The number of registered foreign residents in Japan at the end of 2005 totaled roughly 2,011,500, surpassing the 2 million mark for the first time ever, the Justice Ministry announced Friday.
The figure was up 1.9 percent from a year ago and foreign nationals now account for 1.57 percent of the total population.
Immigration
Japan set to accept more skilled foreign professionals
Japan is set to accept more foreign professionals by introducing more flexible immigration policies, the government said Thursday in line with a set of policy targets adopted by a government panel and aimed at securing leadership in international society.
In an attempt to attract more human resources with highly advanced knowledge and techniques from abroad, the government will extend the legal limit on the length of stay for them to five years from the current three years on a nationwide basis, the Cabinet Office said.
U.N. rapporteur raps Japan’s law on fingerprinting foreigners
A special U.N. rapporteur on racism on Thursday criticized Japan’s new immigration legislation on fingerprinting and photographing all foreign visitors as a process of treating foreigners like criminals.
Doudou Diene, on his last day of a six-day visit to Japan to conduct a follow-up of his report on racism, said at a press conference in Tokyo the immigration bill that just passed the Diet on Wednesday “illustrates something I have been denouncing in my reports for four years. It is the fact that, especially since Sept 11, there has been a process of criminalization of foreigners” all over the world, he added.
Diet passes bill to take foreigners’ prints, pics
Despite strong criticism from the Japan Federation of Bar Associations and human rights organizations, the bill cleared the House of Councilors with a majority vote by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito.
With the revision of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law, an estimated 6 million to 7 million foreigners entering Japan every year will be obliged to have their fingerprints and photographs taken, along with other personal identification information.
Japan rethinks immigration policy
“Whether we like it or not, there are many foreigners who want to come to Japan. We must think about how we can accept those who want to work or settle in Japanese society, without friction,” Koizumi told members of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy, according to the publicized minutes.
“If we accept foreigners beyond a certain scale…there must be friction. In that case, social costs would be tremendous,” Koizumi continued. “We must think how to improve the environment and education system in order to let foreigners work comfortably as a steady labor power.”
Wave of retiring workers could force big changes
All over Japan, companies are bracing for a demographic wave that will wash away many of their most experienced employees. The Japanese call it their “2007 problem.” Beginning next year, members of what Japan considers its baby boom generation will start hitting 60 and dropping out of the workforce. Some might postpone retirement, but they can’t work forever. Plunging birth rates mean there won’t be nearly enough young people to replace them.
Japan is just beginning to wrestle with a more controversial solution to the labor shortage: opening the floodgates to immigration.
Foreign workers account for just 1% of Japan’s labor force, vs. about 15% in the USA. Japan relaxes visa requirements for engineers and other specialized workers. But it is reluctant to let less-skilled workers into the country, limiting them to two- or three-year “training” contracts if it admits them at all.
“Sooner or later, we will need more people,” says Hidenori Sakanaka, retired head of the national immigration bureau office in Tokyo. “This is the time to create a new immigration policy.”
Sakanaka, the former immigration official, says Japanese bureaucrats are in denial. After retiring from his government job, he set up the Japan Immigration Policy Institute to advocate more liberal policies. He made what he admits is a utopian proposal: Admit 20 million foreigners in the next 50 years, up from less than 2 million now.
“Look at the speed of the decline in population. It’s unbelievable. Thirty million people will disappear,” he says. “There are two ways to go: Shrunken Japan ? and learning to live with it; and Big Japan ? we accept foreigners.”
http://www.usatoday.com/money/world/2006-05-02-japan-econ-usat_x.htm
http://www.ncpa.org/newdpd/dpdarticle.php?article_id=3292
Immigration reform, political protests mark world May Day
About 300,000 people across Japan took part in various May Day events calling for better working conditions.
In Tokyo, 44,000 people gathered in a park before marching through the city center, waving colorful banners to protest what they see as growing social inequalities between the rich and poor.
http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2006/may/02/yehey/world/
20060502wor1.html
The Rising Sun slowly sets
Unfortunately, Japan is notoriously closed to foreigners, mainly because opinion polls show that most Japanese associate foreigners with crime. As of 2003, there were only 1.9 million registered foreign residents in Japan, equivalent to only 1.5% of the population. The real number of foreigners is even lower, considering that 600,000 are ethnic Koreans mostly born and raised in Japan and who speak only Japanese, and that most of the 270,000 registered Brazilians and 54,000 Peruvians are ethnic Japanese from South America who have returned to Japan.
Unlike with the French, a lack of fight spells future gloom for Japan’s workers
For about a decade the Japanese government has been loosening its labor laws. Companies that were forced to restructure in the 1990s demanded more flexibility in hiring, so the government expanded the number of job types that could be covered by temporary workers. The result has been a steady erosion of wages, since companies who hire temps deal with agencies rather than with unions or the workers themselves. They ask for lower wages and the temp agencies accommodate them.
On average, a full-time temp worker takes home about one-third the pay of a full-time company employee. But full time employees may lose even that advantage if the government and business community have their way.
Last June, the Japan Federation of Economic Organizations (Keidanren) proposed that regulations standardizing the 8-hour workday be eased.
In practice, what this means is that Japanese companies will no longer be compelled by law to pay office workers overtime if they put in more than eight hours; which in turn means that companies will be able to compel workers to stay at the office longer without adding to their labor costs. In the only country in the world that has a word for “death from overwork” (karoshi), such a development is chilling.
Next year, the government plans to submit a bill to the Diet for a Labor Contract Law, which will allow any company to set its own labor standards.
The bill will include the formation of a special commission that ostensibly protects workers’ rights, but such a law would in effect eliminate labor unions since it’s unlikely employers would allow collective bargaining clauses in their employment contracts.
At present, anyone who is fired for reasons they believe are unfair can take their employer to court. That option would probably become more difficult under the Labor Contract Law.
Gov’t promises to improve livelihood of foreign residents
The panel will take up various problems facing foreign residents, including economic issues and language and other handicaps their children may face, [LDP Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo] Abe said. It will also try to ascertain how they have been accepted by local communities, he said. “Having admitted them into the country, Japan bears a certain degree of responsibility for their wellbeing,” he said.
http://www.crisscross.com/jp/news/369814
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/060413/kyodo/d8gv1msg0.html