Japan needs to attract a large number of foreigners to help revive the farming and fishery industries in areas devastated by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the head of a key reconstruction panel said Friday.
“It is important to draw human resources, including permanent foreign residents” to the hard-hit northeastern region of Tohoku, Makoto Iokibe, who chairs the Reconstruction Design Council, said at a news conference at the Japan National Press Club.
Immigration
インドネシア人看護師、岩手での活動報告 姫路
日本との経済連携協定（ＥＰＡ）に基づき来日、姫路赤十字病院（姫路市）で勤務するインドネシア人看護師、スワルティさん（３２）が、東日本大震災の被災地岩手県山田町での支援活動を終え９日、同病院で記者会見した。スワルティさんは「今後も支援できる方法を考えたい」と話した。
外国人雇用に積極姿勢＝被災地の農漁業再生－復興会議議長
政府の東日本大震災復興構想会議の五百旗頭真議長（防衛大学校長）は１３日、日本記者クラブで会見し、被災地の農業や漁業の再生に関し、「外国人をどう活用するか。国際的な人材を吸引するという在り方も考えなくてはいけない」と述べ、外国人の雇用を積極的に進める方策を検討する考えを明らかにした。
90% of foreigners to stay put: poll
More than 90 percent of non-Japanese studying or working in the country are willing to stay despite the risks and damage caused by the March 11 disasters, an online survey indicated.
The International Foreign Students Association conducted the survey from March 22 to 26 and received 392 responses.
A breakdown of the respondents showed that 60 percent were students and 40 percent were graduate. More than 90 percent were from China, Taiwan and South Korea.
Those who said they were willing to stay in Japan explained their responses by saying: “Because I like Japan,” or “At a time like this, I think I want to work together (with Japanese) to help the recovery,” according to the Tokyo-based nonprofit organization.
The survey also showed that 73 percent of the respondents noticed gaps in information provided by Japan and by their home countries on the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear emergency. Some said overseas news on the nuclear crisis was “excessive.”
Psychiatrists aid traumatized foreigners
A group of psychiatrists who have been providing mental health support for foreign residents has set up an emergency committee to aid non-Japanese suffering from stress and trauma from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
“Those who are suffering the most are the elderly, children, the handicapped and foreigners. And foreigners are particularly prone to become isolated, suffer from a lack of information in their mother tongue, easily become confused by false rumors and suffer from growing anxiety,” said Fumitaka Noda, president of the Japanese Society of Transcultural Psychiatry and professor of psychiatry at Taisho University in Tokyo.
“It’s really important to provide them with accurate information, and then to listen and understand their anxiety,” said Noda, who has been providing mental health care services to foreigners in Japan for 18 years, especially to refugees.
Comprised of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, the transcultural psychiatry society established the Transcultural Mental Health Emergency committee March 19 to help foreigners directly affected by 3/11.
As the only medical society in Japan that focuses on studies of foreigners who have mental health issues due to transcultural problems, the society is working closely with groups that support foreigners, including the Japan Foundation, to continue gathering information on people in need of professional help. It is also planning to teach supporters basic knowledge of mental health, so that when they spot signs of depression or posttraumatic stress disorder they can contact Noda and his colleagues.
Mental health care has become more important as people recover from the initial shock of the disaster and gradually start to get a clear picture of what happened and what situation they are in, Noda explained.
“As people start to look around, they begin to feel more clearly the sense of loss, and anxiety over the future. . . . Some may develop PTSD,” Noda said. “Many suffer from numbness. Because they lost everything they had and they begin to wonder about the meaning of making an effort, making a commitment or loving someone.”
If such cases continue over a long period, then people need to seek professional help, Noda said.
“In this kind of situation, a foreigner’s stress can be more than that of Japanese. We have to spend twice the time we do for Japanese to treat foreigners. We need to listen to their voices wholeheartedly,” Noda said, adding he and his team are ready for action, to help foreigners with mental problems.
“I want people to know there are services available to them. Many may hesitate to ask for mental support, but please, be open about it and contact us,” Noda said.
E-mail Transcultural_mental_health@yahoo.co.jp or call Fumitaka Noda at (080) 5196-8325 or fax (03) 5225-1292.
Industries left short-handed after foreign workers flee Japan following nuke accident
Tens of thousands of worried foreign workers left Japan shortly after a crisis at the nuclear power plant that was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, causing serious labor shortages in some industries.
原発事故：戻らぬ中国人労働者 縫製業は減産も
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。
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