social factors caused the total population to shrink by 124,000.
Of the 124,000, foreigners accounted for 47,000, marking the first decline in 15 years linked to social factors.
The officials attributed the decline in the foreign population to the recession triggered by the collapse of trading house Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008.
Many foreigners lost their jobs and returned to their home countries as the financial crisis unfolded, the officials said.
The number of people aged 65 and older came to 29,005,000, up by 789,000 and accounting for 22.7 percent of the population.
In contrast, those aged 14 or younger fell by 165,000 to 17,011,000. The productive segment of the population, or those between the ages of 15 and 64, came to an estimated total of 81,493,000, shrinking by 806,000.
Japanese population declines by record 180,000 to 127.51 mil.
Japan’s estimated population decreased for the second year in a row, declining by a record 183,000, or 0.14 percent, from a year earlier to 127,510,000 as of Oct. 1, 2009, government data showed Friday.
It was the third year-on-year decline in Japan’s population since 1950 when comparable data became available, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said in a report. Japan’s population previously declined twice — in 2005 by 19,000, or 0.01 percent, and in 2008 by 79,000, or 0.06 percent.
The ministry said its estimate of Japan’s population in the latest report was based on the results of the 2005 national census and annual data on new births and deaths as well as people who entered and left the country.
The number of women stood at 65,380,000, a decrease of 61,000 or 0.09 percent, marking the first natural decline with 5,000 more deaths than births.
The male population stood at 62,130,000, down 121,000 or 0.20 percent, marking the fifth straight annual decline with 54,000 more deaths than births.
Japan’s population has entered a stage of full-scale decline as both men and women recorded natural decreases, ministry officials said.
The figures in the latest report included foreigners who remained in Japan for 91 days or more and foreign students. Of the total, the population of Japanese nationals came to 125,820,000, a decline of 127,000, or 0.10 percent.
The number of people who entered the country totaled 3,114,000, an increase of 250,000 from a year earlier, while those who left Japan stood at 3,237,000, up 329,000, meaning that social factors caused Japan’s population to decline by 124,000.
Of the 124,000, foreigners accounted for 47,000, marking the first decline in 15 years due to social factors.
The officials attributed the decline in the number of foreigners to the country’s economic slump triggered by the collapse of major U.S. brokerage Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008.
Many foreign workers lost jobs and returned to their home countries amid the slow economy, the officials said.
The number of people aged 65 and older came to 29,005,000, an increase of 789,000, accounting for 22.7 percent of the total population.
In contrast, the population of people aged 14 or younger declined 165,000 to 17,011,000. The productive population of those aged between 15 and 64 totaled 81,493,000, down 806,000.
By prefecture, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba, Aichi, Shiga and Okinawa saw population increases as they did in 2008.
Okinawa saw the largest year-on-year increase with a 0.45 percent rise to 1,382,000.
Tokyo remained the most populous region with 12,868,000 people as of Oct. 1, accounting for 10.1 percent of Japan’s total population. Tokyo was followed by Kanagawa with 8,943,000 and Osaka with 8,801,000.
Gov’t drafts guidelines for teaching Japanese to foreign residents
A government subcommittee has drafted guidelines for the first time on teaching Japanese to foreign residents of Japan in order to support them in their daily lives, government officials said Thursday.
The draft guidelines compiled by a Council for Cultural Affairs subcommittee lists examples of words and phrases that foreigners should be encouraged to learn for smooth communication in 10 main types of situations, including health care, travel and activities related to consumption and safety.
The main types are subdivided into 48 categories in which recommended words and phrases are situated in more concrete scenarios such as how to use trains and medicines in Japan.
The number of registered foreign residents in Japan stood at around 2.22 million at the end of 2008, according to the Agency for Cultural Affairs and the Ministry of Justice.
Many government officials concerned with language education believe it would be desirable for at least 1 million of the foreign residents to learn Japanese so that they can live their lives smoothly.
However, there has been no previous attempt to compile government standards on the extent to which foreign residents should learn Japanese.
The draft, due to be submitted shortly to the Japanese language division of the Council for Cultural Affairs, estimates that the total learning period under the proposed guidelines would be around 60 hours.
“(The curriculum) would mean a great deal if it serves to demonstrate the government’s intention to support foreigners living in Japan for a long period,” says Takeshi Yoshitani, a professor who heads Tokyo Gakugei University’s Center for Research in International Education.
Public support will be necessary for foreign residents to secure the 60 hours of learning, he added.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20100416p2g00m0dm004000c.html
Ultranationalist ‘citizens groups’ on the march
“Get out of Japan!”
“Cockroach.”
“Kimchi.”
Those were just some of the insults hurled at a demonstration on Feb. 21 in Tokyo’s Minato Ward.
