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.
News
Number of temporary workers in Japan up 4.6% in fiscal 2008
Japan saw the number of temporary workers rise by 4.6 percent in fiscal 2008, a survey released by the Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare showed on Thursday.
The number of workers now on temporary contracts stood at 3.99 million for fiscal 2008, in a country that was once known for companies that gave their staff jobs for life.
The survey compiled numbers from 66,424 businesses that declared their employment records to the government in the fiscal year that ended on March 31. In recent years, Japan has seen the number of temporary workers on its books increase, as the baby boomer generation begins to retire, and company workers are replaced by people hired from outside agencies.
In fiscal 2007, the nation saw the number of temporary workers increase by 18.7 percent.
Temporary workers are afforded less rights under the Japanese labor law, and can often be dismissed with very short notice and little compensation.
In the aftermath of the credit crisis that started in the United States last year, many temporary workers were left jobless with little money last winter.
The figures for 2008 showed that 2.81 million people were employed on short-term contracts with companies. The 1.18 million workers were in dispatched to companies on long-term contracts.
The governing Democratic Party of Japan said in its election manifesto this summer that it aims to improve the nation’s employment conditions, and “ban, in principle, the dispatch of temporary workers to manufacturing jobs.” The figures released Thursday showed that the number of temporary workers in manufacturing jobs had risen by 19.6 percent from the previous year to 560,000 people on June 1, 2008.
Critics of the temporary worker system have argued that the insecure nature of the jobs provides a great deal of benefits for large companies, but is on the whole detrimental to society.
In the last year, Japan has struggled to bounce back after suffering a downturn in the aftermath of the credit crisis, with weak employment and bad conditions for households preventing growth in the manufacturing sector from turning into a sustained recovery.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-11/26/content_12542627.htm
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
Foreigner vote not reciprocal
The Democratic Party of Japan is likely to give local election voting rights to foreigners with permanent residence status and who are from countries or regions with diplomatic links or other ties to Japan, sources said Monday.
They include South Korea, which has diplomatic ties, and Taiwan, which lacks diplomatic links but has a strong working relationship with Japan, they said. The ruling party may submit the relevant bill in the current extraordinary Diet session, they said.
The bill will not take the so-called reciprocal approach of granting voting rights to long-term foreign residents on the basis of whether their countries confer similar privileges on Japanese citizens, they said.
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200911110133.html
Bill eyed to give vote to foreigners
The Diet affairs chief of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan said Friday that DPJ lawmakers were planning to introduce a bill to grant foreign nationals with permanent resident status the right to vote in local elections.
Kenji Yamaoka also said the current extraordinary Diet session may have to be extended beyond its scheduled end on Nov. 30 because of the need to deliberate on this and 12 other bills.
DPJ Secretary-General Ichiro Ozawa has pushed for giving voting rights to permanent residents of Japan, many of whom are Koreans.
The opposition New Komeito is also in favor of the move.
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200911070139.html
DPJ exec eyes suffrage bill this term
The Democratic Party of Japan may submit a bill during the current extraordinary Diet session that would grant permanent foreign residents the right to vote in local-level elections, DPJ Diet affairs chief Kenji Yamaoka told reporters Friday, noting the session may also have to be extended.
His comments come a day after Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama indicated submitting such a bill anytime soon would be difficult, indicating next year would be the earliest proposed legislation would appear.
Speaking after attending a meeting with Liberal Democratic Party Diet affairs chief Jiro Kawasaki, Yamaoka said he told his opposition counterpart the bill may be submitted as lawmaker-sponsored legislation and asked for cooperation from the conservative LDP, which has been against foreigner suffrage.
“Considering the various opinions that exist within (the DPJ), depending on the circumstances we could ask lawmakers to vote on an individual basis,” Yamaoka said.
Yamaoka also said the Diet session may have to be extended from its current Nov. 30 deadline to allow enough time to deliberate various legislation and treaties.
Hatoyama has been playing down the prospects for drafting the foreigner suffrage bill, saying a consensus has not been reached within the ruling coalition, let alone the general public, over the issue.
Immigration showing signs of ninjo
[The recently released Harrison Ford film] “Crossing Over” is made up of a series of small but interconnected human dramas. It focuses on what the Japanese call ninj?, meaning “heart” or “humanity.” This is clear from the accompanying Japanese pamphlet, which proclaims, “Even (immigration) inspectors have ninj?.”
In recent years, this “foreign crime” (gaikokujin hanzai) discourse has become so widely promulgated by the media that it has come to drive policy, specifically the targeting of foreigners by the police and immigration inspectors. Thus, 2003 saw the implementation of a five-year plan to half the number of illegals known as the Kyodo Sengen. The resulting increase in arrests can be used as “proof” that non-Japanese are more likely to commit crime: In this way, the image, to some extent, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Recent changes to the Immigration Control and Refugee Law — to be implemented within the next three years — give little hope that the system will become less bureaucratic and more human. While there are some provisions — such as permit-free re-entry — that will make life easier for legal residents, failure to report a change of address or other personal details within three months will lead to revocation of residence status. For “illegal” residents, the revisions, which at root are about increased central government scrutiny and monitoring of non-Japanese, will inevitably result in more deportations.
