Justice chief’s proposal to open doors, briefly, for all sectors causes stir
“Putting a three-year limit on a foreign worker’s stay in Japan does not give the company doing the hiring any incentive to take the time to train them for specialized work. Of course, there is also the question of how many skilled workers would want to come to Japan if they are forced to leave after three years,” [Hidenori] Sakanaka [director of the NGO Japan Immigration Policy Institute and former head of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau] said.
Immigration
Education Minister Slammed For Comparing Human Rights To Fatty Butter
[Amnesty International] slammed Japan’s education minister on Tuesday for comparing human rights to fatty butter and saying too much would give Japan “human rights metabolic syndrome.”
“No matter how nutritious it is, if one ate only butter every single day, one would get metabolic syndrome,” Education Minister Bunmei Ibuki reportedly said at a speech in south Japan on Sunday. “Human rights are important, but if we respect them too much, Japanese society will end up having human rights metabolic syndrome.”
The offending remarks “ignore the human rights of citizens,” Amnesty International said in a letter sent Tuesday to Ibuki and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The group demanded Ibuki retract his remarks.
http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20070227p2a00m0na029000c.html
Abe Sees No Problem With Education Minister Calling Japan ‘Homogeneous’
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Monday downplayed criticisms over his education minister’s remarks a day earlier and said there was nothing wrong with the minister calling Japan an “extremely homogenous” country. “I think he was referring to the fact that we have gotten along with each other fairly well so far,” Abe said when asked to comment on the remarks by education minister Bunmei Ibuki. “I don’t see any specific problem with that.”
Japan ‘extremely homogenous’, extremely racialist
In 1986, [then] Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone described Japan as a “homogenous race” nation and faced strong criticism, mainly from Ainu indigenous people.
[Education minister Bunmei Ibuki] speaking at a convention of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s chapter in Nagasaki Prefecture, [echoed Nakasone by asserting], “Japan has been historically governed by the Yamato (Japanese) race. Japan is an extremely homogenous country.
Immigration Officer Faces Charges
A local immigration official faces charges for driving government cars on about 250 occasions without a driver’s license, sources at the bureau said.
He was hired in January 1999 and was assigned to the Hiroshima Regional Immigration Bureau, where he was in charge of immigration control at Hiroshima Airport. He had been cracking down on illegal immigrants since he was transferred to the Osaka bureau in April last year.
http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/national/news/20070224p2a00m0na013000c.html
Editor Claims Magazine on Foreigner Crimes Not Racist
On what are called “entertainment” pages, there are photographs of foreigners and Japanese women embracing on Tokyo streets. One photo of a black man and a Japanese woman has the caption, “Hey nigger!! Don’t touch that Japanese woman’s ass!!”
[Shigeki Saka, editor of the magazine Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu or ?Secret Foreigner Crime Files?] said that while he knew the term “nigger” is racist, he reckoned it would have a different nuance written in Japanese. “We used it as street slang, writing it in katakana. But if we had known that we would get such a huge reaction from foreigners, we might have refrained from using it,” he figured.
Saka said that although the book had been pulled from Family Mart, it is still available at some bookstores and on the Internet.
Hideki Morihara, secretary general of International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism, said the magazine is only part of a wider problem for which the government is partially responsible.
Japan’s innovation problem
…Japan really needs a dual approach to boosting long-term growth prospects: more babies and more immigration.
Thanks to a rapidly aging population, a low birthrate and no pro-growth immigration policies to speak of, Japan faces a skilled-labor shortage. Stimulating procreation is an awkward task for governments, and Japanese already live the longest on a world scale. A more immediate cure is attracting more workers from overseas.That’s easier said than done in uniquely homogeneous Japan. A reminder of the nation’s aversion to opening the floodgates came last week with the publication of a magazine on crimes committed by foreigners. FamilyMart, Japan’s third-largest convenience-store chain, pulled “Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu,” or “Secret Foreigner Crime Files,” from its shelves, citing the publication’s “inappropriate racial expressions.”
It’s significant, though, that some leading politicians such as Shintaro Ishihara, the [right wing] Tokyo governor, are speaking more about the need to attract international talent.
First, a couple of caveats. As a regional leader, Ishihara might not seem all that important. Yet when you manage Tokyo and appear on television as frequently as the charismatic 74-year- old, you have some serious sway over popular opinion.
Also, Ishihara is an unabashed nationalist known for xenophobic statements; he’s sometimes described as Japan’s answer to France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen. Feminist groups also weren’t amused a few years back when Ishihara said women past childbearing age are “useless.”
That said, at least part of Ishihara’s immigration argument is worth exploring. “The country should take it upon itself to adopt an immigration policy,” Ishihara said in an interview with Bloomberg News on Feb. 6. “This is not a question of procuring a labor supply. We should be letting in more people who are intelligent.”
Ishihara’s comments came with a rant about lax Japanese immigration controls that allowed an increasing number of Chinese to enter Japan illegally. “This is leading to new forms of crime,” he said. Such comments only feed those who equate “foreign” with crime and disorder. In my opinion, this part of Ishihara’s immigration stance should be ignored.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/12/bloomberg/sxpesek.php
Japan Store Withdraws ‘Foreigner Crime File’ Magazine
Japan’s crime rate is one of the world’s lowest at 1,776 reported crimes per 100,000 people in 2005, according to the latest government statistics. The number of crimes among Japan’s 2 million foreign residents in 2005 was 2,380 per 100,000.