More than 100 protesters belonging to several groups describing themselves as “active conservatives” gathered in front of a building that houses both the consular affairs department of the South Korean Embassy and the offices of the Korean Residents Union in Japan (Mindan).
Other flags and signs carried angry messages, such as “Expel foreigners,” and slogans equating Korean nationals living in Japan to criminals. Some of the words used could not be printed in a newspaper.
The protesters’ anger seemed to be targeted at a wide range of institutions including the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, China and North Korea. Reporters covering the demonstration were also yelled at.
The group eventually moved on to the Australian Embassy, where they yelled, “We will start a war with white people who insult Japan (over the whaling issue).”
At the same time as the Minato Ward protest, demonstrations were held in Nagoya and Fukuoka protesting plans to give foreign permanent residents the right to vote in local elections.
The Kyoto bar association issued a statement criticizing the group’s actions as “going beyond criticism of the use of the park to being a hate campaign to encourage discrimination.” On March 24, the Kyoto District Court issued a temporary order banning further demonstrations.
For Japan to thrive, the wall must come down
More than 20 years have passed since the Berlin Wall fell, yet Japan remains shut out from the rest of humanity by its own wall. Though it is a shapeless partition that we cannot touch, it nevertheless cuts off the country from the world beyond its shores. What are the characteristics of this invisible barrier?
It serves as much to prevent inbound flows as outward ones. Japan is the only major developed nation where almost none of the men and women of influence — in the realm of ideas, business or government — are from foreign backgrounds. Tokyo, as opposed to other global metropolises, has no cosmopolitan flavor. There is a striking paucity of Japanese people teaching in foreign universities, writing about the humanities and social sciences or contemporary politics in scholarly journals or mass-circulation magazines and Web sites, and working in multinational corporations, international organizations and nongovernmental organizations.
This intangible forcefield harms Japan much more than is generally realized. It condemns Japanese universities, especially in the humanities and social sciences, to international irrelevance. This is not to say that Japan lacks great researchers — it has plenty of them. But they operate in an environment with few foreign colleagues and students (except for a few Asian countries), are under-represented in international conferences, and rarely publish in global journals. Thus, their ideas remain locked within the boundaries of the wall.
This sad state of affairs deprives the country of international influence. As so few Japanese thinkers are heard abroad, the intellectuals, business and government leaders, activists and others who set the worldwide agenda in areas as diverse as economic priorities and fisheries managements are very rarely Japanese. Japan has an enormous stake in climate-change policy, but not one Japanese is playing a key role in shaping the global debate on the issue.
Isolation hurts Japan’s economy, especially in services. Unlike their industrial counterparts, service companies such as hotels, transportation, Web-centric businesses, entertainment and software businesses require a global mind-set and cultural awareness to be successful overseas. If so few Japanese conglomerates have managed to establish themselves in the premier league outside of manufacturing, it is partly due to their mono-cultural and exclusively Japanese management. It puts them at a severe disadvantage when competing with foreign rivals run by multinational and multicultural staffs.
The wall is partly to blame for the country’s greatest handicap. In the past decade, feminization has made great strides worldwide. The situation is far from perfect, but many societies are now making much better use of the talents of the half of the population that happens to be female. One reason Japan is so far behind is that it is cut off from these global trends.
How can Japan, in former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s famous words, tear down this wall? One way is to encourage Japanese to make a name for themselves overseas. Universities could give preference to professors who have both studied and taught for several years overseas and publish in foreign journals. Government agencies could make service abroad in international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization a major asset when considering hirings and promotions.
In the private sector, hopefully more businesses will realize that success, especially but not only in service industries, calls upon a global mind-set. This will entail hiring more foreigners in management positions and internationalizing Japanese staff. Anybody familiar with the Japanese hospitality industry — hotels, airlines, airports — knows how much more competitive it would be if it were more international and less parochial.
Japan has made a remarkable effort to welcome foreign students. But for Japan to attract dynamic and ambitious young men and women, they must be convinced that, though they are not Japanese, they will be able to join the business and academic elite of the country.
Knocking down the wall will be hard. As was the case with Berlin’s barbed wire, it protects the establishment. Japan’s best and brightest will benefit from cultural globalization, but many men who have been sheltered by the barriers that surround Japan (and from competing with women) will find the process traumatizing. But if the nation is to thrive in the 21st century, the wall must go.
Japan, U.N. share blind spot on ‘migrants’
I wish to speak about the treatment of those of “foreign” origin and appearance in Japan, such as white and non-Asian people. Simply put, we are not officially registered — or even counted sometimes — as genuine residents. We are not treated as taxpayers, not protected as consumers, not seen as ethnicities even in the national census. According to government polls and surveys, we do not even deserve the same human rights as Japanese. The view of “foreigner” as “only temporary in Japan” is a blind spot even the United Nations seems to share, but I will get to that later.
