Japan’s population fell by 75,000 in 2009, decreasing for the third straight year and dropping at the fastest rate since the end of World War II.
According to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry’s annual population estimate, the pace of decrease accelerated in 2009 as the 1,144,000 deaths–an increase of 2,000 from 2008–outpaced the 1,069,000 births–a drop of 22,000.
The population decline grew by 24,000 from that of the previous year.
The nation’s population fell in 2005 for the first time since the war. Although the population increased slightly in 2006, it has fallen each year since 2007.
The total fertility rate–the average number of children expected to be born to each woman over her lifetime–is forecast to hover around last year’s figure of 1.37.
“The rate of population decline likely will increase in the future,” a ministry official said.
Immigration
Population probably shrank even more in 2009, ministry estimates
Japan’s population probably shrank further in 2009 as births fell by roughly 22,000 to about 1,069,000, the health ministry said in estimates released Thursday.
“The trend of increasing population decline is expected to continue in the future as the number of deaths rises due to the aging of the population, while the number of women at childbearing age is decreasing,” a ministry official said.
Although the national fertility rate — the number of children a woman would have if she followed the birthrate of each generation in a given year — rose for three consecutive years until 2008, past data suggest the rate in 2009 was around 1.37 — the same as 2008.
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.
More seek, fewer win status as refugees
The number of people granted refugee status by the government between January and September was less than a third of the figure for the same period last year, according to Justice Ministry documents.Considering that applications for refugee status during the nine months surpassed the record number set for the period in 2008, people who support refugees expressed concern that the situation in Japan, which is already seen as having a “closed door” for refugees, is deteriorating.
According to the documents, 1,123 people applied for refugee status between January and September, up from 1,100 the year before, but only 15 people were approved during the period, compared with 46 in 2008.
However, the number of people who were denied refugee status but granted special permits to remain in Japan due to humanitarian considerations increased during the period to 399 from 293 last year, the documents show.
Since October, the number of applications appears to have slowed, while there seems to have been an increase in the number of people granted refugee status, according to sources.
“We determine whether an applicant qualifies for refugee status on a case-by-case basis, so there are years in which we have many (approvals) and years in which we have few,” an official in the Justice Ministry’s Immigration Bureau said.
“It takes one year or more on average for us to conclude whether to grant (refugee status), so even if the number of applicants increases, that is not immediately reflected in the number of applications approved,” the official said.
In 2008, the number of people applying for refugee status increased to 1,599, about double the figure for the year before, likely due to deteriorating public security abroad, including in Myanmar.
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.
Senior immigration officer arrested on suspicion of corruption
A senior immigration officer arrested on suspicion of accepting bribes is believed to have told his briber to set up an office in Kawasaki as a front.
Arrested on suspicion of accepting bribes in return for favors in the screening of residence permits for female bar workers was Masashi Ogura, 54, a chief screening officer at the Narita Airport District Immigration Office. Also arrested on suspicion of bribery was Shingo Ito, 46, the president of a Shibuya company that accommodates overseas entertainers.
Ogura is accused of accepting a total of about 6 million yen from Ito between July 2007 and November this year, while he served in positions at the Yokohama and Narita Airport district immigration offices. Both parties have reportedly admitted to the allegations against them.
Police said that Ito’s company had mainly Filipino women come to Japan as dancers and singers and work at a pub that he operated in the Tokyo city of Fuchu. He also introduced them to other restaurants, investigators said. Ogura reportedly used immigration computer terminals to look up the criminal history and immigration logs of the foreign women that Ito was planning to bring to Japan, and leaked the information.
“He (Ogura) silently accepted the fact that there were false details on application forms,” Ito was reported as telling investigators.
On Friday police searched about 20 locations in connection with their investigation into the alleged bribery, including the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau.
Investigators suspect that Ogura had Ito set up an office under the jurisdiction of the Yokohama District Immigration Office. They said Ito had earlier heard from a man involved in the same type of business that screening at the Yokohama immigration office was lenient, and approached Ogura, treating him to meals and a round of golf.
Ito’s company did not have any business facilities under the jurisdiction of the Yokohama immigration office. To obtain residence permits at the office, the company applying must have a business facility under the office’s jurisdiction with at least five permanent employees. Ogura reportedly told Ito to get his “appearances in order” and set up an office in Kawasaki. The office had just one desk and no permanent manager.
It’s believed that tightened immigration procedures played a part in the pair’s actions. In the past, there were many cases in which women entered Japan on entertainment visas but ended up working as bar hostesses, which promoted immigration authorities to tighten screening of the places where they were working in 2005. According to the Justice Ministry, some 135,000 people entered Japan in 2004 as entertainers, but in 2005 the figure dropped to about 100,000 and in 2008 the number sunk to about 35,000.
