Immigration

The Lower House passed bills Friday making it easier for the Justice Ministry’s Immigration Bureau to keep tabs on foreigners who have overstayed their visas as well as others residing legally in the country.

A new form of identification, called a “zairyu” (residence) card, will replace alien registration cards, with the information on them kept by the Justice Ministry.

Foreign residents will be listed on the Juki Net resident registry network, a computer network linking municipalities that contains demographic information of Japanese residents.

Visas, typically good for three years, will be extended to five. Also, foreign residents will no longer be required to obtain re-entry permits if they return to Japan within a year.

On the other hand, the punishments for failing to report one’s address and other personal information will become harsher. In order to curb fake marriages, the bills give the justice minister the authority to revoke the spousal visas of those who fail to conduct “activities spouses normally do” for six months. Special consideration would be given to spouses who live separately because of mitigating circumstances, including abuse.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20090620a3.html

Compromise paves way for state-issued foreigner cards

 The ruling and opposition camps have revised a contentious set of immigration bills in a way that increases government scrutiny of both legal and illegal foreign residents while extending additional conveniences, according to a draft obtained Thursday by The Japan Times.

Legislators from the Liberal Democratic Party-New Komeito ruling bloc and the Democratic Party of Japan hammered out the bills to reach a balance on how the estimated 110,000 undocumented foreigners living in Japan should be tracked. Currently, municipalities issue alien registration cards and provide public services to foreigners, even if they know they are overstaying their visas.

The revised bills, expected to be passed Friday by the Lower House, will abolish the Alien Registration Act and revise the immigration control and resident registration laws with sweeping changes that put information on foreign residents completely in the hands of the central government.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20090619a1.html

In Japanese, “racial discrimination” is jinshu sabetsu. That is the established term used in official translations of international treaties (such as the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, or CERD) that Japan has signed up to.

However, the Japanese media won’t couch the discussion in these terms. This was visible during the nationwide debate generated by the Otaru onsen case (1999-2005), where public bathhouses refused entry to customers because they didn’t “look Japanese.” If you read the oodles of non-tabloid articles on this case, you’ll see the debate was conducted in milder, misleading language.

For example, it was rendered in terms of gaikokujin sabetsu (discrimination against foreigners). But that’s not the same thing. The people being discriminated against were not all foreign (ahem).

Or else it was depicted as gaiken sabetsu (discrimination by physical appearance). But that’s not “race,” either. Nor is “physical appearance” specifically covered by the CERD.

This term particularly derails the debate. It actually generates sympathy for people afraid of how others look.

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Representatives of municipalities and human rights groups voiced their opposition Thursday to government-sponsored immigration bills they say will lead to violations of foreigners’ rights and excessive control over them.

The proposed bills would issue new “zairyu” (residency) cards to replace their alien registration cards. Failure to carry the cards or report any changes in status could lead to a fine of up to ¥200,000, and failure to comply within three months could lead to one’s visa being canceled.

Alien registration is currently handled by local ward offices, but the new bills would hand responsibility for that task — and any records collected — to the Justice Ministry.

Hiroko Uehara, the former mayor of the city of Kunitachi in western Tokyo, refused to connect the municipality’s resident registry network to the nationwide Juki Net network in 2002 to protect residents’ privacy. She warned that transferring the management of alien registration from municipalities to immigration offices would reduce the quality of service for foreign residents.

“Municipalities have so far made an effort to provide, at their own discretion, services to foreign residents,” Uehara told a gathering in Tokyo. “But if immigration takes control of registration, all that effort will be lost,” she said. 

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20090529a3.html

New gaijin cards could allow police to remotely track foreigners

When the Japanese government first issued alien registration cards (aka gaijin cards) in 1952, it had one basic aim in mind: to track “foreigners” (at that time, mostly Korean and Taiwanese stripped of Japanese colonial citizenship) who decided to stay in postwar Japan.

Gaijin cards put foreigners in their place: Registry is from age 16, so from a young age they were psychologically alienated from the rest of Japanese society. So what if they were born and acculturated here over many generations? Still foreigners, full stop.

Even today, when emigrant non-Japanese far outnumber the native-born, the government tends to see them all less as residents, more as something untrustworthy to police and control. Noncitizens are not properly listed on residency registries. Moreover, only foreigners must carry personal information (name and address, personal particulars, duration of visa status, photo, and — for a time — fingerprints) at all times. Gaijin cards must also be available for public inspection under threat of arrest, one year in jail and ¥200,000 in fines.

However, the Diet is considering a bill abolishing those gaijin cards.

Sounds great at first: Under the proposed revisions, non-Japanese would be registered properly with residency certificates (juminhyo). Maximum visa durations would increase from three years to five. ID cards would be revamped. Drafters claim this will “protect” (hogo) foreigners, making their access to social services more “convenient.”

However, read the fine print. The government is in fact creating a system to police foreigners more tightly than ever.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20090519zg.html

Laid-off foreign workers of Japanese descent who accept financial support from the Japanese government to return to their home countries have been dismayed to learn that they will not be allowed to return to Japan.

“‘Don’t come back.’ Maybe that’s what they’re saying,” says 62-year-old Tess Ohashi sadly. Ohashi is a second generation Brazilian of Japanese descent who lives in Oizumi, Gunma Prefecture, where 12 percent of the residents are Brazilians, the highest rate in the country.

Not all agree with the re-entry restrictions. “There is a need to think wisely and allow re-entry for those who repay their travel expenses,” remarked Yasutomo Suzuki, mayor of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, at a press conference on April 20. Hamamatsu is home to many Brazilians of Japanese descent.

“It’s possible that the ‘for the time being’ provision may become semi-permanent,” says former Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau chief Hidenori Sakanaka.

“People of Japanese descent are living here under qualifications granted to them under the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act. For the Ministry of Justice to forbid such people who used a system that has been introduced without deliberation in the Diet from re-entering Japan is beyond the discretion of the minister for justice and is also a violation of the equality guaranteed by the Japanese Constitution,” Sakanaka concluded.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/features/news/20090430p2a00m0na002000c.html