First, an overview: The number of non-Japanese (NJ) on visas of three months or longer has increased since 1990 from about 1 million to over two. Permanent residents (PR) number over 1 million, meaning about half of all registered NJ can stay here forever. Given how hard PR is to get — about five years if married to a Japanese, 10 years if not — a million NJ permanent residents are clearly not a temporary part of Japanese society.
Moreover, this does not count the estimated half-million or so naturalized Japanese citizens (I am one of them). Nor does this count children of international marriages, about 40,000 annually. Mathematically, if each couple has two children, eventually that will mean 80,000 more ethnically diverse Japanese children; over a decade, 800,000 — almost a million again. Not all of these children of diverse backgrounds will “look Japanese.”
What’s more, we don’t know Japan’s true diversity because the Census Bureau only surveys for nationality. This means when I fill out the census, I write down “Japanese” for my nationality, but I cannot indicate my ethnicity as a “white Japanese,” or a “Japanese of American extraction” (amerikakei nihonjin). I believe this is by design — because the politics of identity in Japan are all about “monoculturality and monoethnicity.” Given modern Japan’s emerging immigration and assimilation, this is a fiction. The official conflation of Japanese nationality and ethnicity is incorrect, yet our government refuses to collect data that would correct that.
The point is we cannot tell who is “Japanese” just by looking at them. This means that whenever distinctions are made between “foreigner” and “Japanese,” be it police racial profiling or “Japanese only” signs, some Japanese citizens will also be affected. Thus we need a law against racial discrimination in Japan — not only because it will help noncitizens assimilate into Japan, but also because it will protect Japanese against xenophobia, bigotry and exclusionism, against the discrimination that is “deep and profound” and “practiced undisturbed in Japan,” according to U.N. Rapporteur Doudou Diene in 2005 and 2006.
There are some differences in viewpoint between my esteemed colleagues here today and the people I am trying to speak for. Japan’s minorities as definable under the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), including Ainu, Ryukyuans, zainichi special-permanent- resident ethnic Koreans and Chinese, and burakumin, will speak to you as people who have been here for a long time — much longer than people like me, of course. Their claims are based upon time-honored and genuine grievances that have never been properly redressed. For ease of understanding, I will call them the “oldcomers.”
I will try to speak on behalf of the “newcomers,” i.e., people who came here relatively recently to make a life in Japan. Of course both oldcomers and newcomers contribute to Japanese society, in terms of taxes, service and culture, for example. But it is we newcomers who really need a Japanese law against racial discrimination, because we, the people who are seen because of our skin color as “foreigners,” are often singled out for our own variant of discriminatory treatment. Examples in brief:
1. Housing, accommodation
One barrier many newcomers face is finding an apartment. According to the Mainichi Shimbun (Jan. 8), on average in Tokyo it takes 15 visits to realtors for an NJ to find an apartment. Common experience — this is all we have because there is no government study of the problem — dictates that agents generally phrase the issue to landlords as, “The renter is a foreigner, is that OK?” This overt discrimination happens with impunity in Japan. One Osaka realtor even advertises apartments as “gaijin allowed,” a sales point at odds with the status quo. People who face discriminatory landlords can only take them to court. This means years, money for lawyers and court fees, and an uncertain outcome — when all you need is a place to live, now.Another barrier is hotels. Lodgings are expressly forbidden by Hotel Management Law Article 5 to refuse customers unless rooms are full, there is a clear threat of contagious disease, or an issue of “public morals.” However, government surveys indicate that 27 percent of all Japanese hotels do not want foreign guests, period. Not to be outdone, Fukushima Prefecture Tourist Information advertised the fact that 318 of their member hotels refuse NJ. Thus even when a law technically forbids exclusionism, the government will not enforce it. On the contrary, official bodies will even promote excluders.
2. Racial profiling by police
Another rude awakening happens when NJ walk down the street. All NJ (but not citizens) must carry ID cards at all times or face possible criminal charges and incarceration. So Japanese police will target and stop people who “look foreign” in public, sometimes forcefully and rudely, and demand personal identification. This very alienating process of “carding” can happen when walking while white, cycling while foreign-looking, using public transportation while multiethnic, or waiting for arrivals at airports while colored. One person has apparently been “carded,” sometimes through physical force, more than 50 times in one year, and 125 times over 10 years.Police justify this as a hunt for foreign criminals and visa over-stayers, or cite special security measures or campaigns. However, these “campaigns” are products of government policies depicting NJ as “terrorists, criminals and carriers of infectious diseases.” None of these things, of course, is contingent upon nationality. Moreover, since 2007, all noncitizens are fingerprinted every time they re-enter Japan. This includes newcomer PRs, going further than the US-VISIT program, which does not refingerprint Green Card holders. However, the worst example of bad social science is the National Research Institute of Police Science, which spends taxpayer money on researching “foreign DNA” for racial profiling at crime scenes.