Masahiro Tauchi, director-general of the Justice Ministry’s Immigration Bureau, expressed regret over Ogura’s arrest.
“It is extremely disappointing that a worker has been arrested. We will thoroughly carry out an internal investigation and deal with the matter strictly,” he said.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20091205p2a00m0na010000c.html
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.
FOREIGNER SUFFRAGE
Local vote for foreign residents: time ripe?
Permanent foreign residents of Japan may finally face a realistic chance of being granted local-level suffrage under the administration led by the Democratic Party of Japan, which has signaled a willingness to pursue such rights.
Foreign nationals at present can’t vote in national or local-level polls, and changing the law has been a bone of contention over the years, particularly under the administrations of the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party, whose conservative ranks lined up against granting suffrage by arguing that permanent foreign residents must first become naturalized citizens.
But DPJ heavyweights Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada and Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa are all advocates of giving foreigners the vote at the local level, and after knocking the LDP out of power last August the DPJ is now in a position to craft legislation it has been pushing since 1998, when the party was launched.
Special permanent residents, who include Korean and Taiwanese who lived in Japan before and during the war and were forced to take Japanese nationality, and their descendants; and general permanent residents, who are relative newcomers from China, Brazil, the Philippines and other areas who have received the appropriate visa status.
At the end of 2008, some 912,400 foreign nationals were registered with the government as permanent residents. Among them, 420,300 were special permanent residents, according to the Justice Ministry’s Immigration Bureau.
Permanent residency is generally granted to people with stable jobs who have lived in Japan at least 10 years. People who are married to a Japanese national are only required to have lived in the country for five years to be eligible.
Local-level suffrage was originally a desire primarily among special permanent residents who lived and worked in Japan for generations, but general permanent residents now outnumber them and also want the vote.
Advocates point out that permanent foreign residents are treated in virtually all other regards as taxpaying Japanese and thus should have the right to vote on matters pertaining to their immediate communities.
The general public also appears to be in favor of granting such rights. According to a recent survey by the Mainichi Shimbun covering 1,066 people, 59 percent supported granting local-level suffrage to permanent foreign residents, while 31 percent did not.
Globally, at least 38 countries — including many EU nations, the United States and South Korea, to name a few — currently allow local-level voting rights for resident foreigners.
The DPJ pledged during the campaign for the August election to keep pushing for laws to grant local voting rights to permanent foreign residents, but the party’s higher priority manifesto avoided the issue.
DPJ Diet affairs chief Kenji Yamaoka recently hinted that a lawmaker-sponsored bill might be drafted during the current extraordinary Diet session. Although the plan was aborted due to expected resistance from within the DPJ and from coalition partner Kokumin Shinto (New People’s Party), a bill is expected to be submitted at the earliest during next year’s regular Diet session.
Behind the push is speculation that Ozawa — who has a strong say in Diet proceedings — is eyeing next summer’s Upper House election as well as nationwide local-level elections in 2011, and sees such a bill as an opportunity to drive a wedge between the LDP and New Komeito, which is clearly supportive of granting voting rights to foreign residents.
Should a bill eventually get passed, it will undoubtedly be embraced by the foreign resident community.
The Korean Residents Union in Japan (Mindan), the largest organization of permanent South Korean residents in Japan, campaigned for candidates supportive of foreigners’ suffrage during the recent general election. Many of the candidates were elected as DPJ lawmakers.
While Hatoyama and Ozawa are both strong advocates of foreigner suffrage, they still face opposition within their party.
But considering how Hatoyama and Ozawa have both promised the South Korean government and Korean organizations here to move forward with the issue, it seems likely the DPJ will seriously consider following through on its pledge in the near future.
Agency for foreigners called for
Representatives from municipalities with a large number of foreign residents are calling for the central government to set up a new agency aimed at improving their livelihoods.
The proposal made Thursday by a group of 28 municipalities in seven prefectures said they have recognized the need for the government to create such an entity so that foreigners in Japan will be better off at a time of economic difficulties.
They also proposed that foreigners have the same rights and responsibilities as Japanese nationals and make it mandatory for children with foreign nationality to attend schools in Japan.
The proposal was handed to Democratic Party of Japan Vice Secretary General Goshi Hosono.
No. of immigrants applying for repatriation aid hit 16,000 by mid-Nov.
The number of immigrants of Japanese descent who had applied for government repatriation aid since the program began in April had reached roughly 16,000 by mid-November, welfare ministry officials said Monday.
http://home.kyodo.co.jp/modules/fstStory/index.php?storyid=472071