There are some signs [Japan’s bureaucratic immigration system] might be changing. One sign of bureaucratic softening relates to naturalization, which in recent years has become a much more straightforward process. In 2008, for example, 15,440 applied for Japanese citizenship and 13,218 were accepted. These figures would inevitably increase if Japan were to recognize dual nationality; many permanent residents, this author included, would welcome the opportunity to contribute more fully to Japanese society if they didn’t first have to give up their original citizenship. Given Japan’s growing need for jinzai (human resources) in order to remain internationally competitive, it is no surprise that more and more politicians are calling for the Nationality Law to be revised.
In 2004, the justice minister announced a more flexible and “humanitarian” stance toward over-stayers. Specifically, the minister said he would apply more discretion in granting special resident status (zairyutokubetsukyoka) in cases where deportation would result in hardships, such as the breakup of families. The Immigration Bureau’s home page explains how “worried illegal migrants” who appear at their local immigration office and fill out the relevant forms (shutto shinkoku) will be allowed to “go home” without first being detained and may even, in special circumstances, be given leave to remain in Japan (see http://www.moj.go.jp/NYUKAN/nyukan87.html ).
2010 bill eyed to give foreigners local-level vote
The government might draft legislation next year to give permanent foreign residents the right to vote in local-level elections, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said Thursday.
“We are not yet in a situation where a bill has been prepared, and therefore it would be fairly difficult in the next Diet session,” Hatoyama told reporters Thursday, referring to the extraordinary session slated to open Monday. But submitting such a bill could be “an issue in the near future,” he said.
Permanent foreign residents, including ethnic Koreans who have grown roots here since the war, aren’t allowed to vote in local elections, much less national ones, despite lobbying for the right on the grounds that they pay taxes just like Japanese.
Kokumin Shinto (People’s New Party), one of the DPJ’s two junior coalition partners, has opposed giving foreign residents voting rights in local elections.
First ever poverty rate released by ministry stands at relatively high 15.7%
The national poverty rate stood at 15.7 percent in 2006, according to first-ever figures released Tuesday by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, a fairly high rate for a developed country.
The poverty rate for children was 14.2 percent that year, the ministry said. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development defines households with less than half the median national disposable income as poor. For Japan it was ¥1.14 million in 2006.
The OECD has published the poverty rates for member countries through 2004, but the Japanese government had not previously calculated the rate.
The rate in Japan “is quite high among the OECD countries,” welfare minister Akira Nagatsuma said at a news conference.
Japan Govt’s Poverty Data Signals Policy Shift
It’s hard to imagine that there would be much hand-wringing in Japan over poverty figures. After all, this is the market where many of the world’s top luxury brands were making a killing before the Great Recession hit. Most Japanese consider themselves to be middle class—more than 80%, if you believe the Cabinet Office’s annual lifestyle survey, released in August. In a country where corporate chieftains’ salaries pale in comparison to U.S. CEOs, the relatively narrow gap between the haves and have-nots had long been a source of pride.
So why is the media making such a big deal of the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry’s release of national poverty figures today?
One reason: It shows that Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is serious about his pledge to put consumers before big businesses. “The government is making the plight of consumers a top priority,” Hisa Anan, secretary-general of Consumers Japan, a national network of non-profit groups, told me. “We hope they continue to follow through.”
No Japanese prime minister had ever authorized a poverty survey before. In the past, Japan had always deferred to OECD statistics. It’s not clear why: Japan could simply have teased out the figures from its National Livelihood Survey.
There was nothing shocking about the ministry’s figures. They showed that Japan’s relative poverty rate edged up from 14.6% in 1998 to 15.7% in 2007. That number is the percentage of the population that lives on less than of the country’s median annual income of just over $25,000—or about $12,500. (Child poverty had increased went up, too, from 13.4% to 14.2%.)
But, apparently, publishing poverty data would have meant that Japan had a problem.
Earlier this month, Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Akira Nagatsuma focused national attention on poverty when he promised to survey the country’s so-called waakingu poa (or, working poor)–people who scratch by on every paycheck working part-time or minimum-wage jobs. It’s hard to fix a problem that you won’t acknowledge. The DPJ-led government was effectively admitting it had a problem.
The OECD had already ranked Japan’s poverty level fourth highest among wealthy nations. But there was one point of disagreement: In its October 2008 report (titled “Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries”), the OECD found that while household incomes in Japan had declined over the past decade, income inequality and poverty were less of a problem than they were five years ago.
In recent years, ordinary Japanese have had plenty to worry about. Unemployment has risen to near record levels. The country’s so-called lost decade of no growth had forced many people to seek short-term contract work or low-paying part-time and temp jobs. And companies blindsided by the global financial crisis and economic downturn have been laying off workers by the tens of thousands. It didn’t help that the government was seen as mismanaging the national pension and health care programs, which are running out of money.
Grass-roots consumer groups had pressed the government for years to do something about what they saw as a widening gap between rich and poor–or kakusa shakai, in Japanese. But bureaucrats and politicians had the final say about the national agenda. They rarely made ordinary Japanese part of the policy debate. Hatoyama’s administration has been moving quickly to change that.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/eyeonasia/archives/2009/10/japan_govts_pov.html