Offenses by foreigners rose to a record high of 47,865 in 2005, from 47,128 a year earlier and 40,615 in 2003, according to police statistics. The number of non-Japanese arrested is also rising, to 21,178 in 2005 from 20,007 two years earlier.
The statistics don’t break out visa-related offenses, which in 2003 accounted for 46 percent of crimes committed by foreigners. By their nature such breaches can’t be committed by Japanese citizens.
Japan’s overall crime rate in 2003 was 2,185 per 100,000 and 2,120 among foreigners. Excluding visa offences, the rate was 1,570 per 100,000 foreigners.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aqOSjgeKU5X8&refer=japan
Japan strips shelves of books on ‘foreigner crime’
Japanese convenience store chain FamilyMart and other retailers are pulling copies of a book on ?foreigner crime? from their shelves after a wave of complaints, the stores said on Monday.
The front cover of ?Shocking Foreigner Crime: The Undercover File?, published in Japanese, features caricatures of non-Japanese, alongside the question: ?Is it all right to let foreigners devastate Japan???We are removing the book from our shelves today,? said Takehiko Kigure of FamilyMart Co.?s public relations department.
?We had complaints from customers, and when we checked the content of the magazine, we found that it contained some inappropriate language,? he added.
Inside the glossy magazine-style book, photographs and illustrations show what the editors say are non-Japanese engaged in criminal or reprehensible behaviour.
?We wanted to take this up as a contemporary problem,? said Shigeki Saka of Tokyo-based publishers Eichi, which also publishes magazines on popular US and South Korean television dramas. ?I think it would be good if this becomes a chance to broaden the debate,? he added.
One caption in the magazine refers to a black man as ?nigger.?
?This is not a racist book, because it is based on established fact,? Saka said. ?If we wanted to be racist, we could write it in a much more racist way,? he added, saying that the word ?nigger? was not considered offensive in Japan.
Details of well-known past crimes committed by foreigners are also given, such as last year?s kidnapping of the daughter of a wealthy plastic surgeon by a group including South Koreans and Chinese, and the 2003 murder of a family of four on the southern island of Kyushu by Chinese citizens.
The number of registered foreigners in Japan has swelled to more than two million, or 1.57 percent of the population, and some commentators recommend the country accept more immigrants to shore up its ageing and shrinking workforce.
Some in Japan, where crime rates are extremely low compared with Europe and the United States, are concerned about a possible increase in crime associated with an influx of foreigners, but mainstream media have not focussed on the issue in recent months.
Magazine plays to Japanese xenophobia
Available in mainstream bookstores, magazine targets Iranians, Chinese, Koreans and US servicemen
The recent release of a glossy magazine devoted to the foreign-led crime wave supposedly gripping Japan has raised fears of a backlash against the country’s foreign community, just as experts are calling for a relaxation of immigration laws to counter rapid population decline.Secret Files of Foreigners’ Crimes, published by Eichi, contains more than 100 pages of photographs, animation and articles that, if taken at face value, would make most people think twice about venturing out into the mean streets of Tokyo.
The magazine, which is available in mainstream bookstores and from Amazon Japan, makes liberal use of racial epithets and provocative headlines directed mainly at favourite targets of Japanese xenophobes: Iranians, Chinese, Koreans and US servicemen.
Human rights activists said the magazine was indicative of the climate of fear of foreigners created by conservative newspapers and politicians, notably the [racist right-wing] governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara.
“It goes beyond being puerile and into the realm of encouraging hatred of foreigners,” Debito Arudou, a naturalised Japanese citizen, told the Guardian. “The fact that this is available in major bookstores is a definite cause of concern. It would be tantamount to hate speech in some societies.”
One section is devoted to the alleged tricks foreign-run brothels use to fleece inebriated Japanese salarymen, while another features a comic strip retelling, in graphic detail, the murders of four members of a Japanese family by three Chinese men in 2003.
An “Alien Criminal Worst 10” lists notorious crimes involving foreigners from recent years, including the case of Anita Alvarado, the “Chilean geisha” blamed by some for forcing her bureaucrat husband, Yuji Chida, to embezzle an estimated 800m yen from a local government. Mr Chida, who is Japanese, is serving a 13-year prison sentence.
The magazine’s writers are equally disturbed by the apparent success foreign men have with Japanese women: hence a double-page spread of long-lens photographs of multinational couples in mildly compromising, but apparently consensual, positions.
Mr Arudou accused the mainstream press of exploiting the supposed rise in foreign crime by failing to challenge official police figures. Although the actual number of crimes has risen, he said, so has the size of the foreign population.
“The portrayal [of foreign criminals] is not one of a neutral tone,” he said. “They don’t put any of the statistics into perspective and they don’t report drops in certain crimes.”
The magazine’s publication coincides with warnings more foreigners should be encouraged to live and work in Japan to counter the economic effects of population decline and the greying society.
The current population of 127 million is expected to drop to below 100 million by 2050, when more than a third of Japanese will be aged over 64.
“I think we are entering an age of revolutionary change,” Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute and an advocate of greater immigration, said in a recent interview.
“Our views on how the nation should be and our views on foreigners need to change in order to maintain our society.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2004645,00.html