In sum, Japan’s police see NJ as “foreign agents” in both senses of the word. They are systematically taking measures to deal with NJ as a social problem, not as fellow residents or immigrants.
3. Exclusion as ‘residents’
Japan’s registration system, meaning the current koseki family registry and juminhyo residency certificate systems, refuse to list NJ as “spouse” or “family member” because they are not citizens. Officially, NJ residing here are not registered as “residents” (jumin), even though they pay residency taxes (juminzei) like anyone else. Worse, some local governments (such as Tokyo’s Nerima Ward) do not even count NJ in their population tallies. This is the ultimate in invisibility, and it is government-sanctioned.
4. ‘Japanese only’ exclusionWith no law against racial discrimination, “No foreigners allowed” signs have appeared nationwide, at places such as stores, restaurants, hotels, public bathhouses, bars, discos, an eyeglass outlet, a ballet school, an Internet cafe, a billiards hall, a women’s boutique — even in publicity for a newspaper subscription service. Regardless, the government has said repeatedly to the U.N. that Japan does not need a racial discrimination law because of our effective judicial system. That is untrue.
For example, in the Otaru onsen case (1999-2005), where two NJ and one naturalized Japanese (myself) were excluded from a public bathhouse, judges refused to rule these exclusions were illegal due to racial discrimination. They called it “unrational discrimination.” Moreover, the judiciary refused to enforce relevant international treaty as law, or punish the negligent Otaru City government for ineffective measures against racial discrimination. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
Furthermore, in 2006, an openly racist shopkeeper refused an African-American customer entry, yet the Osaka District Court ruled in favor of the owner! Japan needs a criminal law, with enforceable punishments, because the present judicial system will not fix this.
5. Unfettered hate speech
There is also the matter of the cyberbullying of minorities and prejudiced statements made by our politicians over the years. Other NGOs will talk more about the anti-Korean and anti-Chinese hate speech during the current debate about granting local suffrage rights to permanent residents.I would instead like to briefly mention some media, such as the magazine “Underground Files of Crimes by Gaijin” (Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu (2007)) and “PR Suffrage will make Japan Disappear” (Gaikokujin Sanseiken de Nihon ga Nakunaru Hi (2010)). Both these books stretch their case to talk about an innate criminality or deviousness in the foreign element, and “Underground Files” even cites things that are not crimes, such as dating Japanese women. It also includes epithets like “nigger,” racist caricatures and ponderings on whether Korean pudenda smell like kimchi. This is hate speech. And it is not illegal in Japan. You could even find it on sale in convenience stores.
ConclusionIn light of all the above, the Japanese government’s stance towards the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is easily summarized: The Ainu, Ryukyuans and burakumin are citizens, therefore they don’t fall under the CERD because they are protected by the Japanese Constitution. However, the zainichis and newcomers are not citizens, therefore they don’t get protection from the CERD either. Thus, our government effectively argues, the CERD does not cover anyone in Japan.
Well, what about me? Or our children? Are there really no ethnic minorities with Japanese citizenship in Japan?
In conclusion, I would like to thank the U.N. for investigating our cases. On March 16, the CERD Committee issued some very welcome recommendations in its review. However, may I point out that the U.N. still made a glaring oversight.
During the committee’s questioning of Japan last Feb. 24 and 25, very little mention was made of the CERD’s “unenforcement” in Japan’s judiciary and criminal code. Furthermore, almost no mention was made of “Japanese only” signs, the most indefensible violations of the CERD.
Both Japan and the U.N. have a blind spot in how they perceive Japan’s minorities. Newcomers are never couched as residents of or immigrants to Japan, but rather as “foreign migrants.” The unconscious assumption seems to be that 1) foreign migrants have a temporary status in Japan, and 2) Japan has few ethnically diverse Japanese citizens.
Time for an update. Look at me. I am a Japanese. The government put me through a very rigorous and arbitrary test for naturalization, and I passed it. People like me are part of Japan’s future. When the U.N. makes their recommendations, please have them reflect how Japan must face up to its multicultural society. Please recognize us newcomers as a permanent part of the debate.
The Japanese government will not. It says little positive about us, and allows very nasty things to be said by our politicians, policymakers and police. It’s about time we all recognized the good that newcomers are doing for our home, Japan. Please help us.